John Locke · Politics
Locke’s claim that the mind begins empty, all knowledge comes from experience - and why that was politically explosive.
Some philosophers held that we are born with built-in ideas - even innate knowledge of God, of logic, of right and wrong, stamped on the mind before any experience. Locke disagreed completely. He argued, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, with nothing written on it at all - no innate ideas, no innate principles, nothing. Everything the mind will ever contain must be put there, from outside, by experience.
If the slate starts blank, how does it ever get written on? Locke identifies exactly two sources, the two ‘fountains’ of all our ideas. The first is sensation: external objects act on our senses and deliver ideas of colours, sounds, tastes, warmth, shapes, motion - the raw input of the outer world. The second is reflection: the mind turning its attention inward and observing its own operations - perceiving, thinking, doubting, believing, willing, remembering. From sensation we get our ideas of the outer world; from reflection, our ideas of the inner one. Crucially, there is no third source. Every idea you possess, however abstract or lofty, must be traceable back to one or both of these two fountains. This is the engine of Locke’s empiricism: a method for auditing any idea by asking where in experience it could possibly have come from - and a standing challenge to anyone who claims an idea that no experience could have supplied.
How does a blank slate end up with rich ideas like justice, beauty, or infinity? Locke’s answer is a kind of mental chemistry. Experience first delivers simple ideas - a particular shade of red, a single sound, the feel of warmth, a unit of duration - which the mind receives passively and cannot invent or refuse. But from these simple atoms the mind is then active: it combines them (joining ideas to form complex ones like ‘an army’ or ‘a unicorn’), compares them (yielding ideas of relation, like ‘larger than’), and abstracts from them (stripping away particulars to form general ideas, like ‘triangle’ or ‘justice’). So the mind is passive in receiving the basic materials but active in building with them. Even our most exalted and abstract concepts, Locke argues, are ultimately assembled out of simple ideas that experience originally supplied - which is why, for him, there is no idea, however grand, whose origin cannot be traced back to sensation or reflection.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Locke’s view that the mind is a blank slate. Give one argument for it and one objection a critic might raise.
Leads to Gottfried Leibniz.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.