Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

Abstract

It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of ‘tabula rasa’ originates with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an ‘originary’ state of human nature.

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Tabula Rasa and Human Nature
ROBERT DUSCHINSKY
Abstract
It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of ‘tabula rasa’originates with
Locke’sEssay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a
child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false,
this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the
present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist
scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been used to signify
an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the
human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a
substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that inno-
vations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine
such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an ‘originary’state of
human nature.
Introduction
The metaphors mobilised by philosophy and psychology do not
simply describe, but have shaped the direction of scholarship by le-
gitimating or de-legitimating particular kinds of research, and by
framing how this research is carried out and understood.
1
Here I
will explore the concept of the tabula rasa; my goal will not be a com-
prehensive survey of every citation of the term, but rather a genealogi-
cal investigation that disturbs commonly-held assumptions and that
can help shed light on changes in our contemporary assumptions
about human life. I shall argue how the tabula rasa has served since
the seventeenth century less as a substantive position than as a rhe-
torical extreme, an image of utter human malleability against which
the speaker can differentiate and render more plausible their particu-
lar account of the human mind. Tabula rasa can thus be conceptual-
ised as a significant, previously little-noted thread within the wider
1
D.E. Leary (ed.), Metaphors in the History of Psychology, (Cambridge:
CUP 1999). Some of the material in this article will also appear in a different
form in a short entry on ‘Tabula Rasa’for the forthcoming International
Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology.
509
doi:10.1017/S0031819112000393 © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2012
Philosophy 87 2012

history of Western discourses positioning writing as a false analogy
for the human mind, and which in so doing facilitate an account of
the human being’s essential cognitive or moral nature.
2
In his influential Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis, among the
most significant texts to have introduced the ideas of Sigmund
Freud to American readers, A.A. Brill stated that for Freud ‘the
child’s mind, when born, is, in the words of Locke, a tabula rasa,a
blank slate’.
3
Brill’s text has been superseded as a characterisation
of psychoanalysis; indeed, it has been argued by Forrester precisely
that ‘in Freud’s account, the child is not a passive tabula rasa’but
rather begins with a range of intersecting and countervailing proper-
ties and propensities.
4
Nonetheless, Brill’s influence lingers in the
popular translation of tabula rasa as ‘blank slate’, which has now
become an everyday figure of speech. However, Brill’s is anything
but a precise translation. Tabula rasa, in Latin, referred to the state
of a tablet after the inscriptions in the surface of wax had been
removed. The tabula rasa is generally taken today to mean a state of
formlessness prior to text, in line with Brill’s‘blank slate’.
However, if we attend more closely, it can be observed that a more
precise translation would be ‘a slate that has been blanked’, the
effect of the erasure of text. Thus Nietzsche, ever the classical philol-
ogist, deploys the term to mean ‘to make room for something new’.
5
Brill is not alone in attributing the image of the human mind as a
tabula rasa to Locke, or in situating this image as a characterisation
of the mind as formless and without predispositions at birth. These
were widely spread beliefs in his time, and remain so in ours. Both,
however, are false. On the one hand, the image of the tabula rasa
has a long, winding history; Brill’s reductive translation itself is a
move within a discursive tradition stretching back beyond Locke.
On the other hand, Locke did not use the term ‘tabula rasa’in the
Essay, but rather spoke of the child’s mind as ‘white paper’;he
does not use the image to argue that the child begins formless and
pure, but that the mind is initially dependent upon experience for
its operation. Helpful for understanding the endurance of these
2
J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (London:
Routledge ([1967] 1978).
3
A.A. Brill, Basic Principles of Psychoanalysis, (NY: University Press of
America, 1921), 16.
4
J. Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis, (London: Routledge,
1990), 81.
5
F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson,
(Cambridge: CUP, ([1887] 1997), 35.
510
Robert Duschinsky

false beliefs is Agamben’s theory of the signature. Commenting on
the history of the idea of ‘secularisation’, he notes that the term
remains marked by its history in theological discourse, in which it
meant the return of the religious individual from pious seclusion to
secular involvement. Thus when Weber refers to secularisation as
part of the disenchantment of the world, he specifically does not
mean the absence of religion but its continued presence as ‘the
ghost of dead religious beliefs’.
6
Agamben terms a ‘signature’a sign
or concept which is ‘marked’or which ‘exceeds’itself by virtue of ‘re-
ferring it back to a determinate interpretation or field, without for
this reason leaving the semiotic to constitute a new meaning or a
new concept’.
7
Agamben has suggested that the concept of ‘tabula rasa’operates
as a signature in this way, but he has only traced its very early
history. I intend here to further this project, focusing attention
on discourses characterising the nature of human beings. Outside
of discourses on human beings, the concepts of tabula rasa and
blank slate have not operated as signatures but as metaphorical
images of purity –Moss, for instance, writes that ‘Greenland was,
in my mind, an enigma. I couldn’t say why I wanted to go there,
but it had something to do with emptiness, the tabula rasa of a
white, continent-sized island.’
8
In discourses on the nature of
human beings, however, the dynamics of the philosophical field
have continued to haunt appeals to the tabula rasa image even
where they extend beyond the philosophical field and into the
social sciences and media discourse.
Tabula rasa in philosophical discourse until Locke
In De Anima, Aristotle argues that ‘What [the mind] thinks must be
in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet (gramma-
teion) on which as yet nothing actually stands written’.
9
Agamben
comments that it was the mind’s potential for different uses, rather
6
M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T.
Parsons, (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1905] 1958), 182.
7
G. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, [2008] 2012), 4.
8
C. Moss, ‘Frozen lands that can thaw the conscience’Daily Telegraph,
14
th
January 2012.
9
Aristotle, De Anima trans. J.A. Smith, (Oxford: Clarendon University
Press, 1931), 430a.
511
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

