please critique my argument against Berkeley

Hello fellow ILP members,

I would like to test out an argument tearing down Berkeleian idealism. Please attempt to tear it down in turn.

Anyone who takes up the challenge (sincerely and reasonably) will get due acknowledgement in my soon-to-be-published book: MM-Theory - A Proposal on the Problem of Mind and Matter.

Berkeley is a material skeptic, which is to say he doubts the reality of the material world. This would not be true if it weren’t for Descartes. Though rejecting the material side of dualism, Berkeley models his understanding of mind straight after his predecessor. Descartes’ concept of mind is designed for doubt. He reasons, quite cleverly, that one can never be certain whether the world as it appears at one moment or another is the product of a dream, a hallucination, or even an evil demon set on deceiving us (remember, Descartes lived in very religious times). He even cast doubt on our abilities to reason our way around such considerations. If we could be hallucinating in our perceptions, we could be delusional in our thoughts; we could be delusional even in our most well thought out and cogent deliberations so that even our most powerful convictions – such as 2 plus 2 equals 4 or that all circles are round – may just be the ramblings of madness (evil demons can be quite insidious). So we have no reason to say – that is, no absolute proof – that any of the world as it appears is real or that any of our theories as we believe them are true.

This makes for a severe problem – not only for Descartes but for idealism in general. Descartes is essentially saying that the reality of the world – of anything – is never to be found in appearances. Though this allowed for the material skepticism that permitted Berkeley to propose a monism of mind (thereby resolving many of the difficulties of Cartesian dualism), it also brought with it the following problem: now the world as it appears, consisting exhaustively of mind, has no reality.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say, on this front, that mind is not real – not if Berkeley is borrowing his concept of mind from Descartes – for the latter is clearly defined in terms of substance, one of the two that actually exist. The problem is rather that the reality of this substance cannot, on the Cartesian account, show up in appearance. We cannot very well say that what we are looking at when we see, let us say, a tree is really an idea, a thought in the mind of God, for that presupposes that the reality of that idea appears to us. If the reality of the tree [i]as a material object[/i] was under the scrutiny of Descartes and Berkeley, why should the reality of the tree [i]as anything[/i] go unquestioned? Thus, if the tree is an idea at all, it must exist outside our perception of it.

At least Descartes, through some fancy shmancy philosophical maneuvering, was able to posit the existence of the material world as a [i]copy[/i] of what we find in appearance (God, he reasoned, would never allow us to be deceived). For Berkeley, however, this was nonsense. It made no sense to talk about the existence of anything outside perception as a copy (how could an apple still be red if no one was around to see it as red?). This didn’t mean, for him, that the world was irreconcilably unlike what it appeared to be in our perceptions, but rather that it was always within the purview of some perception (i.e. God’s). But herein lies his fatal flaw. If he is borrowing his concept of mind from Descartes, which, as I’ve just shown, prohibits the reality of anything in its appearance, then it prohibits the reality of even God’s ideas in their appearances to Him. If God’s ideas are to be of real things, those things must exist outside all perception – even His.

Though this goes directly against the heart of the Berkeleian doctrine, idealists in general might try another avenue: they might say that there [i]are[/i] no real things – not as they appear to the mind at least – but that the mind [i]itself[/i] is nevertheless real. The problem with this is that the reality of this mind cannot show up for itself. Whatever appears to a mind would have to be illusory, and though we might like to say that a copy of that illusion exists (as a real thing) somewhere outside its appearance, we find ourselves brought back inevitably to the same catch-22: that there must be something real outside, not only our own perceptions, but all perceptions. But in this case, that turns out to be those very perceptions. Could the mind be outside itself? Not likely. Either nothing is real, which is nonsense, or idealism, at least when it banks on Cartesian concepts of mind, is false.

This seemed like the core of your arguement.
(I should say I find Berkeley confusing. I think his critiques are very interesting, but once he gets into system building, I get a bit lost. Despite that I’ll take a stab at it)

If I read the above correctly your question is something like if we are divided from some real material object out there and could not really know it, how can we then perceive a real idea? Are we not also separated from this real idea as we would be from a (hypothetical) real object?

I am not sure if Berkeley is saying this, but it seems to me one could argue that the idea is not ‘out there’ - from where it has to run through a process of perception, but is the perception - or rather those ideas that we combine to make it. So there is no distance. What we call perception is actually the only real real realm.

Esse es percepi can be seen as a kind of denial of the subject object split, at least around what we call perception from our viewpoint where we consider ourselves separate from objects.

