Abstract
Berkeley’s negative, defetishizing program was at best a Prolegomenon to the Querist’s conception of money. Philosophically, the major prob¬lem Berkeley faced in his confrontation with the cynically content Irish cottiers (and the libertine graziers) on returning to Ireland as a bishop was the excitation (and taming) of their spirits, respectively. Could some form of money excite the cynically content Irish into industry and tame the besotted Anglo-Irish graziers into frugality? As we have seen, these were vital questions for Berkeley and his Church, but his early philosophy was not able answer them.
the of which zoantholitic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together fallen man than under but one photoreflection of the several iredals gradationes of solar light
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
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Notes
Luce (1949: 224).
Berman (1994: 211–12).
Tipton (1974). See p. 4 for Tipton’s “puzzling” comment.
Pitcher (1977: 176).
Greyling(1986).
Fraser(1901: 126–27)
Wild (1936: 422).
Moked (1988: 2).
Jessop (1953v: 12).
Jessop (1953v: 13).
The insertions are in P 27, P 89, P140, P 142, and D 232–34.
For a discussion the role of “notion” in the philosophical English of the period see Winkler (1989: 278–82).
It is hard to say who is responsible for the “discovery of the notion,” of course, although Desiree Park in Park (1972) and A. D. Woozley in Woozley (1975) are good candidates for being pioneers in settling the rather thin territory. Flage (1987) is the first book-length elaboration on the 1734 insertions. Since the 1970s writers on Berkeley’s general philosophy took a new interest in “notions” and “spirits,” cf. Greyling (1986: Chapter 3, passim); Dancy (1987: Chapter 9); Winkler, (1989: Chapter 9); Muehlmann (1992: 234–48).
Flage (1987: Chap. 5). For example, “I have shown that Berkeley identified notions with actions of the mind and I have argued that it is reasonable to contend that these are intentional acts that relate a certain cognitive content to a certain object or state of affairs. I have shown that this reconstruction is consistent with this repeated contention that there is a close relationship between notions and linguistic meaning, and I have shown that there are several texts in which Berkeley appears to identify notions with mental acts” Flage 1987: 192–93).
For a discussion of Locke’s theory of money see Cafentzis (1989).
For a recent collection of articles on Berkeley’s anti-abstractionism see Doney (1989).
Two useful accounts of Berkeley’s views of algebra and geometry are to be found in Brook (1973: Chapter IV) and Jesseph (1993: Chapter 3).
Jesseph makes this point in the following way: “In the Berkeleyan scheme, algebra is a science of signs with an even higher level of generality than those of arithmetic. Berkeley claims that algebraic letters are signs for numerals, which in turn are signs for collections of objects, making algebra a kind of ‘meta-arithmetic’: ‘Algebraic Species or letters are denominations of Denominations. Therefore Arithmetic to be treated of before Algebra’ (Commentaries, 758). In this formalistic scheme, the truths of algebra are to be interpretated as general statements about the relations between numerical signs in arithmetic. For example, the Berkeleyan interpretation of the algebraic identity (x+y)2=x2 + 2xy + y2 would be that the theorem is a general truth which holds for all numerical signs substituted for x and y in the algebraic formula,” Jesseph (1993: 114).
Brook has a valuable discussion of Berkeley’s notion of arithmetic in his Brook (1973: 147–55), which presaged Jesseph’s formalistic interpretation of Ber-keley’s Philosophy of Mathematics.
For a discussion of Berkeley’s changing attitude towards geometry from the Commentaries to The Analyst see Jesseph (1993: Chapter 2), “Berkeley’s New Foundations for Geometry.” Bertil Belfrage has an extensive discussion of Ber¬keley’s transition from “image-pictures” to “sign-images” in the Manuscript Introduction to the Principles, see Belfrage (1987: 35–45).
