American Philosophy Before Pragmatism (Oxford History of Philosophy) [UK ed.] 9780199577545, 0199577544

Citation preview

T H E O X F OR D H I S T O R Y O F P H I L O S O P H Y

American Philosophy before Pragmatism

T H E OX F O RD H I S TO RY O F P H I LO S OP H Y

The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 Jonardon Ganeri American Philosophy before Pragmatism Russell B. Goodman Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960 Gary Gutting British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing Thomas Hurka British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century Sarah Hutton The American Pragmatists Cheryl Misak

American Philosophy before Pragmatism Russell B. Goodman

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Russell B. Goodman 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014956791 ISBN 978–0–19–957754–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

To Lizzy and Jake

Acknowledgments When I was asked to write this book, I immediately thought of the main figures I wished to consider—people who seemed interesting to me and I think to many others—but also about the amount of work needed to do justice to them. I was fortunate therefore to be invited to take up a fellowship in 2009 at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where discussions with the Institute’s late director, Susan Manning, were particularly helpful to me. In the early stages of the project, I also had a series of productive conversations about eighteenth-century political thought—sometimes amounting to mini-tutorials—with my old friend William C. Dowling. For reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript, I am indebted to Branka Arsic´, James Campbell, Rick Furtak, James Reid, and Andrew Taylor, and I have also received valuable suggestions from Mitchell Aboulafia, Douglas Anderson, James Conant, Andrew Dobbyn, Linda Dowling, Paul Guyer, John Kaag, Cheryl Misak, Phillip Schoenberg, Dieter Schultz, and the readers for Oxford University Press. I am grateful to Oxford Commissioning Editor Peter Momtchiloff for his patience and support. I tried out some of my ideas in courses at the University of New Mexico, and am grateful for the instructive comments and criticism I received from my undergraduate and graduate students. The university’s Research Allocations Committee and Department of Philosophy provided financial support for my research. Thanks also to audiences at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, the E´cole Normale Supe´rieure, University College, Dublin, Columbia University, the University of Colorado, Denver, and the Sapienza Universita` di Roma for discussions of parts of the book. I wish to honor the memory of my friends Barbara Packer, whose influence runs through the second half of the book, and Paul Schmidt, who encouraged me by his words and example to write about Emerson and the Transcendentalists. I owe a special debt to my wife, friend, and companion, Anne Doughty Goodman, whose meticulous editorial assistance greatly improved the manuscript. Russell B. Goodman Corrales, New Mexico January 2, 2015

Contents Introduction

1

1. Jonathan Edwards

8

2. Benjamin Franklin

48

3. Interlude: Strands of Republican Thought

88

4. Thomas Jefferson

101

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson

147

6. Henry David Thoreau

200

Epilogue: Some Continuities in American Philosophy

234

Bibliography Index

261 275

Introduction My subjects here are five American thinkers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). None was a “professor of philosophy,” any more than their contemporaries David Hume and Voltaire were in the eighteenth century, or Sren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx in the nineteenth. All were practical men, though in different ways. Edwards was a minister who devoted his sermons to the self-scrutiny and spiritual awakening of his audiences, and who eagerly recorded the events of the “little awakening” in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1730s. Although Edwards lived through the Enlightenment, he resisted many of its main tenets in his philosophical writings. For example, he argued on empirical grounds that there were miracles, including the religious awakenings he witnessed and the “harvests” of souls for which he took responsibility. He resisted the new moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, according to which morality is grounded in innate human responses rather than in the divine, and he opposed the new historical narratives of Hume and Voltaire, in which the autonomous actions of human beings, rather than a divine creator and constant actor, determine the course of events. Franklin was a “natural philosopher” who invented the lightning rod and Pennsylvania Fireplace and wrote a major theoretical treatise on electricity. He was no epistemologist or metaphysician, and was not particularly interested in philosophical texts. (He is the only writer to be discussed here who did not have a college degree.) Franklin believed that the way to learn about the world was by scientific investigation, rather than reading scripture. He did not think that we have to rely on God at every moment, but that it is up to each of us to get the most out of life. “Early to bed and early to rise,” as his pseudonym Poor Richard Saunders put it, “makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Franklin did become wealthy after arriving in Philadelphia at the age of 17 with a Dutch dollar and a few shillings in his pocket. He was healthy enough to live to an advanced age and to be the oldest signer of the U.S. Constitution, and was wise in a different way than Edwards. There is no innerness to Franklin, no sense of guilt or original sin. He had an evolving moral outlook—far more nuanced than a mere commitment to the pinched virtues of thrift and economy attributed to him by later writers such as D. H. Lawrence—and he held

2

INTRODUCTION

political views that made their way into the structure and actions of the new country. Franklin is a towering figure, but how can we understand him as a philosopher? He finds his intellectual and practical company among the philosophes, such as Voltaire, whom he knew during his several decades of living abroad. If Edwards and Franklin both emerge from the Puritan tradition, Edwards is in some sense the last Puritan and Franklin the first American philosophe. Thomas Jefferson, American philosophe, but with a much more scholarly bent, wrote some of the most inspiring and influential words about political freedom ever penned, among them: “all men are created equal . . . endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.” Jefferson was a skilled politician who served as Governor of Virginia, Minister to France, Vice-President and then President of the United States, and who created (with the labor of his slaves) his ideal residence after leveling the top of a hill at Monticello, Virginia. He signed the United States Constitution, which created a new democratic republican form of government but which also acknowledged slavery, a matter Jefferson discusses at length in Notes on the State of Virginia. A powerful American president who vastly increased the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson asked that only three achievements be memorialized on his tombstone: that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Bill Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, and that he founded the University of Virginia. Emerson and Thoreau, writing sixty years after the American Revolution, saw the country as having failed to live up to its promise. Their critique begins with the lives of individuals, rather than at the level of the republic or constitution. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau writes in the first chapter of Walden, where he examines the economic forms such desperation takes, such as labor at unfulfilling jobs to pay for expensive houses. Emerson is less focused on economics, but equally on the individual’s condition of life. Like Kierkegaard, Emerson distinguishes going through the motions of life and actually existing. Most of us, he thinks, don’t show up for life—we make a “daily non-appearance on parade,” as he puts it in “Self-Reliance,” using a military metaphor for an existential condition.1 Emerson and Thoreau both studied the classics in their undergraduate years at Harvard College, and they revive the ancient Greek and Roman (and Hindu and Confucian) idea of philosophy as a way of life. My models for this book include three histories of American thought: Paul Conkin’s Puritans and Pragmatists, William Clebsch’s American Religious Thought,

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 2, 31; hereafter referred to as CW.

INTRODUCTION

3

and Morton White’s Science and Sentiment in America.2 All share the idea of treating a core group of writers who continue to engage us, whose writings remain fresh a century or two after they were produced. Conkin discusses eight such writers (including Edwards, Franklin, and Emerson, but neither Jefferson nor Thoreau); Clebsch spends his entire book on just three (Edwards, Emerson, and William James); and White devotes a chapter each to Edwards and Emerson (along with a chapter on the U.S. Constitution that corresponds to my “Interlude”) among his five chapters on philosophy before pragmatism. In organizing my discussion around these five writers, I am in accord with William James’s view that philosophies are “visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life,” and that “the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education” lies in our “sense of an essential personal flavor” in each philosopher, “typical but indescribable.”3 I hope to convey each writer’s feel for “the whole push” of things, and to let their words express their essential personal flavor. The fine surveys I cite above are more than thirty years old, as is Elizabeth Flower and Murray Murphey’s classic two-volume History of Philosophy in America.4 Although it is valuable in many respects, Flower and Murphey’s history neglects Emerson and says little about Thoreau. These “Transcendentalist” writers figure much more prominently in my book than in any previous history of American thought. Moreover, I will draw on valuable new writing about all the figures I mention: on Edwards’s philosophy of history and theology, Jefferson and the Hemings family, the contribution of Scottish philosophers to the “Declaration of Independence,” Franklin as a philosopher, Emerson’s complicated relation to slavery and to pragmatism, and Thoreau’s Journal. “Each age,” as Emerson states in “The American Scholar,” “must write its own books.”5 Though I am concentrating on these five thinkers, I want to study them in their transatlantic contexts, not simply as Americans lost in the woods. I want to look through the windows of their writings to the philosophers and other writers they found important. Edwards, Franklin, and Jefferson respond to Newton, Descartes, and Locke, and confront the deism of John Toland and Matthew Tindal, the skepticism of Diderot, Holbach, and Voltaire, and the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume. Emerson and Thoreau respond to the revolution brought about by Kant’s three Critiques, to the emergence of Romanticism as a literary and philosophical movement in Britain, France, and Germany, and to 2 Willliam A. Clebsch, American Religious Thought: a History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), Paul K. Conkin, Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005) (originally published by Dodd, Mead, 1968), Morton White, Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 3 William James, Writings 1902–1910 ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 639 (from A Pluralistic Universe), 502 (from Pragmatism). 4 Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America (New York: Capricorn Books, 1977). 5 Emerson, CW 1:56.

4

INTRODUCTION

translations of philosophical and literary works from India, China, Persia, and the Middle East—all against the background of their lifelong study of the Greek and Roman classics. Several narrative strands run through the book. One begins with the Enlightenment, defined by Immanuel Kant in 1784 as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” That immaturity consists, Kant writes, in “the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” Franklin and Jefferson are representatives of this new maturity. The Enlightenment’s confidence in human power and invention develops together with deism and a portrait of the human being as what Charles Taylor calls a “buffered self.”6 For the deist, God created the world but does not intervene in its proceedings, so that what happens in the world is, to a substantial degree, up to the human beings who inhabit it. The buffered self has its own “inner base area”7—thinking substance in Descartes’ influential analysis—which is sealed off from whatever heavenly or hellish forces exist. In this buffered domain, the self is free to construct its own meanings and associations. The cosmos follows Newton’s laws, which enable us to plan our actions and understand parts of nature. But these laws are not normative: They do not tell us what to do. The recession of meaning from the world and the detachment of the human subject make room for human activity, invention, and power, but they also leave us outside of nature and, in philosophy, subject to the radical skepticism of Descartes and Hume. This is part of the attraction of the new Kantian picture, according to which the world we perceive and know has an inextricable human element to it. The world is not completely alien, and we have the power to recover and enhance our intimate relation to it through a balance of attention to self and world: As Emerson puts the lesson in “The American Scholar”: “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.”8 A second strand, more conceptual than historical, concerns a dialectic of reception and invention. For Edwards, the beautiful world of nature and human beings is entirely received from God. It has no independent existence; nor do we. At any moment and for no reason, God may choose to send us plunging into hell, “incensed” with us for our sins. Franklin and Jefferson work with the world they are given, but they impose themselves upon it and, in the case of Franklin, uncover some of its deep secrets and channel its power. Their sense of things is of a world with considerable scope for human invention. The nineteenth-century writers are much less confident that human invention and industry will solve the problems of human life and that the acquisition of wealth and territorial expansion are desirable goals. They agree with the English Romantic poet,

6 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 134–6. 7 8 Taylor, A Secular Age, 38. Emerson, CW 1:55.

INTRODUCTION

5

William Wordsworth, that in “[g]etting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”9 At the end of his great essay, “Experience,” Emerson denies that he ever got anything, while also stating that he has much: “All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not.”10 Thoreau’s receptiveness is recorded in Walden when, after sitting in front of his cabin for a while, Thoreau finds himself “suddenly neighbor to the birds.”11 Yet Emerson and Thoreau put their own stamp on their reception of things. “One must be an inventor to read well,” Emerson writes in “The American Scholar,” meaning that reading is a task that requires “[t]he one thing in the world of value, . . . the active soul.”12 More generally, Emerson holds that the mind actively forms the world. He writes, in one of his more pragmatic-sounding statements: “Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it . . . Build, therefore, your own world.”13 This statement is at once descriptive, saying that spirit moulds the world, and prescriptive, enjoining the reader to build her own world (a building that is comparable to the German Romantic Bildung). Emerson finds such building in the modest oarsman or farmer but especially in powerful “representative men” like Plato, or even Napoleon, whose inventions of themselves are written into world history. His colleague Thoreau, sitting by the pond, working his bean field, “sauntering” in the woods, might not seem to be inventing or building anything at all, until one remembers not simply his cabin, but his most lasting invention: the text of Walden. Slavery is another strand in my account, and this is the first history of American philosophy to take a sustained look at philosophers’ thinking about it. My aim is neither to excuse nor to condemn, but to study the way people thought about slavery when it was not, as it is now, a settled question. In his paper “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” William James maintains that moral progress consists of society’s shaking itself “into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually aroused complaints.”14 James was writing in 1897, after the “actually aroused complaints” that included the American Civil War came to the foreground. In treating Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau here we have the opportunity to study the evolution

9 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Paul D. Sheats, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Cambridge Edition, 1982), 349 (from “The World is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon”). 10 CW 3:48. 11 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 85. 12 13 Emerson, CW 1:58, 56. Emerson, CW 1:44–5. 14 William James, Writings 1878–1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 611 (from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy).

6

INTRODUCTION

of thinking about slavery, and the formation of a new moral equilibrium. Whereas in the ancient world—say in Plato’s dialogues—slavery was often just accepted, not questioned, all five writers I consider lived during times when slavery was legal and, though more or less accepted, was under attack. Edwards, Franklin, and Jefferson all owned slaves, but the latter two played a role in disturbing the uneasy American moral equilibrium that accommodated slavery, even as they approved an American constitution that included it. Emerson and Thoreau were prominent public opponents of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. Thoreau, who thought that the best state was the one that governed least, nevertheless had no trouble affirming his responsibility to deter the nation from its disastrous and immoral course. Finally, let me say something about pragmatism, which appears in my title, which is usually thought to be the only original American philosophical movement, and which, according to several recent interpreters, has something to do with Emerson’s philosophy. One of the pragmatists, William James, shows up in my narrative quite often, and although I will argue in the epilogue that there are continuities in American philosophy, I do not want to label all these continuities simply “pragmatism.” I am not going to argue that American philosophy is pragmatic all the way through (whatever that might mean), nor that Franklin or Emerson “are pragmatists.”15 In approaching such questions, it is helpful to remember that pragmatism is not just one thing and not just one person. In Pragmatism (1907), William James uses the term in at least six different senses: as a temperament midway between the toughminded and the tender-minded, a method of solving or dissolving philosophical problems, a theory of truth, a theory of meaning, a theory of knowledge (“humanism”), and a metaphysical view (the open universe). A year after Pragmatism appeared, Arthur Lovejoy wrote a well-known critique in which he distinguished thirteen pragmatisms.16 So we need to take care about what we mean when we say that someone “is a pragmatist.” That being said, William James himself found many pragmatist themes when he reread Emerson’s works in preparation for his 1903 address marking the centenary of Emerson’s birth—four years before his own work called Pragmatism was published. We will examine some of these pragmatic continuities at the end of the book. We must also note that James was not simply a pragmatist, and that he did not identify himself as such until an address in 1898, after he had published the Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Will to Believe (1897). He continued to write books, 15 On this question, see Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” in Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 215–23; Russell B. Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 164–6, 177–8; and Russell B. Goodman, “Cavell and American Philosophy,” in Russell B. Goodman, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 100–17. 16 Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 5, no. 1, 1908, 5–12, 29–39.

INTRODUCTION

7

such as A Pluralistic Universe, that are tangential to his pragmatism. The continuities in American philosophy that I will address in the final chapter lie not only in the pragmatism of Emerson, but in the Emersonianism, or more broadly the Romanticism, of William James and John Dewey, and in the strains of a “transcendentalist virus” that Charles Sanders Peirce acknowledges as part of his thought.

1 Jonathan Edwards 1. Awakening Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut in 1703, the son of a Calvinist pastor “with zeal for religious awakenings”1 and the daughter of the most prominent pastor in the Connecticut River Valley. As the one boy among eleven children, Edwards was trained for the ministry from the start. He studied Greek and Latin, entered the Collegiate School of Connecticut (soon to be Yale College) at age thirteen, completed his undergraduate studies in 1720 at age seventeen, and began graduate study the following year. In 1722, still working on his Master’s degree, Edwards took a position as the minister in a small Presbyterian church near New York City. When the church dissolved in 1723, he returned to Connecticut, where he served as a tutor at Yale from 1724–6. In 1726, he secured a ministerial position in the thriving Connecticut Valley town of Northampton, Massachusetts alongside his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, and he remained there for the next twenty-four years. Edwards was dismissed by his congregation in 1750, in part because of the strict standards he set for full church membership, and then moved to Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, where he served as a missionary to some 150 Mahican and Mohawk families.2 It was there that he composed such major philosophical works as Freedom of the Will (1754), The Nature of True Virtue (1755), and Original Sin (1758). In late 1757, Edwards accepted the job of President of the College of New Jersey in Princeton, but died on March 22, 1758, barely six weeks after assuming office, a victim of the normally successful practice of smallpox vaccination that he advocated. Edwards was a prodigiously productive writer from his twenties onwards, beginning with a Diary, notes for works on scripture and the apocalypse, a vast set of Miscellanies that eventually ran to nine manuscript volumes, a series of scientific and philosophical papers, and hundreds of sermons.3 He achieved fame in his time as a

1 George M. Marsden, “Biography,” in Stephen J. Stein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21. 2 See Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 476–9, 553–8; hereafter M&M. 3 The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–2008). The Works of Jonathan Edwards online. http://edwards.yale.edu. Cited as WJE followed by volume and page number.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

9

great preacher, the chronicler of the “little awakening” in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), and the author of the terrifying sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).4 His philosophical works on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics aim to validate the Puritan theology of God’s supremacy, human corruption, and the possibility of a covenant between the divine and the human, in a conversation with the new science of Newton and Descartes and the philosophical writings of John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas More, Nicolas Malebranche, and others.5 For Edwards, God is always at the center of things, the overflowing source of existence and “the measure of all things.” “If there is a single theme that draws together the many disparate lines of thought in Edwards’s metaphysical and scientific writings,” McClymond and McDermott write in their monumental The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, “it may well be theocentrism.”6 That theocentrism, in turn, is grounded as much in Edwards’s inner life as in any text. As a boy, he tells us in his Personal Narrative (c. 1740), he went through a stage of intense religious concern: I used to pray five times a day in secret, and to spend much time in religious talk with other boys, and used to meet with them to pray together. I experienced I know not what kind of delight in religion. My mind was much engaged in it, and had much self-righteous pleasure . . . I had particular secret places of my own in the woods, where I used to retire by myself; and used to be from time to time much affected.7

Yet Edwards concludes that these youthful affections were deceptive: “many are deceived with such affections, and such a kind of delight, as I then had in religion, and mistake it for grace.”8 But he never relinquished the idea that religion is largely a matter of “affection,” or that nature (“the woods”) was a scene of religious instruction, where one might be “much affected.” “In the woods,” as Emerson would write a hundred years later, “we return to reason and faith.”9 4 His Faithful Narrative “circulated throughout the American colonies and in Great Britain, establishing him as a prominent leader in the Protestant evangelical awakening in both British America and Great Britain.” (Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 38). 5 Edwards first read Locke’s Essay during his second year of college, with more pleasure “than the most greedy miser in gathering up handfuls of Silver and Gold from some new discovered treasure.” (Samuel Hopkins, Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards Together with a number of His Sermons on Various Important Subjects (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765), 3–4). In “Edwards and Philosophy,” Miklos Veto¨ maintains that the key influences on Edwards are Locke and Hutcheson (in Understanding Jonathan Edwards; An Introduction to America’s Theologian, Gerald R McDermott, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 154.) Regarding Locke, see also Paul Ramsey’s introduction to Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, WJE 1:47–65. For Edwards’s debts to medieval and renaissance philosophy, see Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6 M&M, 106. 7 WJE 16: 790–1. The “Personal Narrative” was not published till after Edwards’s death. See editor George S. Claghorn’s discussion, WJE 16: 747–50. 8 WJE 16:791. 9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013) vol. 1, 10. Hereafter CW.

10

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Edwards gave up his religious concerns in his teenage years at college and returned, as he puts it, “like a dog to his vomit, and went on in ways of sin.” In his last year, however, after recovering from a “pleurisy; in which [God] . . . shook me over the pit of hell,” he began religious practice again,10 and in the summer of 1721 his formative conversion experiences began. His: sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things.”11

In his philosophy Edwards develops what William Clebsch calls a “sensible spirituality.”12 What he sensed was not visions or miracles like a burning bush or the parting of the seas, but nature, including human nature—what he calls the “beauty of the world.”13 He reports that the “appearance of everything was altered,”14 that he was able “to behold the sweet glory of God” in nature.15 After moving to New York, he describes an increase in his “sense of divine things” and adds: “While I was there, I felt them, very sensibly.”16 Edwards uses the language of ideas and sensibility that came into fashion with John Locke and Francis Hutcheson to fashion a narrative and defense of Christian experience.17 We need not determine the truth of Edwards’s claims about his experience in order to accept that something intense and reorienting happened to him during the years 1721–2. William James was right to say in his Varieties of Religious Experience that “[w]ere we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down man’s liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious peculiarities.”18 Edwards’s conversion experiences were not sudden, like many that James

10

11 Citations from WJE 16:791. WJE 16:793–4. William A. Clebsch, American Religious Thought: A History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 11–56. 13 WJE 6:305. See Section 2f. below. 14 15 16 WJE 16:793. WJE 16:794. WJE 16:795. 17 Roger A. Ward writes: “Edwards challenged the confidence common to Puritan practice, but not supported theologically, that meeting external conditions in some way obligated God to preserve the covenant with New England. His use of Locke, Hutcheson, and other modern thinkers is in part a response to Puritanism’s failure to describe adequately the transformation of human souls (“Jonathan Edwards and Eighteenth Century Religious Philosophy,” in Cheryl Misak, ed., The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. See also M&M, 383–4. 18 William James, Writings 1902–1910, Bruce Kuklick, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 213 (from the chapter on “Conversion” in Varieties of Religious Experience). 12

JONATHAN EDWARDS

11

describes, but they left him with an indelible belief in the presence of divinity, a belief he retained even in the many “dull” and despondent periods recorded in his Diary and “Narrative.” Edwards’s entire body of writing from the 1720s until his death in 1758 is based on the authority of these experiences. Edwards’s conversion differed from others in the Christian tradition in its focus on the world rather than on Christ, and on experience rather than on text.19 It was more gradual than sudden, and it did not follow a period of despair, terror, or sense of sin, as did the conversions of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. This is ironic, considering how much attention Edwards pays to sin and corruption. As his biographer Ola Winslow describes, he “experienced no conviction for sin, no sudden ecstasy of forgiveness. He could not tell the moment at which the new life had begun. He was merely brought . . . to ‘new Dispositions’ and a ‘new Sense of Things.’ ”20 Edwards did not experience, Zakai writes, “the great divine light and the mighty voice of God that Paul saw and heard on the road to Damascus, nor was it the painful, soul-shattering experience of St Augustine so vividly described in his Confessions, or the terrible lightning that struck Martin Luther on the road to Erfurt.”21 Rather, he achieved a gradual and strengthening reorientation to a world that he now saw as expressing God’s glory in every particular. His philosophical writings attempt to do justice to this reorientation.

2. Countering Materialism As he searched for a reasoned philosophy that corresponded to the lesson of his conversion experience—that God manifests himself plainly and beautifully at every moment—Edwards made use of books by Francis Bacon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Rene´ Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Nicolas Malebranche, and Henry More in the Yale library.22 He found that the “mechanical philosophy” of Newton and Boyle and the materialism of Hobbes portrayed a one-dimensional world, the laws of which recognized only such physical properties as mass, momentum, and spatial position. Hobbes wrote that “motion cannot be understood to have any other cause

19 This is not to deny that biblical texts form a part of the “Personal Narrative” or figure in the experiences he describes. He mentions, for example, “I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys,” from the “Song of Solomon,” which, he writes, seemed to represent “the loveliness and beauty of Jesus Christ” (WJE 16:793). 20 Ola E. Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 74. 21 Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 66–7. 22 See Wallace Anderson’s introduction to Edwards’s Scientific and Philosophical Writings, WJE 6:16–27. Sang Lee writes: “Edwards’ concern, however, was not only a philosophical reconstruction in light of the developments in experimental science and empiricistic epistemology. Supremely important for him was the principle of God’s absolute sovereignty in all aspects of reality, both the material and the spiritual” (The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 47–8).

12

JONATHAN EDWARDS

besides motion,”23 and Boyle stated: “The universe being once framed by God, and the laws of motion being settled and all upheld by his incessant concourse and general providence, the phenomena of the world thus constituted are physically produced . . . according to mechanical laws.”24 Boyle attributes power and action to God, but chiefly in setting up the laws that then, without God’s further specific action, “produce” the “mechanical affections,” that is the motions of the entire universe. Edwards found in such views a disturbing, even alarming detachment of God from nature, and the positing of an alternate locus of power. Descartes’s philosophy was also problematic in that, along with God and human minds, he posited matter—res extensa, extended substance—governed by mechanical laws that are independent of the Christian scheme of souls, heaven, and hell. Descartes’s dualism, McClymond and McDermott point out, “was little better than materialism since it vastly extended the scope of the mechanistic system and sought to explain all animal behavior and all but a few forms of human activity in terms of naturalistic principles.”25 Edwards sought ways to reconcile the new science with various forms of immaterialism.

a. God and space In “Of Being” (c.1721),26 the eighteen-year-old Edwards follows the Cambridge Platonist Henry More in maintaining that God is space. Whatever space might be—an absolute background within which all places exist, a set of relations among objects—it is not material, and so offers an obvious counterexample to Hobbesian materialism. In his Manual of Metaphysics (1679) More presents a long list of characteristics that apply both to God and to space: “one, simple, immobile, eternal, complete, independent, existing from itself, subsisting by itself, incorruptible, necessary, immense, uncreated, uncircumscribed, incomprehensible, omnipresent, incorporeal, permeating and encompassing everything, Being by essence, Being by act, pure Act.” If space is not identical with God, he thinks, it is at least “an obscure and diluted image of the real divine presence.” Newton is also in the background here. In the Principia he writes that God “is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space.”27

23 Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy (1665), in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, William Molesworth, ed. (London: John Bohn, 1839, vo1 1), 70. 24 Robert Boyle, About the Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypothesis (1674), cited in Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 103. 25 M&M, 107. 26 This essay, along with “Of Atoms,” “The Mind,” and other scientific and philosophical writings, was discovered by Sereno Dwight around 1820. For the publication history of these papers, see WJE 6: 173–91, 313–31. 27 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)), cited in Jasper Reid, “Jonathan Edwards on Space and God,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003), 390.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

13

Locke also discusses God and space, mentioning “those Philosophers who are of Opinion, That infinite Space is possessed by GOD’s infinite Omnipresence.” In his characteristically circumspect manner, Locke maintains that the limitations of human reason prevent us from any positive conception of infinite space, time, or God.28 He nevertheless raises these questions and in several places indicates his own opinion that “the boundless invariable oceans of Duration and Expansion; which comprehend in them all finite Beings . . . in their full Extent, belong only to the Deity.”29 Edwards opens “Of Being” by asserting that the existence of absolutely “nothing at all is utterly impossible,” which he justifies by the claim, going back to Plato and the Presocratics, that it is impossible to conceive of absolute nothing: “And if any man thinks that he can think well enough how there should be nothing, I’ll engage that what he means by ‘nothing’ is as much something as anything that ever [he] thought of in his life.”30 If nothingness is impossible, there must be being, Edwards continues. Eliding the distinction between the claim that there must be being and the claim that this being is a particular kind of being—necessary and infinite—he moves to the conclusion that “this necessary, eternal being must be infinite and omnipresent.”31 He then claims, without obvious support, first, that “[s]pace is this necessary, eternal, infinite and omnipresent being,” and then that “space is God . . . [A]ll the space there is without the bounds of the creation, all the space there was before the creation, is God himself.”32 Space may be omnipresent, necessary, and eternal, but God is supposed to have other attributes, such as benevolence and power. No contemporaneous account treated space as having such attributes, and perhaps this is why Edwards abandoned this early position within a year or so—in fact within the very work in which he sets it forth.33 The direction in which Edwards moves in “Of Being” and “The Mind” is indicated by a passage from Newton’s other great book, the Opticks; or, a Treatise of the Reflection, Refractions, Inflections & Colors of Light (1704), which Edwards read in his years as a master’s student: Does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: of which things the images only carried through the organs of sense to our little sensoriums, are seen and beheld by that in us which perceives and thinks.34

28 29 32 33 34

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 222. 30 31 Locke, Essay, 200. WJE 6:202. WJE 6:202. This and the preceding quotation are from WJE 6:203. See Anderson’s discussion at WJE 6:73–5. Cited by Anderson at WJE 6:74. See his discussion at WJE 6:22–3.

14

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Once again space is associated with God, not as an attribute, but as “his sensory,” as having to do with his consciousness. God employs space to perceive things “intimately” and “immediately.” With our “little sensoriums” we see only the images, the representatives of these things. Edwards develops these Newtonian ideas as he works out the lines of a thoroughgoing idealism: the claim that all existence consists in, or is grounded in, consciousness, thinking, or awareness.

b. Matter as resistance In “Of Atoms” (c.1721) Edwards accepts and reinterprets the theory of atomic matter, ingeniously bringing it into line with his bedrock Christianity and his emerging immaterialism. He begins with a first proposition: “that that body that is absolutely plenum, or that has every part of space included within its surface impenetrable, is indivisible.”35 But what really is this atomic matter? Edwards rejects the Cartesian tradition that the essence of matter is extension and sides with Locke in seeing matter as fundamentally resistance or solidity.36 Whereas Locke did not think he had the information to say what solidity is in itself, beyond what the senses reveal to us,37 Edwards holds that resistance is the direct action of God: “resistance or solidity are by the immediate exercise of divine power.” The word “immediate” means that there is no mediation here, and in particular no matter between perceivers and the divine power. Edwards draws the contrast with philosophers like Locke who believe in an “unknown substance, which stood . . . underneath and kept up solidity and all other properties, which [philosophers] used to say it was impossible for a man to have an idea of.” For Edwards, the true substance must “subsist by itself and support all properties,” but this substance can only be the Deity: “there is no proper substance but God himself.”38 As he puts it a few years later in “The Mind,” men agree that there must be something to support the properties of body, but they “are wont to content themselves in saying merely that it is something; but that ‘something’ is he by whom all things consist.”39 Edwards also moves away from Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, between qualities like solidity that are “in the Objects themselves,” and those like color that are only sensations in us produced by the primary qualities.40 Edwards argues that color is no less essential to matter than solidity, and he develops an account of matter as resistance in terms of patches of color that resist displacement by other patches of color. In doing so, however, he not only accepts Locke’s view that colors are in minds but draws as a consequence that “nothing belonging to body exists out of the mind”:

35

36 WJE 6:208. Locke, Essay, 122–7. Locke writes: “If any one asks me, What this Solidity is, I send him to his Senses to inform him: Let him put a Flint, or a Foot-ball between his Hands; and then endeavor to join them, and he will know.” (Essay, 126–7.) 38 39 40 WJE 6:215. WJE 6:380. Locke, Essay, 135. 37

JONATHAN EDWARDS

15

It is now agreed upon by every knowing philosopher that colors are not really in the things, no more than pain is in a needle . . . But yet I think that color may have an existence out of the mind with equal reason as anything in body has any existence out of the mind, beside the very substance of the body itself, which is nothing but the divine power, or rather the constant exertion of it. For what idea is that which we call by the name of body? I find color has the chief share in it . . . together with some powers such as the power of resisting, and motion etc., that wholly makes up what we call body . . . If color exists not out of the mind, then nothing belonging to body exists out of the mind but resistance . . . And not that, neither, when nothing is actually resisted; then there is nothing but the power of resistance. And as resistance is nothing else but the actual exertion of God’s power, so the power can be nothing else but the constant law or method of that actual exertion.41

Edwards presents a dynamic view of matter, in which “the very substance of the body itself ” is the “exertion” of “divine power,” and he stresses the real nature of law or habit, as Sang Lee has emphasized.42 But to “find out the reasons of things in natural philosophy,” he maintains, “is only to find out the proportion of God’s acting.”43

c. Idealism A reader of “Of Being” is brought up short by its fourth and subsequent paragraphs, for the claim is no longer that God is space, or space is God, but that “nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness.”44 This passage marks a shift in Edwards’s thought that accords with his other writing in the mid-1720s (as we have seen with “Of Atoms”). He remains an idealist for the rest of his life. To illustrate the claim that there is no existence except in consciousness, Edwards asks us to suppose that “all the spirits in the universe [are] for a time deprived of their consciousness,” and even God’s consciousness is halted. Then, he writes, “the universe for that time would cease to be, of itself; and not only, as we speak, because the Almighty could not attend to uphold the world, but because God knew nothing of it.”45 Edwards is claiming not merely that the world must be knowable, but that the knowledge or consciousness of it (in God’s consciousness ultimately) constitutes its existence. In Edwards’s turn towards epistemology46 one senses the influence of Locke, but even more, the similarity to the idealism of George Berkeley (1685–1753), whose Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues

41

WJE 6:350–1. Sang Lee, Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 7, 100; cf. 15–16, 20, 35, 38, 42. 43 WJE 6:353. For the compatibility of this position with a separate created world, see Sang Lee’s discussion in Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 66. 44 45 WJE 6:204. WJE 6:204. 46 In La Pense´e de Jonathan Edwards (Paris: Les E´ditions du Cerf, 1987), 48) Miklos Veto¨ identifies the epistemological as one of three paths to God, the other two being the “physical way” we have examined, in which resistance is understood as the essence of matter and the immediate exercise of God’s power; and the “logical route,” in which Edwards argues that nonexistence is impossible, and there is a necessarily existent being (cited in M & M, 107). 42

16

JONATHAN EDWARDS

between Hylas and Philonous (1713) were not known to Edwards till around 1730.47 In “Of Being,” Edwards puts his own independently developed idealism as follows: beings that “have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of other things is only by these. From hence we may see the gross mistake of those who think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow; whereas spirits only are properly substance.”48 Like Berkeley, Edwards claims that his idealism is a form of realism: “[T]hat which we call place is an idea too. Therefore things are truly in those places, for what we mean when we say so is only that this mode of our idea of place appertains to such an idea.”49 And he ably defends his view against certain prima facie objections. For example, when he asserts that “the world, i. e., the material universe, exists nowhere but in the mind,” he does not mean that the world is contained in the small part of space that is the brain: “For we are to remember that the human body and the brain itself exist only mentally, in the same sense that other things do.”50 He also tackles the problem of unperceived objects such as “the furniture of this room when we are absent and the room is shut up and no created mind perceives it.”51 In such a case, “the existence of these things is in God’s supposing of them,” and “they must be supposed if the train of ideas be in the order and course settled by the supreme mind.”52 No “created mind” perceives the furniture, but it exists “from all eternity . . . in uncreated idea and divine appointment.”53 God is the great ontological backup. Edwards’s idealism blends empiricist with scholastic and Platonic elements, as we see in his idea that material things are like shadows. Beings come in grades: higher and lower, more real and less real. Readers of Descartes will be familiar with the idea that some ideas contain more reality than others, because Descartes uses this claim in the “Third Meditation” to argue we can infer the existence of God from the idea of God in our minds: “that idea . . . by which I understand a supreme God . . . has certainly more objective reality in itself than those ideas by which finite substances are represented.”54 Only God, Descartes maintains, can be responsible for such an idea. Edwards thus offers a theocentric rather than an anthropocentric idealism, in which the ground of all being is “an all-pervasive and all-inclusive Mind that he identified with God,” as McDermott and McClymond write.55 In this conception of things, they continue, Edwards “unwittingly followed the precedent of patristic and medieval thinkers. Long before, Augustine had modified Plato’s theory of ideas by

48 See Reid, “Edwards on Space and God,” 396, n. 52. WJE 6:206. 50 51 WJE 6:353. WJE 6:353. WJE 6:356. 52 53 WJE 6:357. WJE 6:356. 54 Rene´ Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), vol. 1, 162. 55 M & M, 113. 47 49

JONATHAN EDWARDS

17

proposing that the divine Mind contained the ideas of all things, while Thomas Aquinas later assigned efficacy to God’s knowledge: ‘The knowledge of God is the cause of things.’ ”56 Edwards did not worry as Descartes did that he might be alone in the world. God is always there. The “substance of all bodies,” Edwards writes in “The Mind,” “is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind, together with his stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws.”57 Our ideas are lesser, more shadowy instantiations of types in God’s understanding, bodies are mere “shadows of beings,” and the beauty of the world is but the shadow of the deeper “excellency” and “love” that permeate God’s creation.58 In his epistemological turn, Edwards thus finds another way to oppose materialism and construe the universe as grounded in the glory and beauty of God.

d. Continuous creation and occasionalism The doctrine that God not only created the world but continued to create or sustain it was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.59 Philosophy students often encounter it in Descartes’ Third Meditation: For a lifespan can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates me afresh at this moment—that is, which preserves me. For it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the nature of time that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence. Hence the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one, and this is one of the things that are evident by the natural light.”60

Descartes shied away from the impression his statement conveyed (especially by his word “afresh”) that he thought the world was created from nothing at each moment, rather than sustained or maintained in existence at each moment, but this was just the position taken by Pierre Bayle and Nicolas Malebranche.61 Edwards takes the more radical position. He came to this view early, writing in the Miscellanies in 1725: “’Tis certain with me that the world exists anew every moment,

56

57 M & M, 114. WJE 6:344. WJE 6:380. Cf. Veto¨, in McDermott, Understanding Jonathan Edwards, 156. 59 See Sukjae Lee, “Necessary Connections and Continuous Creation: Malebranche’s Two Arguments for Occasionalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (2008), 539–65; and Kenneth Winkler, “Continuous Creation,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 35 (2011) 287–309. 60 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) vol. 2, 33. The word translated here as “afresh” is “derechef ” in the French translation of 1647 that Descartes approved; “create that thing anew” translates Descartes’s “cre´er tout de nouveau.” 61 For the distinction between “the steadfast preservation of the old [and] the unceasing introduction of the new,” see Winkler, “Continuous Creation,” 302. 58

18

JONATHAN EDWARDS

that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed.”62 As Oliver Crisp summarizes Edwards’s view: “God creates the world out of nothing, whereupon it momentarily ceases to exist, to be replaced by a facsimile that has incremental differences built into it to account for what appear to be motion and change across time. This, in turn, is annihilated, or ceases to exist, and is replaced by another facsimile world . . . and so on.”63 Edwards’s doctrine of continuous creation receives its most developed formulation in his posthumous work, Original Sin, where he writes: God’s upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing, at each moment. Because its existence at this moment is not merely in part from God, but wholly from him; and not in any part, or degree, from its antecedent existence.

The universe so recreated is a completely different one from the universe existing a moment before: it is “a new effect; and simply and absolutely considered, not the same with any past existence, though it be like it, and follows it according to a certain established method.”64 In Section 7, Original Sin and Personal Identity below we shall consider some of the ethical consequences of this claim. Edwards offers several arguments for continuous creation. One is based on the premise that a cause must occur at the same time as its effect (together with Edwards’s background assumption that God exists). Given that there is matter (as resistance, etc.), and that there are spirits or minds, their existence at one moment is not present to cause their existence and character at any subsequent moment. The only cause that is there all the time is God. Edwards illustrates with the example of the moon: [T]he existence of the body of the moon at this present moment, can’t be the effect of its existence at the last foregoing moment. For . . . no cause can produce effects in a time and place in which itself is not. ’Tis plain, nothing can exert itself, or operate, when and where it is not existing. But the moon’s past existence was neither where nor when its present existence is. In point of time, what is past entirely ceases, when present existence begins; otherwise it would not be past.65

God reconstitutes the universe at each moment, Edwards concludes, in a manner that preserves relations of qualitative continuity, memory, and so on. One might believe that God exists but does not recreate or even sustain the world at every moment—as many of the deists did; or one might believe with the materialists that matter just

62 WJE 13:288. Edwards finds scriptural authority for the idea in Revelation 4:11: “For thy pleasure they are and were created” (WJE 13:288). He writes that it is “most agreeable to the Scripture, to suppose creation to be performed new every moment. The Scripture speaks of it not only as past but as a present, remaining, continual act” (WJE: 13:418). 63 Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25. 64 65 This and the preceding citation are from WJE 3:402. WJE 3:400.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

19

sustains itself. Edwards tries to counter both these views by maintaining that “the existence of created substances, in each successive moment, must be the effect of the immediate agency, will, and power of God.”66 In conceiving of the continuous recreation of the world out of nothing, Edwards abandons any commitment not only to material but to spiritual substance, conceived of as an underlying, continuing source of identity, activity, or power. In this way he is closer to Hume than to Berkeley, who still retains a commitment to spiritual or mental substance.67 Edwards believed, as Reid remarks, “that there was no true power in any creature at all, either corporeal or spiritual, and that it was God who did everything in everything.”68 Natural things are “not proper causes” of what seem to be their effects, Edwards writes. They are “only occasions. God produces all effects.”69 This is occasionalism, the view that “all creaturely ‘acts’ are merely the ‘occasions’ of God’s activity. If occasionalism is true, then there are no causal agents other than God. He creates the world; but all instances of apparently mundane causation that obtain thereafter are actually mere occasions for divine action.”70 Occasionalism was formulated in its most influential form by Malebranche, but the idea that all power lies with God was set forth by a host of philosophers from the medieval period onwards.71 Edwards joins many of them in arguing from the passive nature of substance to the existence of God as the only cause. In discussing the moon example considered above, he maintains that the earlier state of the moon cannot be the cause of the later stage both because it is not present at the time of the later stage and because it is “no active cause, but wholly a passive thing.”72 Later, he extends this argument to spiritual substances, in part because his doctrine of continuous recreation seems to leave no room for any power other than God.73 The twin doctrines of continuous recreation and occasionalism are hardly without their problems. Leibniz considered whether “the privilege of enduring more than a moment by its nature belongs to the necessary being alone,”74 and complained that for the continuous recreationist “the creature never exists, that it is ever new-born and ever dying, like time, movement and other transient beings.”75 For the proponent of continuous recreation, then, “no created being is a causal agent, strictly speaking, 66

WJE 3:401. See Jasper Reid, “The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and David Hume,” Hume Studies, vol. 32, no. 1 (2006), 66. 68 69 Reid, “The Metaphysics,” 64. WJE 18:157. 70 Crisp, Edwards on God and Creation, 24. 71 See Sukjae Lee, “Necessary Connections and Continuous Creation,” 539–65; and Sukjae Lee, “Occasionalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL = . 72 WJE 3:400. 73 As Sukjae Lee discusses in “Occasionalism,” Leibniz and other concurrentists maintained that continuous creation is compatible with creaturely powers. 74 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), 355. 75 Leibniz, Theodicy, 354. 67

20

JONATHAN EDWARDS

because no created being exists for long enough to cause any given act.”76 There is also the problem of free will in a world in which God has all the power. As we shall see in Section 6 below, Edwards presents a compatibilist theory in Freedom of the Will that, like that of his younger contemporary Hume, takes the essence of freedom to be the ability to do what one wills.

e. Pantheism In emphasizing the complete sovereignty of God, including his replacement of one world by another at each moment, Edwards has seemed to many commentators to move in the direction of pantheism, the thesis that the world and God are identical. We find him saying in “The Mind” “that God and real existence are the same,”77 and that: When we speak of being in general, we may be understood [to speak] of the divine Being, for he is an infinite being. Therefore all others must necessarily be considered as nothing. As to bodies, we have shewn in another place that they have no proper being of their own; and as to spirits, they are the communications of the great original Spirit. And doubtless, in metaphysical strictness and propriety, he is, as there is none else.78

If Edwards often writes as if there are grades of being, with spirits having more “reality” or “existence” than bodies, here he is saying that spirits and bodies alike are “as nothing . . . in metaphysical strictness,” and that there is “none else” but God. This seems close to the standard definition of pantheism as the claim that God is identical with the universe.79 Notice Edwards’s claim that spirits “are the communications of the great original Spirit.” This is an example of Edwards’s dynamic view of the universe and of God, found also in a passage from the Miscellanies where he denies that the being of creatures is “to be added to” God’s: God—as he is infinite, and the being whence all are derived, and from whom every thing is given—does comprehend the entity of all his creatures; and their entity is not to be added to his, as not comprehended in it, for they are but communications from him. Communications of being ben’t additions of being.80

When Edwards maintains that all God’s creatures are comprehended in him, he leaves room not only for pantheism—all is God and God is all—but for panentheism: the view that the universe is comprehended in God, though it does not exhaust God’s being; or, more simply, that it is in God but not identical with God.81 This is the

76

77 78 Crisp, Edwards on God, 32. WJE 6:345. WJE 6:363–4. 80 As in Crisp, Edwards on God, 140–1. WJE 18:282. 81 Crisp, Edwards on God, 142, 144. The lines between immanence, pantheism, and panentheism are “vague and porous,” according to William Mander (Mander, William, “Pantheism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL = ). 79

JONATHAN EDWARDS

21

predominant view among Edwards scholars (including Crisp), especially given the many references to the biblical story of creation in Edwards’s work.82 It seems fair to say, nevertheless, that Edwards has a less robust sense of the independence of the world than do many Calvinists. In his late work, The End of Creation, he writes that God has a “propensity . . . to diffuse himself,” and that he “looks on the communication of himself, and the emanation of the infinite glory and good that are in himself to belong to the fullness and completeness of himself, as though he were not in his most complete and glorious state without it.”83 The world on this conception is a divine communication in which human beings are particularly, if not perfectly, well equipped to participate. Intelligent beings, Edwards writes, “are created to be the consciousness of the universe, [that] they may perceive what God is and does.”84 Whether this is pantheism or panentheism, it is a system in which God is both metaphysically sovereign and intimately present in the world.

f. The beauty of the world As we have seen, Edwards denies the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, seeing color as one of the essential characteristics of body. He also participates in a major eighteenth-century movement in which aesthetic categories come to the fore, not simply in characterizing works of art or our responses to them, but in describing the world and human religious experience. “No earlier Calvinistic author,” McClymond and McDermott write, “had assigned such a pivotal role to beauty.” One might interpret his entire theology, they argue, as “the gradual, complex, outworking of a primal vision of God’s beauty that came to him in the wake of his conversion experience.”85 For Zakai, Edwards employs a theologia gloriae—a theology of the glorious world God has created—rather than a theologia crucis—a theology of Christ and the cross. That theology, Zakai argues, grounds his “deification and divination of the world of nature.”86 Edwards is perhaps the first American philosopher to see nature as a glorious, divine teacher, but he is certainly not the last. Consider, as an example, the short and potent “Beauty of the World” (1726), where Edwards writes of “that wonderful suitableness of green for the grass and plants, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, the colors of flowers,” and the “great suitableness between the objects of different senses . . . as between the colors of the woods and flowers, and the smell, and the singing of birds.”87 The loveliness of the world, he maintains, is “the reason why almost all men, and those that seem to be very miserable, love life: because they cannot bear to lose the sight of such a beautiful and lovely world.”88

82

83 See Crisp, Edwards on God, 140–63, especially 151, 163. WJE 8:439. WJE 13:252. 85 M & M, 94. Clebsch writes that for Edwards, “[t]he leading category of religious experience became not salvation but beauty” (American Religious Thought, 50). 86 87 88 Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 73. WJE 6:305. WJE 6:306. 84

22

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Edwards weaves a discussion of Newton’s Opticks into his account, emphasizing harmony and proportion: That mixture of all sorts of rays, which we call white, is a proportionate mixture that is harmonious (as Sir Isaac Newton has shewn) to each particular simple color and contains in it some harmony or other that is delightful. And each sort of rays play a distinct tune to the soul, besides those lovely mixtures that are found in nature—those beauties, how lovely, in the green of the face of the earth, in all manner of colors in flowers, the color of the skies, and lovely tinctures of the morning and evening.”89

