Locke5: The supremacy of the law and the domination of nature in Locke

“supremacy” of the Law and the Modern disciplined self

 

-important aspect of Locke’s doctrine of limited govt. is his repeated emphasis on the supremacy or sovereignty of the law, both in state of nature and in a situation of government  (see references throughout).

 

-we find this in a significantly modified version today in the idea of constitutional supremacy—that there is an overarching legal framework with substantive laws and that any government cannot make laws that contradict the substance of the constitution (as in the Canadian Charter)

 

-what is significant in Locke’s view is how this emphasis on the supremacy of the law is tied to a larger worldview that involves a transcendent conception of God as the ultimate source of the natural law to which we must submit.  Hence in the Lockean view the whole conception of the supremacy of law is very much bound up with the idea of submission to a divine will given to us from without (from the beyond).  We carry out that divine will in a fallen earth through our activities of hard work and expansion of wealth.  Hence it involves us also in a tremendous asceticism and disciplining of the self.

-this view can be put into some kind of perspective by comparing it to Greek immanentism (the idea of the divine not as in the beyond but as indwelling in the world [although Plato paves the way for the transcendent conception, in Aristotle and in Greek society as a whole the idea is more one of immanence]). Here, the view is of an ordered cosmos, with each element playing its own role.  The essence or the form of the thing is immanent within it, and is brought out through development.  For example, in humans our essence as political developed over time, as humans went from forming villages to forming political communities with leisure time as the ultimate mode of existence.   The purpose or “law” of the thing is embodied in its nature and experienced as an urge or an instinct.  (the urge toward politics). 

            -what is interesting here is that the essence or idea of our purpose is not imposed on us from without, according to a conception of the law coming from the beyond, but is experienced from within our own natures.  And so one can educate or habituate oneself to accord spontaneously with one’s purpose (for Aristotle as a virtuous person).  But the urge towards virtue or moderation already exists.  This is a dramatically different understanding of the relationship between mind and body.  Just as there is no sharp separation between humans and nature as a whole in the Greek worldview, so there is no sharp separation between mind and body.  The form or telos of the self is immanent also within our physical nature and developed in accordance with it.  The physical self is not repressed or disciplined in the modern sense, but educated, habituated.

 

-with the rejection of this whole worldview in the transition from ancient to modern, and in rejecting the Christianized Aristotelianism of the middle ages, the whole framework for education and habituation is disrupted (for example habituation into predetermined roles of class and sex).  Nature becomes raw desire, passion and impulse, appetite and aversion, and reason stands over against it, just as humans stand over against a new de-personalized nature.   The transcendent conception of God in Christianity, and particularly its Protestant versions, is analogous to this new relationship of mind and body.

-of course, what is also bound up with this constellation is a new emphasis on equality and individual freedom

 

-Hobbes’s solution to the problem of unity and community that emerges out of this new situation is the absolute sovereign, which is the coalescing of the powers of mind and will (as posed over against raw nature) in the hands of one man or body of men.  Hence nature (in the sense of men driven by appetites and aversions) is disciplined by an external and forceful will. 

-what we have in Locke, as a development on the Hobbesian position, and as critical in the modern condition, is the emergence of a capacity for an internalized discipline, and this required the religious force of Locke’s particular brand of Protestantism.  Hence we have the movement of an external force of discipline from the exterior to the interior of the human being, and all of this from within the early modern separation of mind and body.  The body is not cultivated now, or habituated in the Aristotelian sense (although of course it is in childhood), but is disciplined by an external reason, whether it be in the figure of the sovereign or in the “supremacy of the law” that we impose on ourselves.  The problem is that it is still an imposition on a recalcitrant nature (our “fallen” condition), rather than a cultivation of a potential that already exists within nature (Aristotle).  Hence the former position (Locke’s) is fundamentally bound up with repression, asceticism, denial of nature, and all of the problems tied to this.

(the relationship to the nature without is really analogous to this domination of the nature within.)

 

-Locke’s conception of individual self-rule is thus fundamentally bound up with a new version of domination and submission, one which is still reflected in the excessively ideological motivated movements of our time.  It represents a kind of internalized master-servant relationship, between abstract reason and the nature within.  But ultimately the whole problem is bound up with this artificial separation of mind and body which is theorized in early modernity and religiously symbolized in the transcendent and punitive God. 

 

-Rousseau will attempt to overcome this harsh split between mind and body through a new concept of nature, a new way of getting at that nature theoretically (beyond the limited scientific rationality of Hobbes and Locke), and thus ultimately through developing a new concept of self-rule which does not succumb to this domination of mind over body.

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