Book Review: John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding"

John Locke is a French philosopher of the Enlightenment Era. In 1689, he wrote a series of polemical books against the Cartesians titled, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” This compilation of books concerns the Cartesian stance on innate ideas in the human mind. John Locke believes that ideas arise in the mind only after experience. He is against the belief that there are ideas present in the mind prior to experience. He believes that some people confuse the earliest things that they learned as children as innate ideas. John Locke also argues that if there are ideas in the mind before any experience, then they would be shared by all people, but there are no verifiable innate ideas that are held by all people. Not even morals are innate because if that was true, then people from all over the world would share the same moral values. Since many people participate in immoral acts, there are no universal moral values known by everyone; therefore, morality is not innate. Locke holds that morality is something that must be learned first. He attacks the Cartesians by stating that it does not make any sense to believe that the ability to reason is needed first in order to know about innate ideas. Either someone knows or does not know:

“So that to make reason discover those truths thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are always ignorant of them till they come to the use of reason, it is in effect to say, that men know and know them not at the same time.”[1]

John Locke believes that the human faculties of sight and hearing have been given to people by God for the attainment of knowledge; there would be no point in having the faculty of the eyes and ears if people could know about the world without them. Locke believes that ideas come about after experiencing the world. Ideas are, therefore, representations of the things that are experienced. The human person first learns about things through the senses. Then, the acquirement of several simple ideas leads the person to know more them. The person learns that they can be separated or combined to form complex ideas. This is how the accumulation of knowledge is attained. Then, Locke argues that not all knowledge is trustworthy. For Locke, it is only the simple ideas that can be trusted. Complex ideas are created in the mind; “…we having nothing else to refer these our ideas of mixed modes to, as a standard to which we would conform them…”[2]

Locke rejects anything that is not immediately evident, therefore, there is much that the human person should not trust. Locke also believes that words cannot be trusted because they represent ideas of things that are “differently discovered by different men, according to their various skill, attention, and ways of handling; who therefore cannot choose but have different ideas of the same substance, and therefore make the signification of its common name very various and uncertain.”[3] For Locke, words are what undermine the certainty of knowledge because not everyone uses them in the same way. The only things that one can be certain about, according to Locke, are those that can be immediately seen, touched, and heard. Moreover, John Locke holds that the human person can also know about spiritual beings while maintaining that only what is empirical is certain: 

“And therefore concerning the existence of finite spirits, as well as several other things, we must content ourselves with the evidence of faith; but universal, certain propositions concerning this matter are beyond our reach intelligent spirits that God ever created do still exist, yet it can never make a part of our certain knowledge.”[4]

However, faith also has to be scrutinized by reason. No divine revelation can be approved without reason. If any divine revelation disagrees with reason, then it does not need to be accepted; “…we can never receive for a truth anything that is directly contrary to our clear and distinct knowledge.”[5] Divine Revelation has to consider human reason first: “For faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge.”[6]

Furthermore, John Locke is Thomistic about his explanation of the existence of God. He believes that the human person is able to think unlike anything else that exists, therefore, there had to be a first thinker that gave people the ability to think. There can be no infinite regress for Locke. Nevertheless, he is still a modern philosopher against the Scholastics. He is clearly against Anselm because he does not believe that the greatest conceivable being that can be thought of proves the existence of God: “For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing…”[7]

I agree with John Locke that there are no innate ideas in the human person prior to experiencing the world by the senses. We first learn about the things around us by our senses. I do not believe that there is anything that can be used to verify any innate idea in the human person because there are no universal ideas shared by all. Morality, for example, is something that must first be taught by parents. Morality is not something that is universally known because the conscience can be obstructed by several factors, therefore, it must be formed in order to learn to do what is good and reject what is evil. I cannot think of anything that can be said to be a universal idea in all people, therefore, I agree with John Locke that there are no innate ideas. However, I do not agree that the only things we can be sure of are those that can be immediately known by the senses. For instance, faith reveals to people the love of God; faith illuminates reason to know that the love of God is a certain fact. Reason alone cannot know that the love of God is never-ending because human suffering can make a person believe that they are not loved by God; reason in this case would lead to falsity. God can also reveal things that contradict the beliefs of any person. For example, a person that once believed that they are unlovable can one day learn that they are worth loving by God. I do not agree with John Locke when he says, “For faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge.”[8] I do not agree when John Locke says that “we can never receive for a truth anything that is directly contrary to our clear and distinct knowledge.”[9] If God were to reveal any sinfulness that John Locke was unaware of, then John Locke would reject this revelation because it contradicts his knowledge. As a result, John Locke would fail to advance in holiness and virtue.

In conclusion, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” refutes the Cartesian philosophy that states that there are innate ideas. John Locke provides several examples to prove it. He guides the reader in how ideas are formed in the human mind. This book reaches its height when he explains that there are only certain kinds of knowledge we can be sure of. The reader is left thinking about how much of what is held in the mind can be considered true; the accumulation of several ideas does not always lead to truth. I am now wondering about how many problems I have caused myself because of false complex ideas.


Sources:

1. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I Ch. 2. 1689. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/locke/john/l81u/contents.html 

2. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II Ch. 32. 

3. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III Ch. 9.

4. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV Ch.11.

5. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV Ch. 18.

6. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV Ch. 18.

7. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV Ch. 11.

8. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV Ch. 18.

9. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV Ch. 18.