We are now going to tackle John Locke, the first of the British empiricists. Locke lived between 1632 and 1704, and as a young man, he first studied for the ministry. He was a student at Oxford, but the Great London Fire of 1666 changed his mind, and he decided to go into medicine, becoming a friend of Lord Shaftesbury and later his private physician.

Locke lived through a time of great upheaval in England, as this was the era of the English Civil War. What had happened was that Charles I ascended the throne in 1625 and immediately began behaving like an absolute dictator at a time when the English Parliament was clamoring for more power. Parliament was pushing for more authority, and the populace was increasingly inclined toward the writings of the reformers. A growing segment of the population was becoming overtly Protestant, quoting Luther, Calvin, and others. Part of the legacy from Henry VIII was that the Church of England was the official church of the country, and the king, whoever was monarch in England, was the head of both the church and the state. This meant that the king appointed the bishops, not the Pope. That arrangement had been in place since the late 1530s under Henry. So, it's important to remember that the king was not only the head of the state but also the head of the church. If you were someone who thought the church needed reform, the only way to achieve that was by reforming the state and limiting the power of the king, since the king was in charge of the church as well.

Charles I ascended the throne in 1625 and began assuming more and greater powers for himself. At times, he ignored Parliament; at times, he dismissed it entirely. This caused great unrest in England, and eventually, it led to civil war. The Civil War officially ended in 1651, though most of the hostilities and major battles had occurred prior to that. During the war, Charles I initially succeeded. After all, he had a professional army, and his dukes were wealthy enough to have their own private armies, which is why a king, if he wanted to make war, had to gain the backing of his dukes. That's where we get the expression "put up your dukes" for a fistfight—you had to collect the people allied with you to take your side.

The king's forces went to war against the Puritans, who represented the party in Parliament that wanted to reform the church and understood that to do so, they had to first reform the state. The Puritans were agitating for greater limits on the monarch's power and more authority for Parliament. They wanted to expand Parliament and make changes to the conditions for being a member, including allowing people who paid taxes, not just landowners, to have representation.

Initially, Charles won the major battles. But when things were looking bad for the Puritans, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan representative in Parliament from the city of Cambridge, proposed that he take over as commander of the army. Cromwell, despite having limited military experience—he had served in the militia but wasn't a general—had a natural genius for military strategy. He whipped the Puritan army into shape and began winning battles. As the dukes, who were part of the high nobility, saw Cromwell gaining victories, they aligned more with the king because they realized the Puritans wanted to dismantle the hierarchical class structure of society.

In England at that time, society was divided into monarchs, nobility (including dukes, marquises, barons, earls), and commoners, with commoners further divided into businesspeople and poor farmers. The Puritans wanted to change this system and give greater representation to the middle class and those who paid taxes.

When Cromwell began to win battles, Parliament voted to cut the king's salary, which infuriated Charles I. In response, Charles stormed into the House of Commons with his guards, demanding to know the names of those who proposed the bill. The Speaker of the House, kneeling before the king, famously responded, "My Lord, I have neither eyes to see nor ears to hear nor mouth to speak save as this House gives me leave." This put Charles in a difficult position: he could either arrest the Speaker, causing an uproar, or back down. He chose the latter, and ever since that incident, English monarchs knock on the door of the House of Commons before entering. On the first knock, they're not admitted; only on the second knock are they allowed in, reminding the monarch that their powers stop at that door.

As the civil war continued, Charles ultimately lost. One of the decisive battles was fought on a rainy night. The battlefield turned into mud, and Charles, realizing that cavalry charges would be disastrous, sent his soldiers into the field without horse support. Cromwell, on the other hand, had his cavalry trot through the mud. Even without a full charge, the sight of mounted troops overwhelmed the king's foot soldiers, leading to a significant victory for Cromwell.

As I said, Cromwell had strokes of genius. Anyway, the Puritans won the war, captured the king, and presented him with a list of demands. They told Charles, "If you want to remain king and stay alive, here's what you must do. You're going to sign this document stating that you'll never again try to be an absolute monarch."

Charles had been looking across the channel at Louis XIV, the famed Sun King of France, who had everything his way. When Louis’s advisors told him that the state would never stand for a certain policy, he famously replied that he was the state. "L'état, c'est moi" (I am the state), Louis declared. In England, though, such absolutism could never fly because Parliament was independent. Louis XIV had also managed to control those with power and wealth, forcing them to lend him money, which meant they couldn’t protest his policies or risk being asked to repay their loans. This made it easier for Louis to become an absolute monarch in France, something Charles could only aspire to but failed at in England.

