Today’s question: If the mind starts as blank and every idea comes from experience, what exactly are the primitives of knowledge?
Reading Locke immediately after Descartes, I think the biggest takeaway for me from today’s reading — at least the part that was hard to separate from the reading itself — was how much of what he was saying we take for granted now. It really made me think about the fact that what I’m reading is really the foundation of a lot of modern thought.
To be fair, that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was a little more frustrated about how much time he had to spend talking about the soul thinking versus a person thinking, and sensation versus understanding. How much we can sort of skip in modern thought because of our understanding of things like the autonomic nervous system; or of when initial sensation and the idea of object permanence and self-identity actually start to rise in early childhood development.
Still, I know he was speaking for his context — defending against a backdrop of theological assumption that shaped what he could say plainly. It meant the points about sensation, understanding, and reflection were a lot more — not only circumspect but circuitous — than I think I would prefer.
So let’s talk through what he was actually saying. First off, I’m not sure that I would agree that sensation and reflection can really be separated, because while sensation comes in, that is actually what powers reflection. I don’t think that there are any thoughts that do not come from some sort of sensation. Or at least, I think it would be hard to argue that there are. Whether that’s a first-order thought coming immediately from sensation, or a second-order thought coming on reflection from what a sensation meant to us, is another matter entirely.
We can think of a first-order thought, right, as, for example, a lecture. We are experiencing that sensation. We’re hearing the words that are coming in. We’re seeing what is being written on a blackboard. And these are sensations that we can then understand. And if we reflect on those sensations, that becomes a second-order thought. But just like all dreams are assembled from sensations or experiences that we’ve had in reality, all second-order thoughts need to start from some sort of sensation.
And we can also have sensations without being able to process them or reflect on them. Going back to his discussion about children and babies: there was a lot of sensation happening there, and autonomic experiences, but we’re not really reflecting on them until we can start to develop those functionalities. And in order to develop those functionalities, we require a certain amount of sensation.
To his point about somebody who’s been isolated to strictly black and white for their entire life, never experiencing colour: this is going to shape their reflections and their identity, because of how they can align themselves with everything around them. They will not see themselves in certain ways that we would probably distinguish ourselves. So their identity will be shaped based on their experiences, in a way that is probably a little bit alien to everything that we have understood, or that the broader public understands.
And again, modern science comes into play here, because we know that this is true from some unfortunate cases where children have been lost and raised in unconventional scenarios — either by accident or by malice. And so we know how that can affect a psyche and shape your understanding of the world and how you reflect on things. One could argue that our first thoughts are always sensation, that sensation informs reflection, and that reflection in turn processes sensation.
But that brings us back to our original topic for the week. What is knowledge? Are pure sensations knowledge? Do we then know what a thing is? If we can’t describe a thing, do we still know it? If I am looking at yellow for the first time as a child, but I don’t call it yellow — I can’t call it yellow, because I’ve never heard that word — do I still recognize yellow if I see it somewhere else? And if so, I still understand a thing or recognize a thing even if I can’t name it and define it. There’s something fundamental about knowledge if it can even come at a point where we can’t define it — if it’s ineffable but still identifiable.
So if we look at yesterday’s talk about this single point to stand on — his Archimedean point of I think therefore I am. I know I exist, and therefore I know one thing, and I am able to know things. But that sort of self-identity comes very much later than our first sensations and reflections as a child.
So in our formative years, do we not exist because we can’t acknowledge that we exist?
If we experience, do we understand? Or do we experience before we understand? Do we exist? Object permanence, self-identity — these are crucial aspects of being able to understand the world around us, especially if we try to identify and understand the world in a sense of us versus everything that is not us, going back to Plato on Monday. But those are still much later in our developmental process than our initial sensations.
So I think that with Locke, it’s not so much that he disagrees with Descartes’ concept that there’s a fundamental point — that Archimedean point — that we can then use to bootstrap the rest of consciousness and understanding. But he definitely might disagree on what that point actually is. And based on what we’re discussing here, I think that I would have to agree with him.
Where Locke goes from here, in next week’s read, is to spell out what the atoms are: the simple ideas of II.ii. For now, it’s enough to say that the foundation sits one step deeper than Descartes left it — in sensation, before the self that reflects on it.