Metaphysics of the Blank Slate
Positivism and Metaphysical Neutrality
It is probably been something near to a century since slates were used in schools (at least in the industrialized world; no doubt there are places today where slates are still in use), yet we have retained the metaphor of the “blank slate” (tabula rasa), much as we continue to employ Stephen J. Gould’s metaphor of “rewinding the tape of life” although we have ceased to use cassette tapes that require rewinding.
The metaphor of the blank slate is most familiar today in describing the mind, in particular the human mind, since Steven Pinker wrote an influential book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, criticizing the widely held idea that the human mind is a blank slate.
The mind is one entity among many that makes up the world, and if we extrapolate from the assumption that the mind is a blank slate we arrive at the metaphysical idea that the world entire is a blank slate. This I will call the metaphysical blank slate. Moreover, I think that the philosophical tradition of positivism, represented today by what I call post-positivism, constitutes, at least roughly, a doctrine of the metaphysical blank slate.
The positivist seeks to free philosophy from past philosophical mistakes, mostly by eliminating philosophy, or eliminating philosophical doctrines. Hence the role today of “eliminativism” and “deflationism” in philosophy, which often functions by the elimination of folk concepts declared to be insufficiently scientific. Positivism seeks metaphysical neutrality; it wishes to propound no metaphysical doctrines whatsoever; it holds that all metaphysics is a consequence of metaphysical bias, though it cannot help ultimately being metaphysical itself — as with the metaphysical blank slate.
We can understand from this observation the underlying positivism of this ideal — that metaphysics is ultimately meaningless and must be eliminated. One might attain this ideal metaphysical condition of the elimination of metaphysics through metaphysical innocence or through metaphysical disillusionment. Contemporary science has largely chosen the former, while philosophers, who have passed through the dialectic and come out the other side, older and wiser, have chosen the latter. But the result is the same: purging ourselves of metaphysical fallacies in order to enjoy a pristine world, i.e., the world of the blank slate.
The ideal condition of metaphysical neutrality would result from complete freedom from metaphysical fallacies. Since we have seen in Forms of Metaphysical Bias that any and all metaphysical ideas can be considered metaphysical fallacies from one point of view or another, it is difficult if not impossible to attain this ideal condition of metaphysical neutrality. At least, it is difficult to do so and to remain honest about it. This was one of the points that I sought to make in The Recrudescence of Metaphysics, in which I observed that almost all philosophers criticize metaphysics even while almost all philosophers practise metaphysics. It is a condition of self-deception that one would have expected Sartre to have recognized, except that Sartre himself, in his own continental way, was among the positivists.
How was Sartre a positivist? Sartre was among those who explicitly rejected the idea of human nature in favor of an ideal and absolute freedom, and the generally anti-metaphysical tone of existentialism implies that Sartre’s blank slate of the human person was a downward reflection of a metaphysical blank slate, in which the world was as free of metaphysical obligations as the individual was free of human, all-too-human obligations. The mind as blank slate is a corollary of the world as blank slate.
According to this interpretation, the metaphysical blank slate has ontological priority over the mind as blank slate. The primary thrust of a critique of the blank slate, then, ought to focus on a critique of the metaphysical blank slate rather than upon the mind as blank slate. Can we employ existing critiques of the mind as a blank slate in a critique of the metaphysical blank slate?
Steven Pinker on the Blank Slate
The most famous critic of the blank slate, who wrote a book of this title, is the aforementioned Steven Pinker. Here is a passage from his book that outlines prevalent attitudes about the blank slate:
“Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.’ For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves. That theory of human nature — namely, that it barely exists — is the topic of this book. Just as religions contain a theory of human nature, so theories of human nature take on some of the functions of religion, and the Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life. It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that it is based on a miracle — a complex mind arising out of nothing — is not held against it.” (Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Part I)
Interestingly, Pinker cites a analytical philosopher — Bertrand Russell — and the view of human nature, “namely, that it barely exists” as characteristic of the blank slate. As noted above, one of the most well known philosophers who explicitly rejected the idea of human nature was Sartre, who comes from an entirely different tradition of thought. That the doctrine of the blank slate should bridge the analytical/continental divide is remarkable. Does this shared view of human nature imply a shared ontology, however deeply buried under layers of disguises that allow a metaphysic to travel incognito, as it were?
