'By Kicking, If Necessary'

As a freshman I came to philosophy cold, after a brief fling in high school with existentialism and unguided detours into Spinoza and George Santayana. My thinking was a muddle of fashion and myopic autodidacticism. In our introduction to philosophy class we read the obvious stuff – Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant – which helped clear some of the fog. Another name on the reading list, once I had read excerpts from his Three Dialogues, came off as a joke: Bishop Berkeley. Subjective idealism is the sheerest blarney, yet another Irish cock-and-bull story. I had already encountered the word “solipsism” in a biography of Tolstoy, so I recognized it when I saw it. The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of Berkeley’s adolescent theory – he called it “immaterialism” -- is recounted by Boswell on August 6, 1763: 

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus.'"

 

QED. What more to say? In the first stanza of “Epistemology” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950), Richard Wilbur endorses Johnson’s reasoning:

 

“Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.”

 

Tom Disch performs a similar service, without naming Johnson, in “What to Accept” (Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems, 1989):

 

“The fact of mountains. The actuality

Of any stone — by kicking, if necessary.

The need to ignore stupid people,

While restraining one's natural impulse

To murder them. The change from your dollar,

Be it no more than a penny,

For without a pretense of universal penury

There can be no honor between rich and poor.

Love, unconditionally, or until proven false.

The inevitability of cancer and/or

Heart disease. The dialogue as written,

Once you've taken the role. Failure,

Gracefully. Any hospitality

You're willing to return. The air

Each city offers you to breathe.

The latest hit. Assistance.

All accidents. The end.”