31
Berkeley, Principles 1-24
Immaterialism
You
were represented in last night’s conversation, as one who maintained the most
extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that
there is no such thing as material
substance in the world.
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– Hylas (a character
in Berkeley’s
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous)
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Berkeley’s thesis that there is no material
world might seem so absurd that it does not need to be taken seriously. In part this is because it is easily misunderstood. Berkeley
did not deny that there is an external
world, if by that we mean that there are other things distinct from the self
and its ideas. He did maintain,
however, that the only things that exist are spiritual things and their
ideas. We might represent this by
saying that Berkeley
maintained that only minds exist and that there are no bodies, but even this
would not be entirely correct. It all
depends what we mean by “body.” Berkeley maintained that
bodies are nothing more than collections of ideas, existing in the minds of
perceivers. If that is what we take
bodies to be, then Berkeley
did not even deny the existence of bodies.
Similarly, if we take bodies to be physical things, then Berkeley did not deny
the existence of physical things.
“Physical thing” is just another name for body, so in whatever sense
bodies exist, physical things also exist.
If, on the other hand, we take bodies to be mind-independent,
unthinking substances, possibly possessing such characteristic qualities as
extension, mobility, and solidity, then Berkeley did deny the existence of
body. However, he was quick to add
that all anybody really thinks of when they think of bodies is their own
ideas. A few philosophers, corrupted
by scholastic jargon, speak of bodies as being “material substances,” but no
one has any clear idea of what it means to be material or what it means to be
a substance. Berkeley went so far as
to maintain that ordinary people, uncorrupted by the dogmas of philosophy,
think just the way he did. They
consider bodies to be just collections of their own ideas. His conviction that ordinary people are on
his side was so deep that, after seeing his thoughts widely scorned and
condemned subsequent to their initial publication, he formulated the project
of moving to America and founding a university in Bermuda, convinced that
native Americans, uncorrupted by European ideas, would be more open to the
truth of what he had to say.
There is nonetheless something
strikingly counterintuitive about Berkeley’s
position, even when it is correctly understood. If bodies are just collections of our
ideas, then they come into existence and go out of existence as our ideas
come into and go out of existence. If
I am looking at a body, and then I turn my back, my ideas of the body cease
to exist. But if the body just is the
collection of my ideas, then it ceases to exist as well. So bodies exist only when they are being
perceived.
This is not consistent with
common sense, whatever Berkeley
might have thought. At Principles 3 Berkeley claimed that when ordinary people
speak of something they are not currently perceiving,
such as the books in their study, as existing, all they mean to say is that
they were perceived in the past and would be perceived again were they to go
back there. But this is not all that
ordinary people believe. Ordinary
people believe that we are located in space and that bodies occupy locations
in space outside of us and exist independently of being perceived by us, so
that when we turn away from them, they continue to exist outside us.
Berkeley based his position on the
rejection of the ability to form abstract ideas. He claimed that we can have no thought of
the existence of a body apart from perceiving or thinking of the body we
think to exist, so that to attempt to distinguish between the existence of a
body and the perception of it, as we must do when we claim that bodies can
exist unperceived, is to attempt to form an abstract idea. If abstract ideas are impossible we cannot
even think that bodies can exist apart from being perceived, and we use words
that have no meaning if we say that they do.
Unfortunately for Berkeley, common folk do
speak of bodies that exist unperceived all the time. This would be an oddity if they cannot even
form the ideas of what they are talking about. To further defend his position, he claimed
that even though bodies are just collections of ideas, they are not
collections of ideas of imagination made up by us, but collections of ideas
of sense, imposed on us by God. God
works in supremely regular ways in bringing about these ideas in us. For example, if I put the corn in the silo,
God will not give me ideas of corn unless I go into the silo — and will give
me ideas of corn whether I want them or not if I do so. Counting on God to keep on acting in this
supremely regular way is tantamount to counting on landmarks to continue to
be perceived in the same places, on immobile objects to be perceived again at
the places where we left them, and on bodies in motion to be perceived at
those places where the laws of motion should dictate them to be at later
times. When farmers and merchants say
that bodies continue to exist unperceived when they talk about the corn
enclosed in silos, this is all they really mean. They think of the bodies they say exist to
either be perceived by some other mind or to be things they would perceive were they or some other spirit to go into the silo, or would have perceived had they or some other spirit done
so. We get all the same ideas we would
get if there were an external world of independently existing bodies that act
on our sense organs to bring about ideas in us. Only there is no such world. There is only God, acting to bring about
ideas in us in the same way.
