Let Us Reason Together: A Theory of Dialectical Immaterialism

 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

The problem of knowledge begins with the relation between universals and their concrete instances. Whether the universal is real (per Platonic forms) or nominal (a synthetic category of customary use), how do you know what "it" is? Cartesian rationalism dealt a severe blow to the dominant Aristotelian science of the day. Form became increasingly difficult to conceptualize, even as an empirically observable element to any concrete, hylomorphic, entity. In other words, Cartesian philosophy introduced skepticism about whether "form" even existed. And if it did not exist, what was it, precisely, that man knew? And how?

A classic Cartesian example is a piece of wax. You can touch it, smell it, taste it, and all sorts of empirical observations to figure out its properties. But then you put it in fire, and all such properties change. Yet we still call it a piece of wax. How do you recognize it as such? Descartes believed that we do so through a process of pure intellectation, where we refract the image of the wax into our mind, stripping it away of its sensory properties until we get to an unimagistic concept of wax. It is this pure thought of this thing that gives us the grounds to speak intelligibly of wax as wax, whether hot or cold, hard or soft, solid or liquid, with fragrance of honey or not, etc. Such depends upon the existence of matter and the mind's capacity to grasp a hyper-sensory category that we can call, simply, 'wax'.

But this project seemed to assume formal existence when such was hard to prove. Locke rejected this effort to preserve natural categories. Per his tabula rasa theory of the mind, wax has a bundle of properties that are impressed on the mind (the various sensory experiences we have interacting with said wax). From these experiences, we can abstract an average notion of "wax" with the properties we normally associate with it (likely, we imagine wax as a solid, not a melted semi-liquid). But why do we do this? Why not say that melted wax is not wax anymore, but something else? A major element of Locke's epistemology is humility and human incapacity. We intuit that wax is still wax even if it went through the fire (especially if we let it harden back). It's this process of experience, through time, that grants a commonsense, even "noumenological", access to reality qua reality. We sense the reality, the extrasensory substrata to "wax", which we intuit to mean a material continuity. There's a thing behind the aggregate, and contradictory, properties of wax. The human mind can invent various categories to explain this continuous identity, but these are our limited (and perhaps faulty) ways to approach reality. Nevertheless, sensory experience actually grants access to reality. We don't need to close our eyes and enter the confines of our mind to aniconically imagine the Real, the wax behind the wax, the pure abstraction of "matter" as the Cartesians would do.

Locke is trying to defend empirical sensory knowledge as real knowledge. He does not exactly reject Cartesian dualism, mind and matter, though he undermines it. Matter is, basically, all there is. The existence of mind is a divine miracle, the superadded quality which appears in the human animal. George Berkeley, also an empiricist of a kind, rejects this approach. Berkeley believes Locke and Newton (as well as Cartesian philosophy as a whole) will lead to materialism and atheism. Man's mind is simply an empty slate, operating primarily as a video-camera set to record. Cogitation, for Locke, involves a reflection on the material recorded. Mental activity is fundamentally reactive and reflexive. For Berkeley, such an approach fundamentally undermines the concepts of empiricism, the human mind, and God's providential governance over all things.

Berkeley begins with a radical move. He rejects the abstract concept of "matter". It might not seem obvious, but matter is not an empirical concept. One does not see, touch, taste, or smell matter. It is posited as the pure potentiality that subsists beneath all our sensory experiences. One rapidly subordinates empirical experiences to an abstraction that is literally unthinkable. Berkeley rejects Locke's distinction between primary and secondary categories. The former refer to material reality (e.g. space), while the latter refer to human experience of material reality(e.g. color, which depends on human eyes). But how can the human mind abstract anything without particularities like color? Can you imagine a triangle without color? Additionally, what is space to a mind without body? What about an eyeless creature? How is something like a flower experienced by a worm in relation to a man? The idea that this category is universal, while color is not, is simply ridiculous. Berkeley rejects this distinction to make the point that everything, from an actual flower to a flower in your imagination, is "idea".

