George Berkeley is one of the greatest philosophers of the early modern era. Along with John Locke and David Hume, he was a founder of Empiricism, which championed the role of experience and observation in the acquisition of knowledge. He influenced Kant and John Stuart Mill, and even pre-empted elements of Wittgenstein. His book The Principles of Human Knowledge is a masterwork still set on university philosophy courses the world over, and indeed there is a famous university named after him in California. The celebrated Irishman even inspired a limerick.
Yet Berkeley is also widely misunderstood. Different aspects of his thinking, not to mention his character, seem to clash quite spectacularly. His most famous doctrine was viewed as heretical in its day, yet Berkeley was a bishop and fierce believer in the supremacy of the Anglican church. He simultaneously advanced radically counter-intuitive and staunchly conservative arguments. He was a passionate social reformer but was complicit in appalling social evils. This makes Berkeley a fascinating subject. He appears a study in contradiction—but stick with him long enough and you realise that maybe there is no contradiction at all.
Tom Jones, an academic at the University of St Andrews, is well qualified to tell the story, having spent years researching and publishing on the life and work of this multi-faceted thinker. Here, over 550 richly detailed pages, he carefully explains how the different parts might fit together. It is a project of some importance, because you can only assess a thinker’s worth by seeking to understand them in the round.
Born in south-east Ireland in 1685, Berkeley studied at Kilkenny College and then Trinity College Dublin. He entered a world of ideas recently transformed by the likes of Descartes, Locke and Malebranche, and was publishing from his early twenties, when he developed the theory that would come to define him in the public imagination: immaterialism, the view that matter does not actually exist and all objects are in the mind.
The intuitive view tells us that when we perceive an object, our perception connects to something “out there” in the external world. When I look out of the window and form the image of a tree in my mind, I assume there is a lump of matter in the garden lying behind the image—namely the tree. There may be questions over the nature of the relationship between the tree and my perception of it—and these were interrogated in depth by Berkeley’s contemporaries—but the idea that the tree exists in material form was not disputed. Locke had said: “the certainty of things existing in rerum natura, when we have the testimony of our senses for it, is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs.”
Yet for Berkeley there was no reason to assume the existence of a material object at all. When we think we perceive the tree, what information do we have? Nothing beyond the perceptions themselves: sense data of its shape, size, colour and so on. This sense data, for Berkeley, is what constitutes the object. To most people it seems like a radically sceptical view, perhaps even more so than doubting the existence of free will or objective moral laws. But Berkeley, advancing the theory chiefly in his Principles and the Socratic dialogue Hylas and Philonous, thought it was precisely the opposite. Like Locke, he stressed the role of sensory perception in human knowledge, but took this position to its logical conclusion: when something is unperceived, it ceases to be. The famous question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is around to hear it is inspired by Berkeley.
In Berkeley’s conception, the only things that exist are spirits (of which God is the greatest), minds and ideas.
This was not a universally popular theory. Pope, otherwise an admirer, called it “the most outrageous whimsy that ever entered into the head of any ancient or modern madman.” Boswell described a conversation with Johnson: “we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied, his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’” Johnson was appealing to the common-sense view that matter—the rock—exists, and in this case has obvious solidity.
It was immaterialism that earned Berkeley his reputation as an iconoclast. But what at first glance seems revolutionary is in fact another facet to Berkeley’s profoundly conservative disposition. His is the story of a reactionary coming full circle.
Objectionable social attitudes are elevated to philosophy in Berkeley’s reflections on hierarchy and social order. He believed that subordination to our betters is a good in itself. Unreflective obedience is not just right and proper but speaks to humanity’s participation in the divinity: life is structured around order, regularity and chains of command, with God at the top. It is right that human societies echo this in their own relations—be it sovereign and subject, master and servant or husband and wife.
This extends to slavery. Berkeley owned slaves and wrote in support of the practice. He may even, possibly inadvertently, have helped solicit the infamous Yorke-Talbot opinion from the British law officers, which served as a legal bulwark for slavery throughout the British Empire. Berkeley was not much more enlightened in his views towards Irish Catholics, whom he regarded as innately inferior to their Protestant compatriots. He advanced the primacy of the Anglican church with literally missionary zeal at home and overseas, planning unsuccessfully for several years to found a college in the Americas to spread the gospel.
In his daily life the most important figure was God, and his chief intellectual opponents were the “free thinkers” whose irreligion he condemned in his Christian apologetic Alciphron.
Despite the heretical appearance of immaterialism, Berkeley didn’t actually believe he was facilitating scepticism, let alone atheism. In fact, while for him God did not create the world in a material sense, he lies behind all of our ideas, imprinting them on our minds. Berkeley’s system thus retains God as the ultimate cause and creates an intimacy with the deity which can form the basis for our moral judgments. He wrote that his philosophical project was “directed to practise and morality, as appears first from making manifest the nearness and omnipresence of God.”
For Berkeley, the real problem arises if we take the existence of matter as a given. Then we have to describe the relationship between our perceptions and the external world, and admit the possibility of disharmony between the two. In this gap there is the room for doubt: why think that what I see, feel or smell accurately corresponds to what is “out there”? This is “the very root of scepticism,” he writes, for whether our ideas “represent the true quality really existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine.”
His ingenious solution was to circumvent the problem completely, by collapsing one category into the other: if you identify the object and sensory experience of it as one and the same, the room for scepticism disappears. Immaterialism is thus, in Berkeley’s framing, a solution to sceptical doubt rather than an example of it. It is specifically designed to dispel “impious notions.”
That is not to say Berkeley was home and dry. Some asked how hallucinations fit into his picture, alleging that they sever the link between ideas and reality in some distinct way his system cannot account for. Another classic objection has it that the corollary of believing that things do not exist unless they are being perceived is that objects must be continually popping in and out of existence depending on whether they are being looked at or not, which is metaphysically untidy to say the least.
The response available to Berkeley is to argue that God is a perceiver too, and that it is unlikely that God has stopped perceiving the tree. This point is captured in a limerick attributed to 20th-century theologian Ronald Knox:
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.”
Reply:
“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.”
The conservatism underlying the immaterialist philosophy becomes clearer when you realise that in the final analysis, it tells us that there is a tree in the quad, and that the rational agent perceives it accurately. Berkeley writes: “my speculations have the same effect as visiting forein countries, in the end I return where I was before, set my head at ease and enjoy my self with more satisfaction.” The exercise is a clarificatory one, aimed not at demolishing our current understanding but improving it, thus enhancing our relish of the world God has provided for us—and leaving its inequalities intact.
Jones is an authoritative tour guide through all of this. He admits from the outset that constructing a unified portrait from inevitably fragmented historic evidence is challenging, made more difficult still when comparing the different elements of such a complicated thinker. The end result, carefully written and impeccably well researched, is a must-read for those with a background in philosophy. Some passages will be intimidatingly complex to beginners, especially given the book is not strictly chronological, while the focus can stray towards areas that you suspect Jones is interested in personally (such as Berkeley’s belief in the medicinal properties of tar water) rather than having been written with the general reader in mind. None of this changes the fact the book is overwhelmingly a success.
What Jones has revealed is the fascinating combination of chaos and coherence laced through Berkeley’s life. What was his ultimate contribution? For Schopenhauer, Berkeley was “the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity.” Much great philosophy followed from this, both in support of and opposition to Berkeley’s ideas, with Kant’s “transcendental idealism”—stressing the role of perception in our knowledge of the world, and like Berkeley’s theory aimed at combatting scepticism—perhaps the most famous example. To this day, even if you think Berkeley’s metaphysics is wrong it can be difficult to explain precisely why. And there is so much more to explore, including highly original contributions to the philosophy of science and language. Berkeley was not a perfect thinker and his philosophy will remain the subject of misconceptions. But it overflows with riches.
George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life by Tom Jones (Princeton University Press, £30)
