The human being according to Locke

John Locke's picture of human action and its springs was this. We are born with certain habits in place. That is, there are innate mechanisms which brought it about that when certain triggers were encountered, a fixed sequence of behaviour ensued.

These mechanisms were not exclusively physical - in a rational creature they involved thought, the thought that a mental 'discomfort' might be eased, for example, or some pleasure ensue. ...

His position is that Nature equips us with a portfolio of inclinations, desires and aversions to guide us into action that in most circumstances is good for us. For example,

In certain special situations, however, these innate guides would if left unattended let us down. They would lead us to act in a way that would do us harm. For example, ... It is in these circumstances that reason has occasion to intervene.

The role of reason is to oppose our innate inclinations or desires when following them would do us harm.

"It seems plain to me," says Locke, "that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires, where reason does not authorize them."

Instilling this power to resist irrational desires is the point of education, he believes. It is a power "to be got and improv'd by custom, made easy and familiar by an early practice":

"He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry, and is in danger never to be good for anything. This temper therefore, so contrary to unguided nature, is to be got betimes; and this habit, as the true foundation of future ability and happiness, is to be wrought into the mind as early as may be.." (Section 45)

Locke goes into the practical detail of how this is most efficiently to be acheived. He thinks rote-learning - making children repeating verbal formulations of the rules to be inculcated - a poor idea and insists instead on the importance of repeated practice: Instead of the "charging of children's memories, upon all occasions, with rules and precepts" you should make them do it [the action or programme of action to be taught] over and over again, 'till they are perfect…" ( Section 64)

Education is a matter of adjusting the responses the individual makes to the circumstances s/he encounters, and it is best achieved by practice.

Locke has clear (but, as is usual with Locke, not necessarily mutually consistent) ideas about how the linkage between desires and action works, and how educational strategies might be expected to re-engineer them. One mechanism involves drilling, as I have suggested. But he is also insists that "good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided," (Section 54) pointing I think to the involvement of at least one other type of mechanism, one which gives a key role to pleasure and pain ('those never enough admired springs of action', (Bentham))

Whatever mechanisms Locke might have in mind, education is understood as (somehow) concerned with re-engineering (eg through drilling) the links between innate inclinations and desires on the one hand and action on the other. It is the adjustment of habits.

So Locke of course is no logical behaviourist. We are sets of habits, but behind our habits, and responsible for maintaining them, he thinks there are mechanisms. But for Locke, that is what habits rest on - mechanisms. Those mechanisms establish and maintain a person's habits, and in an important sense, the character of a person is the set of habits they display.

The 18th Century concept of the person was of a portfolio of habits moderated to some extent by reason.

By a habit was understood an action or sequence of action (or thought, or sequence of thought) which was, in the person possessed of the habit, reliably triggered by a particular situation. Sometimes, it was thought, an action flowed simply from habit. Sometimes 'reason' played a role.

This is a way of thinking of the human being that runs throughout the early Enlightenment.

To Top

Created 02:01:05

Prepared by VP

Home Page of Web Presentation:

Conceptions of the Human Being in the West