Berkeley

George Berkeley (Kilkenny, Ireland, 1685 – Oxford, 1753) was an anti-metaphysical philosopher, but, from a certain point of view, he remained metaphysical. He was anti-metaphysical in that he denied the existence of objects outside our mind; what we call “object” are actually only a bundle of sensations, which form the ideas of our mind. According to Berkeley “esse est percipi”, “being means being perceived”. We have no element allowing us to establish that this bundle of sensations comes from an object, from which they should emanate. On the other hand, even about sensations we can’t establish that they come from outside our mind. This way, according to Berkeley nothing exists outside the mind. This is anti-metaphysics.
But where do our sensations come from? Berkeley thinks that both sensations and the ideas they produce come from the mind of God, who sends them directly to our mind to communicate with us. Therefore, the whole world is nothing but a language that flows directly from the mind of God to our mind, as if by telepathy, that is, by direct transmission of thought; what exists is only God and us, and between God and us this continuous transmission of thought and ideas takes place; outside of this there is nothing. It is as if we were in a permanent dream, whose contents are given to us by God directly into our mind. In this context, however, Berkeley is metaphysical, since he identifies a place external to us, where ideas are and from which they flow towards us, that is God, or his mind. From this it follows that what is not thought by anyone does not exist. Then, if at any given time there is no one in the world who thinks, for example, of a library, does that library not exist for the duration of that moment, and then will it return to exist as soon as someone thinks of it? Berkeley says “No”, since there is always some spirit who thinks everything, at least God. According to Berkeley, however, thinking that objects exist independently of our thinking doesn’t makes sense, since, the very moment we try to use this idea, we are thinking of those objects and therefore they are no longer objects not thought of by anyone. It’s not humanly possible to imagine objects not thought of by anyone, since, as soon as we imagine them, there is already someone who is thinking of them, that is us.
The vision of Berkeley, as we can see, is a religious vision, and it is also interesting to consider his thesis that we must believe in miracles, since their comprehensibility is no less obscure than the foundations of science. If we go back to look for the basic ideas of any science, we will discover that they are as unknown and obscure as the idea of any miracle.