than the substantive state of blankness, that Aristotle intended by the
image of the writing tablet.
10
The issue Agamben gestures towards in
his characteristically telegraphic style is explained more clearly by
Polansky: ‘We should ask whether the table’s condition of blankness
represents the condition of mind before it knows anything at all and is
merely possible, as in human infancy, or it represents mind’s con-
dition once it knows and can think at will.’
11
Polansky concludes
that Aristotle intended possibility rather than purity, though he
notes that ‘obviously the blank tablet does a poor job of distinguish-
ing the condition of knowledge from the absence of knowledge’.
Likewise, Agamben suggests that this ambiguous image has ‘had
great fortune in the tradition of Western philosophy’for ‘the image
was ambiguous, and this ambiguity certainly contributed to its
success’; our discussions of the mind have been haunted by the
term ‘tabula rasa’, since wherever there are discussions of human po-
tentiality, ‘the white sheet’returns either as an image of purity or as an
image of openness.
12
Agamben notes that the Latin translation of Aristotle used by
Albertus Magnus rendered grammateion as tabula rasa. This trans-
lation was followed by Albertus’s student Aquinas. Aquinas agrees
with Aristotle that the human mind is ‘at first like a tabula rasa on
which nothing is written’, but qualifies that we must also ‘assign on
the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligi-
ble’.
13
Aquinas’s position is subsequently transferred to the antagon-
ist, Epistemon, in Descartes’essay The Search after Truth by the Light
of Nature. Epistemon argues from Aristotelian and Scholastic prin-
ciples that the early education of children is faulty, and that one
might compare ‘the imagination of a child to a tabula rasa on which
our ideas are to be traced’. He complains that ‘our senses, incli-
nations, teachers, and intellect are the different artists who may
work at this task and among them the least competent are the first
to take part, namely our imperfect senses’.
14
Eudoxus, Descartes’
10
G. Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’in Potentialities, ed.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ([1993]
1996), 244–5.
11
R. Polansky, Aristotle’sDe anima, (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 454.
12
G. Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’in Potentialities, ed. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1993] 1996), 249.
13
Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa, ed. Peter J. Kreeft, San Fransisco,
(CA.: Ignatius Press, [1274] 1990), 271–4.
14
R. Descartes, ‘The Search After Truth by the Light of Nature’in
Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew, (NY: Hackett
Publishing Company, [1641?] 2000), 320.
512
Robert Duschinsky

voice in the essay, argues instead however that such an approach
leaves no grounds upon which to base a valid knowledge rather
than arbitrary opinions, shaped by circumstance. However, the
Scholastic tabula rasa image is not simply rejected by Eudoxus,
Descartes’mouthpiece, but redeployed; Eudoxus uses the erasure
of preconceptions ‘by sponging out all its features’, as an invitation
to radical doubt. Such an approach is the precondition for achieving
precise and certain knowledge: ‘one who has reached a certain term of
years known as the age of knowledge, should set himself once for all to
remove from his imagination all the inexact ideas that have hitherto
succeeded in engraving themselves upon it, and seriously begin to
form new ones’.
15
Wolin is thus right when he suggests that
‘Descartes’s principle of radical doubt creates the tabula rasa by an
act of will’, though, as we shall now see, not quite correct when he
states that ‘Locke employed the notion in his famous account of
how the mind formed ideas’.
16
In the immediate context in which Locke was writing, the term
tabula rasa was a familiar image. With Locke’sAn Essay Concerning
Human Understanding published in 1690, William Payne was
already able to say in 1682 that ‘it has been the conceit of many
that the soul is but a rasa tabula, a kind of fair unwritten Paper til
it has received impressions from without’.
17
In particular, the
image was deployed by the Cambridge Platonists, under whom
Payne studied in the 1660s. It served this group of scholars as a
means of positioning themselves against the idea –which they attri-
bute to Aristotle –that human cognition is shaped solely by environ-
mental factors and has no shape of its own. Benjamin Whichcote
preached that ‘there are common principles, which everyone who
considers may come to knowledge of: but before study and
thought, the mind is abrasa tabula as white paper, that has nothing
written upon it.’As a result, ‘tis necessary the mind of man should
be enlightened, as to matters of faith; and excited as to other things
within its sphere within the compass of reason’.
18
Whichcote’s
15
Ibid., 321.
16
S. Wolin, Tocqueville between two worlds: the making of a political and
theoretical life, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41.
17
W. Payne, Learning and Knowledge, (London: Walter Kettilby,
1682), 11.
18
B. Whichcote, ‘That those who are truly religious will be delivered
from all dangerous errors about religion’in The Works of the Learned
Benjamin Whichcote, Volume II, (Aberdeen: Alexander Thomson, [1651]
1703), 4.
513
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

