Philosophers · 哲學家 · The Early Modern Age
John Locke 洛克 · 1632–1704
A physician who asked what the human mind is fit to know, and whose answers shaped modern science, schooling, and government.
一位醫生，問了「人的心靈適合知道什麼」；他的回答塑造了現代的科學、教育與政府。
- Born 出生
- August 29, 1632, Wrington, Somerset, England
- Died 去世
- October 28, 1704, Oates, Essex
- Educated 教育
- Westminster School; Christ Church, Oxford
- Profession 職業
- Physician, secretary, civil servant
- Main works 主要著作
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Two Treatises of Government; A Letter Concerning Toleration
- Exile 流亡
- The Dutch Republic, 1683–1689
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all. 每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
Life · 生平
A life in three scenes 三幕人生
An Oxford physician 牛津的醫生
Locke was born in 1632 in a Somerset village, the son of a country lawyer who fought on Parliament’s side in the English Civil War. He was ten when the war began and sixteen, a schoolboy at Westminster, when King Charles I was beheaded a short walk from his classroom. At Oxford he found the official curriculum, still the philosophy of Aristotle’s medieval followers, tedious and useless. What caught his interest was the new experimental science. He worked with the chemist Robert Boyle, read Descartes, and trained as a physician.
洛克 1632 年生於薩默塞特郡的一個村莊，父親是鄉村律師，在英國內戰中站在議會這一邊作戰。戰爭開始時他十歲；十六歲時他是西敏公學的學生，國王查理一世就在離他教室不遠的地方被斬首。在牛津，他覺得官方課程——仍然是亞里斯多德的中世紀追隨者那一套哲學——沉悶而無用。吸引他的是新興的實驗科學。他跟化學家波以耳一起工作，讀笛卡兒，並且受訓成為醫生。
A patron, a plot, and exile 一位恩主、一場陰謀、一段流亡
In 1666 a chance meeting changed his life. Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the most powerful politicians in England, came to Oxford for his health, liked Locke, and took him into his household as physician and secretary. Two years later Locke supervised a dangerous operation to drain an abscess on Ashley’s liver, and the patient credited him with saving his life. Through Shaftesbury, Locke was drawn into the great political struggle of the age, the effort to limit the power of the crown and to keep a Catholic heir from the throne.
1666 年，一次偶然的會面改變了他的人生。艾希利勳爵——後來的沙夫茨伯里伯爵、英格蘭最有權勢的政治人物之一——為了養病來到牛津，很欣賞洛克，把他請進府裡擔任醫生兼秘書。兩年後，洛克主持了一場危險的手術，為艾希利肝臟上的膿瘍引流；病人認為是他救了自己一命。經由沙夫茨伯里，洛克被捲進那個時代最大的政治鬥爭：限制王權，並且阻止一位天主教繼承人登上王位。
When that effort failed and turned to conspiracy, Shaftesbury fled abroad and died. Locke, under suspicion, followed him to the Dutch Republic in 1683 and lived there for more than five years, some of the time under a false name. He used the time to finish the book he had been drafting for nearly two decades. It had begun, he says, at a meeting of five or six friends whose discussion kept running into difficulties, until it occurred to him that before going further they ought to examine what the human understanding was and was not fitted to deal with.
這番努力失敗、轉為密謀之後，沙夫茨伯里逃往國外，隨即去世。洛克受到懷疑，1683 年跟著逃到荷蘭共和國，在那裡住了五年多，有段時間用的是假名。他利用這段時間，完成了那本已經起草將近二十年的書。照他的說法，那本書始於五六個朋友的一次聚會；他們的討論老是陷入困難，直到他想到：在繼續往下談之前，應該先檢查一下，人的理解力適合處理什麼、不適合處理什麼。
Three books in one year 一年之內三本書
The revolution of 1688 put a Protestant king on the throne under conditions set by Parliament, and Locke came home in the same fleet as the new queen. Within a year he published the three works on which his fame rests: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which appeared under his name; and the Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, which he published anonymously and acknowledged only in his will. He was fifty-seven and had printed almost nothing before.
1688 年的革命，讓一位新教國王在議會設定的條件下登上王位；洛克跟新王后搭同一支船隊回國。一年之內，他出版了奠定他名聲的三部作品：《人類理解論》，具名發表；《政府論兩篇》與《論寬容書簡》，匿名出版，他只在遺囑裡承認是自己寫的。當時他五十七歲，此前幾乎沒有印行過任何東西。
He spent his last years at Oates, the Essex home of Damaris Masham, a philosopher herself, where he wrote on education, money, and the Bible, served on the government’s Board of Trade, and answered his critics. He died there in 1704 while Lady Masham read the Psalms to him.
他晚年住在艾塞克斯郡的奧茨，那是達瑪麗斯・馬沙姆夫人的家，她自己也是一位哲學家。他在那裡寫作，談教育、貨幣與《聖經》，任職於政府的貿易委員會，並且回應批評他的人。1704 年他在那裡去世，當時馬沙姆夫人正為他朗讀〈詩篇〉。
- 1632Born in Somerset生於薩默塞特
- 1666Meets Lord Ashley結識艾希利勳爵
- 1683Flees to the Dutch Republic逃往荷蘭共和國
- 1689Returns to England; publishes the three great works返回英格蘭；出版三部主要著作
- 1693Some Thoughts Concerning Education《教育漫話》
- 1704Dies at Oates卒於奧茨
The central idea · 核心觀念
Experience is the only source of ideas 經驗是觀念唯一的來源
Locke’s project is to trace the contents of the mind back to their origins and so to mark out the limits of what we can know. Everything the mind works with he calls an idea. Simple ideas, such as yellow, cold, or the idea of thinking, come in through sensation and reflection and cannot be invented. Complex ideas, such as gold, justice, or infinity, are made by the mind from simple ones. Where our ideas run out, so does our knowledge, and Locke is willing to say that this happens often. We do not know the real inner constitution of material things, or how matter could think, and in most of life we must be content with probability. He described himself as an under-laborer, clearing away some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge, while Boyle and Newton did the building.
洛克的計畫是把心靈的內容追溯到它們的源頭，從而標出我們所能知道的界限。心靈所處理的一切，他稱為「觀念」。簡單觀念，例如黃、冷，或「思考」這個觀念，是經由感覺與反省進來的，沒辦法憑空發明。複雜觀念，例如黃金、正義、無限，是心靈用簡單觀念造出來的。我們的觀念在哪裡用完，我們的知識就在哪裡用完；而洛克願意承認，這種情況經常發生。我們不知道物質事物真正的內在構造，也不知道物質怎麼可能思考；在人生的大部分事情上，我們只能滿足於或然性。他形容自己是個打下手的小工，清掉一些擋在知識路上的垃圾，而蓋房子的是波以耳與牛頓。
The same temper marks his politics. Because nobody is born with a title to rule or with knowledge of the one true religion, government has to rest on the consent of the governed, and belief cannot rightly be forced. People are by nature free and equal, and reason teaches that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” A government that breaks this trust may be resisted. The men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence had read him closely.
同樣的性格也表現在他的政治思想上。因為沒有人生來就有統治的名分，也沒有人生來就知道哪一個才是唯一的真宗教，所以政府必須建立在被治者的同意之上，而信仰不能正當地被強迫。人天生是自由而平等的；理性教導我們：「任何人都不應該侵害他人的生命、健康、自由或財物。」背棄這份託付的政府，人民可以抵抗。起草美國《獨立宣言》的那些人，仔細讀過他。
No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.在這裡，沒有人的知識能夠超出他的經驗。
Said of our knowledge of our own minds, and often taken as the motto of empiricism. 原是就我們對自己心靈的認識而說的，常被當作經驗主義的座右銘。
The strongest objection · 最強的反駁
The veil of ideas 觀念的帷幕
On Locke’s account the mind never perceives things directly. What it perceives are its own ideas, which things cause in it. He distinguished primary qualities, such as shape, size, and motion, which he thought really belong to objects, from secondary qualities, such as color, taste, and warmth, which are only powers in objects to produce certain ideas in us. The ideas of primary qualities resemble their causes, he said, and the ideas of secondary qualities do not.
照洛克的說法，心靈從來不是直接知覺到事物的。它知覺到的是自己的觀念，而觀念是事物在它裡面引起的。他區分了初性——例如形狀、大小、運動，他認為這些確實屬於物體——與次性——例如顏色、味道、溫熱，這些只是物體在我們身上引起某些觀念的「能力」。他說，初性的觀念與它們的原因相似，次性的觀念則不然。
George Berkeley, a generation later, asked the fatal question. If all we ever perceive is ideas, how could we check whether any of them resembles a thing outside the mind? Comparing an idea with its object would require getting outside our ideas, which Locke says we cannot do. The arguments Locke used to show that color is in the mind work just as well for shape. So his own principles either lead to skepticism about the material world or, as Berkeley preferred, to the conclusion that there is no such world apart from minds and their ideas. Empiricism, pushed consistently, undermined the common sense it had set out to defend.
一個世代之後，柏克萊問了那個致命的問題。如果我們知覺到的永遠只是觀念，我們怎麼可能查核其中哪一個與心靈之外的東西相似？要拿一個觀念跟它的對象比較，就得走到我們的觀念之外，而洛克說我們做不到。洛克用來證明顏色在心靈之中的那些論證，用在形狀上同樣有效。所以，他自己的原則要嘛導向對物質世界的懷疑論，要嘛，如柏克萊所選擇的，導向這個結論：離開了心靈及其觀念，根本沒有這樣一個世界。經驗主義被貫徹到底，反而動搖了它原本要捍衛的常識。
How we know · 史料
The philosopher of liberty and the slave trade 自由的哲學家與奴隸貿易
Locke’s record contains a contradiction that readers should know about. The first sentence of the Two Treatises calls slavery so vile a condition that an Englishman could hardly be imagined to plead for it. Yet Locke invested in the Royal African Company, which traded in enslaved people, and as secretary to the proprietors of the Carolina colony he had a hand in a constitution that gave every free man absolute power over his slaves. Scholars disagree about how to weigh this. Some stress that he later worked to reform colonial policy. Others hold that his theory of property was shaped to fit the colonial enterprise. Either way the case is a warning that fits the subject of this series: a person can state a principle clearly and fail to see what follows from it.
