For this assignment, I crafted a possible argument between George Berkeley and Rene Descartes concerning the existence of material substance. After the dialogue, I critiqued their positions using some basics of Kant's philosophy from Prolegomena.
Cass Lowry
April 29, 2010
PHI 272 – Second Paper; Prompt 1
Berkeley. Oh René, thank you very much for joining me for lunch today. Sitting here, I cannot help but admire the beautiful flowers planted in the quadrangle. Such fragrances! And the wonderful aesthetic note they add to the campus; I am sure they must impress all of the tour groups. How can one not laugh at men such as Locke who contend that such sense perceptions are mere representations of material substances?
Descartes. I am afraid I misunderstand you George. What you mean to say, of course, is it would be ridiculous to conclude that these sense perceptions are a true basis for viewing the world around us.
Berk. Not at all. I am saying that these sense perceptions can in no way derive from any material substance, substratum, or whatever those gobily-gook philosophers want to call it now. In fact, we can clearly know that such material substance does not exist.
Des. I am afraid I must disagree. I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I must side with Mr. Locke. Our sensations are representations of material substances.
Berk. Ha! Please, do go on. Regale me with your proof for material substance.
Des. Well, take this flower for instance. Would you agree that it has a wonderful gold color? That its petals are soft and almost rubbery to the touch and create a shuffling sound when I shake it lightly? That it possesses a wonderful scent and perhaps would have a great taste (although I am not quite willing to empirically prove that claim)?
Berk. Who could say otherwise?
Des. But watch. *Descartes lights a match and chars the petals of the flower* You must admit; the flower’s qualities are now vastly changed. It now smells of ash and soot. Its charcoal color is rough to the touch, and is brittle enough to break in my fingers. The sound of the petals is gone and I would dare you to taste it. But yet, is it not the same flower?
Berk. But of course.
Des. But if it is the same flower, which no one can deny, given the continuity of our experience, how can we know it to be so when all of our sense perceptions of it have changed? Upon closer reflection, we can see that it still maintains the qualities of extension -- for I can hold it in my hand -- mutability, and flexibility -- for even in this moment I can break the stem *snap* and yet it remains the same flower. Clearly, I cannot sense or touch the general aspects of extension, mutability, and flexibility; but may I imagine them? If I sit, and imagine all the different ways I can change this flower (imagine pressing it, varying the crease in one petal in a slightly different manner each time; now try the same with all the petals) I find I cannot possibly envision the infinite ways I could modify this flower. So if I cannot sense extension and the like, and I cannot imagine them, I must understand them with my intellect. I can now see that my knowledge of the flower comes from my mind alone. No matter how many ways it manifests itself to me, the flower remains the flower; my mind can perceive an underlying material substance of the flower, which allows it to remain constant despite its changes in its qualities.
Berk. No my friend!! You were speaking undeniable truth until your final conclusion. You are missing premises! Yes, our sense perceptions of the flower change over time even though the flower remains the same in a certain respect. But it is not accurate to say that this uniformity of our perception must be derived from material substance. Why can it not come from mind?
Des. Absurd. Imagine for me, if you will a flower with four petals. Can you picture it? Now imagine a flower with one million petals. Is the image as clear?
Berk. No. Although I can conceive of a thousand-petal flower existing, I cannot easily picture one.
Des. And herein we can see the difference between understanding and imagining. You can understand the possibility of a thousand-petal flower because you have a clear mental concept of numbers that you can apply to your knowledge of a flower. Such an understanding, however, only points inward to such concepts as mathematics, which exist in your mind, are as clear as a light, and are in no way deniable. Imagining, on the other hand, seems to point outward, towards the body and other experiences; the ability to imagine a three-petal flower does not seem to be a necessary part of the rational mind. Rather, such ideas are not a constant part of our mind, but seem to derive from either proximity to the object or from memory. You are able to receive such ideas from outside of you, (and oftentimes you do, without your consent or desire), which means there must be more to reality than your mind alone. There must be material substance!
