Consciousness in Locke by Shelley Weinberg (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Consciousness in Locke by Shelley Weinberg
Shelley Weinberg’s Consciousness in Locke builds on her previous journal articles and makes significant contributions to John Locke scholarship by offering the first systematic study of consciousness throughout Locke’s Essay. According to Weinberg, consciousness for Locke is self-referential, non-evaluative awareness internal to every thought or perception (22). She argues that once we realize the complexity of any perception—namely that every perception involves, “at the very least, an act of perception, an idea perceived, and consciousness (that I am perceiving)” (xi)—we can see that Locke’s conception of consciousness connects important themes in his philosophical psychology, namely his theory of knowledge, personal identity, and moral motivation, and can solve interpretive puzzles. Weinberg does a very good job in bringing to light connections among different themes in Locke’s philosophy that are not always at the surface of the text. The book is written with admirable clarity, offers careful readings of relevant passages from Locke’s Essay as well as other writings by Locke—including his correspondence with Stillingfleet, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and The Conduct of the Understanding—and engages well with recent debates in the secondary literature.
Chapter one begins by situating Locke’s view within seventeenth-century debates about consciousness by René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Antoine Arnauld, and Ralph Cudworth. The second chapter examines Locke’s conception of consciousness; and the subsequent chapters show how Locke employs his conception of consciousness in his theory of knowledge, personal identity, and moral motivation respectively.
Weinberg’s insight that perceptual states are complex offers clever solutions to puzzles how Locke’s general definition of knowledge can be reconciled with his claims that we can know our own ideas, our own existence, and the existence of external objects. Weinberg’s interpretation of Locke’s account of sensitive knowledge differs from other interpretations by highlighting both internalist and externalist aspects of justification (91–93, 98–111). [End Page 164]
Similarly, she argues for an interpretation of Locke’s account of personal identity that takes seriously both first-personal or phenomenological elements, and external or objective aspects of personal identity. She argues that Locke’s term ‘consciousness’ refers not only to momentary conscious states, but also to an underlying ongoing consciousness, which she calls a metaphysical fact of consciousness and which should not be identified with substance (154–63). The strengths of her interpretation, she argues, are that it avoids the threat of circularity and can accommodate transitivity and divine rectification (xv, 24, 144, 151–54, 181, 227). I am willing to grant that there is a good case that Locke’s account involves an objective standard of consciousness, but I have questions about her claim that Locke “thinks that we are consciousness/mind/body composites (persons), where each component is ontologically distinct regardless of what the underlying real constitutions turn out to be” (165). It would be helpful to follow Locke and consider questions concerning persons at a time separately from personal identity over time. If Weinberg wants to claim that consciousness/mind/body are ontologically distinct at a time, then the textual support is not clear and the interpretation cannot easily be reconciled with relative identity or four-dimensional interpretations.
With regard to moral motivation, Weinberg asks what motivates us to suspend desire. She argues convincingly that our general innate drive for happiness is insufficient, because it operates constantly and, thus, there must be an additional motivation. This is an important new contribution to the literature. Weinberg then identifies our additional concern for attaining true happiness as the further motivation. She understands ‘concern’ in a technical sense as denoting “a natural motivation toward true happiness, namely the uneasiness or pain of its absence” (202). As Weinberg notes (206), Locke clearly links consciousness and concern for happiness in II.xxvii.26, where he regards “concern for Happiness the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness.” In order to render her reading consistent with Locke’s second edition account of moral motivation, it is important to understand concern in terms of uneasiness. However, the cost of...
