1 Introduction
One might divide George Berkeleyâs philosophical work into two fundamental projects. The first is that of persuading his readers of the soundness of his âimmaterial hypothesisâ1 â the negative claim that material substance does not exist. Immaterialism exercises Berkeleyâs considerable argumentative skills as he provides many different reasons for treating matter as not only an unnecessary or empty category, but â more strongly â as suffering from internal contradiction. This project includes his denial of abstract ideas, his views on linguistic meaning and his delimitation of the representative power of ideas, all of which are primarily motivated by the denial of matter. It also includes his defence of immaterialism on the principles of âcommon senseâ. It is this strand in Berkeleyâs thinking that takes pride of place in his Principles and the Three Dialogues, and it is the part of his work that made him famous â or infamous â among his contemporaries, and which receives most attention in the literature today.
Alongside the polemical attack on matter and materialism, however, is a second, positive project. Berkeley seeks to establish a defensible metaphysical picture of the world in the absence of matter. Central to this positive endeavour is a conception of the nature of the mind, along with conceptions of the fundamental ontological categories of substance, unity and causation. This positive project also includes answers to the questions of how the mind becomes aware of itself and its acts, and of how it gains knowledge of other minds including the divine active principle that, in Berkeleyâs view, directs and sustains the phenomenal world. It is in addressing these epistemological questions that Berkeley develops his doctrine of ânotionsâ which is the subject of this monograph.
The doctrine of notions explains how mind with its different operations â its substance-hood, unity and its causality â are known to us. Berkeleyâs use of the term ânotionâ indicates his dissatisfaction with the widespread tendency in the âNew Philosophyâ of his day to characterize knowledge of the inner sphere as mediated by âideasâ. Berkeley introduced the term ânotionâ in the narrow sense that distinguishes it from âideaâ, in his 1734 editions of the Principles and the Three Dialogues. However, this relatively late terminological innovation did not mark a doctrinal change. Berkeley had, in his earlier writings, already rejected the view that it is by the representative power of ideas that we have knowledge of the inner sphere. Indeed, such a rejection is visible as early as his Notebooks, and the first edition of the Principles of 1710 was crystal clear on this point. While nominally introduced in 1734, then, the doctrine of notions is in fact a part of his system from the first period of his philosophy.2
We shall examine, in Chapter 2, how some of the most influential thinkers on Berkeleyâs early philosophy â Hobbes, Malebranche and Locke â had denied that immediate knowledge of mind, or spiritual substance, was attainable at all, and, in Chapter 3, we shall see how Berkeley, with his doctrine of notions, sought to vindicate immediate knowledge of the active, spiritual, self. We shall examine how exactly self-knowledge is achievable, in Berkeleyâs view, and why he insists on our rejecting the easy, and seemingly natural, locution that we have an âidea of the mindâ. Knowledge of the mind, Berkeley argues, is not to be treated as in any parallel way to the perceptual knowledge of objects, and thus cannot be captured by the contemplation of an idea or representation, particularly not one perceived by an âinner senseâ when construed on analogy with the outer senses.
Berkeleyâs account of our knowledge of the mind will be examined in Chapters 3 and 4, and we will see that it also becomes the pathway to a proper grasp of the primary ontological categories of substance and causality. These categories, he holds, must be understood through the direct knowledge we have of our own active mind and its acts â the species of knowledge that he refers to as ânotions.
Furthermore, our own essentially active nature allows us, on Berkeleyâs view, to understand the divine mind which takes the place of inert material substance as the source of our perceptions, as discussed in Chapter 8. It is also reflected in his positive account of conceptual thought, discussed in Chapter 6, according to which concepts are treated as things we do rather than things we perceive, and therefore necessarily draw on notions as well as ideas.
Of course, the negative and positive projects that we have outlined are not fully independent of one another but are rather mutually supportive in Berkeleyâs philosophy. A proper recognition of the nature of mind or spirit allows Berkeleyâs opposition to the existence of matter to become a serious and natural proposition. One reason why Berkeley rejects any role for an inert material substance is because he finds that causal power can be fully understood in terms of mental acts. The mind is the causal foundation of the world of things that we perceive. Such a view, one should note, had already been anticipated in the Scholastic and Cartesian doctrine that the world lacks the power to continue in existence without the active support of God. As Berkeley himself stresses, the world in his idealism is no more inert and lacking in self-sustaining power than the material world described by Descartes in which matter is dependent on continuous divine conservation.3
Our task of making sense of Berkeleyâs doctrine of notions, and his philosophy of mind in general, will only be successful if we recognize an important obstacle that stands in its way. There is an entrenched reading which treats Berkeley as belonging to one side of the empiricistârationalist divide. I believe it is the widespread perception that Berkeley is an empiricist that has often thwarted attempts to make proper sense of his conception of mind and of self-knowledge, and indeed of the whole of the second project outlined above. The empiricist reading will be examined in detail below, particularly in Chapters 4, 5 and 8, but let me now make an initial sketch of its fundamental features.