I went to Stanford’s online philosophy encyc. and found what might not be a different interpretation of Berkeley’s position, but it sounded a little different from yours. I mean the commentary more than the actual quote…

Berkeley and Descartes it seams did not contemplate the notion of derivatives. If the mind is real then all that comes into it are equally real, they in turn belong to ~ derive from external things, thus those external things must be equally real. Unless we add a dualism which otherwise does not exist, but this would be a move away from the Occam’s simplicity and the relationship p to p.

First we need to qualify what we mean by ‘real’ or exists, a thereness would suit primarily, so what can we talk about or think about that is not a thereness of some kind?

gib, I’m not convinced you understand Berkeley - correct me if I’m wrong, bearing in mind the following:

1st) I don’t think Berkeley ever actually talked of idealism. I believe this was a label attached to him by others. Berkeley talked of immaterialism. I’m not so sure he even referred to “reality”, as opposed to the ideal - as you are heavily making out. I might be wrong, but I’m too lazy to go into the other room and review the book I read of him a few years ago: “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge” (which came along with “Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”).

2nd) You make it out like he was concerned with skepticism over whether “reality” was hallucination/dream or not. As far as I remember he was only concerned with proving the true existence of God.

If you are going to talk about appearance vs. truth/reality - such as with Plato’s cave, then allegorically to the allegory, God is the fire/spirit as well as the “real” objects that are being projected off the wall and into the eyes of the prisoners. And human perceivers are the prisoners - the receivers of his active spiritual projection of the world unto us. In this way, Berkeley may be referred to as a Dualist.

The Materialist Dualism is that matter replaces God, but Berkeley simply says that matter is inert, passive and mediate - yet perception is immediate and active, therefore necessarily being the product of active spirit. Fairly logical if you don’t have theories of near-instantaneous energy and forces (though is this not glorified/quantified immaterialism?).
To a Materialist, Berkeley would seem Monist - eliminating matter as a mistake of superfluousness. What is there to say that God mediately passes his spirit through inert matter, before it becomes immediately perceptible to our senses - when we only have perception of our immediate sensory information and not the mediate matter beforehand?

The more sensical Dualist interpretation of Berkeley, like Plato, is that they are under the spell of causative understanding. Cause and effect duality demands that there be a cause to every effect: Berkeley called it God, Plato called it reality/truth, when the effect was perception and appearance - respectively. They are both masters of speculation - this, I see to be the only criticism of such philosophers on this “matter”.

3rd) I am not so sure why you pose Berkeley as so dependent on Descartes: “Berkeley… doubts the reality of the material world. This would not be true if it weren’t for Descartes.” No doubt they arose from the same rationalist period in history and Descartes got there first. But Berkeley’s argument works without need of knowledge of Descartes. They are both rationalist skeptics concerned with God, but that’s about it.

Yes, more or less, but the argument goes even deeper than that: how can God himself even apprehend the reality of his own ideas?

Yeah, well, that’s sort of what I was trying to figure out at viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176282, and what that implies depends a lot on whether or not Berkeley is borrowing from Descartes on the concept of mind-substance.

As for the quote you sited, Berkeley is being either inconsistent or independent of Descartes (in the latter case, I don’t know on what he bases his skepticism of matter). I would argue that the materiality or physicality of what we sense is given in our sense data. The ‘ideas’ of solidity, location, cold & hot, soft & hard, wet & dry, etc. give rise to the holistic impression and concept of ‘matter’.

The last line is hard to interpret: what’s the difference between material and physical?

Your logic is flawless as far as I can see, but Descartes’ combined with Berkeley’s isn’t on this front. See my last paragraph to understand why: it makes no sense to talk about the mind as real but its content as false.

Exactly. But more is involved, when it comes to perception, than just a thereness - there is also what is there. The perception of a material object, for example, entails not only a thereness of the perception, but of what it is a perception of - namely, a material object. Thus, if the perception is there, so is its content - so is a material object.

‘Real’, in this case, just means the presence of what is perceived.

As you know by now (from our past exchanges), I would say that the content of the perceived evinces its thereness in that very perception. Its realness (thereness) is part of the content. This is why my argument is quite polarized in its anti-Cartesian bent.

This is fascinating, are we saying that matter is supplementary to the holistic or experiential world?
That it does what is necessary to substantiate the ‘world’ we live in ~ which is gods objective, such that gods creation passes through the material [its medium?] into the holistic world.

In which case our perception runs parallel to gods intention, we get the end result or as you say ‘when we only have perception of our immediate sensory information and not the mediate matter beforehand’?

