Galen Strawson responds to my essay about Locke’s *Essay*

Locke in his portraits often seems sad, and it’s genial to think that he plays in his philosophy. Nor is it implausible, even when we take play in its core sense, and not simply as lively curiosity (Melanie Klein’s ‘epistemophilic instinct’). Many philosophers play in and among words, and not merely on or with them.

I particularly like two moments when Locke confronts the sceptic, who challenges him to justify his belief in an external world, and to prove that it is not all a dream:

If any one say, a dream may do the same thing, and all these ideas may be produced in us without any external objects, he may please to dream that I make him this answer, 1. That ’tis no great matter, whether I remove his scruple, or no: where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing. 2. That I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire, and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to appear so sceptical, as to maintain, that what I call being actually in the fire, is nothing but a dream; and that we cannot thereby certainly know, that any such thing as fire actually exists without us: I answer, that we certainly finding, that pleasure or pain follows upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we perceive, or dream that we perceive, by our senses, this certainty is as great as our happiness, or misery, beyond which, we have no concernment to know, or to be (Essay 4.2.14).

And again:

if after all this any one will be so sceptical as to distrust his senses, and to affirm that all we see and hear, feel and taste, think and do, during our whole being, is but the series and deluding appearances of a long dream, whereof there is no reality; and therefore will question the existence of all things, or our knowledge of anything: I must desire him to consider, that, if all be a dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the question, and so it is not much matter that a waking man should answer him. But yet, if he pleases, he may dream that I make him this answer, That the certainty of things existing in rerum natura when we have the testimony of our senses for it is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs (Essay 4.11.8).

This is exactly the right move, for there is no knockdown proof. And when Locke’s long-time companion Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, writes to Leibniz about her pleasure in talking to Locke—‘Rational Conversation, with Mutual Good Will, has the greatest Charmes that I know in Life, and I have hitherto been very Happy in respect of that Enjoyment’ (Letter of 8 August 1704)—we understand that it is a nonpareil form of play, perhaps our greatest game and in the service of truth.

Published at Liberty Fund. And here is my original essay about Locke’s “playful philosophy”. And here is Galen Strawson’s, clarifying the Lockean idea of personal identity.