John LOCKE (1632-1704) (Portraid le Herman Verelst)
CAIBIDEIL III
IDÈAL NA PEARSANTACHD AGUS IDÈAL AN T-SAIDHEINS NA MHÙTHADH CRITIGEACH GU PRÌOMHACHAS IDÈAL NA PEARSANTACHD.
§1 - AN TIONNDADH SICEÒLACH SAN IDÈAL-SAIDHEINS AGUS A IDÈA THAR-CHEUMNAIL A-THAOBH TÙIS.
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CHAPTER III
THE IDEAL OF PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL OF SCIENCE IN THE CRITICAL TRANSITION TO THE PRIMACY OF THE IDEAL OF PERSONALITY.
§1 - THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TURN IN THE SCIENCE-IDEAL AND ITS TRANSCENDENTAL IDEA OF ORIGIN.
Rationalist mathematical dualism, rationalist mechanical naturalism and rationalist mathematical idealism prove to be the chief types in which the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanist thought was specified during the first phase of its development since the rise of the new science-ideal. The latter had built a new metaphysics and it was in the cadre of this metaphysics that the dialectical tension between the nature- and the freedom-motives displayed itself.
As long as the primacy of the mathematical science-ideal was maintained, it made no sense to oppose rationalism to empiricism. HOBBES was doubtless an empiricist in the epistemological sense. Nevertheless, his empiricism was of an extremely rationalist stamp, since it conceived of the process of knowledge itself in terms of the mechanical laws of movement.
The psychological turn in the ideal of science in empiricism since LOCKE.
Since LOCKE, however, empiricism brought a psychological turn into the science-ideal. The latter retained its primacy, nevertheless, the turn toward psychologism was highly significant. The science-ideal began to liberate itself, in an epistemological sense from metaphysics. It no longer sought its common denominator(s) for the different aspects of reality in one or two metaphysical concepts of substance. It now sought it within the functional apparatus of human knowledge itself, and at least its inner tendency was to seek it in the psychical function of feeling and sensation alone.
The "substance", the "Ding an sich", became the epistemological X, the unknown and unknowable background of the "empirical world" which is given only in psychical impressions and perceptions.
According to the subject-object-relation in the psychical aspect of human experience, there is to be distinguished an outer world, given only in objective sensations, and an inner world of the subjective operations of the mind which are to be psychically perceived in the so-called "reflection" or "internal sense" only (1). According to LOCKE experience is exhausted by these two "sources".
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(1) In his Essay concerning human understanding, vol. I, Bk 2 ch. I § 4 LOCKE observes as to the latter: "This source of Ideas every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other sensation, so I call this ref1ection, the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself."
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The understanding or the logical function borrows all "Ideas" from them. Just as the "external material things" are the objects of psychical sensation, the operations of the mind (including passions and feelings) are the object of inner perception or reflection (2).
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(2) Ibid. in fine.
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For the rest, LOCKE'S division of the whole of human experience into "sensation" and "reflection", or as it was later to be called, the distinction between outward and inner experience („aüszeren" and „inneren Sinn" in KANT), is the perfect counterpart of DESCARTES' dualistic separation of "extensio" and "cogitatio". Although LOCKE denies the possibility of theoretical metaphysics, his psychological dualism between "sensation" and "reflection" remains grounded in the conviction that behind these two realms of experience, a material substance and a spiritual one must be present. And the latter are the causes of the external sensible and the internal spiritual impressions of experience. In DESCARTES these substances are supposed to possess the sharpest possible independence in respect to each other, although he was not able to maintain this dualism in an integral way. LOCKE agrees, except that he no longer considers the substances to be knowable. And if the material substance can be only an unknown X to human knowledge, then, in the nature of the case, the monistic materialist metaphysics of HOBBES must also lose its foundation.
Nevertheless, LOCKE, too, did not maintain his dualistic position in an integral sense. Although he attempted to oppose sensation and reflection as two entirely independent sources of experience, he did not ascribe to both of them an equal originality. According to him, the inner perception of the operations of the mind is not possible unless the mind by sensations of the outer world has first been stimulated to a series of operations which are the first content of its reflection.
This is the very reason why in the new empiricist school of LOCKE the same polar tensions were present as in the metaphysical rationalism of the Cartesian one.
Both HOBBES and LEIBNIZ had sought to free themselves of the Cartesian dualism. In like manner empiricist-nominalist trends arose which sought to remove the psychological dualism. The new psychologism turned in the mechanistic association-psychology (already stimulated by HOBBES) of a HARTLEY, BROWN, PRIESTLY, DARWIN et al., to the naturalist and materialist pole. It turned to the idealist pole in the spiritualism of BERKELEY. The latter, however, does not belong to the closer community of Humanistic thought, because of his scholastic accommodation of the new psychologism to authentic Christian motives. MALEBRANCHE had done the same with Cartesianism.
