Reflections
on
living…
Viver na luz
ou no reflexo
da vida
Todos aqueles que
a fortuna pôs em evidência, que se distinguiram como agentes e participantes de um
poder alheio, somente gozaram de reputação e viram as suas casas cheias de
visitantes enquanto em posição de destaque: assim que desapareceram,
rapidamente foram esquecidos.
Em contrapartida, o apreço que se dá aos homens
de génio cresce sempre, e não são apenas eles que recebem homenagem, mas tudo
quanto está ligado à sua memória.
(...)
Tu atribuis uma
certa grandeza ao tipo de vida que deverás abandonar, embora tenhas uma
antevisão da vida sábia e tranquila a que irás aceder, o brilho aparente da
vida mundana continua a atrair-te, como se o facto de abandonares a sociedade
equivalesse a caíres numa vida de obscuridade completa.
Estás enganado,
Lucílio: passar da vida mundana à vida da sabedoria é uma ascensão!
A luz
distingue-se do reflexo por ter a sua origem em si mesma, enquanto o reflexo
brilha com luz alheia, a mesma diferença separa os dois tipos de vida: a vida
mundana tira o seu brilho de circunstâncias exteriores, e o mínimo obstáculo
imediatamente a torna sombria, a vida do sábio, essa brilha com a sua própria
luminosidade!
Séneca
“Cartas a
Lucílio”
You're talking
In circles
The words spit out your head
They blind you
With emotion that's plain dead
In circles
The words spit out your head
They blind you
With emotion that's plain dead
These wet sheets
Sex sudden
Mind spent and ill at ease
Your mirror
Screams out this dark release
Sex sudden
Mind spent and ill at ease
Your mirror
Screams out this dark release
Cos only you can be your help
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
Cos only you can tame your hell
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
You know truth
But deny it
Too scared to make a break
Pure feeling
Just squandered in your wake
But deny it
Too scared to make a break
Pure feeling
Just squandered in your wake
Don't tell me
Your virtues
Then run the same lame strife
To tiring
These excerpts of your life
Your virtues
Then run the same lame strife
To tiring
These excerpts of your life
Cos only you can be your help
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
Cos only you can tame your hell
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
So darling just listen
Listen to yourself
Skin
“Listen to yourself “
A
Guide to Locke's Essay
Simple Ideas
Locke used the word "idea" for the most basic unit of human
thought, subsuming under this term every kind of mental content from concrete
sensory impressions to abstract intellectual concepts. Explicitly disavowing
the technical terms employed by other philosophical traditions, he preferred
simply to define the idea as "whatsover is the Object of the Understanding
when a Man thinks." [Essay I i 8] Locke worried little about the ontological status of ideas. He did commonly refer
to them as being "in the Mind," both when we are conscious of them
and when they are stored in memory, he regarded this as no more than a spatial
metaphor. Locke was interested in these immediate objects of perception only
because they point beyond themselves.
Thus, the crucial feature of ideas for
Locke was not what they are but rather what they do, and the epistemic function
of an idea is to represent something else.
For since the Things, the Mind
contemplates, are none of them, besides it self, present to the Understanding,
'tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it
considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas. [Essay IV xxi 4]
Because we do think
and must always be thinking about something or other, then, it follows that we
actually do possess ideas. [Essay II i 1] If we want to
comprehend the foundations for human knowledge, Locke supposed, it is natural
to begin by investigating the origins of its content.
Origin in
Experience
Since knowledge—indeed, human thought of
any sort—is mediated by ideas, it is well worth asking how we acquire them.
Thus, in Book II of the Essay,
Locke embarked on an extended effort to show where we get all of the ideas that
we do so obviously possess. An adequate genetic account will explain, at least
in principle, how human beings acquire the ability to think about anything and
everything.
Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as
we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be
furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless
Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? 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 it self. [Essay II i 2]
The human mind is
like a camera obscura for Locke, a darkened room into which bright
pictures of what lies outside must be conveyed. [Essay II xi 17]
Locke had already argued at length that
ideas are not innately imprinted on the human mind. Observing children
reveals that their capacity to think develops only gradually, as its necessary
components are acquired one by one. No individual idea is invariably present in
every human being, as one would expect of an innate feature of human nature,
and even if there were such cases, they could result from a universally-shared
experience. Everything that occurs to us either arrives directly through
experience, or is remembered from some previous experience, or has been
manufactured from the raw materials provided solely by experience. [Essay I iv]
From the outset of the project, then,
Locke took the empiricist stance that the content of all human
knowledge is ultimately derived from experience. We can only think about things
we're acquainted with in one or the other of two distinct ways:
Our Observation employ'd either about external, sensible Objects; or
about the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our
selves, 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. [Essay II i 2]
Notice that Locke
distinguished sensation and reflection by reference to their objects. We
acquire ideas of sensation through the causal operation of external objects on
our sensory organs, and ideas of reflection through the "internal
Sense" that is awareness of our own intellectual operations. As the rest
of Book II is designed to show, these two sources provide us with all of the ideas
we can ever have. [Essay II i 3-5]
The acquisition of ideas is a gradual
process, of course. Newborn infants, Locke supposed, are first aware of the
vivid experiences of their own hunger or pain. Then, by further experience,
they acquire a supply of sensory ideas from which they can abstract, learning
to distinguish among familiar things. Only later do they attend to their
reflective experience of mental operations in order to acquire ideas of
reflection. [Essay II i 21-24] Since we come to have ideas only by
means of our own experience, Locke supposed, any interruption of this normal
process could prevent us from having them. Having defective organs of sense,
artificially restricting experience, or inattentively observing what we have
can all limit our possession of mental contents. [Essay II i 5-8] Individual human beings therefore
exhibit great differences in their possession of simple ideas, and Locke
speculated that other sentient beings—having, for all we know, experiences very
different from our own—are likely to form ideas of which we can have no notion
at all. Since simple ideas are acquired only by experience, anything we do not
experience is literally inconceivable to us. [Essay II ii 1-3]
Ideas of
Sensation
Everything begins, then, with simple
ideas of sensation. Most of these are uniquely produced in
the mind through the normal operation of just one of the organs of sense. Our
ideas of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and heat, Locke supposed, are acquired
respectively through our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and skin. Lacking the
appropriate organ in any of these cases would wholly prevent our having any of
the characteristic ideas of that sense. With normal sensory organs, we come to
have so many simple ideas of sensation that we don't bother to invent words
naming all of them. [Essay II iii 1-2] Notice that these ideas tend to be
either the unnamed determinate instances of some determinable predicate (particular shades of blue and varieties
of sourness) or sensations easily identifiable by association with other ideas
(the taste of pineapple and the fragrance of a rose).
According to Locke, certain special
simple ideas are acquired by two different senses. Space, extension, figure,
motion, and rest are all presented to us both in sight and in touch; they are
therefore among the most commonly received of all our ideas of sensation. [Essay II v] Because of their prominence, specific
ideas of these kinds constitute the basis for the most fundamental organization
of our sensory experience. All of them represent primary qualities of sensible
objects and serve significant roles in science and ordinary life. Things that
can be both seen and touched seem most obviously real to us.
But is it correct to suppose that one
and the same idea can be acquired from either of two distinct senses? Since
simple ideas of sensation cannot be acquired through defective sensory organs,
on Locke's view, it should be impossible to acquire the visual idea of motion
from tactile sources alone. Locke's Irish friend William Molyneux posed this
problem with precision in letters to the Bibliothèque
Universelle and to Locke himself.
