This Day in Philosophy — 29 August: the birth of John Locke

John Locke was born on 29 August 1632 at Wrington, in Somerset. He died in Essex on 28 October 1704.

In the year of his birth England stood on the brink of civil war; his father fought on the parliamentary side. The whole of Locke's political philosophy was written in a country where the question of what makes power legitimate was being put in blood.

Physician first, philosopher after#

Locke studied at Oxford but had little time for the scholastic curriculum. His interests turned to experimental science and to medicine; he worked with Robert Boyle and became a fellow of the Royal Society.

The turning point came in 1666, when he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, and became his physician, adviser and secretary. The operation Locke performed on Shaftesbury's liver in 1668 saved the patient's life.

That connection carried Locke's thought into politics — and, in 1683, drove him into exile in Holland. His principal works appeared in quick succession in 1689 and 1690, after he had returned to England in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The blank sheet#

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is one of the founding texts of modern epistemology.

Locke's target was the doctrine of innate ideas. Against the claim that the mind contains principles from birth he brought a simple objection: were that so, we should find the same principles in children and across different cultures. We do not.

The image he put in its place is famous. The mind is at the outset a blank sheet (tabula rasa). All its material comes from experience — from sensation of the outer world, and from reflection on the mind's own operations.

The consequences are large. If knowledge comes from experience, then the differences between human beings are the work of education and environment rather than of birth. Locke's writings on education, and the whole educational optimism of the Enlightenment, feed on that thesis.

Primary and secondary qualities#

This is the Essay's most contested distinction.

Primary qualities — extension, figure, motion, number, solidity — belong to the object itself. Secondary qualities — colour, sound, taste, smell, heat — do not: they are the object's power to produce such sensations in us.

An apple, in other words, is not "red". It has a particular surface texture, and that texture, in particular conditions, produces in us the sensation of red.

The distinction sat comfortably with the mechanical natural philosophy of the day. But it carried a problem inside it. If what we know is not the object but the idea in our own minds, how are we to check the correspondence between idea and object?

Berkeley and Hume pressed that question to its limit. The scepticism of Hume, whom this column noted last week, lies at the end of the road Locke opened.

Labour and property#

The Second Treatise of Government (1689) is among the most influential texts in modern political philosophy.

Locke's state of nature is not Hobbes's. For Hobbes it is the war of all against all; for Locke a law of nature is already in force there: no one is to harm the life, health, liberty or possessions of another. The trouble is that this law cannot be applied impartially, since every man is judge in his own cause.

The state is instituted, by consent, to solve that problem. And this fixes the limit of its power: a government that acts against the purpose for which it was established forfeits its legitimacy. The right of resistance follows.

The theory of property is Locke's own. Nature, on his account, is originally held in common; but a man owns his own body, and therefore owns his labour as well. When he mixes his labour with something, he removes it from the common stock and makes it his.

To this he sets two limits: he must not let what he takes spoil, and he must leave enough for others. How those limits came to be exceeded once money was invented — and why Locke thought this legitimate — has been argued over for three hundred years.

Axel Honneth's analysis of labour and recognition, which we covered this month, is a contemporary extension of the same line: work does not merely establish property, it constitutes personality.

Toleration#

A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is an argument written in the aftermath of the wars of religion.

Locke's reasoning is interestingly practical. The state cannot change belief by force, because belief is not produced by the will. Coercion secures outward conformity at best; it does not alter inward conviction. Force is therefore useless even by religion's own lights.

From this it follows that church and state have distinct functions: the state attends to worldly interests, the church to the salvation of souls.

Locke's toleration had its limits too. He excluded atheists and — for reasons bound up with the politics of the day — Roman Catholics. Those limits are rightly criticised now. But the principle itself became the starting point for modern arguments about the secular state.

The contradiction: the slave trade#

There is an unavoidable difficulty in reading Locke.

The philosopher who defended liberty and property invested in the Royal African Company and had a hand in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina — a document that granted slave owners absolute authority.

That contradiction is among the liveliest areas of contemporary Locke scholarship. Some commentators trace it to a flaw in the theory itself; others separate the theory from the practice. The argument goes on, and it has no easy answer.

Influence#

Locke's Second Treatise is heard directly in the language of the American Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the French Enlightenment, Voltaire and Montesquieu read him.

Kant was woken from his "dogmatic slumber" by Hume; but it was Locke who cleared Hume's path.

In Turkish#

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Second Treatise of Government, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Some Thoughts Concerning Education have all been translated into Turkish.

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Note: Locke died a hundred and thirty years before the invention of photography. The cover image is Godfrey Kneller's portrait of 1697, now in the Hermitage Museum.