The inner antinomy in LOCKE'S psychological dualism.
LOCKE'S psychological dualism involved itself in yet sharper antinomies than did the metaphysical dualism of DESCARTES.
Indeed, although he acknowledges innate faculties of the soul, LOCKE contests from the empiricist standpoint the "innate Ideas". The point at which he differed in principle from DESCARTES in this matter consisted in his view that the understanding owes all its content to the simple or elementary psychical representations ("Ideas") given in sensation and reflection. Thought can obtain no knowledge beyond the reach of these representations. LOCKE even refuses to conceive of mathematical thought as purely logical, as DESCARTES and LEIBNIZ had done.
The simple sensible and "spiritual" impressions of psychical experience which the mind must receive purely passively, are sharply distinguished by LOCKE from the complex representations ("Ideas"). In the latter, thought is actively and freely operative, but still remains constantly bound to the material of the "simple Ideas".
The "simple Ideas" owe their origin to sensation and reflection and they not only include pleasure, pain, joy, and grief, but also the representations of force, causality, unity and reality.
The "complex ideas", in which LOCKE includes also the "universalia", i.e. the universal generic concepts acquired by abstraction, are freely formed by the understanding out of the combination of "simple" ones. Among these complex Ideas, the number of which is infinite, LOCKE investigates in particular the concepts of number, space, infinity, the concept of identity (chiefly that of personal identity), that of power (especially in connection with the problem of the freedom of the will) and that of substance.
Thus psychological analysis dissolves the entire content of knowledge into simple psychical impressions. Consequently, even the mathematical science-ideal with its Idea of free creative mathematical thought must be given up, if the analysis is to be carried through consistently. But this consequence was entirely contrary to LOCKE'S intention. He continued with DESCARTES to view mathematical thought, with its strict deductive coherence, as the mainstay of the ideal of science. The total psychologizing of scientific thought was first carried through by BERKELEY and HUME. And so LOCKE's psychological dualism necessarily involved itself in the following antinomy: on the one hand it must reduce the concepts of mathematical thought, with respect to their proper mathematical meaning, to passive psychical impressions of experience; and at the same time, it continues to ascribe a free creative power to reflection in its active character of scientific thought. This antinomy originated from the attempt to furnish a psychological foundation for the mathematical science-ideal.
From LOCKE'S travel-diary it appears that he originally gave up the mathematical ideal of science in the interest of absolutized psychological analysis (3).
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(3) See CASSIRER op. cit. II, p. 243 ff.
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In his Essay, however, this radical psychological standpoint is abandoned and he tried on the one hand to bind mathematical thought to the psychical representations, and on the other hand to maintain the concepts of mathematical thought as the very foundation of the reality of experience. The psychological point of view predominates in the first two books; in the fourth book, however, the mathematical science-ideal predominates. Almost imperceptibly LOCKE'S psychological dualism is transformed into a radical dualism between psychical experience and creative thought. This dualism, however, was threatened at the root by LOCKE'S absolutized psychological starting-point.
And this also explains why in the further development of the psychologizing trend of thought the attack was launched in the first place against the dualistic separation between "sensation" and "reflection".
In his psychological analysis the world of experience is dissolved by LOCKE into atomistic psychical elements, which as such exhibit no orderly inner coherence, but nevertheless are irresistably related by the consciousness to a common, though unknown, bearer (substance).
Reflexion may possess the capacity to join these given elements in an arbitrary manner, as the 24 letters of the alphabet (4); but such freedom to unite remains arbitrary. And an orderly coherence between the simple Ideas of experience cannot be based on arbitrariness.
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(4) Essay concerning human understanding II, 7 § 10. The Idea of an alphabet of logical thought has here acquired a psychological rather than a mathematical sense.
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Unlike HUME, LOCKE had not yet attempted to reinterpret this orderly coherence in a psychological manner. His concept of order was still that of the mathematical science-ideal.
Thus psychological analysis necessarily led to the conclusion that no scientific knowledge of empirical reality is possible.
And at the same time it led to the conclusion that the necessary orderly coherence in the joining of concepts, without which science is not possible, cannot find its origin in the psychical impressions of experience.
LOCKE asserted that exact science would be impossible, if there were no necessary relations between the Ideas. According to him, these relations are elevated above the temporal process of the psychical impressions of experience and possess an eternal constancy. Otherwise one could never pass universally valid propositions. A man would ever remain bound to the psychical perception of the individual impressions of experience (5).
