Berkeley's God

 The more I read George Berkeley, the more it seems to me we might have skipped all the rest of modern philosophy and just left it with him. Here, after all—at the dawn of modern philosophy—we find already disclosed the key insights of the Kantian and the logical positivist systems alike. 

Indeed, Berkeley was perhaps one step ahead of Kant. The latter's great "Copernican Revolution" was to discover that the whole structure of reality and its apparent laws of uniformity could be rescued from skepticism, if it be recast simply as a structure of the mind—belonging to the realm of phenomena. 

There may be such a thing as the "Thing-in-Itself," existing in the noumena outside of the mind, Kant conceded. But, if so, we can never know anything about it. Any conception we can form of it, after all, would have to be mediated through the categories of our own mind. We could know it only through our perceptual and conceptual apparatus, in other words; hence, we cannot know it as it is in itself. 

Berkeley, of course, would agree. But he then—even though he was writing before Kant was even born—did the later philosopher one better. For, if we cannot know anything about the "Thing-in-Itself"—or, what Berkeley calls variously the world of substance or the material substratum of the "Schoolmen"—and indeed, cannot form any conception of it, then how are we entitled even to posit its hypothetical existence? 

We cannot form a conception of the material substratum, Berkeley argues, because any mental "idea" we would form of it would have qualities belonging to the realm of the senses (that is—things which have passed through the categories of our minds, in Kantian terms). Suppose we grant that it could exist. But it could not have any effect on us beyond the ideas we form of it, which can exist without it. 

And so, this material substratum, this "Thing-in-Itself," is entirely without efficacy. It adds nothing to our understanding. To posit its existence is therefore to violate Occam's Razor. It is to multiply entities unnecessarily and violate the law of logical parsimony. And so, we had better dispense with it. 

Suppose we press the point even further, however. Suppose we say—as Berkeley seems to do, in some passages—that the "Thing-in-Itself," or material substratum, is not only dispensable and unnecessary to our conception of reality—but that it is logically invalid. After all, if the notion of such a substance is genuinely "inconceivable," as we have already conceded it to be—then any statement we make concerning it is not only unnecessary—it is also nonsensical and self-contradictory. 

And here, Berkeley seems to have not only gotten ahead of Kant, but to have arrived already at the key insight of the logical positivists—centuries ahead of schedule. 

We then have managed to solve the key problems of philosophy simply by recasting our definition of reality. If reality is to be understood as that which exists outside our minds, then it is indeed a great mystery as to how we can know anything about it. But if reality—in accordance with Kant's "Copernican Revolution," is simply redefined as the rules that govern the phenomena we perceive in our minds, then we can have direct knowledge of it. And any statement regarding a metaphysical reality that is supposed to exist "beyond" or "outside" of our minds is simply nonsensical. It is a non-problem founded on non-propositions. 

But this, of course, does not really end philosophy. Great puzzles remain. If "reality" is simply the phenomena of my mind, for instance, how can I know that other minds exist? Am I forced to lapse into solipsism as the only logically permissible hypothesis? And even supposing reality is made up of the "rules" of my phenomenal existence: are these rules not self-contradictory on several points? 

Here, Berkeley runs square up against certain paradoxes about the nature of time and space that he does not really manage to resolve—though he attempts to do so. Berkeley confronts, for instance, versions of Zeno's paradoxes, though he does not call them by that name. He considers the problem of the continuum, for example: how is it possible to move through space, if any length of space is made up of an infinite number of points? 

Berkeley gets around this by simply stating that space is not in fact made up of an infinite number of points. He argues that the geometricians have invented this problem by their false belief in the possibility of "abstract ideas." Berkeley argues that there are no such thing as "abstract ideas," as such. What there are, are merely logical rules that govern a variety of particular ideas. We know this to be the case, because whenever we try to formulate the concept of an abstract idea in our minds, Berkeley writes, we can only picture a particular example of it. 

So, Berkeley says, geometers have formulated abstract rules governing lines, for instance, which could in theory apply to lines of infinite size. But if they try to implement these ideas, or formulate a picture of a line in their heads, they will always end up producing an image of a finite line. And such finite lines—the ones that really exist in the world—do not, in Berkeley's telling, have an infinite number of parts. In other words, they are not infinitely divisible. "There is no such thing as the ten-thousandth part of an inch," Berkeley declares. 

But, of course, there is such a thing as the ten-thousandth part of an inch, which modern science has measured and recorded. Berkeley might have conceded this point, in our century. But still, he would have pressed, there is some limit to the divisibility of space. There is some final unit of length, beyond which space cannot be further subdivided. 

But such a hypothesis (which some modern philosophers of science do indeed entertain) itself lands one in immediate and inextricable perplexities. For one thing, you have the problem of incommensurability. Any "unit" of length, as the ancient geometers discovered, implies the existence of a diagonal, in its square, which cannot be measured in multiples of that unit. Any unit of length, therefore, necessarily implies the existence of infinitely small subunits of that unit. And so, space really does appear to be infinitely divisible. 

Here's another problem with Berkeley's position. If space is made up of discrete units, after all—then how is it possible to move from one unit to another? One would have to pop out of existence in one unit and appear suddenly in another, for there is nothing intermediate between these two units. As a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel summarized the problem: "[A] discrete world on the other hand must raise the question as to what it is that connects it. [...] A bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Whose sum is one bird." 

Berkeley himself, by this point in the treatise, has already admitted the same problem with respect to time. If time is made up of discrete units, with no continuity between them, he points out, then one is "annihilated every moment of his life," which—he concedes—appears "absurd." It is the bird appearing in one slat of light, disappearing, then reappearing in the next slat. It is the "cinematograph" version of reality that Bergson describes in order to show the inadequacies of conventional human notions of time and space. 

It seems only an oversight on Berkeley's part that he did not see that his objection to the discrete notion of time applies equally strongly to the notion of a discrete, discontinuous space. 

Even a "reality" that is made up exclusively of the rules governing the sequence of phenomena in our minds, therefore, is still rife with contradictions of its own. We therefore cannot escape from a Humean skepticism. Even if we complete the "Copernican Revolution," we are still forced to conclude—as Hume put it (after showing a similar paradox about the continuum of space)—that human beings "must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them." Reality, as such, remains inextricably confusing and mysterious. 

Berkeley, then—to repeat—certainly did not solve all the problems of philosophy. This is not the reason I say that we could as well have dispensed with all the philosophers who came after him. My point is rather that it's not clear that any subsequent philosophers have been able to shed any more light than he could on the problems that remain. 

Here's another remaining problem: suppose we succeed in recasting reality simply as the rules that govern the passing phenomena of our minds. We still must confront the difficulty: why, then, must those phenomena be governed by rules at all? If they exist nowhere but in my mind, why can I not simply will any alternative reality into being as I wish? 

Why should "reality," as we experience it, have exactly the opposite character—namely, that it is wholly independent of our will, and we cannot, by sheer volition, succeed in changing it? As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann define "reality" as such, after all, it is precisely "a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away')." 

Berkeley argues that this is because "reality" exists in the mind of God. The reality that we experience through our minds is the sequence of ideas that God sees fit to show to us—that is why it exists independently of our will. 

As one of the interlocutors in Berkeley's Dialogues puts it, speaking of the ideas that pass in the mind and present themselves to us as an external "reality": "I know myself not to be their author, it being out of my power to determine at pleasure, what particular ideas I shall be affected with upon opening my eyes or ears. They must therefore exist in some other mind[.]"

Suppose we grant all this as true. We are forced to concede, however, that "God"—the other mind that forces these ideas into our minds regardless of our will in the matter—could as well be super-intelligent machines that have suspended our brains in vats and are poking at them with electrodes. In other words, Berkeley's conception of God is just as consistent with the premise of The Matrix as it is with Christian orthodoxy. 

But we may not even need to make that point. We have, after all, already admitted that we are not entitled to make any statements one way or the other about the metaphysical reality that exists "outside" our minds. By the principle of logical parsimony, we can only assert that the sequence of phenomena in our minds exists. The only principle external to that sequence that is required to explain it, therefore, is simply to posit that "something external to our minds creates the sequence of phenomena in our minds and the rules that govern it." 

We may call the "something" that we have just posited "God," if we wish. But we are not entitled to ascribe any further characteristics to it than we have done already. "God" by that definition, is simply "that which prompts the sequences of thoughts and the rules that govern it."

God, by this definition, may as well be no more than a hypothetical external material reality that prompts all of our ideas because these ideas correspond to external objects. "God," by this definition, is exactly the same thing as —or, at least, is no more knowable than—the material substratum or substance that Berkeley has already rejected. 

To say that God must have any more specific characteristics than we find in reality itself—namely, that God is anything more than the sequence of phenomena and the rules that govern them—would be to multiply entities unnecessarily, in the same manner as the materialists who posit an external "substance." It would be to posit extra traits that are not needed to explain the phenomena themselves. 

God, on this theory, turns out to be precisely the same thing as scientific naturalism, naïve realism, atheism, materialism, call it what you will. Berkeley's God—then—turns out to be a great deal like Spinoza's God—for all the bishop explicitly protests against the comparison. 

To say that God implants ideas in our minds, then, turns out to mean nothing other than that phenomenal reality exists independently of our will and is governed by fixed rules. We may posit, if we wish, that something is "causing" this phenomenal reality, but we are not entitled to say any more about this "something" without violating Occam's Razor—and indeed, we may not be entitled to invoke this "something" at all, since—it being outside our perceptual and conceptual apparatus, we can form no notion of it, and therefore anything we say of it must be sheer nonsense. 

All we are left with, then, once we have redefined "God" as Berkeley would seem to redefine the concept, is the obvious conclusion that no one disputes: namely, that we appear to exist in a reality that is independent of our will, and which is governed by rules. The rankest materialist or scientific realist would say no more than the same. 

Berkeley nonetheless insists that certain things can be inferred about this "God" from the features of reality as we experience it. We can know, for instance, that God is benevolent and all-wise, because of the rational provision for all things He has made by the sound, logical order of the universe. 

I leave it to you to answer the question of whether this is the image of God that emerges from a dispassionate consideration of the universe as we find it. Suffice to say that all we can know of God, on Berkeley's theory, is that God is the sort of being that would create this universe. God is whatever external entity would choose to present this particular succession of images, governed by this particular set of laws, to the captive minds of others. 

God, then, is whatever being would choose to present a reality in which weak and vulnerable animals are consumed by stronger ones. It is one where life is only maintained by the destruction of other life. Whether such a "God" is anything other than a substituted name, then, for the blind and hostile forces of indifferent nature known to the scientific materialists, I leave to you. 

But—says Berkeley—even admitting that the universe as we find it is full of certain horrors—we should nonetheless "further consider, that the very blemishes and defects of nature are not without their use, in that they make an agreeable sort of variety, and augment the beauty of the rest of the creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlightened parts." 

I leave to you whether, to Voltaire's point, we are content to regard the destruction of innumerable innocents in Lisbon's earthquake as a fitting way to provide an "agreeable sort of variety" to natural life. Or whether the sight of Hardy's "Blinded Bird," who is pierced with a hot needle by human hands at birth—"with God's consent," as Hardy puts it—"augments the beauty of the rest of creation" by its unmerited suffering. 

So no, then, Berkeley did not solve all the problems of philosophy. The universe remains as apparently cruel and absurd as ever—even if we admit all of his chief conclusions. But it is not clear to me that any later philosopher, up to the present day, has been able to do much better.