An outline of philosophy
Source: Victorian Labor College lecture, circa 1970
First published: Labor College Review, 1990-94
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
The period in which John Locke lived brought many changes in English bourgeois development. The civil war ended in victory for the industrialists against absolute monarchy with the execution of Charles I in 1649. The first attempts at parliamentary rule presented many difficulties, resulting in Cromwell assuming powers of a dictator. The restoration of the monarchy with limited powers under Charles II, followed by his successor James II, a Roman Catholic, was tolerated at the time as both were aged monarchs not likely to live long and consequently it was not necessary for the bourgeoisie to face another civil war.
However, with the announcement of a son and heir to James the possibility of a renewed Catholic domination, intolerable as it was to bourgeois class interests, forced them to risk further strife by inviting James’s eldest daughter, Mary, and her husband William, a devout Protestant, to raise an army. This was accomplished with comparative ease, and William and Mary were installed on the throne in the “Glorious” bourgeois revolution of 1688.
Locke was sceptical of bourgeois democracy, especially after the execution of Charles I. In a sarcastic vein, he wrote: “I found that a general freedom is but a general bondage, and that the popular asserters of liberty are the greatest engrossers of it too, and not unjustly called its keepers.” His chief philosophical work was contained in his Essay concerning human understanding, which is divided into four books, its design according to the author being, “To enquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent,” and this was a means to correct the chief cause of human error, which its author found in human proneness to extend their inquiries to matters beyond their reach, and then to cover their ignorance by empty phrases, or by dogmas that they assumed to be innate and therefore out of reach of criticism.
Locke wanted to make a faithful report, founded simply upon mental facts, as to how far a merely human understanding can go in the way either of certain knowledge of more or less probable presumption, and in what humanity must be contented with ignorance. Although a true report might show that human knowledge must ever “fall short of perfect comprehension of whatsoever is”, it might be “sufficient for our state”; and at any rate we cannot overcome facts.
The first book of the essay provides a preliminary argument against the innateness of any part of our knowledge. It opens the way for Locke’s main position: that whatever any individual can know, or reasonably believe in, or concieve, is dependent upon human experience. We may have ideas without having knowledge, but we cannot have knowledge without ideas; for having ideas, Locke says, means “speaking intelligibly”.
Propositions that contain idea-less terms cannot express truth, or even error, and only connect empty sounds. All our ideas, the most complex and abstract, as well as the simplest, Locke shows to be ideas, which refer either to data that happen to be presented through our five senses, or to operations of mind that have been able to penetrate the interior. If we pretend to extend in word our range further, “we shall succeed no better than if we went about to clear the darkness in the mind of one born blind, talking into him the ideas of morality and God”, he is just as strenuous in arguing for our having an intuitive certainty in abstract ethics as well as existence of external things, as far as they are actually felt, and above all for our having a demonstrable knowledge of the existence of God or “eternal mind”.
Locke was considered to be the third great English materialist. Marx wrote: “Hobbes had systemised Bacon without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon’s fundametal principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay concerning human understanding, supplied this proof.”
As we have already noted, Locke began his essay with an attack on innate ideas. Against this notion he tried to show how the whole of human knowledge was built up through the action of external material objects upon the bodily sense organs. “Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas,” he wrote, Ldquo;How comes it to be furnished? … To this I answer in one word, from experience; in all that our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately dervies itself. Our observation employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected upon by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, spring.”
Locke relies on plain empirical evidence, or rather the absence of it, to disprove the existence of innate ideas. If there were self-evident truths, he argued, these should be present in all men and clear to savages, infants and even idiots. In fact, this is not so; the supposed innate principles in religion, logic, morals and mathematics are consciously held only by educated minds.
According to Locke, the action of external objects upon our sense organs produces, in the first place, “simple ideas”, the elementary sense data supplied by each of the special senses. These simple ideas are the atoms, so to speak, from which the whole complex of knowledge is built. They form “the materials of all our knowledge”.
Wrote Locke: “When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety; and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas. But it is not in the power of the most exalted wit, or enlarged understandings, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind.”
Locke then distinguished simple ideas which, as he asserted, were exact resemblances of qualities really inhering in bodies that evoked those ideas; and simple ideas to which nothing in the external world exactly corresponded. The first he called ideas of Primary Qualities, the second he called ideas of Secondary Qualities.
Our ideas of solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number, were ideas of primary qualities, corresponding exactly to the real solidity,extension, figure motion of rest, and number, of the objects of the external material world. But our ideas of colour, taste, smell, sound, were ideas of secondary qualities only, not corresponding to any real colour, taste, smell, sound, inhering in external material objects.
“The ideas of primary qualities of bodies,” Locke wrote, “are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves. They are in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us; and what is sweet, blue, warm in idea, is but the certain bulk. Figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselve, which we call so.”
In further development of his theory, Locke maintained that when we perceive, think, understand, judge, know: in other words, when we carry out any act of cognition from the simplest sort of sense perception to the most complicated thought, the objects of our cognition are not external objects themselves, but are rather our own ideas, which are called up in our minds by the action of external objects.
In dealing with the development of knowledge, Locke proceeded to say: “Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them. Knowledge, then, seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists.”
According to Locke, when we repeatedly find a group of simple ideas associated together, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance.”
But what the nature of this substance is, our ideas do not inform us. They only indicate to us that substances exist, which are the ultimate cause of our ideas. ”If anyone will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities, which are capable of producing simple ideas in us.”
