Overview
Introduction
Welcome back! In my last essay, we covered two modern philosophers, Descartes and Hobbes. Descartes gave us a new way of thinking about knowledge by doubting everything and finding only the doubter left as his bedrock certainty principle. In the process, he was willing to throw most of philosophy out and start fresh from the beginning. That audacity marks the modern spirit, where the past is not revered unless it can prove itself true in a modern guise.
Hobbes showed us a very cynical side in his estimation of humanity’s virtue, but he also gave expression to this modern understanding when he declared that politics could be understood and facilitated in the social world the same way science and the scientific method was changing the material world.
I want to remind you of the Module Learning Goals and how they are connected with the General Education Learning Outcomes.
Module Learning Goals
• Discuss why Rousseau was so important to the Enlightenment and how he provided a check to its belief in unlimited progress.
• Recognize the importance of the social contract as a way of facilitating human society in the work of Rousseau.
• Present Rousseau’s important contributions to the movement known as Romanticism.
• Discuss the importance of Philosophical Liberalism in the work of John Locke.
• Recognize the importance of Locke’s theory of knowledge.
• Present Locke’s political philosophy and demonstrate its influence on the United States Constitution.
General Education Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this area, students will have demonstrated an ability to:
• Explain and contrast views of various historical and contemporary philosophers.
• Analyze and interpret human thought, achievement, and expression relevant to such branches of knowledge as philosophy, literature, and/or the fine and performing arts, and to communicate the results.
Preparing for Your Essay: Study Guide
• Taking notes while studying academic writings and videos facilitates critical thinking and deeper engagement. This, in turn, makes writing the essays less time consuming.
• Difficulty understanding is most often the result of a lack of focus, rather than the difficulty of the material.
• Checking and answering text messages, having the TV on, or trying to study with other people around prevents you from focusing. These distractions are not conducive to understanding anything deep and profound.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
We resume our study with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). While he was a famous intellectual in France during the time of Voltaire, he would find a different way, and thus a different philosophy. It, too, would have a great influence on the world through the movement known as Romanticism.
With the birth of modernity, the European mind began to embrace the Enlightenment, the idea that life is reasonable and that we can study things, such as politics and economics, in the same way we study nature. In coming to understand the laws of society, we will be able to bring order and sanity to the world of social relations. In doing so, we can create a new society, where freedom is the foundation and where bigotry and superstition no longer control our lives.
This was the great hope. Rousseau also believed this, but he could see that humans were still living imprisoned, and he made it is his task to understand why, as he put it: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (Beardsley 1960, 321). This was an exciting time to be alive, for everything was in the process of being challenged and changed.
We can’t really understand Rousseau without first grasping the meaning of these amazing movements that he was such a crucial part of. “Armed with science, reason, and empirical facts, the Enlightenment saw itself as engaged in a noble struggle against the constructing medieval darkness of Church dogma and popular superstition, tied to a backward and tyrannical political structure of corrupt privilege” (Tarnas 1991, 312). Central to this era was a new identification with skepticism that stood in stark contrast with the certainties of medieval scholasticism.
Skepticism is the belief that while there may be some sort of absolute truth or truths, there was no way for human minds to grasp these truths. The best we could hope for was to know our own experience of life, but not life as it might be in itself. Our experiences are limited, and so certainty would be replaced by probability. Skepticism would really take to heart the allegory of the cave in Plato. All we see are shadows, and there is no way to know reality outside of the cave. The cave is our senses and our minds. They limit what we can understand. It was into this world that Jean Rousseau was born.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, and Romanticism
Swiss-born Jean Jacques Rousseau stood out for trying to find a middle ground between Church absolutism and rational secularism. He was a promoter of the democratic revolutions sweeping through the Western world. As a result, he was perhaps one of the most important philosophers of the 18th century. His impact was arguably greater than any other single writer of his age. For example, Rousseau was considered one of the main inspirations of the French Revolution.
