by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Introduction: Our Love Affair with the Material World
We have seen that the materialist metaphysics of Thomas Hobbes, whatever our personal reaction to it might be, offers a view of reality substantially in accord with many contemporary attitudes and practices. This should not be at all surprising, at least to a point: we are animals, at least in part, even if Hobbes’s view that we are merely animals turns out to be wrong, and thus we are properly concerned with our material security, comfort and pleasure. Moreover, in a world in which we are feeling increasingly fearful and insecure it is hard to pay much attention to matters of the spirit, even if we are so inclined, unless and until our physical survival is fairly safe.
Quite apart from the universal and unavoidable inclination to deal with the daily necessities of survival, however, our relation to the material world has today changed dramatically from the way it was just a few decades ago, not to speak of how it was prior to the industrial revolution. Modern industry and technology have so increased our power to manipulate the physical world that we may be inclined to feel that we have gone from being part of physical nature to being the master of physical nature. We have all grown up in the nuclear age and thus take for granted, to the extent that we even give it any mind, the fact that our technology has given us the power to destroy all life on earth; but if we consider it for a moment, this technology represents a huge leap that must dramatically have changed our attitude toward nature without our even being aware of it. And with computer technology, we routinely and thoughtlessly perform functions of calculation and communication that, just a few years ago, would have seemed positively magical. And consider that, in just a few decades of intensive automobile driving, we have probably caused changes in the climate of the entire planet that the earth’s own natural processes would have taken tens of thousands of years to accomplish.
In short, the material world may today have become more real and vital to us than ever before for the simple reason that we now feel so much in control of it. It is more real than ever before because it is ours, or, even, it is us, in a sense, as it has never been before, so, like Narcissus, we see our own image in the natural world and so fall in love with it, without knowing that it is we: how then could the physical world not be real, indeed what other reality do we need or could there be, since it now seems to be just a simple extension of our own selves, with every person and corner on the face of the earth available at our fingertips, in full voice and living color?
Berkeley’s Metaphysics
It is thus that it may be difficult for us to take seriously the metaphysical claim of George Berkeley (1685-1753), for that claim is, simply and unambiguously, that the physical, material world does not exist; to be more precise, though we do of course experience the material world, and it is thus certainly real as experience, it is not materially real, that is, matter does not exist. Some of Berkeley’s arguments may well remind us of Descartes, who himself doubted the existence of the material world as he came to the determination that the “I” of “I think, therefore I am” is nothing but a “thinking thing,” and that our physical body is utterly separate from and, strictly speaking, unnecessary to our personal existence. In other words, Descartes concludes, quite reasonably, as we have seen, that the mind is utterly independent of the body. However, it is vital to recall that Descartes’s doubting of the reality of the physical world did not amount to the positive assertion that the physical world, consisting of matter, does not exist; on the contrary, Descartes makes clear that he is morally certain that the physical world does exist, and he never, as a practical matter, in fact thinks that the physical world does not exist, however deceptive our sensations of it may be. Descartes’s project, we must recall, is primarily epistemological: he is concerned with knowledge, and specifically with what, if anything, he can know with absolute, metaphysical certainty. Thus Descartes only doubts the existence of the physical world to the extent necessary to prevent himself from committing an error in judgment, that is, specifically, from thinking that he knows something with perfect, absolute certainty that is in fact subject to some doubt, however impractical and miniscule that doubt may be. Ultimately, of course, Descartes concludes (though not until Meditation VI) that he can in fact be metaphysically certain that the physical world does exist, along with the separate, mental world of thought; it is thus that Descartes is a dualist, who asserts that the world consists of two distinct kinds of reality, or substances.
Berkeley, however, unlike Descartes, does not merely doubt the existence of physical matter: he positively and unambiguously asserts its non-existence. To be more precise, it is not that the physical world does not exist; rather, he asserts that it does not exist as a separate kind of material reality. The physical world exists, in other words, but not as physical or material; instead, its existence is entirely mental, or spiritual—”it’s all in our heads,” we might say (though we shall see that this in fact is not quite right). According to Berkeley, everything that we have any contact with, or knowledge of, or access to, comes directly from the senses, or is a combination of sense images, or is a feeling in reaction to sense images; and these sense images are all mental, notwithstanding our apparently commonsensical (but, according to Berkeley, quite mistaken) assumption that these sense images are caused by physical bodies external to our own bodies (for, argues Berkeley, to repeat, there is no such thing as a material body). Thus, for example, I―“mind, spirit, soul or myself”—perceive the various specific sensations of an apple, by sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, and I mentally combine these into a single object, and, moreover, I feel, again in my mind, a liking for the sweet taste and pleasing appearance that I attribute to this supposed object; so, there is an object, and it is an “apple,” but this object is not a material body but a purely mental idea.
