Berkeley Stuff for somewhere…

That this point it will be useful to compare Spinoza’s conception of the Idea of God, and the kind of power such an idea might be thought to had, with another philosopher who far further down the path of equating God’s actual power to the power of thought alone, namely Berkley.

For Berkley the only external reality of which one can sure of are ideas and perceptions one has (of another). And yet, the another itself cannot Berkley argues exist as anything other than my idea. This point leads him to make the very strong claim that ones perception of a thing, actually gives what it is for that thing to be at all (Berk. 3). That is, and in terms of Spinoza, the only reality that Berkley admits is the objective reality of ideas within God: The whole universe Berkley claims (unconsciously echoing Spinoza) could be made of perceptions, which together give the idea of God itself. In this vein, Berkley argues that ideas are themselves (and are of themselves) utterly passive and quite unable to cause one another, as they are merely ‘objective’ representation of another. This again finds deep accord in Spinoza for whom the essence of ideas is only productive as it has a formal being, and not as it is objective (2/49s). And yet, of course this is also the point that Berkley and Spinoza diverge, as Berkley concludes from this last point the necessity of spirits that act to make good the difference, and Spinoza argues instead for the power of formal causes (I will return to this below).

Moreover Berkley agrees with Spinoza about what it is that defines certain ideas as real, and others as imaginary. They will both argue that imaginations by themselves are real enough, or at least of inseparable from ‘real perceptions’ (2/17-c, and  Berk: 22). What then singles out the imagination from reality is its relative lack of intensity, coherence and order, as well as its dependence upon an individual finite ‘spirit (for Spinoza mind) (Berkely ibid, Spinoza 4/9, 2/40s1 and 4/10s, and 4/7 respectively). The implications of this move for the wider issue of what truth is (as opposed to falsity) are profound. For Berkley the truth of the world over my imagination lies in the very fact that this world orginates within a nature that is stronger than mine: so that try as I might to have certain imaginings, God’s power to force certain realities upon me always is always greater than my finite ability to will something else (36). External truth is therefore ultimately guranteed by God’s power to create other more resonate thoughts within me. Or to put it in terms of Spinoza, truth is guranteed by the superiority of an external power in which ones ideas have been caught up (4/4). Or to put the last point another way, both Berkely and Spiniza effectively undermine what exactly what is thought to be truthful in the external,. The external is not truthful because it real, but rather because it is more powerful, and more able to create in us thoughts other than we might will. So that Spinoza and Berekley albeit in different ways give the same answer to the Cartesain of what would happen if God wills something that was false. For both such a situation is made impossible by the very difference in power between God and Man, a difference in power that gurantees that whatever God creates is true, and is so irrespective of any other possible criteria (1/33s, and Berk 36).

Such a privileging of ideas, Berkley contends, will have two main advantages. On the one hand it rids the mind of certain intractable problems about the status of matter.  All matter (whether it is real or not) is merely the product of an idea, and has no reality beyond the ideas in which it is expressed (20) From which Berkely concludes that materialist atheism (by which he no doubt means Spinoza, thought he does not mention him be name) can make no sense as can such argued is premised upon the independent existence of matter (92-96). On the other hand, if one admits it is perception and not matte that is real, then the nature of reality itself subtly shifts, as some problems simply vanish, while new ones emerge. In particular there is a shift in where one starts to look for the real ,as perceptions are naturally compounded and caught with one another. If one starts from perception, one starts from this very compounded nature, and one which one must not then move beyond. Thence once cannot abstract single properties from a compound perception (10-13), without loosing sight of what that perception actually was. Hence, one simply cannot separate out, from movement or colour, or even extension itself from the composite reality in which a perception is given. Moreover perception does not fall into the same antinomies as ‘reality’ can be seen to. Any one body, Berekley suggests, is infinitely divisible and compounded, and ultimately shapeless, as that bodies being is in my mind alone, and given as my mind has a perception of another (47).  Perceptions then truly represent an idea of another: In themselves they might be utterly composite, and always involving any number of sensible qualities, and yet as they give another, these ideas simply and directly give the nature of that another (that is its being).

   The move to  a perception centred view of the mind has the advantage for Berekly that is frees the mind from the drive to find simple substances that somehow belong to the world, and thereby loose sight of what actually is real – namely the ideas of senses (and things) themselves (22). And yet, it is of course obviously that one cannot have such an idea without there being something which perceives this idea, (or causes it) and yet remains distinct from that perception and irreducible to it  (136). Such an agency cannot then be directly perceived at all, but rather must be known in the mind, as that indivisible, simple active being, by which individual ideas are created, and by whom they are perceived (Berkley calling the first operation Will, the Second understanding -27). The Being of the spirit is therefore comprised of this very power to will, think and perceive (138), and knows itself to be such (139). It follows that the  knowledge one has of this spirit is totally different from the kind of knowledge that one can have of the external world itself: Thence Berkley claims, that one cannot have any sort of idea of what it is to be an active thing (that is any perception of it), and but rather must have some kind o notion of the same (142). Moreover it is impossible that any such notion can be given in itself alone: By the same logic I have a notion of myself, I will have a notion of other finite spirits (140), which I will infer indirectly from a given sequence of ideas (145), but also far more importantly I will understand God, by whose power my perceptions are given to me in the first place (147).

This move to spirit and the kind of knowledge applicable to spirit has both obvious resonances in Spinoza and yet is has one critical difference. The similarities in a sense are all too obvious, If one simply equates spirit with essence (both God’ and man’s) Spinoza makes just the same moves as Berkely : Both then suggest that there must be two forms of knowledge beyond the knowledge one has from perception. Both then look for these forms in the same two places. Hence (like Berkely) Spinoza will define common notions (the second type of knowledge) as something that peculiarly relates to the essence (sive spirit) of two individuals, who, through forming such notions, learn both about their own nature and the nature of another (2/38-29). Likewise both thinkers argue that there exists a knowledge beyond these common notions, through which one comes to know God directly and then through God, the actual nature other things.

     And yet, and in spite of this similarity in exposition there remains a critical difference between the two sets of ideas. For Spinoza it is clear enough adequate (that is truthful) knowledge implies action. One cannot therefore know the world without at the same time acting in it (3/1): What is more, the action that arises from knowledge will (Spinoza argues) necessarily enrich the mind, and so be both joyful (3/9), and creative. All actions will, as they are actions increase the number of things the mind can do (and be) and oppose those actions that reduce this number (4/38-39). Or to put it another way, as I act adequately my essences enriches my actual nature, and catching up others within that enriching: Desire is not then the will to a certain fixed power, but rather, is the very opening up to an indefinate extending of what one can do and be (3/10,  and 3/11s). Hence, in the context of common notions, one does not form common notions without being caught up in modifying another in some (positive) way, and being similarly modified in turn (that is ones understanding, and with it joy is increases 4/26, and 34). Knowledge will therefore be for Spinoza necessarily productive and creative in itself (and so en-freeing)., and as is so,  thought itself is caught up in acting. That is, for Spinoza to know adequately, is to be already to be acting (3/28 and 2/7), and therefore (by the above argument) to already be in the middle of extending what one can do and be. However the same is certainly not true for Berekley’s God or his spirits, Such Spirits are confined to the objective world of perception, and therefore remain caught within the power of thought as it is posited as something separate from action. And yet it is this very move that allows one to then clarify exactly how the power of thought can be define God, man, and the world.

In the case of God,. Berekely is clear enough. God’s power (and the very proof of his existence) lies in its ability to catch us up in the middle of anothers. Without God Berkely argues a Human’s ability to influence his world would be restricted to his body alone, and it is only God who ensure that both his action affect other spirits, but also are affected by those others in turn (147); So that the existence of God himself can be directly supposed from the harmony implicit in this middle (148). Thence the power of thought itself is the power to always be caught up in the middle of perceiving others – and God infinitely expresses this power. Moreover, God’s unity itself is prooved (for Berekely) by the very unity of all these perception of another, which find accord with one another, as together they found an ordered world.

The power of individuals to think is then set against any one set of perceptions. Each objective idea contains no reality of its own, hence the power of the spirit actually lies in endlessly moving beyond any one ideas, one representation. Here Berekely puts an interesting twist into ones understanding of time. On one level he appears to present a fairly typical ‘deconstruction’ of time. He argues that if time is seen as something real in itself in which all things are understood to participate equally (as they have being), a paradox arises. Either time does relate to that being itself, in which case each an individual would have had some sort of being in time before they actually came into existence, and would therefore have existed in time for countless ages without a thought. The alternative is that each being is caught firmly up in time itself, and made to perpetually differ in it, so that in each moment being is simultaneous annihilated and recreated. That is one faces the paradox that if ones being really does participate in perpetual time, then one either always in some sense was or one never was, depending on how one understood that participation. So far then Berekely is convention enough (he does after all rule out both alternatives as unthinkable). And yet he then argues that the property of creating a sequence of ideas lies not with some objective time or being in duration, but rather with Spirit itself, which perpetually pitches one beyond any one idea, and one sequence of impression (so that duration itself is merely a measure of the number of ideas which the spirit has moved through –66). The problem of time was not then that it posited the power of the changing over the unchanged, but rather as it the fact that it saw this change as something external to the spirit. From which it follows it is the sprit role to be pitched beyond any one idea, and to be constantly moving across numerous separate perceptions. The power of an individual to think is therefore the power to move beyond one perception, and to be always reaching towards the next. That is, the spirit , which is not of course an idea in itself, is clearly pitched beyond the ideas that together make up our mind: so that that any one idea (or another) is caught up in its anothers, and endlessly changed into other ideas: Duration is not then a little death, but rather the very property of the spirit itself to constantly alter (in some way) that which it is in it. While time itself can only be thought of apart from this power to be in another, as (aka vulgar time) abstract counting.

