Testing the Limits of Reason: the Place of Cicero in Locke’s Doctrine of Natural Law (original) (raw)

2024, Cicero as Philosopher: Interpretation and Legacy, ed. Andree Hahmann & Michael Vasquez (De Gruyter, forthcoming)

to no purpose without punishment'. 7 Yet his attempt to demonstrate these necessary propositions in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) was, as Locke himself supposedly came to realise, an abject failure. Meanwhile, Locke's theory of limited government in Two Treatises relied upon, and blithely assumed without argument, the same propositions that he had so signally failed to demonstrate. From the 1690s, we are told, Locke rather feebly conceded that these propositions had been delivered by revelation, resiling from his previous contention that they could be, and had to be, discovered by reason. The lamentable, and paradoxical, conclusion was that natural law was not, after all, discoverable by natural means. Locke himself did not share Laslett's opinion that a philosopher guilty of egregious incoherence or self-contradiction could retain a title to greatness. This much is evident from his own defence of a philosopher whom, this essay argues, he admired perhaps more highly than any other, and whose authority he repeatedly invoked to 'justify' what his contemporary critics, no less than more recent scholars, considered to be his inept proofs for the existence of God and the immortal soul in the Essay. The philosopher in question was Cicero, 'who of all the Romans best understood philosophy'. Locke rose to defend Cicero's philosophical honour and integrityand, in doing so, his ownin his protracted polemical exchanges with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, from 1697. 8 'It is to be acknowledged', Locke declared peremptorily, 'that truly great men, such as he was, are not wont so manifestly to contradict themselves'. 9 On the balance of probabilities, if an interpreter finds what appear to be incoherencies or contradictions in the writings of a philosopher whose greatness is beyond question, it is likely to be the former who has erred. 10 A small, though happily increasing number of scholars have focused attention on Locke's amplyattested reverence for Cicero and his philosophical writings. 11 They can, albeit rather crudely, be divided into two camps. The first group considers Locke's doctrine of natural law, and the political theory constructed upon it, to be profoundly indebted to Cicero; and they suggest that, once this is appreciated, Locke's theory is more coherent, and less 'exotically' idiosyncratic, than is often supposed. 'Locke', one recent commentator declares, 'intends no great innovations' in his account of natural law, because it was (as he was well aware) 'essentially drawn from Cicero'. 12 The second