Transcript Reading: Locke Part 7

We are going to finish up with Locke with a few reflections on what we've already heard from him and what I've commented on. You might wonder, with all these missteps, holes, faux pas, and so on, why we read Locke. The answer is that Locke made some real progress for philosophy. Instead of being caught in that rationalist network, where the rational order of math and logic was assumed to be the very fabric of reality, Locke wants to take matter as something that really exists. There are external objects—objects outside our minds—and we have perceptions of them, which are inside our minds. These perceptions are not physical objects but sensory bundles—bundles of sights, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells. By bringing us back to experience, Locke emphasizes the direction that the sciences had already been going in for two centuries or so. We’re not just going to spin ideas of a fantasy world and say, "This must be real because there’s no contradiction in it." If we want to know what reality is like, we're going to go out and look.

The inconsistencies in Locke's philosophy are troubling from a philosophical standpoint, but in some cases, they’re encouraging. Locke says all we have in our minds are sensations and concepts, and they don't have physical properties, while the external world has only physical properties. I said, "Well, then how could one be the copy of the other?" The answer is, if they're thought of that way, they can't be. It can't be that what we have is a copy of what's outside our minds. But Locke doesn't get all worked up about that kind of stuff. He just moves on to the next problem. In this way, he ends up championing a kind of common-sense view of the whole thing. He wants to say, "Look, there’s a real world. We perceive the real world. We form concepts. We try to explain the real world. We try to explain how our minds work."

Then he gets somewhat mixed up about that too, because first he says, "There’s nothing in our minds but sensations and concepts," and then he says, "We have an intuitive grasp of our minds and how they work, without being able to form a concept of them," and we certainly don’t perceive them as objects. It would make no sense to ask Locke, "What color is your mind?" for example. But Locke doesn’t get too worked up—he just moves on anyway. You could say he leaves these things unsolved. He leaves these problems to his successors. He says, "Here, guys, here’s the big picture. I think it’s basically right, and these little glitches inside—well, you work them out."

In that way, Locke is doing more of what science was doing in his time—the 1600s—investigating, trying to set up experiments, coming up against conundrums they couldn’t explain, and holding everything in abeyance, awaiting more information, and so on. So in this way, they are more alike. On the other hand, when the rationalists finish their work, they end up with a world that's nothing like the one we experience and live in every day. Leibniz is a good example. He was a great thinker, logically and so on—he even invented the infinitesimal calculus—but his ontology is about things called monads, all of which, down to the tiniest ones like the monads of dust, dirt, particles, and atoms, are all conscious.

I can’t think of a single reason for believing that, except that Leibniz couldn’t explain how life and consciousness arise later if it isn’t already in the original material. But just because he couldn’t think of an explanation doesn’t mean that isn't what happened.

And when he gets done, the picture of reality that he leaves you with is utterly foreign to everyday experience. The average person says, "So, I mean, what do I care? I don't. Monads are windowless, we're all locked in ourselves, and all we experience are states of ourselves. That's not what I experience every day when I go out. It's self-evident to me that there are roads, trees, horses, and fields, stuff like that." And I think that common-sense view is right. Again, I think normal sense perception is self-evident, and we'll deal with self-evidency in more detail later on.

Locke, in his typical kindly way, commends to us these things to think about, gives us his reflections, and leaves it to us. It’s not consistent, but after all, our present science isn't entirely consistent either. Maybe they’re in the same boat, and we'll sort them both out by more investigation of the world around us. I think he commends that to us, and I find that he hit on a lot of things that are right and need to be seconded and endorsed—and then he messed them up pretty badly as well. He did both.

Now, this next thing we’re tackling is more precise and ingenious in the arguments he produces. I’m going to read a number of them to you because there's no better way to convey what he was doing. George Berkeley was a young man who decided to go into the ministry in the Church of England. He was ordained and eventually became a bishop in the Church of England, as it existed in Ireland, hostile territory. But Berkeley took the side of the Irish in that controversy, and in many letters and postings, he sided with the Irish against the English treatment of them.

