Locke, Stock and Barrel
I’ve always been fascinated with the uniqueness of our own experience — how the way things smell, feel, taste, and look to us is something that can’t help but be private. I can’t look through your eyes, you can’t hear through my ears . . . we have to use words and concepts that assume some common frame of reference. And the fact that we get our point across more often than not is a good sign that we do have some kind of common reference. But — as this month’s Humor piece points out in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way — there’s something unavoidably subjective and personal in the whole affair.
It should be no surprise that this revelation has sent many philosophers, focused on classifying and explaining everything, into fits and intellectual contortions. During the modern period, where the search was on for an indubitable and universal truth, something had to be done about this subjectivity. We’ve seen Descartes’ attempts to deal with the problem, and how they were not wholly satisfying. Next up the plate: John Locke, who is probably better known as a political theorist than an epistemologist, but who nonetheless introduced a couple of vital concepts to the dialogue.
Locke was one of the first empiricists — he introduced the concept of the human being as a blank slate (tabula rasa), who acquires all his or her ideas through experiencing the world. Our minds are the machinery that processes sensory experience into ideas, but whether or not we come to a certain idea depends on what we encounter in life. It’s like a coffee maker — just because it is able to combine certain elements to provide a hot, caffienated beverage doesn’t mean that the beverage is automatically inside the machine or that you can get the coffee without the beans and the water. Descartes, by contrast, was a rationalist — he thought that just by virtue of being intelligent human beings, there are certain concepts that we automatically come equipped with and that we can use regardless of what we encounter in the world. He held that we are born with innate ideas, a position that Locke attacks right off the bat in his Treatise on Human Understanding.
Why is this important? Let’s shift the terms of the discussion a little bit. You often hear talk about “natural rights” and “natural law” and things of that sort — the implication is that there are moral rules built into the fabric of the universe, much like gravitational attraction. Proponents of natural rights and natural law will often go a step further, though. These rules aren’t just written into the fabric of the world out there — they’re a part of us. If someone ever says that people have a sort of internal sense of right and wrong, they’re claiming that we have a series of innate moral ideas. If this were true, one would think that moral education would just be a matter of reminding people about what they already know, deep down in their souls — even if they don’t know they know.
(If anyone wants to stop here for the alcoholic beverage of their choice, I won’t be upset. Back? OK, moving on.)
If Locke is right, it just isn’t that simple. If people aren’t exposed to certain ideas, they’ll never acquire them or make use of them. And if all they experience is cruelty, viciousness and hatred, those are the ideas that they’ll develop, no matter how much potential they may have. Again, go back to the coffee machine — you might have the greatest espresso machine in the world, but if you put dirt into it instead of coffee beans, you’re gonna get mud. I admit, I’m in Locke’s camp here, and that’s why you’ve seen me harp on education so much, in my articles and on the boards. The importance of experience in shaping the way we think can not be overlooked. This is not to say that the nature and character of the individual person doesn’t matter, because I believe it does — I just believe that no matter how much capacity for greatness we have, we need something to help bring it out of us.
Just because Locke places a premium on experience does not mean, however, that he has given up on the quest for truth. Yes, knowledge rests on experience, and yes, experience is subjective — someone with healthy eyes sees something different than I do without my glasses, and a noise can sound different depending on how far from its source we are. So how do we know what a thing is really like, as opposed to how it looks to us at the time? If all we know is how a thing seems to be, we don’t have a very solid ground on which to base our conclusions about the object — or so Locke and his fellows thought, anyway.
Locke’s solution was to divide the characteristics of an object into two categories, primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are what an object really is, its essence apart from any investigation or interpretation by human minds. They are the basics, things like mass, length, shape, and so on. These primary qualities interact with our own sensory organs to produce in our minds impressions of the object’s secondary qualities — things like color, texture, smell and taste. Since the sensory organs play a role in shaping the experience, the quality is not wholly of the object — it’s partially a creation of our own mind. But it is something caused by the object, and which can be explained by its own essential qualities. With that distinction, Locke thought he had finessed his way past the problem of subjectivity in experience. How well did he do? Well, we can discuss it on the message boards — and next time, we’ll talk about someone who was less than impressed with Locke’s position.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.