What Is Wrong With
Locke's Philosophy?

Preliminary Remarks

It
should be noted, before reading the critique of John Locke's philosophy given
below, that Locke, while in error on many points regarding the traditional
philosophical questions, made a major contribution to the development of modern
political philosophy. For instance, Locke holds that rights can be determined
from the relations that exist between an infinitely intelligent being (God) and
a rational but dependent being. The moral norms are hence rational, and are
identified with the divine right and then with natural right. Moral laws must
have a due sanction (rewards and punishment) which is imposed on the will in
such a manner as to restrain man from diverging from the tendency that leads to
his own well-being.

Locke
also opposes Thomas Hobbes' theory of society by holding that in the state of
nature man did not live in a wild condition, in which right was force. Men even
at this time were rational and had the notion of the fundamental rights of
life, of liberty, property, and so forth. From man's natural condition to the
state of society, there is a progression; but no innovation is involved. The
sovereign who fails in his obligation to defend the rights of his subjects is
no longer justified in his sovereignty and may be dismissed by his subjects.
Locke is considered the founder of classical liberal politics, and his
influence during the centuries following his lifetime has been great, including
his philosophical contributions to the founding of the American Republic. For more information about
this, see my essay John Locke:
Philosopher of Freedom and Natural Rights.

Jonathan
Dolhenty, Ph.D.

A Critique of Locke's Philosophy

John Locke
(1632-1704) was a notable exponent of empiricism. He was a native of Wrington in Somersetshire, England, and was educated at Oxford. His most notable piece of
writing is An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding.

Locke
had the characteristics of most of the articulate university men of his day: a
petulant rejection of Scholasticism without understanding it; a self-confident
notion of doing philosophy all over again from the ground up; a readiness to
speak with an air of finality upon subjects imperfectly mastered.

Now,
the desire to see philosophical doctrines so clearly expressed and proved that
none may doubt them is human and natural and even admirable. But the assumption
that all philosophy can be reduced to the clarity of A-B-C is fantastic. And
the further assumption that all philosophers of past times have been
woolly-minded blunderers is ignorance and intolerable "cheek." The
old impatience, the old want of humility, which brought in Humanism, the
Renaissance, the Reformation, and all the other thin veneerings
which tried to pass for truth are evident in Locke as they are evident in
Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and nearly all the philosophers who abandoned an
authentic commonsense realism.

Locke
had doubtlessly in mind the recasting of philosophy, for he was not wholly
pleased with Bacon's plan for empiricism. Still, he seems to have had no
detailed plan of his own. Indeed, he did not feel the need of any plan. He was
convinced that, once the human mind had learned to grasp things clearly, once
it knew its own powers and recognized its true limitations, once it was sure of
the nature and extent of its knowledge, the developing of philosophy would be sheerly natural growth. Thus, Locke's special interest was the
epistemological question, and he wrote of it in his famous Essay.

Keen
as he was on clarity of knowledge, Locke did not escape the fatal confounding
of sense-knowledge with intellectual knowledge. And so he proceeded to make
confusion more confounded, so that one may take not only different, but opposite,
doctrines from the premises his theories afford. Follow him in one set of
principles and develop these to the end; you find yourself in idealism,
the dream-philosophy which turns reality into shadow. Follow him in another set
of thoughts, and you will be involved in sensism
and positivism which takes the reality around us as the only thing there
is, and denies value to the intellect and to reasoning (even to the reasoning
by which you have reached this dull conclusion). This impossible agglomeration
of conflicting theories was proposed, explicitly or implicitly, by a man of
undoubted mental gifts who was thwarted at the outset by his muddling of the
basic question of all philosophy, the epistemological question.

The Epistemological Question

Locke
strenuously opposed Descartes'
doctrine of innate ideas. All knowledge has its origin in experience, in
sense-perception. The elements of knowledge are the ideas, and Locke, in
his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, explains the idea in the
following manner:

"It being that term which, I think, serves best to stand
for whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I
have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or
whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking."

Descartes
placed all sense-perception in the spiritual mind, thus identifying
sense-perception with spiritual activity; Locke here does the reverse, by
reducing ideas, at least in part, down to the level of sense-perception
(phantasm, species). By thus arbitrarily blurring the nature of the idea so as
to include sense-perception, he laid the foundation for sensism,
where all thinking is nothing but a form of sensation. Another important
feature of this definition of "idea" is,
that the "idea" is the object of our understanding, instead of
the reality of things being the object of our knowledge.

Ideas,
according to Locke, are derived from two sources -- sense-perception and reflection;
and all knowledge is restricted to ideas.

"Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own
ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is
evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them. Knowledge, then,
seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connection of and
agreement, or disgreement and repugnancy of any of
our ideas. In this alone it consists."

This
means, of course, that we do not really know objects or
things-in-themselves, but ideas or conscious states of the mind; and
this is the standpoint of Descartes and idealism. Locke, however, did not deny
the existence of material substances, such as bodies, nor of spiritual
substances, such as the soul and God; but
substance is unknowable to us, whether material or immaterial.

"Our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all,
in both; it is but a supposed I-know-not-what, to support those ideas we call
accidents...By the complex idea of extended, figured, colored, and all other sensible
qualities, which is all that we know of it, we are as far from the idea of
the substance of the body, as if we knew nothing at all."

While
Locke, therefore, admits the existence of material and spiritual
"substances," he asserts that they are unknowable;
"accidents" or "phenomena" alone are knowable; he is in last instance an empirical phenomenalist.

Primary and Secondary Qualities

Locke
is remembered for his distinguishing of primary and secondary
sense-qualities in bodily things. In his study upon the nature of knowledge, he
had constantly to face such questions as: are sense-objects really what they
appear to be; is the grass really green; is the whirling wheel actually in
motion; is the stone truly solid? Locke decided that there are certain
qualities common to all bodies (impenetrability, extension, shape, rest,
motion) and these are primary qualities which exist as objective things.
He said that there are also other qualities not found in all bodies
alike (color, sound, taste, odor, temperature, resistance) and these are secondary
qualities which are largely subjective, that is, not so much objective
things as the perceivings or feelings of the person
who senses them.

Locke's
distinction of sense-qualities as primary and secondary may serve us as a mere
convenient list. But his theory of their objective reality cannot stand. For we are wholly unaware of the primary qualities except through
the medium of the secondary. And if the secondary be unreliable (being
largely subjective) we have no reason to put any trust in the actuality of the
primary qualities. Locke's theory of
sense-qualities points the way to the self-contradiction of complete
skepticism.