It is characteristic of Edwards’s early “scientific” writings to weave such “Newtonian information,” as Joan Richardson puts it, into his accounts of himself in “an isolated natural setting, engaged in observing, in an attitude of reception, a version of piety, taking in and reading through the signs around and inside him . . . 90 In “The Mind,” Edwards blends an aestheticized theology with his dematerialization of matter in an account of the general “excellence,” “excellency,” or “beauty” of existence.91 He discusses: the beautiful shape of flowers, the beauty of the body of man and of the bodies of other animals. That sort of beauty which is called “natural,” as of vines, plants, trees, etc., consists of a very complicated harmony; and all the natural motions and tendencies and figures of bodies in the universe are done according to proportion, and therein is their beauty . . . As bodies are shadows of being, so their proportions are shadows of proportion.92

Edwards finds beauty not only in the flowers but in the “body of man,” and it is worthy of note that these writings of the early and middle 1720s coincide with his intense courtship of and marriage to Sarah Pierpont.93 As one of my students put it: “Of course the world looked beautiful to him; he was in love!”94

89

WJE 6:306. Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36. Newton occupied a place in eighteenth-century culture like that of Darwin in the twentieth. “Very few people read Newton,” Voltaire explained, “because it is necessary to be learned to understand him. But everybody talks about him.” Quoted in Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (2nd ed.) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 60. 91 McClymond and McDermott maintain that excellency is a synonym for beauty (M & M, 97). 92 WJE 6:335. 93 See Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949), 39, 40. Carl Van Doren notes the contrast between Edwards’s “exquisite and impetuous passion” for Sarah Pierpont and Franklin’s coolness towards his wife Deborah Read (who stayed in Philadelphia during his decades in England and France): “Benjamin chose Deborah with circumspection and very deliberately wooed and wed her . . . Jonathan was impelled to Sarah . . . by an exquisite and impetuous passion, testified to not only by his mystical account of her but by the letter in which he urged her to a speedy marriage. ‘Patience is commonly esteemed a virtue,’ he says, ‘but in this case I may almost regard it as a vice.’ ” See Carl Van Doren, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), xvii. For Edwards’s “Apostrophe to Sarah Pierpont” (1723), see A Jonathan Edwards Reader, John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 281. 94 Edwards’s editors trace the following passage about beauty from the Miscellanies to his courtship: “When we behold a beautiful body, a lovely proportion, a beautiful harmony of features of face, delightful 90

JONATHAN EDWARDS

23

Edwards develops the conception of a dynamic, communicating, beautiful being who pours forth “his own excellency” or beauty as the world of nature, although it is a world that is only a “shadow” of true being: [T]he Son of God created the world for his very end, to communicate himself in an image of his own excellency. He communicates himself properly only to spirits; and they only are capable of being proper images of his excellency, for they only are properly beings . . . Yet he communicates a sort of a shadow or glimpse of his excellencies to bodies, which, as we have shown, are but the shadows of being, and not real beings . . . So the green trees and fields, and singing of birds, are the emanations of his infinite joy and benignity; the easiness and naturalness of trees and vines [are] shadows of his infinite beauty and loveliness; the crystal rivers and murmuring streams have the footsteps of his sweet grace and bounty.95

Perceiving the excellency or beauty of being, Edwards writes, is like tasting honey when one has only heard descriptions of it: “Thus it is not he that has heard a long description of the sweetness of honey that can be said to have the greatest understanding of it, but he that has tasted.”96 Again, it is like “seeing the countenance” of a beautiful person after having only heard descriptions of the person’s beauty. The perception of the excellency of the world, like being in love, is transformative: “The believer hath got such a sight and such a knowledge of things that, ever since, he is become quite another man than he was before.”97

3. Sacred History a. “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God” Edwards’s awakening in his eighteenth year was the central event in his life, and he found himself amidst a wave of such conversions some fifteen years later, when he was the minister in Northampton. His account of that period, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God” (1737),98 one of his best known works, is at once a story with a beginning, climax, and denouement; a sociological description of a town where for a few years religion became the dominant concern; a psychological study of individual religious experience;99 and compelling evidence, Edwards thinks, of God’s working in the world.

airs of countenance and voice, and sweet motion and gesture, we are charmed with it; not under the notion of a corporeal, but a mental beauty.” (WJE 13:278; see also n. 9.) 95

96 WJE 13:279. WJE 14:76–7. 98 WJE 17:414, 14:81. WJE 4:144–212. 99 Perry Miller credits these individual studies for much of the book’s popular success: “The success of the Narrative with a public that could take Pamela (or even more) Clarissa to its bosom owed much to two novelettes that Edwards interpolated in order ‘to give a clearer idea of the nature and manner of the operations of God’s spirit’ ” (Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 137). Miller is referring to the stories of Abigail Hutchinson and Phebe Bartlett. See p. 26 below. 97

24

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Edwards alludes to the Puritan tradition of revivals100 in tallying up the achievements of his predecessor Solomon Stoddard, who served for sixty years as minister. Stoddard was blessed from the beginning “with extraordinary success in his ministry in the conversion of many souls. He had five harvests, as he called them: the first was about 57 years ago; the second about 53 years; the third about 40; the fourth about 24; the fifth and last about 18 years ago.” The years since the last “harvest” had been “a far more degenerate time,” Edwards writes, for although a few young people had been “savingly converted,” there was no “general awakening.”101 The question of how to tell who is and who is not “savingly converted” arises here, as it does in Edwards’s account of his own religious experiences and “self-righteous affections” in the “Personal Narrative”; and again we see why he might have devoted decades of work to this question, culminating in the series of sermons that became Religious Affections. His basic position is already clear, however. He thinks that although God sustains the universe at every moment, there are special works and signs of God, and that the most reliable indicator of their authenticity is how people act. Yet he also always insists that there is no decisive test that will identify to any human observer who is saved and who is not. His position is that certain forms of behavior—a devotion to prayer public and private, a bright demeanor and concern for other people, testimony about a new sense of the beauty of the world—are criteria of religious awakening in the sense that they are characteristic of awakening and, if present, are evidence of such awakening, but are neither necessary nor sufficient for it. (One thinks of Kierkegaard’s claim that one cannot tell the “knight of faith” from a tax collector.)102 The awakening of late 1733 came on gradually, its beginnings marked by “a very unusual flexibleness, and yielding to advice, in our young people,” and then by an outbreak of “remarkable religious concern” in a village three miles from Northampton where a number of persons “seemed to be savingly wrought upon.”103 Edwards is cautious in his claim: they seemed to be “savingly wrought upon.” He sees the process as receptive, as something that happens to someone, not as something that is under one’s control. The more general awakening began that winter, when, Edwards writes, “the Spirit of God began extraordinarily to set in, and wonderfully to work amongst us; and there were, very suddenly, one after another, five or six persons who were to all appearance savingly converted, and some of them wrought upon in a very remarkable manner.”104 The action here is God’s; people are “wrought” upon. God’s spirit sets in, like a great enveloping cloudbank. Edwards is again careful to talk about what 100

See Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 152–5, and M & M, 373–88. All citations in this paragraph are from WJE 4:145–6. 102 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 49–50. For Kierkegaard the incommensurability between behavior and faith is essential. 103 104 WJE 4:147. WJE 4:149. 101

JONATHAN EDWARDS

25

“to all appearance” was a conversion, but at the same time he refers without any caution to “the Spirit of God” (he doesn’t say “to all appearance the Spirit of God set in”). His title, of course, in its reference to “surprising works of God,” reveals his commitment to a divine explanation of the human events he records. Along with these dramatic conversions came a radical change in the very fabric of society: “all the conversation in all companies” was about “religion and the eternal world.” People were so much taken with “reading and praying,” Edwards writes, that outside of Northampton they had the reputation of having given up business altogether. Although this was not the case, they did come to regard their business “more as a part of their duty” than as something they wanted to do.105 The spring and summer of 1735 saw a transformation in human relations, an eighteenth-century summer of love: [T]he town seemed to be full of the presence of God: it never was so full of love, nor so full of joy; and yet so full of distress, as it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every house. It was a time of joy in families on the account of salvation’s being brought unto them; parents rejoicing over their children as newborn, and husbands over their wives, and wives over their husbands . . . [E]very hearer [was] eager to drink in the words of the minister as they came from his mouth; the assembly in general were, from time to time, in tears while the Word was preached; some weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, others with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors.106

People’s rapt attention to Edwards’s words was part of the considerable evidence that what had happened to him more than a decade before was now happening to many in his congregation. He provides a new series of figures: of the roughly six hundred adults in his church, about half were “savingly brought home to Christ” in a period of about six months.107 Some thirty children between ten and fourteen years of age were also “wrought upon,” as well as “several Negroes” who “appear to have been truly born again in the late remarkable season.”108 Quantifying these events in another manner, Edwards writes that during this period it “appears to me probable” that “God’s work” took place “at the rate of at least of four persons in a day, or near thirty in a week . . . for five or six weeks together.”109 Edwards was aware of the charges that might be made against his account: that he is “very fond of making a great many converts, and of magnifying and aggrandizing the matter,” and that he takes “every religious pang and enthusiastic conceit for saving conversion.”110 To counter them he turns his attention to detailed accounts of individual conversions. Anticipating William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, he writes that “here there is a vast variety, perhaps as manifold as the subjects of the operation; but yet in many things there is a great analogy in all.” The “great analogy” consists of a typical pattern, beginning with “a sense of their miserable

105 108

WJE 4:149–50. WJE 4:158–9.

106 109

WJE 4:151. WJE 4:159.

107 110

WJE 4:157–8. WJE 4:159–60.

26

JONATHAN EDWARDS

condition by nature, the danger they are in of perishing eternally” and the “great importance to them that they speedily escape, and get into a better state.”111 The conversion may be sudden or gradual (as it was in Edwards’s case), and there may be false positives: Very often under first awakenings . . . their affections are moved, and they are full of tears, in their confessions and prayers, which they are ready to make very much of . . . and hence they are for a while big with expectation of what God will do for them, and conceive that they grow better apace, and shall soon be thoroughly converted. But these affections are but short-lived; they quickly find that they fail, and then they think themselves to be grown worse again . . . sometimes their religious affections have turned into heart-risings against God . . . 112

Edwards devotes pages of his text to the story of Abigail Hutchinson, who came from “a rational understanding family: there could be nothing in her education that tended to enthusiasm.”113 In the winter of 1735, she became preoccupied with religious matters, first in her envy of a young woman who had had a saving experience, then through her own resolution to systematically read the Bible and her subsequent sense that the text identified her own deep sinfulness. She did not remain in this state of self-condemnation however: As she awaked on Monday morning, a little before day, she wondered within herself at the easiness and calmness she felt in her mind, which was of that kind which she never felt before; as she thought of this, such words as these were in her mind: “The words of the Lord are pure words, health to the soul and marrow to the bones.” And then these words came to her mind, “The blood of Christ cleanses [us] from all sin.”114

These days of “sweetness” continued and grew “brighter” even as her health failed and she succumbed to her illness in June 1735.115 The week that she died, some of her neighbors asked whether she was “willing to die. She replied that she was quite willing either to live or die; she was willing to be in pain; she was willing to be so always as she was then, if that was the will of God. She willed what God willed.”116 Edwards’s narrative, dated November 6, 1736, looks back at a season of conversion that had come to an end, for “[i]n the latter part of May, it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us.” The first sign of this withdrawal was the suicide of Edwards’s uncle Joseph Hawley, who had been “kept awake anights, meditating terror.”117 There were many fewer conversions than previously. Yet among those who seemed to be converted, Edwards reports, most continued in their new approach to life. They experienced “a new sense of things,” including a new sense of the words of the Gospel.118

111 WJE 4:160. One primary pattern in James’s Varieties is the “conversion” of the “divided self ” or “sick souls,” who through a process of regeneration become “twice-born.” 112 113 114 WJE 4:164–5. WJE 4:191. WJE 4:193. 115 116 117 118 WJE 4: 194–8. WJE 4:198. WJE 4:206. WJE 4:208.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

27

b. A History of the Work of Redemption Edwards confined his Faithful Narrative to what he observed in the “little revival” in the Connecticut River Valley in 1734–5, and made no claims for its greater historical or metaphysical importance. He had believed for some time that history is “a great revelatory play,” written and produced by God, in which things are not accomplished at once, but over time,119 but after writing the Narrative he began to consider what part the “little revival” played in God’s plan, and to focus more and more on revivals or awakenings as the key locations of God’s influence in history. By 1739, Edwards had composed and delivered thirty sermons entitled A History of the Work of Redemption, and for the rest of his life worked on a larger version that he hoped to publish under the same title. The basic presupposition of his history, as of his metaphysics, ethical theory, etc., was the complete sovereignty of God over the course of history. “One of Edwards’s main aims,” Zakai writes, “was to undermine the role of human autonomy and freedom in influencing the course of history. God is thus reenthroned as the true Lord of history and human action is accorded the secondary role of being directly affected and influenced by the mighty manifestations of God’s redemptive activity.”120 In taking this position, Edwards was sailing against the tide of the Enlightenment conception of history, where it was precisely the human role—even if played by a king—that received emphasis. One finds that human focus in such works as John Oldmixion’s Critical History of England (1724), which Edwards owned, Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731) and The Age of Louis XIV (1751), David Hume’s A History of England (1754–62), and (after Edwards’s death) Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).121 These new works represented a new conception of the human place in nature, according to which, Isaac Kramnick writes, people “no longer tended to see their place in life as part of some natural, inevitable, and eternal plan. Their own enterprise and ability mattered; they possessed the opportunity (a key word) to determine their place through their own voluntary actions in this life and in this world.”122 This statement applies perfectly to such writers as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, whom we shall be considering in Chapters 2 and 4 respectively, and it just as perfectly expresses a conception Edwards opposed. For Edwards, human beings do not determine their place in history. Only God does so, through his eternal plan, which is the real story of history. Regarding the Enlightenment fashion for human history, Edwards asked: “Shall we prize a history that gives us a clear account of some great earthly prince

119

Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 202. Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 225. 121 For discussion of Edwards’s familiarity with and reaction to the works of many Enlightenment historians, see Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 5–12, 141–2, 226–31. 122 Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism & Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late EighteenthCentury England and America (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 8. 120

28

JONATHAN EDWARDS

or mighty warrior . . . and shall we not prize the history that God has given us of the glorious kingdom of his son, Jesus Christ, the prince and savior of the world . . . [?]”123 Edwards’s version of history begins with the fall and extends to God’s destruction of the world and judgment of human beings. He does not focus on such great figures as saints or popes, nor, like many Protestant historians, on opposition to the Church of Rome. He does not take up the traditional American Puritan story of an essential gulf between the old world of England and the new world of America.124 His focus is entirely on “remarkable pourings out of the Spirit at special seasons of mercy.”125 A year after he completed his sermons on the History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards found himself amidst another one of these mass outpourings, which we now know as the Great Awakening. For Edwards the awakening was a “decisive event” in salvation history rather than “a mere provincial New England affair.”126 He enthusiastically welcomed the English evangelist George Whitefield to America in the fall of 1740, saw in Whitefield’s great success clear evidence of God’s presence, and wrote a series of letters and sermons supporting the revival.127 This is the context in which he produced the terrifying sermon for which he is most widely known, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” to which we shall turn in Section c below. Edwards’s discussions of history reveal two concepts of time: as chronos and kairos. Chronological time is uniform, sequential, and measurable. It is also “empty” in the sense that no moment, simply as a moment, is more significant than any other. This is the time of Newton and Leibniz, and of much of daily life. Kairotic time, in contrast, concerns the opportune, right, or “higher” moment. Edwards’s history is a history of these higher moments or intense sequences, which present a set of relations not discoverable within chronological time: for example, the relations between a biblical prophecy and a contemporary event. As Charles Taylor explains, “higher times” were thought to assemble, gather, reorder, or punctuate ordinary time, to introduce “warps” and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Events which were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked . . . for instance the sacrifice of Isaac and the Crucifixion of Christ. These two events were linked through their immediate contiguous places in the divine plan. They are drawn close to identity in eternity, even though they are centuries . . . apart.128

Edwards’s view that human beings are identical with Adam, and so guilty of his sins, which we shall consider in Section 7 below, is an example of this kairotic ordering of events.

123

124 WJE 9:291. Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 162. 126 WJE 9:143. As Zakai puts it (Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 275). 127 See Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 276–8. 128 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 54, 55; hereafter SA. 125

JONATHAN EDWARDS

29

c. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) If the higher times are at hand, Edwards thinks, then all possible means must be employed to save souls. Ultimately, he believes, the religious life is based on love and beauty, but at the lower levels of religious awareness we need the fear of punishment. “[I]t is a reasonable thing,” he writes, “to endeavor to fright persons away from hell . . .’tis a reasonable thing to fright a person out of an house on fire.”129 Edwards was familiar with Berkeley’s Alciphron; or the Minute Philosopher (1732), in which Berkeley defended the use of fear in inculcating religious belief, and maintained that “the hope of reward and fear of punishment are highly expedient to cast the balance of pleasant and profitable on the side of virtue.”130 The eye for detail that marks Edwards’s early writings about spiders and insects131 is now applied to the punishments that sinners will endure: “the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened her mouth under them.”132 Sounding the theme of his title, Edwards writes that “natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell,” and launches a powerful array of images meant to induce both fear and belief: [The] devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of, all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.133

“Sinners” presents no refuge in a church, community, or congregation, no “mediator,” but only each of us alone before an inscrutable and vengeful God. Edwards is more severe than earlier Puritans in rejecting the idea of a covenant between God and his chosen people. Even if one accepts Christ in one’s life, he maintains, there is no guarantee that one will not suffer in hell. Nevertheless Edwards calls for his hearers to join those who are “flocking from day to day to Christ.”134 In his call for action with no guarantee of success—in a matter of the utmost significance—Edwards anticipates the exquisite uncertainty of the existential commitment portrayed by the Danish Lutheran existentialist Sren Kierkegaard. But whereas Kierkegaard’s God is a huge cipher, a “Paradox,” and the God depicted in Edwards’s own “Beauty of the World” is

129

WJE 4:248. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 170. 131 WJE 6:154–69. 132 WJE 22:406. Edwards sometimes had to pause to let the “shrieks,” “moanings” and “cryings” brought about by his language subside (Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 145). 133 134 WJE 22:409. WJE 22:417. 130

30

JONATHAN EDWARDS

lovely and excellent, here God is “angry” and full of “wrath.” Pointing the finger directly at his audience, Edwards writes: “Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth, yea, doubtless with many that are now in this congregation . . . than he is with many of those that are now in the flames of hell.”135 God’s will, Edwards emphasizes, is completely “arbitrary” and “restrained by no obligation.”136 It is entirely at God’s pleasure whether we are cast down into hell or preserved, and it is certain that wicked men—that is, most of us—deserve “an infinite punishment of their sins.”137 Many eighteenth-century writers, including Benjamin Franklin, thought as Berkeley and Edwards did, that society needed the fear of divine punishment to encourage morality. Few of them, however, can match Edwards’s fascination with punishment, a matter emphasized by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. in a classic critique originally published in 1880. The GOD of Edwards is not a Trinity, but a Quaternity. The fourth Person is an embodied abstraction, to which he gave the name of Justice . . . This takes precedence of all other elements in the composite Divinity. Its province is to demand satisfaction, though as its demand is infinite, it can never be satiated. This satisfaction is derived from the infliction of misery on sensitive beings, who, by the fact of coming into existence under conditions provided or permitted by their Creator, have incurred his wrath and received his curse as their patrimony. Its work, as in the theology of Dante, is seen in the construction and perpetual maintenance of an Inferno . . . Edwards’s theology . . . flowers in heaven, but its roots, from which it draws its life and its strength, reach down to the deepest depths of hell.138

William James, who utilizes Edwards’s nuanced descriptions of religious conversion in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), cannot see how the vengeful doctrines of Calvinism connect with the sweetness that is also Edwards’s subject: [T]o-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ‘delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet’ . . . [This] appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean.139

“Mean” is a good simple word. Edwards’s mean streak, found in many of his sermons, and his conception of a vengeful God, are part of the background to his dismissal by his Northampton congregation in 1750.140

135

136 137 WJE 22:406. WJE 22:405. WJE 22:405–6. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Jonathan Edwards: An Essay,” in Pages from an old Volume of Life, contained in The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1892), vol. 8, 368–9. 139 James, Writings 1902–1910, 302. 140 For accounts of the “Granny Book” case that is part of the story here, see Smith et al., eds., A Jonathan Edwards Reader, 172–8, and Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 197, 215–16. 138

JONATHAN EDWARDS

31

4. The Deist Challenge Elements of deism may be found in the writings of Epicurus (341–271 bce) and Lucretius (c. 96–55 bce), whose thought enjoyed a revival in the seventeenth century. Epicurus maintained that the heavenly bodies were not divine and that “the law of their motions was fully ordained” at the “creation of the world.”141 Nature, Lucretius wrote, “does everything through herself and of her own will without regard to any deities.”142 He held that the gods are “untouched by care,” and that people who think they are wrathful or respond to particular human acts are entertaining “thoughts unworthy of the gods and foreign to their peace.”143 Both writers emphasize that fear of the gods was a major source of, rather than a corrective to, human suffering. People, Epicurus writes, “anticipate and foresee eternal suffering as depicted in the myths . . . . [and] suffer all this, not as a result of reasonable conjecture, but through some sort of unreasoning imagination.”144 Deism in the modern period is often held to originate with Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), who, after the devastating wars of religion in France, proposed that people rely on reason and evidence rather than authority in settling religious disputes. Like many subsequent deists, Herbert was critical of the mainstream belief that heathens who had never heard of Christianity were condemned to hell. This appeared, he wrote, “too rigid and severe to be consistent with the attributes of the Most Great and Good God.”145 The most important deist writer on Edwards’s horizon in the early eighteenth century was John Toland (1670–1722), whose Christianity Not Mysterious ignited a firestorm of criticism when it was published in 1696. (The Irish House of Commons ordered it burned, and Toland arrested and prosecuted.)146 An Irishman with a Master’s degree from Edinburgh, Toland was a student and political associate of Locke (who nevertheless disavowed his book), and a figure in the emerging public space of the coffee house.147 He maintained that there was nothing mysterious about Christianity and writes that there is “nothing mysterious or above reason in the Gospel.”148 Everything mysterious, e.g. miracles, and especially the priestly rites of the Anglican Church, was, according to Toland, not Christian, but pagan. Like Herbert, Toland maintained that the orthodox God could not be good if he required people to believe what they have never heard.149 141 Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus.” in Letters, Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, Russel M. Geer, trans. (New York and Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), 31. 142 Lucretius, On Nature, Russel M. Geer, trans. (New York and Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), 76. 143 144 Lucretius, On Nature, 207. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” 33. 145 Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24. 146 Deism and Natural Religion, E. Graham Waring, ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967), 1. 147 McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 23. Cf. Taylor on “sociability” in SA, 234–42. 148 149 Waring, Deism, 18. McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 25.

32

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Toland is complex. He denied that he was a deist, believed in the Bible as revelation, was attracted to materialism and to pantheism (he coined the term Pantheism for the view that God is in everything), and was interested in reviving the pagan religion of Druidism. He is a representative Enlightenment writer in his commitment to thinking for oneself, and in his appeal to public inquiry, discussion, and criticism.150 Locke may have condemned Toland’s book, but in calling for independent thinking he wrote much in Toland’s spirit. Locke recommended that the reader of his Essay “examine his work according to his own understanding and not any authority.” There is a political background to this shared call, for Locke and Toland both believed that the foundation of the state lies in the people and not in any inherited authority. When Toland attacked “mystery,” he was not only criticizing the church, but, implicitly, the divine right of kings, which was asserted and defended precisely by using the word “mystery.” (James I, for example, spoke of his own “Prerogative or mystery of State” and maintained that one shouldn’t investigate “the mysteries of the kings [sic] power.”151) Although the mysteries of political rule were not an issue for Edwards, the apparent political ramifications of a work like Christianity Not Mysterious were partly responsible for its popularity among Whigs and English Republicans, and the opposition to it by Tories and other defenders of the Crown. Toland’s statement that “truth is always and everywhere the same” is an apt rendition of the central thesis of another deist work, Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730). As the title indicates, the book asserts that Christianity existed from the creation in the form of a “religion of nature”—which Tindal, like most of the deists, took to be essentially concerned with morality and especially with human happiness. The Gospel, though valuable, is thus a “republication”—another making public—of something that was public all along. Tindal’s title entails that the Gospel is not unique or even necessary. If Christianity always existed, then the world did not need Jesus to bring it forth or complete it. As Tindal writes: “the religion of nature is an absolutely perfect religion; . . . external revelation can neither add to nor take from its perfection.”152 Moreover “God, at all times, has given mankind sufficient means of knowing whatever He requires of them.”153 If humankind has always had such means, why do people need special books or bibles, churches, and ministers? God does not need our worship, Tindal asserts, since he is perfect. For Tindal, Sabbath

150 See Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 220–30; and Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, Ted Humphrey, trans. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 41, 42. 151 Beiser, Sovereignty of Reason, 234–5. 152 153 Waring, Deism, 125. Waring, Deism, 107.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

33

observance has no foundation in reason, but exists primarily for the benefit of (Anglican) priests.154 Edwards knew the principal deists at least through secondary sources, and there is evidence that he read Tindal directly.155 He discusses Tindal in his Miscellanies: “Tindal’s main argument against the need of any revelation is, that the LAW OF NATURE IS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.” Among a barrage of objections, including the charge that Tindal’s statement is a mere tautology, Edwards charges Tindal with the error of inferring from the perfection of the law of nature to the perfection of the human instrument that apprehends that law.156 If we can apprehend the law so well, why is there so much disagreement about its contents, and why do we need instruction in morals or religion at all? Why, Edwards continues, do we need deism? If the natural law will teach us all, there will be no need for books that promote any such knowledge as tends to make men good and happy . . . And then also all the pains the Deists take in talking and writing to enlighten mankind is wholly needless and vain, and all Tindal’s own instructions, and particularly all the pains he takes to make men believe that ’tis not best to give heed to pretended revelations and traditionary religion.157

In short, if Tindal is right, then we don’t need Tindal. Edwards attacks the deist rejection of mystery and assertion of the sufficiency of reason. He is no irrationalist, for he believes in argument and refutation, evidence, and the public use of reason. But he believes in something above, beyond, or not comprehensible through reason. He points out that there are many things we believe that are perfectly evident, but which we cannot prove: for example, that there is a material world. We believe in thought, love, and hatred but we really don’t understand what they are, whether they exist in space, have extension, and so on.158 Mysteries, he concludes, thus pervade even the most up-to-date philosophy and science: Thus there are many things that I am told concerning the effects of electricity, magnetism, etc., and many things that are recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which I have never seen and are very mysterious. But being well attested, their mysteriousness is no manner of objection against my belief of the accounts, because from what I have observed and do know, such a mysteriousness is no other than is to be expected in a particular and exact observation of nature, and a critical tracing of its operations. ’Tis to be expected that the further it is traced, the more and more mysteries will appear.159

154 McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 31. See also Kerry Walters, Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), 32–3. 155 McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 35, n. 2. 156 157 McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 77. WJE 23:342–3. 158 McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 81. 159 JWE 23:366. Compare Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

34

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Finally, Edwards argues, deism itself is mysterious. It posits an uncreated being about which the deists say almost nothing, except that it is everywhere, but not in space, and experiences duration, but without succession.160 Edwards reserves some of his strongest condemnations and threats for the deists. He goes so far as to assert that deists kill their own children in cold blood,161 and writes in the History of the Work of Redemption that as the final judgment gets under way, there will be “a visible and awful hand of God against blasphemers, deists, and obstinate heretics, and other enemies of Christ, terribly destroying them with remarkable tokens of wrath and vengeance.”162 The deists, he writes, are not like the heretics, Arians and Socinians, and others, that own the Scriptures to be the word of God, and hold the Christian religion to be the true religion . . . they deny the whole Christian religion. Indeed, they own the being of God but deny that Christ was the son of God, and say he was mere cheat, and so they say all the prophets and apostles were. And they deny the whole Scripture; they deny that any of it is the word of God. They . . . say that God has given mankind no other light to walk by but his own reason.163

That is a pretty good description. Edwards knows very well what he is up against. That the light of one’s reason is the ultimate guide is precisely the central deist methodological tenet and, on this basis, deists tend to deny the truth of the Bible and the divinity of Jesus while still professing belief in God. The deists exemplify an “anthropocentric shift”164 that occurred in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in which the focus on the transcendent and the afterlife recedes, and attention to happiness and morality in this life comes to the fore. Tindal, for example, held that “Men by their nature were fram’d to be useful to one another” and that “the supreme Being . . . has implanted in Man . . . a Love for his Species; the gratifying of which in doing Acts of Benevolence, Compassion and Good Will, produces a Pleasure that never satiates.”165 Similarly Hutcheson writes that God gave us “a determination of Mind” to “approve” benevolent actions,166 and that “that Action is best which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers.”167 The anthropocentric shift also involves a fading sense of mystery, as seen in Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious, and in Hutcheson’s critique of the idea that God adjusts laws to particular cases. If God were to make such minute and ad hoc adjustments, this “would immediately supersede all contrivance and forethought of men, and all prudent action,” as Hutcheson argues.168 160

See the discussion in McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 85. McDermott, Edwards Confronts the Gods, 38. 162 WJE 9:475. As McDermott points out, the deists are the only group “mentioned by name” in this depiction of the final judgment (Edwards Confronts the Gods, 50). 163 164 WJE 9:432. See Taylor, SA, 221–69. 165 Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (London: 1730), vol. 1, 18, 19. 166 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Wolfgang Leidhold, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 197. 167 Hutcheson, An Inquiry, 125. For more on Hutcheson’s greatest happiness principle, see Section 5, pp. 38–9 and Chapter 4, Section 2, pp. 110–11 below. 168 Taylor, SA, 223–4. 161

JONATHAN EDWARDS

35

Edwards resists these tendencies. From his point of view, the deists and other Enlightenment figures miss the essential orientation towards God, not only of history and metaphysics, but of ethics. In carving out a space of events rationally understood, in which human happiness may be developed by human means, they miss the most important thing of all, the “true moral good . . . the greatest and most important thing in the world . . . without which all the world is empty, no better than nothing.”169 It is to Edwards’s defense of this claim about the “true moral good” or “true virtue” that we now turn.

5. True Virtue: Edwards on Morality The Nature of True Virtue (1755, published 1765) is one of the ambitious works Edwards composed during the last seven years of his life, living among the Mohawks and Mahicans in western Massachusetts while conducting a probing engagement with Enlightenment writing about ethics. As with his metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and account of history, Edwards’s conception of ethics is theocentric: if one is kind, benevolent, dutiful, or brave but without a relation to God, then one is not truly virtuous. Referring to the Enlightenment writers, Edwards states: these schemes of religion or moral philosophy, which, however well in some respects they may treat of benevolence to mankind . . . yet have not a supreme regard to God, and love to him, laid in the foundation and all other virtues handled in a connection with this, and in a subordination to this, are no true schemes of philosophy, but are fundamentally and essentially defective.”170

The key moral issue for Edwards is whether one is “in or out of tune with the universe,” as Clebsch argues.171 True virtue, Edwards insists, is a matter of “consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general”—not to humankind in particular.172 It does not consist in “love to any particular beings, because of their virtue and beauty, nor in gratitude, because they love us; but in a propensity and union of heart to Being simply considered . . . to Being in general.”173 We are “part of the universal system of existence,” Edwards wants us to remember, and stand “in connection with the whole.” Our virtue lies in “union and consent with the great whole.”174 Edwards’s conception of virtue as consent to a benevolent universe has roots in Stoicism, with which he was familiar through his early reading of Cicero, and more extensively through his engagement with Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, who were

169

WJE 2:274. WJE 8:560. Among Enlightenment works of moral theory, Edwards read Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustration on the Moral Sense (1728); and Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). See Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 47–8. 171 172 Clebsch, American Religious Thought, 51. WJE 8:540. 173 174 WJE 8:544. WJE 8:541. 170

36

JONATHAN EDWARDS

themselves transmitting ideas and doctrines of Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus.175 Stoic assent, Elizabeth Agnew Cochran writes, is not a fleeting passion but a “focused, continuous disposition” directed both to the universe in general and to its particularities, to whatever comes one’s way. As Marcus Aurelius writes: [N]othing is so conducive to greatness of mind as the ability to examine systematically and honestly everything that meets us in life, and to regard these things always in such a way as to form a conception of the kind of Universe they belong to, and of the use which the thing in question subserves in it; what value it has for the whole Universe and what for man . . . and what virtue it calls for from me, such as gentleness, manly courage, truth, fidelity, guilelessness, independence, and the rest.176

Our human virtues of gentleness, courage, and so on, are grounded in the great universe of which we are small parts and, without that ground, they lose their depth, context, even their meaning. This is what Edwards is getting at when he writes that “no affections towards particular persons, or beings, are of the nature of true virtue but such as arise from a generally benevolent temper, or from that habit or frame of mind, wherein consists a disposition to love Being in general.”177 In contrast to the Stoics, however, Edwards emphasizes beauty, sensibility, and emotional warmth in his writings on ethics, which can be divided into two periods— before and after he studied Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Edwards knew of their writings earlier (he refers to Shaftesbury in 1722), but it was only after his move to Stockbridge in 1751 that he deeply engaged their thought and found that Hutcheson’s notion of a “moral sense” anticipated his arguments against secular or humanoriented ethics.178 Those arguments are well represented in Edwards’s sermon “A Divine and Supernatural Light” (1734), where he writes: “He that is spiritually enlightened truly apprehends and sees it, or has a sense of it. He don’t [sic] merely rationally believe that God is glorious, but he has a sense of the gloriousness of God in his heart.”179 Edwards drives home his point like a good empiricist by considering the difference between the “rational judgment” that honey is sweet and the “sense of its sweetness.”180 The difference between the rational judgment that God is glorious and the sense of his glory is equally great. A decade later, in Religious Affections (1746), Edwards returns to the subject: “[S]piritual knowledge primarily consists in a taste or relish of the amiableness and beauty of that which is truly good and holy: this holy relish is a thing that discerns

175 See Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, “Consent, Conversion, and Moral Formation: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 39 (2011), 626–9. 176 Marcus Aurelius, C. R. Haines, trans. and ed. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1930), 59–61 (Book 3, Ch. 11), cited in Cochran, 639. 177 178 WJE 8:542. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 64, 226, 256–8. 179 180 WJE 17:413. WJE 17:414.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

37

and distinguishes between good and evil, between holy and unholy, without being at the trouble of a train of reasoning.”181 Once again we have “beauty,” “taste” (and elsewhere in the book a “spiritual sense”), all opposed to the intellectual or rational, to a “train of reasoning.” This taste, not reason, is that which “discerns and distinguishes between good and evil.” By the 1750s, Edwards learned that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had anticipated his uses of the concept of “taste,” “sense,” or “relish” in their discussions of secular morality. As Norman Fiering states: “What Edwards in 1731 considered to be the exclusive property of the supernaturally inspired, namely, an awareness of the essential deformity of vice, Shaftesbury called the very presupposition of any conscience whatsoever.”182 Edwards also found that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson disagreed with fundamental tenets of his religious vision in denying that human beings were totally depraved, asserting that they have a deep natural goodness to them, and rejecting the idea of a vengeful God. For Edwards, their focus on human happiness left out the essential relationship constituting human beings. Neither Shaftesbury nor Hutcheson proclaimed himself an atheist. They both spoke about “the Deity,” but did not give God much of a role to play. Shaftesbury condemns a religion of fear that is much like the one Edwards propounds, and concludes that the religious conscience presupposes “moral or natural conscience”—just the reverse of Edwards’s view: For to have Awe and Terror of the Deity, does not, of itself, imply Conscience . . . Now to fear GOD any otherwise than as in consequence of some justly blameable and imputable Act, is to fear a devilish Nature, not a divine one. Nor does the Fear of Hell, or a thousand Terrors of the DEITY, imply Conscience; unless where there is an Apprehension of what is wrong, odious, morally deform’d, and ill-deserving . . . And thus religious Conscience supposes moral or natural Conscience.”183

Shaftesbury uses the expression “morally deformed” as an equivalent for “wrong,” blending the aesthetic and the moral—just as Edwards had done in the 1730s. He also condemns what amounts to Edwards’s “sovereign” God, implicitly denying that God is beyond or sovereign over morality itself. In Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Edwards found a formidable defense and systematization of Shaftesbury’s ideas. Hutcheson argues that we perceive beauty as we perceive colors and sounds, immediately, by allowing our eyes and ears to do their work. What he calls our “Sense of Beauty and Harmony” registers the beauty of landscapes and sunsets, but also the beauty of mathematical theorems and Newton’s physics.184 We would have no idea of the taste of meat, Hutcheson argues in an argument that was later used by Hume as 181

182 WJE 2:281. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 64. Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry concerning Virtue” (1699, 1732) in L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., British Moralists, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 46. 184 Hutcheson, Inquiry, 26, 37, 38. 183

38

JONATHAN EDWARDS

well as by Edwards, if we had no sense of taste. The same holds for beauty and the sense of beauty: without the sense we would have no idea of beauty. Hutcheson barely mentions God but, when he does, he is at pains to deny the thesis that Edwards affirms: that God sustains the world at every moment. Looking at the vast reach of the law of gravitation, for example, Hutcheson writes: “How incomparably more beautiful is this Structure, than if we suppos’d so many distinct Volitions in the Deity, producing every particular Effect.”185 Shifting from beauty to virtue in the book’s second part, Hutcheson argues that, just as there is a natural sense of beauty, so there is a natural sense of virtue, the exercise of which gives us pleasure or pain independently of any advantage we might receive. Just as we may enjoy a painting that we do not own, we enjoy and approve a brave or honest action independently of any benefit it brings us. Even if “it were in the most distant Part of the World, or in some past Age,” Hutcheson writes, “we feel Joy within us, admire the lovely Action, and praise its Author.”186 Hutcheson calls the capacity for these feelings the “moral sense”: [s]ome Actions have to Men an immediate Goodness . . . [B]y a superior Sense, which I call a Moral one, we perceive Pleasure in the Contemplation of such Actions in others, and are determin’d to love the Agent, (and much more do we perceive Pleasure in being conscious of having done such Actions our selves) without any View of further natural Advantage from them.187

That is a mouthful, and one of the criticisms Edwards and other critics would make of the idea of a “moral sense” is that the term is ambiguous or muddled. The phrase “perceive pleasure” shows some of the ambiguity. Is the moral sense a response in us, like pleasure, or is it something perceived in the world, like a sunset? What is the relation of the moral sense to action? Is some will, inclination, or reason to act part of the moral sense, or is it simply a way of passively registering ideas? Regardless of the term’s ambiguity, or perhaps in part because of it, the idea of a moral sense became highly fashionable in eighteenth-century philosophy in Britain and America, particularly as it and such derivatives as “common sense” were deployed by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment who were directly influenced by Hutcheson: his student Adam Smith (1723–90); David Hume; Lord Kames; Thomas Reid (1710–96); and others. Hutcheson articulates and formalizes his principle of human happiness in a way that we now know as utilitarianism. In his most influential turn of phrase, he writes in 1725 that the moral sense leads us to judge that “that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.”188 He presents a version of what would be called 185

186 187 Hutcheson, Inquiry, 59. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 91. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 88. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 125. Hutcheson was the first to use this expression. See Broadie, Alexander, “Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL = . 188

JONATHAN EDWARDS

39

“rule utilitarianism” in arguing that it is sometimes better to prohibit certain “Actions in general,” even though “particular Instances of those Actions would be very useful.”189 He counters a flaw in the consequentialist approach by arguing that moral beauty requires good intentions, so that “Actions which in fact are exceedingly useful, shall appear void of moral Beauty, if we know they proceeded from no kind Intentions toward others.”190 Most troubling for Edwards, Hutcheson drives home the point that the moral sense is a natural human endowment that is independent of any belief in a deity: “many have high Notions of Honour, Faith, Generosity, Justice, who have scarce any Opinions about the Deity, or any Thoughts of future Rewards.”191 Statements such as this led to Hutcheson’s prosecution for deism in 1738. When he was writing The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards could not ignore the formidable Hutcheson, and he shows his respect by advertising some points of agreement. He acknowledges that there is a “general moral sense,” although he wishes to distinguish it from “true virtue,” and states that “things which have been said by others (Mr. Hutcheson in particular) . . . may abundantly show that the differences which are to be found among different persons and nations concerning moral good and evil are not inconsistent with a general moral sense, common to all mankind.”192 He even enlists Hume, along with Hutcheson, in discussing a part of this domain of natural morality: “I agree with Hutcheson and Hume in this, that there is a foundation laid in nature for kind affections between the sexes, that are truly diverse from all inclinations to sensitive pleasure, and don’t properly arise from any such inclination.”193 But Edwards’s main line of disagreement is no less clear. An ethics that leaves God out of the picture and only treats of “benevolence to mankind”194 is defective and dangerous. The greatest happiness principle is concerned only with shadows of being, and what seems like genuine concern for others is really only a form of self-love.195

6. Edwards on Freedom Edwards is perhaps best known to contemporary philosophers for the theory he sets out in Freedom of the Will (1754), a form of compatibilism much like that of his contemporary David Hume.196 Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism, that we are determined and also free.197 One denies

189

190 191 Hutcheson, Inquiry, 126. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 116. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 96. 193 194 WJE 8:625–6. WJE 8:603–4. WJE 8:560. 195 See the discussion in Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 192–4. 196 Edwards did not read Hume till the 1750s, and appears to have developed his views on freedom, identity, causality, and other topics independently of the younger man’s writing. See Reid, “Edwards and Hume,” 54–5. 197 See Michael Mckenna, “Compatibilism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta , ed., URL = . 192

40

JONATHAN EDWARDS

compatibilism if one holds either that if we are determined, then we are not free, or that our freedom requires some uncaused or spontaneous act. This latter position is often called libertarianism. In Edwards’s day it was known as Arminianism, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609). Edwards takes determinism to be entailed by God’s sovereignty, but it is not a determinism imposed on independently existing things. Things are what they are by virtue of their relations to each other and, ultimately, to God. Our will, for example, is not an isolated event but part of a “coherent body of apprehensions,” as Bruce Kuklick states, as we make “affectional contact with [the world] at a given moment.”198 There is no separate subject existing apart from these relations; yet we are free, Edwards maintains, insofar as we can act in the world. We judge that people are free or not, Edwards argues, without considering the origins of their choices and actions. We do not consider how someone: came to have such a volition; whether it was caused by some external motive, or internal habitual bias; whether it was determined by some internal antecedent volition, or whether it happened without a cause; whether it was necessarily connected with something foregoing, or not connected. Let the person come by his volition or choice how he will, yet, if he is able, and there is nothing in the way to hinder his pursuing and executing his will, the man is fully and perfectly free, according to the primary and common notion of freedom.199

Hume had argued for a similar position six years earlier in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), a work to which Edwards does not refer in Freedom of the Will.200 Hume writes: “By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one, who is not a prisoner and in chains.”201 It is easy to distinguish between someone who is in chains and someone who is not, Hume argues, and this is the sense of liberty that counts in daily life. Likewise, although God controls all according to Edwards, the difference between what we are forced to do and what we desire to do is crucial and evident. Edwards offers powerful arguments against his opponents, the Arminians.202 They believe, he writes, that “millions of millions of events are continually coming into existence contingently, without any cause or reason why they do so, all over the world, every day and hour, through all ages. So it is in a constant succession, in every 198 Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 23. See also Stephen H. Daniel, “Edwards as Philosopher,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, Stephen J. Stein, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 172. 199 WJE 1:164. 200 See Paul Ramsey’s discussion of Edwards’s knowledge of Hume in WJE 1:14–15, n. 1. 201 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Eric Steinberg, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), 63. 202 See the discussion in Morton White, Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 37–49.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

41

moral agent.”203 In such a situation, Edwards continues, God “must have little else to do, but to mend broken links as well as he can, and be rectifying his disjointed frame and disordered movements, in the best manner the case will allow.”204 This reduces Arminian theology to absurdity, for it leads to a picture of a less than sovereign divinity in a universe that is out of control. Edwards also takes up the problem of evil, considering whether God is “the author of sin.”205 God is the author of a world that contains sin and evil, Edwards concedes, but God only permits and does not produce the act of sin; he does not exert “a positive agency” in its production.206 This position seems in tension with Edwards’s conception of a world recreated by God at every moment. Continuous creation, it may fairly be said, requires a lot of “positive agency.” Edwards considers the beneficial consequences that might accrue if there is some evil in the world. He agrees that it would be “unjust” for a man to do evil for the sake of good consequences, but denies that this is unjust for God, who: always chooses what is best . . . And if so, then such a choice is not an evil, but a wise and holy choice . . . Men do will sin as sin, and so are the authors and actors of it: they love it as sin, and for evil ends and purposes. God don’t [sic] will sin as sin, or for the sake of anything evil; though it be his pleasure so to order things, that he permitting, sin will come to pass; for the sake of the great good that by his disposal shall be the consequence.207

However consistent and well-stated Edwards’s arguments are, at this point we might have some sympathy, or just plain intellectual need, for his contemporary Voltaire, who a year after Edwards’s death published Candide, ridiculing Leibniz’s idea that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”

7. Original Sin and Personal Identity Although he holds that God controls the universe down to its very existence from moment to moment, Edwards insists that we are free and so responsible for our lives. In Original Sin (1758), completed six months before his death, he develops a radical theory of identity to justify the New Testament claim that we are responsible not only for our past and present actions, but for those of Adam: “by one man’s disobedience,” as the New Testament text reads, “many were made sinners.”208 Edwards asserts the universal “depravity” and sinfulness of humankind, and argues that the death of seemingly innocent babies is evidence of God’s anger with us all: “the general mortality of mankind is an evidence of God’s anger for the sin of those who are the subjects of such a dispensation . . . 209 We see here the continuity of Edwards’s

203 206 208

204 205 WJE 1:183–4. WJE 1:254. WJE 1:397. 207 WJE 1:403. WJE 1:408–9. 209 Romans 5:19. See the discussion in M&M, 350–3. WJE 3:209.

42

JONATHAN EDWARDS

mature philosophical works with the doctrines and tone of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” But is it fair to hold us responsible for something done by Adam? This question raises what Edwards calls the “great objection against the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity.” It is charged “that such imputation is unjust and unreasonable, inasmuch as Adam and his posterity are not one and the same.”210 Edwards finds a way to argue that Adam and his posterity are one and the same, so that it is just for God to punish us for Adams’s sins, because they are in some sense our own. To understand Edwards’s position we must recall the “time slice” view of existence that he propounds in his doctrine of continuous creation. There is no continuing body or material substance to preserve identity over time, and no individual spiritual substance either. Like the rest of the universe, the self is reconstituted anew at each moment by the one substance, God. If we “consider matters strictly,” Edwards argues, “there is no such thing as any identity or oneness in created objects, existing at different times, but what depends on God’s sovereign constitution.”211 Although only God is identical from moment to moment, there are “various kinds of identity and oneness, found among created things, by which they become one in different manners, respects, and degrees, and to various purposes . . . all oneness, by virtue whereof pollution and guilt from past wickedness are derived, depends entirely on a divine establishment.”212 Various time slices of existence may be associated in laws of nature, continuities of habit, parts of a divine historical narrative, or as the “buds and branches” of a great tree, which is the way Edwards thinks God relates us all to Adam: “God, who constitutes all other created union or oneness, according to his pleasure . . . [establishes] a constitution whereby the natural posterity of Adam, proceeding from him, much as the buds and branches from the stock or root of a tree, should be treated as one with him.”213 In this weaker sense, we are all identical with Adam (though not with each other), and the identities of all created things are determined by the way God “treats” them. Edwards writes that “there is no identity or oneness in the case, but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who by his wise sovereign establishment so unites these successive new effects, that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations, and circumstances; and so, leads us to regard and treat them as one.214 By “arbitrary” Edwards does not mean that God has no reasons for doing what he does, only that he acts freely in doing so.215 God is, therefore, not only the one true causal agent, the one true substance, and the architect of the world from moment to moment, but the determiner of the identity of things by the way he “treats” them. There are, in short, no inherent identities except for God’s own. As Reid somewhat cheekily summarizes Edwards’s position: 210 214

WJE 3:389. WJE 3:403.