洛克的生平裡有一個矛盾，讀者應該知道。《政府論兩篇》的第一句話就說，奴役是如此卑劣的處境，簡直無法想像會有英國人替它辯護。然而洛克投資了從事奴隸買賣的皇家非洲公司；而且他擔任卡羅來納殖民地業主們的秘書時，參與了一部憲法的制定，那部憲法給予每個自由人對其奴隸的絕對權力。學者對該怎麼衡量這件事意見不一。有人強調他後來致力於改革殖民政策；也有人認為，他的財產理論就是為了配合殖民事業而塑造的。不管是哪一種，這個案例都是一個警告，而且跟這個系列的主題很貼切：一個人可以把一個原則說得很清楚，卻看不見從它推得出什麼。
Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學
Locke and the Buddha 洛克與佛陀
Locke came closer to a Buddhist position than he could have known, on the question of what a person is. Descartes had located the self in a thinking substance. Locke argued that we have no clear idea of any such substance, and that it would make no difference to me if the substance behind my thoughts were changed every day, provided my consciousness carried on. Personal identity, he concluded, consists in continuity of consciousness, above all in memory: “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.” The self is a relation among experiences, and no underlying thing is needed.
在「人是什麼」這個問題上，洛克比他自己所能知道的，更靠近佛教的立場。笛卡兒把自我安放在一個思考的實體裡。洛克論證說，我們對任何這樣的實體都沒有清楚的觀念；而且，只要我的意識延續下去，就算我思想背後的實體每天換一個，對我也沒有任何差別。他的結論是：人格同一性在於意識的連續，尤其在於記憶：「這個意識能夠向後延伸到過去的任何行為或思想有多遠，那個人的同一性就達到多遠。」自我是經驗之間的一種關係，並不需要底下有一個東西。
A Buddhist philosopher would agree with the negative half and question the positive one. That there is no soul-substance is the doctrine of anattā. But memory seems too thin a thread: I do not stop being responsible for what I have forgotten. Buddhist accounts tie the stages of a life together by causal continuity, each moment conditioning the next, of which memory is only one strand. When Derek Parfit revived Locke’s approach in the twentieth century he widened it in exactly this way, and remarked that the Buddha would have agreed (Dharma and the West, D2).
佛教哲學家會同意否定的那一半，並且質疑肯定的那一半。沒有「靈魂實體」，這正是無我的教義。但是記憶這條線似乎太細：我並不會因為忘了自己做過的事，就不必為它負責。佛教的說法是用因果的連續把一生的各個階段繫在一起：每一剎那作為下一剎那的條件；記憶只是其中的一股。二十世紀帕菲特重新啟用洛克的進路時，正是朝這個方向把它拓寬的，並且說佛陀會同意他（佛法與西方哲學 D2）。
Terms of art · 哲學術語
Words that come with him 跟著他一起來的詞
Gk. idea ‘look, form’
In Locke, whatever the mind is directly aware of when it perceives or thinks.
在洛克，指心靈在知覺或思考時直接察覺到的任何東西。
Qualities that objects have in themselves (shape, size, motion), and powers in objects to cause sensations in us (color, taste).
物體本身具有的性質（形狀、大小、運動），以及物體在我們身上引起感覺的能力（顏色、味道）。
The worry that if we perceive only ideas, the world behind them is hidden from us.
這個疑慮：如果我們知覺到的只是觀念，觀念背後的世界就對我們隱而不顯。
Rights that people have by nature and not by grant of any government.
人依本性而有、並非任何政府所賜予的權利。
The principle that political authority is legitimate only if those subject to it agree.
政治權威唯有得到受其管轄者的同意才算正當，這個原則。
L. tolerare ‘to bear’
The policy of not using the state’s power to compel religious belief.
不動用國家權力強迫宗教信仰的政策。
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. How did Locke say his Essay began?
2. What is the difference between primary and secondary qualities?
3. What was Berkeley’s objection to Locke?
Go further · 延伸
Where he appears 他出現在哪幾課
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ↗The Epistle to the Reader and Book II, chapters 1, 8, and 27. 讀〈致讀者書〉與卷二第 1、8、27 章。
- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government ↗Chapters 2, 5, and 19. 第 2、5、19 章。
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “John Locke” ↗