A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, and Consciousness: Berkeley(The tree will continue to be when God is in the Quad)

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A complete understanding of the contribution of Berkeley’s Philosophical reflections on the development of Philosophy and Psychology requires an understanding of both Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of change and Kantian transcendental theory. Berkeley’s thought is generally classified as a form of idealism because it participates directly in the debate over the role of matter in the explanation of why the world Is as it is.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism is conceived of against a categorical framework of 4 kinds of change: substantial change, qualitative change, quantitative change, and locomotion. Substantial change and qualitative or feature change are both discussed in detail in Aristotle’s account: the latter being what is called “accidental” change. Accidental changes do not refer directly to matter and are logically characterized in terms of possible qualities of things which are opposites, e.g. a bush is possibly either a red blooming bush or a green not blooming bush. The justification Aristotle uses for the characterization of these opposites is not observational. He appeals rather to the principle of non-contradiction:

“two features are opposite if and only if it is impossible for the same thing to have both features at the same time and in the same respect.”

This definition appeals to “the same thing” and this for Aristotle is the logical condition for the attribution of opposites to any enduring thing involved in a process of change. Aristotle also raises the question of how such enduring things come into being and the answer Aristotle gives to this question is once again not observational or empirical but rather logical and rational. The thing, “to hupokeimenon”, cannot be generated out of nothing, it must be generated out of something and this something must be its matter(hulé). Here Aristotle is defining matter technically as that which has the potential, power, or capacity to be formed into some kind(form) of thing. Matter is, then, the potentiality to be formed and is thereby one kind of cause or explanation of why a thing is the thing it is: of why, for example, it endures through a process of feature or quality change. Matter itself is not the sole explanation of why an enduring thing remains the same throughout a process of change. An acorn, for example, is a material cause of an oak tree but does not in itself survive the process of change which results in the oak tree: were the acorn to persist in its existence we would merely be discussing an accidental feature or qualitative change of the acorn: e.g. a transformation of the acorn from green to brown. Any particular acorn, argues Aristotle, will consist of both its matter and its form which together explain what an acorn is. The form of the acorn will provide us with what Aristotle calls the formal cause or explanation of the acorn. If the acorn finds its way into the earth and the transformation into an oak tree begins a third form of explanation, the so-called efficient cause explanation will be required for the kind of change that is occurring. If a fully grown oak-tree which in its turn produces acorns results a fourth kind of explanation will be required, namely the much disputed and controversial teleological or final cause/explanation.

It is important to note here, especially insofar as the understanding of Berkeley is concerned, that “form” for Aristotle has the meaning of “archai” or principle: it is not in the normal meaning a “part” of the acorn. Neither is it the case that for Aristotle “matter ” is a “part” of the acorn that exists. Matter is rather, a potentiality for being something.

We do not find in Aristotle the Platonic distinction between the idea of the oak tree and the oak tree itself. Insofar as the formal “idea” of the oak tree incorporates its essential definition or principle, this, for Aristotle, is just as real as the oak tree we may be resting against on a walk in the countryside

Insofar as quantitative change(the third kind of change) is concerned, numbers can also be a part of explaining the quantitative change of things, a change in the size of a thing, for example. Locomotion(the fourth kind of change), occurs when Socrates, for example, walks from the agora to the harbour in Athens.

