Real or Ideal ?

 

Are you an idealist or a materialist? Some of you might ask: How can we answer the question without knowing what idealist and materialist are? If you are asking questions like this, then congratulations, you are already following the Socratic Method. So, Idealism is actually a metaphysical view of the universe in which we link reality with our ideas and spirituality rather than the physical world. If you wanna test, ask yourself this question: 

Do you observe the world and draw conclusions from what you see?

 Materialism or Realism on the other hand means that matter is the fundamental substance of nature and all our consciousness and experiences are the result of the interaction between matters. Again for a quick check, ask yourself:

Do you trust math or your senses? 

Before you decide about being an idealist or materialist, let’s take a trip to Athens of 399 BCE to give you a better understanding of this concept and its origin. Remember Socrates? (If not then check out the previous articles) He didn’t have a single, clearly formulated natural philosophy. He didn’t even study nature. He studied politics and morality and prided himself on not claiming to know things. But Socrates did two important things: He asked a lot of questions, which influenced philosophers and he inspired the two legends of classical Greek philosophy: Aristotle and Plato. He gave us a spectacular method to get knowledge by asking questions. His name is attached to the Socratic Method, in which you constantly ask questions so that tough big questions can be steadily broken down into smaller parts. The Socratic Method is an example of negative hypothesis elimination or proving that something is wrong to narrow down the possibilities of what might be right. All that but Socrates’s biggest legacy is still his student, Plato, and his student’s student, Aristotle. Both were inspired by Socrates’s methods, but they arrived at some very different conclusions about the world. So when I asked if you are an idealist or a realist, I should have asked:

“Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian?”

Plato and Aristotle, two of the big three Greek philosophers. So, Plato was Socrates' student, though Socrates would have never said that he was his teacher. And Aristotle was Plato's student. Now, if we want to contrast Plato and Aristotle, first I want you to know the contrast between Idealism and materialism. It’s just as easy as looking at Raphael's classic painting: ‘The School of Athens’, (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect) which is one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever produced during the Renaissance. The Renaissance was an intense time of European social, imagination, political and financial resurrection following the Middle Ages. The Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature, and art:

 

‘The School of Athens’

Of course, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is another asset of that reign, but that's a whole other story and we are not discussing arts today. As far as philosophy goes, you can see in the middle, there is Plato and he is walking beside his student, Aristotle. Plato is pointing up, while Aristotle is pointing downwards.

Plato is the Idealist, and that goes into all of his philosophy, whether it is the ideal state or the idea of virtue. The only thing real to Plato was an idea. He believed that this world is kind of a reflection of the real world of ideas. So Plato's pointing up.

Aristotle is a Realist. While Plato says the only thing that is real is an idea and to understand the truth you need to understand ideas, Aristotle says, “The only thing that's real is what's real. This physical world that we live in is a real place.”

To get a profound understanding of the concept, we are going to tread on the footsteps of Socrates and ask "Questions" and then learn through "Discussions" like pre-Socrates, but today, let’s just forget science, philosophy, and metaphysics and ask a general question:

How could we build a perfect society?

And we have Plato and Aristotle to give us their view of the problem. Plato would say, we should get rid of the concept of family and private property. According to Plato, what's truly amiss with our general public is how we indulge in "mine" and "yours." That's all our conflicts. If we got rid of private property, there'd be one less thing to fight over. And while we're at that, we should also dispose of family, because the other half of our quarrels are related to the family. We all can recall childhood memories when somebody said, "My daddy can beat your daddy" or something like that. Let's just get rid of the family. In a broader sense, he is targeting the distinctions that we have established with regards to nation and creed.  Then he would ask to get rid of gender roles, of any sort of conventions that we have in our society. Indeed, this would create an ideal state. And in this, Plato wants to rise above human self-centeredness. He considers selfishness to be the issue that we need to construct a cohesive social system, state containing individuals that don't contend and battle with one another. Along these lines, the objective here is social solidarity. He presented his ideas in his book: The Republic.

 

Now, this all may sound like a good idea to some people, but then again, how many of you would want to live in a society where there aren’t any families, where there's no private property? I won't like this as a place to live. Well, if you are thinking that you can handle this, then are you willing to give up your car or apartment and live in shared accommodation and use public transport forever?

Aristotle counters Plato by saying: who would really care for kids if they didn't belong to anybody? If I heard that my child had been hurt, I would drop whatever I was doing and I would go and tend to my child. What if I hear that somebody else's child or some random kid was in the hospital? Well, that's unethical, but that child is not mine, and accept it, we don’t care for things that we cannot label as “mine.” if we get rid of private property, if we get rid of the family, then we'd just neglect everything because a lot of times, human selfishness works in our favor. Human selfishness is why we eat. It is why we survive. Let’s just think about it, would you want to live a single moment in a world that Plato proposed? Keep in mind that if it were a contest between you or me, it would either be me or I would be dead, I would not even consider your survival. So, Aristotle is thinking about how we create a practical government, acknowledging human nature. And he comes up with is the idea not of the ideal state, but of a state that is real. It is a state in which we are really forced to work together, but at the same time, we maintain who we really are. He wrote a book: The Politics

So, eventually, this really comes down to Raphael's painting and Plato pointing up at the ideal and Aristotle trying to remind his teacher, that they live in a real world. I am sure you are eager to hear more about Plato and Aristotle, and surely I am going to discuss them exclusively with you. You can write books on idealism and realism separately. But for now, I hope this will get you started on idealism and realism.

So, can we conclude that idealism is totally absurd and totally useless? Well, the answer is 'absolutely not.' People who picked science subjects in high school must know that while solving any problem of real-world, we first make an assumption of an Ideal System, after that, we add or subtract terms in our ideal equation to create a modified equation that fits the real-world situation. Eventually, we plug real parameters and constraints into the equation to get a solution. So, while you were complaining that all your science knowledge from the past can only be applied to the ideal situations that are not available in the real world, you were just being a realist. And the book author was an idealist, right? Well, not necessarily. Idealism despite being a vague concept is the base of all the rules that you set in the real systems and drive useful models out of them. Actually, a real system is just a modification of ideal systems. You can even say that there is no concept of being real when there is no ideal to compare. Thus, if you are looking for ways to make your real world better, the choice is pretty simple, set an ideal state for the situation and thrive to make it as close to ideal as you can:

“If your real resembles your ideal, you are already in Heaven”