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(5) Essay IV, 1 § 9: "If the perception that the same Ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and the same relations be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge of general propositions in mathematics; for no mathematical demonstration would be any other than particular: and when a man had demonstrated any proposition concerning one triangle or circle, his knowledge would not reach beyond that particular diagram. If he would extend it farther, be must renew his demonstration in another instance, before he could know it to be true in another like triangle and so on: by which means one could never come to the knowledge of any general propositions."
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We saw, however, that LOCKE did not in the least intend to approve of the drawing of this sceptical conclusion from his psychological resolution of all the content of knowledge into isolated psychical "elements". On the contrary, he remains true to the mathematical science-ideal, and affirms his belief in the super-temporal necessary coherence of the concepts of thought. True science, according to him, is possible wherever we deal only with the necessary connection of concepts, rather than with the "empirical reality of things". Such is the case in mathematics and in ethics.
LOCKE maintains the mathematical science-ideal with its creation-motive, though in a limited sphere.
Here it is the understanding itself that creates its objects, i.e. the necessary relations between the Ideas. The mind forms the archetypes, the original patterns to which the things in the experience of reality must conform. A triangle possesses in an empirical form the same sum of its angles as does the universal triangle in the mathematical concept. Moreover, according to LOCKE, what is valid for the mathematical complex Idea is just as valid for "moral Ideas". These Ideas too are absolutely independent of empirical reality, independent of the question whether or not human actions are really directed by them. "The truth of CICERO'S doctrine of duties does not suffer any injury by the fact that no one in the world exactly follows its precepts or lives according to it in its portrayed example of a virtuous man."
Therefore, according to LOCKE, exact proofs are as possible in ethics as in mathematics.
The thesis: "where there is no property, there is no injustice either," is no less accurate than any thesis in EUCLID. Mathematical science and ethics furnish us with apriori knowledge, infallible, true and certain.
Thus it is clear that in spite of the epistemological-psychological turn of his investigation, LOCKE retains completely the fundamentals of the mathematical science-ideal. In his transcendental ground-Idea the latter still possesses the primacy over the ideal of personality. With a tenacious faith, equal to that of DESCARTES and LEIBNIZ, LOCKE clung to the Idea that human personality can only maintain its freedom of action by being obedient to sovereign mathematical thought.
However, because of the psychological turn which the Cartesian cogito had acquired in LOCKE's epistemological research, there arose an insoluble inner antinomy in the foundation of the mathematical ideal of science. This antinomy is produced by the fact that the "sovereign reason", in which the Humanistic ideal of personality had concentrated itself, refused to accept the dogmatic theory concerning the "Ideae innatae" in their Cartesian sense (6).
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(6) RIEHL, Der Phil. Kritizismus, supposes that no antinomy may here be indicated in LOCKE'S system. This statement contains several errors. In the first place, in the Prolegomena we have pointed out the untenability of an opposition between the genetic and critical view point. Nevertheless, in RIEHL'S argument this distinction plays its confusing role. He does not see that the question about the origin of our logical concepts is a transcendental-critical one, because it cannot be solved without a transcendental Idea of the origin and the mutual relation of the different modal aspects of reality. In the second place, RIEHL forgets that LOCKE in the first two books of his essay had considered unity, force and causality as simply Ideas, and that he proceeds upon the assumption that all complex Ideas possess the simple Ideas as their elements. LOCKE did not yet know KANT'S doctrine of the apriori forms of intuition and understanding.
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The tendency toward the origin in LOCKE'S opposition to the innate Ideas, and the transcendental Idea of origin in LOCKE'S epistemology.
For LOCKE'S opposition to innate Ideas can only be explained in terms of the internal tendencies of the psychological ideal of science. The latter will not permit any restriction upon its sovereign freedom. LOCKE, like HOBBES, could only view the innate Ideas as an arbitrary restriction placed upon the sovereignty of thought. DESCARTES, as we have seen, viewed these Ideas only as potentially innate. In fact, for him they served to check the postulate of the continuity of the science-ideal so that, in due time, the autonomy of creative mathematical thought might be saved. So little did DESCARTES account for the possibility of mathematical thought, that he permitted it to become a static "res cogitans". LOCKE was the first Humanist thinker to grant to psychology the central task of explaining the origin and limits of human knowledge and of critically examining the validity of its foundations. Therefore, he could only view the dogmatic acceptance of innate ideas as an attack upon the very sovereignty of thought.
If the psychological origin (7), the psychological ἀρχή of mathematical thought with its creative concepts is not shown, then, according to LOCKE, the ideal of science does not proceed from the sovereign self-consciousness, but from a dogmatical faith in authority.
