Intersubjective idealism

INTRO: I am having this section because I happen to have a pretty clear understanding of my philosophical views, at least, in terms of fundamental ontological and epistemological points. The thing is that Postgraduate/PhD education in Russia is historically based on the classic philosophy while, nevertheless, ignoring many crucial for the scholars skills that they would need to do their scholarship with. But, as a result, the one who applies for PhD in Russia has to study philosophy. This helped me as well to learn something about myself.

START: Coming back to the ‘two words’, I’ll start with ‘idealism’ which is a part of the classic ontological dualism, as in “materialism vs idealism”. It means that I think and believe that there is no matter, that everything that exist is ideas; material world matters only if it has effect on us; otherwise it does not exist.

Materialism is a dominant way of thinking among people, which is, I am pretty sure, contributing to many issues – from dominating ideology of consumerism to the oppression based on biological/material attributes of individuals. Or, if you are a famous European philosopher in the late 19th century, it may not let you to recognize that social/historical changes can (and do) happen gradually without turning over solid ‘structures’ of society causing mass violence and death. Sorry about that, let’s proceed.

The way I look at and appeal to idealism has different angles. From one side, we can simply juxtapose physical objects (like a stone on the bottom of the ocean) and laws which has power over us, i.e. something that is material but does not exist (has no effect, does not matter to anyone – what stone I am talking about?) and something that is an idea but is very real and impactful. Or, we can simply look at illusions or bias which define a sense of reality for many people individually. But, that would be a subjective idealism.

Bias is often not an individual issue, it is often something that we share with someone – that’s why it is so powerful. The same goes with cultural norms, languages, identities (such as nationality), names for things, and everything else that we share and define with others. In fact, most of those things were defined by someone we do not even know a long time ago but we still follow those definitions of reality that is also ours now.

To be updated.