Now, the Puritans handed Charles I a list of demands, including that no future monarch would be a Catholic (since they feared a monarch taking orders from Rome), and that the English monarch would remain the head of the Church of England, meaning the king would appoint bishops, not the Pope. There were several such stipulations, including one that Charles would never try to regain the throne. They offered him a castle and an income to retire with the promise that he would never again attempt to reclaim power.

Charles signed the agreement, but it was later discovered that he was plotting to regain the throne. He was brought before a tribunal, and they presented intercepted messages, which had been decoded, showing his plans. Charles was condemned to execution, and in 1649, the King of England was beheaded.

Meanwhile, the Puritans established a provisional government, which was later taken over by Oliver Cromwell, the commander of their army. Cromwell declared himself Lord High Protector of England, refusing the title of king or to be addressed as "Your Majesty." The Puritans sought to do away with the monarchy altogether.

Let me illustrate this timeline for you. Charles I was born in 1600, took the throne in 1625, and was beheaded in 1649. Locke was born in 1632 and lived until 1704, so he was a younger contemporary of Charles I. The Civil War officially ended in 1651, but Charles I had already been beheaded in 1649. Oliver Cromwell, born in 1599 and dying in 1658, established a Puritan government in England.

Now, this Puritan government was supposed to be a relief from the potential tyranny of an absolute monarch, but in some ways, it was worse than what it replaced. The Puritans were staunchly opposed to frivolity—they believed in living a sober and serious life. Fun and games, dances, and parties were all frowned upon, and eventually, such activities were outright banned. They even went so far as to outlaw the celebration of Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday. At the time, it was well known that Christmas was originally a Christian takeover of a pagan holiday celebrating the winter solstice and the return of the sun. So, under Cromwell's government, if you were caught decorating a tree or attending a church service that included Christmas carols, you could face fines or even jail time.

Cromwell divided the country into military districts and set officers of the army over each one, effectively turning England into a military dictatorship. So, while they had rid themselves of a monarch trying to become an absolute dictator, they ended up with a military dictatorship that wasn’t much better. The average person didn’t much like the Puritan government. They had cut the king’s salary and favored Presbyterian church organization, which created a messy situation since the majority of the clergy supported Presbyterianism, but the official Church of England was still supposed to be headed by a monarch—who no longer existed.

Charles I’s strict enforcement of Anglicanism had been a major issue before the war. He believed that, since England had a Church of England, everyone should attend it, regardless of their personal beliefs. He had people arrested for attending other kinds of services, fined them, and even had their ears cut off. His response to their pleas of conscience was essentially, "If I say you go to the Church of England, you go to the Church of England."

So, after Cromwell's rise to power, things continued under Puritan rule. Cromwell’s government was supposed to be a break from tyranny, but in practice, it was highly restrictive and, in some ways, worse than what it replaced. When Cromwell died in 1658, it was due to complications from a kidney stone—reportedly uranium poisoning—and many remarked that a small stone had accomplished what the armies of Europe could not: the death of Oliver Cromwell.

After his death, there was a push to have his son, Richard Cromwell, succeed him as Lord High Protector. However, Richard didn’t have the leadership skills or ability to command, and even his supporters recognized that. With his failure to maintain control, the powers that be—the nobility, Puritans, and others with influence—turned to Charles II, the son of Charles I, who had fled to the Netherlands during the civil war. They invited him back to England, restoring the monarchy in 1660, a period known as the Restoration.

Charles II reigned from 1660 until his death in 1685. He was succeeded by his brother, James II. However, James quickly violated the terms of the settlement agreement that had been established during the Restoration. The agreement required that the monarch never become Catholic, recognize the supremacy of Parliament, and refrain from trying to rule as an absolute monarch. Charles II had secretly converted to Catholicism but kept it low-key enough not to cause an uproar. James II, however, openly violated the agreement, which would eventually lead to his downfall.

"You need to sign this, or you're not going to be king." So James II signs it, and though he is a Catholic, his administration is failing in several areas. Even the nobles who initially supported the restoration of the monarchy to preserve their own positions, alongside the Puritan party, agree that James II's rule is a disaster. So, they approach James and offer him a deal similar to the one made with Charles I: "We will give you a castle and a pension, and you can live out your life, throw your parties, do whatever you want—but you won't be king anymore." Then, they reach out to the next closest relative of the last king, William, Prince of Orange, a nobleman living in the Netherlands. Orange is the last name of the royal house in the Netherlands. William of Orange and his wife, Mary, are invited over to become king and queen, ruling jointly.

