Review of John Locke’s An Essay On Human Understanding

John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1690): A Brief Review 

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (AECHU) is perhaps John Locke’s most influential work. Arguably this essay has contributed to the establishment of the modern school of empiricism.[1] Below we will survey briefly the work in question.

As well argued in AECHU and equally by empiricists, “sense experience” is taught to be/as the source of all knowledge. The metaphor of “tabula rasa” (blank slate) became synonymous with Locke’s philosophy, as a way to explain how human attain knowledge. By suggesting the human mind as a blank tablet, John Locke has denied “any ideas or intellectual structure is inscribed on the mind from birth” (ED. L. Miller, Questions That Matters 233). In other words, as most empiricists have argued, there are no innate principles in the mind associating with human knowledge or understanding.  Locke rigorously contested against the prevalent doctrine of the “Universal Assent.” For he argued that, the latter,  has terribly failed to prove that knowledge is inherent to the human mind and naturally imprinted in the consciousness of children and idiots (Locke, AECHU 60). As a matter of fundamental belief, Locke held that the dispositional accounts of innate propositions have not recognized by the least among us—children and the idiots, which in turn renders the universal assent principle unreliable, with no substantial and empirical evidence. It is rather but a perception, an allusion of the mind. Further Locke insisted even if reason were to be the best evidence or “the time of their discovery” (Locke 64) for the existence of intrinsic knowledge, that would still not prove them (innate principles in the mind) innate.  As a result, it is a false premise to affirm that reason has discovered them. In this way, Locke’s emphasis on “experience” as the most reliable source of knowledge is viable.  By experience Locke distinguished its two derivative facets (or two kinds of experience): that of [human] “reflection” and that of [human] “sensation.” The former emphasizes what’s occurring on the inside, that is, the processes of our minds. The latter stresses what’s going on outside, that is, the operations in the external world. This thesis accounts for Locke’s theory on how ideas have entered the tabula rasa of the human mind.

Locke’s work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (AECHU), is divided roughly into five equal books and consists of thirty-one succint chapters. The chief concern is to investigate the source and extent of human knowledge  as well as uncovering the limits of human understanding. Locke accomplished his goal in underlying plainly what is knowable and what is not. For Locke, human knowledge has its limits and measure, even in the most rigorous, meticulous attempt. For we have been endowed with a “portion and degree of knowledge,” he asserted ( 57) because perfect comprehension impossible. In addition, the human mind is sufficiently inadequate to “grasp everything” because there are some things that are beyond the reach of understanding (ibid). As David suggested probability is possible, absolute certainty is not (ibid).  On the other hand, Locke suggested  that knowledge could be placed subserviently under the microscope of scientists.  It could be investigated and could be known. In this respect, his method of investigating the limits of understanding is as follows (1) to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge and examine by what measures, (2) to inquire the original of those ideas and notions, (3) to demonstrate what knowledge the understanding has; including the certainty, evidence and its scope, (4) to inquire into the nature and grounds of faith (Locke 56). Locke made use of what so-called “The Historical, Plain Method” and the experimental methods of the new sciences (i.e. medicine, physics, astronomy) (Miller 237), through which he endeavored to discover the object of the understanding when a man thinks (Locke 59).  In Book I: Of innate Notions, he rejects the idea of nativism or the principle of innate ideas.Book II: Of Ideas, prolongs the argument in  Book I, yet with more force and more particularity. Book III: Of Words,  concerns with the dynamics and nature of language. The stress is in its relations to ideas and knowledege, and cultural context of language.  Finally in Book IV: Of knowledge and Opinion, Locke brings connections with faith, knowledge, opininion, and reason/philosophy.

As a word of conclusion, Locke’s influence on continental philosophy and modern theorists, American life and the social order are enormous.  Though he’s no longer with us, but his ideas live, his tribes are many.

Bibliography

Brown, Robert E. “Edwards, Locke, and the Bible,” The Journal of Religion 79 (1999): 361-384.

Carse, James P. “Mr. Locke’s Magic Onions and an Unboxed Beetle for Young Jonathan,” The

Journal of Religion 47 (1967): 331-339.

Gay, Peter. A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America. Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

Laurence, David. “Jonathan Edwards, John Locke, and the Canon of Experience,” Early

American Literature 15 (1980):107-123.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Miller, ED. L. Questions That matter: An Invitation to Philosophy. New York: University of

Colorado, 1994.

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. Westport: William Sloane Associates, Inc.

 

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[1] Modern philosophers have identified classical empiricism with Aristotle and Plato, and more recently with St. Thomas Aquinas.  In a sense, one could dispute that Lockian doctrine of “tabula rasa” is a footnote to Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophy. For both taught that the sphere of “knowing” or “epistemology” derives directly from our five senses or sense experience of things in the external world.   For St. Thomas, “Nihil in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensa,” (“Nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses”) . However, Locke departed slightly from his predecessors  in insisting that the innate principles of the mind are not universal built-in ideas (See ED. L. Miller’s Questions That Matters for further detail), 233-258).  That does not suggest, however, that Plato held to a theory of “innate ideas,” rather his was the world of “Forms” which exist in the transcendal sphere expresse represenatively as “copies of the forms”  in  the physical world.