Abstract

Comparatively recent scholarship suggests that George Berkeley cannot be seen solely or even chiefly as a British empiricist who is reacting to the materialistic implications of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. C.J. McCracken has shown how Berkeley is influenced by Malebranche’s theses concerning the dependence of bodies on God, without himself doubting the evidence of the senses. McCracken also shows how Berkeley reconstructs and reapplies Malebranche’s fideism.1 Harry Bracken has argued, most notably, that Berkeley espouses certain theses that set him out as an Irish Cartesian. Like Descartes, he takes the challenge of scepticism with regard to sense-experience seriously. He sees experience in general as made up of perceivers and the perceived, with the latter being ontologically dependent on minds. Minds are active and creative substances. They cannot be understood in materialist terms, and are in fact immaterial and immortal. The ultimate mind is God’s, and the divine intellect is responsible for the totality of ideas and notions in their existence, content and structure.2 In this essay I want to suggest, following my title, that Berkeley can also be regarded as a proto-phenomenologist. The term phenomenology will be understood chiefly, though not exclusively, in terms of the approach of Edmund Husserl. It has been argued in at least one study that Husserl’s transcendental philosophy is proximate to Berkeley’s supposed subjective idealism, for all of Husserl’s protestations to the contrary.3 A parallel is only drawn between the two at Berkeley’s expense. What I hope to show, by contrast, are the positive ways in which he anticipates ideas propounded by Husserl and other phenomenologists. In so doing I do not wish to fall into a hasty assimilation of the more recent thinkers to the earlier one, for there remain serious differences between them, most notably in the tasks they set themselves.