Locke's Touchy Subjects

The two touchy subjects treated in this slim volume are the immateriality of thinking substances and existence after the resurrection. Locke's freethinking friend Anthony Collins informed him in 1704 that he was going to publish a book by Samuel Bold on those topics. Locke replies by observing that the topics are “very touchy at this time” and suggesting that Collins hold off on publishing so that Bold wouldn't be “cripled by those who will be sure to be offended” (1). Nicholas Jolley structures his interesting and agreeable book around these two problems. The result is an honorable attempt to vindicate his claim that historians of philosophy will benefit by considering the theological background to the philosophical works they study.Most of Jolley's attention—five chapters—is devoted to the problem of materialism. He advances one and a half theses on this score. His full-throated thesis is that given Locke's other commitments, he really ought to be a materialist about the soul. His sotto voce, not-entirely-asserted thesis is that Locke actually is a materialist, this in spite of Locke's multiple assertions that Cartesian dualism is the more likely hypothesis than thinking matter.According to Jolley, Locke “arguably leaves it to the reader to infer that materialism is the most reasonable of the competing options” (8); a couple pages later, he says, “for Locke the thinking-matter hypothesis is arguably . . . the best hypothesis we have” (10). Jolley never withdraws the “arguably” hedge. He never goes so far as to assert in his own voice that Locke didn't mean his multiple assertions that what thinks in us is probably an immaterial soul. Jolley's caution arises from his view that “to question Locke's sincerity . . . is a sterile enterprise” (98). I think I know where he's coming from. Leo Strauss's central thesis, that historians of philosophy ought to take into account the fact that many works of philosophy were produced under conditions of censorship and oppression, can be taken in an unobjectionable sense. Even so, the extravagance and implausibility of many Straussian readings can be discouraging. The present case is a little unusual, however, because, in the letter from which Jolley gets the title of his book, Locke recommends not publishing on these questions because of the social consequences of heterodoxy. This is more textual support than we usually get for doubting the sincerity of philosophers. If Jolley can convince us that Locke's other doctrines commit him to the materiality of the soul, then we would have good reason to treat his avowals of Cartesian dualism as subterfuge.By my count, Jolley has five reasons for thinking that Locke ought to be a materialist by his own lights. First, he observes that in arguing against Descartes's doctrine that the soul always thinks, Locke claims that it's absurd to suppose that two persons might share one soul. In discussing personal identity, he claims that if the soul is an immaterial substance, it isn't absurd to suppose that two persons might share one soul. One might have thought that in the first edition of the Essay, Locke thinks that the idea of two persons in one soul is absurd; later, in material added in the second edition, he becomes accustomed to the thought and starts to play with it for purposes of thinking about personal identity. Jolley makes the alternative suggestion that in both editions, Locke believes in the absurdity of two persons sharing one soul, and when he makes the conditional assertion that if there are immaterial souls, then it's not absurd that two persons might share a single one, he's constructing a tacit reductio argument against the doctrine that there are immaterial souls.Second, Jolley argues that Locke believes that animals probably don't have immaterial souls and that he also believes if animals don't have immaterial souls, then neither do humans. Jolley gives two reasons for attributing the conditional thesis to Locke. First, according to Jolley, Locke thinks that the most important difference between humans and brutes is that humans have the capacity to abstract, and this difference isn't big enough to demand an immaterial substance. Second, Locke likens the intellectual capacities of senile humans to those of lower animals, which suggests to Jolley that he should say that their cognitive capacities rest on similar metaphysical bases.Jolley's third reason for believing that Locke ought to reject Cartesian dualism is that otherwise his thesis that the soul doesn't always think would commit him to “free-floating bare powers” that aren't grounded in categorical properties (27). When an immaterial thinking soul isn't thinking, it's not obvious what categorical features it might have. Fourth, Jolley gives a mini-survey of two interpretations of Locke's views on substance, and neither of these (as Jolley understands them) is compatible with Cartesian dualism. Fifth, Locke implies that if God superadds thought to matter, he'll do it to matter fitly arranged. To Jolley, this suggests that he believes that God adds mental properties to bodies by giving matter an appropriate structure, and thus that Locke ought to reject Cartesian dualism.As I said, Locke repeatedly asserts that what thinks in us is probably an immaterial soul. As Jolley notes (94–95), he defends this assertion only in the Stillingfleet correspondence, where he points his readers to Essay 4.10.16 and “what I have said there about a system of matter thinking (which there demonstrates that God is immaterial).” Jolley tries to make sense of this reference and can't. So he concludes that Locke hasn't sufficiently justified his claim that what thinks in us is almost certainly immaterial.None of Jolley's individual arguments is entirely compelling, but together they constitute a substantial challenge to those who want to defend the sincerity and philosophical competence of Locke's assertions that what thinks in us is probably immaterial. Defenders should come up with a reading of Locke on substance according to which mental substance can exist without thinking and that allows for a different substratum for minds and for bodies. They should come up with a Lockean division between brutes and humans that's deeper than the capacity for abstraction. They should be able to say something about the Lockean God's preference for adding thought to matter appropriately arranged. And they ought to come up with an interpretation of Locke's justifying reference to Essay 4.10.16 that makes sense.Jolley's second touchy subject is the resurrection. His remarks are worthwhile but scattered; the material isn't structured around defending and developing a thesis. Among other points, Jolley observes that Locke's account of responsibility in his chapter on personal identity is tailored to handle the Last Judgment, that his account of personal identity doesn't require sameness of soul, that his views on the resurrection show an indifference to Christian tradition as a source of authority, and that he, like Hobbes, rejects the eternity of Hell. Jolley fusses some about what Locke means when he calls the doctrines of resurrection and Last Judgment “evident.” The most interesting part of these two chapters is Jolley's discussion of a friendly amendment that J. L. Mackie offers to Locke's theory of personal identity. Mackie suggests that Locke should have incorporated some sort of causal criterion for distinguishing between fake memories and genuine ones. According to Jolley, such an amendment wouldn't work in the case of the resurrection. He leaves the details of justifying this assertion as an exercise for the reader. I would have been interested to see him fill in the gaps.My favorite part of the book is Jolley's treatment of the cognitive state of an oyster. He observes that Locke sometimes seems committed to the Cartesian principle that “there's nothing in the mind of which we are not conscious” (17). But, Jolley also observes, this doctrine is difficult to square with Locke's assertion that all sorts of animals, including mollusks, have perceptions to some small degree. It's hard to believe that oysters engage in metacognition, and it's hard to believe that Locke believes that they do.Jolley offers Locke an attractive way out, suggesting that his version of the mental transparency principle is restricted to thoughts, where these are active and accompanied with voluntary attention (39–40). I like this not just as a piece of sympathetic Locke interpretation but also as a solution to a deep philosophical puzzle. By restricting mental transparency to thoughts, we can save our self-knowledge in the case of our best and clearest cognitions and we can do this without attributing metacognitive capacity to every creature with sense organs. Not every seeming is accompanied by a judgment that that seeming is present; it doesn't even have to be accompanied by the potential for such a judgment.Locke's Touchy Subjects is a well-written and well-informed book on topics on the cutting edge of current Locke scholarship. Anyone working on Locke's metaphysics of mind ought to read it, and others would probably enjoy it as well.Jan Cover gave me useful comments on this review

Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Immortality · Materialism · Psychoanalysis · Theology · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought