Mid-Term Exam Essay: Reality

The “Real” in “Reality”

Most people take for granted that what they see around them is reality.  However, philosophers such as George Berkeley and René Descartes took the time to think this assumption through and come up with their own opinions.
George Berkeley, who rejected the philosophies of materialism because of its seeming path to atheism, was an idealist.  Idealism holds that reality has only non-material properties (661).  There are two schools of idealism.  The first, subjective idealism, says that reality is “me-centered,” or dependent on the mind of the person perceiving that reality.  Objective idealism, however, says that reality depends on some other mind, such as God’s or the mind of a kid in a room somewhere outside the universe (152).

Berkeley’s philosophy was a combination of both objective and subjective idealism.  The conscious mind and its perceptions, Berkeley said, are the only reality, and “the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose), cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. . . . Nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them (153).  In other words, material objects cannot exist, and there is no way to prove that the objects and ideas we perceive are anywhere but inside our own minds.  This is subjective idealism—reality depends on the perceptions and ideas of the subject.

He takes this philosophy one step further, however, and adds an objective element.  There are those things we perceive in our daily lives which are consistent.  For instance, our homes, workplaces, schools, and daily routines are perceived almost exactly the same way every time that we perceive them, “for example, when I shut my eyes and open them again, the world I see before me is the same world that was there before I shut my eyes” (158).  This sameness is explained in the objective aspect of Berkeley’s idealistic philosophy.  The world we perceive stays the same—or at least reasonably close—from perception to perception because God keeps the world—and all of us—in his own mind (158).  Indeed, Berkeley completely rejected the idea of a material world, because the ideas in our minds might be false and because all we know are the ideas in our minds, we can never know anything for sure about the real world” (220).

There are those who object to this purely-spiritual view of reality, who ask, “if I’m looking at a tree, “for example, isn’t there a difference between my seeing a tree and the tree that I see” (157)?  One such philosopher was René Descartes, who believed that the “mind is very different from the body it inhabits . . . because we can conceive of ourselves existing without a body” (75-76).

According to his Meditations, when Descartes first wanted to know what reality was, he first undertook to find out if he existed.  His answer, “I think, therefore I am” was very similar to Berkeley’s idea that the mind is all that matters (293); however, Descartes took this philosophy two steps further.  First, he realized that “we can conceive of ourselves existing without a body” (76); therefore, since we have the ability to think of one without the other, then the mind has to be different from the body.  Because physical, material bodies exist, therefore, then the world must be partly material as well.

Finally, Descartes wished to know if God existed.  His answer, like Berkeley’s, was also yes; however, not in the same fashion.  In Berkeley’s view, God only needs to exist as a mind to hold all the other minds in, and to keep consistency in their perceptions of every-day, routine happenings.  Descartes, however, holds that “we could not know anything with certitude if there were no God to guarantee that our knowledge is generally accurate” (235), and he holds also that “God is not a Being whom we come to know after we know the world around us; instead, God is a Being whom we must know about before we can know anything for certain about the world around us (290-291).  In other words, if there were no God, there would be nothing on which to build scientific knowledge.

Whether the material world exists or does not, both Berkeley and Descartes agree that God exists.  They also have a very definite perception of reality in which God plays a major role.  However, in Berkeley’s reality there is no matter—only spirit or idea—while in Descartes’s reality matter and spirit interact.  We may never know what is the true reality.