_007 Berkely & Idealism

 If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Not according to 18^th Century Irish philosopher George Berkely. In fact, he takes it several steps further to argue that the physical world does not exist at all, employing a theory known as “Subjective Idealism” He takes two main steps to argue this:

The first is “Bundle Theory”, a term coined by David Hume. This states that an object is the sum of all its properties and nothing else.

If you think of an orange, you can see its orange colour, you can feel its weight and texture, you can taste its flavour. All of these things are properties of the orange, which we discover through observation, using our senses. But there is no orange itself. That would suggest that there is an object independent of all of these properties. Try to imagine an orange with no colour, no weight, no size or shape or feeling. It is impossible – there is only perception, not physical objects behind these perceptions.

The second stage of argument is that these properties don’t truly exist either. We see the orange colour of fruit because our brains convert light frequencies into colour and this gives the illusion that the fruit actually has those properties. A dog that sees in black and white (misconception) is not lacking the ability to see the “true” colour of an orange, but it hasn’t created the illusion that there is any colour in the first place. In both cases, our brains are generating information that isn’t an accurate representation of the world. In other words, properties don’t exist unless they are being observed and analysed by someone. In reality, there is no such thing as colour or sound or taste. It’s all in our minds.

So this means that there are no physical objects at all, no physical world independent of our perception. His famous quote: “Esse est percipi” means “to be is to be perceived”. So if no-one is around to hear it, the tree cannot make a sound. After all, sound is only the way we interpret the impact of the tree falling.

But surely the physical world can affect us even without our observation of it? After all, if you were sleeping and suddenly your house was struck by a tornado (with nobody else around) you would still die. But according to Berkeley there was no real tornado, despite that nobody perceived it.

Clearly there are issues with the argument and many wouldn’t go as far as to completely agree with Berkely but he identifies an important idea regarding the nature of existence. Most would argue that there are many events that occur independent of any observation, such as the act of the tree falling to begin with, we can observe the change but we did not observe the event. So it must have happened independent of our experience of it.

Word Count: 494

Berkeley, G. (1948–1957). The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (eds.). London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. 9 vols