John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Human Understanding:
Yet another Essay The Enlightenment was an era that took place primarily in the 18th century and could best be described as a time of progress. Early on in the Age of Enlightenment men began to question old doctrines and search for a new method of thinking and understanding. An answer to one of the most fundamental questions was sought: Where do our ideas come from? Although many pondered the question, two primary schools of thought emerged as an answer to the question: empiricism and rationalism. These ideas concerning the origin of ideas examine the ways in which we gain knowledge. John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” stands as one of the essential books for philosophers and non- philosophers alike
He concludes that there are no innate ideas and instead proposes the well-known theory that the mind is a blank slate. Locke continues that man gains all the knowledge he has from experience. This experience can be broken down further into two types of experience, the first being sensation, which is described as our perception of the external material world using our senses. By perceiving the external world we gain the majority of our knowledge and therefore come to know the qualities of certain things such as hard, soft, bitter, sweet, hot, and cold. Without the initial source of ideas from the external world perceived through our senses, our second source of knowledge could not exist. The second source of knowledge is the reflection of ideas in our mind that it has got from the external world. These operations of the mind, known as reflection, are summed up by Locke: “This source of ideas…though it not be a sense, as having nothing to do with external objects…might properly be called internal sense” (Kramnick
Ironically however, it can be argued that the empiricist view is the most basic and simple understanding of the human mind. Specifically when Locke writes, “Let us then suppose the mind to be…white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas…” (Kramnick 186) After all, what could be simpler than thinking of the mind as a blank slate or, tabula rasa? On the other hand, although the rationalists generally attempt to use deduction and reduce the idea of human understanding to a basic fundamental principle, in Leibniz case what you end up with are complex ideas beyond our understanding that cannot be explained by sensation or any external source and therefore must be innate. As Leibniz states, “…primitive ideas are those whose possibility is indemonstrable, and which are in truth nothing else than the attributes of God (Kramnick 189).” Both of these views attempt to explain the origin of ideas in a simple way. It is a matter of opinion which one simplifies the idea the