In comparison to most of his Early Modern predecessors, John Locke is not shy about embracing the mantle of atomism. On the other hand, Locke commences to provide a new context for atomism: that of the experimental hypothesis. Locke does not get around to explaining exactly how or why the atomist thesis is experimental. In truth, Locke affects to be something of an amateur at natural philosophy, but I do not see how this can be so.[1]
In departments of political science, Plato is the one with the elitist reputation. Locke, while subject to a fair share of criticism, is rarely singled out for his philosophical elitism. Yet for Plato, the commonest man knows truths of perceptual judgment just the same, and equally well, as the greatest philosopher. Whereas for Locke, the supposed egalitarian, not only do the non-philosophers fail to measure up to the philosophers in the domain of perceptual judgment; but the former are excluded from the congregation of truth altogether.
The mounting force of the Early Modern philosophic claim that man, as percipient, should be seen as merely part of the broader animal kingdom certainly does not by itself shock or offend any sacred beliefs. The problem resides in the lengths to which Locke and his brethren must go to deny, misrepresent, and otherwise suppress a true account of what takes place in human perception. That is the basis for the issue. While the many are consigned to this humble station, the philosophers rise to new heights of illustriousness in Locke’s model. One wonders, what exactly the philosophers are capable of knowing, if Locke’s strictures on perception were to prove true.
Nobody enters into human society, except through relationships of trust magnified one hundred fold. Parents, siblings, friends, educators, doctors, coaches: trust is the premise of learning. It does seem odd that Locke should look askance at this aspect of the human race, and seek to convert that trust into a badge of mediocrity or worse. Insofar as knowing the boundaries of truth and falsehood are concerned, Locke thinks there are “few to be found who are not exposed by their ignorance, laziness, education, or precipitancy, to take them upon trust.”[2] These that have not the leisure to study, owing to the labor they must undertake, are so far as Locke can tell incapable of independent judgment. Yet it does not take miraculous powers, to be able to judge what is a tree, what a babbling brook, what a murder: except that the Lockean philosophy of perception denies all of these judgments, in their veracity, and in their very conceivability.
Perception is the philosophical battleground that Locke takes up in the Essay. It is indeed true that Aristotle and Scholastic schools subscribe to the doctrine of species or kinds. Yet it is a gross misrepresentation to suggest that, in Aristotle’s view, he invented such a phenomenon. Mere observation establishes the existence of the kinds, which the very young and the very old identify and recognize with as much ease as they have in breathing. Locke seems to want to summon out of philosophy some super definition of species that could prove its warrant, aside from the fact that they are patterns, forms, the members of which are as alike one another, in many cases, as are a dozen eggs. Against the theory of species Locke advances his doctrine of complex ideas; which is based on a theory of simple ideas; which in turn are predicated upon causal powers in unknown external bodies. This indeed is not a chain of reasoning that one comes by among unlearned people. The atomism that is at its root is the cause of its obscurity.
Boyle and Newton contribute comparatively little to the philosophical development of this line of thought. Boyle expressly turns to the old atomists, which does a service to intellectual historians. Boyle admits, at least, the foundations of the theory.[3] Newton, for his part, works with concepts of atomism for which he does not bother to argue. Newton’s atomism is, essentially if not entirely, the atomism or theory of body Hobbes and Spinoza developed.
One must be aware of the changing position of Early Modern Philosophy in Locke’s England. The hysteria and confrontation characteristic of the reception of Bacon’s and Hobbes’s works is no more. Locke writes from a position that has been sufficiently prepared for by his predecessors. It is no longer necessary for the new philosophy to break down the doors to civilization. It works now from the inside, and it is interested in building institutions, a court of scientific authority. That which the ordinary people think they know, and which may serve them well enough in their daily business from Locke’s perspective, is looked upon very differently by the philosophers of whom Locke approves. This is the source of a new political order, a new set of political problems, which have yet to be adequately identified.
A substance, for both Aristotle and Locke, indicates the perishable external objects. For Aristotle, this is the being that is closest to ordinary faculties, and the easiest to know. For Locke, substance is a subject fit only for philosophers; and these philosophers, in order to properly identify a substance, must abandon much or all of what the ordinary opiners think of the object. Ordinary opinions, Locke argues, suffice for the purposes of “civil and common conversation.” Human beings can get along in the world well enough, Locke suggests, through their ordinary use of names. Yet truth is no part of this ordinary getting along in the world. This is where Locke departs quite radically from Aristotle. For “where general truths are to be established,” the “precise significations of names of substances” will be found apart from ordinary speech and its usages. In fact, even philosophy itself, Locke argues, will be hard pressed to define substances, once it has taken up an investigation into that which the ordinary opinions regard as effortlessly known.[4]
Machiavelli, in his Discourses, argues that “sects” last for a certain period of time, perhaps for fifteen or sixteen centuries.[5] A “sect” is based on a language, a philosophy, a point of view. Machiavelli, whose philosophical bona fides are still questioned by many of our experts, in his Discourses contemplates the range of philosophical eras in a way that is unprecedented. All of the developments envisioned by Machiavelli’s philosophy involve tumultuous change: upheaval for Machiavelli represents the nature of things, both cosmologically speaking and politically, when a proper philosophy is in place. A “sect,” in Machiavelli’s language, involves an ethos: a morality, a philosophical disposition, a set of first principles, a way. Locke possesses this sort of awareness as he writes his Essay. Locke, as we have indicated, did not take the first steps in founding the sect of Early Modern Philosophy. Yet he is consolidating the first steps, codifying them for all time as it were. At the heart of Locke’s enterprise is the attempt to set forth limits as to what the human mind can and cannot know.
In order for a new sect to emerge, it must overthrow the existing sect. Machiavelli discusses the victory of Christianity over paganism as one example. Accidents such as plagues or floods might wipe a civilization away, Machiavelli acknowledges; but human beings can also institute the change in sects themselves. “Those that come from men are the variations of sects and of languages.”[6] “For when a new sect—that is a new religion—emerges, its first concern is to extinguish the old to give itself reputation; and when it occurs that the orderers of the new sect are of a different language, they easily eliminate it.”[7] The war that Bacon, that Hobbes and Spinoza wage against the philosophers in the line of Socratic Greece—this involves such a change of sects. The philosophical language of Plato and Aristotle is laid upon the foundations of ordinary opinion: to explain the causes of the objects actually external to us in the world is a major part of that Greek project. In the Early Modern Philosophy, our access, and philosophy’s access, to the humble facts of perceptual experience is arrested, suspended, to be detained indefinitely. Atomism is an old doctrine, but it had never before been configured in the style of philosophical regime that the Early Moderns, and Locke most effectively, aspire to.
When a civilization has been wiped out, what occurs? The institutions that preserve knowledge are badly damaged, or destroyed. Especially philosophy is easily lost, since it is understood by so few people to begin with; but philosophy is mightily powerful, wherever it exists, because it establishes the resolution of disputes and arguments for an historical period. Machiavelli tells us, that when a civilization is eclipsed, that the new breed of philosophers is in possession of a rare opportunity: for it can begin to establish a new reputation for the old philosophy.[8] Since Machiavelli, what shall be preserved about the teaching of Plato and Aristotle? Whatever the philosopher, Machiavelli observes, decides to represent. And thus Machiavelli himself almost never refers to Plato and Aristotle by name. He doesn’t want to give his adversaries so much recognition. Yet he offers up a caricature of their theories, both in the Prince (Plato) and in the Discourses (Aristotle). Locke is writing in such a time of foundings.
Locke, in his Essay, seeks to pare back the authority of ordinary thought. Yet he also seeks to emancipate philosophical thought from the laws of evidence that are attendant to ordinary thought. Thus, while Locke subtracts a considerable amount of authority from those perceptions that ordinary people have, and upon which their opinions depend—he can also be seen to create new liberties for philosophers: to construct languages, and whole mental realities all their own. One can’t understand Locke’s Essay without a proper focus on his atomism; for this atomism entails a set of deductive philosophical convictions that Locke’s epistemology does not provide for. By focusing upon Locke’s atomism, it is possible to comprehend the degree to which he is seeking to elevate philosophical authority far above ordinary opinion in political terms.
The atomist theory is a deductive, metaphysical theory. It is not a theory of probability by any means. It believes that it has discovered the cause of generation in the world. The cause of the atoms is that the eternal supply of seeds for the purposes of generation must be replenished. This is the atomist theory which has been bequeathed to Locke. It is not a theory that can be learned by any sort of experience. It is not a theory that can be proved by any experiment. For the atoms are not merely held to be eternal; but they are likewise held by these philosophers to constitute the essential truth of perception. In a million years, without atomist philosophers such as Locke, the generality of human beings would never have thought on it.
Scholars frequently wave away concern with Locke’s doctrine of perception on the following grounds. They observe that Locke has said that nature has equipped man well enough with these sensory faculties to enable him to get along in the world. These scholars do not take seriously the crisis that is latent in Locke’s teaching. For while Locke allows that people may know objects well enough to be able to make use of them, he does not concede so much as the reality that ordinary people know what these objects are. Not only are the ordinary opinions epistemologically disenfranchised here; but a new region for philosophic authority, purified of all involvement with mere perception, is likewise being developed. There is no political relationship more fundamental than who has the competence to know truth of fact. Ordinary human beings have as much occasion to consult truth as philosophers do. Yet in Locke’s model, the ordinary speakers are deemed incompetent to know for themselves what are the humblest truths of perception, knowledge that experience had never taught them to doubt.
By nature, human beings seek to expand their knowledge. They begin with opinions, informed by perceptions about several objects. They may be horses, rivers, courage, justice, the list can be quite lengthy. The natural progression for the development of human opinion, is to begin with what experience teaches us about these respective objects, and then to proceed to analyze the qualities which objects of the same type have in common. This is the natural direction of opinion. Most non-philosophers do not push their investigations very far. Yet they do indeed learn from particulars, what a kind of object is. An individual who witnesses a murder for the first time obviously is in no position to judge of it. Yet once she has one experience under her belt, she will recognize the next one she comes upon, without any help from the Lockean philosopher.
This train of development of opinion, which must constitute the majority of partisan political opinions and perhaps religious doctrines as well in a city or state, is however being led into a new sort of regime by Locke. In this regime, the evidence obtainable by perception, instead of serving as the unquestionable foundation for opinion’s development, is consecrated into a problem. That which the individual is absolutely sure that she knows, the new philosophy insists, she not only does not know, but cannot know. This doctrine of perception seeks to clip the wings of opinion before it ever obtains the opportunity to actually become an opinion. It is the original evidence of experience that Locke’s atomistic doctrines seek to call before the court of science, to arrest and suspend their progress.
The scholars who have investigated Locke’s atomism, have not been much exposed to the philosophical foundations of the doctrine.[9] The sect of Early Modern Philosophy has draped that part of the philosophical heritage in solemn silence. One can only get it by studying the texts of Plato and Aristotle. If one takes up the study of Plato and Aristotle in our scholarship, one will find that the extensive influence of Wittgenstein and Russell and formal logic drive the investigations to a considerable extent. It is not likely that philosophies steeped in atomism will provide us with impartial readings of Plato and Aristotle.
“Empirical” is a name that has caused considerable confusion. We need to have a definition of the empirical, so that we know what the words we are using mean. For the atomist philosopher, the object of perception is not external objects. It is not horses, and apples, trees and rocks. The object of perception, for the atomist contingent, is a mental event. This mental event is theoretically isolated from external objects. It is said to be caused by the collision of atoms with the actual sensory organs. These philosophers, beginning with Epicurus really, profess to be “empirical”; but if you ask them to explain exactly what is perceived, it is not going to amount to the ordinary objects that the generality of human beings believe themselves to perceive.
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding begins with a book that is a bit agitated. Locke takes some offense at those who believe themselves to harbor innate ideas, or ideas that are miraculously present when a human being is born. It is not easy to determine exactly which philosophers Locke is singling out for this censure. Descartes certainly does not qualify as someone espousing innate ideas; for one must undergo a rigorous thought process to arrive at the postulate of certainty that Descartes aims for. Nor can one refer to Plato as someone who believes in innate ideas, despite his theory of the souls that possess all knowledge prior to birth. For in Plato’s theory, one needs sense perception in order to revive the ideas that the soul is said to have originally possessed, but forgotten at birth.
One wants to understand the exact nature of the innate ideas that are being debated in book I of the Essay. Locke does give a fair number of examples: such as Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, and the principle that “nothing comes from nothing.” Locke does not identify the progenitors of the philosophical maxim that nothing comes from nothing. Virtually all of pre-Socratic philosophy espoused the belief that “nothing comes from nothing,” beginning with the Ionian natural philosophers and culminating in Aristotle’s own theory. Yet the Ionian natural philosophers, Anaxagoras and Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle all have a theory of generation. There is a branch of the principle that “nothing comes from nothing” that either denies generation outright (Parmenides and Zeno) or that sustains a theory of body which is ineligible to undergo the changes that true coming into being requires: which includes Leucippus and Democritus. Yes the atomists espouse this version of the “nothing comes from nothing” theory. Which means, not incidentally, that Locke must also hold this theory, even if he is not conscious of that fact.
G. A. R. Rogers argues that it would be unfair to class Locke’s corpuscularian doctrine as itself evidence of natural philosophical principles. Locke is clearly an experimentalist in Roger’s view, and he would adjust his point of view if any evidence were to present itself.[10] I hope by this point in our study, that we can regard Dr. Roger’s theory as overcome. There is no conceivable experimental basis for the theory of atomism, since its principal raison d’être is a theory of generation (though a problem-ridden one). Locke’s entire theory of perception is deduced from atomistic postulates, without experimental evidence. Locke’s familiarity with the Zenonian teaching about principles of infinite divisibility, as we will see, is considerable. This rates as perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated concept from Eleatic philosophy. Locke, it is true, does not appear to be familiar with Plato’s refutation of the same. Yet the point is that Plato’s refutation is not an experiment, no more than the principle of infinite divisibility itself is a thesis generated by experiments. Locke’s attempt to swaddle atomist philosophy in experimental blankets is part of an effort, which Boyle’s work certainly did not support—to bury the trail of atomist philosophy in its metaphysical foundations.
The atomist philosophy, it is acknowledged, was a sincere attempt to formulate a theory of genesis based on Parmenides’s seemingly incontrovertible argument that “something cannot come from something” either. The atoms concede eternal being, which they are exemplars of; yet unlike Parmenides’s single “being,” the atoms are many and they can at least be said to “fall” in the void. Leucippus and Democritus were among the best natural scientists of their generation, in Aristotle’s view. Yet the atoms are not capable of undergoing change: not of alteration and not of genesis. Even locomotion, as we have noted, is only indirectly ascribed to the atoms. It is really the void that is the cause of that local movement.
Boyle had some influence upon Locke, but there is no evidence in Locke’s writings of the names of Leucippus and Democritus, of Epicurus and Lucretius. Boyle is to some degree simply embarrassed by the atomist attempt to explain the genesis of human beings. Forms must exist for the human being and all the animals, Boyle concedes; for it is not conceivable that random collisions of atoms could ever explain such craftsmanship. Boyle also expresses concern about the atheism of the classical atomists, or at least in their belief in deities which do not care a whit for human things. Locke does make some references to intelligence in the universe at one point in the Essay; but Locke never admits the existence of any form, as Boyle has done.[11] Locke adheres to the denial of our knowledge of a substance, which are all based upon these forms, even in the case of human beings—which he regards as mere complex ideas.
Locke’s denial that there are natural kinds, that there is such a thing as a human form, is presented at length in the exchange of letters with the Bishop of Worcester. Stillingfleet keeps coming back to the point: “we have three men: Peter, John and James. Yet they are all but men, i.e. all one natural kind.” Rogers’s point that Locke is an experimentalist in terms of natural philosophy isn’t born out by this exchange either. It is certainly everyone’s experience that Tom, Peter, and John are all individual men. Manhood is essential to each of these three distinct individuals. The kind “man” is therefore a universal, something that is capable of being part of more than one particular object. Locke, however, doesn’t budge. Moreover, it is important to notice the way that Locke addresses the challenge. Locke seeks to represent the claim that “John is a man” as utterly trivial. Yet it is not trivial in Locke’s philosophy, for Locke denies that we can possess so much clear knowledge. In fact, it is all of the most trivial knowledge, as commonly regarded, which has suddenly become esoteric according to Locke’s doctrine. That is a major issue in the movement of his theory of the understanding.
The atomism that Locke carries with him, in its metaphysical implications, denies all of the evidence of perception tout court. This is due to the fact of the atomist theory’s pedigree: Parmenides’s “being” gives the lie to all perceptual knowledge, and the atomists (more than the other pluralists) espouse this orthodoxy. “Therefore all the things that mortals have established, believing in their truth, are just a name: becoming and perishing, being and not-being, and change of position, and alteration of bright color.”[12]
Leucippus and Democritus, as noted above, likewise forsake the capacities of atoms to undergo change of alteration or genesis. Only the backhanded or passive capacity for locomotion is conceded, and it is this same locomotion of atoms which must underlie the entirety of Locke’s perceptual process. “One must learn by this rule that man is severed from reality,” Democritus writes. “We know nothing about anything really, but opinion is for all individuals an inflowing.”[13] “Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; atoms and void alone exist in reality. . . . We know nothing accurately in reality, but only as it changes according to the bodily conditions, and the constitution of those things that flow upon (the body) and impinge upon it.”[14]
Locke’s definition of the simple ideas, which are the ultimate furniture of the mind for Locke, savor enough of Democritus’s pronouncements. Locke approaches the arena of experience from a position of theoretical detachment. No ordinary individual takes herself to know, that her perception of an apple is actually an atomist process, whereby her body undergoes a certain change of state, leaving her still without any knowledge of the mysterious substratum that the sensed qualities are thought to inhere in.
When Locke begins to talk about the senses, he does not begin to talk about how objects are. The sensory-perceptual organs, for Locke, are not fitted to provide us with accurate information as to the “whatness” of objects. It is the senses themselves which are “affected” in perception, Locke argues. The sense perception that takes place, according to Locke, does not bring us information as to the whatness of objects. What the senses bring to the mind, is not accurate information, but rather something that “produces those perceptions.”[15]
I do not see how this can permit much of a distinction between the division of “primary” and “secondary” qualities. Locke is denying in this passage that the senses are able to know the whatness of objects. This must apply to all of the senses. That is in keeping with the atomist philosophy. What is perceived, Locke insists, is not information as to what objects are; what is brought into the mind, is defined simply as that which can cause our minds to be affected in this or that way.
The generality of mankind believes that the apple is a unity, a whole, a discrete object. Locke here unleashes the power of the atomist argument: for we cannot, he alleges against the universal consent of human beings, know any “substratum” underlying these qualities.[16] In the first book of the Essay, when Locke is discussing the innate ideas, it never really is quite clear whom he is attacking among philosophers. Even when Locke is talking about diversity in moral beliefs among human communities in the first book of the Essay, not many individuals, philosophic or non-philosophic, would put up much resistance against the argument that all things, including morals, enter the mind through learning and experience. It is only really in the discussion of the simple ideas where we find Locke himself truly challenging the generality of the human race, and the general consent of mankind: for this general consent is no mirage, and it does not believe that it lacks direct experience of the apple. This is the point of ultimate break. It is the reason why ordinary opinion is not eligible to provide constitutive evidence to Locke’s court of science. Locke’s philosophy does not believe in the bodies that the ordinary people believe in. Locke’s attempts to paper over the differences are not the point either: the point is that Locke will not budge from this recalcitrant position, despite all of his amiableness and truly remarkable rhetorical skill.
When Locke makes the transition to perception in book II of the Essay, it is clearly part of a well-wrought design. If the doctrine of innate ideas is a rehearsal for the truly bold pronouncements in book II, it serves its purpose. To be able to subject the alleged innate ideas to punishing criticisms certainly makes Locke appear to be a devotee of experience when he turns to the simple ideas in the second book. Yet these simple ideas, that are alleged to be the building blocks of the mind, are not even held to correspond, in many cases, to any objects that exist in nature. Nor can the simple ideas be known, according to Locke. They can only be named. Substances are what the human race takes itself to perceive. By this I mean the Aristotelian idea of substance, which indicates the individual perishable objects. This is the idea of substance that Locke is attacking. When we would talk about the “constitution” of any object, or that in which its properties “depend,” Locke says, here it is possible that “all of our ideas of substances are false.”[17]
As soon as Locke turns to the issue of sensory perception, we are confronted with the atomist theory. We are confronted by a theory that, in its philosophical and metaphysical roots, denies the reality of the perishable objects themselves. Our knowledge is arrested by Locke at the level of mental objects: Locke denies that the mind can know the unity of the object which possesses the qualities that the simple ideas are said to represent. In Locke’s view, our simple ideas are mysterious. First, they qualify as conditions of our souls, brought about by we know not what objects. Sensation is an occasion for our souls to be “affected” for Locke; he is not sanguine about such sensations being able to tell us anything true about external objects. Secondly, the most we can know about any alleged external object, must observe the atomistic definition of a whole: it must involve a sum of simple ideas, a bundle, “by collecting such combinations of simple ideas, as are by experience and observation” noticed to exist together. The object, whatever it is, Locke insists, cannot be known in any other way than that of “certain simple ideas coexisting together.”[18]
Nobody, not even philosophers outside of their office hours, describe perceptible objects as bundles of qualities. It is not a collection, after all, that we perceive or behold. What we perceive is a whole. The whole, as we have discussed, is not a mere sum of its parts. Yet that is what Locke’s complex ideas all are: a mere sum of parts. The horse is a distinct unity. If it did not have this part of unity, it would not, could not exist. The horse must, in addition, possess the part of being. This is not the same as to say, that we who behold a horse, ascribe being to the idea of a horse we have in our brains. The horse must actually possess the part of being in its constitution. These fundamental metaphysical parts of the horse, its unity and being, are as real as the extremities of the animal: its size, its shape, its color, its number of legs.
Furthermore, this horse must have all the parts of a whole: it must have had a beginning in time, and be fated to a future time when it loses the part of being. It must be subject to alteration such as living objects are, growing at certain times, changing color at certain periods of time, needing to eat and drink. If what I am describing to the reader is not the account of what we actually perceive when we behold a horse, I await the judgment. What is certain is that the horse that I am describing is nothing like the collection of qualities that Locke is enumerating in his theory of complex ideas.
