Mind Tricks: George Berkeley and the Nature of Reality.
Berkeley's namesake philosopher didn't beileve in the objective reality of matter, an idea surprisingly resonant in modern physics.
"Lately, I’ve been spending time at Founders’ Rock trying and mostly failing to get a grasp on reality." writes Pat Joseph, editor of California and has been observed to exist.
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Photo: Founder's Rock.
Credit: Pat Joseph |
Founders’ Rock is an outcropping at the northeast corner of the UC
Berkeley campus, where Gayley Road and Hearst Avenue meet, a lonely spot
shaded by coffeeberry, oak, and eucalyptus. The rock
itself—lichen-encrusted and moss-fringed—is an unassuming jumble.
Aside from the squirrels and transients—and lately, me—it receives
few visitors. Most students and passers-by never pay it any mind. For
them, it may as well not exist.
Yet for all its relative obscurity, Founders’ Rock is, as the name
suggests, at the very heart of the University’s story, for it was here
that the both the campus and the city that grew up around it came by
their name, 150 years ago.
It was in the spring of 1860, just days after the first Pony Express
rider made it to California, that the trustees of the College of
California in Oakland first met to survey the land they had secured upon
which to establish a new university. The real estate was an open swath
of oak-studded savannah that sloped gently downward toward the bay and
was reliably watered by a stream that spilled from the hills. The
trustees, four of whom were reverends, hitched their teams by that
stream, and gathered at the rock, then a prominent landmark in the
surrounding landscape, to consecrate the site as a “seat of
Christian learning.”
They would meet again at the “great rock” six years later and from
it, they looked out to the Golden Gate, where ships weighed anchor and
set sail. Observing the scene, one of the men was moved to recite a
snatch of verse.
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
the first four acts already passed.
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
It was the final stanza in a poem by one George Berkeley, Bishop of
Cloyne. An Irishman who would have pronounced his surname to rhyme with
“darkly,” Berkeley had himself once dreamed of creating a university in
the New World—specifically Bermuda—where he hoped to educate both
settlers and Native Americans. Whether it was due to that fact or simply
in appreciation of his enthusiastic expression of manifest destiny,
Berkeley struck the men as a capital name for the new institution.
As for the rock, it remained for many decades an important spot for
campus observances, and its north-facing flank was long ago graced with a
marble tablet bearing the date of the trustees’ original rendezvous:
April 16, 1860. By then, the good bishop had been dead more than a
hundred years, his own course having never run farther west than
colonial Rhode Island, where he waited three years for the funds he
needed to start his college in Bermuda. As is so often the case in
academics, the money never materialized, and Berkeley returned home to
the British Isles. Today, he is best remembered not as an educator or
poet but as the philosopher whose famous dictum esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived—is a cornerstone of idealism.
We now tend to think of idealism as a naïve devotion to high-minded
principles, but philosophical idealism is something different—an
assertion that reality is fundamentally mind-dependent.
The well-known thought experiment about the tree that falls in a
forest when no one is around to hear it is often erroneously, if
understandably, credited to Berkeley. The question is, does the tree
make a sound? The answer is no. When the tree falls, it creates a
disturbance in the air that spreads outward in all directions, but it
only registers as a sound if it chances upon an ear capable of hearing
it. The sound’s esse, in other words, is indeed its percipi.
But while the example is certainly in keeping with Berkeley’s basic philosophy, his own notion of reality cut deeper still.
In his conception, it isn’t just the sound of the falling tree that
requires a perceiver in order to be realized; without a perceiver, the
tree itself does not exist. Nothing does. As he wrote in his 1710
treatise, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge: “All the choir of
heaven and the furniture of the earth—in a word, all those bodies which
compose the frame of the world—have not subsistence without a mind.”
Though Berkeley’s school of thought is now generally referred to as
idealism, he himself called it “immaterialism.” Whatever –ism you
prefer, the astonishing fact remains: The greatest public university in
the world is named for a man who denied the objective reality of matter.
Founders’ Rock is part of the furniture of the earth—a piece brought
up from the basement, apparently. According to the late Berkeley
geologist Garniss Curtis, it began as intrusive rock that cooled and
crystallized deep underground before being carried to its present site,
considerably altered by chemical processes, and thrust to the surface by
the forces of the Hayward Fault.
That fault is, of course, an underlying physical reality of life on
the Cal campus, and its presence—largely unseen and only infrequently
felt—explains much about the local topography. It was the action of the
fault that created the backdrop of the Berkeley Hills, which rise
abruptly to catch the Pacific sea-fogs and send them back to the bay as
runoff. Strawberry Creek, the drainage that cuts through campus, crosses
the fault zone in a culvert buried beneath Memorial Stadium. In the
short space from where it plunges beneath the bleachers to where it
emerges behind the Women’s Faculty Club, the creek is offset by more
than a thousand feet, its course shunted sideways by the inexorable,
slow-motion creep of the plates.
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Source: CALIFORNIA
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