In Our Time - Empiricism

Episode Date: June 10, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Empiricism, England’s greatest contribution to philosophy. At the end of the seventeenth century the philosopher John Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.”It was a body of ideas that for Voltaire, and for Kant after him, defined the English attitude to thought; a straight talking pragmatic philosophy that was hand in glove with a practical people.How was the philosophy of empiricism developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? And what effect did this emphasis on experience have on culture and literature in Britain?With Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London; Murray Pittock, Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of Manchester; Jonathan Rée, philosopher and author of Philosophy and its Past.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. England's greatest contribution to philosophy is probably empiricism. At the end of the 17th century, the philosopher John Locke wrote in his essay concerning human understanding,

All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? When comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge, to this I answer in one word from experience? It was a body of ideas that for Voltaire and for Kant after him defined the English attitude to thought, a straight-talking, pragmatic philosophy that was hand-in-glove with a practical people.

How was the philosophy of empiricism developed in the 17th and 18th centuries? And what effect did this emphasis on experience have on culture and literature in Britain? With me to discuss English empiricism is Judith Hawley, Senior Lecture in English at Royal Holloway University of London, Jonathan Ray, author and philosopher,

and Murray Pittock, Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of Manchester. Judith Hawley, John Locke's the defining philosopher empiricism, but the other two founding fathers are Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. Can you set the intellectual context of their approach? Yes, I think I certainly would start with Bacon, who in the early 17th century became extremely impatient

with the way learning was conducted in the universities and the way that the new sciences were proceeding so slowly. And he basically set up a kind of research program. He gives us a scientific method and a research program for what we can call the new sciences, natural philosophy, natural history. And he argues that the way to advance knowledge is to start by collecting sense data, experiences, experiments. I mean, the word experience and experiment mean pretty much the same thing in the 17th century.

And he thought that knowledge could be advanced by a group of sensible, clever men getting together in ideal colleges and institutions and amassing data. Now this data wasn't just going to be a collection and heap of sense impressions, I feel hot, I feel cold and so on, but carefully conducted observations of the world. And then by a process of what's called induction, general truths would be arrived at.

But all the time, these general truths about nature would be anchored to sense impressions, experiments, direct knowledge of the world. How new is this and how did it fit in with what Newton was doing? Well, it's new in the sense that much of what was taught in the universities before the 18th century, really, was based on Aristotelian and scholastic methods. Now, Bacon and various other philosophers still respected Aristotle, but they very much disliked the way that natural knowledge was treated in the universities

and school system, which was largely, there are two problems with it. One is that a stable body of knowledge was being passed on, and students were supposed to learn this by road. There's no advancement in knowledge. Nothing new about the world was being discovered. And the other is that the method of reasoning applied to it was a kind of chop logic, hair-splitting dialectics, derived at syllogisms, and you're not arriving at general truths based on unsupposed sense data. Now, Newton, who's often thought of as an empiricist, is really a mathematician, He does do some experiments.

Things like his discoveries about light are derived by having a little crack in his shutter and looking through a prism. So he's observing things with his senses very much. But an awful lot of the big ideas that come from Newton come from mathematical calculations. He says very famously, hypotheses non-fingo, I don't frame hypotheses.

And that was one of the things that what we call empiricists were against the idea of hypotheses and deductive knowledge. But Newton's method is, is mathematically deductive. Murray Piddick, Descartes, I think, therefore, ergo, some, I think therefore I am. Is this a foundation stone?

Does this fit into empiricism? How does that fit into empiricism? We know that Locke was very influenced by Descartes. Well, Descartes' cogito is in some ways the foundation stone of empiricism. In other ways, it actually represents a strand which is usually sublimated in empiricism. First of all, Descartes was a methodological thinker, but he was also a skeptic.

Descartes himself is part of a wider platform of developing intellectual ideas, both linked to the emergence of the new science, principally astronomy is the first of the new sciences in the 16th century, and also to the culture, although he was not himself part of it, of the reformation with a much stronger idea of not sense data, but the importance of the identification of word and fact based on the language of the Bible rather than the idea of a numinous, mystical, perpetually present world underpinned by scholasticism, which was part of Catholic theology. Empiricism, it seemed to fit in very well or have a direct influence by British Protestantism.

