5.1.1.3 Subjective Idealism

Bishop George Berkeley introduced the theory of Immaterialism in the mid 1700’s. It proposed that the material world does not exist independent of our minds; that the only reality is mind and ideas. Berkeley summarized his theory with the motto "To be is to be perceived". This concept was his attempt to defend a spiritual world and prove God’s existence, against Newton’s mechanistic and materialistic science. It was his revolt against Materialism, and it continues to epitomize pure Western Idealism even today. Berkeley thought that the world and the objects in it exist by being perceived in the mind of God. They then come into existence for us as God decides to reveal them to us. God’s omnipresence provides the needed universal observer - He in whose mind the universe exists.

The main point of Berkeley's philosophy is that there is no such thing as matter. It doesn't exist. There are only minds, and ideas that occur in those minds. All the things we perceive are ideas; the fact that we perceive them means that we are ourselves essentially minds. This is the source of the traditional Philosophy 101 activity involving a lively class discussion debating the question: “is this chair really here?”

Berkeley’s theory attempted to refute the idea that matter could exist independent of mind. If he or another person saw a chair then that chair existed. If no one saw the chair then it could only continue to exist if it was in the mind of God. The idea that objects exist independently of a mind or the mind of God is not testable or provable by the scientific method, because all objects we would need to examine must enter our awareness in order to experiment on them. Because the mere act of investigation as to whether object can exist outside the mind must be conducted using the mind confounds the whole attempt to research it.

The logical conclusion of such a philosophy, taken further than Berkeley ever intended, is that reality, being known only through the mind, also exists only in the mind. This amounts to solipsism, the position that nothing exists except for my perceiving self, a view that has rarely, if ever, been seriously considered in the history of philosophy.

To be fair, modern some aspects of Quantum Theory in physics lend some support to the argument that perception does affect reality (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, quantum entanglement, Bell’s theorem, and others). But this would not be the first aspect of Quantum Theory that doesn’t apply at the macro level.

My own personal take on it - subjective idealism is an adult version of the Peek-A-Boo game. When you close your eyes, the universe goes away. Many writers who support various forms of idealism deny that they don't subscribe to an external universe, but give them a few paragraphs to expound, and before you know it they once again come around to their root claim - the universe would not exist if there were no minds to perceive it!