Tabula Rasa
Commonly attributed to John Locke, the concept of the mind as a tabula rasa, a ”blank slate” as a description of the human mind before it receives the imprint of experience, is deeply rooted in scribal culture. Perhaps it was first articulated by Aristotle in the de Anima where he describes the originary mind as an “uninscribed tablet.” But tabula rasa in fact means an erased or scraped tablet—a clear reference to the wax tablets that were a major writing medium from Aristotle’s time to not long before Locke’s. It’s an image strikingly different from the “white paper” of Locke. Unlike the blank page, wax tablets are not imprinted, but incised with a metal stylus—and they can be rubbed out and reused. They’re not only blank, they’re malleable, adaptable, reusable. As an image of mind it is more amenable to Plato’s theory that the psyche existed in some perfect state before birth, and was somehow scraped clean of its scripture by passage into existence. For Plato, the pursuit of wisdom consists in reading the palimpsests of our scraped tablets, holding them in raking light to discern the ghostly shapes of the characters originally inscribed upon them.