Descartes, contemplating this
possibility, had declared that a God who would behave in such a fashion would
be a deceiver for creating us with such a strong inclination to suppose that
bodies continue to exist independently of being perceived. But Locke had already observed that as long
as we feel real pain when we stub a toe on a stone or real pleasure when we
bite into an apple, it doesn’t matter whether the stone or the apple is an
independently existing external body or a dream existing only in us. If there is no external world containing a
fire, but moving your idea of your hand into your idea of the fire causes the
same pain that it would if you had a hand in the fire, and leaves you forever
afterward unable to give yourself an idea of that hand whole, or give
yourself ideas of it moving and doing things you used to be able to do with
that idea, then where is the deception in getting ideas of painful heat from
fire? Either way, whether there is a
material external world or only an ideal world, the effects are the same and
you are warned in advance not to do that thing on account of those
effects. As long as the idea comes and
goes independently of your will, and you get the pleasure or pain
accordingly, the thing is as real for you as anything needs to be, and has to
be treated as such. Berkeley not only took this lesson from
Locke but tried to make the further point that far from deceiving us, God is
actually giving us certain ideas in order to advise us what will happen next,
depending on how we move and otherwise act.
Far from being a remote and disinterested creator, God is constantly
with us, and constantly speaking to us in his own language of ideas, warning
us what is about to happen next. As
for being a deceiver, since unperceived existence is unthinkable, all our
references to bodies that are not currently being perceived are just
references to collections of ideas that are or might under other
circumstances be perceived by ourselves or others, and there is no error in
that. The belief in the unperceived
existence of material substances is not the belief of ordinary people but the
belief of a few philosophers, who have corrupted themselves by bad reasoning
and sought to employ this bizarre belief for atheistic and sceptical
purposes, seeking to substitute the agency of blind matter for that of God
and introduce a universal doubt about all things.
Even with these clarifications, Berkeley’s position
might still seem too absurd to be taken seriously. But those who have bothered to study his
arguments have found his position to be less easy to refute than we might
expect.
QUESTIONS
ON THE READING
1. What are the
objects of human knowledge?
2. Is there
anything said by Berkeley
in Principles 1 that Locke would
have disagreed with?
3. What is
required in order for an idea to exist?
4. What do I
really mean when I say that something I am not now in a position to perceive
exists?
5. What are the
limits on my power of abstraction?
6. Why should the
fact that extension in general (i.e., Cartesian intelligible extension like
that the understanding finds in the wax) is inconceivable unless it is
supposed to have some specific shape, size and velocity entail that extension
in general cannot exist outside of the mind?
7. Why should we
suppose that neither sense nor reason informs us of the existence of solid,
extended corpuscles located in space outside of the mind?
8. What is wrong
with supposing that it is at least plausible that our sensations are caused
by some sort of solid, extended substance existing in space outside of the
mind and acting on our sense organs when we come into contact with it?
NOTES
ON THE READING
Though Berkeley devoted all of Principles 1-24 to arguing that
material substances do not exist, his main argument is over by the end of Principles 6 — indeed, by the end of Principles 3. Principles
1-3 survey the objects of human knowledge and argue that they are all
collections of ideas perceived by us.
It follows that none of them can exist unperceived, though this
startling conclusion is only first drawn in Principles 4. Principles 4-6
charge that those who think otherwise are caught in a “manifest
contradiction” and explain how this could have happened to so many
people. Principles 7-24 mount arguments for the complementary conclusion
that there can be no material things.
