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Berkeley on the Act-Object Distinction*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Thomas M. Lennon
Thomas M. Lennon
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , Fall 2001 , pp. 651 - 668
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2001

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References

Notes

1 Moore, G. E., “The Refutation of Idealism,” reprinted in his Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).Google Scholar

2 Berkeley, George, The Works of George Berkeley: Bishop of Cloyne, edited by Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E. (London: Thomas Nelson, 1949).Google Scholar

3 A lone, but very attenuated, exception is perhaps Warren E. Steinkraus who says: “[o]f course, Berkeley regards the distinction as untenable, though in our day we should have wished for more detailed clarification” (Steinkraus, Warren E., ed., “Berkeley and His Modern Critics,” in New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966], p. 162).Google Scholar

Below I hope to show that Berkeley provided a fair amount of detail.

4 Berkeley, , The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 200Google Scholar, and Berkeley, Principles, pt.1, sec. 22–23, p. 50, in ibid.

5 The argument was thus baptized by Gallois, André, “Berkeley's Master Argument,” The Philosophical Review, 83 (1974): 55–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Amidst a rather extensive literature, Hacking's, IanWhy Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), esp. p. 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is one of the very few to take the argument at all seriously. See also Lennon, Thomas M., “Berkeley and the Ineffable,” Synthese, 75 (1988): 231–50, esp. pp. 231–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Berkeley, Principles, pt. 1, sec. 5, p. 43.

7 Berkeley, , The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 43Google Scholar. For more, see also Turbayne's, C. M. “The Berkeley, Plato, Aristotle Connection,” in Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Turbayne, C. M. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 299.Google Scholar

8 Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, p. 195.

9 For more on the genitive analysis of ideas, see Lennon, Thomas M., “Locke and the Logic of Ideas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 18 (2001): 155–77.Google Scholar

10 Lancelot, Clude, The Port-Royal Grammar (1660), translated by Rieux, Jacques and Rollin, Bernard E. (The Hague: Mouton, 1975)Google Scholar. This is the companion piece to the Port-Royal Logic (1662). The approach taken in this paper follows Berkeley's caution in his notebooks: “of & thing causes of mistake”; “The referring Ideas to things w[hich] are not Ideas, the using the Term, Idea of, is one great cause of mistake” (nos. 115, 660). Given the mistakes he sees deriving from “idea of,” one might ask why Berkeley uses the term at all. As he explains in nos. 685 and 807, it is because the term is already in use. This is not just a terminological point; it is the logic of the term that interests him. He thinks that realists get it wrong and thus go astray. References for Berkeley's notebooks are to the corrected edition in Berkeley, George, Philosophical Works, edited by Ayers, M. R. (London: Dent, 1975).Google Scholar

11 Berkeley seems to have been thinking in these terms in the notebooks. “Idea is [th]e object or Subject of thought; that I think on w[hat]ever it be, I call Idea” (no. 808). Note that I am appeared to by the gods, and not by the appearance of the gods, which would be an odd way of speaking, in English and in Latin. It is the gods that appear to me, and if the gods did not appear, there would be no appearance of the gods. This distinction is important in assessing whether Locke, for example, is open to veil-of-perception arguments based on idea as a tertium quid. For Berkeley, what appears is a bundle, but one whose analysis involves counterfactuals, statements of identity, etc. Neither he nor Locke seems guilty of the sense-datum fallacy.

12 Berkeley, , Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 194Google Scholar. In his notebooks, Berkeley had already noted the threat to his idealism posed by this distinction: “‘Twas the opinion that ideas could exist unperceiv'd or before perception that made Men think perception was somewhat different from the Idea perceived, [tha]t it was an idea of Reflexion whereas the thing perceiv'd was an idea of Sensation. I say 'twas this made 'em think the understanding took it in receiv'd it from without w[hi]ch could never be did not they think it existed without” (no. 658). If there are, as Locke maintained, ideas both of reflection (i.e., ideas of acts of perception) and ideas of sensation (perceptions conveyed into the mind) the ideata of the latter can only be mind-independent.

13 Ibid., p. 195.

14 Ibid.

15 Muehlmann, Robert G., Berkeley's Ontology (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), p. 196.Google Scholar

16 Berkeley, Three Dialogues, pp. 195–96.

17 Thus the importance of arguments from perceptual relativity, which seem therefore to have the positive role generally accorded them by the literature. On the other hand, if it is to be passive the mind cannot make a causal difference. But it can make an ontological difference, it would seem, only in the case of perceived qualities that are tied to hedonic qualities (see Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology, chap. 5).

18 In a sense, ideas just are perspectives, although this tacit evocation of Leibniz must be tempered. There are at least two important differences between Leibnizian and Berkeleian ideas as perspectives. For Leibniz, minds, or at least monads, might just be (a series of) perspectives; not so for Berkeley, for whom minds are substances different from their ideas. For him, it is the object that is (a bundle of) perspectives. Secondly, for Leibniz, the relations governing perspective are all of them, at least in principle, necessary and knowable apriori; not so for Berkeley, for whom, as for Locke, the way at least some things appear is contingent on God's will and knowable only through experience. Not incidentally, I would suggest that Berkeley's preoccupation with theories of vision is of a piece with this notion of an idea as a perspective.