This transfer of power happens in 1689, and William and Mary are well-liked. Their reign is marked by stability, good governance, and further advances in parliamentary supremacy. They are admired not only in England but also in the American colonies, where one of the first colleges was named the College of William and Mary in their honor.

That’s the context in which John Locke lived. When the war broke out, Lord Shaftesbury fled to the continent, and Locke, not being a military man but a doctor, accompanied him to avoid the chaos. Locke had no intention of getting caught in the middle of a battle.

This background is essential for understanding the time of Locke and the political climate he lived in. Many students often don't grasp the "who, what, when, where, and why" of these historical events and figures. Many know about the American Revolution and George III, but they are unaware of who George I or George II were, or anything significant that happened before or after George III. Typically, once Americans are taught about the American Revolution, we declare independence, and the focus of education shifts solely to American history, as if Europe ceased to exist after that. Of course, this is far from the truth, so I’ve provided some background. Now, let's turn to Locke himself.

The English Civil War had been fought over the question of supremacy: should the king or the parliament hold ultimate authority? The king argued, "It's me," while the parliament, backed by the Puritans, argued otherwise. Locke, unlike the continental rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz, was not living a life of nobility. Locke had to work as a doctor to make a living. Though he believed in the rational method of reasoning and mathematical proofs for science, he lived a different life from those supported by the nobility.

Locke stayed out of the war and controversy and focused on his intellectual pursuits. His first major project was understanding how the mind operates—what it can and cannot know. Rather than starting with mathematics and logic as models of reasoning, Locke started with normal perception, which I think was absolutely right and onto something important. Unfortunately, he understood normal perception as merely dealing with isolated sensations: color patches, sounds, tactile sensations, tastes, and smells. He believed these were the basic elements given to the mind.

This, I believe, was a colossal mistake, one that undermined the entire project of providing an accurate account of the world we live in. Since these supposed objects of direct perception only have sensory properties, they could never account for the other kinds of properties we experience. Philosophers like Locke tried desperately to show how we might infer the existence of physical objects from these sensations, but they failed. Hume later exploited these weaknesses mercilessly.

Philosophy, at this point, came with a number of assumptions. One was that the world consisted of two kinds of realities: minds and bodies. Another was the assumption that what is "given" in experience are sensations—not the experience of tables, chairs, people, windows, or houses, but isolated sensory properties like color patches, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations. Most philosophers of the time believed that these sensations came to us individually, and we then bundled them together into recognizable objects.

I argue that this is a grave misunderstanding of what is truly given to us in experience. When we use our senses, we don't just receive a collection of isolated sensory properties. What is truly given to us are things, events, states of affairs, persons, and relationships—complexes that involve much more than simple sensory data. Yet Locke and his contemporaries started with the assumption that we must construct these complex realities out of individual sense perceptions that only have sensory properties. If you can sense the doomed trajectory of such a project, you can understand why this approach ultimately failed.

So, Locke and his fellow philosophers began with an inadequate understanding of what is truly given in experience. And as a result, their philosophies struggled to account for the richness of the world we actually live in.

What we experience is inside of us. It's internal—and with that, you've already lost the whole world. In truth, what we experience is the world around us. We're not just experiencing the surfaces of objects like doors, walls, or the books behind me. No, according to this line of thinking, what we actually experience are tiny, individual color patches, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells, and all of that is inside here. They knew about images on retinas long before modern science. There was a man, whose name escapes me now, who went to a slaughterhouse and picked up the eye of a bull. Fascinated, he discovered that wherever he pointed the eye, an upside-down image of whatever he pointed at appeared on the bull's retina. This led to the conclusion that when we see something, we're not actually seeing the object itself; instead, we're seeing an image on our retina. From there, it was easy to say that this image is transmitted by the optic nerve to the occipital lobe of the brain, where it transforms into some kind of brain process. That, they argued, is what we're truly experiencing.

This gave rise to an increasingly internalized understanding of perception, where what we perceive is not the external object but a tiny representation inside us. So, here are the assumptions they all made:

  1. First, there are minds and bodies.
  2. Second, what's given to experience are sensations.
  3. Third, sensations are inside our minds.

With these assumptions, they now faced the challenge of explaining how we get to an external world that exists independently of you and me. Locke tried and failed. Berkeley followed by saying that the world is simply all the sensations in all the minds—it's not really external. Hume took it even further, attacking that view as well.