That’s one thing. For another, Berkeley became convinced that the reason most people are atheists is that they’re materialists. They think everything is physical and that the physical world has always been here—it just always was. You're right, something is self-existent, but it’s not an ethereal being much like us called God—it’s matter and energy in space. The modern version of that—not in Berkeley’s day but in our own—is to say there was space, quantum gravity, some potentiality for matter, and that’s all you need. Then, they go to town, and the universe we now know is made.

Berkeley didn’t know about quantum gravity or any of the things we know today, but he thought he heard atheists speaking, and the people who rejected all religion—who, in his view, were atheists—were very careful to guard themselves if they were inclined toward philosophical thought or debating the issue. They made it clear that the self-existent reality is matter and energy—maybe matter, energy, and space—and it’s governed by a couple of rules. Maybe it’s gravitation and something else, or that’s it. A century later, those people would welcome Darwin’s theory and claim that everything happened just by the natural effects of the laws on matter and energy.

Darwin himself didn’t accept his theory that way. You know, he writes that when we consider how the laws for matter are impressed upon it by their Creator, we can say the same thing about individuals: individuals are all born by the will of God, but through the secondary means of sexual reproduction. Why not, then, say that species are all created by God, but through the natural means of selection? So, at least when he made the theory, Darwin believed in God—or at least acknowledged that belief in God was reconcilable with what he was putting forward.

I don’t want to jump too far ahead. We’re going to do a brief overview survey of the 19th century at the end of this course, covering Darwin, and then a brief overview of the 20th century. I was asked by the director to put those at the end of the course. The director says, "We need overviews," so we’re going to get overviews.

But for now, I wanted to tick off the last contrast I was making between Locke and Kuyper and then dig right into George Berkeley. Here’s what I had written down for you. Let’s go through it. Since my handwriting, as I’ve been told, is so awful...

Locke wants a laissez-faire view of the state—those are two French words that mean "let it be" or "let it make what it wants." For Locke, this means that the state is not an inquisitorial state like the one set up by Spain. The Inquisition means a court that sits to adjudicate cases of crime, and heresy was considered a crime. It does so actively, even financing investigations into the public to locate and identify crimes and prosecute them.

The idea of a court, as it exists in Britain and the United States today, is that it’s not an inquisitorial court. The court is passive. It sits and does nothing unless it is petitioned by some citizens to correct an alleged wrong. So the court doesn’t run the investigation; the police do. The police investigate someone accused of a crime, and then there’s a hearing to determine whether there’s enough evidence to formally accuse the person and go to trial. (I’ve slipped from Britain and America to just America now, but in any case, it’s a laissez-faire court.) It’s a court that lets things be until it’s petitioned to do something.

Locke thought that the whole of government ought to be like that. After all, the government, in his view, is no more than a private security company. It's only for its members, and taxes only go to enforce the law and protect them from foreign invasion. So, it’s not the state's business to seek out crimes—it’s the citizens' business to report them. Then the state may investigate and may try someone or not, but it only has to do with economics and property. Remember Locke’s remark: "If there’s no property, there’s no injustice." Granted, he used "property" in a much wider way than we do. We use it to mean possessions, but Locke used it to mean anything a person could possess in any sense. It could be my private ideas, my plans, my body, or my life. I possess my own life in Locke’s usage of that term. So, anybody who takes anything that’s not theirs, but is my property, has committed an injustice. I should bring that before the state, and it will have courts that decide whether this accusation has enough evidence to accuse the person and bring them to trial. They have a trial, and the person is found guilty or innocent. If guilty, they are punished.

That’s what Locke wants in a laissez-faire court. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t that be part of the sphere sovereignty view, too?

Kuyper doesn’t want to say yes to that. He wants the courts to be laissez-faire, but not the entire government. His answer is: if an institution in one sphere of life fails, the government may have to step in and fulfill that failed institution’s duty. The government stands ready to step in during emergency situations, and it has to recognize the emergency situation. It can’t just be petitioned—it has to keep an active eye on the entire society, of which it is the agency and institution of public justice.

