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Now, here is Locke, by way of contrast:

We come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation … If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no … ideas of scarlet or green.

So, mind follows sensible matter:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper [Locke’s famous tabula rasa or mind-as-blank-slate, as famed a formulation as Descartes’ cogito] void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.¹⁶⁴

Despite the canonical differences between these two philosophical stances, there are symptomatic, even surprising, convergences. Notwithstanding the fallibility of sensation, Descartes will not deny its irreducibility and role in meaning, involving as it does “pain, pleasure, light, colours, sounds, smells, tastes, heat, hardness and other tactile qualities.”¹⁶⁵ “If someone is blind from birth, we should not be able by force of argument to get him to have true ideas of colours just like the ones we have, derived as they are from the senses.”¹⁶⁶ At this point, Descartes is sounding very like Locke.

Locke, meanwhile, insists that experience also involves “reflection,” or mental processes wherein the “mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations.” These are “ideas … being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself.” Now Locke is sounding like Descartes. Take color:

when the mind makes the particular ideas received from particular objects to become general … This is called abstraction … Thus the same colour being observed to-day in chalk or snow, which the mind yesterday received from milk, it considers that appearance alone, makes it a representative of all of that kind; and having given it the name whiteness, it by that sound signifies the same quality wheresoever to be imagined or met with; and thus universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.¹⁶⁷

In other words, “white” is not just a sensation; it is also a mental reflection on a shared property in experience.

So, both Locke and Descartes recognize the visceral materiality of the sensations that we, in our grammar of multimodality, call qualities. They also both recognize the role of mind in giving order to these sensations. Prioritizing mind, Descartes insists that people can get colors wrong, when for instance, “after being struck in the eye, a person sees sparks and flashes, or when after looking at the sun, the impression is retained for a short time after looking away.” However, he also speaks of vision “acting directly upon our soul insofar as it is united to our body, … ordained by nature to make it have such sensations.”¹⁶⁸ Meanwhile, Locke says that experience is as much a matter of reflection as sensation, as when whiteness is taken to be a shared property of chalk, snow, and milk.

So the opposition between the two philosophers is not fundamental, or at least not to the extent that we may have been led to believe by the academic predisposition to find dispute.

Both Descartes and Locke might be considered dualists – and Descartes notoriously so – separating as they do mind and matter-sensing body. In Locke, the dualism is in the difference between sensation and reflection. But in other moments both also insist on the unity of mind and body-sensing-matter, soul united with body in Descartes’ terms, or reflection integral to sensation in Locke’s.

Both find themselves having to be integrationists as often as they are dualists. So, when we come to our own integrationist account of quality, we want to have our Descartes and our Locke as well.

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¹⁶² René Descartes, 1641 [1984], Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 17.

¹⁶³ René Descartes, 1637 [1985], Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 127.

¹⁶⁴ John Locke, 1690 [1801], An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Edinburgh, UK: Mundell & Son, Bk. II, Ch. I: s.3, 7, 2.

¹⁶⁵ René Descartes, 1644 [1985], Principles of Philosophy, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 209.

¹⁶⁶ René Descartes, 1628 [1985], Rules for the Direction of the Mind, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 56.

¹⁶⁷ John Locke, 1690 [1801], An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Edinburgh, UK: Mundell & Son, Bk. 2, Ch. I: s.2; Bk. 1, Ch. I: s.9.

¹⁶⁸ René Descartes, 1637 [1985], Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 167–68.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 138-140. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

René Descartes and John Locke on Color §MS1.3a