ideas; but, Green argued, without complex ideas, we could not pick out
objects and relations, and thus our sense experience would not be of
properties at all, but of sensations lacking the kind of content which Locke
requires to make his abstractionist story intelligible. Thus, according to
Green, there is no way Locke can coherently adopt his abstractionist
account of thought: either Locke allows thought a role in providing
experience with sufficient content from which abstraction might be possible,
but then he must allow that thought does more than merel y abstract; or he
must confine thought’s role to an abstractionist one, but then rob sensory
experience of the kind of content needed to make abstraction possible.
Green argues, therefore, that ‘where [Locke] speaks of general ideas as
formed by abstraction of certain qualities from real things, or of certain
ideas from other ideas which accompany them in real existence’, ‘[s]uch a
notion of the really existing thing’ cannot be arrived at via abstraction,
because this something ‘Locke [already] has before him’ as without this
notion, we could not have formed the idea of qualities from which the
process of abstraction is meant to begin. Green makes this clear in his
criticism of Locke’s well-known account of how we form the complex idea
of ‘gold’:
[Locke says] ‘When some one first lit on a parcel of that sort of substance we
denote by the word gold ...its peculiar colour, perhaps, and weight were the
first he abstracted from it, to make the complex idea of that species . . . another
perhaps added to these the ideas of fusibility and fixedness . . . another its
ductility and solubility in aqua regia. These, or part of these, put together,
usually make the complex idea in men’s minds of that sort of body we call
gold’. ([An Essay Concerning Human Understanding], Bk II. Ch. xxxi. x.9)
Here the supposition is that a thing, multitudinously qualified, is given apart
from any action of the understanding, which then proceeds to act in the way of
successively detaching (‘abstracting’) these qualities and recombining them as
the idea of a species. Such a recombination, indeed, would seem but wasted
labour. The qualities are assumed to be already found by the understanding
and found as in a thing; otherwise the understanding could not abstract them
from it. Why should it then painfully put together in imperfect combination
what has been previously been given to it complete? Of the complex idea which
results from the work of abstraction, nothing can be said but a small part of
what is predicable of the known thing which the possibility of such abstraction
presupposes.
71
Green thus holds that Locke’s position is fundamentally incoherent, where
this incoherence stems from the dualistic conception of thought and feeling
which it adopts. For Green, thought cannot be conceived as making a
71
T. H. Green, ‘Introductions to Hume’s ‘Treatise of Human Nature’’, Works, Vol. I, pp. 1–371,
esp. pp. 37–8.
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 145
Manymanuals.com
Manymanuals.de
Manymanuals.fr
Manymanuals.it
Manymanuals.pl
Manymanuals.cz
Manymanuals.es
Manymanuals-pt.com
Comments to this Manuals