Should We All Just Shut Up?

For Locke, words are unquantifiable symbols that denote ideas in an individual’s mind, not actual things in the tangible world.  With this perspective, rhetoric becomes an art that leads people away from knowledge rather than to it.  While I’ve never really identified with Locke’s theories (though they are wonderful to think about) I have a hard time refuting this perspective.  We can never know what another person means to say, because we all begin writing our own ‘dictionary of the mind’ upon consciousness that becomes more and more individualized as we get older.  Building off of this metaphor, it seems that although we may never be capable of knowing another person (assuming that communication is the only way to get to know a person), we are able to get to know ourselves extremely well.  This illustrates a dilemma I’ve felt for a long time…do we lose progress of the self by interacting with others?  This is too big of a question to address in a single post, but I had to mention it.  Sometimes I think that I learn something from someone, but in fact I might not have learned what they meant to be teaching.  Rather, we all might serve as mirrors for each other that reflect words (and inevitably our individual ideas attached to those words) into some version of understanding that correlates only to the individual.  This sounds like a lonely existence, and maybe it is.  But what’s more important…companionship or knowledge? 

On a totally different note on Locke’s essay, I found a point of disagreement.  On his attack against ancient writing, Locke states that, “If it doesn’t make sense, it may be disregarded.”(820) This is ridiculous, because Locke seems to disregard the era in which ‘confusing’ texts were written.  Of course ancient texts will be hard to comprehend for a modern man, we can’t just throw out all the discoveries of the ancients simply because language shifts over time.