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stages. A lot of philosophical writing involves this kind of analysis, which in its original Greek sense means untying, or unravelling. Unpacking a whole text in this way would take a very long time, and (as will be seen if you turn to the whole extract in Part II, section 6) Berkeley has a lot more to say than what is contained in the paragraph above. But part of your job in a philosophy essay is to be selective – to work out which particular passages to concentrate on as containing the key arguments, or as representing the crucial elements of a given position.
What about the other component of a good philosophy essay, namely criticism? Here you would need to stand back from what Berkeley is saying and ask which are the crucial premisses on which his argument depends, and whether they are plausible. Probably the most controversial element in the train of thought unpacked above is Berkeley’s claim that we only perceive our own ideas or sensations. Is this true? When you look at a mountain or a house or a river, what are you perceiving? Perhaps the obvious answer is – the mountain, the house, the river. We do not normally say that we see ideas of houses, or look at sensations of rivers; we say that we see houses and look at rivers. So is Berkeley forcing a card on us – softening us up to accept his immaterialist view of reality? It’s true of course that we couldn’t perceive any of the objects around us unless we were equipped with sense organs that respond to the relevant stimuli. So sense-perception is a causally complex process. But should this lead us in the direction of Berkeleian idealism (that only ideas and minds exist)?
These are the sorts of questions to think about. Commentaries and textbooks in the recommended reading section may help you to formulate your critical responses to the text and to make them as precise and rigorously supported as possible. The goal is to move beyond mere opinion or personal reaction and to produce a careful and well-argued case in support of your position. But remember that in philosophy there is seldom if ever a final solution to the perennial underlying questions that great writers like Berkeley are grappling with. In this particular instance, there are deep issues about our conception of reality: do we really understand what we mean when we think of material objects ‘out there’, being there anyway, independently of our own perceptions and understandings of them? If so, what are such objects like ‘in themselves’? Does this question even make sense? Once we begin to reflect on such matters, we may start to appreciate Berkeley’s disquiet about the ‘absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived’ (to use a phrase he employs later on in this text).3 If you think the mountains and rivers and trees are ‘there anyway’, whether anyone is around to perceive them or not, what does this ‘being there anyway’ really amount to?
Making the Subject Your Own
You cannot be expected to delve into all of the reflective questions just mentioned in a short philosophy essay, and inevitably you will have to be selective (just as you have to be selective about which bits of the text to focus on). But the key to enjoying the exercise (and as with worthwhile activity in life, if you enjoy it you are more likely to do it well) is to commit yourself, to enter into the argument, to make it your own, to develop your own reactions. Of course when you are beginning a subject it can be annoying to be asked ‘what is your view?’ One may be tempted to reply in exasperation, ‘I don’t have a view yet!’ But in the very process of unpacking a philosophical argument, teasing out its assumptions and putting them under the spotlight, you will inevitably be engaging with it, and moving towards developing a response of your own.
But do not worry if the issues seem confusing at first, or if your own thoughts about them seem confused. Thoughts do not clarify themselves by whirling around on their own: they become clear, above all, through being put down on paper (or on screen). So despite the advice so often given to essay writers, to make a plan or summary of your essay before you begin writing, it is often best to start straight in with the process of analysis and exegesis. In unravelling the arguments and trying to lay them out as clearly as possible in written form, ideas will coalesce, and your own position will, if all goes well, emerge.
Despite the great value of careful analysis in tackling a philosophy project, one also needs to remember that no problem was ever dealt with solely by breaking it into smaller and smaller components. It is always worthwhile trying to keep an eye on the wider perspective, on how the position you are examining fits in, or fails to fit in, with your picture of reality as a whole. In the Berkeley example, as will be clear if you go on to study this particular extract in detail, his view that nothing really exists outside of a mind (or minds) is intimately connected with his theistic or God-centred outlook – an outlook that Berkeley takes to be incompatible with the independent existence of unthinking matter. As Berkeley sees it, the divine mind, the mind of an ‘Eternal Spirit’, encompasses all that there is, and the notion of material stuff or substance, existing out there, independently, or on its own, makes no coherent sense.
Don’t be afraid to think about how this viewpoint matches, or fails to match, your own outlook. In philosophy we should always strive to be open minded, but none of us ever comes to a philosophical text ‘cold’, or is able to assess it from a standpoint of pure impartial reason; we always bring preconceptions and baggage of one sort or another to our reading. But it is in the tension between our preconceptions and the challenges of the text that something interesting and worthwhile often emerges.
Give It Time
Let me end with a brief word about technique. When I was a student, life sometimes seemed to be one long ‘essay crisis’, and completing a paper or assignment always seemed to be a rush. In fact, working under time pressure may actually have an upside, for sometimes wrestling with a difficult philosophical problem day after day only makes it seem more intractable. But one thing worth remembering is that you are best placed to judge the clarity of what you have written if you put it aside and come back to it later. It’s easy enough to skim over a finished essay and think it’s all fine; but when one re-reads it after a night’s sleep, or better still a couple of days later, one will often see flaws and obscurities (‘What on earth did I mean by that?’). A second read of a paper may help you see it through the eyes of the person who will eventually assess it, and the process of stepping back from what you wrote yesterday will almost certainly lead to improvements. This is a point that probably applies to all successful writing, but it is particularly applicable to philosophy, much of which involves cultivating a sense of critical distance, and engaging in a dialectical process of objections and replies (even when, as in the process of essay writing, the dialogue is between yourself today, and your earlier self who drafted the paper yesterday).
But ultimately one learns by doing. In relating the texts you study to wider questions about the nature of reality and our human place within it, you will be following a road that has excited and inspired many before you. It is not always an easy road, but all fine things are hard, as the philosopher Spinoza observed at the end of his own masterpiece, the Ethics, written some fifty years before Berkeley’s Principles. We cannot all be a Spinoza, or a Berkeley. But we can all enter into the struggle to come to terms with the human condition and our relation to the world around us. And the best and most productive way to enter into that struggle is by looking in detail at the great texts that have come down to us, expounding the arguments you find there, and working out your own critical responses. I hope these brief introductory remarks have encouraged you to set out on this road, and that as you move forward you will increasingly come to see just how creative and rewarding a process philosophizing can be.
Notes
1 1 Plato, Republic, 394d.
2 2 Gottlob Frege, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic [Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I, 1893], transl. M. Furth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 13.
3 3 See Part II, extract 6.
PART I Knowledge and Certainty
Knowledge and Certainty Introduction
Philosophy