Can you bring those two together? Yes. I think that that is one of the key things. The development of Protestantism was a development which de-mistified. First of all, it demystified the church. Then it, and this is very important to empiricism, particularly to Locke, de mystified the monarchy. The Stuart monarchy was effectively a mystic monarchy, engaging in practices such as the royal touch for scruff and other skin diseases.

Charles II, for example, touched 100,000 people during his reign. and the idea of contract theory of government, which was put forward by Locke, was inimical to the idea of a mystic monarchy. Protestantism also made a close identification between language and reality. One of the words hocus pocus, which come from the Protestant mockery of Hockest Corpus,

this is my body from the Latin mass, were key in this because one of the key facts of Protestantism was the attack on transatlanticism, the idea that the elements of the altar change into the body and blood of Christ. And that underpinned a huge range of Protestant thought, both in terms of the centrality of the Word of God and the Bible, rather than the traditions and teaching of the church, but also in a whole range of demystification which spread from that

into all kinds of walks of life and all kinds of thinking in, first of all, in science and elsewhere, and then later. in history, sociology and economics. Jonathan Ray, can we come back to this huge figure of John Locke, as well as a philosopher and a natural scientist, he's a successful politician. Can you give us more information about this man who is going to have such an effect?

Well, he saw himself, as the other great figures of the 17th century, whom we admire did, as a pioneer of something called the New Philosophy. And the new philosophy, the new philosophers didn't have very much in common, But one thing they did have in common was a hatred of Aristotle. And what they hated about Aristotle was partly what's been mentioned already that people treated him as an authority that they didn't dare to go beyond, but also because he had an idea of natural knowledge, which was coming to seem to be an obstacle to progress in the natural sciences.

And that was that nature is divided into different sectors. There are animals which you understand in a certain way. There are machines that you understand in a certain way. there are earthly processes and there are processes in the heavens, and they're all understood in different ways as it were the different faculties of the mind. The big idea behind the 17th century new philosophy was that you could find a uniform pattern of explanation that would apply to animals, to vegetables, to minerals,

to human bodies, to heavenly bodies, to everything. And on the whole, people look back to ancient Greek philosophy, to Epicurus, to the generation after Aristotle, who was famous as an atomist. I mean, we think of Epicurus in terms of monstrous self-indulgence of food, but he was remembered as an atomist. An atomist meant that you thought that everything that happened in the world could be explained in terms of the motions of tiny particles.

And Aristotle's notion that different parts of nature were to be understood in different ways was an obstacle to atomism. That seems to me to be part of the... the sort of hidden curriculum of the new philosophy. What Locke got from Descartes was not only the things that Murray Pettuck has already mentioned, but also a word. That's the word ideas. The word ideas in previous philosophy had meant something very special to do with mathematics, to do with theology. There'd been ideas of numbers, ideas in geometry, but Descartes, very self-consciously introduced a new usage of the word idea,

where ideas were involved not only in our reasoning, but also in our sensations and in our passions. So as it were, instead of human experience being divided up into separate sectors, it was a continuum where all of experience was permeated by ideas. There were philosophers who had thought, well, perhaps you're born with certain ideas, and Locke's just rather arbitrarily and dogmatically rules that out. that leaves it open to him to produce, he talks of himself as using a historical method. The idea is not so much history in the sense of looking back into the distant past,

but history of the individual mind. Instead of trying to find out what the validity of ideas, instead of trying to test the validity of ideas by referring to authorities or to theories, you do it by tracing them back to their origins in individual experience. That's the Big Lachian Revolution. And the Big Lock is the Tabula Raza, the Bourne with a white sheet, The born with the white sheet or the empty cabinet. And he says the task of philosophy is to show how ideas enter into the empty, empty cabinet of the mind,

how our mind is furnished during the course of our lives. So was this radical at the time, Judith? Yes, it's certainly radical. Both in terms of the world of philosophy that we've already talked about, Descartes, who is quite a revolutionary thinker, his idea of the cogito and innate ideas. Locke's first book of the essay concerning human understanding is refuting Descartes. But it's also very radical.

in terms of standard Christian thinking, both Catholic and Protestant, because the idea very much of the Christian church is that we're born with original sin, we're marked with original sin. So Locke's ideas, and one of the reasons why they upset the churchmen so much, especially Oxford, very high Stetelia

and very high church Oxford, was saying we're not born with a stained soul marked by original sin. If we are born as a white sheet of paper, we acquire by our experience, whether or not we're going to be good or bad, we're not marked with the mark of cane. Would it be true to say that his ideas caught on?

