My response to Sam Gregg on “Locke, Metaphysics and the Challenge of America” is up. What I’d like to stress is that this is not ultimately an argument about John Locke. It’s an argument about the deep methodological questions involved in critiquing a society from a metaphysical standpoint:
The impulse to set up an exclusive clique of metaphysically approved thinkers and then devote our energies to “policing the border,” affirming only our favorites while consigning all others to the outer darkness, is not only unsound on the merits, it will also cut off our essentially Lockean society from the sources of cultural nourishment that it is most likely to be able to draw from…If all we do is emphasize that Locke has nothing morally or metaphysically significant to say, we will not only be stating a falsehood, we will be ensuring our own irrelevance…Indeed, we will be significantly helping our enemies…
Backfill here, here, here, here, and here.
Being myself a convert (in philosophical, not theological terms) away from voluntarism and nominalism to more metaphysically sound approaches, I am better positioned than most to appreciate the damage done to Locke’s thought by those influences. As Shakespeare wrote:
The heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive.
However, for the same reason, I am also better positioned than most to know what approaches are most likely to have a positive impact on the metaphysically impaired. Perhaps even more important, I am in a position to warn from personal experience that some approaches actually have a very strong negative impact, driving people further away from sound thinking and deeper into the loving embrace of reductionism.
Locke’s own story is instructive in this regard. Locke didn’t start out with bad metaphysics. Until the late 1660s he was a fairly conventional Oxonian. His main distinguishing characteristic was a keen professional interest in empirical science. But the Scholastic Mafia that ran Oxford didn’t like empirical science and didn’t have a constructive attitude toward new and different ideas. Anyone who didn’t 100% endorse their highly complex metaphysical system in all its detailed intricacies—including its mossbacked hostility to the experimental method—was treated as roughly the equivalent of Satan incarnate.
So they conspired to deny Locke a senior faculty position. By an amazing and totally inexplicable coincidence, that’s about the time Locke started reading deeply in the nominalist critics of metaphysical realism. The rest is history.
If the Oxford scholastics had taken a more constructive and engaging approach to their critics—if they had treated their metaphysical knowledge as a beautiful gift they could offer the world rather than as a litmus test for who gets the privilege of being admitted to decent intellectual society—the whole subsequent history of the English-speaking world might have been different. That’s something for us all to think about today.
September 21st, 2011 | 1:25 am
A few observations:
1) You claim in your Public Discourse response, “one cannot reduce Locke’s thought to nominalism and voluntarism. Locke read deeply in a staggering variety of sources and was influenced by many lines of thought, including ones that had their roots in more metaphysically sound approaches. As a result, there is a great deal in his work that is morally and even metaphysically robust.” You then drop this line of reasoning without providing reasoning for these claims, but do later try to substantiate them in your comparisons between Locke and Aquinas.
The problem with this approach is that it never details and compares the metaphysical foundations of Locke’s thought directly. Showing that there is more than nominalism and voluntarism to his thinking is not an adequate response to Gregg’s claim that these elements are so central as to render Locke’s entire philosophy problematical. What is needed is a direct and clear evaluation of these foundations, both good and bad, and an explanation as to why the good outweighs the bad by taking account of the effects of both and the alternatives proposed, viz., subsidiarity, rather than the indirect and partial response given in the Public Discourse piece.
2) You claim that Locke is really important to American thought and to displace him would be a monumental task, one with potential negative effects that would outweigh the negatives of sticking to Locke, but neither you nor Gregg really substantiate this assumption. Is Locke really that important? The question may seem ridiculous, but it one were to read Tocqueville or Wilson Carey McWilliams, then Locke’s influence will be made to be overstated and that the true American founding can be seen in the towns of New England–afire with civil participation and subsidiarity.
3) You aver that replacing Locke with subsidiarity would be difficult, but you don’t really make a case as to why this warrant not doing so.
4) A third possibility to the either/or proposition of keeping or jettisoning Locke is to consider whether subsidiarity can be coeval/coterminous with a Lockian social contract. Tocqueville seems to think so, but only with considerable tension between them. And if Tocqueville is right, would such tensions necessarily result in the dominance of one or the other? In our own day, for example, the subsidiary institutions and arrangements Tocqueville praised seem to be shrinking or vanishing.
5) Regarding this post and not the Public discourse document, you make two very unconvincing pleas.
a) The appeal to authority is completely unsubstantiated. Why are you in a better position to evaluate this matter by virtue of your personal perspectives? One could plausibly make such an argument against you on these grounds and claim that because you are academically invested in Locke, you have a bias to uphold his thought. Of course, this would be psychology, not argument. It would constitute a distraction and be unfair to you, but that’s where a discussion of your personal perspectives will lead.
b) You employ an analogy as an admonition regarding the dangers of dismissing Locke. However, an analogy presumes a relationship and you do not establish in the scenario you illustrate and it is not clear that these are like things. The hyper-reactionaryism of Oxonian Scholasticism may have driven Locke to the new empiricism, but will a critical reevaluation and replacement of Locke in retrospect instill the same ire? In who? Why?