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

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. Heraclitus also postulated that Fire was the basic matter of the universe, also that all things are in a state of flux from am opposite perspective, thus in a  process of  “Becoming”.  Parmenides, born 510 BCE, opens the door from physics  into  “metaphysics” – whether “being” is objective or cosmic: In the sentence structure of his allegorical story-telling in On Nature, and later in The Way of Truth, and The Way of Seeing, he constructs and uses new linguistic conjunctions of subject, verb, and predicate objects to both establish and equivocate objects which exist  thus illustrating them as the focal points of experiential reality. This technique thereby raises the dialectical question of an existential nature of “Being,” that is, human experience considered in a cosmological context.

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 18th 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 here.

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 21st 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.

Dean B. and his family form one group. He is lost in his lofty philosophical and religious ideals and does not know what is going on around him. She is down to earth, busy with real life taking care of a child, and not afraid of honestly looking us in the eye. She looks very centered and confident in who she is. Let the others worry about the spiritual world.

Sitting on the left is Wainwright, the fan, taking down every word the great man utters. But he is just a symbolic presence required as an audience for Berkeley.

The two wigged gentlemen and the other woman are interesting characters. The one on the right has his arm possessively resting on the back of the woman's chair, suggesting he might be the husband. The woman is looking at B.'s wife, probably confiding in her, but is pointing at the other guy. What is so special about him? He is looking down at what you might think is the notebook held by Wainwright but could it be he is actually examining the woman's bosom that she is displaying in his direction so prominently. Is he her lover? Do we have a triangle here?

The last character, actually a self-portrait of the artist, is looking angrily straight at us, seeming to tell us we have no business seeing this scene. We are voyeurs witnessing the secret drama of two dysfunctional families.

Of course there is also the artist's interpretation analyzing colors and composition.

Anybody can make up stories about paintings and I had fun doing this one. I am glad you liked it.
Happy New Year!
Claudine

Hey bratha!! Hey dude...I've been obsessing about god or higher power..Anyway people never understand that it always existed..so today i pondered and came up with an argument that it always existed and it involves the number zero..i don't know if someone lese has made this up but tell me how you feel about this...

First there was nothing and the mathematical equation for nothing is zero...Zero is just a ghost...Zero is the seed...Now the seed grows into a flower...The seed which is the ghost or just a spirit had a thought and it manifested it into the physical...So then the creation process began as the flower pollinated and created more seeds which spawned into more and more flowers..0 + 1 = 1 spirit + th...ought = creation...So zero could be the most powerful number...Weather you believe in a higher power or not it makes you think that if nothing is the number zero then that could argue if there is a higher power that it always existed ... That zero...the ghost... A spirit manifested its thought to create into a physical manifestation and that spirit was a seed and created the flower of life so you can say zero is the highest and most powerful number...