I'm sorry to use that phrase very quickly. Alexander Pope is picking it up, he's writing the great poem and so on. And did they spread? Was that an idea which the time seized on as being the right idea for the time? Yes, one of the surprising things is how rapidly Lockheon ideas infiltrated a broader culture.

And it's not to say that working men were saying, oh, yes, well, the process of sensation and reflection, you know, teaches us to understand. You never know. But you find it. But you find, you find, you know, in all sorts of printed discourses in the early 18th century, in journals, papers, novels, sermons even,

locking ideas about the importance of the body as an organ of knowledge, about the relationship between individual sensation and the process of reflection and association, which gives you more complex ideas. These are very, very rapidly spread. You find them in a spectator in poems by Alexander Pope. Roy Porter describes Alexander Pryor. Pope's an essay on man as Locke in heroic couplets.

One of the significant things that comes out of Locke is the importance of education. If we're all born as a tabula rasa, then anybody can become educated to be clever. He demystifies the idea of genius as well. And he writes some thoughts concerning education, which he's not a Democrat in the 20th century sense, but he really seems to allow people to think that anybody can become better, anybody can make progress and knowledge. But England did nothing to improve its education system in the 18th century to speak of, in fact, it got worse if anything. So, I mean, in that sense, Locky and ideas were not directly influential on political practice.

I think there's another way in which democracy comes into Locke's influence. One of the effects of his challenge to great thinkers to explain where their ideas come from is that it does introduce a possibility for a kind of a rather truculent tone in philosophy, a sense that all these people with their ideas. their long words are just full of Latin, but they're not full of wisdom. There's a very nice statement by Mary Astell in the 1690s, often referred to as the first English feminists. And she says the great thing about this new movement in philosophy is that it says that custom, learning that comes from custom, is actually a form of corruption.

That means that women and children who have not had the disadvantage of Latin education, who have not had the disadvantage of going to university, do not have their minds filled with all this ridiculous. But that in itself descends from Protestant thinking in the early 17th century, the plain style, the distrust of rhetoric. The idea of rhetoric and high-flown language was associated with the idea of a mystified sacred monarchy. Before I continue with this for a second,

can we take a slight side step into the novel? Because we're talking about the impact on culture generally. Do you think these ideas had an impact on, let's just take the novel as one example? In 1950s, in what published a very influential, book called The Rise of the Novel, and he argues that Locke and Empiricism is one of the things that gives us realism, and realism is one of the defining characteristics of the new novel. Now, he's been criticised because it's not obvious how this general world of philosophy

finds its way into prose fiction, and some people say it must be by a process of osmosis, sort of mocking Locke's thesis. But certainly if you find in early novelists like Defoe, Robinson Crusoe is full of experience. A man writing a journal saying, I felt this, I'm recording it, here I am witnessing it, and I'm learning by my experiences. And he describes... In a sense, the situation in which he finds himself, compels him to talk about.

Yes, exactly. On an island, which is a kind of empty cabinet for him in a way, and he has to furnish his mind with new ideas. One of the most Lockean novelists of all time is Lawrence Stern, and Tristam Shandy writing rather later in the period. and he's rather sceptical and playful about Locke, but what he does is to use Locke as a way of building up, first of all, a structure of his novel on associations.

This idea leads to that, and the narrative follows the personal associations of an individual, but also by giving very detailed descriptions of passing sensations, an idea that floats across his mind, the difference between the feeling of squeezing your hand into a pocket and scratching your head. And this is very, very lucky, that focus on sensation and the individual.

Can I come back a little bit more mainstream now? Jonathan Wright. Bishop Barclay, who built on Locke's work, was Irish Bishop. What did he add to empiricism? What was his part in this? I think he performs the service of showing us how completely wild and crazy empiricism is. I think we tend to think today that empiricism means being sensible and being paying due attention to facts. Actually, that's not what it is. In Locke's account of experience, it means that every single idea must have its genealogy traced back to a particular experience in your own lifetime.

