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The Cartesian Method of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

P. A. Schouls
P. A. Schouls*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

Locke tells us that his purpose in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is “to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent” (1.1.2). He provides a characterization of general human knowledge as universal truths in propositional form. In doing this he presupposes a striking doctrine about the “extent” of man's general knowledge, and he draws freely upon a theory meant to explain both the materials (the “original”) out of which this knowledge is constructed and the way in which it is constructed. He holds that the “certainty” which characterizes general knowledge is obtained only if we proceed from the right materials or foundations in the right way, and that the right foundations themselves can only be obtained in one specific way. In this study I try to show how much more Cartesian Locke is than many commentators would allow. I argue that on Locke's own view the way to obtain the foundations for general knowledge is that of Cartesian analysis, and the way to construct general knowledge once these foundations have been obtained is that of Cartesian synthesis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , June 1975 , pp. 579 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

1. I am grateful to Professors Richard I. Aaron and John W. Yolton for criticism of an earlier draft of this paper; to the University of Alberta for providing time for research in the form of Sabbatical Leave; and to the Canada Council for support of my work through a Leave Fellowship. [This and the next three papers were first presented as a symposium at the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, University of Toronto, June 1974- Eds]

2. The quotations from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding are from the first three volumes of the readily-available ten-volume edition of 1823 (reprinted in 1963, Scientia Verlag Aalen).

3. See my “Descartes and the Autonomy of Reason”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. x, No. 3 (1972), pp, 307-322; and for the implications of such a position for science, my “Reason, Method, and Science in the Philosophy of Descartes”, Australasian journal of Philosophy, Vol. 50, No. 1 (1972), pp. 30-39. In spite of the stress Descartes placed on observation and experimentation, experimentation is extrinsic to the method of the Regulae and the Discourse, and does not play an intrinsic role in the construction of any scientific system. Instead, experimentation tells something about a scientific system as it is being constructed or once it has been constructed. To take physics as an example: experimentation can tell us whether the theories that are being or have been developed are theories about possible or actual corporeal objects.

4. Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. Leyden, W. von Oxford (1954), Essay IV, p. 149Google Scholar. The first Book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding can be taken as a statement of this same position in terms of an attack upon and dismissal of the rival position of innate ideas. This does not, of course, mean that the first Book of the Essay is directed primarily against Descartes’ position. On this point, see W., John Yolton,John Locke and the Way of Ideas, Oxford (1956)Google Scholar.

5. These statements are from Locke's, De Arte Medico (1668)Google Scholar; the fragment from which they are taken can be found in Mandelbaum's, Maurice Philosophy, Science, and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies, Baltimore (1964), pp. 47-8Google Scholar. For a similar comment in the Essay, also possibly directed against Descartes, see 4.12.13.

6. Although, in this paper, I am concerned with ideas rather than with things, I do not imply that Locke presents us with a strict dualism of ideas and things. I do not want to present Locke's position as one which never allows that we observe qualities, things, or events, for there are many passages in the Essay in which Locke writes that we do observe qualities, things, and events. The area of my interest in the first part of this paper can be delimited as well by saying that I am concerned with certain aspects of the experience of the perceiver of things or events quo perceiver of things or events. On the question of whether or not Locke was a representational realist, I have greater sympathy for the arguments persented by Woozley, A.D. in his “Introduction” to the abridged edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Fontana Library, 1964, pp. 24–35)Google Scholar and in his “Some Remarks on Locke's Account of Knowledge” (The Locke Newsletter, No.3, 1972, pp. 15-16), and with the argument of Yolton, John W. in the fifth chapter of his Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar. I have Jess sympathy with the “traditional” position as presented by, for example, Jackson, R. in his “Locke's Version of the Doctrine of Representative Perception” (Mind, xxxix, 1930, pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Martin, C.B. and Armstrong, D.M. Locke and Berkeley, New York, 1968, pp. 125–154)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Although the statement “…ideas… enter by the senses simple and unmixed” may seem to imply a doctrine in which the distinctness of ideas is bound up with the physiological aspect of the involvement of different senses, this is not Locke's intention. For in this passage he also states that the distinctness of ideas is in no way affected by the process involved: whether several ideas enter the mind through different senses, or at the same time through a single sense like that of sight or touch, the simple ideas in each case remain “perfectly distinct”.