It would be wrong too to suggest that Locke is entirely a trailblazer in these arguments. Descartes’ definition of body is itself as philosophically eccentric as Locke’s is. Moreover Hobbes and Spinoza unleashed mighty attacks upon forms and universals in perception and nature. It must certainly embolden the later thinkers, when the earlier thinkers have found no serious competent opposition. It is certain that the non-philosophers are helpless in such debates; and though the religious like Stillingfleet make a noble effort at engaging Locke, it is clear that he does not possess sufficient philosophy to really carry on the battle.
What ordinary people can never learn, is that the redness in the apple, is redness in our minds merely. What the ordinary people can never learn, or endure to believe, is that the coming into being and passing away of the apple is an unreal, or merely epiphenomenal thing. That these are the new bedrock of philosophy’s conception of truth in Locke, indicates the degree of tension that will be inherent in the emerging cultural form. Ordinary ideas will naturally collide with the new model of science. Nor is there a way for the ordinary opinion to finally establish its beliefs, in the face of a science which has philosophically redefined what it means to have perceptions.
It seems fair to point out here that Locke feels not the slightest bit of affection for political or public speech. I sometimes think that Locke would rather have it that there is no speech at all that takes place between, not only members of society and their political representatives; but even among the learned. Locke does not dignify any theory of forms, not even Stillingfleet’s, as a reasonable point of view that may be held in philosophic speech in his model society. From political speech, Locke seems to think, there is nothing to be gained but useless conflict. Political speech can only take place about common objects, of course. In Locke’s philosophy common objects are not possible for the purposes of discourse. Philosophy can supply general definitions, based on its own sort of authority, and this can order opinions apart from discourse. That seems to be what Locke prefers.[19]
Elea is the home of Parmenides and Zeno, his companion. We have seen that Locke himself is obliged to the principle that “nothing comes from nothing,” but also to the conviction that something cannot come from something. Genesis is stricken from Locke’s ontology, for the simple reason that no atomist ontology can truly defend a theory of generation successfully. Locke’s reduction of objects to bundles of qualities, is close enough to the atomist portrait of the macroscopic object as a mere arrangement of particles. “Substance” concerns the whole: but in the atomist story, there really is no whole. For the same reason why physics in the twentieth century began to omit body from its official ontology—Locke’s attack on substance, on the “substratum” of the object, derives from the atomist principles. Zeno was instrumental in bringing atomism about, with his attacks on the principle of plurality in nature. Locke expresses fondness and admiration for Zeno’s arguments, though he does not name their author.
Zeno offers proofs to demonstrate that it is not possible for the hare to ever overtake the tortoise; that it is impossible for the arrow ever to move. Zeno also offers arguments to prove that it is impossible that there is more than one thing in nature. Zeno’s elenchus, which Plato’s Socrates takes up in the second movement of the Parmenides, involves the principle of “infinite divisibility.” Locke calls our attention to this principle. We cannot disprove it or answer its riddles, Locke observes.
Locke does not tell us that Zeno’s arguments from infinite divisibility are designed to prove the reality of Parmenides’s single “being.” Locke does not tell us that Zeno’s arguments actually seemed to have provoked the atomist thesis: that the atoms were posited as metaphysical realities to forestall Zeno’s argument and the infinite cutting and reduction that it imposes. Locke’s familiarity, indeed intimate familiarity with the principle of infinite divisions makes it seem quite likely that he is fully informed about the role that the theory played in the atomist ontology.
Locke, in his discussions of infinite divisibility whether of matter or consciousness, is being quite original. For Locke unfolds the principle of infinite divisibility, in both cases, as a set of challenges to human identity. This is not something Zeno can lay claim to. Locke spends some time discussing the difficulty of knowing immaterial objects. Below, we will examine how Locke investigates the general subject of human identity. For the moment, we are interested in how Locke appraises our capacity to know bodies. In Locke’s view, the subject matter of body contains within it certain paradoxes that are more serious and devastating than any problems besetting our knowledge of the immaterial. The subject of the divisibility of matter or body, Locke argues, is very problematic, “involving us . . . in consequences impossible to be explicated.”[20]
As we have discussed above, Plato does conquer Zeno’s theory of infinite divisibility as regards body, or matter. The reason for the success of Zeno’s theory originally, was his assumption that body is homogeneous. This in fact was Parmenides’s assumption: that there is only “being,” without parts. “Nor is being divisible, for it is all alike.”[21] Plato has proved that no body, no object, is “simple.” Unity and being are the two coequal natures, that the smallest body in nature, or the largest body in nature, must possess. This heterogeneity of body makes Zeno’s riddles of divisibility resolvable. For Plato demonstrates that it is absolutely undeniable, once the coequal natures of unity and being are established, that there is the true reality of a “whole.” Wholes have extremities, limits: they are not subject to infinite divisibility; and this line of thinking therefore overcomes Zeno’s argument.
Whack away at a real whole of parts in nature, and you will destroy it. There is no perplexity involved, only violence. The extremities of a body include its shape, its magnitude, its color, its texture. These are all the parts of a body that would be articulated in the theory of “substance” that Locke works so hard to deny. Yet they can’t be denied, not if truth is to be our guide.
There is a purpose to the effort of attempting to establish a general bearing on Locke’s disposition in the Essay. Great scholars believe that Locke is a spokesperson for common sense; that his theories of understanding are designed to alleviate man’s vulnerability to useless mental adventures. Perhaps Locke’s discussion of identity and diversity can be a moment for persuasion. It is not the experience of the generality of the human race that they lack an identity. This is to say, it is not the general experience of the human race, that they have more consciousnesses than they can keep track of, or coordinate, within the province of one self. Nor is it the experience of the human race that they have a succession of different bodies, making them effectively different substances from one moment to the next.
Locke portrays himself, in the Essay, as seeking to introduce the reader to the modest but convenient limitations of mental life that our Creator has intended for us. This has certainly been an effective rhetorical instrument for Locke, in his introduction of the theory of simple ideas. Yet when Locke undertakes to argue, as he does, that one man is possessed of a succession of bodies; or that one woman is possessed of a multitude of consciousnesses, these arguments seem to follow a very different plan. For the ordinary individual, of modest pretensions to knowledge, she has but one body, and one identity. Locke, relying upon Zeno’s notorious instrument of argument, would like to require of the human race that it adapt to much more demanding, puzzling, and uncomfortable postulates. How these arguments of Locke’s serve man as “practical principles’ has yet to be sufficiently established.[22]
Locke loosely begins with Descartes’ dualism: the mind-body distinction. In the criticisms appended to Descartes’ Meditations, Pierre Gassendi refers to Descartes as “O Soul!” This is a jesting reference to Descartes’ belief that the only thing that he can truly be certain of is his consciousness and the existence of that. Descartes, in his reply to the atomist Gassendi, refers to him as “O Body!” It is a humorous exchange, but it also furnishes Locke with his two objects for division: consciousness and body.
The first challenge Locke poses to us involves atomism directly. In the atomist perspective, the atoms are the true bodies. They are incapable of change. They can hook onto one another, due to their shapes; but they cannot blend with one another, like the elements in a cake batter can. The atoms retain their bodily integrity eternally. They are not eligible to become true parts in a whole. For when a whole passes away, its parts pass away with it.
Yet to resume with the atomist ontology: individual atoms constantly come and go, entering into the loose configuration of atoms and departing. Locke, adhering to the concept of a whole which is based on the atomist ontology, defines a whole strictly speaking as the sum of its parts. Thus, for one atom to be removed, and a single new one added, is to change the body effectively into a new whole, a new body.[23] In the atomist theory, atoms can drift in and out of a configuration at every moment. So by that ontology, the identity of the whole body would change from moment to moment. Locke puts this theory out there, to argue to us that we in fact have multitudes of bodies. Locke does very little to attempt to relieve us of the difficulty which his ingenuity has wrought.
Locke can wield the principle of infinite division in the area of human consciousness as well. Locke is choosing, in his definition of human identity, both bodily and in terms of consciousness, to humiliate the name of “substance” as fiercely as he can. In fact, Locke is using the theoretical axioms that originally generated the atomist thesis, to saddle substance with a certain degree of ignominy and disrepute. The individual, Locke argues, can be said to have a personal identity that exists whenever she is thinking. This personal identity can be said to exist, for so long as memory stretches as well. Yet Locke feels compelled to complicate the theory. For the single person does not always have every memory in front of her. She sometimes has an interrupted consciousness. What becomes of personal identity in these moments? In Locke’s view, if our consciousness should be interrupted for any reason or amount of time, “doubts are raised” whether we are the same thinking thing, the same “substance” or not.[24]
We can behold now the magical powers of Locke’s philosophy of names. The names of “substance” and “identity” and “person” are mixed and matched, but Locke does not take pains to establish clear distinctions for the reader based on her experiences. How else might she be able to follow the nomenclature? “Thus we see the substance, whereof personal self consisted at one time, may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity.”[25] The individual’s “self,” is not synonymous for Locke, with her “personal identity.” I confess that this usage of speech is too complex for me. Like the untrained philosopher, I must surrender my efforts to follow the train of definitions, to see where they may intersect with my own experience; for Locke’s nomenclature is rhetoric of power and control, not of truth. The generality of human beings would not uphold Locke’s distinction between the names “personal identity” and “self.” That is the issue. This is the entire reason for my concern with Locke’s efforts to amputate the use of names from our original experience, that is, perception without the atomist interpretation. It is about the ligaments of language as our sole medium for finding ourselves in our common experience; and the hazards to which this is entirely exposed by Locke’s conception of science.
The object, which is termed by Aristotle “substance” (i.e., trees, rocks, houses) does not have anything to do with “self,” Locke argues. On the face of it, this is a strange argument to make to ordinary people, or on behalf of ordinary people. For they do not view themselves as a bundle of distinct objects, contained within one consciousness. The divisions that Locke has created in body and mind, are sustained in his argument: he only undertakes to represent “self,” as a whole of parts in the atomist model, whereby each self has a number of bodies under its umbrella, and a number of memories as well. It is as if each person is an army of persons, but somehow unified (in the way that the atoms are somehow unified) to produce a self.[26]
Locke is using the name of substance in a way completely at variance with Aristotle’s theory. For Aristotle, the substance is a perishable object. It might be a human being, or it might be a tree, or a pebble. If the substance is a human being, then this substance possesses consciousness and body. The substance is a unity. It is not a part of some miscellaneous whole. Locke’s attempt to impress the name of “substance” into his definitions of body and mind, casting the term into roles which are wholly at variance with the theory of Aristotle to which Locke is so allergic, must be conceded to be a sort of subterranean combat. It is not a helpful way to address philosophers or non-philosophers. It brings us back to the issue of what exactly is it that the new court of philosophic speech in Locke will be able to consult, to bring a more precise signification to the meaning of names? Locke’s whole theory of perception is determined to eject perceptual evidence from such determinations as to truth.
This definition that Locke makes requires the reader to accept that a man has a number of bodies, a number of consciousnesses, and therefore even consists in a number of substances; but that this can all be comfortably fit under the umbrella of one personal identity. The ordinary individual would not be happy with these refinements of language. For if he is truly a succession of bodies (he is not), then he cannot be a single identity. This is how common sense would approach the issue. And if a man had a number of discrete consciousnesses, or immaterial substances within himself, as Locke would have it—then once again this would, in the ordinary view, rend personal identity to the core. My point is that Locke is bringing these afflictions to the mind of the reader, when they do not even exist in reality in the first place. The true definition of a whole, the nature of a whole, will reveal that it has but one set of extremities; that it does not have a succession of bodies, in its extremities; for the principle of infinite division cannot apply there, for the reasons adduced above. Nor yet is there any crowd of consciousnesses, that must be loosely enrolled under the one personal identity that Locke sets up. In Locke’s definition of a self, encumbered as it is with all of these divisions, and dragging in the philosophical language of multiple substances into the equation in addition, I must confess I find no guardrails being furnished to the human race in its efforts to guide itself with secure knowledge.