211 215

212 WJE 3:404. WJE 3:404–5. Reid, “Edwards and Hume,” 69–70.

213

WJE 3:405.

JONATHAN EDWARDS

43

We could say that two time-slices qualified as time-slices of “the same” object just as long as they belonged to the same larger collection. But, then, given that all these time-slices were being successively produced directly by God’s will, and owed everything that they were to His continuous creative act, it would naturally seem to follow that He should get to be the one in charge of collecting different time-slices together, and hence that He should have the honour of deciding when two time-slices were to be considered identical in this weaker sense. And this indeed was Edwards’s point of view.216

But if there is no strict identity, then how can we be praised or blamed even for our own past actions, let alone those of Adam? This is where God’s control over identity (in a “weaker sense”) plugs a gap in Edwards’s system, as God’s orderly recreation of the universe and system of rewards and punishments plug other gaps. In a wellknown passage from A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume denies that we are identical from moment to moment: “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.”217 Edwards’s position on identity is very close to Hume’s: there is no “strict” personal identity from moment to moment. But whereas Hume leaves it here, Edwards appeals to God, and to a weaker sense of identity, to “plug the gaps,” as Reid puts it, “that Hume had left open.”218

8. Edwards and Slavery Each chapter of this book takes up, in some way, the issue of American slavery. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Benjamin Franklin advocated the abolition of slavery at the end of his life, but he owned slaves for decades, and his Pennsylvania Gazette regularly carried advertisements for slaves in the 1730s. Thomas Jefferson condemned slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, but left over two hundred enslaved people to his family when he died, debt-ridden, in 1826. For the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau in the decades before the American Civil War, slavery became an unavoidable moral issue. We get a sense of how deeply entrenched slavery was in America, even in the north, when we realize that Edwards too owned slaves, and that he wrote a defense of the institution.

a. Venus In 1731 Edwards was twenty-eight, married, and the pastor of one of the most important congregations in western Massachusetts. In the spring, he travelled to

Reid, “Edwards and Hume,” 69. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 165. 218 Reid, “Edwards and Hume,” 54. 216 217

44

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Newport, Rhode Island, where he paid eighty pounds of Rhode Island currency for “a Negro Girle named Venus ages Fourteen years or thereabout, TO HAVE AND TO HOLD the said Negro girl named Venus unto the said Jonathan Edwards his heirs Execrs [sic] & Assigns and to his & their own proper Use & behoof for Ever.”219 Edwards later cut his copy of the receipt into strips and wrote sermons on the back, which is why we have it.220 We see not only slavery in this document but race: this is a “Negro” girl, and there were no “White” girls for sale in America. Edwards was out of his element travelling to Newport to meet with the slave trader who sold him Venus and the rough men who were witnesses to the sale, and the eighty pounds he paid for her was forty percent of his yearly salary.221 But it was important to him. Buying a slave, like buying an expensive car today, made one’s life better or more pleasurable, and it advertised one’s station in life, one’s wealth and leisure. As Minkema puts it in a groundbreaking paper on Edwards’s defense of slavery: “ . . . along with building expensive homes and acquiring coaches and silver tea sets, the new American landed and monied class purchased more and more slaves. In the decade and a half after 1700, for example, the number of slaves in New England increased tenfold, from 400 to 4,000.”222 Edwards followed the lead of his father and prominent families of Northampton in buying a black “servant,” as they were called; so he “must have deemed it right and proper for a person of his station to acquire a slave.”223 In “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844) Emerson writes that “[l]anguage must be raked, the secrets of slaughterhouses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been.”224 We need not rake very deeply to understand what phrases such as “Use & behoof for Ever” and “to have and to hold” (so eerily echoing the traditional marriage vow) might tell. We rake language again when we learn that “servant” in colonial America often denoted a slave. There is no further record of Venus. By 1736, another woman, Leah, was a member of the household, and at his death, some twenty years later, Edwards conveyed his slaves Joseph and Sue “lately the proper goods of said Jonathan Edwards, deceased,” to John Owen of Simsbury, Conn., for £23.225 A “Negro boy named Titus,” possibly Joseph and Sue’s child, is also listed in the estate under the heading “Quick Stock.” He was valued at £30.226 219

Smith et al., eds., A Jonathan Edwards Reader, 296. Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” in The Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002), 49, n. 10. 221 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 28, n. 24. 222 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 28. 223 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 24. 224 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” (1844) in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 9. 225 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 57, n. 82. 226 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 43–4. 220

JONATHAN EDWARDS

45

Edwards knew that slaves were human beings. He was “the first minister at Northampton to baptize blacks and admit them into full membership” in the church,227 and in The History of the Work of Redemption he looks forward to a time when “many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Turkey.”228 Yet all this was in the long term. In the present and the immediate future, Edwards accepted the economic and political arrangements of his time.

b. Defending slavery Edwards might have had nothing more to say about slavery had not a controversy over a fellow minister’s performance erupted in 1739. Rev. Benjamin Doolittle was considered extravagant in his expenditures and tastes (as was Edwards), and was accused of being an Arminian, despite his assertions to the contrary. He was blamed by pro-revivalists like Edwards for “snuffing out” the awakening in his town of Northfield, Massachusetts. Then a new charge emerged: that Doolittle owned slaves. Edwards was called upon by a group of ministers to draft a letter defending Doolittle against this charge.229 In his draft, Edwards argues that both the Old and New Testaments countenance slavery, and he charges Doolittle’s accusers with hypocrisy: although they do not own slaves, they profit from them as citizens of the colony. Edwards condemns the overseas slave trade, but largely to advance the claim that domestic slavery is benign. Forcibly taking people from Africa, he states, is “a far more cruel slavery than that which they object against in those that have slaves here.”230 In writing that taking people from Africa is “more cruel” than New England slavery, Edwards concedes that New England slavery is cruel too. As for the nature of that cruelty, children of enslaved people, Lorenzo Greene writes, “were sometimes taken from their parents and sold with as little restraint as one would sell a calf, pig, or colt.”231 If Edwards’s slave Titus was Joseph and Sue’s son, then selling him as “quick stock” while Joseph and Sue were sold separately, would have constituted just such a cruel separation. Edwards did stake out an intermediate position in his draft, opposing further incursions into Africa for the purpose of obtaining/kidnapping slaves. This may not seem like much of a difference, since he still accepted and participated in the institution of slavery. Yet, his fellow evangelist George Whitefield, who approved of slave-owning as promoting Christian virtue, came under attack in the early 1740s for stating that slavery was “a trade not to be approved of.”232 Of such small steps is moral progress sometimes made.

228 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 34. WJE 9:480. See WJE 16:72–6 and Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 31–2. 230 WJE 16:72. 231 Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: 1942), 212; as cited in Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 38. 232 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 39. 227 229

46

JONATHAN EDWARDS

Slavery was accepted throughout much of human history and was “largely taken for granted” in America until the middle of the eighteenth century.233 It is simply assumed in Plato’s writings, for example, and students of philosophy are familiar with the “slave boy” questioned in the Meno, from whom Socrates elicits allegedly innate geometrical knowledge. Aristotle was the first major philosopher to think slavery needed a justification,234 while for Locke, the foremost political philosopher on Edwards’s horizon, slaves are “captives taken in a just war . . . by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters.”235 They are not part of civil society but they are part of the family, as Locke conceives it, which normally consists of “a master of a family with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves.”236 That Edwards needed to come to the defense of Benjamin Doolittle in 1740 testifies, Minkema writes, “to a vein of antislavery sentiment that bubbled just below the surface of New England society.”237 My aim in this study is not to condemn Edwards or any of the other figures I discuss, but to understand their thinking about a moral question that was open for them and that is settled for us. In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (1891) William James presents a picture of the evolution of moral thinking, and of the sentiments and complaints that any moral equilibrium represses: there is nothing final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals . . . as our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without producing others louder still . . . Pent in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by which they may get free.

James mentions slavery among those equilibria of human ideals that have been overcome by this rumbling and grumbling, that have, as he puts it, “slowly succumbed to actually aroused complaints.”238 By examining Edwards’s views on slavery and those of the other American philosophers treated here we can see this slow and painful moral progress close in, as it were, as it plays itself out in the thinking of five intelligent and morally concerned men.

233

Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 64. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 197. 235 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, C. B. Macpherson, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 45. 236 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 46. 237 Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” 35. 238 This and the preceding citation are from William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in Writings 1878–1899, Gerald E. Myers, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 611. 234

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 7/5/2015, SPi

JONATHAN EDWARDS

47

9. Coda Edwards was a prodigious writer and thinker, and a devout naturalist. Perry Miller describes a typical day in his life: He rose at four on summer mornings and by five in the winter . . . and he averaged thirteen hours a day in his study. For exercise he chopped wood or rode horseback, but even then his mind was at work. After dinner (as everywhere in New England, this was at midday), he would ride to some solitary place in the woods, carrying pen and ink with him; he would dismount and walk, jotting down thoughts that were then reworked at night into the “Miscellanies.” On long rides he would carry with him papers and pins, and, having thought through an idea, would pin a paper on his coat, charging himself to associate it with the theme of his cogitation. The legend is that he would reach his door with leaves pinned all over his coat, and that Sarah would help to unpin him.239

With his solitary days and hours, walks in the woods, and sense that nature offers a deep sense of our relation to being, Edwards in some ways anticipates Emerson and Thoreau, who can be just as intense in their observations of nature and themselves. But there is an element in the Transcendentalists’ writing of relaxation, letting go, or “abandonment” that is foreign to Edwards. At the end of his great essay “Experience,” for example, Emerson writes that he is only “gossip[ing] for my hour concerning the eternal politics,” and in “Circles,” he writes that he wants to live with “no past at my back.” In “Walking,” Thoreau advocates “useful ignorance” and “going to grass.” Edwards does not wish to live in the loose and sauntering way that the Transcendentalists sometimes adopt, and that they bequeath to Walt Whitman and William James.240 He is not free to define and create himself, but only to participate in God’s great drama. He is not, as he sees it, original, and the danger is too great for him to “gossip” about the eternal. Edwards’s legacy for American philosophy lies in his intense self-examination, emphasis on sentiment and experience in religion, and theology of nature—cousin to the Transcendentalists’ idea that nature offers us “a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs.”241 In his larger project of defending Puritan Christianity against deism, Arminianism, materialism, and human-centered moral theory, Edwards was less successful. We can take the measure of that failure as we consider the life of his contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, in the Chapter 2. Born in Puritan Boston just three years after Edwards, an immigrant to Quaker Pennsylvania by the time he was seventeen, Franklin became a deist in his teens, and thereafter did not much concern himself with religion, public or private. He had other things on his mind.

239 241

Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 127–8. Emerson, CW 1:7.

240

See the Epilogue to this book.

2 Benjamin Franklin 1. Franklin and Edwards a. Detachment Benjamin Franklin was born three years after Jonathan Edwards in the foremost city of New England and New England Puritanism: Boston, Massachusetts. But he lived a very different life. Whereas Edwards remained in New England and in the church, contending against the new modes of thinking we call the Enlightenment, Franklin left Boston for Philadelphia in 1723 at the age of seventeen, and became a representative Enlightenment figure: an important scientist, influential statesman, and founder and inventor of secular institutions from the Library Company of Philadelphia to the United States of America. Edwards took for granted a great theocentric vision of the universe that specifies what there is—God and his creation, and what one is to do—consent to Being, worship God, attend church. Charles Taylor calls such a vision an ontic logos: an ordering of nature and humanity that is at the same time an ordering of what we are to do. From the perspective of such a vision, one cannot understand how things are without being motivated to act in a certain way. If one is not so motivated, or is indifferent, that is a sign that one has not understood.1 Franklin has a vision too, but it is not as completely filled in as Edward’s radical idealism and dogmatic Christianity. Franklin operates in a world of mechanism, governed by the great ordering principles of Newtonian law. But the laws of physics do not tell one what to do; they are not normative; and they do not explain everything. In the Newtonian mechanical world there is room for human beings to invent things, including themselves, to deepen their understanding of nature, and to develop new powers. Instead of looking backwards to a text, institution, or fundamental Being, Franklin, along with many other Enlightenment figures, looks forward. They see opportunities to establish entirely new systems of understanding (such as the Encyclopedia), new institutions (the Royal Society, the Philadelphia Academy) and, in America, a new nation with a written constitution.

1

See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 161.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

49

Edwards lives in (or seeks to recover) an enchanted world, in which “excellency” or beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder but is “present” in all being.2 According to the new “disenchanted” Enlightenment stance that Franklin adopts, value, mind, and self are separated, even “buffered”3 from the world of matter. God is out there, somewhere (as in deism), but his glory or “excellency” are not to be found among the Cartesian vortices or Newtonian masses. We can serve God best, according to this view, by serving man, contributing to God’s great plan of increasing human happiness (Francis Hutcheson was an early, influential advocate of this position).4 It is in this new spirit that Franklin’s alter ego, Poor Richard Saunders, writes: “Serving God is Doing Good to Man, but Praying is thought an easier Service, and therefore more generally chosen.”5 The new disengaged stance as it occurs in Franklin is memorably shown in his relations with George Whitefield, the English evangelist whose sermons energized the American Great Awakening of the 1740s. Edwards and Franklin both knew Whitefield well. For Edwards, he was an ally in the momentous project of awakening men and women to God’s overwhelming presence in the universe. Edwards offered Whitefield his house and pulpit when he arrived from England in the fall of 1740. When Whitefield spoke, Edwards “wept during the whole time of the exercise,” along with many in his congregation.6 Franklin spends pages of his Autobiography on Whitefield, but always from outside the meaning of his Christian doctrines. He acknowledges, for example, that Whitefield was a good customer of his printing business, which brought out multiple editions of his sermons. It is as a natural phenomenon, however, that Franklin is most interested in Whitefield. Whitefield was known for his powerful voice, and for a powerful influence on his listeners. It was said that he “could throw an audience into paroxysms by pronouncing ‘Mesopotamia.’”7 Franklin offers multiple descriptions of Whitefield’s sermons, but always as the detached observer, never as the inner convert. Here is his account of a sermon Whitefield gave in Philadelphia: 2 This is Avihu Zakai’s thesis in Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). The term disenchantment of the world was first used by Max Weber, who wrote: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations” (“Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated, edited, and with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155). Taylor defines Weberian disenchantment as “the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order” (Taylor, Sources, 17). 3 Taylor uses the term throughout A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), e.g. 37–41. 4 See the discussion in Chapter 1. 5 Benjamin Franklin, Writings, J. A. Leo Lemay, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 1278. 6 Harry S. Stout, “Edwards as Revivalist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, Stephen J. Stein, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136. On some differences between Edwards and Whitefield, see Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949), 141–4. 7 Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 133.

50

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

He had a loud and clear Voice, and articulated his Words & Sentences so perfectly that he might be heard and understood at a great Distance, especially as his Auditories, however numerous, observ’d the most exact Silence. He preach’d one Evening from the Top of the Court House Steps, which are in the Middle of Market Street, and on the West Side of Second Street which crosses it at right angles. Both Streets were fill’d with his Hearers to a considerable Distance. Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the Curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the Street towards the River, and I found his Voice distinct till I came near Front-Street, when some Noise in that Street obscur’d it. Imagining then a Semi-Circle, of which my Distance should be the Radius, and that it were fill’d with Auditors, to each of whom I allow’d two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than Thirty-Thousand. This reconcil’d me to the Newspaper Accounts of his having preach’d to 25000 People in the Fields, and to the antient Histories of Generals haranguing whole Armies, of which I had sometimes doubted.8

Unlike Edwards, Franklin is not in tears. He is curious. He thinks, he walks, he calculates, finding a way to investigate a claim—but not one of Whitefield’s. There is not one word in this paragraph about what Whitefield says. Like Richard Rorty, who was fond of characterizing language as a set of “marks and noises” that human beings “exchange” or bat back and forth,9 Franklin here investigates not the content of Whitefield’s remarks, but the physical effects of his voice, simply considered as noise or sound: that is, as a natural phenomenon. Franklin sees Whitefield not as part of a “history of the work of redemption,” but as a man who, because of the power of his voice, is to be compared to ancient “Generals haranguing whole Armies.” Ever the investigator, Franklin can now provide confirming evidence for these accounts. This is the Franklin who brought vials of oil on a transatlantic voyage to see if it would really calm the waters (he finally concluded not), and who a decade later became famous for his investigations of electricity. Franklin is disengaged in the sense that he does not have to follow anything except his own curiosity and invention. He is not taking direction from some outside or penetrating force. Disengagement can be a form of control, and was in the Enlightenment.10 By objectifying Whitefield’s speech, considering it only as a natural phenomenon, Franklin deprives Whitefield’s speech of all normative force, a fact Franklin parades before the reader of his Autobiography. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes announces an instrumental approach to nature that is made possible by its lack of normative force. We can do what we want with it in short: it is possible to attain knowledge which is very useful in life . . . instead of that speculative philosophy which is taught in the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of 8

Franklin, Writings, 1408–9. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15, 17; and “Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reification of Language,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 63. 10 Taylor, Sources, 160. 9

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

51

which, knowing the force and the action of fire, water, air, the stars, heavens and all other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.11

Franklin wishes precisely to know the force and action of air, as Whitefield puts it into motion before an audience of twenty-five thousand people in Philadelphia. His great fame as a student of electricity came not only from the theoretical proof that lightning is the same phenomenon as static electricity stored in a Leyden jar (see Section 3, p. 66 below), but from the control that his lightning rod gave people over a force that for the entire history of humankind had threatened their lives. In another passage from his Autobiography, Franklin investigates his own reactions to Whitefield’s sermons, and here we do learn something about what Whitefield says: he wants people to give him money. His power to elicit such a response was so well known that people who were merely curious to hear him would empty their pockets before attending his sermons. As Franklin puts it: “his Eloquence had a wonderful Power over the Hearts & Purses of his Hearers, of which I myself was an Instance.” This “Power”—which we see as if from the outside—is shown in Franklin’s case when, intending to hear Whitefield, he silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper, Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the Silver; & he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my Pocket wholly into the Collector’s Dish, Gold and all.12

We never learn what motivated Franklin, though it is, of course, something meaningful that Whitefield said, possibly including the establishment of a school, a cause near to Franklin’s heart. But Franklin dramatizes his detachment from that message even as he admits that it works on him, precisely by not finding it a matter of importance to say what it was. Whatever Franklin’s motives in contributing to Whitefield’s enterprises, he was to benefit from the Great Hall that was constructed for Whitefield in Philadelphia. When it was no longer used for revivals after the decline of the Great Awakening, Franklin, who sat on the Hall’s board of overseers, secured the building in 1750 for his Philadelphia Academy, the ancestor of the University of Pennsylvania. It was the first nonsectarian college in America.13

b. Deism Franklin was proud to call himself a deist. He claims to have arrived at this position in his fifteenth year, 1721: 11 13

12 Cited in Taylor, Sources, 149. Franklin, Writings, 1407. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 147.

52

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

My Parent’s [sic] had early given me religious Impressions, and brought me through my Childhood piously in the Dissenting Way. But I was scarce 15 when, after doubting by turns of several Points as I found them disputed in the different Books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation it self. Some Books against Deism fell into my Hands; they were said to be the Substance of Sermons preached at Boyle’s Lectures. It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much Stronger than the Refutations. In short I soon became a thorough Deist.14

The year 1721 was the year of Edward’s conversion experience. Franklin’s “doubt of Revelation” and his turn towards deism were not induced by what he took to be a reception of God’s presence, but by “Arguments” between the deists and their opponents. Franklin’s own sifting of these arguments, his own reason or thinking, led him to embrace the position that Edwards later condemned as denying Christianity entirely.15 Two years later, just as Edwards’s religious commitment was deepening, Franklin left New England for what his biographer Carl Van Doren characterizes as “an ampler scene and regions more tolerant.”16 Franklin’s position on religion is expressed as much by his tone as by the content of his remarks. Looking back to his youthful days in his brother James’s print shop, he writes that on Sundays, “I contrived to be in the Printing House alone, evading as much as I could the common Attendance on publick Worship, which my Father used to exact of me when I was under his Care:—And which indeed I still thought a Duty; tho’ I could not, as it seemed to me, afford the Time to practice it.”17 Franklin does not angrily reject religion. He admits that he thought it a duty to attend church, but he also makes clear that he did not consider it an overriding duty. He had better things to do: reading “Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates,” “Locke on Human Understanding,” Addison and Steele’s Spectator, the deists Anthony Collins and Lord Shaftesbury.18 Shaftesbury reinforced Franklin’s doubts concerning “many Points of our Religious Doctrine,” and, along with Addison and Steele, provided Franklin with examples of a gently witty, pointed style of writing that he was to make his own. He literally rewrote essays from The Spectator from memory, and then compared them with the originals to see which were superior.19 In Shaftesbury, Franklin found not only a style but an epistemological justification for wit, humor, and ridicule. In “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” Shaftesbury writes: “Truth, it is supposed, may bear all lights, and one of those principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough

14

15 Franklin, Writings, 1359. See Zakai, Edwards’s Philosophy of History, 261–2. Carl Van Doren, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), xvii. 17 Franklin, Writings, 1320. 18 19 Franklin, Writings, 1319, 1321. Franklin, Writings, 1319–20. 16

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

53

recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject.”20 Paul K. Conkin observes that Franklin: was completely lacking in personal piety. He was self-sufficient, increasingly sure of his own freedom, and unconcerned about his standing in the eyes of God. Sin was an alien concept. God had been so good to Ben Franklin that Franklin had to assume that God loved him . . . If Franklin had accidentally met God on Market Street, he would have shook [sic] hands.21

Like many deists, self-proclaimed or not, Franklin’s views on God were a mix, and he writes with so many identities that it is never entirely certain what his real views are. Near the end of his life, in a speech at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he proclaimed that a “special Providence” had guided the course of the American Revolution. Whether one takes this just as a piece of political rhetoric or a sincere expression of belief, Franklin did not then or ever embrace biblical revelation, or Edwards’s view that God sustains and guides the universe at every moment. It would be a mistake, however, to think that Franklin’s deism was, as Edwards and others said of all forms of deism, just atheism in disguise. Like almost everybody in the eighteenth century, Franklin found it natural to conceive of a universe that was created by a supreme being. That belief forms part of what Taylor (following Wittgenstein and Heidegger) calls “the background”: a set of beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that guide people’s lives—not just philosophers’ lives. In A Secular Age, Taylor describes a movement over the last five hundred years “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”22 The deists of the eighteenth century are midway in Taylor’s narrative, and Franklin is a perfect representative. God is not at the center of Franklin’s attention, but he is never entirely dismissed. Franklin’s belief in God is part of the background, not the foreground, of his life. Taylor writes: “Real unbelievers, such as the world knows in profusion today, that is, people who clearly in their own mind reject a belief in God, were not all that numerous in 1751, though the few who fit the description were highly placed.”23 Those highly placed unbelievers included Paul-Henry Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), whose Le Syste`me de la nature (1770) is an explicitly atheistic work. Holbach wrote: Let man cease to search outside of the world he lives in, for beings that provide him with a happiness which nature refuses him: let him study nature, that he learn its laws, that he 20 Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Lawrence E. Klein, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 30. 21 Paul K. Conkin, Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005), 83–4. 22 23 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3. Taylor, A Secular Age, 225.

54

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

contemplate its energy and the immutable way it acts; let him apply his discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to laws from whose binding force nothing can remove him.24

The radical and unusual nature of atheism in the mid-eighteenth century is illustrated by David Hume’s visit to Holbach in the early 1760s. The great Scottish skeptic expressed doubt whether there were any atheists in the world. In a story substantiated by Diderot, co-editor of the Encyclopedia and one of the dinner guests: “Look around you,” Holbach replied, “and count the guests.” There were eighteen at table. “Not bad,” said Holbach. “I can show you fifteen atheists right off. The other three haven’t yet made up their minds.”25

Franklin’s lifelong critique of religion, scientific accomplishments, and faith in human power amidst the laws of nature have much in common with Holbach, Diderot, Voltaire, and other figures of the French Enlightenment. Many of them were his friends during his years in Paris in the 1770s and 1780s. If one were to make a case for the claim that Franklin was an atheist rather than an untroubled, genial deist, the evidence would include his comfort level in the salon of Madame Helvetius (widow of an avowed atheist) in the 1780s, and at the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, where the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) and Voltaire were members. Back in America in the last year of his life, 1790, Franklin defined his deism in a letter to the Congregational minister Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, who had written to him concerning his opinion of Jesus of Nazareth. The tone is cheerful and confident. Franklin writes of his belief in a supreme being who created the world and governs it “by his Providence,” but states that he recognizes such a belief in many different sects. “As to Jesus of Nazareth,” he continues: my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.26

A question central to the life of true virtue as described by Edwards—the divinity of Jesus, upon which much of Christianity depends—is one which Franklin “never studied,” and for which he has no time, even at the end of his life. Here again we see Franklin’s characteristic witty detachment. He approaches the question of the

24

Cited in Taylor, Sources, 326. Cited in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, v. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 400–1. Carl L. Becker speaks of the eighteenth century as a period in which “God was on trial” (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (2nd ed.) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 73. 26 Franklin, Writings, 1179. 25

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

55

“Truth” of this religious question as the scientific observer he is, untroubled by the “big risk” he might be taking by not having gotten himself into a better relation with divinity. That risk appears as a live option to someone like Edwards, who dwells in a normative world of symbols and divine interventions that Franklin rejects from the start. We are “jealous” of Franklin, Conkin maintains, “for his maturity is frightening. And one hates him because he seems aloof and insensitive. And one loves him because he is kind. And all are forced to admire him, for he is great. He may be the American Socrates.”27 Or perhaps he is halfway to being the American Nietzsche. In the face of his essential cheerfulness, one thinks of an aphorism from a section of The Gay Science beginning “The meaning of our cheerfulness . . . ,” where Nietzsche writes of the “greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable.” Franklin doesn’t find the Christian god unbelievable, but he doesn’t believe in a specifically Christian God. If God is not quite dead for Franklin, he is on the sidelines, and Franklin is a strong enough character to entertain what Nietzsche calls the “suspicion” of the death of God. We see this precisely in his response to Stiles’s question about the divinity of Jesus, and his confidence in his own, and humanity’s own, powers. That confidence chimes with the last paragraph of Nietzsche’s section on “The meaning of our cheerfulness”: Indeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”28

Franklin sails this open sea, with “the daring of the lover of knowledge,” and a deep confidence. Although Franklin lived fifty-two of his eighty-four years as a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards, he operated in a very different framework, in which religion was a choice, divinity had receded as an element in explanation and experience, and the main action was by human beings in such public spaces as newspapers, conventions, salons, and scientific societies. Franklin saw nothing unique about Christianity, was not a regular churchgoer, and contributed to every sect, including, in 1788, Congregation Mikveh Israel for a new synagogue in Philadelphia.29 He never tired of attacking the pretentions of religious dogmatists, especially Christian ones. In one of his last such efforts, “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North-America (1784),”

27 28 29

Conkin, Puritans and Pragmatists, 74. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 280. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 468.

56

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

he tells the story of a Swedish minister who describes the historical facts on which his religion is based in a sermon to the “Chiefs of the Sasquehanah Indians,” including the Fall of our first Parents by Eating an Apple, the Coming of Christ to repair the Mischief, his Miracles and Suffering, &c. When he had finished, an Indian Orator stood up to thank him. What you have told us, says he, is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat Apples. It is better to make them all into Cyder. We are much obliged by your Kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your Mothers. In Return I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours.30

The orator then tells of an ancestral hunting society in which people eat only meat, and of the descent from the clouds of “a beautiful young Woman” who introduces them to corn, beans, and tobacco. After hearing this narrative, the minister responds: “[W]hat I delivered to you were sacred Truths; but what you tell me is mere Fable, Fiction, & Falsehood.” The offended Indian complains that the minister is deficient in common civility: “we . . . believed all your Stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?”31 Franklin, one might say, believes all the stories, or none of them. His breezy account of the Old and New Testaments, and his equation of them with the narratives of the Sasquehanahs, is characteristic of a man who did not trouble himself with religious dogma.

2. Forms of Secularity: Invention and the Public Use of Reason Although Jonathan Edwards knew people who did not attend church, in his thought, and in the institutions within which he worked, the Christian God was pervasive— alive, not dead. Franklin, in contrast, operated in a world of multiple secular spaces, a world of newspapers and journals, of the clubs and societies that he joined, then of transatlantic science; and later the world of the British Parliament, French salons, and the American Congress and Constitutional Convention. One can distinguish distinct spheres of secular discourse, understanding, and power emerging in the eighteenth century—economic, political, scientific, and so on—but also what Taylor, following Jürgen Habermas, calls “a common space of discussion through media—in the eighteenth century, print media. Books, pamphlets, newspapers circulated among the educated public . . . These were widely read, and often discussed in face-to-face gatherings, in drawing rooms, coffee houses, salons, and/or in more (authoritatively) ‘public’ places, like Parliament.”32 This new eighteenth-century public sphere supported a new kind of power, the power of critique. It was “a space of discussion which is self-consciously seen as being outside power,” but which is nevertheless “normative for power”: “a discourse of reason on and to power, rather than by power.”33 30 32

Franklin, Writings, 971. Taylor, A Secular Age, 186.

31

Franklin, Writings, 971, 972. 33 Taylor, A Secular Age, 189–90, 191.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

57

Franklin thrived in the transatlantic public space that linked France, England, Scotland, and America. During his years in England (1757–75) as an agent of various American colonies, including Georgia and his own Pennsylvania, Franklin lived in the world of coffee houses, clubs, and royal societies. His biographer, Leo LeMay, describes the weekly “routine of club attendance” that Franklin established in 1758: dining with a group of scientists and explorers (including James Cook) on Mondays, and then on Thursdays with the “Club of Honest Whigs, at St. Paul’s Coffeehouse”, whose members included Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and, occasionally, James Boswell. On Sundays, Franklin frequently dined with a group that included Sir John Pringle, Alexander Small, and David Hume.34 This was the Franklin whom Hume called the “first Philosopher” of America.35

a. The Junto Franklin’s social nature and his invention of new forms of public life were evident in his early days in Philadelphia, when he organized the Junto.36 This was a group of young tradesmen who met weekly for self-improvement, economic benefit, and social and political critique. Initiates were required to stand, lay their hand on their breasts, and answer properly four questions: 1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members?—Answer: I have not. 2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever?—Answ. I do. 3. Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship?—Ans. No. 4. Do you love truth for truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others?37—Answ. Yes. Far from the statement of a particular religion, these questions put distance between all religious concerns and the Junto’s work, which was to occur in a context of respect for all, no matter what their religion or profession. Franklin’s second question chimes with the Enlightenment focus on increasing the happiness of humankind in general, not just members of a particular nation or religion. The third question, defending freedom of worship and speech (“mere speculative opinions”) reveals Franklin’s 34

Franklin, Writings, 1480–1 (editor’s chronology). In a letter to Franklin written in 1762 (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959—) vol. 10, 81–2). 36 The word “junto” was used in England and America to mean “a body of men who have joined or combined for a common purpose, especially of a political character.” William Penn used the term in this sense in 1708, and Washington Irving later (1820) used the term in a more general sense to mean a group of men without any formal organization: “At the corners are assembled juntos of village idlers and wise men.” (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1522. 37 Franklin, Writings, 207. 35

58

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

commitment to the principles that would be embodied in the first amendment to the U. S. Constitution, ratified some sixty years later in 1791. The fourth question— written decades before the scientific achievements that made him famous—reveals his commitment to objective truth and the freedom of thought which is a precondition for its discovery. Franklin formed the Junto in 1727, at the age of twenty-one, when he was working in Samuel Keimer’s print shop. “It was the only college he ever attended.”38 (Franklin is the only philosopher studied here who did not attend college.) By 1732 Franklin had written the four initiation questions cited above, and established a list of queries not for admission but to guide the discussion at each meeting. These included: Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? particularly in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge . . . Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate? . . . Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves? . . . Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country, of which it would be proper to move the legislature for an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting? . . . Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?39

This mix of the self-interested and the other-directed, of the desire to know and the desire to improve, of a concern for “just liberties” and for helping “mankind” is characteristic both of Franklin and of the new “enlightened” thinking of his time. Franklin believed, as many deists did, that we are designed by the creator to seek not only our happiness, but that of others. This benevolence—serviceability to mankind as Franklin puts it—is both natural and virtuous. In a happy harmony, benevolence need not conflict with our own self-interest, economic and otherwise. This is the deist formula that we find in Tindal, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Adam Smith: we may justifiably concern ourselves with human (not heavenly) happiness, because that is what we were created to pursue. This concern with human happiness runs through Franklin’s social and political projects, as it runs through the Enlightenment, where, as Becker writes, “the end of life is life itself, the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death; [and] man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth.”40 We also see in Franklin’s Junto questions, more than forty years before the American Revolution, a society in which people are used to petitioning their legislatures and a concern for the “just liberties of the people.” The twenty-six-year-old Franklin was concerned both with what a government can do, and with a domain of personal freedom into which the government may not enter.

38 40

Conkin, Puritans and Pragmatists, 77. Becker, Heavenly City, 102.

39

Franklin, Writings, 206–7.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

59

Franklin’s use of the phrase “the people” and his focus on liberty are characteristic both of the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and of the interwoven “republican” tradition that includes, besides Locke, John Milton (1608–74), James Harrington (1611–77), Algernon Sidney (1623–83), John Trenchard (1662–1723), and Thomas Gordon (1692–1750).41 Franklin read Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters before he left Boston, as we can tell, because he quotes them in his first series of publications, written under the pseudonym “Silence Dogood.” One of these quotations is a defense of freedom of speech, and a warning about the possibility of tyranny: “That Men ought to speak well of their Governours is true, while their Governours deserve to be well spoken of; but to do publick Mischief, without hearing of it, is only the Prerogative and Felicity of Tyranny: A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their Freedom of Speech.”42 We see here some issues of the American Revolution in embryo and, in the teenage Franklin’s citation of them, a deep political interest that continues through the American Revolution.

b. Printing Franklin’s emerging confidence as a writer is evident in the “Apology for Printers” (1731), which he published under his own name after two years as editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Responding to complaints from many sides about what he printed, he writes of “a vast Unconcernedness” among printers about what they print: Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.43

It is not just that printers work for all (or almost all)44 people who desire their services, but that this equality of “being heard” is beneficial, for it allows truth to emerge. Franklin concludes the “Apology for Printers” with a parable that shows his characteristic use of humor to support his position. He tells of a man who rides on

41 See Hannah Dawson, “English Republicanism,” in the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, A. C. Grayling et al., eds. (London: Continuum, 2006), vol. 4, 2697–700; James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, J. G. A. Pocock, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and other Important Subjects, 2 vols, Ronald Hamowy, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995); and Chapter 3 below. 42 43 Franklin, Writings, 24. Franklin, Writings, 172. 44 Franklin acknowledges that most printers exercise judgment with regard to what they print, and refuses to publish pieces that do “real Injury to any Person,” “countenance Vice,” or “promote Immorality” (Franklin, Writings, 173).

60

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

his mule, letting his son walk alongside. Someone says to him, let your son ride too, so his son gets on, but then another man says that’s mistreating the mule, and when they both get off another points out how stupid they are not to use such a resource. Unable to satisfy everyone, the father decides to throw the mule over the next bridge so they will not have to worry about him. Although his nature is “almost as complying” as the father’s, Franklin writes, “I intend not to imitate him in this last Particular. I consider the Variety of Humours among Men, and despair of pleasing every Body; yet I shall not therefore leave off Printing . . . I shall not burn my Press and melt my Letters.”45 Nine years later, when Franklin’s friend Ebenezer Kinnersley was barred from the pulpit of the Baptist Church because he had criticized George Whitefield, Franklin printed Kinnersley’s defense in the Pennsylvania Gazette with another apology for printers which begins: “It is a Principle among Printers, that when Truth has fair Play, it will always prevail over Falsehood.”46 Franklin was a very successful printer and businessman. By the time he retired in 1748 at the age of forty-two, he had, in the words of his biographer, Walter Isaacson, established “a media conglomerate that included production capacity (printing operations, franchised printers in other cities), products (a newspaper, magazine, almanac), content (his own writings, his alter ego Poor Richard’s, and those of his Junto), and distribution (eventually the whole of the colonial postal system).”47 Franklin was appointed Philadelphia postmaster in 1737, and postmaster general of America in 1753.48

c. The Academy of Philadelphia Franklin’s greatest educational project was the Academy of Philadelphia. He conceived it as a modern school, in accord with writings of Locke, Milton, and Hutcheson. Works in English were to constitute the curriculum, and practical knowledge and physical training would be integrated. Franklin’s “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania” (1749) aims to increase human happiness and serve the public, in good Enlightenment fashion: “The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Common-wealths. Almost all Governments have therefore made it a principal Object of their Attention, to establish and endow with proper Revenues, such Seminaries of Learning.”49 The Academy was to have a central House and a library or access to the town’s library for “Maps of all Countries, Globes, some mathematical Instruments, and Apparatus for Experiments in Natural Philosophy.”50 Boarding scholars were to dine together and “[t]o keep them in

45

Franklin, Writings, 176–7. Benjamin Franklin, The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Ketcham, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 33–4. 47 48 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 60. Franklin, Writings, 1404, 1429. 49 50 Franklin, Writings, 324. Franklin, Writings, 327. 46

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

61

Health, and to strengthen and render active their Bodies” they were to be “frequently exercis’d in Running, Leaping, Wrestling, and Swimming.”51 (Franklin was a strong swimmer, who on his first trip to England jumped into the Thames and “swam from near Chelsea to Blackfryars, performing on the Way many Feats of Activity both upon & under Water, that surpriz’d & pleas’d those to whom they were Novelties.”52) The Philadelphia Academy’s curriculum was to include writing, arithmetic, geometry, and English authors such as Addison, Pope, Algernon Sydney, Trenchard, and Gordon. Advanced students were to read histories of the ancient world and of modern commerce and trade. Histories of the “the work of redemption” were not included. Near the end of the proposal, Franklin writes of the importance for morality of a “publick religion” and of the supremacy of the Christian religion to all others. But the secular orientation of Franklin’s mid-century proposal—at the end of the decade of the Great Awakening—is hard to miss, and was not missed by George Whitefield, whose Great Hall Franklin secured for the school. Whitefield commended Franklin’s proposal, but complained “there wants aliquid Christi in it, to make it as useful as I would desire it might be.”53 For Whitefield, as for Edwards, one science is above them all, that concerning God. As far as Franklin’s proposed curriculum was concerned, there was no such science.54 Franklin writes in his Autobiography that he and Whitefield had a civil friendship but not a religious one: “He us’d indeed sometimes to pray for my Conversion, but never had the Satisfaction of believing that his Prayers were heard.”55

d. “The Albany Plan of Union” Franklin became a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1751, and served as one of Pennsylvania’s representatives at a conference with Mohawk, Seneca, and Delaware leaders in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1753. The French and English struggled for control of the Ohio Valley that lay on the Pennsylvania frontier, and Franklin was an adept negotiator and organizer—for example, of a Pennsylvania militia. In the longer run, he thought, a union of the colonies for common defense against the French and hostile Indian tribes was necessary. This was the position he promoted in 1754, when he was a delegate to a second conference in Albany, New York organized by the London Board of Trade, with representatives from Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Franklin’s “Albany Plan of Union” was approved by the delegates to the conference, but rejected both by the Board of Trade and the

51

52 Franklin, Writings, 327–8. Franklin, Writings, 1351. Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 52. 54 55 Cf. Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment, 51. Franklin, Writings, 1408. 53

62

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

assemblies of the colonies. It reveals another aspect of Franklin’s inventiveness, what he would later call his “experiments in politics.”56 Franklin’s plan anticipates the United States Constitution that he was to work on and sign three decades later. It calls for the establishment of “one General Government . . . in America, including all the said Colonies, within and under which Government, each Colony may retain its present Constitution, except in the Particulars wherein a Change may be directed by the said Act.”57 This was to be a federation or federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) system: an agreement among individual states, each with its own “Constitution.” The states were to cede some powers to the central government, and in Franklin’s plan these powers were substantial, involving war, peace, defense, and taxation. The taxation powers of Franklin’s General Government were far stronger than those set out eventually in the Articles of Confederation (1777) under which the new United States government fought the Revolutionary War. Franklin used recent history to justify his plan’s strong central authority. Only one of seven nearby states had come to Virginia’s aid when it was invaded by the French, and Franklin noted that a “principal encouragement to the French, in invading and insulting the British American dominions, was their knowledge of our disunited state, and of our weakness arising from such want of union.”58 The plan also called for a divided government, a hallmark of eighteenth-century republicanism: a “President General” appointed by the Crown, and a “Grand Council to be Chosen by the Representatives of the People of the several Colonies, met in their respective Assemblies.”59 Of course it was to be the British Parliament—not the people of the colonies—that was supreme both in appointing the President General, and in ratifying any action taken by him and the Grand Council together. Nevertheless, the plan contains a key significant democratic element in its inclusion of “the People” as the basis of the Grand Council. Its provision for elections every three years was designed to assure that the council represented the people. Franklin’s position was in accord with Cato’s Letters (which Silence Dogood had cited in 1722) in advocating more, but by no means complete, power or authority for the people. “Cato” argues both that it is prudent for a ruler to act in the people’s interest and that the only legitimate justification for government is “the people’s welfare.” He accepts rule by a government that will “consult” the people, but his assertion of the primary role of the people in legitimizing government is also clear: The first principles of power are in the people; and all the projects of men in power ought to refer to the people, to aim solely at their good, and end in it: And whoever will pretend to govern them without regarding them, will soon repent it. Such feats of errantry may do perhaps in Asia: but in countries where the people are free, it is madness to hope to rule them against their wills.60 56 57 60

Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 158–62, 457 (from a letter to La Rochefoucauld). 58 59 Franklin, Writings, 378. Franklin, Writings, 383. Franklin, Writings, 378. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, vol. 1, 175.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

63

There is certainly a threat here: the threat of revolution, which had a particular resonance in England after the violence of the Puritan Revolution of 1640 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Franklin did not argue for these “first principles,” but his plan was in accordance with them. It was resisted by the same entrenched interests in England that Cato’s Letters opposed, as well as by the colonial assemblies, who were wary of a strong federal government. As Franklin puts it in his Autobiography: “The Assemblies did not adopt [the plan], as they all thought there was too much Prerogative in it; and in England it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic: The Board of Trade therefore did not approve of it; nor recommend it for the Approbation of his Majesty.”61 Looking back on his Albany Plan of Union after the Revolution, Franklin speculates that, had it been approved, the subsequent Separation of the Colonies from the Mother Country might not so soon have happened, nor the Mischiefs suffered on both sides have occurred . . . For the Colonies, if so united, would have really been, as they then thought themselves, sufficient to their own Defence, and being trusted with it, as by the Plan, an Army from Britain, for that purpose would have been unnecessary: The Pretences for framing the Stamp-Act would then not have existed, nor the other Projects for drawing a Revenue from America to Britain by Acts of Parliament, which were the Cause of the Breach.62

In the eighteenth century people argued about what sort of government to have, rather than taking the existing political arrangements as something given by divine authority. As we saw in Chapter 1, John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious was both an attack on the mysteries of religion and on Tory political theory, according to which, as King James I wrote, there are “mysteries of the king’s power.”63 Franklin eschewed mystery, though there were many questions to which he did not have the answer. He worked in the large public space of rational persuasion, not only on the Albany Plan, but in his earlier defense of freedom of the press, establishment of the Junto as a place for free discussion, and of the Academy of Philadelphia as a forum for learning, criticism, and experimentation. This is the space that, at the end of the century, Immanuel Kant identified as an essential precondition of enlightenment. Kant wrote: “The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind.”64 Franklin uses his reason publicly, in his guises as printer, author, political theorist and dealmaker, community organizer, and (as we see in Section 3 below) scientist. Kant defined “enlightenment” as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use

61

62 Franklin, Writings, 1431. Franklin, Writings, 401. Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 235. 64 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, Ted Humphrey, trans. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 42. 63

64

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

one’s understanding without guidance from another.”65 Franklin, of course, accepted guidance in many areas, but he was mature in Kant’s sense: working from his own sight of things as an independent thinker, creator, and discloser of nature. This latter achievement of Franklin’s—the one that first made him a figure on the European stage—is our next subject.

3. Franklin the Natural Philosopher The possibility of error and surprise are essential to science. If we are only looking for support for what we already believe, then we engage in what Charles Sanders Peirce calls “sham reasoning.”66 Real reasoning, whether in science or philosophy, must be susceptible to detectable error, and thus to improvement. Sham reasoning allows the conclusion to determine the thinking, so that the conclusion is never overturned. Voltaire’s Candide is an example of sham reasoning: there is nothing horrible enough—plagues, earthquakes, etc.—to constitute evidence against the theory, propounded by Leibniz and others, that this is the “best of all possible worlds.” Franklin was best known in his day as a scientist or natural philosopher, a theorist of electricity and inventor of the lightning rod, a member of the British Royal Society, and the author of a best-selling book on electricity: Experiments & Observations on Electricity made at Philadelphia in America (1751). Franklin’s book was a sensation in part because he recorded his errors and false theories along with his successes, illustrating the scientific method at work. As he explains his approach in a letter to a friend: I find a frank acknowledgment of one’s ignorance is not only the easiest way to get rid of a difficulty, but the likeliest way to obtain information, and therefore I practice it: I think it an honest policy. Those who affect to be thought to know every thing, and so undertake to explain every thing, often remain long ignorant of many things that others could and would instruct them in, if they appeared less conceited.67

Franklin’s novel acknowledgments of ignorance and error, theoretical and experimental brilliance, and pervasive humor, made for an irresistible scientific classic that went through five editions in English and was translated into French, German, and Italian.68 The French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, read the

Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 41. See Susan Haack’s discussion in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), where she cites Peirce as writing: “[When] it is no longer the reasoning which determines what the conclusion shall be, but . . . the conclusion which determines what the reasoning shall be . . . this is sham reasoning . . .” (31). 67 Franklin, Political Thought, 109 (letter to John Lining, March, 1755). 68 I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1956), 36. 65 66

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

65

book and arranged a French translation in 1752.69 Diderot recommended the book in 1753 as “the highest expression of experimental science.” Joseph Priestly praised the book for its “simplicity and perspicacity,” “the modesty with which the author proposes every hypothesis of his own” and “the noble frankness with which he relates his mistakes when they were corrected by subsequent experiments.”70 When Franklin issued a revised fourth edition of his book in 1769, he added footnotes and emendations that indicated not only views for which he found more confirmation, but those he had disconfirmed—such as his claim that lightning works by cold rather than hot fusion.71 Franklin made three theoretical contributions in his book. First is the idea that electric matter is found throughout nature, that in his experiments with glass tubes and more sophisticated contrivances he was not “creating, but collecting” the electrical matter “diffused in our walls, floors, earth, and the whole mass of common matter.”72 Second is the idea that bodies contain electrical matter in different forms or stages, which he calls “null,” “plus,” and “minus,” thus inventing our terms for positive and negative charge. His theory is designed to explain the attraction of small bodies to a rubbed glass rod, and the simultaneous repulsion of other such rods. Rubbing, he argues, takes electrical matter from one place and places it in another, and if there is too much (or plus) in two bodies, they will repel one another. As Cohen points out, Franklin’s idea of plus or minus charge is a quantitative concept: one can determine how much plus a body has by how strongly it attracts other bodies. It is also, Cohen maintains, “an invented concept, because we do not observe ‘charge’ in nature.”73 Franklin’s third theoretical contribution was to argue that electric matter is conserved. Newton’s physics is based on the conservation of momentum, but Newton did not posit the conservation of matter (which he thought might be turned into light), and he hardly discusses electricity. Eighteenth-century physics, like the physics of the ancient world, was familiar with mass, light, energy, and heat, but not with electricity. Galileo and Newton produced “near-complete systems of the universe without giving electricity more than a passing comment.”74 It was not obvious that the newly identified electrical matter was conserved.75 Franklin confirmed his principle of the conservation of electricity in experiments he performed in Philadelphia, using new methods of generating and gathering electricity. The first of these, which Franklin and others invented independently, consisted of machines, in Franklin’s case a whirling globe of glass to which a cloth attached to a conductor could be applied. One could use the machine to generate sparks or shocks from the conductor, or one could transfer the electric matter to a newly invented storage device, known by the location of one of its discoverers, a

69 71 73 74

70 Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 488. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 73. 72 Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 72. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 482. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 287, 299–300. 75 Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 285–6. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 299–301.

