John Locke
Where do our ideas come from, and where does authority come from? Knowledge must trace back to experience, power to the consent of the governed.
English · 1632 – 1704
An English physician and philosopher of the dawning Enlightenment, regarded as the father of classical and of political liberalism. Attached to the Earl of Shaftesbury, caught up in the struggles against Stuart absolutism, he was exiled to the Dutch Republic and published his major works only on his return, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His sets out to gauge the reach and the limits of human knowledge, against the of ; his , written against absolutism, recast the legitimacy of power, and his separates Church from State. His method is patient, attentive to the ordinary working of the mind, more concerned with probability than with system. His legacy is immense: he shaped the Enlightenment, and his theses on natural rights and consent fed both the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
There are no : the mind is born a , and sensation and reflection suffice to form all our ideas.
No one can be subject to a political power without their consent: government is only a trust received from the people, not an order imposed from above.
It is labour that creates property: by mixing my toil with something held in common, I rightfully make it mine, prior to any state.
When a government betrays the natural rights it was meant to protect, it puts itself at war with the people, who recover a right of resistance.
One must proportion the firmness of belief to the evidence: to believe beyond what the grounds warrant is a fault against reason.
Justification
If an idea were truly , it would be universally acknowledged; yet neither "whatever is, is" nor any moral principle is so to children, idiots or distant peoples. Locke thus turns the Cartesian argument from universal consent against and the rationalist school: the mind at birth is a , and every idea can be traced back to sensation (external objects) or reflection (the mind's operations on its own ideas). The wager is bold: to show that these two sources alone suffice to compose the whole content of thought, down to the most abstract notions.
Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? ... To this I answer, in one word, from experience.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 1, §2
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I (against innate ideas) and II, ch. 1 (sensation and reflection)
Justification
Locke bounds the understanding: certain, demonstrative knowledge is rare, confined to mathematics and a few moral or metaphysical truths. About existing things and matters of fact we have only probable knowledge, resting on experience and testimony. Without lapsing into , he urges a measured distrust of our claims to certainty.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 2-3 (degrees and extent of knowledge) and ch. 15-16 (probability)
Justification
Since our knowledge of matters of fact stays bounded to the probable, the right use of the understanding is not to believe firmly but to measure assent to evidence: the firmness of belief must exactly track the weight of the grounds. Hence a properly evidentialist norm, on which to believe beyond what the proofs warrant becomes a fault, not against prudence, but against reason itself. Locke makes of it the weapon aimed at enthusiasm, the claim to an inner light that dispenses with proof, and grounds on it his demand for toleration: an unexamined conviction entitles no one to impose it on others.
The mind, if it will proceed rationally, ought to examine all the grounds of probability ... and upon a due balancing the whole, reject or receive it, with a more or less firm assent, proportionably to the preponderancy of the greater grounds of probability.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 15-16 (probability and the degrees of assent)
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 16 (the degrees of assent) and ch. 19 (enthusiasm)
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Justification
Locke distinguishes a thing's real essence (its inner constitution, unknown to us) from its nominal essence (the abstract idea we form from observable qualities, by which we sort it). Genera and species are thus partly the workmanship of the understanding; yet Locke holds to a mind-independent reality of bodies' primary qualities, which anchors his position toward a cautious rather than an avowed constructivism.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III, ch. 3 and ch. 6 (real and nominal essence) · Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 8 (primary and secondary qualities)
Justification
All our knowledge comes from experience: it is built up from simple ideas received through sensation and reflection, to which the mind can add nothing. These simple ideas form the base on which knowledge is erected, an empiricist foundationalism.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II
Justification
Locke detaches personal identity from substance, whether material or spiritual: what makes me the same person over time is the continuity of consciousness, and notably the memory linking my past actions to my present. Person is thus a forensic term, bound to imputation: before the name existed.