Now, when we encounter Berkeley saying something as seemingly controversial as “matter does not exist”, perhaps we should pause before protesting. Perhaps, that is, we should test his Philosophy against a more complex categorical framework such as that produced above rather than in terms of a simple juxtaposition of opposite terms such as “materialism versus idealism” of the kind we find in some dualistic Philosophies. We should remember, that is, that Berkeley systematically attacked both the dualism of Descartes and Locke. We should also recall in this context his attacks on the crude materialism of Hobbes in which he did not crassly maintain “matter does not exist” but rather maintained that materialism is unable to explain the existence of material things adequately: a position that Aristotle would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Berkely’s response to these “new philosophers” is his doctrine of “Immaterialism” which maintains that there is no mind-independent material reality, There is, to concretise the position in a famous example, no tree falling in a forest without witnesses to the event. The reason this description makes sense, argues Berkeley, is that the event can be conceived in the mind of an omnipresent God. The human mind is characterised by Berkeley in terms of thinking/perceiving. This cannot but remind us of the report of the effect on Socrates upon reading a work by Anaxagoras who claimed something very similar to Berkeley, namely that “All is mind”. This work supposedly played a role in the “Socratic turn” from investigating the physical world to investigating the world of our minds. Berkeley was familiar with the Platonic dialogues and was one of the few “modern” philosophers to continue using the dialogue form to present his philosophical position.

In his works Berkeley claims that the combination of materialism and abstractionism are the primary causes of both skepticism and atheism, positions which encourage us to abandon our reasonable beliefs in the power of our senses to perceive the ordinary things of the world, the power of thought to entertain ideas, and the power of God. Of course, Berkeley concedes, we only indirectly perceive ordinary objects such as a train because the primary concern of our minds are “ideas”. This has caused many commentators to label Berkeley’s position as a “representational”: ideas “represent” external material objects. This, then, designates an important necessary property of ideas, namely that they are “representations” and it is this term that best characterises the mind-dependent relation of ideas to sensible reality. This position also reaches forward to Kantian philosophy and transcendental idealism.

So, when Berkeley maintains that a tree cannot fall in a forest without this event “in some sense” being related to the structures of a mind, he is not making the absurd claim that we could never know that such an event occurred without being present at the falling of the tree, because we can, of course, imagine the event happening by inference from the sight of the fallen tree. Here, the idea of the fallen tree can be connected to the idea of its falling via the “idea” of causation. Indeed, the very conception of “fallen tree” has the meaning it does in virtue of the fact that we have incorporated the above causal mechanism into our perceiving of the tree. This for Berkeley, however, would not be a pure case of perception because he believed that “the senses perceive nothing which they do not perceive immediately, for they make no inferences”. And just as causation must motivate an inference in the above case so must matter conceived of as composed of qualities that are independent of our minds. Since, however, our ideas(of thought?) can only represent causality and matter we cannot have any knowledge of this underlying reality of the ordinary things we encounter. because these ordinary things are composed only of our representations.

Dogmatic common sense would here approve of Dr. Johnson’s kicking a stone and declaring “I refute you thus!” but it is important to note in this context that Berkeley was not insisting that the tree did not actually fall in the forest or that Johnson’s stone does not exist. Both exist in relation to the mind of God. The transcendental idealism of Kant would not have rested its case on the idea of God but shares with Berkeley the conviction that there is an underlying reality which we can know nothing about, which lies on the other side of the limits of our reason. Another difference between the two accounts is related to the fact that Kant, unlike Berkeley, believed that common sense had a right to insist that everyday objects such as the stone and everyday events such as the falling tree are empirically real. Kant, however, like Berkeley, would claim that the final philosophical justification of this position must be mind-dependent. For Kant, this means partly constituted by the transcendental structures of the mind such as space, time and the categories of the understanding(substance, causation etc.). Kant’s insistence on the empirical reality of objects is defended in the following quote:

“When I say that the intuition of outer objects and the self intuition of the mind alike represent the objects and the mind, in space and in time, as they affect our senses, that is, as they appear. I do not mean to say that these objects are a mere illusion. For in an appearance the objects nay even the properties we ascribe to them are always regarded as something actually given. Since, however, in the relation of the given object to the subject, this object as appearance is to be distinguished from itself as an object in itself…That does not follow as a consequence of our problem of the ideality of all our sensible intuitions–quite the contrary. It is only if we ascribe objective reality to these forms of representation that it becomes impossible for us to prevent everything being thereby transformed into mere illusion. For if we regard space and time as properties which, if they are to be possible at all, must be found in things in themselves, and if we reflect on the absurdities in which we are then involved, in that two infinite things which are not substances, nor anything actually inhering in substances, must yet have existence, nay, must be the necessary condition of the existence of all things, and moreover must continue to exist even although all existing things be removed–we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion.”(B 69)