66

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Professor of Physics at the University of Leyden. This was the Leyden jar, a predecessor of the battery.76 One stored electricity by applying the conducting wire from the spinning globe to a wire coming out of the Leyden jar. Franklin established that the amount of charge inside the jar was equal to the amount of charge on the outside surface. Franklin also learned to hook up a series of Leyden jars to constitute what we now call a battery. Leyden jars were all the rage in the 1740s and 1750s. Princes were eager to “see this new fire which a man produced from himself, which did not descend from heaven.”77 By discharging them, one could “cause hundreds of persons holding hands to leap into the air simultaneously.”78 As Franklin also discovered, they could endanger one’s life: I inadvertently took the whole [discharge] thro’ my own Arms and Body . . . the flash was very great and the crack as loud as a Pistol; yet my Senses being instantly gone, I neither Saw the one nor heard the other . . . I . . . felt what I know not how well to describe; an universal Blow thro’out my whole Body from head to foot which seem’d within as well as without; after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick Shaking of my body.79

These novel and intriguing playthings moved from drawing room entertainment to tools for scientific inquiry after it was established, through the experiments that Franklin first suggested, that one could charge a Leyden jar as easily from a cloud as from the whirling globe of one of Franklin’s “electrical machines.” A phenomenon that had been taken to be the thunderbolts of Zeus or, as by Jonathan Edwards, God’s voice, was shown to be identical to the humble static electricity that builds up on a woolen garment. That first successful experiment, performed by Franklin’s French translator, Thomas-Francois Dalibard, used Franklin’s design of a pointed metal rod mounted on a platform to gather electricity from a thunder cloud. Meanwhile Franklin thought of a new way to gather the electrical matter. Without knowing of the earlier confirmation of his theory, he successfully performed his kite experiment (while taking some steps to avoid electrocution) in 1752. Franklin describes the experiment as follows: As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them, and the Kite, with all the Twine, will be electrified, and the loose Filaments of the Twine will stand out every Way, and be attracted by an approaching Finger. And when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle. At this Key the Phial [Leyden jar] may be charg’d; and from Electric Fire thus obtain’d, Spirits may be kindled, and all the other Electric Experiments be perform’d, which are usually done by the

76

77 Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 385. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, 432. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science, quoted in James Campbell, Recovering Benjamin Franklin (Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999), 55, n. 49. 79 Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, 82–3. 78

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

67

Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube; and thereby the Sameness of the Electric Matter with that of Lightning compleatly demonstrated.80

Franklin was experienced enough not to gather the electric matter from lightning bolts, but from clouds early in the buildup of a storm, and he clearly argues that his experiment shows the identity or “sameness” of what is in the clouds with what can be produced by his electric machines. He thereby demystifies something previously regarded as mysterious and supernatural. A year later, Franklin announced a new invention in the Poor Richard’s Almanack. This was the lightning rod, which he offered freely to humankind.81 The efficacy and widespread use of these devices brought Franklin additional fame and gratitude. He was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1753 and elected a Fellow in 1756. When in 1757 he began a twenty-year period in England as the agent for various colonies, he arrived not in his beaver hat and plain wool suit (this would be later, in France, as a result of the loss of his trunk) but as the foremost scientist and man of letters of America.

4. Franklin on How to Live a. The Way to Wealth Franklin is the only writer considered in this volume who became wealthy. Edwards had a good salary as a minister and was criticized by his congregation for his extravagant tastes, but he was far from wealthy. Jefferson was wealthy to begin with, having inherited a large estate from his father, but he spent so generously and lavishly in Paris and at home in Virginia that he had to sell his library to the U. S. government to raise capital, and in his will arranged for the sale of most of his slaves to pay his debts. Though Emerson’s father was a respectable Unitarian minister, the modest means of the family are indicated by the fact that the young Ralph Waldo and his brother Edward had to share an overcoat in the winter.82 In his early thirties, Emerson inherited a modest estate from his first wife and bought a house, but he had to go on the lecture circuit to provide for his family. He was never wealthy. Henry Thoreau’s father manufactured pencils, and Thoreau worked in his father’s factory and as a surveyor. He adopted a life of voluntary poverty and demonstrates in Walden how little money we need to live an “extravagant” life. Franklin’s life was quite different from any of these. He did not attend college, as Edwards (Yale), Jefferson (William and Mary), Emerson (Harvard), and Thoreau (Harvard) did. He started working in his brother’s print shop in Boston at the age of

80

81 Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, 367. Franklin, Writings, 1278. Nathan Haskell Dole, “Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: T. Y. Crowell & Company, 1899), ix. 82

68

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

twelve,83 and after running away when he was seventeen, arrived in Philadelphia with his pockets stuffed with dirty shirts and stockings, and a hoard of cash that amounted to “a Dutch Dollar and about a Shilling in Copper.” His first meal in the new city consisted of a “Puffy Roll” and a “Draught of the River Water,” and he caught up on his sleep in a Quaker meeting-house, during the meeting.84 Twenty-five years later he had become a wealthy man. Franklin did not develop a moral philosophy in the sense of a general theory of the good or right. He provides, rather, a series of instructions on how to live, and a set of virtues, with his own experience acquiring wealth occupying a prominent place. Wealth is not the only good, though, for as his most famous alter ego, Poor Richard Saunders, writes: “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.”85 Franklin was all three of these. He was a healthy young man who amazed his new friends in London with his prowess as a swimmer, and lived to be, at eighty-one, the oldest signer of the United States Constitution. Franklin presents himself as wise in the Autobiography, though his readers may feel that his view of life is annoyingly simple. Emerson, who might have been expected to condemn Franklin’s concern with money, compares him to Socrates—or rather, Socrates to Franklin—when he states that Socrates “had a Franklin-like wisdom.”86 Unlike Socrates, Franklin pursued wealth, became wealthy, and placed wealth along with health and wisdom as one of the great aims of life. But he was in accord with Socrates and other Greek and Roman philosophers in thinking of wealth as enabling him to “retire” to a life of public service.87 “How to get RICHES,” as Poor Richard rather directly puts it, is a frequent concern of his Almanack. He points out that riches come as much from thrift as from acquisition, and that, although people “are not equally qualified for getting Money . . . it is in the Power of every one alike to practice [thrift].”88 Franklin compiled and republished some of Poor Richard’s best “Proverbial Sentences,”89 first in his Almanack in 1757, and then in a pamphlet entitled The Way to Wealth. This short work, Franklin tells us, was “copied in all the Newspapers of the Continent, reprinted in Britain on a Broadside to be stuck up in Houses, two Translations were made of it in French, and great Numbers bought by the Clergy & Gentry to distribute gratis among their poor Parishioners and Tenants.”90 Franklin’s focus in “How to Get Riches” is less on heaps of money than on thrift and industry, the means for developing and retaining riches. He is a good capitalist in the Weberian mode: entirely or almost entirely without God, but retaining the structure of constant strenuous effort that Calvinists like Edwards practiced. As Conkin 83

84 Franklin, Writings, 1317. Franklin, Writings, 1326, 1329–30. Franklin, Writings, 1198. 86 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 4, 40 (hereafter CW). 87 88 I owe this point to James Campbell. Franklin, Writings, 1255. 89 90 Franklin, Writings, 1397. Franklin, Writings, 1397–8. 85

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

69

observes, Franklin “remained a good Puritan” in that he “accepted the burden of Puritan secular morality, made harsh demands upon himself, worked hard, and was an incurable moralist in his approach to life.” But, he adds, “Franklin rejected the most basic aspect of Puritanism—the profound submission to, and acceptance of, God’s will.”91 Franklin’s aversion to wasting time in The Way to Wealth is the flip side of his devotion to industry: It would be thought a hard Government that should tax its People one tenth Part of their Time, to be employed in its Service. But Idleness taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent in absolute Sloth, or doing of nothing, with that which is spent in idle Employments or Amusements, that amount to nothing . . . Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labour wears, while the used Key is always bright, as Poor Richard says . . . —How much more than is necessary do we spend in Sleep! forgetting that The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the Grave, as Poor Richard says . . . Sloth makes all Things difficult, but Industry all easy, as Poor Richard says.92

There is a distinction, Franklin continues, between laziness and leisure. “Leisure, is Time for doing something useful; this Leisure the diligent Man will obtain, but the lazy Man never.”93 It must be said that Franklin’s “leisure” sounds a lot like work, and that his goal of unrelenting effort leaves no time or mental space for taking things in, for the “reception” and “listening” favored by the Romantics of the nineteenth century, among them Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau gets up early too, not to “work” as conventionally understood, but to swim in Walden Pond, which he considers a “religious exercise.” As if in parody of Franklin, Thoreau writes that his purpose in going to Walden Pond “was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.”94 Thoreau’s business makes time for a kind of leisure, and a kind of activity, that Franklin did not appreciate.

b. Franklin’s plan for moral perfection Around 1730, Franklin developed a plan of improvement that he followed to some degree for the rest of his life: “I conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any Fault at any time.”95 This proved to be more difficult than he first imagined: “[w]hile my Care was employ’d in guarding against one Fault, I was often surpriz’d by another.”96 But Franklin did not give up on his plan. As a way of regulating and organizing his moral improvement he composed a list of virtues and a chart to keep track of his progress: 91

92 Conkin, Puritans and Pragmatists, 84. Franklin, Writings, 1296. Franklin, Writings, 1297. 94 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden, J. Lyndon Shanley, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 19–20. 95 96 Franklin, Writings, 1383–4. Franklin, Writings, 1384. 93

70

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to Dulness—Drink not to Elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or your self. Avoid trifling Conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your Things have their Places. Let each Part of your Business have its Time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no Expence but to do good to others or yourself: i. e. Waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no Time.—Be always employ’d in something useful.—Cut off all unnecessary Actions— 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak; speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty. 9. MODERATION. Avoid Extreams. Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS Tolerate no Uncleanness in Body, Cloaths or Habitation.— 11. TRANQUILITY Be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. Rarely use Venery97 but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace or Reputation.— 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.—98

Among these thirteen virtues we find the “industry,” “frugality,” and “resolution” that are central to Franklin’s The Way to Wealth. There is more here, however. “Tranquility” was a major virtue in ancient Stoicism, and temperance, moderation, and justice were virtues for Plato and Aristotle. If one thinks of what might be missing here, there is no trace of anything heroic or courageous, a criticism Emerson makes in his essay “Milton” (1838): “Franklin’s man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but savors of nothing heroic.”99 Furthermore, 97 Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The practice or pursuit of sexual pleasure; indulgence of sexual desire” (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3603). 98 Franklin, Writings, 1384–5. 99 CW 10:81. Emerson’s criticism of Franklin, however apt, is in the context of criticisms of Locke, Hume, Bacon, and Rousseau, all of whom are said to be inferior to Milton. About Locke, for example,

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

71

Franklin does not mention friendship, which along with courage and wisdom, were considered by Plato and Aristotle as elements of the good life. He does not mention love, but speaks only of “using” venery, i.e. sex, for health or offspring. Max Weber saw Franklin’s list of virtues as embodying “the spirit of capitalism,” an ascetic dedication to making money that transforms Protestant self-scrutiny into single-minded attention to the self ’s progress in the secular project of creating wealth. It was not just Franklin’s desire to be wealthy to which Weber called attention, but his devotion to that task, his sense that he was called to it, that acquiring wealth was a supreme duty to which one might dedicate one’s life. As Weber puts it: “The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself.”100 Indeed, he claims that it is not simply an end but the end, that for Franklin “the earning of more and more money” replaces the relation to God. Franklin’s morality, Weber claims, is ascetic: “with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, [it] is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture.”101 D. H. Lawrence, writing twenty years after Weber, took another tack against Franklin, arguing that his approach to himself, and to life, was unimaginative and mechanical: I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. “This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,” saith Benjamin, and all America with him . . . I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance-silence-order-resolution-frugality-industrysincerity-justice-moderation-cleanliness-tranquility-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I’m really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.102

What Lawrence, a late English Romantic, misses in Franklin is suggested by the American Romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson when he writes at the end of “Circles”: “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire, is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory; and to do something without knowing how or why.”103 Franklin never wants to do something without knowing how or why. He never wants to forget himself. His moral perfectionism is not the search for a further or greater self—what Emerson calls the “unattained but attainable self.”104 It is an attempt to perfect the self that is already there.

Emerson states: “The man of Locke is virtuous without enthusiasm, intelligent without poetry . . .” (CW 10:81). One might say the same about the man of Franklin. 100

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons, trans., Richard Swedberg, ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 24. 101 Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 25. 102 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), 16. 103 104 Emerson, CW 2:190. In “History,” CW2: 5.

72

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

There is merit to these criticisms of Franklin, but they do not tell the whole story. In the first place they only consider Franklin’s list of virtues in his Autobiography, rather than other parts of that work and his other writings and actions. Even The Way to Wealth speaks of being healthy, wealthy, and wise, not just wealthy. And Franklin was wise. Perhaps—like Socrates—he didn’t think he could write a set of instructions or guidelines for attaining wisdom. One must also put into the balance Franklin’s characteristic Enlightenment concern for and influence on the good of humanity. Franklin eschewed patents on some of his most important inventions (e. g., the Franklin Stove or “Pennsylvania Fireplace” and the lightning rod), gave up his public salaries, and helped organize institutions from the Library Company to the United States of America. One must also credit Franklin for his success in detaching morality from theology—a key task of the Enlightenment—and for the strain of religious tolerance in his thinking and acting.105 And we must consider some other aspects of Franklin’s life, particularly his later life, which is mostly omitted from the Autobiography. (When he died in 1790, he had only begun writing about the late seventeen fifties.) He tells us there that he followed the list of virtues less and less as he grew older, but does not go into the details. When he arrived in France as America’s representative after the Declaration of Independence, he was considered a great hero, greeted by adoring crowds wanting to see the great scientist from the “backwoods” of America. His face and famous fur hat (which was actually Canadian) were the subject of special coins and celebratory chinaware. He was a success in the salons of Paris and at the court of Louis XVI, flirting with the women and amusing all (or almost all) with his wit.106 At home in the small village of Passy, Franklin wrote love letters to the wife of his landlord, stayed out late and slept in, and scandalized John Adams, with whom he worked in the American delegation. Adams confided to his diary in 1778: The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation . . . It was late when he breakfasted, and as soon as breakfast was over, a crowd of carriages came to his levee . . . some philosophers, academicians, and economists . . . but by far the greater part were women and children, come to have the honor to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head . . . He was invited to dine every day and never declined unless we had invited company to dine with us . . . [H]e came home at all hours from nine to twelve o’clock at night.107

105

Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 490–1. Marie Antoinette was originally a skeptic who saw Franklin as simply a tradesman. King Louis XVI, who complimented Franklin on his handling of the negotiations for the U.S. treaty with France, later grew so tired of hearing about him from the Comtesse de Polignac that he had a vase de nuit of Se`vres porcelain made for her with Franklin’s well-known image in the bottom. (Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 632.) 107 Quoted in Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 352. 106

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

73

Franklin’s Autobiography ends before his time in England and France. We can only imagine what he might have included—even as we know some of what he did not— had he continued telling his story. What is certain is that the Autobiography (which he began in 1771) gives us only a portion of Franklin’s life and thought. There is also the question of irony. Franklin believed in his list of virtues, and he sincerely recommended them, but he did so in a skeptical and even ironic manner, much as he had done with “Father Abraham’s Speech” in The Way to Wealth—which he describes rather good-naturedly as being ignored by the people who hear it. Lest the reader think that the writer of the Autobiography was close to the perfection he sought, Franklin reveals that he had originally composed a list of only twelve virtues: But a Quaker Friend having kindly inform’d me that I was generally thought proud; that my Pride show’d itself frequently in Conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any Point, but was overbearing & rather insolent; of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several Instances;—I determined endeavouring to cure myself if I could of this Vice or Folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my List, giving an extensive Meaning to the Word.—I cannot boast of much Success in acquiring the Reality of this Virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the Appearance of it.108

Franklin did not really change his haughty attitude, only his behavior. Here we encounter one of Franklin’s many masks, revealed as a mask by Franklin himself; and another virtue that might be added to his list: wit. Whereas Jonathan Edwards was tormented and tormenting of others, Franklin was cheerful despite his imperfections, and deeply confident. He was a middle-class ironist who did not worry about a deep grounding in the world. In this way he anticipated one stream of pragmatism, for which truths, including moral truths, are human instruments for human purposes, designed to move us “prosperously,” as William James put it, from one experience to another.109

c. Emerson on Franklin Although Emerson writes that “Franklin’s man . . . savors of nothing heroic” in his “Milton” essay of 1838, it is important to note the company in which he places Franklin: Locke, Hume, Bacon, and Rousseau—all of whom are said to be inferior to Milton. Emerson in fact considered Franklin one of the great men of history and literature.110 In his best-known essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson asks: “Where 108 Franklin, Writings, 1392–3. I do not mean to suggest that James himself gave up the search for “a deep grounding in the world,” nor that he abandoned a belief in objectivity. 109 William James, Writings 1902–1910, Bruce Kuklick, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 512 (from “What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism (1907)). 110 Isaacson claims that Emerson and Thoreau found Franklin “too mundane for their rarefied tastes” (Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 479). He seems driven to this conclusion by his view that there is an absolute opposition between rationalism and the Enlightenment on the one hand, and Romanticism on the other. James Campbell, Isaacson’s source for Emerson’s views (480), correctly reports Emerson’s basic positive view of Franklin (Recovering Benjamin Franklin, 34–5). Isaacson incorrectly attributes the two quotations

74

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique.”111 In another publication from this fertile period, Emerson places Franklin’s Autobiography in the company of Augustine’s Confessions, Montaigne’s Essays, Luther’s Table Talk, and Rousseau’s Confessions.112 Emerson’s interest in Franklin reaches back to his earliest journals.113 When he was about twenty, he wrote an appraisal of what he thought of as the Puritan tradition in America, in which Edwards and Franklin stand out: The theory of the strong impulse is true . . . Few bodies or parties have served the world so well as the Puritans . . . our literature should have been born & grown ere now to a Greek or Roman stature. Franklin is such a fruit as might be expected from such a tree. Edwards, perhaps more so.114

Emerson is already a little disappointed in America, but not in Franklin and Edwards, whom he takes to be exemplary cases amidst the general dullness. He has a larger view of Franklin than merely as the proponent of a list of tame and mechanically applied virtues: “Franklin was political economist, a natural philosopher, a moral philosopher, & a statesman. Invents & dismisses subtle theories (e. g. of the Earth) with extraordinary ease.”115 It would be hard to improve on these two sentences (except perhaps by replacing “Earth” with “electricity”) as a summary. Emerson catches not only Franklin’s great breadth—typical of the philosophes—but his inventiveness and fallibilism, his happy ability to “dismiss” his own “subtle theories” when experience contravenes them. He acknowledges Franklin’s importance as a statesman, a man of action. There is a remarkable extended discussion of Franklin in a letter the twenty-yearold Emerson wrote to his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson in 1824. He calls Franklin “one of the most sensible men that ever lived,” not meaning by this that he was narrow or unimaginative but that he was (following the OED) cognizant, aware, endowed with good sense; intelligent, reasonable, judicious. Emerson speaks of Franklin’s “serene and powerful understanding” that was at the same time “so eminently practical and useful.” Franklin, he writes, was

from Emerson that he cites to the same source (Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 565 n. 8); Campbell, from whom he obtains these quotations, correctly attributes the first to a letter written to Emerson’s Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, the second to Emerson’s essay “Milton,” published eighteen years later. There is no criticism of Franklin in the letter to his Aunt. 111

112 CW 2:47. CW 10:241. He places Franklin amongst Montaigne, Milton, Dryden, Shakespeare, Burke, Butler, Newton, Henry IV, Demosthenes, and Washington. See for example The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William H. Gilman et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 1, 250; hereafter JMN. 114 115 Emerson, JMN 2:197. Emerson, JMN 2:208. 113

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

75

no verbal gladiator clad in complete mail of syllogisms, but a sage who used his pen with a dignity and effect which was new, and had been supposed to belong only to the sword. He was a man of that singular force of mind (with which in the course of Providence so few men are gifted) which seems designed to effect by individual influence what is ordinarily done by the slow and secret work of institutions and national growth. One enjoys a higher conception of human worth in measuring the vast influence exercised on men’s minds by Franklin’s character than even by reading books of remote ages . . . many millions have already lived and millions are now alive who have felt through their whole lives the powerful good effect both of Franklin’s actions and his writings. His subtle observation, his seasonable wit, his profound reason and his mild and majestic virtues made him idolized in France, feared in England, and obeyed in America.116

There is no critique of Franklin’s virtues here. Franklin was what Emerson was later to call a “representative” man, someone who teaches as much by his style, voice, character, or action as by his doctrines.

d. Franklin and slavery William Penn, founder of the tolerant colony of Pennsylvania, defended religious liberty but owned slaves. In Pennsylvania, only the Moravian Germans were staunch opponents of slavery, and a Swedish visitor to the colony in 1750 observed that the Quakers owned as many slaves as anyone else.117 Pennsylvania was, nevertheless, the first colony to pass legislation for the gradual elimination of slavery.118 Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette regularly carried advertisements for slaves in the 1730s. For example: “a breeding Negro woman about twenty years of age. Can do any household work.” “A likely Negro wench about fifteen years old, has had the small pox, been in the country above a year and talks English. Inquire of the printer hereof.”119 By 1735, when he was still in his twenties and had been married for five years, Franklin owned a “Negro boy” named Joseph. During the course of his life he owned at least seven slaves. In 1763, for example, he acquired a slave named George in partial payment of a debt, and he gave George to his daughter and her husband at the time of their marriage in 1767. One slave, Bob, was freed in Franklin’s will.120 Franklin took two of his slaves, Peter and King, to England with him in 1757.

116 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, eds. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1909), vol. 1, 375–7. 117 Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert, The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975), 294. 118 Lopez and Herbert, The Private Franklin, 300. John Woolman and Anthony Benezet were prominent antislavery activists who in 1755 convinced Quaker leaders to instruct local Friends meetings to discipline members involved in the slave trade (Gary B. Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 150, no. 4, 2006, 627). 119 Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 129. 120 Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 619–20. See also Nash’s “Slaves and Slave owners in Colonial Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser, 30 (1973), 223–56.

76

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

King ran away and lived with a woman in Suffolk who taught him to read, write, and play the violin and French horn.121 Franklin discusses slavery in “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc.” (1751), where he forecasts a grand economic future for Pennsylvania and America. He condemns the practice of slavery, but not on moral grounds. Slaves, he maintains, are simply too expensive: Reckon then the Interest of the first Purchase of a Slave, the Insurance or Risque on his Life, his Cloathing and Diet, Expences in his Sickness and Loss of Time, Loss by his Neglect of Business . . . Expence of a Driver to keep him at Work, and his Pilfering from Time to Time, almost every Slave being by Nature a Thief, and compare the whole Amount with the Wages of a Manufacturer of Iron or Wool in England, you will see that Labour is much cheaper there than it ever can be by Negroes here.122

Franklin assumes that slaves are “Negroes,” which was mostly the case in America,123 and he condemns slavery on the ground that it is bad for “Whites.” The slaves, he maintains, deprive white people of employment in the “English Sugar Islands,” allowing a few of them to gain vast wealth while leaving the masses poor. The slave owners “are enfeebled” because they do no labor themselves. Their children “become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.” In other words, the institution of slavery discourages white people from following “the way to wealth.” Franklin reveals no concern for the slaves themselves, but considers them only as a less than reliable source of labor: “the Deaths among them are more than the Births; so that a continual Supply is needed from Africa.”124 Franklin speaks of slaves as what Heidegger calls a “standingreserve”: “a continual Supply” that has value only for the use that we make of it, but with no integrity of its own.125 Franklin ends “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” with a paragraph that he excised from later editions of the essay. I consider it here not to condemn but to understand Franklin and his thinking, and to enable us to see the ways in which his views—so typical of his time—evolved. Franklin writes: the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny . . . [I]n Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their numbers were increased . . . why increase the Sons of

122 Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 619–20, 622. Franklin, Writings, 369–70. On white slavery and the blurry lines between slavery and indentured servitude, see Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Many “indentured” servants were kidnapped or convicts, and their “contracts” were bought and sold. 124 Franklin, Writings, 371. 125 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 298. 121 123

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

77

Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.126

This is what the assertion of the inherent superiority of one people to another, based merely on the color of their skin, looks like. Franklin does step back from his views in the last sentence of the passage, admitting that he may be unjustifiably but naturally “partial to the Complexion of my Country.” When he revised his essay in subsequent editions, he removed this paragraph entirely, and changed the claim that “almost every slave [is] by nature a thief ” to the claim that they become thieves “from the nature of slavery.”127 Franklin seems to have been rethinking his position on slavery and the capacities of the slaves during his time in London. A year after arriving there, in 1758, he responded to a letter from the Reverend John Waring, who wanted to found a school to educate and Christianize African Americans. Philadelphia had more slaves than any other city in North America, and Waring wished to start there, with Franklin’s assistance. Franklin might well have avoided making a public commitment, or have given a tepid response, but he endorsed the plan enthusiastically and publicly.128 The school opened in 1758, with thirty black students.129 Five years later, Franklin visited what was now called “the Negro School,” and wrote to Waring: I was on the whole much pleas’d, and from what I then saw, have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them.130

As with the statement at the end of “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Franklin refers to the possibility that prejudices have clouded his vision; and he advertises—as he had in his book on electricity published three years earlier— his willingness to change his mind in the face of evidence contrary to his beliefs. This letter shows a man who is rethinking his position. That rethinking led Franklin to become an active abolitionist, but it took some time. He was still defending slavery in 1770, when, in his “A Conversation on Slavery,” he counters English charges of hypocrisy leveled at the American slaveholders (seeking freedom, enslaving others) by pointing out that it was the English who

Franklin, Writings, 374. Franklin’s paragraph also contains the following sentence: “And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People?” We see the difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism in the contrast between Franklin, who wanted to clear America of woods, and Thoreau, who went to live in the woods to learn to be a superior person. 127 128 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 152. Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 623. 129 130 Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 624. Franklin, Writings, 800. 126

78

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

brought slaves to America in the first place (an ad hominem fallacy—directed at the English critics rather than defending the colonists’ practices). Franklin downplays the extent of slavery in America when he asserts that not one colonial family in a hundred kept slaves. In fact, one in five white Philadelphia households contained slaves; one of every twelve residents of the city of brotherly love was a slave.131 Franklin’s abolitionism emerges in an unsigned contribution to the London Chronicle in 1772, where for the first time he considers the point of view of the slaves. Here he is not focused on the “Whites” who are corrupted by their domination over other human beings, nor on the need to maintain a “continual Supply” of slaves, but on slaves as “our fellow creatures.” He writes of the passage from Africa in which one third of the captives routinely perish, and of the “unhappy people” who survive and have to endure “excessive labour, bad nourishment, uncomfortable accommodation, and broken spirits.” Bringing the point home to England and speaking as an Englishman he asks: “Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?”132 Detestable though he thought slavery was, tax records show at least one slave (possibly given to his daughter and son-in-law) living in the Franklin household in 1772 and 1774. This is most likely George, whom Franklin acquired as part of the payment of a debt in 1763. His wife Deborah bought another slave, Bob, while Franklin was in England. After his return to America in 1775 and before he left for France seventeen months later, Franklin gave Bob to his daughter.133 He took no slaves with him this time, but he was obliged to defend American property rights, including those in slaves. He interceded with the French police, for example, to track down the New Yorker John Jay’s slave, Abbe, when she ran away.134 Franklin’s semi-public turn against slavery intensified in France, where Condorcet’s Reflections on Negro Slavery (1781) made a particularly strong impression on him. In the midst of peace negotiations with the English, he sent “A Thought Concerning the Sugar Islands,” to a select group of English friends, including one of the British peace commissioners. He condemns the African wars that secured the captives taken to America, “the Number that being crowded in Ships perish in the Transportation, & the Numbers that die under the Severities of Slavery.” As in his unsigned piece in the London Chronicle a decade earlier he links the sweetness of sugar to the bitterness of the slave, writing that one can “scarce look on a Morsel of Sugar without conceiving it spotted with Human Blood.”135

131 132 133 135

Franklin, Writings, 646–53; Lopez and Herbert, 297–8; Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 618. Franklin, Writings, 678. 134 Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 620, 631. Lopez and Herbert, 300. Cited in Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” 632 (Papers of Benjamin Franklin 37: 619–20).

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

79

Back in America, Franklin spoke openly against slavery, and in 1787 he accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In 1789, as President of the Society, he signed “An Address to the Public” that pointed out the contradiction between “that luminous and benign spirit of liberty, which is diffusing itself throughout the world” and the “atrocious debasement of human nature” that constitutes the institution of slavery.136 Recognizing that men who have been treated as brutes will need education when they are set free, he called for a “national policy” of attention to “emancipated black people,” included schooling and employment. Such a program, Franklin writes in characteristic Enlightenment spirit, will “promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow-creatures.”137 Franklin subsequently signed a memorial asking Congress to end slavery in the United States. It argued that Congress’s duty to promote the welfare and liberty of “the People of the United States” applies to all Americans “without distinction of color.”138 As this and similar memorials were taken up by Congress, Representative James Jackson of Georgia offered a series of defenses of slavery that Franklin parodied in the last publication of his life, using his final pseudonym, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers.” Responding to an equally fictitious petition to eliminate piracy and the enslavement of Christians,139 Ibrahim argues: “If we cease our Cruises against the Christians, how shall we be furnished with the Commodities their Countries produce, and which are so necessary for us? If we forbear to make Slaves of their People, who in this hot Climate are to cultivate our Lands?”140 Ibrahim argues that the captives are better off for being exposed to the one true religion, Islam. “Here they are brought into a Land where the Sun of Islamism gives forth its Light, and shines in full Splendor, and they have an Opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true Doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal Souls.”141 A month before his death, then, Franklin resumed his criticism not only of slavery, but of religious dogma. If Islam is not a proper basis for enslaving people, then, one is led to think, neither is Christianity. We see here the Franklin who refused to adopt any religious position in setting forth his list of virtues, precisely because he thought people of any religion might practice them. Slavery, however, was too much part of the fabric of life in America to be expurgated as easily as a new Constitution could be

136

137 Franklin, Writings, 1154. Franklin, Writings, 1155. Lopez and Herbert, 301. 139 For an account of the enslavement of Christians, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Random House, 2003). 140 Franklin, Writings, 1158. Cf. Montesquieu, also channeling a defender of slavery: “Sugar would be too expensive if the plant producing it were not cultivated by slaves” (Book 15, Chapter 5: “On the slavery of Negroes,” in The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone, trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 250. 141 Franklin, Writings, 1159. 138

80

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

constructed. In 1790, when Franklin published his satire, there were about 700,000 slaves among the four million inhabitants of the new United States of America.142 It was not until 1865, when the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified, that slavery was prohibited in the United States. In this way Franklin was seventy-five years ahead of his time.

5. Franklin the Founder a. The Declaration of Independence On June 21, 1776, the thirty-three year old Thomas Jefferson sent the seventy-yearold Benjamin Franklin a draft of the American Declaration of Independence with the following note: “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”143 Franklin had returned to America the previous year after living in Britain for a decade (and acquiring a doctorate in Civil Law from Oxford).144 The day after his return, the Pennsylvania Assembly appointed him a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and a year later he joined John Adams and Jefferson in a committee charged with drafting the “Declaration. ” That document is basically Jefferson’s, and we shall examine it more fully in Chapter 4, but Franklin made a key change (among a series of smaller alterations) in response to Jefferson’s note. In Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” the document’s second sentence reads: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant [sic], that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”145 Franklin’s change in the “Declaration” comes at a key point, where the nature of the “truths” enumerated is identified. He changes “sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident.”146 The change eliminates any hint of a religious or “sacred” basis for these truths. Locke had used the term “selfevident” in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding to apply to truths of logic and mathematics, and other writers such as Thomas Reid used the term to describe a wider range of truths.147 Franklin’s change is perfectly in accord with the Enlightenment view that fundamental truths about nature and value may be discovered by the human mind.

142

143 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 464. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 311. See Franklin, Writings, 1482, 1487 (editor’s chronology). 145 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), vol. 1, 423–7. 146 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 311–12, and 312, n. 34. 147 See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 2002), 181–92. Wills’s useful survey is marred by the conflation of “true by virtue of meaning” with “true by virtue of identity.” 144

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

81

There is a religious element in the “Declaration”: all people are said to be “created equal,” and in a further change to Jefferson’s draft, to be endowed “by the creator” with certain rights. There is no reference to a particular religion, however, nor to any characteristics of the creator, such as omniscience or goodness. When the nature and authority of government are treated in the third clause of the sentence, the creator disappears from view. Governments, the document asserts, are instituted to secure rights, and derive their “just powers” neither from a religious authority nor from the creator, but from “the consent of the governed.” The “Declaration” thus presents a largely but not entirely secular theory of political authority. Franklin’s change, introducing all that follows, makes it more clearly so.

b. Franklin’s political philosophy Franklin was one of the most democratic of the founders. He warned against the undue influence of property in a democracy and defended the government’s right to tax and to redistribute wealth. The man who offered advice on “the way to wealth” was thus a leading critic of money’s role in politics. He thought everyone’s vote should count equally, so he opposed giving states with smaller populations as much power as those with larger populations (as ultimately became the case when the Senate was included as part of the United States Constitution). He opposed bicameral legislatures as an implicit form of aristocracy, and warned that the Presidency concentrated too much power in one person. He criticized the idea of a hereditary “Society of the Cincinnati” that would reward children of heroes for their fathers’ heroic deeds in the Revolutionary War (their parents might have deserved some credit he argued, but their children did not). As we have seen, Franklin was the author of the Albany Plan in 1754, the first federal plan for America. Serving as a member of the Second Continental Congress in 1775, he drafted Articles of Confederation that were stronger than those ultimately adopted, but which again, and in new ways, anticipated the federal system that emerged a decade later. Franklin included a division of powers between a strong central government and the governments of the individual states. It contained a single legislative body—always a favorite of Franklin’s—with proportional representation based on population. Congress was to have the power to levy taxes and make war, issue a unified currency, establish a postal system, and enact laws “necessary to the general welfare.” Franklin did not put his proposal to a vote of the Congress, however, judging that the provisions regarding taxation and representation made it unacceptable to a majority of representatives. Franklin sailed for France in October 1776, and stayed for nine years. He negotiated the treaty with France of 1778, perhaps the greatest diplomatic triumph in American history, and the peace treaty with Britain in 1782–3. He knew how to take advantage both of his prestige as a renowned scientist and of his image as a backwoods savant. The French saw him as a combination of the natural man favored by Rousseau and the man of reason and science championed by Voltaire. His

82

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

collected works had been published in 1773, and a new edition of The Way to Wealth, entitled La Science du bonhomme Richard, was issued after his arrival.148 Franklin’s political and economic views became more radical during his time in France,149 as may be seen in a remarkable letter he sent in 1783 to Robert Morris, the United States Superintendent of Finance. Franklin laments American citizens’ unwillingness to pay their taxes, and notes the resolutions by groups of citizens opposed to taking “the People’s Money out of their Pockets.” These people, Franklin asserts, mistake the point. It is not their money at all, but a debt “duly contracted” by their government. He continues as follows: All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages.150

Franklin does not say that the public owns all property, but he does assert that property is for the most part artificial, an artifact of society. The public creates most property with its laws, and therefore has the right to regulate, even to rearrange it. This is not Locke’s view. Locke thinks, somewhat like Franklin, that “every man has a property in his own person,” and in his labor; but he also thinks that when you mix your labor (“the unquestionable property of the labourer”) with the material world you create new property, whether there are man-made laws or not.151 Franklin’s view that any property beyond what is necessary for the survival and procreation of individuals belongs to the state places him closer to the “radical” than to the “moderate” Enlightenment distinguished by Jonathan Israel.152 It also aligns him 148

149 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 326. Cf. Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 657. Franklin, Writings, 1081–2. See also Franklin’s 1784 letter to Benjamin Vaughan, where he states that society makes laws that create property, so has the right to tax it. He also advocates the taxation of superfluous wealth. On the other hand, he holds that people have a “natural right” to what they earn and is necessary to support a family (cited in Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 424). 151 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, C. B. Macpherson, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 19. Locke does place limits on capital accumulation, arguing that we leave “enough and as good” for others. 152 See Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), and Chapter 4 below. Israel sees the American Founders apart from Jefferson as broadly within the “Moderate” rather than the “Radical” Enlightenment: “They were content to work within one country. The Radical Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, by contrast, developed as an active force on both sides of the Atlantic opposed not just to the European, Caribbean, and Ibero-American ancien re´gime but also offering a comprehensive critique of the ‘General Revolution’ as it had thus far progressed in North America” (46–7). The persistence of 150

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

83

with what Eric Nelson identifies as the Greek—as opposed to the Roman—tradition in republican thought. The Greek tradition, with its roots in Plato’s Republic and Laws, “sees the community as the ultimate owner of all goods, and empowers it to arrange the distribution of those goods in such a way as to advance some normative vision of human nature.” For the Roman tradition epitomized by Cicero “the respublica was originally constituted in order to protect private property,” and property is seen as a bulwark against the power of the community.153 After the conclusion of the War of Independence in 1783, Franklin published “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784), where he describes the country as a place where the middle classes (of which he considered himself a member) thrive. In America, he states, people inquire of a stranger not “What IS he? but What can he DO? If he has any useful Art, he is welcome.” It is considered more honorable in America, he continues, to trace one’s ancestry back to tanners, weavers, and ploughmen than to “Gentlemen . . . living idly on the Labour of others.”154 Franklin offers a pragmatic conception of America, as the country of practical effects: tanning, weaving, farming, the Pennsylvania stove and lightning rod, and the U. S. Constitution. He anticipates John Dewey’s attention to practical activities and useful arts, and Dewey’s critique of philosophers who take the real world to lie beyond the body and human labor.155

c. The Constitutional Convention After nine years in Paris, Franklin returned to Philadelphia in July 1785. He added to his house on Market Street, designed an instrument for taking down books from high shelves, was elected President of Pennsylvania, and attended the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.156 He knew the thirteen states from his business enterprises, as the American postmaster general, and from his work in Britain as an

American slavery was an important concern for such radical critics as Mirabeau, Chastellux, Condorcet, Volney, and Paine (41). 153

Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17. Cf. Plato’s Crito, where the Laws tell Socrates that as a resident of Athens brought up under them he is their “offspring and slave.” (Plato, Crito, 50e.1, trans. C. D. C. Reeve, in Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, ed. S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005), 149.) 154 Franklin, Writings, 977. 155 Practice, Dewey writes, is “the only means (other than accident) by which whatever is judged to be honorable, admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete experienceable existence” (John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Jo Ann Boydston, ed., (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), vol. 4, 26). On Dewey’s use of such practical activities as weaving, cooking, and farming at the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, see Russell B. Goodman, “Two Genealogies of Action in Pragmatism,” in Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia, vol. 8 no. 2, 2007, 213–22. On Franklin as a forerunner of pragmatism, see James Campbell, “The Pragmatist in Franklin,” in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin, Carla Mulford, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 104–16, and Recovering Benjamin Franklin, 253–72. 156 Franklin, Writings, 1493–4 (editor’s chronology). See Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 445–6.

84

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

agent for Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other colonies. At the beginning of the convention, William Pierce, a representative from Georgia wrote: Dr Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age . . . But what claim he has to the politician, posterity must determine. It is certain that he does not shine much in public council; he is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man, and tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard . . . He is eighty-two and possesses an activity of mind equal to a youth of twentyfive years of age.157

This is not the narrow, penny-pinching Franklin condemned by Lawrence and others, but someone closer to Emerson’s commanding character or representative man. Franklin was more comfortable with democracy than many other representatives. Roger Sherman of Connecticut held, for example, that the people “should have as little to do as may be possible about government,” while Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts stated: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” Franklin pushed his own views—for a unicameral legislature, an executive council rather than a president, a limited term for the president—but yielded when he was outnumbered. Franklin’s greatest achievement at the convention involved just such yielding, as part of a creative political synthesis. In midsummer, the convention threatened to break up over the issue of proportional representation in the legislature (favored by such larger states as Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania) versus representation of individual states (favored by such smaller states as Delaware and New Jersey). The conflict was about numbers and power. In 1787, Delaware’s population was thirtyseven thousand, while Virginia’s was four hundred and twenty thousand, more than ten times as great.158 If the legislature, whether composed of one house or two, were to be based entirely on population, as Franklin advocated, then Delaware would have one-tenth the power Virginia had. If on the other hand each state had an equal representation in the legislature (as under the Articles of Confederation), then each resident of Delaware, in choosing his representatives, would have more than ten times the power of a resident of Virginia.159 Franklin proposed a key compromise on July 3. There would be two houses of Congress (he thereby abandoned his desire for a single house), but they would have different roles and constitutions: the House of Representatives, based on proportional representation (one representative for every 40,000 inhabitants), would initiate

157

158 Cited in Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 744. Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 747. Article V, paragraph four of the “Articles” states: “In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote.” See Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, J. R. Pole, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett, Publishing Company Inc., 2005), 468. Article II asserts the “sovereignty, freedom, and independence” of the states except for what is “expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled” (467). 159

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

85

all bills for raising or appropriating money. These bills would not be subject to amendment in the other house. In the Senate, each state would have an equal vote. It was a close call, but Franklin’s motion passed five to four. He succeeded as much because of who he was as because of what he said. As Isaacson puts it: “He embodied the spirit and issued the call for compromise, he selected the most palatable option available and refined it, and he wrote the motion and picked the right moment to offer it. His prestige, his neutrality, and his eminence made it easier for all to swallow.”160 In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle stresses the degree to which the virtues require responsiveness to particular situations. One must for example, have feelings of anger or fear or pity “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way.”161 Franklin chose the “right moment” to present his plan, taking elements from plans that he and many others had discussed previously. By doing so he got results—the continuation of a convention for the founding of a nation that was in danger of falling apart. He was pragmatic, and practically wise. In the ensuing weeks of discussion, Franklin argued against property requirements for office holders and for voting. He stated: “some of the greatest rogues I was ever acquainted with, were the richest rogues.”162 He successfully argued for a limited rather than lifetime presidential term, and for Congress’s power to impeach the president.163 On September 17, 1787, the final day of the convention, he endorsed the new constitution in one of his most comprehensive and coherent speeches: I confess that I do not entirely approve of this Constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many Instances of being oblig’d, by better Information or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own Judgment and to pay more Respect to the Judgment of others . . . In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us . . . I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution: For when you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our Enemies, who are waiting with Confidence to hear that our Councils are confounded, like those of the Builders of Babel, and that our States are on the Point of Separation, only to meet hereafter for the Purpose of cutting one another’s Throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

160

Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 453. See also Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 749. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985) 44 (1106b, 15ff.). 162 163 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 455. Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 751–2. 161

86

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Franklin ended his address with the wish “that every Member of the Convention, who may still have Objections to it, would with me on this Occasion doubt a little of his own Infallibility, and to make manifest our Unanimity, put his Name to this Instrument.”164 It was agreed that the constitution be adopted by “unanimous Consent.”165 Franklin’s address coheres with the fallibilistic, experimental approach that he takes in his scientific work. As he wrote to La Rochefoucauld: “We are making experiments in politics.”166 Running through his discourse is the idea of “Perfection.” He notes how extraordinary it would be if a specific group of people, with all their prejudices and errors, should agree on a good document, and he expresses his astonishment at how near to perfection the document before them comes. From his place within a democratic process, Franklin “consents” to a Constitution that is not perfect, but which he thinks is good enough, maybe even the best that could be hoped for. (Given the Constitution’s acceptance of slavery this is a hard claim to agree with.)167 Outside the Convention Hall in Philadelphia, a Mrs. Powel is said to have asked Franklin: “What type of government have you delegates given us?” To which Franklin is said to have replied: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”168 In Chapter 3, the “Interlude” that follows this chapter, we shall consider what he and his contemporaries meant by this term, and shall turn in the Chapter 4 to Franklin’s young republican friend, Thomas Jefferson. We leave Franklin now with an anecdote he recounted to Jefferson about his time in Paris. In the background of the story was the contention by Buffon and the Abbe´ Raynal that America was an inferior continent, with a small number of inferior species. (Jefferson later spent pages of his Notes on the State of Virginia refuting this claim.) Jefferson writes: The Doctor [Benjamin Franklin] told me at Paris . . . [that] [h]e had a party to dine with him one day at Passy, of whom one half were Americans, the other half French, and among the last was the Abbe´ [Raynal]. During the dinner he got on his favorite theory of the degeneracy of animals, and even of man, in America, and urged it with his usual eloquence. The Doctor at length noticing the accidental stature and position of his guests, at table, “Come,” says he, “M. l'Abbe´, let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one half Americans, and one half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other. Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature had degenerated.” It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, 164

165 Franklin, Writings, 1139–41. Franklin, Writings, 1141. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 457. Cf. his letter to Jonathan Shipley in 1786: “We are, I think, in the right Road of Improvement, for we are making Experiments . . . And I think we are daily more and more enlightened; so that I have no doubt of our obtaining in a few Years as much public Felicity, as good Government is capable of affording” (Franklin, Writings, 1161). 167 Cf. Cavell’s idea that “a democracy must know itself to maintain a state of (because human, imperfect, but), let me say, good enough justice.” Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3. 168 Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 459. 166

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

87

Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those of the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbe´ himself particularly, was a mere shrimp. He parried the appeal, however, by a complimentary admission of exceptions, among which the Doctor himself was a conspicuous one.169

Franklin’s clever defense of the land where he was born, in the Paris he loved, leaves us, as it left the dinner party, with a smile and a sense of amazement at the capacities of a great writer, important scientist, and forger of constitutions. Franklin helped define the new American middle-class self: self-educated, self-reliant, generous, thrifty, inquiring, able to achieve “practical effects.” One always has the feeling with Franklin, though, that he is smiling somewhere behind all his masks: behind Silence Dogood and Richard Saunders, behind the man who appeared humble but was not, and who wheeled his barrow through the streets to be sure that people knew he was a hard worker. There is the Franklin of the other twelve virtues, the Franklin of the wild years in Paris, the exuberant experimenter of the 1750s and 1760s, the deist and critic of religion, the democrat, the slaveholder, and the abolitionist. There is a human coherence to these facets of Franklin, a man who was not disturbed by what Emerson calls “the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies,”170 who was happy to change his mind when the evidence warranted, and prepared to change tactics in order to achieve social and political results that we continue to prize today.

