Idealism is inextricably tied with the metaphysics of Presence. That’s the true legacy of Cartesianism; the pure, indubitable being-there that functions as the ground of every ontology. It’s the field of the immediate presence (of the de trop givenness, Sartre would say) that not only survives the epoche, but predates any subject-object differentiation. It simply is. The pure unmediated field is, per definitionem, always included in the ontological account. It is in that sense that Being cannot be thought independently of consciousness – the transcendents (subject and object) have nothing to do with it. That’s why, when in a recent post Levi Bryant listed the central characteristics of idealism, his criteria were sufficient, but not necessary. You don’t have to be a Kantian or a correlationist to be an idealist. You don’t have to insist on categories and subjective construction of reality in order to reject the independence of Being. You only have to be adamant about the Presence (which almost always comes to haunt the realists as a ‘consciousness’). Continue reading