Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

Locke’s Double Key

Model of Mind → Model of Society - Getting Critical Distance - A Pivotal Moment in Time

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Model of Mind → Model of Society

On this page I’ll argue that Locke’s ideas about the mind and politics are 1. deeply interrelated and 2. central to the development of Modern psychology & society. My basic notion is that it’s much easier to think freely when we don’t feel controlled or compelled — in politics by a particular ideology, and in belief systems by sanctified paradigms, higher or predestined truths, epistemological commandments, etc. This of course fits well with liberal and agnostic ways of thinking, where we’re free to contemplate, believe, or disbelieve in any number of ideas and systems.

Locke’s model of the mind does at least two things. First, it helps free the mind from superstitions which make one fear things like evil eyes, possession, malevolent animals, etc. The mind can also take a break from unverifiable and often contradictory religious claims about reality, even though those claims might be helpful in some other ways. The mind can then look clearly at the world around it. This material world is in intimate contact with the mind, since it is this very world which acts on the senses to make the mind what it is. Second, Locke’s model of the mind urges us to take control of our lives and the world around us. It urges us to create a world which allows the freedom for us to become who we want to become, not what some paradigm of caste, class, religion, or ideology urges us to be. In this sense Locke’s model of the mind leads to a liberal, and ultimately democratic, model of society.

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Getting Critical Distance

The ability to admit doubt, to say I don’t know, has many causes, key among these being the ability to distance ourselves from the ideas and habits that are particular to us but not to others. The phrase critical distance is helpful here, since it suggests a mind that’s able to distance itself from its own imprinted attitudes and learned beliefs. In terms of empiricism, it suggests the ability to keep at bay the old ideas imprinted into our brains and to re-imprint our brains with new ideas.  

The idea that we start our lives with a mental blank slate or tabula rasa (a brain not yet imprinted by the senses or by experience) goes back to Aristotle, yet it was explored in detail by John Locke (1632-1704). Historically, Locke’s view of the blank slate is superseded by our understanding of DNA: the deep relation between evolution and genetics makes it hard to think of our minds now as blank slates, that is, as existing without any sort of pre-programming. The same DNA that allows a bird to traverse an ocean, with an uncanny sense of direction, allows the baby to open its eyes and look outside the crib.

In this sense we don’t start off with a blank slate at all. Yet genetics and DNA don’t contradict as much as they complement or complete the common sense notion that we’re products of our senses and our environment. Starting in the womb, we’re influenced most obviously by the mother, who exists within particular lines of genealogy, diet, climate, geography, family, neighbourhood, custom, language, history, politics and religion. Bit by bit these larger influences become part of our neural fabric, flesh, bones, and blood. Our existence in time and space may not exactly be a function of sensory imprints on a pure tabula rasa, yet Locke’s idea of the senses making impressions on a mind that isn’t pre-programmed by specific language, behaviour, or belief is one of the things that propels European thought into the Modern Age. 

The empirical notion that we’re products of our senses may at first appear a blunt, technical, colourless notion, yet it’s in fact one of the most fascinating and rich ideas that we can entertain. What you touch confirms what you see, hear, and smell. What you hear and read are directed by your senses into the neuron patterns of your brain, which becomes an almost infinite and yet unique network of pathways. This network allows you to cognize, interpret, and interact with not only your body and the world around you, but also with your own thoughts and feelings, allowing you to understand what’s happening to the totality of your self as it walks down the street or sits in a cafe — drinking a spritz and watching the sun set over Rome, or chatting with your wife and reading a newspaper in Florence.

The black letters of the newspaper penetrate billions of layers deep into your cortex. The relation with your wife is 40 years deep in memories. Yet they are all alive in the moment, from your finger tips to your brain. To say that it’s all a mechanical product and that it therefore doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t seem to mean a thing.

The senses start off as mere technical connectors, but end up as the invaluable, almost magical conduits to your feelings and experiences, and to all the ideas and beliefs which articulate their meaning.

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Like his theory about sense impressions, Locke’s ideas about an open liberal society helped bring about the shift from Medieval to Modern. In terms of historical chronology, Locke’s theory about democracy comes after Hobbes (1588-1679), who argues that human nature is so brutal that it requires a strict master. It also comes before John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who argues that individuals should be free in every way, regardless of social norms.

Locke’s empiricism also fits within the history of religion: it comes after 16-17th century astronomy, which debunked the notion that humans are at the centre of the universe; and it comes before 19th century natural science and philology, which challenged the notion that human history is guided by a God whose dictates are made clear in the Bible. Situated between Galileo and Darwin, Locke suggests that our psyches are products of the physical world perceived by our senses, rather than sparks from the divine fire. He suggests that we’re the product of our senses, not the product of essences from Heaven. I want to stress that this is only suggested by Locke; David Hume advances it in the 18th century, and existentialists like Sartre advance it further in the 20th. Locke himself accepted the co-existence of empiricism and essentialism, just as Montaigne was skeptical and religious at the same time. Yet while Locke felt that belief in God was as obvious as belief in one’s self, his idea that we’re products of our senses in this world (rather than spiritual essences from another world) fits into the rising humanistic and scientific view of the human condition. This, combined with the later understanding of evolution, neurology, & DNA, eventually dismantles the necessity of using religion to explain who we are.

