Notes on John Locke
Locke was a man who was not keen on innate ideas. Experience was his reasoning for knowledge and it was through experience that Locke thought we gained our knowledge. How do we know what we know? Well Locke puts it down to experience. All ideas come from observation and sensation, without them, how would we reflect and therefore gain knowledge. Sensation is the source of all ideas and he uses the example of a child as a blank piece of paper to explain this. When we are children, we have not yet experienced enough to conceive certain things. A child kept in a black and white room for all his life will not be able to perceive of other colours like scarlet and green. This links to Berkeley whom I may blog about subsequently. Reflection is another concept that Locke explores and he suggests that the mind collects information and the soul considers it. In this way we gain knowledge. Some people never truly reflect, Locke argues, and these people then never form actual ideas.
Much of his writings in his Essay on Human Understanding (especially in our specific chapter of interest) focus on the soul. Locke believes the soul is as inseparable from thinking as it is from the body. He claims that the soul doesn't always think, you need to have organisation before it can begin to interpret things. His thoughts on dreams are sceptical as the idea that you can stop thinking worries him. What also worries him is the idea that you can be thinking in a dream, be woken up, and have no recollection of what you were thinking or 'dreaming' about. There is a lot of thought on whether you are the same person asleep and awake; you could have the exact same thoughts as your asleep self and never know it. It is like the soul and the mind are together but are almost unaware of each other. He reasons that the soul must have some ideas that are not from sensation but is sceptical of this as it would mean that a 'perfect being' would have given you these thoughts, (and we know how he feels about innate thoughts...), so he doesn't like it. He in fact sees dreams as a collection of thoughts from a waking mind. Nothing we dream can be something we haven't already experienced and reflected on. The soul is always reflecting and thinking but this cannot be observed by the body, it can't remember, but this worries him too. It doesn't make sense to him that the soul and body could be separate and it also suggests that some people who do not think whilst asleep are actually soulless. We discussed in the seminar that Locke's dependence on the soul as a definitive article is much like Descartes dependence on God to bridge the gap between his theory, (see previous post on Descartes God Shaped Hole). I do not think however that he is using it for the same reason that Descartes is; i.e. for convenience and to placate the Church. But I do think the use of the soul is slightly contrived in that Locke explains away innate thought using the idea of a perfect being (i.e. the soul) in much the same way Descartes uses God.
In a kind of round about summing up way. Locke then says that the more experience you get, the better thinker you become; a man can have no original thought without context and experience; the mind can receive intrinsic and extrinsic info; you need to walk before you can run in thinking, think little first before you tackle the real issues and interpretation can skew meaning. An example of Locke's principles came up during our seminar discussion. We could see a tree outside the window of the meeting room but how do we know it is a tree? We have been told it is a tree and experience has taught us that objects with a trunk and leaves are trees but how did this idea come about originally? Do we just assume, as Locke does, that the knowledge came from our experience or do we already have the image of a prefect tree in our minds (Plato's forms) and so we can know the image of a tree as long as it conforms to this perfect tree image. This is a little similar to the work we have been doing in Media Key Concepts as it links to Semiotics and Signs. The sign and the signifier concept with the example of a cat, we see a four legged creature with a tail and we know it is a cat. How do we know it is not a dog? Well because we have the referent of the cat already and so can perceive it to be a cat.
I'm going to finish now, having just briefly mentioned perception, which is Berkeley's area of expertise really, with the poem from Berkeley's chapter in the History of Western Philosophy as I think it actually sums up his theories better than I ever could:
There was a young man who said, 'God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad.'
REPLY
Dear sir: Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by yours faithfully, God
Thanks for reading the ramblings of a confused student. Stay Classy Internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment