Ping Pong 14: Never Owning What You Possess
Locke’s beefy self confidence, that there really was a world outside the mind, and that this world really could be perceived, and so annexed to human experiences, took humanity into strange, dark places in which the World so very easily became the mere play thing of a certain subset of humanity, who could use it as they would. A move than included the rights to enslave other humans (as long as one was educating them) and annexe any lands. Now it would be an anachronism to claim that this viewpoint was in any way condemned at the time. This was after all, the era of the slave trade and the first British Empire. And yet it is unlikely to be an entire coincidence, that an entirely different world view was worked out by an Irishman, as Ireland was of course very much in the van of countries which the Empire was spreading into and misusing. That Irishman was Berkeley.
At the heart of Berkeley’s philosophy lie three very deep ideas. Firstly, he claims that humans have to be very careful before they simply assume that their abstract ideas have any internal coherence. Secondly, he argues that the world has no being beyond human perception of it. Thirdly, that in learning of the world, and learning of its causes, one is in fact directly learning something of the will of God. Now put baldly each of these points might appear both naïve in itself, and also hopelessly abstract and inapplicable to anything but the most abstract of philosophies, and it will take the rest of this Rant to show that this is not quite the case. Each topic will therefore need to be considered in turn.
Berkeley is very clear about what is wrong with abstract ideas. Taking his lead, perhaps from Spinoza, he argues that, abstract ideas only appear general because they include a confused representation of very many separate ideas. These separate ideas are then all tied to the same word. One hears the word ‘triangle’ and all the triangles that one has ever seen flood into one’s mind. Awash with all triangles, one is unable to pick out any one shape, and produces for oneself a general definition, which encompasses with plurality of different sliding images.
All of which might at once appear fine and dandy but still only applicable to the history of philosophy, - until one draws out the obvious implication of Berkeley’s remark. Berkeley, bound as he is by the needs of a philosophical treatise, and the desire to attack abstraction, hence confines his written attack to examples where there might appear the greatest case for there being some underlying definition. That is, there might really be something connecting all individual triangles together – some definition, and Berkeley is trying to convince us that this is not the case. Whether or not this argument is convincing (and few subsequent philosophers adopted it), it is certainly true that the argument has much to say when pulled apart from a philosophical debate about abstraction and identity.
If one thinks of such words or phrases such as the unemployed or single mother or even journalist, these words each involve a clear abstraction which covers a multitude of sins. In using them, the mind feels very confident in knowing what it is talking about (and entire political debates are carried out in the name of these generalizations), and yet there remains a gap, wide and inescapable, between this abstraction, and the actual things of the world. The perfect ideal type of the journalist might be before us all, and yet that type has little to do with individual examples. The result is of course that any debate which is carried out in the name of these abstractions, is highly volatile and problematic. The Debate whizzes around between individual examples and general types, as unlikes are traded off with one another in the name of the same, and the very possibility for concord is unpicked even as it is demanded.
This problem goes far further than the debating chamber, - it seeps into the very way that we attempt to manage and regulate our world. Most policies are carried out in the name of such an ill -defined group – the Poor or the Unemployed, and therefore really apply to nobody. Likewise it is just these groups that are those which we attempt to regulate and control. One thinks here of the Press Complaints Commission that strangely never allows a complaint against a journalist to stand, as what is complained about is specific cases, and what is judged is often enough a more generalized picture, where the specific case is subsumed within an idea.
Or to give a darker example. Why do the public back repressive measures against terrorists, and why does the legal profession worry about them? The answer is surely that each means rather different things by terrorists. The ‘Public’ have been encouraged to form the image of a terrorist who quite literally is the dweller in all their terrors. And any amount of oppression could be permitted to placate such a fear. The Legal profession see the matter otherwise, - that terrorism is merely a crime to be treated like any other, like all others, and so must not be judged differently. It is any wonder then, that the politicians find themselves suspended between populism and Good Law, having to choose the one or the other.
Of course the modern solution to the problem is to allow that certain general ideas are real if that reality can be demonstrated by statistics. Numbers can ground the certainty of the abstract and allow it a kind of reality. This was of course always the Brown form of governing. He was the man who always governed in the name of a number, and never in the name of a person. And yet such a method (while perhaps it is the best we have) has three flaws within it. Firstly, the very act of finding statistical proof for a general idea, is problematic in that one can find (to a degree) statistics to demonstrate all manner of different ideas and conceptions, and it is only the prejudice of general ideas that will makes us look for (and then justify) the truth. Secondly if one finds such a link, there is no real way of knowing what the link then means. I mean does it mean that the general idea is in fact true? Surely not! But if it does not mean that, then what exactly does it show? Finally it is not even clear that statistics aside from general ideas themselves are such a great way to govern a country, as all kind of evils can be hidden within the statistics.
This last point brings us back to the second of Berkeley’s theses. He argues that it is a mistake to claim that the world has any reality, beyond its conception within our mind. The Being of things is the Being of perception, and nothing more. Now once again stated blandly the idea is a strange one. It appears to make humans indeed the unwarranted centre of a reality that is little more than a dream. And yet Berkeley is very clear that this not the case. He takes here as his example the fact that in our minds there are two rather different types of ideas. There are memories which we both possess (in the sense that we have them in our mind) but also own (we have rights to summon them up into our minds at will). This contrasts with perceptions. Perceptions I can possess, the idea is mine and must be mine for me to see it at all; but I never own it. That is, I cannot control the torrid stream of thoughts that enter into my mind. This stream, Berkeley says must be the work of some great God, who is capable of conditioning my mind to see such things. My ability to possess perceptions, that is, to have an image of the world in my mind, is therefore the work of an infinite external agency, which surpasses all understanding, and all direct comprehension.
The effect then of such an argument is that humanity is in effect, one step removed from the centre of the universe. The centre is defined by that agent that creates thoughts and perceptions within our minds. And our minds are the immediate reflection of this light source. This position, Berkeley argues, is an important one as it allows one to properly understand the status of knowledge. One might, he suggests, divide knowing into two rather different endeavours. On the one hand there is the immediate grasp of the every day world which we inhabit and in which we form our differing lives. Such a life, Berkeley claims is unaffected by his argument. Humans therefore at all times and in most circumstances have the ability to hollow out a life for themselves, a small patch of light of things known, within the deep silent infinity of things hidden.
On the other hand, there is philosophical knowledge, which in its attempt to navigate the darkness and learn about the world as it really is, is doomed. For that world of substance, that world in itself, Berkeley argues, is not just something we can never know about directly, but rather has no reality beyond the unfathomable purpose of a divinity which creates a series of appropriate images of the world in our minds. In effect humanity’s inability once beyond the mind, to tell apart those elements which relate to an external world of force from those elements which are internal to their own body, and the machinations which create perception within them (is the brain a physical object in the world or a part of me?), is for Berkeley a reason for humans to be modest. Humanity might not be able to tell itself apart from this world (and might always have the right to possess a nice little life within that world), and yet that does not mean that one has the right to own the world as one’s own, or to treat it simply as one’s own God-given property. The world remains for Berkeley then merely something which God lends to us, for a while, to use but never own.
The position of God in the Berkeley argument is moreover somewhat problematic. Berkeley never develops a cogent account of what that God is, and just why they are creating a torrent of perception within the world. God remains this curious agent. An agency that is reduced perhaps to a flicker of a moment. The moment at which the world (whatever it might be) tumbles into vivid reality. The Moment beyond our easy understanding where something of the world (something other than us or any of our perceptions, including our perception of the body) becomes able to create an axis of perceiving – within which we are. The problem then becomes how one might explore the nature of this axis, and therefore the nature of God. This was the third topic identified above.
Berkeley suggests that God is like a human personality. His nature is hidden, and yet his personality is evident from the nature of creation, just as a human personality is evident from the movement of a face. Learning about the real underlying truth of the world becomes therefore, for Berkeley, about attending to the signs that God gives within our world, signs that confirm both his reality and purpose, but also inspire us towards moral actions. Both of which moves need to be considered in turn.
The Berkeley God reveals himself as a mind in the creation of causes. A Cause is, Berkeley says, a pure sign. We look at one thing in the world and immediately know what will happen next (or at least infer what is happening). This happening then allows us to understand that underpinning our apparent ability to order the world, there must lie some creative principle, some God. The universe is then awash with signs about the nature of the creator, and his deep purpose. In effect therefore reality, or the element which really matter in reality, call it God, is pitched into the algebra of the future. God reveals his own being in promising to us a certain future; That is, the agency which is actually creating the world is revealed in the promise of a series of futures, whose reality is inscribed within the day to day world.
From which it immediately follows that humans are very subtly pitched within such a creation. They might well choose to ignore the nature of this future (and the testament of reality it conveys). They might then remain within their own nice little world, and not worry over much about whatever warning signs are flashed before their eyes. Or again and even more problematically, it is clearly very easy, given the Berkeley metaphysics, for humanity to confuse the nature of such signs with the nature of abstract ideas. Humanity can therefore very easily confuse such signs with their own general ideas (which might leap from idea to idea in a way that resembles a sign). And one could only have any real hope of telling the two apart from careful and very considered contemplation. A contemplation which would necessarily allow for the fact that in every sign there will be a dimension of abstract idea (and therefore an unhelpful generality) and aspects which relate to a future, and yet the two are not the same. As in the case of abstract ideas, the idea itself leaps around creating the problem. Problem and solution are therefore given in a single throw: We Cure crime (or terrorism) by creating the conditions within which the criminals themselves are created, that therefore in knowing ‘who’ the criminals (or terrorists) are likely to be in the first place… Signs by contrast need no such act of creation within the idea. On the contrary, struggle as we might with solutions or try as we might to ignore the problem, they are the ones who always beckon, always threaten…
The second aspect of signs for Berkeley revolves around the issue of morality. Berkeley, good Christian as he is, is sure that God and humanity on a deep level, share a nature. Humans and God are both Spirits. They are therefore capable of acting and of willing that action. In our actual lived intentions, in our capacity to will or want at all, Berkeley says that we directly understand the nature of God. The question then, we need to ask ourselves in deciding to perform an action, is always whether or not God, given that he runs between all individuals, and values then all equally, would will it. Our acts of subcreation (what we will) are then caught up in a far greater web of being, and must be so, as the constituting reality of the universe designs it to be so. The tie in of reality and morality is here a very strong one. Humans only accord with the reality of the universe when they allow for other individuals to also be within the world, and judge all their actions against the needs of these others. Reality therefore necessarily, at the deepest level demands a collectivity of purpose and action.
However it is at this point Berkeley breaks off from being a philosopher, and reverts back to being the Good Bishop he also was. The Secret of collectivity lies for him, very firmly created within the Bible as it is the written will of God. He might then have defined a series of very deep philosophical problems, which take humanity’s apparently most personal of possessions (their perceptions), and turns them into a necessarily collective phenomena. He might at the same time, open out a difference between truths that relate to mere abstraction, and those that relate to a reality whose nature is to encode and beckon us towards a future. And yet having defined these axes with clear and precise philosophical genius, he then relies on the traditional tools of theology to supply an answer. A procedure that rightly or wrongly could not be accepted by the generation that immediately followed his own. It is then to this generation that the next Rant in this sequence will turn.
