164 REVIEWS–REPORTS tematic comprehension of Berkeley’s
phi-losophy has appeared. Th e author has com-pleted such an assignment well, reconstruct-ing the almost unknown components of Berkeley’s system. Similarly to Grzeliński’s previous publications on Hume’s philoso-phy, the aesthetics by Neoplatonists of Cam-bridge or on Shaft esbury, the book Man and Infi nite Spirit […] is a worthwhile contribu-tion to the Polish philosophical-historical studies on the British output on ideas.
Przemysław Wewiór (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland)
Adam Grzeliński: Author’s Note on the Review of Człowiek i duch nieskończony:
immaterializm George’a Berkeleya [Man
and Infinite Spirit: Immaterialism of George Berkeley]
I would like to thank the reviewer for many positive words that he used reviewing my book – such reviews would certainly make any author blush since no one else knows all the shortcomings of their work better than the author himself. I must agree with Re-viewer that many issues raised in the book are worth a broader and more detailed anal-ysis: obviously, not only the relations be-tween Berkeley’s religious views expressed in his philosophy and the doctrine of the Anglican church, or with Socinianism, as it is suggested in the review; other issues could be added to this category as well, such as deism of John Toland and Matthew Tin-dal, Pierre Bayle’s skepticism, religious writ-ings of William King and Peter Brown (cler-gymen and opponents of Berkeley) to name
a few. As there are many topics worth a more detailed consideration, I believe they should remain such for future studies.
Nevertheless, there are some issues men-tioned in the review I feel obliged to clarify. It is the fact that Berkeley’s works are a kind of religious apologetics, although they have widely recognized philosophical value and importance. Scholars dealing with Berkeley’s thought cite not only his primary texts, such as Treatise on the Principles of Human Know-ledge, Dialogues between Hylas and Phi-lonous, or Alciphron, but also refer, even if marginally, to essays published in the Guard-ian or to the sketches of his sermons. Th e religious tone of the thought should not be neglected. It is also worth mentioning that the bishop of Cloyne, as Berkeley is oft en referred to, had extensive knowledge and was deeply interested in sciences, or political and economical issues.
All these make any attempt of an overall presentation of Berkeley’s philosophy a question of choice and setting a perspec-tive from which such an attempt should be made. In case of Man and the Infi nite Spirit, it was (and such was my intention) a philo-sophical and systematic perspective. What I intended to achieve was to show the com-plexity of the philosophical system oft en abbreviated to the noun immaterialism or the famous phrase esse est percipi. Occa-sionally, it was necessary to treat some top-ics somewhat superfi cially; the theories of Th . Hobbes and of B. Mandeville were even only mentioned. But what about the rela-tion between epistemology and metaphys-ics and religious beliefs, which were
de-165 REVIEWS–REPORTS
pendent not only on the dogmatics of An-glicanism, but also on Berkeley’s own worldview, the relation on which any inter-pretation of Berkeley’s philosophy must be based? Berkeley reformulates many philo-sophical questions trying to bring religious faith nearer experimental empiricism of his time. If philosophy is meant to be a clear and precise expression of a worldview, it cannot ignore its metaphysical claims. Ber-keley was perfectly aware that empiricism could have resulted in skepticism (also concerning religion) similar to that can be found in David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature or Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and abandoned this way of rea-soning (only some remarks on it can be found in the relevant entries of his Philo-sophical Commentaries). On the other hand, presupposing the existence of mat-ter, he links it with the approval for seeing the nature as a quasi-mechanistic being, indiff erent to man with all his needs and goals. This denial of Providence, which was more and more clearly evident in the theses by many philosophers of Berkeley’s time, was the source of his immaterialism. Th e identifi cation of any activity with crea-tion, the claim of the primacy of tangible individual experience over any conceptu-alization, and a pure subjective character of temporality should also be treated as Berkeley’s way of reconciling philosophy with religion. All these, as I stated in the book, were the justifi cation for Anglican dogma of symbolic presence of Christ’s body and blood in the mass and created a vision of the future life.
What is essential is that Berkeley em-phasized the emotive character of the lan-guage; also his own works can be read two-fold: as works containing philosophical (and also scientifi c) content, but at the same time, as a kind of religious apologetics or proleptic speech directed atheists and free-thinkers. Th at is the reason why the com-mentators fi nd it quite diffi cult to divide them into two separate categories, one re-ferring to religion, the other to philosophy; it seems that the reformulation of philoso-phy (or, in Berkeley’s own words, his “new way thinking”) was to point at the possibil-ity of reading the very philosophical theses as arguments for the existence of God and as encouragement for worshippers. Inter-estingly enough, Berkeley does not formu-late any “proof ” in the metaphysical sense, but proclaims the necessity of relating all phenomena to man and his goals and what he recognizes as good: well-being of his worldly body, moral good or care for his soul – all these presuppose the providential order of the world.
Th is accounts for the fact that the last section of Man and the Infinite Spirit is so short – which reviever considers its shortcoming: the main religious arguments, namely the order of nature as discovered in sciences, sublime natural beauty, and moral duties independent of capriciousness of hu-man will, were pointed out in previous chapters. However, anyone who has once read Berkeley’s Alciphron, remembers that although Euphranor, the philosopher’s alter ego, could sometimes convince Alciphron, the atheists, or the title “minute
philoso-166 REVIEWS–REPORTS pher”, at the end of the seventh dialogue the
latter leaves tired of the discussion and the whole religious debate is left rationally un-resolved. Similarly, as far as faith is con-cerned, Berkeley claims there is no evidence. And although Berkeley’s arguments enabled one to fi nd religious undertone in empiri-cism, there is one exception: the revealed religion. Quite on the contrary to what can be read in the review, the way Berkeley un-derstood religion cannot be reduced to ra-tional, natural religion of philosophers, to the religion which in his days took the form of deism and in the hands of Toland and Collins was deprived of its mysteries. Even if Berkeley had used certain arguments for acknowledging the revelation, the detailed analysis of his doctrine would seem to go beyond the scope of the work of philosoph-ical character, and as far as I know the lit-erature, it is hard to fi nd relevant studies1. Is seems that nowadays Berkeley is perceived more as a philosopher than a theologian.
Th e review contains one more critical remark concerning the structure of the book. I cannot agree with the statement that “the digression on ether” is compara-tively too vast because it is twenty pages long. Ether, the alleged substance of fi re, and of light, was the subject of serious sci-entifi c speculations at the beginning of the eighteenth century (for example Isaac
New-1 For further reading see for example: D.Ber-man, George Berkeley. Idealism and the Man, Ox-ford 1994, and J. Downey, George Berkeley. Proleptic Preaching [in:] Th e Eighteenth-Century Pulpit, Oxford 1969.
ton wrote on it in his early essays and let-ters, and in his last signifi cant work, Th e Optics (1704), and in 1755 Immanuel Kant wrote on ether in his Meditationum quarun-dam de igne succincta delineation). Never-theless, science was then abandoning its qualitative character and became fully quantitative thanks to discoveries by New-ton in physics and later by Lavoisier in chemistry. As the activity of ether was rath-er a mrath-ere speculation, prath-erhaps it was only in the aesthetics that the qualitative charac-ter of the experience was still recognized. Th e interpretation, I suggest in my publica-tion, attempts to restore the integrity of Berkeley’s thought; according to it, the the-ory of ether should be seen as a conceptual equivalent of the aesthetic experience: ether, as light, creates all the objects of perceptions – the only objects that were real to the Irish philosopher. Th e concept is worth our at-tention not only because it gives us an in-sight into an interesting period of forming modern science as known today, and not only because it requires an interpretation by anyone who studies Berkeley’s works and who encounters the diffi culties in coherent reading of his Siris, but also because it em-phasises the link between the philosophy of nature and the aesthetics in George Berke-ley’s philosophy.
Adam Grzeliński (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland)