tabula rasa or ‘white paper’is an image of the absence of religious and
moral principle prior to education and instruction, but posits a
capacity for consideration and a determinate compass of reason to
already be present from the start, giving the mind a determinate set
of predispositions and potentialities. It seems highly likely that
Locke was familiar with Whichcote’s use of the tabula rasa image:
Damaris Masham writes that Locke ‘very much admired sermons
he heard from Dr. Whichcote’,
19
and two volumes of the sermons
were part of Locke’s personal library.
20
Another similar precursor to Locke in use of the image was Henry
More. In An Antidote Against Atheism, More attends to ‘that notable
point in Philosophy, Whether the Soul of man be Abrasa Tabula,a
Table-book in which nothing is writ; or Whether she have some
Innate Notions and Ideas in herself’.An Antidote Against Atheism
would later be part of Locke’s library, and the subject of an exchange
of letters between Locke and Damaris Masham. Arguing against the
thesis that perception is ‘a Passive way impressed or delineated upon
her from the Objects of Sense’, More sees himself as in agreement
with Descartes on the existence of innate ideas, but frames this argu-
ment in the Platonic form that true perception is in fact recollection:
‘the Mind of Man more free, and better exercised in the close obser-
vations of its own operations and nature, cannot but discover that
there is an active and actuall Knowledge in a man, of which these
outward Objects are rather the re-minders then the first begetters
or implanters’.
21
Over a decade before Locke first used the term, Andrew Marvell
playfully presumes upon the reader’s knowledge of such philosophi-
cal uses of the term tabula rasa in his poetry. Marvell had studied at
Cambridge during a period in which the influence of Whichcote and
More was pervasive, and he repeatedly engages with their ideas in his
poetry. In his Upon Appleton House, Marvell writes that the flooded
fields of the country house remind him of Eden: ‘The world when
first created sure/Was such a table rase and pure/Or rather such as
the toril/Ere the bulls enter at Madril’.
22
The tabula rasa is here
19
D. Masham, cited in Yolton, J.S., A Locke Miscellany, (Bristol:
Thoemmes, 1990), 349
20
J. Harrison & P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke, (Oxford: OUP,
1965).
21
H. More, ‘An Antidote to Atheism’in A Collection of Several
Philosophical Writings, (London: William Morden, [1655] 1712), 17.
22
A. Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’in Marvell: The Complete
Poems, ed. Jonathan Bate, (London: Penguin [1951] 1972), lines 445–8.
514
Robert Duschinsky

deployed by Marvell, with some playfulness and some seriousness, as
a characterisation of an ideal of untouched purity, in noting how this
ideal is evoked by the way that flooding erases the features on the
Nunappleton estate. The distance, however, between the North
Yorkshire countryside at the close of a decade of civil war and ‘a
table rase and pure’is indicated by Marvell’s next image comparing
the flooded fields to a bull ring. If an indefinite, flooded space
resembles for a moment an ideal of purity, this is necessarily a
passing image, able to be overcome by its resemblance to the political
chaos of internecine war. Marvell does not therefore evoke the tabula
rasa as an uncomplicated image of purity. Like the ‘pure virgin limbs’
of the fawn killed by ‘wanton troopers’in The Nymph Complaining,
the tabula rasa of Appleton House points at once to unreal innocence
and political possibility.
23
Locke’stabula rasa
The term ‘tabula rasa’appears in Locke’s the Essays on the Law of
Nature. Its usage here further supports the idea that Locke did
not intend to suggest that the mind begins without form or structure
by the metaphor. Locke states that his aim is ‘to inquire whether
the souls of the newly-born are just rasas tabulas, afterwards to be
filled in by observation and reasoning, or whether they have
the laws of nature as signs of their duty inscribed on them at birth.
But by our inquiry whether the law of nature is written in the
souls of men we mean this: namely, whether there are any moral
propositions inborn in the mind’.
24
Locke distinguishes here
between observation and reasoning, the two elements that together
comprise understanding. He also suggests that the tabula rasa is
not an image of cognitive formlessness, but of a state that requires
correct instruction in order to form representations of true moral
principles.
In the unpublished Draft A of the An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Locke deploys the tabula rasa theme again, in at-
tempting to specify that the newly-born do not begin with
23
A. Marvell, ‘A Nymph Complaining at the Loss of her Fawn’in
Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Jonathan Bate, (London: Penguin
[1951] 1972), lines 1, 89.
24
J. Locke, ‘Essays on the Law of Nature’in Locke: Political Writings,
ed. Mark Goldie, (Cambridge: CUP, [1664] 1997), 96.
515
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

determinate, explicit knowledge but that such knowledge is formed
through the combination of sensory experiences with the innate
capacities of human beings for internal mental operations such as
comparing or abstracting. Far from suggesting that the child is
simply a product of his or her environmental influences, he suggests
that there are two objects of sense: external objects on the one hand,
and on the other ‘the experience of the operations of our owne minds’.
Our minds are irreducible to the experience of external objects and
should themselves be considered as ‘a substance wherin thinking
knowing doubting hopeing feareing & c does subsist’. These are
‘the two only principles or originals from which we receive any
simple Ideas whatsoever & that all the knowledg we have beyond
this is noe thing else but the compareing uniteing compounding en-
largeing’. Locke suggests that the mind does not therefore begin
formless, but void specifically of ‘ideas’except as generated by
internal and external experiences: ‘when the minde which at first
tis probable to me is rasa tabula, hath by repeated exercise got the re-
mbrance of severall of these simple Ideas & observd that a certain
number of them are joynd constantly togeather it comes as I have
said before to looke on them as the marks effections or concomitants
of that one thing’.
25
Locke is, in Draft A, drawing a distinction between Ideas and any
other forms of thought. He specifies that the formation of Ideas
depends upon our experiences of external objects. However he quali-
fies that Ideas are irreducible to such sensory experiences, since they
require internal processes such as comparison and abstraction. Locke
is suggesting that all knowledge comes solely from the effects of
external sensory experience and internal reflection. This is not an ar-
gument for the extreme formlessness of the mind at birth; hence Kant
can affirm that he is agreement with ‘the celebrated Locke’when he
argues that, with regards ‘the occasioning causes’of ‘all knowledge’,
‘the impressions of the senses providing the first stimulus, the whole
faculty of knowledge opens out to them’.
26
Rewording but not alter-
ing his argument from Draft A, in Draft B Locke states that ‘there is
noe notion, Idea or knowledge of any thing originally in the soule, but
that at first it is perfectly rasa tabula, quite void.’From this he
25
J. Locke, ‘Draft A’in Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, and other Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch &
G.A.J. Rogers, (London: Clarendon Press, [1671] 1990), 7–8.
26
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., trans. Norman Kemp
Smith, (NY: Palgrave, [1787] 2007) 121–2.
516
Robert Duschinsky

