One classic philosophical dispute is the battle over innate ideas. An innate idea, as the name suggests, is not acquired by experience but is somehow “built into” the mind. Philosophers who accept innate ideas differ about their nature and content. Leibniz, for example, sees God as the creator innate ideas that exist within the monads. Other thinkers forgo metaphysics, such as those who think humans have an innate concept of beauty that is the product of evolution.
Over the centuries, philosophers have argued for and against innate ideas. For example, some take Plato’s Meno as an early argument for innate ideas. In the Meno, Socrates claims to show that Meno’s servant knows geometry, despite the (alleged) fact that he never learned geometry in this life. Other philosophers have argued that there must be innate ideas for the mind to “process” information coming in from the senses. To use a modern analogy, just as a smart phone needs software to enable the camera to function, the brain needs innate ideas in to process the sensory data coming in via the optic nerve.
Other philosophers, such as John Locke, have reject innate ideas in general. Others have been critical of specific forms of innate ideas—the idea that God is the cause of innate ideas is, as might be suspected, not very popular among those who attribute them to evolution.
Interestingly, there is some contemporary evidence for innate ideas. In his August 2014 Scientific American article “Accidental Genius”, Darold A. Treffert presents something akin to a 21st century version of the Meno. Investigating the matter of “accidental geniuses” (people who become savants as the result of an accident, such as a brain injury), researchers claimed they could create “instant savants” by the use using brain stimulation. These instant savants were able to solve a mathematical puzzle they could not solve without the stimulation. Treffert asserted that this ability to solve the puzzle was since they “’know things’ innately they were never taught.” To provide additional support, Treffert gave the example of a savant sculptor, Clemons, who “had no formal training in art but knew instinctively how to produce an armature, the frame for the sculpture, to enable his pieces to show horse in motion.” Treffert goes on to explicitly reject the “blank slate” notion (which was made famous by John Locke) in favor of the notion that the “brain might come loaded with a set of innate predispositions for processing what it sees or for understanding the ‘rules’ of music art or mathematics.” While this explanation is certainly appealing, it is well worth considering alternative explanations.
One established objection to this sort of argument is the like that used against past life experiences. When someone claims to have had a past life based on knowing things they would not normally know, the obvious reply is they learned through perfectly mundane means. In the case of alleged innate ideas, one reply is that the person gained the knowledge through experience. This is not to claim that such claims are intentional deceptions. They might not recall the experience that provided the knowledge. For example, the instant savants who solved the puzzle probably had previous puzzle experience and the sculptor might have seen armatures.
Another objection is that an idea might appear innate but instead is a new idea that did not originate directly from a specific experience. For example, consider a person who developed a genius for sculpture after a head injury. The person might have an innate idea that allowed them to produce the armature. An alternative explanation is that they faced a problem and solved it without any appeal to innate knowledge. The solution turned out to be an armature, because that is solved the problem. To use an analogy, someone faced with the problem of driving a nail might re-invent the hammer, but this does not entail that the idea of a hammer is innate. Rather, a hammer is what would work and it is what a person would tend to make.
As has always been the case in the debate over innate ideas, the key question is whether the phenomena in question can be explained best by innate ideas or without them. As a Cartesian, I am fond of innate ideas but always consider alternative explanations.
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This is a very interesting topic. As a dedicated musician with several decades of experience, I can say that talent really does exists. However, Treffert thinks that savantism, genius, and talent, are all similar, or the same thing. They are not. Drawing a map of your town after you surveyed in on a helicopter is very different than being Mozart. First, great art (and what does that mean? that’s another, vast subject, but let’s say the works of the great composers, these are always good examples) is not a mere skill or just an idea, but something far more mysterious. The historical facts of great artists creating great works can be explained only as facts, like the law of gravity. When Beethoven was asked how he came up with certain ideas in his music, his answer was: ‘That, I do not know.’.
This is not an acquired skill. What education and training does is merely to polish and refine whatever is there already, if there’s anything. I have seen this through myself, even I believe I might be autistic. This is not just anecdotal, this pattern is observable through the history of music and musicology (I am mainly a musician, don’t do musicology but I know the history of music in enough detail and have read the biographies of many composers).
Treffert states:
”… for understanding the ‘rules’ of music art or mathematics.”.
The man is completely wrong. Music and art has nothing to do with mathematics. There aren’t ‘rules’ for music either. The entire music theory system is a bunch of deductions, : in fact, the ‘rules’ were EXTRACTED from great works of music, not the other way around. JS Bach didn’t know any music theory. In fact, most great composers didn’t know any, either.
When Chopin was unknown as a child and was auditioned in a music conservatory so that he could study music, the professors wrote down: ”Chopin, Frederik, genius.”. Many years later, the composer Robert Schumann, who was also a music critic, played the unknown Chopin’s music at the piano and wrote in his essay: ‘Hats off, gentleman. A genius!’. That was 1835 or something.
And history only confirmed these remarks.Chopin is today known all over the world as ‘the poet of the piano’.
In general, when a great composer said of someone else ‘X is a genius’, one better believe it, for none of them were keen in uttering great compliments to other musicians and they were very, very picky.
One of the most interesting cases is when the composer Joseph Haydn, who was basically the god of music in Vienna and the world, saw the child Mozart playing (if I remember well he was 6), and Haydn took aside Mozart’s father and said to him: ‘Sir, your son is the greatest musician I know of, either in person or by name.’.
A very good example of musical talent in savantism today is Derek Paravicini, a pianist with very serious mental retardation, he can’t count up to 10 and he cannot tell the right hand from the left one. Yet he plays the piano better than many pros who acquired the ‘skill’.
