Berkeley's Idealism | Philosophy Tube

four years ago way back at the start of philosophy tube I made a video about Bishop George Berkeley or I guess you could call in Berkeley if you're from California Berkeley was an Irish philosopher with some pretty interesting ideas that are worth revisiting now especially if you are studying him on the British philosophy a-level syllabus Berkeley thought that the world and everything in it exists only when somebody is observing it when we stop looking at something it no longer exists this theory is called idealism not to be confused with being an idealist which usually means something else and it's neatly captured by the phrase essay asked per kidney to be is to be perceived that's how my old textbooks used to explain it and I think that's a little bit blunt Barclays point is actually a little subtler than that and I think the best way to get at what he's saying is with a challenge so I want you to try and imagine an apple okay I'm imagining an apple now I want you to try imagining an apple without imagining how it looks okay a little bit more challenging but I can imagine an apple that has weight and I can feel it in my hand I can smell it even if I can't see it an invisible Apple basically okay now try imagining an apple without imagining how it smells how it tastes how it looks how it feels an apple with no weight no volume nothing that could be detected by your senses what have you got left nothing right that's what to be is to be perceived means for something to exist at all it must be at least in principle perceptible to us that's just what it means for something to exist and the upshot of this for Berkeley is that something mental namely our minds or God's mind is at the bottom layer of reality reality isn't some objective independently existing thing it's in here Berkeley isn't the only person to have ever thought of this but he is the philosopher that schools universities like to talk about before we talk about how we can use this idea let's anticipate some common questions that you might have the first one is that it really really seems like things exist when we aren't looking at them if you see a tree in spring and then you go away and you come back to it in autumn it's changed and that would be really weird if it didn't exist in the meantime to go through any changes at all the English priest Robert Knox captured this question in the form of a Limerick saying there was a young man who said God must find it exceedingly odd to think that the tree should continue to be when there's no one about in the quad Berkeley's basically there I go again calling a Berkeley's named Barclay Barclays reply to this was that there is someone who is always perceiving everything keeping it there even when we aren't looking at it dear sir your astonishment awed I am always about in the quad and that's why the tree will continue to be since observed by yours faithfully God one of the other questions you might have might be about things like subatomic particles which are so small that we can't really observe them does that mean that they don't exist then according to Berkeley well it's true that we can't observe them directly but by doing experiments with things like particle colliders we can observe the effect that they have in the world and from that deduce that they are there so they are still perceptible just not directly okay we've learned what Berkeley thought about existence and perception and that's kind of cool I guess but who really cares about any of this well here's the really cool bit because he's actually making two points here his first point is that nothing exists unless it is being perceived that's a point about metaphysics about what exists but his second point is that mental stuff minds is at the bottom layer of reality that reality and everything we might say or know about it is inherently subjective and that is a very interesting idea subjective here doesn't mean that it's all made up or that anything goes or that none of it really matters the word subjective gets kind of a bad rap like that it just means what it says that reality is grounded in the experience of a subject this idea has pretty profound implications for the way that we understand science a lot of people have this idea that science is about trying to find objective universal truth but an idealist approach to it would be to say not so much science is about predicting experience so much of the history of mysticism and religion was about prophecy about foretelling the future and science if you do it right is the tool that actually allows you to do that to say that Halley's Comet will return at this time on this date that these drugs will have this effect on the body of the weather on Tuesday will be like this what the ultimate objective nature of reality is I mean who knows if there is such a thing science might not be able to tell you but it can tell you what the weather will be like on Tuesday it can predict human experience there are also some profound political implications for this centering of subjectivity political here means to do with the distribution of power rather than meaning any specific political party for the last several hundred years it was assumed that some people mainly white men were more objective and rational and saw things as they really are in contrast to women who were emotional and hysterical and blew things out of proportion it wasn't just a gendered thing either it was a race thing Western European ideas of government and property were taken by Western Europeans to the universal and rationally grounded whereas first nation American and Canadian ideas about property and government were taken to be primitive and local or just assumed to be absent we talked about that kind of thing when we talked about the philosophy of John Locke a while ago a lot of these ideas are still around today and are still being recreated in new forms a lot of the time people might say that their political opponents don't really care about the facts and don't see things as they really are we use words like freedom fighter terrorist moderate extremist even democracy and tyranny as if there really is some objective truth of the matter and maybe more interestingly as if we ourselves are in the best position to judge and know that truth people still get called out by women on their sexism or by people of color on their racism and reply with things like I must exist or animal racist as if they are in the best position to know that rather than those affected by their actions being in a better position to know the centering of subjectivity in the form of lived experience might prompt us to reevaluate who we listen to about what so maybe sometimes take a step back and say maybe I don't have a main line straight to universal truth maybe this is just the way I see it so how do you see it then in particular when we realize that historically certain types of people have been given licence to push their way of seeing things on everyone else and to back it up with violence well idealism might seem like a neat little idea or curiosity that's never really going to leave the classroom but if to be is to be perceived and you change the way you perceive you can literally change the world boss YouTube is free to watch however it is not free to make because it turns out that rent and food are really expensive patreon.com slash philosophy tube is where people can give me like a couple of bucks a month me and that helps me continue making the show and also remain alive so anything you could do to help me with that would be absolutely lovely [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 124,533

Keywords: philosophy, berkeley, idealism, metaphysics, A-Level, exam, epistemology, thought

Id: hi6TbMEk_T4

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017