Principles
1-3. Why
sensible objects cannot exist apart from being perceived. Principles
1 could have been written by Locke, and Berkeley likely intended it to sound
as if it had come from the pages of Locke’s widely respected Essay.
Anyone who surveys the objects of human sensory experience, Berkeley
claimed (following Locke), will find that they consist either of ideas of
sensation, coming from the five senses, or ideas of reflection obtained by
attending to the operations of the mind or the passions aroused in it by the
pleasing or displeasing aspects of its ideas of sense. All the things that we call objects and
consider to exist around us are collections of ideas. At least, this is all we experience objects
to be, and all we have in mind when we talk about things. An apple or a book is just a collection of
ideas. Some of these ideas are ideas
of sensation or memory; others may be ideas of imagination. (For example, I may only imagine the taste
of an apple while looking at it.) But
there is nothing more to objects.
But ideas only exist in minds and they
only exist insofar as they are perceived by those minds. If objects are just collections of ideas,
then the same must be true of them. They
can exist only insofar as they are perceived.
Moreover, Berkeley
claimed, this is all that people ever mean when they claim that something
exists. They mean that the thing is
perceived by someone. Or, if there is
no one around, they mean either that there was someone around at an earlier
time who perceived it at that earlier time or that if someone were to perform
certain actions (those followed by our getting ideas of our bodies moving to
occupy a certain place) then they might perceive it. (On this account, we never claim to know
that something now exists if no one is perceiving
it. If we are not ourselves perceiving
something, we must rely on the testimony of others to be assured of its
existence. And if no one is now perceiving it, we can get no further than thinking
it existed once, when someone did perceive it, or that it might be perceived
by someone who is appropriately positioned.
Recall, in this context, that Locke himself denied that we can be
assured of the existence of objects that are not currently being perceived.)
The entire argument is nicely summed
up at the close of Principles 4:
1. Sensible objects are things we perceive
by sense.
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2. The only things we perceive by sense are
our own sensations.
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3. Our sensations cannot exist independently
of being perceived.
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Sensible
objects cannot exist independently of being perceived.
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What
does it mean to have an idea? Perhaps the
most serious objection to Berkeley’s
argument is that it rests on a particular view of what it means to have a
sensation or idea — a view that need not be accepted. On Berkeley’s
view, an idea is a mental state. At
the same time, however, it is an object of perception. Combining these two claims results in the
view that an idea is a kind of object that exists in the mind and that the
mind somehow looks at or perceives this object.
There is much to recommend this view
(it accounts for what we are perceiving when we misperceive; it accounts for
how different people can perceive the same object in different ways; it
accounts for how we can perceive objects that are at a distance from us; and
it accounts for what we are thinking about when we think about objects that
do not exist), but there are also problems with it. One is that it is threatened with an
infinite regress. If we perceive
objects by having ideas, then how do we perceive ideas? By having ideas of our ideas? But then how do we perceive those ideas? Berkeley
would have responded to these questions by saying that for an idea to be
perceived by a mind just is for it to exist in that mind. After all, for Berkeley, the being of an idea cannot be
separated from its being perceived.
But there is another way to avoid the
regress that does not lead to Berkeley’s
immaterialist conclusions. This is to
maintain that ideas are not objects that are perceived by minds but acts or
operations that are performed by minds.
When the mind perceives an object it performs an act, the act of
perceiving. This act exists in the
mind and it exists only when the mind performs it. But the object that is perceived through
performing this act is distinct from the act.
Just because the act of perceiving exists in the mind and exists only
when the mind performs it, it does not follow that the object perceived by
performing this act is similarly located in the mind and dependent on it.
