Leithart
Berkeley is an anti-abstractionist.
What is abstraction? Berkeley is basically taking on Locke, who argues (in Berkeley’s telling) that our process of thought works something liek this: We have a particular thing that invariably has a combination of qualities. But those qualities are abstractions. We can see resemblances among things: a red rose, red car, red coat, red dress, but “red” never appears in our experience except as an attribute of some thing. From the repeated occurences, we can “frame an idea” of “Red.” General terms refer to abstract ideas formed over time out of experience with real concrete things.
Locke, by most accounts, is vague about what it means to “frame an idea” of something, but on Berkeley’s reading, Locke means something like “imagine” or seeing with the mind’s eye. Berkeley understands that Locke claims that the term “Red” refers to this “imagined” “abstract idea” of “redness as such,” redness without any other qualities. We can push the abstraction further, and attempt to imagine “color” as such but no particular color, “motion” in no particular direction with no particular speed, “man” but no particular qualities. Berkeley mocks Locke’s claim that it is a difficult thing to form the abstract idea of a triangle, which is neither equilateral, scalenon, oblique, but none and all of these at once. Rather say, impossible!
Berkeley says that such abstract ideas are simply inconceivable. Though he has a number of arguments against the particular defense of abstract ideas, his core contention is that one cannot conceive of a triangle that is not a particular kind of triangle and certainly not a triangle that has several mutually-exclusive properties. We cannot conceive of “color” that is not a particular color; the referent of abstract terms like “color” is not an abstract idea of “color in general” but all particular things that have color, or all particular colors. It is a general term referring to many particulars, rather than an term referring to an abstract idea. The line does not “contain” all lines, but “represents” all lines; proofs work not because the geometer is working with an impossible abstract triangle, but because he is attending to those features of this triangle that all triangles have in common. A particular triangle can stand for all others.
For Berkeley, general terms are “metaphorical” rather than “abstract.” Representation is basic to our thinking.
Another part of his argument concerns the nature of language. The notion of abstract ideas arises, he says, from a misunderstanding of how language works. This is an example of what Berkeley sess as a common philosophical procedure: Philosopher suffers from self-imposed afflictions; they kick up a dust and then complain when they cannot see.
One problem with common notions of language is the view that every name has one precise and settled signification, and only one. If you assume this, then you do have a problem when faced with words like “color” or “red” or “man,” for what is the referent of these terms. Berkeley says instead that a name has the same definition but does not always standing for the same idea. It “signifies indifferently a great number of particular ideas.”
Behind this error Berkeley spied another mistake, the opinion that names have only the purpose of communicating ideas, such that whenever the word is uttered, the corresponding idea is supposed to be aroused in the mind of the listener. On the contrary, Berkeley says (in a proto-Wittgensteinian, Austinian vein), words are used not only to arouse ideas but also to rouse passions, excite or deter from some action, put the mind in a particular disposition. Even proper names are not necessarily used with the intention of signifying a particular thing, but have a rhetorical purpose. When a scholastic calls on the authority of Aristotle, “he means by it, to dispose me to embrace his opinion with the deference and submission which custom has annexed to that name.”
This anti-abstractionist beginning is in the background when Berkeley opens his argument concerning sensations and sensible qualities, which is at the heart of his anti-materialist argument. His argument against materialism is essentially twofold: first, he claims that things are collections of sensible properties, and thus can exist only in mind; second, says that materialism is self-contradictory.
Materialism posited a distinction of the thing existing and the qualities that it possesses, a distinction between existence of a thing and the perception of it. Beneath the distinction between existence and perception, esse and percipi, is the concept of abstract ideas. For Berkeley, to divide between sensible qualities and their perception is to divide the things from itself. It is to abstract qualities that cannot exist in isolation.
Suppose someone says: Oh, I can conceive of an unperceived tree. In fact, I’m thinking of a tree right now, in the middle of a field, with no one around to perceive it. Berkeley would say: You’ve only abstracted other people’s perception, not your own. The fact that you are conceiving of a tree that is unperceived by others means that you are conceiving it. Absolute existence – unperceived existence – is contradictory. It is to say that I am conceiving of an unconceived or unconceivable thing.
Berkeley wants to go further than show that existent things cannot be unperceived. That still too much abstracts the being from the perception; he wants to prove that existence is to be perceived, esse is percipi. He wants to show that being perceived is constitutive of the being of a thing. That is, he doesn’t want to make an epistemological argument but an ontological one.
There are several steps to his argument. Passions, ideas, thoughts cannot exist except in mind. This, he thinks, will be conceded by his opponents. If there is a process of thought, there must be a thinker, and if the thinker stops thinking the thought, the thought ceases to exist.
Sensations we receive, that is, ideas imprinted by sense, can only exist in the mind, just as any other thoughts. What we call an “apple” is a combination of sensible properties – a red, round, juicy, tasty fruit – and each of these properties is an idea. Since ideas can exist only if thought, then what we call an apple, since it is a collection of ideas, can only exist as perceived, can only exist in a mind perceiving.
