Philosophers

Why is George Berkeley classified as an empiricist given his belief that only minds and ideas exist? How does one observe a mind or an idea?

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One observes an idea simply by having it. For an idea to exist, and for someone to be aware of it, are, for Berkeley, the same thing. To be is to be perceived. You might say: no, the things we are aware of are not ideas but bodies. But Berkeley would say: bodies are ideas, and it is through experience that we know about them. Empiricism holds that experience is the only foundation we have for knowledge, or indeed for any kind of cognition at all, whereas rationalism suggests that we have some other source for knowledge, perhaps some kind of super-sensory faculty of pure intellect. But Berkeley straightforwardly declares: 'Pure Intellect I understand not' (Philosophical Commentaries, sect. 810). All that our senses reveal to us of bodies are their superficial appearances, qualities such as size, shape, colour, flavour etc. A rationalist would suggest that our intellect enables us to penetrate beyond these, and to grasp the underlying substance to which all these various qualities adhere. Berkeley, by contrast, maintains that the sensible qualities of bodies are all that we can know of them, and he dismisses the philosophical notion of 'material substance' as a wholly unintelligible abstraction: 'when I consider the two parts or branches which make the signification of the words material substance, I am convinced there is no distinct meaning annexed to them.' (Principles of Human Knowledge, sect. 17). It is precisely because he is an empiricist, not presuming to overstep the epistemological constraints that sensation places on him, that he ends up claiming that bodies only exist in the mind. Sensation cannot support any notion of mind-independence, simply because we can never perceive an unperceived object.

But you rightly identify a problem in Berkeley's system when it comes to knowledge of the mind itself. Berkeley expressly denies that we can have an idea of the mind (Principles, sect. 27). So then how can we have any knowledge of it at all? And, if Berkeley doesn't have a coherent account of how the mind can have knowledge of itself, then what right does he have to postulate the existence of any such thing at all? It's not that empiricism as such precludes knowledge of the mind. Locke, for instance, split experience into two separate branches, sensation and reflection, the latter of which was supposed to be our source for knowledge of our own minds and their operations. But Berkeley's theory of ideas generates special problems for the establishment of a theory of reflection. These problems were left unsolved in the first edition of the Principles and Three Dialogues. They might have been addressed in the projected second part of the Principles, which was going to be directly concerned with the mind, but this never got finished: 'As to the Second Part of my treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, the fact is that I had made a considerable progress in it; but the manuscript was lost about fourteen years ago, during my travels in Italy, and I never had leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject.' (Letter to Samuel Johnson, 25 Nov. 1729). In the 1734 revised second edition of the first part of the Principles, bound up with a revised third edition of the Three Dialogues, Berkeley did insert a few new passages which touched directly on this issue of knowledge of the mind. He suggested that, even though a mind wasn't the sort of thing that we could have an 'idea' of, we could nevertheless have a 'notion' of it. But these new remarks are so brief that it's hard to extract a clear and coherent theory from them. All in all, although the observation of ideas is entirely unproblematic for Berkeley -- it's the notion of an unobserved idea that he finds unintelligible -- the observation of the mind certainly is not.

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