Then the question arises, well, surely there are all sorts of ideas that we seem to rely on implicitly that can't actually be traced to that. And the one that Barclay focuses on is matter. what Barclay tries to show is that the idea of matter well there isn't any such thing as an idea of matter we think we use the word but actually the word stands for a complete nonsense we have no evidence for it and what's more it doesn't add up the idea of matter

so Barclay starts from this idea that knowledge is rooted in experience which may sound like a sort of materialistic two feet on the ground kind of idea and then shows that what it leads to, it kind of undercuts those materialist premises, because how can you get back to an idea like matter when all you've got to work with

is the experiences that are taking place in your own head, in your own mind? Yes, you only know your sensations, you don't know the physical world. Did Hume, coming from the deep north, did Hume make another different sort of contribution in empiricism because it's ceasing to be English, as it were, We've now got an Irish bishop

and we've got a Scottish philosopher coming in there. Indeed. I mean, Hume, I suppose, there are two strands to his empirical thought. The first is perhaps the most famous, the idea that, the sceptical idea, that cause and effect depends on causation

and we can't actually see causation. They have to assume it. You know, when a billy of ball strikes another billy of ball, you can't see why one of them may go in one direction and one of them in another. And that goes back to the principle of induction, which Judas was talking about, that actually you can't see the process

whereby we arrive at inductive scientific conclusions, if you like. You can't see why repeated experiments are true. But at the same time, Hume is very influenced as a lot of other Scottish mathematicians philosophers are and south of the border too by Newtonian mechanics. And Hume models the mind, really, on a model of Newtonian mechanics, which seems very definitive and scientific. And this idea that Hume has that you have to assume causation is the way that he binds

these two rather contradictory impulses in his philosophy together. I mean, the difference between Barclay and Hume, really, is that Hume cheerfully admits that you suspend your skeptical disbelief the minute you walk out of the door, and Barclay doesn't, You know, Barcliffe, Barclay, the appearance is the reality. For Hume, you can't see causation, but you've gotten your daily life to assume it. Now, as you have pointed out, Samar, Jonathan, the empiricism we're talking about, they wouldn't have gone around calling each other empiricists at that time, but they became known as that, this collection.

So when did they become known as that and what was, in sum, that? Well, the word empirical does exist in English in the 17th, 18th, century, but it's primarily a term of abuse, and an empiric is a quack. It's a doctor who has no theory. I mean, it comes from the Greek word meaning experience. Experience, in a sense, in a good sense, that a wise old person has a lot of experience, but also in the negative sense of knowledge that is based on rules of thumb rather than explicit theory.

The way empiricism becomes part of the sort of founding myth of 19th and 20th century, is in the wake of Immanuel Kant and the translation of Kant is writing in the 1780s, 1790s immediately translated into English and people get this wonderful story that the history of philosophy in the 17th and 18th century is a battle between two teams of three. Locke Barclay and Hume, the English, because continental people don't really know there's a distinction between England and Ireland and Scotland, Lockely and Hume, the English and Descartes, are in Leibniz, the Continentals, and they're supposed to be at each other's throats. I mean, there's very little historical substance of this.

They're supposed to have been at each other's throats. The empiricists saying that everything comes from experience, the continentalists saying that everything comes from reason, and then Kant comes along and shows that actually experience requires a contribution from both, so that each of the camps was correct about as far as it went, but neither was the whole truth. And it took Kant. Interesting that.

So it's only in retrospect. that this neat story of these two trios comes into being? It isn't just in retrospect, it seems to me, please, I mean, obviously you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but the French Revolution and the French wars, the war we have sort of cemented that idea that the English-stroke British were the pragmatic people who were sensible to common sense,

and over there there were abstract people theorising, talking about big ideas which were very dangerous. That is a huge persistent idea, and persists to this day, doesn't it? The story Kant was telling turned out to be prophetic and in a wider cultural sense have a lot of resonance. I think Kant has a very good legacy here for German philosopher because in German metaphysics in the 19th century was a good deal more abstract,

the most of the 18th century French thinkers, but it received a much softer ride from English response, partly as a result of Kant, partly as a result of the sympathy of certain writers, for example, courage, and partly because, I, I suspect Prussia was an ally at the Battle of Waterloo. But I think there is a whole wider impulse in empiricism, which is emerged by the end of the 18th century in the idea of history, in the idea of politics, in the idea of sociology,