169 Thomas Jefferson, “Anecdotes of Benjamin Franklin,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed. (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), vol. 18, 170–1. 170 Emerson, CW 3:36.

3 Interlude: Strands of Republican Thought 1. The Nature of the Concept The American Founders, however wary they might have been of pure democracies, agreed that they were establishing a republic, and Americans today pledge allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands.” What is a republic, then, and what did Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and others mean by the term? There was no consensus on the meaning of the word “republic” in the eighteenth century, and some uses of the term were incompatible.1 Nevertheless, the word had a distinct family of uses in the sense described by Ludwig Wittgenstein when he wrote that some meaningful terms have no essential definition, no one feature common to all their instances, just as the members of a family have a set of characteristic features but no one feature common to them all. Such terms are like a thread composed of many fibers, “the strength of [which] does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.”2 In what follows I shall briefly identify some of the overlapping fibers of the term “republic” as it existed for Franklin and Jefferson in the second half of the eighteenth century.3

1 J. R. Pole, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, J. R. Pole, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.), 206 (editor’s note to Federalist Thirty-Nine). Pole earlier states that “the concept of ‘republican government’ ” is “a generality encompassing wide and sometimes incompatible differences” (The Federalist, xxiii). 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, G. E. M Anscombe and Rush Rhees, eds. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), paragraph. 67. Cf. Eric Nelson: “I begin from the premise that the question ‘what is the essence of republicanism?’ is badly posed. If by ‘republicanism’ we mean a tradition of taking the ‘republic’ as the constituent unit of political life, then there will be as many ‘republicanisms’ as there are uses of the word ‘republic.’ Rather than searching in vain for the ‘essence’ that underlies all these uses, we should treat the word ‘republic’ in the same way that Wittgenstein treats the word ‘game’ in the Philosophical Investigations” (The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17–18). Wittgenstein maintains that if one looks at all the things we call games, “you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.” (Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 66). 3 Nelson provides a good summary of the outpouring of writing over the last fifty years about the nature and history of republicanism, and its relation to natural law theory, liberalism, and the “rights” theories of Locke and others. See also Knud Haakonssen, “Republicanism,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

INTERLUDE

89

2. Popular Government/Democratic Accountability Republics were understood as “popular” governments, arrangements of power that gave a significant role to “the people” (who were always male, and usually landowners). The people were distinguished from the monarch, and from a small group of nobles or aristocrats. We see the contrast between republics, considered as popular governments, and monarchies in a mid-century essay by Franklin’s friend David Hume entitled “Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic.”4 Hume sees danger in both forms, and wishes to defend a limited monarchy with a House of Commons, such as Britain’s. He thinks republics are inclined to be disorderly, with “a civil war every election” that will lead to a tyranny worse than limited monarchy. Hume concludes his essay by stating that while the danger from monarchy is “more imminent,” the danger from “popular government . . . is more terrible.”5 Regardless of what one might think of Hume’s conservative politics or his understanding of republics, he represents a strand of eighteenth-century thinking that spans the political spectrum in seeing republics as forms of “popular” rule. Some fifty years later, in The Federalist, James Madison offers a definition of “republic”: we may define a republic to be . . . a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behaviour. It is essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it.6

Madison envisions a republic as a government in which the people not only have a significant share, but also are the source of all the legitimate powers of the government. Madison’s republic differs both from the “Commonwealth” advocated by the English republican theorist James Harrington—a combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—and from the system favored by Hume, where some legitimate power lies in the crown, some in the aristocracy, and some in the people.7 Madison’s definition introduces a specification or refinement of the idea of representation in the term limit and the power to remove officials for bad behavior. Philosophy, Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 568–74, and Hannah Dawson, “English Republicanism,” in the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, A. C. Grayling et al., eds. (London: Continuum, 2006), vol. 4, 2697–700. 4 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, Eugene F. Miller, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1985) (2nd edition), 47–53. First published in Essays, Moral and Political, (1741), with eleven editions by 1777. 5 Hume, Essays, 52–3. This argument can be countered by the emphasis on laws in republican thinking discussed in Section 7 below. 6 Federalist, 207 (Federalist Thirty-Nine). 7 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, J. G. A. Pocock, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xiv (editor’s introduction).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

90

INTERLUDE

These are designed, he writes, to assure that “the great body of the people” not only choose their representatives but continue to exert their influence on them.

3. Mixed Constitutions Republican writers typically are concerned with political structure. The tradition of three elements, each having an “equal share,” goes back to Aristotle, who writes of a “mixture” or “mixed form of constitution” composed of “free birth, wealth, and merit.”8 In Rome, Cicero wrote of a balanced mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in De Re Publica (often translated as “On the Commonwealth”). Nearer in the background of the American Founders was the existing British tripartite structure of monarch, lords, and commons (which some writers considered a republic)9 and Montesquieu’s revolutionary redefinition of the three parts in terms of their powers or functions: legislative, executive, and judicial.10 Montesquieu argues that by separating these three powers, republican governments protect the liberty they make possible: When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a single body of the magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically . . . All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principal men, either of nobles, or of the people, exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging the crimes or the disputes of individuals.11

There is a direct line of influence from these words to Federalist Forty-Seven, where Madison cites Montesquieu in arguing that: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”12 The U.S. Constitution that Madison defends accomplishes a 8 The Politics of Aristotle, Ernest Barker, ed. and trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 176 (Book IV, Chapter VIII, 1294a). 9 The word “republic” came into general use in seventeenth-century England during the Cromwellian period, when there was a legislature and a “Protector” but no monarch. See William R. Everdell. The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Pocock argues that the theory of the republic in seventeenth-century England followed rather than preceded the establishment of the republic under Cromwell: “There is a real sense in which republican theories were a consequence, not a cause or even a precondition, of the execution of the King and the temporary abolition of the monarchy” (The Commonwealth of Oceana, xi, editor’s introduction). 10 Montesquieu,” The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone trans. and eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 156–66. Cf. Philip Pettit: “only in the eighteenth century—most famously in the work of Montesquieu,” was the division of power understood as one of “making law, of executing or administering law, and of adjudicating those controversial cases where the law has to be applied” (Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 177). 11 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 157. 12 Federalist, 261. Madison cites Montesquieu on 262 ff.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

INTERLUDE

91

separation of powers by establishing a legislature (itself separated into two bodies, the Senate and the House of Representatives)(Article I, Section 1), a President vested with “executive Power” (Article II, Section 1), and a judiciary to judge cases under the Constitution and the laws of the United States, and certain other cases (Article III, Sections 1 and 2).13 The Constitution further distributes and separates political power by assigning powers to the states, thereby achieving what Hamilton calls a “constitutional equilibrium between the general and the state governments.”14 For a republican, as the historian F. W. Maitland sums it up, “The exercise of arbitrary power is least possible, not in a democracy, but in a very complicated form of government.”15 The republican trope of “checks and balances” is related to the separation of powers. Whereas such separation is a formal matter, the concept of checks and balances draws attention to the effects of such forms. The various powers act as checks on one another’s excesses, and balance each other out. “Check” can mean to exercise a veto, to examine and control, or to delay or clog.16 Montesquieu speaks of checks on power in The Spirit of the Laws: “So that one cannot abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things.”17 In one of Cato’s Letters (1720–3) entitled, “The encroaching Nature of Power, ever to be watched and checked,” the English republican John Trenchard writes: “Only the checks put upon magistrates make nations free; and only the want of such checks makes them slaves. They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people, and act by rules prescribed them by the people.”18 Some sixty years later, in Federalist Nine, Alexander Hamilton describes a modern “science of politics” that utilizes principles unknown to the ancient world, among which are “the regular distribution of power into distinct departments” and the “introduction of legislative balances and checks.”19

4. Representation Madison holds that a republic differs from a direct democracy in embodying a system of representation. In this system, the people do not directly govern. They choose their representatives, who then make the laws and see that they are executed. The “true distinction” of the American governments, Madison writes, “lies in the total 13

Federalist, 474, 479, 481. 15 Federalist, 167, Federalist Thirty-One. Cited in Pettit, Republicanism, 174. 16 David Wootton, “Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: ‘Checks and Balances’ and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism,” in David Womersley, ed., Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 209–74. 17 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 155. 18 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and other Important Subjects, Ronald Hamowy, ed., (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), (February 9, 1722), vol 2, 803. 19 Federalist, 42. I have modernized Hamilton’s spelling of “balances.” 14

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

92

INTERLUDE

exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share” in the government.20 What he means by this is that whereas, in Britain, the House of Commons was understood to embody, and not just to represent, the people’s presence in the government, in the American system, with all the parts of the government deriving their authority from the people, there is no special part of the government that is particularly the people’s. The entire government is representative. The Constitution, Madison writes, is not “a charter of liberty granted by power,” but a “charter of power granted by liberty.”21 As Gordon S. Wood summarizes the Federalist’s appreciation of this “pervasiveness of representation”: “All parts of the government were equally responsible but limited spokesmen for the people, who remained as the absolute and perpetual sovereign, distributing bits and pieces of power to their various agents.”22 The move from direct to representative democracy constitutes a new kind of political association, J. G. A. Pocock argues: no longer one in which someone acts with me, but one in which someone acts for me.23

5. Corruption Concern about corruption runs through the republican tradition, from Plato and Aristotle, to Machiavelli, the English Republicans, Montesquieu, and the American Founders. Franklin’s answer to the question about the new government—that it was “a republic . . . if you can keep it,”24 reveals the anxiety about corruption and degeneration that was there in America from the start. “Keeping it” is a deep goal of Plato’s Republic, where the system of education that reproduces the guardians is designed to prevent any corruption of the ideal political arrangement. In Aristotle’s Politics,25 the issue of change, specifically degenerative or corrupting change, comes to the fore. He distinguishes three kinds of rule—of the one, the few, and the many—each with a virtuous and a corrupt form. Monarchy’s corruption is tyranny, aristocracy’s is oligarchy. “Polity”—Aristotle’s word for the

20 Federalist, 341 (Federalist Sixty-Three). See the discussion in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 599. 21 Quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 601. Originally published in the National Gazette, January 19, 1792. The full quotation is: “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty.” 22 Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 599. 23 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 520. 24 Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 459. 25 These works have almost identical titles in Greek: Plato’s work is called Politeia, Aristotle’s Politike¯. The translation of Plato’s work as Republic was a Roman development, as in Cicero, who renders politeia as res publica. Cicero’s work, as translated by Renaissance scholars, was called Republic. See Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, and Fred Miller, “Aristotle’s Political Theory,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL = .

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

INTERLUDE

93

rule of the many for the good of the polis, has as its corrupt form “democracy,” the wayward and unintelligent rule of the mob.26 Aristotle maintains that there are six political forms, three corrupt and three virtuous, but he offers no account of the transitions among them. The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 bce) historicized Aristotle’s forms, maintaining that they follow an unchanging order of succession, with each virtuous form degenerating into its corrupt twin, and then into another virtuous form in an endless cycle. Polybius calls the virtuous form of rule by the many “democracy,” (using the term Aristotle had for the corrupt form), and the corrupt form “ochlocracy,” mob rule. Although one cannot end the cycle, Polybius holds, one can prolong its virtuous periods by constructing a mixed regime, with “all the good and distinctive features of the best governments, so that none of the principles should grow unduly and be perverted into its allied evil.”27 The idea of a mixed regime as necessary to forestall corruption is central to eighteenthcentury republican theory in France, Britain, and America. The U.S. Constitution, for example, is a version of the one-few-many mixed government called for by Polybius and later republicans. It has its one president, and its few popularly chosen representatives, all founded on the will of the many, the people who establish the constitution and choose their representatives through regular elections. The Federalist argues that the American mixed regime forestalls corruption by not granting any one party or group the power to make all others dependent on it, and by the filtering mechanism representation provides. In a republic, Madison writes, one may hope “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”28 Madison does not assume, however, that the “chosen body of citizens” will sacrifice their parochial or personal projects to the good of the whole. He worries about factions, understood as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”29 Factions are corrupt in two ways: in failing to pursue the best interests of the state (the general form of corruption in Aristotle’s theory), and in invading the “rights of other citizens” (a modern conception of corruption, deriving from Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government).30

26

Aristotle, Politics, 114–15 (Book III, Chap VII, 1279a). Polybius, The Histories, W. R. Paton, ed. and trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), vol. 3, VI.10 (cited in Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 3). 28 Federalist, 52 (Federalist Ten). 29 Federalist, 48 (Federalist Ten). As examples of causes embraced by factions he mentions: a “rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property . . .” (54). 30 See the discussion of Locke in Chapter 4 below. 27

94

INTERLUDE

Much of Madison’s discussion concerns this second form of corruption. He argues that the separation of powers is “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government,”31 and that because republics can be extended over a larger territory than direct democracies, they are less likely to be dominated by one point of view: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”32 Those who were less sanguine about this structural protection for “the rights of individuals” hastened to pass the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, in 1791. Madison also relies on the “extended sphere” of the republic to argue that republics will pursue the best interests of the whole state: “In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.”33 Here his argument falls down, as Morton White points out in his probing and detailed examination of The Federalist and the U.S. Constitution.34 Just because the republic is unlikely to be controlled by factions, it does not follow that it will pursue “justice and the general good.” “Why,” White asks, “should a large federal republic, simply by virtue of diminishing the likelihood that an immoral majority will form, make it very likely that a moral majority—if I may use that expression—will form?35

6. Wealth Worries Much of the republican concern about corruption focuses on wealth, whether land or, later, money and finance. Plato warns about the corrupting power of wealth in the Republic, which is why the guardians are not allowed to own private property or even to know and raise their individual children. In the Laws, where Plato depicts his “second-best society,” he warns against great accumulations of wealth and advocates “a certain equality of possessions.”36 He maintains that a single individual should be allowed to amass up to four times the value of the standard land allotment, but if he accumulates more he should be forced to “consign the surplus to the state and its gods.” The laws permit no dowries and attack lavish inheritances.37 In the Politics, Aristotle is intensely anxious about the corruption brought by wealth. He thinks that it might be in some way “just” to ostracize powerful citizens for a while—that is to banish them for a fixed period—even if they had not been 31

32 Federalist, 54 (Federalist Ten). Federalist, 53 (Federalist Ten). Federalist, 284 (Federalist Fifty-One). 34 Morton White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 35 White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution, 165. 36 Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 116 (citing Laws 684d). 37 Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 117, and nn. 130–2. 33

INTERLUDE

95

convicted of any crimes.38 He favors aristocracy over democracy, but recognizes that the rule of the excellent is not likely to be achieved. Any achievable state, he argues, must guard against the power of wealth by fostering and giving power to a numerous middle class, the class “most ready to listen to reason.” Such a state would occupy the mean between the extremes of oligarchy (rule by the rich) and democracy (rule by the poor). In a state “where the middle class is large, there is least likelihood of faction,” Aristotle holds. Such a state is therefore more stable than an extreme democracy or greedy oligarchy, both of which are more likely to lead to tyranny.39 In the seventeenth century, James Harrington was preoccupied with money and land, and refers to Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Laws in recommending that large fortunes be broken up and dowries severely restricted: “it hath seemed to some (says Aristotle) the main point of institution in government to order riches right; whence otherwise derives all civil discord?” Harrington’s ideal commonwealth was to be composed of at least five thousand landowners, each of whose annual revenue was restricted to 2,000 pounds a year.40 In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu argued that the regulation of property is essential to the health of the republic. “When a republic has been corrupted,” he writes, “none of the ills that arise can be remedied except by removing the corruption and recalling the principles.”41 One set of principles was the Roman agrarian laws, which restricted the amount of public land wealthy people could control: “When the laws were not rigidly observed, things returned to the point where they are presently among us: the avarice of some individuals, and the prodigality of others caused parcels of land to pass into few hands.”42 In contrast, Montesquieu maintains, ancient republics were founded on a principle of equal division of lands, which produced “a powerful people,” “a well-ordered society” and “a good army, each one having an equal interest—and a great one at that—to defend his country.”43 Writing from France in 1785, Thomas Jefferson holds that “the small land holders are the most precious part of the state,” and argues for laws dividing large estates and imposing substantially higher taxes on the wealthy than on the poor: I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers & sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of

38

Aristotle, Politics, 135–6 (Book III, Chapter XIII, 1284a–b). Aristotle, Politics, 181–2 (Book IV, Chapter VIII, 1295b–1296a). 40 Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 115, quoting from The Prerogative of Popular Government. 41 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 121. 42 Quoted in Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 161. 43 Quoted in Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 160. 39

96

INTERLUDE

property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, & to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour & live on.44

There is a Lockean element here in Jefferson’s talk of rights and of the earth as a common stock for human beings.45 His concern for poor and unemployed people and his suggestion that “an equal division of property” would be just, even if “impracticable,” mark him as a member of what the historian Jonathan Israel calls the “Radical Enlightenment.”46

7. Law Republicans tend to believe that the laws of the state, and particularly of the republican state, create, rather than impose upon or constrain, freedom. Harrington writes of an “empire of laws and not of men” that he traces back to Aristotle and Livy.47 He contrasts “liberty . . . from the laws” and “liberty by the laws.”48 A citizen of Lucca, it may be said, is in some sense free of all governments, but only free by the laws of Lucca. He only attains to a certain kind of liberty by participation according to the laws of his state. This idea goes back to Aristotle’s view in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics that we do not fulfill our potential as human beings outside human society, but only as a member of the polis. Hobbes’s late seventeenth-century claim that law is always an imposition on our freedom came as a radical challenge to this tradition.49 In a virtuous republic, the laws apply to everyone, including those who make them, and they are relatively stable and consistent.50 And people respect the law “for its own sake,” as Charles Larmore puts it, “instead of seeking to circumvent it or adhering to it solely out of a fear of sanctions.”51 The United States Constitution that Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison signed in 1787 provided a written set of fundamental laws for the country that have been remarkably stable. There is a provision for amending these laws, and it was used frequently in the early years of the republic, most notably in adopting the Bill of Rights. Amending the 44 Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson: Political Writings, Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 107 (letter to James Madison, October 28, 1795). 45 As in Locke, in Jefferson the “republican approach became intertwined . . . with a habit of jurisprudential, natural-rights thinking, and had a deontological aspect.” See Pettit, Republicanism, 101. 46 See Jonathan Israel: A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). 47 Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, 20. 48 Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, 20. Cf. Pettit, Republicanism, 36 ff. 49 50 See Pettit, Republicanism, 37. See Pettit, Republicanism, 174. 51 Charles Larmore, “Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom,” in Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice, Daniel M. Weinstock and Christian Nadeau, eds. (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004), 103.

INTERLUDE

97

Constitution is a complicated process, however, requiring two-thirds of both houses of Congress or a convention called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures to propose an amendment. Ratification requires approval by the legislatures or ratifying conventions of three-quarters of the states. Only twenty-seven amendments have been ratified. The thirteenth, banning slavery and “involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” was ratified in 1865. Madison takes up the question of reverence for the law in Federalist Forty-Eight, where he discusses the ease of amendment to the draft constitution for Virginia that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1783 (it was never adopted). “The plan,” Madison writes, “like every thing from the same pen, marks a turn of thinking original, comprehensive and accurate; and is the more worthy of attention, as it equally displays a fervent attachment to republican government, and an enlightened view of the dangerous propensities against which it ought to be guarded.”52 But the procedure for amendment, requiring the agreement of two of the three branches of government, each by a two-thirds vote, was too easy. There must be such a procedure, Madison argues, but conventions for this purpose ought to be reserved for “great and extraordinary occasions.” Too frequent appeals, simply by their existence “carry an implication of some defect in the government,” and would therefore: deprive the government of that veneration, which time bestows on every thing, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability . . . When the examples, which fortify opinion, are antient as well as numerous, they are known to have a double effect. In a nation of philosophers, this consideration ought to be disregarded. A reverence for the laws, would be sufficiently inculcated by the voice of an enlightened reason. But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato. And in every other nation, the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage, to have the prejudices of the community on its side.53

Madison follows Hume and other eighteenth-century philosophers in seeing a fundamental split between reason and the passions.54 The laws of republican governments must be arrived at by reason, and “it is the reason of the public alone that ought to controul and regulate the government.” But reverence for the laws is an “advantage” to republican governments.55

8. Varieties of Liberty The terms “liberty” and “freedom” have multiple meanings.56 We are here discussing political liberty or freedom, not the metaphysical freedom that Jonathan Edwards addressed in Freedom of the Will. Nevertheless, there is a useful analogy between two 52 54 56

53 Federalist, 273 (Federalist Forty-Nine). Federalist, 273, 274. 55 See Pole’s footnote to Federalist Forty-Nine, Federalist 276. Federalist, 276, 274. See Larmore, “Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom,” 97–100.

98

INTERLUDE

main metaphysical conceptions of freedom and two main concepts of political liberty. In both domains, there are positions that envision liberty as going along with something (for example, reason, the general will, the polis, one’s own most authentic self), and opposing positions that hold liberty to consist in not being governed by something. Isaiah Berlin calls the political versions of these positions positive and negative liberty: “The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master . . . I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes.”57 Here the person wishes to go along with her inmost authentic nature. The negative sense of liberty, which Berlin finds in the writings of Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Mill, and Constant, indicates “a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated . . . I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.”58 There are elements of both of these conceptions in the republican tradition, as in the Lockean “liberal,” “rights” tradition with which it is interwoven and sometimes contrasted.59 Recent republican theorists have distinguished a third concept of liberty, or, as it seems to some observers, a second kind of negative liberty, one that emphasizes not only an area in which society does not intrude, but a certain status that each free person has. Pettit calls this status “non-domination,” and explains it is a way of life in which no one has “to bow and scrape to others,” in which persons would be “capable of standing on their own two feet . . . each able to look others squarely in the eye.”60 He cites, as characteristic of this conception of liberty, Montesquieu’s statement: “Political liberty in a citizen is that tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another citizen.”61 There is thus an intersubjective, even communal, aspect to republican liberty, where “the focus of attention,” as Larmore discusses, is on the “relations in which people stand to one another” rather than on a zone of freedom in which people may act “unimpeded by others.”62

57 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 203. 58 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 196, 194. 59 Knud Haakonssen writes: “The opposition between liberalism and republicanism, while a source of inspiration for the recent revival of the latter, is more an invention of this revival than ascertainable historical fact.” (“Republicanism,” 571.) 60 Pettit, Republicanism, 133. 61 Pettit, Republicanism, 71 (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 157). 62 Larmore, “Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom,”102.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

INTERLUDE

99

9. Slavery in the American Republic There is considerable irony in the fact that people so concerned with freedom should have constructed a republic that acknowledged slavery—without, however, ever using the words “slave” or “slavery” in the Constitution. The Constitution contained a fugitive slave law, though its reference to slavery is euphemistic and shamefaced, as White says: “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”63 There was also a section concerning the “importation” of slaves (Article I, Section 9): “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding Ten dollars for each Person.”64 As everyone knew, the southern states thought it “proper to admit” slaves, so this was legalizing slavery in America until 1808. (The importation of slaves was prohibited by an act of Congress, effective January 1, 1808.) When Madison argued before the Constitutional Convention on behalf of the new constitution on June 6, 1787, he portrayed slavery as one of the problems that a faction had produced. The mere distinction of color, he stated, had been made the ground of “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”65 But when he discusses factions in Federalist Ten some five months later, he omits all reference to slavery as supported by a faction; and, as White points out, his definition of a faction logically excludes slavery, because it defines a faction as a group of citizens who invade the rights of other citizens. The slaves were not citizens.66 An even more remarkable reference to slavery in the Constitution of 1787 is found in Article I, Section 2, the fourth paragraph of the document: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.67

The phrase “free Persons” implies that there are unfree persons, the “other Persons.” Thus the Constitution recognized that the slaves were persons, but for the purposes of taxation and representation in the House of Representatives, the slaves were to count less—precisely three-fifths—of what a free person would. This was a political compromise. If all the slaves were counted, then the southern states would have a 63 White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution, 169 and Federalist, 482 (Article IV, Section 2, later altered by the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865). 64 65 Federalist, 478. White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution, 169. 66 67 White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution, 169. Federalist, 474.

100

INTERLUDE

greater number of representatives, and hence more political power. If they were not counted at all—not being citizens—then southern power in the House would be greatly diminished. (The issue did not arise for the Senate, because each state was (and is) represented by two senators, no matter what its population.) Madison, an opponent of slavery who, like his friend Jefferson, continued to own slaves, in Federalist Fifty-Four goes through a series of logical contortions to justify this provision of the Constitution. His basic argument is that slaves are treated by the law as persons but also as property; so they should not be treated as full persons. As for the three-fifths number, he casually judges it to be just about right. He rejects the argument that the slaves are mere property with no rights: “In being protected on the other hand in his life and in his limbs, against the violence of all others, even the master of his labor and his liberty; and in being punishable himself for all violence committed against others; the slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society; not as a part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property.”68 But the slave is an article of property, if not merely that. According to the laws under which they live, they have “the mixt character of persons and property.” So he embraces “the compromising expedient of the constitution . . . which regards the slave as divested of two fifth of the man.”69 At the end of Federalist Fifty-Four, Madison steps back from his argument somewhat by maintaining that he has been presenting “the reasoning which an advocate for the southern interests might employ on this subject.” Although his reasoning “may appear to be a little strained in some points,” he continues, “yet on the whole, I must confess, that it fully reconciles me to the scale of representation, which the convention have established.”70 Madison’s phrase “a little strained in some points” is a mark of his “discomfort,” as J. R. Pole puts it, “with this intellectually inconsistent and morally unconscionable argument.”71

68 71

69 Federalist, 296. Federalist, 297. Federalist, 298 (editor’s note).

70

Federalist, 298–9.

4 Thomas Jefferson 1. Introduction Jefferson is a central figure of the American Revolution and the early republic: author of the “The Declaration of Independence” (1776), “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1777), and his magnum opus, Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson was an actor as well as a thinker. The Declaration was not only a discourse or plan of action, but a great speech act by which the former colonies established themselves as independent of Britain. The “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” with a few of its more radical proposals omitted, became the law of Virginia.1 With the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States, Jefferson, as the third president of the United States, created the conditions for the agrarian society he envisioned in his Notes. Back in Virginia after his presidency, he founded the first secular university in America, the University of Virginia. Some of Jefferson’s actions and writings are problematic, however, as they conflict with his expressed political and moral doctrines. In the “Declaration” he holds that “all men are created equal,” and in the Notes he writes eloquently about the evils of slavery. Yet he owned between one and two hundred slaves throughout his adult life, and fathered a slave family with his slave Sally Hemings. Compounding his inconsistencies, he argues in the Notes that “the blacks” are an inferior race, the members of which should be expelled from America, lest they mix with “the whites.” Jefferson did not remain silent about this great national question, and was attacked in his day by his political opponents for his condemnation of slavery. He contributed, however imperfectly, to the search for what William James was to call a new “equilibrium of human ideals.”2 Jefferson was born in 1743 into a wealthy family with deep roots in Virginia society. His mother, Jane Randolph, was a member of Virginia’s landowning elite, and his father, Peter Jefferson, was a Virginia-born surveyor, mapmaker, landowner, and magistrate who rose in society by talent, charm, and energy. Jefferson was Jefferson’s Bill was finally passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786. See R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 68–9. 2 See William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, contained in William James, Writings 1878–1899, Gerald E. Myers, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 611; and Section 6 below. 1

102

THOMAS JEFFERSON

educated by tutors at home and in nearby small schools, but at the age of sixteen he asked his guardian (his father having died three years earlier) for permission to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, giving as one of his reasons that he would be able to devote more attention to study and less to socializing (“put a Stop to so much Company”).3 Permission granted, he spent the next two years at the college, where he came under the influence of William Small, the only layman on a faculty of Anglican clerics and a recent graduate of Marechal College in Aberdeen, Scotland. Small taught almost half the courses Jefferson took, in such subjects as natural philosophy, mathematics, and ethics. He introduced Jefferson to the works of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and John Locke, as well as to the Williamsburg society gathered around Governor Francis Fauquier, a member of the Royal Society. There, Jefferson met George Wythe, a self-educated lawyer and classicist who became the first professor of law at William and Mary. Jefferson “read law” with Wythe for five years—twice the normal period—before being admitted to the bar in 1767. His course of study amounted to a substantial graduate education, which ranged from Sir Edward Coke’s dry but essential Institutes and Reports to European civil law, British parliamentary law, and works of history, philosophy and ethics.4 Most of Jefferson’s papers and his library were destroyed in a fire at his mother’s home at Shadwell in 1770, but we can glean something of his early reading and intellectual formation from a letter he sent to his prospective brother-in-law Robert Skipwith in 1771, when Jefferson was twenty-eight. Jefferson had been practicing law for four years and was in his second year as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses when he wrote his response to Skipwith’s request for a catalogue of books for a gentleman’s library “to the amount of about 50 lib. Ster.” Instead, Jefferson sent a catalogue for a “general collection” for a “private gentleman,” which he suggested Skipwith accumulate over a period of years.5 He arranged his list under eight headings: “Fine Arts” (the longest), “Criticism on the Fine Arts,” “Politicks, Trade,” “Religion,” “Law,” “History. Antient,” “History. Modern,” “Natural Philosophy, Natural History, &c,” and “Miscellaneous.”6 Jefferson justifies the preponderance of literary works (by Pope, Dryden, Milton, Molie`re, Congreve, Swift, Addison, Sterne, Rousseau, Marmontel, Smollett, Richardson, and Fielding) partly on the ground that they foster moral development, understood as the strengthening and elevating of our feelings, sentiments, or emotions. Literature excites our “moral feelings,” Jefferson writes, just as much as acts in the real world do: When any original act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also . . . Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our

3 4 5

Thomas Jefferson, Writings, Merrill D. Peterson, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 733. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 4–6. 6 Jefferson, Writings, Peterson, ed., 740, 742. Jefferson, Writings, 743–5.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

103

virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body acquire strength by exercise . . . We neither know nor care whether Lawrence [sic] Sterne really went to France, whether he was there accosted by the Franciscan, at first rebuked him unkindly, and then gave him a peace offering: or whether the whole be not fiction. In either case we equally are sorrowful at the rebuke, and secretly resolve we will never do so: we are pleased with the subsequent atonement, and view with emulation a soul candidly acknowledging it’s [sic] fault and making a just reparation.”7

The discourse of sentiment, emotion, feeling, and beauty marks this statement as in the broad stream of moral sense philosophy that runs from Shaftesbury through Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Reid, and which we have already encountered in Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue. Jefferson’s emphasis on the “notion of moral ‘beauty’ ” and his “suggestion that moral approval and moral motivation go together” mark his thought as in the tradition of Francis Hutcheson.”8 In the same way as many of the Scots, most notably Hume, Jefferson denied that morality is founded on reason. Otherwise, as he was to put it, the professor would be morally superior to the ploughman: “State a moral case to a ploughman & a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”9 The discourse of sentiment and morality that Jefferson employed was not confined to Britain. In France, Diderot held that “if people but weep, they cannot be wicked,” and a story by Marmontel (whose “Moral Tales” are included in Jefferson’s list) depicts a mother who “chooses the more virtuous of two men for her daughter to marry by observing which one cries more at the theatre.”10 In the other categories of his list for Skipwith, Jefferson included only a few of “the best books,” since Skipwith was not particularly interested in law, politics, or criticism. Under “Criticism on the Fine Arts”, Jefferson lists seven items: Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, “Burke on the sublime and beautiful . . . Hogarth’s analysis of beauty . . . Reid on the human mind . . . Smith’s theory of moral sentiments . . . Johnson’s dictionary, Capell’s prolusions.” All but the last (an eighteenth-century collection and commentary on Shakespeare) are regarded as important today, and the three Scottish philosophers on the list give credence to Garry Wills’s claim that there is a significant Scottish component in Jefferson’s thought.11

7

Jefferson, Writings, 741–2. Samuel Fleischacker, “The Impact on America: Scottish philosophy and the American Founding,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, Alexander Broadie, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 335, n. 15. 9 Letter to Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr, from Paris, August, 10, 1787, in Jefferson, Writings, Peterson, ed., 902. 10 Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 277. 11 Wills, Inventing America, passim. Note, however, that no work of Hutcheson, the founder of the moral sense school and a significant presence in Wills’s discussion, is in this list. Wills argues that “Hutcheson was the author on the central topic of philosophy as it was taught at Philadelphia and Princeton and New York,” 8

104

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The section on politics lists eight books, among them Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Bolingbroke’s political works, “Locke on government” (presumably the Two Treatises of Government first published in 1689, and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698). Sidney distinguished “consent” from “force” as a basis for government, and wrote: “God leaves to man the choice of Forms in Government; and those who constitute one Form may abrogate it.” Jefferson’s reference to Locke runs contrary to Wills’s argument that in formulating the “Declaration of Independence,” it was the Scottish thinkers—rather than Locke and other English writers—who influenced Jefferson’s thought.12 There are in fact many sources for Jefferson’s political ideas: Locke, republican theorists such as Sidney and Montesquieu, the Scottish moral sense philosophers, and the ancient Greek and Roman writers he first read in Williamsburg. Jefferson’s section on “Religion” is noteworthy for its distance from Christianity and even from deism, although both are present. The first item on the list is Locke’s Some Thoughts on the Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth (an addendum to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding), which is mostly a manual concerning prejudice and error. Locke warns against the practice, for example, of “hunting after Arguments to make good one side of a Question, and wholly to neglect and refuse those which favour the other side.”13 Locke’s essay, thus, is far from an orthodox religious text. Next on Jefferson’s list are five classical works: Xenophon’s memoir of Socrates, Epictetus’s Manual, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Cicero’s Offices and Tusculan Disputations. Jefferson’s “Religion” list thus provides support for Dumas Malone’s claim that his fundamental philosophy of life was a blend of Stoicism and Epicureanism: Before he attained domestic happiness he had probably worked out his enduring philosophy of life; it was marked by cheerfulness not gloom, and he afterwards described it as Epicurean, though he hastened to say that the term was much misunderstood. He came to believe that happiness was the end of life, but, as has been said, he was engaged by ‘the peculiar conjunction of duty with happiness’; and his working philosophy was a sort of blend of Epicureanism and Stoicism, in which the goal of happiness was attained by self-discipline.14

and points out that Hutcheson’s Inquiry of 1725 and the Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747) were in the library Jefferson sold to Congress, and that he repurchased them for his own library later (Wills, 201). For a critique of Wills, see Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4 (October, 1979), 503–23, and Fleischacker, “The Impact on America.” For a thorough review of the literature, see Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 141–7. 12 Wills relies on this list in arguing for Reid’s importance for the “Declaration,” but he does not mention that Locke’s political works appear there too, a point first noted by Hamowy (see Wills, Inventing America, 182, 175–6). 13 John Locke, Some Thoughts on the Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth, (Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1741), 43 (paragraph 14). 14 Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 108.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

105

There are modern works too in Jefferson’s “Religion” list, including, a four-volume set of Hume’s essays, which contains such skeptical essays as “On Miracles,” and is about as far from a religious work as one can get. There are five volumes of Lord Bolingbroke’s philosophical works. Bolingbroke was a religious writer, a deist who held that we can know the existence of God and the veracity of morality through reason. But he also held, in a passage Jefferson copied into his notebook, that “[n]o hypothesis ought to be maintained if a single phenomenon stands in direct opposition to it.”15 Jefferson also lists Lord Kames’s 1751 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, which attempt to establish the validity of our common moral intuitions; Robert Dodsley’s Oeconomy of Human Life (1750), a popular work of didactic morality alleged to be “Translated from an Indian Manuscript written by an ancient Bramin”; and Laurence Sterne’s Sermons, where (following Hebrews xii, 14) he calls for us to “follow peace with all men.”16 The list concludes with two books by the rationalist theologian William Sherlock which argue for immortality and a future state.17 All in all, this list of religious books is that of a moderate deist or Stoic, who believes in some divine principle of the world, and who thinks questions about the existence of God or a human life after death should be decided by reason. Jefferson’s list of “Ancient History” texts begins with one word, “Bible,” and then passes to a set of pagan sources: Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Caesar, Plutarch’s Lives. By placing the Bible at the head of this list, Jefferson tells Skipwith that it too is a record of human events, produced by human beings. Jefferson here exemplifies the Enlightenment as described by Kant in that he was prepared, and prepared others, to use their understanding “without guidance from another.”18 For Jefferson, the Bible was a text worth reading for its historical information and moral lessons, one of a profusion of texts from which we may benefit. Jefferson lists Hume’s History of England, Stith’s History of Virginia, Bossuet’s History of France, Clarendon’s history of the English rebellion and Robertson’s history of Scotland in his section on Modern History. These are all works of secular history, about politics, war, and human custom, not about what Edwards called, some thirty years earlier, the “history of the work of redemption.” Jefferson is in accord with the deists in rejecting the idea of history as a record of God’s interventions in the world. Hume’s argument in “On Miracles,” included in the four-volume set of Hume’s works that Jefferson recommends in the section on “Religion,” concludes that there cannot be good reason to believe in miracles—understood as violations of 15 Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 106, quoting Gilbert Chinard, ed., The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson. His Commonplace Book of Philosophers and Poets (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928). 16 Laurence Sterne, “Follow Peace” (Sermon XLI), in The Works of Laurence Sterne (London, 1790), vol. 8, 263–72. 17 The full titles of these last mentioned books are: A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1689) and A Practical Discourse Concerning a Future Judgment (1692). 18 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, Ted Humphrey, trans. (Indianapolis and Cambridge MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 41, 42.

106

THOMAS JEFFERSON

the laws of nature—for laws of nature are precisely what we have on the best possible evidence. The section on “Natural Philosophy, Natural History, &c” shows Jefferson’s interest in agriculture, with such works as “Tull’s horse-hoeing husbandry” and “Home’s principles of agriculture.” It includes “Franklin on Electricity,” and “Buffon’s natural history.” The final small “Miscellaneous” section includes “Voltaire’s works”—this almost two decades before Jefferson set foot in France—and Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). Jefferson’s recommendations to Skipwith are a guide to his intellectual universe five years before he produced two of the documents for which we remember him, “The Declaration of Independence” and the “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.” The first of these will be our main subject in the Section 2, and the second in the Section 3 below.

2. The Declaration of Independence Following the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763 (known in America as the French and Indian War) the British imposed new taxes on the American colonists, in part to repay their expenses defending them from the French and Indians. The Stamp Act of 1765 levied taxes on paper and printed goods, and though it was repealed a year later in the face of an American boycott, new taxes were imposed. When Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1768, he joined George Washington and Patrick Henry in the radical bloc that questioned the justice of such taxation without representation in Parliament. (For their part, the British pointed out that only 300,000 Englishmen out of a total of 8 million subjects of Great Britain and Ireland actually voted to elect the House of Commons, and their duty was to represent all people of the Empire, under the doctrine of “virtual representation.”)19 In 1773, Jefferson worked with others in Virginia to establish a system of “committees of correspondence” to facilitate communication among the colonies, and, after the British closure of the port of Boston after the Boston Tea Party at the end of the year, he helped organize the first continental congress. Jefferson’s instructions to the Virginia delegates, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774) was printed anonymously by his friends, and reprinted in London. This was Jefferson’s first statement of political philosophy.20 Jefferson asserts that the Americans are “a free people claiming their rights,” not just asking for a “gift,” and invokes a tradition of rights going back to the Saxons that allowed him to express his pride in being a full-fledged British citizen.21 As R. B. Bernstein puts it: “he thought that a Virginia gentleman was as good as—and 19

20 Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 17–18. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 22–3. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings, Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77–9. 21

THOMAS JEFFERSON

107

entitled to the same rights as—any native-born Englishman.”22 Among these rights were the right of free trade—threatened by a series of British tariffs—and “the glorious right of representation.”23 If there is no representative body, or a body not sufficiently representative, then, Jefferson asserts, “power reverts to the people, who may exercise it to an unlimited extent.”24 Even the king derives his authority only from the people, not from some divine right or mystery: “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.”25 In his claim that the people are the fundamental basis of the state and his assertion that in certain circumstances the people may reassert this power, Jefferson stands in the broad tradition that begins with Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Locke holds that “whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience.” By such a “breach of trust,” Locke continues, the legislature or the executive, “forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”26 This is the “Locke on government” that Jefferson recommended to Skipwith three years earlier. Jefferson was known to some members of the Continental Congress as the author of the “Rights of British America,” but in 1775 he came to the attention of the entire membership when he wrote and presented Virginia’s response to the peace proposals Lord North offered to the colonies. North’s proposal was to end some of the more egregious taxes and restrictions of trade, while reasserting British rights to impose them. By presenting the proposal to each legislature individually, North aimed to divide the colonies. Jefferson’s response here was more sober than in the “Rights of British America,” but equally powerful and radical. Lord North’s proposal was, Jefferson pointed out, only for “a suspension of the mode, not a renunciation of the pretended right to tax us.” He ended with the threatening conclusion that “nothing but our own exertions may defeat the ministerial sentence of death or abject submission.”27 Congress adopted Jefferson’s language with some small changes and John Hancock, President of Congress, signed the document on July 31, 1775. When Congress set up a committee to write a declaration of independence in the following summer, Jefferson was chosen to serve, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. The five members then agreed that Jefferson should draft the document, with Adams deferring to Jefferson

22

23 Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 20. Jefferson, Political Writings, 67–9, 75. 25 Jefferson, Political Writings, 77. Jefferson, Political Writings, 79. 26 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, C. B. Macpherson, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 111 (para. 222). 27 “Resolutions of Congress on Lord North’s Conciliatory Proposal,” in Jefferson, Writings, 334, 335. 24

108

THOMAS JEFFERSON

both because of the “Elegance of his pen” and because “I had been so obnoxious for my early and constant Zeal in promoting the Measure, that any draught of mine, would undergo a more severe Scrutiny and Criticism in Congress, than one of his composition.”28 Jefferson altered his first draft in accordance with suggestions from Franklin and Adams, and about a quarter of it was cut in the congressional debates, to Jefferson’s chagrin. (Franklin tried to console him with the tale of a hatter whose sign originally read “John Thompson, Hatter, Makes and Sells Hats for Ready Money,” but ended up with only his name and the picture of a hat.)29 Fortunately for our purposes, the first two paragraphs, which contain statements of moral principles and political philosophy, were approved virtually unaltered from Jefferson’s original draft.30 The Declaration’s first paragraph is one long sentence: When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.31

This was not an address to the British crown, but to “mankind.” The time to ask for rights was over, the time to take a place on the world stage (and to find some allies, e.g. France) was at hand. Jefferson’s Americans were not asking for something or even asserting their rights. They were explaining, “declaring the causes,” why “one people” declared its independence from another. How were these people constituted as one and distinguished from the other? Their history was British; they had taken themselves, as Jefferson had two years before, to be loyal subjects of the British Crown. What bound the declarers of independence was not only a common history as colonists administered by a government that did not treat them as full citizens, but a free act of breaking the bands and forming new ones. The freedom or liberty that was exercised is that identified in Locke’s Second Treatise when he writes that men may join with one another by their free consent to form civil society.32 “Every man is born with . . . a right of freedom to his person, which no other man has a power over, but the free disposal of it lies in himself.” By this right “a man is naturally free from subjection to any government.”33 According to this conception, there was no deep history or metaphysical basis for the Americans to remain British. Jefferson is presupposing that they can decide or consent to form “one people” and to “dissolve the political bands” that have connected them to 28

29 Cited in Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 31–2. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 34. For the version Jefferson prints in his “Autobiography,” see Jefferson, Political Writings, 96–102. For the composition history of the “Declaration,” see Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson, 138–41 and Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 220–6. 31 Jefferson, Political Writings, 102. 32 33 Cf. Locke, Treatise, 47–8 (paras. 89–90), and passim. Locke, Treatise, 98 (paras. 190–1). 30

THOMAS JEFFERSON

109

another. There are echoes of this view in Jefferson’s later idea that the Constitution should come up for revision every twenty years.34 The signers of the “Declaration” were observers of “the course of human events” but also actors in this course as they assert their place among “the powers of the earth.” There is nothing supernatural or mysterious about the events mentioned and anticipated in the “Declaration.” Yet Jefferson uses the expression “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” These laws are said to “entitle” the free choice of government, although they are not said to determine that choice. In the background here is the long tradition of “natural law theory” that runs from Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius to Hugo Grotius and John Locke.35 There is mystery here, in that it is not clear what the status and origin of these laws are or how they found or entitle rights. Jefferson’s expression “nature’s God” suggests some transcendent grounding but does not specify the relation “God” has to “nature”: whether God is the creator of nature (as in Genesis), an immanent principle in nature (like the Stoics’ Logos), or simply nature itself (as in Spinoza). Similarly, Jefferson does not clarify the relation between the “laws of nature” and “nature’s God.” Are they identical and if not how do they differ? Of course, Jefferson’s aim was not to produce a work of academic philosophy, but to create the text for a potent political act. The “Declaration’s” second paragraph begins: We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.36

Jefferson’s use of the word “truths” indicates the objective character he attributes to “rights.” Like the natural law theorists, he is talking about principles, laws, or truths that are independent of human beings, not mere customs that are entirely a human creation. He holds these truths to be “self-evident,” a term used by Locke, but only for statements of identity. A more likely source is Thomas Reid, whose An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) is on the Skipwith list.37 In any case, we can say that Jefferson believed in substantial moral/political truths that—like those that the ploughman and professor could both understand—were accessible and persuasive to the human mind.