For example, the government has to provide a safety net for the poor. In a failed economy, the government may distribute food for free, and it is obligatory for the government to pass laws that will lead to economic recovery. But it may not wholesale take over the economy—especially not permanently. That’s Marx’s solution, but sphere sovereignty is not Marxism. The government doesn't devise the economy and put it on the people by force. It encourages the economy through laws, attempting to aid recovery, and it helps to preserve and support it, even if a safety net measure needs to be taken, such as distributing food to the citizens who would otherwise starve.

Kuyper made that point more than once with respect to different institutions. He held that if other institutions fail, the government could step in temporarily and do as much as it could to fill that place. But he did not want the government to remain that way. He wanted the government to do as much as possible to restore and revive the failed institution and have it continue to take its rightful place in this multiplicity of spheres of life and institutions, to preserve and promote those spheres.

I think Kuyper has gone a long way in giving us something different. All views of the state prior to Kuyper’s idea are hierarchical. Whether they’re monarchical or democratic, whether the authority is top-down or by election from the bottom up, the whole of society is governed by the state. What Kuyper is objecting to is the totalitarian state. The totalitarian state governs the entirety of society—not only every individual but all the institutions in that society. All institutions are subject to the state.

The sphere sovereignty view (I'll just put "SS") holds that all other institutions have relative autonomy. The government can exercise its proper authority and go into the realm of another institution if a crime is being committed there. That’s the business of the state. If a law is being broken, it has every right to go in and is obligated to do so. So, I can’t murder a family member in the privacy of my home and then say to the state, "You can’t come in here, this is private." No, that’s not how it works.

Public justice means both public effects. So, if I slight a child by giving them a smaller piece of cake, that’s private. We’re not calling the police for that. But if I harm the child, then you call the police, and it becomes a matter of public justice. That falls into the sphere of the state to adjudicate and punish.

As I say, Kuyper didn’t live at the same time as Locke, but Locke so beautifully stated the hierarchical view that I wanted to contrast it with what I take to be a more Christian view. Now, because we’ve got Locke giving a clear statement of the hierarchical view, sphere sovereignty is taught by Kuyper. I told you Kuyper lived from 1837 to 1920, but it’s around the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th that Kuyper gets a chance to put sphere sovereignty into practice as Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Alright, that, as far as I’m concerned, finishes up our study of Locke’s philosophy, the direction he pushed things for coming thinkers, and now we’re ready to start with Berkeley. George Berkeley—I’ve already told you some introductory stuff about him—was a bishop in the Church of England in Ireland. Tough assignment, I would think, but he did so while favoring very strongly the Irish cause. He wrote a number of essays condemning the English for the way they treated the Irish, and he didn’t bear any equivalent burden of crossing the Irish. He had good relationships with the Irish, whether they were in his church or they were Catholics.

He was more concerned with people who were atheists, who claimed there is no God. He’s looking at the philosophy that’s being written. No doubt he read Descartes, no doubt he read Locke. And what comes across to him is this idea that what we directly experience are not objects outside ourselves, but objects in here, in our minds. In our minds are colors, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells. And they come in bundled—this kind of bundle is a table, this kind of bundle is a face with flowers, and this kind of bundle is a chair. And that bundle over there is an old lady. The bundles come in, and we know them.

Now, why then are some people still resistant to the doctrine of God and the gospel of Christ? He’s a Christian, there’s no question. What he wants to say, and I’ll read you his own words, is this: “All the monstrous systems of atheists have relied on the alleged existence of a material substance and the difficulty of understanding how it could be created out of nothing by God’s command.” His experience is that the people who say they’re atheists—all, or at least many, of the ones he knew—claimed they were materialists, and they don’t see how God could create matter out of nothing.

That’s the doctrine known in Christianity as the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Latin for “out of nothing.”