Berkeley’s Argument
While it is hardly arguable that our ideas exist only as mental entities, how can Berkeley assert the same of the objects that the ideas are ideas of? Berkeley asks us to consider what we mean when we assert that something exists: “The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.” What Berkeley points out here is that our use of the word “exists” simply represents our having a sensation of a thing; in other words, when I say “there is a chair,” the “is” means that it exists, but all that means, really, is that I see it. “There it is,” I might say to you, “see for yourself.” Thus, again, I am never asserting of a thing anything more than that I perceive it, because, in fact, that is all I can ever do. If I “know” that the chair “exists,” all that means is that I see it; and the “seeing” of it represents nothing more than a perception in my mind. Thus Berkeley distills the core principle of his metaphysics into the phrase, “esse is percipi”―”to be is to be perceived,” that is, existence and perception are identical, they are exactly the same thing, the perception of a thing is all the thing is, perception is the whole of being itself.
With a humorously facetious twist, Berkeley says, “It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing among men that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding.” It is “strange,” for Berkeley, because if we closely consider the matter, we will see that we do indeed know these things by perceiving them―indeed, how else would we know them, as they are after all “physical” things. Yet, all of our sensible perceptions, as such, are just that―perceptions in our minds, “and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations.” In other words, all we can perceive are perceptions themselves; it is perceptions we perceive, for we don’t have a mountain in our head when we observe a mountain. Of course we assume that there is a mountain out there, but we do not perceive it; we only perceive what we perceive, and that can only be a (mental) perception.
Berkeley takes issue with certain of the most hallowed terms in the history of metaphysics, considering first the notion of abstract ideas. By “abstract idea” we mean generally an idea, a mental entity, that abstracts from―is derived from―some concrete kind of object. Thus we are familiar with physical bodies of various kinds, by perceiving them, and we have in our minds an abstract idea of “body” that constitutes the essence of body, or what all those bodies have in common as bodies. Different philosophers offer varying accounts of what abstract ideas are or where they come from, but it is a rare philosopher who denies their existence as such; but this is just what Berkeley does, arguing that an abstract idea, along with the physical object it purports to be an idea of, is just another idea, along with the physical object itself. In other words, it is not really the idea of abstract ideas that he denies so much as the idea that such ideas are abstracted from some physical body external to us, for to Berkeley, as we have seen, the “physical” is nothing more than another species of idea or perception―in short, again, it’s all in the mind. Thus, says Berkeley, “there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives.” This is, in essence, simply another way of saying that all that exists is of the nature of spirit and thus not of matter: for Berkeley, there is of course only one kind of substance, namely spiritual or mental substance, which is, again, precisely the opposite of the materialist view of Hobbes, thus the term used to describe Berkeley’s point of view, “immaterialism.”
Berkeley also attacks the widely-held belief in the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” qualities, made famous most notably by the English Philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). According to this view, physical objects consist both of certain primary qualities that are essential to their very existence as physical objects, as well as of secondary qualities that can and do vary constantly. We have already seen Descartes touch on the basic idea of primary qualities, in Meditation II, as he considered the nature of bodies to determine whether the “I” of “I think, therefore I exist,” had anything to do with bodily existence (which he determined, as we recall, that it did not). Thus extension is a primary quality, because, by nature, all physical objects are extended in space, and figure is a primary quality because all physical objects have some shape; and all bodies have number and can be counted, and are moveable, etc. Moreover, whereas the secondary qualities, like heat or color, are what we perceive by the five senses, the primary qualities are not directly perceivable; and it is the claim that there is some such “substratum” of unperceived reality, known as “matter,” existing independent of our sensation, that Berkeley attacks. Berkeley defines matter as “an unthinking substance,” as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, motion and figure do actually subsist.” But such a thing cannot exist, according to Berkeley, for, as we have seen above, all we can coherently mean by “existence” is that something can be perceived and thus exists as an idea in our minds. “Hence,” says Berkeley, “it is plain, that the very notion of what is called matter or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it.” In other words, to think of matter is precisely to think of something, and anything I think about, by definition, exists as, and only as, a thought and thus is nothing other than an idea.
