Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I want to start
today by asking you to do something very simple.
I want you to just look at whatever's directly
in front of you. Okay. Maybe it's a desk, maybe
steering wheel, a coffee cup, or, you know, just
your own hands. Seems like a simple enough request.
It does. Now, here's the question. You assume
that the object you're looking at is solid, right?
You assume it's made of matter. And you definitely
assume that if you closed your eyes or if you
walked out of the room, that object would just
sit there exactly as it is, waiting for you to
come back. Well, yeah, that's a fundamental assumption
of pretty much all of human existence. The world
is physical. It's made of stuff. It exists whether
we're looking at it or not. Well, today we are
going to explore the mind of a man who looked
at that very assumption, the absolute bedrock
of our reality, and said, Actually, I can prove
that you are wrong. And he wasn't kidding. Not
at all. He argued with this rigorous, almost
terrifying logic that matter simply does not
exist. And we should be clear. We aren't talking
about some guy in a basement with a, you know,
a wild conspiracy theory. We're talking about
George Berkeley, one of the absolute giants of
18th century philosophy. He's basically the Agent
Smith of the 1700s trying to tell us the Matrix
isn't real. But before we get into the truly
mind -bending philosophy, we have to settle the
name. Ah, yes. The pronunciation. Because if
you are listening to this in America, and especially
in California, you're probably thinking of the
famous university city, Berkeley. Right. And
while the city is, in fact, named after him,
the man himself was Anglo -Irish. And in his
time, and still in the UK today, the pronunciation
is Bark, Bark. Barkley. Berkeley. So out of respect
for the man who is about to dismantle our reality,
we'll be sticking with Berkeley for this deep
dive. So Bishop Berkeley, he lived from 1685
to 1753. And looking at this stack of research
we have today, biographies, letters, his own
philosophical treatises, this guy is just a walking
paradox. He really is. I mean, on one hand, he's
this high -ranking, very respectable Anglican
bishop. On the other, he's a radical philosopher
whose ideas profoundly influence people like
David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and even, some would
argue, Albert Einstein. And then you get to his
personal life, and it just reads like an adventure
novel. I mean, we've got a failed utopian city
in the middle of the Atlantic. A weird inheritance
scandal involving the author of Gulliver's Travels.
A very strange story. A skint as a slave -owning
plantation farmer in Rhode Island, of all places.
And a final chapter where he becomes completely
obsessed with a miracle cure made of tree sap.
It is a wild ride, but... The mission for us
today is to try and connect these dots. We want
to understand how a man can claim the physical
world is an illusion, yet still be considered
a genius rather than, you know, a madman. Exactly.
I'm ready to have my brain broken. So where does
a character like this even begin? He begins in
Ireland, in Kilkenny. He was born in 1685 at
a place called Dysart Castle. A castle. Okay,
so that sounds pretty impressive. Was he from
nobility? Not exactly high nobility, but he was
definitely part of what was called the Anglo
-Irish ascendancy. That was the Protestant ruling
class in Ireland at the time. Exactly. His father
was a cadet of the noble Berkeley family. So
they had status. They had land. And George, well,
he was. clearly brilliant from the very beginning.
He goes to Kilkenny College and then straight
on to Trinity College, Dublin. And he didn't
just attend. By all accounts, he basically dominated
the place. Oh, absolutely. He was elected a scholar
in 1702 and then a fellow in 1707. Now, for context,
that meant he had a secure, prestigious academic
position at a very, very young age. So he's not
just sitting around in an ivory tower pondering
existence. Not at all. He was incredibly active.
He was a librarian, a lecturer in Greek. taught
Hebrew, and he was an ordained preacher. He was
a very busy man. I do love the image of him as
a librarian. It feels so fitting for a guy who
thought the entire world was made of ideas. It
does, doesn't it? But he didn't stay cooped up
in Dublin forever. He did what all the cool rich
kids did back then. He went on a big road trip.