concludes that ‘all our knowledge is founded on & ultimately derives
its self from…externall sensible objects, or the internall operations of
our own mindes’.
27
In the final draft of the Essay, however, Locke does not use the
term ‘tabula rasa’. Instead, at the beginning of the second book,
he argues ‘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?…To this I answer, in one word, From
Experience’.
28
This statement has been read by many to suggest
that Locke believes that the mind is formless at birth. As Plotkin
asserts, commenting upon this passage: ‘this is the statement of
the famous blank slate or tabula rasa, and has proved, especially fol-
lowing the founding of scientific psychology two centuries later,
one of the most enduring and contentious axioms of the
science’.
29
However, if one reads on in the Essay,Locke’sargument
diverges from its historic caricature. Locke suggests that the for-
mation of ideas is initially dependent upon sensory experiences, in
exactly the same manner as seeing is dependent upon light.
However, like Whichcote in his use of the tabula rasa motif,
Locke also suggests innate capacities for judgement must be
engaged for there to be any understanding of the meaning of such
sensory experiences. He insists that there is ‘no knowledge
without discernment’: the ability to distinguish between experi-
ences, compare them and abstract from them.
30
Locke does
indeed close his Some Thoughts Concerning Education with the state-
ment that a child can be considered ‘as white paper or wax to be
moulded and fashioned as one pleases’. However, if one considers
the method Locke suggests will achieve this moulding and fashion-
ing, it is one that recognises the determinate features with which a
child is born and their inherent predispositions: ‘God has
stamped certain characters upon men’s minds’and therefore
27
J. Locke, ‘Draft B’in Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, and other Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch &
G.A.J. Rogers, (London: Clarendon Press, [1671] 1990), 128.
28
J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and other
Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, (London: Clarendon Press,
[1690] 1979), 104.
29
H. Plotkin, Evolutionary Thought in Psychology, (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), 18.
30
J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and other
Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, (London: Clarendon Press,
[1690] 1979), 202.
517
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

attempts to ‘study their natures and aptitudes and see, by often
trials, what turn they easily take and what becomes them’.
31
Leibniz’s Locke
Whereas Locke is commonly believed to have originated the idea of
the ‘tabula rasa’, and to have intended by it the argument that the
human mind begins without form or structure, we have seen that
neither is true. It has not been uncommon for scholars of Locke to
have recognised this; however, these specialists have, to date, only ad-
dressed these false beliefs as a peculiar hindrance to a correct under-
standing of Locke’s arguments.
32
They have not explored the
genealogy or operation of these perceptions. A signpost towards
such a genealogy is offered by John Dewey, in a little-known diction-
ary entry. He suggests that ‘Leibniz, in criticising Locke’sEssay upon
Human Understanding, uses the phrase continually and technically,
and from him it gained new currency’given that ‘Locke himself
does not use the phrase’.
33
In his New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz offers a sus-
tained critique of Locke’sEssay Concerning Human Understanding,
and particular criticisms of the image of the ‘tabula rasa’as an accu-
rate characterisation of the human mind. He suggests that ‘Aristotle
and the author of the Essay maintain’that ‘the soul in itself is comple-
tely blank like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been
written –a tabula rasa’, which implies that ‘everything which is in-
scribed there comes solely from the senses’. By contrast, Leibniz
argues that the human mind ‘inherently contains the sources of
various notions and doctrines which external objects merely rouse
up on suitable occasions’.
34
Leibniz’s figure of ‘Locke’, against
which he can position his argument, is an incarnation of Descartes’
31
J. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and Of the Conduct of
the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant & Nathan Narcov, (London:
Clarendon Press, [1693] 1996) 44, 161.
32
E.g. M.V.C. Jeffreys, Locke: Prophet of Common Sense, (London:
Methuen 1967); W. Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism and Philosophy,
(Cambridge: CUP, 1994).
33
J. Dewey ‘Contributions to Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology’
in The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 2, 1899 –1924, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston & Sidney Hook, (Carbondale, IL.:Southern Illinois University
Press, [1902] 1976), 256.
34
G.W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. Peter
Remnant & John Bennett, (Cambridge: CUP [1765] 1996), P54.
518
Robert Duschinsky

Epistemon from the The Search after Truth by the Light of Nature (a
text we only have any access to in the original French because Leibniz
himself copied it out). However, the Scholastic enemy has been trans-
posed in Leibniz’sNew Essays. Whereas, in Descartes, valid philoso-
phical knowledge was threatened by the formless abstractions on the
nature of human life presented by Scholasticism, in Leibniz the
threat of formlessness lies internal to the activity of philosophical dis-
courses on human nature, and is embodied in ‘Locke’. In using the
term ‘white paper’from prior tabula rasa discourse, Locke became
aligned with Scholasticism whose conceptual abstractions served as
akey‘constitutive outside’,
35
rejected by philosophical discourses
as a positive move in establishing their own position on human
nature. ‘Locke’became the spectre of modern philosophy’s debt to
and rejection of Scholasticism. These stakes are entirely missed by
the long history of discourses on ‘Locke’stabula rasa’. They were,
however, addressed by Hume’s rather sympathetic suggestion that
Locke accidently allied himself with the Scholastics in deploying
the unfortunate term tabula rasa:‘I must own it to be my opinion,
that Locke was betrayed into this question by the schoolmen’,who
made available such ‘undefined terms’.
36
Leibniz’s characterisation of ‘Locke’as believing that ‘everything
which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses’is in one way
highly familiar to us. Like the account commonly believed today,
he suggests that Locke used the term tabula rasa in the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, and that by it he intended the ar-
gument that everything which is inscribed in the mind is a product
solely of the senses. In another sense, however, the characterisation
by Leibniz is unfamiliar, in that this image and argument is placed
in a historical context that stretches back to the Latin translation of
Aristotle. Leibniz is not alone in this awareness of the tabula rasa
as a concept that radically predates Locke: William Molyneux, in a
letter to Locke himself regarding the translation of the Essay into
French, states that ‘I do not go by Aristotle’stabula rasa’and
asserts that there is something ‘solid’in the argument that there are
certain innate faculties to the human mind.
37
35
E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time,(NY:
Verso, 1990), 18, 56.
36
D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric
Steinberg, 2
nd
ed., (NY: Hackett Publications Company, [1777] 1993), 13.
37
W. Molyneux, ‘Réflections de Mr. L–.’in The Correspondence of John
Locke: Letters nos. 2199–2664, ed. Esmond Samuel De Beer, (Oxford: OUP,
[1697] 1981), 779, my translation
519
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

Both Leibniz’s caricature of Locke’s argument and his placement
of this metaphor in its historical context can be explained through a
single hypothesis: that reference to the tabula rasa should be regarded
as a rhetorical extreme of originary malleability. Through situating
themselves as obliged to qualify the extreme view suggested by
‘Locke’stabula rasa’, philosophers and social commentators have
mandated discourse on human nature, and the extent to which it is
responsive to change in response to environmental manipulation
through education. The tabula rasa after Leibniz has served as an
extreme position, obliging qualifications from the speaker as a sup-
plement to its utter and absurd indeterminacy. This zero-degree is
handy for the philosophical field, establishing the potential for phil-
osophy both to make determinate claims about human nature and to
claim to determinately open new possibilities for human beings.
Kant, for example, suggests that whilst human malleability opens
the possibility of philosophy, and of the social and pedagogic
sciences, as a meaningful activity for altering human lives, the
extreme of total malleability closes again the meaningfulness of re-
flection on the nature of human experience and action.
38
And as
Wahrman has described, ‘this image –of the tabula rasa –was end-
lessly recycled in the mushrooming pedagogical literature of sub-
sequent decades, enthralled as it was by the shaping power thus
conferred upon education’.
39
From Leibniz onwards the tabula rasa
was never as much a live concept within philosophy as the first part
of a genre of narratives which ran ‘While Locke’s image of the
mind as a ‘tabula rasa’can be accepted to some extent and indicates
the importance of education, in fact the mind is better regarded as…’
The tabula rasa thus operated as a polemical empty-shell of a phi-
losophical concept, which establishes the far limits of originary form-
lessness and provides scaffolding for discourses on the true form of
human nature. For instance, Hegel in his Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, opposes both the real meaning of Aristotle’s image of
the blank writing tablet and his own thought to ‘realism in the
most trivial sense, namely that the soul is a tabula rasa (Locke) and
receives its concepts from the external world’.
40
Patterson asserts
that ‘the Platonic philosophy is likewise better fitted than that of
38
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed., trans. Norman Kemp
Smith, (NY: Palgrave, [1787] 2007), 8.
39
D. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 186.
40
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, II, ed. Robert F.
Brown, (Oxford: OUP, ([1826] 2006), 226.
520
Robert Duschinsky

Locke for the investigation of those principles such as those of Beauty
is manifest from this: that whereas Locke’s theory of the understand-
ing regards the human soul as primarily a tabula rasa, whose sub-
sequent ideas are the mere echo of the impressions of the outer
world…according to Plato, she is a tablet legibly written on from
the first’.
41
He makes use of the spatial metaphor of the tabula to
discuss the occupation of British colonial space, though still as a rhe-
torical point of comparison to what he sees as the actual state of
affairs: ‘in succeeding to the empire of India, we [the British]
found no tabula rasa whereon to write what we pleased, but a taxative
system which in its general features had been in operation for two
thousand years. The very slowness of our progress to supremacy –in-
corporating at intervals here a district and there a province –pre-
vented the adoption of any comprehensive scheme founded on
European notions of administration’.
42
A minority of modern philosophical texts have deployed the tabula
rasa theme as an ideal not of potentiality but of purity. An interesting
case is that of Ayn Rand. Rand deploys the tabula rasa image as a tool
for placing responsibility for good or evil solely on the individual,
who on this basis warrants a highly circumscribed level of social or
material support:
Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a
rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty,
and grants them that initial good will in the name of their
human potential. After that, he judges them according to the
moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of
major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral con-
demnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value its de-
stroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them
personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to
their virtues. It is on the ground of that generalized good will
and respect for the value of human life that one helps strangers
in an emergency—and only in an emergency.
43
However, it has been more common among philosophical discourses
to have continued to use the tabula rasa image primarily to establish
41
R.H. Patterson, Essays in History and Art, (Edinburgh: William
Blackwood & Sons, 1861), 82.
42
Ibid. 174.
43
A. Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: a new concept of egoism,
(New York: New American Library, 1964), 52. My thanks to inestimably
erudite Benjamin Crowne for this reference.
521
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