This view, too, has much to recommend
it. The chief among its advantages is
that the qualities that we perceive are not very good candidates for being
mental states. We perceive things like
redness, hardness, squareness, and rotten
smells. But we do not think that the
mind that perceives red turns red, that the mind that perceives hardness
turns hard, that the mind that perceives squareness
takes on a square shape, or that the mind that smells something rotten itself
has a rotten smell. Instead, we are
more inclined to suppose that if there are such things as ideas of redness or
hardness, or squareness, or rotten smells, and
those ideas are mental states, then they must be distinct from the things
they are “of.” To have an idea of red
cannot be the same thing as to be red, but must be something more like
performing the act of thinking about red, so that the act of thinking exists
in the mind, but without the mind taking on the redness thought about. And the same would have to hold for
hardness, squareness, rottenness, and so on. But then the idea is one thing, and the
object the idea is of is something else, and it ought to be in principle
possible that the one could exist when the other does not — so I can think of
objects that do not exist, and objects can exist even though they are not
thought of or perceived.
Berkeley was aware of
this objection, and at different points in his work he said things that might
be taken to address it. Chief among
them is Principles 49:
…
it may perhaps be objected, that if extension and
figure exist only in the mind, it follows that the mind is extended and
figured; since extension is a mode or attribute, which (to speak with the Schools)
is predicated of the subject in which it exists. I answer, those qualities are in the mind
only as they are perceived by it, that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but
only by way of idea; and it no more
follows that the soul or mind is extended because extension exists in it
alone, than it does that it is red or blue, because those colours are on all
hands acknowledged to exist in it, and nowhere else.
It might be objected that this is tantamount to giving in to
the objection, and accepting that ideas must be distinct from the things they
are of, from which it would seem to follow that idea and object must be
different things. But Berkeley’s claim here
was that the only way that things like redness or extension can exist is as
the object of ideas. It makes no sense
to consider them to have an alternative mode of being, independent of the
ideas that are of them.
Principles
4-6. Why
so many have failed to recognize the impossibility of the unperceived
existence of sensible things.
Having argued that sensible objects cannot exist unperceived because
they are just collections of ideas received by sense, and ideas of sense
cannot exist independently of being perceived, Berkeley proceeded to claim that anyone who
supposes the contrary is caught in a “manifest contradiction.” The contradiction, of course, is
maintaining that something that cannot exist unperceived, namely our ideas,
nonetheless can exist unperceived. The
contradiction is so blatant that Berkeley
had to wonder how anyone could have missed seeing it. His answer was that it happens because of a
widespread acceptance of the belief that we are able to form abstract
ideas. To briefly review what was
discussed in the previous chapter, Berkeley
was of the view that his predecessors and contemporaries, particularly Locke,
had believed that we can form separate and distinct ideas of things that
cannot exist separately, such as shapeless extension and colourless
shapes. If you think we can do that, Berkeley observed, then you will not balk at the view that we can form
separate and distinct ideas of the existence of a sensible object and the
perception of a sensible object. And
because you think you can conceive the two separately, you will maintain that
it is possible for the one to occur without the other. In fact, Berkeley insisted, things are the other way
around. The only ideas that can be
abstracted or separated are ideas of things that can in fact exist
separately. But our ideas of sense cannot
exist apart from being sensed.
Therefore we cannot form abstract ideas of sensible qualities existing
apart from being perceived. And anyone
who tries to do so will see that they cannot bring it off.
Principles 7-24. Why
material things that are distinct from sensible things, though perhaps
resembling them, cannot exist unperceived.
Even if we grant that Berkeley has established that sensible
things, the things we perceive by means of our senses, cannot exist apart
from being perceived, we might still wonder whether other things also exist —
and not just other minds, but other unthinking, material things. Berkeley
turned to consider this possibility over Principles 7-24. Over these sections he did not just argue that
we couldn’t know that material things exist.
He argued instead that it is impossible that they could exist. This is because the very notion of a
material thing is empty, meaningless, and even self-contradictory. Insofar as we think of material things, we
think only of our ideas, which cannot exist independently of being
perceived. If we attempt to describe
what the term “material thing” might refer to, we end up describing it in
terms of qualities like extension, motion, solidity, and colour, which are
qualities of our ideas and things that cannot in fact exist independently of
being perceived. If we give up on the
attempt and take material things to be indescribable, then we don’t know what
we are talking about when we claim that they might exist. We aren’t in fact saying anything when we
say that material things might exist.
