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.