Innatism in Locke and the Belief in “OBOT”: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

What occupies a conspicuous stead among the multifarious concatenation of issues that stir the mind about philosophy is the question: how do human beings become conscious of their belief in the supra-sensible being? As an appendage enquiry, one might ask further: do they become conscious of them through the senses? Or, are they revealed to them intuitively through the rational faculty? Even more seriously, are these beliefs generated from their daily experiences? Many scholars have attempted to grapple with these questions. However, within the clime of Annang philosophy, belief in “Obot” shows that everyone is endowed with knowledge from birth. But, John Locke in the modern era of British philosophy argues in contradistinction to this basic belief among the Annang, by maintaining that the mind at birth is completely empty, and hitherto likened to a clean slate (a tabula rasa). This Locke an thesis, once placed at par with the sagacity of some traditional beliefs, would seem not to hold much water. To this end, our study presents the belief in “Obot” among the Annang people of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, as a fecund reasonable, philosophical model for the question of belief in its religious epistemological dimension. Again, as a defensible metaphysical model, the belief in “Obot” shows that the outcome of what we know or become in life is a product of our innate endowment at birth. The deterministic character and the rationalistic coloration of the belief in “Obot” among the Annang people shows that nature plays a vital role in knowledge acquisition. All we know in the world has its root in nature; and it is under this clime that children are said to possess knowledge innately. Armed with the nitty-gritty of these permutations, this study attempts to x-ray the belief in “Obot” among the Annang people as a vestige to the rejection of Locke’s critique of innatism for a belief in “Obot”.

Keywords: Innatism, obot, belief, annang philosophy, empiricism

Cite this Article

Samuel Akpan Bassey, Nelson Robert Enang, John Gabriel Mendie. Innatism in Locke and the Belief in “OBOT”: A Contrastive Study. OmniScience: A Multi-disciplinary Journal. 2018; 8(2): 10–17p.