Principles
7-15. The
meaninglessness of “material.” The
educated opinion of Berkeley’s
day was that the sensible qualities of colour, smell, taste, are sensations,
not qualities of bodies. As such they
can only exist in minds, not in material things. This was the view of Hobbes, Galileo,
Descartes, Locke, and Bayle, and Berkeley
was happy to help himself to it without supplying any further justification
(though the first part of his Three
dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
argues for it in some detail). He
added, however, that not only could material things not have colour or smell,
or taste, etc., they could not have qualities that are anything like what we
experience as our sensations of colour, taste, smell, etc. His reason was that, as he put it, “an idea
can be like nothing but an idea” (Principles 8). Consider heat. Heat is a feeling that we experience when
we touch hot things. But a feeling
can’t be like anything other than a feeling and feelings can only exist in
minds. To suppose that an unthinking,
material thing could have anything in it like our feeling of heat would be
like supposing that an unthinking material thing could have something in it
like our feelings of pain or pleasure.
This is absurd. The same could
be said of colour. If we accept that
colour does not exist outside of us, on the surfaces of mind-independent
material things, then it too is just a sensation or a way of feeling.
In addition to appealing to this
“likeness principle” to deny that material things could have qualities
resembling what we experience as heat, colour, smell, taste, etc., Berekeley added something else. He included figure and motion on the list
of sensible qualities (Principles
7). In other words, he rejected the
distinction between primary and sensible qualities. This was something Bayle had done,
following Foucher, and Berkeley endorsed their arguments while
adding a powerful one of his own. He
claimed that it is impossible for the primary qualities to exist apart from
sensible qualities like colours, heat and cold, tickles. If they can’t exist apart from one another,
and we accept that the sensible qualities are just feelings that can only
exist in minds, then the primary qualities can only exist in minds as well.
Berkeley’s reason for
holding this view was a specific application of his claim about the
impossibility of forming abstract ideas.
We can’t abstract the idea of solidity from the idea of extension, because
the idea of solidity is just the idea of resisting another body that tries to
move into the space you occupy, and so involves the idea of extension. But we can’t abstract the idea of extension
from the idea of shape. Every
extension must be the extension of some shape or other. And for there to be shape there must be
edges that define the shape. But for
there to be edges there must be contrasting sensible qualities. What makes an edge is a difference in
colour or a difference in tactile feelings of pressure. So where there are no colours or tactile
feelings there can be no edges, hence no shape, hence no extension, hence no
solidity. But colours and tactile
feelings are ideas that exist only when they are perceived. So solidity and extension must be only ideas, that exist only when they are perceived.
In addition to making this ingenious
appeal to the inseparability of the primary from the sensory qualities
Berkeley reiterated the point Foucher had made and
Bayle had alluded to: that the same arguments that are used to prove the
ideality of the sensible qualities can also be used to prove that the primary
qualities are merely ideas in us and not qualities of mind-independent
things. These arguments were perceptual
relativity arguments, which turn on the observation that the same object can
appear differently, from which it is concluded that what we experience are
just appearances, which exist only in us and not real qualities of the
object. The same bucket of water, for
example, will feel warm to a cold hand and cold to a warm hand. Because it cannot be both warm and cold at
the same time, we conclude that these qualities must exist only in us — or,
that if they do exist in the body, we do not know which, if any, of the
qualities we experience is the one that is to be found in the body. But, just as feelings of temperature vary
with the hand that feels them, so shapes and numbers vary with the conditions
under which objects are viewed. Single
objects look doubled to a person who is pressing on the side of their
eyeball. A penny really looks
elliptical when lying on a table but round when held up before the eye, as is
demonstrated in painting. And so on. If in the one case we say that the heat and
cold we feel are merely ideas in us and not real qualities of the bodies
outside of us, then by parity of reasoning we should say that the shapes,
sizes, numbers, and other modes of extension and solidity that we see and
feel are merely ideas in us and not qualities in bodies. (It bears noting that Berkeley was not as pleased with this
argument as he was with the earlier argument from the impossibility of
abstracting the primary from the sensible qualities. This is because the argument allows that
there might be extended, solid objects that exist independently of being
perceived and only establishes that we do not know how their extension and
solidity is modified. The earlier
argument, in contrast, establishes that mind-independent, material things
could not be extended or solid.)
