John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1693)
Unlike Descartes earlier, and unlike the later Hartley, Locke is not concerned with the anatomical location or operation of the mind and the senses. Insisting rather that we cannot know the true physical-anatomical structure underlying human consciousness and perception, Locke develops a description of the operation of the mind, the senses, and language in relation to a largely unknowable physical world.
After refuting the belief in the existence of innate ideas in the first book, Locke turns to an extended account of the way the mind takes in and develops its relation to “simple ideas,” by which he means individual sensory data which, composed together, produce our perception of objects in the world. Proclaiming that “all knowledge comes from Experience” (59), he develops an account in which the mind, originally empty, comes to engage fully with the world and with itself through sensation and reflection. Initially, the mind learns to group together simple ideas in the exterior world into coherent objects and its awareness of itself into thoughts; eventually, it synthesizes complex ideas composed of large numbers of simple ones, and establishes connections between them. The mind, unless it or the senses are significantly damaged, cannot help taking in ideas from the world, and developing in response to them. However,
There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us, and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves, which we call so. (87)
Locke believes that our perception of the world, including the simple ideas which form the building blocks of all thought, are not a true representation of reality, but merely the effects of an unknown physical reality on the specific apparatuses of human perception. He insists that every creature’s senses are not arbitrary, being adapted to its way of life; they are a necessary and convenient way of relating to the world whose reality remains unknown and unknowable.
[intuition, reason, revelation] All ways of understanding have to do, for Locke, with determining the relations between ideas. The simple ideas being naturally given and unalterable, it is generally relations between complex ideas that occupy the human mind. In ascertaining whether two ideas are or are not related, whether as identities, relations, cause-and-effect, etc., the mind has three routes: intuition, which works instantly and without fail, where it is a matter of comparing clear ideas with clear distinctions between them; reason, which helps to determine the relation between two ideas the connections between which need to be traced out and illuminated first, and revelation, which covers the relations of ideas which are not to be understood any other way, and comes directly from God. Locke does not exactly privilege either of the three; though he argues that revelation ought to trump reason, it is impossible without reason to know whether any particular authoritative statement is a revelation or not.
[PAIN] The crucial way in which perception, as well as the larger structure of the mind including memory, is connected to the species’ survival lies in the significance of pain in the formation of earliest memories: “Attention and repetition help much to the fixing of any ideas in the memory; but those which naturally at first make the deepest and most lasting impression, are those which are accompanied with pleasure or pain” (97). In the beginning of life, pain performs the function later turned over to reason, of guiding the actions of the organism in the world with the goal of staying alive.
Generally speaking, all sensation is accompanied by the simple ideas of pleasure or pain, in various degrees. From the earliest age, pain and pleasure point out naturally the actions which will most benefit the creature, forming the basis of our ideas of good and evil.
An interesting by-product of Locke’s focus on the mind is his insistence on the lack of a difference between bodily and mental pains: both in fact are present in the mind, with different source-attributions.
Locke discusses the passions under the headings of pleasure and pain, calling them “the hinges on which our passions turn...” (161). Curiously, the passions for him bear no necessary relation to the body, as evidenced by the example of blushing, which not always and not in all people accompanies shame. The passions are essentially different positional-temporal-logical relations to pain and pleasure and their causes, good and evil. Passions are also largely solipsistic, not requiring, with the exception of envy and anger, the presence of another human. Of all the passions, only desire seems to interest JLo in depth.
[WILL] The will is not an agency, but a faculty=ability of the mind to direct its inner and outer (bodily) actions. It is determined by DESIRE, which Locke equates with uneasiness in the absence of an acknowledged good. The "good" referenced may be either natural or learned/acquired, though for many, the satisfaction of basic desires for bodily subsistence takes up the majority of their time and efforts. No good is pursued unless desired, i.e. unless its absence is experienced as an uneasiness, which is the main engine of human action.
[style] I must mention that Locke is possibly the snarkiest thinker I have read so far. Exerpts from his letters in response to the Bishop of Worcester's refutations are at times painfully funny, anticipating (I think) Laurence Sterne's narrative style.
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