John Locke's Ideas on Primary and Secondary Qualities - Assignment Example

ON LOCKE As humanity lives its life in the world that it has created, it is confounded by questions and queries that strike at the very heart of humanity’s existence. As this is our predicament, what makes matter more difficult is the fact that more often than not the answers to the questions that haunt humanity eludes a clear-cut and definitive elucidation. Being such, most of us no longer bother to look for possible solutions and answers to the questions that looms our very existence. But humanity is fortunate. There are some brave persons who are willing to untangle the knot and remove the maze so that the rest of humanity may have a clearer understanding, a good grasping of human nature, of the world and if possible of humanity and human existence itself. And John Locke is one of them. John Locke (1632 –1704) is an empiricist. In fact, he is considered as the father of Modern British Empiricism. But what is empiricism? The fundamental form of empiricism that can be claimed to have been developed out from the philosophical system of Locke is the idea that “sense perception (including direct observation senses, indirect observation by the use of instrumentation, and experimentation) is the only reliable method for gaining knowledge and for testing all claims of knowledge.”1 Thus, Locke’s empiricism is a contra-position against the rationalist philosophers position that hold the supposition that there are innate ideas that are intrinsic and inherent to human nature. And with the innate ideas, thereby, creating the notion that human beings are aware or have knowledge of simple truths that do not necessitate experience. This very idea of ‘innatism’ is what Locke intends to destroy when he raised the claim that the human mind is a tabula rasa implying the notion that human mind is a blank slate and that all the things that we claim we know is derived from experience. As Locke has stated in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.2 Thus, Locke’s simple answer to the innocuous yet is perplexing question “how do you know?” via experience. Locke’s simplistic and common sensical approach regarding the question of knowledge is not with out a problem. Given that all the things that we claim we know is taken from our experience of external objects of sensation and the workings of internal reflections, what Locke has to maintain and in fact assumes is the presence of independent external objects. What do we mean? When Locke asserted that the fundamental source of knowledge is experience, he automatically accepts the truism that there is an external reality, a reality existing outside human beings that is capable of sustaining or holding the independent and external objects of human beings’ experiences. The external objects are to be assumed as outside the perceiver and that it exists regardless of whether it is being perceived or not. This assumption is very important in Locke’s philosophy since in maintaining experience as the fundamental source of knowledge, he removes the possibility of claiming that knowledge arrived at with out experience is technically to be considered as an illegitimate form of knowledge. But what do we really know? As Locke assumes that there is a substratum called as Reality (but this is unknowable in itself) that more or less holds the external objects of experience, the question that comes to fore is ”what do we really know?” According to Locke, external objects or bodies possess qualities. Quality is “the power of the object to produce an idea in the mind”3 Hence, implying that there is delineation between an idea and a quality; an idea is the object of understanding of the mind while quality is the power an object to produce an idea in the mind. There are three types of qualities: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary qualities are qualities, which are inherent, intrinsic in the object itself. So much so, that these primary qualities are distinct from our perception of it which means that “these properties which all material things have in themselves whether they are perceived or not.”4 As such, primary qualities are qualities that belong to the object regardless whether we are perceiving it or not. Thus, ”It is utterly inseparable from the body, in what state soever it be; and such as in all the alterations and changes it suffers, all the force can be used upon it, it constantly keeps... The bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of their solid parts. Those are in them, whether we perceive them or not; and when they are of that size that we can discover them, we have an idea of the thing as it is in itself"5 While on the other hand, secondary qualities are qualities that are not inherent in the object per se but are dependent on how the perceiver perceives the object. As John Dunn claims, “secondary qualities (like color) depend in part on the perceptual powers of the observer.”6 The secondary qualities are basically the power to produce sensory experience in us. As such, secondary qualities are “ such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities…to operate after a peculiar manner on any of our sense, and thereby produce in us the different ideas of several colors, sounds, smells, tastes…”7 Thus, secondary qualities are “nothing in the objects.”8 And the last type of quality which is considered as minimally important (compared with the first two) is the tertiary quality, which is the power of another object to effect some changes on another object. Being such, “it is the power that is in any body, by reason of the particular constitution of its primary qualities, to make such a change in the bulk, figure, texture and motion of another body, as to make it operate in our senses differently from what it did before.”9 Locke’s analysis of primary and secondary qualities brings up an important distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are “intrinsic properties of all material things”10 while secondary qualities are “the power of objects to produce certain ideas in us.”11And that this power is basically founded on the internal constitution of the primary quality itself, thus presenting the notion that ideas of secondary qualities are the observers‘ response to the motion of “minute particles in the primary qualities.”12 The distinction made by Locke rests on the presupposition that “primary-qualities ideas resemble the qualities”13 while secondary-qualities ideas “do not exists in the object but are rather the perceptions of the observer.”14 The argument that he basically used in order to support his claim is the argument that secondary qualities can “produce illusory effects” 15making it susceptible to perceptual illusion. While on the other hand, perceptual illusion is not possible in primary qualities for the fact that “corpuscular science is sufficient to explain the causal mechanisms of perception and that this theory gives us no reason for believing that …secondary qualities resemble qualities in objects”16 in the same manner that primary quality does. But what should be noted here is the idea that the primary qualities are resemblances of the qualities in the things themselves whereas the secondary qualities are in no way resemblance of the things themselves. As Locke asserts, ” the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exists in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produces in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensation s in us.”17 The resemblance thesis of Locke speaks of the “resemblance” between the idea of primary qualities (which is explicitly pointing to the mind) and the qualities itself (external objects). Strong criticisms have been raised against Locke’s resemblance thesis. Berkeley argues that if it’s an idea of primary qualities that we know or have in our mind, there is no possibility that we can check the resemblance thesis for the simple fact that what we only have is an idea and that it is possible only to speak of resemblance if there is in any way for us to really know the external reality with which we can compare our ideas vis-a vis that of the qualities per se. Berkeley’s criticism not only questions the validity of the resemblance between the idea of primary quality and the quality itself rather it thrust at the very logic of the resemblance thesis – if what one has is an idea about a material object, what is it that we really know? Thus, it seems quite easy for Berkeley to maintain that Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities are spurious since technically both are ideas lodged in the mind. More over, it appears that Locke himself is ambiguous in his resemblance thesis since he is silent regarding the fact whether primary qualities refer to particular qualities or general qualities of objects. But inspite of this it should not be forgotten that Locke only raises the resemblance thesis in order to highlight the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. And that I agree with Thomson when he said, “all material objects must have a shape, a size, and so on but they need not have a color or a smell for example. Second we should explain the secondary qualities of objects in terms of primary qualities and not the other way around.”18 In the end, I believe that although Locke’s distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities may be open to strong rebuttal what cannot be denied is that fact that we owe John Locke the fact that he has removed experience from the periphery and has placed it at the center of our epistemological questions, making it in turn the stable foundation of the things that we may claim we now. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dunn, John, Urmson, J.O. and Ayer, A.J. The British Empiricists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Lavine, T.Z. From Socrates to Sartre: the Philosophic Quest. New York: Bantam Books, 1989. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in The Empiricists. New York: Anchor Books, 1974. Thomson, Garret. An Introduction To Modern Philosophy 2nd ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1993. Read More