Differing notions of experience of Philosophers

Locke's view of experience sees the world as preexisting and the mind as learning from experience. Locke believes that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and it is only through experience that knowledge is gained. Any knowledge possessed by the individual would be knowledge gained through experience. In the beginning, however, the individual has no experience. In the Garden of Eden, when Eve has experience of reaching for the extended red apple, it is a new one, the outcome of which will teach her a lesson she could not have gained otherwise. She has been told not to perform this action, and yet the consequences of performing the action are unknown to her until she has performed the action and suffered the consequences. What she can perceive at this point are simple ideas, ideas that originate from experience and that cannot be broken down into simpler entities. These ideas are produced in the mind by sensory experience, the experience of extension, of shape and size:

These simple Ideas, the Materials of all our Knowledge, are suggested and furnished to the Mind, only by those two ways above mentioned, viz. Sensation and Reflection (Locke 121).

The knowledge involved is not such as could be produced in any way but through the senses and through the r

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tion through the senses, but it is not a sense in itself. For Locke, an essential question is how we can know of the existence of other things, things outside ourselves. He would agree with Descartes that we can know our consciousness because we are within it, but the world is perceived only through the senses. Experience is what the senses make of that world, and the senses can be false. Locke states this directly when he writes, The knowledge of the existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connexion of real existence, with any idea a man hath in his memory, nor of any other existence, but that of God, with the existence of any particular man; no particular man can know the existence of any other being, but only when by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him (Locke 557). For Locke, it is the act of experiencing something which gives that something a reality, and such experiencing comes through the senses. However, our own existence is something we perceive directly and plainly and certainly. It does not need to be proved because it is so palpably obvious, and Locke seems to echo Descartes when he stats, "I think, I reason, I feel pleasure and pain; can
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Approximate Word count = 1990
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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