Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental

This from a recent comment thread:

I think we should all agree on what counts as ‘subjective idealism’. I characterise it as the view that the objects we commonly take to be physical objects are in some way, or wholly, mind dependent. This a reasonable interpretation of Kant.

Let's leave the interpretation of Kant for later. The definition on offer raises questions.

1) Does the 'in some way' render the definition vacuous? I see a tree. The tree exists whether or not I am looking at it. But while I am looking at it, the tree has the relational property of being seen by me.  This property depends on my seeing which is a mental act of my mind.  (An act is not an action, but an intentional, or object-directed,  experience.) So there is a way in which the tree is mind-dependent.  It is dependent on me for its being-seen. There is a whole range of such  properties. The tree is such that: it is deemed beautiful by me; falsely believed by me to be a mesquite; thought by me to have been planted too close to the house, thought by you to have been planted just the right distance from the house, etc.  

Or consider money. What makes a piece of paper or a piece of metal money? Obviously, money to be money, i.e., a means of exchange, depends on minded organisms who so treat it.

2) If, on the other hand,  physical things are wholly mind-dependent, then that presumably means that trees and such are dependent on one or more minds for all of their properties, whether essential or accidental, whether monadic or relational, and also dependent on minds for their very existence.  This leads ineluctably to the question as to who these minds are.  Surely the physical universe in all its unspeakable vastness does not depend on my mind or yours or any finite mind or any collection of finite minds.

So the question arises: has there ever been a subjective idealist (as defined above) among the 'name' philosophers?  George Berkeley, you say? But the good bishop brought God into the picture to secure the existence of the tree in the quad when no one was about:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God

If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context. Interestingly, whereas in the Principles, as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues (212, 214–5) he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.^[20] If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging. (SEP Berkeley entry)

Now if the ultimate subject of subjective idealism is God, who exists of absolute metaphysical necessity and who creates and ongoing sustains in existence  everything other than himself, then such an idealism is better described as objective. 

Kant's brand of idealism is neither subjective nor objective, but transcendental. What this means I will explain later. 

Comments

[oz the ostrich]

>Kant's brand of idealism is neither subjective nor objective, but transcendental. What this means I will explain later.

I look forward to this.

On relational 'properties' Ockham (Summa I.50) argues that if relation existed outside the mind "then whenever a donkey moved locally here below [on earth], every celestial body would be changed, and would receive something anew in itself, because otherwise it would be more distant from the donkey than now, and if distance were another thing , it would truly lose one thing and receive another anew".

[BV]

1. Cambridge properties are properties.

2. You ignored the money example.

3. You didn't rise to the challenging of providing an example of a 'name' philosopher who is a subjective idealist by your definition. Berkeley is no example, and neither is Hume, since he is a skeptic.

[oz the ostrich]

>You didn't rise to the challenging of providing an example of a 'name' philosopher who is a subjective idealist by your definition.

Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant.

But rather than get into a protracted dispute about the textual interpretation regarding the first three, I want to hear about Kant.

Money: I agree with you. But the physical object which we use for money is not mind-dependent.

[oz the ostrich]

But if you prefer, change the definition as follows.

Subjective idealism is the position that some or all of the features of objects that we commonly take to be mind independent are, in fact, mind dependent.

Thus I (being a common person) take the being-seen of my desk as mind dependent. As soon as I stop looking, the being-seen ceases. But I take the blackness of the desk's surface, its shape, the fact that it exists here in this room at all, its continued identity through time, as mind independent. A subjective idealist would question some or all of these independency assumptions.

Meanwhile I shall work on assembling a set of proof-texts from our four philosophers.

[oz the ostrich]

This from NKS may help

“I shall use the term subjectivism (and its equivalent subjective idealism) in the wide sense which makes it applicable to the teaching of Descartes and Locke, of Leibniz and Wolff, no less than to that of Berkeley and Hume. A common element in all these philosophies is the belief that subjective or mental states, " ideas " in the Lockean sense, are the objects of consciousness, and further are the sole possible objects of which it can have any direct or immediate awareness. Knowledge is viewed as a process entirely internal to the individual mind, and as carrying us further only in virtue of some additional supervening process, inferential, conjectural, or instinctive. This subjectivism also tends to combine with a view of consciousness as an ultimate self-revealing property of a merely individual existence.”

I agree with it.