Locke on life: the vital union and the embodied person

Abstract

This paper offers an interpretation of Locke's understanding of life, challenging a familiar reading which treats him as endorsing a mechanical reduction of the living body. Against the mechanists, Locke clearly states that the internal movement constitutive of life is excited from within the organism, and he also holds that the coordination of the bodily organs (their unity of function) cannot be understood mechanically. Rather, the different parts of the organism enjoy a 'vital union', a concept that Locke borrows from Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists. In the final part of the paper, it is shown how personhood, on Locke's understanding, partakes in this vital union and how the person is thus embodied in the human organism, or 'Man'.