The Nature of Substance
The Nature of Substance
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There are a number of complex philosophical issues brought about by a discussion of substance. As you may recall from an earlier chapter, the Ancient Greeks were very much concerned about the question of substance. At present, science tells us everything is made up of material atoms, and yet, philosophers still debate this scientific conclusion. It is not to say that atoms do not exist (although no one has actually seen one, which is another question about scientific realism), but rather a question of what is reality made up of, mind, matter, or a combination of both.
These questions lead to other questions regarding the nature of the human mind. Is it just the brain or does it have an immaterial component? What of the soul? All these questions will be considered in the following sections below.
POWERFUL IDEAS: THE NATURE OF SUBSTANCE
Materialism claims that all real objects are physical. Dualism claims that all real objects are either physical or nonphysical. Idealism claims that all real objects are nonphysical.
Berkeley and Idealism
Berkeley contends that the only things that are real are ideas. This view is known as idealism. All the objects we encounter in the world (which is an idea as well) are nonmaterial objects. As bizarre as this may at first sound, what you should be aware of is the fact that the only objects that we do have direct access to in our mind (or brain) are ideas.
We assume that our idea of objects in the world is tied to or come from these objects; some underlying physical substance, yet Berkeley is denying that we have any good reason to infer to this material substance. Berkeley employs a radical empiricism. He thought that we can only acquire knowledge from our experiences—from our per- ceptions. What is the nature of our perceptions? We assume that we perceive objects directly, yet in fact, what we are doing is experience an idea of the object, which has been constructed by our mind. Berkeley goes on to argue that “to exist is to be perceived.”
Berkeley contends that the only things that are real are ideas. All the objects we encounter in the world—which is an idea as well—are nonmaterial objects. As bizarre as this may at first sound, what you should be aware of is the fact that the only objects that we do have direct access to are our ideas. We assume that our idea of objects in the world are tied to or come from those objects (we think those ideas correspond to object in reality), some underlying physical substance, yet Berkeley is denying that we have any good reason to infer to is this material substance.
He may have a point. Consider a strawberry, for example. It has a certain color, shape, and weight; it has a particular texture, taste, and smell. These are all perceptions, ideas in your mind. If you take away the taste of the strawberry, take away its smell, its weight, its shape—what do you have left? Nothing. The strawberry is a bundle of those perceptions. Reality is a bundle of perceptions. In fact, Berkeley
believed, “to be is to be perceived”: esse est percipi. To take another example, consider an object, such as a desk in a room. What do you see besides color, shape, and exten- sion? If all we perceive are these things, and these qualities are ideas in the mind, why posit the existence of some other substance, matter that is unperceived? Berkeley goes on to make a distinction between immediate and mediate objects. Immediate objects are those we perceive directly, while mediate objects are those that we infer from our immediate perceptions.
In his view, matter or substance is something that we infer exists, but, in fact, we do not directly perceive. Yet what would the matter be like. What would the noumenal world (of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804, to be discussed later) be like? Is it not something that we can never know, yet we posit or assume that it exists? What Berkeley says is that we don’t need material substance to explain our experiences, and it is an unwarranted inference to draw because there is no reason to assume that our ideas that are of the phenomenal world correspond to a physical or material reality.
Berkeley goes on to mark a distinction in the type of minds that exist. He states that the world is composed of two things: ideas and minds. To be an idea, it must be perceived. Perceived by what? A mind. A mind is a perceiving thing. Finite minds can only perceive a limited number of ideas, so what happens to this room when no one is here to perceive it? Does it cease to exist? If that were the case, then how come it always reappears when some perceives it? Would it be the same room?
“If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?”
—The Chautauquan Magazine, 1883, in discussion of Berkeley’s metaphysics
Objects continue to endure, according to Berkeley, because there is one, Infinite Mind. His answer is that it the world continues to endure when we do not perceive it because it continues to be perceived by the infinite mind—God. God is an infinite mind that perceives all things. Ultimately, his entire philosophy can be boiled down to this one profound thought: to exist is to be an idea in the mind of God.
Powerful Thinkers: Immanuel Kant
One of the most influential philosophers in history, Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, Prussia. He died there in 1804, never having strayed far from home and having lived a rela- tively quiet life. Yet, this quiet, lifelong bachelor’s works transformed philosophy forever.
Kant, in his monumental (and monumentally difficult) Critique of Pure Reason (1781) questioned the necessary conditions of experience, and he explored our possibilities of knowledge. He drew a distinction
between phenomena, the reality of appearances in our everyday life as we live it, and noumena, realities that exist independent of the human mind’s interpretation. Kant analyzed human experience and the way we organize it in terms of how that reality appears to us phe- nomenologically but also how it really is—a radically precise reas- sessment of a problem that goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Kant’s transcendental idealism explains how humans interpret the world by imposing structures and order on our perceptions of that world.
The human mind organizes experience based on categories we impose on experience. A priori propositions, such as 2 + 2 = 4, do not depend on experience. A posteriori propositions rely on experience for justification. For example, the proposition “Sally is hungry” relies on experience to show whether or not it is true.
Kant’s contributions to ethics, was as least as influential as his meta- physics. He began with his search for one ultimate principle to guide morals in 1785 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and contin- ued as he explained the rational justification for ethical judgments in his 1788 The Critique of Practical Reason. In 1790, The Critique of Judg- ment followed. For Kant, reason is the guiding principle of morals. This principle was his categorical imperative, a product of reason that states simply that you should act always as if according to a maxim that you would turn willingly into a universal law and also that you should always treat humanity—in your own person as well as that of others—as an end in itself and never as a means to an end. Kant’s ethics is discussed later in this book in the chapter on ethics.