It makes a great deal of difference how Locke proposes to define “identity.” Through the prisms of Locke’s science, we can behold the brave new world in which we live. Every individual is supposed to have so many orientations, preferences, genetic predispositions. In every individual there is a multitude. In common experience, and in common sense, of course, the individual is just that: an individual. The individual is a unity, and the various parts of the self must cohere in a single order. Locke perhaps helped to pave the way for this dicing up of the personality into such a varied portfolio; but one can observe that precious little care has been taken for the eventual reconciliation of such competing selves, as the philosophers conceive of it, in the lives of the human beings whose identities are formed through such theories of education.
Locke’s simple ideas are a theory of phenomenology. It involves an equation. The ordinary individual believes that she has direct perception of the apple and its attributes: she believes, as Aristotle would say, that she perceives the “substance.” The red belongs to the apple. The taste belongs to the apple. The white on the inside belongs to the apple. Also the shape, the texture, the fact that the apple will smash if you hurl it against a wall. The fact that the apple will go bad after a certain number of days. The fact that one can use it to make apple cider. This whole worldview is cast to the hazard by Locke’s metaphysics. For Locke, the apple becomes the “apple.” What is obvious to the ordinary percipient, is not to Locke and his associates. The only explanation for this difference, is what the Lockean philosophers believe themselves to know about the perceptual process itself. This philosophy is steeped in atomism.
The apple becomes the “apple”: that is, the mere label, rather than the direct object. What happened to the object? Our senses cannot reach to it, Locke argues. Aristotle’s theory of a substance indicates the direct object. This is what Locke has argued we must surrender, as a bridge too far for our capacities to know. If the apple has become the “apple,” then what do we experience? Not the redness of the apple; not the roundness of the apple, not the sweetness of the apple; what we experience are “simple ideas,” that is, ideas caused in us, by we know not what.
Before, when we were talking about substances, the issue of simple ideas came up. The issue that I want to return to is whether or not Locke thinks it is possible for our sensory faculties to give us accurate information about the “whatness” of the objects we perceive. Above, I argued that it is not possible, in Locke’s view. It is established that there is only one way for the senses to function: bodies “without us” can only affect us “by the immediate contact of sensible bodies.” This indicates the atomist theory. For the atoms directly collide with our sensory organs in that theory, as opposed to Aristotle’s theory where the senses are separated from external objects by mediums, such as air. Since we are not aware of external objects actually colliding with our sensory organs, Locke instructs us, these must be “insensible particles.” Locke says that he knows of no other way for external bodies to affect us, except by “immediate contact.”[27]
Martha Brandt Bolten says that Locke’s simple ideas represent the objects external to us faithfully, in his view. Yet this is not Locke’s theory.[28] Locke presents us with the doctrine of “powers.” The ordinary individual does not think that what he perceives is caused by powers. He perceives the apple. No, says Locke. There are objects external to us, and we don’t know what they are themselves. We only know how they affect us. Thus the wall between ordinary perception and the objects, the full-fledged emergence of epistemology. The ordinary individual does not believe that the sweetness, the redness, the roundness are merely phenomena of his brain, rather than attributes of the external object.[29] In Locke’s model, they cannot be attributes. They are merely effects. What possesses the powers?
The reason why we must view Locke’s doctrine of perception as a metaphysical theory, is because the atoms are metaphysical objects. These are the “insensible particles.” In atomist philosophy, the reason for the atoms’ smallness is the fact that actually perceptible bodies display the kinds of qualities that atomism cannot certify: perishable objects grow and undergo alteration; they come into being and pass away; they are liable to damage in their extremities. If one thinks about it, there really is no reason for Locke to challenge the perceptual faculties of human beings, even given his atomism. If the atomist believes that atoms underlie the perishable objects, and that these invisible objects return to furnish nature with the seeds necessary for future generation, that does not inescapably require the philosopher to indict ordinary perception. Locke indicts ordinary perception, because the atoms are a theory of reality. The atoms are a theory of what the real beings in nature are. This is the full implication of Parmenides’s serious impact on the pluralist philosophers. The pluralist philosophers to a man surrender the language of coming into being and passing away, due to the metaphysical postulates of Parmenides’s theory. That is a very big and real issue for human beings, the reality or illusory nature of mortality. Locke is committed to the metaphysical view all the way: this is why he quibbles with the ordinary individual as to what she is actually capable of knowing in perception, even though no ordinary experience ever presented an individual with any difficulties in this region of experience.
Locke’s claim merely to be helping the human race adjust to its inborn limitations in the faculties of knowing doesn’t hold up: in fact, Locke severely criticizes the humblest of these faculties, and he does so from the vantage point of a theory which believes that it possesses vastly superior knowledge to anything that can be derived from perception. This is contrary to Locke’s official claims. His theory of perception itself subverts those claims. Locke says that he only relies upon experience and observation, along with “conjectures” of his own free devising, to reach his conclusions. The trouble is that Locke’s conjectures include atomism, a theory which takes over the departments of experience and observation in a way that is not compatible with the ordinary experience.[30]
That Locke appeals, in his conversations with other men, to what they experience and observe, is certainly true. What is certainly false is that Locke himself obtained his insights, or alleged insights, from experience and observation. We have remarked above that Locke seeks to establish a clear separation between the civil use of speech and the philosophic use of speech. Such a division deserves to be remarked upon, precisely because Locke professes to be unfolding a philosophy which reveals distinct limitations across all of human thought and mental life. It really isn’t so. Locke’s philosophers are capable of discovering vastly different objects, and vastly different uses of the common names, than what is ordinarily construed; and given the paucity of faculties that Locke alleges to be the predicament of man, it is not clear exactly why such a division would be at all appropriate, or even possible.
As noted above, Locke is content that the ordinary signification of names is sufficient for people to conduct their business, to both interact with one another and to engage in “commerce.” Such speech is allowed to pass by Locke for matter of “convenience.” However, it is many times that occasions arise in contracts and the conduct of commerce, of various sorts, where truth becomes a very pivotal issue. In such situations, where truth is at issue, the ordinary signification of names has no standing. It is the philosophical use of words alone that can “serve to convey the precise natures of things,” and to express “certain and undoubted truths.” The problem is that these precise natures of things, and certain and undoubted truths, are in Locke’s account severed from the perception of fact altogether.[31]
The history of civilization reveals very clearly that there is no way to muzzle philosophers. Every period is marked by philosophy, though it may go by other names. In one civilization the priests may effectively ascertain certain decisive truths for the cultural direction of the people. In other periods of civilization, such as at Athens during the time of Socrates and Democritus, an entire litany of philosophers were able to discourse on their theories, without much let or hindrance, or damage to the public. Quite the contrary. Yet if Plato dreamt of philosopher kings, he never developed a realistic plan for bringing such into power. The best that Plato could do, if we trust the legitimacy of the Letters ascribed to Plato, is to believe that he was persuaded to try to change the mind of the tyrant of Sicily, to convert him to true philosophy. According to that letter, the truth of which I cannot vouch for, Plato’s experiment ended up disastrously for him: that is, he was sold into slavery, allegedly, and had to be purchased by his friends anew.
Locke is entertaining a very different set of propositions. Locke belongs to the Machiavellian line of philosophers. This genealogy of philosophy puts practical implementation of political authority and philosophy into the first rank of concernments. Locke envisions, and not without warrant, a future civilization in which philosophy, his version of philosophy, has become dominant, and perhaps all the while preserving its anonymity in so doing. The people cannot understand philosophy. If philosophy undertakes to supply itself with a different theory of what language is, to guide its own usage, the community may well never be the wiser. Yet, as I have indicated above, it has severe implications for the ordinary life. For in a community so regulated by an atomistic culture, or a culture subservient to a like natural philosophy, the ultimate pronouncements upon truth will refuse to abide by the ordinary signification of names; and without this, the ordinary individual loses the power of experience itself, which is precisely to inform him as to what the world is. One can imagine a Lockean world where debate consists merely in philosophy’s fluctuation between different interpretations of a name. For all the people will be able to tell, great issues are being considered; but from the vantage point of the Lockean philosopher, they are merely exercising personal liberty in the manner of their use of speech, which indicates no true movement of development of opinion at all.
The easiest thing for a philosophy to extract from ordinary opinion, is suspended deliberation. Philosophy need only raise a question that the interested speakers do not know how to negotiate. Instantly, things will grind to a halt. Clearly, if we were speaking about the ordinary opinions’ tendency toward passions, as regards public issues, it is almost always desirable to solicit deliberative qualities. Yet that is not what the Lockean scientific authority is proposing to do. When Locke denies that the individual can have an experience of a horse itself; when Locke insists that what really takes place in perception is that we perceive a collection of distinct objects, which the mind must thereafter attempt to relate to one another: in this context, science is interfering with the natural operation of the mind. There is no such process whereby ‘simple ideas’ are related to one another, because the category of simple ideas is itself a fiction. Lockean science, therefore, would suspend opinion before it can even articulate itself: it subjects opinion to a painstaking, exhausting analysis, which is painstaking and exhaustive because artificial, and not how people think.
Whatever the subject, although Locke picks up the names in common usage, one cannot rely upon common usage to understand what Locke is referring to. This is because Locke is all the while practicing the scientific speech that he is explaining. Thus “qualities.” In ordinary speech: if you ask someone about the qualities of an apple, they will tell you that it is red and round and juicy and fits into the palm of your hand. This is not Locke’s usage of the term. For Locke, “quality” is a power to produce sensations in us. Quality cannot refer to the sensed external objects themselves. Locke’s use of speech would not make sense on any other model except the atomist one.
Locke’s definition of “idea” is clear enough. “Idea” is the thing that Locke names, when we have some kind of perception. Ordinary opinion would like to say that the cause of the perception is the snowball, the tree, the person, the rabbit. Locke, however, does not allow this construction. Instead of the rabbit, the tree, we must say that the idea is caused by some “power,” which belongs to some “quality” in the external object. “Qualities” and “powers” are steps of removal between us and the perceptible object. We do not perceive what objects are, but rather strictly how they can make us feel. There is a world of difference between these orientations, because they amount to the truth of two very different things: how we feel, and what something is. We can’t know the latter, Locke states; we can only know the former.[32]
Locke gives us the example of a snowball. For ordinary opinion, the snowball is simply what we perceive, directly. Plato and Aristotle would agree with ordinary opinion. For Locke, however, the snowball is just a name that we ascribe to something we know not what. The external object, or substance, which is beyond our comprehension allegedly, has certain qualities in it; and these qualities it is, which are finally said to produce in us simple ideas, of “white, cold, and round.” Thus we are twice removed from the snowball, which has been exiled from the category of knowable objects. There is the snowball, which we know not; its qualities, which we know not; and lastly the ideas, which must be the effect of the qualities of the objects we know not, as they produce effects or sensations in us.
