George Berkeley Empiricist Philosopher and Bishop GEORGE BERKELEY

George Berkeley, Empiricist Philosopher and Bishop

GEORGE BERKELEY (16851753)

Berkeley was born in Ireland near Kilkenny. His father was a customs officer, and was reasonably well off. His grandfather had been English, but both grandfather and father lived in Ireland. Berkely did not go to England until 1713, and consider himself Irish. Still, he was Anglo-Irish and not Catholic Irish. The 17 th century was filled with English Irish conflict. Cromwell came to Ireland in the 1650 s and brutally supressed the country. After his ascession to the throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William III came to Ireland on a military campaign which culminated at the battle of the Boyne and the surrender of Limerick in 1690.

Berkeley was educated at Kilkenny College, where he was proceeded by Jonathan Swift, and was contemporary with Congreve. In 1700, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to Trinity College, Dublin. Berkeley studied Latin, and Greek, French and Hebrew, mathematics and, among other contemporary works of philosophy, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley got his B. A. in 1704, and stayed on a Trinity in the hope that a fellowship might become available. On June 9 th, 1707 he was admitted as a fellow and ordained as an Anglican priest.

In 1707 Berkeley started to keep a note book, filled with reflections about a wide range of philosophical subjects. There are two of these note books filled with some nine hundred entries. They are clearly intended for his own use and not intended for publication. They give us a rare glimpse in the mind of a great philosopher working on problems. These note books have been published as Berkeley's Philosophical Commentaries. Berkely had already developed his immaterialist hypothesis - the view that matter does not exist.

In 1709 Berkeley was ordained as an Anglican deacon. He published his first major work: An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision. In 1710 he is ordained a priest. He published A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. This is arguably Berkeley's most important work, and contains his critique of materialism, dualism and his arguments for his immaterialist hypothesis.

In April 1713 Berkely visited England for the first time is presented to the English court by Jonathan Swift and he quickly becomes a court favorite. He publishes the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. This is the popular version of the doctrines presented in the Principles. This is the book you are reading. Berkeley is unusual among the great philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century for two reasons. He married and he made the voyage to the Americas.

In 1724 he was appointed Dean of Derry. He devised a scheme to found a college in the Bermudas. He was promised a grant from the government for 20, 000 pounds to fund the project. In August, 1728 he married Anne Forster, the daughter of a Judge. In September, after four years of preparation for the new college, he set sail for America and spent three years in Rhode Island awaiting the promised grant from the government. In 1732 he finished Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher critically examining the various forms of free-thinking in the age. Upon hearing the grant would not be forthcoming, he gave the books and supplies for the new college to Yale college and returned to England.

Berkeley's Extravagant Opinion

The main point of Berkeley's philosophy is that there is no such thing as matter. It doesn't exist. There are only minds, and ideas that occur in those minds. All the things we perceive are ideas; the fact that we perceive them means that we are ourselves essentially minds. Berkeley dared to question Sir Isaac Newton on his mathematics, particularly infinitesimals. He was himself an able and subtle mathematician; but he insisted that nothing in the real world could be divided infinitely. He also challenged Newton's notions that space and time could be said to exist on their own without anything happening in them. Time, said Berkeley, does not 'flow equably' regardless of its contents; time is the succession of ideas in the mind.

The Freethinker

How he arrived at his immaterialism is perhaps plain enough to see. He started out as a constantly-questioning youngster, as he tells us in his private notebook: he was 'distrustful at eight years old'. The fashionable attitude for young bucks at the beginning of the 18 th Century was the adoption of a thoroughgoing radicalism called 'Freethinking', which challenged all accepted wisdom, and religion in particular.

The young Berkeley seems to have applied the method of freethinking to everything he came across. When he studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, the new and exciting textbook was John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and in it Berkeley's eagle eye fell on a decidedly dodgy description of substance. This is defined as something which we suppose to underlie all the perceptible features of things, though substance is not in itself perceptible, according to Locke. Applying to Substance the scepticism the Freethinkers applied to God, Berkeley concluded that this mysterious matter is something which makes no appearance in the world, and which we can do perfectly well without. Logically, to say that we cannot imagine doing without something is not sufficient to prove that such a thing is present. Indeed, by Occam's Razor we are bound to discredit such an imaginary entity.

We are left then with nothing but our perceptions; but the evident fact that our perceptions are well-knit and coherent in daily life amounted, for Berkeley, to nothing short of the divine. In this way his scepticism, followed unflinchingly to its conclusion, brought him back to religion. Nothing essentially inaccessible to mind can be presumed to exist: Berkeley's motto became esse est percipi - 'to be is to be perceived'. We are not, however, isolated minds; we rely on shared experience in the greatest and least things in life. The ground of our unity, the universal mind within which we commonly perceive, act and communicate, he concluded, is God. Berkeley accordingly became an advocate of religion; he took holy orders, as was required of those lecturing at Trinity College. He lectured in Greek, Hebrew and Divinity, becoming a Fellow of the

College in his early twenties. It may seem in hindsight a large step for Berkeley to decide that the Source Of All is identical with the Holy Trinity as worshipped in the Church of Ireland, and to go all the way to becoming a bishop of that church; but he took that path, and it certainly helped him achieve a good deal in his lifetime.

