Philosopher of the Month: John Locke
It is perhaps a measure of John Locke's greatness that nowadays his views
seem prosaic commonplaces. The force of his arguments and the influence of
his conclusions were so powerful as to become entwined in the warp and weft
of western thinking. It was not always so. In his own time, Locke was a
revolutionary.
Locke crammed an awful lot into one lifetime: Oxford Don, physician,
meteorologist, chemist, horticulturist, secretary, tutor, civil-servant,
political advisor, diplomat, theologian, exile and, once, an enemy of the state,
implicated in a plot to assassinate the king. But he is most well known as an
epistemologist and political philosopher. One of the most crucial aspects of
Locke's thought was his challenge to traditional political and religious
authority. This finds its expression in two of his most influential works: the
Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and the Two Treatises of
Government (1690).
The Essay commenced with a lengthy diatribe against innatism. This was the
view that there were certain innate principles imprinted upon the brain of
every human as guides to both practical and ethical life. Although this now
seems massively anachronistic (thanks largely to Locke's influence) these
were manifest truths in the middle of the seventeenth century. Even
Descartes resorted to innate ideas to bridge the gap from mind to world. It
has been remarked that whilst Descartes was the first modern philosopher,
Locke had the first modern mind. His rejection of innatism is a reflection of
this fact. The doctrine had been used as a tool for the dogmatist to
inculcate obedience. Locke's dismissal of this view paved the way for the
legitimacy of individual intellectual integrity.
As Locke had vanquished dogmatism in epistemology, so he attacked it in
politics. The first of the two Treatises was designed to show that the divine
right of kings was nonsense. It had been maintained that kings had authority
since they were direct descendants of Adam who, as owner of the earth, had
sovereign power over it. Locke produced many criticisms of this, not least
that it was implausible as a matter of fact. More importantly, however, he
showed that ownership had nothing to do with sovereignty - the fact that I
own some land does not give me a power of life or death over those standing
on it.
In the place of these traditional views Locke put forward more measured
alternatives. In the Essay he proposed to provide a map of the mind's
faculties through introspection. It was his hope to set the limits of human
knowledge, faith and opinion, so as to prevent fruitless disputes on topics
the understanding was not fit to deal with. The most famous and influential
of Locke's findings was that all knowledge was founded on and derived from
experience. This thought found expression in Locke's ‘new way of Ideas’.
There were two sources of ideas: sensation and reflection. It was these
combined, compared and contrasted which provided the basis for all human
knowledge. It was these also that fixed the boundaries of human thought,
and provided some of Locke's most controversial conclusions.
Locke held that simple ideas enter the mind single and unmixed, thus all
complex ideas are products of the understanding's faculty of compounding.
Consequently complex ideas of objects were merely stuck-together simple
ideas. But what of the substance of things? For Locke, our idea of substance
is the something, we know not what, which we suppose to glue the causes of
our ideas together. This, of course, was anathema to both the Aristotelian
and Cartesian traditions which placed substance at the heart of their
respective systems. For Locke, the idea was merely a peculiar place-holder
with no correlate in our experience.
Locke's addition to the subject-matter of philosophy was the issue of
personal identity. By rejecting a notion of contenful substance, Locke had to
provide another criterion of personal identity over time, and did so in the
form of psychological continuity, mainly of memory: I am the same as my
younger self if I can recall the actions of this more youthful me. Although
his solution fades in and out of fashion, the problem itself remains an
enduring philosophical issue.
In the political arena Locke is seen as the founder of the modern liberal
tradition, with its emphases on limited government by social contract and
the right of the people to overthrow a ruler. Locke's arguments were
directed against not only traditionalists, but also the extremism of Hobbes'
Leviathan. The Lockean society with its emphasis upon consent and toleration
is not only more realistic, but provides the model for modern democracy and,
it has been argued, even supplies the blueprint for the American
Constitution.
There is a very great deal more to John Locke. He wrote on many subjects
and founded several new schools of thought. Nevertheless, it is as a
philosopher that Locke will be remembered. A philosopher, moreover, who is
once more beginning to regain the recognition he so much deserves.