In short, says Berkeley, when we think of matter as some external, “material substratum” in which all sensible reality somehow subsists—that is, some fundamental ground of physical reality that contains or enables the existence of all physical reality—what we seem to be talking about is “the idea of being in general, together with the relative notion of its supporting accidents.” In other words, matter, if it exists, would constitute the basic reality of physical reality, supporting the secondary qualities that we perceive with our senses. But we don’t perceive such “being in general,” argues Berkeley, rather we perceive beings themselves—that is, we perceive them by our perception of the sensations we associate with them, and this is all they can ever really be, at least for us. Thus Berkeley says, this “general idea of being appears to me the most abstract and incomprehensible” of all possible ideas and, because we can clearly have no perception of it, it cannot be real. Moreover, Berkeley argues that “the very notion of what is called matter or corporeal substance involves a contradiction,” since a “notion” is just another word for an idea, a purely mental entity, and thus matter is in essence reduced to a non-material idea, which evidently contradicts the very essence that matter claims, however dubiously, to possess.
Now let us turn from the direct metaphysical consideration of matter to an epistemological question: could we perceive, that is know, in any way, the existence of material objects external to us even if they did exist?
Even If Matter Did Exist, We Would Have No Way of Knowing It
In ¶18, Berkeley implicitly turns from the direct consideration of his metaphysical position to a consideration of epistemology. Specifically, the question now becomes, could we know of material objects, even if they were to exist? Berkeley says, of course, that we could not.
Let us assume, argues Berkeley, that material objects exist outside the mind; in order to know them, we would have to use either our physical, bodily senses, or our purely mental power of reason. In order to know something by the senses, we would have a sensation of it, of course; but there would be no way to know that a sensation came from anything but another sensation. The senses, by definition, perceive only sensations, and sensations are known to us only as perceptions of the mind. Even were it true that some material body outside us impressed itself upon our material body from without, causing some material reaction of skin and nerves, leading to a physical impression on the brain, still all we are in touch with is the thought of the object so produced; we are not and can never be in touch with the object itself, even if there is one, which, according to Berkeley, there is not. The same problem essentially bedevils the mental power of reason: reason can only know reasons, so to speak, and reasons are mental entities, not material things, so even if there were material things without us, no amount of pure reasoning would be able to tell us whether those exterior things were anything like the mental ideas of them since reason could have nothing to do with them.
Here Berkeley invokes the phenomenon of dreams, pointing out, much like Descartes, that in dreaming we experience a complete version of material reality: thus, to reprise an example of my own, the fire-breathing dragon I see in my dream I also smell and hear, moreover it causes in me physical fear and the sensation of running away from it, etc. But all of these “physical” sensations of “material” events are of course purely mental. Thus, in my dream I lack nothing whatever, at least in principle, of what I assume I experience of the physical world in my waking state; yet, in my dream there is nothing whatever physical. Thus I do not need for the physical world to be material, since it can be just as real in purely mental form, as in my dreams. Recall, of course, that Descartes only assumes he is dreaming, for the sake of argument, in order to further his epistemological project, specifically, that is, to prevent himself from falling into errors of knowledge; by contrast, Berkeley invokes the example of dreaming to establish that, in principle, the materiality of the physical world is unnecessary to its reality, and thus to support his metaphysical position that the material world need not exist.
Nothing Exists Apart From Perception
One might object that it seems self-evident that innumerable things exist, like the famous tree in the forest that may or may not make a sound, which no one perceives. The materialist Hobbes would of course assert that such a tree not only exists but also makes a sound, since both tree and sound are purely material entities, one made of matter and the other a moving of matter in waves (and from a scientific standpoint Hobbes would of course be perfectly correct). But we have already noted above that all the idea of the unperceived object really is is itself an idea of something that could be perceived if one were to happen upon it, or that may be being perceived by some unknown perceiver. Moreover, to think of an unperceived object is essentially impossible. Berkeley agrees that “there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them… but what is this… more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think them all the while?” Berkeley has us again: by thinking about an unperceived thing, we are ignoring that the very thing we are thinking about as unperceived is still and yet thought by us as a perception in the mind, and if we stop perceiving it, what good reason do we have to believe that it still exists, until, that is, we bother to think of it again it by perceiving it again in our minds?
