Nativism

NATIVISM. - A term from philosophical language, used to indicate any system or tendency that admits the original (congenital, innate) existence in the human spirit of concepts, categories, and ideas not derived from experience. In the same sense the term nativism is sometimes used (which is indeed more common in the specific question concerning the origin of the ideas of space and time). In a broader sense, i. can also indicate the existence of spontaneous aptitudes in the human spirit.

I., in its various forms, represents the historical antithesis of empiricism and sensualism (v.), which, by reducing all contents of knowledge to pure data of experience, compromise every true universality and necessity of human knowledge. It is precisely with the aim of giving a foundation to the universality and necessity of the concept (v.) that not a few forms of rationalism have believed they must seek its origin and exclusive derivation in the very nature of the spirit.

I. has historically taken different forms. In Plato (cf. Theaet., Resp., Tim.) the ideas are innate in the sense that they do not derive, as regards their content, from the sensible world, but posit themselves as the immediate spiritual object of the intuitive reminiscence (ἀνάμνησις) of the soul. This form of i. is accentuated in the conception of Plotinus and has a reflection in Augustinian gnoseology (v. AGOSTINO), continued thereafter, substantially, in not a few Scholastics, particularly in St. Bonaventure (v.).

In modern philosophy Cartesian rationalism gave new vigor to i.: already explicit in Descartes himself (cf. Medit., III), as an objective predetermination in the mind of concepts and principles, it is defended, in the sense of a "virtual" preexistence, by Leibniz (cf. Nouv. ess., I, 3; II, 1) and, with Augustinian dependence, by Malebranche. In Kant the problem of the necessity and universality of knowledge determines his particular form of i., which understands the forms of knowing (intuitions and categories) as an a priori structure of the mind, the transcendental condition of experience itself (cf. De mundi sensibilis principiis, § 6, and Kritik der v. Vernunft, introduction). In later philosophy one should recall, among others, the position of Rosmini, for whom the idea of being is innate in the human intelligence, as its immanent objectivity (cf. Nuovo saggio, sez. 5ª, cap. 1, art. 8 and passim).

The positive claim of i., asserted against the inadequacies of empiricism, lies precisely in the exigency of safeguarding the character of necessity and universality of knowing, which assures the value of an effective knowledge. If such universality cannot prescind from the original meaning of the intelligence as the power to think and to affirm in the absolute order of being, nevertheless it by no means requires that the contents in which thought actualizes itself preexist in the spirit antecedently to experience. The true solution of the problem is to be sought in Thomist realism, which places in the objectivity of being, grasped in the real data of experience, the reason and the ontological principle of the universality and necessity of spiritual knowledge (v. CONCETTO; CONOSCENZA; UNIVERSALI).

Salvatore Scimé

END OF THE SIXTH VOLUME.