FREE ESSAY ON LOCKE, BERKELEY & HUME

LOCKE, BERKELEY & HUME

Enlightenment began with an unparalleled confidence in human reason. The new science's
success in making clear the natural world through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume affected the
efforts of philosophy in two ways. The first is by locating the basis of human knowledge
in the human mind and its encounter with the physical world. Second is by directing
philosophy's attention to an analysis of the mind that was capable of such cognitive
success. 
John Locke set the tone for enlightenment by affirming the foundational principle of
empiricism: There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.
Locke could not accept the Cartesian rationalist belief in innate ideas. According to
Locke, all knowledge of the world must ultimately rest on man's sensory experience. The
mind arrives at sound conclusions through reflection after sensation. In other words the
mind combines and compounds sensory impressions or ideas into more complex concepts
building it's conceptual understanding.
There was skepticism in the empiricist position mainly from the rationalist orientation.
Locke recognized there was no guarantee that all human ideas of things genuinely
resembled the external objects they were suppose to represent. He also realized he could
not reduce all complex ideas, such as substance, to sensations. He did know there were
three factors in the process of human knowledge: the mind, the physical object, and the
perception or idea in the mind that represents that object. 
Locke, however, attempted a partial solution to such problems. He did this by making the
distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities produce ideas that
are simply consequences of the subject's perceptual apparatus. With focusing on the
Primary qualities it is thought that science can gain reliable knowledge of the material
world. Locke fought off skepticism with the argument that in the end both types of
qualities must be regarded as experiences of the mind.
Lockes Doctrine of Representation was therefore undefendable. According to Berkley's
analysis all human experience is phenomenal, limited to appearances in the mind. One's
perception of nature is one's mental experience of nature, making all sense data objects
for the mind and not representations of material substances. In effect while Locke had
reduced all mental contents to an ultimate basis in sensation, Berkeley now further
reduced all sense data to mental contents.
The distinction, by Locke, between qualities that belong to the mind and qualities that
belong to matter could not be sustained. Berkeley sought to overcome the contemporary
tendency toward atheistic Materialism which he felt arose without just cause with modern
science. The empiricist correctly aims that all knowledge rests on experience. In the
end, however, Berkeley pointed out that experience is nothing more than experience. All
representations, mentally, of supposed substances, materially, are as a final result
ideas in the mind presuming that the existence of a material world external to the mind
as an unwarranted assumption. The idea is that to be does not mean to be a material
substance; rather to be means to be perceived by a mind. 
Through this Berkeley held that the individual mind does not subjectively determine its
experience of the world. The reason that different individuals continually percieve a
similar world and that a reliable order inheres in that world is that the world and its
order depend on a mind that transcends individual minds and is universal (God's mind).
The universal mind produces sensory ideas in individual minds according to certain
regularities such as the laws of nature. Berkeley strived to preserve the empiricist
orientation and solve Lockes representation problems, while also preserving a spiritual
foundation for human experience.
Just as Berkeley followed Locke, so did David Hume of Berkeley. Hume drove the empiricist
epistemological critique to its final extreme by using Berkeley's insight only turning it
in a direction more characteristic of the modern mind. Being an empiricist who grounded
all human knowledge in sense experience, Hume agreed with Lockes general idea, and too
with Berkeley's criticism of Lockes theory of representation, but disagreed with
Berkeley's idealist solution. Behind Hume's analysis is this thought: Human experience
was indeed of the phenomenal only, of sense impressions, but there was no way to
ascertain what was beyond the sense impressions, spiritual or otherwise.
To start his analysis, Hume distinguished between sensory impressions and ideas. Sensory
impressions being the basis of any knowledge coming with a force of liveliness and ideas
being faint copies of those impressions. The question is then asked, What causes the
sensory impression? Hume answered None. If the mind analyzes it's experience without
preconception, it must recognize that in fact all its supposed knowledge is based on a
continuous chaotic volley of discrete sensations, and that on these sensations the mind
imposes an order of its own. The mind can't really know what causes the sensations
because it never experiences cause as a sensation. What the mind does experience is
simple impressions, through an association of ideas the mind assumes a causal relation
that really has no basis in a sensory impression. Man can not assume to know what exists
beyond the impressions in his mind that his knowledge is based on.
Part of Hume's intention was to disprove the metaphysical claims of philosophical
rationalism and its deductive logic. According to Hume, two kinds of propositions are
possible. One view is based purely on sensation while the other purely on intellect.
Propositions based on sensation are always with matters of concrete fact that can also be
contingent. It is raining outside is a proposition based on sensation because it is
concrete in that it is in fact raining out and contingent in the fact that it could be
different outside like sunny, but it is not. In contrast to that a proposition based on
intellect concerns relations between concepts that are always necessary like all squares
have four equal sides. But the truths of pure reason are necessary only because they
exist in a self contained system with no mandatory reference to the external world. Only
logical definition makes them true by making explicit what is implicit in their own
terms, and these can claim no necessary relation to the nature of things. So, the only
truths of which pure reason is capable are redundant. Truth cannot be asserted by reason
alone for the ultimate nature of things. For Hume, metaphysics was just an exalted form
of mythology, of no relevance to the real world. 
A more disturbing consequence of Hume's analysis was its undermining of empirical science
itself. The mind's logical progress from many particulars to a universal certainty could
never be absolutely legitimated. Just because event B has always been seen to follow
event A in the past, that does not mean it will always do so in the future. Any
acceptance of that law is only an ingrained psychological persuasion, not a logical
certainty. The causal necessity that is apparent in phenomena is the necessity only of
conviction subjectively, of human imagination controlled by its regular association of
ideas. It has no objective basis. The regularity of events can be perceived, however,
there necessity can not. The result is nothing more than a subjective feeling brought on
by the experience of apparent regularity. Science is possible, but of the phenomenal
only, determined by human psychology.
With Hume, the festering empiricist stress on sense perception was brought to its
ultimate extreme, in which only the volley and chaos of those perceptions exist, and any
order imposed on those perceptions was arbitrary, human, and without objective
foundation. For Hume all human knowledge had to be regarded as opinion and he held that
ideas were faint copies of sensory impressions instead of vice - versa. Not only was the
human mind less than perfect, it could never claim access to the world's order, which
could not be said to exist apart from the mind. Locke had retained a certain faith in the
capacity of the human mind to grasp, however imperfectly, the general outlines of an
external world by means of combining operations. With Berkeley, there had been no
necessary material basis for experience, though the mind had retained a certain
independent spiritual power derived from God's mind, and the world experienced by the
mind derived its order from the same source.