Locke gets a little loose in his discussion at this point. He wants to make a distinction between primary and secondary qualities. This again, imposes great complexity upon the discussion. Hitherto, in the category of qualities, Locke had limited us to the power that any object had to produce something in our mind. Locke should not be entitled now to use the name of “quality” differently, when he seeks to talk of “primary qualities.” In the case of “primary qualities,” Locke instructs us, he is referring to qualities that are inseparable, permanently inseparable, from external bodies themselves. The category of quality for a moment is wrenched apart from our experience merely, and is now associated with some external body. What is this external body that has the primary qualities?
The original atomists really had no basis for claiming size, shape, or weight for the atoms. For these things are only known by perception, and atomism gives the lie to all content of perception. As Democritus pointed out, perception is simply how our bodies are affected by incoming atoms. This entirely closes down the avenue between perception and knowledge. Thus the attempt by Leucippus and Democritus to ascribe perceptible attributes to atoms is not justified by their own theory. Indeed, their claim that the atoms are simply “being,” and “indivisible,” is contradictory in a way that cannot be overcome, as Plato proved. Locke is working with the same effective doctrine of perception, based in the atoms. Thus Locke truly has no avenue open to him, to rely upon the senses, to know “primary qualities of bodies.” It is only when we draw up the metaphysical foundations of the theory of atomism that this becomes clear to us, and Locke certainly attempts to suppress that knowledge. Boyle possessed it. There is no reason to suspect that Locke did not.
Scholars’ attempts to somehow link ordinary perception to Locke’s doctrine of the “primary qualities of bodies” fails for the reasons adduced just above. The atomist ontology does not furnish us with the right to obtain any accurate information from sense perception, period. Thus Locke is following the original atomists in an unjustified attribution of “parts” to these objects which were originally defined as pure being.
When Locke starts to talk about qualities which are “utterly inseparable” from body, he describes no quality whatsoever in nature. For all bodies come into being and pass away; all bodies cease to be; and when they cease to be, their qualities cease to be. Nor does any body in nature endure all possible violence from external force, such that it keeps its extremities intact. Locke clearly wants to make the argument that the primary qualities of bodies can be known by sense perception. Yet it fails for two reasons. In the first case, Locke’s theory of perception cannot bear the burden of furnishing such accurate information, due to the nature of the atomist ontology. Second, there simply are no qualities of bodies that are “inseparable” from them, which, “despite all the force can be used upon it, it constantly keeps.”[33]
Locke omits being. It is hard to explain how any of these qualities could be without the part of existence. In fact it is impossible to explain how any of these qualities could exist without the part of being. These “qualities” are not body itself, Locke explains. Locke does not specify in what way the mind comes to “find inseparable” these primary qualities from bodies: but we know that it cannot be perception. For by perception, we know that the objects in the world, absolutely all of them, are wholes of parts. We know that they have the part of being, and the part of unity. We know that they are therefore wholes; that these wholes have natures; that the very nature of a whole requires that it possess extremities, which cannot be infinitely divided. For absolutely every body in nature, solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest and number are separable from the body. Because the body itself will lose the part of being, and be no more. It is atomic bodies that Locke is referring to, and that is why the primary qualities cannot be known in any way except by theory, deductive argument, metaphysics. We have since established the metaphysics of atomism: atoms must be eternal in order to provide the supply of matter for generation. Epicurus refers to the atoms as “seeds.” Yet we have also seen that the atoms cannot indeed be seeds. That they cannot so much as exist at all.
“Being” is not able to manifest itself in the “simple ideas” that Locke has established as the original material of all of our ideas. Mind can reflect on the relationship between simple ideas; and mind can discover in itself certain thoughts that are caused by the simple ideas that are permitted, in Locke’s doctrine, to enter into consciousness through the powers of the insensible corpuscles when they strike against the several sense organs. Which is to say that Locke talks about “being” as an idea that the mind is naturally driven to when it is confronted by any perception whatsoever. “Being,” in this sense, has the status merely of an idea in the mind. “Existence and unity are two other ideas, that are suggested to the understanding by every object without, and every idea within,” Locke writes.[34] This is not the original atomist doctrine, which Locke is certainly dependent on. Nor can there be any body in rerum natura, perceptible or not, that lacks the part of being. We do not here talk of conceptions of being which the mind is led to find in its own ruminations; what we here address is the parts that must exist in any body whatsoever that is in nature and “being” is certainly the most fundamental part, or one of the most fundamental parts, whether or not our minds be led to such thought or no.[35]
“Unity” also is characterized by Locke as a thought that the mind is driven to by its own reflection on itself. Such “unity” tells us nothing about the nature of the insensible particles, in Locke’s view; and for this reason Locke does not enumerate being or unity among the inseparable parts of the real bodies. “Cohesion” is a property of the imperceptible bodies in Locke’s theory. “Cohesion” might be regarded as a different name for unity. However, this is not what Locke has in mind. “Cohesion,” as Locke characterizes it, is some force which prevents the imperceptible body from flying into pieces. This “cohesion” furthermore ignores the fact that the atoms are supposed to be indivisible, that is to have no real parts.[36] In any event, “unity” does not indicate a force that holds anything together. “Unity” is a form which indicates absence of division. Insofar as an object is a unity, it is not “many.” The unity of any body whatsoever indicates its oneness, and it is certain that there is no body in nature, perceptible or imperceptible, that lacks the part of unity.
When Locke is talking about body and “primary qualities,” he certainly makes us feel as if he is talking about something indestructible. Locke talks about a grain of wheat, and argues that it is infinitely divisible. Not only this, but that each division of the wheat must retain the same “primary” qualities of solidity, extension, figure and mobility. Locke’s body is indestructible. That is not the body that we know in our world. That is the atoms.[37]
The horse won’t survive the first division. The apple won’t survive the first division. In fact, the wheat won’t survive more than a division or two. For there is no such thing as “matter,” only bodies which are wholes of parts; which are destructible. Locke is talking about atoms here, there is nothing else that he could be talking about. That is why we know that his theory of primary qualities is derived from the metaphysical theory of atoms and not from perception. Our perception does indeed acquaint us with the qualities of shape and size and movement or rest. Yet our perception does not ever acquaint us with such qualities in objects that are indestructible.
Locke is thought to be the founder, or at least the one who developed the formal classification, of the “secondary qualities.” By the same token, Boyle is thought to have been the first one to employ the term “primary qualities.” The “secondary qualities” are said to be mere “effects” of “powers” that the unknown external objects, or the atoms that emanate from them, exert on us. Color, sound, taste. The primary qualities, by contrast, are supposed to actually belong to the atoms. These primary qualities are somewhat extended by Locke, from what they were in the original atomist theory. For Leucippus and Democritus, atoms have size, shape, weight. That is it. Yet the atoms cannot be perceived. How do we know what qualities to ascribe to atoms, if they cannot be perceived in any respect? What is the difference between the image of roundness, that we see (a secondary quality), and the “primary quality” of shape that is ascribed directly to the atoms?[38]
Scholars have made quite a big issue out of this distinction in Locke. We had only to wait for Hume to sweep the whole thing almost entirely away. Hume admits that shape and size are as subject to perception as color and taste. Hume casts the whole category into darkness. Yet scholars cling to Locke as if he were really a defender of the ordinary perception and its allegedly feeble tether on the reality of things.[39] It is saying a lot that Boyle and Locke are the founders of this terminology. Atomism was created in the fifth century B.C. It has been recreated innumerable times in the succeeding centuries, by Epicurus and Lucretius, Machiavelli and Gassendi, Bacon and Hobbes. Why the new distinction? Because Locke is trying to give atomism a respectable reputation: that is, he is attempting to represent it as an “experimental” theory. He is also attempting to suppress the metaphysical origins of the theory, which Locke’s own atomism cannot finally escape.
It should be said that the original atomism of Leucippus and Democritus was not entitled to ascribe parts to the atoms either: not even the rudimentary parts of shape, size, and weight. This is because the atoms are beholden to the Eleatic principle of unity: divisionlessness. This is part of the heritage of being born from a false theory: for Parmenides’s original argument tried to make the case for near a dozen characters or natures to be enlisted under the rubric of “being.” It took Plato’s genius to break that argument down, and to reveal to us what is somehow quite obvious: that shape, and size, and parts of time, and location, and perfection, and sameness with itself, are none of them identical with the character of “being.” All those natures heaped up by Parmenides, on the passport of meager “being” by its lonesome: so many seats needed on the ship of passage, but the metaphysical papers say that there is only one nature aboard.
Parmenides had no right to the additional characters he claimed for his great unity. He claimed them anyway. Why? Because he could not talk about anything imaginable by simply uttering the name of “being.” Parmenides had to finally admit that his object is a unity, although he never did formally admit it. Plato makes him admit it, or extracts the confession from a figurative Parmenides in his dialogue. The same is true of atomism: it has no license to enumerate shape, size, or weight, solidity or extension or figure. All the atomist theory can claim for itself is “being,” smaller versions of Parmenides’s being. Plato refutes the atomist theory the very same way he refutes Parmenides’s theory: by proving that the smallest object in nature is composite. There are no “simples.” One notices that Locke tries to provide this atomic status even to his “simple ideas.”
The distinction between the primary and secondary qualities is nugatory. They are neither of them real, because both are predicated upon the atomist ontology. Bodies that we can perceive, even if only with special instruments, are the only bodies we know of in nature. It is from our perception that they are seen to have the qualities of shape, size, weight, but also color, texture, taste, sound. To engage in an argument as to how the primary qualities would be knowable, if not through perception, would be to suppose that the atomist theory is conceivably true. I take it that the atomist theory is refuted. Yet in addition to acknowledging that the perception of shape and size and weight are real, we can enlarge that to include the reality of color, and sound, and taste, and texture. Once one removes the atomist ontology, we have to await some other reason to doubt our perceptions. As I have indicated above, if the ordinary experience furnished us sufficient reason to regard our perceptions as unreliable, the generality of the human race would be far in advance of science in attempting to guide us safely. These doctrines of Locke, about atoms and primary qualities and powers and secondary qualities, answer to no need of the human race. They answer to the ambitions of political philosophy, Locke’s.
Our entire discussion in this book has been concerned with atomism. For that is the great line of division that separates the sophisticated scientific opinion from the popular opinion. This division is known mostly only to those who belong to the sophisticated part; for they, though brought up initially into the world of ordinary speech and consciousness, have purchased a technique of abstraction from ordinary speech, which their fellows have not got.
