A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  Berkeley, like Locke, was an empiricist. He believed that everything that we say derives its sense from experience. Since our experience of the relation among things in the ‘external world’ presents us only with regular succession, and not with any spirit or will that animates it, we can mean nothing more when we invoke causal laws, than to refer to this regularity. This theory of Berkeley’s presaged Hume’s radical attack on the traditional concept of causality. It also echoed Leibniz’s theory that causal laws express ‘well-founded phenomena’. It showed the extent to which the concept of causality was becoming uppermost in the minds of philosophers, beginning to take its place as one of the central concepts, indicative of a central problem, in metaphysics.

  Berkeley's criticism

  George Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne, was perhaps the greatest of the philosophers to derive his main inspiration from the metaphysics of Locke. He is best known for his idealism, expounded in the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), according to which the world contains nothing but spirits and their ‘ideas’. Berkeley thought that this theory was an ineluctable consequence of the empiricist method that Locke had put forward. Since he accepted that method—and moreover thought that it was the only one that accorded with human common sense—he accepted the consequence. However, his idealism was consequent upon a clearer, though far narrower, presentation of the concept of an ‘idea’ than can be derived from Locke. For Berkeley ‘ideas’ are mental particulars, the immediate objects of the ‘perception’ whereby the contents of our mind are revealed to us, and they comprise all actual mental contents. Images, sense-experiences, thoughts, concepts—all are ‘ideas’ in Berkeley’s sense, since all are immediate objects of mental perception. (Kant was not the only one to complain about this assimilation of items so diverse into a single category. But it was perhaps Kant who made the most telling criticism, in arguing that the empiricists find their conclusions persuasive only because they confuse sensibility and understanding, and so ‘sensualise’ the concepts of the understanding, and misrepresent their nature and function in the derivation of human knowledge.)

  Having made this assumption, however, Berkeley went on to draw conclusions which seemed compelling both to him and to many of his contemporaries. First, he attacked Locke’s theory of abstraction, arguing that since everything that exists is a particular, there can be no such thing as an abstract idea. For consider the abstract idea of a triangle: it is supposed to be neither scalene nor isosceles, to have all triangular shapes and no specific triangular shape at once. And is it not an absurdity to think of a triangle that is indeterminate in all its properties? There is an obvious reply: Locke was referring, not to a triangle, but to the idea of a triangle; it is ridiculous to suppose that an idea of a triangle is itself a triangle and therefore determinate in its shape. But this reply was forbidden by Berkeley’s assimilation of ideas and images under a single mental category. An image of a triangle in some sense shares the properties of the triangle it represents. Berkeley is right in assuming therefore that there can no more be an abstract image of a triangle than there can be an abstract triangle. And since images are his model for all the ‘ideas’ of the mind, his conclusion must therefore appear correspondingly more plausible.

  But why should that assimilation of ideas to images have appeared persuasive? The answer is to be found in Berkeley’s attempt to fill in the gap, left open by Locke’s empiricist theory of meaning, between experience and idea. Berkeley makes experiences and ideas one and the same: a perception of a red book, an image of a red book, an idea of a red book— these are all examples of one kind of thing, different in name, but not in nature. Hence there is no difficulty in showing how words are given sense by their application in experience: everything denoted by a word is, in effect, an experience (or idea), and there need never be any doubt in our mind as to what we mean by the words we utter. We need only refer back to the experience which the word denotes. (It is a characteristic of rationalist philosophy to bring all mental processes under one label. But it is also characteristic of rationalism to distinguish very carefully between those ‘clear and distinct’ perceptions which belong to reason and those more confused mental items that display the workings of sense and imagination. For Berkeley such a distinction is empty.)

  Idealism

  Berkeley feels that he can now provide an answer to the fundamental question of philosophy as he saw it. This is the question of existence. What is existence? Berkeley’s first answer is that to be is to be perceived: esse est percipi. If everything which confronts us is an idea, then the principle of existence must be found in the nature of ideas. It is absurd, however, to think of ideas as existing outside the mind. And to exist in a mind is to be perceived by that mind. Hence, nothing can exist which is not perceived; any metaphysical assertion that commits itself to the existence of an imperceivable thing is absurd. In particular, Berkeley thought, the belief in what he called ‘material substance’ is absurd: this term corresponds to no idea, and therefore has no sense. We do not even know what we mean to assert when we commit ourselves to the existence of that which it purports to name.

  This radical conclusion (which Dr Johnson thought he could refute by kicking against a heavy stone) was not, according to Berkeley, repugnant to common sense. On the contrary, it is only metaphysical confusion that could lead the ordinary person to doubt it, since he applies words according to their proper meanings, and therefore affirms existence only of those things of which he has an idea; in other words those things which he experiences. What then are the ‘material objects’ to which we so repeatedly refer? Berkeley refrains from saying that they are ideas: for to every table there exists not one but many, perhaps infinitely many, perceptions. Hence the term ‘table’ denotes, not a single idea, but ‘a collection of ideas’. This theory is obscure, as is shown by Berkeley’s answer to the question ‘What does it mean to say that the table exists while I am not perceiving it?’ His answer (in the first instance) is that such an assertion means no more than that, if were to return to the place where the table stands, then I would have a certain perception. In other words, it makes reference not to an actual but to a possible idea. This introduces a complication into Berkeley’s philosophy which he brushes aside somewhat peremptorily, but which has been recognised in recent years as the major source of difficulty for theories such as Berkeley’s: how can there be such entities as possible ideas?

