George Berkeley
Berkeley’s Idealism
His Project
We will introduce Berkeley’s Idealism in the metaphysical sense, that is to say all that exists is that of nature of mind, immaterial spirit. He was a very practically minded man. He denies the existence of matter. He considered carefully John Locke’s epistemology. Mind is the object of thinking, the only thing the mind thinks is idea. Ideas are representations of material objects, seeing this scheme, Berkeley’s strategy is simple, namely, to deny that there is any objectively real representations of our ideas of primary qualities. To deny that you can break the cognitive barrier and get to the extra-mental, outside of the mind. Locke did it by casual inferences, whereas Locke is realist about materiality, Berkeley is anti-realist about matter, denying the independent reality of matter. That’s characteristic of metaphysical idealism. Idealism is a kind of ant-realism about matter. We will run across other views that questions the reality of matter that is known as phenomenalism, that is they assert that all we know are appearances of things like material objects but whether in reality there is matter is another question. Idealism is a subset of phenomenalism. Immanuel Kant is some sort of phenomenalist, characteristically, all of the 19th century German idealism is phenomenalism. The Platonic tradition likewise is a kind of idealism.
The thing that encouraged the rise of materialism, deism and atheism is Newton’s physics. What he is asserting in his mechanistic physics is the independent reality of matter, force, uniform absolute space and time. Newton assumes all four of them are objectively real and Berkeley asserts all of them are unreal. The cause of the difficulty is mechanistic science. Berkeley’s method is going to be thoroughly empiricist, and he insists that the only resources we have a natural knowledge is the ideas that comprises of experience. He is going to affirm the empirical faculties are quite trustworthy if we use them right, he is an evidentialist. Difference between Berkeley and Locke is he doesn’t think there is evidence for the existence matter, physical form, absolute space and time.
Q&A
The development of continental rationalism from Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz until Kant around 1800 is forced to bring to bear of the thinking of David Hume, the empiricist trend continues in the phenomenalism of the 19th century to people like Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and subsequently 20th century Logical Positivism. What we find in 19th century German and French thought is the idealism out of the roots of continental rationalism. You can be idealist with two philosophical traditions, both empiricist and rationalist. How come the rationalist become idealists? Rationalism is talking about the intellectual resources innate within the human mind. You move from Age of Reason into the 19th century and the emphasis is on innate resources, not for knowledge but for creative self expression. What you get here is an idealism of romanticists sort rather than the enlightenment sort. An idealism that depends upon the recognition of the inner reality, the springs of activity and action and thought which are within the human spirit, whereas for Berkeley as an idealist, he does not stress the resources of the human spirit but the passivity of the human mind as a recipient of certain kinds of sense stimuli.
His Principles
Abstract Ideas
He’s trying to work with Locke’s epistemology to other conclusions, so his first move is to argue against John Locke’s theory of abstract ideas. This is dealing with the philosophy of language. So in the open introduction section of the material that we have from Berkeley he talks about language and abstract ideas and argues for a Nominalist position in opposition to John Locke’s Conceptualist position. His point is that language gets thoroughly abused, we tend to think that wherever there is a general term there must be some real object corresponding to it. We tend to assume that all nouns and names name things so if there are general nouns they must name general things. But that is a mistake, language can do many other things besides naming, not all words name is referential, there isn’t necessarily any one-to-one correlation between words and ideas like Locke thought. Words often have no fixed meaning in any case, but in addition to referring to things words can be used to comfort, to encourage, to exhort, to blame and all sorts of things we do with language. This might remind you of 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein, there is a group of people who insists that all languages must have reference, who said there are all sorts of other things we do with language and Wittgenstein call them language games, we do all social activities with languages. For example, Berkeley said that according to Locke, we have an extra idea of spacial extension, size, shape, densities. He denies that there is such thing as abstract ideas. He is telling Locke that he is not efficiently empirical on the matter of abstract ideas, what is there in our experience of using general terms which relates to thinking abstract ideas? You have to think of words not of names that points to object, but symbols which build into a whole language that relates to other symbols, so what you think is in terms of a language and within the framework of that language you are thinking an abstraction from particular objects. Language seen as a system of symbols which is a vehicle for abstraction. This goes into 19th century and gets picked up in all sorts of literary theory .
