Locke on Language

No one can deny the huge role language plays in our lives, but at the very same time, a lot of us take it’s basis for granted. We never even consider breaking it down, the different kinds of words, where they come from, why we use them, what they really mean. It’s a whole system we learn as children, take for face value and move on. And ye, language, not just the ability to make noise, is what separates us from animals, it is the most important element we possess as a race. In chapters I though IV of book III, Locke breaks down language to its most simple of forms and builds upon this foundation. Ultimately as he states in chapter II, words mean nothing but the ideas to which we assign them, they are the tools that man use in order to get the invisible ideas floating around out of his head and into the world. It is not the words that have meaning; they mean nothing without the ideas. But his major focus lays in general ideas, because this isn’t as simple as particulars, assigning a certain word to a certain thing, this is giving a whole array of similar things a common identity.

And then there is the particularly interesting part in which he analyzes the difference between real and nominal essences of beings. The idea of “essence” has been a reoccurring theme in the works of Descartes, Spinoza, and now Locke. It was important when trying to prove the existence of God, but Locke brings it down to the world around us. According to him there is both real and nominal essences, Real, being the intrinsic value, and nominal pertaining to its observable properties. And yet, despite what we would assume differentiation to be based off of (the real essence), it is based off nominal essence. He goes on to state “species that are distinguished by their real ideas [are] useless” (Locke, 186). This may seem backwards, but after reading through point seventeen we come to realize that the basis of words is solely what we perceive, this is what he had laid out in his previous chapters. Words, general terms, they rely on the characteristics things posses, and then also privation. Cold is the absence of heat; man is what the particular “Joe” lacks. This is a turn from Descartes who could and would not rely on his senses as a connection to reality.

Locked on Common Sense

In the opening of the Epistle to the Reader, Locke describes how a conversation shared amongst him and his friends sparked an intense and laborious debate and subsequent impasse, on certain philosophical principles. Locke, noticing that the conversation was limited by boundaries of human knowledge, decided to lay out a philosophical framework of understanding that functioned within those boundaries. The complex nature of the metaphysical quest for universal knowledge does not lead to a suitable and functional understanding of knowledge. The design of his framework beginning in Book I immediately reduces some of the heavily debated points covered by other philosophers, to that of speculation. Locke’s method focuses on where conscious ideas come from, what ideas are and their certainty and extent, and the nature and grounds of faith and opinion. Physical considerations of the mind, how essence body and spirit come to have sensation in our organs, ideas in our understanding, and the dependence of ideas on matter, are NOT matters of primary focus in Locke’s platform. What IS of focus, directly counters views that metaphysical philosophers such as Descartes had pertaining to the trusting (or lack thereof) of corporeal senses. Locke places a heavy emphasis of the use of senses as that which establishes knowledge through sensation experience and reflection.

How much we know the extent of our comprehension can be very useful, even considering the limitations of our knowledge capacity. I like the sailor example that Locke uses when tackling the limitations of knowledge- a sailor may never know or fathom the deepness of the ocean, but is capable of using a line of known length to assist in the traversal of unknown waters to his benefit. By experiencing through the senses, our mind processes and operates. We think and reflect to produce ideas, which in turn lead to greater knowledge. Without these experiences to sense and reflect on, we remain in an infant or ‘tabula rasa’ like philosophical state of knowledge. The senses produce repeatable simple ideas which can complex to form an infinite variety of complex ideas. Because the mind can neither make nor destroy these simple ideas, if we do not have the ability to sense something, we do not have the ability to create ideas and in turn extensive knowledge on it. In reflecting on all of this, I tried to come up with some type of sense that I do not recall ever experiencing- namely that the experience of telepathy. Locke would probably conjecture that we are not able to have knowledge of the transferring of thought, if we have never experienced a simple telepathic process sensation to produce the simple ideas. With the pretty sexy stuff running around in the 7 billion minds that inhabit our planet, maybe that’s not so much of a bad thing.

Contra Mind-Body Dualism, G.W. Leibniz

       Within the Monadology, Liebniz attempts to provide his account for the reality of the universe, as based on the simplest substance identified as a monad. One of his main causes for the discourse was to provide a more probable solution to the mind-body problem than the Cartesian idea of dualism.
       He states "..every living body has one dominant entelechy, which in an animal is its soul; but the parts of that living body are full of other living things...which also has its entelechy or dominant soul (p.69)", eventually leading him to say that "there are no spirits without bodies (p.72)". Further supported by the idea of the monad, which in itself has the predetermined mechanism of harmony with all the other monads, Liebniz establishes a system of reality that has less to do with how separate the mind and the body are in their respects to each other, but more with how all the monads are able to exist with those monads that are different based on this harmony. Previously, he also argued that each monad is different from each other in the sense that, when God created the first monad A, he then made other monads that in some qualities are not A, and one of the major ways in which they could be different is that they're either active or passive in respect to each other, aside from the qualitative difference.
       Some questions begin to arise; how is it that a monad of thought, or those exact qualities that for Cartesian followers constitutes the mind, can have substance? And even before that, to say that everything is made up of these tiny substantiated particles that are irreducible seems to imply that the mind is the only true existing thing, whereas matter, or extension, was just accidentally and simultaneously created as a fabric in the universe that only responds with modes in appearance or "perception (p.14)".
       The major goal of this system was to battle dualism with a combination of what seems to be a hybrid of teleology and the view of efficient causes, in that the monads act with bodies to carry out whatever quality it is they have within themselves or composite beings, without being able to influence each other or affect one another; they simply remain qualitatively different. However, I still cannot reconcile that, though this system is adequately logical, the monads are the only true substance, yet matter was just somehow created at the same time so that monads and substance coexist in appearance. Does this view battle dualism effectively, or does it have just as many cracks and flaws?

What is Real and Intelligible

The Treatise on the Emendation of Intellect, is supposed to give insight into how the mind can form ideas that are clear and distinct. However after reading the passages, I found myself asking the question what is real and intelligible? I think that the intended function of the intellect is to assess our immediate environment and communicate the information to our body so it could respond in whatever way appropriate and helps us to form our final decisions. The ideas that we accumulate through our past and present experience are clear and distinct. Our minds are active and associative from one situation to another. If we sit in silence and try to remain that way, thoughts will arise no matter how much we try to block our minds from it. Would these thoughts be considered “real and intelligible” or fiction? “A circle is one thing, the idea of a circle is another. For the idea of a circle is not something having a circumference and a center, as is a circle, nor is the ideas of a body itself a body. And since it is something different from its object, it will also be something intelligible through itself”(p170, 33). So when we know the nature of both the circle and the square it is impossible for us to combine the two, but I’ve seen square donuts. So the folks at the Donut Plant took one idea formed a new one, which in turn can be formed into something else that is both real and intelligible.

Unit of Mind and Body

The first twenty-three propositions of Ethics pt.2 deal with the human mind and its relation to the body. The most important of these, I think, are P11 (“That which constitutes the actual being of the human mind is basically nothing else but the idea of an individual actually existing thing”) and P13 (“The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body – i.e., a definite mode of extension actually existing, and nothing else). From these two propositions Spinoza establishes a unity of mind and body. But if a human mind is only the idea of its respective, actually existing human being, why make the distinction between mind and body at all? It seems as though Spinoza makes the mind out to be a transient phenomenon occurring within the human body. However he goes on to state that “it follows that man consists of mind and body, and the human body exists according as we sense it.” How can man consist of both mind and body when mind only exists insofar as it is the idea of an individual actually existing person? Either mind must be re-defined or man is only the respective physical body.

This flaw in Spinoza’s argument has consequences for the rest of his philosophy. If mind does not exist then the whole class of attributes called Thought cannot exist. This is because Thought is dependent upon the existence of a thinking faculty, namely the mind, without which it is non-existent. Additionally, Ideas cannot exist since they too are dependent upon an idea-forming entity like the mind. So if Thought and Ideas are dependent upon the existence of the mind, without which they cannot exist as attributes, then it follows that no mode of substance can possess these attributes. This means that neither God nor humans can possess the attribute of Thought, which Spinoza would find to be absurd.

Existing Inside of God

From Proposition 21 onwards Spinoza reaches one of his most important claims, that God is the cause of both the existence and essence of everything. Everything lives inside of God, he has determined the particular ways in which nature functions; he is the one and only infinite substance from which everything we know of stems from. Does this mean finite things are made out of an infinite substance? How is that possible? Even things that have a designated start and finish still have to, in some way, come from God. It’s within the proof of Proposition 28 that Spinoza addresses my question. His answer: finite things must have been caused by other finite things which had to be caused by other finite things etc etc. I’m not necessarily satisfied with this answer. He goes on to then bring up the concepts of “Natura Naturans” and “Natura Naturata” as a mode of explanation, in which he describes “Natura Naturans” as something conceived through itself, and “Natura Naturata” as things that come out of necessity of God’s nature.

While reading through the appendix of Part I, the adage “Perspective is reality” kept running through my mind. Such is true on an individual level concerning man, but also on a much broader scale. In the quest to figure out final causes, humans constantly have to come to believe that the world was created for their own advantage, and that man is meant to worship God in hopes to stay within his good graces, and receive the benefits of these graces. Spinoza states that this is far from the case. Ultimately, things were not created with human standards in mind; they were not made in attempts to fit into our fabricated ideals of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, but for their sole purposes alone. “Nature has no fixed goal and that all final causes are but figments of the human imagination.” (Pg. 26) Within this one statement he discredits teleology, his discredits the idea that we can explain things through their purposes, for their purpose has nothing to do with us, it is something all in its own. Ultimately, the perfection of things in nature cannot be measured on a human scale, but in terms of themselves, and nothing else. It’s the same as disregarding a genre of music or cuisine because we don’t personally like it, that would just be absurd.

Difference and Unity in God

Difference is possible in two ways “Two or more distinct things are distinguished from one another either by the difference of the attributes of the substances or by the difference of the affections of substance” (1P4). That is, there are two types of difference: formal and modal difference.  I’m just going to address formal difference.  Substances with different attributes are distinct formally, because they possess separate, independent essences. An attribute is what “the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence”(1D4). But really, we are saying substance insofar as it is expressed by this attribute. One might wonder why Spinoza distinguishes between substance and attribute at all, since it will turn out that each attribute must be able to be conceived by itself, which is part of the definition of substance.

The answer is that if he cannot distinguish substance from attributes, then there are an infinite number of attributes, possibly, but we have no explanation for that nor for the possibility of God’s existence. In addition to a concept of difference, Spinoza needs one that explains unity.  Otherwise, there will be no reason to believe that there is any relation between different attributes, and, eventually, the world would be separated into an infinite number of possible worlds, each of which possessing an absolutely unique essence. In other words, in order for Spinoza to think unity in “Nature” whatsoever, he has to posit a distinction between substance and attributes, by which attributes are distinct, but this does not mean that substances are different.

In some ways, Spinoza’s proof for the existence of God amounts to an argument that there is no reason to distinguish substances from one another, since they are distinct only in attribute, they could be the same single substance. 1P5, P6 and P10 speak of the irreducibility of the attributes (or substance conceived by the different attributes). P7, P8 and P9 are all premises towards P11, establishing the necessary existence, infinity and “reality or being”.  P9 is especially important, because only on these grounds are we lead to conceive a reason for a substance containing more than one attribute. But the proofs of P11 seem to depend primarily on the necessary existence of God.  The first is simply the ontological proof, that existence necessarily belongs to, or “is involved in”, his essence. The second claims that the absolutely infinite being is not a contradictory notion, or there is no reason contrary to such a being. The third proof is a posteriori, following the supposition that if anything exists, an omnipotent being exists. But P11 is then supplemented by P12, P13 and P14, which go towards establishing not merely that a single substance is a non-contradictory idea, but also that God must be an eminently simple being.