What is an ontological argument? In the introduction to Alvin Plantinga’s The Ontological Argument, written by
Richard Taylor, the argument is defined simply as one which ‘purports to prove,
simply from the concept of God as the supreme being, that God’s existence
cannot rationally be doubted by anyone having such a concept of Him.’ He goes
on to say that ‘it is thus a purely a priori argument, that is to say,
one that does not appeal to any facts of experience but is concerned solely
with the implications of concepts – in this case, the concept of God’.
Our modern understanding of the ontological argument is that it was first
formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century C.E. This
is not disputed. But it is perfectly clear that some kind of ontological
argument lies behind the arguments which are found in Plato’s semi-secularised
discussions, in Aristotle (particularly in the Nicomachean Ethics), and,
if Plato is to be considered an accurate historian of the views of Parmenides,
also to be found in his dialogue Parmenides.
What I intend to do here is to review the history of the ontological argument
from St. Anselm onwards, and then to explore the likely nature of the
ontological argument in antiquity. The range of questions which might be asked
by a neophyte, or an advanced student, give many clues about the probable shape
of such an argument.
The Ontological Argument in Anselm
“Anselm… is rightly regarded as the inventor and perfecter of the ontological argument, though his philosophical inspiration was largely derived from St. Augustine. … His position is not that of a skeptic seeking some rational persuasion of God’s existence, but that of a believer seeking a single conception which would make manifest at once God’s existence and God’s attributes”. [1]
The following is extracted from chapters 2-4 of St Anselm’s Proslogion, quoted from Alvin
Plantinga’s The Ontological Argument. Plantinga takes his text from Anselm’s
Basic Writings, translated by S. N. Deane, with an introduction by Charles
Hartshorne, 2nd edition, 1962, Open Court Publishing Company.
Prosologion, Ch. II –
Truly there is a God, although the fool hath said in his
heart, There is no God.
And so, Lord, do thou, who dost give understanding to faith, give me, so
far as thou knowest it to be profitable, to understand that thou art as we
believe; and that thou art that which we believe. And, indeed, we believe that
thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no
such nature, since the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalm
xiv. 1). But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which
I speak – a being than which nothing greater can be conceived – understands
what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he
does not understand it to exist.
We might rephrase this thus: “Our belief is that God is a being greater
than any other which can possibly be conceived. And it is this greatest of all
beings which gives us understanding. A fool can understand the conception of
this greatest of all beings as a conception, though he does not understand the
existence of the greatest of all beings”.
This might be criticized by pointing out that two key elements in this
argument are undefined. We have a definition of ‘God’ as the greatest of all
beings.’ However we do not have a clear definition of the meaning of ‘greatest’
in this context, and neither do we have a clear definition of ‘existence.’ Both
of these terms are made to do much work in this discussion.
For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another
to understand that the object exists. When a painter first conceives of what he
will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding, but he does not yet
understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made
the painting, he both has it in his understanding, and he understands that it
exists, because he has made it.
Anselm makes it clear he understands the distinction between knowledge of a
concept, and knowledge of the existence of something – in this case ‘God’. The illustration
which he uses here is interesting. He likens the conceiving mind to the mind of
a painter conceiving a representation of an object – before he begins to paint
he has a conception in his mind of what he intends to paint, but does not
understand it ‘to be’ ‘because he has not yet performed it’. But once the
conception is painted, the painting has come to be (i.e., it ‘exists’).
However, a painter creates a representation by painting it, not an object
itself. This is an important detail if the argument is designed to prove the
‘existence’ of God, rather than a physical object. It is fair to argue that the
conception in the mind of the painter is also a representation, in that it is a
conception rather than the thing itself. So the painting is a representation of
a representation. The painting exists in the sense that it is a physical object
existing in the world, containing an image which may or may not be a
representation of an object which exists.
Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists
in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived.
For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood,
exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can
be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists
in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which
is greater.
Rephrasing the first part of this, ‘even the fool can conceive that an idea
in the understanding can be of something which is greater than anything other
which can be conceived. He can understand this, and what is understood, has an
existence in the understanding’.
It is true that the conception of something which is greater than anything
other which can be conceived can be a concept, even in a foolish mind. But it
does not follow that it is, as Descartes would say later on, a clear and
distinct conception. ‘Great’ is a term which can mean many things, and to a
fool, it is in the nature of foolishness for its meaning to be misunderstood.
Anselm then passes on to the suggestion that something which is greater
than anything which can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone.
The reason he gives is that, if this conception exists only in the understanding,
then to conceive it to exist in reality would be greater.
This requires deconstruction. If the conception, in the understanding of
the fool, is unclear and indistinct, then it does not follow that what can be
conceived in the understanding must exist in the world. If the conception is
clear and distinct in the understanding of the wise man, does it follow that
that which is conceived in the mind must also exist as a physical reality? The
answer is no, in that, no matter how clear and distinct the conception of God
is in the mind, it is a conception which describes what can be known or
inferred of God by the mind of man. And man by his very nature, must
participate in the quality of foolishness more than the quality of the divine.
A further criticism of this passage might be that ‘existence’ is used very
loosely. Can we speak of God existing, rather than speaking of the reality of
God? This is an important point if part of the definition of God is that the
divine possesses a transcendent reality, rather than a physical one.
The only circumstance in which the concept of God in the understanding must
also exist as a reality, is where that reality is transcendent - where the
possessor of the understanding is also divine, and thus necessarily
participates in the being of God through the clearest and most distinct
understanding of the nature of God.
Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be
conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which
nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be
conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that
there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it
exists both in the understanding and in reality.
As already pointed out, that if there is a conception of that which nothing
greater can be conceived in the understanding, and the understanding alone, it
does not follow that there is no doubt that there ‘exists’ a being (or rather
that a being of this nature has reality), and that it exists both in
understanding and in reality. J.G.
Frazer suggested that Plato sometimes confused an epistemology with an
ontology, and Anselm seems to be confusing the idea of naming, conceiving and
describing a being with the necessity of the reality of such a being. Again,
only if the scope of the understanding is as clear and distinct as the reality,
would there be the impossibility of that understanding existing alone. And that
is not a likely proposition. The ultimate nature of reality is always going to
transcend our capacity to conceive of it, except in very special circumstances.
From Chapter III:
God cannot be conceived not to exist – God is that, than
which nothing greater can be conceived. –That which can be conceived not to
exist is not God.
And it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be
conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot
be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived
not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can
be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be
conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so
truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it
cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord, our
God.
Anselm has accepted his proof of the ‘reality’ of God, and is now building
on it. I am not sure how one can argue that conceiving of a being which cannot
be conceived not to exist, is necessarily ‘greater’ than one which can be conceived not to exist. Again,
this only makes sense if the conception in the understanding is of the same
nature as the being who exists in reality. He argues however that if the
conception which is greater than anything which can be conceived, can be
conceived not to be real, then it is not that which is greater than anything
which can be conceived. And that this would be an irreconcilable contradiction.
How so? We are talking in terms of the subjective powers of the mind here. In
the mind of the fool, it is clearly possible to conceive in the understanding a
being than which greater nothing can be conceived, and then to change opinion
to that in which it can be conceived not to be real. But this is a fallible
judgement, so for the most part this this does not throw up an irreconcilable
contradiction.
So truly, therefore, dost thou exist, O Lord, my God,
that thou canst not be conceived not to exist; and rightly. For, if a mind
could conceive of a being better than thee, the creature would rise above the
Creator; and this is most absurd. And, indeed, whatever else there is, except
thee alone, can be conceived not to exist. To thee alone, therefore, it belongs
to exist more truly than all other beings, and hence in a higher degree than
all others. For, whatever else exists does not exist so truly, and hence in a
less degree it belongs to it to exist. Why, then has the fool said in his
heart, there is no God (Psalm xiv. 1), since it is so evident to a rational
mind, that thou dost exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is
dull and a fool?
Anselm is here building on his conclusion that God cannot be conceived not
to exist. It follows therefore that if a mind could conceive of something
greater, that creature would rise above the Creator, which (to Anselm) would be
‘most absurd’. We can sense here that it is almost the case that the reality of
the God he is discussing is dependent on whether or not the understanding of
the believer is sufficiently acute to bring the God into being. But essentially
here Anselm is looking for support for the faithful, and is not arguing for the
power of an understanding of the divine, and of the word.
He argues that all other things excepting God can be conceived not to
exist. This implies that they are part of the secular world rather than the
divine reality. However the corollary is that the divine reality is
qualitatively beyond mundane reality. But again, if the conception in the
understanding of the faithful is less than perfect, then it does not follow
that the conception of God cannot be conceived not to exist. And this would be
true if the understanding was nearly at the highest degree of the spectrum
which runs from foolish to wise.
From Chapter IV:
How the fool has said in his heart what cannot be
conceived. – A thing may be conceived in two ways: (1) when the word signifying
it is conceived; (2) when the thing itself is understood. As far as the word goes,
God can be conceived not to exist; in reality he cannot.
But how has the fool said in his heart what he could not
conceive; or how is it that he could not conceive what he said in his heart?
Since it is the same to say in the heart, and to conceive.
But, if really, nay, since really, he both conceived,
because he said in his heart; and did not say in his heart, because he could
not conceive; there is more than one way in which a thing is said in the heart
or conceived. For, in one sense, an object is conceived, when the word
signifying it is conceived; and in another, when the very entity, which the
object is, is understood.
In this fourth chapter it is as if Anselm has reflected on what he has
written, and realizes he needs to deal with the objection that he is confusing
(or conflating) an epistemology with an ontology. An object can be conceived in
terms of words (what Bertrand Russell would say was ‘knowledge by
description’), or in terms of a non-textual, intuitive understanding, (which
Russell terms ‘knowledge by acquaintance’).
In the former sense, then, God can be conceived not to
exist; but in the latter, not at all. For no one who understands what fire and
water are can conceive fire to be water, in accordance with the nature of the
facts themselves, although this is possible according to the words. So then, no
one who understands what is can conceive that God does not exist, although he
says these words in his heart, either without any, or with some foreign
signification. For, God is that than which a greater cannot be conceived. And
he who thoroughly understands this, assuredly understands that this being so
truly exists, that not even in concept can it be non-existent. Therefore, he
who understands that God so exists, cannot conceive that he does not exist.
Anselm acknowledges that in terms of description, a conception in the
understanding may be imperfect, and consequently it is possible to conceive of
the non-existence of God. But in terms of knowledge by acquaintance, to
continue with Russell’s terminology, it is not possible to conceive of the
non-existence of God. He uses the concrete images of fire and water, and argues
that our understanding of those (which will include knowledge of their
properties and characteristics), according to their differing natures, could
not be be confused with one another; but that this might be possible in terms
of their descriptions in words. He then argues that ‘no one who understands
what is’ (i.e., what is real) can conceive that God does not exist, although it
remains possible to express the notion in words, either words without
signification, or with some signification which has no bearing on the question
of the reality of God. He who has a thorough understanding of this, certainly
understands that God so truly exists, that not even in concept can God not be
real.
This is placing a great deal on non-textual and intuitive understanding.
The fact remains that intuitive understanding can be as fallible and plain
wrong as any other kind, and so Anselm has not made a watertight case for the
reality of God. Though this is an argument which might please the faithful, who
might be inclined to amplify their faith in line with what they believe
intuitively to be the case.
I thank thee, gracious Lord, I thank thee; because what I
formerly believed by thy bounty, I now so understand by thine illumination,
that if I were unwilling to believe that thou dost exist, I should not be able
not to understand this to be true.
Richard Taylor writes that: “Anselm gives some background to how he came to construct his argument for the proof of the reality of God in the Proslogion.’ He was, he writes, seeking some single argument that would not only prove God’s existence but make evident God’s attributes as well. The central idea of the ontological argument, that perfection implies existence, kept forcing itself on him, but he rejected it as a specious and illusory basis for any argument until, finally, he realized he could find no rational ground for rejecting it any longer, whereupon he joyfully embraced it as providing the proof he had been seeking.” [2]
The Ontological Argument in Descartes
The argument developed by Descartes differs from Anselm’s in a number of respects. He avoids the term ‘great’ (and notes the fact in the course of his argument). Instead he uses the concept ‘perfect’, so that God is described as the ‘supremely perfect Being’. He also uses variations on the phrase ‘clearly and distinctly’ in connection with his apprehension of the idea of God. [3]
If just because I can draw the idea of something from my
thought, it follows that all which I know clearly and distinctly as pertaining
to this object does really belong to it, may I not derive from this an argument
demonstrating the existence of God? It is certain that I no less find the idea
of God, that is to say, the idea of a supremely perfect Being, in me, than that
of any figure or number whatever it is; and I do not know any less clearly and
distinctly that an actual and eternal existence pertains to this nature than I
know that all that which I am able to demonstrate of some figure or number
truly pertains to the nature of this figure or number, and therefore, although
all that I concluded in the preceding Meditations were found to be false, the
existence of God would pass with me as at least as certain as I have ever held
the truths of mathematics to be.
To paraphrase: ‘If it follows that an idea in thought can be expressed, and
all I know clearly and distinctly about it,
is the case, then may I not use this as the basis of an argument to
prove the reality of God?’ He finds the idea of a ‘supremely perfect Being’ as
real within himself as ideas of geometric figures, and numbers. He does not
know any less clearly and distinctly that actual and eternal existence is a
property of the supreme perfect Being, than he knows all which he can
demonstrate in relation to geometrical figures or a number truly comprises the
properties of these. And were everything else in the preceding Meditations to
be found false, the reality of God would be as real for Descartes as he ever
held the truths of mathematics to be.
However clear and distinct is Descartes idea of a ‘supremely perfect
Being’, and that this idea can be expressed, it does not follow that it can be
used as the basis of an argument to prove the reality of God. To follow his
analogy, his knowledge of the properties of geometrical figures and numbers,
may be extensive and even comprehensive, but it does not follow that his
knowledge of these properties is complete. The properties of which he knows are
just that. It is obvious that it is easier to circumscribe the properties and
characteristics of geometrical figures and numbers than to have a clear and
distinct idea of the properties and nature of a ‘supremely perfect Being’. What
Descartes can have in his mind is a ‘notion’ of the properties and nature of such
a perfect Being. He might think that the reality of God, the existence of God
is at least as real as the truths of mathematics; this is a notion only, rather
than something which can be established.
This indeed is not at first manifest, since it would seem
to present some appearance of being a sophism. For being accustomed in all
other things to make a distinction between existence and essence, I easily
persuade myself that the existence can be separated from the essence of God,
and that we can thus conceive God as not actually existing. But, nevertheless,
when I think of it with more attention, I clearly see that existence can no
more be separated from the essence of God than can its having its three angles
equal to two right angles be separated from the essence of a rectilinear
triangle, or the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley; and so there is
not any less repugnance to our conceiving a God (that is, a Being supremely
perfect) to whom existence is lacking (that is to say, to whom a certain
perfection is lacking), than to conceive of a mountain which has no valley.
Descartes defends himself against the possible charge that his argument is
sophistry. He can ordinarily distinguish between the existence and the essence
of something. And so he can easily persuade himself that the property
‘existence’ can be separated from the ‘essence’ of God. And thus that we can
conceive of God as not possessing the property of something which exists. This
however he says is the result of inattentive thinking, and more attention to
the question allows him to clearly see that the existence of God cannot be
separated from the essence of God any more than the properties of a
right-angled triangle can be separated from the essence of it. Or any more than
that the idea of a mountain can be separated from the idea of a valley. So the
repugnance of the idea of conceiving a supremely perfect Being without the
property of existence is no less than to conceive of a mountain without a
valley.
The problem here is the conception of existence as a form or mode of
perfection. In antiquity this equation would not have been made – rather the
nature and properties of divinity would have been drawn in contrast with those
of existence. There are many ways to express this difference – the secular
world has existence, the world of coming-to-be and passing-away has existence,
man has existence, the world of things and of representation has existence. The
Divine and the eternal did not have existence in the same way in the ancient world.
The world of reality was understood to be separate in essence from the secular
world; this separate reality was the realm of the divine, and so existence
would not be a property of the divine, even if the divine was (as it generally
was) considered to be completely real. This is not to say that the divine could
not manifest or act in the world of existence; but that existence is a species
of imperfection, with which the divine could be (and was) contrasted. Descartes
cannot mean that God is real in the sense of having a presence in the material
world. And it is curious that later he treated God as if he was walled up in
his own sphere. This was necessary to promote the idea that one could do
mathematics without reference to God, and without concern that God would
interfere with the purely mathematical workings of the world.
But although I cannot really conceive of a God without
existence any more than a mountain without a valley, still from the fact that I
conceive of a mountain with a valley, it does not follow that there is such a
mountain in the world; similarly although I conceive of God as possessing
existence, it would seem that it does not follow that there is a God which
exists; for my thought does not impose any necessity upon things, and just as I
may imagine a winged horse, although no horse with wings exists, so I could
perhaps attribute existence to God, although no God existed.
Here, Descartes concedes that though he can conceive of the supreme perfect
Being as possessing existence, it does not necessarily follow that there is a
God which exists, since his thought ‘does not impose any necessity upon
things’. What he means by this is that the reality or otherwise or god is not
dependent on his understanding of the nature of God.’ So Descartes might be
attributing the property of existence to God, even if no God existed.
But a sophism is concealed in this objection; for from
the fact that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, it does not follow
that there is any mountain or any valley in existence, but only that the
mountain and the valley, whether they exist or do not exist, cannot in any way
be separated one from the other. While from the fact that I cannot conceive God
without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and hence
He really exists; not that my thought can bring this to pass, or impose any
necessity on things, but, on the contrary, because the necessity which lies in
the thing itself, i.e., the necessity of the existence of God determines me to
think in this way. For it is not within my power to think of God without
existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection)
though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.
Descartes argues that there is sophistry in this objection, before
introducing a genuine sophism into the argument. He says that he cannot
conceive a mountain without a valley, but agrees that it does not follow that
there is any mountain or valley in existence. But, that whether they do or do
not exist, the mountain and the valley cannot be separated from one another. He
then says that since he cannot conceive of God without the property of
existence, ‘it follows that existence is inseparable from him, and hence He
really exists. Descartes has introduced the idea of the ‘necessity’ of the
existence of God here, quite shamelessly: he argues that it is ‘not that my
thought can bring this to pass, or impose any necessity on things, but, on the
contrary, because the necessity which lies in the thing itself, i.e., the necessity of the existence of God
determines me to think in this way’. That this remains a subjective
understanding, rather than an objective property of God, is confirmed by the
words which follow: ‘For it is not within my power to think of God without
existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme
perfection), though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or
without wings.’ Again the notion that existence is a form of perfection is called
into play, and in conjunction with the necessity of the existence of God,
because he is perfect, and the circular argument is complete.
Descartes then passes on to a discussion of the relationship between the
matter of mathematical figures in his mind and in existence, as a comparison
with his proof of the existence of God. The following large paragraph is split
into four parts for convenience:
And we must not here object that it is in truth necessary
for me to assert that God exists after having presupposed that He possesses
every sort of perfection, since existence is one of these, but that as a matter
of fact my original supposition was not necessary, just as it is not necessary
to consider that all quadrilateral figures can be inscribed in the circle; for
supposing I thought this, I should be constrained to admit that the rhombus
might be inscribed in the circle since it is a quadrilateral figure, which,
however, is manifestly false.
Descartes is arguing that it is not necessary to assert that God exists
once he has presupposed (as part of the definition of the supreme perfect
Being) that He possesses every sort of perfection (the property of existence
being one of these), for the supposition was not necessary (in the sense that
it is not necessary intellectually to assert this for the properties of things
to be real), just as one does not have to think of facts such as ‘all
quadrilateral figures can be inscribed in the circle’. Descartes here is
referring to the strict definition of a figure being inscribed in a circle,
which requires that each of the vertices should be in contact with the circle.
The truth of what can be contained within a circle is not constrained by the
looseness of a mathematician’s statement such as ‘all quadrilateral figures can
be inscribed in the circle’. The rhombus is a quadrilateral figure, but it does
not meet the requirement of each of the vertices being in contact with the
circle.
We must not, I say, make any such allegations because
although it is not necessary that I should at any time entertain the notion of
God, nevertheless whenever it happens that I think of a first and a sovereign
Being, and, so to speak, derive the idea of Him from the storehouse of my mind,
it is necessary that I should attribute to Him every sort of perfection,
although I do not get so far as to enumerate them all, or to apply my mind to
each one in particular. And this necessity suffices to make me conclude (after
having recognized that existence is a perfection) that this first and sovereign
Being really exists; just as though it is not necessary for me ever to imagine
any triangle, yet, whenever I wish to consider a rectilinear figure composed
only of three angles, it is absolutely essential that I should attribute to it
all those properties which serve to bring about the conclusion that its three
angles are not greater than two right angles, even although I may not be then
considering this point in particular.
Descartes here makes an interesting series of statements. These seem to be
arguing that the notion (and Descartes uses this word here rather than
‘understanding’, which was used earlier in the argument) of God does not have
to be conceived ‘at any time’, but that when it is conceived, he thinks first
of ‘a first and sovereign Being’, and derives the idea of Him ‘from the
storehouse of my mind’. And it is
necessary to attribute to this derived idea ‘every sort of perfection’. But, in
the light of his frequent use of the phrase ‘clearly and distinctly’ in
connection with his understanding of the properties of the supremely perfect
Being, it is extraordinary to read the succeeding text. He says that does not
‘get so far as to enumerate them all, or to apply my mind to each one in
particular’. So in what way is his understanding ‘clear and distinct’? I think
here Descartes is emphasizing that his understanding or notion of God has
nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of God. But if the understanding
of God is actually just a notion, involving loose ideas of perfection, then in
what way does this constitute a proof of the existence of the ‘supremely
perfect Being’? In the text which follows Descartes emphasizes that he does not
desire to accept anything which he cannot conceive clearly and distinctly.
But when I consider which figures are capable of being
inscribed in the circle, it is in no wise necessary that I should think that
all quadrilateral figures are of this number; on the contrary, I cannot even
pretend that this is the case, so long as I do not desire to accept anything
which I cannot conceive clearly and distinctly. And in consequence there is a
great difference between the false superstitions such as this, and the true
ideas born within me, the first and principal of which is that of God.
Here Descartes is confronting loose definition, in this case the
overgeneralization that all quadrilateral figures can be inscribed in a circle.
The overgeneralization contradicts the need to conceive the understanding of
God ‘clearly and distinctly’. And so there is a great difference between
notions based on overgeneralisations such as ‘all quadrilaterals can be
inscribed in a circle’, and the ideas born in the mind, the first of which is
that of God.
For really I discern in many ways that this idea is not
something factitious, and depending solely on my thought, but that it is the
image of a true and immutable nature; first of all, because I cannot conceive
anything but God himself to whose essence existence necessarily pertains; in
the second place because it is not possible for me to conceive two or more Gods
in this same position; and, granted that there is one such God who now exists,
I see clearly that it is necessary that He should have existed from all
eternity, and that He must exist eternally; and finally, because I know an
infinitude of other properties in God, none of which I can either diminish or
change.
To Descartes this idea of the supreme perfect Being is not something
fabricated by the human mind, but it is the ‘image of a true and immutable
nature’. Then he says something quite surprising - he says he cannot ‘conceive
anything but God himself to whose essence existence necessarily pertains’. What does he mean by this? Is he saying that
he can doubt the existence of all other entities? Or perhaps he is saying that
existence is not a necessary or essential property of all entities other than
God? Descartes has subtly shifted his position here, by modifying his implicit
definition of ‘existence’. Now it is an essential property of the divine, and
perhaps an inessential property of all other entities and objects. The question
arises therefore, is the modified definition of existence something which has
aspects in common with the existence associated with entities and objects? Is
it really the case in the mind of Descartes that ‘God’ possesses the property
existence more than everyday objects which we are more accustomed to say exist?
And he cannot conceive two or more gods in the same position. Granted that
this supremely perfect Being exists, it is necessary that He should have
existed from all eternity, and that He must exist eternally.
This is the end of the paragraph
split into four parts . Descartes now concludes his argument:
For the rest, whatever proof or argument I avail myself
of, we must always return to the point that it is only those things which we
conceive clearly and distinctly that have the power of persuading me entirely.
And although amongst the matters which I conceive of in this way, some
indeed are manifestly obvious to all,
while others only manifest themselves to those who consider them closely and
examine them attentively; still, after they have once been discovered, the
latter are not esteemed as any less certain than the former. For example, in
the case of every right-angled triangle, although it does not so manifestly
appear that the square of the base is equal to the squares of the other two
sides as that this base is opposite to the greatest angle; still, when this has
once been apprehended, we are just as certain of its truth as of the truth of
the other. And as regards God, if my mind were not preoccupied with prejudices,
and if my thought did not find itself on all hands diverted by the continual
pressure of sensible things, there would be nothing which I could know more
immediately and more easily than Him. For is there anything more manifest than
that there is a God, that is to say, a Supreme Being, to whose essence alone
existence pertains?
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley
I’ve chosen to look initially at the philosophical outlook of Berkeley
through public criticism by Bertrand Russell. [4] He was born in
Ireland in 1685, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin when he was
twenty-two years old. What was peculiar about his philosophy was that he denied
the existence of matter, and in fact the reality of the objective world. He
argued that material objects had existence only in so far as they are perceived
by the viewer.
The obvious criticism of this theory is that if perception is the only
thing which gives objects their reality, then when we are not looking at them,
they should not exist.
To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for
instance, would cease to exist if no-one was looking at it, he replied that God
always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to material
objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at
them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have
an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his opinion, a
weighty argument for the existence of God.
His principal philosophical concerns were expressed in a small number of
works written before he was twenty-eight years old. These concerns resemble
remarkably those of ancient priestly interest. His works were A New Theory
of Vision (1709); The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710); and The
Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous (1713). The last of these is the one which
presents the argument against matter. Russell considers that the first of these
dialogues and the beginning of the second present the main aspects of the
theory, and supplies a useful summary of the argument. This summary is
reproduced here. Russell feels that Berkeley:
advances valid arguments in favour of a certain important conclusion, though not quite in favour of the conclusion he thinks he is proving. He thinks he is proving that all reality is mental; what he is proving is that we perceive qualities, not things, and that qualities are relative to the percipient. [5]
There are only two characters in the dialogue, Hylas and Philonous. [6] The former
represents educated common sense, and Philonous, represents Berkeley himself.
Shortly after the opening remarks,
Hylas says that he has heard strange reports of the
opinions of Philonous, to the effect that he does not believe in material
substance. ‘Can anything,’ he exclaims, ‘be more fantastical, more repugnant to
Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is
no such thing as matter?’ Philonous
replies that he does not deny the reality of sensible things, i.e. of what is
perceived immediately by the senses, but that we do not see the causes of
colours or hear the causes of sounds. Both agree that the senses make no inferences.
Philonous points out that by sight we perceive only light, colour, and figure;
by hearing, only sounds; and so on. Consequently, apart from sensible qualities
ther is nothing sensible, and sensible things are nothing but sensible
qualities or combinations of sensible qualities.
Philonous now sets to work to prove that ‘the reality of
sensible things consists in being perceived’, as against the opinion of Hylas,
that ‘to exist is one thing, and to
be perceived is another’. That
sense-data are mental is a thesis which Philonous supports by a detailed
examination of the various senses. He begins with heat and cold. Great heat, he
says, is a pain, and must be in a mind. Therefore heat is mental; and a similar
argument applies to cold. This is reinforced by the famous argument about the
lukewarm water. When one of your hands is hot and the other cold, you put both
into lukewarm water, which feels cold to one hand and hot to the other; but the
water cannot be at once hot and cold. This finishes Hylas, who acknowledges
that ‘heat and cold are only sensations existing in our minds’. But he points
out hopefully that other sensible qualities remain.
Philonous next takes up tastes. He points out that a
sweet taste is a pleasure and a bitter taste is a pain, and that pleasure and
pain are mental. The same argument applies to odours, since they are pleasant
or unpleasant.
Hylas makes a vigorous effort to rescue sound, which, he
says, is motion in air, as may be seen from the fact that are no sounds in a
vacuum. [7] We must, he says,
‘distinguish between sound as it is perceived by us, and as it is in itself; or
between the sound which we immediately perceive and that which exists without
us’. Philonous points out that what
Hylas calls ‘real’ sound, being a movement, might possibly be seen or felt, but
can certainly not be heard; therefore it is not sound as we know it in
perception. As to this, Hylas now concedes that ‘sounds too have no real being
without the mind’.
They now come to colours, and here Hylas begins
confidently: ‘Pardon me: the case of colours is very different. Can anything be
plainer than that we see them on the objects?’ Substances existing without the
mind, he maintains, have the colours we see on them. But Philonous has no
difficulty in disposing of this view. He begins with the sunset clouds, which
are red and golden, and points out that a cloud, when you are close to it, has
no such colours. He goes on to the difference made by a microscope, and to the
yellowness of everything to a man who has jaundice. And very small insects, he
says, must be able to see much smaller objects than we can see. Hylas thereupon
says that colour is not in the objects, but in the light; it is, he says, a
thin fluid substance. Philonous points out, as in the case of sound, that,
according to Hylas, ‘real’ colours are something different from the red and blue
that we see, and that this won’t do.
Hereupon Hylas gives way about all secondary qualities,
but continues to say that primary qualities, notable figure and motion, are
inherent in external unthinking substances. To this Philonous replies that
things look big when we are near them and small when we are far off, and that a
movement may seem quick to one man and slow to another.
At this point Hylas attempts a new departure. He made a mistake, he says,
in not distinguishing the object from the sensation; the act of perceiving he
admits to be mental, but not what is perceived; colours, for example, ‘have a
real existence without the mind, in some unthinking substance’. To this
Philonous replies: ‘That any immediate object of the senses – that is, any idea
or combination of ideas – should exist in an unthinking substance, or exterior
to all minds, is in itself an evident contradiction.’
Russell points out that the argument has now become a logical one, and is
no longer empirical in nature. Berkeley has moved on to a discussion involving
ideas, as expressed by Philonous a few pages later, where he says, ‘whatever is
immediately perceived is an idea; and can any idea exist out of the mind?’
After a metaphysical discussion of substance, Hylas
returns to the discussion of visual sensations, with the argument that he sees
things at a distance. To this Philonous replies that this is equally true of
things seen in dreams, which everyone admits to be mental; further, that
distance is not perceived by sight, but judged as the result of experience, and
that, to a man born blind but now for the first time able to see, visual
objects would not appear distant.
At the beginning of the second Dialogue, Hylas urges that
certain traces in the brain are the causes of sensations, but Philonous retorts
that ‘the brain, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind’.
Russell ends his summary of the argument here, and divides Philonous’
argument into two parts. The first is the argument that we do not perceive
material things, but only their secondary qualities, such as colours, sounds,
etc. These secondary qualities exist in the mind, and are mental in nature.
Russell thinks that Berkeley’s reasoning is ‘completely cogent as to the first
point,’ but as to the second, ‘it suffers from the absence of any definition of
the word ‘mental’. He relies… upon the received view that everything must be
either material or mental, and that nothing is both’.
When he says that we perceive qualities, not ‘things’ or ‘material substances’, and that there is no reason to suppose that the different qualities which common sense regards as all belonging to one ‘thing’ inhere in a substance distinct from each and all of them, his reasoning may be accepted. But when he goes on to say that sensible qualities – including primary qualities – are ‘mental’, the arguments are of very different kinds, and of very different degrees of validity. There are some attempting to prove logical necessity, while others are more empirical. [8]
Russell is not interested in Berkeley’s argument after this, as he
explained. This is because he has exposed the same looseness of language which
we saw employed by the most celebrated exponents of the ontological argument
(and consequently the weakness of the argumentation), and the rest of
Berkeley’s argument concerns a theological understanding of the world. We
however shall press on, since Berkeley’s theological understanding is relevant
to the subject of this book, and it also presents an alternative form of
ontological argument, which Berkeley claims shows the reality of God.
The Second Dialogue opens with a discussion which functions to clarify
whether the essentially skeptical view of Hylas is the correct response to
Philonous’ argument. Philonous ( p 166)
asks to know ‘whether I rightly understand your hypothesis. You make certain
traces in the brain to be the causes or occasions of our ideas. Pray tell me,
whether by the brain you mean any sensible thing?’ Hylas confirms that this is
his view, and that he cannot imagine what else Philonous thought he might mean.
Philonous responds by defining that ‘sensible things are all immediately
perceivable, are ideas; and these exist only in the mind.’ They both agree that
Hylas has agreed to this much earlier in the argument.
Philonous then argues that, since the brain, being itself a sensible thing,
‘exists only in the mind’, and asks if Hylas would agree whether or not it is
reasonable to suppose that ‘one idea or thing existing, occasions all other
ideas.’ And that if this is his view, how does he account ‘for the origin of
that primary idea of the brain itself?’
Hylas replies that he does not explain the origin of our ideas by a
‘brain which is perceptible to sense; rather he understands the brain being
‘only a combination of sensible ideas’, and that the explanation is by means of
another brain which he imagines.
Philonous responds by suggesting that things imagined are as truly in the
mind as things which are perceived. Hylas agrees. Philonous points out that
Hylas has been ‘all this while accounting for ideas, by certain motions or
impressions in the brain’ by means of ‘some alterations in an idea, whether
sensible or imaginable,’ and that it does not matter which. Hylas is a little
shaken by this, and says that he begins to suspect his own hypothesis.
A clue is presented as to where Philonous is going with this argument,
since he says that ‘all we know or conceive are our own ideas,’ with the
exception of ‘spirits.’ And if we do not conceive it, then we ‘talk
unintelligibly,’ instead of forming a reasonable hypothesis’. Hylas now
crumbles, and says that he ‘now clearly see it was a mere dream’ to argue in
terms of motions or impressions in the brain. Philonous responds by saying that
‘this way of explaining things… could never have satisfied any reasonable man’
since ‘what connexion is there between a motion in the nerves and the
sensations of sound or colour in the mind?’ He agrees with Philonous that he is
satisfied that no sensible things have a real existence. He also agrees the he
is clearly a skeptic.
Philolaus then embarks on a long paean to the glories of the sensible world
and its orderliness:
Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth, to all
those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and
situation of the planet, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those
(miscalled erratic) globes ever known
to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not
measure areas around the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so
immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of Nature actuates the
universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! How
magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be
scattered throughout the whole azure vault!
Philonous is appealing here to the heavens as a representation of the
divine, whose uniformities point to something beyond the appearance. He says to
Hylas that he ‘must call imagination to his aid,’ since ‘the feeble narrow
sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving round the central fires the
stars ; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in
endless forms.’
This is not a metaphorical appeal. Berkeley has introduced the notion that
reality as it is represented to us is not simply the more or less complex
response of the human brain to sensory data, but is a series of representations
which are associated with cosmic ‘all-perfect’ mind:
Neither sense nor imagination are big enough to
comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though
labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still
stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that
compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret
mechanism, some divine art and force linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse
with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my
thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense,
beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought!
Both Philonous and Hylas by this point share the view that sensible things
exist in mind only. Up to this point however, the view of Hylas has been a
profound skepticism about reality, and our capacity to know it. By contrast,
here Philonous shows, on the basis of the same evidence, that a quite different
conclusion can be drawn, if the intellectual frame is changed. Philonous then
attacks the skeptical position in general:
What treatment then do those philosophers deserve, who
would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should
those principles be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty
of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this
skepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of
sense?
Hylas is not impressed, and is not converted to Philonous’s outlook. He
says that his comfort is that Philonous is ‘as much a sceptic as I am’.
Philonous disagrees, which strikes Hylas as meaning that Philonous agreed all
along to the premises of the argument, but is now denying the conclusion,
leaving Hylas ‘to maintain those paradoxes’ which Philonous led him into.
Argument and evidence however do not by themselves lead to single and
unambiguous conclusions. We arrive at conclusions only by the properties and
processes of mind, and on the basis our notions and expectations. Philonous
denies that he agreed with Hylas ‘in those notions that led to skepticism.’ He
argues that Hylas ‘indeed said, the reality of sensible things consisted in an absolute existence out of the minds of
spirits, or distinct from their being perceived.’
Consequent to this, Hylas is ‘obliged deny sensible things any real
existence’. And that, according to his own definition, he is therefore a
professed skeptic. But Philonous says that he ‘neither said nor thought the
reality of sensible things was to be defined after that manner.’ Instead he
says that to him it is evident, for the reasons that Hylas allows, ‘that
sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit.’ And so he
concludes that it is not the case that they have no real existence, ‘but that
seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being
perceived by me, there must be some other
mind wherein they exist’ Berkeley’s
emphasis . As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is
there an infinite omnipresent spirit who contains and supports it.’
This is an interesting proof of the reality of divine Being, which differs from the other arguments we have looked at. Berkeley clarifies that this is not the Christian notion that God knows and comprehends all things. He argues (as Philonous) that ‘men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him.’ [9]
Hylas objects that this is a footling distinction, saying ‘so long as we
all believe the same thing, what matter is it how we come by that belief? To which Philonous replies that they don’t
believe the same thing. ‘For philosophers, though they acknowledge all
corporeal beings to be perceived by God, yet they attribute to them an absolute
subsistence distinct from their being perceived by any mind whatever, which I
do not.’ He asks, ‘is there no difference between saying, there is a God, therefore he perceives all things: and saying, sensible
things do really exist; and if they really exist, they are necessarily perceived
by an infinite mind: therefore there is an infinite mind, or God. This
furnishes you with a direct and immediate demonstration, from a most evident
principle, of the being of a God.’
Again Berkeley returns to the judgement that men make about sense data,
which is not always the same, though the evidence is the same. As Philonous he
says that ‘Divines and philosophers had proved beyond all controversy, from the
beauty and usefulness of the several parts of the creation, that it was the
workmanship of God. But that setting aside all help of astronomy and natural
philosophy, all contemplation of the contrivance, order, and adjustment of
things, and infinite mind should be necessarily inferred from the bare
existence of the sensible world, is an advantage peculiar to them only who have
made this easy reflexion: that the
sensible world is that which we perceive by our several senses; and that
nothing is perceived by the senses beside ideas; and that no idea or archetype
of an idea can exist otherwise than in a mind.’
Berkeley regarded this as a powerful argument against atheism. Hylas says
that ‘some eminent moderns’ entertain a notion of ‘seeing all things in God’,
(a reference in particular to the French scholar Malebranche) and gives detail
in response to questioning by Philonous. Hylas says that these men conceive
that the soul being immaterial, ‘is incapable of being united with material
things, so as to perceive them in themselves, but that she (the soul) by her
union with the substance of God, which being spiritual is therefore purely
intelligible, or capable of being the immediate object of a spirit’s thought.
Besides, the divine essence contains in it perfections correspondent to each
created being; and which are for that reason proper to exhibit or represent
them to the mind.’
Philonous is not impressed with this argument, in that he argues it makes a
created world ‘exist otherwise than in the mind of a spirit’. This is because,
as he has said, ‘nothing is perceived by the senses besides ideas.’ He does not
share the view with Malebranche that there is an absolute external world.
According to Philonous, Malebranche ‘maintains that we are deceived by our
senses, and know not the real natures or the true forms and figures of extended
beings, of all which I hold the direct contrary.’ Hylas thinks however that
what Philonous proposes comes near to ‘seeing all things in God’.
The response of Philonous is that ‘few men think, yet all will have
opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing
strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should
nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them
attentively.’ [10] He says he is
very remote from the view of Malebranche, because Malebranche builds on the
most abstract general ideas… though he (Philonous) agrees with holy Scripture,
in ‘that in God we live, and move, and have our being’. He explains briefly the
difference between his view and that of Malebranche:
It is evident that the things I perceive are my own
ideas, and that no idea can exist unless it be in a mind. Nor is it less plain
that these ideas or things by me perceived, either themselves or their
archetypes, exist independently of my mind, since I know myself not to be their
author, it being out of my power to determine at pleasure, what particular idea
I shall be effected with upon opening my eyes or ears. They must therefore exist
in some other mind, whose will it is they should be exhibited to me. The
things, I say, immediately perceived, are ideas or sensations, call them what
you will. But how can any idea or sensation exist in, or be produced by,
anything but a mind or spirit? This indeed is inconceivable; and to assert that
which is inconceivable, is to talk nonsense….
