Holland Hall, St. Olaf College, where I tried to be a philosopher. Long hair and going barefoot to class weren’t enough. But I loved this building. Who wouldn’t?

I haven’t been in a philosophy course since my undergraduate university, where I did the minimum to get the degree. It feels a little funny to admit that minimum thing, but there you go.

The discussion begins with Berkeley. I wrote a poem about him for the philosophy newsletter, way back when. Something like:

The matter of matter is simply a smatter

Of Berkeley’s insidious plot.

The matter that matters is simply the latter:

Everything that which is not.

The poem jogs my memory just a bit, actually, since at this point in life that poem is all that I remember of Berkeley. I do not remember arguments of perceptual variation and perceived qualities. The students do, they seem to be all over it. An example: the size of an object, which looks smaller as you back away from it, larger as you grow near. The teacher uses the example of riding in a car. Close objects move very fast, or seem to, and objects in the distance seem to move slower. Of course they aren’t moving at all, the person riding in the car is moving. 

Pretty interesting. We assume the objective size and shape of objects is not changing, even though our perceptions of them are constantly changing. How often do we even think about that?

Now to Locke. Primary and secondary qualities. Is this how an object really is, a primary quality? And how we perceive it through our senses, that is a secondary quality? I might have to ask the students after class.

One of the young philosophy professors when I was an undergraduate was Dr. Taliaferro. In a chance conversation in the department office he told me what was, for him, the purpose of philosophy. I wrote a poem about that, too – I remember it because I included it in a book of poems I self-published.

Dr. Taliaferro

The goal of all philosophy, 

he tells me,

is to see things differently.

I tell him he looks like a duck.

So I wasn’t much of a philosopher and certainly not much of a poet. More of a smart aleck. Perhaps I was using poetry to deflect my insecurity. Perhaps I still do, I realize, writing this. That I must think about more later.

The teacher winds up the conversation, I realize now that up to this point the lesson has been review for the students. She projects on the screen for the first time, it’s a piece by Berkeley. Philonous and Hylas are in dialogue, the students select who will read what role. They begin. Philonous pushes Hylas into absurdities. He uses the argument for perceptual variation, the size of things as seen by animals of different sizes. He makes Hylas claim, sort of, that objects are at the same time different sizes. “From perceptual variation it follows,” summarizes the teacher, “that what we perceive is nothing like the real thing. Berkeley will always try to make the positions he is criticizing seem much more absurd than they really are.” If you get to make both sides of the conversation, you certainly can make one side look particularly good and the other particularly bad. It’s a move on Berkeley’s part that I resent a bit. 

I believe I first read Berkeley – and this dialogue – in the student lounge of Thorson hall at St. Olaf College. The college mentioned in The Great Gatsby. It was a late night, perhaps one of the few times I stayed up past midnight working on a paper. I felt that this was something one should do as a college student, as a philosophy major. No one else was in the lounge, I had a large table to myself, the tall ceiling and wood paneled walls were all there for my personal ruminations, me the thinker. The paper I wrote wasn’t great, I’m sure. One of a million philosophy papers that philosophy professors have read while berating themselves for becoming a philosophy professor.

“I can see you find Berkeley unconvincing,” says the teacher. “I can’t blame you too much.” The students continue to read.

“Philonous: Can a real motion in any external body be at the same time both very swift and very slow?”

Here we go again. Hylas has to say that it cannot. The student reads Hylas’s line:  “It cannot.” And now Hylas is on record and soon will be caught in another bind, for later he will have to admit that speed is also perception, like the teacher’s earlier example of the person riding in a car. 

I feel for Hylas. I really do.