  Berkeley’s arguments for his view, in so far as they are not merely reaffirmations of the immediate consequences of his theory of ‘ideas’, consist in spirited, but as it now seems, often misguided, attacks against Locke. Berkeley rejects the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. He thinks that whatever arguments are given for the unreality of the second must equally establish the unreality of the first. He also dismisses Locke’s view of substance, arguing that we can have no idea of the pure ‘substratum’ divested of its qualities, and therefore cannot know what we mean in referring to such a thing. He argues from the subjectivity of ideas directly to the subjectivity of the qualities represented through them, in a manner that betrays his too easy assimilation of thoughts to sensations, and which therefore establishes the inadequacy of the former by reference to the well-known Cartesian arguments for the inadequacy of the latter.

  It is now perhaps more apparent than it was to Berkeley’s contemporaries that these negative arguments trade on inapposite conflations and hasty analogies. Berkeley confuses (though the fault is not entirely his) the Lockean ‘substance’ with the material stuff of the physical world; he ignores the distinction between real and nominal essence and uses the word ‘idea’ to name, indiscriminately, qualities, sensations and the concepts which result from them. In short, he fails to present in a cogent manner the issue which really concerns him, which is that of the relation between appearance and reality. His slogan that ‘to be is to be perceived’ might be better expressed as ‘being is seeming’. And the true epistemologic
al weight of his argument can then be seen to amount to this: it is a necessary truth that all my evidence for how things are is derived from my immediate and incorrigible knowledge of how things seem. But I cannot mean, in referring to the world, to refer to a world other than the one that I know (for otherwise I would not know what I mean). So what I speak of, in speaking of objects, is not some underlying reality that lies beyond all my powers of observation, but rather the totality of appearance. In other words, in speaking of objects, I am speaking of the sum of what I can, from my own point of view, observe. My world is my world. It is not just unverifiable but meaningless to speak of some other world which transcends the world as it appears to me. Since ‘appearance’ or ‘how it seems’ are terms which refer, of necessity, to the mental state of an observer, it seems that the observer has neither reason nor capacity to affirm the existence of things that are not mental.

  God and the soul

  The real problem that arises for Berkeley, and one which he recognised, was this: how can one accept such a view and escape from the conclusion that all I think and know is contained within the sphere of my own consciousness, so that I have no grounds for asserting the existence of spirits besides myself? This difficulty Berkeley confronted in a manner reminiscent of Descartes. He argues for the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent God who sustains not just the illusion but the reality of a many-souled universe. As Berkeley clearly saw, however, he could not confront the question immediately, without first showing that terms like ‘soul’, ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ are indeed meaningful according to his own precepts. He admitted some difficulty over this, arguing that the mind is not itself an idea since it is not identical with any of its contents. So do we have an idea of the mind? If you take away all the contents of a mind, you do not take away the mind itself, since it is not identical with any of its contents nor with all of its contents taken together. Indeed, the mind seems to be a substance precisely in the Lockean sense: it is an unknowable substratum. Being forced to admit as much, Berkeley found it necessary to say (as though it made things clearer) that we have not an idea, but a ‘notion’ of this substratum. The suggestion is to some extent redeemed by the following observations. First, we do have a unique experience which is associated with the mind: the experience of volition, through which we derive our idea of a true causality. Secondly, we can make sense of ‘mental substance’ by extending the maxim that was applied to ideas, that to be is to be perceived, to apply to notions of substance. In this case the maxim becomes: to be is to perceive. It is therefore through the relation of perception that we understand the nature of mind. Perception requires two terms; the reality of one term (the idea) and the reality of the relation (perception) necessitate between them the reality of the other term (the mind). It is as though perception is the hidden ‘bond’ between substance and attribute. Certainly Berkeley’s confusion of ideas with qualities, and his view that substance must contain some active principle and therefore can only be mental, seem to imply some such conclusion.

  Having resolved the problem of the nature of mind to his satisfaction, Berkeley felt able to lean on the Cartesian part of his argument. This proceeds, via the proof of the existence of God, to the not surprising conclusion that the world is in fact more than it merely seems to be: it is as it appears to God. While our knowledge of this divine appearance is imperfect we can be fairly sure that we are not deceived in those beliefs that arise cogently and naturally from the perceptions which God vouchsafes to us.

