Transcript Reading: Barclay

When we last met, we finished up the philosophy of John Locke, and I introduced George Berkeley. We’re going to continue today with Berkeley, but there was one thing I forgot to do, and that was to summarize some of the main ways that Locke influenced the American Founding Fathers. I mentioned that they had read him, and that's evident, first of all, in the expression “life, liberty, and property.”

This is what Locke says the state exists to protect, and of course, it’s familiar to most of you. Jefferson changed that to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson thought it was fairly obvious that the goal everyone sets for themselves in life is to be happy. And what makes them happy may vary from person to person, but happiness is something that everybody, inevitably and irresistibly, is drawn to as a purpose or goal of life. So, he starts with that, and that’s what the government, or the state, exists to promote and protect.

The Founding Fathers also followed Locke in endorsing the Contract Theory of government. The Contract Theory says that originally, individuals were solitary, and then they banded together to create a state. Locke says this was mainly to protect their lives, liberty, and property. The state isn’t for everyone; it’s for those who sign on and pay taxes to support it. It was easy for early Americans to endorse a contract theory, and that’s what they were doing in the colonies. They were meeting, forming a contract. At first, it was only that the different colonies had trade agreements and so on. Later, they wanted complete unity and proposed that in the Declaration of Independence, where they declared their intentions and reasons for being a separate and sovereign country.

In many ways, Locke's ideas about the state of nature are assumed in the writings of early Americans, although no one that I know of explicitly said that there were solitary individuals to begin with. Instead, they believed that individuals depended on a group that became self-sufficient, and that group eventually became a state when it began to make laws and arrangements for deciding disputes and hearing cases. That was beyond what they needed at the time, as all they needed were decent reasons for withdrawing loyalty to King George III of England.

The idea of rights was also influenced by Locke. Locke argued that because there are natural ethical laws known to all people, humans are not inherently amoral brutes, as Hobbes would have it. They know it’s wrong to murder, wrong to steal, and so on. Thus, the notion of rights develops. A right corresponds to a law: if it’s immoral and punishable to steal or murder, then I have the right not to be robbed or killed. The Founding Fathers also embraced the idea of consent of the governed—that what makes a government legitimate, what gives it the right and duty to make laws, is the consent of the people it governs. Locke got that idea from Luther, but it was important in the American colonies as well, as they were saying to King George, “We withdraw our consent for you to be our king—you’re fired!” That was the main point of the Declaration of Independence: the consent of the governed had been withdrawn.

There are so many ideas from Locke’s philosophy that influenced the Founding Fathers, even if they modified them in certain ways. It’s very clear. And, like Locke, they didn’t entirely get rid of the hierarchical view of society, with the state at the top. That means government still had a hierarchy, but with the democratic idea that individual citizens had a vote and could decide who the officeholders would be—and they could vote them out if they didn’t like what they were doing.

So, while Locke’s ideas influenced the founding of America, when Locke wrote his philosophy, there wasn’t a government on earth that followed all of those rules. The Americans tried to do it and came close to Locke’s vision of government and society, but they didn’t get rid of the hierarchy. I wish they had. I wish they had thought, "Let’s not have a hierarchy at all." Instead, they stuck with the older model. But the sphere sovereignty model, as developed later in the Netherlands at the end of the 19th century by Abraham Kuyper, would have been an interesting alternative. Locke’s ideas had a significant influence on the new country in the New World, and it’s a tribute to his legacy.

Now, let’s move on to Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley was born in Ireland, but he had English parents, which made him a citizen of England. He was well-regarded by the Irish people because he defended them many times in essays he wrote, speaking out against the mistreatment of the Irish by the English. Berkeley received his education at Trinity College in Dublin, and at an age when an American scholar would just be preparing to write their PhD dissertation, Berkeley had already published a work called "Principles of Human Knowledge." In this work, he contributed to the ongoing debate started by Locke, affirming empiricism—the idea that experience is the basis of our knowledge of the world around us. He also accepted principles of logic and math.

What drove Berkeley was his concern with materialism. He believed that many atheists were also materialists, and he wanted to challenge that. What he didn’t like was the materialism that underlies most atheistic worldviews. Berkeley wanted to affirm both science and the existence of God, along with ethical values and free will. But how do you manage to keep science and free will together? That’s a big challenge that confronted Berkeley, just as it did Locke and other thinkers before him.