The larger question posed by the doctrine of the blank slate in bridging the divide between continental and analytical philosophy is whether it constitutes a comprehensive worldview under which these less comprehensive philosophies are subsumed. In other words, is there a hidden, quasi-religious character to the metaphysical blank slate? In so far as we may identify the metaphysical blank slate with positivism (and with post-positivism), one cannot but be reminded of Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, which included this entry: “Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.” There is, in positivism, a tendency to be loud and abrasive when one ought to offer evidence and argument, which suggests that evidence and argument are lacking, and that the doctrine is held as an article of faith rather than as a rational choice.
How well would Pinker’s characterization of the mind as a blank slate serve as a formulation of the metaphysical blank slate? Pinker wrote in the above passage, “religions contain a theory of human nature.” which suggests the relationship between a metaphysic and a doctrine of mind: if we take the blank slate as a religious doctrine, then the comprehensive conception of religion includes within it a religious doctrine of mind that was a piece of the whole; if we rather take the blank slate as a metaphysical doctrine, then the comprehensive conception of metaphysics includes within it a theory of mind which is of a piece with the metaphysical whole.
Ortega y Gasset on the Self and War
Pinker himself, however, is guilty of conceptual confusions on a level with those he highlights in his criticism f the doctrine of the mind as a blank slate. Here is is comment from the same book citing the views of Ortega y Gasset:
“War is not an instinct but an invention,” wrote Ortega y Gasset, paralleling his claim that man has no nature but only history.
The famous passage to which Pinker was referring is, I believe, this: “…man, in a word, has no nature, what he has is… history.” (“…el hombre no tiene naturaleza, sino que tiene… historia.” Historia como sistema, sec. VIII) Pinker has completely misunderstood Ortega y Gasset in taking him to be an advocate of the blank slate.
When Ortega y Gasset said that man has not an essence, but a history, he was anticipating the evolutionary psychology to which Pinker would later give eloquent expression. The evolutionary psychologist understands that the human mind is a product of its history, and this is all that Ortega y Gasset is saying. We can make a distinction between personal history (ontogeny) and the history of the species (phylogeny), and both shape the individual mind. An exclusive focus on ontogeny might leave the impression that the human mind is a blank slate, written on by circumstance and happenstance, but a wider historical perspective that embraces phylogeny in addition to ontogeny confirms rather than refutes Ortega y Gasset in the eyes of contemporary science.
For more context, here is a fuller extract from the Ortega y Gasset passage from which the “War is not an instinct but an invention” quote derives:
“La guerra no es instinto, sino un invento. Los animales la desconocen y es de pura institución humana, como la ciencia o la administración. Ella llevó a uno de los mayores descubrimientos, base de toda civilización: al descubrimiento de la disciplina. Todas las demás formas de disciplina proceden de la primigenia que fue la disciplina militar. El pacifismo está perdido y se convierte en nula beatería si no tiene presente que la guerra es una genial y formidable técnica de vida y para la vida.”(“En Cuanto Al Pacifismo,” París y diciembre, 1937)
It occurred to me that if we translate the world here translated as “invention” as “mutation” we get a very different way to think about that other aphorism plucked out of Ortega y Gasset — man has not an essence, but a history — and its implied corollary — war has not an essence but a history.
One cannot make much of a good translator’s case for rendering “invento” as “mutation” rather than “invention,” and I don’t want to find myself advocating Heideggerian “translations” (as with some of Heidegger’s bizarre renderings of ancient Greek), but a philosophical case might be made for this substitution. There is a sense in which an invention is a mutation of technology, and in which a mutation is an invention of nature. (I have elsewhere suggested that we can even think in terms of technologies of nature.)
