Abstract
This paper aims to draw out two distinct strands in Locke’s account of our simple ideas of experience: an instrumental and an immersed model of experience. The place of pleasure and pain in sensation is key to the distinction between these two models. After showing this equivocation in Locke’s account, I consider its implications for his account of object perception, or our ideas of particular substances, and suggest that considering these issues in Locke might afford insight into contemporary discussions of the Binding Problem. I conclude by showing how Berkeley and Condillac resolve this equivocation in Locke and considering why Locke himself might have failed to do so.
This paper has benefited greatly from the discussion at the Embodied Empiricism workshop at the University of Sydney and at a conference on early modern accounts of the passions at University of San Francisco. I owe particular thanks to Gideon Manning for his extensive commentary, and to Donald Ainslie, Peter Anstey, Hal Cook, Ofer Gal and John Sutton for their remarks. Research for the paper was supported by a grant from Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.
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Notes
- 1.
Cited internally as ECHU with reference to book, chapter and paragraph.
- 2.
This engagement is announced in the Epistle to the Reader of the Essay, with Locke’s self-description as “an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge” of the sort that Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and ‘the incomparable Mr. Newton’ were pursuing, and is evident in his appropriation of Boyle’s brand of the mechanical philosophy in detailing the inner workings of bodies. In recent years, Locke’s scientific interests have been well-discussed. Relatively early discussions include: Sanchez-Gonzalez 1990. Wilson 1995, Stein 1990, and Downing 1997, 1998. For more recent discussion see: Anstey and Harris 2006, Jones 2007, Keating 2002, Meynell 2003, Milton 2001 and Walmsley 2009.
- 3.
See for instance ECHU 2.2.3: “This is the reason why, though we cannot believe it impossible to God to make a creature with other organs, and more ways to convey into the understanding the notice of Corporeal things, than those five, as they are usually counted, which he has given to man. Yet I think it is not possible for any one to imagine any other qualities in bodies, however constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides, sounds, tastes, smells, visible and tangible qualities.”
- 4.
See also ECHU 2.1.23–24 and 2.23.13.
- 5.
There is no doubt much more to say here. Understanding the relation between our ideas of primary and secondary qualities for Locke is a vexed topic. As I note below, sometimes Locke does suggest that secondary qualities are analogous to pleasures and pains, and so do potentially give us some information bearing on our welfare. I say ‘potentially’ here because not only will this depend on the dimensions of analogy but also on the conception of pleasure and pain in play, as will become clear in the next section.
- 6.
It is hard to know just what Spinoza’s account of sensation is – he himself does not use the term – but Spinoza is clear that “the ideas which we have of external bodies indicate the condition of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies” (Ethics IIP16Cor2 in Spinoza 1985). At the basis of this claim is Spinoza’s claim that our conatus is our essence (EIIIP7). Like it is for Spinoza, conatus is at the centre of Hobbes’s philosophy, and one might well argue that our drive to persevere shapes the content of our sensory experiences had through the working of the machine of our body.
- 7.
- 8.
Simmons 1999 makes a similar point.
- 9.
See, for instance, Summa Theologiae I, q.78, art.4. (Aquinas 2002).
- 10.
ECHU 2.21.42 supports this reading. There Locke asserts that “whatever has an aptness to produce pleasure in us, is that we call Good, and what is apt to produce Pain in us, we cal Evil, for no other reason, but for its aptness to produce pleasure and pain in us.”
- 11.
See for instance ECHU 4.2.14.
- 12.
There might well be a third alternative to consider here. Our ideas of pleasure and pain might give us information about the world, just not about the way things benefit and harm us. On this line, ideas of pleasure and pain would be akin to our ideas of secondary qualities. Though these ideas do not represent (by resemblance) qualities of objects, we can gain some information about the world if we could adduce the causal relation between primary qualities and our ideas of secondary qualities. Similarly, this line would go, if we properly understood the causes of our pains and pleasures, those ideas could give us information about primary qualities. Locke seems to be suggesting this in a comparison he draws between ideas of secondary qualities and our ideas of pain in ECHU 2.8.16 and ECHU 2.8.18:
And yet he that will consider that the same fire, that at one distance produces in us the sensation of warmth, does at a nearer approach produce in us the far different sensation of pain, ought to bethink himself what reason he has to say, that his idea of warmth, which was produced in him by the fire, is actually in the fire; and his idea of pain, which the same fire produced in him the same way, is not in the fire. Why are whiteness and coldness in snow, and pain not, when it produces the one and the other idea in us; and can do neither, but by the bulk, figure, number, and motion of its solid parts? (ECHU 2.8.16, emphasis mine).