It may be that the objection to the notion put forward by Malebranche is
that it depicts reality as something which is perceived as outside the human
mind by the human mind, whereas Berkeley does not make this distinction. For
Berkeley it is as if his mind is a subset of the divine cosmic mind, perceiving
a subset of the ideas in that mind. If
he perceives ideas, it is because the cosmic mind wills it.
The ideas which present themselves to Philonous, he argues, ‘it is very
conceivable that they should exist in, and be produced by, a spirit; since this
is no more than I daily experience in myself, inasmuch as I perceive numberless
ideas; and by an act of my Will can form a great variety of them, and raise
them up in my imagination: though it must be confessed, these creatures of the
fancy are not altogether so distinct, so strong, vivid, and permanent, as those
perceived by my senses, which latter are called real things. From all which I conclude, there is a mind which affects me every moment with all the sensible
impressions I perceive. And from the variety, order, and manner of these, I
conclude the Author of them to be wise,
powerful, and good, beyond comprehension.
Philonous emphasizes here that he is not saying that he sees ‘things by
perceiving that which represents in the intelligible substance of God. This I
do not understand; but I say, the things by me perceived are known by the
understanding, and produced by the will, of an infinite spirit.’ So his
objection is as I suggested, and he is not simply seeing what is ‘in’ God.
Beyond this, the Second Dialogue deals with Malebranche’s occasionalism,
which sees the physical world as a place where God has the occasion to create
motion and change, and also deals with ideas of substance.
Hume and Kant on Reality
In his first work, the Treatise on
Human Nature, published in 1739, when he was 29, Hume argued that he was
introducing the scientific method into psychological subjects. That is, he was
using an analytical and empirical approach to matters concerned with the mind,
and human understanding. This was a large claim for his approach. It was
certainly analytical, but its empirical content consists largely of appeals to
experience and well-argued conjecture.
Hume argued on this basis that human understanding is based on sense data
and empirical sense impressions. We have knowledge only of what we directly
experience. He divided sense impressions into strong and weak, arguing that
weak impressions are simply copies of strong impressions. The mind makes sense
of these impressions in the context of what the mind believes it already knows
and understands. He argued entirely against the notion of innate ideas, which
had been part of the currency of philosophy in the preceding period.
There are two key and related areas where Hume’s inquiry into human nature
threw up problems which cannot be satisfactorily resolved; these are: a) whether it is really legitimate for us to
perform inductive thought, and b) whether or not we can infer causality. Hume
argued that we assume the constancy of the conjunction of things on the basis
of experience, but have no actual knowledge of how these things are conjoined.
Whatever might hold relationships together is obscure to us, and even our
understanding of ourselves is no more than a complex bundle of sense
impressions associated with the notion of the self. Of the self itself, we have
no real knowledge. In essence Hume was arguing against the uniformitarian
attitude to the world which developed after the publication of Newton’s Principia, which saw the apparent
regularity and mathematical predictability in Newton’s description of the world
as reliable proof of its consistency.
Hume used the example the example of colliding billiard balls to illustrate
his point (Hume was clubbable, so the example is not a surprising one). Skilled
players of the game know how the geometry of billiards works, and can infer the
way a ball (B) will move when struck by ball (A). The skill of a good player
relies on the consistency of the behaviour of the balls. We assume because of
the consistency of this behaviour that there is an underlying and consistent
causality at work. However Hume argued that, despite the apparent regularity of
the behaviour of ball B when struck by ball A, we have no insight at all into
the underlying process by which this behaviour is effected. Nor have we any
reason beyond custom and expectation to believe that the balls will behave in
the expected manner. Causality itself is a mystery wherever it is found, and we
have no knowledge of how and why it works.
This is the reason why Hume is regarded as a sceptical philosopher – we
have no certain knowledge about some things which we take very much for
granted. This is true for both inductive thought, and our understanding of
causality.
So Hume is left in an interesting position. On the one hand, he argued that
what knowledge we have is based purely on experience, and this experience is
mediated through sense impressions. On the other hand, he argued that we have
no real understanding of how the knowledge we have is assembled, since the
consistency we see in the relation between ideas is purely customary and a
matter of expectation, which isn’t an understanding. This applies also to
causal relations.
Hume’s point is not that the universe might at any moment start behaving in
a different way; only that what we think we understand, we do not ‘understand’
at all. It is a matter of conjecture based on experience. What underlies these
consistencies is wholly unknown to us.
Immanuel Kant responded to Hume’s challenge by inverting the line of
argument. Where Hume argued that knowledge is acquired through experience, Kant
argued that what we understand is shaped by what the human mind can understand.
That is, it is reason itself which gives us understanding, and not simply
sensory experience. We have to understand reason if we are to understand anything.
Not only did Kant argue that what we understand is shaped by properties and
characteristics of reason, he also argued that the world of experience, the
imagined source of sensory impressions received by the mind, might also be a
product of human reason. In other words, we assume that the objective world we
see as having existence outside ourselves in space and time, has objective
reality. However without a proper understanding of human reason, it is as
unreasonable to assume this to be the case, as it is for us to assume the
consistent behaviour of billiard balls on a table.
This is not to assume the identity of, or to conflate processes occurring
in the phenomenal world, with those operating in the mind. Precisely because we
do not understand the processes and relations of things in the phenomenal
world, there is no reason for them to always conform to our understanding.
Kant’s first major work was the Critique of Pure Reason. It had to be a critique rather than a dogmatic survey of pure reason, since reason remained to be understood. Kant felt that, in pursuing this approach, he was making metaphysics anew, and that all previous writings on metaphysics were superseded, at least in terms of metaphysics as a science. He made this clear in the short work Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself As A Science, which was published around Easter 1783, some two years after the publication of the Critique in the summer of 1781. The purpose of the Prolegomena was to make clear the radical nature of the Critique, and to explain his intent. Kant expected the Critique ‘to have a revolutionary effect and anxiously awaited its impact on the world of learning. In fact he found that it was being received in silence’. [11]
A key argument of the Critique is that the reason does not apprehend things
as they are, but only as they appear to us. Kant repeats the distinction made
in classical times between the phenomena and the noumena. We can apprehend the
phenomena, but the relationship between the phenomena and the noumena, or the
‘thing-in-itself’, is entirely unknown to us, and unknowable by means of the
senses, and the mind. To Kant, only the ‘thing-in-itself,’ or
‘things-in-themselves,’ are real.
So how does Kant set about creating a scientific metaphysics? He tells us in the preamble to the Prolegomena that ‘If a field of knowledge is to be exhibited as a science, its differentia, which it has in common with no other science and which is thus peculiar to it, must first be capable of being determined exactly; otherwise the boundaries of all the sciences run into one another and none of them can be treading soundly according to its own nature.’ [12]
He continues by pointing out that ‘this peculiarity, whether it consists in
the difference of the object, or of
the sources of knowledge, or of the kind of knowledge, or of some if not all of these together, is the
basis of the idea of the possible science and of its territory’. Kant defines
metaphysics very closely as something whose ‘fundamental propositions … and its
fundamental concepts must never be taken from experience’, since metaphysical
knowledge lies beyond experience. The ground of metaphysics will not be either
‘outer experience’, which he defines as the source of physics, nor ‘inner
experience, which provides the basis for empirical psychology.’ In other words
metaphysics is a priori knowledge, ‘out of pure understanding and pure
reason’.
Kant recognizes the need to differentiate metaphysics from pure
mathematics, and refers the reader to the Critique, where he says
‘Philosophical cognition is rational cognition from concepts. Mathematical cognition is rational cognition from the construction of concepts.’ [13]
He expands on this by saying that ‘to construct a concept means to exhibit a
priori the intuition corresponding to it. Hence construction of a concept
requires a non-empirical intuition. Consequently this intuition, as intuition,
is an individual object; but as the construction of a concept, (a universal
presentation), it must nonetheless express in the presentation its universal
validity for all possible intuitions falling under the same concept.’
Kant uses the example of the construction of a triangle, arguing that this
construction exhibits the object which corresponds to this concept ‘either
through imagination alone, or in pure intuition.’ It can be drawn on paper of
course, as a mathematical figure, but in such a case the representation is an
empirical intuition, not a pure intuition, though both in the case of the pure
intuition and the empirical intuition, Kant has exhibited the object a
priori, without having used a model taken from experience (meaning that
only the properties of a triangle have been used in its construction). Though
the drawn figure is empirical, yet it serves to express the concept ‘without
impairing the concept’s universality’.
Only those properties which it is necessary to consider for the
construction of the triangle are involved – the many inconsequential details of
a physical triangle – the length of the sides, and the angles of the triangle,
are not involved in the abstraction. All such irrelevant details are removed
from the concept, and the result is therefore wholly abstracted from any
particular instance of a triangle.
Kant’s argument is therefore that ‘philosophical cognition contemplates the
particular only in the universal’. By contrast, he says that mathematical
cognition ‘contemplates the universal in particular, and indeed even in the
individual’. This might seem at first sight to be a strange distinction,
however Kant explains himself clearly, saying that even in the case of this
mathematical cognition, the contemplation of it is ‘a priori, and by
means of reason.’ And so, ‘just as this individual is determined under certain
universal conditions of construction, so the object of the concept – to which
this individual corresponds only as its schema – must be thought of as
determined universally. Thus the
essential difference between these two kinds of rational cognition ‘consists in
this difference of form, and does not rest on the difference of their matter or
objects.’
He goes on to criticize those who ‘have meant to distinguish philosophy
from mathematics by saying that philosophy has as its object merely quality but
mathematics only quantity,’ He argues that ‘the form of mathematical cognition
is the cause of the fact that mathematics can deal solely with quanta’ (i.e.,
magnitudes), and that ‘only the concept of magnitudes can be constructed, i.e.,
displayed a priori in intuition. Qualities, on the other hand, can be exhibited
only in empirical intuition; hence a rational cognition of qualities can be
possible only through concepts.’ He invokes the example of a conical shape,
‘which can be made intuitive without any empirical aid, merely according to the
concept of a cone; but the colour of this cone will have to be given previously
in some experience or other. However the cause of anything cannot be exhibited
in intuition, since cause is presented by experience.
Again against those who have argued for a simplistic distinction between
the objects of philosophy and mathematics, he points out that in fact
‘philosophy deals with magnitudes just as much as mathematics does – e.g., with
totality, infinity, etc. Mathematics similarly is concerned not only with
quantity but also with the difference between lines and planes considered as
spaces of different quality, and with continuity as a quality of extension.
The End of the Ontological Argument
I did not write about the Ontological Argument in an earlier draft of this
book. But I gained an understanding of its severe limitations while I was
writing the paper in 2006 which was subsequently abandoned, due to the weakness
of this mode of argument. Knowledge of these limitations informed the
discussion of questions about reality in the two parts of the book which were
under way, which looked at Greece and Assyria respectively. Once those two
parts were largely constructed, I turned to the Ontological Argument sometime
in 2012.
Ontological argument ought to be about the nature of reality itself, rather
than a particular aspect of it. Attempting to prove the existence or reality of
God on the basis of purely logical and a priori argument is
about proof and existence within a known and perceived frame of reality, which
is presumed to be real, though we have no knowledge of what it is and why it
presents itself to us in the way that it does. So ontological argument for the most
part isn't about reality at all, but some part of that reality, and
argued in terms of the properties and attributes which that part may or may not
have.
The concept of God is discussed within either the reality we know in terms
of space and time, or else existing in some other place beyond the limitations
of physical reality. In either case the physical frame of space and time is
taken as a given.
In classical antiquity this would have seemed to be a barbarously crude way
to argue about the divine. When they talked about reality, they meant reality
itself, not some particular representation of it. And that reality was
coterminous with Being. In other words, divine Being was presumed to be at the
root of all the forms of reality which can be represented. It was reality.
Ancient ideas about divinity therefore need to be understood in their
original context, or at least in as much of it as we can muster. A thorough
understanding of the varieties of the ontological argument will not tell us
much that is useful about ancient conceptions of the divine.
So this part of the book should
be understood as a necessary demolition of the usefulness of the ontological
argument, as we understand it. In the course of writing, I was reminded that
there were ancient misunderstandings of the nature of divinity also, on the
basis of the way in which the divine was spoken. If the divine is one and
indivisible, for example, how is it that there are hundreds of gods, and not
one?
Parts Two and Three can be read in a number of different ways. But
essentially the discussion is of a common intellectual substrate, shared by
Greece and Assyria, which lies beneath the strikingly different cultures. The
nature of that substrate is explored initially through the writings of Plato,
and the Greeks in general.
The contention is that Plato, in writing about the Forms or Ideas, was
actually telling us something of extraordinary importance about Greek theology,
and the role and function of divine images. The source of the idea of the
nature of reality, of Being itself is referred to by Plato in many places, but
never fully explained. And there is a related question he asks, about a most
fundamental matter, but does not answer. The answer can be guessed, though
professional philosophers are not in the business of guessing. So we have had
nearly two hundred years of scholarship devoted to Plato, which has explained
very little.
I guessed the answer, though as it turned out, I knew the answer already
from a different context. It can be demonstrated that the same question lies
beneath Mesopotamian ideas about the nature of reality, as expressed in the
liturgy of their New Year Festival, and in other sources. It is the reason why
there are two creations - the first chaotic, and the second, rational.
[2] Plantinga, A. The Ontological
Argument, from the introduction by Richard Taylor, pviii. Macmillan, 1968.
[3] Descartes, Rene, third Meditation. In
The Philosophical Works of Descartes,
Volume I, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross.