The Grand Tour. It was a rite of passage. Between
about 1714 and 1720, he traveled extensively
through Europe. And being Berkeley, I'm guessing
he didn't just do the standard tourist stops
in Paris and Rome. Oh, not at all. He undertook
one of the most thorough tours of Italy ever
recorded. I mean, he walked the length and breadth
of the country. There are reports he even climbed
down into the crater of Mount Vesuvius, which
was active at the time. He's climbing active
volcanoes. And interestingly enough, he's also
acting as a kind of talent scout. I read that
he discovered an artist named John Smibert while
he was in Italy. Yes, that's a fascinating side
story. Smibert was a Scottish artist working
in Italy. Berkeley met him, recognized his talent,
and basically took him under his wing. He eventually
convinced Smibert to join him on his later adventures
in America. And Smibert becomes a big deal. A
huge deal. John Smibert is now widely considered
the founding father of American portrait painting.
So, you know, just as a little side hobby, Berkeley
helped kickstart the entire history of America.
That is a serious side quest achievement. Now,
before we get to that American chapter, we have
to talk about the money. Because in 1723, Berkeley
comes into a fortune. And it's in this incredibly
dramatic, almost scandalous way. The Vanessa
Affair. Oh, this is straight out of an 18th century
gossip column. Okay, set the scene for us. There
was a woman named Esther Van Omri. She was known
in society by the name Vanessa. She was the longtime,
very intimate companion of Jonathan Swift. The
Jonathan Swift, the guy who wrote Gulliver's
Travels. The very same. They were extremely close
for years. But shortly before she died, she discovered
that Swift had secretly married another woman.
Oh, wow. And she and Swift had a massive, apparently
violent quarrel. We don't know exactly what was
said, but she was absolutely furious. So on her
deathbed, she rewrote her will. And I'm guessing
she cut Swift out. Completely. And in his place,
she named George Berkeley as her co -heir. What?
Why him? That's the craziest part. Berkeley barely
knew her. He'd met her father years before, but
they weren't close friends. It was a complete
shock. He suddenly inherits a significant sum
of money, purely because she wanted to spite
Jonathan Swift from beyond the grave. Talk about
a lucky break. Although, didn't he lose a good
chunk of it in legal battles? He did. Lawsuits
were practically the national sport of the 18th
century, but he kept enough to completely change
the course of his life. And this new wealth allowed
him to pivot from being an academic theorist
to a visionary man of action. And this brings
us to the American dream part of the story. But
Berkeley's dream wasn't about getting rich. It
was about building a utopia. That's right. The
Bermuda Project. In 1725, Berkeley published
a proposal to found a college in Bermuda, which
he very romantically called the Summer Islands.
Bermuda. That seems incredibly remote. Why there?
It was remote, but in his mind, that was part
of the appeal. It was this perfect centralized
location, untainted by the corruptions of Europe,
where he could train ministers and missionaries.
Or what was the plan for them? The plan was they
would then spread the Anglican religion and what
he saw as refined English culture throughout
the American colonies and to the Native American
populations. He had this very romanticized view
of the West as a new Eden. And he was incredibly
committed to this. I mean, this wasn't just some
passing whim. Oh, no. This is where you really
have to admire his conviction, even if you question
the plan. At this time, he was a dean in the
church. He held a deanery that was worth 1 ,100
pounds a year. And in the 1720s, that's... That's
an enormous amount of money. It's a massive,
life -changing salary. You are set for life with
that kind of income. And he gave it up. He resigned
the deanery and accepted a salary of just £100
a year to pursue the Bermuda Project. He literally
took a 90 % pay cut for his ideals. That is really
putting your money where your mouth is. He then
spent years lobbying London society. He charmed
all the big names, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison,
Richard Steele. He even lobbied the House of
Commons directly. And it worked. Miraculously,
yes. Parliament actually promised him a grant
of 20 ,000 pounds to build this college. That
is an astronomical sum for the time. So with
a promise of money in his pocket and a heart
full of hope, he set sail. In 1728, he marries
a woman named Anne Forster, and they head across
the Atlantic. But, and this is a key detail,
they don't go straight to Bermuda. They land
in Newport, Rhode Island. I had no idea Berkeley
ever lived in the colonies. He lived there for
about three years. He bought a 96 -acre farm
in Middletown, Rhode Island, and he named it
Whitehall. And while he's there, he's not just
sitting around. For the architecture geeks listening,
Berkeley is actually credited with introducing
Palladianism to America. That's that very symmetrical,
classical style, right? With the columns and
the pediments. Exactly. He apparently borrowed
a design for his front door case from the famous
English architect William Kent. It seems like
a tiny detail, but that style became the dominant
visual language of the American colonial period.