Kant then goes on to confirm that “our mode of intuition is dependent upon the existence of the object”(B71) and he will thereafter on behalf of Berkeley refute Johnson’s refutation, by claiming that one might be able to kick the thing in itself but the correct description/explanation of what we are doing is going to be close to the one Berkeley gives: thereby agreeing with both Aristotle and Berkeley that matter can only be known by the perceptual form it takes, i.e. known as a pure potentiality, an actual X. Hume may well have played a negative role in awakening Kant from his dogmatic Wolfian slumbers but it was most certainly Berkeley’s arguments that assisted in the formulation of Kant’s critical Transcendental Idealism. Whether Kant would have agreed with the thesis that Berkeley’s commentators have projected upon him, namely that our knowledge of events such as the falling tree is merely a bundle of ideas(including causation) will largely turn upon whether we can regard “causation”, a category of the understanding, as an “idea”. For Kant, there is at least one difference between the sensible intuition of the tree lying in the grass and the more active inference of causation that is incorporated into the conceptualization of the “fallen tree”: and this difference is that the latter involves an active process of thinking that has a universal character–in contrast to the intuitive receptive process or perceptual contact with the sensible particular of the tree.

This Kantian criticism, however, should bear in mind that Berkeley was aiming his account at the camp of “new philosophy” that included Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke. He was, that is aiming to criticize the idea of a mind-independent reality by showing that it has logical inadequacies. He also believed that the “new philosophy” risked plunging one into the abyss of skepticism and its more abstract form of atheism. Both Descartes and Locke, for example, believed in the thesis that it was the primary qualities of size and shape which provided the substantial objective foundation for the more secondary so-called subjective properties of the objects we experience. This “new Philosophy” according to Berkeley both encouraged belief in unacceptable accounts of the relation of the physical material world to the immaterial mind and encouraged believers to begin to cast doubt on the idea of God.

In modern times we can see the atheist Merleau-Ponty agreeing with the former complaint in the name of the “new” modern philosophy of Phenomenology. In his work “the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues:

“That the thing is correlative to my body, and in more general terms to my existence, of which my body is merely the stabilized structure. It is constituted in the hold which my body takes upon it: it is not first of all a meaning for the understanding, but a structure accessible to inspection by the body, and if we try to describe the real as it appears to us in perceptual experience, we find it overlaid with anthropological predicates. The relations between things or aspects of things, having always our body as their vehicle. the whole of nature is the setting of our own life or our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue. That is why we cannot conceive anything which is not perceived or perceptible. As Berkeley says, even an unexplored desert has at least one person to observe it, namely myself when I think of it, that is when I perceive it in purely mental experience. The thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it and can never be actually in itself because its articulations are those of our very existence and because it stands at the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it with humanity.”(P.373)

Berkeley’s response to skepticism was in the animus of both Kant and Merleau-Ponty. “Esse is percepi”–to be is to be perceived, Berkeley declares as part of his response to the skepticism of Descartes and Hobbes. In agreement with Kant, he maintains that there is no epistemological position which can relate my perception of rivers, mountains, and deserts to a postulated mind-independent existence of these entities simply because there cannot be any indirect representation of a mind-independent reality. Berkeley illustrates his position by pointing to the discussion of primary qualities by both of these authors. Size and shape, Berkeley argues, are not qualities of a mind-independent object but merely themselves perceptual ideas which as Berkeley points out varies with the perspective of the perceiver: square towers appearing round from a distance and the moon appearing to be the size of a sixpenny piece..

