Transcendental Idealism

In a burst of insanity I asked a very good friend what to blog on this evening. He skyped back to say I should blog on Transcendental Idealism.

So, instead of writing a fascinating blog on why I’m half princess half missionary (which I can give if you really want another time!), I’m directing you all to Wikipedia for a much better explanation on Transcendental Idealisim than I could ever give… and then writing a bit of a blurb down the bottom should you care to read my ponderings on this topic.

Reading from that Wiki page on to another about George Berkeley I was intrigued by these words:

"In reference to Berkeley's philosophy, Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked a heavy stone and exclaimed, "I refute it thus." A philosophical empiricist might reply that the only thing that Dr. Johnson knew about the stone was what he saw with his eyes, felt with his foot, and heard with his ears. That is, the existence of the stone consisted exclusively of Dr. Johnson's perceptions. It might be possible that Dr. Johnson had actually kicked an unusually grey tree stump, or perhaps that a sudden attack of arthritis had flared up just when he was about to kick a random patch of grass with a painting of a rock. Whatever the stone really was, apart from the sensations that he felt and the ideas or mental pictures that he perceived, was completely unknown to him. The kicked stone existed, ultimately, as an idea in his mind, nothing more and nothing less.

"Theologically, one consequence of Berkeley's views is that they require God to be present as an immediate cause of all our experiences. God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery that in the fullness of time led to the growth of a tree in the university's quadrangle. Rather, my perception of the tree is an idea that God's mind has produced in mine, and the tree continues to exist in the Quad when "nobody" is there simply because God is an infinite mind that perceives all."

I appreciate in these two paragraphs the thought that God MUST be present in all, thoughts and perceptions, rational and belief… and furthermore, that even to believe in something it was God himself who has enabled us to. Theologically I think that this is a very sound view, but in honesty I find it difficult to translate to the physical world I live in. (I’m sure that philosophers though would find something wrong with those words physical world though!)

I’m much more comfortable thinking that the couch I’m sitting on is not just my perception, but an actual object that is … and that it is perceived the same way to all people, because regardless of how we perceive it, it IS. However, that being said, just because I’m comfortable with something doesn’t make it so, it just makes it easier for me to believe that it is so.

I guess this raises a lot of questions that my “after work brain” just can’t quite take in, but I shall continue pondering though and you might benefit (or not!) from the thoughts that make it through the fuse box of my mind into the “real” world.

What I do find fascinating though is that I always thought I was into philosophy… until of course I started to read a bit more philosophy and find I’m not THAT into it! Give me a good old theological text and I’m happy… philosophy for some reason scares me. A) Because I don’t understand it B) Because I think that if I did understand it I wouldn’t trust it because how would I know what I understood was what I understood and how can I trust something I’m not even sure exists?