If we hold generally that historical beings have not an essence, but a history, we next have to ask ourselves how deep that history goes. The depth of our inquiry will yield different results. An ontogenic history of war will yield a different perspective than a phylogenetic history of war, and similarly if we pass beyond the phylum of war to the social equivalent of the biosphere — the sociosphere — in which the phylum of war emerges, we have an even deeper history. We can ultimately follow this history to cosmology and the origins of the universe.
Ontogenic and Phylogenic Blank Slates
What are the ontogenic and phylogenic equivalents of the metaphysical blank slate? The ontogenic is everything that astronomers call “local”: our local galaxy, our local star system, our local planet, even our local selves, at the most diminutive end of the scala natura. That is to say, everything taken as an individual or an object has its individual development. But some individuals are greater and grander agglomerations of lesser individuals, and so anything one rung above us in the scala natura is the phylogenetic context of our ontogenic individual development. The history of our species is the phylogenetic context of ourselves, but the development of our species takes place within the phylogenetic context of the entire history of the biosphere itself, which ultimately falls within the developmental ambit of galactic ecology.
Every star and every planet — like every mind — has its individual developmental progression, even while the whole composed of all developing individuals also passes through developmental stages. Moreover, while an individual developmental path is unique, the stages of development are usually recognizable as such, and the individual object may be taken as the token of a type. Hence the scientific impulse to establish a taxonomy by which we can readily identify these stages of development and so understand where they fall within the history of the universe entire.
The known universe has passed from Population III stars to Population II stars and now largely consists of Population I stars (though there are still quite of few ancient stars still steadily shining, and the red dwarf stars will continue to glow like hot embers long after pleasantly bright stars like our sun have burned themselves out). Within each of these populations individual stars came into being and pass away (to employ an Aristotelian turn of phrase) according to the typical developmental pattern of stars of that population.
There is a sense in which the universe is “our” universe, and if theories of the multiverse ever rise to the level of empirical confirmation we may be able to speak of “the local universe” — and I would consider this a good thing and a sign of our conceptual progress. Our universe, our big bang, and our development from primordial energy to the subtle emergent complexities of mind and civilization are reminders that even the universe entire is a “local” phenomenon. To transcend the relentlessly “local” character of all things our thought must converge upon infinitistic cosmology and infinitistic historiography.
The Metaphysics of Science
How did I get from ontology to cosmology? Cosmology now recognizes (as it did not recognize in the past) that the universe entire has a history, and as Ortega y Gasset said of humanity — that man has not an essence, but a history — so too we may say of the universe that it has not an essence but a history. In order to understand the metaphysical structure of the world, we must study its material structure, and the study of the material structure of the world is cosmology. We must return to the now-dated conception of “natural philosophy” to arrive at a metaphysic drawn directly from science.
Fortunately, the nascent metaphysics of science, which abandons the doctrine of the blank slate, does not obligate one to embrace essentialism about the mind or human nature, as seems to be the assumption behind the passionate denunciation of both world and mind shaped by history, by the advocates of the blank slate. The human mind (and its underlying substrate in the brain, and the world as underlying substrate of both mind and brain) is not characterized by essentialism. The properties that the mind possesses in virtue of the history of the individual and the history of the species are not immutable, eternal, or necessary. One would even hesitate to call these properties “inherent,” because they are inherent only as a function of history, not as a function of the structure of the mind itself. Indeed, the latter view gets the fact of the matter exactly backward (which is, not surprisingly, the error of all teleological thought).
The mind has structure because it has a history; it does not enter into history (initially) because it has a structure. And this suggests that the world has a metaphysical structure because it has a history, and the error is to suppose that the metaphysical structure dictates the history of the world. Put in these terms, we immediately recognize this latter idea as a familiar doctrine that is commonly held of the world: that of a teleological and deterministic conception of the world slowing working out or unfolding a grand metaphysical design.
Pinker’s emphasis in the quote above falls upon the mind and its complexity, and each mind is the mind of an individual self, so that this approach to the blank slate is centered on the self as blank slate. The idea that the self unfolds teleologically and deterministically according to a grand metaphysical idea is the familiar idea of destiny. We are equally familiar with the equally invidious idea of historical destiny, i.e., the destiny of larger social wholes — peoples, societies, nation-states, civilizations — unfolding deterministically and teleologically.
