A Companion to Locke

Matthew Stuart, Matthew Stuart

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118328798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This collection of 28 original essays examines the diverse scope of John Locke's contributions as a celebrated philosopher, empiricist, and father of modern political theory.

• Explores the impact of Locke's thought and writing across a range of fields including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, political theory, education, religion, and economics
• Delves into the most important Lockean topics, such as innate ideas, perception, natural kinds, free will, natural rights, religious toleration, and political liberalism
• Identifies the political, philosophical, and religious contexts in which Locke's views developed, with perspectives from today's leading philosophers and scholars
• Offers an unprecedented reference of Locke's contributions and his continued influence

Part I
Life and Background

Chapter 1
Locke's Life

MARK GOLDIE

When John Locke was born, in 1632, England's universities were dominated by Scholastic Aristotelianism, its authors obliged to submit their books to censors, its people ruled by a monarch who had ceased to call parliaments, and its worshippers punished if they did not conform to the established Church. When he died, in 1704, England had a burgeoning American and oceanic empire, its armies were crushing the Continental superpower France, its regime was a parliamentary monarchy, its universities were coming to terms with Newton's Principia, its coffee houses were bestrewn with uncensored print, and Trinitarian Protestants could worship as they chose. During Locke's childhood, the English overthrew and executed one Stuart monarch, and, in his middle age, deposed another. Locke was both a witness and an agent of England's transformations, and his own life, like his country's, turned upon the axis of 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution. Before then, he was obscure and unpublished, and for some years an exile; afterwards, he was famous and prolific. In his annus mirabilis, 1689, he published his cardinal work of epistemology, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his epitome of the Whig theory of liberty and revolution, Two Treatises of Government, and his critique of religious coercion, A Letter Concerning Toleration. He was a child of the Reformation and a progenitor of the Enlightenment.

1.1 Early Years, 1632–1652

Locke was born in Wrington and brought up in nearby Pensford, a village six miles south of Bristol. He was not by birth a gentleman, but became one; his inheritance was modest, but he died wealthy. His near relations included a clothier, tanner, brewer, and pewterer. His father was an attorney and clerk, serving the magistracy of Somerset and acting as steward of estates to a landed gentleman, Alexander Popham. John Locke senior had a few tenants of his own, whom his son inherited in 1661 and would manage in absentia, sternly exacting rents, but charitable to the “honest and industrious” poor (Corr., 3310). The West Country was economically dynamic, home to an export-led woolen textile industry, and Locke would remark in the Two Treatises that 10 acres of Devon were as productive as a thousand uncultivated in America (TT, 2.37). Commercial agriculture, household artisanship, and, increasingly, transoceanic trade were, for him, paradigms of the fruitfulness yielded when the industrious dutifully applied themselves to God's world.

Locke remembered his father as severe and his mother as affectionate. His father's surviving notebook chiefly concerns magistratical duties, such as disciplining tavern keepers, vagrants, and begetters of bastards, but also contains criticisms of Charles I's bishops. Was not kneeling to receive communion impious, and should not congregations determine their own choice of minister? Locke's grandfather bequeathed money for a Bible lecture, and he was baptised by a semi-conforming minister who ignored Prayer Book rubrics which troubled his conscience. For such Puritans as these, godliness flowed from Scripture and not from the inventions of priests, and true religion was to be found more in the pulpit than at the altar. When the Civil War came, Locke's father fought in the Parliamentarian army, and Colonel Popham's troops destroyed the “superstitious” windows, organ, and episcopal throne in Wells Cathedral.

It is, however, misleading to trace a high road from Parliamentarian Puritanism to republicanism and religious toleration, still less to “liberalism.” The Parliamentarians sought a “mixed and balanced monarchy” of Crown, lords, and commons, and deplored the regicide and military republic that were the unintended outcomes of civil war. While hostile to episcopacy and “popish” ceremonial, they aimed at a highly disciplined national church, and loathed the anarchy of sects and fanatical “enthusiasm” which emerged from the chaos of war. Popham, Member of Parliament for Bath, was typical of the Parliamentarian leadership which spent the 1640s opposing Charles I but the 1650s opposing Oliver Cromwell's revolutionary Protectorate and moving towards re-embracing the Stuart dynasty. Such men, just as much as loyal Royalists, ensured the restoration of Charles II in 1660, and Charles prudently ensured that they, traitors to his father, held public office and sat in Parliament.

In 1647 Locke entered England's finest school, Westminster, under the renowned Richard Busby. Fellow pupils included the future poet John Dryden and the “virtuosi” Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. Like many talented boys of modest background, Locke depended on patronage. Among his earliest letters are carefully crafted compliments to his “Maecenas” and “best patron,” Popham, for whom “the greatest advantage I demand of my studies is an ability to serve you” (Corr., 96). A grammar school meant tuition in Greek and Latin, and the Westminster curriculum was reminiscent of the eclecticism of Reformation humanism which readily embraced the pagan classics alongside Scripture and the Fathers. When Locke came to write on toleration for a European audience, he wrote in Latin, and the Epistola de Tolerantia assumes his readers' classical education, for he cites Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Tacitus, and Virgil. At the close of his life, he recommended not only the New Testament but also Cicero's De Officiis (On Duties) as the best guides to morality (Corr., 3328).

1.2 Oxford, 1652–1667

Locke entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1652, where he became a “student”: at first a pupil and latterly what other colleges call a Fellow. The College, purged of its Royalist and then Presbyterian heads, was now governed by John Owen, a religious Independent, nicknamed “Cromwell's Pope.” England was a republic, and Locke's tutor, William Cole, was described as a “fanatic” although to Royalists all Puritans were fanatics. The natural course of Locke's life now pointed toward ordination in the ministry, as the statutes for a Student required, and then either remaining a university tutor or taking a parish or perhaps becoming chaplain in a great household. He held the posts of tutor, praelector in Greek and rhetoric, and censor in moral philosophy (1661–1667). His role was pastoral as well as pedagogic in his oversight of pupils: young men who typically became country gentlemen or entered the legal, medical, clerical, or teaching professions.

When Locke wrote to Popham in the year of the Restoration, he remarked that “the whole nation looks on you as a defender of their laws and liberties,” from which we deduce that he accepted England's road back from republic to monarchy, and from Puritanism to what would later be called Anglicanism. In the anarchy that ensued after Cromwell's death, he deplored this “great Bedlam England,” the wars of this “giddy nation,” and the “tyrants [who] are the promisers of liberty” (Corr., 82, 91). He had written a poetic encomium for Cromwell in 1654, but in 1660 he did so for Charles II.

In religion, the young Locke was a conformist, accepting first the Cromwellian settlement and then the return of the episcopal Church. He was also a conformist in theory, for his first political or, rather, ecclesiological writings, known as the Two Tracts on Government (1660–1662), urge the necessity of obedience to the ruler's imposition of religious order in all things “indifferent” to salvation. Hence it was that, after his college was purged again in 1660, Locke was issued with a certificate of acceptability by the new Dean, John Fell, later Vice-Chancellor and Bishop of Oxford. Although he would later drastically change his mind concerning toleration and came to reject coercion of “tender consciences,” and although he would express anticlerical distaste for church hierarchies, Locke never showed any inclination to become a religious Dissenter, as many Puritans now became, and he attended Anglican worship for the rest of his life. It was not that he believed that Anglican ceremonial or episcopacy were divinely ordained; on the contrary, precisely because they were man-made he felt no reason to scruple society's conventional norms. It also followed that the only ground for coercion of those who rejected the Church was a calculus of their civil danger. What he changed his mind about was the empirical weight of that calculus. He emerged as a “latitudinarian,” later assailed for betraying the sanctity of Anglicanism and the necessity of uniformity. Like other latitudinarians, and moderate Puritans, his personal religiosity stressed virtue and “practical piety” rather than the doctrine, ritual, and clerical authority favored by “High Churchmen” or the mystical “enthusiasm” and spiritual introspection of the sectaries. He wrote that godliness lay in the proper “management of [our] temporal affairs” so that we may be in “a condition of doing good and performing those offices required … in [our] station” (Corr., 426).

The universities inherited from the Middle Ages both a philosophy and a pedagogy. Scholasticism was a substantive philosophical system, having Aristotle's metaphysical, scientific, moral, and political texts at its core, and a system of teaching which prioritized the exposition of classical, scriptural, and patristic sources, and the honing of forensic skills through disputation. According to his early biographers, Locke “never loved the trade of disputing … [it] being rather invented for wrangling or ostentation than to discover truth” and complained that he “lost a great deal of time … because the only philosophy then known at Oxford was the peripatetic [Aristotelian], perplexed with obscure terms and stuffed with useless questions” (Goldie and Soulard 2014). He attributed his philosophical awakening to extracurricular reading of Descartes. Yet he certainly learnt the rhetorical arts, formal and informal, that would serve him well in sustaining a vast correspondence, and in his verbal facility: he was a “wit” in its then generic sense. This would equip him for public service and fashionable salons, in a society which valued conversability.

One result of Locke's lecturing at Christ Church was a text now called Essays on the Law of Nature (1663–1664), a misleading title, for these are a set of disputations, in which propositions or “questions” are offered, tested, demonstrated, refuted. They lead the student through familiar conundrums concerning the essence of jurisprudence, the typology of laws, and the relationship of natural to divine and human law and the ius gentium (law of humankind). While synoptic in intent, the Essays indicate two themes that would remain constant: a voluntarist theory of law and an empiricist thesis concerning knowledge of natural law.

During his Christ Church years, Locke became interested in natural philosophy – “science” as we now call it. He met Robert Boyle, absorbed the new mechanical philosophy, participated in anatomical dissections, acquired a knowledge of astronomy, and trained in medicine. He befriended Thomas Sydenham, with whom he shared an interest in respiration, circulation of the blood, and epidemic fevers, and together they composed two tracts, “De arte medica” and “Anatomia.” Thereafter he was an occasional pract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• References to Locke's Works
• Introduction
• Part I: Life and Background
• Part II: Metaphysics and Epistemology
• Part III: Government, Ethics, and Society
• Part IV: Religion
• Part V: Locke's Legacy
• Index
• EULA