Nature or nurture?
The vexed question thus posed in shorthand was thorny enough even before
it became supercharged by certain topics of bitter debate in the current
Academy. I have been thinking about two
of these Third Rail issues—the theory of the radical “social construction of
gender” and the investigation of large data sets concerning the distribution of
varying intelligence quotients among human populations—but in terms of a blog
“publication” I have sufficient good sense to stick to my cobbler’s last, which
I take to be philology.
The question is whether we human
beings come into this world furnished or unfurnished with cognitive content, so
to speak. Are there such things as innate ideas? Are certain skills—a capacity for language,
for instance—“hard-wired” at birth? Or
was everything “within” us once “outside” us?
The old idealist tradition, carried on and Christianized by so many of
the medieval writers I most admire, generally believed in innate ideas, but
believed also in a kind of curse of ethical amnesia that so dimmed and blurred
them as to leave us struggling in a moral fog as we become ever more mired in
the world and its experiences. That is a
main theme of Wordsworth’s great “Immortality Ode.” The child enters the world “trailing clouds
of glory”—with a soul “not in entire
forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness” but, alas, pretty close
to it. Perhaps the best-known
philosophical denier of innate ideas was John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), a work of enormous
influence on modern political thought, especially radical thought. The less “essential” human nature there is,
the more formless and malleable it is taken to be, the better it is for
political radicals like the Marxists. If
“human nature” is entirely created by socio-economic forces external to the
individual, social engineering is not merely acceptable but laudable
What interests me now are the
metaphors that have been used to describe the human mind in its supposedly
original empty state, for they are scriptorial and bibliographical images: the tabula rasa, the clean slate, the blank
page. Other metaphors for filling a void
might seem more apt: filling up an empty vessel with liquid from a pitcher, for
example. But we find in the figurative
language a kind of mini-history of writing methods. The tabula,
or wax-covered board, was an accouterment of ancient and medieval schools. A student could incise the wax with a
hardwood or metal stylus, creating legible signs. We still can use the word tablet of certain notebooks. If you then heated the wax you could easily
scrape it flat again, creating a new usable surface or tabula rasa, rasa being
the feminine participle of rado, “to
scrape or shave”. At a later date the
more common writing surface in the schoolroom was slate, a small slab of fine-grained, foliated metamorphic rock on
which chalk marks could be easily made and easily erased. A big piece of slate used for this purpose is
usually called a blackboard.
It turns out that certain common
ideas and terms are surprisingly hard to nail down securely. I am just at the moment not able to get to
the library so frequently as I would wish, and my Internet search for the
actual first known use of the phrase tabula
rasa to denote the infant consciousness in an “originary” state has been
inconclusive. Younger readers may be
startled to learn that there are things, including some important ones, that
aren’t on the Internet. (Alternatively, I might be entirely
unsurprised to realize that they are there, but that I am incapable of finding
them!) I suspect that tabula rasa must show up in one of the
medieval Latin translations of Aristotle; but that is just a guess. Locke himself, though the purported inventor
of the tabula rasa theory, was too
modern to bother with waxed boards or thinly-sliced rocks. As somebody who did a lot of writing, he knew
what it was that people actually preferred to write upon. “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we
say, white paper, 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.”
Alas, my own mind is
far too often very like “white paper, void of all characters, without any
ideas”. Except that the experienced void
appears closer to cotton wool or the styrofoam packaging peanuts that follow me through life. Impelled by random forces of static
electricity they fall to the carpet or cling in chains to the Amazon box. These things certainly do look “socially
constructed” to me.
