John Locke Affirmed Evolutionary Human Nature and Denied the Blank Slate

Having argued many times on this blog that evolutionary science confirms John Locke's account of the state of nature, I must admit that I have never answered the most obvious objection to that argument--that Locke originated the idea of the tabula rasa or "blank slate" that denies human nature, and thus denies any evolutionary science of human nature.

My answer to this objection is that it makes two claims that are both false--that Locke originated the idea of the tabula rasa, and that Locke denied human nature by insisting that the human mind was utterly formless and malleable.  (A similar argument has been made by Robert Duschinsky, "Tabula Rasa and Human Nature," Philosophy 87 [2012]: 509-529.)

In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Steven Pinker defended his scientific theory of human nature against the Blank Slate--"the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves" (2); and his chief villain as the originator of this idea was Locke.  Pinker began his book by quoting a famous passage from Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II.1.2) that Pinker identified as the original statement of the Blank Slate:

"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" (5).

Notice that here Locke uses the term "white paper," which he repeats in another passage (I.2.22), and elsewhere he speaks of an "empty cabinet" (I.1.15); but nowhere in the published version of Essay Concerning Human Understanding does he use the term tabula rasa, although it did appear in two early drafts of the book.  The Latin text of Locke's Essays on the Law of Nature does refer to rasae tabulae ("empty tablets") (in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, 1997, p. 96).  And at the end of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he said that human infants could be considered "only as white paper or wax to be molded and fashioned as one pleases" (par. 216).

Locke did not originate the idea of the human mind as a tabula rasa.  It can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and others prior to Locke.  In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas asks "Whether the soul understands all things through innate species?" (I, q. 84, a. 3).  He answers no, and he finds support for this in Aristotle's statement in the De Anima  that the intellect is like "a tablet on which nothing is written" (tabula in qua nihil est scriptum) (430a).  

What he means by this is that the intellect by which the mind understands whatever can be known has no innate forms of this knowledge, although it has the potentiality for knowing these forms through sense experience.  This is Aristotle's denial of Plato's teaching that the human mind at birth is filled with all the ideas it will ever know.  That this is wrong is proved, Aquinas explains, 

"from the fact that if a sense be wanting, the knowledge of what is apprehended through that sense is wanting also; for instance, a man who is born blind can have no knowledge of colors.  This would not be the case if the soul had innate images of all intelligible things.  We must therefore conclude that the soul does not know corporeal things through innate species."

Since no one can say that Aristotle and Aquinas denied the reality of human nature, they must have understood their claim that the mind is "a tablet on which nothing is written" as compatible with the idea of human nature.  They understood that while knowledge is derived from sense experience, the very capacity for learning from experience depends upon the human mind having the natural faculties for such learning.

The same can be said about Locke.  He repeatedly affirmed human nature.  In the Second Treatise, for example, he saw that human beings in the state of nature could know the "law of nature" as rooted in "the principles of human nature" (secs. 4, 6, 10, 67).  So he must have understood that while the mind is "white paper" or an "empty cabinet" to be filled by experience, learning from experience requires some innate structures in the mind that constitute human nature.

That Locke understood this is implied by some of Pinker's criticisms:

". . . The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything.  As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous.  But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don't do anything.  The inscriptions will sit there forever unless something notices patterns in them, combines them with patterns learned at other times, uses the combinations to scribble new thoughts onto the slate, and reads the results to guide behavior toward goals.  Locke recognized this problem and alluded to something called 'understanding,' which looked at the inscriptions on the white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating.  But of course explaining how the mind understands by invoking something called 'the understanding' is circular."

"This argument against the Blank Slate was stated pithily by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in a reply to Locke.  Leibniz repeated the empiricist motto 'There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses,' then added 'except the intellect itself.'  Something in the mind must be innate, if it is only the mechanisms that do the learning. Something has to see a world of objects rather than a kaleidoscope of shimmering pixels.  Something has to infer the content of a sentence rather than parrot back the exact wording.  Something has to interpret other people's behavior as their attempts to achieve goals rather than as trajectories of jerking arms and legs."

". . . Leibniz, like Hobbes (who had influenced him), was ahead of his time in recognizing that intelligence is a form of information processing and needs complex machinery to carry it out. . . ."

. . .

". . . Everyone acknowledges that there can be no learning without innate circuitry to do the learning.  In their . . . manifesto Rethinking Innateness, Bates and Elman and their coauthors cheerfully conceded this point: 'No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa.'" (34-36) 

Notice that even though Pinker dismisses it as circular reasoning, Locke recognizes that the mind needs some innate capacity for "understanding" to interpret what experience writes on the "white paper."  In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke says that while we do not have "innate impressions," we do have innate "natural faculties" for learning from experience and learning how to pursue our happiness.  The desire for happiness and the aversion to misery are "innate practical principles." We are moved to action by our "natural desires." The human good is what is naturally desirable for us (I.1.1; II.20.6; II.21.4-8, 31-73). 

In his Essays on the Law of Nature, it is clear that for Locke the "empty tablets" (rasae tabulae) are not cognitively formless, because the mind has "its own faculties"--the will and the understanding (observation and reasoning)--that allow us to learn from experience and then to act on what we have learned to satisfy our natural desires.  We learn the law of nature "in the light of nature" (95-96).

Granted, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke's considering infants "as white paper or wax to be molded and fashioned as one pleases" does sound like the formless and utterly malleable blank slate that Pinker ridicules.  But throughout that book, Locke stresses the importance of shaping education to conform to the "natural genius and constitution" of each child, because children differ in "their natures and aptitudes," in their "native stocks," and therefore one must "make the best of what nature has given" (pars. 1, 66, 87, 100, 102, 108, 123-26, 139, 161, 216).  So even if the mind of a child is flexible or plastic to some degree, it is not infinitely so.  Shaping the human mind through education is constrained by the innate potentiality of human nature in general and individual nature in particular.

And while Locke does not develop anything like the Darwinian idea of evolution, he does suggest an evolutionary human nature insofar as he indicates that human nature was first formed in the "state of nature"--the original condition of our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors, which is what evolutionary psychologists today call "the environment of evolutionary adaptation."

Evolutionary anthropologists like Pinker, Robert Sapolsky, Christopher Boehm, Richard Wrangham, and Brian Hare often present the debate over the evolutionary human nature of hunter-gatherers as a dispute between Hobbesians and Rousseauians, but they ignore the possibility that Locke might have been closer to the truth than either Hobbes or Rousseau.  Their failure to consider the Lockean account of the state of nature is probably explained by their identifying Locke with an implausible blank slate teaching.  For example, Boehm says "I have tried to straddle the polarized debate" between the Hobbesians and Rousseauians, but without realizing that his position coincides largely with Locke's, because he assumes that Locke endorses the blank slate theory (Hierarchy in the Forest, 128, 227).  The same mistake is made by Paul Rubin in Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers University Press, 2002), page 2.

Boehm and his colleagues are mistaken.

Some of my other posts on the evolutionary idea of human nature can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.