Berkeley on the Meaning of Idea
Stephen H. Daniel
Phil 412.900
January 19, 2014
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Berkeley on the Meaning of Idea
Stephen H. Daniel
Introduction
There is probably no issue more debated in Berkeley scholarship than
what he means by “idea”. This is understandable, considering how he treats the
immediate objects of our perception (i.e., ideas) as the things that comprise the
real world. Of course, most of his contemporaries and many later critics are
puzzled by this way of speaking about ideas because it seems to ignore how
ideas and their objects are ontologically distinct. As is well-known, though, the
early 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley rejects such a distinction by
arguing that it is impossible to conceive of a sensible thing or object apart from
the sensation or perception of it (PHK 5, D 230)1. This allows him, as Michael
Ayers remarks, to use “ideas,” “sensations,” “sensible qualities,” “sensible
things,” and “sensible objects” 2 more or less interchangeably. “Call them which
you will,” Berkeley quips. (D 197, 215)
No doubt part of the difficulty here stems from how Berkeley takes
advantage of ambiguities in the use of terms such as idea and perception. To get
around this, some commentators adopt an act–object model and describe
1. I cite Berkeley’s Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge [PHK] by
section; his Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous [D] is cited by page. Both are in vol. 2 of
The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (9 vols.; London: Thomas
Nelson, 1948-57). Berkeley’s Notebooks [NB] is cited by entry number in Berkeley’s
Philosophical Works, ed. Michael. R. Ayers (Rutland, VT, 1992).
2. Michael Ayers, Introduction to George Berkeley, Philosophical Works, x.
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Berkeleyan ideas simply as the objects of our acts of perceiving or thinking.3
Others rely on the Cartesian distinction between formal and objective reality to
explain how ideas exist formally but not objectively in the mind.4 Worried,
however, that this strategy might allow for talk of real things outside of mind, still
other commentators prefer to think of ideas as intentional objects.5 Yet others
propose an “adverbial” account, in which ideas are not objects of perception at all
but are rather ways of perceiving.6 But because the adverbial account does not
seem to seperate the activity of perceiving from the thing percieved by such
activity, still others7 suggest that we focus, on the one hand, on how mental acts
differ from mental events rather than, on the other, on how mental acts differ from
mental objects.
With such a variety of interpretations, it is no wonder that we have yet to
3. See A. C. Grayling, “Modern Philosophy II: The Empiricists,” in Philosophy: A Guide
Through the Subject, ed. A. C. Grayling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 518; Colin
M. Turbayne, “Lending a Hand to Philonous: The Berkeley, Plato, Aristotle Connection,” in
Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, ed. Colin M. Turbayne (University of Minnesota
Press, 1982), 299; and Kenneth P. Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989), 43, 309.
4. See, for example, Noel Flemming, “Berkeley and Idealism,” Philosophy 60 (1985), 31618. Cf. Daisie Radner, “Berkeley and Cartesianism,” in New Essays on Rationalism and
Empiricism, ed. Charles E. Jarrett et al, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supp. vol. #4 (1978),
167; and Robert G. Muehlmann, “Berkeley’s Problem of Sighted Agency,” in Berkeley’s
Metaphysics: Structural, Interpretive, and Critical Essays, ed. Robert G. Muehlmann (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 164.
5. See Winkler, Berkeley, 7, 185-97; M. R. Ayers, “Berkeley: His Immaterialism and Kant’s
Transcendental Idealism,” in Philosophy Through Its Past, ed. Ted Honderich (New York:
Penguin Books, 1984), 236; Michael Ayers, “Berkeley and the Meaning of Existence,” History of
European Ideas 7 (1986), 569; Geneviève Brykman, “Pleasure and Pain versus Ideas in
Berkeley,” in George Berkeley: Essays and Replies, ed. David Berman (Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 1985), 135. Cf. Robert G. Muehlmann, Berkeley’s Ontology (Indianapolis, 1992), 227.
6. See George Pitcher, Berkeley (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 198-202;
Margaret Atherton, “The Coherence of Berkeley’s Theory of Mind,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 43 (3) (March 1983), 395. Cf. Muehlmann, Berkeley’s Ontology,
226-31; George S. Pappas, Berkeley’s Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 11, 128.
