John Locke (1634–1704) An Essay Concerning Human ...

SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Locke argues that almost all of science, with the exception
of mathematics and morality, and most of our everyday experience
is subject to opinion or judgment. We base our judgments on the
similarity between propositions to our own experience and to the
experiences we have heard described by others. Locke examines the relation
between reason and faith. He defines reason as being the faculty
we use to obtain judgment and knowledge. Faith is the acceptance
of revelation and has its own truths, which reason cannot discover.
Reason, however, must always be used to determine which revelations
truly are revelations from God and which are the constructions of
man. Finally, Locke divides all of human understanding into three
sciences: natural philosophy, or the study of things to gain knowledge;
ethics, or the study of how it is best to act; and logic, or the
study of words and signs.
Analysis
Locke effectively shifted the focus of seventeenth-century
philosophy from metaphysics to the more basic problems of epistemology, or
how people are able to acquire knowledge and understanding. Locke
rigorously addresses many different aspects of human understanding
and of the mind’s functions. His most striking innovation in this
regard is his rejection of the theory that human beings are born
possessing innate knowledge, which philosophers such as Plato and
Descartes had sought to prove.
Locke replaces the theory of innate knowledge with his
own signature concept, the tabula rasa, or blank slate. Locke tries
to demonstrate that we are born with no knowledge whatsoever—we
are all blank slates at birth—and that we can only know that things exist
if we first experience them.
Locke builds a strong case against the existence of innate
knowledge, but the model of knowledge he proposes in its place is
not without flaws. By emphasizing the necessity of experience as
a prerequisite for knowledge, Locke downplays the role of the mind
and neglects to adequately address how knowledge exists and is retained in
the mind—in other words, how we remember knowledge and what happens
to our knowledge when we aren’t thinking about it and it is temporarily
out of our consciousness. While Locke is thorough in his discussion
of what objects of experience can be known, he leaves us with little
idea of how the mind works to translate experiences into knowledge
and to combine certain experiences with other bits of knowledge
to categorize and interpret future information.
Locke presents “simple” ideas as a basic unit of human
understanding, claiming that we can break all of our experiences
down into these simple, fundamental parts that cannot be broken
down any further. For example, the idea of a plain wooden chair
can be broken down into simpler units that are received by our minds through
one sense, through multiple senses, through reflection, or through
a combination of sensation and reflection. “Chair” is thus perceived
and understood by us in several ways: as brown, as hard, as according
to its function (to be sat upon), and as a certain shape that is
unique to the object “chair.” These simple ideas allow us to understand
what “chair” is and to recognize it when we come in contact with
it.
Locke’s theory of primary and secondary qualities is based
on the Corpuscular Hypothesis of Robert Boyle, Locke’s friend and
contemporary. According to the Corpuscular Hypothesis, which Locke considered
the best scientific picture of the world in his day, all matter
is composed of tiny particles, or corpuscles, which are too small to
see individually and which are colorless, tasteless, soundless,
and odorless. The arrangement of these invisible particles of matter gives
an object of perception both its primary and secondary qualities.
An object’s primary qualities include its size, shape, and movement.
They are primary in the sense that these qualities exist regardless
of whether anyone perceives them. Secondary qualities include color,
odor, and taste, and they are secondary in the sense that they may
be perceived by observers of the object, but they are not inherent
in the object. For example, a rose’s shape and the way it grows
are primary because they exist regardless of whether they are observed,
but the rose’s redness only exists for an observer under the right
conditions of lighting and if the observer’s eyesight is functioning
normally. Locke suggests that because we can explain everything
using the existence only of corpuscles and primary qualities, we
have no reason to think that secondary qualities have any real basis
in the world.
According to Locke, every idea is an object of some action
of perception and thinking. An idea is an immediate object of our thoughts,
something we perceive and to which we are actively paying attention.
We also perceive some things without ever thinking about them, and
these things do not continue to exist in our minds because we have
no reason to think about them or remember them. The latter are nonimmediate
objects. When we perceive an object’s secondary qualities, we are
actually perceiving something that does not exist outside of our
minds. In each of these cases, Locke would maintain that the act
of perception always has an internal object—the thing that is perceived
exists in our mind. Moreover, the object of perception sometimes
exists only in our minds. One of the more confusing
aspects of Locke’s discussion is the fact that perception and thinking
are sometimes, but not always, the same action. To add to the confusion,
Locke claims in Book II that an action of perception may have
a nonimmediate object, not that it must have one. This
makes it difficult to pin down a rule for what perception is and isn’t,
and how perception works.
We may find Locke’s discussion of essence, or substance,
confusing because Locke himself doesn’t seem convinced of its existence. Locke
may have chosen to retain this concept for several possible reasons.
First, he seems to think that the idea of essence is necessary to
make sense of our language. Second, the concept of essence solves the
problem of persistence through change: that is, if a tree is just
a bundle of ideas such as “tall,” “green,” “leaves,” and so on,
what happens when a tree is short and leafless? Does this new collection of
qualities change the essence from “tree” to something new? In Locke’s
view, the essence persists through any change, remaining the same
despite changes in the object’s properties. A third reason Locke
seem to be compelled to accept the notion of essence is to explain
what unifies ideas that occur at the same time, making them into
a single thing, distinct from any other thing. Essence helps clarify
this unity, though Locke is not very specific about how this works.
For Locke, essence is what qualities are dependent on and exist
in.
Locke’s view that our knowledge is much more limited than
was previously supposed was shared by other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
thinkers such as Descartes and Hume—even though Locke differs sharply
from Descartes about why that knowledge is limited. For Locke, however,
the fact that our knowledge is limited is a philosophical rather
than practical matter. Locke points out that the very fact that
we do not take such skeptical doubts about the existence of the
external world seriously is a sign of how overwhelmingly probable
we feel the existence of the world to be. The overwhelming clarity
of the idea of an external world, and the fact that it is confirmed
by everybody except madmen, is important to Locke in and of itself.
Even so, Locke holds that we can never have real knowledge when
it comes to natural science. Rather than encouraging us to stop
bothering with science, Locke seems to say instead that we should
be aware of its limitations.