[Correspondence 1064,
1609, 1620.] Supposing that someone blind from birth became familiar with solid
figures by touch alone and then later gained the power to see, would this
person be able to distinguish a cube and a sphere by sight alone without first
touching them? In a passage added to the Essay's
second edition, Locke agreed with Molyneux (on a view confirmed by
twentieth-century empirical research) that the answer must be no. [Essay II ix 8] The visual and tactile ideas of the
globe are distinct. Although we use the same words to designate ideas of shape
and motion whether they have come from sight or from touch, only "an
habitual custom" associates ideas from distinct senses with each other.
In a few, even more special instances,
simple ideas are produced in us by reflection as well as sensation. These are
ideas that are invariably present in the mind in association with every other
object of thought, no matter what its source. According to Locke, such ideas of
both sensation and reflection include pleasure, pain, power, existence, and
unity. [Essay II vii] Among these existence and unity secure
yet another aspect of the organization of our experiences, by providing clear
conceptions of reality. Pleasure and pain, as we'll see later, play a special
role in motivating us to exercise the volitional power behind all human
actions, of mind and body.
Primary and
Secondary Qualities
Although Locke assumed that simple ideas
of sensation are invariably produced in our minds by the influence of external
objects on our organs of sense, he did not suppose this causal process to be
straightforwardly representational: there need not always be something in the
object that corresponds directly with the idea it produces in us. In some
cases, for instance, it is the absence, rather than the presence, of some
determinate feature in the thing that produces "a real positive Idea in the Understanding." [Essay II viii 1-2] Even on a causal theory of perception,
privation is a change in the sensory organ, and therefore fully perceptible.
Thus, our ideas of cold, darkness, and (perhaps) rest are produced by the
absence of heat, light, and motion in things.
Despite the systematic ambiguity of our
usual vocabulary, Locke maintained, we should always distinguish between ideas
themselves, the immediate objects of thought as entertained by the mind, and
qualities, the causal powers by means of which external objects produce those
ideas in us. [Essay II viii 7-8] An examination of the causal processes
involved in formation of our sensory ideas thusly led Locke to propose an important distinction among the qualities of bodies:
The primary
qualities of any body are
features Locke took to be inseparable from it, both in the sense that they are
the kinds of features we experience to be aspects of every body and in the
sense that we suppose that they would remain present even if the body were
divided into imperceptible parts. [Essay II viii 9] Our ideas of the primary qualities
include those of solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest, and number. Notice
that all of these ideas are perceived by touch and that all except solidity are
perceivable by sight as well. Since bodies operate only on mechanistic principles, our perception of such ideas
can only result from a direct contact between our organs of sense and the
object itself—or, in the case of vision at a distance, an imperceptible
particle from the object itself. [Essay II viii 12] Such qualities therefore exist as
features of the body itself, independently of their perception.
Secondary qualities, on the other hand, Locke held to be
nothing in the object itself except a causal power to produce ideas of a
certain sort—a color, a taste, or a sound, for example—in us. Like the mere
powers of producing change in other objects, these supposed qualities are
nothing other than effects produced by the genuine (primary) qualities of
bodies themselves. [Essay II viii 10] Notice that all of our ideas of
secondary qualities are produced in us only by a single sense; their perception
clearly depends upon the normal operation of our sensory apparatus in response
to the merely dispositional properties of things. Thus, our customary
supposition that such qualities really exist in nature is nothing more than a
reification of the ideas that are actually produced in our minds by the primary
qualities of things. [Essay II viii 14-17]
Locke's arguments in defence of this
thesis may be familiar from their prior statement in Galileo, Descartes, and
Boyle or from their later appropriation by Berkeley and Hume. The color and
taste of manna (a natural laxative) are less like its powdery texture than like
its effect on the digestive tract; although things themselves remain the same
in darkness as in light, their color appears only through the mediation of rays
of light; contrapositively, the mechanical process of grinding an almond can change
only its primary qualities, yet the secondary qualities are thereby modified;
and a single body of tepid water can seem both warm and cool at the same time,
if our fingers have been differentially chilled and heated beforehand. [Essay II viii 18-21] In every case, the proper conclusion
is that the ideas of secondary qualities are produced in us only by the
mechanical operation of the primary qualities of bodies.
