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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2012
Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications.
1 Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (ed.) Nidditch, P.H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 [1690])Google Scholar. Citations taken from Locke's Essay are referenced as book, chapter and paragraph number.
2 An overview of the eighteenth-century perception of Locke as a materialist can be found in Thiel, U., ‘Locke and Eighteenth-Century Materialist Conceptions of Personal Identity’, The Locke Newsletter 29 (1998), 59–83Google Scholar, 61 and ‘Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity’, in Haakonssen, K. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 286–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Contemporary interpretations stressing Locke's sympathies with materialism are Jolley, N., Locke: His Philosophical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar and Kemmerlig, G., ‘Locke on the Essence of the Soul’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 17 (1979), 455–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Stuart, M., ‘Locke on Superaddition and Mechanism’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 6 (1998), 351–79, 365CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Ayers, M., ‘Mechanism, Superaddition, and the Proof of God's Existence in Locke's Essay’, The Philosophical Review 90(2) (1981), 210–251, 248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Wilson, M., ‘Superadded Properties: The Limits of Mechanism in Locke’, in Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 196–208Google Scholar and ‘Discussion: Superadded Properties: A Replay to M. R. Ayers’, op. cit., 209–214; Stuart, op. cit., 373.
6 Downing, L., ‘The Status of Mechanism in Locke's Essay’, The Philosophical Review 107(3) (1998), 381–414, 409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Roger Woolhouse for instance insinuates that Locke might just have tried to avoid ‘Stillingfleet's accusation that it was inconsistent to allow that matter might think’ (Woolhouse, R., Locke. A Biography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 407Google Scholar).
8 Downing op. cit. and Downing, L., ‘Locke's Ontology’, in Newman, L. (ed.), Locke's ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 352–380CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wilson (op. cit. 201f) explains that our failure to comprehend how primary qualities can produce sensations is a further obstacle to our understanding whether and how it is possible that matter can think.
9 For instance, Stuart rejects the idea that ‘Locke's talk about superaddition is intended as a sort of epistemological dummy’ (Stuart, op. cit., 364) that merely reveals our inability to understand the concept of thinking matter. For Locke, he argues, it is a genuine possibility that God endowed matter with the power to think. The implication here seems to be that conceivability tells us something about the possibility of the conceived thing, while claims about the inconceivability of thinking matter, taken in isolation from Locke's claims to its conceivability, amount to statements about its metaphysical impossibility.
10 See Hamou, P., ‘Locke on Thinking Matter: A Reassessment’, in Anstey, P. (ed.), John Locke Critical Assessments, vol. 3. (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar, for an interpretation that accounts for the limited use of the conceivability test.
11 J. Locke, The Works of John Locke, new ed. corrected, vol. 3, London, 1823 (rep. 1694), 37.
12 Ibid.
13 Ayers, op. cit., 251; also see Stuart, op. cit. and Jolley, op. cit., for the claim that Locke fails to provide any support for his belief in substance dualism.
14 J.L. Mackie's comparison between Locke and Berkeley suggests that Lockean substances must be interpreted as particular parcels of matter; see Mackie, J.L., Problems from Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mackie's description fails to recognise that strictly speaking Lockean substances are underdetermined, as E. McCann has pointed out: ‘Our idea of substance has nothing more in it than that it supports qualities’ McCann, E., ‘Locke's Philosophy of the Body’, in Chapell, V. (ed.), Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56–88, 83Google Scholar; also see his ‘Locke on Substance’, in Locke's ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, op. cit., 157–91Google Scholar and Chappell, V., ‘Locke and Relative Identity’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989), 69–83Google Scholar. Due to this underdetermination it is as conceivable that Lockean substances are material as it is conceivable that they are immaterial. Tentative dualism captures the possibility of both kinds of substances, while tentative materialism fails to do so.
15 Letter to Henry More (1649) in Descartes, R., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, (eds) Cottingham, J. et al., vol. 1–3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), vol. 3, 366Google Scholar.
16 Since Locke grants beasts the capacity for perception (2.9.11), active powers (2.27.5), reason and knowledge (3.6.12), Antonia LoLordo concludes that for Locke it must be the ability to act morally that distinguishes humans from animals; see her ‘Person, Substance, Mode and the “the Moral Man” in Locke's Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40(4) 2011, 643–67Google Scholar.
17 See Thiel, U., ‘Personal Identity’, in Garber, D. and Ayers, M. (eds), Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 868–912Google Scholar, 886 for an overview of resurrection theories common in the seventeenth century.
18 Winkler, K., ‘Locke on Personal Identity’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (1991), 201–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Locke's example of the prince's soul migrating to the body of a cobbler (2.27.15) might be read as a challenge to this claim, since the soul is here presented as able to reincarnate the same person in another body. Note, however, that in this particular passage the soul is assumed to carry ‘with it the consciousness of the Prince's past life’ (ibid.). This suggests that the soul's power to re-instantiate a specific person cannot be distinguished from on a person's ability to resume her previous consciousness.
20 Cf. Yaffe, G., ‘Locke on Ideas of Identity and Diversity’, in Locke's ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, op. cit., 192–230Google Scholar; Winkler, op. cit.; Flew, A., ‘Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity’, Philosophy 26 (1951), 53–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Helm, P., ‘Locke's Theory of Personal Identity’, Philosophy 54 (1979): 173–185, 178fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Cf. Yaffee, op. cit.; Winkler, op. cit.; Chappell, op. cit.; Thiel, U., ‘Locke's Concept of Person’, in Brandt, R. (ed.) John Locke. Symposium Wolfenbüttel 1979 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 1981), 181–192Google Scholar; Helm, op. cit.; Mackie, op. cit.; Allison, H., ‘Locke's Theory of Personal Identity: A Re-Examination’, Journal of the History of Ideas 23(1) (1966), 41–58; Flew, op. citCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Winkler, op. cit., 206f.
24 Thiel 2003, op. cit., 893.
25 The same argumentative move occurs in Locke's Journals, as Ayers has pointed out: in reply to Cudworth and in relation to the question of whether animals have souls Locke would argue that personal immortality does not automatically follow from the continued existence of the soul. The reason for this would be that consciousness and memory are conceived as ‘contingent activities of the soul’ whose ‘occurrence at any time ‘wholly depends upon the will and good pleasure of the first author’(Locke 1936, 121ff; Journal 20 February 1682): immortality is a state of grace, not the natural state of the soul.' (Ayers, op. cit., 254–5) Ayers here in principle confirms the view that Locke directs our attention to God and his role in enabling consciousness and memory in order to render references to the soul redundant.
26 Yolton, J., The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person and Spirits in the ‘Essay’ (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 63Google Scholar.
27 I am grateful to Peter Anstey, Antonia LoLordo, Martin Lenz and Arif Ahmed who read a draft of this paper. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the ‘The Rise of Empiricism’ conference at the University of Sydney in 2010 and the colloquium of the Leibniz Prize Group at Humboldt University in 2011 and I would like to thank the audiences for their valuable comments and questions.