Coherence

Abstract

Almost 300 years ago, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley [1685–1753] called into question whether anything could exist independently of the psychological processes necessary to perceive it. In his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, he defended the impossibility of conceiving of a world outside of our own sensorial capacities. In his opinion, all the properties of objects, both the secondary qualities – such as color, smell, flavor, or taste – and the so-called primary qualities – like shape, movement, or solidity – only existed in the mind: they were no more than perceptions. Among the arguments he used to convince the reader that the exterior and interior worlds were inextricably linked to our perceptual capacities, one stands out in particular: “Because intense heat is nothing else than a particular kind of painful sensation; and pain cannot exist but in a perceiving being, it follows that no intense heat can exist in an unperceiving corporeal substance.”3 Like many other philosophers before and since, Berkeley used harmful experiences as probative examples. Given that pain does not exist separately from consciousness, he maintained, heat does not exist independently of its perception, and so on. This departing premise for his reasoning, however, is more than questionable. By affirming a connection between pain and consciousness, Berkeley denies the possibility of pain that cannot be perceived, which makes it impossible to speak of unconscious pain.

Pain, by its very intensity, may end up altering reason.¹

There is nothing, including hate, that cannot adopt the form of a word ^.2