From this distinction, Locke concluded
that there is a significant difference in the representational reliability of
primary and secondary qualities. Our ideas of primary qualities resemble the
qualties themselves; the mind-independent features of material objects are (at
least at the microscopic level) exactly as we perceive them to be. But our
ideas of secondary qualities and powers resemble nothing in the material world;
they are the causal consequences, in our minds, of the mechanical action upon our
sensory organs of corpuscular primary qualities. [Essay II viii 23-24] As his Royal Society companion Robert
Boyle had shown, the rapid motion of insensible particles of matter is a
genuine feature of objects, a primary quality that can be transmitted
mechanistically from one body to another: as a result, fire has the power to
melt other bodies and—in the same way—to produce in us the ideas of warmth,
heat, or even pain. [Essay II viii 15-16]
Ideas of
Reflection
Although he insisted that human
awareness begins with simple ideas of sensation, Locke did not believe that
they comprise all of our mental contents. We also acquire simple ideas of
reflection through an objective observation of our own mental operations. In
any these operations, the human mind must be either passive or active, Locke
supposed, and the most fundamental ideas of reflection are therefore just two
in number: perception, in which the mind passively receives ideas, and
volition, in which it actively initiates something. [Essay II vi 1-2] Every other idea of reflection, on
Locke's view, is a simple mode of one or the other of these two basic types.
All human mental activities derive from the faculties of understanding and
will.
We are naturally familiar with such
activities, since they constitute the whole of our conscious thought, but this
does not entail our having clear conceptions of them. Familiarity without
careful attention provides only confused ideas of our own mental operations. As
Locke had already noted, the components of experience we first acquire are
vivid sensory impressions of the external world. It is only with increasing
maturity and a capacity for detachment that we grow able to make the careful
inward observations from which clear ideas of reflection may arise. [Essay II i 7-9] Even when we have acquired clear ideas
from reflection, Locke supposed, we often designate them with a vocabulary drawn
from the concrete context of sensory experience, representing our
"inner" mental operations by an implicit reference to observable
"outer" processes. [Essay III i 5]
The first and simplest of our ideas of
reflection is that of perception, the passive reception of ideas through
the bodily impressions made by external objects upon the organs of sense.
Although perception in this sense is distinguished from thinking generally by
the relatively meager degree to which it falls under our voluntary control,
Locke believed it always to require some degree of conscious attention.
Physical stimulation of the sensory organs does not produce ideas unless the
mind is attentive. [Essay II ix 1-4] Here Locke tilts to a significant
feature of our sensory experience. Although we are almost constantly bombarded
by physical stimuli—any one of which will, in the ordinary course of things,
produce in our minds a particular sensory idea—we never perceive all of them
and sometimes exercise deliberate control over which ones we do perceive.
Attention, choice, and judgment can all influence the operation of the
officially passive faculty of perception. [Essay II ix 7-8]
Another of our cognitive capacities is
the ability to retain ideas in the mind over time, either in continuous
contemplation or in recollection of ideas after a period of inattention.