See Section 5, “Radical Republicanism,” below. For the modern period, see Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 36 37 Jefferson, Political Writings, 102. Following Wills, Inventing America, 181–3, 191. 34 35

110

THOMAS JEFFERSON

The “Declaration” provides a list, but not a complete list (“among these are . . .”) of these self-evident truths: “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The language here is more deist than stoic, in that men are “created,” have a “creator.” Wedded to this vaguely Judeo-Christian picture is a vision not of original sin but of original “unalienable rights” (a phrase that appears in Hutcheson) in a state of nature. The state of nature, as Locke understood it, was not a state of license, for there is “a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that all being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”38 In Locke, then, we have the themes of equality, natural law, and life and liberty that we also find in Jefferson, as well as the idea that government is instituted to protect our rights. Jefferson does not mention Locke in the “Declaration,” but he follows Locke’s standard list of rights by beginning with our rights to life and liberty. Then, in a stroke of genius, he adds “the pursuit of happiness.” There is nothing like this in Locke, who speaks of life, liberty, and “possessions” or “estates.” But among a host of writers in Scotland, France, and England in the mid-eighteenth century “happiness”—human, measurable happiness, not divine happiness—became a revolutionary tool for the comprehension and assessment of actions and governments. Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) was a crucial early text in establishing the new emphasis on measurable human happiness. It is in Hutcheson’s Inquiry that the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers” first appears: In comparing the moral Qualitys of Actions, in order to regulate our Election among various Actions propos’d, or to find which of them has the greatest moral Excellency, we are led by our moral Sense of Virtue to judge . . . that, that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.”39

We see here not only the first formulation of the “greatest happiness” principle, but a concern with the calculation of happiness that is characteristic both of the utilitarian tradition and of the Enlightenment, and which particularly appealed to Jefferson. Hutcheson’s phrase received an influential formulation in the writings of Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), whose Dei Delitti e delle Pene (1764) Jefferson studied in Williamsburg.40 Beccaria wrote of “the greatest happiness distributed among the greatest number” (“la massima felicita` divisa nel maggior numero”).41 In France, the article Locke, Treatise, 9 (para. 6). Elsewhere in the Treatise Locke speaks of the “lives, liberties, and estates” of citizens. 39 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Wolfgang Leidhold, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 125. 40 41 Wills, Inventing America, 157–8. Wills, Inventing America, 150, 155. 38

THOMAS JEFFERSON

111

on “Government” in the Encyclope´die argued that the greatest happiness of the greatest number was a criterion of good government (“Le meilleur des governments est celui qui fait le plus grand nombre d’heureux”), and Chastellux maintained in De la Felicite´ (1772) that since superstition clouds one’s happiness, the felicity of a nation was inversely proportional to the number of priests.42 Happiness was thus a touchy subject for the French censors. It was no longer just the preserve of theology, but a measureable outcome in the public domain of calculation and experiment.43 Since Romanticism, we may be accustomed to think of the measurement and calculation of happiness as a form of alienation and falsification by which we lose touch with nature. In the eighteenth century, it had a critical and even revolutionary role. Jefferson integrates the eighteenth-century “human happiness” tradition with the seventeenth-century Lockean theory of natural rights. He also adds a key modifying word to his formulation: “pursuits.” He doesn’t say we have a right to happiness— what a burden for government that would be!—but that we have a right to pursue happiness. There is more than a hint of positive liberty here, as Isaiah Berlin defines it: “to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes.” Berlin’s formulation doesn’t mention happiness, but draws attention to the pursuit of one’s own goals. The idea that the government must secure the conditions for our pursuit of happiness opens up a new domain of government activity that goes beyond protecting life and liberty—not that of producing happiness, but of securing the conditions that make it possible. “When Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness,” Wills writes, “he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant a public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed, the test and justification of any government.”44 Returning to the text of the “Declaration” (and still to the first three sentences of its second paragraph) we find three substantial claims: government is instituted to protect fundamental rights (“to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men”); legitimate governments must be founded on “consent” (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”); and “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish” the government and institute a new one “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends.” All these claims are prominent in Locke’s Treatise on Government. When does a government become “destructive” of the ends for which it is established? Had the British government reached the point of destroying the Americans’ rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? There were battles at Lexington and Concord, massings of troops, and oppressive taxes, but did this make rebellion imperative? Jefferson, like Locke, states that it would be imprudent to change governments for “light and transient causes,” but he continues: “But when 42 44

Wills, Inventing America, 150, 137. Wills, Inventing America, 164.

43

Wills, Inventing America, 151.

112

THOMAS JEFFERSON

a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” Jefferson’s argument was not that tyranny had been reached, but that it was “on its way,” as Fleischacker puts it, through “a series of relatively small betrayals of political legitimacy.”45 This is exactly Locke’s argument, in some of the same language: “But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people . . . it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.”46 In the 1820s, as the fiftieth anniversary of the American republic was about to be celebrated, some people questioned the originality of Jefferson’s “Declaration,” and he addressed the issue in a letter written the year before he died: This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney &c.47

Jefferson was a great writer. He is modest here in not claiming to produce new arguments or principles, though he does suggest that he has said some things that “had never been said before.” He denies “copying” from a previous writing—seeming to agree that if he had, this would have diminished his achievement. The authority of the document, he says, rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day. It is “sentiments”—deep moral convictions and responses of the sort we find in Sterne’s Sentimental Education or Hume’s writings on morals—to which Jefferson appeals. It is one thing to register these sentiments, however, and another to distill and express them in an appropriate manner, to present them in terms “so plain and firm as to command their assent.” This, Jefferson says, would be to present the “common sense” of the “subject.” Jefferson is in accord with Reid’s idea that expressing the common or communal sense of a matter is a philosophical achievement, not a matter of “vague common talk” or the “lowest common denominator.”48 The “Declaration” is more a legal brief than an exercise in political philosophy, and is devoted primarily to specific charges, the “long train of abuses,” committed by the 45 47 48

46 Fleischacker, “The Impact on America,” 320. Locke, Treatise, 113 (para. 225). Jefferson, Political Writings, 147–8 (Letter to Henry Lee, dated May 8, 1825). Wills, “Inventing America,” 190–1.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

113

king and parliament. Among these abuses are the nullification of laws passed by colonial legislatures, dissolving legislatures and failing to reconstitute them, keeping “in times of peace, standing armies,” rendering the military superior to civilian authority or “civil power,” “imposing taxes upon us without our consent,” and (after the outbreak of hostilities) burning towns, destroying “the lives of our people,” and encouraging “domestic insurrection.”49 At the end of the “Declaration” stands a sentence, which in its context not only reports on a declaration of independence, but achieves or carries it out: We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.50

The authority for the declaration lies with “the good people of these colonies,” a position in accord both with Locke and with the republican writers Harrington, Trenchard, and Gordon.51 However, in the idea that the people of the American 49 Jefferson, Political Writings, 103–4. Congress adopted the first two paragraphs of Jefferson’s draft with few changes, but cut the bill of particular “abuses” severely, including the following charge against the king:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither . . . Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And . . . he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another (Jefferson, Political Writings, 99–100). No one could have said it better: slavery violates the very “sacred rights of life and liberty” spoken of earlier in the “Declaration.” The British king did not exactly force slavery on the unwilling colonists, however. It was part of the fabric of life in all of the colonies, nowhere more than in Virginia, which had more slaves living within its borders than any other colony. It is true that in Jefferson’s time the British vetoed a Virginia bill prohibiting the further importation of slaves, but the Virginia legislature’s motive was not opposition to slavery, but preservation of the value of “homebred slaves” (Wills, Inventing America, 41). The strangeness of Jefferson’s attachment to his original version lies in his blindness to the way his own behavior was at variance with the principles he championed, for he was one of the greatest slaveholders in his state until the day that he died. The American congressional delegates were well aware of the British criticism that they were hypocritical for advocating their own freedom while denying it to their slaves, and did not wish to bring up the subject in the “Declaration.” See Section 5 below for Jefferson’s views about slavery. 50 Jefferson, Political Writings, 105. 51 See Chapter 3, the “Interlude,” on the concept of a republic.

114

THOMAS JEFFERSON

colonies can gather themselves together and unite to form “free and independent states,” the “Declaration” is more in accord with the radical contingency of the state, as depicted in the social contract tradition epitomized by Locke. Hannah Arendt stresses the radical nature of the final sentence of the above quotation, where the “mutual pledge” of life, fortune, and honor is “to each other” rather than to any already existing political entity such as “the crown, representing the realm as a whole.”52 The operative verbs in the first sentence of the quotation above are “publish and declare.” The content of this public declaration is both a statement of fact—the colonies are free and independent—and a moral claim—they ought to be free and independent. The arguments about British abuses and general principles explain why the colonies ought to be independent, but what is the status of the claim that they are free and independent? In this case, up to the time of the Declaration, the colonies were a rebellious section of Great Britain. The objective of the “Declaration of Independence” was not to report on their independence, because that independence was not the standing condition in which the signers found themselves. Rather, the declaration was meant to effect independence, to originate it. To say that the colonies were an independent state in this context—in a meeting of representatives of all the colonies, embracing a Lockean social contract view of government—was to make them one—until or unless they were subdued by the British. The “Declaration” committed the signers and the people they represented to the financial and military responsibilities of free and independent states.53 During the revolutionary period people paid more attention to the specific charges against the British contained in the “Declaration” than to the general statements of principles with which it began. In the ensuing debates about the Constitution, the “Declaration” was largely forgotten, and is not mentioned at all in the Federalist. But as Abraham Lincoln observed in an address at Springfield in June 1857, Jefferson’s words continue to do work as a barrier to despotic government: The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of posterity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should

52

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 127. Jefferson’s draft (as approved by Franklin, Adams, and other members of the drafting committee) did not contain the phrase “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” which was added by Congress (Jefferson, Political Writings, 101). For the differences in ordering and content between the committee’s draft and the version passed by Congress, see Jefferson, Political Writings, 96–102. 53 See J. L. Austin, How to do things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). “Declare,” like “proclaim,” is to some degree an exercitive, a “decision that something is to be so.” But it is also a commissive, which “commit[s] the speaker to a certain course of action” (see Austin, 154–7).

THOMAS JEFFERSON

115

re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.54

As he developed his public opposition to slavery, Lincoln used the document crafted by the slaveholder Jefferson to advance the cause of abolition. He drew a contrast between what Wills calls “the Declaration as the statement of a permanent ideal and the Constitution as an early and provisional embodiment of that ideal, to be tested against it, kept in motion toward it.”55 The “Declaration,” Lincoln writes, was issued as: a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.56

According to this conception, the “Declaration” presents the founding regulative ideals of America, while the Constitution is a great, but imperfect and changing, attempt to realize these ideals.

3. Religious Freedom a. Jefferson’s 1777 Bill Jefferson regarded “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1777), along with the “Declaration,” as one of his three great achievements.57 The Bill begins with a statement of political philosophy that embraces the principles of religious freedom and free inquiry, provides a foundation for these principles in “natural right,” distinguishes between “civil rights” and “religious opinions,” and sets this all in the context of an account of the human mind and will:

Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” June 26, 1857 in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed., (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. 2, 406. As for the original intention of the Constitution’s framers regarding equal rights, Lincoln points out (following Justice Curtis’s dissent in the Dred Scott decision) that in five states—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina—“free negroes were voters, and, in proportion to their numbers, had the same part in making the Constitution that the white people had” (Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield,” 403). 55 Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 101. 56 Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield,” 406. 57 The third was the founding of the University of Virginia. Jefferson left instructions that the following epitaph “& not a word more” be inscribed on his tombstone: 54

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom & Father of the University of Virginia (Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson, 137). The Bill was not passed until 1786, with some of Jefferson’s more sweeping language about the supremacy of reason removed (Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 279; see also Cogliano, 164–5 n. 38).

116

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet [chooses] not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislature and ruler, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical . . . that our civil rights have no dependance [sic] on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry . . . that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction . . . that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.58

Jefferson’s bill runs along deist lines. There is talk of God, but also talk of reason, which is said to be given us by God so that we may figure things out for ourselves. We are not constructed to believe in a particular religion, and no specific religion is mentioned in the Bill, again in accord with the deist rejection of miracles and sacred texts. Briefly considering the history of religion, the Bill states that “false religions” have been propagated by force and law, and it rejects “compulsory contributions” to any church as “tyrannical.” Finally, Jefferson’s bill defends not only freedom of belief, but “free argument and debate” as the essential means for attaining truth in religion and elsewhere. With this philosophical prelude constituting its first, longer section, the Bill’s second section enacts a law in accord with it: We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods; or shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.59

There are clear anticipations of Jefferson’s text in Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration, a work Jefferson read.60 Locke calls for a separation of civil from religious 58

59 Jefferson, Political Writings, 390–1. Jefferson, Political Writings, 391. Three works of Locke, including the Second Treatise on Government, are listed in Jefferson’s letter to Skipwith, but not A Letter Concerning Toleration or the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Jefferson’s knowledge of Locke’s Second Treatise, see S. Gerald Sandler, “Lockean Ideas in Thomas 60

THOMAS JEFFERSON

117

authority. The former is concerned with “Life, Liberty, Health,” and the possession of “Money, Lands, Houses.” But it is not concerned with the “Care of Souls.”61 That care is the responsibility of the souls themselves, Locke thinks, who may join or depart from a religious community or church as they see fit,62 and who cannot be compelled to believe, even if they are compelled to act in certain ways or to profess belief. “All the Life and Power of true Religion,” Locke held, “consists in the inward and full perswasion of the mind: And Faith is not Faith without believing.”63 Jefferson wrote in his bill that civil government may interfere with a religion only when its principles lead people “into overt acts against peace and good order.” Much religious practice does not consist of such acts, but rather of perfectly normal, legal actions that do not disturb the peace. Locke had made the same argument, that nonreligious practices do not become unlawful simply because they are performed in a church: Is it permitted to speak Latin in the Market-place? Let those that have a mind to it, be permitted to do it also in the Church. Is it lawful for any man in his own House, to kneel, stand, sit, or use any other Posture; and to cloath himself in White or Black, in short or in long Garments? Let it not be made unlawful to eat Bread, drink Wine, or wash with Water, in the Church. In a Word: Whatsoever things are left free by Law in the common occasions of Life, let them remain free unto every Church in Divine Worship.64

Locke had written as a tolerant Christian emphasizing the moral teaching of Jesus, and held that true Christianity consists of “Charity, Meekness, and Good-will in general towards all Mankind; even to those that are not Christians.”65 He advocated toleration of Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Arminians, and Quakers, and wrote that “neither Pagan, nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth, because of his Religion.” Jefferson’s document identifies no specific religion, and it surpasses Locke’s in the scope of its toleration. Locke had denied protection for atheists on the ground that without belief in God they could not be trusted: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants, and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist.”66 Locke also argued against toleration for Roman Catholics, on two grounds: that they were not to be trusted, believing “Faith is not to be kept with Hereticks,” and that they obeyed a foreign prince.67 Jefferson speaks simply

Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1960, vol. 21, no. 1, 110–16. See also works listed in Cogliano, 165 n. 44. 61

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, Mark Goldie, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 12, 13. 62 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 15–16. 63 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 13. 64 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 57. 65 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 8. 66 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 58–9, 52–3. 67 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 50 n. 127, 52.

118

THOMAS JEFFERSON

of “religious opinions” and “opinions in matters of religion” as being outside the government’s purview. Those opinions might include any religion and, as far his document states, no religion, or even atheism—surely an “opinion” in a “matter of religion.”

b. Religion in the Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson wrote the Notes after his term as Governor of Virginia had ended, when he retired to Monticello to enjoy the life of the gentleman scholar-farmer that he desired but only infrequently attained. He was responding to a series of questions about the climate, geography, towns, religions, animals, aborigines, and colleges of his state sent by the head of the French delegation in Philadelphia to all the governors of the former British colonies. Jefferson’s responses, first published privately in 1785, and then in a larger public edition in 1787, became his major written work. The Frenchman had asked each governor to describe “the different religions received into that state,” and Jefferson addresses the question with an historical narrative. He has nothing to say about the need for or validity of religion, but only about the human motives that lead to religious “intolerance” and the disappointments of those who came to Virginia seeking religious freedom: The first settlers in this country were emigrants from England, of the English church, just at a point of time when it was flushed with complete victory over the religious of all other persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the powers of making, administering and executing the laws, they shewed equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian brethren, who had emigrated to the northern government. The poor Quakers were flying from persecution in England. They cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only for the reigning sect. Several acts of the Virginia assembly of 1659, 1662, and 1693, had made it penal . . . for any master of a vessel to bring a Quaker into the state; had ordered those already here, and such as should come thereafter, to be imprisoned till they should abjure the country; provided a milder punishment for their first and second return, but death for their third; had inhibited all persons from suffering their meetings in or near their houses, entertaining them individually, or disposing of books which supported their tenets.68

Jefferson describes a somewhat happier state of affairs as he comes closer to his own times, when two-thirds of the population were dissenters (that is, not members of the Church of England), the Virginia legislature had declared the right to free exercise of religion (though not yet put that right into law), and all laws restricting the free exercise of religion, e. g. requiring church attendance, had been rescinded.69 Although Jefferson’s narrative is one of progress, it is hardly triumphant. There were still heresy laws on the books, he complained, which made it a crime for someone “brought up in the christian religion” to deny its truth, to deny the being of a God or the Trinity, to assert there are more gods than one, or to deny the divine authority of scripture.70 He 68 70

Jefferson, Political Writings, 392. Jefferson, Political Writings, 393.

69

Jefferson, Political Writings, 392–3.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

119

concludes his historical narrative with the rueful claim that he is offering “a summary view of that religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of their civil freedom.”71 Governor Jefferson was hardly an uncritical booster of the state he led. Jefferson sets out a philosophy of religious tolerance that coheres with his bill for religious freedom. We cannot legitimately allow the state to determine what we believe: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”72 Surveying the history of religion, he offers a somewhat different picture of Christianity than Edwards does in his History of the Work of Redemption: “Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned: yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”73 There are thousands of religions practiced on earth, Jefferson observes, and in America, the states of New York and Pennsylvania “flourish infinitely” without an established religion.74 Jefferson’s lifelong commitment to the separation of church and state is illustrated by an incident from his second term as U.S. President. Asked for assistance by a group of citizens in favor of a national day of prayer, Jefferson declined. He was prevented by the Constitution he wrote, not only from prescribing such an observance, but from recommending it. Doing so, he wrote, would be to “indirectly assume to the U.S. an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from.” Only “civil powers,” he adds, “have been given to the President of the U.S. and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.”75

4. Jefferson’s Religious Philosophy Was Jefferson a deist, as he sometimes seemed to be? Or was he an atheist, as his political opponents charged? Was he a Stoic or Epicurean, as Malone asserts? What did he see as religion’s moral teachings? And what was his attitude to Christianity? Jefferson was not a philosopher of religion like John Toland or a theological system builder like Jonathan Edwards, but he did think about the validity of religious and associated moral claims, not just about the separation of church and state. During his 71

72 Jefferson, Political Writings, 394. Jefferson, Political Writings, 394. 74 Jefferson, Political Writings, 395. Jefferson, Political Writings, 395. 75 Jefferson, Political Writings, 397, 398 (letter to Rev. Samuel Miller, dated January 23, 1808). Cf. Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, in which he writes: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State” (Jefferson, Writings, 510). 73

120

THOMAS JEFFERSON

first term as President, as he planned the Louisiana Purchase and registered James Madison’s decision in Marbury vs. Madison, he drew up two Syllabi, one on Epicurus,76 the other comparing the moral views of Jesus with those of Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Epictetus, and others.77 He shared the second syllabus with his family and a few friends, while keeping the first one to himself till the last decade of his life. Jefferson amplified his account of the morals of Jesus in 1804 by pasting passages that he cut from the New Testament into a blank book that he then titled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth extracted from the account of his life and doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.78 He used this copy for years, though it was lost after his death. In 1819–20 he constructed an expanded version in English, Greek, Latin, and French that he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the volume popularly known as “The Jefferson Bible.”79 Already in the list Jefferson sent to Skipwith in 1771, Jefferson had treated the Bible as “History. Antient” rather than divinely inspired truth.80 The Life and Morals of Jesus, constructed almost fifty years later, treats Jesus as an historical figure, and contains no references to anything supernatural. It begins: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed . . . And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth . . . To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child . . . And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling-clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.81

And it ends: Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Now, in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.82

There are then three key texts to consider in discerning Jefferson’s mature religious views: the Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus, written sometime before April 1803, the Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others, sent to Rush and Priestley in 1803,83 and The Life and Morals of Jesus that he cut, pasted, and bound in 1819–20. There are also three key letters: to Joseph Priestly on April 9, 1803, recording his pleasure at receiving Priestley’s volume Socrates and Jesus Compared;84 to Benjamin Rush on April 21, 1803, conveying his 76

Jefferson, Political Writings, 315–16 (Letter to William Short, October 31, 1819). Jefferson, Political Writings, 267–70 (Letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803). 78 Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2011), 26–7 (introduction). 79 80 Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible, 26–31 (introduction). Jefferson, Writings, Peterson, ed., 745. 81 82 Jefferson Bible, 1 (text). Jefferson Bible, 82 (text). 83 84 Jefferson Bible, 26 (introduction). Jefferson, Political Writings, 265–6. 77

THOMAS JEFFERSON

121

Syllabus of . . . the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others;85 and to William Short on October 31, 1819, who was his secretary during his years in Paris as American Consul. To Short he proclaims: “I too am an Epicurean,” and includes in his letter the Syllabus of Epicurus. The letter to Short refers both to the Syllabus of the Doctrines of Jesus, and to the original volume of extracts from the New Testament.86 Jefferson presents a different face to each of these men, or in the terms of William James’s Psychology, he constructs with each a different “social self.”87 Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, was also a prominent Unitarian, and Rush, the renowned Philadelphia physician, signer of the “Declaration of Independence,” and critic of slavery, was a devoted Presbyterian. In his letters to them, Jefferson is concerned, as it were, to establish his Christian credentials. But it is a moral and human Christianity that he presents, not a metaphysical or cosmological one. He says nothing in his letters to Priestley and Rush about the Epicurean syllabus he had written shortly before. He even urges Rush to conceal his moral views from the public, lest they be used against him: And in confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new misrepresentations and calumnies. I am moreover averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public; because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to . . . seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience, which the laws have so justly proscribed.88

Only to Short, his companion in the Paris of the philosophes, and only at the end of his life, does he reveal his Epicurean “physics,” coupled with the blend of ancient and Christian morality that he set out in the syllabus he sent to Rush. As the President of the United States, Jefferson presented yet another face. He was already known as the defender of the separation of church and state, and he was attacked during his first presidential campaign for being an atheist and a Jacobin. His “Syllabi” and severely excised “Bible” would have, as he well knew, added fuel to the fire. But near the end of his life he wanted Short, at least, to know what he thought. Let us look in more detail at these texts. First, the letter to Short, in which Jefferson identifies himself as an Epicurean, and speaks of “our master Epicurus” in urging Short to rouse himself from his “indolence” and travel down south to see the new University of Virginia. He recalls their time in France together as he brings his letter to a close, expressing his satisfaction at the news that a bust of Condorcet has been saved. He then adds: “I will place under this a syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus, somewhat in the lapidary style, which I wrote some twenty years ago; a like one of the

85

86 Jefferson, Political Writings, 266–70. Jefferson, Political Writings, 313–16. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 281–3. 88 Jefferson, Political Writings, 267. 87

122

THOMAS JEFFERSON

philosophy of Jesus, of nearly the same age, is too long to be copied.”89 Thus, the Epicurus syllabus antedates the comparative syllabus of Jesus and ancient philosophers, but not by much. Whereas the comparative syllabus and biblical extracts eschew metaphysics, the Epicurus syllabus starts there, with Epicurus’ atomistic materialism: Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus Physical.—The Universe eternal. Its parts, great and small, interchangeable. Matter and Void alone. Motion inherent in matter which is weighty and declining. Eternal circulation of the elements of bodies. Gods, an order of beings next superior to man, enjoying in their sphere, their own felicities; but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of beings below them. Moral.—Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness . . . The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind . . . To procure tranquility of mind we must avoid desire and fear, the two principal diseases of the mind. Man is a free agent . . . 90

As an Epicurean, then, Jefferson holds that the universe is constituted solely of particles of matter and the void in which this material moves. Furthermore, the universe is eternal; hence it is uncreated. There are gods, not just one god, but they are material too, and in any case do not meddle in worldly affairs, including those of human beings. By abandoning creation and the idea of one God, Jefferson decisively departs from deism. He is even further from Jonathan Edwards, whose avenging God watches our every thought and movement. Jefferson’s Epicurean Syllabus posits no future life of reward or punishment. It is focused entirely on human life—on tranquility of mind and human happiness. Epicurus held that one of the great causes of human unhappiness is fear of the gods, a fear his philosophy is designed to dispel. Jefferson never includes the metaphysics (e.g. a creation) of the Bible when he discusses Jesus. In the letter to Short, he writes that Jesus was a “benevolent Moralist,” but that his genuine doctrines must be extracted from the “rubbish” and “artificial Systems” that occlude them. Among the artificial systems he lists: “The immaculate conception of Jesus, His deification, the creation of the world by Him. His miraculous powers, His resurrection and visible ascension. His corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy,

89

Jefferson, Political Writings, 315. Jefferson, Political Writings, 315–16. Cf. Jefferson’s letter to John Adams of six years earlier (June 27, 1813): “The summum bonum with me is now truly epicurean, ease of body and tranquility of mind; and to these I wish to consign my remaining days” (Jefferson, Political Writings, 435). 90

THOMAS JEFFERSON

123

etc.”91 Jefferson’s is a Christianity not mysterious, and a Christianity that is moral, not metaphysical. His metaphysics—or physics and cosmology—is Epicurean. Next let us consider some details of the “Syllabus of an estimate of the merit of the doctrines of Jesus, compared with those of others that Jefferson sent to Rush. Jefferson had long been interested in comparisons of pagan and Christian morality. In the 1770s, he had noted Bolingbroke’s idea that the teachings of Jesus are incomplete and need supplementation by “heathen” writings,92 and in some “conversations . . . in the evenings of 1798–99” he promised to send Rush an account of “the Christian system.”93 When Priestley sent Jefferson a copy of his newly published hundredpage pamphlet Socrates and Jesus Compared, President Jefferson suggested that Priestley was just the man to produce a more general account that would compare not only Socrates, but “Pythagoras, Epicurus, Epictetus, Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Antoninus” with Jesus. If he had time himself, Jefferson writes, he would include an account of “the deism and ethics of the Jews” and would consider Jesus as a moral reformer, omitting, however, “the question of his divinity, and even his inspiration.”94 Jefferson was nothing if not consistent in his view of a non-mysterious Jesus who was a great moral reformer. Although Jefferson asked Priestley to produce a more extensive account of the Greek and Roman philosophers, it was Jefferson himself who did so a few weeks later when he sent both Priestley and Rush his “Syllabus of an estimate of the merit of the doctrines of Jesus, compared with those of others.” He wrote in his covering letter to Rush: To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.95

He urged Rush not to publicize what he calls “my religious tenets,” invoking the right to resist “invasions” of his “liberty of conscience.” The Syllabus has three headings: “Philosophers,” “Jews,” and “Jesus.” Jefferson’s list of “Philosophers” is identical to that he gave to Priestley, just what we might teach today in a course on Greek and Roman Philosophy: Pythagoras, Socrates, Epicurus, Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus (i.e. Marcus Aurelius). Seventy-five years before Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals, Jefferson discerns different sets of values in the ancient world and in Christianity. The precepts of the ancient philosophers “related chiefly to ourselves, and the government of those passions which, unrestrained, would disturb our tranquility of mind. In this branch of philosophy they were really great.” But they neglected other people considered simply as human beings:

91 93 95

Jefferson, Political Writings, 314. Jefferson, Political Writings, 265, 266. Jefferson, Political Writings, 267.

92

Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 109. 94 Jefferson, Political Writings, 265–6.

124

THOMAS JEFFERSON

They embraced, indeed, the circles of kindred and friends, and inculcated patriotism . . . towards our neighbors and countrymen they taught justice, but scarcely viewed them as within the circle of benevolence. Still less have they inculcated peace, charity, and love to our fellow men, or embraced with benevolence the whole family of mankind.96

Jefferson’s short section on the Jews credits them with having embraced “Deism; that is, the belief in one only God.” Their ideas of that God were, however, “degrading and injurious,” and their ethics were “anti-social” respecting other nations.97 Jesus corrected the Jews by propounding a “universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind.” He emphasized interiority, not just externally visible actions: “The precepts of philosophy, and the Hebrew code, laid hold of actions only. He pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.”98 In his letter to Short, Jefferson expresses his hope for “a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind.” His own contribution to the project, he writes, might include a new translation of Epictetus, “the genuine doctrines of Epicurus,” and the abstract of the moral teaching of Jesus.99 The Syllabi and abstracts from the evangelists that we have examined are the closest Jefferson came to completing this project. The focus is on morality throughout, but he takes his metaphysics from Epicurus, while excising all reference to Creation and miracles from his accounts of Jesus. Unlike Locke, he was untroubled by the lack of religious backing for morality. Jefferson wrote in 1814 that although “[s]ome have made the love of God the foundation of morality,” he had encountered many virtuous atheists, among them Diderot, D’Alembert, Condorcet, and Holbach. “Their virtue,” he concludes, “must have had some other foundation than the love of God.”100 An earlier (1787) letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, from the time he was getting to know such atheists in Paris, advises him to decide on the basis of his own reason whether God exists, and urges him not to worry about morality if it turns out that there is no God, for in that case reason would provide its own comforts and “incitements to virtue.”101 In these statements about religion and morality, Jefferson appears as an exemplary Enlightenment thinker, for whom reason was supreme.

5. Radical Republicanism Jonathan Israel distinguishes the thinkers of the “Moderate” from the “Radical Enlightenment.” The radicals were descendents of Diderot, Helvetius, and

96 97 98 99 101

This and the preceding quotation are from Jefferson, Political Writings, 268. Jefferson, Political Writings, 268. This and the preceding quotation are from Jefferson, Political Writings, 270. 100 Jefferson, Political Writings, 314. Jefferson, Political Writings, 286. Jefferson, Political Writings, 255.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

125

Holbach, and included Mirabeau, Condorcet, Raynal, and Volney in France, and in America, Jefferson, Paine, Rush, and Joel Barlow.102 They sought a complete separation of church and state, the end of hereditary aristocracies, a more equal distribution of wealth, and equal human rights throughout the world. The moderates—Hamilton, Adams, and Washington in America—were content to see their revolution confined to one country, to make accommodations with slavery, and to foster aristocratic tendencies like the proposed Order of Cincinnatus.103 The radicals, Israel writes, were part of “a vast flow of democratic ideology, filling hundreds of tracts and pamphlets, [that] engendered an entire new language of freedom, combating tyranny, and human rights.”104 With his influential articulations of human rights, support for the separation of church and state, democratic inclinations, and condemnation of slavery in the Notes (even as he continued to own slaves; see Section 6), Jefferson lies on the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. He is also in line with the radicals (and with Emerson) in holding that the American Revolution was not fully accomplished. He thought that a periodic review of the constitution and a universal educational system were necessary for a healthy democracy. Behind Jefferson’s proposals lies a philosophical view of the self as “punctual”: existing only at a point in time, as a tabula rasa with no innate ideas and no essential connection to society.105 The punctual self, as Charles Taylor puts it, objectifies and neutralizes the world: it takes “a domain of being in which hitherto the way things are has set norms or standards for us, and [takes] a new stance to it as neutral.”106 Jefferson’s stance towards the constitution, as to much of the world, is neutral in this way. He does not grant it any necessary authority, merely by virtue of its having been formulated by some wise men of the past. According to Aristotle’s Politics and the republican political tradition that flows from his work, we are essentially members of the polis, not detachable from it, so that our political nature, as Taylor writes, “provides the matrix within which [we] can be the kinds of beings” we are.107 Jefferson is a republican who endorses a politically active citizenry, but he does not think the active citizens have metaphysical or essential connections with any polis. As we shall see in the Section a below, Jeffersonian republicans might at any moment, or at least every twenty years, write an entirely new constitution and set of laws.108

102 Jonathan Israel: A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 48–9, 40–3. He also includes Joseph Priestley, among others. 103 104 Israel: A Revolution of the Mind 43–5. Israel: A Revolution of the Mind 49. 105 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 171 ff. 106 107 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 160. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 196. 108 Thus Jefferson’s writing exhibits a tension between an “atomist-instrumental” politics and a “citizen-participation” politics (Taylor, Sources, 196–7).

126

THOMAS JEFFERSON

If a connection to an existing polis is not essential for Jefferson’s radical republicanism, what is essential is a grounding of authority in the consent and “direct action of its citizens”: [It] must be acknowledged, that the term republic is of very vague application in every language. Witness the self-styled republics of Holland, Switzerland, Genoa, Venice, Poland. Were I to assign to this term a precise and definite idea, I would say, purely and simply, it means a government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority; and that every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in its composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of its citizens.109

By this criterion, he maintains, France and Venice with their hereditary rulers, and Holland, where the rulers are “self-chosen,” are not republics.110 Jefferson envisioned a system of American republics all the way down to the level of the individual farm. The way to have “good and safe government,” he writes, is: not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many . . . Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police . . . the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man’s farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.111

a. The earth belongs to the living We are familiar today with the idea that a patent, say on a new drug, expires after a period of time. Jefferson proposed a similar fate for debts. His fundamental premise is that the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead. If the nonexistent dead determine the lives of living people, this is a matter of force, not right. He wrote to James Madison from Paris in September, 1789: “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”; . . . the dead have neither powers nor rights over it . . . no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living.112

What Jefferson saw in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution gave concreteness and urgency to his proposal. The French, he writes, are deciding exactly this question of the living versus the dead as they consider, in a vast social experiment, whether “they may change the appropriation of lands given antiently to the church, to

109 111

Jefferson, Political Writings, 207. Jefferson, Political Writings, 204–5.

110

Jefferson, Political Writings, 208. Jefferson, Political Writings, 593.

112

THOMAS JEFFERSON

127

hospitals, colleges, orders of chivalry, and otherwise in perpetuity.” In these cases, Jefferson held, “the legislature of the day could authorize such appropriations and establishments for their own time, but no longer.”113 It was not only debts, then, that were to expire, but bequests and commitments. Relying on Buffon’s tables of human mortality and his own calculations, Jefferson concludes that each generation passes in about twenty years.114 He then argues that debts, including those of the government, should last no longer than a generation: “19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation, nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly extend a debt.”115 Madison pointed out some of the difficulties with Jefferson’s proposals. He observes that people not yet born have interests for which they may be indebted to those now alive: “Debts may be incurred for purposes which interest the unborn, as well as the living: such are debts for repelling a conquest, the evils of which descend for many generations.”116 Regarding the cancellation of debts after twenty years, he argues that “the possibility of an event so hazardous to the rights of property could not fail to depreciate its value [and] the approach of the crisis would increase this effect.”117 Jefferson applies his reasoning to the U.S. Constitution, holding that a constitutional convention should convene every twenty years: “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation . . . Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”118 (This reconvention every twenty years would seem itself to be a perpetual feature of the constitution.) Madison puts the case for a fundamental conservative approach when he asks: “Would not a government so often revised become too mutable to retain those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires, and which are perhaps a salutary aid to the most rational Government in the most enlightened age? Would not such a periodical revision engender pernicious factions that might not otherwise come into existence?”119 Jefferson’s twenty-year reconvention was designed to take account of the nation’s new political experience, but not everyone would have had twenty years of experience at the time of the reconvention, a point David Hume had made in “Of the Original Contract,” included in the works (“Hume’s Essays”) that Jefferson recommended to Skipwith:

113

114 Jefferson, Political Writings, 597. Jefferson, Political Writings, 594–5. 116 Jefferson, Political Writings, 595. Jefferson, Political Writings, 607. 117 Jefferson, Political Writings, 607–8. 118 Jefferson, Political Writings, 596. He held that there should be a revolution every twenty years, that his own election in 1800 was a second American revolution, and that the country needed another one in 1820 (Wills, Inventing America, 123–4). 119 Jefferson, Political Writings, 606. 115

128

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Did one generation of men go off the stage at once, and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies, the new race, if they had sense enough to choose their government, which surely is never the case with men, might voluntarily, and by general consent, establish their own form of civil polity, without any regard to the laws or precedents which prevailed among their ancestors. But as human society is in perpetual flux, one man every hour going out of the world, another coming into it, it is necessary, in order to preserve stability in government, that the new brood should conform themselves to the established constitution.120

Jefferson would have noted, however, that, cogent as Hume’s critique was, his conclusion left no room for even the smallest constitutional change. Jefferson never abandoned his proposal, or his strong sense that the earth belongs to the living, but he did tone down his call for complete revisions of the constitution. A quarter of a century after writing to Madison from France, and after serving two terms as President, on July 12, 1816, he wrote from Monticello to his friend Samuel Kercheval as follows: [L]et us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods. What these periods should be, nature herself indicates. By the European tables of mortality, of the adults living at any one moment of time, a majority will be dead in about nineteen years . . . Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness . . . a solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years, should be provided by the constitution; so that it may be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation . . . the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something.121

Again we see the emphasis on human happiness and the twenty-year cycle, but the idea that the people are to “hand on” the constitution after repairing it, and to do so “from generation to generation,” strikes a more conservative note. Jefferson’s constitution was an experiment to be lived with and judged on the basis of ongoing social and individual experience and a framework of basic human rights. It was not meant to be unchanging, so there was no point in searching for an “original intention” or context. John Dewey understood this as Jefferson’s “democratic faith”: [H]e was no friend of what he called “sanctimonious reverence” for the constitution . . . Were he alive, he would note and scourge that lack of democratic faith which, in the professed name of democracy, asserts that the “ark of the covenant is too sacred to be touched.” Jefferson saw that periodical overhauling of the fundamental law was the alternative to change effected only by violence and repetition of the old historic round “of oppressions, rebellions, reformations,

120 David Hume, Selected Essays, Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar, eds. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 284. 121 Jefferson, Political Writings, 216.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

129

oppressions.” There was but one thing which was unchangeable, and that was the “inherent and inalienable rights of man.”122

Arendt has a somewhat different interpretation of Jefferson’s position. She finds his proposal an “awkward attempt” to treat a problem not addressed by the Constitution: how to keep alive the revolutionary spirit, the pervasive thinking about the shape the government should take that characterized the revolutionary period. Arendt argues that Jefferson did not seriously wish to grant future Americans the right to establish non-republican governments, but that what he wanted, rather, was “an exact repetition of the whole process of action which had accompanied the course of the Revolution.” Whereas “in his earlier writings, he saw this action primarily in terms of liberation, in terms of the violence that had preceded and followed the Declaration of Independence,” in his later writings he emphasized the actions of “constitution-making and the establishment of a new government, that is . . . those activities which by themselves constituted the space of freedom.”123 She argues that the course of the French Revolution played a major role in changing Jefferson’s thinking, that “when he had learned his lesson from the catastrophes of the French Revolution, where the violence of liberation had frustrated all attempts at founding a secure space for freedom, [he] shifted from his earlier identification of action with rebellion and tearing down to an identification with founding anew and building up.”124

b. Wealth and equality Like many in the republican tradition, Jefferson worried about the excessive influence of property and wealth in public affairs. Montesquieu wrote that “equality of distribution [makes] the excellence of a republic” and, in a section of The Spirit of the Laws entitled “How the laws establish equality in democracy,” he called for a census and “particular laws to equalize inequalities, so to speak, by the burdens they impose on the rich and the relief they afford to the poor.”125 Jefferson had paraphrased this passage in his Commonplace Book before traveling to France as U.S. Envoy,126 but his experience of pre-revolutionary Paris gave urgency and concreteness to his convictions. In a letter to Madison written in 1785, he describes a journey to the mountains near Fontainebleau, where he fell in with a peasant woman. “Wishing to know the condition of the laboring poor,” he entered into conversation with her, determining her income, paucity of work, and shortage of food. When they parted he gave her 24 sous—about three days’ pay—for guiding

122 John Dewey, “Presenting Thomas Jefferson,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1954, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), vol. 14, 216. 123 124 Arendt, On Revolution, 237. Arendt, On Revolution, 236. 125 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone, trans. and eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 98, 44, 47. 126 Wills, Inventing America, 208.

130

THOMAS JEFFERSON

him. In typical eighteenth-century fashion, this act of generosity produced a torrent of emotion, and then reflection: She burst into tears of a gratitude which I could perceive was unfeigned because she was unable to utter a word. She had probably never before received so great an aid. This little attendrissement, with the solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country & is to be observed all over Europe.127

Jefferson thought that “an equal division of property” would be “impracticable,” but he called for a more egalitarian distribution of land and income. He favored a graduated tax on property, rising “in geometrical progression” with its size, and for a floor below which there is no tax at all: “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point.”128 In a sentence that could have come straight out of Locke’s Second Discourse, Jefferson writes: “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor & live on.” But he adds something not found in Locke: “Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.” If one cannot provide a plot of land for every American, one can still work to assure “that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small land holders are the most precious part of a state.”129 Like Locke, Jefferson thought that laboring on one’s one parcel of land was a vital means of creating property. But, unlike Locke, he held that working one’s land— a particular kind of property and a particular way of life—makes one a virtuous citizen. In the background here is the Roman tradition of the virtuous farmer or husbandman, and Jefferson’s favored rural life at Monticello. In 1803, some fifteen years after writing the letter from France we have been examining, President Jefferson purchased the vast Louisiana territory from France, thereby making vast tracts of land—much of it inhabited by Native Americans— available to American settlers.130 He saw a future for the Native Americans too, but only if they exercised their “reason” and realized that they had to give up their hunting existence for the new life of agriculture. As he stated in his “Second Inaugural Address,” in March, 1805, “humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to

127

Jefferson, Political Writings, 106. Jefferson, Political Writings, 107. Jefferson’s interest in the condition of common men and women is revealed also in his advice to Thomas Lee Shippen in 1788 to enter into ordinary homes to see how people lived, what they ate, etc.: “You must ferret the people out of their hovels, as I have done, look into their kettle, eat their bread, loll on their beds under pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find out if they are soft” (Wills, Inventing America, 158–9). 129 Jefferson, Political Writings, 107. 130 For Jefferson’s interest in and exploitation of the Native Americans, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). 128

THOMAS JEFFERSON

131

maintain their place in existence.”131 Privately, however, he had written previously that he would be “glad to see the good and influential individuals among [the Native Americans] run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”132 In pursuing the goal of establishing a republic of virtuous farmers, Jefferson was willing to assist in what he saw as an inevitable historical process that would destroy the Native Americans’ established ways of life, ways that he nevertheless recorded with respect in his substantial chapter on “Aborigines” in Notes on the State of Virginia.133

6. Education Jefferson thought that government ought to support a basic education for everyone in the new American republic, and a system of subsequent education for the deserving few. The political payoff was to be an active citizenry who could guard their own rights by spotting and rejecting tyrannical governments. During his term as governor of Virginia, Jefferson introduced “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge (1779).134 It states that even those governments that best protect “individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights” are subject to “degeneracy” and “tyranny,” and that the best means of countering these tendencies was “to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.”135 The Bill envisions an elite class of leaders, motivated not by desire for wealth or power but by their concern for “publick happiness” and “the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.” In order to increase the supply of such leaders, the Bill provides for the education of those excellent students whose families could not afford it. It is better, Jefferson writes, that such people be “sought for and educated at the common expence of all, than that the happiness of all should be confined to the weak or wicked.”136 Jefferson’s system has three tiers. At the bottom are the elementary schools in each district or “hundred”—five or six square miles—funded by the inhabitants of the district. Each school was to teach: reading, writing, and common arithmetick, and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Graecian, Roman, English, and American history. At these schools all the free children, male and female, resident within the respective hundred, shall be intitled to received tuition

131

Jefferson, Political Writings, 532. Jefferson, Political Writings, 525 (letter to William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, dated February 27, 1803). 133 Jefferson, Writings, Peterson, ed., 218–32. 134 The Bill never passed, though Jefferson continued to propose versions of it and a weakened version passed by the end of the eighteenth century. See Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 39, Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 280–4. 135 Jefferson, Political Writings, 235. 136 This and the preceding quotation are from Jefferson, Political Writings, 236. 132

132

THOMAS JEFFERSON

gratis, for the term of three years, and as much longer, at their private expence, as their parents, guardians, or friends shall think proper.”137

Girls were to receive the same elementary education as boys, but the word “free” indicates that such education was not envisioned for enslaved persons, who, of course, could not vote. Jefferson describes his bill more expansively and colorfully in the Notes on the State of Virginia, where he writes that its aim is “to provide an education adapted to the years, to the capacity, and the condition of every one, and directed to their freedom and happiness.”138 This is standard Enlightenment discourse, entirely secular in its concern with human happiness, and in envisioning a human political construction as the means to bring that happiness about. “By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor,” Jefferson writes “we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.”139 Jefferson sees mass education, not just the education of the leaders, as a counter to the corruption and degeneration of governments—a major concern of republican theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He writes: “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.”140 If the three years of elementary school are the foundations of Jefferson’s democratic republic, the next level is a select group of students attending one of twenty state-funded “grammar schools.” Each ward or district was to select one student a year to attend one of these schools, and each school was to choose one student a year to be supported for six years. As Jefferson rather harshly puts it: “By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go.”141 This is equality of opportunity, but by no means equality of access. Since Jefferson held that those who could afford it could send their sons to these grammar schools and beyond, his educational system was in fact a mixture of egalitarianism, intellectual excellence, and the influence of wealth—not unlike American education today. From the grammar school graduates each year, half would be sent to the College of William and Mary to study the subjects of their choosing, and the other half would be kept as masters of the grammar schools.142 In the years after his two terms as U.S. President, Jefferson dedicated himself to establishing the University of Virginia. This was the third achievement he asked to be memorialized on his gravestone (along with the “Declaration of Independence” and the “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom”). Whereas the major colleges 137 139 141

Jefferson, Political Writings, 237. Jefferson, Political Writings, 259. Jefferson, Political Writings, 257.

138 140 142

Jefferson, Political Writings, 257. Jefferson, Political Writings, 259. Jefferson, Political Writings, 257.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

133

and universities of colonial America, with the exception of Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy, had been founded by religious groups and designed to train members of the clergy, Jefferson’s university had the aims of his educational system generally: to “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness” depend, and to develop the “reasoning faculties of our youth” that are necessary both for “correct action” and “happiness within themselves.”143 Jefferson drew up plans for the university, secured the funding, and helped recruit the faculty. He fended off charges that he was an atheist, an opponent of slavery, and the enemy of privilege (for all of which there was considerable evidence), and contended with the potential rivalry with his alma mater, the College of William and Mary. Thomas Cooper, Jefferson’s first choice to be the new professor of chemistry, was blocked because of his friendship with Joseph Priestley, and Jefferson was forced to invite different “religious sects” to establish professorships of “their own tenets, on the confines of the university, so near that their students may attend the lectures there, and have the free use of our library.” Yet he successfully resisted the appointment of a professor of divinity and insisted that the religious sects and the university preserve “their independence of . . . each other.”144 He envisioned a modern university ruled by reason. Its curriculum, as it took shape in the 1820s, included the ancient and modern languages, mathematics and the sciences, medicine, government, history, law, ethics, literature, and fine arts.145

7. Race and Slavery People came to America for many reasons, but many did not come of their own free will, most prominently the roughly 600,000 enslaved Africans imported into the country.146 There was “white cargo” too, even before African slavery became established. In the early seventeenth century, London authorities shipped thousands of poor children to Virginia to work in the fields, British convicts were transported, mostly to Virginia and Maryland, and young men were simply kidnapped by planters’ agents for two pounds apiece. A greater number of men and women— 300,000 between 1620 and 1775—came as “indentured servants” who, while they were indentured, under colonial law were treated as chattels, the same as cattle and wagons.147 143

Jefferson, Political Writings, 299, 300. This and the preceding quotation are from Jefferson, Political Writings, 407. 145 Jefferson, Political Writings, 302. See Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson’s University (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2002), Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 172–7, and Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). 146 See Stephen D. Behrendt, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 251–74. 147 Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 12, 13, 14, 17, 108–10. 144

134

THOMAS JEFFERSON

About this early period before the importation of African slaves into Virginia, the historian Edmund Morgan writes: Servitude in Virginia’s tobacco fields approached closer to slavery than anything known at the time in England. Men served longer, were subjected to more rigorous punishments, were traded about as commodities already in the 1620s148 . . . [S]lavery introduced no novelties to methods of production . . . The seventeenth-century plantation already had its separate quartering house or houses for the servants. Their labor was already supervised in groups of eight or ten by an overseer. They were already subject to “correction” by the whip. . . . Their masters already lived in fear of their rebelling. But no servant rebellion in Virginia ever got off the ground.149

As life expectancy rose in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, African slaves became more economical than indentured labor, and slavery became established, defined and protected by the law.150 According to a 1723 Virginia statute, for example, it was illegal to free any slave “except for some meritorious services, to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council.”151 This was the society into which Thomas Jefferson was born. After the Revolution, Jefferson and his former tutor George Wythe were members of a committee to revise the laws of Virginia. They had before them Blackstone’s recent commentary on the laws of England, according to which slavery was completely unjustified. Parting from Locke and classical writers, who accepted slavery for captives in war, Blackstone wrote: “War itself is justifiable only on principles of selfpreservation; and therefore it gives no right over prisoners, but merely to disable them from doing harm to us by confining their person; much less can it give a right to kill, torture, abuse, plunder, or even to enslave, an enemy, when the war is over.”152 Jefferson’s language for the Virginia bill made it appear as if slavery was prohibited in the state: “no persons shall henceforth be slaves within this commonwealth, except such as were so on the first day of this present session of the Assembly, and the descendants of the females of them.”153 In fact this language legitimated slavery and forbade only the importation of slaves, which the Virginians did not want anyway. As John T. Noonan argues, it would have been “enormously expensive” to emancipate even the children of the more than two hundred thousand slaves in Virginia, and “[t]o have replaced their labor would have been nearly impossible.” Jefferson, Wythe, James Madison, and others cannot be blamed for “not attempting the impossible.” But, Noonan concludes, “not attempting the impossible, they reinstituted slavery by

148 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 296. 149 150 Morgan, American Slavery 308. Morgan, American Slavery 296–315. 151 Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 109. 152 John T. Noonan Jr., Persons and Masks of the Law (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1976), 47. 153 Noonan Jr., Persons and Masks of the Law, 51.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

135

law. For that decision they were responsible—that is, it must be recognized that they as human beings performed the acts by which slavery was continued as a legal institution. They chose to participate in the system.”154 Jefferson writes about the evils of slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia and calls for “total emancipation”155 of all American slaves, a radical opinion at the time. Like Franklin, but more eloquently and on the basis of more direct experience, he writes of the damage slavery brings not only to the slave, but to the slave owners and their children: The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.156

Jefferson’s discussion of slavery in the Notes is also distinguished, however, by a racist strain. He argues that with American blacks, as opposed to the “white” slaves of the ancient world, one is dealing with “real distinctions which nature has made.”157 The blacks, he maintains, are more subject to sensation than to reflection or imagination, less subject to reason,158 and they are less beautiful than whites, in part because the “eternal monotony” of their skin is incapable of expressing emotion.159 A key case that Jefferson brings up, only to dismiss, is that of Phillis Wheatley. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., she was probably “a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambian coast”160 who arrived in Boston at the age of 7 in 1761, and was bought as a house slave by Susanna Wheatley, wife of a merchant.161 She learned English rapidly, was taught to read by Susanna’s teenage daughter, and began to publish poetry. In 1770, her elegy on the death of George Whitefield became an international hit and was printed and sold in New York, Pennsylvania, Boston, and London. In 1773, her “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London, “the first book of poetry published by a person of African descent in the English language.”162 In London to supervise the publication, Wheatley met a future Lord Mayor, was invited to an audience with the King, and met Benjamin Franklin, to whom she decided to dedicate a second book of poetry.163 In France, Voltaire concluded that her volume “had proven that blacks could write poetry.”164 Within a month of her return to America, her owners freed her.