7. See Radner, “Berkeley and Cartesianism,” 167; Harry M. Bracken, “Berkeley and
Malebranche on Ideas,” The Modern Schoolman 41 (1963), 14; Fred Wilson, “On the Hausmans’
‘A New Approach’,” in Muehlmann (ed.), Berkeley’s Metaphysics, 75-78.
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get a good grasp of this principal feature of Berkeley’s philosophy. The purpose
of my discussion is to indicate how by reading Berkeley’s published works (in
particular, the Principles and the Dialogues) through the lens of his early
manuscript Notebooks, we get a clearer view of his doctrine of ideas—
specifically, what he means by saying that qualities are in the mind “by way of
idea.” I do not assume that the published works mark advances beyond his
seperate earlier views. Instead, I contend that some of Berkeley’s published
remarks are complicated by his attempts to accommodate his own insights to
Cartesian or Lockean ways of speaking that treat qualities (as Berkeley puts it)
“by way of mode or attribute.” I conclude that by focusing on the Notebooks we
retrieve the key for understanding why he thinks of real things as ideas by
clarifying what he means by saying that ideas are “in” (i.e., related to) mind.
I. “By Way of Idea”
Though commentators might not agree on what ideas are for Berkeley,
they generally agree on what ideas are not. For example, ideas are not modes,
attributes, qualities, or properties of substances, because that would imply that
minds (“spiritual substances”) are extended or colored whenever they entertain
such ideas.8 Instead, he maintains that qualities are “. . . in the mind only as they
are perceived by it—that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but only by way of
idea” (Principles 49). What “by way of idea” means is clarified (somewhat) in the
Dialogues when he observes that “sensible qualities are objects immediately
8. See A. A. Luce, “The Philosophical Correspondence between Berkeley and Johnson,”
Hermathena 56 (1940), 109. Cf. Muehlmann, Introduction to Berkeley’s Metaphysics, 2-8; Edwin
Allaire, “Berkeley’s Idealism,” Theoria 29 (1963): 229-44. Also see Winkler, Berkeley, 193n.
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perceived . . . [which] exist, not by way of mode or property, but as a thing
perceived in that which perceives it” (D 237). Qualities or objects are thus
sensable only if they are specifically identified as those qualities or objects. That
is, apart from their being identified “by way of idea” (i.e., “in” the mind), qualities
or objects are unintelligible because they have no specific identity. That is why a
sensable quality is an object of mind that exists only in mind, namely, as an idea
(PHK 89).
Berkeley’s remarks on this point lead Andrew Baxter (in 1733), and later
Thomas Reid, G.E. Moore and others, to conclude that, for Berkeley, there is no
difference between an act of perception and the thing perceived.9 Indeed, in the
first edition of the Principles, Berkeley seems to say just that: “In truth the object
and the sensation are the same thing, and cannot therefore be abstracted from
each other.”10 The perception and the thing that the perception is a perception of
are the same, for a perception is this or that perception precisely in virtue of it’s
object. Furthermore, no object can be imagined that is ontologically distinct from
its sensation or perception, for it is by means of that sensation, perception, or
idea that the object is identified as that object.
We can, however, retrieve some of the context in which Berkeley originally
formulates his doctrine of how ideas and minds are related by consulting the
Notebooks. There Berkeley indicates how issues relating to what he means by
idea are resolved only by recognizing how spirits or minds are not objects of
thought (i.e., ideas) but are rather the activity whereby ideas are identified and
9. See C. J. McCracken and I. C. Tipton, eds., Berkeley’s Principles and Dialogues:
Background Source Materials (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 200-1, 206.
10. Pr. 5, in Works 2: 43. Cf. Turbayne, “Lending a Hand to Philonous,” 299.
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thought in relation to one another. In the Principles and Dialogues Berkeley
seems, at least at first glance, to treat minds as if they were objects by referring
to them as “spiritual substances.” But, he says, minds are not objects because
they are not ideas nor are they known “by way of idea”:
There can be no idea formed of a soul or spirit: for all ideas whatever,
being passive and inert . . . they cannot represent unto us, by way of
image or likeness, that which acts. . . . So far as I can see, the words will,
soul, spirit, do not stand for different ideas, or, in truth, for any idea at all,
but for something which is very different from ideas, and which, being an
agent, cannot be like unto, or represented by, any idea whatsoever . . .
