September 5, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Try to define idea in your own words. It’s a good exercise. Much of our lives are spent dealing with abstractions that we struggle to define.
As students, our entire coursework at HMU revolves around great ideas. When outlining the Great Books curriculum, Mortimer Adler limited his selection of great ideas to about one hundred. Of course, he was limited by print at the time. We are no longer bound by such restrictions. Therefore, HMU allows students to pursue great ideas that interest them, which means that we occasionally add to those original one hundred. However, not everything is a great idea. In fact, each idea must be carefully considered before it can be considered ‘great.’ Fashion, for example, is an idea but perhaps not a great one (of course, if you disagree, I’m always open for a debate.) In my mind, fashion is fascinating, artistic, and readily discussable, but it probably falls under a broader category such as culture or art.
So, for our exercise, idea, according to me, is a thought. It’s the frame or field of important things. It’s an intangible good, something essential to language and communication. An idea can be about tangible or intangible things, but the idea itself may be intangible. Ideas need to be communicated, so we have created language. Clearly, my attempt at a definition already shows the limits of language. How do we define (and use!) words which contain such abstraction?
My clumsy attempt at a definition doesn’t quite measure up to Merriam-Webster’s. The dictionary adds a little bit of clarity with “a formulated thought or opinion.” But then it muddies the waters again with the definition of: “anything that is known or supposed about something.” The dictionary also offers: “an entity (such as a thought, concept, sensation, or image) actually or potentially present to consciousness.” This seems like a solid start, until it adds the clarifier “an indefinite or unformed conception.” After reading the dictionary definitions, I’m not sure if the term idea references something specific or not.
The confusion is understandable. It’s an incredibly difficult, abstract idea. In order for it to remain flexible, it necessarily needs an element of vagueness. The definition even differs (greatly at times) depending upon which philosopher you study (more on this in a future blog). For now, we’ll state that there’s no doubt, despite your definition, that ideas are the stuff of philosophy. And philosophy is a particularly important human endeavor. Since, nearly everyone traffics in ideas all day long, it’s important to spend a little time understanding the stuff that circles in our brains whether we’re aware of it or not.
To help round out our definition, I’ll conclude this blog with a section of Mortimer J. Adler’s explanation from the Syntopicon. He points out that great ideas (versus the simpler term idea) consist of complex interior structures which are ordered into separate parts. The smaller parts which fall under the umbrella might even oppose each other, they can expand upon each other, or they can merely seem unrelated. This is why I might place fashion under the great idea of art, for example. And art might also include painting or mechanical work, etc. These subcategories might fall under different umbrellas too, which is why I claim that fashion would pertain to both art and culture. In addition to this, Adler says, “The great ideas are also the conceptions by which we think about things. They are the terms in which we state fundamental problems; they are the notions we employ in defining issues and discussing them. They represent the principal content of our thought. They are what we think as well as what we think about.”
Furthermore, he adds:
“The word ‘idea’ has many other oppositions of meaning in its tremendous range of ambiguity. It is sometimes used exclusively for the eternal types in the divine mind or the intelligible forms that exist apart from material things which are their copies; sometimes for concepts in the human mind, abstracted from sense-experience; sometimes for the seeds of understanding which belong innately to the intellect and so do not need to be derived from sense. Sometimes ‘idea’ means a sensation or perception as well as an abstract thought, and then its connotation extends to almost every type of mental content; sometimes it is denied that that there are any abstract or general ideas; and sometimes ‘idea’ has the extremely restricted meaning of an image which is the memory of a sense perception.”
In other words, ideas are necessary constructs for communication. They are essential to the human. They are also incredibly ambiguous.
I hate to leave it there, with such vague shadows of understanding…but check back in upcoming weeks for a map of how the great thinkers used the word idea.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Triff