I remember reading a credible source about a man who was working in a circus toward the end of the 1800. The writer, a musician and musicologist, wrote something like this :
”I had been told that there was this astonishing pianist who was part of a circus troupe, so I set out to meet him…….I was waiting in his room to arrive. When he did, I was absolutely repulsed. He was drunk and reeked of alcohol and struggled to stand. He uttered something about having been told that I was there for a demonstration at the piano, and then to my amazement, proceeded to play, with absolute perfection, the most difficult works of Franz Liszt. Then suddenly he fell asleep, and I left.”.
Now this seems a very unusual skill, playing difficult works at the piano while being completely drunk. This would seem savantism too.
However, I believe that this is different from the musical genius of the great composers, in that it doesn’t involve the CREATION of music, but the performing of it. One might say that the difference is like that of being a fine actor and reciting Shakespeare, and being Shakespeare. People often generalize over ‘talent’ and ‘genius’ (the latter being a much higher form of talent) and skill.
In the case of Paravicini, the man has been unlucky: had he not been mentally retarded, I am sure he would have smashed it in the world of musical composition.
One last contemporary example, Alma Deutscher. She is not a savant, nor is mentally impaired (fortunately), yet she seems straight out of the tales of the great composers.
Schopenhauer believed that yes, talent and genius is innate. I absolutely agree. But I add, this is not just an idea, or a mere skill, but something else. What, I do not know, even though I have been a musician for decades. I have seen (heard) it myself in my own way too, for example I listen back to some music I recorded 15 years ago, when I did not know or understand as much about music as I do know, and ask myself ‘where that did come from’.
Many years ago I read the autobiography of Michael Jackson, I remembered very well how he described the same feeling, saying (paraphrasing) that he ‘didn’t make music happen’ and that ‘he was just like a means for music to get through’. I have felt the same way and many composers said the same of their best work, for example: ‘I wrote this work very quickly’. I saw this for myself, the best stuff seems to pour out of nowhere. Rules or maths would have destroyed it. But this is absolutely not to say that training, practice, ‘rules’ and theory don’t matter. Ironically, the more talent there is, the more one should educate himself to polish it. But this is never used to create talent. Take the great jazz pianist and composer Hiromi Uehara. There’s these silly ideas about her practicing the piano many hours a day. This is absolutely not true. Many others have practiced the piano more and for more years than her, and they aren’t as good. But if you see her, she’s always playing it with so much happiness and excitement, like a child playing with her favourite toy, with a huge smile on her face.
Valentina Lisitsa is like that, too, performing Liszt with a smile on her face. Very few do that, the others seem to be walking on eggshells when they play and have this frown on their face, because the pianistic skill came with a much greater effort. I say, this is a huge difference. Not to say that the others aren’t fine pianists, they are. But the difference is glaring.
I agree with Schopenhauer, talent and genius are innate, the training always comes second, never first. He even said that people who create only according to rules, seem to produce pedantic work. I agree. It will sound forced and unnatural.
Moreover, I agree with him about all else being innate as well, such as good and evil dispositions. But, as he himself advised, one should never give up learning and trying to understand, as this can help. But never to create inside what is missing from the start, only to polish it further, perhaps even develop it.
”.. people who create only according to rules, seem to produce pedantic work. I agree. It will sound forced and unnatural.”. Whilst this is true, the downside of this is that many people use this as an excuse to be lazy and not exert their mind and skills, i.e. the mistake of the lazy dullard who learned nothing. Many pop musicians are exactly that, fools without discipline who got lucky. Which, said from me, is ironic, since I am a pop musician too. I am not a snob but neither I am a simpleton; I am very, very picky myself and I believe that even a pop musician should learn all that can be learned about music, including music theory. I think Socrates would agree with me.
If anyone is in doubt whether musical talent exists, if he doesn’t have a clear idea of what that is, this is not difficult to find out: just ask any experienced, credible music teacher, piano teachers, etc. No one is trying to ‘romanticize’ music, or anything like that, in fact this too is a silly idea, i.e. some scholars say that for example Beethoven was ‘lionized’ by many other composers, as if the latters saw something that wasn’t really there. No, the lionization is absolutely warranted: Beethoven had been severely abused as a child by his crazy father, and then became deaf, yet he produced some of the greatest musical masterworks in the history of humankind.
It’s as if a painter had become blind and produced the finest painters ever. No, Beethoven REALLY was a superhero of music and art. In the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter he never sent, he wrote how he felt he wanted to kill himself but he would not do so, and continue to ‘fight for the spirit of Art’.
I mean, Socrates, Beethoven…..these guys really were something!!
painters=paintings
I suppose acquired savantism is possible. I just had not thought about it that way. We all have potential to get smarter, although that may be hampered by mental disability, a such as ADH disorder. I have a neighbor who has ADH. She is clearly intelligent, but her anger with the condition interferes with reasonings, leaving her aloof and unapproachable. She is a hermit, like me, for a different reason. A dozen or more have lived in and left the apartment I occupy because of her erratic, unpredictable behaviour: pacing, loudly, at all hours and stomping through her apartment. Her rules are her rules. She has no compunction over expressing the anger. The apartment management does nothing. They simply wait until the next tenant comes along, losing revenue in the process. She advertises her disability with a bumper sticker on her car, essentially saying: love it or leave, get over it. People leave. One does not “get over” loss of sleep, due to the ignorance of others. So, no, I’m not a savant. But, have done all right for a country kid, with uncredentialed knowledge. My credentialed brother and I laugh about that.