What is an ontological argument? In the introduction to Alvin Plantinga’s The Ontological Argument, written by
Richard Taylor, the argument is defined simply as one which ‘purports to prove,
simply from the concept of God as the supreme being, that God’s existence
cannot rationally be doubted by anyone having such a concept of Him.’ He goes
on to say that ‘it is thus a purely a priori argument, that is to say,
one that does not appeal to any facts of experience but is concerned solely
with the implications of concepts – in this case, the concept of God’.
Our modern understanding of the ontological argument is that it was first
formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century C.E. This
is not disputed. But it is perfectly clear that some kind of ontological
argument lies behind the arguments which are found in Plato’s semi-secularised
discussions, in Aristotle (particularly in the Nicomachean Ethics), and,
if Plato is to be considered an accurate historian of the views of Parmenides,
also to be found in his dialogue Parmenides.
What I intend to do here is to review the history of the ontological argument
from St. Anselm onwards, and then to explore the likely nature of the
ontological argument in antiquity. The range of questions which might be asked
by a neophyte, or an advanced student, give many clues about the probable shape
of such an argument.
The Ontological Argument in Anselm
“Anselm… is rightly regarded as the inventor and perfecter of the ontological argument, though his philosophical inspiration was largely derived from St. Augustine. … His position is not that of a skeptic seeking some rational persuasion of God’s existence, but that of a believer seeking a single conception which would make manifest at once God’s existence and God’s attributes”. [1]
The following is extracted from chapters 2-4 of St Anselm’s Proslogion, quoted from Alvin
Plantinga’s The Ontological Argument. Plantinga takes his text from Anselm’s
Basic Writings, translated by S. N. Deane, with an introduction by Charles
Hartshorne, 2nd edition, 1962, Open Court Publishing Company.
Prosologion, Ch. II –
Truly there is a God, although the fool hath said in his
heart, There is no God.
And so, Lord, do thou, who dost give understanding to faith, give me, so
far as thou knowest it to be profitable, to understand that thou art as we
believe; and that thou art that which we believe. And, indeed, we believe that
thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no
such nature, since the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalm
xiv. 1). But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which
I speak – a being than which nothing greater can be conceived – understands
what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he
does not understand it to exist.
We might rephrase this thus: “Our belief is that God is a being greater
than any other which can possibly be conceived. And it is this greatest of all
beings which gives us understanding. A fool can understand the conception of
this greatest of all beings as a conception, though he does not understand the
existence of the greatest of all beings”.
This might be criticized by pointing out that two key elements in this
argument are undefined. We have a definition of ‘God’ as the greatest of all
beings.’ However we do not have a clear definition of the meaning of ‘greatest’
in this context, and neither do we have a clear definition of ‘existence.’ Both
of these terms are made to do much work in this discussion.
For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another
to understand that the object exists. When a painter first conceives of what he
will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding, but he does not yet
understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made
the painting, he both has it in his understanding, and he understands that it
exists, because he has made it.
Anselm makes it clear he understands the distinction between knowledge of a
concept, and knowledge of the existence of something – in this case ‘God’. The illustration
which he uses here is interesting. He likens the conceiving mind to the mind of
a painter conceiving a representation of an object – before he begins to paint
he has a conception in his mind of what he intends to paint, but does not
understand it ‘to be’ ‘because he has not yet performed it’. But once the
conception is painted, the painting has come to be (i.e., it ‘exists’).
However, a painter creates a representation by painting it, not an object
itself. This is an important detail if the argument is designed to prove the
‘existence’ of God, rather than a physical object. It is fair to argue that the
conception in the mind of the painter is also a representation, in that it is a
conception rather than the thing itself. So the painting is a representation of
a representation. The painting exists in the sense that it is a physical object
existing in the world, containing an image which may or may not be a
representation of an object which exists.
Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists
in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived.
For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood,
exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can
be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists
in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which
is greater.
Rephrasing the first part of this, ‘even the fool can conceive that an idea
in the understanding can be of something which is greater than anything other
which can be conceived. He can understand this, and what is understood, has an
existence in the understanding’.
It is true that the conception of something which is greater than anything
other which can be conceived can be a concept, even in a foolish mind. But it
does not follow that it is, as Descartes would say later on, a clear and
distinct conception. ‘Great’ is a term which can mean many things, and to a
fool, it is in the nature of foolishness for its meaning to be misunderstood.
Anselm then passes on to the suggestion that something which is greater
than anything which can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone.
The reason he gives is that, if this conception exists only in the understanding,
then to conceive it to exist in reality would be greater.
This requires deconstruction. If the conception, in the understanding of
the fool, is unclear and indistinct, then it does not follow that what can be
conceived in the understanding must exist in the world. If the conception is
clear and distinct in the understanding of the wise man, does it follow that
that which is conceived in the mind must also exist as a physical reality? The
answer is no, in that, no matter how clear and distinct the conception of God
is in the mind, it is a conception which describes what can be known or
inferred of God by the mind of man. And man by his very nature, must
participate in the quality of foolishness more than the quality of the divine.
A further criticism of this passage might be that ‘existence’ is used very
loosely. Can we speak of God existing, rather than speaking of the reality of
God? This is an important point if part of the definition of God is that the
divine possesses a transcendent reality, rather than a physical one.
The only circumstance in which the concept of God in the understanding must
also exist as a reality, is where that reality is transcendent - where the
possessor of the understanding is also divine, and thus necessarily
participates in the being of God through the clearest and most distinct
understanding of the nature of God.
Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be
conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which
nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be
conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that
there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it
exists both in the understanding and in reality.
As already pointed out, that if there is a conception of that which nothing
greater can be conceived in the understanding, and the understanding alone, it
does not follow that there is no doubt that there ‘exists’ a being (or rather
that a being of this nature has reality), and that it exists both in
understanding and in reality. J.G.
Frazer suggested that Plato sometimes confused an epistemology with an
ontology, and Anselm seems to be confusing the idea of naming, conceiving and
describing a being with the necessity of the reality of such a being. Again,
only if the scope of the understanding is as clear and distinct as the reality,
would there be the impossibility of that understanding existing alone. And that
is not a likely proposition. The ultimate nature of reality is always going to
transcend our capacity to conceive of it, except in very special circumstances.
From Chapter III:
God cannot be conceived not to exist – God is that, than
which nothing greater can be conceived. –That which can be conceived not to
exist is not God.
And it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be
conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot
be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived
not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can
be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be
conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so
truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it
cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord, our
God.
Anselm has accepted his proof of the ‘reality’ of God, and is now building
on it. I am not sure how one can argue that conceiving of a being which cannot
be conceived not to exist, is necessarily ‘greater’ than one which can be conceived not to exist. Again,
this only makes sense if the conception in the understanding is of the same
nature as the being who exists in reality. He argues however that if the
conception which is greater than anything which can be conceived, can be
conceived not to be real, then it is not that which is greater than anything
which can be conceived. And that this would be an irreconcilable contradiction.
How so? We are talking in terms of the subjective powers of the mind here. In
the mind of the fool, it is clearly possible to conceive in the understanding a
being than which greater nothing can be conceived, and then to change opinion
to that in which it can be conceived not to be real. But this is a fallible
judgement, so for the most part this this does not throw up an irreconcilable
contradiction.
So truly, therefore, dost thou exist, O Lord, my God,
that thou canst not be conceived not to exist; and rightly. For, if a mind
could conceive of a being better than thee, the creature would rise above the
Creator; and this is most absurd. And, indeed, whatever else there is, except
thee alone, can be conceived not to exist. To thee alone, therefore, it belongs
to exist more truly than all other beings, and hence in a higher degree than
all others. For, whatever else exists does not exist so truly, and hence in a
less degree it belongs to it to exist. Why, then has the fool said in his
heart, there is no God (Psalm xiv. 1), since it is so evident to a rational
mind, that thou dost exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is
dull and a fool?
Anselm is here building on his conclusion that God cannot be conceived not
to exist. It follows therefore that if a mind could conceive of something
greater, that creature would rise above the Creator, which (to Anselm) would be
‘most absurd’. We can sense here that it is almost the case that the reality of
the God he is discussing is dependent on whether or not the understanding of
the believer is sufficiently acute to bring the God into being. But essentially
here Anselm is looking for support for the faithful, and is not arguing for the
power of an understanding of the divine, and of the word.
He argues that all other things excepting God can be conceived not to
exist. This implies that they are part of the secular world rather than the
divine reality. However the corollary is that the divine reality is
qualitatively beyond mundane reality. But again, if the conception in the
understanding of the faithful is less than perfect, then it does not follow
that the conception of God cannot be conceived not to exist. And this would be
true if the understanding was nearly at the highest degree of the spectrum
which runs from foolish to wise.
From Chapter IV:
How the fool has said in his heart what cannot be
conceived. – A thing may be conceived in two ways: (1) when the word signifying
it is conceived; (2) when the thing itself is understood. As far as the word goes,
God can be conceived not to exist; in reality he cannot.
But how has the fool said in his heart what he could not
conceive; or how is it that he could not conceive what he said in his heart?
Since it is the same to say in the heart, and to conceive.
But, if really, nay, since really, he both conceived,
because he said in his heart; and did not say in his heart, because he could
not conceive; there is more than one way in which a thing is said in the heart
or conceived. For, in one sense, an object is conceived, when the word
signifying it is conceived; and in another, when the very entity, which the
object is, is understood.
In this fourth chapter it is as if Anselm has reflected on what he has
written, and realizes he needs to deal with the objection that he is confusing
(or conflating) an epistemology with an ontology. An object can be conceived in
terms of words (what Bertrand Russell would say was ‘knowledge by
description’), or in terms of a non-textual, intuitive understanding, (which
Russell terms ‘knowledge by acquaintance’).
In the former sense, then, God can be conceived not to
exist; but in the latter, not at all. For no one who understands what fire and
water are can conceive fire to be water, in accordance with the nature of the
facts themselves, although this is possible according to the words. So then, no
one who understands what is can conceive that God does not exist, although he
says these words in his heart, either without any, or with some foreign
signification. For, God is that than which a greater cannot be conceived. And
he who thoroughly understands this, assuredly understands that this being so
truly exists, that not even in concept can it be non-existent. Therefore, he
who understands that God so exists, cannot conceive that he does not exist.
Anselm acknowledges that in terms of description, a conception in the
understanding may be imperfect, and consequently it is possible to conceive of
the non-existence of God. But in terms of knowledge by acquaintance, to
continue with Russell’s terminology, it is not possible to conceive of the
non-existence of God. He uses the concrete images of fire and water, and argues
that our understanding of those (which will include knowledge of their
properties and characteristics), according to their differing natures, could
not be be confused with one another; but that this might be possible in terms
of their descriptions in words. He then argues that ‘no one who understands
what is’ (i.e., what is real) can conceive that God does not exist, although it
remains possible to express the notion in words, either words without
signification, or with some signification which has no bearing on the question
of the reality of God. He who has a thorough understanding of this, certainly
understands that God so truly exists, that not even in concept can God not be
real.
This is placing a great deal on non-textual and intuitive understanding.
The fact remains that intuitive understanding can be as fallible and plain
wrong as any other kind, and so Anselm has not made a watertight case for the
reality of God. Though this is an argument which might please the faithful, who
might be inclined to amplify their faith in line with what they believe
intuitively to be the case.
I thank thee, gracious Lord, I thank thee; because what I
formerly believed by thy bounty, I now so understand by thine illumination,
that if I were unwilling to believe that thou dost exist, I should not be able
not to understand this to be true.
Richard Taylor writes that: “Anselm gives some background to how he came to construct his argument for the proof of the reality of God in the Proslogion.’ He was, he writes, seeking some single argument that would not only prove God’s existence but make evident God’s attributes as well. The central idea of the ontological argument, that perfection implies existence, kept forcing itself on him, but he rejected it as a specious and illusory basis for any argument until, finally, he realized he could find no rational ground for rejecting it any longer, whereupon he joyfully embraced it as providing the proof he had been seeking.” [2]
The Ontological Argument in Descartes
The argument developed by Descartes differs from Anselm’s in a number of respects. He avoids the term ‘great’ (and notes the fact in the course of his argument). Instead he uses the concept ‘perfect’, so that God is described as the ‘supremely perfect Being’. He also uses variations on the phrase ‘clearly and distinctly’ in connection with his apprehension of the idea of God. [3]
If just because I can draw the idea of something from my
thought, it follows that all which I know clearly and distinctly as pertaining
to this object does really belong to it, may I not derive from this an argument
demonstrating the existence of God? It is certain that I no less find the idea
of God, that is to say, the idea of a supremely perfect Being, in me, than that
of any figure or number whatever it is; and I do not know any less clearly and
distinctly that an actual and eternal existence pertains to this nature than I
know that all that which I am able to demonstrate of some figure or number
truly pertains to the nature of this figure or number, and therefore, although
all that I concluded in the preceding Meditations were found to be false, the
existence of God would pass with me as at least as certain as I have ever held
the truths of mathematics to be.
To paraphrase: ‘If it follows that an idea in thought can be expressed, and
all I know clearly and distinctly about it,
is the case, then may I not use this as the basis of an argument to
prove the reality of God?’ He finds the idea of a ‘supremely perfect Being’ as
real within himself as ideas of geometric figures, and numbers. He does not
know any less clearly and distinctly that actual and eternal existence is a
property of the supreme perfect Being, than he knows all which he can
demonstrate in relation to geometrical figures or a number truly comprises the
properties of these. And were everything else in the preceding Meditations to
be found false, the reality of God would be as real for Descartes as he ever
held the truths of mathematics to be.
