The artist as universal mind: Berkeley's influence on Charles Johnson

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Gary Storhoff

In opposing the artist to the materialist, Johnson explores alternative metaphysical positions of Realism and Idealism - the two fundamentally different ways people conceive of their world, think about their world, and make crucial decisions about their world and other people. Johnson intends to jolt emotionally the assumed realist reader into an entirely different perception of the world, making him/her forego a customary, conditioned, and ordinary version of material reality in favor of a more expansive and aesthetic sense of the world. Johnson reveals himself to be an Idealist whose mission is to persuade his readers of the philosophical claims of Idealism, a vocational calling that he has made his own in interviews and his book Being & Race. Johnson writes that the purpose of all great art is beyond conventional morality; it is to challenge our metaphysics: "Our perception - or way of seeing - has been shaken, if one is talking about great art" (Being 4). Johnson's artist combats the "Age of Hype" (xi) - the province of the marketplace - to establish an intellectual justification for his or her art.

In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Bishop George Berkeley's metaphysics guides Johnson's thematics, for in Berkeley's philosophy, Johnson discovers his ally against what he envisions as a reductionist world view. A commercialized version of the world is based, for Johnson, on a materialist metaphysics. This essay will investigate the Berkeleyan framework that Johnson employs, then apply it to two stories in the volume, "Menagerie" and "China." "Menagerie" satirizes a world that banishes Berkeleyan Idealism in favor of a crass materialism, while "China" enacts the performance of the artist as Divine Creator. The stories depict the conflict between the Artist and the Marketplace in philosophical terms, with Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne used metaphorically in each story. Berkeley's philosophy assists Johnson in arguing for a view of the world appropriate to his own exalted vision of the artist as Divine Creator. Berkeley's theory of perception, his attack on the erosive skepticism and rationalism of his own age, and his complex quarrel with materialist reality suggest a philosophical framework in which Johnson can establish art as the supreme human activity, and the artist as the source of our shared world. With Berkeley's philosophical approach used as scaffolding, Johnson "raise[s] the high wire of artistic performance" to make the writer the divine artificer of our culture ("Acceptance" 209).

Such a contention requires evidence, especially in light of Johnson's lack of extraliterary citation of Berkeley, and his oft-avowed debt to the phenomenologists, especially his acknowledgments of the writings of Husserl and Heidegger. The Sorcerer's Apprentice provides internal evidence of Johnson's philosophical debt, for The Sorcerer's Apprentice reveals that Berkeleyan Idealism is a constant correlative in his writing. Johnson alludes to Berkeley the man in "Menagerie, A Child's Fable" (to his portly physical frame, "weighing more than some men" [43], and to his mental acuity - ". . . Berkeley was, for all his woolgathering, never asleep at the switch" [43-44]); in his reference to the "playful verse attributed to Bishop Berkeley" in "Alethia" (100); and to Berkeley the philosopher in "China" ("the body as it must be in the mind of God" [84]). Berkeley, then, is amply summoned into use throughout the volume, and these allusions hint at Berkeley's Idealism as a source for Johnson's own metaphysical view.

"An Idea Consists in Being Perceived"

Berkeley's influence on Johnson is seen primarily in the Bishop of Cloyne's rejection of an empirical reality that transcends perception. Generally considered the founder of the modem school of Idealism, Berkeley argues that things cannot exist on their own, separate from an imaginative agent. Berkeley's insistence on the mind's primary role in the constitution of the world mirrors Johnson's own conception of the delicate balancing act of the artist "on the high wire," as he/she challenges our ways of knowing the world.

Berkeley's central metaphysical theory is expressed in the following passage:

For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived - that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi; nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds of thinking things which perceive them. (2: 42)

This passage from The Principles of Human Knowledge is the centerpiece of Berkeley's conception of "ideas" (i.e., sensory objects) which exist, and only exist, in the mind. Berkeley insists that we do not inherit an unchanging, static reality independent of experience (John Locke's unchanging, eternal, but utterly unperceived substratum of all material things). All aspects of our consciousness are ideas existing in the mind. If absolute reality were inaccessible and unknowable, if things are forever beyond the shaping powers of the creative faculties of human beings, then the artist cannot claim an independent vision of the world - let alone reconfigure the reader's perception of the world. For Berkeley, there is no irreducible "something-I-know-not-what" concealed behind the sensory world, some noumenal reality that we can never apprehend but only dimly intuit.