While most people, such as Voltaire, were celebrating the breakthroughs of a new rationality, Rousseau saw it as very problematic. To put rationality onto a throne was to put in danger our very nature — feelings, intuition, and spirituality that transcended the world of cold logic and abstract thinking. Civilization alienated people from their natural condition of goodness.
Rousseau was a proponent of the “natural man”, that is, the person who lives closest to nature is the happiest. While he was no more interested in the world of scholasticism than Voltaire was, he did question the power of rationality to bring about any real good. He looked at the history of civilization and he saw nothing but wars and people being inhuman to one another in a hundred ways. What was wrong? Why did people treat one another so poorly? Hobbes had a very negative view of human nature. Rousseau did not share this view of human nature; rather he transferred it to human civilization. Humans were naturally good. It was society that corrupted us.
To understand what he was trying to get at, you can look at the modern power and influence of materialism in our lives today, which is so much more potent than in Rousseau’s day. Look at the power of the media to influence our tastes and our choices. All of this Rousseau saw as a problem. He felt that the arts and sciences, in essence, cultural evolution and development, lead to more problems than they solve.
This would lead directly to Rousseau’s looking with admiration upon tribal groups that he felt had avoided the trappings of a class-based system based on the accumulation of wealth.
Contrary to Hobbes’ view that mankind’s natural state is war, “short, brutish, and vainglorious”, Rousseau held that in a natural state and way of life, people were free to live simply and at harmony. While we now know that tribal groups had their wars and problems, it is also true that they were able to avoid many of the current problems faced by people in a system where so many are living below the poverty line and others make millions and even billions of dollars. This kind of disparity was unknown to tribal people.
Natural Religion
Along with a natural life lived close to nature, Rousseau believed in religion, but not orthodox religion. “Natural religion” was central to the human heart. That which we find within ourselves, within nature — something we can feel and act on and which works best when not interfered with.
Plato also thought religion was good for his Republic, whether true or not, because it promoted social order. One reason why: It consists of belief in God and future reward and punishment. Thus, it provided for the social order. Rousseau thought unbelievers should be banished. For the same reason, Plato banned most artists from his republic. He felt they played upon people’s negative emotions and did not support a life of virtue.
If Descartes is famous for saying, “I think, therefore I am,” you could argue that Rousseau’s never-explicitly stated thesis might be “I feel, therefore I am.” Love of God, awareness of goodness, and behaving well come primarily from our feelings, not our reason.
When you study intellectual arguments, you can see really smart people line up on both sides of most theories. How can you tell what is true? Rousseau says that our minds can never take us to the truth. It is our feelings that play this important role of discernment.
One moves away from religious authoritarianism, and instead places trust in his or her own direct intuition of the truth. Notice how this soon has political implications. A move away from religious dominance and absolutism — a hierarchical Christian worldview — also led to a move away from the King as God’s willed ruler.
During medieval times, if you asked someone who put the king in power, they would answer that God had established the divine right of kings to rule the world. Rousseau challenged this by declaring that sovereignty resides in the will of the people, and people can (and should) overthrow any government that does not respect the will of the people.
The Social Contract
Rousseau stated his view on how the development of society ought to take place: The idea of a social contract with Rousseau is the same as with Hobbes. It gets away from the idea of a divine establishment of government and instead, bases it on people agreeing together on how best to meet their needs. In this sense, you don’t murder one another, not because God has forbidden it, but because it is in everyone’s best interest.
An example of how the social contract works is in the area of political rights. Where do rights come from? Do new rights develop over time? It was a novel idea when governments first gave people basic rights, such as freedom of speech, press and assembly. These rights were not always rights. They only became rights when enough people agreed that this was the way things would be in the future.
Today, we are still debating rights. Some rights are taken for granted, but we are still discussing issues, such as the right to die. In the future, we may say that things like health care and housing are rights, but our society has not agreed upon this yet. The idea of agreement points to the fact that it is a social contract that we are talking about.