There was a sense, at the time, of the political nature of The Analyst. Apparently Philalethes Catabrigiensis, the pseudonynomous author of Geometry no friend to Infidelity, or a defence of Sir Isaac Newton and the British Mathematicians, saw in The Analyst the stirrings of a religious pogrom on the Whig intelligentsia at the bottom point of Walpole’s fortunes in the 1730s and accused Berkeley of percolating a witch-hunt: “For God’s sake are we in England or in Spain?” “Is this the language of a familiar who is whispering an inquisitor, &c.?” “Let us burn or hand up all the mathematicians in Great Britain, or hallo the mob upon them to tear them to pieces every mother’s son of them, Tros Rutulusve fuat, laymen or clergymen, &c. Let us dig up the bodies of Dr. Barrow and Sir Isaac Newton, and burn them under the gallows” (F 9). Berkeley evaded some of the charges while verifying others. For example, he claimed the right to be silent about his timing (F4) and then divulged that Addison was the source of the claim that at least one great Whig mathematicians (read Halley) was an “infidel” (F 7).
There are many useful historical introductions to analysis in the seventeenth and eightenth centuries, for example, Boyer (1989: chaps. 16–20).
Quoted in Jesseph (1993: 144).
For a discussion of the axiomatic-tabular presentation of discourse in the “Classical Age” see Foucault (1970).
The literature on Berkeley’s social and ethical philosophy is rather thin and it focuses on his Passive Obedience (1713). For a useful selection of the prominent articles in the field see Clark (1989).
Jonathan Bennett in Bennett (1971) argued that, at best, Berkeley could be a “duo-ipist,” i.e., presenting arguments for the existence of two beings: the self and God. Since then Berkeley’s “other minds” arguments have become popular termini in the standard tours of his thought. See, for example, Winkler (1989: 284–86), or Urmson (1982: 61).
A useful overview of this development is Leary (1989). The cross-disciplinary impact of Newtonian natural philosophy has been the subject of many scholarly efforts. For Newtonianism in pornography see Jacob (1993); for Newtonianism in poetry see Jones (1966).
Newton’s Principia marked at once the triumph of mechanical philosophy as well as its demise. For Newton demonstrated that the model of mechanical philosophy devised by Descartes and employed by Hobbes was totally inadequate as an explanation of “the system of the world” and much else. All doubts as to Newton’s often anti-mechanical attitude began to vanish after Keynes’ revelation of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts in the 1940s. For a discussion of the new look in Newtonian studies see Shapin (1996: 155–158) and for a bibliography pp. 210–11.
Newton’s “system of the world” was far from stable. Perturbations from the comets that passed through the orbits of the planets always threatened to destabilize the system and sending the planets into the sun or into stellar space. Swift satirized Newtonian anxiety and gloom concerning the prospects of the solar system in Gulliver’s Travels.
The “solar system” model of social rule was a tempting one for eighteenth-century divines because it was tailor-made by Newton to describe the hierarchical relation between God, the Pancrator, and the system of the world. For an excellent discussion of the “God’s Present Duties in the Cosmic Economy” according to Newton, see Burtt (1932: 288–93).
For a general discussion of the development of the concept of momentum see Holton (1952: 288–90). For a discussion of Descartes’ notion of momentum see Dugas (1988: 160–62). Leibnitz challenged Descartes’ conservation of momentum law and initiated the vis viva controversy. A set of basic documents for this controversy can be found in Magie (1963: 50–58).
Quoted in Holton (1952: 290).
For an excellent discussion of Definition III of Newton’s Principia see McMullin (1978: 33–43).
Mandeville is often taken to be a precursor of the laissez-faire tradition in political economy. He insisted in Mandeville (1954)—his response to Berkeley’s criticism in Alciphron—that “skillful Management” was crucial for the transfor¬mation of private vices into public benefits. Characteristically, his example of “skillful Management” is the law: “if a Felon, before he is convicted himself, will impeach two or more of his Accomplices, or any other Malefactors, so that they are convicted of a Capital Crime, he shall be pardon’d and dismiss’d with a Reward in Money” (p. 43). Hirschman in Hirschman (1977: 18), like Berkeley before him, obviously did not find this example convincing, because he concluded, “Since the modus operandi of the Politician was not revealed, however, there remained considerable mystery about the alleged beneficial and paradoxical transformations.” For an attempt to textually supply these modus operandi, see Home (1978).