As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 27, §9
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 27 ("Of Identity and Diversity")
Justification
Locke makes desire an uneasiness, the goad that moves action toward what is lacking. But a person has the power to suspend the pursuit of a desire in order to examine it and judge whether it leads to the true good: freedom lies in this reflective delay, which sorts desires instead of following them blindly, without for all that extinguishing them.
Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 21
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Justification
In Lockean psychology, pain is, together with pleasure, the spring of all action: we naturally flee pain, and the good is measured in part by what delivers us from it. Suffering has no value of its own, it is an evil to be avoided and relieved, even if Locke's Christian horizon leaves it a place in the trial of this life.
Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 20-21
Justification
A Christian, Locke holds man to be the workmanship and property of God, set in the world to fulfill his ends according to the natural law that reason illumines. This providential frame gives life its direction; but Locke joins to it a large human share, the free pursuit of happiness and the care of oneself, which does not await its meaning from a revelation.
Second Treatise of Government, II · Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 21
Justification
A Christian, Locke looks for a future life, but grounds it on the promised resurrection rather than on a natural immortality of the soul, which he doubts (he even entertains a matter capable of thinking). It is God who raises and rewards, the hereafter being a gift, not an intrinsic property of the mind.
The Reasonableness of Christianity · Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV, 3
Justification
Locke refuses innate essences: the mind is born a blank slate, and what a person becomes owes to experience and education. In metaphysics, we reach only nominal essences, our own classifications, not the real nature of things, which strips essence of its determining role.
Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 1 and III, 3 · Some Thoughts concerning Education
Justification
Locke locates liberty not in the will (the question "is the will free?" is ill-framed) but in the agent's power to suspend the pursuit of a desire so as to examine and deliberate before acting. This capacity to halt and weigh one's desires leans toward , in a careful analysis rather than a clear-cut metaphysics.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 21 ("Of Power", liberty and the suspension of desire)
Justification
Locke holds that good is what produces pleasure and evil what produces pain; happiness, the sum of pleasures, is what all pursue. But the prudent man, able to suspend his desires, aims at a lasting, well-examined happiness rather than at immediate pleasures, which tempers the hedonism with a concern for reasonable flourishing.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 20 (pleasure and pain) and ch. 21, §§51-60 (the pursuit of true happiness)
Justification
No one has authority over another by nature: all being free and equal in the state of nature, no political power can be legitimate without the consent of those who submit to it. From this premise Locke draws a contract of an altogether different kind from 's: one does not surrender one's rights to an absolute sovereign, one entrusts government with a mere trust, bound to an end, the preservation of lives, liberties and estates. Power thus stays conditional and revocable, where the Hobbesian pact was an alienation beyond recall. This is the foundation of political liberalism.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 8 ("Of the Beginning of Political Societies")
Justification
If power is but a trust received to preserve natural rights, then it is bounded by its very end: it cannot reach beyond the common good, nor rule by arbitrary decrees, nor tax without consent. Locke derives from this the institutional arrangement (supremacy of the legislative, separation of powers) and, above all, the consequence refused: a ruler who betrays the trust puts himself in a state of war with the people, who thereby recover a right of resistance. Far from opening the door to disorder, this right is the last guarantee against tyranny, the judge being none other than the wronged people.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 18-19 (of tyranny and the dissolution of government)
Justification
If the earth is given in common to all, how can a thing become mine without each person's consent? Locke's answer starts from a title prior to any compact: every man owns his own person, and therefore the labour of his body. By mixing that labour with something held in common, I join to it something already mine and rightfully withdraw it, owing no one's agreement. Property is thus a natural right grounded in labour, prior to the state, which places Locke toward the end of the axis. Yet the famous Lockean proviso, that "enough, and as good" be left for others, inscribes from the outset a moral limit on appropriation.
The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided ... he hath mixed his labour with, and thereby makes it his property.Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 5, §27
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 5 ("Of Property", labour and the Lockean proviso)
Justification
The individual is primary: bearer of natural rights (life, liberty, estate) in the state of nature, he enters society only by his own consent and the better to protect those rights. The community is an aggregate of free and equal individuals, not an organic whole that would precede them: methodological and normative .