19 See also Berkeley's Philosophical Commentaries, nos. 810–11 (in TheWorks of George Berkeley, Vol. 1, p. 97): “Pure Intellect I understand not.” “Locke is in [th]e right in those things wherein he differs from [th]e Cartesians.” Berkeley sometimes suggests that the mind is active in perception, for example, at Principles, pt. 2, p. 27, and especially at p. 139: “a soul or spirit is an active being whose existence consists, not in being perceived, but in perceiving ideas and thinking” (in The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 105)Google Scholar. But in none of these texts does he say that the mind's activity consists in its perceiving rather than entirely in willing. Moreover, especially in the more problematic texts, his concern is to distinguish the mind from its ideas, which he does in terms of the activity of the former and the passivity of the latter. Once it is acknowledged that perceiving and being perceived are the same occurrence, it is clear that the mind is passive with respect to it. It is God who is active.

20 Sellars, Wilfrid, “Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas,” in Studies in Perception, edited by Machamer, P. K. and Turnbull, R. G. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), p. 289.Google Scholar

21 Radner, Daisie, “Berkeley and Cartesianism,” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Suppl. Vol. 4: Essays on Rationalism and Empiricism (1978): 165–76, esp. p. 167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Pitcher, George, “Minds and Ideas in Berkeley,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969): 198–207, esp. p. 200.Google Scholar

23 Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology, p. 202.

24 See Tipton, I. C., Berkeley (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

25 The dance tune had in fact come to Berkeley from Hobbes. See Philosophical Commentaries, no. 796: “Hobbs in some degree falls in w[i]th Locke saying thought is to the Mind or him self as dancing to the Dancer.” The example is a bit misleading in that the waltz is not an immediate object of perception, which, as Berkeley repeatedly insists, is the only topic of the first dialogue. With its institutional, dispositional character, a waltz is more like Berkeley's constructed physical object. In fact, Hobbes had used the image of jumping, which was to be taken up by G. F. Stout in the twentieth century. See Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, translated by Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., and Murdoch, D. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Vol. 2, p. 125Google Scholar. Hobbes's objections are not the only ones of interest here. In the first set, concerning ideas and their causes, Caterus and Descartes employ a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic denominations that exactly parallels the internal-external accusative distinction (Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, pp. 66–67, 74–75 [which, unfortunately, translates in terms of “extraneous labels”]).

26 Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology, p. 203.

27 Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 197.

28 This the long argument of Pierre-Daniel Huet's Traité philosophique de lafaiblesse humaine (Paris, 1722).

29 Kant, Emanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Smith, Norman Kemp (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 72, 88–90.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., p. 89.

31 Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), pp. 3–4Google Scholar. Notably, for one who has little use for history, Goodman credits Berkeley, among others (including Kant), for the “overwhelming case against perception without conception, the pure given, absolute immediacy, the innocent eye, substance as substratum” (p. 6).

32 Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 198.

33 Bennett, Jonathan, “Substance, Reality, and Primary Qualities,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1965): 1–17Google Scholar; reprinted in C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong, eds.., Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 86–124.

34 Loux, M. J., Universal and Particulars: Readings in Ontology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 7–8Google Scholar. If Locke has an implicit ontology of predication, it would be the class-inclusion account made explicit in Berkeley.

35 Martin and Armstrong, eds., Locke and Berkeley, p. 94.

36 This interpretation began in the 1950s with papers by R. Van Iten and W. H. Hay on the role of universals for Berkeley. It was first formulated by E. B. Allaire and subsequently received considerable debate. For criticism of it, see Pappas, George, “Ideas, Minds, and Berkeley,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 17 (1980): 181–94, esp. pp. 188–90Google Scholar. For defense of it, see Hausman, Alan M., “Adhering to Inherence: A New Look at the Old Steps that Led to Berkeley's Idealism,” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 14 (1984): 421–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

But cf. Hausman, David and Hausman, Alan, Descartes's Legacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Berkeley was already addressing this issue in the notebooks (see no. 886): “If a man with his Eyes shut Imagines to Himself the Sun & firmament you will not say he or his Mind is the Sun or Extended. Tho Neither sun nor firmament be without his Mind.”

38 This may be what Berkeley is getting at when in an anticipation of adverbial theories he writes in his notebooks (no. 24): “Nothing properly but persons, i.e., conscious things do exist, all other things are not so much existences as manners of [t]he existence of persons.”

39 Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, sec. 91, pp. 80–81. H. M. Bracken has shown that the Cartesians, at least, had already invoked an account of the connection between substance and mode other than that of inherence in “Some Problems of Substance among the Cartesians,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964): 129–37.Google Scholar

40 Although he calls ideas acts, Muehlmann at one point gets this exactly right. “Berkeley describes perception of the proper objects [e.g., colour] as a “bare reception.’ He would urge, accordingly, that it is more perspicuous to say of these proper objects that they are had (rather in the way that we have such “objects’ as pains and pleasures) than to say that they are immediate perceivings distinct from, but directed at, these proper objects” (Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology, p. 202). Kenneth P. Winkler provides enormous textual support to show that ideas are immediate objects of perception in his Berkeley: An Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 3–10Google Scholar. What these texts show, it seems to me, is that each idea taken “singly,” as Hylas puts it just before he is given the Master Argument, is not an object in the sense explicated by the congeries analysis. On the other hand, if Winkler is right, then of course the defense here of Berkeley against Moore is in trouble.

41 Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 244. As M. R. Ayers puts it, once Berkeley has rejected the mind-independent thing—and with it the Cartesian distinction between esse formale and esse obiectiva—he must “puff up the idea (i.e., the intentional object, the thing as it exists in the mind) as something in its own right” (History of European Ideas, 7 (1986): 567–73, esp. pp. 569–70 and n.10). On the reading above, the idea, although taking a subjective genitive, ceases thereby to be a mere appearance.