Let me try to make this as clear as I can. By “matter,” they don’t just mean that there are objects outside of us that have physical properties, such as weight, mass, density, solidity, charge, specific gravity, and so on—any property related to another by physical laws. They mean to say that those objects outside of us have only physical properties, and no other kind. In philosophy, a materialist isn’t someone who believes in accumulating wealth (that’s an ethical materialist), but a materialist in ontology—remember, in the theory of reality—is someone who says that reality itself has only physical properties and is governed only by physical laws.

That’s what Berkeley is talking about here. The people who say they’re atheists, who reject all religion, claim they’re materialists—that matter and energy are self-existent.

Let’s clarify this. A materialist is someone who believes that all reality has only physical properties and is governed by only physical laws. Now, I’m going to point out something right away—this is a pretty hard position to maintain. If you claim there are no logical laws, how are you going to argue for that? How are you going to attack other views and say, “No, these are false”? “False” isn’t a physical property. How are you going to tear apart someone else’s argument and claim they’ve made fallacies or invalid inferences if there are no logical laws?

So, a lot of atheists, who hold not only materialism in this strict sense, are actually dualists. They believe there are two kinds of properties and they add math and/or logic to materialism. In the dualistic view, all things have physical properties, but there are also logical properties that govern those things. So, they are physical/logical, or physical/mathematical. This way, we have a way of calculating material things and can actually do physics.

I mean, if things have only physical properties governed by only physical laws, there’s no science of physics, because there are no logical inferences—no reasons to support a conclusion. So, a lot of atheists, though they are dualists, still reject religion. The strict materialists, who make this claim that all reality has only physical properties governed by physical laws, are fewer, but they do still exist. They existed into the late 20th century, and there are some who still exist today.

Now, let’s put these down. For Berkeley, he wants to say that these are the reasons for being atheists, and he can show that these reasons are false. Because, are you ready for this? He’s going to argue that there are no such things as physical objects.

That's not a way I would have thought of approaching an atheist. I would want to give the atheist a chance to read Scripture and see if, by the testimony of the Spirit, it strikes them as being true—the truth about God from God. It’s a kind of "do it yourself" or "find the truth out for yourself" approach. But if I were going to try to make an argument, I don’t think I’d start by trying to disprove the existence of physical objects because I think they’re around me all the time. They’re not exclusively physical—it’s not that any of them have only physical properties—but almost everything I see around me has physical properties. This book, the tablet I’m using as my blackboard, the chair I’m sitting in, the books over my shoulder here—all have physical properties. But Berkeley’s going to argue that there are no physical things at all. That’s surely startling, but I assure you, he came up with ingeniously clever arguments.

One of the things that characterizes his philosophy is how young he was when he achieved this. He was about 25 or just a few years older when he started to write this stuff, and that’s unusual in philosophy. I’ve mentioned before—and many philosophers have commented on this, starting with Plato—that it takes people a while to live with their theory, work through it, see the holes, flaws, and weak points, and then figure out what could be done about them. This usually happens later in life. I think that’s true, and as you know, Christian philosophy worked out by Professor Dooyeweerd is brilliant in detail. Dooyeweerd wasn’t an exception, but George Berkeley was. He gave really clever arguments, and I’m going to start by reading some of them to you—not long passages, but long enough for you to get the point.

Berkeley says, “All the monstrous systems of atheists have relied on the alleged existence of material substance and the difficulty of understanding how it could be created by the simple command of God. The supposed existence of matter has made it easier for impious and profane persons to deride immaterial substance, to deride the idea that minds or souls are realities that are not physical, to suppose that souls are divisible and corruptible like the body, to deny providence, and to attribute the whole series of events to blind chance or fatal necessity.” So, he’s saying that if only we could get rid of matter, the atheist would lack the cover of an empty name to support their impiety.

But how can we get rid of matter without denying the validity of all of science? That’s how Berkeley approached this problem. Can I do two things: get rid of an external physical world, and still keep physics and astronomy?

He started out by arguing concerning the primary and secondary substances. I’ll remind you of this in this way: primary and secondary qualities. This distinction was first proposed by Galileo, then taken over by Descartes, and it occurs in Locke—though not in these terms, as Locke gives them different names. But let’s put it down the way Galileo laid it out.

