Berkeley Wasn't Wrong, Just Misunderstood

A rehabilitation of idealism for a contemporary reader

There is a joke that philosophers tell about George Berkeley, the eighteenth-century Irish bishop who argued that the material world does not exist. Samuel Johnson, famously, responded to the view by kicking a large stone and declaring: I refute it thus. The joke is that Johnson had not refuted anything at all, that his kick proved only that kicking a stone produces a sensation of resistance and pain, which is precisely what Berkeley would have predicted. But the joke has a second edge, which is that most people who dismiss Berkeley are doing something structurally similar to Johnson, mistaking a vivid intuition for a philosophical argument and not noticing that the intuition does not go where they think it does.

I want to take Berkeley seriously, not because I think he was right in all the details of his system, but because I think the core philosophical impulse behind his idealism is both more defensible and more important than the standard dismissal allows. Contemporary philosophy of mind has, in my view, been circling back toward Berkeley for decades without quite admitting it, and reading him carefully reveals why some of the hardest problems in consciousness studies look the way they do.

Was Berkeley really proved wrong by kicking a rock?

WHAT BERKELEY ACTUALLY ARGUED

Berkeley's central claim is captured in the Latin phrase he made famous: esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. What exists, for Berkeley, is either a mind or an idea in a mind. The table in front of you is not a mind-independent material object that causes sensations in you. It is a collection of ideas: of colour, of solidity, of shape, of texture. These ideas exist in your mind when you perceive them, and they exist in God's mind when you do not. The continuity and stability of the physical world is guaranteed by the fact that God perceives everything always, and so nothing goes out of existence merely because we stop looking at it.

This sounds bizarre, and most introductory philosophy courses treat it as a historical curiosity before moving on to positions that take the existence of matter for granted. But the argument Berkeley gives for idealism is not bizarre at all. It proceeds from a premise that almost every philosopher accepts: that what we have direct cognitive access to are our own sensory ideas, not mind-independent objects. We see colours, not wavelengths of light. We feel resistance and pressure, not the microstructure of matter. The question Berkeley asks is what grounds the inference from sensory ideas to a mind-independent material world that supposedly causes them.

His answer is that the inference is groundless, and not merely epistemically groundless but conceptually confused. We have no clear concept of what matter would be if stripped of all sensory qualities. Primary qualities like extension and solidity, which Locke thought were genuinely in objects, turn out on examination to be just as idea-dependent as secondary qualities like colour and smell. You cannot form a concept of pure extension without imagining something extended, and imagining is a mental act. The idea of mind-independent matter is, for Berkeley, an idea of nothing, a verbal combination that fails to correspond to any coherent thought.

Berkeley did not deny that the stone is real, that it hurts when you kick it, or that it continues to exist when you leave the room. He denied that its reality consists in anything other than its being perceived, which is a different and considerably more interesting claim.

THE STANDARD OBJECTIONS AND THEIR LIMITS

The objections to Berkeley are well-rehearsed, and they are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. The most common is the solipsism objection: if the world consists of minds and their ideas, and if I cannot directly perceive other minds, how do I know other people exist? Berkeley's response is that other people's existence is inferred, as it always has been, from the behaviour of their bodies, understood now as complexes of ideas in my mind that are best explained by positing other minds as their source. This is not obviously worse than the standard view, which also requires an inference from observed behaviour to the existence of other minds.

A second objection is the one Johnson made: the physical world is simply too solid, too resistant, too independent of my wishes and expectations to be merely a set of ideas. Berkeley's response is to distinguish between ideas of imagination, which we can alter at will, and ideas of sense, which are more vivid, more orderly, and more independent of our will. The difference between dreaming a stone and actually kicking one is not a difference between mental and non-mental but a difference between one kind of mental content and another. The ideas of sense are, for Berkeley, more real than ideas of imagination, not because they correspond to mind-independent matter but because they are more vivid, more coherent, and more systematically ordered by laws of nature that express God's rational governance of the world.

The God-guarantee is the part of Berkeley's system that most contemporary readers find hardest to accept, and reasonably so. The claim that unobserved objects continue to exist because God perceives them imports a theological commitment that cannot be assumed in a secular philosophical context. This is a genuine weakness, though it is worth noting that Berkeley is not simply helping himself to God as a deus ex machina. His argument for God's existence is independent of the idealism and follows from his broader epistemology. Whether it succeeds is a further question, but the structure is not as ad hoc as it is sometimes presented.

A NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Berkeley wrote at a moment when Locke's representative realism had made the sceptical problem about the external world urgent in a new way. If what we perceive are representations of an external reality rather than that reality itself, the question of how we know the representations are accurate becomes pressing. Berkeley's idealism is partly a response to this problem: by collapsing the gap between representation and reality, he eliminates the sceptical threat at its source. Whether he eliminates it at too high a cost is the question his philosophy poses to us.

BERKELEY AND THE HARD PROBLEM

Here is where Berkeley becomes relevant to contemporary philosophy of mind in a way that is rarely made explicit. The hard problem of consciousness, as David Chalmers has articulated it, asks why physical processes give rise to subjective experience. Why is there something it is like to see red, to feel pain, to hear music? The problem is hard because no amount of functional or physical description seems to close the explanatory gap between neural processes and conscious experience.

Berkeley dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it, and the dissolution is instructive. If the physical world is itself constituted by ideas in minds, then there is no explanatory gap between the physical and the mental to cross. The redness of the apple is an idea. The neural process that occurs when I see the apple is also a complex of ideas, understood within the framework of natural law that God has established. The question of how the physical gives rise to the mental does not arise, because the physical was always already mental.

