George Berkeley

A Philosophical Life

Tom Jones

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691217482
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosopher Biographies

A comprehensive intellectual biography of the Enlightenment philosopher In George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life, Tom Jones provides a comprehensive account of the life and work of the preeminent Irish philosopher of the Enlightenment. From his early brilliance as a student and fellow at Trinity College Dublin to his later years as Bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley brought his searching and powerful intellect to bear on the full range of eighteenth-century thought and experience.Jones brings vividly to life the complexities and contradictions of Berkeley's life and ideas. He advanced a radical immaterialism, holding that the only reality was minds, their thoughts, and their perceptions, without any physical substance underlying them. But he put forward this counterintuitive philosophy in support of the existence and ultimate sovereignty of God. Berkeley was an energetic social reformer, deeply interested in educational and economic improvement, including for the indigenous peoples of North America, yet he believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy and defended slavery. And although he spent much of his life in Ireland, he followed his time at Trinity with years of travel that took him to London, Italy, and New England, where he spent two years trying to establish a university for Bermuda, before returning to Ireland to take up an Anglican bishopric in a predominantly Catholic country.Jones draws on the full range of Berkeley's writings, from philosophical treatises to personal letters and journals, to probe the deep connections between his life and work. The result is a richly detailed and rounded portrait of a major Enlightenment thinker and the world in which he lived.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT George Berkeley? We know that he was born in 1685 in or near Kilkenny, Ireland, and died in 1753 in Oxford, England; that he studied and taught at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) from 1700; that he spent the best part of a decade between 1722 and 1732 fundraising for and attempting to establish a college in Bermuda; that he was made bishop of Cloyne in the south of Ireland in 1734. But primarily, perhaps, we know that he was the most significant proponent of the philosophical doctrine of immaterialism, the doctrine according to which there is no material substance supporting the sensible qualities we experience as perceptions or ideas.

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 Philonous’s arguments for immaterialism, believes he has adopted a scepticism that makes knowledge of things as they are in themselves impossible: ‘You 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 that’.¹ Hylas hasn’t yet grasped that Philonous, and Berkeley behind him, are identifying sensations and real natures. Some of Berkeley’s near-contemporaries took the doctrine more generally to be ‘the most outrageous whimsy that ever entered in the head of any ancient or modern madman’, and felt that in arguing for ‘the impossibility of the real or actual existence of matter’, Berkeley was taking away ‘the 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, doubtful’.² Whilst immaterialism may now have few adherents—and those few proposing something very different from Berkeley—the 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 ‘Berkeley’s puzzle’, which ‘is this: to describe the explanatory role of sensory experience without being driven to the conclusion that all we can have knowledge of is experiences’.³

‘’Tis Plain, We Do Not See a Man’

This book gives an account of (and modestly extends) what we know about Berkeley. It offers details of the documented aspects of Berkeley’s 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 Berkeley’s 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 Berkeley’s biographical experience of education through one kind of documentation—the 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 Berkeley’s 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 Berkeley’s life together across the full length of his career, as A. A. Luce’s biography, dating from 1949 and still the most recent book-length treatment, declines to integrate biographical and philosophical discussion.⁴ Berkeley’s 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 posed—what 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, Berkeley’s wife, to their son George Jr after Berkeley’s death)? People have not been afraid to characterise Berkeley—as pious and practical, for example, or as more than normally given to dissimulation and deceit.⁵ 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 Berkeley’s 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 him—his 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 Berkeley’s 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 Berkeley’s 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 Berkeley’s immaterialism offers a justification of a biographical approach to his philosophical career—but 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 two—between 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.⁶ 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. […] 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 Phænomena 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.⁷

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 senses—from the movement of the planets to the movement of human bodies.

Berkeley is not a dualist of this kind: he believes that ‘there is not any other Substance than Spirit or that which perceives’.⁸ His rejection of this kind of dualism might lead to comparison with attitudes considered dangerously heterodox, such as Benedict de Spinoza’s assertion that there is only one substance in the universe, God.⁹ Berkeley makes efforts to distance himself from the ‘wild Imaginations’ of Spinoza, who is listed next to Hobbes as a believer that matter might exist without mind.¹⁰ Berkeley’s assertion of one spiritual su...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Dating
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Birth to the New Doctrine
• Chapter 3: Immaterialism
• Chapter 4: Passive Obedience and Early Politics
• Chapter 5: Philosopher of Education
• Chapter 6: London and Italy
• Chapter 7: Others
• Chapter 8: London and Italy Again
• Chapter 9: Love and Marriage
• Chapter 10: Bermuda and Rhode Island
• Chapter 11: Alciphron
• Chapter 12: The True End of Speech
• Chapter 13: Cloyne: Discipline
• Chapter 14: ‘Early Hours as a Regimen’
• Chapter 15: Cloyne: Therapy
• Chapter 16: Afterlife
• Chapter 17: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index