This, “we know not what” reveals inconsistency as well as a certain shiftiness in Locke’s empirical philosophy.
“We know not what” is the seed out of which Kant’s theory of the unknowable thing-in-itself grew, along with agnosticism of the nineteenth century. To regain a materialist outlook, Locke, certainly inconsistently, maintained that to a certain extent our ideas are true copies of real things and to that extent we do know what “things in themselves” are like; namely, our ideas of solidity, extension, figure, motion and number of objective things.
At the same time however, Locke holds that the knowledge derived from sensation is inferior in certainty and clarity to knowledge that is presumably obtained through the superior channels of demonstration and intuition. According to him, we are intuitively aware of what spirit, the soul, and God are, but have no clear idea of material substance.
Nevertheless, his insistence that all knowledge is the product of sense experience; that sensation is caused by the action of external objects on the bodily sense organs; that our ideas, at least of the primary qualities, are copies of real things, led to a further development of his materialism by French materialism in the eighteenth century. The French priest Condillac (1715-80) rejected intuituion and reduced reflection to sensation.
In its theoretical content, empiricism is a view of the world. It perfoms a definite social function as a method of thinking appropriate to specific historical conditions and by serving the class requirements of the bourgeoisie. It is first of all a theory of knowledge (epistemology), not a theory of being (ontology).
The conscious limitation of empiricist thought to epistemology alone was the source of its most serious weakness. Empiricism came into the world with an ineradicable birthmark, an inherent ambiguity. The empiricist proceeds from the premise that all knowledge is based on experience. But he is not clear on (a) what generates this experience and (b) what are the things that experience informs us about.
Materialism, unlike empiricism, gives a plain and direct answer to these two questions. It states that objective, physical being precedes animal and human sensation, perception and knowledge. It insists that all the “furniture” in the human mind comes from interactions and connections with the social and natural environments. Materialism insists upon the unity of objective being and subjective thought.
Locke's writings are filled with inconsistencies, but to grasp the source of this evasiveness it is necessary to note the history and the class necessity of the period. Locke was the principal ideologist of the victory of the bourgeois revolution in England — a revolution that ended in compromise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
Locke was called upon to reconcile the conflicting claims of Christianity and practical philosophy, of divine revelation and bourgeois reason, of the existence of a state church with the toleration of non-conformist sects, of the king with parliament, of traditional beliefs with new discoveries and progressive ideas, of the rights of men with the demands of private property. It would have been impossible to satisfy the both sides fully and maintain consistency.
Locke, for example, is regarded as the architect of religious tolerance in England, yet he refused to grant freedom of worship and thought either to Catholics or atheists because these extremes were repugnant to the new bourgeois regime.
Mechanics was the central science of Locke’s time. The conceptions derived from that branch of natural science dominated the thinking of that time. Mechanics took the commanding position because the most vital concerns of bourgeois society were tied up with the requirements of water transport, mining and metallurgy, and military engineering. These decisive branches of social-economic activity placed the major technical and theoretical problems before the scientific investigators of the early capitalist epoch.
The scientists had destroyed the monololy of knowledge of scholasticism, substituting the philosophy of empiricism, but the empiricists now came up against metaphysical reasoning — that is viewing things in isolation, like Newton who in his discoveries of gravitation and mechanical force was not interested in its origin, which he considered part of God's creation.
The problem facing empiricists was to weave theology and physics into a single fabric. They accomplished this by interpreting nature and its laws, disclosed by scientific investigation, as the handiwork of God. These bourgeois minds conceived a divinity with the combined function of a capitalist, a craftsman, and a constitional monarch.
God was no longer the Supreme Final Cause of the universe as he was in scholastic metaphysics, but its First Efficient Cause. The cosmos was an immense machine invented by God to which, like a capitalist machinist, he gave the original impulse. Once nature had been set in motion, it proceeded automatically according to the mechanical laws of material movement.
It was in this reason that Locke could introduce into his philosophy unknowable material substances, objectively existing primary qualities and subjective secondary qualities — all requirements necessary for bourgeois class development.
The methods and conclusions of the new science conflicted with familiar facts of everyday experience. According to Copernicus, the belief that the earth was fixed at the centre of the universe while the planets and stars revolved around the earth was only an appearance. The apparent movement of the sun, which contradicted this unobvious relation, was explained by the rotation of the earth about its axis every twenty-four hours.
In economics, the apparent movements and relations of capitalism are very different from their real nature. To the superficial observer it looks as though the worker receives from the employer payment in full for his work. If this were really so, if there were any equal exchange of wages for labor and its products, what would be the incentive for capitalist production and where would the profits of the capitalist come from?
The monetary transaction between the employer and the wage worker disguises the real relation between them. What appears on the surface as a relation of equality (the worker sells their “labour” to the employer for a mutually agreed price — if the worker does not like the price the employer offers, they need not work for that employer) is in reality a relation of inequality. The task of scientific investigation is to go from phenomenal, superficial forms in which the relations directly present themselves, to the hidden causes that constitute their inner reality.
In both the philosophical system of empiricism and the economic system of capitalism the inner essence of thing remains mystical to the bourgeois mind. Substance in the mechanical system was as mysterious as the essence of value and the secrets of its monetary form were to the capitalist theoreticians. However much Locke strove to introduce rationality into his conceptions of nature and society, his inquiring mind had to retire baffled before the impenetrable sanctuaries of the bourgeois epoch.