I can imagine that some individuals find this idea of historical destiny to be grand and majestic, while others find it suffocating and oppressive, as when William James’ protested the “block universe” of Hegel. And, again in parallel, we find both of these opposing attitudes in reaction to the doctrine of determinism as realized in a conception of individual destiny: some individuals find the idea of a destiny for themselves as a crushing burden, while some find the same idea liberating. This fundamental temperamental gulf cannot be wished away. As Fichte once observed, the kind of philosophy one has depends on the kind of man one is. Fichte has often been attacked for this, but he has put his finger on an important expression of intellectual diversity.
Blank Slate Cosmology
The widely-held ontological view that the world is metaphysically pristine — an ontological tabula rasa on which the chance events that transpire in time arbitrarily record a history — and the relation of this idea to that of the self as metaphysically pristine — and we can legitimately ask which blank slate presumption comes first: the mind or the world? It is an ontological chicken-and-egg question — is itself a metaphysical doctrine, and, while free of essentialism, we have seen that it implicitly incorporates its own kind of destiny as the unfolding of particular metaphysical idea in the life of an individual or in history as a whole. And a little further thought makes it obvious that the self as a blank slate must take its place within an entire cosmology, the blank slate cosmology, in which everything from the self up to the universe entire is a blank slate, all of which exemplify the metaphysical blank slate.
An intelligent species (of which the individual claimed to be a blank slate is a member) and the civilization it produces are among the last of emergent complexities in a long sequence of emergent complexities, in which later forms of complexity build upon earlier forms of emergent complexity (I went into this in more detail in The Apotheosis of Emergent Complexity).
It is instructive to follow the sequence of emergent complexity back to the origin of the universe, because eventually forces us to recognize the reductio ad absurdum of the blank slate. The complexity of the individual mind grows out of the complex history of a species; a complex species grows out of a complex ecosystem; a complex ecosystem grows out of a geologically complex planet; a geologically complex planet grows out of complex chemical reactions that arise from minerals and chemical elements; the complex mixture of minerals and elements grows out of an increasingly complex cosmology as generations of stars produce more complex chemistry through nucleosynthesis and supernova explosions.
When Pinker writes that the blank slate is, “…the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves,” if we are not to beg the question we must ask, what is the origin of that which inscribes the blank slate? In so far as we inscribe it ourselves, we get the image of two empty mirrors infinitely reflecting each other, and it is difficult to imagine how any content can be derived from this, so that we are once again begging the question unless we posit some original bias or tendency, in which case the blank slate is not so blank. If we contend that the blank slate of the individual mind is written upon by society, the situation is no better, because society is a collection of individuals, and we can only posit some content to be inscribed upon the individual if we maintain that the iteration of all these blank slates reflecting each other somehow give rise to something original.
If we maintain, following evolutionary psychology, that it is history that writes upon the blank slate, then we must ask where the history comes from that shapes the mind by shaping the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (also known as the EEA). A species arises from an ecosystem, and this, too, is a kind of communal iteration, the biological equivalent of society, in which organisms, mostly the same, but different in detail, produce copies of themselves, again, mostly the same, but different in detail, and if this process is repeated a sufficient number of times under changing environmental conditions (which can serve the role of speciation pumps) new species diverge from old species.
But where does the ecosystem come from that results in species? An ecosystem arises when life emerges on some geologically complex planet. A geologically complex planet arises from a complex universe that can produce such planets, and this ultimately arises from the aftermath of the big bang. Cosmologists who study the large scale structure of the universe have been trying to answer how a complex universe arises from the aftermath of the big bang, and one of the great moments in contemporary cosmology was the detailed map of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) that showed ever so subtle fluctuations in the CMBR, so that it was not perfectly uniform (i.e., anisotropic). From this subtle anisotropy emerged stars and galaxies, which, like individuals in a society, or species in an ecosystem, or planets among solar systems, are iterated over time, with the tiny initial imperfections accounting for different developments in different parts of the universe, which, over billions of years, ultimately yields the individuality of the individual, i.e., personal identity.