The "idea" is fundamentally passive. It is something one experiences in the world or thinks about in the mind. But all of these ideas are mind-dependent. They don't exist without a mind to experience them. Hence Berkeley introduces a new dichotomy: "spirit". While the idea is passive and inert, the spirit (the willing intellect, the mind) is active. Locke screwed up the relation between mind and reality because he considered the mind as primarily passive. Yet it is the mind reaching out, through seeing and listening, which makes reality visible. It is not enough to have rods and cones in your eye to see color. There must be a mind present looking (even if this action is done subconsciously). Ideas are not out there doing things to you, per se, it is the mind interacting with a world available. While this approach might seem to undermine the existence of the world for solipsistic insanity (i.e. there's no world out there, but the only thing you can know is your own mind), it does not if you take Berkeley's Christian theology. Since only minds are active, we experience a world of other minds. You might get surprised when someone shouts your name. The experience is not simply sound, but intelligence. Of course, you could get tricked. You think you hear your name, but it's the sound of a bird or a car or something else. What grabs your attention, when you hear your name is the intelligence behind the call. You experience, indirectly through the series of ideas, another spirit. When it comes to reality as such, the divine Logos is "speaking". It is this Mind (the Creator Mind of all minds) that sustains our public world.

Our various experiences of the world have coherency through this divine mind. It's in this way that Berkeley eliminates the non-empirical abstraction of matter. We consider wax as "wax" because we notice a, divinely given, pattern of things. Wax is the "ideas" that constitute its sensory experience (even if seemingly contradictory). Wax is hard, cold, fragrant, soft, hot, etc. There's no metaphysical thing under these ideas. The aggregate our mind puts together as one thing, and not several, is the wax. The thing is the thing because we perceive, and reckon, it so.

Here, Berkeley develops new concepts to bridge the seemingly impossible gap between spirit and idea. First of all, if the Spirit is interpreting various ideas into bundles, what are these bundles? They can't simply be ad hoc products of individual minds. Wax is single thing, not several things (one which is yellow, one which is hard, one which is fragrance, etc.), and not because someone forced all to believe wax is such. Secondly, if "spirit" and "idea" are fundamentally different, how can spirits produce ideas? How can the active produce the passive, if there's no "stuff" beneath either acting mind or inert experience (rational or sensual)?

For the second question, Berkeley revives a neoplatonic concept of "energy" (or "fire"). To summarize briefly, neoplatonists synthesized Aristotelian notions of energeia (working) and Stoic notions of "fire" to produce an account of how the higher realm of intellect interacts with the lower realm of matter. While developed in many different directions, in the Latin-speaking West and Greek-speaking East, among pagans and Christians, this basic schema reaffirmed the good of material (empirical) reality through its subordinate place beneath the realm of the intellect. A recent essay ("Gregory of Nyssa's Bundle Theory of Matter") has even argued that the great Cappadocian pursued a similar strategy to Berkeley, rejecting the abstraction of "matter" beneath experienced qualia. Nevertheless, Berkeley's metaphysic argued that the activity of the mind, through thinking and doing, left "ideas" in its wake. Thinking is not simply passive reflection, but action and action requires a metaphysical base (i.e. being and doing are real). Thus, our ability to interact with other minds depends upon our positing this activity through the experience of strings of ideas through time (a given which has reality according to the Logos' ordering of the cosmos). In short terms, we see action through successive actions and must posit the existence of an active element, namely a "spirit" or mind.