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 2 (the state of nature) and ch. 8 (individual consent)
Justification
The state of nature is no licence: it is governed by a law of nature that reason discovers. Since all men are the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, none has the right to destroy another or to put him under his absolute power. From this original equality Locke derives, not a mere duty not to harm, but correlative subjective rights, to life, liberty and estate, that each bears prior to any government. Power is therefore legitimate only to secure them; to violate them makes it tyrannical. These "unalienable rights" would pass almost word for word into the American Declaration of Independence.
Second Treatise of Government, II-V
Justification
Once the community is formed by consent, it moves as one body by the rule of the majority: the decision belongs to the greater number, else the compact would be void. Legitimacy springs from the people and their assent, not from a competence reserved to experts, which places Locke on the democratic side of the axis.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 8, §95-99 (the rule of the majority)
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Justification
Locke designs workable institutions fitted to men as they are: a livable but inconvenient state of nature, fallible governments that must be bounded and revocable. Far from an ideal city, he aims at concrete guarantees (separation of powers, supremacy of the legislative, right of resistance), which makes for a political realism tempered by principles of right.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 9 (the inconveniences of the state of nature) and ch. 11-13 (the extent and limits of power)
Justification
Locke's toleration rests on the idea that sincere cannot be coerced: inner assent must follow conviction, never dissimulation or forced profession. This demand for inner truthfulness, joined to his evidentialist rule, inclines him toward a rigorism of sincerity, though he does not thematize a casuistry of lying as such.
A Letter Concerning Toleration (forced faith is no faith)
Justification
Locke conceives a natural law, accessible to reason and grounded in God's will, which prescribes duties (not to harm another in life, liberty or possessions): a morality of obligation, close to . He nonetheless mixes in the consideration of rewards and punishments, and so of consequences, which motivate obedience, hence a secondary consequentialist weight.
Essays on the Law of Nature (1664); Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 2 (the law of nature)
Justification
By justifying the right of resistance and the revocability of government, Locke gives the Glorious Revolution its theory and breaks with the order of divine right. His confidence in the growth of knowledge through experience and in the reform of education places him on the reforming side, without revolutionary radicalism, hence a moderately progressive value.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 19 (the dissolution of government)
Justification
For Locke faith and reason do not conflict: Christianity is reasonable, and reason is the last judge of what may count as divine revelation. Faith never contradicts the clear truths of reason but adds truths beyond its reach, which reason authenticates: a harmony with a measure of separate domains (the magistrate does not judge salvation, revelation does not overturn evidence).
The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) · Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 18 (faith and reason, and their respective provinces)
Justification
Locke holds God's existence to be one of the few demonstrable truths: from our own existence he infers, by causal reasoning, an eternal, all-powerful, intelligent being. This Christian theism underpins his ethics (natural law is the divine will) and his politics (natural rights come from the Creator).
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, ch. 10 (the demonstration of God's existence)
Justification
A direct consequence of the : what a man becomes owes far more to education, habit and environment than to any nature given in advance. Locke reckons that nearly all the differences among men come from the upbringing they receive, making him a strong proponent of .
Of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §1
Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §1 ("nine parts of ten are what they are by their education")
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Justification
Locke admits a bodily reality endowed with primary qualities (extension, figure, motion) that our ideas copy, but also a thinking mind; and he confesses he cannot know whether God might not have given matter the power to think. This cautious dualism of body and mind, alongside a solid realism of bodies, rules out both idealism and strict materialism, hence weights shared between materialism and dualism.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 8 (primary and secondary qualities) and IV, ch. 3, §6 (thinking matter)
Anachronistic question: comparing the mind to a computing machine postdates Locke by centuries, and he does not address it.
Locke develops no position on technology as a distinct philosophical theme; the axis belongs to later debates.