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Pain And Pleasure-Pain Argument Analysis

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Humans perceive our surroundings through our various senses; it has been argued that all of these feelings and impressions exist only within the perceiver’s mind. Irish philosopher and Empiricist George Berkeley argues in his Three Dialogues that heat and cold that we directly perceive is no different from pain or pleasure, which are ideas that only exist in the mind, since these feelings stem from the mind as a result of our contact with the outside world (Radcliffe, McCarty, Allhoff, and Vaidya 56). In this essay, I will provide arguments to justify that Berkeley’s pleasure-pain argument fails to justify his claim that pain and pleasure can only exist in one’s mind. In Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, in which Philonous, who represents Berkeley, and Hylas, who speaks for Locke, engaged in a prolonged discussion over …show more content…

In creating this argument of pleasure and pain, Berkeley is trying to support his claim to a mind-dependent world, rejecting Locke’s idea of mind-independent physical world, since Berkeley believed that God created the image that humans or other beings see in their minds, and that we create our own idea and interpretation of these God-made impressions in our mind. The difference between immediate and mediate perception is the fact that immediate perception is directly perceived by our senses, whereas mediate perception is indirectly perceived and requires some medium in order to be sensed by our mind. For example, when a friend is running towards you as he’s yelling, the sound of yelling is the immediate perception, and the perception of the friend running towards you would be mediate. In the Three Dialogues, Philonous begins as he asserts to Hylas that sensible things are those that our senses could immediately perceive, he argues that a mind independent object can’t feel pleasure or pain, since unless a thinking mind thinks about it, it can’t be hot or cold (Radcliffe, McCarty,

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In order to demonstrate this argument, Berkeley creates a dialogue between Hylas and Philonous. At the beginning of this dialogue, Hylas believes that is absurd to claim that objects only exists within the mind, and that Philonous is taking skepticism to a new level by claiming this. Philonous decides to persuade Hylas by questioning his beliefs, and he claims his motives are to help Hylas see what is “most agreeable to Common Sense (69).” Berkeley uses this dialogue to address the counter arguments to his belief, and he uses the character Philonous to prove that his point truly is the most logical. At the end of the story, Hylas is left uncertain of what he believes on the nature of objects and the mind, but he agrees that Philonous is more right than he originally was.

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