Mentalism
Here his attention is turned to the theory of ideas and he argues for a position that has become known as mentalism. Mentalism and the view that only minds and their ideas exist. If ideas are indeed the initial stuff out of which knowledge is composed, pure simple ideas and compound ideas related to each other with affirmations or denials, and if ideas are mental events then if the cause must be like the effect then ideas must have mental causes so the ideas that flood through my mind must be caused either by my mind or by other mind or minds. Right away, he realized the awfully difficult problem that Descartes had posed for himself with his Mind-Body dualism and causal interaction. How can bodily changes produce mental changes, how can physical stimuli to the senses producing brain processes cause changes in them that immaterial soul. Moreover, there was a tradition developed in Europe that’s known as occasionalism which has the view that there is no casual connection between Mind and Body, but when something physical happens to me, that is the occasion on which God causes the corresponding mental state to occur and vice versa. The thing that occasionalist tries to do is certain Calvinist view. When we say God is all mighty, we mean that he has all the power there is and nobody else has any power. Nothing physical has casual power, that is how occasionalist tries to avoid the implications of mechanical science. Berkeley is going to say that it’s God that is the cause, but before that he needs to deal with John Locke’s theory of ideas, he has three arguments for that. One is that unperceived things has no point of reference, when you are talking about matter, the language has no empirical meaning. Second is the cause effect, like cause, like effect. The third is about Locke’s doctrine of primary and secondary qualities as if we can think about them separately. In common sense experience, I never conceive color without spatial extension. If you never have primary qualities without secondary qualities and vice versa, that means secondary qualities are subjective and same is true for primary qualities. If primary and secondary are both subjective, what is left of the objectively matter independent in its existence, empirically nothing. There is not a trace for empirical evidence for the existence of matter as objectively real substrate. On the theory of ideas his conclusion is mentalism that all that exists is minds and ideas. It’s the kind of phenomenalism about physical objects the thing that keeps him from pure phenomenalism is that he asserts the reality of mind and the reality of God and if God and minds are for real then he’s not completely phenomenalist, he is phenomenalist just about physical objects.
Replies to Objections
Berkeley’s denial of the existence of matter substratum independently of any mind seems to be sustainable insofar as the concept of matter is an abstract idea rather than an empirical notion and as a nominalist he maintains that we just don’t have abstract ideas, the word matter has no reference, similarly with his mentalism. Because if it is the case that all we know about material objects derives from our ideas of primary and secondary qualities and if it is the case that we never have primary quality ideas independently of secondary qualities or vice-versa and the both primary and secondary qualities are relative to all sorts of observation conditions then it seems to follow that both primary and secondary quality is in the same condition namely those subjective there are simply equalities of our ideas and we have no evidence for any unchanging qualities or at least objective qualities in hearing in material substrate are out there. So his conclusion is that as far as the empirical evidence is concerned, all that we know is minds and their ideas, and our ideas of material objects are just ideas compounded out of primary and secondary qualities with no notion of matter. If he stopped there, there would be an immediate objection: how do you account for the ordered uniformity of nature and how do you account for ideas you have if not caused by external material things. His line of thought starts with Descartes I think. What I think is ideas, among our ideas we distinguish between active and passive ideas, because some ideas I choose to have and there are involuntary ideas like sense expression. While I can be the cause of voluntary ideas, but not for involuntary ideas like pain, so there must be other cause rather than my mind for these passive ideas and it must be some other mind. The the next step in his thinking though is to take note of the uniformities of nature, that is to say the uniformity of our experience. The fact that there are predictabilities within the experience that we have, the fact that we live in a world of common sense experience, common order, common predictability, public evidence and so forth. So there must be as the cause of this sort of uniformity, there must be some greater mind. God is the other mind that’s needed in the case of passive ideas. God not only causes our passive ideas but gives us an ordered world of experience with all of its predict abilities. He is not only the creator of our finite minds but also the one who informs our finite minds so that our sensations are a kind of divine language to us by which we grasp the order of things to which we have to adjust into which we have to fit and in this way we participate in God’s ideas. It’s sort of an empiricists equivalent of saying that the human Logos participates in the divine Logos and human mind participates in the divine mind. It turns out God is the sufficient cause of not only all that is but of all ideas that occur passively to minds that exist. So God is the creator of the world of nature ex nihilo and creator of finite minds well.