I refuse to help the undergrad write his term paper.

The God issue is a place I get confused by Berkeley, and not from any problems per se with theism so of these things I shall remain silent.

I can’t speak to his sources, but it seemed to me your argument was looking at Berkeley from a modern perspective: perceiver, sense organs of perceiver, media, object ‘out there’. The process of perception and any distortions, separations and impossibilities built into this ‘system’. Whereas it seemed to me this system was being denied. The ideas are not perceived but perception. And perception is not the process we think of it now, some nerve/sense organ mediated interpretation but rather a kind of ding an sich. The middle is the real, rather than modern western neo-scientific models where the subject is real and the object is real - in scientific realism - but the middle is distorting.

Something more like phenomenalism.

We have used our experiences to build up the notions of ‘matter’ and ‘physical’, though if we really examine our experiences there is something much more ephemeral about them than these terms imply. Also material/matter/physical are words that now refer to things that are about as immaterial as possible. But both these sentences are likely tangential to your interests. Again, I think he is saying what we would call the middle is real, the perceiving.

I thought that was interesting/odd also.

I bolded the text that I think is the crux of the problem here, which I am attempting to upheave. It is only immaterial when you equate ‘mind’ to ‘Cartesian mind’. Descartes clearly wanted to draw as wide a distinction between mind and matter as he possibly could, and Berkeley is trying to unify them. But he quite naturally struggles to do so when he uses the Cartesian concept of mind which is defined in such as way that makes unification impossible.

The objective of my philosophy (which I’m certain is what Berkeley was trying to do) is to put reality back into our experiences (to undo Cartesianism). Berkeley and I are on the same page with uniting matter with mind, but we differ in our skepticism over the existence of matter. Berkeley said matter is really mind, and since mind is immaterial, matter as such doesn’t really exist. I say matter is really mind, and so mind, after all, is material.

Does that make sense?

Then no acknowledgement for you

The problem is that anything real maybe unknowable to the mind itself. Kant already solved this dilemma with his conjecture of a priori knowledge. With a priori knowledge, it doesn’t matter whether what is known is real or not, but rather posits how reality can exist if it can exist at all.

I recognize it as a position in philosophy. A few thoughts…

1. There is a dualism in Berkeley, spirits and ideas, the former having something like agency. Highlighting that might help your position.

2. I think the word ‘material’ is problematic in the extreme. Phenomenologically, scientifically and philosophically. I don’t think it means anything. If I investigate matter phenomenologically, carefully notice what I experience with even the most mundane and original kinds of matter that set up the word - stone, water, tree - they seem very ephemeral to me. Scientifically the word has expanded to include things that are as ephemeral as angels: fields, massless particles, energy, even the quantum foam of a vacuum or particles in superposition. When we use the word, it seems to me it says nothing about whatever it might modify or distinguish from something else. Anything science decides exists will be called material or physical. Philosophically I think the word is problematic because of the above, but also because we only know about matter via phenomena, but the word has come to function as if it is more real than phenomena. But problematic as a kind of philosophical fruit from a poisoned tree - to use an analogy from police/law.

I think these problems affect or should affect any current critique of Berkeley. A last more tangential point is that many physicists now see reality as information, which is getting very close to calling it ideas. I think a current critique of Berkeley would at least in footnotes need to show how this does or does not relate or might relate to Berkely. I mean there are even a growing number of physicists who think that reality is not really here, but that what we experience is actually on the periphery of the universe and our whole local realism is based on something like a hologram projected from this periphery.

3. I’d still be interested in hearing how you take my idea of Berkeley saying the middle was real and not so much what we call the subject object. Better explained in previous posts.

Hi gib,

A very interesting post. Idealism (esp. Berkeley) is my ‘thing’, as you may remember.

Best wishes,

R

If you do not want to think, is there thinking? Wanting and thinking go together, and thought is matter, so thought is used to achieve either material or spiritual goals. But unfortunately, some place the spiritual goals on a higher level, and consider themselves very superior to those who use thought to achieve material goals. So actually, whether you call it spiritual or material, even the so-called spiritual values are materialistic. So it is matter; thought is matter. And, thought is not a creator of thought; it is a responding to the stimuli. What is there is only the stimulus and response. Even the fact that there is a response to the stimulus is something which cannot be experienced by us except through the help of thought, which creates a division between the stimulus and response. Actually, the stimulus and response is a unitary moment. You can’t even say that there is a sensation; even the so-called sensations we think we’re experiencing all the time cannot be experienced by us except through the knowledge we have from the sensations.

