Berkeleyan Myth

This is a reflection on the first two pages of Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Philonous and Hylas meet early in the morning in a garden. Philonous expresses his surprise at meeting Hylas so early, and praises the morning as follows:

Can there be a pleasanter time of day, or a more delightful season of the year? That purple sky, those wild but sweet notes of birds, the fragrant bloom upon the trees and flowers, the gentle influence of the rising sun, these and a thousand nameless beauties of nature inspire the soul with secret transports; its faculties too being at this time fresh and lively are fit for these meditations, which the solitude of the garden and tranquility of the morning naturally dispose us to.

Thus, Philonous is immediately established as the kind of person who:

1. Gets up early. This suggests diligence and non-decadence, moral virtues.
2. Enjoys the simple pleasures of nature. This suggests (again) non-decadence, but also that Philonous is in touch with the natural world, has his senses wide open, is not locked into the world of books and ideas.
3. Is reasonable and comes to independent conclusions. Notice solitude and tranquility: Philonous does not come to his opinions because others tell him to believe something, nor does he jump to conclusions in the heat of an argument.
4. Has thoughts that are natural. This is really the key word here: it is nature herself that leads Philonous' thoughts in a certain direction, that makes him think, that makes him believe whatever he believes.

On the very next page, Philonous' character is sketched in further:

I entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceits of others, I am even so far gone of late in this way of thinking, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it to you on my word, since this revolt from metaphysical notions, to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many things which were before all mystery and riddle.

Philonous, the natural man, condems in others affected doubts, fantastical conceits, sublime and metaphysical notions--in other words, all that is not natural. And he does this is the name of two things: the plain dictates of nature and common sense.

This should give us pause. If the dictates of nature are indeed plain, then why does Philonous need to invoke a second authority, namely, common sense? And note that 'common sense' here is not something like rational thought, a system of operations we need to process the plain dictates of nature; on the contrary, common sense is identified as the opinions of the vulgar.

A strange alliance has been created here! Why would the plain dictates of nature need complementation from the opinions of the vulgar? The real reason is clear: the dictates of nature are famously unclear, if they are dictates at all; using Nature as authority will not get Berkeley very far. He needs an authority that actually speaks, and that has not been used by all the school philosophers (but if his enemy is Locke, why speak about the schools at all?) he wishes to demolish. This authority is common sense.

But of course, common sense alone will not do the trick. Tell philosophers that instead of arguing they just need to go to the local tavern and ask the farmer, the baker and the tanner his questions about the world, and they will laugh at you. Rightly so, of course: for whatever the prejudices of the philosophers themselves may be, those of the common people are certainly no less strong and no more innocent. Common sense is but the name of an uncritically received, purely contingent historical heritage; it is the least authoritative of authorities; its voice is not that of Nature, but that of a distorted and petrified History.

It is only by a clever trick of characterisation, pulled off seemingly before the argument has started, that Berkeley manages to glue nature and common sense together. The most improbable connection is given a proper name (Philonous) and made probable--if it speaks, it must surely exist!

Berkely here seems to provide the perfect incarnation of what Barthes called myth. He turns the historical (common sense as the product of a specific cultural development) into the natural (common sense as closeness to nature); he justifies the claims of common people without explaining them; he makes common sense innocent. Here, observe Barthes (page references to the Vintage Classics English translation):

What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality. [...] [M]yth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made. (p. 142)

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. (p. 143)

And, the cherry on the cake, this is what Barthes says about statements of fact in myth (which he identifies as typically bourgeois):

The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it. (p. 155)

Berkeley, then, creates not just a myth among many, but the myth of myths: the myth of common sense, which in turn justifies all the myths that follow.

The Myth of a Unified Theory

Among scientists only physicists still believe in the dream of a single theory, and among them only the theoreticians, and in fact only those that work on string theory, quantum gravity, and other attempts to "unify" the fundamental forces of nature--a tiny but vocal minority, vocal because people want to hear what they say. These are the celebrities of science, since only their work still embodies the mythical goal of science.

Meanwhile, the fundamental forces are fundamental only on the plane of ideology; in the actual practice of physicists, there is a proliferation of models, equations, approximations; everything points to an always increasing diversity. Nature and Science, as concepts, are about to fracture; only the myth of a unified theory (which is the myth of reductionism) still holds them together.