So, we have this idea: sensory qualities are the essence of things, and those things are inside our minds. If you're a materialist, then they are inside our brains because, according to that view, there are no non-physical minds.

What else did they assume? They also assumed, and then tried to justify with arguments, that the sensations we experience are copies of external realities. Locke started with that assumption, trying to defend it.

 

Locke argues that the sensations we experience are like internal, small images or copies, much like the image on the retina of that bull’s eye in the story. These "copies" are how we know that an external world exists because, according to Locke, our perceptions are faithful representations of that world. He believes there is an internal world that we are directly conscious of, which serves as a faithful copy of an external world—one that we are never directly in contact with. Instead, we are always in contact with the "citizens" of our minds, which exist only in the mind.

Now, moving on to George Berkeley: he’s going to say something different. Berkeley disputes Locke's idea of "copies" of external things. Instead, Berkeley suggests that reality consists of minds and the sensations they experience. For most of his work, Berkeley denies the existence of material objects outside of perception—reality, for him, is sensations within minds, though some debate remains about how strictly he maintained this view. But to avoid diving too deeply into Berkeley just yet, we’ll stick with Locke for now.

Locke, unlike Descartes, does not start with a metaphysical proof of an external world. Descartes, after proving the existence of God, claims that God, being all-perfect and incapable of deception, would not allow us to believe in a world that doesn’t exist. Locke, on the other hand, begins with a direct examination of the mind itself. He tries to understand the nature of ideas, the things that exist in the mind, by analyzing their sources.

His first major conclusion is that the mind is a tabula rasa—a blank slate. According to Locke, the mind doesn't contribute anything to our experiences but passively receives impressions. The mind is like an empty tablet upon which experience writes.

This idea, however, is problematic for modern thinkers. We now understand that the mind does contribute to experience—unconscious biases, for example, can shape how we perceive the world. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious reinforced this, showing how much of our behavior and perception can be influenced by unconscious processes. But Locke wasn’t dealing with that knowledge, and for him, experience was paramount. His theory reduced experience to sensations—color patches, sounds, tastes, etc.—which exist only in the mind, not in the external world.

Locke also rejected the idea of innate ideas, which was a cornerstone of rationalist thought. Rationalists like Descartes and Leibniz believed that certain ideas, like the laws of logic and mathematics, were inborn. These ideas, they argued, were not derived from experience but were inherent to human reason. They used these innate ideas to explain how we come to know universal truths—like mathematical laws or logical principles—that experience alone could never fully justify.

For instance, a law like "all A's are followed by B's" cannot be proven through a finite number of observations. No matter how many times you observe A being followed by B, it doesn’t guarantee that B will always follow A. The rationalists explained this by saying that the mind, through its innate ideas, recognizes the lawfulness of these occurrences. Locke disagrees with this. He argues that we don’t discover truths about the world simply by relying on these supposedly innate ideas. Instead, we learn through sensation and experience.

To counter the rationalists, Locke offers his own metaphor for the mind: he compares it to a camera or a blank room. Sensations, he says, enter the mind through "slots"—our eyes, ears, nose, and so on—just as light enters a camera. These sensations then write themselves onto the mind, which starts off empty. The mind, like a blank slate or an empty room, passively receives and stores these sensations.

Locke’s metaphor draws from the concept of the camera obscura, an early device that projected images of the outside world onto a surface inside a dark chamber. Vermeer, the famous painter, used one of these devices to help create his realistic images. Locke saw the mind as operating in a similar way—sensations project onto the mind, which passively records them.

In contrast to the rationalists, Locke insists that the mind is not equipped with innate ideas. Everything we know comes from experience. But this leads Locke into the tricky territory of explaining how we know universal truths—truths like mathematical or logical laws, which don't seem to come from experience alone. Locke is going to have to tackle this issue.

In summary, Locke’s philosophy hinges on three key ideas:

  1. The mind is a blank slate: Experience and sensation write upon the mind, which starts out empty.
  2. Sensations are internal: We never directly experience the external world but rather "copies" or representations of it.
  3. No innate ideas: Locke rejects the rationalist idea that certain truths are inborn. Everything we know comes from experience.

As we move forward, Locke will develop these ideas further and tackle the challenges posed by the rationalists. Next time, we’ll continue exploring how Locke defends his views and how he addresses the limitations of experience in providing us with knowledge.


Last modified: Friday, October 11, 2024, 12:00 PM