For Epicurus, for Bacon, for Hobbes, for Locke, the cause of names is something felt internally by the individual. This is what atomism does: it erects a wall between the philosopher and the application of the names already available in common speech. For Plato, the names originate in attempts to supply references to objects that are external to us. For Locke, names originate in the philosopher’s desire to express his feelings.[40] There cannot be a more diametrically opposite view of language than that which is evident between Plato and Locke. Bishop Stillingfleet’s objections to Locke’s thoughts on the liberty of employing names after one’s own fashion, are on point. “But I am utterly against any private mint of words; and think those persons assume too much authority to themselves, who will not suffer common words to pass in their general acceptation; but will set such bounds and limits to the sense of them, as suit best with their own speculations.”[41]
John W. Yolton offers a way to approach John Locke’s Essay that should be addressed at this point. We must not subject Locke to justificatory challenges, Yolton proposes; Locke was merely articulating, in his corpuscular philosophy, certain assumptions of the new science.[42] Whether Locke’s principles lead to radically skeptical postulates is therefore not a subject that Yolton is willing to entertain. Yet Locke speaks dismissively of non-philosophers, and blames them for not subjecting their beliefs to the searching criticisms that he supplies. In seeking to make a break between the evidence available to the sciences and that accessible to ordinary opinion, Locke is a political philosopher. To toss the idea of “form” onto the scrapheap, and to replace it with the hypothesis of insensible causal particles, is not something that can properly escape justificatory explanation. Mandelbaum is right to call attention to Locke’s atomism, and to observe furthermore that Locke undertakes nowhere to justify his reliance on this theory.[43]
Locke tips his cap to the “social nature” of language.[44] Yet Locke argues from the other extreme position. Locke insists that a word stands for only that idea that the individual has before his mind, when he utters that name. Locke is adamant: words in their primary signification “stand for nothing” but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them.[45] Locke states that our ideas are “invisible,” so it would seem hard to know how we could measure a man’s use of names by his ideas as Locke states. Yet Locke also argues with some intensity that this individual prerogative is that which the freedom of the political state depends upon: instead of freedom of opinions, in Locke’s politics, there is to be freedom in the interpretation of names. It is clear enough that these two uses are quite distinct from one another. Freedom of opinions cannot be said to exist, unless and except as the names people use indicate the same objects.
A person cannot begin to discover the boundaries of his existence, if the language in which he is implicated is not known to him, insofar as how it is understood by those in a position to make their understanding of it decisive. The linguistic community of the symbolic logic does not commit itself to the existence of any object, strictly speaking. They regard such knowledge, as atomists will, as beyond their capacities for knowing, and thus they regard themselves as skeptics. Yet this will all pass by the understanding of the ordinary citizen, who cannot imagine that the expert means anything else, but to indicate his firm opinion about some actually existing common object. The prospects of misunderstanding in this particular relationship are so severe, as concerns the interaction between the learned opinion and the unsophisticated opinion, as to constitute a crisis.
The relationship between the issue of substance and the issue of language is very intimate indeed, in the case of Locke especially. First of all let us think about what the ordinary individual perceives when he perceives a cat. The individual, if he has perceived a cat before, and I am following Plato’s foundationalist theory here—and if this perception has taken place within the comfortable range of his sense faculties—will have imprinted into the wax block of his memory the image of a cat. This image is not logos. In other words, the image is not a scientific definition. The individual does not undertake any special labor to learn the form of the cat. Since there are no atoms interfering with the sense faculties and their perception of the objects that actually exist external to us—this is Plato’s understanding—and since people do indeed refer to the same objects with the same words with great exactitude and constancy—it seems to me that there is little reason to doubt this. For Plato, perception is a judgment. Yet it is not a judgment that is anchored in definition.
The atomist ideology accomplishes two things when it dismisses the foundationalism of Plato. In the first place, it denies that the ordinary individual, in his perception, can actually acquire direct knowledge of the external objects. This point of view, as David Chalmers has enumerated it, is alleged to be “naïve” or “Edenic.” Again, this must draw us closer to the psychological chasm that distinguishes Locke’s scientific speech, from the civil speech to which he accords no degree of respect insofar as arriving at truths is concerned. The non-philosophic speaker cannot conceive that someone would argue, that we cannot directly perceive the cat, the apple, the red ball, the white wall, the “gavagai” of Quine. Yet from the point of view of the atomist philosopher, it is equally absurd, and finally intolerable to Locke, that anyone should suppose that he truly could directly perceive objects.
The doctrines of “simple” and “complex” ideas that Locke outlines for us eliminate the object as a “whole of parts.” This is why Locke does not ascribe “being” to the atoms. “Being” is attributed rather to the preference and will of the individual: it is a quality manufactured inside the mind, rather than an attribute of the body that is external to the mind, in Locke’s philosophy. The atomist philosopher insists that every macroscopic body be reduced to atomic particles. In the atomist model, a whole reduces to the sum of its parts. In the atomic model, any and every whole, reduces to the individual atoms that are said to underlie it.
In Locke’s experimental philosophy, it is not admitted that “gold” is any whole of parts. Allegedly, we cannot know what the external object is. We are limited by the definition of atoms, and powers, and simple ideas. Quietly, this removes the body from the equation. When Locke gets around to conducting experiments upon gold, the only thing he can produce is a list of properties, or predicates: it is shiny, it is heavy, it does or does not dissolve in aqua regia. One’s list of “simple ideas” will depend on the experiments that one conducts. The experiments that one conducts control what the final complex idea will be, that the philosopher adds together. Yet still, we have only a bundle of properties. Where is the gold?
Along with the doctrine of substance, the gold has been retired from the stage. The “substance” is just that thing which has the attributes. That is Aristotle’s definition of a substance: that of which predication is made. What takes the place of the object? The philosopher’s experiment. Which brings us back to Francis Bacon, and his ambivalent indictment of sense perception. Sense perception is invalid, Bacon argues, when ordinary people are the ones doing the perceiving. Yet when the experimental philosopher is doing the perceiving, perception obtains bona fides. The ordinary use of names, Locke argues, is sufficient for the people to get their lives by; yet it is wholly incompetent to so much as participate in the search for truth.
I believe that Hobbes is right when he says that all people have an interest in truth. All have an interest in it, because all of us need to know certain things in order to conduct our lives.
Want of science, that is ignorance of causes, disposeth, or rather restraineth a man to rely on the advice and authority of others. For all men whom the Truth concerns, if they rely not on their own, must rely on the opinion of some other, whom they . . . see not why he should deceive them. Ignorance of the signification of words, which is want of understanding, disposeth men to take on trust, not only the truth they know not, but . . . what is more the nonsense of them they trust; for neither error, nor nonsense, can without a perfect understanding of words be detected.[46]
Every civilization has its specialists, its members of special learning: Doctors, educators, generals, public officials, spiritual advisors. It is the fate of the human being born into this world, to have to take a great deal on faith, on trust. Because, not having the leisure to know for himself, and needing to know certain things, he is as prepared to trust the expert as he is prepared to trust his parents or his friends. As Hobbes notes, where special learning is involved, people do not suspect malfeasance, because they do not associate learning with treachery. Locke is in agreement with all that I have said above. Except that Locke, in his new science of understanding, is ready to indict the evidence of perception, in those areas where people believe that they already know. Men had not got into the practice of seeking out assistance, to discover whether the apple before them is an apple; or whether the redness of the apple is really just in them.
The philosophy of knowledge that Locke prepares in his Essay seeks to constitute a learned class that has set itself in opposition to the beliefs of the generality of human beings. That universal belief is that their perceptions do actually and without difficulty inform them as to what the objects about them are. The new philosophy of knowledge is preparing to define the majority of human beings, as part of the lower animal kingdom, which lives by instinct and imagination, rather than as the human animal which both possesses the means of knowing, (recognizing effortlessly the various kinds), and the desire to know. The philosophy of knowledge that Locke’s learned class is preparing to disseminate fully envisions a political order, in which those dependent on the sense faculties will not be admitted to debates as to truth of fact, except as spectators. Will the non-philosophers fail to be aware of their exclusion? I think this must be conceded. Does this therefore vacate the problem which I allege? Only if the injuries and confusions, the frustrations and deceptions which attend to this new regimen of language, are likewise illusory. I do not think that this, however, can be sustained.
This is the context in which Locke undertakes to discuss free will. What does Locke say? Locke does not say that free will is a false conception. Locke does not say that free will is delusional. Locke does not say, either, that free will is true. What Locke says, is that this phrase, is without meaning. The meaning of the name of freedom, Locke argues, has nothing to do with the name of “will.” It is as if, Locke says, we were to talk about the squareness of virtue, or the swiftness of a pie. If you go into any home in America, for example, and are invited in to sit at the dining room table for a cup of coffee; and if you ask the people there whether they believe in free will, it is entirely likely that they will insist that of course they believe in free will; that they believe in freedom; that they believe in an individual taking responsibility for what he has done; that an individual ought to be free to live his life as he pleases, within certain boundaries.
If you suggest to these individuals that the will is not free, this would not be well received. If you would represent to the hosts that the will is not related to freedom in any way, you would render them distinctly uneasy. For their whole mental lives are so organized by the analysis of what they believe to hinge on their choices, and their entire hopes in this world are so tightly committed to certain decisions in life that they have taken; and they feel such an enormous degree of burden due to the responsibility that they feel for the decisions that they have made; that it would be as if to vacate their entire reality, to undertake to explain to them, that the will is aloof from freedom; that these are as unrelated to one another as shape is to taste.
Is it possible for human beings to really be free to form an opinion on Locke’s teaching? If they do not understand the atomism upon which it is predicated? We need to remind the reader, that just as in the first chapter of the Essay, Locke is coming towards beliefs that are universally shared, of his own free volition—rather than responding to any mass of pilgrims who are standing outside of his master’s estate, seeking counsel; is it possible for the average run of human beings to literally be free in a debate of this issue, as stimulated quite possibly by Lockean discourse? I submit that it is not. Yet, as Locke has insisted, men are free to use names after the manner they please. Philosophers are free to bring their doctrines into the most intimate recesses of the public opinion; they are even allegedly free to do this without responsibility for what their statements may suggest to others.
It is probably not by accident that Locke decides to take up the issue of freedom of the will in his largest chapter in the Essay, and the most pivotal one: the chapter on Powers in book II. “Powers,” in the atomist ideology, indicate the “causes” of what we perceive. When we feel something, we are to that degree passive; which means that something else must be acting on us, on our passivity. We do not know what the external object is that exercises this action, Locke assures us; it is the atoms, but they cannot really be known. On the other hand, we can know our passion, or how things make us feel, or what the “powers” of objects cause us to imagine. This is an accurate description of what Locke takes perceptual experience to be.
The ordinary person is going to associate the names of “will” and “liberty” and “freedom.” This is quite like Locke’s earlier discussion of “self,” “identity,” and “person.” In Locke’s master vocabulary, these words all indicate different things. For the non-philosopher, they are effectively synonyms. For the unsophisticated individual, that is, the one who has not been drilled in these philosophies, choice is what is suggested by these names, by all of them. He had as soon use one name as the other: will, choice, decision, liberty, freedom, even consent.
By “will,” Locke insists, we mean no more than this: that a man is able to continue in some action of thinking or moving, or to forbear such an action. Will involves motion for Locke, and perhaps this is the reason why it is situated in the chapter on “powers.” Locke talks about the will as involving the power to begin or forbear movement, but in such a way that there is not much room for thought or deliberation. Will is involved for Locke “barely by thought or preference of the mind ordering.”[47] Knowledge of fact and circumstance, the preconditions for truly making decisions or “willing,” are left out of Locke’s definition. That seems to be a fairly significant omission.
Locke is working very hard to reduce, to dampen, to estrange, the categories of knowledge and will. It is true, people have the ability to pick up a piece of toast, or to decide that they are full and don’t want any more; to abbreviate a walk due to fatigue; to think of a friend with whom we have had a quarrel, or to push that out of mind. Yet if the average individual were to discuss with us his conception of will, he is not likely to refer to any of these things. He is not likely to refer to his breakfast toast, or the walk. He is not likely to consider any of these things important enough to bring up the will. This is because when ordinary people talk about will, or choice, or freedom, or consent, they reserve it for occasions of special consequence, what they regard as subject matters of unusual importance, rather than any slight or habitual actions.
