1. Tom is right that there’s lot of spirited rhetoric in Locke’s writing about the search for truth but there’s also a healthy dollop of skepticism about our rational powers. So despite his sometimes strident confidence regarding the rational demonstrability of morality, he also avers, in The Reasonableness of Christianity, that most folks would be insufficiently “studious” to follow the train of reasoning even if it were, in fact, available. In my comments regarding constructivism I don’t mean to reduce ALL of Locke to construction or deny he embraces any hopes for truth, but there sure is a lot of construction, though certainly different from the post-modern iterations it likely helped spawn. Maybe my overriding point is that the elements of construction, combined with the often subterranean political objectives, ,makes discretely compartmentalizing nature and convention in Locke very difficult.

2. I don’t deny that there is, for Locke, the experience of pleasure,and something like happiness, even happiness delivered by something like the experience of virtue. But the epistemological status of virtues is rendered problematic but his discussion of morality as comprised of “mixed modes”, ideas patched together but the imagination that have no “archetype” in nature. Locke also often relativizes happiness, making its content dependent upon the vagaries of history, cultural context, and individual inclination (there’s a lot on this in the section devoted to innate principles of action). So the question isn’t whether or not there is any happiness at all, or even a some common threads that unify the many diverse conceptions of happiness he discovers, but whether or not these common threads are enough to give us a concept that is sufficiently regulative.

3. Tom is right to point that the problem of a truly comprehensive anthropology is shared by all the philosophers: Lock, Aristotle, and Strauss too–the whole lot of them. He’s also right that Locke discerns various points of commonality but, again, the issue is whether or or not that common ground, in light of the great divergences between us in his account, is robust enough to rise to the level of a normative standard. It would be hard to develop such an account on the basis of the fact that we all eat food and wear clothing. Referring back to the section in the Essay on innate practical principles, Locke seems more impressed by what divides us than what unites us. Part of the problem might be that Locke is often deliberately elliptical regarding his account of man.

To repeat, I’m really appreciative of Tom’s response and work on Locke in general–I’ve learned as much from his account as from anyone else’s.

If it wasn’t obvious from my email to PL, I should point out that West’s efforts are important correctives to some Straussian complacency on these issues.

1. “the rest of Locke’s epistemology is so thoroughly constructivist it’s almost theoretically impossible to articulate a hard demarcation between patterns apprehended and postulated. It’s important to remember that his notion of construction isn’t simply free imaginative creation or a conscious act of will: there is always a cultural or historical context, not to mention the fodder of our experience for the imagination to act upon in the first place.”

2. “Two, the summum bonum of happiness is complicated by the fact that Locke thinks (and this is clearer in his letters sometimes) that happiness is ultimately elusive.”

3. “Finally, there is no real coherent account of that species man that enjoys happiness, maybe THE lacuna in Locke. So even if nature survives as a standard of some kind, it’s a thoroughly compromised one.”

I respond:

1. Locke’s argument in Essay bk. 4 culminates in a passionate appeal to the pride of the reader by showing how shameful it is to be slavishly submissive to error. One of the main sources of error is one’s “cultural or historical context” to use IK’s phrase. Locke obviously knows how hard it is to resist “the common received opinions, either of our friends or party, neighbourhood or country” (Essay, bk. 4, chap. 20, §17). But we should use our minds as best we can to achieve this. In his Epistle to the Reader, Locke says, concerning the Essay as a whole, that “he who has raised himself above the alms-basket, and not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter’s satisfaction.” Locke adds: “every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight, and he will have reason to think his time not ill-spent, even when he cannot much boast of any great acquisition.” We may be prisoners in Plato’s cave, but Locke no less than Plato thinks it is both noble and pleasant to bend every effort to make the ascent to the sun. This is far from proto-postmodern “constructivism.”

2. IK says Locke thinks happiness is “ultimately elusive.” Yes and no. Obviously there will always be pain, and pain can make us miserable. But pain is part of life, and in fact is part of what makes us capable of developing our mind and character (as Locke explains in Essay bk. 2, chap. 3). Without the incentive of pleasure and pain, man, “however furnished with the faculties of understanding and will, would be a very idle unactive creature, and pass his time only in a lazy, lethargic dream” (bk. 2, chap. 7).

By cultivating our talents, we make ourselves capable of friendship, without which we cannot be happy. Locke writes, Education §135, that virtue makes a man “valued and beloved by others, acceptable or tolerable to himself. Without that, I think, he will be happy neither in this nor the other world.” In this Locke follows Aristotle, Ethics bk. 9, chap 4: “we should strain every nerve to avoid wickedness and should endeavour to be good; for so and only so can one be either friendly to oneself or a friend to another.”

IK says Locke’s letters show that “happiness is ultimately elusive.” Well, maybe ultimately. But what about this world? A remark that Locke makes in a letter to his philosophic friend Molineax suggests that Locke was fully appreciative of the share of happiness offered to man in this world, if he is fortunate enough to have a good mind and a good friend: “you will not blame me, if I have a longing to see and embrace a man I esteem and love so much, before I leave this silly earth; which, when the conveniencies of life are moderately provided for, has nothing of value in it equal to the conversation of a knowing, ingenious, and large-minded friend, who sincerely loves and seeks truth.” (http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1444&chapter=81479&layout=html&Itemid=27)

3. IK says there is “no real coherent account of that species man.” But if I am right in “The Ground of Locke’s Law of Nature,” Locke has such an account in his descriptions of human beings as partly sharing in a common nature (so that all benefit from food and clothing), and partly different (so that only a few benefit from cultivation of the intellect for the purpose of philosophy).

Does Aristotle have a superior “coherent account of that species man”? Doesn’t Aristotle in effect admit that our insight into the nature of a species is limited by our sense perception and reflection, just as Locke too says?

In sum, I think IK and Sara are making things more difficult for Locke than they are.

Incidentally, Locke has a marvelous account of the problem of mistaking nature for convention in Essay, bk. 1, chap. 3. But Locke’s point throughout is that it is possible to see the difference, if one is observant and thoughtful.

Getting Locke’s self-understanding right is obviously important. However, the fact that he deconstructs the “ordinary course of nature,” which appears to us as “species” of things, only to have to reconstitute or reconstruct it for social and political reasons is a good place to initiate a fundamental critique of the adequacy of his account of the nature of things.