Empiricism and Neo-Conservativism

A standard course in Academic Philosophy is 'British Empiricism', typically covering 17th and 18th Century philosophers Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The main tenets of Empiricism are that there are no innate ideas in humans, and that all experiential knowledge is derived from sensory information. Locke, the earliest of the three, proposed a distinction in that information, between the 'primary' and the 'secondary' qualities of a perceived object. The former are such features as shape, size, and motion, while the latter are color, sound, taste, feel, and smell. The former group subsist in the object itself, and are merely replicated in perception. The latter, in contrast, reside only in the mind of the perceiver, as effects on its sensory apparatus, of transmitted molecular motions inhering in the object. It is hardly a strain to posit Berkeley as a successor to Locke, because his version of Empiricism is the expressed result of his criticism of the latter. For, he presents a counter to the primary-secondary distinction, arguing that even the former qualities are only in the mind of the perceiver, e. g. the size of the sun appearing to be smaller than a finger in front of the eye that can block it out. Now, as previously discussed, a student might take this course, and a teacher might even give it, oblivious to the fact that Locke is also a seminal figure in Political Philosophy. And, they might suppose that Berkeley's thoughts on Politics are, analogously, a tweaking of Locke's theory of Democracy. But that is hardly the case. For, while Berkeley does not seem to touch upon the topic at all, his subtle adjustment to Locke's Epistemological Empiricism seemingly amounts to a more profound reaction to the latter's concept of Democracy. Locke's primary-secondary distinction also grounds a public-private one, notably insofar as his notion of the kind of contract that is the basis of political legitmacy claims objective validity. So, Berkeley's eradication of the 'primary' category is also an elimination of the reality of publicness, and, hence, is a denial of the legitimacy of the contract that is the basis of Democracy. When Berkeley reduces all experience to privacy, he goes further to contend that all experience is a communciation between God and the subject, which is essentially a subordination of public Democracy to. private Faith. As often expressed by George W. Bush, a prominent contemporary example of this attitude is Neo-Conservativism, which exposes their essential anti-Democratism. So, as previously argued, disorder in Academia is not without its significant public consequences.