The empirical philosophy (from the Greek empeiria = experience) gains a paradigmatic, systematic, methodological and conscious critical formulation from Locke.
Following the traditional line of empiricism, which admits that all knowledge comes from experience, therefore, from the senses, Locke seeks to understand the genesis, function and limits of understanding human. For this, he criticizes the Cartesian notion of subject as substance. “The mind is a tabula rasa”, Aristotle would already say, which is taken up here to show that nothing does not exist in the mind that was not previously in the senses.
According to Locke, the mind is like a passive wax, devoid of content, in which the data of sensibility imprints there the ideas that we can know. Here, idea does not have the same meaning as in Descartes (or if it does, it is just adventitious, not innate). Innate ideas exist in the human spirit, predate birth and thus coordinate the way man knows. But for the empiricist philosopher, human knowledge is determined by impressions coming from sensation, not from an innate intelligible foundation. Body and mind are one thing, they are not distinct as in Descartes. Note that we are still working with the notion of subject as a foundation, but now no longer a universal subject (reason) and rather a particular subject in which all representations (ideas) are enclosed in the way each individual perceives the reality. The question then remains: how to universalize judgments, since representations are particular? Here is the answer below.
First, for Locke the only thing that can be innate in man is the ability to grasp (abtract) ideas of singular facts (as in Aristotle) and not that the ideas themselves are innate (as in Descartes). In your Essay on human understanding, Locke does a kind of mapping of how ideas are produced in our minds. Ideas derive from sensations. There is no pure thought about merely intelligible concepts, but thinking is always thinking about something received by sensations imprinted on our mind. Experience is nothing more than the observation of both external objects and the internal operations of the mind. Thought is not formal, but rather a synthesis between form and content derived from experience and limited to it. The experience can be of two types:
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1. External, from which the simple ideas of sensation are derived (extension, figure and movement, etc.);
2. Internal, from which the simple ideas of reflection (pain, pleasure, etc.) derive.
So Locke calls it quality the power that things have to produce ideas in us and distinguishes between:
- primary qualities – are the real qualities of bodies of which the corresponding ideas are exact copies;
- secondary qualities – are the possible combinations of ideas, being in part subjective, so that their ideas do not exactly correspond to the objects (color, taste, odor, etc.).
The mind, according to Locke, has both the power to work combinations between simple ideas forming complex ideas, and to separate ideas from each other forming general ideas.
There are three types of complex ideas:
1. Mode ideas, which are affections of the substance;
2. Ideas of substance, born from the custom of assuming a substrate in which some simple ideas subsist, and
3. Ideas of relationships, which arise from the confrontation that the intellect institutes between ideas.
Locke also admits the general idea of substance, obtained by abstraction and does not deny the existence of substances, but the human capacity to have clear and distinct ideas. According to Locke, the real essence would be the structure of things, but we only know the nominal essence, which consists of the set of qualities that it must have to be called with a given name. Thus, abstraction (which in the ancients was the means by which the essence of being was reached) becomes, in Locke, a partialization of other complex ideas: the general and universal do not belong to the existence of things, but are inventions of the intellect itself that refer only to the signs of things, whether words or ideas.
Knowledge, then, consists in the perception of the connection or agreement (or the disagreement and contrast) between our ideas.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Philosophy - Brazil School