A STUDY & INSIGHT

JOHN LOCKE was a seventeenth-century English philosopher, famous for developing the Lockean social contract. This includes ideas surrounding the “state of nature” (the theoretical state of society that preceded government), “government with the consent of the governed”, and the natural rights of life, liberty, and estate. Locke was also the first to fully develop the idea of the tabula rasa (the theory that we are born with a “blank slate” mind which is formed by experience and perception).

. See also The philosophy of Kant

Locke was, arguably, the first English empiricist and therefore the creator of a philosophy that was seen at the time as being quintessentially English. He was a great political thinker and his ideas on governance greatly influenced the creators of the American constitution. There was a thread of secularism running throughout his work, though he found a place for God within his thinking, making him, in effect, a deist (a belief in god but not in divine revelation).

Empiricists broadly believe that knowledge can be acquired only through experience, primarily sensory experience, and that this experience is processed (reasoned) via the brain. The “tabula rasa” referred to the blank state of the mind before it has received any sensory input from which to construct knowledge of the world. This was distinct from the contemporary beliefs of rationalists such as Descartes whose famous statement, Cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am), is an example of a conclusion reached a priori – in other words it is a deductive belief, knowable without any experience in the matter.

An empiricist might say that we construct our view of reality through forming simple assumptions, from which we can create more complex ideas. For example, the simple idea of “yellow” comes from experiencing yellow again and again. Once one has also experienced the ideas of a “circle” and “heat”, one might combine the three to form the more complex idea of the sun. A rationalist, however, might believe that we are hardwired to “know” yellow – and heat and form – and that we can reason the idea of the sun without having experienced it.

Put simply, John Locke’s epistemology (philosophy of knowledge) was a precursor to the nature/nurture dichotomy that still causes debate today. From sofa arguments about children “getting that behaviour from you” to social debates about the causes of homosexuality and the nature of women’s role in society – all are, in part, indebted to Locke’s rejection of Descartes’ rationalism and his secularisation of the process of the acquirement of knowledge.

HE was also deemed a “probable-ist”. Suggesting that nothing was absolute, nothing was certain, and we can only infer and refine through logical deduction, Hobbes believed that all evidence points to probable connections and helps lead us to probable beliefs only. This in essence is the English methodology and, via its popularity throughout the intellectual circles in which Locke mixed, it helped to codify the scientific method that is still used today; namely, that knowledge is gained through measured experience and refined through repetition.

As with much philosophical thought and doctrine this can all seem semantically confusing. One might best exemplify empiricism by references to where it has been used allegorically or metaphorically. For example, the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe has been styled as the first (great) empirical prose work and can certainly be read through the prism of empiricism. The island itself where Crusoe is stranded could be interpreted as a physical metaphor, but the analogy is strongest when referring to the hero’s initial lack of understanding or comprehension of his predicament (tabula rasa). Crusoe then begins to refer in his narration to “discovering”, “feeling”, “finding” and “seeing” things, and subsequently to “understanding” new experiences. Eventually he forms an idea of how the island works and his place in it and, using his new knowledge, he creates more complex constructs such as “huts”, “materials” and “contraptions”, exploring how he might survive there. Eventually he comes to dominate and own the place. Whether or not one gives credence to this interpretation, it is fair to say that Robinson Crusoe – though ostensibly a simple adventure yarn – was one of the first English-language novels to come at the time of the development of empiricism and the scientific method. It is possible that Defoe was unconsciously channelling these ideas even if he wasn’t doing so explicitly.

LOCKE was born in Wrington, Somerset and educated at Oxford, where he seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the First Earl of Shaftesbury, who became his friend and patron. Locke supervised a major operation to remove a hydatid cyst from Shaftesbury’s liver in 1668; the wits of the time found it very amusing that Shaftesbury’s liver needed a silver tap for the rest of his life. From 1675 to 1679 Locke lived in France, where he studied the work of Descartes, among others. Shaftesbury, who had been much engaged with parliamentary opposition to the house of Stuart, fled to Holland in 1681. Locke followed in 1683, returning to England after the accession of William of Orange in 1688. Over the course of the next twelve months Locke’s major philosophical works, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Civil Government, as well as the Letter Concerning Toleration, were published, the latter two anonymously. Locke’s final years saw the publication of Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). He was given minor administrative functions by the government – and, lived out his life quietly at the house of Damaris, Lady Masham, in Essex.

Although he is famous as the senior figure of British empiricism, Locke’s philosophy is more complex than this suggests. He rejected any place for “innate ideas” in the foundations of knowledge, and, is, in that sense anti-rationalistic. This view puts experience, or ideas of sensation and reflection, firmly at the basis of human understanding. However, Locke allowed the idea that some of our knowledge of objects gained from measurable aspects of physical reality, such as number, shape and so on, do give us an adequate representation of the world around us. These are an object’s primary qualities, as distinct from its secondary qualities, which are more subjective – such as its colour, smell or taste. But the power to know things derives from the all-knowing God, and “we more certainly know that there is a god than that there is anything else without us”.

ALTHOUGH Locke is thought of as the first great English philosopher of the scientific revolution, he became ally and “under-labourer” for Boyle and Newton. He himself was doubtful whether such natural philosophy could ever aspire to the condition of a science. By this he meant an activity capable of yielding rational and adequate insight into the real essences of things, yet also yielding us god-like. The task of scientific epistemology is to display what we do know, the various sources of knowledge, the proper employment, and above all the limits and doubtful capacities of our minds. It is through this theme that Locke connected his epistemology with the defence of religious toleration. This radical doctrine, together with his work on property and on the relationship between government and consent, is his enduring legacy to political philosophy.

Locke’s greatness lies in his close attention to the actual phenomena of mental life, but his philosophy is in fact balanced precariously between the radical empiricism of followers such as Berkeley and Hume and the theological world of reliance on faith that underpinned the message of Christianity. His views that religion and morality should be as open to the demands of demonstration and proof as mathematics stamps him as a key Enlightenment figure, even as his insistence on the primacy of ideas opened the way to more radical departures from that climate.

Footnotes:

Allegorical – Story with an underlying message as well as the literal one.

Empiricism – Doctrine that all knowledge derives from experience.

Epistemology – Study of the source, nature and limitations of knowledge.