as developing through stages. And the idea of progress becomes in place for the first time by the end of the 18th century and becomes part of the English, but also the American story. And I don't want to broaden this discussion too, necessarily. But one of the ways to understand America's operation in the world today is quite simply it's probably the last empiricist estate in the West. It actually believes that society is evolving more or less towards a form of the way the American polity is, and that's part of

its founding father's account in 1776 as part of its founding myth. The idea that society goes through certain stages is an empirical idea which is very strongly present in British, what's called British Wake History, but is also very present in American self-perceptions. And that idea always means that you have a right to intervene and to bring people up to your standard, to your level. Empiricism has a profound political influence on Anglo-American politics and self-perception in the 19th and 20th centuries. And that influence is defined not only against the Continentals, but also against the kind of politics the Continentals tend to choose. Violent, abstract in the French case or monarchical absolutist, for example,

in the Zardist case in the imperial German one. Julia? Yes, I'll say something about the Anglo-French divide. I mean, we've always been at war with the French, and during the 18th century we are in the Austro-Hungarian War, outside the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years' War and so on. And so the opposition against Descartes becomes part of that nationalism. But it's also used by the French.

The essay concerning human understanding Locke's essay is translated into French in 1700 but pretty much sinks without trace I mean the unsold copies remaining 30 years later what gives it its influence in France is that Voltaire, the great philosopher, is in exile in England between 1726 and 1729 he publishes a set of letters,

the English letters or the philosophical letters in 1734 in which he directly compares Descartes and Bacon, Descartes and Newton, Locke and, you know, so on, there are letters all about them. And he says things like, you know, don't dismiss Descartes. He provided a sketch where Locke and Newton provided masterpieces. And he's using the British philosophers,

both in order to, in a sort of disinterested way, say, look, here are these new ideas you can get at, but also crucially to attack the French establishment, the sorts of superstitions and mystifications that Mario was talking about earlier, are things that the philosoph set themselves against. So it's useful for them. to be able to set up the English as different or the British is different in order to get at the French religious establishment.

A very popular and influential in a general cultural sense philosopher in this country, these islands, in the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, who described himself as an empiricist and seemed to bring on himself because of the contradiction of factors that he was, English eccentric, English intellectual, English earl and so on and so forth. But he was very pleased, it seems, to call himself an apparistice. Given the evidence it was moving against empiricism, why was he keen to reclaim that ground, Jonathan?

Well, I think because in the 19th century, empiricism had been seen as one of the two complementary errors that had led up to Kantianism and 19th century German philosophy. The premise of Bertrand Russell's thought throughout his life is that 19th century German philosophy rests on a mistake. And he therefore decided to go back to what had, what had actually been rather caricatured in the 19th century as British empiricism.

He did see himself as revising that tradition and revising it in all its starkest luneness, really. I mean, we think of Bertrand Russell as being a sensible, scientific-minded kind of philosopher, but in his high empiricist phase, he does say there is no such thing as matter, there is no such thing as mind, there is only a neutral medium of experience.

when we talk about, I may think that there are four of us sitting in this room, but that's only a theory. All I actually have is various sensations in my head. And you, three people, are just logical constructions that I've hypothesized to try and make sense of the patterns in my experience. He was like that sometimes. So, I mean, there is a real, he's a very radical thinker in the sense of going completely. completely against common sense.

Empiricism and common sense are often thought of as being complementary with each other. This is very interesting, because you've mentioned that before, and I find it fascinating. It is supposedly the great bluff common sense, John Bull, philosophy. And yet when it's extrapolated by Barclay or Hume, or even when you've described a bit from Russell, it does go in a direction which is as far away from common sense as you could be, really. At least a profound skepticism. Almost against common sense. At least a profound skepticism.

I mean, Locke starts with this premise that, that empirical knowledge is only probable. It's not certain. It's not dependent on mathematical proof. You can only have probable knowledge. You can only know certain kinds of things. And the senses, he's always saying the senses can fool you. If you're drunk, short-sighted, if it's foggy,

you can't see so well. So the kinds of facts, the kinds of certainty you get are going to be only probable. Thank you all very much next week, Renaissance Magic. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed the... this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.