Berkeley’s first publication deals with this issue right off the bat. He tackles the problem in such a way that he is able to affirm the existence of God, ethics, and free will—while denying, are you ready for this, that there is anything physical at all. Whoa! That’s going pretty far. Nobody so far had said there are no such things as purely physical objects that make up the external world and produce effects in our minds as sensory copies of them. We’ve been through this before: Descartes affirmed it, Spinoza affirmed it, Leibniz did, Locke did—and Berkeley says, “Nope! I can show you why that doesn’t work.” That’s pretty startling. How do you get rid of physical objects and still have science? What is science going to be about?

Berkeley sets out to attack the idea that Galileo first proposed: that all things have primary qualities and secondary qualities. The primary qualities of a thing are that it occupies space, moves in space, and has physical properties like weight, mass, density, solidity, charge, and so on. The secondary qualities are colors, sounds, tastes, and touches. These exist in the mind, while the primary qualities exist outside the mind.

Berkeley thinks he can show that this distinction is faulty, and that all the things we call primary qualities are actually bundles of secondary qualities. How does he do that? Well, let me read a bit of him to you. It’s always good to hear an author in their own words. Here we go...

As several of these characteristics are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name and so are reputed as one thing, that is, the primary qualities. Thus, for example, certain color, taste, smell, figure—having been observed to go together—are accounted as one distinct thing, signified by the same name, for example, an apple. Other collections of these secondary qualities, these ideas, can constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and other sensible things. But none of these do we ever find as matter. I find it necessary to suppose a material substrate.

His opponent says, "This is Berkeley in conversation with someone rejecting his view." The other fellow says, "It’s necessary to have a material substance without which the qualities cannot be conceived to exist." But Berkeley replies, “A material substratum, you call it. Pray, by which of your senses did you become acquainted with that being?” The guy has to say, "None of the senses," right? The theory is that external things are purely physical, and that’s the substance. They give rise to sights, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells by causally affecting minds.

So Berkeley asks him, "By which of the senses do you know there’s such a thing as material substance?" Well, it’s not itself sensible. We don’t perceive it. Its modes and qualities—only its effects on us—are what we perceive.

"It seems, then, you have a relative notion of it, or that you conceive of it not otherwise than by conceiving of its relations to the sensations." Here is something that Berkeley invented, and I'll put it down here: Berkeley invented the idea of a notion. He coined the term. It means something that occurs in a mind, and that’s all it meant. He wanted it because we’re already talking about perceptions and concepts, both called ideas, and that can be confusing. So he wanted another word—a kind of catch-all for anything in the mind. So, he’s arguing with this thought, and he’s saying,

"Be pleased, therefore, to tell me what this relation consists of." The guy says, "No, matter isn’t an idea, it’s not a percept that occurs in our minds. What occurs to us is that it would require some physical substratum in the thing to give rise to the sensory qualities that we perceive."

"Oh," Berkeley says, "so by which perception do you know this, that there are physical things? Do you see them, taste them, hear them, smell them?" The guy says, "No, no, those are the effects of the material on our senses."

Then the fellow says, "No, those perceptions are not of a material thing. They don’t convey to us a thing with only physical properties. Instead, it’s the relations between the ideas that it produces in us that give us the idea of a substratum or substance."

"Well, tell me what that relation is, then," Berkeley continues.

"Well, haven’t I said that it’s expressed in the term 'substance' or 'substratum'? That which underlies the others is, in that sense, more real because it causes the others."

"Well, if so, the word 'substratum' should mean that it is spread under the sensory qualities. Isn’t that right? It’s something basic to them."

"Sure."

"And consequently, it underlies not only the sensory qualities that it produces in minds, but it underlies extension—being extended in space?"

"Yes, that sounds right."

"And that something distinct from and exclusive of extension is supposed to be the substratum of extension?"

"Yes, just so."

"Answer me: can a thing be spread without extension?"

"You take things in a strictly literal sense," the guy objects. "You’re being too literal here," he says to Berkeley.

Berkeley replies, "I’m not for imposing any sense on your words. You’re at liberty to explain your meanings as you please. Only, I ask you to make me understand something by them. You tell me matter supports or stands under the sensory qualities. How? In the way your legs support your body?"

