The idealist theory of George Berkeley: the spirit fills everything
When it comes to reflecting on what the mind is, it is very easy to start at the starting point of consciousness. We can doubt many things, but as the philosopher Descartes established, the undoubted thing is that we exist, at least as a conscious mind of itself. Everything else, including what is our personality and our behavior patterns, seems more uncertain.
This approach is solipsistic, that is, part of the starting point of the conscious "I" of each one and questions everything that is not that. One of the most radical thinkers when it came to carrying the solipsism to the last consequences was the Englishman George Berkeley. In the following lines I will explain how did the world see George Berkeley through his idealist theory .
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Who was George Berkeley?
The philosopher George Berkeley was born in Ireland, specifically in a town called Kilkenny, in 1685. After studying at Kilkeny College first and at Trinity College in Dublin, he became an Anglican priest and began to study and write essays.
In the year 1710 he wrote his first important work, the Treaty on the principles of human understanding, and three years later, Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonus. In them he expressed a way of thinking deeply influenced by idealism, as we shall see.
In the year 1714, after writing his main works, he moved to London and traveled occasionally in Europe. Later he moved to Rhode Island with his wife with the goal of creating a seminar. This project failed due to lack of funds, which made him return to London, and later to Dublin, place where he was appointed Bishop a few years later . There he lived the rest of his years until his death in the year 1753.
The idealist theory of George Berkeley
The main aspects of the philosophical theory of Gerorge Berkeley are the following:
1. Strong idealism
Berkeley started from the presupposition that the essential thing is to analyze everything from the point of view of ideas, the immaterial. So that, he cared about studying logical and formal systems , and his thinking focused on working with concepts, beyond empirical observations. This was relatively frequent in his time, since the influence of medieval scholastic philosophy, which was dedicated to justifying the existence of God through reflection, was still noticeable in Europe. However, as we shall see, Berkeley carried his idealism to its ultimate consequences.
2. Monism
As we have seen, George Berkeley was essentially concerned with ideas, which equated the spiritual. However, unlike other idealists, it was not dualistic, in the sense that he did not believe that reality was composed of two fundamental elements such as matter and the spiritual . He was monistic in a sense in which practically no one had been: he only believed in the existence of the spiritual.
3. Extreme solipsism
From the combination of the two previous characteristics, this third arises. Berkeley believed that, in reality, everything we think and perceive is part of the same: the spiritual. In its Christian conception of things, everything that surrounds us is the spiritual substance created by the Christian god so that we live in it. This has as its implication the following characteristic, the most striking of the theory of George Berkeley.
4. Relativism
For Berkeley, when we see a mountain that looks tiny on the horizon, it really is tiny, and it will be transformed as we get closer to it. When we see as if the oar bends when submerged in the water, the oar is really bending. If we think that a sound comes muffled through the wood of a door, that sound is really like that, not because it has crossed any material element.
Everything we perceive is really as we perceive it , since everything is spirit, there is nothing in it that must follow certain rules. What happens is spiritual substance transforming before our eyes by the will of the Christian god. In turn, he believed that what exists is what is perceived, so that everything that is not disappears, literally and in all senses.
- Maybe you're interested: "Types of religion (and their differences in beliefs and ideas)"
In conclusion
Although it was not his intention, the philosophy of George Berkeley shows us to what extent we can fall into absurdities if we only look at our own ideas, if we reject the possibility that there is a material reality out there .
This is something you can fall into regardless of whether you believe in any religion or not. It is, basically, an extreme relativism that we sometimes use in some contexts and situations, but that if we continued in any situation it would lead us to fall into the absurd.
