The Views of Locke

INTRODUCTION The life-blood of philosophy is argument and counter-argument. Plato and Aristotle thought of this as what they called dialectic discussion. D. W. Hamlyn JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) Locke was the first of the British empiricists who held that our concepts and our knowledge are based on experience. He forms his system of knowledge with empiricist idioms, namely: all knowledge comes to us through experience. "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." There is no such thing as innate ideas; there is no such thing as moral precepts; we are born with an empty mind, with a soft tablet ready to be written upon by experimental impressions. Locke was a believer in God; he accepted the cosmological argument of God as a first cause. Our mere existence proved to Locke that there existed a God, nothing short of an eternal, all powerful, and all knowing Being could possibly have been responsible for the existence of man. It may be, however, that he was not prepared to accept it all in quite this literal way. In his First treatise of Government, for example, he writes: Ð'... Ð''And therefore I doubt not, but before these words are pronounced, if they must be understood literally to have been spokenÐ'... .' He is here referring to Genesis 28:29 at the point at which God confronts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: Ð''And God said unto them. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.' This may be an indication that, although a devout Christian, he often wrote for those with a faith more simple than his own. The overall aim of the first treatise was to assert the claim that kings did not rule with arbitrary power, nor by right of inheritance in a direct line from Adam. Filmer claimed that God gave Adam dominion over the earth and all other creatures; Locke that God gave the earth to Adam and all his descendants, who were all entitled to a share in its bounty, providing they earned their bread by the sweat of their brows and laboured to make the world even more fruitful. The basis for understanding Locke is that he sees all people as having natural God given rights. As God's creations, this denotes a certain equality, at least in an abstract sense. This religious back drop acts as the foundation for all of Locke's theories, including his theories of individuality, private property, and the state. He believed that humans were autonomous individuals who, although lived in a social setting, could not be articulated as a herd or social animal. Locke believed a person to stand for, "Ð'... a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places, which it only does by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking." This ability to reflect, think, and reason intelligibly is one of the many gifts from God and is that gift which separates us from the realm of the beast. The ability to reason and reflect acts as an explanation for individuality. All reason and reflection is based on personal experience and reference. In the state of nature, man has a natural liberty Ð''Ð'... to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit.... (II:4). Such freedom is not freedom to do anything at all;