"No, you’re being too literal again."

"Then let me know any sense, literal or not, to make sense of what you’re telling me."

The opponent says, "I don’t know what to say at this point."

Berkeley replies, "It seems then that you have no idea at all of matter, which you want to talk about, and say that it exists in itself and is purely physical, nor what relation it bears to accidents."

"Yes, that’s my position."

"And yet you asserted that you could not conceive of how qualities—sensory qualities—should really exist without conceiving at the same time of a physical support for them."

"Yes, that’s what I said."

"That is to say, when you conceive of the real existence of the qualities, you do it without conceiving of something of which you cannot conceive."

In other words, the guy here is saying that the physical properties of a material object exist independently of any sensations. But when he comes to talk about the physical properties that he knows, he only talks about sensations.

And this essentially is what Berkeley’s argument comes down to. I’m repeating deliberately what I’ve said before just so I’m sure it’s clear to you: take any object you want. The opponent wants to say that the object itself is physical, but it affects us by giving us sensations of it—color, taste, touch, smell, and so on. Now, let’s talk about its physical properties. It’s extended in space. Do you have a perception of that? If so, you’re not talking about something purely physical that’s independent of sensations—you’re talking about a sensation. His opponent wants to reply, "No, I’m talking about the thing itself. I want to talk about its spatiality."

And Berkeley argues that this idea, this concept, comes down to more sensations.

And this is what I explained last time: suppose we take the physical property of solidity. This is a solid object. What does that mean? It means that when it comes in contact with another object, neither can go right through the other without breaking it. It means that when one solid thing comes into contact with another, there’s going to be a sound. It means that if one of the things that comes in contact with the other is part of your body, you’re going to feel resistance. But what you’re experiencing is the feeling of resistance, the sound of two things colliding, and the sight of two things impinging on one another such that each resists the other. Or, if one does go through the other, it has to break it apart. Those are all sights, sounds, touches, and so on.

In other words, when you try to press the view that there are independent, purely physical things, and that they are the substance of the world that we live in—the thing which stands under and supports all the other kinds of qualities that things seem to have in our ordinary, everyday experience—what you’re really saying is that those things have only physical properties, and they cause us to experience sensations. So, the color, touch, taste, sound, and smell exist only inside our minds. What’s outside is purely physical. But Berkeley shows that all of these so-called physical properties reduce to nothing but collections of sensations. He argues this very well, and it made a tremendous impact when he wrote and published these ideas.

The conclusion Berkeley comes to is this: “Esse est percipi”—“to be is to be perceived.” That’s what exists. Now, it’s not really everything that exists in Berkeley’s system here—in other words, it’s not only perceptions, but there are also minds. So, Berkeley’s ontology, based on this epistemological argument, is that there are minds and there are perceptionsthat exist in minds. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole of reality.

He supplements this argument by another one, arguing against the existence of general concepts, what used to be called universals. The term he uses is abstract generals. Suppose we have the abstract general concept of man—what is the content of this? Berkeley argues that we never think of man in general, and that when we use that term, it doesn't have any real content. When we talk about man and mean all men, we actually think of one specific person, and then we add the proviso that we mean all the rest too. But we don’t have a percept of all humans at once. We can talk about it anyway, but these abstract general terms really have, as their content, a perception—whether we're talking about all men, sheep, farms, or whatever it is. What’s in our mind at the time is some recollection of a man, the rough outline of a sheep, or a farm. Berkeley wants to say that these things we take as abstract generalities are not different from the single perceptions that he’s reducing everything to. Let’s see if I can find a good statement of that in his work.

Nobody denies that there are minds, and what minds know are ideas. But this, unfortunately, is only a matter of definition. Minds know only ideas if you define the objects of knowledge as ideas. Unfortunately, the term idea has carried as many special meanings of its own as the objectionable expression material substance—and that turned out not to mean anything except sensations.

So, how is Berkeley going to justify this view and still keep science? Isn’t science—particularly physics—about purely physical objects? He does it this way: he does not understand the existence of bodies—that is, collections of sensations—as body, an abstract general idea that doesn’t have any real content. The content really exists in our mind when we use that term, just like when we use the term man or sheep or farm and mean all of them. It has one particular instance in mind, literally in the mind, and that instance stands for all the rest.

