THE BERMUDA GROUP  (DEAN BERKELEY AND HIS ENTOURAGE)  Oils on canvas,  (begun 1728, completed 1739)   176.5 x 236.2 cm (69 1/2 x 93 in )  
BY  John Smibert    American, born Scotland, 1688 - 1751  

Painting on display in the Yale Art Gallery exhibition "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
thru  December 31, 2011.

The Dynamics of Multi-Solipsism
by Johnes Ruta, AzothGallery.com

This is a strangely fascinating painting, as George Berkeley is an important figure in the history of 18^th century philosophy.  A careful study of the figures in this painting reveals many curious clues to the sensibility of a pivotal movement in intellectual history.  Here we see Dean George Berkeley with his family, his sponsor, and teaching administrators as two wigged gentlemen.  In 1729,  twenty years after the publication of his theory of Immaterialism, this group left England, ostensibly to open a college on the island of Bermuda, for the purpose of training ministers especially for the churches of the southern colonies of North America. They first traveled to American and landed at Newport, where Berkeley bought a plantation while he waited for the promised funding for his school to arrive.

Bishop George Berkeley, consecrated in 1724, was a modern figure in the philosophical movement called “Empiricism,” a system that in the Western world originated with Epicurus in ancient Athens, who maintained that the senses, rather than reason, were the only sources of knowledge.  This principle was perpetuated by Berkeley’s philosophical predecessors Thales, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. In terms of the categories of idealism and materialism, the concept of  “Immaterialism” argued by Berkeley has been variously misunderstood and quite often mocked as absurd, ego-centric, and irrational.  But where it borders solipsism, and has generated seemingly conflicting interpretations, it needs deeper understanding, and deeper analysis.

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist, the epistemo-logical position that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. To better understand Berkeley’s Immaterialism, we should compare it to the principles of solipsism, which are divided into defined into three levels: 1. Egotism, that is, the isolation or self-

perceived supremacy of the individual personality;  2. Metaphysical, encompassing the questions of philosophy regarding individual perspective and relationships; and  3. Epistemological, in the study historical development of the field of knowledge, in this case of the juxtaposition of matter and perception. 
 

The principle of materialism can be traced back in the West to the beginnings of thought about nature and the composition of the world: Around 585 BCE, the astronomer Thales argued that matter is derived from water and is always in a state of flux. Around 80 years later, Heraclitus compared the sensation of the passage of time to the flow of a river.     

The Peripatetic axiom, handed down by Aristotle and quoted by in Latin by Thomas Aquinas, is: "Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu" i.e. : "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses"   Leibniz stipulates this with the response “Nici intellectus ipsa” that is, “except the intellect itself,”  and begins a hypotheses of “probability” where the bases of  reasonable determinations are considered, even in the requirements of legal court evidence where “proof” is required to be established.

In modern Western philosophy, the epistemological doctrine had been begun as a core tenet of Descartes—that what is in the mind is known more reliably than what is known through the senses.  Descartes, trying to establish the continuity of personal identity, and as a remedy to an inevitable skepticism of everything, proposed that the continuity of the “self” derives from thought. This would soon enable the extreme view that the orientation of the senses is the sole reality of the world.

John Locke in his Understanding of Human Experience came to the conclusion that we are not born with any innate knowledge, even such as the presence of God, and that human identity is “the gift of experience”— that the sum of these is what defines the personality.  The first prominent modern Western idealist in the metaphysical sense was George Berkeley  who argued that there is no deep distinction between mental states, such as feeling pain, and the ideas about so-called "external" things, that appear to us through the senses. There is no real  distinction, in this view, between certain sensations of heat and light that we experience, which lead us to believe in the external existence of a fire, and the fire itself. Those sensations are all there is to fire. Berkeley expressed this with the Latin formula esse est percipi: "to be is to be perceived."

In response to Locke, Berkeley put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it). In his text Alciphron, Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God.

To trace the theoretical history of Berkeley’s logic, this form of perspective is carried to its logical extreme in his view of the world which defines a subjective reality for each person, in which there is no other material dimension than the pure imports of each person’s own perceptions. It is as though when one walks from one room to another, the physical reality is only that in which one is present from moment to moment, and forms as one arrives, and is dissipated and disintegrated from the space from where one has moved away.  Berkeley's “Immaterialism” is defined as a subjective idealism in which is a purely subjective uni-verse.  The disconnect favored is between the senses and any acknowledgement of an independent material  reality, and that there can be no distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects, because objects themselves cannot exist unless perceived by the senses. Berkeley would go on to reject both Newton's system of Fluxions, which Leibniz also developed as The Calculus, and Leibniz' mathematical theory of Infinitesimals, as based on introspective measurement of particulate existence, which would acknowledge motion in an external material reality.

Berkeley's philosophy was mocked and rejected in his own time by many, even by the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who while walking in the woods, demonstrated his view of Berkeley's error by the act of kicking a stone, "I refute Berkeley thus !"