Locke wants to suggest that it is absurd to talk about the freedom of the will. To the ordinary individual, this suggests that thinking about important matters, such as he sets aside special time for, and perhaps even consults friends, ought not to be spoken about in terms of the free or unfree. An individual, perchance, may be working at a job in which the person in charge abuses him, disrespects him, offends him. Yet because this individual does not believe himself to have many other employment options, and because this individual has responsibilities to support a family, he may feel that his will is not free; that though he would like to defend himself against this abuse, he is forced to swallow this injury, and to remain at the job. This issue I think rises to the level of importance that most people would associate with something like the will. It takes courage to resign from the job, to seek another job, and so forth. It may well take courage to endure the job, unpleasant as it is. Yet here we are not talking about the tying of one’s shoelaces. Here we are not talking about the “intention” of perceiving a tomato. Here we are talking about issues that the individual believes bear significantly upon his weal and woe; and it is not hard to discover circumstances in which the individual feels unfree to act as he would like to act; where he is forced to undergo degradation in order to acquit responsibilities. The truncated definition of will supplied by Locke, that it is either continuing in an action, or forbearing to continue in it, “barely by a thought or preference,” thus makes nonsense of the way people generally use speech. In proportion as deliberation is involved, to that degree will and choice are involved.
Locke is determined to wholly segregate the name of “will” apart from the name of “freedom.” In this way, he can attack the universal belief in free rational choice, without appearing to do so directly. We will have occasion, when we examine Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, to observe that Locke himself does indeed believe in freedom of the will. That he is not in favor of it in other cases; that he is very firmly opposed to it in certain cases, especially on educational matters that bear upon the formation of character. More on that below. Here, we have Locke saying that freedom is simply a different kind of thing than willing. It is plain then that the will is nothing but one power or ability, and freedom another power or ability; so that to ask, whether the will has freedom, is to ask, whether one power has another power.[48]
What then is the power of freedom in Locke’s view? It is not easy to see the difference between Locke’s definition of freedom and will. “Freedom,” by contrast, seems to belong, in Locke’s view, to external considerations, which might hinder or enable us. Freedom in other words, is not to be implicated by Locke in the deliberations antecedent to choosing; but rather in external circumstances that we have no control over, insofar as they relate to our “will” (bereft of thought). For the human being who takes her bearing by perception, therefore, neither the definition of “will” nor the definition of freedom contains or includes any recognition of the need for knowledge and awareness of that issue or subject on which one is going to act.[49] This is not to say that nobody in Locke’s moral universe possesses this power of deliberation. We will see below, that Locke’s philosophers possess it. Yet Locke’s philosophers possess this “active liberty” or freedom, which involves considerable deliberation, only in a context that has rejected the authority of perceived facts.
Locke’s strategy for addressing the issues of rational free choice, and truly having the opportunity to cause one’s significant actions, is linguistic. The category of “will” is banished from deliberation by Locke. “Will” is made by Locke to appear as a guard at a gate, who either lets a person pass or detains him. The issue of why the guard should operate this way, or in one manner rather than another; the issue as to whether the man cares one way or the other as to whether or not the man passes; the issue as to whether the individual has much greater, more pressing business to think on at this moment, which he should reflect upon: none of these issues are allowed by Locke to appear, in his discussion of the parameters of “will.” None of these imperatives are allowed to emerge in the context of the discussion of “freedom” either.
Locke makes the decision that “freedom” concerns the body, rather than the mind. If a man is not walled in, he has the freedom to walk. If a man’s car is unmolested on the road, if he is not detained by police or accidents, he is free to drive. Most human beings would probably be thinking more about their destination. Is the individual free to decide where to walk, where to drive? Is the individual free to decide in what manner his entire life shall be caused to move, so as to produce freedom from fear and an improvement of the quality of his time? Is the man free to express those parts of his personality which are closest to his character? None of this appears or is allowed to appear in Locke’s discussion of the parameters of freedom. Thus the purpose of deliberation, and the signification of action as the carrying out of rational, free choices, is the thing that Locke’s definitions block from our view.
Locke has thus explained to us the distinction between willing and freedom, in his view. To be able to will, is to be able to “prefer.” To be free, is to be able to “execute” preference. Knowing the truth about facts is not a part of Locke’s discussion of willing or freedom at all. Locke is compressing the discussion of willing and freedom into precisely those areas where a man is not likely to think seriously. Or which do not bear upon his ability to know the truth of his situation. It is fair to call these things to the reader’s attention, because Locke’s science of understanding undertakes to oppose the universality of people in their belief that their perceptions tell them accurate information about objects. Locke’s attempts to discuss “will” and “freedom” are thus aloof from the ability to know. Locke is creating significations for these words of “will” and “freedom” that are quite compatible with a man having no idea what the facts of his situation are.
Let’s look at the examples of freedom which Locke provides to us. We can bear in mind that for most people, freedom is a pretty important name. It indicates the difference between slavery and its opposite; it concerns the protection against bondage, the possibility of seeking happiness.
A man standing on a cliff, is at liberty to leap twenty yards downward into the sea, not because he has a power to do the contrary action, for that he cannot do; but he is therefore free, because he has a power to leap or not to leap, but if a greater force than his, either holds him fast, or tumbles him down, he is no longer free in that case. Because the doing or forbearing of that particular action, is no longer in his power.
The power to leap off a cliff, without being interfered with, is one of Locke’s examples of “freedom.”[50] Such a man has the “freedom” to leap or not leap. One might observe here that this is a rather diminutive representation of the nature of freedom and the choice it involves. Doubtless, the prisoner to be executed has the freedom to choose whether or not he shall be hooded before his hanging. It seems unlikely, though, that a political party could bring voters to the polls to secure that mode of liberty.
Locke looks at a man in a jail cell. The jail cell is twenty-feet square. The man is, Locke tells us, pressed up against the bars on the north side of the cell. Northerly, in the northerly direction, he is not “free” to walk any further. But if he moves southerly, then indeed we can call him “free,” Locke argues, because there is room (twenty feet) to move in the southerly direction. Our friend in the jail cell might be a close relative to the cliff jumper. Suicides and prisoners, and their freedom. This is a definition of freedom that would make Machiavelli proud.
I would prefer that Locke talk about freedom in other contexts. For example, I would like to see Locke discuss freedom in terms of the human being’s ability to rely upon his experience (through perception) and use of speech, to be able to discover his relationship to the society in which he lives. I would like Locke to undertake this discussion in terms of the new authority of science that Locke has segregated apart from “civil speech,” and reserved exclusively to scientific speech. Is a man free to have opinions, in a society where he is led by uses of words which are expressly exempted from the obligation to represent the world as it actually is? This freedom that I speak of, I do not know how a man can have it in a society where the reigning science has emancipated itself from the common perceptual evidence. To assign to every man, the right to use names after his preference, is to provide no freedom at all to the universality of people, because they have no use for inventing new significations for words.
Peoples’ freedom of opinions depends first of all upon knowing what words refer to. It is only the men and women of science who stand to obtain liberty by this new extravagant right to use names after whichever fashion one pleases. Locke is marrying our idea of freedom to prerogatives of desperation and confinement. A people which is not possessed of the powers to come to this insight, may not be able to recognize its chains; but that makes the chains all the more, rather than the less pernicious.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, II.viii.22, 140.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding I.iii.24, 82.
Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle. Edited by M. A. Stewart. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991, 70.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding III.ix.15, 484.
Discourses. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, II, 5.
Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, II, 5.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Atomism consists in the divisionless, in its ancient foundation. Descartes, who despite his vehement protestations is indeed an atomist, denies that he is such based on two propositions: (1) that God, who created all matter, could intervene at any time and divide the bodies he has created; and (2) that we can mentally divide matter. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume I. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge University Press, 1985, part 2, chapter 20, 231. Neither of these caveats is finally relevant. To suppose God’s intervention, or capacity for such, is to suppose superhuman and miraculous intervention. It goes against the entire grain of the Enlightenment’s “experimental” basis for knowledge in the first place; and it tells us nothing about the matter that God creates when He is not actively undertaking to alter it. The divisibility that God can inflict on matter is not the same as the divisibility of matter itself: for the divisibility of matter itself indicates that it has all the parts, not just homogeneous divisions. The ancient root of the indivisible characteristic of atoms is precisely their eternal nature: the train of philosophy that produced the atomist doctrine was run aground on Parmenides’s argument that there must be some ungenerated “being” which is not subject to genesis and destruction, to supply the materiel for the observable world. Secondly, to be able to mentally divide matter is insignificant. We can imagine gold mountains. Does that make them exist? To be mentally divisible is to be pseudo-divisible. To be really divisible is to possess the parts of coming into being and passing away. Such will be demonstrated in the text of this chapter. Thus Descartes sustains the premises of classical atomism, and so does Boyle. “That there are in the world great store of particles of matter, each of which is too small to be, whilst single, sensible, and being entire or undivided, must needs both have its determinate shape and be very solid: insomuch that, though it be mentally, and by Divine omnipotence divisible, yet by reason of its smallness and solidity nature doth scarce ever divide it; and these may in this sense be called minima or prima naturalia” (41). In “The Origins of Forms and Dualities.” In Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle. Edited by M. A. Stewart. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991.Scholars refer to Boyle for evidence that the old atomism is not alive in Locke. They wish to treat the “corpuscularian thesis” as if it offers no more than “a tentative explanation” of the phenomena., which must preclude a “systematic explanation of natural philosophy” in Locke. Cf. G. A. J. Rogers. “The Intellectual Settings and Aims of the Essay,” 20–21. In Lex Newman, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Peter Anstey goes so far as to maintain that “the new experimental philosophy constituted not just the experimental method practiced along natural historical lines. Ironically, it also spawned a new speculative hypothesis, as articulated and championed by Boyle. . . . First, it was specifically developed as a via media or generic hypothesis which was neutral on the question of the divisibility of matter” (5). John Locke and Natural Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Locke is careful not to enumerate “being” or “unity” among the “primary qualities” of bodies. In Locke’s theory, the primary qualities are “inseparable” from bodies. When Locke writes about the primary qualities, and the division of bodies, they certainly appear indestructible. I examine this more closely in the text. It is really “being” which is the metaphysical foundation of the atomist theory, which Locke declines to recognize. Once concede the part of “being” in the atom, and the part of “unity,” and the argument for indivisibility is refuted. The very justification for calling into question the veracity of ordinary perception hinges on the proposition that the true bodies must be eternal, barring Divine intervention. Since the perceptible bodies are perishable, the real bodies must be imperceptible. Locke adheres rigidly to this thesis throughout the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. No experiment ever generated corpuscular theory; and even in Boyle, the similarities between his theory and that of Democritus-Leucippus and Epicurus is enough to make Boyle anxious. Stephen Gaukroger likewise believes that Locke does not depend on the theory of atoms or corpuscles. “In other words, in contrast to the mainstream mechanist view that explanation in terms of underlying micro-corpuscularian structure is the only legitimate form of explanation, Locke counters with the view that such underlying structure does not in fact provide any kind of explanation at all because it falls outside the domain of what we can know” (165). The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gaukroger’s argument requires more explanation. If Locke was truly neutral about the atomist thesis, he would be truly neutral about the theories of “powers,” “simple ideas,” and the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke is not neutral on any of these issues. In fact, Locke is entirely dependent on the atomist presentation of perception for his whole theory in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
However much strength of belief is requisite to make the break with ordinary perception and the evidence it obtains, Locke possesses it. In no place does Locke allow for the possibility that ordinary perception is accurate in terms of knowing truth of fact. Maurice Mandelbaum had this right in 1964: “Locke, like Boyle and Newton, was an atomist.” Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1964. In Mandelbaum’s view Locke can be found “taking the truth of atomism for granted” (1). Peter Alexander concedes that “the idea of explanation to which we are thus led is an atomistic one, although Boyle prefers not to use that word because he sees problems about the alleged indivisibility of atoms and because certain unwelcome associations cling to it” (62). In Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Alexander elsewhere observes of the “corpuscles” that they “have no empty spaces in their constitutions; matter completely fills their boundaries. They are therefore absolutely solid” (145). In “Solidity and Elasticity in the Seventeenth Century,” in G. A. J. Rogers, editor. Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Edwin McCann indicates that corpuscularianism is effectively atomism, which it is, and that Locke is both. “Locke’s treatment of such central philosophical issues as substance, qualities, identity, natural kinds, and the structure and limit of scientific explanation was fundamentally shaped by the conception of body that he inherited from Gassendi and Boyle. . . . This doctrine, a form of mechanistic atomism, had the following core tenets. All bodies are either (a) individual atoms or corpuscles, which are physically indivisible . . . or (b) aggregates or collections of atoms” (65). In Vere Chappell, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Locke. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cf. Roger Woolhouse in the same volume: “Locke’s picture of matter is continuous not only with ours but also with that of the classical atomists, Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus” (158). “Locke’s Theory of Knowledge.” John Yolton sides with the scholars who refuse to concede that Locke is a committed atomist. See “The Science of Nature,” 183, in John W. Yolton. John Locke: Problems and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Locke’s college notebooks do not reveal Boyle’s influence, but rather that of Descartes, Spinoza and Gassendi. J. R. Milton, “Locke at Oxford,” in G. A. J. Rogers. Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 18. Cf. Thomas Lennon. “Locke’s Atomism.” Philosophy Research Archives 9(1983): 5, for another view that Locke is indeed an atomist. For another view disputing such a Lockean atomist ontology, see Robert A. Wilson. “Locke’s Primary Qualities.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40(2002): 219.