Every history is a result of both lawlike regularities and unaccountable contingencies (irreducible randomness). Each level of emergent complexity — stars, planets, ecosystems, species, minds, civilizations — has distinctive forms of lawlike regularities and unaccountable contingencies. Particle physicists try to determine the lawlike regularities that would have described the early universe no less than our universe today, but these mathematical models do not describe (though they are consistent with) the unaccountable contingencies that result in a subtle anisotropy of the CMBR. Similarly, the study of stars and their planets gives us laws of stellar evolution and the evolution of planetary systems, but it does not account for the unaccountable contingencies that makes one planet subtly different from another planet. The same can be said for biospheres, species, minds, and civilizations.
The Universe as a Blank Slate
Is the universe itself is a blank slate, possessing no intrinsic structure, and everything that follows from it mere further blank slates that emptily reflect what came before? The view of contemporary cosmology is that the universe deviates from being a blank slate in virtue of the minute differences in the CMBR. This is a reasonable place to start, but we know that contemporary cosmology and physics is incomplete. We cannot yet account for dark matter or dark energy; we cannot give an account of the relationship between general relativity and quantum theory; our models do not tell us what occurs within singularities, and if the big bang is the result of an initial singularity, then our models are not yet able to penetrate into the origins of the universe. As we continue to unravel the world by the pursuit of science, I think that we will learn about further levels of lawlike regularities and unaccountable contingencies — histories not available to our inspection at our present level of scientific and technological sophistication.
A reductionist might be content to assert that all emergent complexities can be traced back to, and ultimately reduced to, the original deviation from pure homogeneity that is documented by the CMBR, but I think that each level of emergent complexity, and not only the original source or emergent complexity in the big bang, add further distinctive lawlike regularities and unaccountable contingencies, so that if we could map with similar precision the formation of planets, the origins of a biosphere, the natural history of a species, or the emergence of the mind, we would find in each of these levels of emergent complexity a story of both lawlike precision and random contingencies.
In fact, we are now compiling just such a detailed biological history of our own species, by the recently available scientific resources of DNA sequencing. There is a precise description of the structure of DNA, and how exactly DNA can reproduce itself. But this reproduction is attended by occasional accidents, mutations, that can ultimately issue in speciation. The laws and the accidental contingencies of DNA and its mutations are specific to DNA and cannot be explained in terms of lower levels of complexity, like the CMBR, or higher levels of emergent complexity, such as the minds and the societies that emerge from species that cross the threshold of intelligence.
Contingency and the Natural History of Freedom
The universe entire has a history, and this history can be described in terms of laws formulated in mathematical precision, but we must also acknowledge contingencies consistent with the laws but not predictable on the basis of these laws. And planetary systems have a history, described by laws and embodying contingent accidents. Our terrestrial biosphere has a history, our species has a history, our minds have a history, and our civilizations have histories. Each of these histories inscribes something of its own on other existents; each individual — whether individual particle, star, planet, DNA strand, species, or mind — both inscribes a trace of itself on its neighbors, and is in turn inscribed upon by its neighbors.
Not only is the mind not a blank slate, and the universe not a blank slate, and everything between the individual mind and the universe entire not a blank slate, but each is shaped by a succession of histories that give to later emergent complexities a distinctive character. This is not an argument for determinism, whether cosmological, geographical, biological, or social, because just as all these histories were made of lawlike regularities and unaccountable contingencies, so the individual mind that is the inheritor of billions of years of history that made it what it is, is also constituted by lawlike regularities and unaccountable contingencies. Much of the individual’s behavior can be predicted on the basis of lawlike regularities, but that does not exclude the unaccountable contingencies. On the contrary, the emergence of mind in history makes these unaccountable contingencies explicit and conscious for the first time in the history of the universe, and this explicit, conscious exercise of unaccountable contingency we call freedom.