Principles
16-17.
The
meaninglessness of “unthinking thing.”
In proving that mind-independent material things could not be
extended or solid, Berkeley
established that we have no clear idea of what we mean by calling a
mind-independent material thing a material
thing. The term “material” could not
mean “extended” nor could it mean “solid” since extension and solidity cannot
exist apart from sensible qualities, which cannot exist apart from being
perceived. But then it is not clear what
“material” would mean, especially given that filling space is the quality
that natural philosophers throughout the period had taken to be essential to
matter. Having established this much, Berkeley turned to the
other component of the idea of a mind-independent material thing: the notion
of a “thing” or substance. Suppose we
accept that material (i.e.
spatially extended) things cannot exist independently of being
perceived. Might we nonetheless
suppose that some sort of unthinking thing exists outside of us? The trouble with this claim is that
“unthinking” is a purely negative term.
It tells us what the thing is not, but not what it is. So if there is any content to the claim
that unthinking things might exist unperceived, that content must be carried
by the residual notion of a thing. Berkeley charged that
when this notion is stripped of all the sensible qualities and all the
primary qualities, nothing is left of it but the notion of some substance or
substratum in which non-mental qualities of some unknown sort might inhere. But what do we mean when we talk of a
substance in which qualities inhere or a substratum that supports
qualities? Literally, the Latin term
“substance” means that which stands underneath something else and props it
up. “Substratum” likewise refers to
that which is spread under something else.
But this cannot be what philosophers mean when they talk of substance
and substratum, if for no other reason than that these are spatial relations,
having to do with the extension and relative placement of things, and extension
has already been proven to have no existence apart from being perceived. But far from anyone having explained what
other meaning the terms “substance” and “substratum” might carry,
philosophers like Locke had candidly confessed that they had no idea what the
terms might mean. The terms refer to
“something I know not what,” as Locke had put it. Berkeley
drew the obvious conclusion: since neither the term “material” nor the term
“substance” have any meaning, people do not know what they are talking about
when they claim that material substance could exist independently of being
perceived.
Principles
18-20. Why
we can’t deduce that material things must exist even though we know nothing
about them. There remains one recourse for a materialist. A materialist might claim that even if we
cannot describe material things in any way, we can still infer that they must
nonetheless exist. The inference is
based on the claim that the best way to account for why our sensations exist
is to suppose that material things exist apart from us, and cause us to feel
sensations when we approach them. Berkeley had two main
objections to this view. The first was
that the case of dreams shows us that we don’t need to be affected by
anything in order to get ideas that are so closely patterned on the ideas we
get from waking experience as to be indistinguishable from waking
experience. But we know the ideas we
get in dreams are not produced by material things acting on us. Since the two sets of ideas, the dreaming
and the waking, are so much alike as to be indistinguishable, the fact that
the one is not caused by material things proves that the other need not be
caused by material things either.
Berkeley’s second
argument went further, and established that material things not only need not
exist to cause our waking experiences, but that they could not possibly cause
those experiences. Here again Berkeley’s job was easy,
because his contemporaries all had to agree with his premise. They all accepted that matter is very different
from mind — so different that it is impossible to understand how matter could
act on mind to cause it to have sensations.
Berkeley’s Principles 20 backs these arguments up
by offering an early version of what has since been referred to as the brain in
the vat case. The case is of an
amputated brain, kept alive in a vat and electronically stimulated by a
scientist to receive all the same experiences it would obtain were it
attached to a human body and living an ordinary human life. The only difference is that Berkeley’s example is
not of an amputated brain but of a disembodied mind. Berkeley observed that a mind that is
directly affected by God with all the same sensations that I receive because
of the way I am acted on by what I suppose are external bodies would have
experiences that are indistinguishable from mine. The example goes to show that there is
nothing about my experiences that could entitle me to infer that they are
even probably caused by external objects.
Principles 22-23. The
“master argument.” After an
obscure allusion, in Principles 21,
to “errors and difficulties” that spring from materialism but are avoided by Berkeley’s immaterialist alternative (Berkeley
was thinking of the atheism and scepticism discussed in the previous chapter)
Berkeley
turned to offer a final argument for his position. The argument is prefaced by the claim that
he was “content to put the whole upon this issue” and “give up the cause” if
this argument were successful. For
this reason, it has come to be referred to as the “master” argument. The argument is neither clear nor
uncontroversial, and has provided a great deal of amusement to formal
logicians who like to fight over whether it involves an illegitimate shift in
the scope of a modal operator. The argument
takes the form of a challenge: if you can so much as conceive it possible for
an extended movable substance, a sound, a figure, or a colour to exist
outside of some mind that perceives that substance, Berkeley will give up his
views and agree that you are correct. Berkeley was confident
that you cannot do that, because anything you conceive of as possibly
existing outside of the mind of any perceiver must of course be conceived by
you, and so is not outside of the mind of any perceiver after all. The best you can do is conceive
of an object that is not now being perceived by anyone else even though you
are having ideas of it. The grain in
the silo that I mentioned earlier is like this. Even though I suppose that the grain is
enclosed in the silo, so that no one can perceive it, what I am talking about
is a collection of ideas of imagination that are now existing in me and that
I take to resemble ideas of perception that others would have if they were to
do certain things (e.g., go into the silo).
Generations of scholars have been
stunned by this apparently simple argument, and convinced that such a strong
thesis as that of the impossibility of the unperceived existence of bodies
could not be based on such an apparently trite observation as that conceiving
something existing outside of all minds involves conceiving that thing. This has led them to look for some sophism
concealed in the argument. It may be,
however, that the master argument is not a special and particularly decisive
argument at all, but merely a way of bringing people to appreciate that it is
impossible for them to abstract the idea of the existence of a sensible thing
from the idea of its being perceived. Berkeley had already
claimed in Principles 5 that the
main reason why people believe that bodies exist independently of being
perceived is that they suppose that they can abstract the idea of being from
the idea of being perceived. It is not
surprising, therefore, that he should have decided to rest his case on a
challenge to people to form such an idea.
Supposing they cannot rise to the challenge would not prove that
bodies cannot exist unperceived. It
would merely remove people’s chief reason for thinking that they can.
ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Was Berkeley successful in
his attempt to claim that when ordinary people speak of things existing
unperceived they do not really mean it but instead really mean something
else?
2. On different
occasions Berkeley
said different things about what it properly means to say that something
exists unperceived. Sometimes he said
it means that the thing is being perceived by God, who sees all, but not by
any other finite spirit. At other
times he said it means that the thing was previously perceived by some
spirit, from which we infer that had a spirit been placed in the appropriate
circumstances, they would have perceived it.
Examine the recent literature on Berkeley’s
account of unperceived existence and review what can be said in favour of or
against both of these accounts.
3. Was Berkeley ultimately
successful in his attempt to answer the objection that ideas are acts of
perceiving and not mental objects? In
addressing this question consider what he had to say about the act/object
distinction in the first part of his Three dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous
as well as Principles 49. Note that there is also a large body of
secondary literature on this question.
Consult some of the most recent of those discussions in giving your
assessment.
4. Was Berkeley right to claim
that nothing can be like an idea but another idea?
5. Was Berkeley right to reject
the distinction between primary and secondary qualities?
6. Review some of
the recent literature on Berkeley’s
master argument and comment on whether that literature has demonstrated that the
master argument rests on a fallacy.
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