How Berkeley’s Works Are Interpreted

Instead of interpreting Berkeley exclusively in terms of how he relates to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, this chapter suggests we consider him in relation to other figures as well (e.g. Stoics, Ramists, Suárez, Spinoza, Leibniz). This allows us to integrate his published and unpublished work, and it reveals how the breadth of his writings are much more aligned with one another. Specifically, it indicates how mind is the will that things be identified by being differentiated and related rather than something distinct from already differentiated things.

The Harmony of the Leibniz–Berkeley Juxtaposition

The juxtaposition of the views of Leibniz and Berkeley indicate how the very points mistakenly cited to differentiate them are clarified precisely by appreciating their similarities, particularly in terms of understanding how minds differentiate and relate bodies. Such a strategy is especially useful for understanding how their accounts of perception, substance, and contingency depend on their mutual commitment to the harmony of all things and on their sensitivity to distinguishing the different domains of natural philosophy and metaphysics.

Berkeley, Suárez, and the Esse–Existere Distinction

For Berkeley, a thing’s existence (esse) is nothing more than its being perceived “as that thing”. It makes no sense to ask (with Samuel Johnson) about the esse of the mind or the specific act of perception, for that would be like asking what it means for existence to exist. Berkeley’s “existere is percipi or percipere” thus carefully adopts the scholastic distinction between esse and existere ignored by Locke and others committed to a substantialist notion of mind. Following the Stoics, Berkeley proposes that, as the existence of ideas, minds “subsist” rather than “exist” and thus cannot be identified as independently existing things.

Berkeley and Malebranche on Human Freedom

For Berkeley, I am not a substance who just happens to associate ideas; rather, I am the differentiation and association of those ideas, the will that there be such an order, variety, and comprehension. In creating minds, God creates an infinity of active principles in terms of which objects are intentionally identified in virtue of actions for which we are justifiably held responsible. As Malebranche suggests, God impels us toward the good in general, but we fixate on particular goods. For both thinkers, we need to see how things exhibit God’s grandeur in being related in infinite ways. In this way, we are freed to identify all things as purposive and harmonious.

Berkeley’s Stoic Notion of Spiritual Substances

For Berkeley, minds are not Cartesian spiritual substances because they cannot be said to exist (even if only conceptually) abstracted from their activities. Similarly, Berkeley’s notion of mind differs from Locke’s in that, for Berkeley, minds are not abstract substrata in which ideas inhere. Instead, a mind is a substance in a way consistent with the Stoic logic of the seventeenth-century Ramists on which Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards draw. The Stoic character of Berkeley’s philosophy is recognizable only when we see how it is based on a doctrine in which perceptions or ideas are intelligible precisely because they are always embedded in the propositions of a discourse or language.

Berkeley on Representation

There are two different contexts in which Berkeley speaks about representations: first, in regard to ideas that “re-present” in memory or imagination the things in experience they resemble; and second (and less familiarly), in regard to how minds organize the objects of experience in the specifically linguistic ways that make those objects intelligible. This second sense does not treat minds like ideas but as the active principles by which ideas are made intelligible.

Berkeley, Browne, and Collins

Berkeley argues that claims about divine predication (e.g. God is wise or exists) should be understood literally rather than analogically, because like all spirits (i.e. causes), God is intelligible only in terms of the extent of his effects. By focusing on the harmony and order of nature, Berkeley unites his view of God with his doctrines of mind, force, grace, and power, and avoids challenges to religious claims that are raised by appeals to analogy. This chapter shows how a letter, supposedly by Berkeley to Peter Browne (“discovered” in 1969 by Berman and Pittion) is, in fact, by John Jackson (1686–1763), controversial theologian and friend of Samuel Clarke.

Berkeley on God’s Knowledge of Pain

Since nothing about God is passive, and the perception of pain is inherently passive, then it seems that God does not know what it is like to experience pain. Nor would he be able to cause us to experience pain, for his experience would then be a sensation (which he does not have). My suggestion is that Berkeley avoids this situation by describing how God knows about pain “among other things” (i.e. as something whose identity is intelligible in terms of the integrated network of things). This avoids having to assume that God has ideas (including pain) apart from his willing that there be perceivers who have specific ideas that are in harmony or not in harmony with one another.

Berkeley and Spinoza

There is a widespread assumption that Berkeley and Spinoza have little in common, even though early Jesuit critics in France often linked them. Later commentators have also recognized their similarities. This chapter focuses on how Berkeley’s comments on the Arnauld–Malebranche debate regarding objective and formal reality, and on his treatment of God’s creation of finite minds within nature relate his theory of knowledge to his doctrine in a way similar to that of Spinoza.

Berkeley’s Christian Neoplatonism and Malebranchean Divine Ideas

Berkeley’s doctrine of archetypes explains how God perceives and can have the same ideas as finite minds. His appeal to Christian Neoplatonism opens up a way to understand how the relation of mind, ideas, and their union is modeled on the Cappadocian Church Fathers’ account of the Persons of the Trinity. This way of understanding Berkeley indicates why he, in contrast to Descartes or Locke, thinks that mind (spiritual substance) and ideas (objects of mind) cannot exist or be thought of apart from one another. It also hints at why Gregory of Nyssa’s immaterialism sounds so much like Berkeley’s.