Lecture 2 - John Locke (mainly)

In the second lecture of our History and Context of Journalism module our focus was John Locke. This was reflected in the reading as the Bertrand Russell chapters contained a lot of chapters on Locke, signaling his importance to modern philosophy. The other set text for us to read was John Locke's own work, 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'. I found the Essay quite difficult to read, (not only because I had to read it from a computer screen, perhaps investing in the actual book might be a good idea), it is of course a fairly archaic text and although the ideas that Locke conveys in the Essay can be applied to a modern context it took a lot of thought for me to understand them in comparison to other contemporary texts.

John Locke was a key exponent of Empiricism which is what British Philosophy is mostly known for. His work was mainly focused on the idea of a Social Contract, i.e. people agreeing to a government which was especially interesting given the historical context of his writings as he wrote in the years following the English Civil War. He was an extremely political man, involved in the Restoration of Charles II and also in The Exclusion Bill Crisis of 1678-1681 which aimed to prevent there being a Catholic King. The reason Locke opposed a Catholic King was not a religious one. Although Locke was religious he believed that religion should be kept separate from politics whereas James II believed in the divine right of Kings. Eventually however, history shows the Exclusion Bills failure as James II became King and John Locke left the country to escape possible persecution as a leading figure in the Bill. Locke did eventually return after the Glorious Revolution in 1688 led by William of Orange.

Social Contract
As I said previously, one of John Locke's main focuses was the idea of a Social Contract. This applies also to Hobbes Leviathan and the 'state of nature' hypothesis of the condition of humanity before the state's foundation. Locke's views on state of nature are collected from his Second Treatise on Civil Government written during the 1680s. For Locke, the state of nature has a law of nature that governs it; this law is reason. Reason teaches us that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty and possessions" although this is at least partly deduced from Locke's prior Christian theology.

The state of nature theory would have appealed to Locke because it reiterated some of his own ideas that power is not a God given right. A leader is chosen by the people and agreed on creating this 'mortal God'. It is essentially the demystification of Kings as it shown that the power would have originally rested with the people, we just lose it by choosing someone to be an absolute leader. More will be written on this blog about 'The State of Nature' in the coming weeks and months.

Locke... again
Locke was also very famous and respected for his Treatise of Government writings which attacks not only the divine right of kings but was also a light bit of banter between himself and Hobbes. He believed in a similar way to Descartes that everyone begins with a 'blank slate' upon which we gain our knowledge, this links back -as everything seems to- to epistemology. Locke believed that there is nothing in your brain that hasn't come from experience, but he was not an atheist, he believed that God gave us this brain and there does not seem to be the same sense of convenience within his inclusion of God that you feel in Descartes work. He also gave a set of natural laws, the right to life, liberty, and property and enshrined property as the most important.

<-------John Locke------->

His writings almost give us a manual for a revolution as he shows that the citizens could rebel if the government disobeyed the law, another natural right and an inalienable truth. In summation, our understanding comes from experience, our reasoning produces real knowledge, the discovery of knowledge and morality comes from God, you should be guided individually by private revelation and faith and religion can be strong but kept separate from politics. He was also against innate ideas which are ideas that already exist in our minds from birth because it contrasted from his own theory of independently building up knowledge through experience.

Newton
I'm sure I will talk more about Newton in subsequent blogs but the lecture ended with brief mention on Newtons early work and his life. Locke was a kind of 'humble under labourer' who cleared the ground for scientists like Newton. Newton was able to convince people that the world was ordered and knowable through mathematical demonstrations of Copernicus and Kepler. He never got stuck on why things happened, he was purely interested in the how. Science can only demonstrate that a force operates, not why. Newton believed that the universe demonstrated God's freedom and omnipotence; the limit to our knowledge was why God had done this so science shouldn't make things up. I would like to speak more about Newton and of course his most famous work, his Prinicpia, but I do not yet know enough about Newton to talk with any air of certainty so I'll leave it here.

I hope you found this blog and if you did then I hope you also found it interesting.