Berkeley on the Act-Object Distinction

Dialogue-Canadian Philosophical Review

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 651-668

  Lennon, Thomas M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85011525707     PISSN: 00122173     EISSN: 17590949     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300004923     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. G. E. Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism,” reprinted in his Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).
2. George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley: Bishop of Cloyne, edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson, 1949).
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” (Warren E. Steinkraus, ed., “Berkeley and His Modern Critics,” in New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966], p. 162). Below I hope to show that Berkeley provided a fair amount of detail.
4. Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 200
5. Berkeley, Principles, pt.l, sec. 22–23, p. 50
6. in The Works of George Berkeley.
7. The argument was thus baptized by André Gallois, “Berkeley's Master Argument,” The Philosophical Review, 83 (1974): 55–57.
8. Amidst a rather extensive literature, Ian Hacking's Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), esp. p. 41, is one of the very few to take the argument at all seriously.
9. See also Thomas M. Lennon, “Berkeley and the Ineffable,” Synthese, 75 (1988): 231–50, esp. pp. 231–37.
10. Berkeley, Principles, pt. 1, sec. 5, p. 43.
11. Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 43.
12. For more, see also C. M. Turbayne's “The Berkeley, Plato, Aristotle Connection,” in Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by C. M. Turbayne (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 299.
13. Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, p. 195.
14. For more on the genitive analysis of ideas, see Thomas M. Lennon, “Locke and the Logic of Ideas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 18 (2001): 155–77.
15. Claude Lancelot, The Port-Royal Grammar (1660), translated by Jacques Rieux and Bernard E. Rollin (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). 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.
16. References for Berkeley's notebooks are to the corrected edition in George Berkeley, Philosophical Works, edited by M. R. Ayers (London: Dent, 1975).
17. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. 2, p. 194. 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.
18. The Works of George Berkeley, p. 195.
19. The Works of George Berkeley.
20. Robert G. Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), p. 196.
21. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, pp. 195–96.
22. 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).
23. See also Berkeley's Philosophical Commentaries, nos. 810–11 (in The Works 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.”
24. 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). 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.
25. Wilfrid Sellars, “Berkeley and Descartes: Reflections on the Theory of Ideas,” in Studies in Perception, edited by P. K. Machamer and R. G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), p. 289.
26. Daisie Radner, “Berkeley and Cartesianism,” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Suppl. Vol. 4: Essays on Rationalism and Empiricism (1978): 165–76, esp. p. 167.
27. George Pitcher, “Minds and Ideas in Berkeley,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969): 198–207, esp. p. 200.
28. Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology, p. 202.
29. See I. C. Tipton, Berkeley (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 15–16.
30. 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.
31. See Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Vol. 2, p. 125.
32. 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”]).
33. Muehlmann, Berkeley's Ontology, p. 203.
34. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 197.
35. This the long argument of Pierre-Daniel Huet's Traité philosophique de la faiblesse humaine (Paris, 1722).
36. Emanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 72, 88–90.
37. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 89.
38. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), pp. 3–4. 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).
39. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 198.
40. Jonathan Bennett, “Substance, Reality, and Primary Qualities,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1965): 1–17
41. 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.
42. M. J. Loux, Universal and Particulars: Readings in Ontology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 7–8. If Locke has an implicit ontology of predication, it would be the class-inclusion account made explicit in Berkeley.
43. Martin and Armstrong, eds., Locke and Berkeley, p. 94.
44. 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 George Pappas, “Ideas, Minds, and Berkeley,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 17 (1980): 181–94, esp. pp. 188–90.
45. For defense of it, see Alan M. Hausman, “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.
46. But cf. David Hausman and Alan Hausman, Descartes's Legacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 116.
47. Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, sec. 91, pp. 80–81.
48. 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.
49. 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).
50. 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. 3–10. 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.
51. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, p. 244.
52. As M. R. Ayers puts it, once Berkeley has rejected the mind-independent thing-and with it the Cartesian distinction between esse formate 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.