For a sampling of this literature see Woozley (1989); Flage (1987), passim; Muehlmann (1992: 235–40).
For a sophisticated discussion of the deists’ “twofold philosophy” see Harrison (1990: 85–92).
Berkeley increasingly relied on analogical reasoning as he developed his social and theological thought. Analogy was used in the “solution” to the “other minds” problem as well as in the determination of God’s attributes. Thus in (AL, iv, 17–22) he criticized the “negative theology” of his Anglo-Irish colleagues Archbishop King and Bishop Peter Browne for their improper deployment of analogy in arguing that God’s attributes, like wisdom or knowledge, cannot be understood literally and that they are unknown and unknowable in this life. But “no-attributes=no-existence” was an ontological shibboleth for Berkeley, thus King and Browne have inadvertently analogized God out of existence! To examine what went wrong, he had his mouthpiece Crito turn to the scholastic distinction between metaphorical and proper analogies—e.g., roughly between “my love is like a red, red rose” (metaphorical) and “this engine has 500 horse power” (proper)—in order to point out that King and Browne confused these two kinds of analogies; the purely metaphoric analogies would not give us knowledge of God’s attributes, but a proper analogy would. For a further discussion see Berman, (1994: 140–44). An interesting analysis of analogy in Siris is to be found in “The method of inductive analogy,” Chapter 12 of Walmsley (1990: 157–72).
Walmsley (1990: 143), for example, contrasts the “teasing mystification” of the introduction of Siris with the frank and open manner that Berkeley stated his objective in the Principles and Dialogues.
For a discussion of the seventeenth-century philosophical genealogy of the “notion” see Winkler (1989: 279–80, footnote 2).
For a further defense of the autonomy of the notion see Adams, (1989). An acute analysis of the philosophical crisis of Berkeley’s nominalism in 1734 can be found in Muehlmann (1992: 235–46). Neither Adams nor Muehlmann note the fact that Berkeley’s notions function beyond the realm of “mental acts” by including mathematics, morality, and political economy.
See Caffentzis (1989: 78–88).
Berkeley rejected the Cartesian identification of unknowns with line segments. As Boyer in Boyer (1989: 377) points out, though Descartes’ notation in La geometrie looks modern, “There was nevertheless, an important difference in view, for where we think of the parameters and unknowns as numbers, Descartes thought of them as line segments”.
For an alternative eighteenth-century development of the notion of notion see the selection from Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Works in Berman (1989: 346–49).
Primate Boulter wrote in 1728, “Since I came here in the year 1725, there was almost famine among the poor; last year [1727] the dearness of corn was such that thousands of families quitted their habitations to seek bread elsewhere, and many hundreds perished.” quoted in “William Wilde’s Table of Irish Famines, 900–1850,” in Crawford (1989: 11).
For a discussion of this period and the legislative strategies employed by the Irish Parliament and the English Lord Lieutenant to deal with the catastrophic situation of social reproduction in the Ireland of the 1720’s see Kelly (1991–92).
Foucault argued that “the Classical episteme” of the seventeenth and eight-eenth century as sciences that “always carry within themselves the project, however remote it may be, of an exhaustive ordering of the world; they are always directed, too, towards the discovery of simple elements and their progressive combination; and at their centre they form a table, on which knowledge is displayed in a system contemporary with itself,” see Foucault (1970: 74). Clearly Berkeley and the Querist are not “classical” in this sense.
An very useful study of the importance of music in eighteenth century semantics see Barry (1987). Another study of the intersection of music theory with reflections on language in eighteenth-century France is Thomas (1995).