Now let’s see what he does about science. When we say that friction causes heat, we mean that certain ideas—sensations of rubbing—are always accompanied by sensations of heat. In other words, friction is the sign of heat. It’s a mistake, therefore, to think that the natural sciences can ever prove anything. On the contrary, the function of science is merely to describe accurately the observable relations between one set of sensations and another. In other words, science isn’t there to prove one theory or another; it’s there to say that when I experience X, Y, and Z, next I experience A, B, and C. It’s there to describe, to trace out these causal pathways—how one set of sensations follows from another.

At the beginning, we were puzzled—how, if he’s going to get rid of physical objects, can there be any science? The answer is, he changes the whole idea of science. Science doesn’t just observe that one set of sensations is followed by another. Science tries to explain why A, B, and C always follow X, Y, and Z, and it’s the why that leads to differing theories about how that comes about. The theories often include things no one has ever seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled. That’s the more common view of science. So, it’s a tough sell for him. But there are other things that follow from this view that Berkeley finds very congenial to his worldview. One of them is that it answers the question of whether God’s existence is capable of proof—and Berkeley thinks it is.

He takes a standard objection to his view. Here’s the objection:

We light a candle, and everyone leaves the room. After half an hour, we come back, and the candle has burned down. Now, if the candle is nothing but a bunch of perceptions, and perceptions can exist only in minds, then when we removed all the people from the room, that set of perceptions we call a candle should have ceased to exist. But isn’t it obvious that it continued to exist, which is why it’s burned down?

Berkeley’s answer to this is best captured, I think, in a little limerick I learned a long time ago about Berkeley’s view. It will be easy for you to remember, and it will summarize his ontology. The limerick goes like this:

"There was a young man who said, ‘God
Must find it exceedingly odd
When he sees that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.’"

So, the young man—a student, as the limerick envisions—walks across the college quadrangle, sees the tree, and puzzles: "Wait a minute. God must think it’s really odd that this tree continues to exist when no one is around in the quad and no one’s perceiving it." Percepts can’t exist unperceived—they are perceptions.

To his surprise, the young man gets a letter from God:
"Dear Sir, your astonishment is odd.
I am always about in the quad,
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by,
Yours faithfully,
God."

That’s Berkeley’s ontology. What exists are sensation bundles. This particular bundle we call a candle and candlestick—candle holder and candle. The reason this continues to exist when no one is in the room is that there’s a mind that perceives everything all the time.

In Berkeley’s view, he doesn’t construct a proof of the existence of God like Descartes, who uses premises to conclude God exists. For Berkeley, God is a hypothesis that answers a question everyone would have to face: if the material world is sensations, and the world we experience is nothing more than sensations bundled together into objects, then how can they continue to exist when no one perceives them? The answer is: there has to be at least one mind that perceives everything all the time. So, it’s a hypothesis, but in Berkeley’s view, it’s the only one that can answer the question of how everything continues to exist when no humans perceive those things. The answer is God.

God is the one who sustains our minds and gives us the perceptions that we get. So, God not only created the world but continually creates it and sustains all the perceptions that people ever have. If you ask, "What does it mean to exist?", the answer is: To exist is to be perceived or to be a mind. That’s often quoted in Latin as “Esse est percipi”—to be is to be perceived. If you try to talk about something that you do not and cannot perceive, then you end up talking about nothing at all. The words you use—words that are supposed to be full of sound and fury—actually signify nothing.

This is a standard point for people who hold this view that makes perception primary. This view is called, in philosophy, phenomenalism—phenomena meaning "appearances." The ancient Greeks distinguished between the appearance of a thing and the thing itself, what underlies the appearance. They said there’s a substance—a substratum of a thing—and that’s its physical properties. Then this thing gives rise to all the other kinds of properties we perceive it to have. But Berkeley is arguing that there aren’t any others. It all comes down to one kind of thing, namely, the appearances. There it is, in Greek: phenomena—the appearances. So, phenomenalism is the view that there is no substance—there are only the phenomena.

This view is going to be stated as clearly as possible and argued for as rigorously as possible by the next figure we’ll cover—David Hume. When he gets done, there’s no world, no minds, no self, no God, no material substance—there’s nothing. And that’s what provokes Kant. But this is a significant step on the way to what provokes Kant.

