David Berman was an old-school philosopher who, for reasons you will not be expecting, encouraged his students to see philosophy as a project of self-discovery.1 I haven’t spoken to him in over a decade but he was one of the biggest influences on my undergraduate experience and upon hearing of his recent death, I’d like to remember him in some way by saying a little about one of his ideas, and in doing so, suggesting something about the man I briefly knew.
The idea that I will take from him that has influenced how I approach philosophy in the broadest sense is the ‘Typical Mind Fallacy’ (he attributes the insight to William James). This is the tendency of philosophers to assume that the way they experience the world is the one correct way of experiencing the world and from this to draw conclusions about either all minds or about the fundamental nature of reality itself. It is an incredibly common philosophical confusion that Berman encouraged all his students to resist. It can best be illustrated by Berman’s original case-study, the debate between Locke and Berkeley on abstract general ideas.
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke gives an account of how we form general ideas by abstraction from particular instances, enabling us to cognise general truths. Upon seeing many particular triangles, we can abstract to form the idea of a triangle in general as a shape with three sides: “Thus, by having the idea of a figure with three sides meeting at three angles, I have a complete idea, wherein I require nothing else to make it perfect.” Our abstract ideas form the basis of our general knowledge of the world.
George Berkeley thought this was absurd:
“Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for my self I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to my self the ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them… the idea of man that I frame to my self, must be either a white, or black, or tawney, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man…After reiterated efforts and pangs of thought to apprehend the general idea of a triangle, I have found it altogether incomprehensible. And surely, if any one were able to let that idea into my mind, it must be the author of the Essay concerning Human Understanding: he, who has so far distinguished himself from the generality of writers, by the clearness and significancy of what he says. Let us therefore see how this celebrated author describes the general or [which is the same thing, the] abstract idea of a triangle. “It must be,” says he, “neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenum; but all and none of these at once. In effect it is somewhat imperfect that cannot exist; an idea, wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together.”
Maybe Locke can conceive of a triangle that isn’t equilateral, isosceles or scalene; Berkeley says he can’t.2 Berkeley’s rejection of abstract general ideas (and in particular of metaphysical categories like ‘inert material substance’) was at the heart of his philosophy. Ultimately, it was necessary for his Master Argument for the conclusion that everything exists inside a mind. Can you think of something that exists outside the mind? What have you thought of and where is that thought? (It’s in your mind, isn’t it? checkmate atheists). Opponents will want to say that when they think of something existing outside of their mind, they are thinking of something in general and Berkeley wants them to understand that this is nonsense.
So, who’s right here, Berkeley or Locke? Berman’s response to the debate was diagnostic (he was a trained psychoanalyst as well as a philosopher). Based on Berkeley’s philosophical writing and sources from his autobiography, Berman reasoned that Berkeley had very strong mental imagery while Locke didn’t. For some readers, it will be obvious that Locke is correct. When they think of (or visualise) a triangle, they don’t think of a particular triangle. For others with eidetic imagery, when they think of a triangle, they think of a particular triangle. The debate is fundamentally a disagreement between people with different kinds of experience, each insisting that their way of experiencing things was the one, correct normal one. From this perspective, a good deal of the history of philosophy can be made sense of as contests between people with different types of experience, each treating their own mode of experience as normative. Gilbert Ryle, for example, spends a section in The Concept of Mind giving ingenious linguistic analyses of talk about ‘visualising’ and ‘visual imagination’ because obviously (for him) people don’t actually have mental images and their language needs to be explained away. People do a lot of creative philosophical work in their attempts to de-legitimize others’ experiences.
Berman wrote about this years before the term ‘aphantasia’ would be coined by psychologists or philosophers would take an interest in the issue. I recall Berman himself saying that he had tried for years to visualise a triangle and could normally imagine two sides but it would disappear before he saw the third. He encouraged us to see our potential mental differences as an opportunity for surprise and wonder (as any good Star Trek fan would) and he didn’t see the task of philosophical education to be a matter of bestowing ‘the right intuitions’ onto students, but instead, he sought to help them see how their own minds work. He spoke of the challenges John Dalton had when trying to convince people that colour-blindness was real. It’s a shame some contemporary philosophers aren’t more tolerant of the fact that others might be having very different experiences of the world.
There are several ways you could respond to this view of philosophy.
One response is to reject introspection as a philosophical method. “Oh, you can imagine philosophical zombies, that’s nice! It’s not for me, but good for you :)” Philosophers’ reports on what they imagine/intuit/conceive are perhaps useful data for psychologists but they’re not going to lead us to the fundamental nature of reality. The limits of philosopher’s imaginations are not the limits of the world.3
Berman’s own belief (as far as I could tell) was to maintain the idea that introspection does get us to the fundamental nature of reality, but only because something like Berkelian idealism is correct. Since what ultimately exists are minds and ideas, introspection on different kinds of minds and different kinds of ideas is the best method we have of getting at fundamental reality. It just that one person can’t do this alone. What Berkeley had missed out by committing the typical mind fallacy was that some minds are materialist minds with material substance in them! The committed materialist is giving an honest and accurate account of the universe sustained in their mind which is ontologically different from what exists inside idealist minds. This is (among other things) a deeply ecumenical view of philosophy. I don’t find the metaphysics plausible but I do think it is original.
One final story captures his commitment to introspective methods. It happened several weeks into his course on Schopenhauer. Late in the afternoon, in a poorly ventilated, crowded, and overly warm lecture theatre, Berman began discussing some small and seemingly irrelevant passage in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. I think it was from On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This week, his voice was particularly monotonous and the topic was deeply uninteresting. At least it seemed that way at the time. As this lecture went on, even the most dedicated students began to get bored and tired. I remember myself slipping, the staleness of the air, slouched in my chair, struggling to focus, drifting into half-sleep, aware only of the warmth and the drone of his voice slipping from my attention.
Suddenly, a loud bang shot through the room and Berman shouted “MURDER!!!”. Everyone in the room shot upright. He had banged a wooden block against the lectern and his face had a wild intensity. In his usual voice he continued “I want you all to introspect on that feeling inside you right now. Look at it directly. That is the Will to Life inside you. This is what Schopenhauer wants you to understand.” He had staged the whole thing and was boring us intentionally. He confessed that his original plan involved a fake gun. You can talk in abstract about Schopenhauer’s theory, but for Berman, words were no substitute for direct experience.
- By ‘old-school’, I mean it sometimes felt like his philosophy had come intact through a wormhole from the 17th century. ↩︎
- Later I found myself more drawn to Jim Levine’s characterisation of the debate as a contest between substitutional and denotational readings of the quantifier. ↩︎
- Another response is to try to de-psychologise the whole thing by modelling conceivability with two dimensional semantics. Perhaps some people can meaningfully intuit the correct set of horizontal propositions that form a propositional concept, I pretend to no such capacities. ↩︎