(Pr. 27, also see Pr. 135-42; D 233).
If they are not ideas—that is, if they cannot be objects of thought—they cannot
be substances in any Aristotelian, Scholastic, Cartesian, or Lockean sense. So
when Berkeley says minds are substances, he must therefore mean it when, as
he often says, minds are not related to their ideas as supports nor are they
places in which ideas inhere (Principles 49, 73-74, 89; Dialogues 212, 237, 249).
Rather, the “substance” of mind is simply the consciousness of ideas as
determinate, real things.11
Just as this way of understanding mind requires a different understanding
of substance, so it also requires a different understanding of idea. As Berkeley’s
contemporaries would have known, this other understanding draws more
explicitly on how the expression “by way of idea” means a communication from
God.12 Such a communication cannot be from God to independantly existing
11. See Stephen H. Daniel, “Berkeley, Suárez, and the Esse-Existere Distinction,”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2000), 621-36.
12. See Flemming, “Berkeley and Idealism,” 313-14; and Stephen H. Daniel, “Berkeley’s
Christian Neoplatonism, Archetypes, and Divine Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 39
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minds, for that would imply that our minds are objects (at least as far as God is
concerned). So instead of saying that our minds (like other things) exist, Berkeley
is generally careful to say that our minds “subsist”—that is, as the particular
cognitive and affective arrangements and associations that identify the infinate
furniture of the world (NB 109).
Within that mindset, we are said to know a sensible object “by way of
idea”—or have an idea of a thing—when we place it in relation to other things in
our experience (NB 369). This is what it means for something to become an
object of thought (NB 808). An act of mind is the perceiving that there be an
object, not that there is an object (as if the object exists prior to its being
perceived). In perceiving, the mind does not make a judgement about an object
(e.g., that a cherry is red), for that would imply that the terms of the judgement
(cherry, red) are already determinate and intelligible.13 Instead, the preception of
an idea is an event in which ideas or objects are identified as meaningful by
being differentiated. The characterization of a cherry as red is not, therefore, a
judgement about the cherry (as if “cherry” could be intelligible apart from its
color). In other words, the idea cherry is not a proposition, nor (as George
Pappas argues persuasively in his book Berkeley’s Thought14) is anything
predicated of anything else in the idea cherry. Nonetheless, my having the idea
cherry is an expression of God’s will that there be a differentiation of determinate
objects in my experience. This event of perceiving is not a judgment, but it
(2001), 240, 256-58. Cf. Lisa Dowing, “George Berkeley,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
< http://plato.stanford.edu/entries>.
13. Cf. Jody Graham, “Common Sense and Berkeley’s Perception by Suggestion,”
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (1997), 400; Pitcher, Berkeley, 22.
14. Cf. Pappas, Berkeley’s Thought, 134-36, 157.
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expresses a proposition, namely, that there is (in virtue of this event) a
differentiation that heretofore has not existed. We can, of course, later describe
positing an idea in propositional terms (i.e., as a particular act of will responsible
for a particular, seperate idea), but that is done only retroactively.
II. The Activity of the Mind
For Berkeley, to say that no object can exist apart from its being perceived
means that it cannot exist apart from its being willed to be perceived as that
thing. The will that there be differentiation among objects does not exist apart
from its differentiation in effects. Only in its effects can we discern the identities of
things as differences in our affective apprehensions (i.e., as volitions) (NB 808).
Volitions are the actions by which each idea is situated as causally related to
other ideas (NB 831). The actions by which ideas are identified are thus
themselves said to “exist” in only a derivative fashion (NB 644, 673). Though
volitions and the will are not ideas—and thus literally do not exist (NB 792)—they
are real things (NB 806-807).
This leads Berkeley to conclude that the mind is not a thing that perceives
(NB 581) but is rather a particular congeries or concrescence of preceptions (NB
580). This does not mean that the mind is a bundle of already differentiated ideas
(as David Hume argues); rather, it is the “principle” or activity of differentiation
and association by means of which ideas are identified. That is why there is no
mind apart from the activity of perceiving, willing, etc. certain specified ideas:
when there is no succession of ideas (i.e., no thinking), there is no mind (NB
651).
