Four years ago, way back at the start of Philosophy Tube, I made a video about Bishop George Berkeley. Or I
guess you could call him "Berkeley" if you're from the California.
Berkeley was an Irish philosopher with some pretty interesting ideas that are worth revisiting now,
especially if you are studying him on the British philosophy A-Level syllabus!
Berkeley thought that the world and everything in it only exists when somebody is observing
it. When we stop looking at something it no longer exists. This theory is called Idealism.
Not to be confused with "being an idealist," which usually means something else. And it's
neatly captured by the phrase "esse est percipi;" "to be is to be perceived."
That's how my old textbooks used to explain it, I think that's a littlebit blunt:
Berkeley's point is actually a little subtler than that. I think the best way to get at what he's saying is with a
challenge. So, I want you try and imagine an apple. Okay: I'm imagining an apple. Now I want you to try imagining
an apple without imagining how it looks. Okay: little bit more challenging, but I can imagine an apple that has
weight and I can feel in my hand and I can smell it even if I can't see it - an invisible apple - basically. Okay.
Now try imagining an apple without imagining how it smells, how it tastes, how it looks,
how it feels; an apple with no weight, no volume - nothing that could be detected by your
senses. What have you got left? Nothing, right?
That's what "To be is to be perceived" means. For something to exist at all it must
be, at least in principle, perceptible to us. That's just what it means for something to exist. And the upshot of this for Berkeley is that something
mental, namely our minds or God's mind, is at the bottom layer of reality. Reality
isn't some objective, independently existing thing: it's in here! Berkeley
isn't the only person ever to have thought of this, but he is the philosopher that schools and universities like to talk about.
Before we talk about how we can use this idea, let's anticipate some common questions you might have. The
first one is that it really, really seems like things exist when we aren't looking at them.
If you leave a tree in Spring and then you go away and come back to it in Autumn, it's changed, and that would
be really weird if it didn't exist in the meantime to go through any changes at all. The English
priest Robert Knox captured this question in the form of a limerick:
"There was a young man who said, "God Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."
Berkeley's - there I go again calling him 'Berkeley!' His name's 'Berkeley!' Berkeley's reply to this was that there is someone
who is always perceiving everything, keeping it there even when we aren't looking at it.
"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree, Will continue to be,
Since observed by, Yours Faithfully, God!
One of the other questions you might have might be about things like subatomic
particles, which are so small that we can't observe them. Does that mean that they don't exist then, according to Berkeley? Well, it's true that we
can't observe them directly, but by doing experiments with things like particle colliders we can observe the effects
that they have in the world and from that deduce that they are there. So they
are still perceptible, just not directly.
Okayt we've learned what Berkeley thought about existence and perception. That's kinda
cool, I guess. But who really cares about any of this? Well, here's the really cool bit. Berkeley is actually making
two points here: his first point is that nothing unless it is being perceived, that's a
point about metaphysics, about what exists. But his second point is that mental stuff, minds,
is at the bottom layer of reality. That reality and everything we might say or know about
it is inherently subjective. And that is a very interesting idea.
Subjective here doesn't mean that it's all made up or that anything goes or that
none of it really matters - the word 'subjective' gets kind of a bad rap like that - it just
means what it says: that reality is grounded in the experience of a subject.
This idea has pretty profound implications for the way we understand science. A lot of
people have this idea that science is about trying to find objective, universal truth, but
an idealist approach to it would be to say, "Ehh, not so much." Science is about
predicting experience. So much of the history of mysticism and religion was about prophecy,
about foretelling the future, and science, if you do it right, is the tool that actually allows you to do that.
To say that Halley's Comet will return at this time on this date; these drugs will have
this effect on the body; that the weather on Tuesday will be like this. What the ultimate, objective nature
of reality is, who knows? If there even is such a thing. Science might not be able to tell
you, but it can tell you what the weather will be like on Tuesday: it can predict human experience.
There are also some profound political implications for this centring of subjectivity, political
here means 'to do with the distribution of power' rather than meaning any specific
political party. For the last several hundred years it was assumed that some people, mainly
white men, were more objective and rational and saw things as they really are, in contrast
to women, who were emotional and hysterical and blew things
out of proportion. It wasn't just a gendered thing either, it was a race thing:
Western European ideas of property and government were taken, by Western
Europeans, to be universal and rationally grounded, whereas First Nation American and Canadian
ideas were taken to be primitive and local, or just assumed to be absent. We talked about that kind of thing when we talked about the philosophy of John Locke a while ago?
A lot of these ideas are still around today and are still being recreated in new forms. A lot of the time people might say that their political opponents
don't really care about "the facts" and don't see things "as they really are;"
we use words like "freedom fighter," "terrorist," "moderate," "extremist,"
- even "democracy" and "tyranny" - as if there really is some objective truth of the matter
and, maybe more interestingly, as if we ourselves are in the best position to know that
truth. People still get called out by women on their sexism, or by people of colour on
their racism, and reply with things like, "I'm not sexist!" or, "I'm not racist,!" as if they
are in the best position to know that, rather than those affected by their actions being in the better position to know.
The centring of subjectivity in the form of lived experience might prompt us to re-evaluate
who we listen to about what. To maybe sometimes take a step back and say, "Maybe I don't have a mainline straight to
universal truth, maybe this is just the way I see it. So how do you see it then?" In particular,
when we realise that historically certain types of people have been given license to
push their way of seeing things on everyone else and to back it up with violence,
well... Idealism might seem like a neat little idea or a curiosity that's
never really gonna leave the classroom, but if to be is to be perceived and you change the way you perceive, you can literally change the world.
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