If you picture a prestigious colonial building
like Monticello or the White House, you're picturing
a style that Berkeley helped to import. So he's
farming, he's designing door frames, and he's
waiting for his 20 ,000 pound check from the
British Parliament. And he waits, and he waits,
and he waits. Now, while we were in Rhode Island.
Yeah. We have to address a very difficult part
of the record here. The outline mentions the
controversy. Yes. And it's important we don't
shy away from this. To get a full picture of
the man, you have to look at the whole story.
The historical records from his time in Rhode
Island are perfectly clear. George Berkeley purchased
enslaved Africans to work on his plantation at
Whitehall. So he wasn't just a passive observer
of slavery. He was an active participant in the
institution. Correct. And this wasn't a case
of him privately struggling with it while publicly
conforming. He baptized three of the enslaved
people he owned, but he also publicly and explicitly
defended the institution of slavery. In what
way? He argued that becoming a Christian did
not entitle an enslaved person to freedom. He
saw slavery as entirely compatible with his theology,
which for us today is... Well, it's a shocking
and abhorrent position. And this has had real
consequences for his legacy, even right up to
the present day, hasn't it? Very recently, yes.
In 2023, Trinity College Dublin, the university
where he was a fellow and an absolute legend,
made the decision to remove his name from their
main library. Wow. It had been the Berkeley Library
for decades. They officially renamed it the Evan
Boland Library in 2024 after the great Irish
poet. And the university was explicit about the
reason for this. Yes, completely. They issued
a statement saying it was specifically because
of his ownership of enslaved people and his active
written defense of slavery. They've adopted what
they call a retain and explain approach for other
artifacts, like a stained glass window featuring
him. So they keep the history visible, but they
add context panels to explain the full, and in
this case, very ugly reality. Exactly. It's that
complexity we mentioned at the start. A brilliant
philosophical mind capable of profound insight.
yet also fully enmeshed in the brutalities and
prejudices of his era. It's a tough thing to
reconcile. It is. So back in Rhode Island around
1731, the dream finally falls apart. The check
never came. The prime minister at the time was
a man named Robert Walpole. And Walpole was a
famous pragmatist. He looked at the plan and
basically thought, a utopian college on a tiny
island in the Atlantic. This is a waste of money.
The funds were blocked. They never arrived. Berkeley
realized it was over. That must have been absolutely
crushing. I mean, he gave up his fortune, he
moved his family across the world, and he basically
got ghosted by the government. It was a huge
failure. So he packs up his family and returns
to London in 1732. But before he leaves America,
he does something that has a massive and lasting
impact on American history. Look at that. He
donates his farm, Whitehall, and his entire massive
personal library, nearly 1 ,000 volumes, to the
fledgling Yale College. To Yale? Why Yale? He
had become friendly with some of its tutors,
and that donation effectively doubled the size
of Yale's library at the time. It brought rigorous
Anglican scholarship and European philosophy
into the heart of Puritan New England. So even
though his own college failed, he unwittingly
helped build the intellectual foundation of what
would become the Ivy League. That's a fascinating
and ironic twist. But let's get to the main event.
The reason he's in the history books isn't just
because he farmed in Rhode Island. It's because
of his core idea, the immaterial. materialist
thesis? It's to be perceived. That's the bumper
sticker. Yes. Okay. Let's unpack this slowly
because when you say matter doesn't exist, my
brain instinctively fights it. I'm holding a
pen right now. It feels hard. It has weight.
If I drop it on the desk, it makes a noise. How
can a certified genius claim this isn't real?
This is the key. Berkeley would say, I never
said the pen isn't real. I said matter isn't
real. There's a difference. Okay. here's how
he breaks it down he argues that the entire universe
consists of only two things first there are spirits
spirits these are active thinking perceiving
minds You are a spirit. I am a spirit. Anything
that is conscious and has a will. Got it. Mines.
Second, there are ideas. These are the passive
things. They are sensations, thoughts, feelings,
memories, everything that a spirit can perceive.
