what is heligan idealism?

Answer 1

Generally speaking, idealism is one of 3 traditional answers to questions concerning the relationship between mind and matter. Materialism says that what is ultimately real is matter, and thus mind is nothing other than material processes of some sort. Idealism asserts that mind is the ultimate reality, and matter is just a product of mind – more or less like the world in a dream seems real while you are in the dream, but when you wake up you realize that the world in you dream was just created in your mind. Some have tried a third solution, saying that ultimate reality is neither mind nor matter, but something else that is somehow the primordial source of both.

Hegelian idealism (from German philosopher G.F. Hegel) attempts to uncover the "movement" of spirit – how it changes and evolves over time. For Hegel, ultimate reality is "absolute spirit" – which is more or less a mental sort of thing, which is why his philosophy is called a form of idealism. But absolute sprite is not simply something that we are from the start, but rather, something that we must achieve through progressive steps. There is an inner "mechanism" (so to speak) – a lawlike unfolding of spirit that progresses through stages. This mechanism is the dialectic. The basic idea is that every element of reality (up to the point of absolute spirit) contains the seeds of its own opposite. You take any given thing and call it your thesis. This thesis contains (logically implies) its contrary, which is the antithesis. The thesis and antithesis combine to form a synthesis. This synthesis then becomes your new thesis, which has its own antithesis, which leads to yet another synthesis, and so on. Hegel saw this as a PROGRESSIVE process, not merely an endless cycle. The ultimate goal of the process is the stage of absolute spirit.

Like the previous answerer pointed out, Karl Marx (who was a student of Hegel) took the basic idea of Hegel's dialectic and applied it to the evolution of matter. In other words, where Hegel was an idealist, Marx was a materialist, which is why it is often said that "Marx stood Hegel on his head." This idea of the dialectic was where Marx derived his view of progress through human history based on the material means of a production. He saw capitalism as a stage which can be thought of as a thesis. Communism is the antithesis (which is why we hear the famous phrase that "capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction"). For Marx, the ultimate synthesis is society without any government at all – a sort of perfect, harmonious anarchy, which is the materialistic equivalent of Hegel's notion of absolute spirit.

Answer 2

I think you may mean Hegelian idealism, after the German philosopher G.F. Hegel, early 19th century--sort of invented dialectical materialism and the idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; big influence on Marx (Karl) and others.