What’s the Matter with Bishop Berkeley? pt. 1

Most people who dismiss Bishop Berkeley do so because he held the crazy idea that the world was not physical. That is, the notion that the world is made up of perceptions is so counterintuitive that it just seems wrong on its face. At best Berkeley can be said to be an ally to the silly mystics. Somebody who can only be believed when you’re stoned or during some sort of psychotic break. However, when I was an undergrad and reading the Bishop my problem with Berkeley wasn’t that he believed that the world existed in perception alone, but rather that he was ultimately unable to believe this.

Here’s Bishop Berkeley’s argument against matter:
I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause…. But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, 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 any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and doth conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind; though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in it self.

This is all fine and good, and yet the problem of consistency of thought, of the continuity remains. If we accept Berkeley’s immaterialism one trouble remains: How can we find that the universe coheres, that the world of perception is not our own subjective mess, that we aren’t trapped in solipsistic bubble of our own making? And Berkeley’s solution to this trouble is wholly unsatisfying. He posits a God who exists as the ultimate perceiver. But this God is merely a stand-in for matter. God, like matter, has not perceptible qualities. This is no solution at all.

So the problem became how does one solve this second problem. How can the world be said to cohere now that we’ve eliminated both matter AND God too? This is, as I see it, the project of the phenomenalists.

[more to come]