Ideality is a Lonely Place

Speaking of logical deadends, here's a piece of flash fiction I wrote last year (reviving a ignominious character from another story) on the idealist/constructivist/neo-Kantian notion that our understanding of the world reduces to a mere collection of ideas.

The World of Ideas

It sounds strange, I know, but reason compels me to say it: When I die, the whole world could die right along with me. A lover of people and nature, I want to believe otherwise, but I have learned from Professor Benjamin Wright, the chair of philosophy at Carrington State College, that all we can know are our ideas. The awful truth is that my idea of a world beyond my ideas – a world that might survive the death of me and my ideas – is just one of my ideas. It worries me, too, that so many great thinkers, and not just Professor Wright, have taken to the idea that everything is just an idea. Plato – one of Professor Wright’s favorites – had the idea that only ideas were fully real; and Descartes sometimes described the world as an illusion created by an “evil genius”; and Kant, who Professor Wright said was the deepest thinker ever, was sure that we couldn’t even think about a world outside of our ideas.

“I’m afraid that’s all we have,” Professor Wright said. “We don’t really have each other; we just have our ideas of each other.” So when I die, when I can no longer have any thoughts, all those people and things I’m thinking about will be gone, too, including Professor Wright.

I was sure that something was wrong with my ideas, so I asked Professor Wright if he thought that his very life might depend on my ideas. Professor Wright told me that my ideas of him would die along with all my other ideas. But everyone knows that ideas live in brains and brains die with their owners; I wanted to know whether he would die. He said that the Professor Wright I know would be lost forever, but not the Professor Wright other students might know. That wasn’t much help, since I was just as worried about those other students and their ideas of Professor Wright. Everything I know, Professor Wright agreed, will be lost forever when I die, including my ideas of those other students and my ideas of their ideas of Professor Wright.

He challenged me to think about him without using my ideas. At first his challenge seemed like a philosophical trick, like the work of Descartes’ evil genius; but then he reminded me of Kant’s idea that anything outside of our ideas is unthinkable, and I must admit that I couldn’t think about Professor Wright at all without using my ideas. So I decided to focus on Professor Wright’s ideas. Would they die with me, too? He said that his ideas would not die with me; that they were his ideas and could only die with him. I think I understand now why he wasn’t too concerned about my ideas -- or even my death: When I die, all he will be inclined to say is that his ideas of me have died, and the death of an idea is not usually as bad as the death of a person. Even my idea of the world dying along with me would be nothing other than an idea of one of his ideas.

But If I know anything at all, I know that my death would be more than just one of Professor Wright’s ideas, so I asked him if our conversation implied that the world was bigger than our ideas. It was Professor Wright, after all, who gave me the idea that we can only know our ideas, just as Professor Wright borrowed the idea from Plato and Descartes and Kant. Professor Wright smiled said that he, like those great thinkers before him, could be certain only of one idea: That he alone existed and was real. And to me, a lover of people and nature, that sounded even worse than death.

Comments always welcome,

DKJ