Berkeley did not stint in his budget for music-making and musical instru-ments. His most famous gift was of a grand organ to Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island in 1733. “The organ, the second in New England, was built by Richard Bridge of London and approved, it is said, by Handel,” see Houghton et al (1986: 77). But he was also careful to have, at great expense, a musician in his home, for the instruction of his children and his own pleasure. Berkeley was not alone. As James Brewer reports in Brewer (1997: 534), music in provincial social life “was often not of the latest fashion, but it was a collaborative endeavour whose satisfactions flowed as much from the sociability of music-making as from the quality of its performance, Musical talent contributed to the social pleasure of collective appreciation, to the creation of harmony.” Patrick Kelly has pointed out to me that the Percevals, Berkeley’s aristocratic mentors, were deeply involved with music (both as players and appreciators) and inevitably had an influence on Berkeley’s musical tastes and passions.
Philosophy seems to have recapitulated this movement in the twentieth century. From the late Wittgenstein and Quine to Derrida and Lyotard, the common project has been to construct a non-homological semantics. Richard Rorty’s work from his anthology, The Linguistic Turn, through, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, to his Philosophical Papers, have constituted an extensive commentary on and contribution to this process of de-homologizing language and reality. For the eighteenth century, see Kevin Barry’s discussion of responses to the crisis of Lockean semantics in Barry (1987: 12–15). For an alternative perspective on this transformation, using the transformation from the centrality of noun to verb instead of the contrast between painting and music, see Stankiewicz (1974).
Kevin Bany, in Barry (1987: 16), finds in texts like Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Rousseau’s Essai sur I’ohgine des langues (1764) the beginning of “an alternative to the pictorial, specular analogies of lamps and mirrors and pictures.” Brian Rotman in Retman (1987: 32–46), argues that there is a more sophisticated interpretation of perspectival painting that would also give the same effect on semantics as music did, viz., emphasizing the “empty” or “zero” sign and the interpretational creativity of the viewer.
Peter Walmsley’s study of Berkeley’s rhetoric seems to leave The Querist in the hands of the reader. That is, he sees it as a collection of “ideas and proposals... not, however, presented in a coherent fashion.” Rather “whatever larger message we derive from The Querist depends on our own willingness of respond to its open and demanding text,” cf. Walmsley (1990: 142).
Vickers (1959: 142). For further comment in this vein see Hutchison (1953).
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right could be seen as an origin of an autonomous subjectivity to a capitalist monetary economy. Hegel’s successors, Feuerbach and Marx, had to therefore confront a revived as well as a new divinity: God and Money, respectively. Feuerbach attempted to de-alienate God while Marx attempted to defetisize Money.
Samuel Johnson (1978) has the following selected entries for these items: “Counter.” A false piece of money used as a means of reckoning; money in contempt; “ticket.” A token of any right or debt, upon the delivery of which admission is granted, or a claim acknowledged; “token.” A sign, a mark; “mark.” A token by which anything is known; a proof; an evidence.
For a discussion of token currency in eighteenth-century Ireland see Josset (1971: 161–62, 347–48). Johnston (1970: 67) discusses the problems and frauds attendant to token money in early eighteenth-century Ireland. George O’Brien dis-cusses tokens and coinage in O’Brien (1977: 345–52).
Hobbes used the word “tokens” to refer to names in general whose deployment he divided into “marks,” i.e., names used to aid memory, and “signs,” i.e., names used to communicate. Locke rejected Hobbes’ terminology and used “mark” and “sign” interchangeably. For more on Locke’s philosophy of language see Guyer (1994) and Caffentzis (1989: 77–123).
O’Brien (1977: 352): “Indeed, in the more remote parts of [Ireland], the use of money was by no means general in the eighteenth century. As late as 1814 Wakefield observed that all transactions amongst the country people were effected by tally, and the circulation of either coins or tokens was almost unknown.”
For an interesting discussion of the difference between “representing” and “signifying” in Berkeley’s semantics see Winkler, (1989: 14–21).
