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| Konrad Lorenz Nobel Foundation Archive |
The
theory that holds that we are a blank slate,
on which someone (perhaps ourselves) should write our character and our
behavior is quite old. It could go back at least to Aristotle’s theory of potentiality
and actuality, according to which the human soul is born in a state of potentiality,
like an unwritten tablet, and must become an actuality:
What [the
intellect] thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing
tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens
with mind. (On
the Soul).
This
idea was recovered by medieval philosophers such as Avicenna and Saint Thomas
Aquinas, and later in the 17th century by John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where
he replaced the term Tabula Rasa
by White
Paper:
For such who are
careful... to principle children well... instill into the unwary, and as yet
unprejudiced understanding, (for white paper receives any characters) those
doctrines they would have them retain and profess.
And
later he adds:
Suppose the mind to
be, as we say, a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes
it to be furnished?