So spirit and idea. That's the entire list. There's
nothing else. That is the complete inventory
of the universe, according to Berkeley. Now,
think about an apple. When you experience an
apple, what actually happens in your mind? I
see redness. I feel a smooth skin. I smell a
certain scent. You taste sweetness. You hear
a crunch when you bite into it. All of those
things, redness, smoothness, sweetness, crunchiness,
are what? Sensations. They're ideas in my mind.
Exactly. They are ideas. Berkeley then asks the
killer question. Does redness exist out there
in the world if there's no eye to see it? No,
that's just light waves. Does sweetness exist
if there's no tongue to taste it? No, that's
just a chemical structure. So if you strip away
all of these qualities that depend on a mind,
the color the texture the smell the taste the
sound what is left of the apple nothing Precisely.
Berkeley argues that an object is nothing more
than the collection, the bundle, of these perceived
ideas. We have this habit of assuming there's
some invisible, colorless, tasteless, silent
stuff underneath it all, a substance we call
matter that holds all these qualities together.
Right, a substrate. But Berkeley says that's
a complete fiction. It's an unnecessary, unprovable
fantasy. He says, try to imagine an unperceived
object. Try to imagine a tree in a forest when
absolutely no one no mind is perceiving it. Okay,
I'm picturing a tree in a forest. No one's around.
But you are picturing it. It is an idea in your
mind right now. You haven't escaped perception.
You can't. The very act of conceiving of an unperceived
thing makes it a perceived thing. Okay, he's
got me in a logical box there. But this leads
to the classic, you know, college dorm room philosophy
question. I know where you're going. If I walk
out of this room and no one is here to perceive
the microphone, does the microphone just disappear?
Pop out of existence. This is the hurdle everyone
trips over. And it's a fair question. If to be
is to be perceived and no human is perceiving
it, it should vanish. But Berkeley has a very
powerful answer. He says, no, of course it stays.
Why? Because there is another perceiver, an infinite,
omnipresent, eternal mind that perceives everything
all at once and always. Gone. God. Berkeley argues
that the entire universe is, in essence, an idea
in the mind of God. The universe is held in existence
moment to moment because it is being constantly
perceived by God. That is a huge shift from the
science of his day, right? Oh, it's a massive
shift. The dominant scientific view, the Newtonian
view, was that God was a kind of cosmic watchmaker.
Right. He builds the universe, winds it up, and
then lets it run on its own according to physical
laws. Exactly. He was distant. He set the machine
in motion and then stepped back. Berkeley's God
is the exact opposite of that. So Berkeley's
God is not a watchmaker. He's a what? A live
streamer constantly broadcasting reality to us.
That's actually a pretty good modern analogy.
Berkeley argues that what we call nature or the
laws of physics, the sun rising, gravity pulling
things down, the seasons changing, is really
a visual language spoken by God. A language.
Yes, God is actively and directly generating
these ideas in our minds in a consistent, reliable
order. The reason the table is still there when
you turn around and look back is that God is
consistently maintaining that idea for you and
for everyone else. It sounds surprisingly similar
to modern simulation theory. It is the 18th century
theological version of simulation theory. If
you think about a complex video game, the world
only renders because the computer code is telling
the screen what pixels to display. There's no
physical rock inside your computer's memory.
There's just code generating the idea of a rock.
So Berkeley is saying there's no physical rock
in the universe. There is just God's code. God's
ideas being fed directly to our spirits. That
is a perfect way to put it. He removes the hardware
of the universe matter and leaves only the software
spirits and ideas. And he didn't just rely on
faith to prove this. He used some pretty sharp
logical arguments to try and dismantle the whole
idea of materialism. You mentioned the likeness
principle. The likeness principle. It's very
clever. He said, quite simply, an idea can only
be like another idea. What does that mean? Well,
you can compare the memory of a table to a photograph
of a table. You can compare your idea of a tree
to my idea of a tree. Both are ideas. But he
argues you can never, ever compare an idea of
a table in your mind to a so -called physical
table that exists outside of any mind. Because
I can't get outside my own head to look at the
real one and see if it matches. Exactly. You
are permanently locked inside the theater of
your own perceptions. So to assume there is a
physical world out there that... perfectly matches
your mental world is a huge leap of faith that
you can never ever verify. It's an unnecessary
hypothesis. He also loved to use something called
the bucket experiment to mess with people's assumptions.