The primary goal of laws in a society should be to promote liberty and equality, and not allow economic disparity to harm the relations of members of society with one another. For example, many of the rights granted to those facing physical challenges, such as equal access to school buildings, is something Rousseau would agree with. In his mind, this would be a good use of legislation in a just society.
The key to such a society, according to Rousseau, is education. Children are naturally good. Education should do as little constraining and punishing, etc., as possible. Instead, it should allow the good natural tendencies to flourish. This view continues to have a strong sway in our world today, but it was amazingly radical when Rousseau first proposed it.
Educators often saw children as “horses that needed to be broken,” to be made compliant with authority. Rousseau saw this as a huge mistake, because he thought it turned children into mean, petty, and competitive people. “A child must be helped to unfold its own nature at its own pace and childhood has a right to happiness” (Beardsley 1960, 319).
This idea that children had a right to happiness is very new, and is a demonstration of how far we have moved into the modern world. It also ties into the concept of rights. For example, think of all the laws that have been passed to protect children, such as child labor laws. All of this is a consequence of Rousseau’s influence, whether directly or indirectly.
Rousseau and Romanticism
Besides Rousseau’s influence on how we think of government and education, he had a huge impact on founding the movement of Romanticism. “Rousseau’s embrace of a religion whose essence was universal rather than exclusive, whose ground was in nature and man’s subjective emotions and mystical intuitions rather than in biblical revelation, initiated a spiritual current in Western culture that would lead to Romanticism …” (Tarnas 1991, 313). To understand the importance of Romanticism, you have to see it as one of two streams of thought coming out of the Renaissance.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment foster one stream. Its focus is on rationality, empirical science and a skeptical secularism. The other stream is fostered by the polar complement to the Enlightenment.
“The Romantic valued man for his imaginative and spiritual aspirations, his emotional depths, his artistic creativity, and powers of individual self-expression and self-creation. While the scientist sought truth that was testable and concretely effective, the Romantic sought truth that was inwardly transfiguring and sublime. Both of these streams tended to be “humanist” in its high estimate of man’s power and its concern with man’s perspective on the universe. Both looked to the world and nature as setting for human drama. Both found in classical culture a rich source of insight and values. Both were in rebellion against oppressive traditional structures and in quest of human freedom” (Tarnas 1991, 367).
One way to see how these two streams work together and form the modern worldview in so many ways is to use the simple example of exploring something, such as chocolate. If you were emphasizing the Enlightenment view, you would probably study its chemical compounds and learn all you could about how it was grown and processed. If you were exploring it from the Romantic sensibility, then you would probably just want to eat it!
When you are in your "Enlightenment mood," you look at nature as something to use to facilitate human life and well-being. If you are in your Romantic mode, you look at nature as something to enjoy and appreciate for its own sake. While many people love to spend time out of doors, we now know that due to the exploitation of nature, we need to find a little more of the Romantic sensibility in all of us, so that we do not so damage nature that it cannot recover its balance.
Most every countercultural movement has based itself on going up against those who place so much emphasis on reason that they leave no room for feelings and intuition. Poetry becomes as important as philosophy.
This was a time when some poets wrote philosophy and had a huge impact on the intellectual world. Coleridge, one of the more famous Romantic poets, wrote: “deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling” (Tarnas 1991, 369). This makes a lot of sense to me personally. The wisest people I know have been able to combine “head and heart" in a really remarkable way.
It seems that people who only have access to their rationality lack empathy and compassion, and those too caught up in their feelings and not in touch with their reason and ability to think critically make huge mistakes as well. It results in what Buddhists call “idiot compassion.” Their hearts are in the right place, but they make errors based on impulse rather than measured judgment.
You may be more familiar with this idea under the slogan of “tough love.” Tough love means you have to do what seems harsh at times in order to do what is best for someone. It might not look compassionate, but in the long run it is.
John Locke: Philosophical Liberalism
John Locke (1632-1704) can be understood, in some ways, as the founder of philosophical liberalism. This is not because he originated the ideas, but that he articulated them in a way and at a time in which they could be heard. Many of his ideas were “in the air,” and so I think it will be good to start off by understanding Locke’s era and the movement we now recognize as philosophical liberalism.
Philosophical Liberalism does not refer to what we understand as liberals and conservatives. Today, both conservatives and liberals accept the basic ideas articulated by John Locke, which radically changed society in the Western world.
As you can see, when you study ideas, there is some debate on who influences whom. Do philosophers influence the times they live in, or are philosophers influenced by the times they live in? Do ideas create change? Or do ideas only articulate and explain changes that are already happening? Well, as you might imagine, the answer, I believe, lies in the middle.
Ideas and events mutually influence and shape one another. However, if I would have to lean in one direction or another, I would lean in the direction that ideas originate in small groups and then act like a seed in society. What it grows into is not easily controlled, but that ideas have a powerful influence, I doubt not.
The philosophical ideals known as philosophical liberalism started in England and Holland. As we saw, Holland was a much better place to have new ideas published, because it was more tolerant of new ideas.
Not surprisingly, one of the foundational ideas of liberalism is the idea of tolerance. Liberalism felt that religious wars were pointless and, as seen in the Thirty Year’s War, it was impossible to win them anyway. Liberalism favored the middle class more than the aristocracy, and as a result, had intense respect for the rights to hold and control property.
Further ideas were a tendency to favor democracy, a belief that all men were created equal, and that it was circumstances rather than inherent characteristics that caused people to be unequal. Thus, there was an emphasis on education.
Liberalism was forward-looking and optimistic, and naturally, it was opposed to everything medieval. It was interested in progress and believed in the power of knowledge and technology to bring about a golden age. By hoping to end religious and political strife through an adherence to the rule of reason and rational inquiry, it hoped to liberate new energies previously wasted on war for commerce and science.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of liberalism is a focus on individualism. This idea, reborn during the Renaissance, gained power and visibility with the Protestant Reformation and the philosophy of Descartes. Determining what was true from false became not a collective enterprise, but an individual endeavor.
The most influential philosopher of these ideals of philosophical liberalism was John Locke.
John Locke
John Locke (1632-1704) was a successful proponent of the English revolution of 1688, and all of his influential writings are confined to the period of 1687 to 1693. His most famous book, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was finished in 1687. He also wrote books on toleration and education.
Locke’s father was a Puritan, and this must have had some lasting influence. Locke was religious, but not fanatical. He studied at Oxford, which was still scholastic. He did not like scholasticism, and was much attracted to the philosophy of Descartes. He was trained as a physician, and so like many of the great philosophers of this time, he was devoted to science and rationalism, and these qualities would infuse his philosophy.
Locke fled to Holland and lived there for a number of years before the English revolution. Most of his life was dedicated to literary work and dealing with the controversies to which they had given rise.
Locke gives expression to the idea that knowledge is not certain, but only probable. As a result, we have to hold our conclusions with gentleness, because we might have to change and update them when new information comes to us.
The fact that knowledge changes as more information is accumulated helps people avoid dogmatism. Obviously this ideal is foundational to Philosophical Liberalism, and we can see it today in the U.S. Constitution, which incorporates into its structure the ability to amend itself over time.
While Locke, as both a devout Christian and a philosopher, holds the love of truth to be a high mark of a superior person, he states that the love of a specific teaching is not the same as the love of truth, because that specific teaching may be shown to be wrong at some point in the future.
We must hold our truths gently and be sure that little truths do not prevent our openness to the larger truth. We can know things with certainty (4 plus 4 always equals 8) and other truths are propositional. It might be wise to accept them as long as we hold them as only probable, rather than certain. That way we can adjust our understanding as knowledge grows.