8. See, for example, 3.6.28, 3.9.17, 4.6.7.

9. I here use “passive” in the way Locke uses it, namely, only to indicate that, because of the involuntariness characteristic of sensation, the presence of the ideas of which the mind is conscious must be accounted for in terms of an extra-mental reality (cf. 2.1.25). Being conscious of ideas is, of course, an “action” of the mind (cf. 2.21.5).

10. On this point, as well as on the issue of knoweldge of the connection between ideas of primary and secondary qualities, see Yelton's, John W. “The Science of Nature” in John Locke, Problems and Perspectives, ed. Yolton, John W. Cambridge (1969), pp. 183–193, esp. pp. 187 ffGoogle Scholar.

11. Aaron, Richard I. John Locke (third edition), Oxford (1971), p. 112Google Scholar; Martin, C.B. and Armstrong, D.M. Locke and Berkeley, A Collection of Critical Essays, New York (1968), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Note again, for example, 2.12.1, 2.23.1, 3.9.13, 4.4.12.

13. Aaron, op. cit., pp. 111-2Google Scholar. See also Bennett, Jonathan Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Central Themes, Oxford (1971), pp. 25–30.Google Scholar

14. Although Locke often uses statements like “simple ideas… are imprinted” (2.1.25) and “simple ideas… are only to be got by those impressions objects themselves make on our minds” (3.4.11), there is no reason to suppose that he here refers to single simple ideas rather than to simple ideas perceived in combination. He sometimes also writes that “simple ideas, the materials of all our knowledge, are suggested… to the mind only by… sensation and reflection” (2.2.2; see also 2.12.2). If he here refers to the way we obtain single simple ideas, statements like these might imply that these ideas are not immediately received from sensation; they are suggested by sensation.

15. For example: 2.1.25, 2.2.2, 2.12.1, 2.12.2, 2.13.1, 2.13.28; 4.1.4, 4.18.3.

16. Aaron, op.cit., p. 227Google Scholar.

17. There are other passages which express the same doctrine, but in which the word “simple” does not appear either, e.g. 2.13.28, 3. 11.9, 4.1.4, 4.3.8.

18. Aaron, loc. cit.

19. Aaron, op. cit., p. 133.Google Scholar

20. E.g. 4.1.4, 4.2.1, 4. 7.10, 4.18.3.

21. Locke himself explicitly refers to this process as one of decomposition. Cf. 3.11.9, 4.4.9.

22. Adam, and Tannery, OEuvres de Descartes, vol. 6, p. 18.Google Scholar

23. Op. cit., vol 7, p. 155.

24. Cf. e.g. Yolton, John W. in the Introduction to Yolton's edition of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London (1961), pp. xix–xx.Google Scholar

25. See also 4.4.9, and 4.17.3.

26. See also 4.2.1, 4.2.7, and 4.17.15.

27. Sometimes, as in 4.12.7, it looks as if Locke hints at the limitation of this method to the field of mathematics. The point of such passages is, however, that the methods of disciplines distinct from mathematics are merely specific exemplifications of the general method of analysis-synthesis. The method used to develop “morals” is that used to develop mathematics, differently manifested because of a difference in subject-matter. Therefore Locke can say: “Confident I am, that if men would in the same method, and with the same indifferency, search after moral, as they do after mathematical truths, they would find them [i.e. “moral ideas”] have a stronger connexion one with another, and a more necessary consequence from our clear and distinct ideas, and to come nearer perfect demonstration than is commonly imagined” (4.3.20).

28. Cf. 2. 11.16, 2.12.18, 4.2.1, 4.17 .4.

29. Cf. 1.1.3, 2.11.14-17, 2.33.19.

30. Locke accounts for error in terms of memory. Cf. 4.1.9, 4.2.7.