32
Berkeley Principles 1-7, 25-33, 89, 135-156
Spiritual Realism
By the close of the first Dialogue Berkeley’s Philonous has
established that we have no knowledge of an external world consisting of
material substances, and that material substance could not even possibly
exist. This thesis might seem so
absurd that it does not need to be taken seriously, however compelling the
arguments for it may be. 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.
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 say that their cell phone continues to exist in their pocket
even though they are not now perceiving it, all they mean to say is that their
memory of having perceived it in the past leads them to infer that it would
be perceived again were they to reach into their pocket. It is not that it continues to exist in
their pocket in the meantime, but just that they are confident that new ideas
of it would be created in them were they to reach into their pocket. 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.
To defend his position, Berkeley
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 tablet in the
backpack, God will not give me ideas of the tablet unless I look or reach
into the backpack — and will give me ideas of the tablet 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 we talk about tablets continuing to exist in backpacks, this is
all we really mean. We think of the
bodies we say exist to either be perceived by some other mind or to be things
we would perceive were we or some other spirit to open
the backpack, or would have perceived
had we 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 that his position is not so easy to refute.
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. Why can one idea
not be the cause of another?
6. How many
different kinds of substance are there?
7. What does our
freedom of will strictly allow us to do, according to Berkeley?
8. What made Berkeley think that our
ideas of sense are not produced by ourselves?
9. How did Berkeley distinguish
ideas of sense from other ideas?
10.
Berkeley did not believe
that the law of universal gravitation is a description of a force in bodies
that makes them move towards one another.
What did he think this law, and the laws of nature in general are
descriptions of? What is the only
“force” in nature, as far as he was concerned?
11.
Did Berkeley
follow Locke in believing that the existence of other finite minds must be
accepted on faith?
12.
In what sense do we see God?
NOTES
ON THE READING
Phenomenalism. The main part of Berkeley’s Pinciples of Human Knowledge opens with a claim
that could just as well have been written by Locke: “It is evident to any
one who takes a Survey of the Objects of Humane Knowledge, that they
are either Ideas actually imprinted on the Senses, or else such as are
perceived by attending to the Passions and Operations of the Mind, or lastly
Ideas formed by help of Memory and Imagination, either compounding, dividing,
or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways.” Locke had said exactly as much in the
opening sections of Essay II, and
reiterated it at the opening of Essay
IV, when saying what our knowledge cannot extend beyond relations between our
own ideas. Berkeley was not quoting
Locke, but may well have been attempting to imitate his style. Locke was immensely popular by the time
Berkeley wrote, and Berkeley will have certainly wanted to show that the was beginning his work exactly where Locke began: with
the sober claim that our knowledge does not extend beyond our own ideas.
But almost immediately, Berkeley went on
to draw a striking and very unLockeian metaphysical
conclusion from this opening thesis: that what we call the objects of
experience or sensible things are just collections of ideas. Various ideas, such as those of roundness,
redness, tartness, and crispness are commonly observed to occur together. Because they recur so often in our
experience we notice them, and give the whole bundle of them a name, like “apple.” The fact that we use one name for the whole
collection leads us to think that they make up one thing. But that one thing, the apple, is not made
up of skin and pulp and seeds, much less of water and fructose. It is made up of ideas. Of course, it also has skin and pulp and
seeds, but the skin, and pulp, and seeds are made up of ideas, and our talk
of things like water and fructose molecules is understood in terms of
imagined ideas of the sort one finds in the diagrams in chemistry textbooks.
This brings up an important point. Not all of the ideas collected together
under the name apple are always perceived when we perceive an apple. When first viewing an apple, we only see
the outside, not the seeds. Unseen
parts of the apple, like the seeds, are not perceived but imagined. Whenever ideas have been commonly observed
to go together in the past, and later just some of them are seen, our past
experience suggests ideas of the absent ones, leading us to produce those
ideas ourselves in imagination. So
sensible things are not just collections of currently sensed ideas. They are shot through with remembered and imagined
ideas.
