Putting Descartes before the Horse

 

Bishop George Berkeley

I pointed out to a correspondent of late that Descartes, to arrive at his famous statement “I think, therefore I am,” had assumed a stance of radical doubt. He then realized that the one thing he could not doubt was his own thoughts, whether or not they referred to anything outside themselves. And if he was experiencing thoughts, then he existed too. It took him several further steps to come to the conclusion that the physical world existed.

And that conclusion was soon successfully challenged by Berkeley. Berkeley points out that there is no logical necessity to posit the existence of any physical world that corresponds to our perceptions, our thoughts. Therefore—Occam’s Razor—it is improper to do so.

I think I am correct in saying that nobody has successfully challenged Berkeley on that point. Most of us just live our lives ignoring it.

My correspondent reacted badly. 

Of Descartes, she wrote, “Descartes could NOT have affirmed rationally that the brain did not exist! All humans who think and behave normally have brains. No humans who do not have brains can think or behave normally. THAT much science was known to Descartes.”

Of Berkeley, she wrote that he was “delusional and lost in the ego-centricity of his right-brain so that he can no longer interact rationally with the rest of the human and physical world.”

What I see here is “cognitive dissonance”: it is a common cognitive dissonance. It is why we commonly just ignore Berkeley. The idea that the reality of the physical world is open to question is so unexpected to us Moderns that we cannot assimilate it. We simply refuse to entertain the thought.

Meaning we are all mad.

It is demonstrably true that the existence of the physical world is debatable; because it has been debated throughout history. Aside from Descartes and Berkeley, Plato and the Neoplatonists doubted its existence. It was only shadows of puppets reflected on the wall of a dimly-lit cave. The thing was so obvious to Plato that he did not even think to make an argument. And Plato has been pretty well-respected throughout the history of Western philosophy. The medieval school of philosophy called “Realism” rejected attention to the physical world in favour of concentrating only on what was “real”—that is, the ideal forms, which exist only mentally.

The Buddhist world, similarly, considers the world of the senses “maya”: “illusion.” “The power by which the universe becomes manifest; the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world.” So does Taoism. So does Hinduism. The same insight is critical to understanding Canadian indigenous people’s traditional beliefs: far from being modern ecologists, they did not believe that nature was real. We in the modern West are actually in a minority in assuming the importance of the physical world.

Now, realizing that the physical world may not be real is pretty mind-expanding. Real or not, it is an important insight that our experience of the spiritual is immediate and undeniable, but our experience of the physical is indirect and dubious. “Scientism”—our modern pseudo-religion—has this backwards. It is a profoundly inadequate account of reality. Much or most of what we call “mental illness,” I suspect, is caused by this inadequacy. Mental illness happens when we discover our actual experience does not conform with the official world view, or we see flaws and inconsistencies in the matrix, and do not know how to interpret it. It is vital to have a bullet-proof world view—to see the world as it truly is. Our “scientistic” world view has too low a ceiling. Leonard Cohen speaks of a “spiritual catastrophe." 

Even if there is a world that corresponds to our sense-perceptions, we have a second, epistemological problem: how does it correspond, and how can we know that correspondence? Does our experience of the colour “blue,” for example, tell us anything meaningful about the external quality “blue”? Or is the real blue a chuckling demon blinking in semaphore? Do you perceive what I perceive as blue, as what I would call red if I saw with your eyes? For the first thing is mental, a thought in the mind. The second thing remains, in principle, unknown in its essence.

Philosophy is more fun than LSD. And safer. 

Elon Musk on Ultimate Reality

Elon Musk is right, except for his arbitrary identification of physical reality with “base reality.” Take that away, and there is no real philosophical problem. It does not matter whether what we perceive is mental or physical in origin. Ask Bishop Berkeley. Material reality is an unnecessary assumption, and in the end, as Musk points out, an untenable one.

All that really matters is whether God exists. If he does, we can be confident that our experience is ultimately meaningful. If he does not, it equally does not matter whether we perceive “base reality” or some computer simulation: either way, nothing means anything.

Berkeley

The Distinguished Bishop of Cloyne Wearing a Silly Hat.

It is incredibly cheeky of me to say so, but I really think Western philosophy has been in a funk since Berkeley. It seems to me Berkeley resolved everything and has never been successfully challenged. Nevertheless, his conclusions have been so difficult for many to swallow that ever since, philosophers have turned on philosophy itself, seeking to deny it in order to deny Berkeley.

As my first-year philosophy professor said, “but we know there are no unicorns.” Struck me as special pleading at the time, and it still does. The real problem with Berkeley, I think, is that he leaves God too prominent. That is intrinsically frightening to anyone with something to hide. 

Hume Wearing an Even Sillier Hat and Playing the Clown.

Therefore, philosophers since Hume have gone after the fundamental premise that reason can lead us to truth. This is the essence of Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche; of the entire Romantic movement, from the 19th century until now; Marx and Freud and Modernism and Post-Modernism too. It gets quite tedious. It has also been an axe hacking sat the root of Western civilization ever since—rejecting reason means rejecting all established order. We have seen great bloodbaths since. 

Kant, Seen from
Above.

But it is all also, surely, self-contradictory. As we mentioned earlier with regard to Hume, to use a rational argument to show that reason cannot be trusted is to show that this argument, too, cannot be trusted. It is self-contradictory.

It is therefore necessary to conclude that reason can be trusted. The basic operations of reason must be understood as essential, eternal elements of the universe as it truly is—the eternal Logos. 

Hegel, on a Good Day.

Which slams us right into the imaginary stone wall of Berkeley. Since then, there has been nothing in the field of ontology, although there have been good social and natural philosophers.

Berkeley says only perceptions exist; there is no independently existing material world to which they refer. Everything subsists in the mind of God. We are all avatars in a cosmic video game. 

Nietzsche in the Old Philosophers' Home, Dying of Syphilis.

Deal with it, already.