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Lexicon.

idealism

noun [aɪˈdilɪzəm]
pronunciation CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, open source

Idealism is acting on high ideals and hopes for a better world, often despite practical limits; in philosophy, the view that mind or ideas are basic to reality.

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Definitions

  1. The tendency to be guided by ideals, noble principles and belief in how things ought to be, often together with underestimating the obstacles that real life puts in the way.
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  2. In philosophy: a family of theories holding that mind, thought or ideas come first and that the material world either depends on them or is known only through them.
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  3. In art and literature: the practice of showing people and things in a finer, more perfect form than they have in nature, as opposed to realism.
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  4. More generally: the quality of being ideal, or the act of forming a picture of the ideal in the mind.
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Examples

Usage

In everyday English idealism is a word with two faces. Said with warmth, it praises someone who cares about justice, fairness or beauty and refuses to accept that things must stay as they are. Young people, reformers and volunteers are often described as full of idealism, and losing one's idealism is a common way of talking about growing tired or cynical. In this sense the word sits close to hope and commitment.

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Said with doubt, the same word suggests that someone is out of touch with reality. Phrases like naive idealism or starry-eyed idealism point to plans that ignore cost, human nature or the time needed to make change happen. Idealism is therefore often set against pragmatism, the habit of judging ideas by whether they work, and much political writing turns on the tension between the two. Which tone a writer intends usually becomes clear from the words that come before it.

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In philosophy idealism names a group of positions rather than a single theory. George Berkeley argued that to exist is to be perceived, Immanuel Kant spoke of transcendental idealism, and later German thinkers such as Hegel developed absolute idealism. What these views share is the claim that the mind is not a passive mirror of a ready-made world. The usual opposites in this field are materialism and, in theories of knowledge, realism.

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Webster's dictionary of 1913 records three senses: being ideal as a quality or condition, the conception of the ideal or imagery, and in philosophy the theory that denies the existence of material bodies and admits the reality only of ideas and their relations. The everyday sense of acting on high hopes is not given there as a separate meaning, although the same dictionary defines an idealist as one given to romantic expectations as well as one who holds the doctrine of idealism.

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Word forms

Regular forms according to English morphology (editorial description); the noun is mostly used without a plural.

word forms

przypadek forma
singular idealism
plural idealisms

Word forms: Editorial team

Collocations

Synonyms · Antonyms

Synonyms utopianism, romanticism, optimism, high-mindedness, quixotism
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Antonyms realism, pragmatism, cynicism, materialism
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Etymology

Formed from ideal and the suffix -ism. Skeat (1910) traces idea through Latin idea to Greek ἰδέα, the look or semblance of a thing, and links it with ἰδεῖν, to see. He derives ideal from Middle French ideal, from Latin idealis, and lists idealism and idealist among the derived words, noting that most of these terms are rather modern. Webster (1913) compares idealism with French idéalisme and idealist with French idéaliste.
source W. W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., Oxford 1910, open source
also Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913, open source

Related words

Related entries

Questions and answers

What does idealism mean?

Idealism means acting on high ideals and believing that things can and should be better than they are. Philosophers also use the word for theories that treat mind or ideas as more basic than matter.

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Is idealism a good or bad thing?

It depends on the tone. Idealism is praised when it means caring about principles and working for change, and criticised when it means ignoring practical limits, as in naive idealism.

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What is the difference between idealism and realism?

In everyday use an idealist focuses on how things ought to be, while a realist focuses on how they are. In philosophy realism holds that the world exists independently of the mind, which idealism questions.

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What is the opposite of idealism?

In everyday speech the usual opposites are realism, pragmatism and cynicism. In philosophy the classic opposite is materialism, the view that matter is the basic reality.

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