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(7) LOCKE himself qualified his Essay concerning human understanding, as an enquiry "into the original,(sic) certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent." (I, 1 § 2). And in book II, 1 § 24, he writes, after having established sensation and reflection, sensory perception and internal introspection as the only sources of our knowledge: "All those sublime thoughts which tower above the clouds, and reach as high as heaven itself, take their rise and footing here: in all that good extent, wherein the mind wanders, in those remote speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas which sense or reflection have offered for its contemplation."
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And it is just this latter that the "Aufklärung" intended to combat with all the means at its disposal: "The way to improve our knowledge is not, I am sure, blindly and with an implicit faith, to receive and swallow principles; but is, I think, to get and fix in our minds clear, distinct and complete Ideas, as far they are to be had, and annex them to their proper and constant names." So LOCKE writes in the fourth book of his Essay concerning human understanding (Ch. 12, sect. 6).
The antinomy in LOCKE'S thought which we must establish between the psychologized Idea of origin and the mathematical ideal of science, was disguised by his limiting scientific knowledge to the sphere of the non-real.
The distinction between the knowledge of facts and the knowledge of the necessary relations between concepts.
For this purpose LOCKE introduced a fundamental distinction between the knowledge of empirical facts and the scientific knowledge of the necessary relations between concepts.
A distinction which had previously been made by HOBBES and would later be taken over by HUME. We shall see that it no longer could have any critical value for the latter.
In opposition to DESCARTES, however, LOCKE maintained the view that mathematical and moral judgments are synthetical and not merely logical. From the standpoint of his psychologism no possibility existed to ground synthetic judgments otherwise than on the single psychical impressions of experience.
This is exactly what HUME later did in a very consistent manner. Now LOCKE, in the fourth book of his Essay, introduced, in addition to "sensation" and "reflection", a new faculty of cognition, namely the intuition of the "cogito". This faculty was proclaimed to be the indubitable foundation of all exact scientific knowledge and was thought of as the basis of mathematical proof ("demonstratio"). But by introducting this faculty he really turned away from the paths of his psychologizing epistemology.
DESCARTES had also founded the certainty of mathematical knowledge on the intuitive certainty of the thinking self-consciousness. But he considered that mathematical knowledge originated in creative logical thought alone, apart from any assistance from sensory perception.
It was precisely against this purely analytical conception of scientific thought that LOCKE directed his thesis that, if thought is to lead us to knowledge, it must always remain joined to the material of psychical sensations.
LOCKE recognized that the continuity and infinity of space and time go beyond the perception of particular empirical sensations. Nevertheless, his analyses, in the second book of his Essay, of the complex Ideas of number, space, time, and infinity are invariably joined to the simple impressions of experience.
Thus the ultimate termination of LOCKE'S psychological analysis of knowledge in the face of mathematical thought signifies a capitulation of his critique which is replaced here by the dogmatic proclamation of the primacy of the mathematical science-ideal.
The psychological epistemology had only caused a rupture in this latter, because LOCKE no longer deemed it possible to grant to mathematical thought domination over empirical reality. Physics and biology are, according to him, entirely dependent upon sense perception and cannot be subject to any mathematical method of demonstration: "Certainty and demonstration are things we must not in these matters pretend to" (8).
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(8) Essay iv, 3 § 26, As is known, LOCKE retracted this statement with respect to physics after he learned from NEWTON the method of scientific physics. See RIEHL, Der phil. Kritizismus (3e Aufl. I, p. 89).
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Nevertheless, we can observe in the epistemological turn of LOCKE'S philosophy the germ of a critical self-reflection regarding the root of the science-ideal. This self-reflection was soon to cause a radical reaction against the rationalism of the "Enlightenment". It was to lead to the granting of primacy to the ideal of personality. For LOCKE irrevocably rejected the Cartesian deduction of "Sum res cogitans" from "Cogito ergo sum". In other words to mathematical thought was denied the competency to identify itself with the "sovereign personality", as the root of the science-ideal.
Similarly LOCKE refused to resolve the will into a mode of mathematical thought.
Thus the science-ideal was critically emancipated from the domination of a metaphysics, in which, in the last analysis, mathematical thought had been exalted as the origin and root of the cosmos. This emancipation was to have a radical significance for the further development of Humanistic philosophical thought.
The emancipation of the mathematical ideal of science from the rationalistic metaphysics of nature opened the way to the insight that the root of reality is not to be discovered by scientific thought. And it now became possible to see that the science-ideal must have its fundamentals in the ideal of personality.
The consciousness of the absolute autonomy and freedom of personality was not clearly expressed in Humanistic philosophy, as long as the root of reality was sought in a material substance. Nor was it clearly expressed as long as a material substance was opposed to a "res cogitans".
(Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I/ Part 2/ Chapt 3/§1 pp 262-271)