Yes, this was his brilliant response to John
Locke. Locke was the big philosopher before Berkeley,
and he tried to save a version of materialism.
Locke argued that objects have primary qualities,
things like size, shape, motion, which are real
and objective and exist in the object itself.
And then they have secondary qualities, things
like heat, color, or taste, which are subjective
and only exist in our minds. So for Locke, a
campfire log is objectively cylindrical. That's
a primary quality. But it's not objectively hot.
Hot is just a feeling, a secondary quality. Precisely.
And Locke proved that heat was subjective with
the famous bucket experiment. You take three
buckets of water, one hot, one cold, and one
lukewarm. You put your left hand in the hot water
and your right hand in the cold water. You leave
them there for a minute. Then you plunge both
hands into the lukewarm bucket at the same time.
Right. And the hand that was in the hot water
will feel the lukewarm water as cold. And the
hand that was in the cold water will feel the
lukewarm water as hot. Exactly. The water itself
is only one temperature, but your senses are
reporting two completely different things. Therefore,
Locke said, aha, heat is not in the water. It
is in the mind. That seems like a pretty solid
argument. It is. But Berkeley steps in and says,
hold on. This doesn't just apply to heat and
color. This applies to everything. He says, take
size. If you look at a castle from 10 miles away,
it looks like a tiny speck on the horizon. If
you stand right at its base, it's a towering,
immense wall. The apparent size changes dramatically
based on your perception. Right, that's perspective.
Or take shape. Look at a coin straight on. It's
a perfect circle. Look at it from an angle. It's
an oval. Look at it from the edge. It's a thin,
flat line. So which one is the real shape? So
if size and shape change, depending on where
I'm standing and how I'm looking, then they are
relative to the observer, just like heat and
cold. They are mind dependent. And if size and
shape are in the mind, then Locke's distinction
between primary and secondary qualities completely
collapses. Nothing is primary. Everything exists
in perception. That is devastatingly simple.
He just takes Locke's own weapon and uses it
against him. It's a perfect logical judo move.
He uses his opponent's momentum to flip the whole
argument on its head. And this feeds directly
into his work on vision, too. I was reading about
his an essay towards a new theory of vision from
1709. He made the radical claim that we don't
actually see distance at all. This is one of
his most lasting contributions, actually. It
had a huge influence on the psychology of perception.
Berkeley argued that the retina, the back of
your eye, is a two -dimensional surface. It's
flat. It can only register patterns of light
and color. So it's like a movie screen. Exactly.
And you cannot see the third dimension depth
on a 2D surface. A line coming straight at your
eye just looks like a single point. It has no
visible length. So how do I know that my coffee
cup is two feet away and the door is 20 feet
away? I feel like I'm seeing that distance. Berkeley
says you're not seeing it. You are inferring
it. You've learned it through habit and association.
Your brain sees a collection of visual cues,
an object looking smaller or fainter in color
or a bit blurry or how your eyes have to converge
to focus on it. And your brain says, aha, based
on all my past experiences of walking over to
things and reaching out and touching them, this
particular set of visual cues means far away.
So vision is basically a language that our brains
learn to read over time. Precisely. He used a
wonderful analogy. He compared it to seeing a
person with a red face and inferring that they
are embarrassed. You don't literally see the
emotion of embarrassment. You see the color.
And through social learning, you infer the emotion.
In the same way, you don't see distance. You
see light and patterns and infer space. He even
tried to prove this with a real -life medical
case, didn't he? The so -called cataract boy.
The Molyneux problem. This was a famous thought
experiment that philosophers had argued about
for years. The question was, if a man who was
born blind could suddenly be made to see, could
he distinguish a cube from a sphere just by looking
at them without touching them first? And Berkeley's
answer was a firm no. A firm no, because, he
argued, the man has not yet learned the language
of vision. He hasn't associated the visual idea
of a cube with the tactile idea of a cube. And
then a real -world test case came along. It did.
