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Immaterialism Simply Put
By: Uccisore

Immaterialism Simply Put

Berkeley’s Immaterialism was created to address a common issue in philosophy- skepticism, which is to say doubt, in regards to what our senses tell us. A popular view in Berkeley’s time was that what we see, hear, feel and etc. cannot be trusted to be factual.

This may seem odd to someone with no experience in philosophy, so let us look at why this is a problem in the first place.

With a moment of thought, anyone can see that there are situations in which what we see isn’t exactly right. We have all seen a straw or spoon appear to be bent when it is stuck in a glass of water. Certainly the straw or spoon is not actually bent. Also, we have all had dreams in which we seem to hear and see things that aren’t real. There are more powerful examples, though. A wall that appears to be solidly green may, upon close inspection, be covered with blue and yellow dots. Upon closer inspection, those dots may contain still other colors, and ultimately, all are composed of molecules that are probably colorless. So then, what color is the wall really? We all know that objects that are further away appear to be smaller than objects that are closer. But of course, we believe objects themselves aren’t really getting any larger or smaller. How then, can we claim that we see the size of an object, when it’s apparent size is always changing from our perspective, even as it’s real size is (we assume) staying the same? There are similar examples that apply to our senses of hearing and touch.

These kinds of situations have led philosophers to accept that the world isn’t exactly as we see it. Just as the spoon isn’t really bent, it also isn’t really gray, isn’t really the size we see it as, and etc. Skepticism is the belief that because of these doubts, we really can’t know anything about the world at all.

As was said, Berkeley developed a theory to get around this problem of skepticism. As he saw it, the entire problem revolved around the notion that what we experience- the actual images, sounds, and other sensations we get from our eyes and ears and such- was viewed as lesser, a mere representation of the unknowable material world, which was the greater or more substantial. His solution is at once simple and confounding- if we cannot know anything about this outside, material world that our experiences are representations of, why suppose it exists in the first place? Instead, Berkeley said that ideas- the images in our minds of things like chairs, books, and trees- are all that exists, along with the minds that think of them. If there was no mysterious outer world to compare our ideas to, then the reason for skepticism is gone. He called this unknowable stuff ‘matter’. This idea is called Immaterialism.

This notion seems absurd on it’s face to many people, but Berkeley expressed a genuine surprise at times that his view wasn’t more widely accepted, so at the very least, it seems he wasn’t joking, or creating Immaterialism as just a curiosity for philosophers to debate about. Indeed, while it is very easy to disagree with or dislike Immaterialism, it is another thing altogether to disprove it. Once it is accepted that all we can ever know about are images of things in our minds, it makes a certain sense to say that that’s all there is.

The biggest hurdle for Immaterialism right off is that we have this notion that our images are of something external to us. When we see a tree, it’s not a product of our imaginations, and other people see it just as we do. How can ideas in the mind be all there is, if other people share them? More importantly, how can a tree be an idea in the mind if it exists when nobody is around to perceive it?

Berkeley had two answers for this. First of all, he pointed out that we can’t imagine a tree without imagining an observer. We can only picture what a tree looks, feels, and smells like, and those sorts of mental images all involve someone seeing, touching, or smelling. Try to imagine a tree apart from what it looks like to the eye, what it feels like to the hand, what it smells like to the nose. If you can’t, you aren’t alone- Berkeley claimed that nobody could do this. Because of this, he claimed that there was no such thing as ‘a tree with nobody observing it’, or at least that if there is, we have no idea what it would be like, and have no business talking about it.

Second, Berkeley argued that God was in constant observation of all things, and because of this, a tree always existed in God’s mind, whether or not anybody else saw it. Indeed, he held that God was the Being responsible for the existence of everything, the reason why the world seems consistent, instead of being like a dream.
The importance of God in Berkeley’s Immaterialism is two-sided. On the one hand, he relied on the existence of God to support the existence of perception without matter. On the other, he believed that his Immaterialism provided support for the existence of God, in particular that God was a personal, rational, intangible Being as Christianity taught. With no good reason to believe in solid matter, God was the only thing that could sustain a world of ideas.

However, this reliance on God is also one of the major ways in which Immaterialism is open to attack. God is essentially invisible, and only perceived indirectly (if at all)- just like matter. In short, all the reasons Berkeley has given us to reject matter can be turned around to reject his God. There is one catch however- Berkeley’s God is first and foremost a mind. This is important because according to Berkeley, minds are one of the two things we can know for a fact exist- after all, we are minds, and we know that we exist. So at least God resembles something that we know exists, whereas matter (to Berkeley) is an entirely other sort of substance about which we know nothing.

In the end, the biggest problem for Berkeley’s Immaterialism is that no matter how well it is argued, most people cannot bring themselves to believe it. In this respect, it is just like the skepticism he sought to defeat- both are positions that can be argued for powerfully, but lead to conclusions so out of touch with everyday experience that it’s almost impossible to regard them as more than curiosities, or hurdles on the way to actual understanding. On one hand, Berkeley’s Immaterialism can be seen as a legitimate alternative to skepticism, but on the other, it’s another way of using philosophy to argue for conclusions that common sense could never endorse- which is certainly a primary reason for opposing skepticism in the first place.

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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