Because sensible things just are
collections of sensed, remembered, and imagined ideas, and ideas exist only
in minds and only when perceived, sensible things exist only in minds and
only when perceived. But we need to
keep in mind that there are various ways in which sensible things can be
perceived. They can be sensed to now
exist before us. They can be
remembered to have existed. And they
can also be imagined. Our tendency is
to leap to the conclusion that just because something is imagined, that does
not mean that it exists. It is just “imaginary”
as we put it. But we have already
discussed one exercise of imagination that ought to give us some pause:
imagining the seeds inside an apple we are currently sensing. Sometimes, one thing we are now sensing
leads us to imagine something else that has been frequently connected with it
in the past. This does not just happen
with the back sides or insides of things now facing us. It can happen with one thing and something
entirely different from it.
Remembering that you put your tablet in your backpack, a present
sensation of your backpack can lead you to imagine your tablet. More to the point, it can lead you to
imagine that if you were to look
inside your backpack, then you
would see your tablet. This is a
further exercise of the imagination that is involved in making us think of
sensible things.
Berkeley noted that ideas occur in a
regular or law-governed order or sequence that allows us to anticipate which
ones will occur after which other ones.
Getting visual ideas of your backpack leads you to think that if you
were to create certain ideas of volition or willing inside of yourself —
specifically, those ideas of volition that you know from past experience have
been regularly followed by visual and tactile ideas of your hands and arms
reaching out and grabbing and opening the backpack, then those ideas would be
followed by yet other visual ideas of your backpack. We learn all this from childhood by
experience. And we refer to the laws
in accord with which ideas are produced in us as the laws of nature.
Berkeley’s view was that ideas can only
be produced by minds. After all,
material substances don’t exist to produce them, and we know that minds do
exist (because something needs to exist to perceive ideas and we are
intuitively aware of ourselves as minds that perceive ideas). We are intuitively aware, moreover, that
we, as minds, produce our own ideas of memory, imagination, and volition.
Since ideas can only be produced by
minds, and the laws of nature describe the manner in which ideas are produced
in us, the laws of nature must actually be descriptions of the manner in
which minds are disposed to produce ideas.
But, wrongly in Berkeley’s view, we instead attribute the regularity
in the sequence of ideas to the ideas themselves, as if earlier ones caused
the later ones.
Later philosophers have come to refer to
the view that objects are just collections of currently perceived and
imagined ideas, and that unperceived objects are imagined ideas that are
linked by laws of nature with perceived ones as phenomenalism. Berkeley
has been recognized as one of the founders of phenomenalism. However, his phenomenalism is connected
with views about God’s role as cause of ideas of sensation that later phenomenalists have found to be unacceptable.
The
distinction between reality and illusion.
Though Berkeley
maintained that sensible objects are just collections of ideas existing only
in the minds of sentient beings, and only when they are perceived, he did not
deny that these objects are real.
There is a difference, Berkeley
observed, between those ideas we cook up in imagination, and those ideas that
are given to us in sensation. While
the former are figments that we cause to come and go as we will, we cannot
make the latter come and go simply by willing it. If we feel cold, we may imagine warmth all
we want, but that will not produce sensations of warmth. We find that we can only get sensations by
acting in just the way we would act if there were an external world
containing objects that cause those sensations in us. Getting sensations of warmth means willing
to move our bodies and getting ideas of our body parts moving relative to our
ideas of sources of heat. Only after
ideas of sensation have been produced in us in that order do we start to
experience sensations of warmth. That
makes our sensations of heat and cold, of our body parts, and of sources of
heat real things and not just figments of our imaginations. The same holds for all other ideas of
sensation.
So for Berkeley, to distinguish between reality
and illusion is to distinguish between sensing and imagining. That is something we can do in a number of
ways, just by inspecting our ideas, and without needing to invoke any
supposition about the causes of our ideas.