   The word ‘spirit’ then convey in Berekely the very power to exceed any once occasion (one set of ideas). So that finite spirits exist as the middle to ideas themselves or that which is giving an idea is already (as a perpetually thinking power of thought) moving into another idea (and so is one with universal annhilation of ideas). While God acts across all of creation itself, endlessly ensuring that the various parts of creation are caught up within one another,  Hence one might say the finite spirit  is that which is the middle of particular other (certain thoughts), which it endlessly moves elsewhere. And  in the contrast God himself represents the absolute principle, that all ideas refer to others, who nevertheless have no existence beyond this giving of an idea of another. How then do these two principles of anothering link up? That is how does the spirits anothering of itself hook up God giving the world only as the ideas of anothers (who have no reality beyond that giving)? This problem is made all the more problematic given that the mind can itself generate (via its own imagination) sensations for itself. How then does it ensure any one perception is related both to the life of a certain spirit (that is the future beyond that perception which the spirit is endlessly tumbling into), but also everything else (that is all other spirits, including God)? Or to put it more darkly Berkley seems to trap the mind between two madness: On the one the one hand there is the madness of the self-deluding spirit, which will snatch at any image however imaginary as it flits from idea to idea; On the other hand there is God himself, who endlessly produces new thought and impression in finite minds, and can clearly do so irrespective of any sense or order.

This is then the importance of the laws of nature. God, Berkley argues, does not just arrange a random collection of anotherings that each mind must grasp. On the contrary God (and as a product of his own goodness) arranges these connections in settled orders (31). In grasping that order the finite spirits propensity to run ahead of itself, ceases to be a liability, and becomes rather an asset, by which part of  God’s own perpetual power of creation, can be pre-hended. This order is then marked out from perception by the vividness of the ideas within it. Any mind, that is following the path set by natural law, remains at each point caught within vivid perceptions, and never has recourse to the far less intense imaginings of its own mind (30). This ordering is not the ordering of cause and effect (as no idea can cause another- 25), but rather operates as a fixed system of signs, by which any finite spirit can, on the perception of one idea, come to presage another (65). Ideas will then come together to produce ‘machines’ or ‘ artificial and regular combinations’ whereby, by combining with other ideas different ways, a ‘few original ideas may be made to signify a great number of effects and actions’ (ibid). These combinations are therefore fundamentally arbitrary in nature, and have no reality beyond the ideas by which they occur and whose sequence they reveal. For example, one does not perceive distance because other ideas are genuinely far way, but rather because the very idea of distance itself indicates when and under what circumstance the individual might subsequently come into closer contact with the things objects  currently only seen (44).

  Hence the twin senses of being within the middle of another come together within causality, in which a finite spirit is simultaneously tumbling into new ideas as God is creating ideas of another within it.  So that, the power of thought (God’s and man) come together in prediction, in which the human mind anothers itself, as God is anothering the world through perception, (that is, giving the world as a sequence of ideas of another). Or to put it another way, the powers of thought are given as one in causality, which is both a sign (in which one idea indicates another) and a machine (in which perceiving one idea is already on the to producing another), Spinoza at this point follows a very similar path. For him, the essence of an adequate idea lies in the fact that in having such an idea the mind is caught up in perceiving a great many different things, that it itself has produced (3/1). Or to put it another way, at this point, the sense that the mind (as it strives) is always anothering itself, coalesces with the fact that the same mind will find itself pitched within the middle of others, and the two is given in one thought/ action (by 3/1 and 3/3), in which God’s very power is actually expressed, and expressed as God sive Nature(4/4). The difference between Berkley and Spinoza the being the consequence each draw from this union. For Spinoza God’s intellect has no reality beyond the finite minds themselves (2/11c). So that the sense that God is both creating an idea of another within a human essence, and in that creation impelling that individual to think anew cannot ever be separated from one another in God itself. Such a separation is only possible for finite minds, that can very easily both perceive a thing and be changed by that perception, and yet not directly realise all the connections between the two. For God the, of the level of the infinite the power to act (that is to be changed) and the power to think (to be caught up in the middle of others) are one and the same (2/7c), even if this union is clearly not so simple for finite things.  For Berkley no such move,  is conceivable upon religious grounds (if no other –150) and he is forced into a different argument that must assert the reality of God’s intellect (and being)  as something utterly distinct from finite mind, and as a reality in its own right.