The interpretations of Berkeley's philosophy range from it being seen as a denial of any external reality, to a more comprehensive view that now appears an as advanced  theory of the functions of brain synapses in cognitive science -- that all perceptions form cohesive patterns in the mind reflecting  real external realities.

In this nearly mural size painting nearly 8 feet wide by 6 feet in height, John Smibert has captured a revealing situation: the essence of solipsism that Berkeley’s ideology encapsules is evident in the expression of each figure:  George Berkeley himself gazes off into the heavens, looking diagonally upward across the foreground of the painting.  His mind is set on the functionality of the Church of England as a tool to promote the greater solipsism of the Crown of England: his college has been designed with the purpose to train Presbyterian ministers who will be disseminated to the colonies where they will work to keep the indentured servants, slaves, and Native American “savages” from rebelling against the ceaseless exploitation of their plantation masters, under the threat of eternal punishment.  Berkeley’s right hand rests upon the authority of the Book, perhaps either a law book, or one of his own published philosophical treatises. His left hand is folded in a properly posed, yet unconsciously sinister hidden manner around his back. Berkeley’s friend and sponsor John Wainwright sits at the left looking with adoration at Berkeley, his hands inscribing George’s pronouncements.  Berkeley’s wife Ann and infant son Henry gaze out at the viewer, as does the figure at the far left attributed to be Smibert himself, all seeming to appeal to the empathy of the viewer. Ann’s companion Miss Handcock looks to Ann at her left, while she quietly points with her left hand to the wigged person of John James standing at her right, as though he were her paramour. Meanwhile Richard Dalton stands behind her left side with his hand poised on the back of her chair, in the proximity to her bare shoulder, while gazing with an expectant, almost inviting look at John James, whose own eyes fixedly press down ambiguously, or flickeringly, both in the same direction as the writing in Wainwright’s large book, and upon the glowing skin of Miss Handcock’s open, elegant décolletage. 

So here we have a topographical map manifesting the essence of Berkeley’s theory of “Immaterialism,” which had been published in 1709. Each figure exists within the epitome of their own subjective reality. … This is a weird painting, in which Smibert, we know not whether wittingly or unwittingly, has nailed the impertinent political reality of Berkeley’s “Immaterialism,” in which each character on the surface appears to be part of a cooperative group mission, but in deeper, more subtle personal reality manifests their own self-seeking interests. . In political terms, I would describe Berkeley’s principle as “Reality Chauvinism,” and it can only be related in practice as the anticipation, 150 years ahead of its time, in the expression of “Social Darwinism” of the late 1800s.

Smibert was hired to teach art at the College, and accompanied Berkeley, his family and entourage, but without Wainwright. They sailed instead to the American colonies, where they finally landed at Newport.  There Berkeley bought a small plantation, while awaiting the government funds to arrive that had been allocated to start his Bermuda College.

Were we to compare the land forms of Bermuda itself to the background landscape of the painting, we would detect an exaggeration of the rocky coast, and inaccuracy of the type of trees depicted.  Smibert soon left Newport and went on to Boston where he lived and worked the rest of his life. As a portraitist in the colonies, his artistic vision became the prominent trend-setter for American portraitists of the rest on the 18^th century.  Berkeley went back to England in 1732. Some of Smibert's other multiple portraits such as "Sir Francis Grant and His Family" 1718,  "The Continence of Scipio" 1726;   "Daniel, Peter, and Andrew Oliver" 1732;  as shown on Richard H. Saunders on-line book on Smibert at
http://books.google.com/books?id=Wklq3JItYOgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22John+Smibert%22+paintings&hl=en&ei=uIXhToHCLKjf0QG76oDTBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22John%20Smibert%22%20paintings&f=false   do  give some interesting clues to the interpersonal dynamics found in “The Bermuda Group” more difficult to analyze.  

However, Berkeley’s stated purpose to create the Bermuda College, in order to supply the churches of the New World with ministers, no doubt trained in Berkeley’s perspective, would be agents first to perpetuate and ensure the rule of the King of England, that is, the imperial singularity of the monarch in the order of the “divine right of kings.” More to the point, Berkeley’s mindset was built to preserve the social order as the perceived and correct order of the universe : God maintains the imperial "observership" of all actions in the world, and hands down the protectorship of the moral order to the king, then the nobles, then the wealthy plantation owners.  In this century in the New world, as in the Old, rights are the dominion of "Real Politic", specifically the class of land-ownership.  The social order must be maintained against potential and feared uprisings of those “savage [native] Americans,” and the indentured servant and the slave classes who worked those plantations of the southern American colonies…!   This was not the Humanism of John Locke, who advocated the principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number." For those workers no “subjective reality” would be permitted in any society or in any plantation church community before the American Revolution, and for the slaves, not until the Emancipation Proclamation.  Subjective Idealism was surely only a domain of the privileged classes, and is still being fought for in the 21^st century – witness the Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street movements.  

Ironically, in terms of any persistence of Berkeley’s reality, when he left England and came to Newport, it appears that his arrangements of reality for the disposition of funds to found his college on Bermuda, then faded in the real world of English politics. Reality check.