Not only do ideas of sense occur independently of the will, they feel
different from ideas of imagination — they are more strong, vivid, and lively
— and they occur in a regular sequence or order that conforms to what we call
the laws of nature (e.g., our ideas of sense always exhibit bodies as moving
in accord with the laws of gravitation and collision). We do occasionally run into problem cases
where just some of the criteria for distinguishing between reality and
illusion are satisfied. Our sensations
of the motions of our bodies are produced by our wills, thought they are
vivid, strong and lively, and governed by laws of nature. Experiences of miracles violate laws of
nature but are vivid, strong and lively and occur independently of our
wills. Ideas produced in dreams appear
to occur independently of our wills and to be strong, vivid, and lively, but
they often contain events that occur contrary to laws of nature. And so on.
But all that this goes to show is that the distinction between reality
and illusion is not always easy to draw, not that there is no such
distinction or that we need to appeal to mind-independent material objects to
draw the distinction. It is sometimes hard to distinguish
reality from illusion. We do sometimes mistake dreams for
reality or miraculous events for dreams.
It is a strength, rather than a weakness of Berkeley’s account that it does not make
the distinction between reality and illusion more clear-cut than it in fact
is. An account of the difference
between reality and illusion that draws a clear-cut distinction between the
two would fail to explain how it is that we can sometimes be confused or
mistaken about where to draw the line.
The
existence of the self. Sensible
objects are not the only real things for Berkeley.
Other things exist that are not sensible and that are known in other
ways than by having ideas. These
things are spirits. Chief among them
are the self, God, and other minds.
Like Descartes and Locke, Berkeley believed that
the existence of the self is intuitively obvious, as is the existence of all
of its acts and thoughts. I know by a
kind of extra-sensory intuition that I exist and that I perform acts like
sensing, willing and imagining.
This intuition has to be extra-sensory
because it is in principle impossible to know the self by having an
idea. Berkeley had already declared in Principles 2 that it is impossible for
ideas to exist on their own. Ideas
cannot exist apart from being perceived, which means that there must be
perceivers. These perceivers could not
themselves be ideas on pain of causing a vicious regress. So while sensible things are mere
collections of ideas, minds cannot be ideas or collections of ideas.
But simply because the self could not be an idea or a collection of ideas,
why should it follow that it could not be
known by having an idea or collection of ideas? Berkeley
observed that ideas are passive and inert.
They don’t act in any way, even to the extent of appearing or
disappearing. Instead they just are,
and something else makes them come and go.
But Berkeley
claimed to be aware of himself as a thing that acts. From this he drew the conclusion that he
could not possibly have an idea of himself, since that idea would fail to
represent one of his most quintessential features.
But if we do not know ourselves through
having ideas, what form does our intuition of our own existence take? Berkeley
claimed that we have a “notion,” as opposed to an idea, of ourselves. Etymologically, a notion is a thought had
by nous (the ancient Greek word for
the pure intellect) as opposed to a thought had by means of sensory
experience.
So it would seem that there are actually
two kinds of thoughts that we can have: ideas, which arise from sensory
experience and are repeated in memory and imagination; and notions, which
involve a kind of direct understanding.
At Principles 89 Berkeley suggested that
we do not just have notions of ourselves but also of other minds, including
God, and of relations between things.
We arrive at our notions of ourselves by “inward feeling or
reflection,” at our notions of other minds by reasoning, and at our notions
of relations by, presumably, intuition.
Berkeley’s doctrine of
notions opens a can of worms. If we
can have notions of spirits, why can’t we have notions of matter? Can notions or the things known “noetically” exist apart from being perceived? If they can, why can’t ideas? Is a spirit just a notion or a collection
of notions the way a sensible object is a collection of ideas? Or is it something distinct from notions
that can exist even when the notions are not being perceived? If notions are different from spirits, then
how do they represent spirits? If
representation is possible without resemblance, then why shouldn’t it be
possible for ideas to represent objects without resembling them as well, so
that the being of an idea might be abstracted from the being of its object
after all? Berkeley struggled with these questions in
another work, the third part of his Dialogues
between Hylas and Philonous. A
study of whether he was successfully able to address them is suggested as a
research project at the close of this chapter.
