#idealism

I don’t feel like making this one too heavy. You can only have so many blue days in a month. But I would like to post an update on what I’ve been thinking about. The single most frequent comment I get from anyone that I’ve burdened with this absurdist pursuit of some kind of desire-less existence is “Why do you even want to live without it?” To many, it may seem like I am trying to kill a part of me that is essentially human, something foundational to every single human impulse and ability that I possess. Indeed, why would I want to do that?

Let’s see how I have practiced the idea so far. In trying to achieve a love for others without desiring any love back, the basic tendency is to deal with money. Why not spread this little money I have and surprise people? I remember back in my UG days in Bangalore, my friend and I would go to Church Street to buy Christmas gifts for everyone. Not only did it make the month of December our collective favourite month, I have to admit there was a secret joy in knowing that my gifts were going to, in some way, make me more beloved with the people I loved most. In a similar vein, while not intentional per se, I would always try to help people around if they asked for help in some project or research, and I would at some level feel like that help would make them love me more. Strangely, the one habit I have been able to single out as one that I truly practice out of no desire to be loved back is buying my friends flowers every time I meet them. It makes me feel one with them. It makes me feel good that I can associate them with flowers. It is the one act of true love that I have been practicing so far, and I didn’t even know it.

What difference does that even make? I realised that this giving of flowers was truly the most unattached I felt. Unattached only to the fear or anxiety of not having done something better. The flower represented no superior quality, no display of imagined purity, nor a breaking of societal norms. It represented purely my love for my friend, a physical manifestation of what I think they feel like to me.

I have been reading psychological journals that talk about what desire could be to the human mind. Some say it might be an indelible part of the human psyche, a key motivator and completely inseparable from the pathology of the human mind. Indeed, one even comments on whether this “death of desire” might represent in itself a repressed desire. As a scholar of a humanities, as I assume many of you reading this are, if you are a structuralist, you are inevitably attracted to the idea of having been moulded, knowingly or unknowingly, by the frameworks of society that surround you. But as a post-structuralist, would you not agree that desire itself is a primary driver of the repressive societal structures that bind us? And indeed, they are repressive, otherwise we would not celebrate a free market that has been ravaging our finite world like an insatiable monster unless our own desires were being satisfied (this is something I’ve been reading about in ‘On the Calculation of Volume’ by Solvej Balle).

To be free of these, not necessarily in a material sense, is to allow yourself to consider a possibility where you proceed through life unbound by these structures. However, a criticism that was rightly pointed out to me by a friend was how shallow these things might seem when there are so many bigger problems in the world. Indeed, proponents of historical materialism might not even take anything I say seriously at all, saying my idealism is the reason we are in the shit that we are. I will not presume to act as if I will suddenly be able to reconcile materialism and idealism, but there is a lot of truth in this. Do you accept the rigidity of structuralism, and by extension also the ability that it gives you to truly engage with the world? Or do you try to find meaning in a post-structuralist world, where true meaning is up in the air for everyone?

What I find most clear to me now is that in this quest for some kind of freedom from desire, I feel calm and peace unlike I have ever before. Some have argued with me, saying I am becoming cynical but I want to tell them on the contrary; I have become more hopeful than ever. There is a joy in trying to imagine what I can with this unburdening of the self from the desire of the self.

Let us again go back to the exciting and fun world of policy. Can I not look at collective struggles from a materialist lens? Can I then not look at the individuals within that struggle from an idealist sense? I wonder if that would make for a more complete way to look at what the problems that people face are really? Imagine a case of sanitation. The materialist eye would realise that the casteist histories of our society have an outsized effect on how people look at the responsibilities of cleaning. The idealist eye would perhaps consider what it would mean for the creative abilities of people once they are freed of the aesthetic limitations of a dirty environment.

Jean Delville, 1895

Jean Delville, 1888

Jean Delville, 1907-1914

How Two Monkeys Argued Over Whether the Jungle is Made of Thoughts or Trees

Materialism and idealism are two very different answers to the question of what exists fundamentally.

Materialism says that matter, energy, physical processes, and the structures described by physics are primary. Minds, thoughts, emotions, memories, and consciousness emerge from physical systems such as brains. In this view, the universe existed long before humans appeared, and consciousness is a product of certain arrangements of matter.

Idealism reverses the direction. It says that mind, experience, or consciousness is fundamental. The physical world is either constructed from experience, dependent on consciousness, or exists within some larger mental reality. Different idealists mean different things by this. For some, reality exists within a universal mind. For others, all we ever know are experiences, so talking about matter beyond experience is an unnecessary assumption.

The difference can be illustrated simply. A materialist looks at a brain scan and says that neural activity produces thoughts. An idealist looks at the same scan and says that both the brain scan and the thought appear within consciousness, so consciousness must be more fundamental than the brain. As for which is closer to reality, the honest answer is that nobody knows with certainty. However, the evidence currently available tends to favor a broadly naturalistic and physicalist picture.

The reason is not that materialism has solved consciousness. It has not. The so-called "hard problem" remains unsolved. The reason is that every reliable connection we have discovered points from changes in the brain to changes in experience. Damage the brain and consciousness changes. Alter neurotransmitters and experience changes. Put someone under anesthesia and consciousness disappears. Stimulate specific brain regions and specific experiences appear. These findings fit naturally within materialism. Idealism faces a different challenge. It must explain why consciousness behaves as if it is constrained by stable physical laws and why brain interventions so systematically alter experience. Idealists have proposed answers, but they are generally less developed and less predictive than physical explanations.

There is also a third possibility that is becoming increasingly popular among philosophers. Reality may be neither purely material nor purely mental. Some philosophers propose that both mind and matter emerge from something deeper that we do not yet understand. Others suggest that consciousness may be a basic feature of nature rather than a product of matter or the creator of matter.

From a cautious philosophical perspective, the strongest position today is not classical materialism and not classical idealism. It is often called naturalism. Naturalism says that whatever reality ultimately is, it behaves in ways discoverable through observation, science, and careful reasoning. It leaves open the possibility that our current concepts of both matter and mind may be incomplete.

A useful metaphor is that materialism says reality is fundamentally like a machine that eventually generates experience. Idealism says reality is fundamentally like experience that eventually generates the appearance of a machine. Both stories explain some things well and struggle with others.