DID YOU KNOW?

This week’s Did You Know is a continuation of a soon to be released book entitled “God and Spirituality,” by Glenn Chesnut: The cognitive structures of our minds have a profound effect on the kinds of beings that will be perceived. I do not mean to be attacking Immanuel Kant all the time, because this was one of his most important contributions to philosophy, and at the basic level, he was entirely correct. There is a major school of psychotherapy called cognitive therapy which has helped enormous numbers of people by teaching them how to reframe the cognitive structures of their minds. In treating chronic depression, the success rate for cognitive therapy alone is just as high as the success rate for medication alone. The world literally becomes a totally different place when we reframe the cognitive framework of our minds.

The Irish philosopher Bishop Berkley, in the early eighteenth century, stated the basic philosophical principle of subjective idealism, which is esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived.” The only beings of which we can ever be directly aware are those which we would call a material object is simply a cluster of ideas, involving the solidity that we perceive when we push on it, the effort it requires to lift and move it, its extension in space, and so on. But all these ideas in our minds arise from our sense perception.

To the degree to which a philosophical position involves some form of idealism, defenders of that position will argue that the epistemological ground of being (the raw sense data that pours into our minds in unstructured form) is therefore also the ontological ground of being. There is a significant distinction being made here. Episteme in Greek means “knowledge,” while the word onta in Greek is the participle of the verb to be, and means “beings.” If we ask where and how beings come into being (as beings that we can understand and think about inside our minds), then the epistemological answer is that they come into being out of the epistemological ground of being, not the cosmological ground of being.

There has been an idealistic cast, too much of modern philosophy, although one must also distinguish between a variety of different strategies for dealing with the problem of where ideas come from, and their ontological status. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy for example is usually described as transcendental idealism, which is more sophisticated than Bishop Berkeley’s subjective idealism, but it is nevertheless a form of philosophical idealism.

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Some of the twentieth century existentialists, including both the atheistic philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Christian theologian Paul Tillich, were idealists at least to a degree. There have been many debates over how best to label Heidegger, where one prominent contemporary commentator argues that he started out in Being and Time (1927) as to some degree an ontological idealist and then later became what that author calls a temporal idealist. To be continued.