Vanessa and the American Venture

Berkeley must have been a most engaging and persuasive person. He became acquainted with Alexander Pope in London, who described him as possessing 'every virtue under heaven'extraordinary praise from such a sharp satirist. He was also friends with Jonathan Swift, who called him 'an absolute philosopher', in the sense of one who does what is right rather than what is gratifying or convenient. Swift had a wealthy lover, Esther Vanhomrigh, whose story he told in the poem Cadenus and Vanessa. When Esther died she left a very large sum to Berkeley, although she was 'a perfect stranger' to him. Berkeley accepted this money as a godsend and made good use of it. He persuaded the British Government to grant him a further enormous sum, £ 20, 000, to go and found a university in America. Berkeley sailed to New England, where he stayed for over two years. His plan was to build a seminary that would educate not only the European settlers' sons, but also young Native Americans and African slaves, so that they could become ministers and teachers among their own peoples.

On the map, Bermuda seemed the ideal place for this. So much the worse for those who trust maps, as Berkeley realised when he arrived in New England; Bermuda was utterly impractical for many reasons. By that time it was impossible to alter the terms of his government grant, which in any case never came through, so he endowed existing colleges instead. On leaving America, Berkeley sent Harvard and Yale boxes of books, enriching their libraries. He also gave Yale a farm to support the college, which was at the time a struggling rural seminary with thirty or forty students. When Berkeley was in America (1728 - 31), he was the most famous person ever to have travelled there: his books had been published in London and he was a dean of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. At that time, to be a bishop, or even a dean, was no small matter; it was a position of influence perhaps comparable to that of a present-day senior executive of a major corporation.

Berkeley enlisted at least one effective disciple there, the American Samuel Johnson, who consulted him and followed Berkeley's plan in setting up what is now Columbia University. The University of Pennsylvania also acknowledges his influence, as does the Berkeley Divinity School at Newhaven. There are now many towns in the USA named after George Berkeley, including the home of the University of California. These were so named, probably not so much in recognition of his philosophy, or his philanthropy, as for a stirring poem he wrote whose last verse begins 'Westward the course of Empire takes its way.

It's All In Your Head

Berkeley's American friend Samuel Johnson is not to be confused with his namesake, the English lexicographer, who made an impatient attempt at refuting Berkeley's immaterialism. He kicked a rock, so that his foot rebounded off it, to show that it contained matter; but in that act he only showed his failure to grasp what Berkeley's theory said. It has been misunderstood fairly consistently ever since, though some philosophers, notably Ludwig Wittgenstein, have found it both logically sound and meaningful. In the Chapel of Trinity College Dublin there is a stained glass window dedicated to George Berkeley, erected a hundred years after his death and furnished with the wry quote: 'And when the multitude heard him, they were astonished at his doctrine' (Matthew 22: 32). To see the world in Berkeley's terms requires a mental change of perspective such as the following

Question: How far away is the Milky Way? Hint: The nearest star we see at night, Alpha Centauri, is 4. 24 light years away, and it is indeed in the Milky Way. That however is not the right answer. Answer: Our own local star the Sun is in the Milky Way, as are we. Therefore the Milky Way is at no distance at all. Just as our solar system is completely in the galaxy, the physical world we inhabit is completely in perception, that is to say, in the realm of the perceptible. Something - it could be impatience or reluctance - has consistently prevented people from working out just what is and is not implied by Berkeley's immaterialism. It is perhaps easier to point to what

Berkeley did not claim. He did not say that everything is 'in your head'. This makes no sense, since heads are also in the realm of perceptible things. He did not say that things have no solidity; solidity is a perceptible feature. He did not question the reality of the world, as perceived; on the contrary, the obstinate empirical facts of the real world were the grounds of his objection to Newton’s infinitesimals.

Remove matter and the world is left exactly as it was, only without one explanation of what holds it together; an explanation which Berkeley found to be both unnecessary and insufficient. One consequence to the thinker who takes this step is that the greatest miracles of religion and fable become trivial compared to the single mystery that anything can appear to exist at all. Berkeley excluded such scientific extensions of perception as telescopes and microscopes from his common-sense world, the world in which we live and make our moral choices; he said that what is seen through the microscope is another world. To this extent he was perhaps anti-scientific; but on the other hand the scientific community has quietly come round to accepting Berkeley's opinion as to the provisional and necessarily falsifiable status of scientific hypotheses

Common Sense

Berkeley denied the existence of substance, defined as something essentially inert or passive. He allowed only two ways for something to have a claim to existence: either by perceiving, or by being perceived. Locke's inert matter failed on both counts. Without the stimulus of Locke's unfortunate description of substance, Berkeley's argument might not have arisen. The interesting thing, though, is how many problems Berkeley solved with this stroke - too many, for his contemporaries. Transubstantiation, for one, simply ceases to be an issue. Berkeley's stance was ecumenical, as shown in his most successful publication, A Word to the Wise (1749). Addressed to the bishops and clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, it urged them to take steps to improve the circumstances of the Irish poor, by encouraging industry and self-esteem. His words were direct and forceful, yet so tactfully chosen that the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy responded with an enthusiastic endorsement.

In his later life, as Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, Berkeley became a practical and energetic promoter of the Irish people's wellbeing. He wrote The Querist, a challenging and ingenious tract on economics and became famous as a healer of many various ills, using a purgative potion whose recipe he may have learnt from the Native Americans: tar water. This became such a fad that an apothecary in late 18 th-Century London, when asked if he sold tar water, is said to have replied that 'he sold nothing else'.