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Finding Directions by Indirection: The Island as a Blank Slate
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221 fIndInG dIreCtIons by IndIreCtIon The Island as a Blank Slate Elly Vintiadis and Spyros D. Petrounakos What is striking about Lost is the extent to which it challenges what we take for granted. This in itself may be of no philosophical importance. But through its explicit use of philosophers’ names and themes of philosophical importance like free will vs. determinism, faith vs. reason, time, causation and so on, Lost would make any philosophically inclined viewer try to find philosophical connections. Such was the case with us, as we found ourselves attracted initially to the centrality of the character of John Locke. Having made the connection with the epistemology of the philosopher John Locke, we gradually realized that epistemological questions are raised through both the content and the form of the show, for both the characters and the audience of Lost. Further thought on the characters of John Locke and Desmond Hume as the plot unfolded led us to the rationalist-empiricist debate and to the concept of a blank slate. This debate has left an indelible mark in the history of Western philosophy, as any student of epistemology can attest.1 This chapter presents our thoughts on these issues, in keeping with the title of the present volume, which we understand as gesturing also toward the attitudes, aims, and ambitions of J. J. Abrams and his team as they worked on the project of Lost. Of course, we do not think that Lost, or any show for that matter, can (or aims to) exhaust these debates. But as philosophers, we will use the show to try to illustrate some of aspects of these debates for the nonspecialist reader. As fans—as Losties ourselves—we will also try to bring forth how groundbreaking we believe the show to be. The Rationalist-Empiricist Debate When the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote his Essay Concerning Human Understanding one of the main questions that preoccupied thinkers 222 Elly Vintiadis and Spyros D. Petrounakos concerned, on the one hand, the source and the limits of knowledge and, on the other, the role that reason, the senses, and faith play in its acquisition.2 In part this was a result of the prominence and the promises of the nascent new science, which challenged many people’s long-standing and deeply entrenched beliefs. Prior to John Locke, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) had maintained (as Plato and the Scholastics had done previously) that reason is the source of knowledge, justification, and truth and that at birth the human mind comes equipped with certain innate ideas, such as that of God.3 Because of the central role allotted to the faculty of reason in the attainment of knowledge, the school of thought that Descartes represents is called rationalism (from ratio, the Latin word for reason). In contrast, Locke belongs to the rival school of the British empiricists, who believed that we come into this world without any innate ideas but, instead, our mind is furnished by experience, from which we gradually build the entire edifice of our knowledge. This idea is encapsulated in Locke’s view that at birth the human mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa, on which experience is written. But it is important to note that for Locke experience has a dual aspect: we experience the external world through our sensations and we experience our own minds through reflection. By combining these two natural faculties of sensation and reflection we become aware of the agreement or disagreement between our ideas and acquire knowledge. If we now turn to Lost, we see that from the very beginning we are introduced to a duality through two main characters, Jack Shephard and John Locke. Jack is the doctor, the man of science who strongly believes in the empiricist idea of the importance of the senses in the acquisition of knowledge. Jack quickly assumes, de facto, the role of the leader—a move that reflects the assumed predominance and importance of factual, empirical knowledge within the community of survivors. Yet quickly Jack finds a rival in John Locke, who, despite his name, is the man of faith. In a group that must survive in a foreign and hostile terrain, the leader is called upon to make sense of the new environment and situation. By positioning Locke and Jack in the role of leaders, the show immediately presents a dilemma for both viewers and characters as to whom it would be best to follow...