Locke's Anthropology: Travel, Innateness, and the Exercise of Reason

Abstract

Previous accounts of Locke's ethnographic perspective on human custom have commonly focused on what might be called his political anthropology, above all in the Second Treatise and Locke's view of the state of nature. His discussion of the origins of government, the function of money in transforming political relations, and the role of property led him to comment suggestively on historical instances of Amerindian practice derived from his reading of travel literature.1 Interesting though they are, these examples represent only a part of Locke's engagement with questions of custom and belief around the world and his view of the primitive. In the first book of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke developed a case against innate ideas and principles with far reaching anthropological implications, causing alarm to his contemporaries in ways that his travel references in the Treatises, on the whole, did not. Rather than dwell on the controversy, I propose to investigate the anthropological dimension of Locke's critique in some detail, initially focusing on how he used his sources and represented what they had to say.The 'anthropological' side of Locke's strategy against innateness was to point out the existence of irreducible cultural diversity, which he refused to write off as degeneracy caused by education or the results of the Fall.2 In this context, we can trace Locke's engagement with the phenomenon of cultural diversity to two principal sources.3 In the first instance, his way of approaching human nature through a study of customs and manners was indebted to the methodology of natural history. This approach emphasised the accumulation of evidence on a probabilistic basis without assuming a knowledge of essences in advance. From the perspective of such a natural history, Locke refuted the claim of innate ideas or principles by treating their existence as an empirical question, a matter of fact subject to determination through historical research.The logic of Locke's position was based on the claim that attributions of innate principles, tendencies or ideas, required as a necessary condition the establishment of universal consent to an agreed set of moral tenets and beliefs (such as the idea of God). Accordingly, he made use of reports of cultural diversity to attack supposedly innate common notions or natural prolepses, drawing on a technique of argument well established in the sceptical tradition. Sceptics, both ancient and early modern, pointed to incommensurable customs and the existence of cultural difference in order to demonstrate the absence of universal consent and also to raise the criterion problem (i.e., the lack of a criterion for deciding differences of moral opinion). In so doing, Locke answered Stoic assumptions about a uniform human nature.4The two sources of Locke's encounter with diversity converged in his reading of travel literature. This material not only confirmed the absence of unanimous consent, as Locke referenced it, but it also constituted up-to-date information, supplying empirical testimony on human practice which could be cross-checked and confirmed. Strictly speaking, Locke's argument against innateness did not require the extended attention he gave to accounts of travel to distant parts of the world. Variation in opinion and belief of almost any kind (at home as much as abroad) would have been sufficient for his needs. But there is no doubt that he regarded himself as strengthening the case against unanimous consent or a consensus gentium by surveying the testimony of travellers so carefully. The fact that 'whole Nations' (I.iii.9) dissented from what allegedly unified mankind lent credence to the view that no internal rules or principles inhabited the soul. Those closest to nature - primitive peoples - evidently lacked the requisite knowledge or tendency to embrace appropriate moral practices and religious beliefs. Polite nations, whom we might have expected to benefit from learning and inquiry, observed the same lack of support for these basic notions. …