Berk. Calm down René. You have originally missed the point of my objection. I deny that our conceptions of extension, mutability, and flexibility have any grounding in the material world.
Des. Humor me.
Berk. Why do you not trust the qualities of the flower, such as its scent or color, as a basis for clear knowledge?
Des. Because my senses are faulty. They change and make mistakes.
Berk. Well then, can you conceive for me the extension of this flower? Do you have it in your mind? Good. Now, imagine that you are a honeybee coming to suck nectar out of the flower. Will you admit that animals have the same capacity for sensing as humans?
Des. I will admit it.
Berk. Well, how would the flower appear to the honeybee? To the bee, it would seem a mountain, while to you, the flower would still seem the size of your hand. Thus, at the same moment, the flower would have two different extensions. If extension is material substance’s unchanging characteristic, clearly this is a contradiction. Extension is based on sensory perception to the same extent as color and scent.
Des. You clearly misunderstand extension. We, as rational humans, can understand that the flower has an unchanging extension.
Berk. But clearly that extension is subjective! The extension of a five-foot statue looks incredibly different to a six-foot and a four-foot tall man. Thus, it is based on sense perception.
Des. You cannot see extension. It is something to be known.
Berk. Listen, you made another frightful mistake when you were discussing the distinction between imagination and intellection. You claimed that our imaginations are not self-willed, and therefore must come from something outside of us. To that I agree, but you would be foolish to so quickly assume that it came from anything material.
Des. What else could it come from?
Berk. If you would stop being so thickheaded for a moment…you must understand that extension, like all other qualities, is nothing more than a sense perception. Imagine for instance, if you were to look at the flower with one eye bare and the other using a microscope; the flower would have two different extensions at the same time. We cannot have an idea of anything if it is not from a sense perception. And because all we know is derived from sense perceptions, which, you agree, are functions of the mind, we have no cause to believe in material substance. Yet, you are correct, not all of our ideas are self-willed; many times we cannot control what we experience, so they must come from outside of us. They must come from another mind, one that gives them uniformity; so that when we burn a flower we know that it is the same flower. The only mind powerful enough to provide such constant uniformity would be an infinite mind; therefore, all of our wonderful perceptions must come from the infinite, omnipotent mind of God.
Des. Ridiculous. Our God is not a deceiving God! Why would he make it seem we have a material world around us then? Why would he deceive us by presenting a seeming third-party materialism, from which we assume we can learn ideas, when he is really the one feeding us concepts, images, ideas, and understandings? That does not make sense. God is omnipotent! What advantage would it do him to deceive us?
Berk. We are not being deceived! Everything we know is derived from a sense perception, and all sense perceptions can be found in the mind of God. It is the simplest and truest explanation. God, in his omnipotence, does not need to use a tool such as matter to convey experiences to us.
Des. But that is inconsistent with our thoughts! Some of our concepts, such as mathematics, and the simple fact that we exist as thinking things, can be clearly perceived, whereas our perceptions of shape, scent, and texture are often confused and muddled. They cannot derive from the same source.
Berk. Who cares about a distinction in our thoughts? We could not have our thoughts without deriving them from the world around us! Everything we know is through experience!
Des. Have you never doubted your senses before! Clearly, they are unreliable, but yet we can be certain that we, as thinking-things exist. Our knowledge derives from mind and clear perceptions. And we can clearly perceive that God would not deceive us!
Descartes and Berkeley’s tea-luncheon at this point has deteriorated into a shouting match. Conversation could continue, and Berkeley might easily respond to Descartes that God does not deceive us, but rather it is merely humans who are have caused their own confusion ; but stopping here is wise because at this point the two philosophers have unearthed the conflicting axioms of their worldviews. In the preceding hypothetical conversation concerning the nature of material substance, while both the rationalist Descartes and the empiricist Berkeley elucidate perceptive arguments, Descartes’ philosophical perspective can clearly be seen to be the stronger argument. This conclusion can be primarily drawn from his belief in the lucidity of reason.