A useful discussion of Berkeley’s philosophy of language can be found in Land (1986: 79–130).
Patrick Kelly points out, for example, that the key phrase is not “ticket” but “ticket conveying Power,” i.e., “Berkeley’s main emphasis is not on the inert function of the medium of exchange but rather the credit creating role of the circulating medium,” in Kelly (1985: 112).
One way to place the views rejected by the Querist is by identifying them with the two stages Foucault notes in his story of “Western episteme” from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. “Intrinsic value” is the analysis of money appropriate to the period of the late Renaissance, what Foucault called the period of “similitude,” while for the “classical” period (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) “money is that which permits wealth to be represented,” cf. Foucault (1970: chapter 6). There are now numerous commentaries on Foucault’s thought, but Amariglio (1988) is a useful not only for economists.
Foucault (1970: 181).
De Sade wrote in Les prosperites du vice, “I love gold so much that I have often masturbated before the immense pile of sovereigns, and all the while with the notion that I can do anything with the wealth I have before my eyes.” Cited by Goux (1990: 205).
Berkeley began and ended The Querist with a paean to Power and Action, for example, “I 7. Whether the real End and Aim of Men be not Power?” and “III 308. Whether the Sum of the Faculties put into Act, or in other Words, the united Action of a whole people doth not constitute the Momentum of a State?” As I pointed out in the last section, Berkeley’s concept of the relation between power and action changed dramatically when he realized that ideas can not only signify spirits, but that they can be analogous to spirits as well and hence open up a way of understanding social relations.
Foucault (1970: 200–8) sketched out “the general organization of the empirical spheres.”
Foucault’s discussion is to be found in Foucault (1970: 116–17) where one reads, “to name is at the same time to give verbal representation of a representation, and to place it in a general table,” and Berkeley is questionably incorporated into “the Classical experience of Language.” To get a better sense of Berkeley’s deconstructive role in Foucault’s plot consider James Harris’ placing of questions in the structure of Language. Harris claimed that there were two kinds of sentences: sentences of assertion, based on the minds powers of perception, and sentences of volition, based on “not only on the Will, but the several Passions and Appetites, in short, all that moves to Action, whether rational or irrational.” Questions are sentences of volition, for Harris, “For who is it that questions? He that has a desire to be inform’d.” “The Requisitive and Interrogative Mode are distinguished from the Indicative and Potential, that whereas these last seldom call for a Response or Return, the two others at all times necessarily demand one,” Harris (1968: 15, 16, 149).
For example, Schumpeter (1954: 288–89) argued that the Querist was a “crypto-metallist.”
Quoted in Vickers (1957: 132). Vickers claimed that “[Berkeley’s] banking proposals themselves rested on the similar suggestions of John Law, though care was taken in the case of Berkeley’s bank to avoid the errors into which Law’s practice, as opposed to his theory, had fallen” (p. 165). Law’s critique of gold and silver currency in his Essay on a Land Bank (1705) and Money and Trade (1707), however, was quite different from Berkeley’s. The sin of specie, for Law, was that it was not stable in value while, for Berkeley, the sin of specie was that it was a “drug” and reduced industry. For more on John Law’s theory of the value of money see Murphy (1997: 53–59).
Foucault claimed, in Foucault (1970: 182), that Law remained true to his money-pledge theory throughout his life. Law’s theory was first based on land and later on “by the collective consent or the will of the prince.... Law was obliged to renounce [the land bank] technique in his French experiment and subsequently provided surety for his money by means of a trading company. The failure of his enterprise in no way affected the validity of the money-pledge theory.”
Luce and Jessop (1955vii: 164). Falvery of UCC was kind enough to show me his as yet unpublished paper on George Berkeley and Roman Catholicism.
It is interesting that the Querist immediately follows the initial query series on the Bank with a discussion of “the catholic question.” (I. 290–311) And the transitional query is: “I. 288. Whether a Scheme for the Welfare of this Nation should not take in the whole Inhabitants? And whether it be not a vain Attempt, to project the flourishing of our Protestant Gentry, exclusive of the Bulk of the Natives?”