However clear and distinct is Descartes idea of a ‘supremely perfect
Being’, and that this idea can be expressed, it does not follow that it can be
used as the basis of an argument to prove the reality of God. To follow his
analogy, his knowledge of the properties of geometrical figures and numbers,
may be extensive and even comprehensive, but it does not follow that his
knowledge of these properties is complete. The properties of which he knows are
just that. It is obvious that it is easier to circumscribe the properties and
characteristics of geometrical figures and numbers than to have a clear and
distinct idea of the properties and nature of a ‘supremely perfect Being’. What
Descartes can have in his mind is a ‘notion’ of the properties and nature of such
a perfect Being. He might think that the reality of God, the existence of God
is at least as real as the truths of mathematics; this is a notion only, rather
than something which can be established.
This indeed is not at first manifest, since it would seem
to present some appearance of being a sophism. For being accustomed in all
other things to make a distinction between existence and essence, I easily
persuade myself that the existence can be separated from the essence of God,
and that we can thus conceive God as not actually existing. But, nevertheless,
when I think of it with more attention, I clearly see that existence can no
more be separated from the essence of God than can its having its three angles
equal to two right angles be separated from the essence of a rectilinear
triangle, or the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley; and so there is
not any less repugnance to our conceiving a God (that is, a Being supremely
perfect) to whom existence is lacking (that is to say, to whom a certain
perfection is lacking), than to conceive of a mountain which has no valley.
Descartes defends himself against the possible charge that his argument is
sophistry. He can ordinarily distinguish between the existence and the essence
of something. And so he can easily persuade himself that the property
‘existence’ can be separated from the ‘essence’ of God. And thus that we can
conceive of God as not possessing the property of something which exists. This
however he says is the result of inattentive thinking, and more attention to
the question allows him to clearly see that the existence of God cannot be
separated from the essence of God any more than the properties of a
right-angled triangle can be separated from the essence of it. Or any more than
that the idea of a mountain can be separated from the idea of a valley. So the
repugnance of the idea of conceiving a supremely perfect Being without the
property of existence is no less than to conceive of a mountain without a
valley.
The problem here is the conception of existence as a form or mode of
perfection. In antiquity this equation would not have been made – rather the
nature and properties of divinity would have been drawn in contrast with those
of existence. There are many ways to express this difference – the secular
world has existence, the world of coming-to-be and passing-away has existence,
man has existence, the world of things and of representation has existence. The
Divine and the eternal did not have existence in the same way in the ancient world.
The world of reality was understood to be separate in essence from the secular
world; this separate reality was the realm of the divine, and so existence
would not be a property of the divine, even if the divine was (as it generally
was) considered to be completely real. This is not to say that the divine could
not manifest or act in the world of existence; but that existence is a species
of imperfection, with which the divine could be (and was) contrasted. Descartes
cannot mean that God is real in the sense of having a presence in the material
world. And it is curious that later he treated God as if he was walled up in
his own sphere. This was necessary to promote the idea that one could do
mathematics without reference to God, and without concern that God would
interfere with the purely mathematical workings of the world.
But although I cannot really conceive of a God without
existence any more than a mountain without a valley, still from the fact that I
conceive of a mountain with a valley, it does not follow that there is such a
mountain in the world; similarly although I conceive of God as possessing
existence, it would seem that it does not follow that there is a God which
exists; for my thought does not impose any necessity upon things, and just as I
may imagine a winged horse, although no horse with wings exists, so I could
perhaps attribute existence to God, although no God existed.
Here, Descartes concedes that though he can conceive of the supreme perfect
Being as possessing existence, it does not necessarily follow that there is a
God which exists, since his thought ‘does not impose any necessity upon
things’. What he means by this is that the reality or otherwise or god is not
dependent on his understanding of the nature of God.’ So Descartes might be
attributing the property of existence to God, even if no God existed.
But a sophism is concealed in this objection; for from
the fact that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, it does not follow
that there is any mountain or any valley in existence, but only that the
mountain and the valley, whether they exist or do not exist, cannot in any way
be separated one from the other. While from the fact that I cannot conceive God
without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and hence
He really exists; not that my thought can bring this to pass, or impose any
necessity on things, but, on the contrary, because the necessity which lies in
the thing itself, i.e., the necessity of the existence of God determines me to
think in this way. For it is not within my power to think of God without
existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection)
though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.
Descartes argues that there is sophistry in this objection, before
introducing a genuine sophism into the argument. He says that he cannot
conceive a mountain without a valley, but agrees that it does not follow that
there is any mountain or valley in existence. But, that whether they do or do
not exist, the mountain and the valley cannot be separated from one another. He
then says that since he cannot conceive of God without the property of
existence, ‘it follows that existence is inseparable from him, and hence He
really exists. Descartes has introduced the idea of the ‘necessity’ of the
existence of God here, quite shamelessly: he argues that it is ‘not that my
thought can bring this to pass, or impose any necessity on things, but, on the
contrary, because the necessity which lies in the thing itself, i.e., the necessity of the existence of God
determines me to think in this way’. That this remains a subjective
understanding, rather than an objective property of God, is confirmed by the
words which follow: ‘For it is not within my power to think of God without
existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme
perfection), though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or
without wings.’ Again the notion that existence is a form of perfection is called
into play, and in conjunction with the necessity of the existence of God,
because he is perfect, and the circular argument is complete.
Descartes then passes on to a discussion of the relationship between the
matter of mathematical figures in his mind and in existence, as a comparison
with his proof of the existence of God. The following large paragraph is split
into four parts for convenience:
And we must not here object that it is in truth necessary
for me to assert that God exists after having presupposed that He possesses
every sort of perfection, since existence is one of these, but that as a matter
of fact my original supposition was not necessary, just as it is not necessary
to consider that all quadrilateral figures can be inscribed in the circle; for
supposing I thought this, I should be constrained to admit that the rhombus
might be inscribed in the circle since it is a quadrilateral figure, which,
however, is manifestly false.
Descartes is arguing that it is not necessary to assert that God exists
once he has presupposed (as part of the definition of the supreme perfect
Being) that He possesses every sort of perfection (the property of existence
being one of these), for the supposition was not necessary (in the sense that
it is not necessary intellectually to assert this for the properties of things
to be real), just as one does not have to think of facts such as ‘all
quadrilateral figures can be inscribed in the circle’. Descartes here is
referring to the strict definition of a figure being inscribed in a circle,
which requires that each of the vertices should be in contact with the circle.
The truth of what can be contained within a circle is not constrained by the
looseness of a mathematician’s statement such as ‘all quadrilateral figures can
be inscribed in the circle’. The rhombus is a quadrilateral figure, but it does
not meet the requirement of each of the vertices being in contact with the
circle.
We must not, I say, make any such allegations because
although it is not necessary that I should at any time entertain the notion of
God, nevertheless whenever it happens that I think of a first and a sovereign
Being, and, so to speak, derive the idea of Him from the storehouse of my mind,
it is necessary that I should attribute to Him every sort of perfection,
although I do not get so far as to enumerate them all, or to apply my mind to
each one in particular. And this necessity suffices to make me conclude (after
having recognized that existence is a perfection) that this first and sovereign
Being really exists; just as though it is not necessary for me ever to imagine
any triangle, yet, whenever I wish to consider a rectilinear figure composed
only of three angles, it is absolutely essential that I should attribute to it
all those properties which serve to bring about the conclusion that its three
angles are not greater than two right angles, even although I may not be then
considering this point in particular.
Descartes here makes an interesting series of statements. These seem to be
arguing that the notion (and Descartes uses this word here rather than
‘understanding’, which was used earlier in the argument) of God does not have
to be conceived ‘at any time’, but that when it is conceived, he thinks first
of ‘a first and sovereign Being’, and derives the idea of Him ‘from the
storehouse of my mind’. And it is
necessary to attribute to this derived idea ‘every sort of perfection’. But, in
the light of his frequent use of the phrase ‘clearly and distinctly’ in
connection with his understanding of the properties of the supremely perfect
Being, it is extraordinary to read the succeeding text. He says that does not
‘get so far as to enumerate them all, or to apply my mind to each one in
particular’. So in what way is his understanding ‘clear and distinct’? I think
here Descartes is emphasizing that his understanding or notion of God has
nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of God. But if the understanding
of God is actually just a notion, involving loose ideas of perfection, then in
what way does this constitute a proof of the existence of the ‘supremely
perfect Being’? In the text which follows Descartes emphasizes that he does not
desire to accept anything which he cannot conceive clearly and distinctly.
But when I consider which figures are capable of being
inscribed in the circle, it is in no wise necessary that I should think that
all quadrilateral figures are of this number; on the contrary, I cannot even
pretend that this is the case, so long as I do not desire to accept anything
which I cannot conceive clearly and distinctly. And in consequence there is a
great difference between the false superstitions such as this, and the true
ideas born within me, the first and principal of which is that of God.
Here Descartes is confronting loose definition, in this case the
overgeneralization that all quadrilateral figures can be inscribed in a circle.
The overgeneralization contradicts the need to conceive the understanding of
God ‘clearly and distinctly’. And so there is a great difference between
notions based on overgeneralisations such as ‘all quadrilaterals can be
inscribed in a circle’, and the ideas born in the mind, the first of which is
that of God.
For really I discern in many ways that this idea is not
something factitious, and depending solely on my thought, but that it is the
image of a true and immutable nature; first of all, because I cannot conceive
anything but God himself to whose essence existence necessarily pertains; in
the second place because it is not possible for me to conceive two or more Gods
in this same position; and, granted that there is one such God who now exists,
I see clearly that it is necessary that He should have existed from all
eternity, and that He must exist eternally; and finally, because I know an
infinitude of other properties in God, none of which I can either diminish or
change.
To Descartes this idea of the supreme perfect Being is not something
fabricated by the human mind, but it is the ‘image of a true and immutable
nature’. Then he says something quite surprising - he says he cannot ‘conceive
anything but God himself to whose essence existence necessarily pertains’. What does he mean by this? Is he saying that
he can doubt the existence of all other entities? Or perhaps he is saying that
existence is not a necessary or essential property of all entities other than
God? Descartes has subtly shifted his position here, by modifying his implicit
definition of ‘existence’. Now it is an essential property of the divine, and
perhaps an inessential property of all other entities and objects. The question
arises therefore, is the modified definition of existence something which has
aspects in common with the existence associated with entities and objects? Is
it really the case in the mind of Descartes that ‘God’ possesses the property
existence more than everyday objects which we are more accustomed to say exist?
And he cannot conceive two or more gods in the same position. Granted that
this supremely perfect Being exists, it is necessary that He should have
existed from all eternity, and that He must exist eternally.
This is the end of the paragraph
split into four parts . Descartes now concludes his argument:
For the rest, whatever proof or argument I avail myself
of, we must always return to the point that it is only those things which we
conceive clearly and distinctly that have the power of persuading me entirely.
And although amongst the matters which I conceive of in this way, some
indeed are manifestly obvious to all,
while others only manifest themselves to those who consider them closely and
examine them attentively; still, after they have once been discovered, the
latter are not esteemed as any less certain than the former. For example, in
the case of every right-angled triangle, although it does not so manifestly
appear that the square of the base is equal to the squares of the other two
sides as that this base is opposite to the greatest angle; still, when this has
once been apprehended, we are just as certain of its truth as of the truth of
the other. And as regards God, if my mind were not preoccupied with prejudices,
and if my thought did not find itself on all hands diverted by the continual
pressure of sensible things, there would be nothing which I could know more
immediately and more easily than Him. For is there anything more manifest than
that there is a God, that is to say, a Supreme Being, to whose essence alone
existence pertains?
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley
I’ve chosen to look initially at the philosophical outlook of Berkeley
through public criticism by Bertrand Russell. [4] He was born in
Ireland in 1685, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin when he was
twenty-two years old. What was peculiar about his philosophy was that he denied
the existence of matter, and in fact the reality of the objective world. He
argued that material objects had existence only in so far as they are perceived
by the viewer.
The obvious criticism of this theory is that if perception is the only
thing which gives objects their reality, then when we are not looking at them,
they should not exist.
To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for
instance, would cease to exist if no-one was looking at it, he replied that God
always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to material
objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we look at
them; but as it is, owing to God’s perceptions, trees and rocks and stones have
an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his opinion, a
weighty argument for the existence of God.
His principal philosophical concerns were expressed in a small number of
works written before he was twenty-eight years old. These concerns resemble
remarkably those of ancient priestly interest. His works were A New Theory
of Vision (1709); The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710); and The
Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous (1713). The last of these is the one which
presents the argument against matter. Russell considers that the first of these
dialogues and the beginning of the second present the main aspects of the
theory, and supplies a useful summary of the argument. This summary is
reproduced here. Russell feels that Berkeley:
advances valid arguments in favour of a certain important conclusion, though not quite in favour of the conclusion he thinks he is proving. He thinks he is proving that all reality is mental; what he is proving is that we perceive qualities, not things, and that qualities are relative to the percipient. [5]
There are only two characters in the dialogue, Hylas and Philonous. [6] The former
represents educated common sense, and Philonous, represents Berkeley himself.
Shortly after the opening remarks,
Hylas says that he has heard strange reports of the
opinions of Philonous, to the effect that he does not believe in material
substance. ‘Can anything,’ he exclaims, ‘be more fantastical, more repugnant to
Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is
no such thing as matter?’ Philonous
replies that he does not deny the reality of sensible things, i.e. of what is
perceived immediately by the senses, but that we do not see the causes of
colours or hear the causes of sounds. Both agree that the senses make no inferences.
Philonous points out that by sight we perceive only light, colour, and figure;
by hearing, only sounds; and so on. Consequently, apart from sensible qualities
ther is nothing sensible, and sensible things are nothing but sensible
qualities or combinations of sensible qualities.
