The Valve - A Literary Organ | Locke, Socke and Two Soaking Footsies

<< Zizek the Embarrassment | Front Page | The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis >>

Monday, November 12, 2007

Locke, Socke and Two Soaking Footsies

Posted by Adam Roberts on 11/12/07 at 03:54 PM

John Locke? Why, Locke is considered equally important to empiricism and social contract theory. His ideas have had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence. Locke, clearly, was some sort of genius.

Here’s one especially genius Lockean idea, one that hasn’t, I think, had enough attention in accounts of his philosophy. I’ve been making my way through Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), a work I knew by reputation but had never actually read (Google Books have a splendid facsimile of the first edition here). I knew that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of pedagogy drew heavily on Locke’s conception of education as primarily a matter of forming character (healthy mind in healthy body and so on). But until I actually read the book I hadn’t realised just how brilliant his thinking was. Take this:

I:vii: I will also advise [the schoolboy’s] feet to be wash’d every day in cold water, and to have his shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water, whenever he comes near it. Here, I fear I shall have the mistress and maids too against me. One will think it too filthy, and the other perhaps too much pains, to make clean his stockings. But yet truth will have it, that his health is much more worth than all such considerations, and ten times as much more. And he that considers how mischievous and mortal a thing taking wet in the feet is, to those who have been bred nicely, will wish he had, with the poor people’s children, gone bare-foot, who, by that means, come to be so reconcil’d by custom to wet in their feet, that they take no more cold or harm by it, than if they were wet in their hands. And what is it, I pray, that makes this great difference between the hands and the feet in others, but only custom? I doubt not, but if a man from his cradle had been always us’d to go bare-foot, whilst his hands were constantly wrapt up in warm mittins, and cover’d with hand-shoes, as the Dutch call gloves; I doubt not, I say, but such a custom would make taking wet in his hands as dangerous to him, as now taking wet in their feet is to great many others. The way to prevent this, is, to have his shoes made so as to leak water, and his feet wash’d constantly every day in cold water.

If only this practice had been adopted at my school. How marvellous it would have been.

And what might a person look like if they’d spent the whole of their cold, rain-sodden, Northern-European life in leaky, thin shoes? I wonder.

Comments

I never considered how much A.E. Housman owed to Locke.

http://www.bartleby.com/123/62.html

By on 11/12/07 at 06:59 PM | Permanent link to this comment

“I did far too much when I was young” he sometimes said to me. “As a student I sometimes studied all night, I always had a bucket of cold water under the table; if I noticed that I wanted to fall asleep, I put my feet in it, and then I felt fresh again....”

Eugenie Gallie, quoting a landlord reporting what Nietzsche said, in Sander Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, Oxford, 1987, p. 171

(more at my URL).

By John Emerson on 11/12/07 at 10:34 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Let the record show: I had second thoughts and changed the title of this post.

By Adam Roberts on 11/13/07 at 09:06 AM | Permanent link to this comment

"cherry-picking.”

How ‘bout discussing say Marx’s documented use of the N-word? Marx at times argued for the “liquidation” of “reactionary” races, claimed that blacks were “inferior,” and even hinted that slavs, gypsies-- and jews---deserved genocide. Marx frequently used the “N” word in his letters. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, never did. (Google ‘er)

By Phrumious on 11/13/07 at 01:20 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Phrumious; is it possible that your comment has washed up here from some other, more politically engaged post?

By Adam Roberts on 11/14/07 at 09:17 AM | Permanent link to this comment

On the plus side, he argues in that book that people shouldn’t swaddle their babies and that they should keep their kids away from doctors. And really, isn’t the whole shoes thing over-rated?

By on 11/17/07 at 12:13 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Name:
Email:
Location:
URL:

Valve Links

Current Authors

Past Authors

Most recent articles

Most recent comments

Search:

Archives

Syndication

Validation

Credits

Blogroll

Monday, November 12, 2007

Locke, Socke and Two Soaking Footsies

Comments

Add a comment: