Immaterialism is a striking doctrine, and Berkeley seems to have appreciated that it could easily be taken as a form of wild and radical scepticism. In 1713, he published a set of three dialogues between Hylas, who begins as a materialist, and Philonous, an immaterialist, to expand on and popularise the doctrine. Hylas, when he accepts Philonousâs arguments for immaterialism, believes he has adopted a scepticism that makes knowledge of things as they are in themselves impossible: âYou may indeed know that Fire appears hot, and Water fluid: But this is no more than knowing, what Sensations are produced in our own Mind, upon the Application of Fire and Water to your Organs of Sense. Their internal Constitution, their true and real Nature, you are utterly in the dark as to thatâ. Hylas hasnât yet grasped that Philonous, and Berkeley behind him, are identifying sensations and real natures. Some of Berkeleyâs near-contemporaries took the doctrine more generally to be âthe most outrageous whimsy that ever entered in the head of any ancient or modern madmanâ, and felt that in arguing for âthe impossibility of the real or actual existence of matterâ, Berkeley was taking away âthe boundaries of truth and falshood; expos[ing] reason to all the outrage of unbounded Scepticism; and even, in his own opinion, mak[ing] mathematical demonstration, doubtfulâ. Whilst immaterialism may now have few adherentsâand those few proposing something very different from Berkeleyâthe arguments he used to defend his position are still the subject of philosophical debate. John Campbell and Quassim Cassam, for example, have produced a dialogical book on what they call âBerkeleyâs puzzleâ, which âis this: to describe the explanatory role of sensory experience without being driven to the conclusion that all we can have knowledge of is experiencesâ.
ââTis Plain, We Do Not See a Manâ
This book gives an account of (and modestly extends) what we know about Berkeley. It offers details of the documented aspects of Berkeleyâs life, such as the nature of his early schooling, his relationships with women, his work towards establishing a university in Bermuda, his purchase of enslaved people whilst in America. Berkeley was a thinker and writer throughout his life, and his writings are another different but still more important form of documentary evidence about that life. I survey Berkeleyâs entire career as a thinker and writer, attempting to show how his concerns intersect with those of other thinkers and of the intellectual, social, and political movements of his age as well as previous ages. The line between the two kinds of documentation that support this study is not perfectly clear. We have some knowledge of Berkeleyâs biographical experience of education through one kind of documentationâthe statutes of the school he attended, the assessment procedures for fellowships at TCD when he was submitted to them, records of disciplinary issues in college when he was the junior dean, records of the charity for the schooling of Catholic Irish in Cloyne when he was bishop, his choices in educating his own children at home, and so on. That knowledge is difficult to separate from Berkeleyâs extensive but diffuse writing on education, at its most concentrated in Alciphron and The Querist, but a perennial concern. The same can be said of his political allegiance, family life, taste, and various other important topics. No attempt has been made for over a hundred years to bring these two kinds of documentation of Berkeleyâs life together across the full length of his career, as A. A. Luceâs biography, dating from 1949 and still the most recent book-length treatment, declines to integrate biographical and philosophical discussion. Berkeleyâs documented life and participation in various institutions and practices, such as those of the exclusive educational institutions of a Protestant elite, is inseparable from his treatment of major philosophical and social issues.
Any biography might be taken as the answer to a slightly different and more abstract question about its subject from the one just posedâwhat can we know about George Berkeley? To a great extent this question will be answered by what we admit as documentation of a life and by how willing we are to engage in interpretation and speculation about the meaning of documents. But there is a further question concerning what can be said about a life as a whole. Can we attribute character to Berkeley, given that all we have of him is a set of documents, even if some such documents explicitly discuss his character (such as the remarkable letters written by Anne, Berkeleyâs wife, to their son George Jr after Berkeleyâs death)? People have not been afraid to characterise Berkeleyâas pious and practical, for example, or as more than normally given to dissimulation and deceit. But we may have misgivings about such characterisations, even based on relatively ample documentary evidence. There are always things about people that we do not know, things that have eluded documentation, or which could not be documented (at least not in any straightforward way). The question of what we can know about another person should occur to the writer and reader of a biography, as we worry about the judgements we are inevitably forming of the subject and the basis on which they are founded. In Berkeleyâs case there is a further complexity: the question of what we can know about other people is bound up philosophically with what we most commonly do know of himâhis propounding the doctrine of immaterialism.
What does immaterialism have to do with the question of what we can know about other people? My purpose in addressing this question at the beginning of this book is twofold. First, by offering a brief survey of the immaterialist writings for which Berkeley is best known I want to introduce those unfamiliar with his thought to some of its central topics, and to indicate to those already familiar with his thought something of my own approach to immaterialism. My discussion does not aim to achieve the standard of a technical, professional, philosophical interpretation of Berkeleyâs immaterialism, nor to offer a summary of philosophical commentary on particular questions or passages. Rather, I aim to broach some of the topics that will be particularly relevant to other parts of this biographical study. I refer in the notes to some selections from the substantial technical commentary on Berkeleyâs metaphysics, not with the aim of arriving at an interpretive consensus, but to point readers to examples of more philosophical commentary where a variety of approaches to the topic in question can be found. Second, I want to suggest that a consideration of the central topics in Berkeleyâs immaterialism offers a justification of a biographical approach to his philosophical careerâbut one that might first require us to rethink our ideas of what people are and how they know one another.
For a student in the early eighteenth century, the most canonical modern philosophy was dualist. Holding that there are two substances in the universe, mind (or spirit) and body, Descartes and his followers upheld a strong distinction between the twoâbetween substance that is thinking and unextended and substance that is unthinking and extended. John Locke identified the two kinds of being known to man as cogitative and incogitative beings. Locke is clear that spirit is metaphysically prior to matter and should precede it in any course of study:
[U]nder what Title soever the consideration of Spirits comes, I think it ought to go before the study of Matter, and Body, not as a Science that can be methodized into a System, and treated of upon Principles of Knowledge; but as an enlargement of our Minds towards a truer and fuller comprehension of the intellectual World, to which we are led both by Reason and Revelation. [âŠ] Matter being a thing, that all our Senses are constantly conversant with, it is so apt to possess the Mind, and exclude all other Beings, but Matter, that prejudice, grounded on such Principles, often leaves no room for the admittance of Spirits, or the allowing any such things as immaterial Beings in rerum natura: when yet it is evident, that by mere Matter and Motion, non of the great PhĂŠnomena of Nature can be resolved, to instance but in that common one of Gravity, which I think impossible to be explained by any natural Operation of Matter, or any other Law of Motion, but the positive Will of a Superiour Being, so ordering it.
Philosophical understanding of the world, in this type of dualism, is understanding how spirits, principally God but also lower orders of spirits, work upon matter to produce the regular phenomena made evident to us by our sensesâfrom the movement of the planets to the movement of human bodies.
Berkeley is not a dualist of this kind: he believes that âthere is not any other Substance than Spirit or that which perceivesâ. His rejection of this kind of dualism might lead to comparison with attitudes considered dangerously heterodox, such as Benedict de Spinozaâs assertion that there is only one substance in the universe, God. Berkeley makes efforts to distance himself from the âwild Imaginationsâ of Spinoza, who is listed next to Hobbes as a believer that matter might exist without mind. Berkeleyâs assertion of one spiritual su...