INNATISM

Innatism teaches that man is born with ideas. It is a psychological explanation of the origin of human thought, not to be confused with idealism, which contends that thought generates its own content. Historically, innatism has taken two main forms, the Platonic and the Cartesian.

Plato's innatism is a psychological corollary to his theory of being and knowledge. Influenced by Parmenides's insistence that the mind knows being and that being as such precludes change, plato denied that the mind could abstract meaning from the material world experienced by the senses. Pure meaning, for him, was expressed in the judgment of identity (A is A ), and this kind of judgment looked directly to the intelligible content that the mind found within itself. Man's advance from ignorance to knowledge was not the fruit of experience but of remembrance. It followed from this that the soul had lived in the world of forms before it was united to the body.

The innatism proposed by R. descartes was less central to his philosophy; some Cartesians, such as L. brunschvicg, maintain that Descartes's doctrine could have prescinded from it. The Cartesian clear and distinct idea is not measured by reality but is reality's measure. Things are true to the extent to which they conform to the idea expressing their nature. The mind must purge itself of the disturbing influence of the imagination and of the senses, draw within itself, and thus—by a supreme effort of concentration—intuit ideas that are reducible to their clearest and most distinct components. Once convinced that the mind does, in fact, possess an intuitive knowledge of clear and distinct ideas by withdrawing from experience, Descartes was forced to reject Aristotle's notion of abstraction and to conclude that human ideas are born with man.

A realist and Aristotelian theory of knowledge objects to innatism because the doctrine is based on an a priori metaphysics rather than on an analysis of human experience. Factually, men learn through experience. Intelligibility is first grasped in sensible "examples" (to use St. Thomas Aquinas's word) presented to the mind by way of experience. Distilling meanings from the material instances in which they are found, the intelligence predicates such meanings of things. The human intel lect thus depends upon sensation in two ways: (1) it abstracts meaning from things, and (2) reflecting upon the sensorial context in which these things are presented to it, it refers this meaning to the things themselves in judgment. Moreover, a phenomenological study of knowledge reveals no data supporting the innatist contention that man is born with ideas.

In some psychological and psychiatric theories, especially those of S. freud and C. G. jung, innatism can mean that man's sensorial equipment is predisposed at birth—through racial, biological, historical, and other circumstances—to a subsequent determination of his intellectual life. A similar kind of innatism is advocated by St. thomas aquinas, who taught that man's intellectual capacity and, to an extent, his achievement, is dependent upon the sensorial equipment with which he is born.

See Also: knowledge, theories of; idea; ontologism.

Bibliography: a. carlini, Enciclopedia filosofica, 4 v. (Venice–Rome 1957) 2:1422–28. p. foulquiÉ and r. saint–jean, Citionnaire de la langue philosophique (Paris 1962) 364. r. eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, 3 v. (4th ed. Berlin 1927–30) 1:49–51.

[f. d. wilhelmsen]