Socratic Stroll 63: Do we have any innate ideas?

David Hume and other empiricists hold that all ideas derive from sense experience. Plato, Descartes, and other rationalists hold that some ideas are innate. In the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates argue that we must already have the ideas of perfect equality, beauty, and goodness at birth because that’s when we start judging things that we perceive with our bodily senses as falling short of those ideals.

Here is Socrates conversing with Simmias, narrated by Phaedo, as written by Plato at Phaedo 75b–c:

“Then before we began to see or hear or perceive in any way, we must have had a knowledge of absolute equality, or we could not have referred to that standard the equals which are derived from the senses? For to that they all aspire, and of that they fall short.

“No other inference can be drawn from the previous statements.

“And did we not see and hear and have the use of our other senses as soon as we were born?

“Certainly.

“Then we must have acquired the knowledge of equality at some previous time?

“Yes.

“That is to say, before we were born, I suppose?

“True.

“And if we acquired this knowledge before we were born, and were born having the use of it, then we also knew before we were born and at the instant of birth not only the equal or the greater or the less, but all other ideas; for we are not speaking only of equality, but of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness, and of all which we stamp with the name of essence…. Of all this we may certainly affirm that we acquired the knowledge before birth?

“We may.”

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