(John Locke's subtle and influential defense of religious ...)
John Locke's subtle and influential defense of religious toleration as argued in his seminal Letter Concerning Toleration (1685) appears in this edition as introduced by one of our most distinguished political theorists and historians of political thought. John Locke's subtle and influential defense of religious toleration as argued in his seminal Letter Concerning Toleration (1685) appears in this edition as introduced by one of our most distinguished political theorists and historians of political thought.
John Locke was an English teacher and philosopher, a representative of empiricism and liberalism. He contributed to the dissemination of sensationalism, and his ideas had a huge impact on the development of epistemology and political philosophy.
Background
Locke was born on August 29, 1632, in Wrington, England. His father, also called John, was a country lawyer and clerk to the Justices of the Peace in Chew Magna, who had served as a captain of cavalry for the Parliamentarian forces during the early part of the English Civil War. His mother was Agnes Keene. Both parents were Puritans.
Education
In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London under the sponsorship of Alexander Popham, a member of Parliament and his father's former commander. After completing studies there, he was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of 1652 at the age of twenty. Although a capable student, Locke was irritated by the undergraduate curriculum of the time. He found the works of modern philosophers, such as René Descartes, more interesting than the classical material taught at the university. Through his friend Richard Lower, whom he knew from the Westminster School, Locke was introduced to medicine and the experimental philosophy. He obtained a bachelor of medicine in February 1675, having studied medicine extensively during his time at Oxford and worked with such noted scientists and thinkers as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and Richard Lower.
John Locke had been looking for a career and in 1667 moved into Shaftesbury's home at Exeter House in London, to serve as Lord Ashley's personal physician. In London, Locke resumed his medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham had a major effect on Locke's natural philosophical thinking - an effect that would become evident in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Locke's medical knowledge was put to the test when Shaftesbury's liver infection became life-threatening. He coordinated the advice of several physicians and was probably instrumental in persuading Shaftesbury to undergo surgery (then life-threatening itself) to remove the cyst. Shaftesbury survived and prospered, crediting Locke with saving his life.
During this time, Locke served as a Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina, which helped to shape his ideas on international trade and economics. Shaftesbury, as a founder of the Whig movement, exerted great influence on Locke's political ideas. He became involved in politics when Shaftesbury became Lord Chancellor in 1672, and, following his fall from favour in 1675, Locke spent some time travelling across France as tutor and medical attendant to Caleb Banks. He returned to England in 1679 when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn. Around this time, most likely at Shaftesbury's prompting, Locke composed the bulk of the Two Treatises of Government. While it was once thought that Locke wrote the Treatises to defend the Glorious Revolution of 1688, recent scholarship has shown that the work was composed well before this date. The work is now viewed as a more general argument against absolute monarchy (particularly as espoused by Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes) and for individual consent as the basis of political legitimacy.
Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement in the Rye House Plot, although there is little evidence to suggest that he was directly involved in the scheme. There, he had time to return to his writing, spending a great deal of time re-working the Essay and composing the Letter on Toleration. Locke did not return home until after the Glorious Revolution. He accompanied William of Orange's wife back to England in 1688. The bulk of Locke's publishing took place upon his return from exile - his aforementioned Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration all appearing in quick succession.
Locke's close friend Lady Masham invited him to join her at the Mashams' country house in Essex. Although his time there was marked by variable health from asthma attacks, he nevertheless became an intellectual hero of the Whigs. During this period he discussed matters with such figures as John Dryden and Isaac Newton.
Locke's celebrated liberalism was not the ideology of his youth. He was a diligent, if not a brilliantly outstanding, scholar. However, much of his political work is characterized by his opposition to authoritarianism, and particularly to the tendency towards Totalitarianism advocated by Hobbes.
Locke believed that no one should be allowed absolute power, and introduced the idea of the separation of powers, whereby the Church and the judicial system operate independently of the ruling class. In particular, he defined our civil interests (those which the State can and should legitimately protect) as life, liberty, health and property, specifically excluding religious concerns, which he saw as outside the legitimate concern of civil government. If much of this seems familiar from the American Declaration of Independence, that is no coincidence as the American founding fathers freely admitted their debt to Locke's Political Philosophy.
Although Locke was associated with the influential Whigs, his ideas about natural rights and government are today considered quite revolutionary for that period in English history.
Views
Locke saw the properties of things as being of two distinct kinds. Their real inner natures derive from the primary qualities, which we can never experience and so never know. Our knowledge of material substances, therefore, depends heavily on their secondary qualities (by reference to which we also name them), which are mind-dependent and of a sensory or qualitative nature. He therefore believed in a type of Representationalism, that these primary qualities are "explanatorily basic" in that they can be referred to as the explanation for other qualities or phenomena without requiring explanation themselves, and that these qualities are distinct in that our sensory experience of them resembles them in reality.
He claimed that "the mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone" (an idea being something within the mind that represents things outside the mind). However, he also argued that a proper application of our cognitive capacities is enough to guide our action in the practical conduct of life, and that it is in the process of reasoning that the mind confronts the raw ideas it has received (an approach not dissimilar to the Dualism of Descartes). His definition of knowledge might be stated, then, as the perception of the relationship between ideas. Where Locke differed markedly from Descartes and other predecessors, though, was in the status he granted to the senses. Descartes held that the senses incline us to have certain beliefs, but that this alone does not amount to actual knowledge (which requires interpretation and explanation by reason and the intellect). For Locke, however, the senses themselves are a basic and fundamental faculty which deliver knowledge in their own right. Indeed, his whole conception of an idea differed from that of Descartes: for Descartes, an idea was fundamentally intellectual; for Locke it was fundamentally sensory, and all thought involved images of a sensory nature. In later editions of the treatise, he also included detailed accounts of human volition and moral freedom, the personal identity on which our responsibility as moral agents depends, and the dangers of religious enthusiasm. Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Locke started from a belief that humans have absolute natural rights, in the sense of universal rights that are inherent in the nature of Ethics, and not contingent on human actions or beliefs (a kind of Deontology).
Quotations:
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.”
“The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.”
“We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us."
“Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves poison the fountain.”
“So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.”
“The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its Author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure, all sincere; nothing too much; nothing wanting!”
Membership
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Locke is typically English in his reverence for facts, whether facts of sense or of living consciousness, in his aversion from abstract speculation and verbal reasoning, in his suspicion of mysticism, in his calm reasonableness, and in his ready submission to truth, even when truth was incapable of being fully reduced to system by man.
Interests
Writers
It does not seem that Locke read extensively, but he was attracted by Descartes. The first books, he told Lady Masham, which gave him a relish for philosophy, were those of this philosopher, although he very often differed from him.