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Nonetheless, the mind and its ideas are different, in the same way that the
activity of distinguishing and associating ideas is different from the objects
distinguished or associated (“bundled”). The activity by which ideas are identified
and related to one another is radically different from the objects (ideas) that are
bundled. Since the identification of ideas as distinct objects occurs through acts
of their being associated in relation to one another (which, by the way, is the
means by which we note the passage of time), ideas are said to exist “in” minds,
in that they are identified, differentiated, and related to one another by means of
an “active principal.” But the principal itself cannot be imagined apart from it’s
activity (e.g., thinking, willing) without making it into an object, that is, to treat it as
an idea.
To say, then, that minds are spiritual substances means that they
“support” such identification, differentiation, and relation by being (as Berkeley
puts it) the “being” or “existence” of ideas. To have an idea, then, is to think it as
an element in a complex of perceiving, willing activity (NB 25, 154, 230).
Abstracted from its integral and affective relation with other ideas in that inate
complex of cognitive, affective activity, an idea would be a passive sensation
whose connections to other ideas is unknown and therefore is considered as
having an external cause (NB 286, 499, 744, 756). But from Berkeley’s
perspective, it would be inappropriate to imagine such disconnected ideas or to
think that souls, persons, or human beings could be mere bundles of ideas.
Every agent or self is differentiated and identifiable in virtue of its volitions
and ideas. When the self is not willing or thinking, it does not exist (NB 83, 646,
674, 791). So long as I exist or will, I must have ideas (NB 842; Pr. 98). Since no
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agent can will without willing something, every volition must be informed by a
perception: in other words, there is no blind agency (NB 812). Just as volitions
are the affective expressions of mind, so ideas are the cognitive expressions of
mind. Ideas are thus the products of volitions, volitions are the relations of ideas,
and thoughts are ideas that are related to one another volitionally.
Concluding Remarks
For Berkeley, then, ideas are intelligible only insofar as they are cognized
by mind. To understand what that means requires that we understand what it
means for something to be known “by way of idea”. That, in turn, requires that we
understand how mind is the means by which we understand ideas. I have
suggested that to do that we focus on the Notebooks rather than the Principles
and Dialogues. In the Notebooks we discover a way to think about ideas in terms
of mind that current interpretations of Berkeley’s doctrine of ideas by and large
overlook. Efforts to describe an idea using the act–object distinction—even as
qualified in formal–objective, intentionality, or adverbial accounts—or using the
mental act–mental event distinction do not capture Berkeley’s central insight
about how ideas or sensible objects are initially identified by being differentiated.
That is, such views overlook his point that existence is not simply added onto the
thing as if it could have an identity apart from its place within a cognitive–affective
matrix that designates a mind. Rather, a thing’s very being consists in its being
perceived as that thing; and its being that thing consists in its being perceived as
that thing by a particular mind. So to describe an idea as a mental event does
really not help us, because one of the issues regarding ideas is what it means to
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call them objects of mind in the first place.
Nonetheless, the distinction between act and event is useful because it
helps us see how ideas are the identities produced in and through events of
differentiation. The act-event distinction also opens up the possibility for thinking
that the differentiation of things by or in mind need not be understood in terms of
discrete acts by individual minds. For if ideas are identified simply in virtue of
their being uniquely perceived by a particular mind, then it is not enough to say
that minds themselves are individuated in the first place by God. For then God’s
individuality itself needs to be explained. 15 Berkeley helps us avoid such an
endless regress, though, by describing ideas as products of differentiating
events, not objects created by the discrete acts of a previously individuated being
(God).
Due to space limitations, I have not been able to pursue other topics that
are of even more interest to me than what Berkeley means by ideas. But since all
of Berkeley’s doctrines are ultimately grounded on the nature of ideas, my having
addressed this topic has to be the starting point for understanding his philosophy
and for seeing his importance in the context of other early modern thinkers.
15. Cf. Stephen H. Daniel, “Berkeley’s Pantheistic Discourse,” International Journal for
Philosophy of Religion 49 (2001), 179, 184-89.