The Strange Case
of
KASPAR HAUSER

The romantic philosopher, Rousseau, believed that children were born innocent and the world corrupted them. Thus, education was the key to creating a just and peaceful world. Rousseau created a way of training children for the State, in accordance with reason and nature.

The British empiricist philosopher John Locke also believed we are born with clean slates - our mind at birth is a 'tabula rasa' on which life writes. There are no 'innate ideas' about the world - we learn everything by looking at the world and exploring it with our senses.

Many experiments have, unfortunately, been done on animals to determine how much of what they are as adults is dependent on 'nature' and how much on 'nurture'. These have often attempted to deprive animals of part of their normal upbringing - for instance, by binding birds wings to their bodies so they cannot learn how to fly by practising in the nest. But it is, of course, impossible to separate an animal from any kind of nurture at all - it is impossible to create a control for the experiment. Another way of investigating the effects of nature and nurture is to examine identical twins. Since they are genetically identical, it should be possible to say that any differences between them are due to their upbringing. This is especially useful where identical twins have been separated very early or even at birth and have had quite different lives.

So far as we know, there has never been a true attempt to find out what happens to human beings if they are deprived of any kind of contact with life. However, there was a very strange case in 1828 when a boy suddenly appeared in Germany, apparently having been locked up all his life and only just released. He had met only one person in his life. He seemed to have lived all his life in a dark container, two metres long, one metre wide and one and a half metres high. Every morning he found food and water and sometimes he would be drugged, it seems, and have his nails cut &c. No one knows why or how this all happened. The boy's name was Kaspar Hauser.

As Rousseau suggested, Kaspar Hauser was innocent and uncorrupted - he didn't even seem to recognise the difference between men and women.

But he had some secret. In 1833, having lived just five years a free man, Kaspar Hauser was killed with a knife through the chest.

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