An ironic description of the French system of public finances is to be found in Murphy (1997: 130–38). He writes: “The whole fiscal-financial system rested on a triad involving the minister, the aristocrat, and the financier. Bribes were paid to ministers so that they would grant tax farm leases or privileges to certain named individuals.... The high nobility of the sword and robe, high-ranking bishops, and aristocratic ladies, in particular widows keen to ensure that the family’s wealth was kept intact, were involved in profit-making out of the state’s finances. Both the nobility and the common people identified the financiers as the source of France’s problems. The financiers were perceived as bloodsuckers (les sangsues) who fiscally pillaged the country. Yet the irony of the situation was that the financiers were just the front for the rich nobility,” Murphy (1997: 132).
For a discussion of “elenchus” in Berkeley’s work see Walsmley (1990: chapter 6).
Money was in use in Ireland long before the Norse invasions, but the first documented minted money was struck in Dublin by the Norse king, Sihtic III, around the year 1000 A.C.E. The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland was followed by the establishment of a number of mints in the thirteenth century. These mints were often run by Italian merchants who were also engaged in a variety of banking activities usually involving papal taxes and revenues. An interesting discussion of these merchants and their place in the development of the Irish monetary system see 0’Sullivan(1962).
See George Berkeley, “The Plan or Sketch of a National Bank,” in Johnston (1970: 205–7). He wrote the Plan because, though “it should seem no difficult Matter to convert Queries into Propositions,” the Querist was repeatedly asked for an Abstract of his thoughts. The real problem for Berkeley is not Thought but Sense of the Public Weal, “It should seem the Difficulty doth not consists so much in the contriving or executing of a National Bank, as in bringing Men to a right Sense of the Publick Weal, and of the Tendancy of such Bank to promote the same.”
Hall (1949: 26).
See Cullen (1972: 46) and Carswell (1969: 207).
Hall (1949: 7–8).
The early Berkeley, in one of his Guardian essays (no. 49), drew a similar distinction between Natural and Fantastical Pleasures: “It is evident that a desire terminated in money is fantastical; so is the desire for outward distinctions, which bring no delight of sense, nor recommend us as useful to mankind; and the desire of things merely because they are new or foreign,” Luce and Jessop (1953vii).
For a recent discussion of the eighteenth-century literature on “the pleasures of the imagination” versus the “sensuous” pleasures of the body see Brewer (1997: 87–91).
Porter (1987: 101).
Cooper (1963: 207–8).
Cheyne (1991: ii) claimed that “these nervous Disorders being computed to make almost one third of the Complaints of the People of condition in England.”
The relation of hypochondria to hysteria and other “nervous diseases” was the source of a huge medical literature in the eighteenth century and, perhaps, an even larger late twentieth century commentary. The classic twentieth century text is, of course, Foucault (1973: 136–58). An interesting review of the history of psychiatry literature up until the early 1980s is Rousseau (1983: 61–121). Roy Porter’s introduction to Cheyne (1991: ix-li) is a useful, recent contribution to the history of hypochondria.
Aristotle (1962: Book I, chapter 9): “So, while it seems that there must be a limit to every form of wealth, in practice we find that the opposite occurs: all those who are amassing wealth in the form of coin go on increasing their pile without limit.”
Joseph Johnston’s series of pieces include “A Synopsis of Berkeley’s Monetary Philosophy,” Hermathena, No. 55, 1940, “Locke, Berkeley and Hume as Monetary Theorists,” Hermathena, No. 56 and “Bishop Berkeley and Kindred Monetary Thinkers,” Hermathena, No. 59, 1940. These were reprinted in Johnston (1970) as Chapters VII, VIII, and IX respectively. nother important commentator was Ellen Douglass Leyburn. She wrote a Ph.D. thesis on The Querist for the English Department at Yale University in 1937. I believe that it is the only complete book-length work on The Querist with the exception of Johnston’s and mine. She published a precis of her thesis as Leyburn (1937). I find no evidence that she published anything more about Berkeley’s thought. Leyburn’s thesis is a fine work of stylistic analysis that attempts a psycho-political explanation of a very important question: why did the 1750 edition of The Querist have 299 fewer queries than the 1735–1737 pamphlets?
See Keynes (1936). His efforts were aided by the publication of the first 1935 edition of Heckscher’s Mercantilism. Heckscher critically commented on Keynes’s attitude to mercantilism in Hecksher (1955: 340–58).
Johnston (1970: 98).
Johnston (1970: 98).
Johnston (1970: 99).
Hutchison (1953) was republished in Clark (1989).
Hutchison (1953: 52).
Keynes described himself and his friends in youth as “water-spiders, grace-fully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact with the eddies and currents underneath” in Keynes (1972: 450).
Ward (1959) is reprinted in Clark (1989: 181–90).
Ward (1959: 185, 188).
A short bibliography on the new interdisciplinary theory of money would include Rossi-Landi (1983); Derrida (1992); Baudrillard (1981) and Baudrillard (1983); Goux (1990); Hayek (1978) and his classic Hayek (1984).
Marx (1973: 162–63): “To compare money with language is not less erroneous. Language does not transform ideas, so that the peculiarity of ideas is dissolved and their social character runs alongside them as a separate entity, like prices alongside commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language.” Simmel echoes Marx in Simmel (1978: 167): “In short, a number of most important processes follow this pattern of the growing importance of one element leads to greater success, but the complete hegemony of this element, and the total elimination of the contrasting element, would not result in total success; on the contrary, it would deprive the original element of its specific character. The relationship between the intrinsic value of money and its purely functional and symbolic nature may develop in analogous fashion; the latter increasingly replaces the former, but a certain measure of the former has to be retained because the functional and symbolic character of money would lose its basis and significance if this trend was brought to its final conclusion.”
The commentary literature on the Berkeley’s “language model of nature” is enormous. For a start, one should read Turbayne (1970), and the very good introduction to the “world as text” theme in Dancy (1987), Chapter 8.
Murray (1985: 153).
Murray (1985: 154).
Berman (1994: 168–69).
Berman (1994: 170) claims that Berkeley distinguishes two sources of the Irish failure: (a) “a faulty notion and use of language” and (b) “fashion and appetite.” But are they independent of each other? Can one rectify the language of money without rectifying fashion and appetite?
The major texts are An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (1733), the latter is a mature defense of the former. The commentary literature is immense, but two useful contributions are Schwartz (1994) and Atherton (1990).
Luce and Jessop (1954vii: 183–84).
For an account of Locke’s theory of signifying words and representative ideas see Land (1986) and Kretzmann (1968).
Margaret Atherton’s discussion of Molyneux’s Question is thorough, see Atherton (1990: 184–87). A fascinating discussion of the history of Molyneux’s question, including its implications for Enlightenment politics, see Morgan (1977). William Molyneux’s interest in blindness might very well have been excited by his wife’s blindness. Three months after his marriage, Lucy Molyneux was “attacked by an illness” that blinded and pained her until her death. This “sickness unto blindness” was not unusual in the Ireland of the day, which was “a country of the blind.” William Molyneux, when he watched his wife cross the room, would undoubtedly be reminded of the thousands of blind men and women in the alleys of Dublin and on the country roads. The blindness of the native Irish was attributed to malnutrition, smoke, and “fluxes.” As Corkery (1967: 28) concludes: “Between the absence of windows and the ever present clouds of smoke, the people dwelt in darkness; it did not make for health, nor for quick convalescence when sickness broke out; quite commonly it lead to blindness.” The native Irish intelligentsia was also prone to blindness, according to Corkery (1967: 29): “Blind poets, blind fiddlers, blind beggars of all kinds were to be seen tapping their way on every road in the country, from fair to fair, from house to house.” Mathuna (1979: 30) notes that Gaelic literature “does abound in figures with impaired vision.” He also points out that Gaelic word for “blind,” dall, had an interesting secondary usage: “We now come to consider objects and aspects of the physical world which are called dall in the sense of “dark, obscure” and the like. The point here is that these objects and aspects of the physical world reverse the preceding process, as they characteristically frustrate the normal person’s vision. They are cases of objective blindness or obscurity.”