Locke posits a blank slate, yet the vacuity of this slate is so great that he, along with his contemporary Blaise Pascal, assumes that it can only be filled with the essence of soul and God. In the 18th century, however, intellectuals start to argue that notions of soul and God are no longer necessary to fill in the blanks, so to speak. The line from Locke’s empiricism to Sartre’s atheism may be a long and jagged one, but it bridges the centuries nonetheless.

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A Pivotal Moment in Time

Locke started writing his influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1671, prior to Newton’s ground-breaking 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Locke finally published the fourth draft in 1690. In his “Epistle to the Reader,” he says that he has 

aimed sincerely at Truth and Usefulness, though in one of the meanest ways. The Commonwealth of Learning, is not at this time without Master-Builders … ‘tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge. 

Humbled by the work of Newton, Locke’s contribution was nevertheless also revolutionary in the sense that he helped to turn the mind (rather than our understanding of the way the physical world works) toward a position from which it could look at things anew. Like Locke’s Essay itself, his tabula rasa helps to clear away some of the rubbish that had accumulated over the years, so that humans might see things unfettered by ideas and systems that were no longer compatible with the discoveries of science. 

Locke’s 1690 Essay was published well before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) or the genetics of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet his model of the mind helped us to see it as a product of the senses. From this moment onwards the very basis of explaining who we are tends to be a physical explanation. No matter how much we dream of other dimensions or mystic possibilities, we see our existence as a function of our experience in this world. The coffee cup that sits on the white tablecloth may seem like it’s floating in the bright clouds of heaven, yet it’s made of ceramic. The coffee came on a ship from hundreds of miles away.

Not surprisingly, the religiously orthodox were quick to spy danger in Locke’s materialist mode of thinking. In her Introduction to Locke’s Essay, Pauline Phemister notes the early objections of Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester:

Stillingfleet singled out Locke’s initially innocuous suggestion that God might superadd thinking to matter. The bishop regarded the materialism implicit in this hypothesis as particularly dangerous to the doctrine of the immateriality and immortality of the soul. He considered Locke’s account of substances and essences as theologically objectionable and held the same opinion about his idea-based account of human knowledge which, so Stillingfleet believed, was unable to justify belief in the mysteries of the Christian religion that lay beyond experience and reason. 

The reason I focus here on Locke’s version of empiricism, and not on his grim forerunner Hobbes or on his incendiary afterburner Hume, is that Locke’s views are more temperate and thus allow a more relaxed space to ruminate, question, and explore. Hume’s skepticism (and his implicit use of empiricism) is impressive yet extreme: it leads to a version of philosophical nihilism which may make sense rationally yet which isn’t as useful as that of Locke — either in allowing for knowledge and meaning, or for allowing the possibilities of theism. Likewise, Hobbes’ vision of the meanness of Nature and the necessity of an authoritarian ruler may hold true in many ways (especially in the age of Putin and Trump…), yet it isn’t a vision that liberal intellectuals aspire to.

In Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, published one year after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he argues for free individuals and free societies in a way that Hobbes couldn’t easily imagine in his Leviathan (1651), which was written at the end of the Civil War (1642-51). Locke’s vision of freedom culminates two centuries later in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which was published in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. From this perspective, Locke is like Mill in that both combined empiricism with a vision of individual and political freedom at a time when both of these freedoms were expanding. 

Locke’s vision of the mind and society helped to loosen the hold of religious dogma and political monarchy, as we can see in his profound influence on Voltaire. In his science-fiction story Micromégas (1752), a wise alien interviews disciples of Leibnitz, Locke, and Saint Thomas:

"And you, my friend," he said to a follower of Leibnitz, who was there, "what is your soul?"

"It is," answered he, "a hand which points to the hour while my body chimes, or, if you like, it is the soul which chimes, while my body points to the hour; or to put it another way, my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is its frame: that is all clear enough."

A little student of Locke was standing near; and when his opinion was at last asked: "I know nothing," said he, "of how I think, but I know I have never thought except on the suggestion of my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances is not what I doubt; but that it is impossible for God to communicate the faculty of thought to matter is what I doubt very strongly. I adore the eternal Power, nor is it my part to limit its exercise; I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think."

The [alien] creature of Sirius smiled; he did not deem the last speaker the least sagacious of the company; and, were it possible, the dwarf of Saturn would have clasped Locke's disciple in his arms.

But unluckily a little animalcule was there in a square cap, who silenced all the other philosophical mites, saying that he knew the whole secret, that it was all to be found in the "Summa" of St. Thomas Aquinas; he scanned the pair of celestial visitors from top to toe, and maintained that they and all their kind, their suns and stars, were made solely for man's benefit.

While Locke’s religious belief may seem traditional now, it certainly wasn’t then. Also, given the early state of science, it’s not surprising that he kept the traditional unifying and self-explanatory (some would say circular) beliefs in soul and God. In any case, free thinking isn’t freedom from God as much as it is freedom to think about God in any way whatsoever. Locke may not go as far as Hume in his free-thinking, as far as Mill in his vision of societal freedom, or as far as Huxley in his questioning of religion, yet he advocated personal and political freedoms that Hume, Mill, and Huxley subsequently took for granted.  

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