At this point Berkley come up against the deep problem of both how he can proof the existence of a necessary identities of God, the world and man, but also how once unities are established how he can ensure they that they all interrelate in such a way as maintains each singularities integrity. In the former case the problem is that his account of the mind not only very effectively undermines any doctrine of unity as it is normally understood (13), but also renders any anything that smacks of unity (for example a particular idea) passive and uncreative  (18). He will then have problems about what exactly the unity of the soul consists of. All he can argue is that unity of the spirit is comprised of the very act of willing, acting, and perceiving; and that it is then integral to such a unity that it cannot be grasped by an idea but rather can only be thought of in terms of some kind notion that its can be formed from the synthesis of my ideas (145). And yet this move simply begs the question, as to whether (and when or even if) this power of action was ever really unified? A question that of course occupied many of the philosophers (such as Hobbes) who Berkley critiques (and was the motive for then thinking in terms of abstraction in the first place), - a fact that Berkley’s very methodology must make him ignore. Moreover this problem of the nature of the unity by power becomes all the more problematic when it is very simplistically applied to God. Berekly here argues that one can directly compare the way one perceives humans to the way ones perceives God. He contends as one does not see humans directly, but rather synthesizes from a certain set of ideas the presence of a human being; then likewise one can deduce God’s being from our continued ability to perceive (149). In arguing this way he simply ignores the difference in kind that palpably exists between deducing the presence of an finite object form a set of perceptions, and deducing the present of an infinite object from our very ability to perceive at all. Finally Berkley has no more luck in defining the unity of the world (as I will discuss more fully below). He repeatedly argues that the unity of the world is itself the product of the goodness of God, and yet fails then to provide a principle why God’s goodness need make one unified world in the first place: What all what is it about unity that is so very good?

Berkley’s explication of unity is unconvincing to say the least. But then this might not matter if together his three elements, God, the World and The self come together to create a unity of their own. This was after all what he argued a cause was. Unfortunately they do not, which will now be shown. Starting with the status of the world. Berekely argues that the unity of the world itself was the direct product of God’s Goodness (151), and so a testimony (even in its apparent faults) to the shere strength of God’s power (152). And yet Berkley leaves suspended the question as to whether God’s goodness is really so very reconcilable with the world itself. After all (although Berkley does not consider this point) given both that human actions are obviously tied up with the world they find themselves within, and that God clearly could create a number of worlds (which are after all merely perceptions), and fill them with any number of spirits, there seems not only no imperative that there is but one world alone. Indeed if anything an in infinitely powerful and Good God should surely create for each spirit the best of possible worlds for that one spirit to inhabit, and do whether or not each if these worlds are inhabited by more than one spirit or not. Berekly answers this point by appealing to a higher destiny, and saying that any individual pain will if viewed from a different perceive turn out for the good. And yet unlike Leibniz, he can have no rights to make such an argument, as there is no necessity on his all powerful God to create one world and therefore he simply does not need to trade off individual evils with greater goods. Or rather he should only do it because he has a foreknowledge of how an individual pain will help a specific individual directly, and not because the pain itself will help others. There is after all no reason why an all powerful God needs to create perceptions that concur across different modes (particularly if those modes will never meet), if by not doing so he can create a better world for both : or to put it another way if Berekely’s God endlessly told lies about what was happening elsewhere in the universe it is impossible that he could be found out – and so there seems no reason for his Goodness to unify the world (even the best of all worlds).

  Berkley could of course defend himself at this point be saying that God cannot tell a lie (although what criteria he would have to decide this seems open for question), and so must follow what individual spirits have done. And yet this would save him from the immediate consequence that of his goodness impelling him of create many worlds, but only at the cost of making God’s power (that is what god was doing) depend upon the power of individual spirits. But once this point is then conceded, is becomes debatable whether one will really save either the integrity of either God’s or the world as a whole anyway. This is because exactly what an event was would itself be perpetually be being conditioned by the way it affected individual finite spirits. Each finite spirits would exist as sealed unit of production, in which perception of another (given to it by God) was taken up and changed in someway, before being returned back to the idea of God  and then through God given to yet another, who similarly transformed it. Ideas would then loose all formal existence beyond the spirits that took them up, and across which they are differed. Berkley will try to insulate himself against this move by ensuring all his examples of shared thoughts involve abstract perceptions such as blue or heat (140)- which can therefore be shared by all alike. And yet in doing so he simply ignores his own dictuum that ‘blueness’ itself does not exist as an abstract quality (10), and only exists in the perception of another (49). Thence, he cannot appeal to the abstract quality of blueness to ensure uniformity in perception : What is real after all is not the blueness itself  but the blue rhino which is crashing towards one of us…

