Like Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, and other modern philosophers, Lock evicts ousia from nature, condemning from the outset “fruitless inquiries after substantial forms, [which are] wholly unintelligible and whereof we have scarce so much as any obscure or confused conception in general” (Essay p. 14). But, also like the others, Locke hardly escapes ousiodic structure in the human realm. As Harold Noonan has put it,
Although Locke’s notions of substance and matter are so manifestly unaristotelian, something like Aristotle’s substantial form holds a prominent place in his thought, at least with respect to living creatures.[i]
The trifold structure of ousia in fact animates Locke’s account of the bedrock denizen of the human world, the property owning individual; and human communities exhibit the same structure, though in weakened forms.
The weakenings, to be sure, are manifold. In the earlier thinkers I have discussed, and in many others besides, power was legitimated from above–by the superior rationality of free citizens, for Aristotle; by God himself, for Aquinas and Spinoza. For Locke, by contrast, the authority of government comes famously from below, from the consent of the governed.
Moreover, the ordering or dispositive power of the commonwealth is restricted to negative rather than positive listing—it defines and punishes transgressions, rather than establishing and enforcing positive norms. And third, that power is dispersed, into distinct legislative, executive, and “federative” powers (T2 ¶¶ 143-145).
All very well. But in discussing the legislative itself, Locke breaks revealingly into ousiodic, indeed Aristotelian, terms:
…’tis in their Legislative, that the Members of a Commonwealth are united and combined together into one coherent living body. This is the Soul that gives Form, Life, and Unity to the Commonwealth…The Essence and Union of the Society consisting in having one will, the Legislative, when once established by the Majoritie, has the declaring and, as it were, the keeping of that will. The Constitution of the Legislative is the first and fundamental Act of Society…(T2 ¶ 212.; emphasis in original).
Soul, form. essence, act: once again we watch a modern philosopher succumbing to the categories of an Aristotle he claims to despise.
Further weakenings of legislative power follow. For one, the Legislative is merely intermittent: unlike a form, the activity of which provided the kernel of stability in a thing, the Legislative need not always be at work, i.e. in session (T2 ¶ 143). Its intermittence makes it porous, for it means that legislators spend part of their lives living as ordinary citizens. Third, legislative power is not a fully dispositive power to order tout court, but (in addition to being negative) is defined as a “limited fiduciary Power to act for certain ends” (T2 ¶ 149). It functions, in fact, according to the overall principle of salus populi suprema lex, the well-being of the people is the supreme law (T2 ¶ 150; Chapter XV passim). The salus populi, in turn, is centered on the preservation of property (T2 ¶¶135, 222.
The commonwealth thus exists for the sake of private property.
This brings us to Locke’s concept of ownership. Here, the weakenings in his account of the commonwealth suddenly vanish and ousiodic domination breaks out in full force. Thus in Chapter V of his Second Treatise, Locke writes that both reason and revelation tell us that nature has been given “to Mankind in common” (T2” ¶ 25). But God gave the world to humans in order that it be used “for the Support and Comfort of their being—” and the use of nature is individualistic. Consider Locke’s prime example, at T2. §26, of natural appropriation:
The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian…must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life (T2” ¶ 26).
Beyond its patronizing treatment of Native Americans, this example instates eating as the primary example of the use of nature: we use nature paradigmatically, it suggests, by incorporating it into our bodies. So property, for Locke, first comes about through the establishment of boundaries: nature that was originally Ours is apportioned into Mine and Yours.
This boundary, we see from the above quote, is inviolable: if something is mine, others have no right to it at all, and it cannot be taken from me. In the example above, the inviolability is furnished by my body’s boundary: since what I ingest becomes part of me, what nourishes me can nourish no one else. The ground of private ownership is thus the individuality of the user’s body.
It is not as if ownership consisted in the recognition by my fellows of my right to use an object (IT2” ¶¶ 28-30). Rather, it is conceived strictly as a binary relation between the owner and the owned. When we move beyond eating, this relation is established by labor: we gain title to something by laboring on it. As Locke puts it (taking as example acorns gathered by someone), it is
labour [that] put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right (T2” ¶ 28).
Similarly for land: the person who tills it “by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.” Labor is thus a formative activity which results in the extension of ownership from the boundaries of my body to include everything which that body’s activity reshapes: the initiative of the working body, the way it affects nature outside it, becomes dispositive power once that nature is owned.
Just as the state broke forth for Hobbes with an unjustified absolutism, so does the individual ownership of property for Locke. The lack of justification follows from the absoluteness, as it usually does: absolutes are rarely, if ever, justifiable. The absoluteness, in turn, is what happens to a particular kind of ousia–state, individual–when it no longer countenances any other kind.
[i]Harold Noonan, “Locke on Personal Identity” Philosophy 53 (1978) pp. 343-351, p. 344.