Besides, manna, by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of its parts, has a power to produce the sensations of sickness, and sometimes of acute pains or gripings in us. That these ideas of sickness and pain are not in the manna, but effects of its operations on us, and are nowhere when we feel them not; this also every one readily agrees to. And yet men are hardly to be brought to think, that sweetness and whiteness are not really in manna; which are but the effects of the operations of manna by the motion, size, and figure of its particles on the eyes and palate; as the pain and sickness caused by manna are confessedly nothing but the effects of its operations on the stomach and guts, by the size, motion, and figure of its insensible parts (for by nothing else can a body operate, as has been proved). (ECHU 2.8.18, emphasis added).
These passages, interestingly, raise a question about how we are to distinguish between our ideas of secondary qualities and pleasures and pains. Hume, in his Treatise on Human Nature, raises just such a question in his discussion of scepticism with regard to the senses (THN 1.4.2.12), a section I take to be largely about the empiricist prospects for an account of object perception. This would seem to bear on my discussion later in this paper.
- 13.
In an extended treatment of this problematic, I would also want to consider in more detail Locke’s epistemology, for it seems to me that we can think about the importance of the distinction there between intuitive and demonstrative knowledge, on the one hand, and sensitive knowledge on the other, as importantly dependant on the separability of pleasure and pain from our other simple ideas, and so dependent on an instrumentalist conception of embodiment.
- 14.
It might well be that for Locke our ideas of particular substances are ideas of kinds of objects, rather than of individual objects. Nonetheless, those ideas would presuppose, for him, ideas of individuals, and Locke owes his readers an account of our perceptions of objects. I don’t see that that account of our ideas of individuals would be very different from his story about our ideas of particular substances.
- 15.
James 1950/1918, 462.
- 16.
Descartes’s account of the three grades of sensation in his Replies to the Sixth Objections fits this reading well. On that account, the first grade of sensation consists simply in the physiological changes in our sense organs. The second and third grades both concern our sense perceptions, that is, sensations as mental states. The second grade of sensation consists of ideas of the various sensible qualities that are available to us. These sense perceptions do not yet allow us to form ideas of object, though there may be patterns to our perceptions. Descartes describes the third grade of sensation as our judgements of something before us – that we see a bent stick in water, for instance. (See 7:436ff; 2:294ff) It is hard to know how to read ‘judgement’ here. It seems clear that Descartes does not intend the sort of judgement that is the focus of the Fourth Meditation. I am inclined to read him as accounting for the way we reify the patterns we perceive into objects.
- 17.
Again, the sense of judgement in play here cannot be that of the Fourth Meditation. (See n.16 above.)
- 18.
- 19.
Of course, if one does not begin from a Lockean perspective, assuming that sensory information is simply brought into the mind to be processed, one might reject the Binding Problem as a genuine problem. See for instance, O’Reagan and Noë 2001.
- 20.
It is important to note that the distinction between touch and vision does not correspond to a distinction between ideas of secondary and primary qualities. This is certainly the case for Berkeley who rejects the distinction, but it is also the case for Locke. Touch, after all, allows us to have ideas of shape just as well as vision, not to mention solidity.
- 21.
See n.13 above.
- 22.
TS II.1.3; Condillac 1754/1984, 158.
- 23.
See also TS II.8.1: “Without pleasure our statue would never have the wish to move: without pain it would move with confidence and infallibly perish. It must then always be exposed to pleasant and unpleasant sensations” (Condillac 1754/1984, 119).
- 24.
Condillac’s account of how we come to perceive objects should be of particular relevance to cognitive scientists interested in the Binding Problem.
- 25.
Descartes, for instance, initially denies animals are capable of pain and pleasure, just insofar as they are incapable of thought (see 3:85; 3:148 and 4:573; 3:302ff). Later, in correspondence with More, he backpedals a bit, simply suggesting that we cannot know whether animals experience pleasures and pains (5:276f; 3:365f).
- 26.
See for instance ECHU II.27.15.
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Shapiro, L. (2010). Instrumental or Immersed Experience: Pleasure, Pain and Object Perception in Locke. In: Wolfe, C.T., Gal, O. (eds) The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3686-5_13
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