Berkeley’s position on
the nature of spirits led him to conclude that the self could not possibly be
material. Bodies are collections
ideas. The collections of extended,
solid particles that early modern science took bodies to be made up of are
likewise collections of ideas. The
thing that has the ideas could not itself be a collection of ideas. It must be something radically distinct,
called a spirit or mind.
This argument was intended to address
all of Locke’s worries about thinking matter and the substance of the
soul. It is beyond question, on Berkeley’s system, that
the thing that thinks is an immaterial substance.
The
existence of God. Whereas we have a direct intuition of
ourselves, we know the existence of God and other minds by demonstration or
reasoning. These demonstrations do not
lead us to have an inner awareness of other minds. We have no inner awareness of any mind
other than our own. Instead, they give
us reason to infer that there must be other minds. When we infer the existence of these other
minds we do not perceive or intuit them the way we perceive or intuit
ourselves. Instead we employ our
notion of ourselves to stand in for them and represent them. We take our notion of ourselves to model what
these other minds must be like. In the
case of other finite spirits, we take the model to be a fairly good
resemblance. In the case of God we
suppose our own minds serve only as an imperfect model that gives us some
notion of what is present as the mind of God.
Here is why we feel entitled to do this
where God is concerned: Like Locke and
Descartes, Berkeley
accepted the principle that every effect must have a cause. We know by intuitive self-consciousness
that our ideas of imagination are caused by our own minds. But this is not the case with our ideas of
reality. Since we are not the cause of
these ideas, Berkeley
reasoned that they must be due to the activity of some other spirit, who
imposes them on us just as we impose our ideas of imagination on
ourselves. There is simply no other
alternative, since if matter does not exist and all our ideas are themselves
inert and passive, then the only thing left that could possibly cause our
ideas is mind or spirit.
If we compare our ideas of reality with
our own effects, our ideas of imagination, we discover an immense difference in
scale. The things we can imagine are
few, dim and incoherent. Even the
greatest poets, painters, and filmmakers working together can only produce
partial views of characters and events that often seem implausible if not
outright incoherent. Our ideas of
reality are not like that. They are
much more vivid than anything we can produce in imagination, and they are
incredibly rich in both detail and extent.
There are no partial views.
Every scene is full from horizon to horizon and exact down to the smallest
perceivable detail. And the whole is
perfectly ordered. The author of our
ideas of reality never gets the time lines wrong, never attributes actions to
characters that their personalities could not possibly be supposed to induce
them to perform, and never describes events that could only happen through a
violation of the laws of nature. (There is a small, technical exception for
the case of miracles that we can ignore for present purposes. Berkeley’s
discussion of the topic can be located by doing an electronic search for the
term in the Intelex edition of his collected
works.)
Berkeley thought that
this means that our ideas of reality must be produced by a single, governing
spirit, not a collection of spirits who might disagree and work at cross purposes
to one another. And it means that this
spirit must be supremely powerful and intelligent. It must be, in other words, God.
Berkeley also thought
that we can infer that God must be benevolent and concerned to provide for
us. This follows from the way our
ideas of reality have been ordered, so that they always occur in a certain
pattern that can be described by laws (the laws we call the laws of nature,
though they are really the laws in accord with which God brings about ideas
in us). Even though the strict
observation of laws means that God is sometimes obliged to cause us pain, God
is not a cruel being. On the contrary,
by always bringing about ideas of reality in us in the same way, God has
enabled us to take the ones that occur earlier as signs for those that are to
come later, and so anticipate the future and act to stave off misfortune. Our
ideas are in effect a language whereby God is constantly speaking to us about
what is going to happen next, and so advising us how to live in comfort. Getting
ideas of a precipice, we know to turn away to avoid getting ideas of pain and
broken bones. Getting ideas of food,
we know to eat in order to avoid getting ideas of hunger. Getting ideas of a pleasant or unpleasant
taste, we know whether the food is likely to be good or bad for us, and so
on. God is therefore
providential. God looks out for us and
is constantly speaking to us and advising us what to do in order to avoid
ideas of pain and obtain ideas of pleasure.