In 1728, a surgeon named William Cheseldon performed
a groundbreaking operation on a 13 -year -old
boy, Daniel Dollins, removing his congenital
cataracts. What happened when the boy could see
for the first time? The report published by the
surgeon claimed the boy was completely confused.
He couldn't judge distances at all. He apparently
thought all objects were touching his eyes, just
as things he felt with his hands touched his
skin. He couldn't tell a cat from a dog without
touching them. Berkeley seized on this immediately
and claimed it was total vindication for his
theory. See, I told you so. Exactly. Although,
I do have to add the expert caveat here. Modern
historians and philosophers of science have looked
at this and, well, the story is a bit murky.
Some scholars have pointed out that Berkeley
knew the surgeon, Cheseldon. And the language
in the final published report uses some very
specific Berkeleyan philosophical phrases. There's
a suspicion that Berkeley might have, well, ghostwritten
or at least heavily influenced parts of that
report to fit his theory. No way. Are you serious?
It's a plausible theory. Also, the poor boy's
vision was never very good even after the surgery,
so the data was messy from the start. But in
the 18th century, Berkeley definitely took a
big victory lap with it. He really was a fighter,
wasn't he? Which brings us to his battle with
the mathematicians. Because he didn't just stay
in his lane of metaphysics and theology. He went
after the hard sciences. This is my absolute
favorite Berkeley era. In 1734, he publishes
this book called The Analyst. And that's the
one with the incredible subtitle. That's the
one. A discourse addressed to an infidel mathematician.
So subtle. Who's he mad at? He was angry at the
whole scientific establishment, but the infidel
mathematician is widely believed to be Edmund
Halley, the astronomer of Halley's comet fame.
Okay, so... What was the argument? Well, scientists
and mathematicians of the day were starting to
get very cocky. They were mocking religion, saying
things like, you religious people believe in
mysteries and invisible things you can't prove.
Like the Trinity. That's irrational. We scientists
only deal in cold, hard, logical proof. And Berkeley
decided to flip the script on them. He basically
said, you want to talk about believing in irrational
nonsense? Fine. Let's take a close look at your
new holy scripture. Calculus. He went after calculus,
the greatest invention of Isaac Newton. That's
bold. Incredibly bold, but he had a point. At
the time, the logical foundations of calculus
were, frankly, a mess. Newton and Leibniz used
these concepts called flexions and infinitesimals.
Infinitesimals. I've heard the term. What are
they? Well, they're meant to be an infinitely
small quantity. To solve a problem, a mathematician
would take a quantity, let's call it O, and treat
it as a tiny but non -zero amount so they could
do algebra with it, like divide by it. Okay,
so it's a very, very small number, but it's not
zero. Correct. But then, and this is what Berkeley
spotted, at the very end of the equation, to
get the clean final answer, they would just treat
that same quantity O as if it were zero and throw
it away. Wait a minute. You can't do that. It
can't be not zero at the start of the problem
and then zero at the end of the problem. That's
a contradiction. That was Buckley's entire point.
He said it was logically incoherent. You can't
have it both ways. And this is where he coined
one of the greatest insults in the entire history
of mathematics. He called these infinitesimals
the ghosts of departed quantities. The ghosts
of departed quantities. That is beautiful. It's
poetry. It's perfect, isn't it? A quantity that
was just there. doing mathematical work, and
then it vanishes without a trace like a ghost.
He argued that the mathematicians were accepting
just as much mystery and bad logic in their own
field as they accused theologians of having in
theirs. And the really crazy thing is, he was
right, wasn't he? He was completely 100 % right.
The calculus worked. It gave the right answers
for building bridges and predicting the orbits
of planets. But the logical foundation it was
built on was broken. So what happened? It took
mathematicians nearly another century, people
like Cauchy and Weierstrass in the 19th century,
to formally develop the concept of limits, to
fix the very logical holes that Bishop Berkeley
had pointed out. So the philosopher who didn't
believe in matter actually corrected the foundational
logic of the greatest scientists on Earth. He
demanded rigor. And he didn't stop there. He
also went after Newton's physics, specifically
the ideas of absolute space and time. Right.