What is there is only the knowledge we have of the self, the knowledge that we have gathered, or had passed down to us, from generation to generation. Through the help of this knowledge we create what we call self, and then experience the self as separate from the functioning of this body. So is there such a thing as the self? Is there such a thing as I? The I is the first person singular pronoun. I use “I” to make the conversation simpler, and call you “you,” and I “I,” but simply what we call I is only a first person singular pronoun.

Nor me, apparently.

gib, if you want monism then Spinoza might be a more appropriate subject to tackle. But then monism doesn’t really allow for an idealist/realist divide…

Buddhism might be worth a shot.

I’ve had a busy weekend and no time to philosophize. So I’ll try to get through as many posts as I can with as brief a reply I can (which means skipping over a few, so don’t be offended).

Only if you cling to Cartesian ‘mind’ - which Kant, and Berkeley, did without entertaining the possibility of alternatives.

I think a summary reply to all the above could go like this: what I’m attacking in my OP is not so much Berkeley but idealism based on Cartesian ‘mind’ - which I think is all Berkeley had to work with at the time and more or less went unquestioned until (probably) Nietzsche. I want to point out the incoherency in that sort of idealism. So long as you put reality back into mind (specifically, into what ‘appears’), you can spout off whatever brand of idealism you like and I’ll applaud it.

I think that’s what Berkeley was trying to do but Cartesianism was holding him back (probably without his realizing it).

Oh, you’ll get your acknowledgement - don’t you worry - but I don’t always reply to everything.

Now that I’ve re-read through your post, I do have a few thoughts:

1. The way you make Berkeley out to be a ‘dualist’ has nothing to do with my critique of his idealism. My critique is centrally his borrowing from Descartes the concept of ‘mind’. Which leads me to the second of my thoughts:

2. The lineage goes like this: Descartes → Locke → Berkeley. Locke’s is a response to Descartes realism. Descartes, in the end, reverses his skepticism and posits a real world outside perception as a copy of perception (God would never allow us to be deceived). Locke comes in and says “Well, hold up now, not everything in perception corresponds to something real. Secondary qualities don’t. But primary qualities do. Secondary qualities are those which can only exist in a mind.” Then Berkeley steps in and says “Wait a minute! Isn’t everything in perception a secondary quality then?”

So, yeah, technically, Berkeley is not drawing on Descartes directly, but as with many lines of thought that get passed down from one generation of philosophers to another, Berkeley is definitely influenced by Descartes ideas on mind. Could he have been making sense without Descartes? Sure, I suppose, but he probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Thanks but I’ve got my own… and it is very “Spinozan”.

The mind is a “thing in itself”. Kant already solved Cartesian dualism on epistemological grounds. If nothing can be known about minds, then knowledge itself is doubted, hence the need for ontology and the categorical imperative.

Knowing is a product of the mind, a result of thought.

I find with these old philosophers that it’s hard to make sense of where they make sense and where not - at the risk of being irrelevant to your problem, I note here that the idea that 2+2=4 could be an illusion is nonsensical, since there are no such things as 2, +, = or 4 outside the deliberate hypothesis, the construction of the mathematical method. So it is necessarily a fiction, in the sense that it is a human construction. A fiction or construction aimed to say something about what we can perceive, to project logical meaning into it. The mind is capable of doing this, apparently - so 2+2=4, or the fact that we can understand this phrase and after we’ve learned the method of constructing it in school think that it is self-evident, says mostly something about the mind.

You have described the problem here already: this formulation supposes that the mind is not a reality; if parts of it are not realities it can not itself be real.

What is reality then? By the above rationale, anything that overturns the order of the mind, that proves it false.

I think the second scepsis does not follow from the first. The fact that we cannot verify that things exists outside of the mind does not mean that we cannot verify that they exist in the mind. We can certainly verify that things exist in the mind: experience is all that exists anyway. Note that “existing” is a term invented by humans to denote what is gathered in experience.

Not of the definition of reality is the thought/perception of God.
Which is what Einstein thought for example. I don’t know about Berkeley.

What if the only thing which can be said to be real (which is the issue) is the experience of a thing? This seems the most sensible to me. And mind is experience, so mind that would be the accumulative name for reality.

I can see this conclusion arising from the argument but all rests on the definition of reality.
The objects which we experience may not exist as such outside our experience, and can certainly not be defined as real without our experiences of them, so they derive their reality from our experience/interpretation of them, which is done by our mind - no, which is what our mind is.

I’m probably not being helpful here at all…