Berkeley

 George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, sometime Dean of Derry, fellow of Trinity College, Dublin and probably the best known Irish philosopher is one of those people in the history of philosophy who just will not go away. He is usually grouped with the ‘British Empiricists’, along with Locke and Hume, who bracket him. Indeed, he does draw a lot of his thinking from Locke, whom he criticises. Hume famously regarded Berkeley as a sceptic, something which, I imagine, Berkeley would have strenuously denied.

I have just finished reading

Flage, D. (2014). Berkeley. Cambridge: Polity.

This is in the ‘classic thinkers; series, and presumably the implication is that Berkeley is a classic thinker, whatever one of those might be. But in my reading and research Berkeley is one of those people whose ideas just will not go away. Perhaps it is because Ian Ramsey started off as a Berkeleian idealist. Perhaps, also, because Lonergan regarded Berkeley as a ‘naive idealist’, or perhaps because Harriet Baber (in her book on The Trinity) described Berkeley as a brilliant, mad Irishman who contrived wonderful arguments in support of crazy conclusions.

I am not particularly going to engage with Berkeley’s thought, at least directly. For one thing, I have not read enough of it, and for another, it is a bit confusing, at least insofar as its conclusions are, on the face of it, crazy. After all, he does come to the conclusion that the material world does not exist, and that everything is in the mind, or at least someone’s mind. The be perceived is to be is his watchword. If something is not observed by someone, then it does not exist.

The argument develops from that step, which is perhaps a bit unusual and counter-intuitive, to arguing that as, for example, the table downstairs will still be there even though I am not in the room, cannot see it, and nor can anyone else, that some mind must be able to see the object and, therefore, that mind must be that of God. Berkeley’s argument, therefore, is an argument for the existence of God.

Theism is a bit of a drug on the philosophical market at present, of course. Many philosophers are not theists, and some are outright atheists. There still seems to be some thought around that humanity has somehow outgrown God, or, as Laplace put it, there is no need of that hypothesis. Indeed, I’m currently reading A. C. Grayling’s new book on the ‘Frontiers of Knowledge’. While it is, of course, dangerous to discuss a book before you have finished it, Grayling is a well known atheist philosopher, and seem to regard modern theism as a ‘God of the gaps’, that is a God whose activity as understood by humans retreats as more is discovered, and also historical theism as a sort of proto-technology, that is trying to control the environment without really knowing what was going on. Presumably science, in spite of the huge (and, as Grayling acknowledges, growing) gulfs of ignorance we have, will still blow all theism away.

I am not pretending that Berkeley has any answers to these problems. He was, after all, doing his philosophy in the early Eighteenth Century when the scientific revolution (or one of them) was only just getting going. Indeed, part of his work was an objection to some aspects of Newton’s theories, that is the inventions of imaginary (or ‘occult’) forces to account for movements, such as centrifugal and centripetal force.

So what was Berkeley up to? Why did a highly intelligent man spend his time promulgating such theories which were, on the face of it, bizarre? Various people have come up with various reasons, of course. A lot is to do with the historical context Berkeley lived in, and a bit to do with his Christian faith. I cannot help but think there is a little more to it than that. To some extent, I suspect, Berkeley was making fun of some thinkers of his time.

The title page of two of Berkeley’s significant works include subtitles. The Principles of Human Knowledge has: ‘wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, with the grounds of scepticism, atheism, and irreligion, are inquired into.’ The Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous has the subtitle: ‘The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of human knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the soul and the immediate providence of a deity in opposition to sceptics and atheists. Also to open a method for rendering the sciences more easy, useful, and compendious.’

Berkeley’s targets are clear: sceptics, atheists and, in the Alciphron dialogues, ‘freethinkers’. It seems to me that the implication of these works is the irrationality of the sceptical atheistic viewpoint. Berkeley seems to be arguing that the sceptics and atheists might be arguing that theism, or specifically Christianity is irrational, but their own grounds for understanding the world, that is, materialism, are at least as irrational as any other. Berkeley can come up with a totally crazy system that is entirely consistent within itself – immaterial idealism – and, from that, out-argue the materialist sceptics, represented by, for example, Hylas. If that is the case then all the rational, material systems the atheists, sceptics or freethinkers might come up with are no more valid than Berkeley’s own mad system. The mere coherence of a system of philosophy does not point towards its overall correctness, after all. At some point, the system has to touch the real world somewhere. Berkeley argues that it does, and that point is in our minds. Most philosophers would probably argue that the point is in the material world, but just because that is reasonable and coherent does not make it any more correct than Berkeley’s system.

Berkeley’s system is, then, just different. In the terms of his times he could argue with, and possibly win against, his imagined opponents, the sceptics and atheists of his day. Recall, after all, that Deism was regarded as a threat to orthodox Christian faith at the time. Berkeley would probably argue that Occam’s razor applies to world philosophies of this sort and that his views yield fewer objects than the other, and therefore is to be favoured for its relative simplicity.

Perhaps, therefore, we should not just dismiss Berkeley as being a naive idealist or immaterialist. Perhaps he was just suggesting that we have to make a choice in our philosophical system, and that naive idealism is not as bad as naive materialism. Perhaps, in the face of modern science, he has a point.