The mind goes hunting

Watch a newborn baby. Moments after birth, snuggling up against her mother's breast, she instinctively opens her mouth to receive the offered nipple and starts to suckle. She already knows what she needs and, finding it, is content. Even in those early stages of life, the baby takes a proactive stance towards her world. She cries out, drawing attention to herself, demanding to be taken notice of. At a very basic level, her mind is already responding to the world and interacting with it. Feelings and responses interlock perfectly: the baby needs milk and cries out; the nursing mother may start to produce breast milk at the sound of her baby crying. Back in the seventeenth century, John Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that all knowledge comes through sense experience, and that we are born tabula rasa: a passive blank slate on which experience can start to write. But in actual fact, as anyone knows who has watched over a baby during his or her first days and weeks of life, pointers to what we shall become are already there at our birth. Babies have a personality out of all proportion to their experience. We are born with a genetic make-up that will shape our future, moulding us to become like our parents. We arrive in this life at a particular moment, in particular circumstances. We are, as Heidegger said, “thrown” into life; we cannot escape our inheritance.