Ordinary Citizens : Locke's Politics of "Native Rustic Reason"

ORDINARY CITIZENS: LOCKE’S POLITICS OF “NATIVE RUSTIC REASON” By Jack Byham A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Political Science—Doctor of Philosophy 2014 ABSTRACT ORDINARY CITIZENS: LOCKE’S POLITICS OF “NATIVE RUSTIC REASON” By Jack Byham John Locke (1632-1704), an early philosopher of liberalism who lived and wrote during the period we call the Enlightenment, wrote a short treatise on the pursuit of truth and on what it means to be “enlightened,” entitled Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1704). In addition to deserving a close analysis for its own sake, the Conduct provides an ideal setting for an exploration of Locke’s other works. Locke is the author of important works on political philosophy, on epistemology, and on religion; the Conduct helps us to understand how these various works fit together in Locke’s thought. In this dissertation I explore the Conduct and its relationship to Locke’s other major works in order to examine the following questions at the heart of Locke’s political philosophy: what does it mean to be “enlightened”? How are freedom of mind and intellectual independence, which are the goals of Locke’s enlightenment, related to his argument for political freedom and security, which are the goals of his liberalism? And finally, can we learn anything for ourselves from Locke about the activity of pursuing the truth and of freeing our minds to receive it? These questions are the focus of this dissertation. I argue throughout that Locke supports and defends in a variety of ways a single “Lockean” proposition: ordinary minds possess the moral and intellectual capacity for the independence of mind required for self-rule and self-government. I find that Locke considered intellectual independence of ordinary individuals to be crucial to the success of his politics of limited government. Copyright by JACK BYHAM 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Locke and the Politics of “Native Rustic Reason”...................................................1 Outline of Dissertation...............................................................................................................9 Chapter One: Locke and the “Way of Ideas,” or, How Not to be a Metaphysician......................13 Why “Enlightenment”?............................................................................................................13 Our Need for Moral Knowledge and the Problem of Skepticism............................................17 Locke and the Knowledge of our Duties.................................................................................28 Locke’s Theory of Knowledge................................................................................................31 Radical Skepticism: External Reality Cannot Be Known to Be Real......................................33 Metaphysical Dogmatism: We Can Know What the World Is................................................37 Substance.................................................................................................................................37 Infinity......................................................................................................................................54 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................59 Chapter Two: Locke and the Revision of “Moral Man”................................................................65 Aquinas and the Christian Natural Law Teaching...................................................................67 Locke and the Christian Natural Law Tradition......................................................................80 Innate Moral Principles............................................................................................................81 Conscience...............................................................................................................................91 Free Will..................................................................................................................................96 Conclusion: The Political Bearing of Locke’s Revisions of “Moral Man”...........................107 Chapter Three: Locke’s Defense of “Native Rustic Reason”......................................................115 The Law of Nature in the State of Nature..............................................................................125 Self-love and Interest in the State of Nature..........................................................................135 Defending “Native Rustic Reason”: The Potential of the Ordinary Intellect........................142 Defending “Native Rustic Reason”: The Dangers of the Educated Intellect.........................154 Chapter Four: “Native Rustic Reason” and Prejudice.................................................................169 A Christian Kind of Charity...................................................................................................173 Interpreting Locke’s Enlightenment Rationalism..................................................................181 Locke on “Prejudice”.............................................................................................................199 Locke’s Rhetoric and Audience in the Conduct....................................................................202 Prejudice and its Sources.......................................................................................................206 Prejudice as a Sign of Attachment to Truth...........................................................................210 Recognizing and “Curing” Prejudice.....................................................................................214 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................226 Chapter Five: The Law of Nature and Christianity.....................................................................228 iv The Law of Nature in the Second Treatise............................................................................232 The Law of Nature and the Law of Works in the Reasonableness........................................235 Christianity as a “Reasonable” Religion................................................................................242 “Illiterate Men” and “Elevated Understandings”...................................................................256 Conclusion: Liberal Faith and the Future of Liberalism..............................................................264 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................272 v Introduction: Locke and the Politics of “Native Rustic Reason” At the heart of modern political life in the West is the distinction between a public and a private sphere. Within the tradition of Western political philosophy, this distinction received its first thoroughgoing defense in the thought of John Locke. Locke defended the idea of a limited government that protects a private sphere where individuals are free to pursue the good as they see fit within the bounds of the law as if it were the only legitimate kind of regime. Today, many nations possess a limited government in just this sense: “liberalism” is ascendant. The awareness of the possession of this kind of political freedom reverberates today in statements overheard frequently, especially in the United States, such as, “It’s a free country, I can do what I want” and “It’s a free country, I can think what I please.” These claims do not express a right to rule others; on the contrary, they express a singular attachment to the idea that we are free to live as we choose. They crudely reflect a healthy pride and confidence in the notion that we can manage our own affairs without having to be imposed upon by another’s vision of what is good for us. The existence of this private sphere, where neither throne nor altar is acknowledged to a have a right to impose its comprehensive vision of the human good, is evinced in Locke’s political philosophy most clearly by his teaching on the ends of government—ends which place upper limits on the legitimate use of political power. According to Locke, those ends are nothing “but the Peace, Safety, and publick good of the People,” ends which are best served, in Locke’s view, by the protection of everyone’s rights (Second Treatise, § 131). The limits of political power, as distinguished from and subservient to those ends, are expressed most clearly in A Letter Concerning Toleration: government in this world extends only to the things of this world, such as “life, liberty, health . and the possession of outward things”; “the care of Souls cannot 1 belong to the Civil Magistrate” (Letter, 26-27). Of course, the public good, the care of the body, and the protection of rights are not the same as the moral or intellectual perfection of individuals. Though political power, understood in this way, makes no official claim about what constitutes the perfection of an individual, and can even accommodate various competing conceptions of that perfection, it cannot afford cold indifference to all kinds of human thought and action. The preservation of a good society in the liberal sense—one that protects a robust private sphere—still requires that citizens treat each other with a modicum of moral decency. In this sense liberal politics, too,

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