In short, argues Berkeley, “if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reason to think there were that we have now.” In other words, either there are external, material bodies or (as Berkeley asserts) there are not. Even assuming that there are such things, however, we can neither affirm nor deny their material existence since the only things we have any contact with are our own, mental perceptions; moreover, assuming that Berkeley is right that there are no such external, material bodies, this does not prevent us from assuming and thinking, as presumably we do most of the time, that what we perceive with our senses corresponds to some external, material thing, even though there is no reason why we should think so.
That God Exists
Thus it can only be the case that “all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind…; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit.”
Berkeley observes that, though everything that exists is some form of idea, there are nonetheless differences among the various ideas one has; in particular, there is a fundamental distinction between the ideas of imagination and those of sense. As for ideas of the imagination, these seem to be creations of the will or at least subject to alteration or manipulation by the will; by contrast, “whatever power I have over my thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by sense have not a like dependence on my will.” In other words, I can close my eyes and imagine a table in any color I like and I can change the color of the imagined table at will; but when I open my eyes to observe with my senses the table that appears to exist in front of me, I do not have the power to choose what color that table happens to be. Moreover, “The ideas of sense are more strong, lively and distinct than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series….” Both these considerations lead Berkeley to be able to conclude that these objects of sense, in contrast to the ideas of imagination, are not created by me and thus that there must be some other “author” of their existence.
Now most of us naturally conclude from these considerations that that author is the material world itself, though how that has come about must remain a mystery to us; in any event, since sense objects always seem “to be there,” however much they may change over time, this seems to us to establish that they have an existence independent of our own, and specifically a material existence. As for Berkeley, he readily concedes that such objects do have an independent existence; however, that is no reason to assume that their existence is material, however accustomed we may be to assume so. Rather, claims Berkeley, this establishes that there is “some other will or spirit that produces them,” and there is no good reason why they need be material in order to be “real.” What the coherence and independence and regular order evidenced in the objects of the natural world establishes, rather, is “the wisdom and benevolence of its author.” And that author, of course, can only be God.
Approaching this from another way, we might think of the consistency of things like the table we see with our senses as refuting Berkeley’s argument that material objects outside us do not exist. Thus we might observe that when I see a red table I can ask other people in the room whether they also see the red table and, when they confirm that they see it too, I can conclude, “ah ha, if we all see it then it must be independent of us all and thus there must be a material world outside us that we are all perceiving.” But note, this in fact does nothing to refute Berkeley since the only certainty any of us have that the red table exists consists of our perceptions of it, so it remains for all of us a purely spiritual entity as far as any of us can know; and the fact that we all perceive the same red table establishes only that no one of us is responsible for it—it is not a creature of my personal dream or willed by my imagination—so there must be an author outside of all of us who is responsible for it, and that author, as Berkeley has argued, goes by the name of “God.”
Berkeley’s Grand Design of Nature
So, Berkeley offers a grand design of the natural world, one that we may appreciate for a certain pristine intellectual consistency and even beauty. God is eternal spirit, and God creates the world as a purely spiritual reality, and God creates human beings who are able to enjoy this creation through their perception of it and in this way are created in God’s own image. Perception being what it is, all we perceive are perceptions; therefore, there is no need whatever for any other kind of world, such as a separate material world, since we wouldn’t be able to perceive it even if God were to create it. Of course God could presumably create a separate material world, corresponding to and directly copying, in material form, the spiritual world we all inhabit through our minds; but it would serve no point. “If therefore it were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do so, must needs be a very precarious opinion; since it is to suppose, without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that are entirely useless, and serve no manner of purpose.” Not only would we not be able to perceive it, but also God would then have the trouble of creating a whole, separate and superfluous world, which God would, moreover, have to keep constantly synchronized with its spiritual equivalent assuming, that is, that things are as we typically assume them to be. How is it that we typically assume things to be? We all typically assume, don’t we, that the perceptions of the physical world in our minds correspond to a material world outside of us; by “correspond” we mean simply that the world we perceive is the same as, or substantially resembles, the world that actually exists. But this material world is, we assume and must concede, totally distinct from us, indeed, that seems to be the way we want it. But all we have are our perceptions of it: the physical “world,” we assume, is “out there,” but we exist according to our perceptions: I know I exist because I can think it, as Descartes has established. But thinking is nothing else than perceiving, so the only world we can perceive is a world like to ourselves, namely a world of thought, idea, spirit; and any other world would be utterly superfluous, indeed wasteful, since it would serve no purpose, be unperceivable and impose the difficulty of constant maintenance to boot.