The empiricist paradigm
The interpretation of Berkeleyâs philosophical work that has been dominant since the middle of the nineteenth century treats Berkeley as the second great British empiricist and as the philosopher who stands between, and connects, the work of Locke and Hume. I shall call this interpretation the âempiricist paradigmâ.
I find it useful to treat the empiricist reading as a paradigm because it has a holistic structure of theses and assumptions that makes it almost impervious to piecemeal criticism. To question this interpretation, it is never enough to point to anomalies â recalcitrant statements or passages â because the empiricist reading is able to neutralize their impact by telling us they are elliptical or âtacticalâ or, in certain cases, by downplaying the importance of the text in which they appear.
I also call the empiricist reading a paradigm because I want to stress its historical character. It arose in a particular period, and since then it has been supported by the institutional practice of philosophy â particularly by how Berkeley is taught and how he is categorized by journals and libraries. But I shall not attempt to describe this historical and sociological dimension of the empiricist interpretation â I trust the reader will be already familiar with it, and that its presence need not be detailed or demonstrated.
Let me confine myself to a few brief comments about the history of this interpretational paradigm. It was first established by the Hegelian school, then maintained and refined by British empiricist thinkers of the twentieth century, and today it remains the default framework for understanding Berkeley. We find expression of the paradigm, in embryonic form, in the âLectures on the History of Philosophyâ that were delivered by Hegel in Jena and published after his death.4 Hegelâs conviction that Berkeley âproceeds from the standpoint of Lockeâ is then taken up by Kuno Fischer, Wilhelm Windelband and other German historians of philosophy of the latter part of the nineteenth century.5 In England, it was made popular by the T. H. Green, a follower of Hegel, in his âIntroductionâ to Humeâs Philosophical Works.6 It was espoused with particular verve and wit by Bertrand Russell,7 and it is also a fundamental part of the popular interpretations of A. J. Ayer and J. O. Urmson.8 But its influence and expression goes far beyond the handful of thinkers I have just named. The empiricist reading remains the established view today, often providing the implicit framework for interpretations of Berkeley in scholarly work. It makes four large claims.
Firstly, and most importantly, Berkeley is treated as a concept empiricist. He is thus seen as part of a tradition of empiricism in which John Locke is the most significant forerunner. Berkeley âproceeds directly fromâ the standpoint of Locke, Hegel declares.9 While Berkeley may have disagreed with Locke on important issues, relating particularly to ontology, it is still thought that he was working within the same epistemological framework, and that his thought was thus in principle opposed to the Cartesian rationalist tradition.
Concept empiricism can be encapsulated in the scholastic maxim: nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. In accordance with this, it rejects the possibility of innate content in the mind and excludes any appeal to a faculty, such as the âpure intellectâ, with access to content underived from sense experience. This interpretation thus treats Berkeley as siding, in so far as epistemology is concerned, with Gassendi, Hobbes and Locke, and against Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz.
The second claim of the empiricist interpretation of Berkeley is that his famous critique and rejection of material substance leads, almost inevitably, to David Humeâs rejection of spiritual substance. This claim has been advanced in a stronger form, such that Berkeley had already, covertly, endorsed the Humean move.10 But usually the claim is more circumspect. Berkeleyâs rejection of material substance, along with his maintenance of spiritual substance, is held to be a philosophically precarious position â a leaning tower that soon falls when Hume brings pressure to bear on it. Interpreters thus treat Humeâs famous view of the mind in his Treatise, according to which it is nothing more than a âbundle of perceptionsâ, as the natural extension of Berkeleyâs critique of material substance. T. H. Green wrote that
Or, as A. J. Ayer puts it:
Of course, this second claim about the relation between the philosophy of Berkeley and Hume is not exclusive to proponents of the empiricist paradigm. Thomas Reid, in the late eighteenth century, had seen Berkeley and Hume as philosophical brothers-in-arms, with Hume extending a sceptical attack that had been started by Be...