“The Intellectual Setting and Aims of the Essay.” In The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Lex Newman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.x.6, 621.
Parmenides fragment 8. In Kathleen Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, 44.
Fragments 6 and 7. Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 92–93.
Fragment 9. Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 93.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.i.3.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II. xxiii.2.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxxii.5, 385.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxiii3, 296.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.iii.6, 540.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxiii.31, 313.
Parmenides fragment 8. Freeman. Ancilla to Pre-Socratic Philosophy, 44.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding I.iii.3, 67.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxvii.3.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxviii.10, 336.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II. xxvii.11, 337.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxvii.10.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.ii.11, 536.
“The Origin of Locke’s Doctrine of Primary and Secondary Qualities.” Philosophical Quarterly 26(1976): 305–16.
Reginald Jackson refers to Locke’s sympathy for the plain man insofar as his theoretical proclivities go. “Locke’s Version of Representative Perception,” 154. In C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong, editors. Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1968. Locke does not seem to me to have much sympathy for the generality of human beings. H. E. Matthews maintains that Locke, most of the time, “plainly takes it for granted that we directly perceive material objects” (58). In I. C. Tipton, editor. Locke on Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. We certainly are not conceded by Locke to be able to know what substances are. Locke uses the term substance in its Aristotelian signification: that indicates the perishable objects that people regard as commonly perceptible. The human mind does not possess such power, in Locke’s view. In terms of truth, Locke insists that the very causes of our perception are “insensible” bodies—a position from which Locke never wavers. Locke allows to non-philosophers their own use of speech which is certainly based on direct perceptions, but ordinary use is distinguished by Locke from all enquiries having to do with testimony as to truth of fact. Samuel C. Rickless regards Locke as a “valiant and thoughtful champion of common sense” (318). “Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78(1997). According to Rickless, Locke simply “did not worry much about whether his views were clearly expressed or mutually consistent.” The Essay Concerning Human Understanding may be many things, but careless it is not. No reader of Locke’s epistolary exchange with Stillingfleet can believe that Locke is a careless writer or logician. Robert A. Wilson believes that Locke theorizes corpuscles by analogy to perishable, perceived objects. “Locke is in effect offering a two-step rule for determining what the primary qualities are: first, identify these qualities that are to be found universally in sensible bodies; . . . and second, infer that these very same qualities are also present in insensible bodies” (210). “Locke’s Primary Qualities.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40(2002). It has been indicated above that Locke does put this view out there, at least once. Margaret Atherton echoes this point of view. “The scientist comes by the idea of body in the same way the rest of us do, by abstracting an idea from the sensible qualities we happen to find in experience. “Knowledge of Substances and Knowledge of Sciences in Locke’s Essay. History of Philosophy Quarterly 1(1984): 426. Atherton’s theory seems problematic. Per Locke, we can only know macroscopic bodies by “immediate contact” of body with body: that means atomist particles. That indicates that there is a disconnect between our mental experience (how our senses or mind are affected) and the external objects, whatever they are. Furthermore, Locke does not even concede that being is a “primary” quality. One problem is that for Locke, the primary qualities of bodies are inseparable from those bodies. This can only be so if the bodies are eternal. Moreover, Locke never does directly explain how sensory perception conveyed by sight escapes the moratorium on secondary qualities. The same goes for the sensations of touch.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding I.iv.25, 103.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding III.ix.3. Cf. Essay III.ix.8, 479.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.viii.8, 134.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.viii.9, 135.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.vii.7.
Locke does not enumerate “being” or “unity” as attributes of the “insensible particles,” nor does he say that they must attach to the real bodies whether we perceive them or no. Locke admits to being a natural philosopher in this particular. “I hope I shall be pardoned this little incursion into natural philosophy . . . to distinguish the primary, and real qualities of bodies, which are always in them (viz. solidity, extension, figure, number, and motion or rest . . . from those secondary and imputed qualities, which are but the powers of several combinations of primary ones” (Essay II.viii.22). Unity and being are not listed. Our scholars often accept Locke’s argument. Thus Yolton: “The ideas of unity, existence, substance, infinity, power and cause are explanatory concepts constructed by the mind when confronted by specific sorts of experiences” (50). “Locke’s Concept of Experience.” In C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong, editors. Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1968. In Peter Anstey’s view, “extension and cohesion are, therefore, conceptually and ontologically prior to all the other qualities that matter might have” (104). John Locke and Natural Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxiii.23–25.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.viii.9, 135.
Samuel Rickless believes that direct perception and the primary qualities of body are compatible with one another. Direct perception therefore gives us access, for Rickless, to some aspects of reality: the shape, size, movement or rest, bulk, and cohesion of bodies. A basketball’s roundness, in Rickless’s view, would count as a primary quality of a real body. “On the interpretation that I have been defending, the determinable property, shape, is a primary quality by virtue of the fact that it is a quality, which is inseparable from bodies. . . . By contrast, the determinate property, redness, is a secondary quality, because it is a non-real quality.” “Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78(1997): 308. However,we must consider some additional facts. Perceived shape, perceived solidity, perceived number, are secondary qualities too. For these are caused by “insensible” particles that collide with our faculties, allegedly. Perception introduces us to no primary qualities per se, because it does not acquaint us with the actual atoms. If I read Martha Brandt Bolton’s article correctly, this is what she is calling our attention to. “The Origins of Locke’s Doctrines of Primary and Secondary Qualities.” Philosophical Quarterly 26(1976): 308. Michael Jacovides appears to advance the same claim that Rickless makes. Jacovides says that “our ideas of primary qualities resemble.” Yet if they did, we would be able to perceive and know substances, which Locke will not allow. Perception of shape, size, bulk, cohesion are all the product of “powers” of “insensible particles.” Thus they do not resemble. “Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities,” 103. In Lex Newman, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Peter Alexander appears to be in agreement with the argument I am setting forth. All perceived qualities belong to the mind alone, regardless of the type of idea. Qualities, predicates of the bodies alleged to exist, but imperceptible, are ascribed to bodies and not to the mind. “For Locke, ideas, all of them, are “in the mind,” and qualities, all of them, are in bodies” (118). Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Alexander notes that for Locke, “existence is thus not a quality of things because it is suggested by all of them and does not differentiate them” (222).
All of Locke’s pivotal doctrines, from the simple to the complex ideas, the primary versus the secondary qualities, to substance and mixed modes, depend on the evidence of things not seen. Locke nowhere wavers on the postulate that it is “insensible” particles that are the cause of sensation; and that sensation thereby does not correspond to or represent the actual bodies in nature. In Locke’s view, if we had senses “acute enough” to discern the minute particles of bodies, they would produce different ideas in us, which take the place of the simple ideas we now have. The yellow color of gold will disappear, and leave us merely with an arrangement of particles. One can’t get more atomist than that. (ECHU II.xxiii.11). Well, this is not entirely true. Locke does, in at least one place, attempt to link the perception of “primary qualities” of perceptible bodies to the imperceptible qualities of the atoms. Scholars are correct to argue that Locke himself claims that perception can furnish knowledge to us about the “primary qualities” of bodies. The point is that Locke’s atomist ontology will not be able to cover the cost of those claims. This suggestion, even if it is one that Locke is making himself, is not tenable given the rest of his theory. Let us say that the object in question is a tree that we think we are perceiving. Locke, if he is to allow us to perceive the “primary qualities” of the tree, would be including the size, the shape, the texture, the solidity, and some additional qualities of the tree. This would come very close to allowing us to see the tree as a “substance.” What Locke holds, is that we are incapable of perceiving substances, that is, we are incapable of knowing the “underlying something” in which the “qualities” inhere. I really don’t think that if our senses are conceded the authority to directly know size and shape of perceptible bodies, that Locke can sustain his embargo on our knowledge of substances. Locke would have to give up his theory of “powers” also. If, that is, we could perceive directly the size and shape of a tree, then in those perceptions it would not be possible for atoms to be the basis of our perception. It would overthrow Locke’s entire theory, and subvert the theory of language which is the essential distinction between philosophers and the generality of people in Locke’s view. The philosophers are not obligated to define names in accordance with common usage. They are free, in fact, especially in the case of moral words, to rely upon their own “active liberty” to construct these significations. This will be discussed in the text of the next chapter.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding III.i.2, 402.
The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter. London: 1698, 25.
John W. Yolton. The Compass of the Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 16, 75.
Maurice Mandelbaum. “Locke’s Realism.” In Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1964. Mandelbaum is correct to view Locke as an atomist, but he also believes that this atomism is known “inductively,” as part of a “confirmable theory basic to their new experimental philosophy” (1). “Therefore, when one recalls Locke’s faith in the achievements of their new science, and his high opinion of Boyle and Newton, it is surely not surprising to find him taking the truth of atomism for granted” (1). There is no inductive route to atomism. Boyle is honest enough with us about where he learned the theory, that is, from Leucippus and Democritus and Epicurus and Lucretius. In order to be able to live with the atomist theory, Boyle makes exceptions: Boyle allows that God made forms for man as well as for the animals. Their genesis is therefore kept apart from atoms, by Boyle. Yet I nowhere see Locke make any such concession.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III.i.1, 402.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III.ii.2, 405.
Leviathan. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 11, articles 17–18, 69.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.5.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xi.16.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.21.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.27.