John Locke in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

John Locke in the Twenty-First CenturyEtienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag and Introduced by Stella Sandford (London/Brooklyn: Verso, 2013)Poor Descartes. The seventeenth-century French tried to naturalize the mind by doubting everything and restarting from what he thought was unarguable: I think, therefore I am. The mind was a thinking substance with innate a priori ideas, while the body was a separate extended substance whose senses supplied us with less reliable a posteriori ideas. Since the Cartesian cogito began in an individual mind, the problem immediately arose as to how to connect that interiority to an exteriority: its own body and a world of other minds and bodies. So, while Descartes is credited for starting a modern psychology incorporating a conscious self, he is blamed for generating modern dualism and a corresponding state of alienation between mind and body, subject and object-a breach every subsequent philosophical innovation has addressed one way or another. An early effort was that of British empiricist John Locke, who declared the mind a tabula rasa; our ideas were all acquired a posteriori through lived impressions.Locke is also known as the architect of the liberal revolution that substituted an atomistic individualism and bourgeois property rights for divinely ordained land-based feudal aristocracy. Nonetheless, in Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, Marxist Etienne Balibar has now withdrawn credit from Descartes for conceiving our modern notion of consciousness and a rationalist psychology, to instead bestow it on Locke! Balibar justifies his ironic choice in an intriguing analysis of Locke's discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Of Identity and Diversity, Book II, xxvii, 1694 edition). Balibar's essay is sixteen years old, but has now been translated into English by theorist Warren Montag and ably introduced by British philosopher Stella Sandford. The book contains a new preface and significant appendices, including a detailed Philosophical and Philological Glossary and a second essay on Spinoza and Locke.We attend particularly closely not only since Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Universite de Paris X and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, but because he is embedded in the critical post-structuralist pantheon as co-author with Louis Althusser of Reading Capital (1965) and, like Althusser and Montag, a distinguished Spinoza scholar. The other rationalist, Spinoza, born in 1632, the same year as Locke, had argued in the opposite direction when answering Cartesian dualism: the universe was one Substance Absolutely Infinite conceived as either mental or material and incorporating everything. He called it God or Nature and defined our chaotic emotions as bodily affects resulting from our situations within this larger matrix. In the essay on Spinoza and Locke, Balibar suggests that after Descartes, psychology had two radical naturalistic possibilities: Spinoza's rationalistic materialism or Locke's rationalistic empiricism.Balibar's further purpose is to find points of contact between the Anglophone and Continental philosophic traditions in response to the rift that developed after the Second World War between European critical philosophy (phenomenological, existentialist, and Marxist), which allows for theoretical questions of Being, desire, and political engagement, and the analytic school (positivist, empirical, emphasizing the use of symbolic logic). Despite the latter's important sources in 1920s Middle Europe, the two strands developed independently with little crossover and much alienation. Analytics dominated in Britain and America during the Cold War, but the critical theorists ascended in Europe after 1968. …