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Assignment Survey of American Literature 4

The document discusses John Locke's philosophical work and its influence. It explores how Locke attempted to show in works like An Essay Concerning Human Understanding how people can use reason to know what they need to know and believe only what they ought to believe. While reasoning is difficult and requires effort, Locke had an optimistic view that if people use their minds and senses carefully, they will naturally agree on important matters. A key was recognizing limits to understanding, balancing skepticism with faith. Most importantly, people can know God exists, which provides the true basis for morality.

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Nisha Farida Saputra
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62 views2 pages

Assignment Survey of American Literature 4

The document discusses John Locke's philosophical work and its influence. It explores how Locke attempted to show in works like An Essay Concerning Human Understanding how people can use reason to know what they need to know and believe only what they ought to believe. While reasoning is difficult and requires effort, Locke had an optimistic view that if people use their minds and senses carefully, they will naturally agree on important matters. A key was recognizing limits to understanding, balancing skepticism with faith. Most importantly, people can know God exists, which provides the true basis for morality.

Uploaded by

Nisha Farida Saputra
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The ideas of 17th-century English philosopher and political theorist John Locke greatly influenced modern philosophy and

political thought. Locke, who is best known for establishing the philosophical doctrine of empiricism, was criticized for his atheistic proposition that morality is not innate within human beings. However, Locke was a religious man, and the influence of his faith was overlooked by his contemporaries and subsequent readers. Author John Dunn explores the influence of Lockes Anglican beliefs on works such as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). From Locke By John Dunn The Essay Concerning Human Understanding In the Essay itself, and more practically in Some Thoughts concerning Education and The Conduct of the Understanding, Locke attempted to show how men can use their minds to know what they need to know and to believe only what they ought to believe. Reason must be their last judge and guide in everything. Where reason does not guide their formation, men's opinions are 'but the effects of Chance and Hazard, of a Mind floating at all Adventures, without choice, and without direction'. Although it has its own pleasures, 'all Reasoning is search, and casting about, and requires Pains and Application'. Because it is so easy for men to judge wrongly, and because there is much more falsehood and error amongst men than truth and knowledge, all human beings have good reason to 'spend the days of this our Pilgrimage with Industry and Care' in the search for truth. What the Essay attempts to offer is practical aid in this search. It does so in two rather different ways. The first is to show how the human understanding works successfully: how it is capable of knowledge and of rational belief, what human beings can know and what they cannot. The second is to explain why on the whole in practice it works so badly. Both these preoccupations were essential to Locke. If human beings could not in principle know what they needed to know, their predicament would place in doubt either the good will or the power of a divine Creator. But if they could not help acting as they did, not only would they be unfree, and hence not responsible for their apparent actions; but God himself would be the cause of all that Locke most loathed in human beings. Both preoccupations are clearly present in the earliest draft of the Essay[The later editions show] his major change of mind on the nature of free agency, and by the new chapters on enthusiasm and on the association of ideas[yet] the picture of human knowledge and belief that it presents is on the whole an optimistic one. It is optimistic not because it makes extravagant promises of the degree to which human nature can be changed by political design, nor because it exaggerates the extent of human knowledge or minimises the difficulties which men face in regulating their beliefs in a rational manner, but because it considers the workings of men's minds in such simple, sober and unpretentious terms. The optimism is more a matter of tone What underlies it, above all, is a remarkable assurance about the scope of possible agreement in human thought. I am apt to think, that Men, when they come to examine them, find their simple Ideas all generally to agree, though in discourse with one another, they perhaps confound one another with different Names. I imagine, that Men who abstract their Thoughts, and do well examine the Ideas of their own Minds, cannot much differ in thinking. If men will only use their minds and their sensesthe 'inlets' of knowledgecarefully and sincerely, they will find themselves compelled to know and believe what they should and

thus compelled to agree with those of their fellows who make an equally sober and honest use of their faculties. A key element in achieving and sustaining such agreement is a recognition of the limitations, what Locke himself calls the mediocrity', of human understanding. As elsewhere, at the centre of his thinking there lay a fine balance between scepticism and faith. The salience of the faith is hardest to miss when he itemises what men do in fact know, or sketches how they have good reason to live their lives. The most important single item of possible knowledge is the existence of God: 'we more certainly know that there is a GOD, than that there is any thing else without us'. What makes it so important is its immediate and overwhelming implications for how men should live. Man's very power to know anything is not something that simply appears from nothing in the course of the history of the worldso that there 'was a time then, when there was no knowing Being, and when Knowledge began to be. Rather, it was a direct gift from an all-knowing God who has existed for all eternity. The true ground of morality is 'the Will and Law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his Hand Rewards and Punishments, and Power enough to call to account the Proudest Offender.

Name : Nisa Faridah Class : A NPM : 180410080076 Assignment Survey Of American Literature 4 America Revolution

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