kokorodoko wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 12:35 pmI'm thinking of starting to acquaint myself with British empiricism. Thinking of either Locke (because he's very prominent) or Hobbes (because he's one of the early ones). Can I jump into blabla Human Understanding right away or is reading Hobbes first better? Any secondary lit that might be helpful?
Surprising to me, Locke and Hobbes both talk a lot about words and language, and not really about "stuff" at all.
I think Berkeley gave the right response to Locke, that the latter's "ideas" cannot be spoken of outside of the thing in which they are perceived or from which they are derived. Per Locke's own reasoning, there are no grounds for claiming that a certain idea derived from one kind of sense impression is identical to or has any essential relationship to an idea derived from another kind of sense impression, even though the ideas look the same to the understanding. Since ideas do not have an essential connection to the thing, but are mental representations (which must remain fuzzy), and the names used to refer to them (the only clear part), it is wrong to extract them from the context of their encounter to be treated as universals, based on an assumed similarity between them, since their only provable similarity is their name. Ideas are not properties of things, Locke says this. Maybe he could fast forward to Kant and call them categories of understanding instead. Berkeley insists on the idea being
in the thing always, even though it is not a property of it. I see prefigurations of Hegel and phenomenology.
I couldn't wrap my head around Berkeley's main thesis though: Being is impossible without being-perceived, since I cannot
conceive of a thing existing while not also being perceived??? What does my ability to conceive of it matter?
I haven't even gotten to the commonwealth part of Hobbes yet, but this is the idea that spontaneously crystallized itself to me:
I have always regarded, as I think is pretty common, Hobbes' idea of the polity as cold and brutal, because of its apparent amorality. Thinking more about it however, his kind of political order is considerably less oppressive (potentially) than one that seeks to use law to instate and maintain a kind of moral order. In Hobbes, the law is pure power. The function of the law is to make the people scared enough of the sovereign that they are protected from each other. There is thus a clear distinction between law and morals - morals have to do with relations between people. Since the actions and values of individuals at their root (this is Hobbes' view) are results of "passions", they are not rational and cannot be rationalized. No principles can be derived from them, they can only be negotiated, and they remain perpetually in an unsteady state.
In Kant's view, by contrast, law
should be moral. It is possible to work out binding principles which must be agreed to given correct use of a reason accessible to everyone. In this view, human co-existence is possible without Hobbes' sovereign - in theory without an external coercive power (a state) altogether. However, every member must now bind themselves to a principle which is absolute and non-negotiable. The coercion is internal rather than external. The unique individual (Stirner) is obliterated since the moral law is super-individual. This kind of thinking continues in communism and some strands of anarchism. It underlies communist re-education - since our order is the supremely rational one, if someone resists it, it must be because they haven't
realized the truth and rightness of it yet.