Thursday, November 15 was World Philosophy Day, and in honor of that global celebration, Shamrock Craic looks at the life and legacy of Kilkenny-born George Berkeley, often considered to be the father of modern idealism.

A Bishop and well-rounded intellectual who was knowledgeable in theology, mathematics, optics, and politics, among others, Berkeley is among the three great British empiricists (along with John Locke and David Hume) and rightly thought of as Ireland’s greatest philosopher. Living during a critical time period where religion and rationality were grappling with each other, Berkeley came up with a philosophy that places God at the center, in stark opposition to the cold, materialist world that Newtonian mechanics implied. This would later on be called subjective idealism, although Berkeley never used the term himself, preferring the term “immaterialism,” and would be immortalized in history books as well as indirectly through the ideas of later philosophers.

Berkeley grew up in Ireland as an accomplished young man, earning a master’s degree and writing his two monumental works, The Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in his early 20s. These outline his philosophical arguments, and while Three Dialogues was written much later, most people prefer starting with it because it is easier to understand and more straightforward. Afterwards, he travelled to England and Europe and eventually made his way to Rhode Island in America, where he stayed for four years while attempting to secure funding to establish a town and college on the Atlantic island of Bermuda that never panned out. Towards the latter half of his life, he returned to Ireland where he was appointed as Bishop of Cloyne.

He was fondly described as kind, humane, proactive, adventurous, and willing to stand up for his convictions, and one story even describes him as trying out a near-death experience out of curiosity. When he died, Alexander Pope—his friend and a well-known English poet—honored him with this eulogy: “To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.”

A QUESTION OF PERCEPTION

Berkeley’s philosophy didn’t emerge fully formed in one book. It took him several years to flesh it out, and his starting point was rooted in science. In An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, which was his first book, he said that when we look at objects, we don’t directly perceive their distance, whether from ourselves or other objects. In other words, it’s not like there’s a number hovering over every object, describing how far away it is from us. We arrive at an estimate by ourselves, based on our experiences with sight and touch.

This already contains the shadow of what Berkeley would eventually ask: if much of what we know about objects come from our past experiences, or from within our minds, then is the object really out there in the first place? Do physical objects even exist?

The answer that he would present to this would be a startling no, and this would earn him a place alongside Locke (and Hume, who’d come later) as an influential empiricist, since all three of them agree that ultimately knowledge is based on experience. Locke was the first to create shockwaves throughout the world of philosophy, but Berkeley would take this further by arguing that material things don’t exist at all.

SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM

It’s helpful to define what Berkeley meant by matter—something that exists independently from the mind and that can be perceived with any of the senses. Common sense would say that a chair is material, because it presumably exists even if we are not in the same room as it, and we can sit on it, trip against it, touch it. We are surrounded by material things, and much of what we feel or think about can be traced to such things.

Berkeley upturned conventional notions and said that this is completely wrong. Matter is an illusion. In fact, what we think of as matter is simply a collection of ideas or perceptions that are all in our heads. So the table at which you eat your dinner—yes, it’s imaginary, and so is your dinner, in the sense that the entire scene is playing out inside your mind.

This leads to the Latin expression that Berkeley would become famous for: Esse est percipi (aut percipere), or “To be is to be perceived (or to perceive).” To understand this properly, we need to turn to the other side of the equation. In Berkeley’s concept of the world, only two things exist: ideas, which we mistake for material things, and spirits or minds, which do the perceiving and act as a sort of receptacle for ideas. A mind possesses will and understanding, so human beings definitely qualify. Unlike ideas, minds exist on their own—so we don’t have to panic about whether we ourselves exist or not, because as long as we are perceiving, that is proof enough of our own existence.

It’s almost as if Berkeley set this up to defy Descartes, who coined an equally catchy phrase: “Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I exist.” Descartes was saying that his mind—the “I” that exists and perceives—was equivalent to his thoughts, and Berkeley contested that by drawing a sharp distinction between the two.

In addition to his empirical philosophical view, Berkeley also contributed much to the evolution of idealism. In philosophy, this doesn’t mean someone who is rosy-eyed and passionate about perfection, although Berkeley could qualify as that. Rather, to be a philosophical idealist means that you believe that reality is completely created by the mind, as opposed to materialism. Berkeley’s ideas were so significant that he actually founded a new kind of idealism: subjective idealism, since he put the emphasis on individual minds. Other strands of idealism are Hegel’s absolute idealism, which focuses on a continuously evolving Absolute Spirit, or Kant’s transcendental idealism, which still maintains that there exists an independent material world outside of our minds.

GOD AS INFINITE MIND

George Berkeley as Bishop of Cloyne. (Internet Archive Book Images / Flickr)

However, this isn’t all there is to Berkeley’s philosophy. It’s likely that you’ve stumbled upon the same idea yourself while daydreaming: what if matter is an illusion, and it’s all in our heads? The question that follows from that is: if an object needs to be perceived to exist, does that mean objects disappear when we don’t perceive them?

It seems like a logical conclusion. The table exists only because we perceive it, so when nobody is looking at it or touching it, then it must stop existing. But this is extremely counterintuitive, and it feels absurd on a fundamental level, perhaps because we used to think like this as infants. Amidst diaper changes and feeding bottles, babies at a certain level of development have no concept of object permanence, i.e. they believe that when an object flashes out of their sight, it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why their mother leaving can trigger a panicked reaction. These infants could have been staunch advocates of Esse est percipi! To find out which side of the debate you stand on, you can ponder on this thought experiment (don’t blame us if you get a headache): “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

But Berkeley’s philosophy is hardly that simple and straightforward. Otherwise, it would never have reached the levels of fame (and influence) that it did. There’s one piece of the puzzle that is missing: Berkeley’s motivation for undertaking all this in the first place. Curiosity is noble enough, but he was driven forward by a larger purpose. He was a Bishop who wanted to reconcile the significance of God with an increasingly scientific environment that was starting to doubt religious values. The dilemma at the heart of his questioning was ultimately theological.

It is at this intersection where Berkeley became truly innovative. Yes, we individual minds perceive objects, but beyond us, there’s an Infinite Mind—God, who perceives everything and who generates even our own perceptions. Because God is omnipotent, then the tree that falls in a forest always make a sound. Regardless of whether there are people around, God will always be there to hear it. This nicely solves the problem of object permanence and fills in many of the gaps in Berkeley’s ideas.

It also prevents his philosophy from turning into solipsism, which believes that nothing but one’s individual mind exists. This is more the stuff of random musings—we’ve all had those strange moments when we start questioning the reality of things—rather than the perspective of serious philosophers, who have never formally championed it. It does count, however, as divine solipsism, since everything exists only through God. This places God in a supremely powerful and involved position where He causes everything. The universe as we know it becomes inseparable from God’s mind.

GEORGE BERKELEY’S LEGACY

George Berkeley Dean of Derry Plaque

If you’re looking at this image on a screen, does it really “exist?” (Geograph)

Subjective idealism is, in a sense, Berkeley’s answer to the challenge posted by Newton’s discoveries. While we hardly bat an eyelash at these in the present, they were extremely revolutionary during Newton’s and Berkeley’s time, and their implications extended beyond science. Newton’s laws suggested a completely mechanical universe that can be understood purely through cause and effect, with laws that operated like clockwork. One can do away with God effectively in such a universe, which consists entirely of material things that can be explained with science and defined through numbers.

As a rather feisty response to this notion, Berkeley wrote “The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician.” It’s not clear whether he was addressing Newton or the astronomer Edmond Halley, but it was essentially a critique of calculus that forced mathematicians to make calculus more rigorous. This was only one thrust, though, of Berkeley’s mission of defending Christianity against Newton’s mechanical universe, which played out mostly in his championing of subjective idealism—where God was intimately involved in everything and never an apathetic bystander.

A 1924 light verse attributed to Ronald Knox cheekily sums up Berkeley’s stance. Here’s an excerpt:

“Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad;
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God”

The University of California, Berkeley, was named after George Berkeley. (Wikimedia Commons)

While Berkeley hasn’t become as much a household name as Newton, he is still an extremely important and game-changing figure in philosophy, influencing many thinkers after him such as Kant, Mill, Russell, Schopenhauer, and Hume. Aside from his ironic contribution to calculus, his ideas about perception have also become part of modern of modern psychology and optics, and Schopenhauer salutes him as the father of idealism.

As counter-intuitive as his philosophy may be, it is difficult to argue against it successfully because Berkeley already anticipated most of the objections that can be raised against it. Berkeley would hardly have raised an eyebrow at American educator Samuel Johnson’s attempt to refute him by kicking a heavy stone. This fails because even the pain that Johnson feels from kicking the stone is still a perception coming from his mind, and the same goes for the stone itself.

Despite this, Johnson understood the significance of Berkeley’s ideas and incorporated these into his own philosophy, which was taught to around half of American college graduates and even indirectly influenced the Declaration of Independence. Though Berkeley never founded his Bermuda college, his name is born by one of the residential colleges at Yale University as well as the Berkeley Library at Trinity College Dublin. And, in 1868, when what was then the College of California was seeking to expand from Oakland, the board chose to name the new school and location after him, becoming the University of California, Berkeley.