I Am Thought, Therefore I Am!

Berkeley, the seventeenth-century idealist philosopher, has a beautiful phrase set against Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”:

To be is to be perceived.

We perceive our own being through the way we flow in the lives of others.

In a scene from the beautiful film Cloud Atlas, Sonmi—the prophetic woman liberated from slavery—addresses the people using Berkeley’s statement:

To be is to be perceived, and knowing oneself becomes possible only through the eyes of another.
The nature of our immortal lives finds meaning only in the consequences of our words and deeds as they realise themselves across history. Our lives are not ours alone. From birth to death we are connected with others, in our past and in a future that has not yet arrived; with every act of evil and every act of kindness in the world, we give birth to our future.

Aydin Areta