Berkeley makes the implicit claim in his Three Dialogues that all things humans know are derived either from their sense perceptions or from the connections of ideas they draw through observing and reasoning from these perceptions. Although confusion is possible, if humans take the time to sift through their senses, they will arrive at the proper conclusions about the nature of God and the uniformity of experience. In fact, Berkeley proves God from the constancy of sense perceptions. Having already shown that all sensations are subjective and can in no way exist in anything other than a mind and that he is not at all times in control of these ideas and experiences they must come from the mind of God, an active, omnipotent, and omnipresent mind. He then goes on to confirm his idea of God by extrapolating from his intuitive perception of his soul. From these premises, Berkeley is able to account for all of the ideas we receive from experience as well as the conclusions and observations we can draw from such perceptions caused by the mind of God.
Descartes, however, describes a type of knowledge for which Berkeley’s philosophy is not able to provide an explanation, that of mathematics. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes describes mathematics as knowledge that is “certain and indubitable.” Our theories of mathematics seem to have no direct basis in our sense perceptions, for we cannot clearly imagine the whole concept of a triangle, in all of its representations, but only intuit and represent it. Neither can they be attributed to observations and conclusions we draw from our senses, for there is a clear distinction between theories and theorems. Theories are a group of principles, observations, and general rules, which allow humans to predict the future with reasonable certainty. Such theories are what Berkeley describes in his philosophy as being abstracted from our senses. Theorems, on the other hand, are conceptual truths that we can apply to find certain answers, provided we have applied them correctly. No sense perception can adequately provide a mind with the idea of an equilateral triangle, yet we still have the idea; furthermore, we can use our idea to reason further theorems, which can be used to correctly predict the nature of our environments. The nature of theories is exactly the opposite; theories cannot progress through reason to predict nature, but rather must be continually furthered through observation and analysis of nature. Clearly, Berkeley does not account in his philosophy for the activity of mathematical reasoning.
The question must therefore be asked, where can such reasoning originate? Descartes would respond that, because God gave us rationality, the mere fact that we can clearly perceive such conclusions makes them true. Leaving his circle aside, it is apparent that Descartes, although unable to adequately prove their cause, correctly intuits the validity of such judgments. To extrapolate from Berkeley’s philosophy, the only manner in which he can explain the existence of mathematical theories in our minds would be to posit that God, the active mind, placed such reasoning in our minds; but this would be inconsistent with his former arguments. First, it is clear that such reasoning cannot derive from sensible things, and therefore cannot enter our mind through the senses, for “sensible things are those only which are immediately perceived by sense” and sense does not have the function of further perception. If humans do not receive knowledge of mathematic principles from senses, then they must come from God. This, also, is not defendable. Berkeley proves the existence of God through our experience with the sensory world. If God’s existence cannot be confirmed through other means than our sense perceptions (the exploration of the nature of the soul only continues Berkeley’s proof, and cannot replace it), then it is impossible for humans to receive other knowledge, ideas or insights from him. In other words, if our only source of knowledge is through the senses, we only know God through our senses, and we cannot derive mathematics from our senses, then it is not possible for God to put mathematics in our minds. Mathematical reasoning then, seems to have no source; this would be impossible.
Upon further exploration, although both philosophers’ arguments have some flaws, it is clear that Descartes’ philosophy is better able to explain epistemology. Berkeley’s idealism, a form of substance monism, is flawed because it cannot account for the mathematical forms of reasoning, which clearly form a large part of human consciousness and clearly lie at the heart of Descartes’ Meditations. So while we may enjoy sitting on a spring day, reveling in fragrant flowers, we should rest assured that, if necessary, we could easily find the area of wood chips necessary to cover the flower bed.
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