Primary qualities are the physical properties: weight, mass, solidity, density, being a solid, liquid, gas, or plasma, and being subject to physical laws such as the second law of thermodynamics—that everything, unless acted on by an external force, gains entropy. So, everything tends to fall apart, disintegrate, or cool off. Primary qualities are also subject to other rules, like the laws of gravitation.

Secondary qualities are things like color, warmth, smoothness, wetness, smells, and tastes—such as the rotten egg smell of sulfur. So, it appears to have a color and is warm or cold (tactile sensation), smooth or rough (also tactile), has smells and tastes, and results in sounds registering in our ears.

In some cases, the dualist wants to say that both of these sides are true. They hold that primary qualities are true of our bodies, and secondary qualities are true of our souls or minds. That’s the way the dualist does it. For Galileo and Descartes, as you know, they endorsed dualism. They believed that’s the best we can do—so we have both sets of qualities. But remember, the secondary qualities are not out there in the world—they are true of things that have the primary properties.

And those primary properties give rise to, or cause, the secondary ones. So, in the dualist scheme, the primary qualities are all physical, and they somehow cause minds to see colors, hear sounds, feel surfaces that are smooth or rough, and perceive tastes and smells—all the senses. That’s what the dualists want to say.

What Berkeley is going to do here is claim a number of things. One, there’s no good way for these primary qualities to cause the secondary ones. If we introspectively examine the contents of our minds, we’ll find only the secondary qualities. Then the cruncher is this: he analyzes the terms we use for the primary qualities and finds that if you analyze them, you’ll see that they are terms for bundles of secondary qualities. In that case, there really are no primary qualities—there are only secondary ones. And the entirety of reality becomes what registers in minds.

So, in Berkeley’s ontology, he ends up with God, human minds, and the perceptions in those minds that God gives to them. And why do the perceptions agree with one another? I’ll use that term, “agree.” When I look over there, I see a door. When you look over there, you see a door. And someone far away looks over there and sees a door at a distance. Why is that? Because God sees to it. So, that’s what we mean by an object—we mean all the sensations that God gives to all the minds. And that’s what he does: he keeps it orderly. We all look over there and see a door; we all look over here and see a wall; and over my shoulder, we all see books. God coordinates them. And why couldn’t an all-powerful, all-knowing God do that? You want to tell me that God can’t create perceptions in minds and perceptions in minds? Why can’t he do that? I can just see Berkeley saying, “Give me a good reason why an omnipotent, all-powerful being couldn’t do that. Which part of omnipotence do you not get?”

So, we’re going to look at his arguments, and we’re going to take them very seriously. And as I said, I’ll read them to you. There’s a progression in them—he didn’t see all of this at once. He arrives at it gradually, and by the time he lays it out, it’s a cruncher. He says to a materialist, “What do you mean by solidity? Just take it back to the physical property.”

The materialist answers, “Well, if two things are solid in physics, then if you crash them together, neither can pass through the other without disrupting it. That’s part of what we mean.”

“Oh,” Berkeley says, “so you have the sight of one thing, the visual sight of another, and the visual sight of crashing them together, and one can’t go through the other without destroying it.”

Those are all sights, aren’t they? They’re all visual sensations in your mind. Of course, you can also feel that an object is solid—but isn’t that when one sight hits another sight, and where it hits your fist, you get tactile sensations too, of resistance, and it makes a certain sound? Now, if you take away the visual sights, the sounds, the tactile sensations—what’s left of the idea of solidity?

Now you have the materialist scrambling. He goes through one physical, allegedly physical, property after another and shows that they all reduce to bundles of sensations. And everybody has been conceding for 200 years or more that sensations exist only in minds.

There you have Berkeley’s theory of reality: reality consists of God, human minds, and the sensations God gives to minds. It’s a very extreme view, but there are some very clever arguments for it. You may be relieved to hear that they don’t work—there are certainly replies to Berkeley. But we’ll see all of that when we come back next time. We’re going to engage with him as fully as we can. That’s on the docket for our next lesson.