But this raises the first problem again. What is this stringing together of several ideas? Why does the mind not instinctively treat every idea as its own thing? Berkeley introduces the concept of "prejudice" to explain this mental activity. Not a negative or pejorative term, prejudice is the way our mind patterns the world. It's a product of mental activity, the string to hold together several ideas. Thus, it's not a yellow, a hard, a cold, a fragrance, but the singular bee's wax. However, and this point is key for the major argument of this essay, this process is constantly revised through experience in the world. As Berkeley knew from his efforts at monetary theory and evangelizing, people can create bad prejudices. As one example, Berkeley's bank project was a process of national re-patterning. Gold was not wealth, but industry was wealth. Parliament, as the mind of the Irish nation, had to create the patterns to didactically instruct people. This process was gentle and discursive, not brainwashing or interrogative. It was a process of conversation, between the individual mind and the world around, a conversation that the national Parliament (as the public, and legitimate, authority) guided. This task reflected how God communicates to people in the world. The Logos does not violently rip open souls, like a machinist with clockwork, to reprogram or fix. Rather, the Logos appears, speaks, dialogues, and makes certain empirical observable facts. The Logos instructs the individual mind about the cosmos, preserving the dignity of the mind as an active element engaged in constant patterning. In Christian form, one either patterns things towards saving knowledge of the truth, or towards ultimate destruction.

It's the above that I want to conceptualize as "dialectical immaterialism". It is Berkeley, I think, who offers a great way to approach the problems of German idealism. Like Hegel, the mind pursues objectivity through its own subjectivity. There's no way out from the human mind to some rationalist paradise of reality simpliciter. Instead, one is always in time and bound to time. Berkeley was not as radically historicist as Hegel would be (a product of romantic counterattack against Kant and his philosophical heirs). But Berkeley's empiricism produced the same set of problems. The real world remained the very basis for knowledge, yet it was also a kind of trap. You could not simply step outside and posit what the world looks sub specie aeternatatis. It is from the very patterning that man gains insight into things as they really are. The goal is not to achieve objectivity per rational positivists. You can not see the world from nowhere because you are always a subject and the world is fundamentally mind dependent. But like Hegel, the goal is to find objectivity through the absolute subject (and not get lost in the relativity of the always historically conditioned). For Berkeley, the absolute subject was the Logos, the creator mind who is constantly speaking to creation.

Per Berkeley, the Logos has a myriad ways of speaking. Naturally, the Logos speaks through the givenness of created experience. The wind and the rain, the snow and the sun, the trees swaying in the wind and the rabbits nibbling on grass, all of these are part of the Creator's speech. Our very bodies and souls are part of this speech as well, the existence of their varied faculties that we (as mind-spirits) use constantly. Additionally, God also speaks in unique ways that Christians call revelation (or special revelation). Hence, Berkeley recognized that many pagan philosophers recognized the Logos. Revelation involved the history of the Logos' work to create a people to save the world, ultimately manifest in Christ Jesus.* The Logos speaks in many different ways. Sometimes in peace and sometimes in wrath, sometimes with clarity and sometimes in riddles or parables, the Logos is not simply a sublime reality but the creator (and savior) Mind. Thus reality was either fundamentally God-based or matter-based. One theory would subsume the other. Per early modern definitions, atheism was not the non-existence of God (a relatively stupid claim) but the lack of providence from said God (or gods). Epicureans believed in the gods, but were atheists because the gods didn't bother in the affairs of the world. Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish heretical philosopher, was called an atheist because God was reality; God had no separate existence from nature or history. Aristotle posited God as an explanatory cause, but the Aristotelian god is not active in the world (but dreamily enraptured in his own contemplation).

While Hegel was not an atheist in this sense, Marx certainly was. Reputedly turning Hegel on his head, Marx embraced dialectics within a materialist (and not idealist) framework. It was the contradictions from material reality (not the social ideas through time) which fired history forwards. Marx's Aristotelian tendencies (whether his teleological definition of man and nature, as well as part of his concept of value) fits well with this materialism. Unlike the crude rationalists or positivists before, the dialectical process is absolutely necessary to explain how man is not simply a product of his times. If radical historicism is correct, then relativism easily grabs control. Knowledge of the past is not an objective vision, but a subjective construct (per Lessing's ditch). We learn, perhaps, things were not quite as they are. But the Enlightenment quest for universal reason was dead in the water. Both Marx and Hegel reject this irrationalist turn in their own way, and dialetical theory is necessary to pursue universal (meaning publicly accessible) knowledge of reality.

