Berkeley, George

BERKELEY, GEORGE. - English philosopher and Anglican bishop, b. 12 March 1685 at Dysert, in County Kilkenny in Ireland, to an immigrant Anglican family, d. at Oxford on 14 Jan. 1753. At the age of 15 he entered Trinity College, the celebrated University of Dublin, where he completed his studies brilliantly and where he was later a teacher of Greek, Hebrew and theology. During this time he wrote the Commonplace Book (published only by Fraser in 1871; much better is Johnston's edition, 1930), a book of personal notes and jottings, very useful for understanding the formation and development of his thought. At the same University B. held the office of preacher, after having received Holy Orders in 1709. In that same year he published his first work, Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, and in the following year, 1710, his principal work, Treatise on the principles of human knowledge. Towards the end of 1712 he went to London, where he met many of the leading scholars of the time and conducted a polemic against the freethinkers, with various articles in the journal The Guardian. In 1713 he published Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in which he sets out, in a more lively and literary form, the same ideas as the Treatise. In 1714 he came to Italy for the first time and returned there in 1716, remaining for 4 years; passing through Paris he had occasion to converse with Malebranche. Having returned to London, after working for an ethico-religious reform, in which he saw the only effective remedy for the ills of his country, he hoped to carry out his project of evangelization among the American Indians, with the founding of a missionary institute in the Bermuda islands: with his wife, some companions and an exceptional supply of volumes, he set sail in 1728 for the New World. However, after a stay of 3 years at Rhode Island (during this time he composed the dialogue Alcyphron or the minute philosopher against the freethinkers), seeing his hopes disappointed owing to the failure to send subsidies, he returned to London. In 1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. In this office he displayed an active zeal in every field, with broad tolerance towards the Catholics who constituted the vast majority of his diocese. Besides various publications on different subjects, in 1744, on the occasion of an epidemic, B. published a curious medico-philosophical writing, taking as his starting point the therapeutic qualities of tar-water which he had tested in America: Siris (from σειρά = chain), A Chain of philosophical reflexions and enquiries concerning the virtues of tar-water. From the philosophical aspect this last work reveals a conception of the world in part new, with a mystical-Neoplatonic background, without however arriving, as some maintain, at a true antithesis of his previous thought. In 1751 B. abandoned his see and retired to Oxford, where he spent the last years of his life until his death.

THOUGHT

The starting point of B.'s philosophical system, elaborated with the explicit intent of combating the atheism, skepticism and rationalism of his time, must be sought in Cartesian subjectivism and in Locke's empiricist nominalism, not without a direct dependence on the spiritualism of Malebranche. Moving from the Cartesian presupposition that the object, insofar as it is given in knowledge, is only idea or representation, and pushing beyond the critique that Locke had directed against the objectivity of the secondary qualities of bodies, B. arrives at the clear negation of matter as an objective reality transcending our representations. In fact, he affirms, the very same reasons that demonstrate the subjectivity of the secondary qualities — sounds, colors, etc. — hold also for the primary qualities, that is, extension and motion. These too (B. strives to demonstrate it in the careful Theory of Vision) are irremediably subjective, insofar as space is not, as is commonly believed, a datum of external perception, but rather the purely ideal result of prior experiences and psychological associations. Once the objectivity of space is denied, there remains no reason whatsoever to admit, with Locke, beyond our representations of bodies, an unknown material substance (Principles, § 73): the body is nothing other than the complex of our ideas or representations, « what is seen, smelled, touched ». "Matter" is at bottom a simple name (nominalism) by which we designate the aggregate of our sensible representations; the being of bodies is resolved into their presenting themselves to our consciousness, into their being perceived, « their esse is percipi » (Principles, § 3). To think, as existing beyond our representations, an unknown and ineffable material substance, as substratum or origin or cause of them, is to mistake for reality a pure "scholastic abstraction."

But if it is true, B. affirms, that bodies are nothing other than ideas, it does not follow that reality is denied or destroyed: the world is not an illusion or a hallucination. Reality remains firm and solid; it is, however, entirely resolved into the spiritual world. Substantial reality, albeit relative, is our spirit, the I which cannot be reduced to a simple bundle of representations, but is intuited as subject and active principle of ideas, which indeed it can revive and reproduce through imagination and memory. This spiritual activity of our I has, however, an evident limit: in fact the world of external sensations is not within our arbitrium and our power; the corporeal universe does not depend on us (Principles, §§ 29, 146). From this immediate datum of our psychological reflection B. concludes that the ideas of the world derive for our spirit directly from God: He, infinite and absolute spirit, is the supreme and fundamental reality, eternal productive activity of ideas, which He impresses upon our spirit according to an order and a regularly uniform succession, in which consists the so-called natural law (Principles, § 30). Consequently the reality and consistency of the world does not depend at all on my present perception, or on that of any other finite spirit, but solely on the activity of the absolute spirit: it is in this their independence from any particular spirit that there consists, according to B., the reality of the ideas identified with things.

Thus rather than in an idealism in the modern sense of the word, B.'s system is resolved into an immaterialistic and theistic realism. Against the skeptics he can affirm that not only is knowledge of reality possible for us, but indeed this coincides with our very ideas and knowledge; and against atheism B. arrives at the affirmation of God, not as a simple first cause of a material and objective world, but as the center and immediate origin of our own spiritual life: a conception, as can be seen, essentially mystical, in accord with B.'s genuinely religious temperament, and which is accentuated in the last philosophical work, Siris.

In harmony with the fundamental lines of his system B. resolves the remaining philosophical problems, for example that of truth and causality. True is all that is thought and willed by God, false is what is thought only by our spirit; every simple original perception (intuition) is true; error comes from our fallacious associations of the primitive data. False moreover and unreal is every product of abstraction: abstract ideas, against which he directed a tenacious and subtle critique, have for B. no consistency, not even in the mind. As for causality, it belongs solely to the spirit. There is no causal nexus among representations in themselves (Principles, §§ 64-65), but solely an order of succession and of finality, according to the will and Providence of God: who can freely suspend or break that order by miracle. Mechanism therefore, as a system of interpretation of reality, is false, although it has a utilitarian and practical moment. Likewise, the sciences have a purely practical value; truth and reality is a conquest that only philosophy can attain.

B.'s system, a penetrating and original philosophical mind, is an extremist reaction against materialism; it has, however, its fund of truth as every production of genius does. Even for traditional philosophy the universe is insofar as it is thought and willed by God; it is not the knowledge of God as a function of things, but rather things as a function of that knowledge. This was B.'s fundamental intuition. But his error, grave and in no way excusable given the openly insufficient logical and metaphysical presuppositions, was to deny the reality of matter as distinct from spirit. True it is that nothing exists independently of the thought and the actual will of God, but this does not remove the fact that things have a reality of their own, and once this is denied, the way is opened toward idealism and pantheism. The very affirmation of the reality and substantiality of our I as spirit will not withstand the logical development that the Berkeleian presuppositions will find in another great English philosopher, D. Hume (v.); the same must be said, analogously, also of causality, denied by B. to matter and reserved to the I.

It is not difficult, moreover, to observe how in B.'s immaterialism, even though animated by the most sincere religious breath, besides the already indicated essential change in the concept of truth, it is extremely difficult, not to say impossible, to save other fundamental concepts of the Christian philosophical tradition, such as those of creation and of freedom. A difficulty this that is inherent in every philosophical system that misrecognizes the objectivity of being and the transcendent reality of nature, an irrepressible condition and at the same time a limit of the life and activity of the human spirit.

Ugo Viglino