All we need to do is pay heed to the language in which this advice is
given.
Berkeley was
particularly proud of this result.
Unlike Descartes and Locke, who took our ideas of reality to be caused
by material substances and who therefore opened the door to Deism, atheism
and, ultimately, scepticism, Berkeley’s alternative account of the cause of
ideas of reality gave God a central and undeniable role to play in producing
the world we see about us, indeed, in delivering an ongoing, providential
message to all of us.
For Berkeley, God is not just responsible for
making our ideas of reality follow upon one another in a law-like fashion,
but also for giving each different finite spirit a set of ideas consistent
with perceiving objects from a particular perspective. Thus, when we are sitting across the table
from one another, God ensures that while I am getting visual ideas of the
front side of my mug, you are getting visual ideas of the back side. This creates the effect of a number of
different minds each experiencing the world from the perspective of a certain
location in space particular to it.
But, of course, the minds are not outside of one another in space at
all. Being spirits, they are not the
sort of things that are located in or fill space.
Obviously, were it not for God, there
would be no ideas of reality, no externally imposed order or law-likeness in
our sensory experiences, and no community between the experiences of one mind
and another. Everything would collapse
into illusion and unintelligibility.
The world as it is constituted requires that God be placed at the
center of things, playing an essential and ineliminable role. There can be no mechanism making things
happen on Berkeley’s
system. God has to exist and be acting
to impose corresponding ideas on our minds from moment to moment. Doubt about the existence of God is a sheer
impossibility as long as you accept the immaterialist thesis.
The
existence of other minds. Having
established that God exists, Berkeley
employed a second causal argument to establish that other minds exist. He noted that among our ideas of reality
are ideas of human and animal bodies.
While these ideas conform in many ways to the laws of nature that God
has instituted, they appear to be capable of moving themselves. Our ideas of human bodies, in particular,
often exhibit these bodies as moving in ways that are random, unpredictable,
and even wicked and contrary to the otherwise benevolent intentions of God.
Taking the course of these ideas to
arise from inattention or mistake on the part of God just does not square
with the evidence we can see of his intelligence and power from his other
works. The most reasonable
explanation, Berkeley
contended, is to suppose that God has created other finite minds, capable of
having ideas and performing volitions.
We know that when we perform volitions we are able to bring about a
limited set of alterations in a particular class of our ideas: our ideas of
the positions of the limbs of a particular body we call our own. Perhaps God has graciously indulged other
finite minds by giving them a free will to move other human bodies, and so
brought it about that whenever these other finite minds perform acts of will,
both their ideas of their own bodies and our ideas of their bodies are
appropriately modified to reflect those acts of will.
On this account, we do not move our
bodies. We merely perform acts of
will. God then moves our bodies for
us. That is, he gives us ideas of the
limbs of our bodies in appropriately changed positions, and gives everyone
else corresponding ideas. That is all
that moving a body amounts to on Berkeley’s
account.
ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. As described in
the notes on the reading, Berkeley’s doctrine of notions raises a number of
difficult questions about what it means for an idea or a notion to represent
an object and about whether Berkeley is within his rights to treat our
knowledge of ourselves so differently from our knowledge of sensible
things. Berkeley struggled with these questions in
the third part of his Dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous. Do a study of
this work and of the recent secondary literature on it and assess the
adequacy of his answers.
2. Berkeley’s argument for
the existence of an immaterial self rests on the claim that ideas cannot
exist apart from being perceived, so that the existence of ideas implies the
existence of a perceiver. This claim
was challenged by Hume, in Book 1, Part 4, Section 6 of his Treatise of human nature, though Hume
himself came to have misgivings about this challenge, which were laid out in
his appendix to that work. Assess the
cogency of Hume’s reasons for rejecting Berkeley’s
principle, particularly in the light of his own later reservations.
|