A hypothesis: an all-knowing mind is the only thing that can answer this. Now, this doesn’t prove there’s only one all-knowing mind. That’s Berkeley’s hypothesis. But if you ask him, "How do we know there aren’t five or thirteen and a half all-knowing minds?", he doesn’t have an answer for that. He has not proven that the all-knowing mind he calls God—a term he doesn’t hesitate to use—is the only one. Nor has he proven that God is good. God is all-powerful in the sense that He’s the source of all perceptions that occur in all minds, but this doesn’t prove that God cares about human beings. So, for all Berkeley knows, there could be many such gods. They’d have to agree on which perceptions to give people, or maybe there’s a couple of them that don’t agree, and they send different perceptions to people, and we regard those people as insane.

Berkeley also says there are no laws that govern the world. What we call laws is just the average way we see God do things. So, the real reason why A, B, C follows from X, Y, Z is that’s the way God brings them about. Whenever He does X, Y, Z, He then brings about A, B, C—and on those occasions when He brings about something different, we call it a miracle. But there are no rigid laws—just the average way God does things.

It’s a serious issue, though, that Berkeley assumes God revealed scripture that shows His role when he can’t show that there’s only one such being, that the being is good rather than evil, or that the being cares about humans. Nor can he get anywhere near proving that God provides a way of redemption for all humans

No, he can’t get to any of that stuff with this argument. But this argument made an impact, believe me, especially the part that goes like this:

Pick any supposedly physical characteristic. Let’s take weight. What this means is that we feel a tactile sensation, pressure on our hands when we lift something. It registers so many pounds on a scale—we can see the scale, that counts as a perception. We can see the needle turn on the dial and see where it stops. That’s an indicator of what we’re calling weight. It’s an indicator of how much pressure we’d feel if we picked it up.

We also see it fall if unsupported, and we can add the usual conditions that provide us with the gravitational pull of the Earth, right? As long as it’s not too far from the Earth and provided it’s not lighter than air, we’ll see it fall if unsupported. But those are all sensations, right? They’re all things we see, feel by touch, and so on. If you mean something more than that by weight, go ahead and tell me what it is.

That’s Berkeley’s argument.

He does this for all the supposedly physical properties. In doing so, he performs what comes to be known in philosophy as reducing the physical to the sensory. You might want to use the term phenomenal instead of sensory, or Lockean(known by the senses). This term becomes central to any argument that says: "There appears to be this kind of thing in the world, but actually, there’s only this other kind of thing." What you think is a different kind of thing over here is actually just some combination of these things over here. So really, there are only these things. This is called a reduction argument.

If you hear people use that term or come across it in your reading, they’re not talking about a weight loss program! They’re talking about a specific kind of argument. It’s an argument that says: There appear to be these things, but really, there are not. There are only these kinds of things.

Berkeley starts right out with one of the most famous reduction arguments ever given. Kant is going to try to get around this. Kant says that as a philosopher, he himself was kind of dull until he read Hume. Kant said, "I was a sleeping dogmatist." He just took for granted that there were external physical objects, sensory copies in here, plus logical concepts. He took that for granted. Then he read Hume and saw that all of it could be mowed down by this vicious reduction argument.

Kant’s response was, "This isn’t saving science. This is destroying it."

Berkeley doesn’t rescue science—he changes what we mean by the word. Instead of just describing causal pathways as we encounter them and see them, science postulates causal pathways we can’t see, along with other hypotheses of things we can’t see, in order to explain what we can see. Take atomic theory: are there little tiny things called atoms, and do they make up bigger things, like this desk and our own bodies? Well, by now, we have tons of evidence that there really are atoms, and we know a great deal about their nature. We know enough about that nature to predict what should result if we do this, this, and this with enough of them—and then we get the result. That doesn’t prove the theory, but it confirmsit (if you remember my little talk on the difference between proof and confirmation).

So much of that is now at our fingertips that nobody today doubts atomic theory. That’s closer to what science is about—postulating theories, testing them, carrying out experiments, and making inferences.

Kant says Berkeley didn’t save science—he wrecked it.

So, we’re going to continue. We’ll wind up Berkeley next time and prepare for Hume.