This attitude is seen in his ideas about tolerance where he states: “The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others. … There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others” (Russell 1945, 609). This is a great restatement of the perennial wisdom that the more we know, the more we know how little we know. Socrates would like Locke!
Locke’s Theory of Knowledge
John Locke is considered a founder of not only liberalism, but also a founder of empiricism in knowledge that would lead eventually to to the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s extreme skepticism.
Western philosophy, ever since Locke, has been divided into two main streams, Continental rationalism and English empiricism. The rationalists, such as Descartes, believed in the mind’s ability to discover the truth through its own innate ideas. The empiricists, starting with Francis Bacon, found truth in only what could be empirically observed, and thus put a great deal of emphasis on our perceptions and sensations as the basic foundations of knowledge.
Locke believed that we came into the world as a clean sheet of paper. We don’t have innate ideas, although we do have innate rational abilities that work on the material that gets printed on the sheets of paper that are our minds. That material is experience. Without experience, we would have no ideas. That is empiricism as a theory of knowledge in a nutshell.
We tend to take this for granted nowadays, but at the time of Locke, this was a major innovation. Before that, many philosophers had assumed with Plato that the mind had many innate ideas. Even Descartes believed that by looking into his own mind, he could find certain truth, and in fact, that was the only place he could find it. Locke found this more of a belief than a fact. When he looked into his mind, he found that it was working on impressions which all had their origin in the external world.
Even today with babies, we often wonder what they are thinking about or if they are thinking at all, in terms that we would recognize as thought. Babies are surely absorbing an immense amount of information. The question is: do these impressions combine with ideas already in the baby’s mind, or are these impressions the foundation of a future ability to have ideas? This question is still unresolved. In fact, philosophy still has no answer to the problem of how we can know anything exists outside of our own minds!
Think about seeing a tree. Your eyes don’t go out to touch the tree. You see the tree, not "out there," but inside your mind. Technically, what you see is simply the light refractions from the surface. Your brain then organizes all of that into the image of a tree. We all take the outside world for granted, but it is funny to remember that philosophy cannot validate that assumption.
Here, it is important to remember that the truth most likely exists between the two extremes of rationalism and empiricism. Psychology has found that we are not just products of nature or nurture, but some mixture of the two together.
Locke’s Political Philosophy
John Locke wrote two books on government. In the first, he had to dismantle the whole idea of the divine right of kings once and for all. He shows through various inconsistencies in this aristocratic idea that the time has come to let go of this unwarranted belief. We take it so for granted today that it is easy to forget that the whole world up until this time had been subject to kings using various forms of the divine right argument to exist and rule.
Americans even wanted to make George Washington our first king. Perhaps our love of fame and celebrities is an offshoot of those days when we believed some people are inherently more special than others. Locke is able to accomplish his first task, but then he must complete the harder task, which is to find a way of defining and defending legitimate political power. If God does not give the right of some to rule, then who does?
We do! That is, Locke writes that governments gain their ability to rule through a social contract in which we give up parts of our freedom in return for services and protections by those in power. Most importantly, because it is a contract, the people have the right to remove the government if the government does not fulfill its responsibilities.
The government is based on natural law, which is understood as the law that is clear to the light of human reason. Now obviously, this does not work so well in the details, but it makes some sense as a generalizing principle. That is, if you ask a majority of humans if murder is reasonable, they will realize that it is not.
The emotions behind murder might be understandable, but the action is usually condemned, except when you kill someone in self-defense. Even this exception seems natural to the light of reason.
Did you notice the similarity to the American Declaration of Independence? "We hold these truths to be self-evident [that is, found in the natural law, the light of human reason] that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." We see the influence of Enlightenment philosophy all over the founding documents of the United States.
On a side note: When people talk about the United States being a Christian country, they usually mean it in the Protestant sense that the foundational certainties are Luther’s certainties, that is, the Bible. When we look more closely, we see that the foundational ideas are not biblical, but philosophical. Now it is true that our culture was very influenced by the Bible, but we must take the time to be clear about what we are referring to, our culture or our government, which can, I think, be separated.