Although he naturally relied upon the spatial metaphor of memory as a
"Store-house" or "Repository" of ideas, Locke emphasized
that the ideas we can recall are not actually in the mind—that is, we are not
conscious of them at all—during the inattentive interval. Memory is just the power to bring to mind ideas
that we are aware of having perceived before without simply perceiving them
anew. [Essay II x 1-2] Like Descartes, Locke assumed that the
proper function of human memory relies upon some physical process within the
human body, as shown by the gradual effacement of infrequently experienced
ideas and the loss of memory as a result of bodily disease. [Essay II x 4-5] On the other hand, some ideas are more
firmly and easily retained than are others. Greater degrees of attention and
frequent repetition of experience have some influence on this, but Locke
supposed that the most important factor is the association of certain of our
ideas with pleasure and pain. The retention of ideas thusly correlated with the
achievement or loss of happiness is one of the benevolent provisions for the
needs of human life, since it motivates us to avoid or prefer experiences of
appropriate sorts. [Essay II x 3] Being able to remember our past
experiences of hunger or headache without actually feeling their pain, he
argued, encourages us to act in such ways as are likely to forestall their
recurrence. [Essay IV xi 5-6]
Our reflective ideas of other mental
operations receive much shorter treatment. Discerning is the mental operation of
distinguishing among our ideas--either quickly by wit or carefully in sober
judgment. This is a vital tool in providing the supply of distinct ideas whose
interrelations we intuitively grasp in assenting to self-evident truths. [Essay II xi 1-3] In the same fashion, the activity ofcomparing gives rise to our knowledge of
relations by noticing non-exact similarities among our ideas. [Essay II xi 4-5] Compounding is the mental capacity to manufacture
new complex ideas out of relatively simple components, while abstracting is the ability to make general use of
particular ideas in more general reference by stripping away their indexical features. These processes are especially
vital because they ground our linguistic competence in employing general terms
and secure the possibility of universal knowledge. [Essay II xi 6-9] Distinguished by their phenomenal
quality, other cognitive powers are comprehended by the reflective ideas of
sensation, remembrance, recollection, contemplation, reverie, attention, study,
dreaming, and ecstasy. [Essay II xix 1-2]
Animal Thinking
Although each human being must acquire
the ideas of reflection by observation of her own mental operations, on Locke's
view, the activities thusly conceived may then be attributed to other sentient
beings, qualified with the suspicion that they may vary greatly in degree from
case to case. [Essay III vi 11] There is ample evidence of individual
variations even among similarly-constituted fellow humans, and it is reasonable
to suppose that non-human thinkers could differ in ways that we cannot
literally imagine. Although our own faculty of perception is perfectly suited
to the conduct of human life, for example, Locke noted explicitly that other
spirits, whose embodiment involves sensory organs different from our own, might
well perceive aspects of the world of which we are unaware. [Essay II xxiii 12-13] Dependent as we are on a sense of
sight with a particular acuity, we can only speculate how the natural world
might appear to beings whose visual abilities were different, much less those
for whom the senses of smell or hearing are more fundamental.
Although Descartes and his followers had
dogmatically argued that non-human animals, lacking possession of a separable
thinking substance or soul, must therefore be incapable of thinking in any
form, Locke preferred to examine the empirical evidence in an effort to
discover to what degreeanimals may be capable of engaging in mental
activity of each sort. [Essay II i 19] The intellecual capacity for
perception, Locke held, marks the distinction between animal and plant life,
and the sensory faculties of each species are well-suited to the practical
needs of life for animals of that sort. Since individual human beings differ
widely in their intellectual abilities, Locke even speculated that those of
some animals may exceed those of the least gifted of human thinkers. [Essay II ix 11-15] In the case of the retention of ideas,
he suggested that the behavior of songbirds clearly exhibits their deliberate
effort to learn a new tune. [Essay II x 10]
Nevertheless, Locke believed that the
higher intellectual abilities of animals are strictly limited. They do not
compare or discern ideas that lie beyond their immediate "sensible
Circumstances," nor are they capable of compounding the new complex ideas
required for engaging in mathematical thought. [Essay II xi 5-7] Most notably, he maintained that
non-human animals are utterly incapable of abstraction. Even if their sensory
capacities permit them to engage in some degrees of intuitive thinking, then,
their inability to form abstract ideas and employ general terms make it
impossible for them to rise above particularity in order to engage in moral
reasoning. [Essay II xi 10-11] Thus, Locke preserved a significant
moral distinction between human beings and other animals without grounding it
on an ontological distinction in the possession of an immaterial soul.
Tito Colaço
X _ XI _ MMXIV
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