Newton believed that space was like a giant,
invisible container that existed on its own,
even if it was completely empty. And Berkeley
applied his, if it can't be perceived, it's meaningless
rule. He wrote a work called Dimotu, or On Motion,
and he argued that motion is always relative.
How so? He used a simple thought experiment.
Imagine a universe with only one single body
in it, just one ball floating in an infinite
void. Could that ball move? Um... No, I guess
not, because there's nothing for it to move towards
or away from. There's no reference point. Exactly.
Motion is a relationship between at least two
objects. If you remove the objects, the concepts
of motion and space cease to have any meaning.
You can't perceive an empty space. That sounds
a lot like Einstein's theory of relativity. It's
a direct precursor. The great philosopher of
science Karl Popper explicitly called Berkeley
a forerunner to both Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein
for this insight. Wow. Popper even coined the
term Berkeley's razor. Like Occam's razor, the
simplest explanation is usually the best. It's
similar, but sharper. Berkeley's razor says we
should eliminate all essentialist explanations.
Don't invent mysterious, unperceivable things
like absolute space or gravity as a force. Just
describe the observed regularities in a mathematical
way. Don't invent invisible stuff. He really,
really hated invisible stuff. If he couldn't
perceive it, he wanted it gone from the explanation.
Consistency was his absolute superpower. Consistency
was his superpower until we get to the very end
of his life. Because now... I think we have to
talk about the tar water. Ah, yes, the tar water
phase. The final strange chapter. This part of
the story feels like a plot twist that the writers
just threw in at the last minute. We go from
dismantling calculus and predicting Einstein
to selling snake oil. It is genuinely bizarre.
In 1744, he publishes a book called Cirrus, a
chain of philosophical reflections and inquiries
concerning the virtues of tar water. So what
on earth is Cirrus about? It is a chain of philosophical
reflections concerning the virtues of tar water.
You're not joking. It's literally about pine
tar mixed with water. Yes. The recipe was to
take pine tar, mix it with water, let the heavy
tar settle to the bottom, and then you drink
the clear water that's left. Berkeley became
utterly convinced that this was a panacea. A
cure -all. A cure -all. He claimed it could cure
smallpox, ulcers, asthma, indigestion, scurvy,
you name it. He thought tar water could fix it.
Was he? OK. I mean, what prompted this? Why was
he pushing this so hard? It actually started
from a humanitarian impulse. He was serving as
a bishop in a very poor part of Ireland called
Cloyne, and he saw terrible poverty and disease
all around him. He wanted to find a cheap, accessible
medicine that anyone could make at home. He had
heard reports from colonists in America about
the supposed medicinal properties of tar, and
he just he convinced himself it was the answer.
So his heart was in the right place. He was trying
to help people. He was. But he didn't just write
down a recipe. The book Syrus is one of the strangest
texts in all of philosophy. It starts with the
chemical makeup of pine tar, then it moves on
to discuss the vital fire of the universe, which
then leads him to the ancient Greek philosophers,
and the book ends with a contemplation of the
Holy Trinity. I'm sorry, he connected pine sap
to the nature of God. He did. He had this whole
theory that the tar coming from pine trees that
reach for the sun contained a concentrated form
of the sun's vital spirit, which ultimately flows
from God. It was a grand unified theory of tar.
So... Did people actually buy this? They went
absolutely crazy for it. Get this. Cirrus was
actually his single best -selling book during
his lifetime. You're kidding me. Not at all.
Far more people in the 1740s knew him as the
Tarwater Bishop than as the Matter -Doesn't -Exist
Bishop. Tarwater became a huge fad in London
society. People were drinking it everywhere.
It's almost humbling, isn't it? You can be one
of the most brilliant logicians in Europe, and
your biggest hit is a recipe for tree juice.
It just goes to show that even geniuses are not
immune to wanting a magic bullet for their health
problems. So we have the man, the wild philosophy,
the takedown of math, and the tar. Look at the
legacy. How did the world react to his core idea,
his immaterialism? In his own time, mostly with
mockery and confusion. The most famous story,
the one everyone knows, involves Dr. Samuel Johnson,
the great man of letters and dictionary writer.
The rock kicking story. The rock kicking story.
