A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (review)

24o HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and there we get little more than declarations of the kind: "Let me free it once and for all!" (p. 175). More fundamentally, Sallis does not deliver on the promise, implied in the title as well as in his usage of legein, to account in ontological terms for the subject's dispossession of itself. His claim seems to be that imagination somehow "encroaches" upon reason (p. 166) and thereby "infuses [it] with indeterminacy, anarchy" (p. XI). Such a muddling of faculties, if it is indeed what Sallis's scant references to imagination are to suggest, not only lacks any reliable basis in both Kant's letter and spirit, it also dodges the issue of ontological fragmentation. Addressing that issue directly would not have been an insurmountable task. Indeed , Kant gives two answers to the old question, "What is being?"--one answer too many. His doctrinal answer is that being (Dasein) is a category. It is doctrinal since anything that can be demonstrated a priori is part of critical "doctrine." His subversive answer to the same question is that "being (Seth) is not a predicate." Since all categories function as predicates, Sein amounts to the simple givenness enunciated in the very first lines of the Aesthetic. It can be shown that these two being concepts disrupt the subject from within. Quite disappointingly, however, Sallis considers that "the moment one takes up the dismantling of subjectivity, he thereby ahondons the Kantian edifice" (p.175). This blasts the reader's expectations of a "gathering," understood as the basic ontological process, that would "subvert" (p. 13) the metaphysics of full presence. Instead of carrying out that program from within the Kantian framework, Sallis appeals to Nietzsche, Heidegger and L6vi-Strauss (p. 175) tO manifest the[undamentum concussum of metaphysics. Having shown that "the fragmentation which (the metaphysical gathering of reason) would repair proves irreparable" (p. 152) in Kant himseff, why does Sallis find it necessary to turn away from Kant? One feels the need to pursue the reading under the guiding question, "What is being?" and show beyond Sailis or in his stead, how the Kantian subject reveals itself to be a broken measure for theory and practice: broken between pre-categorical, pre-predicative existence, which provides ontological moorage but determines nothing , and self-positing thinking, which determines all that can be hut is not constitutive ontologically. This would be one step on the road which Sallis's answers abandon as soon as his own questions have opened it. REINER SC I-ti) RMANN New School for Social Research James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198o. Pp. xiv + 194. The revival of philosophic interest in Locke's theory of property makes the first full-length study of the subject fi)r half a century indeed welcome. Tully's approach is first to establish the epistemological basis of Locke's moral and political ideas in relation to the Essay, then to compare Locke's theory of origin of property with BOOK REVIEWS 241 those of other seventeenth-century writers, and finally to analyze what he calls the "transition from antiquity to polity," that is the progress from the state of nature to civil society. He argues that a common model, which he terms the 'makership model', is applicable to Locke's treatment of man's relation to the Creator and his Creation and to his concept of moral knowledge. In the latter sphere demonstrative certaillty is possible, since according to the theory of mixed modes and real essences in the Essay man has access to the kind of knowledge which in relation to the physical world is available only to God. Through language the moral understanding of individuals comes to constitute an intersubjective reality, which can be identified with the Natural Law in the mind of the Creator. In terms of Natural Law the idea of maker's ownership of what he has created serves both to establish man's right to share in God's bounty in order to fulfil his duty of self-preservation and to provide, through labor, the means whereby this common bounty may be divided between individuals...