  The most interesting part of Berkeley’s theology lies in a novel argument for the existence of God. This argument both clarifies and depends upon Berkeley’s notion of spiritual substance as the only source of activity. He rightly observes that, among ideas, we can distinguish those in respect of which we are active from those in respect of which we are passive. I can voluntarily call an image or thought to mind, and recognise it as the product of my mental activity. But other ideas—in particular those which go under the denomination of sensation and belief —are not similarly accessible to my will. I cannot command myself to believe that France is smaller than England, to see a man instead of a table before me, to feel a pain in my finger, and so on. Yet these involuntary ideas seem to be impressed on me with great vivacity. Whence came they? Not from me, for I can neither refuse nor amend them. From nowhere? Their vivacity and compellingness suggest otherwise: they bear the imprint of some other force. But force signifies the active principle—the will—which animates all spiritual substance. I conclude, therefore, that they are produced in me by some other being, some being far greater, and far wiser and far more powerful than I.

  The conclusion falls short of what is theologically desirable. Embellished with other arguments, and set in the context of Berkeley’s radical scepticism about his own and his reader’s powers to transcend the knowledge provided by experience, it might seem persuasive enough. However, the argument involves many a weak step. Its assumption that, because I am passive in respect of an idea, some other being must be active in respect of it, stands, to say the least, in need of justification. It is from this point, however, that Berkeley, like Descartes, begins the laborious task of reconstructing the world of common sense. He considered himself to have effected no genuine change in that world; he had done no more than re-establish the priority of appearance, and so banish the metaphysical superstitions for which ‘material substance’ was the unholy name.

  Conclusion

  It is difficult to summarise the achievements or the beliefs of the early British empiricists. But certain threads seem to bind their philosophies together. In particular there is the disposition to put the theory of knowledge before metaphysics. In doing so, they rise to the vantage-point from which metaphysics can be criticised, and even dismissed as nonsense. But, bound up with this same disposition is another, which has been historically central to it. This is the tendency, present already in Descartes, to look for the foundation of knowledge, and hence to arrive at a satisfactory theory of what I can know and mean, on the basis of the evidence and understanding available to me. Thus we find, in all traditional empiricism, a radical allegiance to the first-person case, a belief that all philosophy must be resolved by appeal to my experience, and by studying the details of how things seem to me.

  Out of this preoccupation many confusions arose, but so too did many clarities. It became clear, for example, that certain concepts, previously regarded as subsidiary to philosophical argument, in fact take a central place in all true metaphysics—these are the concepts of cause, of object, of existence and of the distinction between appearance and reality. At the same time the reliance of philosophical argument upon a theory of meaning, and upon a conception of the capacities of the human mind, became more apparent. When Hume was to draw out what he considered to be the true consequences of the empiricist assumptions, he was to put forward what Locke and Berkeley had merely hoped for: a philosophy dedicated to the destruction of metaphysics, and founded in a complete science of human nature.

  8 - THE IDEA OF A MORAL SCIENCE

  The rise of modern science during the seventeenth century shook traditional beliefs in religion, politics and morality, at the same time instilling into those who renounced those beliefs an unforeseen conviction of the power and scope of the human intellect. But science brought with it a new and unfamiliar bridle to the ambitions of thought. It rested its authority at least in part on observation. This gave new impetus to the Cartesian doubt. If what I know of the world I know through observation, then what can I know beyond the fact that I seem to observe things? In other words, what can I know beyond the contents of my own mind? Without the overarching structure of a priori truth, philosophy seems to-lack the bridge that will take it from subject to object. It lies trapped in the first person, forced either to remain there, or to call, like Berkeley, in some new and less reasonable way, upon the God who had rescued Descartes from solipsism.

  Before this radical scepticism could fully assert itself, the op
timism of Newton held sway in the minds of less observant philosophers. Because their thought did much to create what has since become one of the fundamental branches of philosophy, we must treat of them here. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the empiricism of Locke gradually worked itself out through theories of ethics—the branch of philosophy which had in modern times been treated systematically only by the profoundly unempiricist Spinoza.

  The philosophers that I shall discuss—Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Butler—belong to the ‘Enlightenment’. In the first flush of scientific confidence, the thinkers of the Enlightenment tried to carry over into every human intellectual endeavour the search for first principles which, in Newton’s physics, had been attended with such success. This search brought with it a sceptical attitude towards authority, rejecting everything that had no secure foundation in experience. In history, morals, metaphysics and literature the Enlightenment attitude briefly prevailed, giving rise to the phenomenal ambitions of the French encyclopaedists, and to their materialist, almost clockwork, vision of the universe. It produced the political theories which motivated the French and American revolutions, and the systematic explorations in chemistry and biology that were to find fruition in nineteenth-century evolutionism. It also brought about the technical achievements which precipitated modern industrialism, and while thus preparing the way for the miseries of revolution and factory labour, it infected the minds of the educated classes with a serenity of outlook, and a trust in human capacities, that weathered the assaults of Hume’s scepticism, of Vice’s anti-rationalism, of the growing introversion and doom-laden mysticism of the romantics. This was the Augustan age of English poetry, the age of Johnson and Goldsmith, of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, of Lessing and Winckelmann. From the point of view of the historian it is perhaps the richest and most exciting of all intellectual eras, not because of the content, but because of the influence, of the ideas that were current in it.