In this Berkeley does not deny the existence of “things.” Mountains, trees, flowers, and (Samuel Johnson to the contrary) rocks are, Berkeley says, really “outside my mind.” They really exist “out there.” But he redefines both “existence” and “thing.” By “thing” he means a combination of sensible qualities, rather than a material substance in which certain qualities inhere. There is nothing supporting the sensible qualities, so that if you take away the sensible qualities, then you have nothing at all. By “existence” he means that they are perceived, thought by some mind, if not by a human mind, then must be in some divine mind.
Berkeley thinks that he’s overturned skepticism., Skepticism arises when there is some veil of ignorance between the world and the perceiver. But if things are collections of sensible qualities, then there is no veil of ignorance. Sensible qualities do not veil the reality but are the reality. Sensations we perceive – the colors we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we smell – are the real world.
The negative side of Berkeley’s position is a series of arguments against matter. Again, he is not rejecting “material objects” if that is taken in the sense of particular things. Rather, he attacks philosophical conceptions of matter.
By this, he usually means some kind of unthinking, inert, featureless substratum that supports all the sensible qualities of the things that we see. This is the “real thing” that is behind the combination of sensible qualities, or, more broadly, the underlying substratum of all observable reality.
He presents various arguments against this conception. First, he claims the very idea is contradictory. Whether we talk about primary (extension, figure, motion, etc) or secondary qualities (color, sound, taste, etc) qualities, they are said to exist in an unthinking substance called “matter,” a “substratum.” But extension is an idea, and color is a sensible quality that exists only in the mind. How can these things be said to “exist in” an unthinking substance?
He also thinks that materialism founders on teh matter-spirit relationship. Material things excite ideas in our minds, but materialists cannot explain how bodies can act on spirits.
In another brilliant argument, Berkeley suggests that materialism is actually a veiled form of nihilism in which the fundamental structures of the world are really nothing. Matter in some systems refers not to the primary qualities but to the totally unqualified something in which primary qualities inhere. The substratum is not itself extended, but is the platform for extension. If this platform has no qualities, it is indistinguishable from nothing. Materialism dissolves into nihilism.
There are some obvious objections to this. If sensible qualities exist only when perceived, then if I stop perceiving my coffee cup – close my eyes, e.g. – does it cease to exist? Berkeley answers, No, because there is another perceiver who continually perceives and so sustains everything., Things exist outside of our minds, but Berkeley strenuously denies that things can exist outside of anybody’s mind. This world would not continue to exist if God were not continually overseeing it.
It is often objected that Berkeley turns the world into chimera. Everything is just dreams and shadows. Berkeley answers this by distinguishing between the more powerful and vivid impressions made on the mind by senses, which come from the outside, from the fainter and less real productions of our own mind. We can make the distinction. (But this isn’t always the case; some people are delusional.)
Relativism is a more challenging objection. People have different perceptions of the same thing. If existence is perception, then they must be looking at different things. Berkeley actually believes that this is an argument in his favor. After all, how does the materialist explain the change in perception that has no apparent change in the object itself. I suspect Berkeley’s fuller answer might go like this: The thing X is the combination of sensible qualities, but this combination of sensible qualities is potentially infinite, since there is an infinite number of different circumstances and perspectives one might take on a thing. I look at a tree from 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet, and so on away, in different light: Which is the real tree? Berkeley’s answer would seem to be that the tree is the sum total of all those possible sensible ideas. And, since God is the guarantor of created existence, the fact that there is an infinite number of sensible qualities in the tree is not a problem. They can hold together as qualities of one thing because God perceives them as such.
What does B propose in the place of materialism? Essentially, God. In ontology, Berkeley says that the world consists of sensible ideas that are “signs” from God. The world is God’s language. Language is Berkeley’s master ontological metaphor. As John Milbank has suggested, he argues for an “ontology without substance,” i.e., an ontology in which God governs a world of sensible ideas for our good and to display His glory, where God “fills the space” that philosophy has filled with material substance.
In Alciphron and elsewhere, Berkeley speaks of the world as being the “language of God.” In A New Theory of Vision, he says that our sight of a tree is a visual “sign” from God that directs us how to navigate through the world. I see a large moving object in front of me, this is a “sign” that I should step out of the way to safety. He is a nominalist here as elsewhere: There is no natural connection between the sensation/sign and the “message” God is sending me. Through custom and experience, I learn the “language” of God in the sensible universe and learn that the sight of large moving objects can lead to a tangible impact.
In all this, he seems to deny the reality of second causes: God causes everything directly and immediately, and this works into his positive epistemology. There must, he argues, be some cause of ideas. It cannot be idea itself, or matter. Matter is contradictory, and ideas are incapable of producing other ideas. The only possible cause is a spiritual substance. I can produce ideas in my head at will: but when I open my eyes, I don’t produce the sensations that I experience. That must mean that “some other will or spirit” produces them.
His attack on materialism is an attack on an alternative explanatory principle to God, and so his attack on materialism unfolds as a theistic proof. Matter cannot explain the production of ideas, yet ideas are produced; therefore God exists. The world is sensible ideas, but these are inert so that it cannot cause another sensible idea; therefore, there must be some cause of the sensible ideas that make up the world. It cannot be matter, so it must be mind. It cannot be my mind, but must be God’s.
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