Thus, there would simply be no point to God’s creating a separate, material world, since it could only remain completely unknown to us, and it would presumably be inconsistent with the perfection of God to create something so utterly needless and purposeless.
God is Not a Deceiver
On confronting the apparently inexorable force of Berkeley’s argument, we may well feel disappointed, at least, and perhaps downright deceived. It may seem, indeed, that Berkeley is essentially proposing that God is a great deceiver akin to Descartes’s evil genius, since we go through life assuming that material things exist only now to realize that we have been mistaken.
Before jumping to this conclusion, however, we should note that we are routinely deceived about many things, but almost invariably we have the power to avoid deception if we are careful not to stretch the limits of our natural capabilities. We have seen, in Descartes, how readily we can be deceived by the senses, indeed, how the senses give us nothing other than appearance and never reality itself; but we have also observed how useful the senses can be in acquiring knowledge as long as we use them carefully and as long we exercise the necessary mental reflection in assessing sensory information and as long as we do not overextend the capacity of our powers of judgment. In other words, with the exercise of reason and humility our senses can be a great gift. And so for Berkeley, if God has created us in such a way as to be capable of deception, God has also, as Descartes observes, created us with the capacity of self-correction; thus deception, when it occurs, is almost always of our own making and thus altogether avoidable. In other words, it is not God who is deceiving us, but we who are deceiving ourselves. Thus, rather than feel slighted for being subject to deception, we might better feel grateful for the power to avoid it. And this principle surely applies when it comes to the non-materiality of the world as well as it does for the limitations of the senses. In other words, God has evidently also given us the ability to understand Berkeley and thus to realize at last the fact that “there is not any other substance than spirit, or that which perceives.”
Conclusion: The Physical World is Real but it Is Not Material
Even if, by undeceiving ourselves, we can shed the notion that we have been deceived, we may yet be inclined to feel that all excitement and purpose have been drained from the world along with the elimination of its material bodies. Perhaps we are crestfallen at the prospect of never being able to touch our baby’s soft hair, or our lover’s smooth skin. But such sentiments make no sense, for we have in fact lost nothing of the sort since we are capable of exactly the same sensations, of the same bodies, that we were before, except that we now know that these bodies, though real, are simply not material. But we have lost nothing with this knowledge because we are still perceiving exactly the same things we were perceiving before, namely our perceptions; and this is all we have ever perceived or ever could perceive. The world, in short, loses nothing for being purely spiritual, indeed, if anything it is a great gain since, after all, it is the reality of the spirit that has always been, even for those most committed to materialism, the most enduring and meaningful sort of reality, as in the case of a person, most notably, whose spirit is what we most cherish about them, rather than their mere flesh, even indeed after they are gone.
Indeed, beginning with the philosophy of Plato, we have learned, regardless of the nature or fate of the material world, that ideas are very real things indeed, if not the most real of things. Thus, with respect to our perception of “bodies” as well as of imaginings and other “creatures of the mind,” Berkeley says,
The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of Nature are called real things: and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they copy and represent. But then our sensations, be they ever so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless ideas, that is, they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas of sense are allowed to have more reality in them, that is, to be more strong, orderly and coherent, than the creatures of the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the mind.
So the same “reality” exists for us to enjoy, albeit a purely spiritual reality which is all “in our heads.” In God, the “eternal spirit,” all spiritual reality subsists, thus God, we may presume, perceives all reality, from every possible spatial perspective, at all times, all at once. By contrast, each of us, as an individual perceiver, is granted a single perspective, at a single time, on the whole of this spiritual reality. Each of us occupies a single, spiritual corner in the whole of God’s spiritual kingdom; and we interact with the natural bodies of this great spiritual realm as well as with the other perceivers who themselves occupy their own corners of this great edifice of nature.
This description of Berkeley’s spiritual world, we might note, is no different than it would be if we were describing a material world in which our little corner were part of some material construct; moreover, this spiritual world is also no less meaningful or valuable than its material equivalent would be, and it may, indeed, be a great deal more so.
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