the extreme pole of a spectrum ranging from an origin of extreme
formlessness to an origin of utterly pre-set structure. For example,
King has distinguished between the histories of western and Hindu
and Buddhist philosophies by arguing that ‘the mind has rarely
been conceived of as a tabula rasa or a passive recipient of perceptual
knowledge in Indian culture, being actively involved in its acqui-
sition, even in the Nyāya and Vaiśes 
ika schools. This conception of
the mind’s active role in perceptual experiences gave Indian theories
of perception a more ‘idealist edge’than one finds in western philos-
ophies until Immanuel Kant’.
44
Tabula rasa in psychological discourse
Philosophical usage of the tabula rasa as a rhetorically-useful whip-
ping post has been inherited by psychological discourses. This is
the case even with authors appearing to agree with the idea of
tabula rasa: a telling case is Le Bon’sThe Psychology of Socialism.
Here Le Bon warns against ‘crosses between members of different
races. The individual then becomes a sort of tabula rasa. He has
lost his ancestral concepts’he is nothing but a hybrid without
morals or character, at the mercy of every impulse’.
45
The tabula rasa played a role in delineating the boundaries and
content of psychology itself. Deploying the classic philosophical nar-
rative to engage in a distinction between psychological from socio-
logical discourse, and to privilege the latter, Durkheim writes that
humans are shaped by ‘religion, political organization, the degree
of development of science, the state of industry, etc. If they are con-
sidered apart from all these historic causes, they become incompre-
hensible. Thus, how can the individual pretend to reconstruct,
through his own private reflection, what is not the work of individual
thought? He is not confronted with a tabula rasa on which he can
write what he wants, but with existing realities’.
46
By contrast, the
philosophical legacy of the tabula rasa has also been deployed as a
constitutive outside to true psychology. Husserl writes that Locke
has misdirected psychology away from the fundamental importance
44
R. King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist
Thought, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 149.
45
G. Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, trans. Bernard Miall, (NY:
Transaction, [1899] 1981), 62.
46
E. Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, (London:
Routledge, [1904] 1977), 78.
522
Robert Duschinsky

of intentionality through his image of the mind as passively ‘like a
writing tablet’, which ‘dominates psychology and the theory of
knowledge for centuries, even up to the present day’.
47
Similarly,
in Allport’s foundational work on the psychology of personality, he
opposes his argument to the position he believes can be attributed
to Locke. ‘Locke’, he argues ‘assumed the mind of the individual
to be a tabula rasa at birth. And the intellect itself was a passive
thing’. Allport, by contrast, identifies with Leibniz, for whom ‘the
intellect was perpetually active in its own right…bent on manipulat-
ing sensory data’.
48
Such a mobilisation of the image of the tabula rasa as a constitutive
outside, against which the speaker’s more appropriate perspective on
the true form of the human mind can be positioned, has generally
been maintained since Allport. For instance, Davies uses the image
for navigation in passing through treacherous terrain. She asks: ‘Is
the child a passive, innocent tabula rasa on which culture is
written, or does the child have innate, active, sexually impulsive
drives of his/her own? How far is the child ‘innocent’with regards
to incidents of sexual abuse?’
49
She then uses the false opposition
between sexuality and innocence, facilitated by appeal to the tabula
rasa and the polyvalence of the term ‘innocence’,
50
to show that in
fact that innocence does not require a tabula rasa model of human
nature. Children may have certain sexually impulsive drives and yet
not be considered complicit in their abuse by adults.
As well as facilitating narratives on human nature, ‘Locke’s image
of the tabula rasa’has also been mobilised to police and enjoin
changes within psychological discourses themselves. For instance,
in an editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Abed uses the ac-
cusation that ‘we regularly find psychiatrists, psychologists and social
scientists violating basic biological rules by (for example) assuming
the human mind is a blank slate’to argue that psychiatry should in-
tegrate evolutionary theory more fully as its governing paradigm.
51
47
E. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
[1954] 1970), 85.
48
G. Allport, Becoming: basic considerations for a psychology of personal-
ity, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 7–8.
49
M. Davies, Childhood Sexual Abuse and the Construction of Identity,
(Bristol, PA.: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 75.
50
R. Duschinsky, ‘Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education,
Performativity’Textual Practice, 2012, in press.
51
R.T. Abed, ‘Psychiatry and Darwinism: Time to reconsider?’The
British Journal of Psychiatry 177 (2000): 1–3, at 2.
523
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

Here Abed deploys the ‘blank slate’as a threat of scientific illegibility,
necessitating adherence to evolutionary theory as a barricade against
the violation of ‘basic biological rules’. Another case is Sherry’s argu-
ment against studies in media psychology that explore the ‘impact’of
representations on viewers. He argues that such an approach has been
guided by a misguided account of human beings, as the passive
product of experiences. The ‘environmental determinism’of research
on the effects of the media has been ‘philosophically based in the em-
piricism of Locke who felt that an individual begins life as a tabula
rasa or “blank slate,”and that the process of development consists
of filling the blank slate with information garnered through empirical
interaction with the world’.
52
As a result of this debt to Locke, Sherry
contends that media psychology has therefore presumed upon a
simple model of ‘impact’as immediate inscription rather than
observe more closely the neuropsychological processes involved in
media consumption. Sherry also alleges that the reification of every
human being as equivalent to a blank slate has also directed media
psychology away from individual differences in experiences of con-
sumption, caused by factors such as cultural background or personal
traits.
An interesting appearance of the tabula rasa motif in psychological
discourse occurred in the debate between Vandell and Harris in a
special issue of Developmental Psychology. What is notable about
this case is that there was both use of the tabula rasa image, and
also some recognition that this image serves psychological discourse
as a polemical extreme, and abject subject-position. Harris argues
that genetic inheritance and peer groups play a more significant
role in shaping an individual than the parenting they receive. Yet
she has been criticised for opposing her view to a caricature, in
which parents freely mould their formless infant. Harris counters:
Vandell claimed that I have constructed a ‘straw man’–that I
have accused developmentalists of holding a view of development
that has been dead for years. But ‘this view of the child as a blank
slate on which parents are free to create’(Vandell, 2000, p. 700) is
not what I accused developmentalists of holding. The ‘blank
slate’view of development –the idea that babies are born with
no innate knowledge, no built-in predispositions –is indeed
long dead. The mental set I call the ‘nurture assumption,’on
52
J.L. Sherry, ‘Media Effects Theory and the Nature/Nurture Debate:
A Historical Overview and Directions for Future Research’Media
Psychology 6(2004): 83–109, at 88, parentheses suppressed.
524
Robert Duschinsky

the other hand, is still very much alive. It isthe pattern of thought
that underlies the use of the loaded term nurture –a word that
means ‘to take care of’or ‘to rear’–as a substitute for the
neutral term environment.
53
Tabula rasa in post-Foucauldian feminist theory
The tabula rasa has also become a key polemical figure in the recep-
tion of Foucault’s statement that ‘the body is the inscribed surface of
events’by feminist theorists.
54
The statement comes from his essay
‘Nietzsche, History, Genealogy’, as Foucault describes Nietzsche’s
attention to the conflict and interplay between different forces,
which play themselves out in the shaping of both subjectivity and
embodiment.
Foucault’s work is used to discuss the social determination of the
embodied subject, as a way of thinking about the meaning of
agency. ‘For Foucault’, Butler argues, ‘the cultural construction of
the body is effected through the figuration of “history”as a writing
instrument that produces cultural significations –language –
through the disfiguration and distortion of the body, where the
body is figured as a ready surface or blank page available for inscrip-
tion’.
55
Turner agrees that Foucault’s subject is ‘a featureless tabula
rasa awaiting the animating disciplines of discourse’.
56
The accusa-
tion from Butler and Turner is that Foucault’s human being is inher-
ently passive, receiving their embodied identity like the inscriptions
upon a blank page. Such criticisms of Foucault have been responded
to in various ways by later feminists. One common approach dis-
tinguishes two forms of power in Foucault’s work. On the first
model, ‘power is the maker of persons. Power is productive and its
products are the specific forms of historical subjectivity. Since
53
J.R. Harris, ‘Socialization, personality development, and the child’s
environments’Developmental Psychology,36 (2000), 699–710, at 701; citing
D.L. Vandell ‘Parents, peer groups, and other socializing influences’
Developmental Psychology,36 (2000): 699–710.
54
M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, History, Genealogy’in Aesthetics: Essential
Works Volume 2, ed. James D. Faubion, (London: Penguin, ([1971] 1998),
375.
55
J. Butler, ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions’The
Journal of Philosophy,86(11) (1989): 601–607, at 603.
56
T. Turner, ‘Bodies and Anti-Bodies’in Embodiment and Experience:
The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas,
(Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 37.
525
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

Foucault rejects the claim that there is anything like a human nature
that is transhistorical in character, power on this model has in effect a
tabula rasa –the individual, not yet a subject –on which to inscribe its
various constructions.’
By contrast, ‘the second model of the functioning of power is not
that of power as person-maker but of power as one player in a social
field –really a battlefield’.
57
Adding to this discussion, Kirby has cri-
ticised both Foucault and Butler. She suggests that for both theorists
the body is conceptualised as unintelligible in itself, waiting dis-
course to give it meaning just as the tabula rasa waits passively for
its inscription. She identifies that such a narrative is complicit with
the ‘dubious sexual economy that informs this notion of writing.
The model of the tabula rasa whose inert matter merely receives
and then bears an inscription without in any way rewriting its signifi-
cance is surely a familiar story. Within patriarchal thought the body/
woman, as that specular surface, is routinely denied any efficacy in
the reproduction of value.’
58
Kirby proposes instead a realist position
in which all matter, including the body, is by degrees generative of
meaning; she insists that our embodied subjectivities do not resemble
atabula awaiting inscription, whether blank or otherwise.
In opposition to such readings, Geuss has argued the inscription
metaphor is precisely a way for both Nietzsche and Foucault to
show that no reinterpretation will ever ‘encounter…just a tabula
rasa, but a set of actively structured forces, practices, etc. which
will be capable of active resistance to attempts to turn them into
other directions, impose new functions upon them’.
59
The metaphor
of inscription is mobilised, Geuss argues, to mark any cultural form
as always already a palimpsest, rather than to imply that there was a
time prior to text. In agreement with Geuss, McLaren identifies
that ‘Foucault uses many verbs to describe the effect of power on
the body –it is marked, engraved, moulded; it is shaped and
trained; it responds and increases its forces…a closer consideration
of his genealogical works reveals that the inscription model does
not adequately capture the different ways that Foucault talks about
the body, and there is no compelling reason to privileged the social
inscription account over the others’. McLaren implies that there
57
S.L. Bartky, ‘Agency: What is the Problem?’in Provoking Agents:
Theorizing Gender and Agency, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner, (Champaign,
IL., University of Illinois Press, 1995), 188–9.
58
V. Kirby, Telling flesh: the substance of the corporeal, (London:
Routledge, 1997), 44, 147.
59
R. Geuss, Morality, Culture and History, (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 13.
526
Robert Duschinsky

must therefore be some utility gained by those who only tell ‘part of
the story’.
60
I would agree. For instance these discussions of Foucault
have missed the fact that, in The Order of Things, Foucault himself
offers a critique of the tabula rasa image as a characterisation of
human nature (which he attributes to Locke). He diagnoses this me-
taphor as a ‘parallel’, at the level of discourses on the ‘genesis of con-
sciousness’, of a wider societal move towards regarding knowledge as
capable of comprehensive tabulation.
61
Feminist discourses regarding Foucault and the figure of the tabula
rasa do not, themselves, occur on some ‘blank slate’, but are interven-
tions within and appropriations of the history of utterances making
use of the term that have been traced above. Instead, like my previous
sentence, they allow the speaker to enact their obligation to qualify
the extreme and indeterminate position by making determinate
claims about how things really stand. As we have seen, ‘Locke’s
tabula rasa’has been deployed in the history of philosophy and psy-
chology to signify an origin of utter human mental malleability.
I would suggest that these accusations at Foucault play out the
same argument on different terrain: not the mind, but embodiment.
Against the extreme malleability of ‘Foucault’s’subject, scholars can
situate themselves as obliged to elaborate determinate positions on
the nature of embodiment.
Conclusion: the tabula rasa today
Curiously, however, appeal to the tabula rasa image has gone into
something of a decline within social scientific discourses over the
last ten years. In particular, whilst the tabula rasa image has certainly
continued to see use in the past decade among psychologists, its
prevalence in major peer-review psychology articles and books by
leading scholars has notably declined. With the rise of theories of epi-
genetics, nature/nurture debates in the manner of Vandell and Harris
have been rendered obsolete, in turn making the tabula rasa a less
handy constitutive outside. Epigenetics suggests that human beings
are determined by neither nature nor nurture but by their ongoing,
mutual interaction of each with the other: genetic predispositions
can shape individual perception and social responses, and experience
60
M.A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity,
(NY: SUNY, 2002), 206.
61
M. Foucault, The Order of Things, (London: Routledge, [1966]
1989), 79.
527
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature

can impact upon the genetic predispositions of an individual or their
descendents.
62
Stephen Pinker’sThe Blank Slate: The Modern
Denial of Human Nature ostensibly highlights the enduring signifi-
cance of the tabula rasa image as a constitutive outside for psychologi-
cal discourses on human nature. Though he corrects the
misconception that Rousseau invented the image of the ‘noble
savage’, Pinker deploys the classic narrative we have seen above to
accuse Locke’s‘doctrine of the Blank Slate’of having ‘set the
agenda for much of the social sciences’and of having misdirected psy-
chology into an attempt ‘to explain all though, feeling, and behaviour
with a few simple mechanisms’.
63
Instead, he aligns himself with
Leibniz in arguing for a brain which evolution has granted certain
predispositions and biases. Yet Pinker makes the image of the
tabula rasa glow into brightness precisely by setting fire to it. He
deploys the tabula rasa not as a constitutive outside for his own pos-
ition on the nature/nurture debate but to shift the terrain of this
debate. He surveys psychological research that suggests that there is
no originary human nature about which to argue, but rather an epi-
genetic interaction.
Yet, despite its decline, within psychological discourse the image
of the tabula rasa remains available as a rhetorical resource. In
Schaffer and Kipp’s influential textbook Developmental Psychology,
they note that an ‘influential view on children and childrearing was
suggested by John Locke, who believed that the mind of a child is
atabula rasa, a blank slate, and that children have no inborn ten-
dencies’. The authors regret, however, that Locke ‘collected no objec-
tive data to back up’his argument, and contrast Locke to the more
accurate and substantiated views of human nature presented by
later psychologists.
64
The same narrative can be seen, transposed to
a discussion of what chickens can teach us about human psychology,
in Lennox: ‘If a few more philosophers had had a little more empiri-
cal interaction with chickens, John Locke may have reconsidered his
notion of tabula rasa, the idea of the incipient individual as a blank
slate’.
65
Surpassing even this, my favourite instance of the tabula
rasa theme in contemporary psychological discourse is from
Kenrick et al., who argue against Locke from an evolutionary
62
M. Rutter, Genes and Behaviour, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
63
S. Pinker, The Blank Slate, (London: Penguin, 2002), 6.
64
D.R. Schaffer & K. Kipp, Developmental Psychology,7
th
ed.,
(Belmont, CA: Thompson Higher Education, 2007), 8.
65
P. Lennox, ‘Pecking order’Times Higher Educational Supplement,4
th
February, 2010.
528
Robert Duschinsky

perspective on cognitive science. They suggest that ‘sufficient
numbers of discordant findings have proliferated to make the blank
slate look like the graffiti-filled wall of a New York subway station’.
66
Beyond psychology, it remains commonplace today to hear it as-
serted from academic and media discourses that ‘the notion of child-
hood innocence originated with theories developed by the
philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’,
67
and that
‘Locke proposed the tabula rasa, the blank sheet on which experience
writes human characters’.
68
Wasserman and Clair, sociologists, even
suggest that ‘the tabula rasa concept, with its most famous origins in
John Locke’s essay Concerning Human Understanding, is at the core of
Western ontological conceptions of the human being in general’.
69
Yet the tabula rasa remains an ambiguous image. Thus on the one
hand, Williams offers an analysis of the rise in unconventional chil-
dren’s names by suggesting the ‘I think everybody really wants a
tabula rasa’so ‘that they can invest them with as much of their own
personality and, more to the point, as little of yours, as possible’.
70
On the other hand, Graham-Dixon claims of Locke that ‘the most
famous metaphor of his epistemology, according to which the
human mind is a tabula rasa –a blank piece of paper –boldly contra-
dicted the traditional Christian belief in Original Sin. Whereas
writers from the time of St Augustine onwards had argued that chil-
dren are corrupt from birth, because of their inherent sinfulness,
Locke argued that the mind of the child is essentially innocent,
pure’.
71
As Agamben suggested, in discourses on human nature the
term tabula rasa continues to slide between an image of originary po-
tentiality or openness and an image of originary purity.
Northumbria University
robert.duschinsky@northumbria.ac.uk
66
D.T. Kenrick et al., ‘Evolutionary Cognitive Science’in From
Mating to Mentality, (Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press, 2003), 21.
67
C. Mitchell & J. Reid-Walsh, Girl Culture, (Westport, CT.:
Greenwood Publishing, 2008), 365.
68
The Guardian, 23 June 2011
69
J.A. Wasserman & J.M. Clair, ‘The Medicalization of Homelessness
and the Sociology of the Self’Studies in Symbolic Interaction,37 (2011):
29–62, at 33.
70
Z. Williams, ‘I called my daughter Harper first’Guardian,11
th
July,
2011.
71
A. Graham-Dixon, ‘Age of Innocence’Sunday Telegraph,5
th
August, 2007.
529
Tabula Rasa and Human Nature