Berkely might then attempt to defend himself by citing the power of God. But here he then faces a new intractable problem about the exact nature of this power. At the centre of Berkely’s argument lies the claim that God has a very different type of power than that enjoyed by humans. God alone can create idea of another within individual minds. This then in turn leads to problems as to how such a power can act in individual modes. Here the there two clear alternative. On the one hand God could divide himself up into an active power of nature, and a sense he creates ideas in another, and thereby keep the two distinct and separate from one another. Berkley of course explicitly rules out this move (and must do as it smacks to him of Spinozian atheism 151). On the other hand, if God is acting in the foreknowledge of what will happen, and chooses that happening (and had deliberately chosen that happening from all the other possible from all the other happening of the world), it is very difficult how any one individual finite is free at all. On he contrary (and following Spinoza in 1/33s) God will not have only creates a spirit in the knowledge of how it will act, but also (in providing it its own perception world) very much curtailed its power to do anything other than what God had decreed for it. Moreover no such individual could ever escape God’s will, and if the worse came to the worse (and they refused to conform) God could simply change the rules and force new and apparently miraculous perception on the finite mind, and thereby oblige it to think has he would want (66).

 

To Conclude, Berkley deserves great credit for highlighting  a deep tension at the heart of any theory that sets out for perception alone: That is the potential duality of an empty striving soul, and a world chock full of anothers to fill that soul with. Berkley therefore understands the full ambiguity of the phrase ‘ middle of another’.: So that, as I perceive my spirit is in the middle of others (ideas), which it heedlessly takes up and discards in its rush for thought; Likewise the very act of perceiving itself locates the mind in being caught up by another, others whose very being it itself gives in this perception. The Perceive is then to be perpetually differing something of oneself , and to do so by being locates within anothers, whose being is then tied up in this differing. Moreover Berkley does not merely define the problem, but also, via causality offers a solution to it: In the cause, the otherness of perception, and the otherness of myself are given in a sign-machine- which also hooks me up to other thoughts, and does so as I am striving to change myself. His problem is that he cannot then so easily move to justify this synthesis – which is where his problem start. He cannot,(as Spinoza might) start from the synthesis of God and Nature, and derive from that synthesis what God and nature are, as such a move embraces pantheism. On the contrary he must start from the unities of God, the world and the soul, and attempt to derive the synthesis from their very singularity. The problem then being that the kind of synthesis he is looking for seems to compromise one of his three singularities.

   And yet from another hopelessly anachronistic position, one might argue that neither of the three breaches in the unity of world, god and self need matter much, as long as they are simply faced up to. . Read as if one was Deleuze, Berkely’s deconstruction of the world is very close to the disjunctive synthesis. The only difference being that this synthesis readily accepts the co-presence of many differing worlds, each of which is as perfect as it can be, and indeed takes up this difference as a positive principle in itself. ‘God’ is therefore good as he is the master of the disjunctive synthesis, rather than the arbitrary contriver of an unnecessarily unified world. In a similar vein, the compromise of  God, frees up the singular spirits to be productive events. Events, which exist in the world not as things, but rather as modes (or nodes) of focused change (or production), in which existing differences are taken up, and refocused, and thereby made anew. Which is why Berkley argues that spirits have an ideal presence in the world, and not a real one, and that they operate both as both node of perception, and a mode of action (a will). Finally there is the destruction of the individual, which introduces a third distinct synthesis , that of the all powerful paranoid God, which endlessly reckons up what has happened, and draw it off into unity and too easy continuum.

  Of course, as I said there is much anachronism here: Berkley was very much a thinker of his time, and the idea of the good Bishop simply accepting (along with Deleuze) that God was Dead is somewhat bemusing. And yet here is a real point here. It is clear that Berkley cannot have the unities beyond the synthesis of the world he so desperately wants. A move that then leaves the reader with an apparent choice. Either one must (along with Spinoza) jettison the very possibility of such a unity, and rethink God, and his implications for thought from a new and quite different perspective. Or one could keep (albeit in a different sense) something of the unity, and then glory in the breaches that that very keeping opens up in any conventional account of unity. Berkley of course, in the name of faith rejects both such moves, and in to scripture to justify his stance…