Johnson is walking with his biographer, James
Boswell, and they're discussing Berkeley's theory
that matter doesn't exist. Johnson gets frustrated
with the whole idea, so he kicks a large stone
with mighty force until his foot rebounds and
he shouts, I refute it thus. I refute it thus.
It's such an iconic common sense comeback. It
is iconic, but as a philosopher, I have to point
out, Johnson completely and totally missed the
point. How so? I mean, he proved the rock was
hard and solid. Berkeley never, ever denied that
the rock was hard. He never denied the sensation
of solidity or the sensation of resistance or
the sensation of pain in your toe if you kick
it. Berkeley would just say, yes, of course,
God gave you the idea of a solid rock. And when
you kicked it, he gave you the idea of pain.
Johnson proved he had a sensation. He did absolutely
nothing to prove there was an unperceivable material
substance causing it. So Dr. Johnson just stubbed
his toe for nothing? Pretty much. He refuted
a position Berkeley never held. Other writers
took shots at him too, right? I think Lord Byron
wrote a little jab about him. He did. In his
epic poem Don Juan, he wrote the lines, When
Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, And
proved it was no matter what he said. That's
a solid 19th century pun. A very solid pun. And
Herman Melville in his novel Marty has some characters
joking about being on a ghost ship, but still
having palates perfectly capable of appreciating
a good plum pudding. It's a clear nod to the
idea that even if the world is just an illusion,
the pudding still tastes good. But his legacy
isn't just a series of literary jokes. I mean,
his name is literally on the map of the United
States. The University of California, Berkeley.
Yeah. and the city of Berkeley that surrounds
it. It is just wild to me that the absolute epicenter
of the 1960s counterculture is named after an
18th century slave -owning Irish bishop. How
on earth did that happen? It goes all the way
back to his failed Bermuda Project. To promote
the idea, he wrote a poem called Verses on the
Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.
He was a poet, too. Is there anything he didn't
do? He was a decent one. And that poem contains
one very, very famous line. Westward, the course
of empire takes its way. Westward, the course
of empire takes its way. Yeah. I've heard that.
That sounds like the unofficial slogan for manifest
destiny. It essentially became that. And in the
19th century, when the founders of the new University
of California were looking for a site, they stood
on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate and the
Pacific Ocean, the ultimate West. And one of
them recalled that line from Berkeley's tome.
They named the site Berkeley in his honor. So
despite the spectacular failure of his college
in Bermuda, his educational legacy succeeded
in a way he never could have possibly imagined.
And of course, Yale still has a residential college
named after him to honor that massive donation
of his farm and his books that helped build the
university. And Trinity College in Dublin has
the stained glass window, but not the library
anymore. A complicated legacy, as we said. So
let's try to wrap this up. We have a man who
is just... A bundle of contradictions. A bishop
who fundamentally questioned the nature of physical
reality. A slave owner who gave up a personal
fortune to try and build a utopian college. A
fierce critic of calculus who accidentally paved
the way for its modern logical foundations. And
a seller of tar water who also happened to be
one of the sharpest metaphysicians in history.
That about sums it up. So what is the big takeaway?
Why should you, listening right now, care about
George Berkeley in the 21st century? I think
Buckley challenges us to do something we rarely
do. Question our most basic assumptions. We go
through our entire lives assuming we know what
reality is. We think we see the world objectively
as it truly is. Berkeley grabs us by the shoulders
and says, no, you don't. All you ever have and
all you ever can have is your own perception.
It's a profound lesson in intellectual humility.
We are all locked inside our own experience of
the world. And in our modern world with virtual
reality, with AI generated images, with deep
fakes, the line between perception and reality
is getting blurrier and more confusing every
single day. Berkeley was asking these questions
300 years before the Apple Vision Pro. He really
was. Yeah. And I'll leave you with a final thought,
listener. If Berkeley is right and if to be is
to be perceived, what happens to all the parts
of the universe we haven't seen yet? The bottom
of the Marianas Trench, the dark side of a planet
orbiting a distant star. Exactly. Does the unobserved
universe exist right now in all its detail only
because God is watching it? Or is it all waiting
there in some state of non -existence, just waiting
for a conscious mind, one of us, to look at it
and in that very act, bring it into being? That
is a thought that will keep you up at night.
Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. Keep receiving,
everyone.