What Berkeley contributes is how this dialectical relationship is construed. Berkeley's theory of ideas encapsulates both sensory and mental (even socially mental) experience. Berkeley's empiricism even privileges the sensory as primary, often determining the shape of our mental ideas (i.e. we must see flowers before we mentally imagine flowers in all shapes, sizes, colors, etc.). Yet this form of dialectics is not simply man's engagement with the material world around him. It is an engagement with the minds that produced reality, and most importantly the Mind which creates all reality. For Hegel, history is the drama of God's self-realization. For Marx, man becomes "God" through actualizing nature in the drama of history (leading towards communism). Man becomes a masterless and self-mastered in the cosmic drama. For Berkeley, history is God's self-disclosure towards man's actualization (rebirth) as sons of God. The biblical drama is the Logos' plan, the pattern for individual humans and human societies. Dialectical immaterialism (or dialectical empirico-immaterialism, or something else ugly but explanatory) aids to make this point clear. We simply don't have access to the world, the process of patterning is how we gain knowledge, and the process of dialetics (the conversational back-and-forth) is how we achieve true knowledge of the real. But this process is, ultimately, not one of progressive gains, but apocalypse. Per Berkeley, the Logos takes flesh and dwells among men. Per Hegel, the world-spirit appeared on horseback. And so on.

It's this anachronistic analysis of Berkeley, a kind of post-Hegel reassessment, which offers a strong way for Christians to give an account of metaphysics. Lest one be overcome with anxiety, this way forward is not a rejection of tradition. As stated above, Nyssen seems to have discovered a similar set of problems (even if his lack of empiricism did not motivate a better theory of history). The quest, as it had been for Hellenic neoplatonists, was to see the real. This quest, whether it's ancient Greece or ancient China or India, is shared among most philosophers. It's the quest for reality as rationality (and rationality as reality, per Hegel's remark) that supports any substantive account of society, ethics, even eschatology. Lest we simply believe the myths given to us (whether myths of autochthomous tribes with their gods, or myths of progress and infinite perfectibility), there must a be a vision of the whole. Yet this sight comes to us through time, amid the rapid flux of all human experiences (both directly experienced and indirectly experienced through testimony/faith). To historicize Berkeley's empiricism, all our ethics, social organization, and ways of life depend upon knowledge of the End. Kant's categorical imperative is flimsy for this job.

In short, the rational-real project must go on if we're not to become animals (with a Nietzschean fantasy of being a Homeric heroic ape-man). Yet its success depends upon a dialectical approach, an awareness of limitation and human subjectivity. Berkeley, as a radically Christian philosopher, has a vision of the New Jerusalem, an alternative to a Marxian eschaton of communism. A dialectical approach would also ratify the revelation (in individuals and social organizations) of the gospel, the new way of life revealed in Christ's death and resurrection. Such an approach ratifies certain views of what's possible and impossible, but only through dialogue with the Logos. In this way, Berkeley (as much as Hegel and Marx) serves as a way to think beyond the neoliberal prison we all exist within. The myth of infinite progress out of infinite complexity, a metasystem of non-systems, can be abolished. A Popperian claim for universal science (and progress) can be rejected for the absolute subject. One sees the end proleptically in a solitary vision: Christ on the cross. Power, authority, law, righteousness, and flourishing find their definition in this epicstatic movement of mind to Mind. This is the way.



*This accords with very early Christologies, where Christ (as Logos) is the God revealing/revealed. No one knows the Father except through the Son (Mt 11:27). None have seen the Father but the Only-Begotten (Jn 1:18). Many more verses share a similar claim. As the Wisdom and Mind of God, the Logos many times revealed God through prophets and wonders. But in the flesh, the Logos makes God known through His Name: Jesus, the Christ. Irenaeus and Justin Martyr continued this tradition, and many others, emphasized this traditional interpretation. Christ is the key to the entirety of Scripture, the main agent that knits the whole of Israel's history together. It was not until Augustine's age, where trinitarian concerns altered this theology. Now it was God-as-trinity who appeared in the OT. While not untrue, the primacy of the Logos as revealer/revealed dissipated.