Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [48]
Unfortunately for the indirect realist, if Locke’s correct, the way we perceive the world to be is not how the world really is. The tinned sardines appear to our senses with both primary and secondary properties, and so only some of what we perceive of them can be accurate. Similarly, since we don’t seem to be able to perceive the world without secondary qualities like color and taste, we can never directly perceive the world the way it really is—our tools for perception are simply not built that way. So, how do we determine which of an object’s properties are primary—that is, not mind dependent? If no properties turn out to be independent of the viewer, we cease to be realists about the world and become epistemological idealists.
What Marco Saw on Mulberry Street7
Esse est Percipi (“To be is to be perceived”).
—George Berkeley
Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) gave us epistemological “idealism,” the idea that the physical stuff of the world from whales to farmers, rusty teapots to Sneeden’s Hotel is wholly a matter of perception. Imagine gazing deeply into McElligot’s Pool and through the crystal-clear water, seeing: “A long twisting eel / With a lot of strange bends / And, oddly enough, / With a head on both ends!” (Pool).
Now close your eyes. There in your mind is the eel—long, striped, two-headed—just as it appeared in the depths of the pool. But wait. Isn’t the object of your experience the eel in your head, not the one in the pool? Isn’t any knowledge about the eel really knowledge derived from that image, reliant on your senses and a product of your brain? In fact, isn’t the eel in the pool unnecessary for any of your knowledge since you’re working from that mental image when you describe it as having a head on both ends? When pressed, we might even conclude that we can have no knowledge of the external world but only of our mental representations of it: in other words, our knowledge is about our “ideas.” As Berkeley puts it,
As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense . . . but they do not inform us that things exist without the mind, . . . if we have any knowledge at all of external things, it must be by reason, inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense.8
That our knowledge is not about things of the world but about our perceptions fits well with our understanding of experience: our brain doesn’t respond to something in the external world, but rather to stimuli supplied by our sense organs. And yet, most of us would likely not give up on the notion that there is in fact an external world and that we can have knowledge of it.
If with Berkeley, we take all experience to be experience of mental images, there is no right to infer a corresponding external reality. So, how is it that an idealist would explain that each time I look at the first page of McElligot’s Pool, there is always the same picture of a mustachioed farmer with suspenders and a pitchfork leaning on a fence post? I could close the book for a moment or for a week, and when I look at it again, that page will have the same picture. Similarly, when you describe what you see on that page, it will match the one that I had described. Since Berkeley denies the existence of mind-independent objects, it’s difficult to see how your mind and mine (and mine at different times) manage to have identical perceptions of what is on that page. This sort of experience of continuity suggests that the external world exists as more than just perceptions in my mind or yours.9
Despite Berkeley’s really clever argument, few