Philonous now sets to work to prove that ‘the reality of
sensible things consists in being perceived’, as against the opinion of Hylas,
that ‘to exist is one thing, and to
be perceived is another’. That
sense-data are mental is a thesis which Philonous supports by a detailed
examination of the various senses. He begins with heat and cold. Great heat, he
says, is a pain, and must be in a mind. Therefore heat is mental; and a similar
argument applies to cold. This is reinforced by the famous argument about the
lukewarm water. When one of your hands is hot and the other cold, you put both
into lukewarm water, which feels cold to one hand and hot to the other; but the
water cannot be at once hot and cold. This finishes Hylas, who acknowledges
that ‘heat and cold are only sensations existing in our minds’. But he points
out hopefully that other sensible qualities remain.
Philonous next takes up tastes. He points out that a
sweet taste is a pleasure and a bitter taste is a pain, and that pleasure and
pain are mental. The same argument applies to odours, since they are pleasant
or unpleasant.
Hylas makes a vigorous effort to rescue sound, which, he
says, is motion in air, as may be seen from the fact that are no sounds in a
vacuum. [7] We must, he says,
‘distinguish between sound as it is perceived by us, and as it is in itself; or
between the sound which we immediately perceive and that which exists without
us’. Philonous points out that what
Hylas calls ‘real’ sound, being a movement, might possibly be seen or felt, but
can certainly not be heard; therefore it is not sound as we know it in
perception. As to this, Hylas now concedes that ‘sounds too have no real being
without the mind’.
They now come to colours, and here Hylas begins
confidently: ‘Pardon me: the case of colours is very different. Can anything be
plainer than that we see them on the objects?’ Substances existing without the
mind, he maintains, have the colours we see on them. But Philonous has no
difficulty in disposing of this view. He begins with the sunset clouds, which
are red and golden, and points out that a cloud, when you are close to it, has
no such colours. He goes on to the difference made by a microscope, and to the
yellowness of everything to a man who has jaundice. And very small insects, he
says, must be able to see much smaller objects than we can see. Hylas thereupon
says that colour is not in the objects, but in the light; it is, he says, a
thin fluid substance. Philonous points out, as in the case of sound, that,
according to Hylas, ‘real’ colours are something different from the red and blue
that we see, and that this won’t do.
Hereupon Hylas gives way about all secondary qualities,
but continues to say that primary qualities, notable figure and motion, are
inherent in external unthinking substances. To this Philonous replies that
things look big when we are near them and small when we are far off, and that a
movement may seem quick to one man and slow to another.
At this point Hylas attempts a new departure. He made a mistake, he says,
in not distinguishing the object from the sensation; the act of perceiving he
admits to be mental, but not what is perceived; colours, for example, ‘have a
real existence without the mind, in some unthinking substance’. To this
Philonous replies: ‘That any immediate object of the senses – that is, any idea
or combination of ideas – should exist in an unthinking substance, or exterior
to all minds, is in itself an evident contradiction.’
Russell points out that the argument has now become a logical one, and is
no longer empirical in nature. Berkeley has moved on to a discussion involving
ideas, as expressed by Philonous a few pages later, where he says, ‘whatever is
immediately perceived is an idea; and can any idea exist out of the mind?’
After a metaphysical discussion of substance, Hylas
returns to the discussion of visual sensations, with the argument that he sees
things at a distance. To this Philonous replies that this is equally true of
things seen in dreams, which everyone admits to be mental; further, that
distance is not perceived by sight, but judged as the result of experience, and
that, to a man born blind but now for the first time able to see, visual
objects would not appear distant.
At the beginning of the second Dialogue, Hylas urges that
certain traces in the brain are the causes of sensations, but Philonous retorts
that ‘the brain, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind’.
Russell ends his summary of the argument here, and divides Philonous’
argument into two parts. The first is the argument that we do not perceive
material things, but only their secondary qualities, such as colours, sounds,
etc. These secondary qualities exist in the mind, and are mental in nature.
Russell thinks that Berkeley’s reasoning is ‘completely cogent as to the first
point,’ but as to the second, ‘it suffers from the absence of any definition of
the word ‘mental’. He relies… upon the received view that everything must be
either material or mental, and that nothing is both’.
When he says that we perceive qualities, not ‘things’ or ‘material substances’, and that there is no reason to suppose that the different qualities which common sense regards as all belonging to one ‘thing’ inhere in a substance distinct from each and all of them, his reasoning may be accepted. But when he goes on to say that sensible qualities – including primary qualities – are ‘mental’, the arguments are of very different kinds, and of very different degrees of validity. There are some attempting to prove logical necessity, while others are more empirical. [8]
Russell is not interested in Berkeley’s argument after this, as he
explained. This is because he has exposed the same looseness of language which
we saw employed by the most celebrated exponents of the ontological argument
(and consequently the weakness of the argumentation), and the rest of
Berkeley’s argument concerns a theological understanding of the world. We
however shall press on, since Berkeley’s theological understanding is relevant
to the subject of this book, and it also presents an alternative form of
ontological argument, which Berkeley claims shows the reality of God.
The Second Dialogue opens with a discussion which functions to clarify
whether the essentially skeptical view of Hylas is the correct response to
Philonous’ argument. Philonous ( p 166)
asks to know ‘whether I rightly understand your hypothesis. You make certain
traces in the brain to be the causes or occasions of our ideas. Pray tell me,
whether by the brain you mean any sensible thing?’ Hylas confirms that this is
his view, and that he cannot imagine what else Philonous thought he might mean.
Philonous responds by defining that ‘sensible things are all immediately
perceivable, are ideas; and these exist only in the mind.’ They both agree that
Hylas has agreed to this much earlier in the argument.
Philonous then argues that, since the brain, being itself a sensible thing,
‘exists only in the mind’, and asks if Hylas would agree whether or not it is
reasonable to suppose that ‘one idea or thing existing, occasions all other
ideas.’ And that if this is his view, how does he account ‘for the origin of
that primary idea of the brain itself?’
Hylas replies that he does not explain the origin of our ideas by a
‘brain which is perceptible to sense; rather he understands the brain being
‘only a combination of sensible ideas’, and that the explanation is by means of
another brain which he imagines.
Philonous responds by suggesting that things imagined are as truly in the
mind as things which are perceived. Hylas agrees. Philonous points out that
Hylas has been ‘all this while accounting for ideas, by certain motions or
impressions in the brain’ by means of ‘some alterations in an idea, whether
sensible or imaginable,’ and that it does not matter which. Hylas is a little
shaken by this, and says that he begins to suspect his own hypothesis.
A clue is presented as to where Philonous is going with this argument,
since he says that ‘all we know or conceive are our own ideas,’ with the
exception of ‘spirits.’ And if we do not conceive it, then we ‘talk
unintelligibly,’ instead of forming a reasonable hypothesis’. Hylas now
crumbles, and says that he ‘now clearly see it was a mere dream’ to argue in
terms of motions or impressions in the brain. Philonous responds by saying that
‘this way of explaining things… could never have satisfied any reasonable man’
since ‘what connexion is there between a motion in the nerves and the
sensations of sound or colour in the mind?’ He agrees with Philonous that he is
satisfied that no sensible things have a real existence. He also agrees the he
is clearly a skeptic.
Philolnous then embarks on a long paean to the glories of the sensible world
and its orderliness:
Raise now your thoughts from this ball of earth, to all
those glorious luminaries that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and
situation of the planet, are they not admirable for use and order? Were those
(miscalled erratic) globes ever known
to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not
measure areas around the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so
immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of Nature actuates the
universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! How
magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be
scattered throughout the whole azure vault!
Philonous is appealing here to the heavens as a representation of the
divine, whose uniformities point to something beyond the appearance. He says to
Hylas that he ‘must call imagination to his aid,’ since ‘the feeble narrow
sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving round the central fires the
stars ; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in
endless forms.’
This is not a metaphorical appeal. Berkeley has introduced the notion that
reality as it is represented to us is not simply the more or less complex
response of the human brain to sensory data, but is a series of representations
which are associated with cosmic ‘all-perfect’ mind:
Neither sense nor imagination are big enough to
comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though
labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still
stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that
compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret
mechanism, some divine art and force linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse
with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my
thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense,
beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought!
Both Philonous and Hylas by this point share the view that sensible things
exist in mind only. Up to this point however, the view of Hylas has been a
profound skepticism about reality, and our capacity to know it. By contrast,
here Philonous shows, on the basis of the same evidence, that a quite different
conclusion can be drawn, if the intellectual frame is changed. Philonous then
attacks the skeptical position in general:
What treatment then do those philosophers deserve, who
would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should
those principles be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty
of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this
skepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of
sense?
Hylas is not impressed, and is not converted to Philonous’s outlook. He
says that his comfort is that Philonous is ‘as much a sceptic as I am’.
Philonous disagrees, which strikes Hylas as meaning that Philonous agreed all
along to the premises of the argument, but is now denying the conclusion,
leaving Hylas ‘to maintain those paradoxes’ which Philonous led him into.
Argument and evidence however do not by themselves lead to single and
unambiguous conclusions. We arrive at conclusions only by the properties and
processes of mind, and on the basis our notions and expectations. Philonous
denies that he agreed with Hylas ‘in those notions that led to skepticism.’ He
argues that Hylas ‘indeed said, the reality of sensible things consisted in an absolute existence out of the minds of
spirits, or distinct from their being perceived.’
Consequent to this, Hylas is ‘obliged deny sensible things any real
existence’. And that, according to his own definition, he is therefore a
professed skeptic. But Philonous says that he ‘neither said nor thought the
reality of sensible things was to be defined after that manner.’ Instead he
says that to him it is evident, for the reasons that Hylas allows, ‘that
sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit.’ And so he
concludes that it is not the case that they have no real existence, ‘but that
seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being
perceived by me, there must be some other
mind wherein they exist’ Berkeley’s
emphasis . As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is
there an infinite omnipresent spirit who contains and supports it.’
This is an interesting proof of the reality of divine Being, which differs from the other arguments we have looked at. Berkeley clarifies that this is not the Christian notion that God knows and comprehends all things. He argues (as Philonous) that ‘men commonly believe that all things are known or perceived by God, because they believe the being of a God, whereas I on the other side, immediately and necessarily conclude the being of a God, because all sensible things must be perceived by him.’ [9]
Hylas objects that this is a footling distinction, saying ‘so long as we
all believe the same thing, what matter is it how we come by that belief? To which Philonous replies that they don’t
believe the same thing. ‘For philosophers, though they acknowledge all
corporeal beings to be perceived by God, yet they attribute to them an absolute
subsistence distinct from their being perceived by any mind whatever, which I
do not.’ He asks, ‘is there no difference between saying, there is a God, therefore he perceives all things: and saying, sensible
things do really exist; and if they really exist, they are necessarily perceived
by an infinite mind: therefore there is an infinite mind, or God. This
furnishes you with a direct and immediate demonstration, from a most evident
principle, of the being of a God.’
Again Berkeley returns to the judgement that men make about sense data,
which is not always the same, though the evidence is the same. As Philonous he
says that ‘Divines and philosophers had proved beyond all controversy, from the
beauty and usefulness of the several parts of the creation, that it was the
workmanship of God. But that setting aside all help of astronomy and natural
philosophy, all contemplation of the contrivance, order, and adjustment of
things, and infinite mind should be necessarily inferred from the bare
existence of the sensible world, is an advantage peculiar to them only who have
made this easy reflexion: that the
sensible world is that which we perceive by our several senses; and that
nothing is perceived by the senses beside ideas; and that no idea or archetype
of an idea can exist otherwise than in a mind.’
Berkeley regarded this as a powerful argument against atheism. Hylas says
that ‘some eminent moderns’ entertain a notion of ‘seeing all things in God’,
(a reference in particular to the French scholar Malebranche) and gives detail
in response to questioning by Philonous. Hylas says that these men conceive
that the soul being immaterial, ‘is incapable of being united with material
things, so as to perceive them in themselves, but that she (the soul) by her
union with the substance of God, which being spiritual is therefore purely
intelligible, or capable of being the immediate object of a spirit’s thought.
Besides, the divine essence contains in it perfections correspondent to each
created being; and which are for that reason proper to exhibit or represent
them to the mind.’
Philonous is not impressed with this argument, in that he argues it makes a
created world ‘exist otherwise than in the mind of a spirit’. This is because,
as he has said, ‘nothing is perceived by the senses besides ideas.’ He does not
share the view with Malebranche that there is an absolute external world.
According to Philonous, Malebranche ‘maintains that we are deceived by our
senses, and know not the real natures or the true forms and figures of extended
beings, of all which I hold the direct contrary.’ Hylas thinks however that
what Philonous proposes comes near to ‘seeing all things in God’.
The response of Philonous is that ‘few men think, yet all will have
opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused. It is nothing
strange that tenets, which in themselves are ever so different, should
nevertheless be confounded with each other by those who do not consider them
attentively.’ [10] He says he is
very remote from the view of Malebranche, because Malebranche builds on the
most abstract general ideas… though he (Philonous) agrees with holy Scripture,
in ‘that in God we live, and move, and have our being’. He explains briefly the
difference between his view and that of Malebranche:
It is evident that the things I perceive are my own
ideas, and that no idea can exist unless it be in a mind. Nor is it less plain
that these ideas or things by me perceived, either themselves or their
archetypes, exist independently of my mind, since I know myself not to be their
author, it being out of my power to determine at pleasure, what particular idea
I shall be effected with upon opening my eyes or ears. They must therefore exist
in some other mind, whose will it is they should be exhibited to me. The
things, I say, immediately perceived, are ideas or sensations, call them what
you will. But how can any idea or sensation exist in, or be produced by,
anything but a mind or spirit? This indeed is inconceivable; and to assert that
which is inconceivable, is to talk nonsense….
It may be that the objection to the notion put forward by Malebranche is
that it depicts reality as something which is perceived as outside the human
mind by the human mind, whereas Berkeley does not make this distinction. For
Berkeley it is as if his mind is a subset of the divine cosmic mind, perceiving
a subset of the ideas in that mind. If
he perceives ideas, it is because the cosmic mind wills it.
The ideas which present themselves to Philonous, he argues, ‘it is very
conceivable that they should exist in, and be produced by, a spirit; since this
is no more than I daily experience in myself, inasmuch as I perceive numberless
ideas; and by an act of my Will can form a great variety of them, and raise
them up in my imagination: though it must be confessed, these creatures of the
fancy are not altogether so distinct, so strong, vivid, and permanent, as those
perceived by my senses, which latter are called real things. From all which I conclude, there is a mind which affects me every moment with all the sensible
impressions I perceive. And from the variety, order, and manner of these, I
conclude the Author of them to be wise,
powerful, and good, beyond comprehension.
Philonous emphasizes here that he is not saying that he sees ‘things by
perceiving that which represents in the intelligible substance of God. This I
do not understand; but I say, the things by me perceived are known by the
understanding, and produced by the will, of an infinite spirit.’ So his
objection is as I suggested, and he is not simply seeing what is ‘in’ God.
Beyond this, the Second Dialogue deals with Malebranche’s occasionalism,
which sees the physical world as a place where God has the occasion to create
motion and change, and also deals with ideas of substance.
Hume and Kant on Reality
In his first work, the Treatise on
Human Nature, published in 1739, when he was 29, Hume argued that he was
introducing the scientific method into psychological subjects. That is, he was
using an analytical and empirical approach to matters concerned with the mind,
and human understanding. This was a large claim for his approach. It was
certainly analytical, but its empirical content consists largely of appeals to
experience and well-argued conjecture.
Hume argued on this basis that human understanding is based on sense data
and empirical sense impressions. We have knowledge only of what we directly
experience. He divided sense impressions into strong and weak, arguing that
weak impressions are simply copies of strong impressions. The mind makes sense
of these impressions in the context of what the mind believes it already knows
and understands. He argued entirely against the notion of innate ideas, which
had been part of the currency of philosophy in the preceding period.
There are two key and related areas where Hume’s inquiry into human nature
threw up problems which cannot be satisfactorily resolved; these are: a) whether it is really legitimate for us to
perform inductive thought, and b) whether or not we can infer causality. Hume
argued that we assume the constancy of the conjunction of things on the basis
of experience, but have no actual knowledge of how these things are conjoined.
Whatever might hold relationships together is obscure to us, and even our
understanding of ourselves is no more than a complex bundle of sense
impressions associated with the notion of the self. Of the self itself, we have
no real knowledge. In essence Hume was arguing against the uniformitarian
attitude to the world which developed after the publication of Newton’s Principia, which saw the apparent
regularity and mathematical predictability in Newton’s description of the world
as reliable proof of its consistency.
Hume used the example the example of colliding billiard balls to illustrate
his point (Hume was clubbable, so the example is not a surprising one). Skilled
players of the game know how the geometry of billiards works, and can infer the
way a ball (B) will move when struck by ball (A). The skill of a good player
relies on the consistency of the behaviour of the balls. We assume because of
the consistency of this behaviour that there is an underlying and consistent
causality at work. However Hume argued that, despite the apparent regularity of
the behaviour of ball B when struck by ball A, we have no insight at all into
the underlying process by which this behaviour is effected. Nor have we any
reason beyond custom and expectation to believe that the balls will behave in
the expected manner. Causality itself is a mystery wherever it is found, and we
have no knowledge of how and why it works.
This is the reason why Hume is regarded as a sceptical philosopher – we
have no certain knowledge about some things which we take very much for
granted. This is true for both inductive thought, and our understanding of
causality.
So Hume is left in an interesting position. On the one hand, he argued that
what knowledge we have is based purely on experience, and this experience is
mediated through sense impressions. On the other hand, he argued that we have
no real understanding of how the knowledge we have is assembled, since the
consistency we see in the relation between ideas is purely customary and a
matter of expectation, which isn’t an understanding. This applies also to
causal relations.
Hume’s point is not that the universe might at any moment start behaving in
a different way; only that what we think we understand, we do not ‘understand’
at all. It is a matter of conjecture based on experience. What underlies these
consistencies is wholly unknown to us.
Immanuel Kant responded to Hume’s challenge by inverting the line of
argument. Where Hume argued that knowledge is acquired through experience, Kant
argued that what we understand is shaped by what the human mind can understand.
That is, it is reason itself which gives us understanding, and not simply
sensory experience. We have to understand reason if we are to understand anything.
Not only did Kant argue that what we understand is shaped by properties and
characteristics of reason, he also argued that the world of experience, the
imagined source of sensory impressions received by the mind, might also be a
product of human reason. In other words, we assume that the objective world we
see as having existence outside ourselves in space and time, has objective
reality. However without a proper understanding of human reason, it is as
unreasonable to assume this to be the case, as it is for us to assume the
consistent behaviour of billiard balls on a table.
This is not to assume the identity of, or to conflate processes occurring
in the phenomenal world, with those operating in the mind. Precisely because we
do not understand the processes and relations of things in the phenomenal
world, there is no reason for them to always conform to our understanding.
Kant’s first major work was the Critique of Pure Reason. It had to be a critique rather than a dogmatic survey of pure reason, since reason remained to be understood. Kant felt that, in pursuing this approach, he was making metaphysics anew, and that all previous writings on metaphysics were superseded, at least in terms of metaphysics as a science. He made this clear in the short work Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself As A Science, which was published around Easter 1783, some two years after the publication of the Critique in the summer of 1781. The purpose of the Prolegomena was to make clear the radical nature of the Critique, and to explain his intent. Kant expected the Critique ‘to have a revolutionary effect and anxiously awaited its impact on the world of learning. In fact he found that it was being received in silence’. [11]
A key argument of the Critique is that the reason does not apprehend things
as they are, but only as they appear to us. Kant repeats the distinction made
in classical times between the phenomena and the noumena. We can apprehend the
phenomena, but the relationship between the phenomena and the noumena, or the
‘thing-in-itself’, is entirely unknown to us, and unknowable by means of the
senses, and the mind. To Kant, only the ‘thing-in-itself,’ or
‘things-in-themselves,’ are real.
So how does Kant set about creating a scientific metaphysics? He tells us in the preamble to the Prolegomena that ‘If a field of knowledge is to be exhibited as a science, its differentia, which it has in common with no other science and which is thus peculiar to it, must first be capable of being determined exactly; otherwise the boundaries of all the sciences run into one another and none of them can be treading soundly according to its own nature.’ [12]
He continues by pointing out that ‘this peculiarity, whether it consists in
the difference of the object, or of
the sources of knowledge, or of the kind of knowledge, or of some if not all of these together, is the
basis of the idea of the possible science and of its territory’. Kant defines
metaphysics very closely as something whose ‘fundamental propositions … and its
fundamental concepts must never be taken from experience’, since metaphysical
knowledge lies beyond experience. The ground of metaphysics will not be either
‘outer experience’, which he defines as the source of physics, nor ‘inner
experience, which provides the basis for empirical psychology.’ In other words
metaphysics is a priori knowledge, ‘out of pure understanding and pure
reason’.
Kant recognizes the need to differentiate metaphysics from pure
mathematics, and refers the reader to the Critique, where he says
‘Philosophical cognition is rational cognition from concepts. Mathematical cognition is rational cognition from the construction of concepts.’ [13]
He expands on this by saying that ‘to construct a concept means to exhibit a
priori the intuition corresponding to it. Hence construction of a concept
requires a non-empirical intuition. Consequently this intuition, as intuition,
is an individual object; but as the construction of a concept, (a universal
presentation), it must nonetheless express in the presentation its universal
validity for all possible intuitions falling under the same concept.’
Kant uses the example of the construction of a triangle, arguing that this
construction exhibits the object which corresponds to this concept ‘either
through imagination alone, or in pure intuition.’ It can be drawn on paper of
course, as a mathematical figure, but in such a case the representation is an
empirical intuition, not a pure intuition, though both in the case of the pure
intuition and the empirical intuition, Kant has exhibited the object a
priori, without having used a model taken from experience (meaning that
only the properties of a triangle have been used in its construction). Though
the drawn figure is empirical, yet it serves to express the concept ‘without
impairing the concept’s universality’.
Only those properties which it is necessary to consider for the
construction of the triangle are involved – the many inconsequential details of
a physical triangle – the length of the sides, and the angles of the triangle,
are not involved in the abstraction. All such irrelevant details are removed
from the concept, and the result is therefore wholly abstracted from any
particular instance of a triangle.
Kant’s argument is therefore that ‘philosophical cognition contemplates the
particular only in the universal’. By contrast, he says that mathematical
cognition ‘contemplates the universal in particular, and indeed even in the
individual’. This might seem at first sight to be a strange distinction,
however Kant explains himself clearly, saying that even in the case of this
mathematical cognition, the contemplation of it is ‘a priori, and by
means of reason.’ And so, ‘just as this individual is determined under certain
universal conditions of construction, so the object of the concept – to which
this individual corresponds only as its schema – must be thought of as
determined universally. Thus the
essential difference between these two kinds of rational cognition ‘consists in
this difference of form, and does not rest on the difference of their matter or
objects.’
He goes on to criticize those who ‘have meant to distinguish philosophy
from mathematics by saying that philosophy has as its object merely quality but
mathematics only quantity,’ He argues that ‘the form of mathematical cognition
is the cause of the fact that mathematics can deal solely with quanta’ (i.e.,
magnitudes), and that ‘only the concept of magnitudes can be constructed, i.e.,
displayed a priori in intuition. Qualities, on the other hand, can be exhibited
only in empirical intuition; hence a rational cognition of qualities can be
possible only through concepts.’ He invokes the example of a conical shape,
‘which can be made intuitive without any empirical aid, merely according to the
concept of a cone; but the colour of this cone will have to be given previously
in some experience or other. However the cause of anything cannot be exhibited
in intuition, since cause is presented by experience.
Again against those who have argued for a simplistic distinction between
the objects of philosophy and mathematics, he points out that in fact
‘philosophy deals with magnitudes just as much as mathematics does – e.g., with
totality, infinity, etc. Mathematics similarly is concerned not only with
quantity but also with the difference between lines and planes considered as
spaces of different quality, and with continuity as a quality of extension.
The End of the Ontological Argument
I did not write about the Ontological Argument in an earlier draft of this
book. But I gained an understanding of its severe limitations while I was
writing the paper in 2006 which was subsequently abandoned, due to the weakness
of this mode of argument. Knowledge of these limitations informed the
discussion of questions about reality in the two parts of the book which were
under way, which looked at Greece and Assyria respectively. Once those two
parts were largely constructed, I turned to the Ontological Argument sometime
in 2012.
Ontological argument ought to be about the nature of reality itself, rather
than a particular aspect of it. Attempting to prove the existence or reality of
God on the basis of purely logical and a priori argument is
about proof and existence within a known and perceived frame of reality, which
is presumed to be real, though we have no knowledge of what it is and why it
presents itself to us in the way that it does. So ontological argument for the most
part isn't about reality at all, but some part of that reality, and
argued in terms of the properties and attributes which that part may or may not
have.
The concept of God is discussed within either the reality we know in terms
of space and time, or else existing in some other place beyond the limitations
of physical reality. In either case the physical frame of space and time is
taken as a given.
In classical antiquity this would have seemed to be a barbarously crude way
to argue about the divine. When they talked about reality, they meant reality
itself, not some particular representation of it. And that reality was
coterminous with Being. In other words, divine Being was presumed to be at the
root of all the forms of reality which can be represented. It was reality.
Ancient ideas about divinity therefore need to be understood in their
original context, or at least in as much of it as we can muster. A thorough
understanding of the varieties of the ontological argument will not tell us
much that is useful about ancient conceptions of the divine.
So this part of the book should
be understood as a necessary demolition of the usefulness of the ontological
argument, as we understand it. In the course of writing, I was reminded that
there were ancient misunderstandings of the nature of divinity also, on the
basis of the way in which the divine was spoken. If the divine is one and
indivisible, for example, how is it that there are hundreds of gods, and not
one?
Parts Two and Three can be read in a number of different ways. But
essentially the discussion is of a common intellectual substrate, shared by
Greece and Assyria, which lies beneath the strikingly different cultures. The
nature of that substrate is explored initially through the writings of Plato,
and the Greeks in general.
The contention is that Plato, in writing about the Forms or Ideas, was
actually telling us something of extraordinary importance about Greek theology,
and the role and function of divine images. The source of the idea of the
nature of reality, of Being itself is referred to by Plato in many places, but
never fully explained. And there is a related question he asks, about a most
fundamental matter, but does not answer. The answer can be guessed, though
professional philosophers are not in the business of guessing. So we have had
nearly two hundred years of scholarship devoted to Plato, which has explained
very little.
I guessed the answer, though as it turned out, I knew the answer already
from a different context. It can be demonstrated that the same question lies
beneath Mesopotamian ideas about the nature of reality, as expressed in the
liturgy of their New Year Festival, and in other sources. It is the reason why
there are two creations - the first chaotic, and the second, rational.
[2] Plantinga, A. The Ontological Argument, from the introduction by Richard Taylor, pviii. Macmillan, 1968.
[3] Descartes, Rene, third Meditation. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Volume I, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross.