A classical article identifying the dominance of the visual model as the result of a male bias in philosophy see Fox-Keller and Grontkowsky (1983). Another classic text which links vision and hysteria is Irigary (1985).
For Denis Diderot’s account of Saunderson’s death bed discussion with a Reverend committed to converting him to a belief in God see Croker (1966). Diderot was imprisoned for this piece of writing on the blind mathematician. It should not be surprising to note that blindness (like madness) was an extraordinary sensitive subject for an age of “Enlightenment” (and “Reason”) and the source of a multitude of metaphors.
Cataract operations were beginning to be performed in the early eighteenth century and they provided perfect models for Molyneux Man. Cheselden’s surgical experiments on cataracts were widely discussed and one of his most celebrated cases was mentioned by Berkeley in his The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (1733). Needless to say, the older method of the “miraculous cure” found in the New Testament is a rhetorical subtext of Berkeley’s examination of vision.
Much of Cheselden’s article is reprinted in Morgan (1972: 19–21).
Quoted in Morgan (1972: 20).
Quoted in Morgan (1972: 20).
Cheyne (1991).
Roy Porter’s discussion of spleen, hypochondria and hysteria is in Porter (1987: 84). A good selection of material from eighteenth-century medical texts can be found in Hunter and Macalpine (1963: 282–378).
A classic review of hysteria is Veith (1965).
Foucault (1965: 136–58), is still a useful discussion of the changes in the conceptual paradigm concerning hysteria in the “Age of Reason.”
Quoted in Veith (1965: 142).
Foucault (1965: 150).
Jonathan Swift, “A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club,” in Swift (1966iii).
Swift (1966iii: 835–36).
The first chapter of Malcolm (1989) is an excellent introduction to Swift’s theory, art, practice, and experience of madness. Swift had decided to devote his legacy to “to build a house for fools and mad” in 1731. By 1735, he was deeply involved in the project.
There is very little written about Berkeley tarantism adventures. Luce’s and Jessop’s useful introduction to “Berkeley’s Journals of Travels in Italy,” which have a remarkable history of their own, can be found in Luce and Jessop (1953vii: 231–41). A charming, but literal commentary on Berkeley’s Journals can be found in Brayton (1946). Brykman (1971), includes a French translation of some of the Journals as well as comments on the phenomenon of tarantism and the biographical and historic context of Berkeley’s observations. Dr. Freind, the author of the History of Physic, and a notorious Tory physician who became the court physician of George II is a remarkable eighteenth-century figure who has not received much attention in the twentieth. There is a short, but detailed biographical account of him in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Di Martino (1966: 50) is quoted in Oughourlian (1991: 133).
Di Martino (1966: 65) quoted in Oughourlian (1991: 134).
Luce and Jessop (1954vii: 274, 286).
Luce and Jessop (1954vii: 277).
Luce and Jessop (1954vii: 288–89).
Luce and Jessop (1954vii: 288–89).
Oughourlian (1991:135).
A psychoanalytic interpretation of Berkeley’s life and his theory of money (which gives prominance to Ferenczi’s coprophiliac ontogenesis of the interest in money) is to be found in Wisdom (1953: 163–65). To get a flavor of Wisdom’s interpretational method consider his reading of the Querist’s National Bank proposal on p. 164: “The Central Bank was the great bowel capable of defecating all the money that was needed; there was a new institution with great power to produce great quantities of good faeces”!
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Caffentzis, C.G. (2000). The Querist’s Solution. In: Exciting the Industry of Mankind George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 170. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9522-3_5
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