The major problems for metaphysical idealism is the problem of evil. At least from a theistic standpoint for the obvious reasons. If there is no real materiality, no real physical forces, then all of the things the part of the problem of evil, physical pain, cancers, including death, don’t have the kind of explanation that has traditionally been given. Namely that they are caused by physical processes which are part of the physical environment in which God has put if we run afoul of its processes we break our necks. If you don’t have physical causes to explain physical evils you’ve got a problem and in as much as those things come to us as passive experiences you have to say God causes it directly. So there are idealists who try to handle it by affirming a finite God that while he has all the power there is limit to what is conceivable in terms of a world without evil. Other idealists will argue that physical evils are illusory where you get closer to the hallucination somewhere in that ballgame, you’ll find the attitudes of Christian science which is an idealist metaphysic.
Berkeley’s emphasis is going to be that the world of nature is, as Newton has depicted it, a world with a fixed order that isn’t arbitrarily interrupted by God. He maintains that this general order of nature is essential for the guidance of ordinary life, the environment has to be predictable, it’s essential if we’re going to be able to understand nature’s processes and you could add the use nature’s resources must be orderly and predictable and these advantages outweigh what he calls particular inconveniences. He’s using what historically was known as the greater good argument, evils are permitted for a greater good. He wants to say natural evils are necessary in bringing out the contrasts accenting Beauty shading the fit the picture so that we can really see what’s good and pursue it. The fact that there is pleasure and pain involved in human experience serves as God’s pedagogue schoolmaster in teaching us how he wants us to live, teaching us how to behave which is one of the things that John Locke said in talking about ethics the pleasure and pain provide sort of reward and punishment. So in that sense pain and fear are necessary to our well-being when seen in larger perspective. The greater good kind of argument is essentially the same as Christian theists have used throughout the centuries for natural evils. When it comes to human sin he believes that this is active ideas, the consequences of that on other people. God orders their experience consistently with the effects of your intentions towards those other people. The combination of free will argument and greater good argument takes care of it.
Sometimes the the history of scientific thought through the 19th century into the 20th is captioned as the dematerialization of matter. You can see the change that’s gone on because back in the 18th century matter was composed of atoms and that changed as we began to talk about the structure of the atom as we began to see that E = MC2 that matter is not an ultimate, the principle of the conservation of matter that it cannot be created and cannot be destroyed of Newtonian physics gave way to the principle of the conservation of energy. It is fair to say that contemporary physics does not have the concept of matter that they had in the 18th century. I think the question is whether the Newtonian conception of matter has any empirical basis, any scientific basis. If Newtonian concepts are without empirical basis what happens to Newton’s claim to be doing empirical science? Berkeley, David Hume and Immanuel Kant said no, which means when post-newtonian science began to develop, the ground was ready for it. There is another question that whether matter itself is passive or having some power, some potentiality that’s in process. In Berkeley the emphasis is on passive, some of the Continental thinkers think it is more active. For Plato, Aristotle and Medieval philosophy, matter is potent, it has natural potentialities and inherent teleology in matter itself, an inherent telos. The loss of the teleological view of nature that came with the Scientific Revolution introducing mechanistic science changed the conception of matter to something bear path substrate, and Berkeley is seeing the problems with it.