To transcend ordinary we need idealism
Please call me idealistic. I will wear it as a badge of honour.
Idealism has been getting a bad rap for the past few decades.
A large part of this has to do with our current worldview, which is based on the scientific, everything that cannot be measured is not real, rational, success-driven view.
When we awaken idealism, we awaken imagination and the world of ideas. What is not to love about that? The whiplash awesome? The unexplainable…the miraculous. Imagine a life without these?
The argument against idealism is the wish to be practical (Which I am a fan of, but it has its place), to be evidence-based. (Which is needed, but not at the extreme, for then we lose our intuition and the space for mystery and the miraculous.)
Idealism is the evoking of the unmeasurable, the not knowing. It animates the space between the idea and great art.
If Picasso rationalised his paintings before he painted, we would not have art, we would have ordinary.
There would be no breathtaking. No soul stirring for the experience of great art, great work. For daring, bold, beautiful imagination.
To transcend ordinary we need idealism. Idealism is the doorway to breathtaking beauty, uncompromising, irrational ventures…the ones that force us to jump off a cliff without a chute, and in the jumping to open whole new vistas of possibility previously unknown.
It engages the question…how do we do the impossible? And in the question, it evokes answers that would never have emerged.
We are suffering in a world of over-measurement, over-evidence-based, over-rational. Ordinary, average, normal, reductionistic.
It’s past time for a turn back to idealism, to open the flood gates on the impossible, unmeasurable, magical, irrational, expansive.
Without the mystery… if all questions were answered… what kind of desiccated lives would we live?
Idealism engages life. Viva Idealism.
Written January 17th 2014
Published April 22nd 2026. Photo taken April 22nd 2018