This is not the same as saying that the hard problem is easy. Berkeley is not offering a functionalist reduction of consciousness to information processing. He is inverting the explanatory order. Rather than starting with the physical as primary and asking how the mental fits in, he starts with the mental as primary and asks how the apparent independent existence of the physical is to be understood. That inversion is exactly what some contemporary philosophers of mind, approaching from very different directions, have been arguing for. Galen Strawson's case for panpsychism, which holds that the physical was always already experiential, is structurally similar to Berkeley's move even though it proceeds from entirely different premises and arrives at a different conclusion about what the physical ultimately is.

The hard problem asks how the physical gives rise to the mental. Berkeley's answer is that the question is malformed: there is no non-mental physical for the mental to be given rise to by. Start from experience and the problem looks entirely different.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESONANCE

There is a strand of twentieth-century philosophy that independently arrived at positions with strong Berkeley-adjacent commitments, without typically acknowledging the connection. Husserl's phenomenology begins from the structure of consciousness and argues that the objects of experience are constituted within consciousness rather than simply given to it from outside. This is not Berkeley's idealism, but the insistence on beginning from the first-person perspective and building outward from there, rather than starting from a third-person physical description and trying to fit experience in, is a Berkeleyan methodological commitment even when it is not presented as such.

Merleau-Ponty goes further. His account of perception insists that we do not perceive a mind-independent world and then form representations of it. We are always already in a perceptual relation with a world that is constituted in and through our embodied engagement with it. The perceived world is not a representation of a mind-independent reality but the correlate of a perceiving subject, something whose being is bound up with being experienced. This is closer to Berkeley than most phenomenologists are comfortable admitting.

What the phenomenological tradition contributes that Berkeley lacks is an account of how the world can be intersubjectively shared even if it is constituted in consciousness. For Berkeley, the shared world is guaranteed by God. For Husserl, intersubjectivity is constituted through a complex of mutual recognition between embodied subjects, each of whom constitutes a world that is structured to be shareable with others. This is a more satisfying account for secular purposes, and it suggests that the Berkeleyan core, the priority of the experiential over the material, can be detached from the theological apparatus and defended on independent grounds.

WHAT THE MISUNDERSTANDING CONSISTS IN

The standard misunderstanding of Berkeley is to read him as denying the reality of the physical world. He is not. He is denying that the physical world's reality consists in being mind-independent. These are quite different claims. The table is real. Its colours are real. Its solidity is real. What is not real, for Berkeley, is an underlying material substrate that the table would continue to be even if there were no minds at all to perceive it.

This matters because most of the intuitive force of the objections to Berkeley is generated by the first misreading rather than the second. If Berkeley were saying that the table is not real, then Johnson's kick would be relevant. But Berkeley is saying that the table's reality is of a different kind than we habitually assume, that it is constituted by ideas rather than underwritten by matter. The kick produces a real sensation of resistance, which is a real idea, and that is all the reality the table needs or has.

The deeper misunderstanding is to assume that idealism is a position adopted from the armchair in defiance of common sense, whereas materialism is the commonsense view that any reasonable person would hold. This historical narrative is mistaken. Materialism in the modern sense, the view that reality is fundamentally physical and that the mental is either reducible to the physical or entirely mysterious, is a product of the scientific revolution that is no older than Berkeley himself. What Berkeley was arguing against was not a timeless common sense but a specific philosophical and scientific picture of matter that Descartes and Locke had bequeathed, a picture that Berkeley thought generated severe philosophical problems, including the sceptical problem about the external world and the problem of how the mental relates to the physical, that idealism could dissolve. He was not obviously wrong about that.

A BERKELEY FOR THE PRESENT

What would it mean to rehabilitate Berkeley for a contemporary reader who cannot simply accept the theological framework? I think it means extracting three commitments that can be defended without it.

The first is methodological: begin from experience. Whatever philosophy of mind you end up with, the data that needs to be explained is the character of experience as we undergo it. A philosophy that makes experience inexplicable or epiphenomenal has failed on its own terms, not merely because it is counterintuitive but because it has abandoned the explanandum it was supposed to address.

The second is ontological: take seriously the possibility that the priority relation between the physical and the mental runs the other way from how we habitually assume. The assumption that matter is primary and mind derivative is not a discovery of science. It is a philosophical interpretation of science, and there are philosophers of physics and philosophers of mind who have argued, from different directions, that the interpretation is both unnecessary and confused. Berkeley saw this clearly in his own context. The specific arguments he gave are not all transferable to ours, but the diagnosis is still apt.

The third is critical: examine what you actually mean by matter. Berkeley's point that the concept of mind-independent matter is empty when pressed is a point that continues to have force. The hard problem of consciousness is, in part, a symptom of that emptiness. We cannot explain how the physical gives rise to the mental because we have no account of the physical that does not already help itself to mental concepts in its description. Extension, resistance, solidity: these are all concepts formed in experience and carrying the mark of experience in their content. Berkeley was the first philosopher to press this point systematically, and it has not been adequately answered.

I am not arguing that Berkeley was straightforwardly correct. His theology creates problems that cannot be wished away, and the version of idealism that is defensible today would need to look quite different from his. But the impulse behind his idealism, the refusal to take matter as a given and the insistence on starting from experience, is an impulse that philosophy of mind has repeatedly had to rediscover. It would save considerable effort to engage with it directly, in the form that Berkeley gave it, rather than arriving at Berkeley-adjacent positions by circuitous routes and then declining to acknowledge the provenance.

The author is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford and a researcher in philosophy of mind. Published at magicinharmony.com