Foundations · Ii

The Ontological Spectrum

What finally exists?

Ontology is the part of philosophy that asks what really exists. Answers range from matter alone to mind alone, with positions in between.

Materialism. Matter is all that finally exists. Mind, thought and consciousness are products of physical processes, such as the working of the brain. Democritus reduced everything to atoms and empty space, and Hobbes to bodies in motion. This is not the everyday sense of caring too much about possessions. Iqbal does not use the word in these paragraphs, but the psychology he answers in the ninth and tenth paragraphs leans this way when it explains mystic states by their bodily causes.

Dualism. There are two kinds of thing, each fully real. For Descartes, body is extended in space and mind is thinking, and the puzzle of how the two affect each other became the mind-body problem. On page 28 Iqbal mentions the “inter-relation of body and mind” assumed by modern psychology.

Idealism. Reality is, in the end, mental or spiritual. Matter is not denied, but it depends on mind or is the way mind appears. Berkeley held that to be is to be perceived, and Hegel saw reality as Spirit working itself out. Iqbal says the Ash‘arite thinkers anticipated “modern forms of Idealism” (page 7), and Royce, in the eighth paragraph, was an idealist. On page 25 Iqbal says he is not building “an idealistic argument” from our knowledge of other minds.

Two questions, not one. What exists is a different question from how we know, which was the subject of the previous page, and what we ought to do is a third, the subject of the next. Locke and Berkeley agreed that knowledge comes from experience, yet Locke was a dualist and Berkeley an idealist. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” is mainly an answer about knowing. It says we know things only as they appear to us, not that only minds exist.