the.com/idealism

means The belief that things should be shaped by how good or perfect they could be, rather than settled for as they merely are.

from From Greek 'idea' — the visible form or pattern of a thing, rooted in 'idein,' to see. Plato used 'idea' for the perfect, unchanging forms behind the shadows we actually perceive — a chair-in-itself behind every wobbly real chair. 'Idealism' as a philosophical term emerged in the 1700s to name the view that reality is fundamentally mental or ideal rather than material; the looser, everyday sense — chasing how things ought to be — grew out of that same root, the eye reaching past what it sees toward what it imagines.