Explanation of Berkeley's Critique of the Lockean Notion of Substratum - Essay Example

their molecular configuration or structure. Observing thus the mind was naturally led to the conception of a material substratum as something which 'underlay' and 'supported' the sensory qualities which were now perceived and known: 'the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities one found existing, which one could not imagined to exist sine re substante' ( Locke, Essay).Thus Locke agreed to the view that material substances were the ontological correlates of logical subjects - they are the things which possess qualities, such as space, shape and motion.

On the other hand Locke himself had agreed that if an attempt was made to abstract from our ideas of these qualities, one was left with only an indeterminate notion of a substratum. Yet Locke insisted that this substratum alone unified and integrated the qualities instantiated in it. Moreover, he also held that the 'real essences' of objects, incapable of being comprehended by the human mind, determine the structure of all complexes of qualities and are 'situated' in the indeterminate substratum.

They could only be understood by a being with adequate, superhuman faculties. Lockean view held that normal humans comprehend things as they systematically appear to them, conditioned by their perceptions; things as they actually are intrinsically lie beyond the confines of normal human intellect. Berkeley thought Lockean viewpoint offered much scope for skepticism. He understood clearly that once the real goes beyond the reach of all possible experience then skepticism began. The concept of material substance precisely left one skeptic.

Berkeley instead put forward a metaphysical analysis of what it meant to state that a physical object existed. This analysis was an alternative Locke's skeptic concept of the 'material substratum'. Berkeley's theory also doubled up as a neo-phenomenalist reduction of physical objects into complexes of ideas, which Berkeley believed ran along side the common sense perception of the nature of the physical world. Berkeley took an anti-skeptical stance that the real world is directly encountered in perception, and that our knowledge of this world is direct and non-inferential.

However if what one perceives directly is the real and objective world, and we immediately perceive only our own ideas, then it follows logically that our ideas are constitutive of reality, and are not, as was Lockean stance, merely representative of reality. It is important to see that both Locke and Berkeley believed that our entire conceptual framework was derived entirely from experience, however Berkeley argued if Lockean material substance is indeterminate and metaphenomenal, then there can be no concept of material substance, and the assertion that such a substance or substratum exists becomes, empirically meaningless.

Berkely further argued that objective world of physical objects is very real. Physical objects cannot be analyzed in Lockean terms as complexes of qualities 'supported by' an underlying substratum they are rather composites of the simple ideas acquired in their perception.In short, for