It is difficult to guess how Berkeley might have responded to Merleau-Ponty’s final justification of the existence of things as being essentially related to the existence of my lived body and its grasp of reality in its “Being-in-the-world. He certainly would have questioned the absence of God because for him, as was the case for Aristotle, the existence of rivers, mountains, and deserts in the physical world receive their final justification by being occurrences in the mind of God actively thinking them. Aristotle’s account also argues that the soul of man is essentially related to the existence of a body possessing psuche (life). Just how much of a “modern” philosopher Berkeley is could perhaps be determined by whether and to what extent he would prefer an Aristotelian or Kantian account to the type of account given by Merleau-Ponty.

In his work “Principles of Human Knowledge” Berkeley claims that human ideas are passive and do not possess any causal power. This is probably the cause of the attribution of the “bundle theory of ideas” to his theory. One consequence of the above claim by Berkeley is that no idea can guarantee the objectivity of any other idea because no active power can be attributed to any idea in any human mind. In psychological terms, ideas are here conceived of as generated by sensations in what Kant might call the faculty of Sensibility. They must, if they are ideas of outside objects or events, be generated or caused to occur by something outside myself. This cannot by definition be an idea on Berkeley’s premises. He also in this work dismisses the possibilities of a self possessing causal power and this leaves Berkeley with only one other possibility for a final justification of his position and that is a wise, powerful, omnipresent, benevolent God. It is here that the journeys of Berkeley and Kant part ways because Kant would embrace the above possibility of a self possessing causal power in his account of the transcendental justification of our explanations of events, objects, and actions. Kant would claim that the freedom of the human being is an expression of a causal transcendental power that enables us to conceptualiSe the tree lying in the grass as a “fallen tree”, and this active power in its turn provides us with an awareness of ourselves as active rational beings capable of making true judgments about the fallen tree. This idea of humanity being the causa sui of its representations in the mode of thought rather than the receptive terminus of passive perception is, of course, the mark of transcendental idealism. The question Berkeley would have immediately raised in relation to this account is “What has happened to God, the guarantor of the existence of everything in the world?” Kant was no atheist. He believed that three of the guarantors of the existence of the physical world were Metaphysics, mathematics, and natural science. Kant also believed that the theoretical philosophical attempts to demonstrate either the existence or the non-existence of God merely demonstrate the limits of our knowledge and reason, thereby forcing us into the realm of faith grounded in practical reason and the freedom of man as a noumenal being: a faith that acknowledges the moral law as the organiser of our lives. Man as a noumenal being, then, has answers to the four questions constituting the domain of philosophy: “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?”, “What is man?”, and “What can I hope for?”. With respect to this last fourth question, one can suspect that the answers given by both Berkeley and Kant to some extent converge in the position that part of the answer is to be found in the Bible and in Christianity’s belief in the salvation of our souls. The reason why this fourth question preoccupies the mind of man to the extent that it does is due to the noumenal transcendent nature of man’s being–man for Kant and Aristotle is pure potential which can be empirically realised in either a virtuous or vicious disposition. Berkeley, on the other hand, does not have at his disposal the idea of a self with causal power, a self with the freedom to choose his/her destiny and might as a consequence have to embrace a determinism in which beings seem predestined to certain destinies because of predispositions or original sin or original goodness. Berkeley would also regard with suspicion the apparent “dualism” of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds of Kant’s theory. One and the same self cannot, he would argue be both a noumenal and a phenomenal self. Kant would respond to this by acknowledging that the distinction looks dualistic even if it is not so.

Brett in his work “History of Psychology” places Berkeley squarely in the Empirical British tradition of philosophy and moreover claims that Berkeley shares with the “new science” of his day respect for the methods of science which would later be embraced by the “new science of Psychology” in 1870:

“The Essay toward a New Theory of Vision”, first published in 1709 must be reckoned the most significant contribution to Psychology produced in the eighteenth century. It merits this title on two distinct grounds: for it was not only an original treatment of this topic but also a classic example of method….the first instance of clear isolation and purely relevant discussion of a psychological topic, and this penetration to the strictly relevant detail is, in fact, the secret of Berkeley’s success.”

One should bear in mind the date of Brett’s work, 1921 because it probably was not clear at this point that this separation of the paths of Philosophical Psychology and Scientific Psychology may have been a case of unnecessary divorce. We have certainly gained a knowledge of detail of man we might not otherwise have been apprised of but this separation leaves us with the problem of reconciliation in the future if we wish to integrate this detail into the larger context of questions such as “What can I know?” “What is man?” and “What can man hope for?”

Brett correctly points out that Berkeley’s theory managed to rid men’s minds of lines and angles when speaking of perception and he praises this move because it does not commit the error of supposing that” perceptions were made of conceptual elements”. Brett continues:

“the prevailing emphasis on knowledge, on the cognitive powers, was a source of errors from which only genius could shake itself free.”

Now Kant would probably agree that geometry plays no significant role in the “perception” of the “fallen tree” but he would also insist that insofar as this incorporates a causal assumption, we must surely, therefore, be prepared to accept a conceptual component. Kant, of course, places perception in an epistemological context. Knowledge, he claims:

“springs from two fundamental sources of mind: the first is the capacity of receiving representations(receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations(spontaneity(in the production) of concepts). Through the first, an object is given to us, through the second an object is thought in relation to that given representation(which is a mere determination of the mind). intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts can yield knowledge.”(B74)

It would seem that if Brett is right and Berkeley is eliminating all conceptual knowledge then all that can be said of the tree lying in the grass is that in perceiving it we confine ourselves to intuiting this particular that is here and now and impressing itself on my visual field and my awareness. The interesting question to ask given Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal capable of discourse is whether it is even possible to “name” this particular with the otherwise general term “tree” given the conceptual elements assumed in such an act. If we cannot name the intuition then it seems that we have to confine ourselves to an experience of “this-here-now”. Even this, however, is ambiguous since one can still wonder where the “this” is? Is it on the surface of my eye, on the retina of my eye, or somewhere out there, in the vicinity of the “cause” of the phenomenon in the external world? Berkeley may not be able to answer this question given his commitment to immaterialism and his definition of an idea as largely receptive and as possessing no causal power.

Brett’s praise of Berkeley’s method is also problematic. Berkeley criticises the “new Philosophy” of Locke presumably partly because of its atomistic materialistic roots inherited from Locke’s mentor, Boyle and partly because of the “new” scientific method of observation and experiment used by Boyle. For Brett the scientific method of Boyle must be science par excellence but it has to be pointed out that this method itself contains active a priori conceptual components that are intended to organise experience rather than are derivatives from experience: components that can only have their roots in the Kantian faculty of understanding which includes amongst other things “causality”. Brett does not mention the problem Berkeley has with simple judgments such as “The train cannot be heard or seen” because for example its tactile properties cannot be heard or seen. Neither does he mention Berkeley’s “methodical solution” to this problem which claims that the tactile, visual and auditory ideas of the train are united in the mind of God. The Kantian solution to this problem would refer to the causal powers of the self, amongst which are included the transcendental unity of apperception, a unity of an “I think” which unites disparate contents under one experience in one mind. It is not out of the question that the faculty of apperception or the power of apperception owes its theoretical existence to this problem of Berkeley’s. Both philosophers would have agreed, however, that failure to solve problems such as this one results in skepticism. Berkeley, unlike Kant, however, and like Descartes and Locke responds to skepticism with the dogmatism of the time, whether it be theological or scientific. It would take the genius of Kant to respond in an enlightened fashion to skepticism without resorting to dogmatism of any kind, retaining the importance of religion for the philosopher and the man in the street and without dismissing the importance of the science of both Boyle and Newton. Furthermore, Kant’s transcendental Philosophy also retains an interesting connection and continuity with the most difficult aspects of Aristotelian Philosophy.