Irish  Phenomenology:  An Overview

Jerry Harkins

God is not the distant engineer of Newtonian machinery that in the fullness of time led to the growth of a tree in the university's quadrangle. Rather, my perception of the tree is an idea that God's mind has produced in mine, and the tree continues to exist in the Quad when "nobody" is there simply because God is always there.                       
                                                                                 —Bishop Berkeley [1]

Bishop Berkeley’s notion is, of course, a variation on the age-old question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make any noise?”  It is questions like this that give philosophy a bad reputation and lead directly to such nonsense as that preached by the likes of Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.  His Grace believed Esse est percipi which is to say to be is to be perceived.  He probably meant it the other way around but, no matter.  The notion that being and perception are pretty much the same thing is nonsense.  If, after all, there is no one in the forest to perceive the tree, then the tree itself would not exist and the question of whether it makes noise is unnecessary.  Monsignor Ronald Knox attempted to resolve the matter as follows:

There was a young man who said, “God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there’s no one around in the Quad.

REPLY

Dear Sir,

Your astonishment’s odd

I am always about in the Quad

And that’s why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by

Yours Faithfully,

God.

In other words, the tree exists whether or not there is anyone around to see it just as the tree makes sound when it falls whether or not it is heard.  (This, by the way, is true even if there is no God in the Quad.)  I trust you never had any doubt about it.

Some of my more benighted friends tell me that such questions are trivial, on a par with, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” [2] and “Who shaves the barber?” [3]   These are benighted objections specifically because they ignore such real world derivatives as:

“If a man speaks in the forest, and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?”

But Monsignor Knox missed the point (and not for the first time, either).  Let us grant for the sake of argument that, Berkeley notwithstanding, God set in motion a process (call it “evolution”) that led to the tree.  (Since God almost certainly did not put that particular tree in that particular Quad, it had to get there through some process. [4])  Now, either the existence enjoyed by the tree is physical or it is not.  If it is, then its physicality is independent of the observer.  If, on the other hand, its existence depends on the presence of an observer then that existence cannot be physical.  Which is to say the tree is merely an illusion created by God to deceive us.  If someone threatens to hang you from its highest branch you have nothing to worry about.  Plato thought that God created the idea of perfect treeness and that the big woody plants of our experience are merely pale reflections of that idea.  This formulation is fantastical but has three important merits.  It accounts for the differences you will find among different descriptions of the same tree by different observers.  It explains the ability of people to engage in class inclusion class exclusion logic.  We have no trouble lumping apple trees and pine trees in the same class called “trees.”  We instantly sense the common treeness of giant sequoias and tiny bonsai.  And it assures that we will not be ridiculed if we run the other way when the lumberman yells, “Timber!”   Otherwise:

There was a wise man who thought God

Had forgotten to finish the job

The tree’s personality

Lacks substantiality

And limits its lease on the Quad.

Scholarly Notes

1.  George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Irish philosopher (!) who was the (Anglican) Bishop of Cloyne which is in County Cork.  He was required reading in phenomenology courses back when such courses were still being taught.  Phenomenology courses were punishment for grave sins committed in an earlier life but it was later decided that it was excessively cruel and unusual.  Aside from that, no one was ever sure what it was.  Kant thought of it as the division of metaphysics that treats of motion and rest as two of the characteristics you can posit about things.  Husserl, who never wrote a comprehensible sentence, thought of it as a discipline underlying all sciences by describing “…the formal structures of phenomena or of both actual and possible material essences that are given through a suspension of the natural attitude in pure acts of intuition.”  Hegel, however, was certain that phenomenology is the study of the evolution of mental power.  As you can see, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference what it is.

2.  According to St. Thomas, an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Which implies that God could create an infinite number of angels which, in truth, he couldn’t.  The correct answer depends on how small the pin is, how big the angels are, and whether they’re doing the fox trot or the monkey.

3.  “In a certain town, the barber shaves everyone who does not shave himself.  Who shaves the barber?”  Bertrand Russell may have invented modern logic but he obviously did not worry overly about undistributed middle terms.  He claimed to think this question is a paradox but it is not because it merely relies on an ambiguous definition of “everyone.”  The middle term must be independent of the major term.  What Russell should have said is “every man who belongs to the class of men who (a) do not shave themselves and (b) are not barbers.”  Logic is punishment for grave sins committed repeatedly in multiple past lives.  Modern logic is hell.

4.  Pat Robertson is convinced that the tree was brought into the Quad one moonless night by a homosexual cabal intent on seducing Bishop Berkeley.  And I say, why not?