The law can allow different cultures to co-exist together somewhat peacefully. Because if the law, rather than our culture, is based on the Bible, that gets right to the heart of many of the political battles being waged today. Is the Bible the source of our laws, or is it simply the natural light of reason, as articulated by Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers?
Personally, I like to think of the United States as the first philosophical country in the world. That is, it is a country founded on ideas, rather than on race and shared history.
One of Locke’s predominant interests was in the role of property. One of the keystones of liberalism and the rising middle class concerned property; the right to have it, protect it, and pass it on within a family. In fact, Locke goes so far as to say that people form governments primarily to protect their property. In fact, the Declaration of Independence originally said life, liberty and the pursuit of property (rather than the pursuit of happiness).
A final area I want to mention is Locke’s ideas concerning checks and balances. “The doctrine that the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government should be kept separate is characteristic of liberalism. The [branches] must be separate to prevent abuse of power” (Russell 1945, 637). He felt that the legislative branch should hold the most power, and that the people could dissolve it.
It is interesting that Locke does not (and no one else has either) come up with a successful formula for settling disputes when the three branches disagree with each other. This was most obvious during the American Civil War. Could states secede from the union? No one knew, and it was only decided by the victory of the north over the south. When you think about it, it is amazing that we have had only one civil war.
The only way to avoid constant war is to find ways to cooperate and compromise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLwRXlSgiSQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liVQ21KZfOI&list=PLvAz-MIrNi_WSQFbP5WgSjHJmDHfK-Z-j
Academic Requirements
This course requires active engagement in a variety of ways, including dialoguing with your peers, reading, watching documentaries, writing essays and completing the final assessment.
Module Reflections
• Please include at least ten bullet point notes on "takeaways," from different sections of my essay and any videos you are required to watch. These are quotes and thoughts that intrigue you. Place these notes at the top of your assignment along with a header (see example).
• Then pick two of the most interesting to you and write a reflection no less than a good paragraph (200 words) on each of the two takeaways you found most meaningful (400 total words).
Think for Yourself
Please avoid summarizing in your reflection because that is not the point of this philosophical invitation to think deeply about things for your self. This is a philosophical exercise or practice. I will be looking for your thoughts about the module rather than reiterating what the module already presented.
Your reflections need to demonstrate that you studied the whole module, both my essays and the videos. The easiest way to do this is to take some bullet point notes as you go through the module. As you do so, you will find some general themes you can think about and include in your reflection.
You are not required to use the following prompts, but they may help you think about what you are studying:
• What did you learn that was significant for you?
• Can you explain its significance?
• Can you explore any revelations or insights that your studies opened for you?
• What happened because of these insights to your thinking and learning?
• Did you have an emotional response, negative or positive? Do you know why?
• Have you had any experiences you are willing to share with our class that help you relate to and understand any of the material in this module?
• Did this assignment contain any “awakening” ideas, those that inspire you rather than depress you?
• Did you find any of the ideas surprising? Why?
• Can you give an example or two in your reflection that demonstrates you were engaging with, and thinking about, our curriculum in a serious way?
• Did you find yourself thinking about class content when you did not have to, such as finding yourself discussing ideas with friends or family?
• Have your studies contributed to any increase in self-knowledge (how you understand the world and your place in it) or a deeper understanding of one’s current world view?
Minimum Guidelines
• Please make ten bullet point notes on "takeaways," from different sections of my essay and any videos you are required to watch. These are quotes and thoughts that intrigue you.
• Each reflection must be at least 200 words (400 words total).
• Summaries do not receive credit because they do not require serious thought — simply the ability to record information.
• Your assignments are not eligible for A’s if they require proofreading.
• Peer exchanges must be at least 100 words to receive credit (200 words total).
• Assignments that are partial (not meeting minimum requirements) do not receive partial credit.