154 155 157 159 160 161 163

Noonan Jr., Persons and Masks of the Law, 54. 156 Jefferson, Political Writings, 482. Jefferson, Political Writings, 481. 158 Jefferson, Political Writings, 474, 478–9. Jefferson, Political Writings, 476. Jefferson, Political Writings, 475. Cf. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 197. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 17. 162 Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 16–17. Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 21, 31. 164 Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 34. Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 33.

136

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Wheatley had a telling epistolary encounter with Jefferson’s fellow Virginian, George Washington, to whom she sent a poem that she composed in late 1775, on the occasion of his being appointed commander of the armies of North America. Washington replied, thanking her for her “elegant lines” and asserting: “the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents.” He ends with an invitation: “If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to whom nature has [been] so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great respect, you obedient humble servant.”165 Wheatley did visit Washington in his camp, and though he had written to her that he did not want to seem vain by publishing her poem, he did arrange for it to be printed in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776.166 This is the background against which, nine years later, Jefferson felt compelled to mention Wheatley. He would have known by 1785 that people north and south in America (Franklin and Washington) and in France, where he was living, were becoming convinced that the Africans were as talented as any other human beings. Wheatley was a powerful counter-example to the racist views he shared, as Gates points out, with Hume and Kant.167 Jefferson writes that although Native Americans show talent for orations and carving, “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.” There is “no poetry” among them, he continues: “Religion, indeed, has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”168 As Gates points out, Jefferson shifts the terms of what is required to prove black equality from “a thought above the level of plain narration” to something like “good” poetry and then simply asserts that her poetry has no merit.169 If, on the contrary, Africans like Wheatley have the same talents as Europeans, then the contrast that Jefferson draws between the race-based slavery of America and slavery in the ancient world disappears, which undermines his argument for the expulsion of the former slaves: Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.170

Jefferson published the Notes when he was in Paris as America’s minister, renowned as America’s “apostle of freedom,” but concealing the fact that his “servants” James and Sally Hemings were his slaves and were actually in France illegally. Within a few months of the Notes’ publication he began his permanent liaison with Sally, a fifteenyear old woman of mixed race. (His wife, Martha, died in 1782.) In the complex 165

166 Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 37–8. Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 39. Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 23–6. Gates cites passages from Hume’s “Of National Characters” and Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. 168 169 Jefferson, Political Writings, 476–7. Gates, Phillis Wheatley, 43, 47, 49. 170 Jefferson, Political Writings, 480. 167

THOMAS JEFFERSON

137

world of Virginia plantation society, Sally and Thomas Jefferson’s deceased wife shared the same father, John Wayles. But Sally’s mother was a slave, and so, therefore, was she. Jefferson fathered seven slave children with Sally, four of whom grew to adulthood. He continued to reissue the Notes in subsequent years without altering the language about the mixing of the races that is quoted here. A few years after first publishing the Notes, Jefferson’s racial views were challenged by his correspondence with Benjamin Banneker, a freed slave from Philadelphia who produced a sophisticated almanac. Jefferson wrote about him to Condorcet in Paris, and in 1791 had Banneker appointed an assistant surveyor for the new federal capitol in Washington, DC. Jefferson wrote to Banneker: “No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America.”171 As was customary, he signed the letter, “Your most obedient humble servant” (as had Washington in his letter to Wheatley). This completely ordinary closing was used against Jefferson by his political opponents in later years, as they argued that he had humbled himself before a black man.172 After Banneker’s supporters printed and distributed his original letter together with Jefferson’s reply, Jefferson’s opponents published these letters, along with passages from the Notes on the State of Virginia condemning slavery and supporting the French Revolution, to portray him as a dangerous radical.173 “[C]urrent-day fashion,” Annette Gordon-Reed writes, “often casts Jefferson as the extreme racist and political conservative of his age, [but] this was not his general reputation during most of his political career.”174 In his context, even on the question of slavery, he was not as conservative as many. Jefferson did not ultimately change his mind about the inferior capacities of blacks, however, despite his relations with Banneker and other African-Americans. What his biographer Fawn Brodie calls the “emancipation zeal of his earlier years” faded away after he returned from France to Monticello in 1794. Back in Virginia, she writes, he was “[t]rapped in a system which permitted interracial sex as long as it was kept secret, and which continued to encourage the open sale of men, women, and children as if it were a God-given right.”175 Perhaps “trapped” is too strong a word, for Jefferson had other options. He could have chosen a new style of life, perhaps in a new place. He did not want that. Monticello was good to him in many ways. As Gordon-Reed puts it: “He created his own version of slavery that he could live in comfortably with the Hemingses. It suited him.”176 171 Jefferson, Political Writings, 483–4. Privately, he expressed doubts whether Banneker had written the almanac by himself. See Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 88. 172 173 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 477. Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 476–7. 174 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 476. 175 Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974), 289. 176 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 640.

138

THOMAS JEFFERSON

It did not suit some of his friends, however. When the French republican thinker, the Comte de Volney (1757–1820) visited Monticello in 1796, he was appalled to find that Jefferson carried a small whip when they visited the fields, which he shook at those who were not working. In what Volney described as “a comic scene,” the slaves worked “furiously under their master’s menacing gestures, only to relapse into lassitude as soon as his back was turned.”177 Volney also expressed astonishment at seeing slave children called black, who were as white as himself: “Mais je fus e´tonne´ de voir appeler noirs et traiter comme tels des enfants aussi blanc [sic] que moi.”178 Some twenty years later, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Jefferson in the course of his triumphant tour of the United States to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, he found Jefferson at Monticello with 130 slaves, including Sally Hemings. He subjected his old friend to “a torrent of friendly rebukes”179 for retaining them, but Jefferson kept them until his death, when, with the exception of Sally Hemings and her children, they were sold to pay his substantial debts.180 The most developed of Jefferson’s later statements on slavery comes in a letter to Edward Coles in 1814. Coles was thinking of leaving Virginia, in despair at its retrograde social and economic conditions. Jefferson writes with a sense of history, with compassion for the slaves, and as someone who knew that he influenced the national argument about slavery: “The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” His own ideas on slavery have “long since been in possession of the public,”181 he states, but it has been difficult to get his fellow Virginians to see that the liberty they fought for in the revolution was the same liberty that their slaves deserved: “it was not easy to carry them to the whole length of the principles which they invoked for themselves.”182 One might of course say the same of Jefferson himself. Jefferson saw the whites of the generation before his own as subject to habits that were hard to disrupt. Their “daily habit of seeing the degraded condition” of the slaves provided an experientially based confirmation of their racist views.183 But Jefferson continued to maintain such a view himself, not only in advocating separation of the races but in his derogatory picture of the blacks. He writes: “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”184

177

178 Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 288. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 287. Edmund S. Morgan, “Jefferson & Betrayal,” New York Review of Books, 26 June, 2008, vol. 55, no. 11. 180 See Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 655–7. Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Randolph, inherited Sally, though she lived as a free woman after his death. She was given “her time,” i.e. released without a formal procedure, some years later. Cf. Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan, “Jefferson’s Concubine,” New York Review of Books, 9 October, 2008, vol. 55, no. 15. 181 This and the preceding quotation are from Jefferson, Political Writings, 492. 182 Jefferson, Political Writings, 493. 183 184 Jefferson, Political Writings, 493. Jefferson, Political Writings, 494. 179

THOMAS JEFFERSON

139

Sally Hemings had been Jefferson’s lover for almost twenty years when he made this statement. We have no writing from Sally Hemings, but there was considerable evidence about her ties to Jefferson even before the publication of DNA-based evidence in 1998.185 There are dressmaker’s receipts showing that Jefferson spent significant sums on clothes for Sally, rather than have her make her own clothes, as was usual for servants.186 There are the names of Sally’s children—Beverly, James Madison, Harriet, and Eston—all of great personal significance to Jefferson.187 The Hemings women were never “leased out” when Jefferson was away on his numerous journeys,188 and Jefferson “had been in the vicinity” nine months before the birth of each of Sally’s children.189 There were reports from contemporaries about tall red-haired slave children at Monticello,190 and the relationship of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson became an issue in Jefferson’s second presidential campaign, when a disappointed office seeker published an account of “Dusky Sally” and her liaisons with the president. Jefferson neither confirmed nor denied the relationship, and his white family carefully covered over her story.191 In 1873, Sally Hemings’s son James Madison Hemings (1805–77) published his memoirs in an Ohio newspaper.192 Writing about the period when Sally replaced her mother as the maid to Jefferson’s daughter, Madison (as he was known) wrote: But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.193

One can infer the influence of Sally’s older brother James on her behavior. Jefferson paid for James to learn French, and to study French haute cuisine. Sally would have See Eugene A. Foster et al., “Jefferson fathered slave’s last child,” Nature 396: 27–8 (November 5, 1998). See also the careful account on the Monticello website (http://www.monticello.org/site/plantationand-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account), and the discussion in Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson, 170–98. 186 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 298, Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 234. 187 Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 1997, 196–201, Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 517. 188 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 237. 189 Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 111. See also Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 195–6. 190 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 643. 191 See Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 154–5, 194–7, Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 60–1. 192 Madison Hemings, “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1.” Pike County (Ohio) Republican, March 13, 1873, reprinted in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 245–8. 193 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 326. 185

140

THOMAS JEFFERSON

learned from him and others that Jefferson had imported her illegally, and that slaves were routinely freed by the Parisian Admiralty Court. Armed with this knowledge, James began negotiating an agreement with Jefferson, agreeing to return to cook for him and to train another chef, after which he would be freed. Sally, a girl of fifteen who had never left her country, had a bargaining position, and according to her son she elected to return only under certain conditions. She trusted her master, who was not legally bound to keep his agreement. She would have considered that if she returned with Jefferson, it would be not as the wife of a black man but in an entirely new status, as the “concubine,” as her son put it, of the central power at Monticello, and with the promise that all their children would eventually be freed. If she stayed in France, she would have been cut off from her family and all cultural connections. In any event, Jefferson kept his promise and freed all their children by the time of his death. He never wed again, and never conceived children with anyone else.194 In coming to agreement with Sally in France, where she was to some degree a free person, Jefferson not only acknowledged her freedom, but his own desire and need for her. There was something like a degraded form of a marriage here, an agreement to live together and, with Hemings already pregnant, to produce a family. She made the best bargain she could, and he made a bargain that allowed him to preserve a form of life that he desired. “The resolution of her conflict with Jefferson,” GordonReed writes, “allowed Hemings to go home with the knowledge that she had a oneon-one relationship with the ultimate power at Monticello.”195 She remained his slave, however, and so, bizarrely, did their children, for many years. In Hegelian terms, we see here a stage in the master-slave dialectic, but by no means a complete reversal or overcoming of the master’s power.196 For Jefferson’s many other slaves, however, there was no such accommodation. Franklin also owned slaves, though they were much less a part of his life in Philadelphia and London than they were in Jefferson’s life at Monticello. Franklin’s wealth came from printing, not from a rural slave economy, so it was less of a jolt for him to give up his slaves. He could preside over the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of slavery at the end of his life, but only a few years after his last two slaves/ servants passed away. Franklin went through an evolution in his views of both slavery and race. He defended slavery in part on the basis of the alleged inferiority of the Africans. But he changed his mind and worked with schools for the education and integration of former slaves. Jefferson’s beliefs did not really develop. He started from the belief that slavery had to be abolished, though not immediately, but never abandoned the views about the inferiority of blacks that he incorporated into the Notes. Franklin exemplifies an openness to racial questions and a final position detached from racism. Jefferson, a brilliant writer of Enlightenment political theory 194

195 Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 174–82, 326–52, 489–92. Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses, 342. My colleague Adrian Johnston informs me that Hegel wrote this section of the Phenomenology of Spirit under the influence of the slave revolt in Haiti. 196

THOMAS JEFFERSON

141

and an opponent of slavery, exemplifies a strain of racism that remains a bitter ingredient in American life. In “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” William James offers a conception of morality and moral evolution: there is nothing final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals . . . as our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones, so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without producing others louder still.197

Under every system of moral rules, he continues, are “innumerable persons whom it weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by which they may get free.” There is moral progress, however, something like scientific progress: “society has shaken itself into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually aroused complaints.”198 Franklin and Jefferson wrote during a time when slavery was both part of the American moral equilibrium and under attack. Both men played a role in disturbing that equilibrium, in thinking about it, and in voicing some of the “complaints” to which it gave rise. What they could not do was give direct voice to the complaints of the enslaved persons whom they encountered and lived with, a task taken up twentyfive years later by the freed slave Frederick Douglass, in his address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852) Crediting the great achievements of the founders and their lasting articulation of human rights, Douglass recorded his profound alienation in an America in which slavery persisted and even became nationalized with the Fugitive Slave Act. The celebration of freedom that takes places on the fourth of July, he wrote, is “yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn.”199

8. Nature Jefferson thought that life on the land, whether in the form of small farms or his own grand estates at Monticello and Poplar Forest, was essential to a virtuous republic. It was certainly part of his conception of the good life. After twenty-four years in politics as state representative, governor of Virginia, minister to France, and Secretary of State in George Washington’s administration, Jefferson vowed to retire,

197 James, Writings 1878–1899, 611. In his claim that there is nothing final in morality, James follows Emerson, who wrote of the virtues that “all are initial” (The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 2, 187), hereafter CW. On Emerson and James, see the Epilogue to this book. 198 This and the preceding quotation are from James, Writings 1878–1899, 611. 199 What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2, ed. John W. Blassingame, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 368.

142

THOMAS JEFFERSON

provoking concern from his friends and a mocking newspaper essay by his rival Alexander Hamilton, who suspected his expressed desire to be “the quiet, modest, retiring philosopher” was a mask for an “intriguing incendiary” who hoped to succeed Washington as president.200 But Jefferson was sincere. He did resign, and before offering his resignation in July 1793, wrote to Madison: I have now been in the public service four & twenty years; one half of which has been spent in total occupation with their affairs & absence from my own. I have served my tour then . . . The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world. It leads me to seek for happiness in the lap and love of my family, in the society of my neighbors & my books, in the wholesome occupation of my farm & my affairs, in an interest or affection in every bud that opens, in every breath that blows around me, in an entire freedom of rest or motion . . . owing account to myself alone of my hours & actions . . . Indeed my dear friend, duty being out of the question, inclination cuts off all argument, & so never let there be more between you & me, on this subject.201

On January 5, 1794, Jefferson left Philadelphia for Virginia.202 This was the period during which he reconceived Monticello as a Palladian house, and as a place where the best of the old world—his books, wines, neoclassical design—met the landscape and distant Blue Ridge vistas of the new.203 The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads (1798) appeared five years later, would have understood Jefferson’s “interest of affection in every bud that opens,” as he, had he read it, would have appreciated Wordsworth’s complaints of 1805 that “the world is too much with us,” that “late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Jefferson wanted to preserve his powers, living life at a different rhythm, with the rhythms of nature. In his Farm Book, Jefferson recorded the first arrival of each species of bird and animal, the first budding of trees, the arrival of the shad, the blossoming of the lilac and red bud, the ripening of strawberries, peas, Indian corn, and cucumbers.204 Jefferson did not retire permanently to Monticello for another twenty odd years, however, for he served as Vice-President and then President for two terms. Still, his love of nature runs through his letters and the Notes on the State of Virginia, to which we shall now turn for the last time. We have drawn on the Notes for Jefferson’s discussions of religion, slavery, and education, but the book as a whole presents a vast panorama, in which Virginia’s natural features, animals, and plants play a major role. It opens with chapters on Boundaries, Rivers, Sea Ports, Mountains, and Cascades. The chapter on “Productions Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal” contains long lists of wild and domestic plants—squash, tobacco, maize, oak, birch, beach, cranberries, blackberries, and 200

201 Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 101. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 101. 203 Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 105. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, 109. 204 Wills, Inventing America, 118. This is the Jefferson who established the nation’s first professorship of agricultural science at the University of Virginia, and whose “greatest invention” was the moldboard for the plow, which turned soil over rather than simply to one side (see Wills, Inventing America, 143). 202

THOMAS JEFFERSON

143

dewberries—and tables of weights of European and American animals, designed to refute Buffon’s claim that old world animals are larger than new world ones.205 The book contains only a few pages on military forces but fifteen on “Aborigines,” including lists of tribes, and discussions of their history, politics, and language.206 The chapter on Rivers considers the “beautiful” Wabash and the Ohio (“the most beautiful river on earth”), which “loses its name” where it branches “into the Monongahela and Alleghaney” at Fort Pitt.207 The following section, “Mountains,” includes an extended description of the passing of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains at what is now known as Harper’s Ferry. It is, he asserts, “perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature . . . worth a voyage across the Atlantic”: You stand on a very high point of land. On your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain an hundred miles to seek a vent. On your left approaches the Patowmac, in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder, and pass off to the sea . . . But the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture is of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the fore-ground. It is as placid and delightful, as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes itself; and that way too the road happens actually to lead.”208

Passages like this, no less than the design of Monticello, support Wills’s claim that Jefferson was a “great artist” who lived with an “aesthetic grasp” of things.209 Jefferson does not just write about the river and mountains, but about the human eye and a human response (it is “delightful”), the “invitation” the scene issues to the human observer,” to “participate” in the “calm below.” Jefferson’s balanced sentences describe a natural balance of the sublime and beautiful, the vast “riot and tumult,” “wild and tremendous” of the river, with the “placid and delightful . . . smooth blue horizon” of the “plain country” below.210 Jefferson’s interest was not just in nature simpliciter, but in nature as it strikes the observer, the man of feeling and varying points of view. This is shown by another passage—somewhat incongruously inserted in the chapter on “Cascades”—where Jefferson describes a “Natural bridge, the most sublime of Nature’s works,” on his property in the appropriately named Rockbridge County: Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on 205

206 Jefferson, Writings, 150–99. Jefferson, Writings, 215–17, 218–32. 208 Jefferson, Writings, 133, 136, 137. Jefferson, Writings 143. 209 Wills, Inventing America, 129–30. 210 Jefferson owned and recommended Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). See Wills, Inventing America, 270–1. 207

144

THOMAS JEFFERSON

your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach. If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme. It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!211

The contrast between the “beautiful” arch seen from below and the “painful and intolerable” view from the top is again a version of the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The student of early nineteenth-century literature may be reminded here of Emerson’s experiment, recorded in his first book, Nature (1836), of trying to view the world from between his legs, so as to get a fresh perspective on things.212 His younger friend, Henry Thoreau, was as dedicated a naturalist and walker as Jefferson, an equally competent surveyor and student of the Greek and Roman classics, and a small-scale farmer in his cabin at Walden. Jefferson would have appreciated Thoreau’s meticulous records of the first frost, budding of the willows, and song of the loon, and with his taste for the life of the common people, he would have appreciated or at least tolerated Thoreau’s cabin. Thoreau, who wrote a great essay on “Walking,” and looked to the Native Americans as examples of human virtues, would have approved of Jefferson’s advice to his nephew Peter Carr that he habituate himself to long walks: The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse; and he will tire the best horses.”213

Jefferson and Thoreau, two American agrarian philosophers, would have found substantial agreement about individual rights, the dangers of intrusive government, the separation of church and state, and even about the evils of slavery; though their agreement there would have gone only so far. These speculations raise the question of Jefferson’s relation to Romanticism, the movement that was born almost three decades before his death with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and, in Germany, the Atheneum of Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. Several elements of Romanticism are present in Jefferson. He is a man of feeling, especially in natural settings, and he searches for a stable, receptive country abode where he can think, write, and contemplate. Beauty is a major category of his understanding of the world. Yet Jefferson is not a Romantic, and the differences may be indicated under three headings:

211

Jefferson, Writings 148. “Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!” (Emerson, CW 1:31.) 213 Jefferson, Political Writings, 245. 212

THOMAS JEFFERSON

145

a. Nature and the divine. Jefferson sometimes expressed a sense of a divine presence in the universe that he also finds in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, but it is a quite muted sense, and it is absent from the Epicureanism and deism to which he was also attracted. Jefferson has a detached view of the world, and he is an example of what Taylor calls the “recession of the divine” from nature. The Romantics, in contrast, embrace what Carlyle called “natural supernaturalism,” according to which nature is a teacher, a wise counselor, and in some sense a direct manifestation of the divine.214 In Nature (1836), the book that fired up American Transcendentalism, Emerson called the woods “plantations of God,” where “a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and . . . we return to reason and faith.” Emerson’s “faith” is not primarily doctrinal but experiential: “I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”215 There is nothing like this in Jefferson; he is simply not a religious thinker, let alone a mystic.

b. Alienation. The Romantics write from a sense of disenchantment with Enlightenment rationality that is not present in Jefferson. This may take the form of a suspicion of science, as in Wordsworth’s complaint that “we murder to dissect,”216 or the search for new forms of inquiry that blend the chemical, geological, and biological sciences with the poetic, moral, and religious dimensions of human experience. The Romantics felt that something fundamental was “off ” in human life: we “lay waste our powers,” as Wordsworth put it; we “lead lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau was to say.

c. Inwardness. For the Romantics the route to a deep knowledge of nature lies through the self, not merely via the senses. Many eighteenth-century writers, including Jefferson, valued passionate human responses to the world as a sign of morality or authenticity. But in the Romantic period these sentiments were construed not merely as authentic reactions, but as providing an access to the world impossible for disengaged reason to achieve. The new Romantic principle of order, Taylor writes, was not exoterically available . . . [O]ne could only understand it fully by participating in it. . . . The old idea of a rationally evident harmony of natures gives way to a new one of a current of love or life, which is both close to us and baffles understanding.217

214

See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), especially pp. 65 ff. The term “natural supernaturalism” was first used by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdro¨ckh (1831), Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 193–202. 215 Emerson, CW 1:10. 216 “The Tables Turned,” (1798), in William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Paul D. Sheats, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Cambridge Edition, 1982), 83. 217 Taylor, Sources, 380.

146

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Emerson’s statement in “Circles” that “[n]othing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,”218 and his report in Nature that “currents of the Universal Being” had circulated through him are perfect examples of this new Romantic view of order. If for Jefferson nature is orderly and sometimes awe-inspiring, it is basically neutral and detached from us. The Romantics seek intimacy with nature, a union or reunion that lies as much in inward reorientation as in sense experience and organized science.

218

Emerson, CW 2:190.

5 Ralph Waldo Emerson 1. Introduction: Early Influences Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson helped define the Enlightenment disengagement from religion, and from the conception of an intrinsic normative order of the world.1 Emerson, like Jonathan Edwards, sought to recover such a world, but unlike Edwards, he thought of that recovery as the creative outcome of his own divinity. Emerson was a Christian minister for some years, but he found that he best sensed the beauty of the world outside of any church, in the woods and fields of Concord, Massachusetts, and in an intellectual landscape that included the Greek and Roman classics, Hinduism and Confucianism, Unitarian Christianity, Plato and Kant, and the Romantic writing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Whereas Edwards had a religious awakening during his junior year at Yale, took an M.A. in theology, and spent the rest of his life working as a minister, Emerson began a journal called “Wide World” in his junior year at Harvard that shows his interests ranging beyond the Bible and Christian apologetics to works of Byron, Milton, Walter Scott, Voltaire, Pythagoras, Martial, Humphrey Davy, Montaigne, and Madame de Stae¨l.2 In his teens and twenties Emerson was torn between the secure career of a minister, following in his father’s footsteps, and a new kind of identity that emerged in the nineteenth century in the work of writers like Goethe and Coleridge: that of the poet/philosopher/naturalist. After graduating from Harvard College, he taught in his brother William’s school for young ladies from 1821 to 1825, entered the Harvard Divinity School, and in 1829 secured a position as junior pastor of Boston’s Second Church. He resigned three years later, however, after delivering his “Lord’s Supper” sermon, in which he explained why he could no longer administer the sacrament.3 He traveled to Europe, met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas

1 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 161, and Chapters 2 and 4 above. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William H. Gilman et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82), vol. 1, 3–158; hereafter JMN. For an early list of Emerson’s reading, see JNM 1:55–8. 3 Joel Myerson, ed., Transcendentalism: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68–78.

148

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Carlyle, had an epiphany in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and returned in 1833, determined to be “a naturalist.” Emerson was a naturalist, however, who was also a mystic. He had what William James called “religious experiences.” Rather than taking them to reveal a deeper relation to the Christian God, however, Emerson took them as an awakening into nature. As he writes in his revolutionary first book, Nature (1836): In the woods . . . these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign . . . There I feel that nothing can befal me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.4

Emerson reports a direct confrontation with God, not merely with God’s symbols or signs. Moreover, it is a God of which he is a part, or for which he is a medium. The miracle that he reports, then, is not in the distant past but in the present, and it consists in the writer’s divine nature as “part or particle of God,” with the “currents of the Universal Being” circulating through him. Of course it is hard to analyze such language and such experience, but two things are clear: Emerson portrays no gap between himself and the god or Being of which he is a part; and there is no mention in this passage of a church, religion, or text. In his great essay “Experience” from the Essays, Second Series (1844), Emerson writes: “A man will not be observed in doing that which he can do best. There is a certain magic about his properest action, which stupefies your powers of observation, so that though it is done before you, you wist not of it.”5 So it is with Emerson himself. We cannot see exactly how he manages to achieve his distinctive voice and angle of vision on things, but we can articulate that vision as it appears in his writings, and we can, by way of introduction, place Emerson’s thinking in relation to his cultural and intellectual setting.

a. Unitarian Christianity Emerson and his father were Unitarians, not “Orthodox,” Calvinists, or Puritans. Unitarians believed in one God, not in some mysterious three-in-one entity, as they saw the Trinitarians maintaining. They asserted that Jesus was an extraordinary human being. If their opposition to mysteries is in line with that of the deists a hundred years earlier (e.g. Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious), they were less radical than the deists in continuing to believe in inspired scripture and other “miracles.” They offered a kinder, warmer, more rational Christianity than the 4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 1, 10; hereafter referred to as CW. 5 CW 3:40.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

149

Calvinists, using the resources of modern science to find the religious truths contained in the Bible. Their confidence was not justified by events, however, as more and more of the newest criticism cast doubt on the Bible’s divine origin.6 The outstanding Unitarian of Emerson’s day and place was William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), whose sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) was widely considered definitive. Emerson was much affected when he heard Channing preach in 1821, and when in 1824 he made his decision to attend Divinity School, he met with Channing weekly, working with him on biblical interpretation.7 Channing opens “Unitarian Christianity” in a spirit of rational investigation and scientific discovery: We reason about the Bible precisely as civilians do about the constitution under which we live; who, you know, are accustomed to limit one provision of that venerable instrument by others, and to fix the precise import of its parts, by inquiring into its general spirit, into the intentions of its authors, and into the prevalent feelings, impressions, and circumstances of the time when it was framed.

He criticizes much that passes for reasoning about the Bible, however: It is astonishing what a fabric they rear from a few slight hints about the fall of our first parents; and how ingeniously they extract, from detached passages, mysterious doctrines about the divine nature. We do not blame them for reasoning so abundantly, but for violating the fundamental rules of reasoning, for sacrificing the plain to the obscure, and the general strain of Scripture to a scanty number of insulated texts.8

The central “mysterious doctrine” that the Unitarians reject is that of the Trinity: In the first place, we believe in the doctrine of God’s UNITY, or that there is one God, and one only . . . We understand by it, that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfection and dominion belong.9

Channing’s reasonable, sweet, nonthreatening tone towards the Calvinists contrasts with the threats against the deists and Arminians issued by Edwards and other orthodox Christians, but his argument is based on the scripture they share: We do, then, with all earnestness, though without reproaching our brethren, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity . . . With Jesus, we worship the Father, as the only living and true God. We are astonished, that any man can read the New Testament, and avoid the conviction, that the Father alone is God . . . We challenge our opponents to adduce one passage in the New Testament, where the word God means three persons.10 6 See Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 49–50, for discussion of Johann Eichhorn’s influence on Emerson’s brother, William, while he was at Go¨ttingen. 7 Richardson, Emerson, 47, 48, 57. 8 This and the preceding quotation are from William Ellery Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” in The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston: George G. Channing, 1849), vol. 3, 65. 9 10 Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 69. Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 71.

150

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

There is no historical evidence, Channing continues, that early Christians accepted the Trinity. Indeed if they had, the objection of polytheism would surely have been raised against them by other Jews, but there is no evidence that it was.11 Having argued for the Unitarian belief in one God and in Jesus as distinct from and inferior to him, Channing turns to the moral character of God. He notes that everyone describes God as just and good, but that “it is very possible to speak of God magnificently, and to think of him meanly.”12 Whereas Unitarians think of God as a father concerned with the moral progress of his children, the Calvinists: take from us our Father in heaven, and substitute for him a being, whom we cannot love if we would, and whom we ought not to love if we could. We object, particularly on this ground, to that system, which . . . teaches, that God brings us into life wholly depraved, so that under the innocent features of our childhood is hidden a nature averse to all good and propense to all evil, a nature which exposes us to God's displeasure and wrath, even before we have acquired power to understand our duties, or to reflect upon our actions . . . to give existence under this condition would argue unspeakable cruelty.13

The Calvinist vision undermines morality, Channing continues, by presenting an immoral God, and it leads to “a gloomy, forbidding, and servile religion.”14 Emerson was profoundly influenced by Channing, but defined himself by departing from Channing’s views. There is a constant emphasis on unity throughout Emerson’s mature writing, but not on the personalized unity of the JudeoChristian creator God. Rather, Emerson speaks of an impersonal “Supreme Cause” and of “the resolution of all into the ever blessed ONE.”15 In such passages, he is closer to Neoplatonism, the Hindu Vedas, and the Bhagavadgita than to Unitarian Christianity. Emerson follows Channing in emphasizing the humanity of Jesus, but also in elevating his conception of what it is to be human, as Channing does in his sermon, “Likeness to God” (1828). Channing writes that God can be known “only through sympathy or kindred attributes . . . God becomes a real being to us, in proportion as his own nature is unfolded within us.” Ten years later in his “Divinity School Address” (1838) Emerson writes of Jesus: “Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man.”16 But this incarnation, as Emerson sees it, was not limited to the man Jesus, has nothing specifically Christian about it, and is not founded on a relation to any text. For Emerson we are not merely like God, but “part or particle of God.” Three more differences between Emerson and Channing are worth noting. First, Emerson refigures the accepted notion of miracles by denying that they are divine 11 13 15 16

12 Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 72–3. Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 82. 14 Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 85–6. Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 87. CW 2:40 (from “Self-Reliance”). Channing, “Likeness to God,” in The Works of William E. Channing, vol. 3, 229; Emerson, CW 1:81.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

151

interventions. Rather, he holds, all of life is a miracle.17 Second, nature occupies a special place in Emerson’s religious ontology. The woods or the bare common— rather than a church—are places of divine inspiration, the sites that characteristically allow the miracle of existence to show itself.18 “[A]s pronounced by Christian churches,” Emerson complains, “the very word Miracle . . . gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”19 Third, Channing was suspicious of enthusiasm, emotional outpourings, and impermanent “awakenings.” We do not, he holds, “judge of the bent of men's minds by their raptures.”20 Emerson does judge of men’s minds by their raptures, although he wants to distinguish fanaticism from genuine enthusiasm—literally God in us. At the end of “Circles,” he writes: “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”21

b. Plato and Neoplatonism Emerson read Plato in Greek and in English translations when he was an undergraduate. In 1820 he submitted an essay entitled “The Character of Socrates” for the Bowdoin Prize, which he did not win. But this essay and the next year’s “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy”—also submitted unsuccessfully for an undergraduate prize—mark Emerson’s early interest in philosophy, Plato, and the character of extraordinary human beings. Emerson always works his own imaginative refigurings of other writers’ thoughts, but one can recognize Platonic themes in his mature writing even when Plato is not mentioned. Emerson writes in “Experience,” for example: “Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.”22 In “The Poet,” he states that the poet stands near the place where “Being passes into Appearance,” and holds that when we read the poet’s works correctly “[w]e are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air.”23 Emerson turns Plato’s cave story to his own purposes, however, for Plato wanted to expel most poetry from his republic, whereas for Emerson, it is the poet/philosopher who leads us out of the cave of illusion to the broad light of reality. In the Republic, the Good is not merely the light by which we understand things, but the source of those things: “not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being,

17 CW 1:81. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement that “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), paragraph 6.44). 18 Cf. Taylor’s chapter “Nature as Source,” in Sources, 355–67; and his claim that while the idea of nature as source “seems essential to Romanticism,” it is also found in such non-Romantic writers as Goethe and Hegel (369). 19 20 21 22 CW 1:81. Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” 96. CW 2:190. CW 3:41. 23 CW 3:9,17. See the discussion in Barbara L. Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 151.

152

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

but superior to it in rank and power.24 Remarks such as this are taken up by the Neoplatonist tradition of Proclus, Plotinus, and Iamblichus, to which Emerson was attracted early on. A journal passage from 1824, for example, portrays Plato and Plotinus as one of a group of “godlike worthies” who depict states of mind of “unbounded greatness & worth.”25 Plotinus is a major presence in Emerson’s Nature, which begins with an epigraph from the Enneads that questions the reality of nature: “Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.”26 Plotinus also appears in the text of the book, without being identified, in a passage concerned with our passivity or receptivity before the onset of “intuitive knowledge.” Emerson writes: It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not blind and deaf.”27

The first words of this passage are from the Enneads as translated by Coleridge: “Plotinus says of the intuitive knowledge that ‘it is not lawful to inquire whence it sprang as if it were a thing subject to place & motion for it neither approached hither nor again departs from hence, to some other place, but it either appears to us, or it does not appear.’ ”28 Emerson weaves this fragment from Plotinus into a discussion of the suddenness of the onset—and departure—of what he calls the “transparent” universe, and he continues with one of his characteristic, ever changing, lists of great figures, here including Plato, the Brahmins, Bacon, Leibniz, and the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg.29 Later, in the “Spirit” chapter of Nature, he acknowledges that he is speaking of something “ineffable.” He writes: “he that thinks most, will say least.”30 In his chapter on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James sets out four features of mystical experience. These are: 1) ineffability 24 Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, C. D. C. Reeve, eds. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005), 500 (509 b6). 25 JMN 2:374. Emerson could read Greek but preferred to work with translations (Richardson, Emerson, 65). Richardson distinguishes seven stages of Emerson’s understanding of Plato, as he read reconciliations of Plato and Christianity, Thomas Taylor’s translation of Plato into English, with its Neoplatonic and Pythagorean orientation, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s attempt to take “Plato as primary and foundational, not a secondary carrier of Christian or neo-Pythagorean ideas,” and then the Bohn Library edition of 1848–54 (Richardson, Emerson 65–6). 26 CW 1:1. 27 1:22. On the metaphor of transparency in nature, see B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall (New York: Continuum, 1982). 28 JMN, 5:103. Plotinus, Enneads, V, v. 8. The full paragraph in MacKenna’s translation is: “But we ought not to question whence; there is no whence, no coming or going in place; now it is seen and now not seen. We must not run after it, but fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for its appearance, as the eye waits on the rising of the sun, which in its own time appears above the horizon—out of the ocean, as the poets say—and gives itself to our sight” (Plotinus, The Enneads, Stephen MacKenna, trans. (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1969), 409). 29 30 CW 1:22. CW 1:37.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

153

(“The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words”; 2) “noetic quality” (“mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge”; 3) transiency (“half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day”); and 4) passivity (“the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance).31 These features are found in the writings of Plotinus, and in the passages from Emerson we have been considering.

c. Kant Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, the Critique of Practical Reason, in 1788, and the Critique of Judgment in 1790. Whatever else one might say of these and other works of Kant, they changed the philosophical landscape in a way that Jonathan Edwards, who died in 1758, or David Hume, who died in 1776, did not live to see. Kant looms large, if somewhat indistinctly, in the writings of two authors Emerson began reading in the mid-1820s: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame de Stae¨l (1766–1817). In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge discusses the history of modern philosophy, including Locke, Berkeley, and Leibniz, emphasizing the question of where our knowledge originates, and whether any of it is innate. He is familiar with Hume’s skepticism concerning cause and effect, and Kant’s central thought about the preconditions of experience that lie within the human mind: “We learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learnt force us inward on the antecedents, that must be pre-supposed in order to render experience itself possible.”32 Coleridge refers to “the illustrious sage of Ko¨nigsberg” whose work “took possession of me as with a giant’s hand,” and he holds that Kant’s doctrines become clearer and clearer the more one reads him.33 As often with Coleridge’s prose, however, he postpones a full accounting of his subject, so that it is hard to discern in much detail what Kant’s doctrines are. Coleridge employs the Kantian distinction between Understanding and Reason that is so prominent in Emerson’s Nature. Kant held that the Understanding is the faculty responsible for the causal order and the identity of objects through time, but denied that it tells us about noumena or things as they are in themselves. Nonetheless, in his moral philosophy Kant argues that the moral law commands us not through our understanding but through reason. Following this command, Kant holds, requires that we take a different point of view on ourselves than as beings living in the causally ordered world of the understanding, determined merely by desires and outward circumstances. When we act morally, Kant holds, we inhabit a “kingdom of ends” in which we are free. Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, with an influential 31 32 33

William James: Writings 1902–1910, Bruce Kuklick, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 343. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1975), 79. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 84.

154

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

introduction by the American philosopher James Marsh (1825), was an early source of Emerson’s knowledge of the distinction between Reason and Understanding, a distinction that was all the rage in American letters and advanced religious thought in the years after Marsh’s edition was published.34 “In Coleridge,” Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson writes, “with indispensable clarification from Marsh, Emerson found a fully articulated, carefully defended argument for an active power in the self that is capable of self-determination. This power, called reason, is higher than the senses and higher than the understanding.”35 We need not agree with Coleridge’s interpretation of Kant (which owes much to Schelling) or Marsh’s interpretation of Coleridge to see the path by which the discourse of understanding and reason made its way into Emerson’s early work. In a potent passage from the concluding “Prospects” chapter of Nature, Emerson calls for a balance of understanding and reason, without which we are only half-human: At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone . . . His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner’s needle . . . Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are . . . gleams of a better light,—occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force,—with reason as well as understanding.

Emerson’s list of such gleams of a better light, a mixture of the moral, political, and religious, illustrates his concern not simply with thought but with action and power. He mentions “the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers.” These are examples “of Reason’s momentary grasp of the scepter; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous instreaming causing power.”36 Kant would have been aghast at a conception of reason that embraces “the miracles of enthusiasm,” and he does not think of reason, or of anything else, as “an in-streaming” power. But Kant recognizes that if moral action requires willing in accord with the commandments of reason, then reason is a powerful component of human moral life. In Emerson’s Nature, reason becomes an epistemological and metaphysical principle that colors or shapes the world: The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason.37

34 36

35 Packer, The Transcendentalists, 23–5. Richardson, Emerson, 93. 37 This and immediately preceding quotations are from CW 1:42–3. CW 1:31.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

155

Eight years later, in “Experience,” Emerson portrays the world as less “ductile and flexible” than in Nature, but still asserts that the universe “inevitably . . . wear[s] our color.”38 Dropping the idea of shaping by an active Reason, he develops what Cavell calls an epistemology of moods, according to which the world we live in is always seen from the outlook of one or another mood: “Life,” Emerson writes, “is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be manycolored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.”39 Emerson also learned about Kant from Madame de Stae¨l, whose On Germany— suppressed by Napoleon in France—was published in an English translation in 1813.40 At the age of nineteen, Emerson read her popular novel Corinne, with its brilliant, passionate, and independent heroine, and the following year he read her books on the French Revolution, Rousseau, and Germany. In early 1824, as he was seriously considering the study of divinity, he was also reading Leibniz and Adam Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu, and long articles about de Stae¨l’s On Germany in The Edinburgh Review.41 De Stae¨l became one of Emerson’s “early constant reference points,” Richardson writes, “one of the people he read and reread, turning the books a little each time like a kaleidoscope, so that a new pattern could emerge from the familiar elements.”42 The attractions of On Germany—a book of over 800 pages—are many. Among them are the Germans themselves, as portrayed in relation to the French: The Germans often run into the error of introducing into conversation what is fit only for books; the French sometimes commit the contrary fault of inserting in books what is fit only for conversation.”43 A Frenchman can speak, even without ideas; a German has always more in his head than he is able to express.44

The Germans, de Stae¨l maintains, have no idea how to conduct a conversation, but they are deep. They have rediscovered the power of the human mind: “It might be said, with reason, that the French and the Germans are at the two extremes of the moral chain; since the former regard external objects as the source of all ideas, and the latter, ideas as the source of all impressions.”45 This statement illustrates one of de Stae¨l’s main lessons about the development of German philosophy from Leibniz

38

CW 3:45. CW 3:30. The idea that Emerson develops an epistemology of moods was first set out in Cavell’s “Thinking of Emerson” (1971), reprinted in Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, David Justin Hodge, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10–19. 40 Packer, The Transcendentalists, 21. 41 42 Richardson, Emerson, 52–4. Richardson, Emerson, 54. 43 Madame the Baroness de Stae¨l-Holstein, Germany, with notes and appendices by O. W. Wight, (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1859 [originally published in London, 1814]), vol. 1, 23. 44 45 Madame de Stae¨l, Germany, 75. Madame de Stae¨l, Germany, 23. 39

156

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

onwards: that the Germans, in contrast to the English and the French, portray the mind as formative, active prior to experience, not as a blank slate on which the world impresses itself. Kant is the central figure in de Stae¨l’s account of this development and her twentypage chapter46 on him presents more detail, more systematically, than Coleridge, while eschewing Kant’s technical vocabulary. She surveys Kant’s pre-critical scientific writings as well as the three Critiques, and portrays the Critique of Pure Reason as rejecting both the idealism of Descartes and Leibniz and the empiricism of Locke. She understands that Kant responds to Hume’s skepticism about cause and effect: “it is our understanding which gives laws to external nature, instead of receiving them from it.”47 De Stae¨l presents Kant as concerned with limits imposed by the laws of our understanding, and the consequent impossibility of metaphysical investigations into how things are in themselves. She is familiar with the antinomies of pure reason that arise when we try to transcend these limits. But she also attributes to Kant a view that is actually post-Kantian: that sentiment has the task or power not of reaching knowledge beyond the conditions of our understanding, but of working beyond those conditions in achieving a practical use of reason.48 There is, she writes, a “primitive law of the heart, as space and time are of the understanding.”49 However true to Kant de Stae¨l’s interpretation may be, it had a formative influence on Emerson’s notion of what he calls the “sentiment of virtue” or “moral sentiment.” This focus on the sentiments, which we saw in the Scottish moral sense theories of Hutcheson, Smith, and Hume, takes on an entirely new life in Romantic writers like Emerson, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Emerson makes sentiment the center of his theory of religion in “The Divinity School Address” in language indebted to Kant, as transmitted by Marsh, Coleridge, de Stae¨l, and others: A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue . . . The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish . . . These laws refuse to be adequately stated . . . They elude, evade our persevering thought, and yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse . . . this sentiment is the essence of all religion.50 This sentiment is divine and deifying . . . Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to

47 Madame de Stae¨l, Germany, vol. 2, 157 ff. Madame de Stae¨l, Germany, 161. Madame de Stae¨l, Germany, 164–7. 49 Madame de Stae¨l, Germany, 167. She did not make this all up. Kant speaks of our “reverence” for the moral law and of respect for the law as a “self-produced” feeling (as opposed to a “feeling received from outside influence”) in the section on “Reverence for the law” in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, H. J. Paton, trans. (New York, Harper & Row, 1964), 69, note **. 50 CW 1:77. 46 48

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

157

derive advantages from another,—by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason.51

We see how far Emerson is from Christianity here, in his sense that the sentiment is deifying, and that “the fountain of all good” lies in each person, rather than in some external being. The Kantian elements include the term “Reason,” said to be accessible to every person, and the idea that morality consists of “principles,” or “laws” for which we have “reverence.” Emerson’s heady mix of ethics, aesthetics, and religion differs from Kant in many ways; yet there is a tip of the hat to Kant’s Enlightenment principle of thinking for oneself in Emerson’s emerging theme of “self-reliance,” expressed here in his claim that one cannot be great by following the great.52

d. Hume, Montaigne, Skepticism David Hume loomed large in the young Emerson’s intellectual landscape, both for his History of England and for his Essays. Emerson mentions “Hume’s Essays” in his “College Theme Book” of 1822,53 and the following year writes that he is an “idolater of David Hume.”54 He “peppered” his Aunt Mary Moody Emerson with “letters containing Humean arguments in hopes that she might refute them.”55 She could not. A year or so out of college, he writes to her about Hume: “Who is he that can stand up before him & prove the existence of the Universe, & of its Founder?”56 In the same year, 1823, he writes in his Journal: “Mr Hume’s Essay upon Necessary Connexion proves that Events are conjoined, and not connected; that, we have no knowledge but from Experience. We have no Experience of a Creator & there[fore] know of none.”57 When he was in divinity school and considering Samuel Clarke’s a priori arguments for the existence of God, Emerson set out several critiques of Clark in his journal and then wrote: “These cavils against Dr Clarke & his a priori crew are all found in Hume Dial. on Nat. Rel.”58 Skepticism of various forms shows up in Emerson’s mature philosophy, some more indebted to Hume than others. Emerson conceives of skepticism in four main ways: (1) as a radical doubt about the reality of the world and other people (as in Descartes’ Meditations); (2) as a limited and desperate form of human life; (3) as a rueful sense of the disappointments and tragedies of life; and (4) as an admirable way of life practiced by ancient skeptics and by one of Emerson’s favorite philosophers,

51

CW 1:79. Cf. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Ted Humphrey, trans, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983). 53 JMN 1:187. 54 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph L. Rusk, ed. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1939), vol. 1, 135. 55 56 Packer, The Transcendentalists, 36. Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, 138. 57 58 JMN 2:161. JMN 2:417 (1825). 52

158

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Michel de Montaigne.59 The first form is displayed in the middle of “Experience,” when Emerson’s advice to treat others well is paired with a doubt about their reality: “Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.”60 The second is the target of remarks such as this from Representative Men: “I play with the miscellany of facts and take those superficial views which we call Skepticism but I know that they will presently appear to me in that order which makes Skepticism impossible.”61 Emerson’s tragic sense of human life appears in this passage about his friends, again from “Experience”: “There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there.”62 Skepticism wears a happier face in “Montaigne; or the Skeptic,” published in Representative Men (1850). Here the skeptic is the mediator between sensation and morals, abstraction and materialism, and the wise observer judging the best things of life, especially human life: “The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game, and the chief players, what is best in the planet, art and nature, places and events, but mainly men.”63 Emerson celebrates Montaigne’s earthiness: “He likes his saddle. You may read theology and grammar and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet or smart or stinging.”64 Most importantly of all, Emerson inherits the essay form from Montaigne.65 Emerson’s second and greatest book bears the same title, Essays, as Montaigne’s great work, and there is more than just a title in common to the two books. The essay—literally a trial or attempt, not a fully finished product or complete system—is the appropriate literary form for a mode of thinking that seeks insights, angles of vision, and progressions of thought, but makes no claim to completeness, nor even at times to correctness. Montaigne writes: “I, who am monarch of the subject which I treat and not accountable for it to anyone, do not for all that believe everything I say. Sometimes my mind launches out with paradoxes which I mistrust and with verbal subtleties which make me shake my head; but I let them take their chance.”66 In a corresponding passage at the end of “Circles,” Emerson writes: “But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head, and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the 59 Emerson’s reading in Montaigne goes back at least to his twenties, when he writes in his Blotting Book 1 (1826): “I won’t relax with poetry. I want something more bracing. I’ll take Montaigne” (JMN 6:13). 60 CW 3:35. 61 CW 4:103. Cf. “Experience”: “So is it with us, now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the reception of spiritual law” (CW 3:41). 62 63 64 CW 3:33. CW 4:91. CW 4:94. 65 See Section 5a on “Style” below, pp. 177–8, for more on this subject. 66 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, M. A. Screech, trans. and ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 1068.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

159

least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things.”67 There is a lot of “I” in both writers, another feature of the essay form. “I myself am the subject of my book,” Montaigne writes,68 not meaning that he is producing an autobiography, but rather that he is showing us how he thinks. As he puts it: “Every day I spend time reading my authors, not caring about their learning, looking not for their subject-matter but how they handle it; just as I go in pursuit of discussions with a celebrated mind not to be taught by it but to get to know it.”69 Emerson admires Montaigne’s essays precisely because they are conversational, unpretentious, entertaining, and wise: “I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”70 We learn how Emerson thinks by seeing that, like Montaigne, he employs the informality and spontaneity of the essay, not to deny or avoid but to arrive at truth. His skepticism, like Montaigne’s, is centered on what the Montaigne scholar Ann Hartle calls “the moment of openness to the possible,” rather than, as in Hume, “the moment of doubt.”71 “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire,” Emerson writes, “is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety . . . to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.”72 Emerson’s essays both advocate and practice such expansive forgetfulness. “No powerful mind,” as Montaigne observes in a remark that characterizes Emerson’s essays no less than his own, “stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward.”73

e. Wordsworth and Coleridge In the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads that he published with Coleridge, William Wordsworth writes that their “principal object . . . was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them . . . in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.”74 Emerson signals his approval and embrace of this quest for the ordinary in a culminating passage from The American Scholar: I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the 68 CW 2:188. Montaigne, Essays, “To the Reader,” lvix. 70 Montaigne, Essays, 1051. CW 4:95. 71 Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105. 72 73 CW 2:190. Montaigne, Essays, 1211. 74 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Paul D. Sheats, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Cambridge Edition, 1982), 791. 67 69

160

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body.75

Emerson goes on to claim that “the highest spiritual cause [is] lurking . . . in these suburbs and extremities of nature” but it is a “cause” or unified, animating “design” that is to be approached not by transcendent intuition, but by a deeper attention to the natural, including the human, world.76 How to attend to the world is a major concern of Wordsworth’s poetry. In “Tintern Abbey” (1798) the poet returns to the banks of the Wye, the memory of which had sustained him “in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din | Of towns and cities.” Now, in the present tense of the poem, he has learned: To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity.

Nature remains an essential source of orientation, however, whether in memory or in present perception, where he feels: . . . a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.77

Wordsworth’s poem names a mysterious “motion” and “spirit” that “rolls through all things.” Although Wordsworth later defended orthodox Christianity, there is no creator God or personal god here. Rather, he thinks of nature—the Wye Valley and the setting sun—as a “guide” or “guardian.”78 Similarly, for Emerson, nature is the setting where we feel the “currents of the Universal Being” and a place of perspective and orientation, even on the religion that he leaves behind: “We can never see christianity [sic] from the catechism:—from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds, we possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.”79 The biography on which we look back is, of course, that of Jesus, and Emerson—like Jonathan Edwards in “The Beauty of the World”—finds in nature not a person but something “impersonal and illimitable.”80

75

CW 1:67. This passage is essential to the argument Stanley Cavell makes for the correspondence of Romanticism and the ordinary language philosophy of Austin and Wittgenstein. See his In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Emerson mentions Wordsworth as part of this movement at CW 1:68. 76 77 CW 1:67–8. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 91, 92. 78 79 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 92. CW 1:10 (Nature), CW 2:185 (“Circles”). 80 CW 2:186. On the impersonal in Emerson, see Sharon Cameron, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” in her Impersonality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007),

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

161

Coleridge thought of the poet, and the poet-philosopher that he aspired to be in such works as Biographia Literaria and Aids to Reflection, as exercising an imaginative or “esemplastic power” that energizes or vitalizes things. The imagination, he writes, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create . . . It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”81 Emerson follows Coleridge when he writes in “The Poet” that the “quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze,”82 and characterizes a poem in terms of its life: “For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,— a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”83 In this sense an essay by Montaigne or Emerson is a poem—a living, passionate thought with its own architecture. Like Kant, Wordsworth and Coleridge portray the human mind as active in forming reality, offering literary explorations of the emerging idea that, as Hilary Putnam once put it: “the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”84 For the Romantics, something new is achieved in this interaction, a marriage of self and world as Wordsworth and Coleridge figure it, or simply a new “creation,” as Wordsworth puts it in “The Recluse”—achieved by the “blended might” of an individual mind and the external world to which it is “exquisitely . . . fitted.”85

2. Departures and Beginnings: the early 1830s Emerson became a successful preacher in churches around New England in his twenties, and in 1829 was invited to become junior pastor of Boston’s Second Church. He married Ellen Tucker later that year, though it was clear that the beautiful and wealthy young woman suffered from tuberculosis. “I want to tell you that I love you very much,” she wrote with mock distance to her fiance´, “and I would like to have you love me always, if consistent with your future plans.”86 Ellen died in February 1831 at the age of nineteen. Her devastated husband prayed for relief from the “miserable debility in which her death has left my soul,” and took to walking to her tomb every morning. In an incident recorded in his journal fourteen months later, he opened her casket.87

79–107; and Branka Arsic´, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). 81

82 83 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 161, 167. CW 3:20. CW 3:6. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xi. 85 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 231. On the marriage of self and world, see also Coleridge “Dejection: An Ode,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, H. J. Jackson, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 114–18; and Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14–20. 86 87 Richardson, Emerson, 84. JMN 3:226; Richardson, Emerson, 3–5, 116. 84

162

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

But he kept reading: in Plotinus; and then in the Bhagavadgita (in Victor Cousin’s Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie), where he encountered an Indian vision of cosmic justice and the unity of all things.88 He read biographies of Newton, Madame de Stae¨l, and Sir William Jones, and, in natural science, J. F. W. Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Sir Humphrey Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, and Thomas Mawe’s Linnaean System of Conchology.89 He began planning a book, and he found a way to leave his position in the church. In September 1832, Emerson delivered a sermon entitled “The Lord’s Supper,” explaining his objections to the communion service or “Lord’s Supper” that as a pastor he was required to administer. He concludes that “Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he ate the passover with his disciples; and further . . . that it is not expedient to celebrate it as we do.”90 Even if Jesus uttered the words “This do in remembrance of me,” Emerson continues in the careful, scholarly manner of the new biblical criticism, these words are mentioned in only one of the four gospels, and might have been only an expression of “natural feeling” among “friends.” There is no evidence that these words constitute an instruction “to impose a memorial feast upon the whole world.”91 Furthermore, even if it were admitted that the immediate disciples of Jesus kept the ceremony, that “does not settle the question for us.” The question is to be settled by what is suited “to this day.” (Here we see Emerson’s resistance to outward authority and his concern with the present.) The ritual as Emerson sees it practiced around him has lost its “life and suitableness”; it is like “the dead leaves that are falling around us.”92 Emerson drives home his point in the first person, in a forecast of the radical individualism that characterizes his mature thought: “This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough that I should abandon it . . . I will love him as a glorified friend after the free way of friendship and not pay him a stiff sign of respect as men do to those whom they fear.”93 There is also an anticipation of pragmatism in Emerson’s assertion that religious forms and institutions are to be justified not by their origins, but by their suitability to the present age. If they no longer serve him, as well as others, now and in the future, they are to be abandoned. Emerson asked for but was not given permission to discontinue the administration of the Lord’s Supper. Leaving his position as minister of the Second Church, and

88 Richardson, Emerson, 110, 114–15. Emerson had been primed for the idea of non-Western thought a year or so before, when he read, in its original French, Joseph-Marie de Ge´rando’s Histoire compare´e des syste`mes de philosophie. Ge´rando, Richardson writes, “treats all thought as primary, interesting in itself, potentially valid” (102, 104). On Emerson and Hinduism, see Russell B. Goodman, “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 51, no. 4 (1990), 625–45. See also Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press), 1993. 89 90 Richardson, Emerson, 121, 123. Myerson, Transcendentalism, 69. 91 92 Myerson, Transcendentalism, 70. Myerson, Transcendentalism, 74, 76. 93 Myerson, Transcendentalism, 75.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

163

after giving up his house and selling his furniture, he sailed for Europe in December 1832.94 He stayed for almost a year. In England, Emerson met the aging Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth was kind to him and recited a new poem. Coleridge spent most of his time arguing against Unitarianism and in favor of orthodox Trinitarianism, in what Emerson characterized as “rather a spectacle than a conversation.”95 Emerson had real conversations, and initiated a lasting friendship, with Thomas Carlyle, whose anonymously published writings he had been reading for years.96 In Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times” (1829), for example, Emerson encountered an emphasis on the primacy of individual development: “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects in himself.”97 Visiting Paris, Emerson saw the paintings and sculpture in the Louvre, but was most impressed by the rows of biological specimens in the Jardin des Plantes. “The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever,” he writes of the great French natural history museum: as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms,—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes . . . Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer,—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me . . . I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually “I will be a naturalist.”98

When he returned to Boston, Emerson sought to develop this vision of a nature with which we have a deep affinity in a series of lyceum lectures on “natural history.” He also presented new lectures on the lives of great men: Michelangelo, Martin Luther, George Fox, and Edmund Burke, while continuing to preach at different churches around Boston (until 1839). He met the Quaker dissident Mary Rotch when he preached in New Bedford for three months in 1833–4, finding her focus on the inner voice rather than any text congenial to his emerging conception of “self-reliance.” In his 1835 lecture on George Fox, Emerson concludes that his doctrine of an inner “Light” is a version of an old and common theme: “that every man was the care of a Genius who befriended him . . . that an infallible Adviser dwells in every heart very silently, very peacefully.”99 Emerson also learned from a young American student of German philosophy, Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90). Hedge’s father was a Harvard professor of logic who sent his thirteen-year-old son to preparatory school in Germany, and then to Harvard College and the Harvard Divinity School. Hedge published a long review of Coleridge’s work in the Christian Examiner in 1833, where he notes Coleridge’s 94

95 96 See Richardson, Emerson, 125–7. CW 5:7. Richardson, Emerson, 145. 98 Cited in Richardson, Emerson, 147. JMN 4:199–200. 99 The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, eds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–72), vol. 1, 172. 97

164

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

immense gifts of erudition and expression, but laments that Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is the task—to introduce the “transcendental philosophy” of Kant—that Hedge takes up.100 In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy: “[S]ince the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.” This “key to the whole critical philosophy,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “a priori knowledge.”101 Hedge organized what became known as the Transcendental Club, suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy in response to what Hedge characterized as the “rigid, cautious, circumspect, conservative tang in the very air of Cambridge which no one, who has resided there for any considerable time, can escape.”102 The club included George Ripley, who founded the experimental community of Brook Farm; Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), who established the Temple School in Boston; and, in subsequent years, Margaret Fuller (1810–50), Elizabeth Peabody (1804–94), Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), and others. The club established its own journal, The Dial, edited by Fuller and then by Emerson. Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” (1843) appeared in The Dial, along with prose and poetry by Emerson, Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” Thoreau’s “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” and translations of Chinese, Indian, and Persian classics. In 1835, Emerson visited the Temple School—named for its location in the Masonic Temple in Boston—and Alcott soon became a frequent visitor in the Emerson home. They shared the view that the evidence for Christianity (and in Emerson’s case other forms of spirituality) lies in the present, all around us. Both Emerson and Alcott found Neoplatonism and the philosophy of Swedenborg congenial sources for their poetic accounts of the origin of things, and they rejected the idea that our fallen existence is due to a fundamental depravity or sinfulness. For his school, Alcott built chairs and desks to replace the backless benches of ordinary schools, had a sofa for visitors, decorated the room with boughs, paintings, and sculpture, and left a central space for dancing. His assistant Elizabeth Peabody (1804–94), who taught Latin, arithmetic, and geography, recorded his practices and conversations in her Record of a School (1835) and Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836).103 The Conversations, which Alcott adopted as his own,104 did not help his reputation, however. Although he maintained that evidence for the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of children’s thought, it is clear from the book that he manipulated and suggested, amidst increasing resistance from the children. (When Alcott asks what a young boy will do with his life, he replies: 100 101 103

Frederic Henry Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” in Myerson, Transcendentalism, 87. 102 Hedge, “Coleridge’s Literary Character,” 92. Richardson, Emerson, 245. 104 Packer, The Transcendentalists, 42, 44, 55–60. Packer, The Transcendentalists, 57.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

165

“I shall use my Soul in selling oil.”)105 Even more troubling were Alcott’s frank discussions of conception, circumcision, and childbirth, and his eschewal of the Unitarian claim that historical investigation was required to prove the existence of miracles. There was no need for historical scholarship to prove the truth of Christianity, Alcott argued, because conclusive evidence for it could be found within each person, even children. The controversy over Alcott’s views about Christianity prefigured the uproar over Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” two years later. Regardless of Alcott’s success as a writer or thinker, a visit that he paid to Emerson in June 1836 had a stimulative effect. In the weeks following, Emerson drafted key sections of Nature, the book he had been working on throughout the year. Although there is a tradition that Alcott is the “poet” whose words end the book, it is more probable, as Packer argues, that Alcott’s works “were chiefly valuable as a stimulus to rival productions. In the words of one of Emerson’s favorite Arabian proverbs, ‘a fig tree looking on a fig tree becometh fruitful.’” Packer points to a later visit from Alcott, after which Emerson wrote in his journal: “When I see a man of genius he always inspires me with a feeling of boundless confidence in my own powers.”106 Margaret Fuller was another stimulating influence on Emerson at this time. Her father, a Massachusetts Congressman and Harvard graduate, wanted his daughter to have the education traditionally reserved for men. He tutored her himself and later sent her to a succession of schools, where she excelled. She was reading Latin at the age of eight, Greek the following year, and studying philosophy, chemistry, and criticism as a teenager.107 In 1832 she began to study German with James Freeman Clarke, then a student at the Harvard Divinity School, and in 1834 Hedge showed Emerson her translation of Goethe’s Tasso.108 Fuller had heard Emerson preach and lecture for years, but they did not meet until 1836, when she visited him in Concord. Talking to her, Emerson wrote after that first meeting, was “like being set in a large place. You stretch your limbs & dilate to your utmost size.”109 Fuller shared Emerson’s interest in Goethe and in Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Conversations with a Child (the child was the twenty-year-old von Arnim; Goethe was fifty eight). She introduced Emerson to the work of George Sand, and argued for the importance of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry.”110 People paid to hear Fuller talk, or rather, as she insisted, to talk with her. She organized a series of “Conversations” for Boston women beginning in 1839, on topics in Greek mythology and the fine arts.111 She encouraged her conversational partners 105

106 Packer, The Transcendentalists, 59. Packer, Emerson’s Fall, 58. Packer, The Transcendentalists, 41, Richardson, Emerson, 238. 108 Packer, The Transcendentalists, 42, Richardson, Emerson, 238. 109 The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, 32. 110 Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life, vol. 2, The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), xiii, 12, 22; Richardson, Emerson, 241, 325, 327–9. 111 For the importance of conversation in Plato, de Stae¨l, Coleridge, Goethe, and Alcott—all authors who were important for Fuller—see Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life, vol. 1, The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 296. 107

166

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

to see Greek religion anthropologically, as an alternative cosmological and moral system without heaven or hell, a single “iron chain [of] productive energy.”112 She conducted discussions of Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, Bacchus, and her favorite, Minerva, preparing the ground for her later statement that: “Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, woman of the Masculine as Minerva.”113 She required that her students not simply listen to her, but that each woman be “willing to communicate what was in her mind.”114 In doing so, she was in accord with Emerson’s idea that everyone has something original to say and do, and with his conception of the scholar as an “active soul.”115 From Emerson, Fuller wrote, she “first learned what is meant by the inward life. . . . That the mind is its own place was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind.”116 Fuller became a member of the Transcendental Club and then editor of The Dial. She turned down early works by Thoreau and Alcott, despite Emerson’s pressing her to publish them. To Thoreau, she wrote that his essay was “rich in thoughts” that were nevertheless so much “out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain.”117 To Alcott, whose “Orphic Sayings” in the first issue of The Dial were ridiculed as “Gastric Sayings,” she stated: “The break of your spirit in the crag of the actual makes surf and foam but leaves no gem behind.”118 Fuller was an excellent critic, but her contemporaries testified to the gap between the quality of her conversation and that of her prose. “My voice excites me,” she wrote, “my pen never.”119 In his Memoir of Fuller, Emerson wrote: “her pen was a non-conductor.”120 Nevertheless Fuller established herself as a writer with her essays in The Dial, a successful travel narrative, Summer on the Lakes (1843), and a series of dispatches for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Her most important work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), first appeared in The Dial in 1843 as: “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” The original title emphasizes her claim that both men and women suffer in the current arrangements of the sexes, where the ideal man and the ideal woman are at odds with their lower or degraded selves. “What woman needs,” she writes, “is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.”121

112

Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Private Years, 301. Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” (1843), in Myerson, Transcendentalism, 419. See Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 137–41 and Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Private Years, 297–306. 114 115 Quoted in Marshall, Margaret Fuller, 134. Emerson, CW 1:56. 116 117 Richardson, Emerson, 239. Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Years, 16. 118 Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Years, 10. 119 Richardson, Emerson, 238, Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Private Years, 339. 120 R. W. Emerson, J. F. Clarke, and W. H. Channing, eds, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Phillips Sampson, 1852), vol. 1, 294. 121 Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit,” 394. 113

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

167

Fuller develops a dynamic, gendered psychology, according to which masculinity and femininity pass into one another, so that there is “no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”122 Nevertheless, she writes as a woman, for women, in a developing tradition that includes the abolitionist Angelina Grimke´, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the writer George Sand, all of whom she mentions.123 “Ye cannot believe it, men,” Fuller writes, “but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you, is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves.”124 Fuller’s unfolding of women’s “powers” and “finding out what is fit for themselves” are versions of the widespread Transcendentalist concern with selfdevelopment and self-expression, what Emerson calls in “History,” discovering one’s “unattained but attainable self,”125 or, as in the work to which we shall now turn, enjoying “an original relation to the universe.”

3. Nature Nature is a beautiful and suggestive work, with wonderful sentences and paragraphs, but it is less controlled than Emerson’s essays, and less coherent. Emerson never published anything like it again. Its form is that of a treatise, with an introduction and then chapters entitled “Nature,” “Commodity,” “Beauty,” “Language,” “Discipline,” “Idealism,” “Spirit,” and “Prospects.” Although I present no general theory of the book, even in its first words we hear Emerson sound some of the major themes of his mature writing: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs.126

Emerson does not want to look back, and he is not absorbed in anticipations of the future. It is “God and nature face to face” that he seeks, now. He needs no text or church but instead seeks an “original” “revelation to us.” This is to put himself, and all those included in his first person plural “we,” in the position of Jesus or Moses— rather than in that of the historian, biographer, or critic of their words. Emerson’s word “original” is at once an indication of Romantic imagination and poetic creativity, and a reference to the origin of all things. When he asks his potent rhetorical question “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” he is saying both that we should develop our unique contribution to the history of the world and that we should acknowledge, enjoy, our relation to the common origin of all things. 122 124

Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit,” 418. Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit,” 402.

123 125

Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit,” 415–16, 406–7. 126 Emerson, CW 2:5. Emerson, CW 1:7.

168

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Prominent among the oppositions running through this passage are past and present, death (sepulchres or tombs) and life, insight and tradition. Emerson is a radical in so far as he wishes to leave traditions behind, to operate, as he later says in “Circles,” “with no Past at my back.”127 It is not simply traditions that he sometimes wishes to leave, but friends, lovers, books, pictures, and his own attained but not final self. Emerson’s present-tense focus is found throughout his mature work: in the “Divinity School Address,” where he writes: “God is, not was”; in “History,” where he talks of converting the “There or Then” of misused history into the “Here and the Now” of biography; in “Self-Reliance,” where he complains that “man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.”128 Nature has a chapter entitled “Idealism,” where he mentions Berkeley and the Indian philosopher Viasa, the reputed arranger of the Vedas. He finds in their writing, as in that of Leibniz and Hume, the congenial view that our mind and its immediate contents are more certainly known than the world of matter and minds outside us.129 Yet just when it seems that Emerson embraces an idealism that denies the reality of the world of nature, he turns towards that world, in one of the dialectical reversals that characterize his mature writing: But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.130

Idealism, Emerson concludes in the following chapter, entitled “Spirit,” is “a useful introductory hypothesis,”131 useful because, as he learned from Madame de Stae¨l, it introduces us to the power of the mind. Emerson’s particular form of idealism borrows from the subjective idealism of Berkeley a lesson about the difference between thought and matter; from Kantian idealism, lessons about the shaping power of the human mind; from Neoplatonic idealism, an account of our common origin in the One Mind. Emerson seems to be thinking of subjective idealism when he writes that idealism “leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it baulks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women.” He continues, though, in a manner that sounds more like Kantian transcendental idealism: “Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular.” Emerson rejects any form of idealism (or realism, for that matter) that “makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.”132 He seeks to recover an intimacy with nature, our common blood with it, not to transcend it. In

127 129 130

128 Emerson, CW 2:188. CW 1:89, 2:7, 2:39. CW 1:22, 35. Emerson includes Hume in the corresponding passage in his journal (JMN 5:123). 131 132 CW 1:35. CW 1:38. CW 1: 37–8.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

169

this way, as Richardson writes, “Nature is heavily weighted toward the world.”133 It is a world understood both abstractly and concretely, containing corn and melons, men and women, stone and sky, and ordered forms of animals, some extinct, some still evolving. Human beings may be one of the latter, but hopeful as Emerson is, he presents an account of a fall, not of a steady progression: “A man is a god in ruins . . . Man is the dwarf of himself.”134

4. Two Radical Addresses Emerson’s addresses of the 1830s are neither sermons, treatises, nor essays, although they contain elements of all three. What is new in them is a measured, assured voice that continues in Emerson’s writing for the next forty years. The two addresses we shall consider are pointed public attacks on what Emerson was to call in “SelfReliance” the “smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.”135 “The American Scholar” (1837) criticizes American scholarship, at the Harvard event meant to celebrate American letters; and the “Divinity School Address” (1838) is a savage attack on the conduct and teaching of Christianity. Both addresses were controversial, especially after they were published in newspapers (Emerson was such a smooth and inspiring speaker that many in his audience did not pay that much attention to what he was saying). After delivering “The Divinity School Address,” Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard until after the Civil War.

a. “The American Scholar” Previous speakers had used the same title as Emerson did, and it was expected that on such occasions, with the president, professors, and students of the college in attendance, one would celebrate the achievements of American scholarship at the commencement of the new academic year. In the second sentence of his address, however, Emerson announces that “[o]ur anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor.” He follows this discordant note with others that more directly address the condition and achievements of his audience, and the wider republic of the United States: Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.136

133

134 Richardson, Emerson, 227. Emerson, CW 1:42. Emerson, CW 2:35. On her visit to America in 1835, the English writer Harriet Martineau was shocked by Harvard’s “air of indolence and privilege” (Packer, The Transcendentalists, 66). 136 Emerson, CW 1:52. 135

170

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

There seems to be no current American achievement to celebrate. Emerson’s address, with its mixture of the hopeful and the condemnatory, draws on the tradition of the jeremiad, a form traditionally used, Kenneth S. Sacks writes, “both to remind congregations of their present failings and to inspire them to higher goals.”137 Emerson is not addressing a religious congregation, however, but an academic gathering, and rather than relying on the Bible or any established text, he presents his own series of myths and distinctions. Emerson begins with what he calls a “fable” of “One Man,” divided by the gods into many, who then lose track of their connection to the One Man. The many men are parts that have been amputated from the trunk: “a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” We have farmers, Emerson continues, but not “Man on the farm”; thinkers, but not “Man Thinking.” In “the degenerate state” in which we mostly find ourselves, we do not find the scholar or “Man Thinking” but “a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”138 Emerson’s opening takes up the theme of unity that we saw in Nature, this time in the fable of the One Man. But it introduces crucial new notes in the idea that “society” victimizes us, and that the victimization consists in thinking someone else’s thoughts—or worse, seeming to think when all one is doing is making meaningful noises without meaning anything, like a parrot. Notice here and elsewhere that there is nothing particularly American about Emerson’s scholar. He or she is simply Man Thinking, not an American thinking American thoughts; and the scholar works in opposition not to American society but to “society” simpliciter. Emerson is really analyzing our existential condition, not the condition of a particular culture. We already see, therefore, Emerson’s habit of subverting his own titles. “The American Scholar” is neither about scholarship as traditionally conceived, nor essentially about America.139 Of course, this is not to say it has nothing to say about them. Like Plato in the Republic, Emerson addresses the nature of the scholar by first considering his or her education, of which there are three main parts. We might expect something like the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and theology, or a modern version encompassing history, literature, and science, but Emerson does not recommend anything so conventional. His “Transcendentalist Trivium,” as we might call it, consists of nature, books, and action. Emerson writes: The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass

137 Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for SelfReliance (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 43. 138 Emerson, CW 1:53. 139 Sacks writes: “In referring to the American scholar, Emerson fully subverted an established phrase. Used previously with nationalistic and moral overtones, for Emerson it signified freedom from all prescribed culture and convention.” (Understanding Emerson, 30–1.)

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

171

grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle.140

The scholar must learn to admire nature as well as know its laws, which are also laws of the human mind. But Emerson does not hold merely that our minds are subject to the laws of the universe, but also that we contribute to the reality our minds then register. In this sense the scholar is both creative and receptive: she “shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.”141 “The mind of the Past” is the second great influence on the scholar, and books are the foremost example. Books may be abused, however, when they prevent thinking. They can overwhelm us with their detail or power, and lead us to mistake the product for the process: The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation,—the act of thought,—is instantly transferred to the record . . . The writer was a just and wise spirit. Henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious . . . The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.142

This passage begins with a crucial Emersonian distinction between acts of creation and their material effects. The effects, even if they are great books, are just relics, traces of the activity of thinking that is Emerson’s central value. In “The Divinity School Address” Emerson will make the same point about the Bible, a book. Midway in the above passage, Emerson echoes his opening “sluggard intellect of this continent” in speaking of the “sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude.” The multitude declares that we are to worship this or that; settle it that this or that book is perfect. Then the slugs form colleges and write books about the record rather than the activity of thought. In those colleges, he says, we have “the bookworm” rather than Man Thinking. The scholarly class tend mere relics, and are composed of “the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.”143 Who would want to go to a college like this? And what good are books anyway? Emerson addresses the second of these questions when he writes: “Books are for the scholar’s idle times.” When thinking or observing, the scholar has no time for books. He puts the point theologically, but it is more broadly about the distinction between one’s own thought and that of another: “When he can read God directly, the 140 142

Emerson, CW 1:54. Emerson, CW, 1:56.

141 143

Emerson, CW 1:55. Emerson, CW 1:56.

172

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” Books are not to be abandoned—after all, they are the second part of the Transcendentalist Trivium. There are “intervals of darkness . . . when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining,” and it is then that “we repair to the lamps which were kindled” by the great writers of the past, “to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.”144 Having defended his claims that books are among the worst things when abused, and only for the scholar’s idle times, Emerson makes one of his characteristic turns, to a substantial defense of books: “It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books . . . There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I had also wellnigh thought and said.”145 What really counts, whether in reading or in thinking—“[t]he one thing in the world of value”—is “the active soul,—the soul, free, sovereign, active.”146 Applying this central premise to reading, Emerson holds that “there is . . . creative reading, as well as creative writing,” and that when “the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.”147 The scholar as Man Thinking is a poet or inventor, a creator rather than a “restorer of readings.” Action is the third great influence on the scholar, not just the action of the active soul, but the actions of life “in country labors; in town—in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art.” These actions, and the lives into which they are woven, constitute the scholar’s “dictionary.”148 Action is more than a resource, however: for Emerson, it is an expression of one’s being: “A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think . . . Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakspear.”149 Emerson likes it wild, whether in nature generally or in the part of nature we call the human being. This wild and unhandselled, “strong to live” element intensifies in Emerson’s essays, is developed in new directions by Thoreau, and is one source of the affinity Friedrich Nietzsche felt for Emerson’s writing.150 “The great man,” Emerson writes, “makes the great thing,” as much by his character as by his doctrines.151 Passing from the education to the duties of the scholar, Emerson argues that they “may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”152 Emerson’s “self-trust” is

144

145 146 Emerson, CW 1:57. Emerson, CW 1:57–8. Emerson, CW 1:56. 148 149 Emerson, CW 1:58. Emerson, CW 1:60–1. Emerson, CW 1:61. 150 See Michael Lopez, ed., Emerson/Nietzsche. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 43, 1–4, 1997. 151 152 Emerson, CW 1:64. Emerson, CW 1:62. 147

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

173

an obvious precursor, or version, of the “self-reliance” that he discusses in his most famous essay. It is not necessarily easy to trust yourself in Emerson’s sense, which is why he says that the scholar must be “free and brave.” So there are two components or poles of the scholar’s activity: her own brave self-trust, and the cheer, elevation, and guidance that she brings to others. Emerson claims that the first leads to the second: “the deeper he dives into his privatest secretest presentiment,—to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music: this is myself.”153 For Emerson, the route to the universal, public, and impersonal is through the person. Emerson swings back to the condemnatory mode in contrasting Man Thinking with the ordinary condition of humanity. By speaking in the first person plural, rather than the second person, he includes himself in the condemnation: Yes, we are the cowed,—we the trustless . . . Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called “the mass” and “the herd.” In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say—one or two approximations to the right state of every man.154

Ten years before Sren Kierkegaard wrote that “a crowd . . . is untruth,” and fifty years before Nietzsche condemned “herd” morality in Beyond Good and Evil, Emerson develops the contrast between the authentic individual and a conforming society.155 Kierkegaard and Emerson both write of individual “upbuilding,” but the contrast is instructive. Whereas Kierkegaard’s individual exists most authentically in the paradoxical relation to an incomprehensible deity, or in fear and trembling before an incomprehensible divine command, the end of Emersonian “upbuilding” is something happier, sunnier, and more self-contained: “The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man.”156 Kierkegaard would never say anything like this. Emerson concludes “The American Scholar” by turning from an abstract discussion of the scholar to his own time and place.157 He finds “auspicious signs” of new activity in poetry, science, and politics: in “the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state,” and in the work of writers such as Goldsmith, Burns, Goethe, 153

This and the preceding citation are from Emerson, CW 1:63. Emerson, CW 1:64, 65. 155 “A crowd—not this crowd or that, the contemporary crowd or a deceased crowd, a crowd of commoners or of the elite, of rich or poor, etc., but a crowd understood in the concept—is untruth, since a crowd either makes for impenitence and irresponsibility altogether, or for the single individual it at least weakens responsibility by reducing the responsibility to a fraction” (“For the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual’ ” (1846), in Sren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong trans. and eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 107. Nietzsche describes “men, not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man—such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their ‘equal before God,’ until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today—.” Beyond Good and Evil (1886), contained in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, trans. and ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 266. 156 157 Emerson, CW 1:65. Emerson, CW 1:66. 154

174

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Wordsworth, and Carlyle, who attend to the “common” and the ordinary rather than the “remote” and distant: The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time . . . I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal Minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of ? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;—show me the ultimate reason of these matters;— show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.158

This powerful passage brings back the vision of the one—in the form of “one design” and a common originating “cause”—at the same time as it reveals Emerson’s intense interest in particulars like the meal in the firkin and milk in the pan. He draws the attention of his contemporaries to their own surroundings, challenging them to find “the miraculous in the common,” as he stated in Nature.159 Achieving an original relation to the universe requires at the same time an acknowledgment of what it has to offer.

b. “The Divinity School Address” In his address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School, Emerson traces the origin of religion not to a divine intervention but to human experience of divine law. He calls this experience “the sentiment of virtue,” “religious sentiment,” or “moral sentiment”: A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then instantly he is instructed in what is above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet.

This sentiment, Emerson maintains, is “the essence of all religion,” not only in Palestine, but in Egypt, Persia, India, and China.160 Right at the start then, Emerson denies the exclusive truth of Christianity, and in calling “what is above him” “his own,” he displaces the creator god and puts the human being at the center of divine existence. Though Emerson asserts his belief in an immanent divinity, he is equally forthright in stating that no one word or group of words will serve to describe it adequately: 158

Emerson, CW 1:67–8.

159

Emerson, CW 1:44.

160

Emerson, CW 1:77, 79, 80.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

175

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws . . . These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not by us or for us be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude, evade our persevering thought, and yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.161

Openings to these laws are available to everyone, but each person must find her own way to and through them. The moral or religious sentiment is a form of self-reliance in that no one else can do it for you—no priest, or church, and no mere imitation or parroting of words. Emerson puts this by saying that the moral sentiment is “an intuition” or “provocation” that “cannot be received at second hand”: Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; It is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.162

Provocation of this sort is the deepest form of education. It is what one gets from a friend, a walk in the woods, or a good book. It is what Emerson is speaking about in “The Poet” when he writes that “[a]n imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.”163 Provocation produces an active soul, the “one thing in the world of value,” as he says in “The American Scholar.” Where is Jesus in all this, and what of the church that the Divinity School graduates will serve? “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets,” Emerson states. “Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man . . . He saw that God incarnates himself in man.”164 But his doctrines were perverted, Emerson argues. He taught the divinity of everyone, and the church taught that only he was divine. His words and life were turned into static forms for people to imitate. Some of the most ferocious words Emerson ever wrote were directed against these confusions and perversions: Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous

Emerson, CW 1:77. This passage displays the combination of ineffability and “noetic” character that James finds in mystical experience. The mystic “immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others” (James, Writings 1902–1910, 343). 162 163 Emerson, CW 1:80. Emerson, CW 3:18–19. 164 Emerson, CW 1:81. Packer observers that Emerson’s “attitude toward Jesus fluctuates between strained expressions of admiration and outbursts of unmistakable resentment” (The Transcendentalists, 92). This is an example of the former. 161

176

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking.165

As in “The Lord’s Supper,” Emerson finds that Christianity petrifies contingent events into oppressive forms, and as with the colleges depicted in “The American Scholar,” so with the “eastern monarchy of a Christianity” depicted in the “Divinity School Address”: they are institutions built in honor, but also in forgetfulness, of living thought and experience. Christianity institutionalizes this forgetfulness, Emerson states, in treating “the revelation” as “long ago given and done, as if God were dead.”166 Unlike his contemporary Kierkegaard, who likewise thought that the churches were institutions for the forgetfulness of the divine, Emerson believes in the possibility of a contemporary revelation, a “revelation to us, and not the history of theirs,” as he had put it in Nature.167 Revelation, as he describes it in the “Divinity School Address,” is not “overpowering,” or “excluding,” but is rather “a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.”168 It is “commanding,” but in a way that allows us to “find pleasure and honor in obeying,” and it is likely to be found, again, in nature: “The faith should blend with the light of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the breath of flowers.”169 Emerson’s advice to the graduates is not that they abandon the church, but that they “let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing,”170 and that, above all, they offer their humanity and friendship to their parishioners: be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own soul, you shall gain a greater confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men do value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews, we have had in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were.171

The minister is not to be too anxious to visit all his parishioners, but when he does, he is to make it count. Like reading a good book or a great day in the woods, an encounter with the minister is to provide relief, joy, and elevation amidst “the dreary

165 168 171

Emerson, CW 1:82. Emerson, CW 1:83. Emerson, CW 1:90.

166 169

Emerson, CW 1:84. Emerson, CW 1:85.

167 170

Emerson, CW 1:7. Emerson, CW 1:92.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

177

years of routine and of sin.” Emerson sometimes (as at the end of Nature) sounds as if he believes that all our troubles will soon be over, but what he really believes is that our lives are punctuated by periods of insight and elevation amidst the general illusion, disorientation, and routine.

5. Emerson’s Mature Philosophy a. Style Emerson published a volume called Essays in 1841, followed by Essays, Second Series in 1844. Together these include most of his great works: “Self-Reliance,” “The OverSoul,” “History,” “Circles,” “Friendship” in the first series, “The Poet,” “Experience,” and “Nominalist and Realist” in the second. A third great volume, Representative Men, appeared in 1850, and a more somber collection, The Conduct of Life, in 1860. Emerson’s style in the essays is remarkable, but there is no agreement on what it is. Some critics maintain that his main unit of thought is the sentence, and he certainly produces any number of great sentences or even sentence fragments, such as “[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”172 He also produces powerful paragraphs and entire essays, though how his thought moves within them is not always easy to say. Some critics find that the disjunctions, turnings, and seeming incoherence of his style are a mere mechanical imprint of the fact that he constructed his essays from his journals. Yet Emerson’s essays were tried out and reworked in the talks that he gave over periods of years. He was a brilliant and careful writer. It is useful to think about the essay as a form. As we have seen, Montaigne, who invented the essay (essai, trial), was one of Emerson’s favorite philosophers, one of two philosophers (along with Plato) allotted a chapter in Representative Men. Montaigne addresses the style and method of his essays in his own essay “On Experience” (“De l’expe´rience”) published over two hundred and fifty years before Emerson’s essay of the same title:173 The learned do arrange their ideas into species and name them in detail. I, who can see no further than practice informs me, have no such rule, presenting my ideas in no categories and feeling my way—as I am doing here now; I pronounce my sentences in disconnected clauses, as something which cannot be said at once all in one piece.174

The idea that the essay presents something that “cannot be said at once all in one piece” entails that there is something that it can say, if not “at once all in one piece.” The essay, one might say, is that saying—it works in fragments, and successions and re-encounters. What it says can be found not “at once” but over a period of time. In 172

Emerson, CW 2:33. Montaigne’s “On Experience” was included in Book III, added in the 1588 revision of the Essays (Montaigne, Essays, liii (editor’s introduction). 174 Montaigne, Essays, 1222. 173

178

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

this way, it is like music, which also cannot reveal what it has to say “at once,” but only through its development.175 The essay is also personal, spontaneous, contingent (even if it is carefully written). “Self-Reliance,” for example, begins in the most casual way: “I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional.”176 To take another case, near the end of “Experience” Emerson lists the “lords of life,” or recurring categories of human existence, among them “Surprise,” “Illusion,” “Succession” and “Temperament.” But he immediately retreats from any claim of completeness or even order to his list: I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics.177

Emerson names the lords of life as he finds them in his way, not as they appear from some god’s eye point of view. In doing so, he exploits the possibilities of the essay, as delineated by Theodor Adorno in “The Essay as Form.” Adorno writes that the essay: reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo . . . Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say.178

In the three sentences from “Experience” cited above, Emerson uses the word “I” eight times, something our high-school English teachers told us never to do, but perfectly in accord with Adorno’s characterization.

b. Self-Reliance Emerson is engaged in what Nietzsche would later call “a critique of moral values” or “revaluation of all values” as they are presently conceived and instantiated, and the quest for, even the invention of, “new values” and better virtues.179 “Self-reliance” is Emerson’s name for one such better virtue, perhaps his central or basic virtue. “Conformity” is the name of the corresponding vice, as Emerson announces when he states: “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.”180 175 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, Sherry Weber Nicholsen, trans., Rolf Tiedemann, ed. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1991), 10, 11, 22. 176 177 178 Emerson, CW 2:27. Emerson, CW 3:47. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 4. 179 See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface” to On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 456, and “Why I am So Clever” (Basic Writings, 710). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: “Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values does the world revolve” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 243). 180 Emerson, CW 2:29.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

179

We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, or when we produce the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us.”181 We conform to our own past actions if they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. Emerson finds that many of our virtues are really “penances” or apologies for our failures to act—for our “daily non-appearance on parade,” as he puts it, using a military metaphor for an existential condition.182 If the negative pole of self-reliance is the aversion to conformity, its positive pole is a wise originality and spontaneity, represented in Emerson’s image of a group of nonchalant boys, “sure of a dinner . . . [who] would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one.” The boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a free, “irresponsible” condemnation of those they see as “silly” or “troublesome,” and praise for those they find “interesting” or “eloquent.”183 The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson’s characteristic combination of the Romantic (finding wisdom in children) and the classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the place of lords or nobles). Emerson presents self-reliance in another way, as the behavior or manner of the essay writer himself. Two paragraphs after introducing the boys, Emerson assumes something like their identity, beginning with a story from his younger days: I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested—"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.184

These are dangerous doctrines, beyond conventional good and evil in their grounding entirely in the self. Notice, however, that Emerson does not embrace the Devil. His impulses, he says, “do not seem to me to be” from the Devil. What he embraces is the radical freedom to live “from within” rather than from any tradition or habit, no matter how valuable it might have been in the past. Emerson does not endorse living only in oneself, but rather living “from within.” He could hardly be more outward than in publishing an essay and presenting it as a popular lecture. He presents a grown-up version of the nonchalant boys, retaining, as he had written in Nature, “the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”185 Having done so much work explaining “self-reliance,” Emerson destabilizes the concept midway through the essay. “To talk of reliance,” he writes, “is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is.”186

181 184

Emerson, CW 2:32. Emerson, CW 2:30.

182 185

Emerson, CW 2:31. Emerson, CW 1:9.

183 186

Emerson, CW 2:29. Emerson, CW 2:40.

180

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Self-reliance can be taken to imply that there is a self already formed on which we may rely, something external to our onward life and thought that we, as it were, lean on. Emerson’s point is that the “self ” on which we are to rely is the original self that we are in the process of creating, what he calls in “History” the “unattained but attainable self.”187 Self-reliance is discussed and exemplified in many of Emerson’s essays, though the term appears only infrequently, as in “Manners,” from the Essays, Second Series. There self-reliance is illustrated in the “gentleman”: A gentleman never dodges: his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or, do we not insatiably ask, Was a man in the house?188

Emerson’s advice for the society of the self-reliant is: When you visit, make it count, make it an event. Gentlemen should “not be too much acquainted,” he states. They “should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries.”189 Even “lovers,” he adds, “should guard their strangeness.”190

c. Friendship Emerson’s discussions of friendship occur throughout his essays and not only in the essay called “Friendship.” They are deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, Emerson values great friendships, but on the other hand, he is disappointed with the limitations of his friends, and finds he must leave even the best of them behind. He finds what society ordinarily calls friendship a low and unambitious form of human life. We mostly “descend to meet,” he complains in “Friendship”: “All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!”191 Friendships are matters of affinity, and have nothing to do with effort, worldly accomplishments, or physical beauty. When “all is done,” Emerson writes in “Spiritual Laws,” “a person of related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another having come: we are utterly relieved and refreshed: it is a sort of joyful solitude.”192

187 2:5. Charles Taylor calls this an expressivist view of the self, according to which the “manifestation also helps to define what is to be realized. The direction of this e´lan wasn’t and couldn’t be clear prior to this manifestation . . . A human life is seen as manifesting a potential which is also being shaped by this manifestation; it is not just a matter of copying an external model or carrying out an already determinate formulation” (Sources, 374–5). Cf . “The Over-Soul”: “We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more” (Emerson, CW 2:165). 188 189 190 191 192 CW 3:79. CW 3:80. CW 3:81. CW 2:117. CW 2:87.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

181

Emerson registers his disappointment with his friends in “Experience,” as we have seen. He finds that even close friends, like revered books and paintings, do not sustain our interest or continue to inspire: How strongly I have felt of pictures, that when you have seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again . . . The reason of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friendship and love.193

These fine things that “you shall never see . . . again” are the flip side—the less pleasant face—of the surprises and flashing insights that Emerson characteristically seeks and records. We see here a tragic theme in Emerson’s thought that is often overlooked. Friendship serves the self, and it induces as well as relieves us from our solitude: “The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.”194 The search for friendship requires departure as much as arrival, then, a point about which Emerson is quite clear, even ruthless, near the end of “Friendship”: I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them . . . I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament . . . Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own.195

As always in Emerson’s essays, one comes to his strong sense of his own self (the word “I” appear ten times in the quotation above!). But Emerson loves his friendships, as he loves his books. When they are “real,” he writes, they are “the solidest thing we know.”196 His essay thus presents two faces: the condemnatory and the celebratory. He celebrates friendship as composed of truth or sincerity on the one hand, and tenderness on the other.197 Sincerity, a noble virtue, is the “luxury” only allowed to those in “the highest rank,” who have none above them “to court or conform unto.”198 In a friend, Emerson writes, I behold “the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”199 This is one of many moments in Emerson’s texts where along with his concern for his own self-expression, he finds an other—sometimes in nature, sometimes in the words of a text, sometimes, as here, in another person. The friend so experienced inspires fear, in part the fear of failing to live up to a mutually held ideal. That ideal is “an alliance of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which

193 197

CW 3:33. CW 2:119–20.

194

CW 2:116–17. 198 CW 2:119.

195 199

CW 2: 126. CW 2:120.

196

CW 2:118–19.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

182

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

beneath these disparities unites them.”200 Friends are equals who spur each other to greater efforts, and greater deeds. Readers of Nietzsche will find anticipations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s chapter “On the Friend.” in the passage just quoted, and in Emerson’s continuation: That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance . . . Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.201

We are to turn from the friend who no longer helps build us up, but not from the friend with whom we joyfully contend. Nietzsche read Emerson in the summer before he composed Thus Spoke Zarathustra and copied passages from Emerson’s essays in his Notebooks. In Zarathustra he writes: In a friend one should still honor the enemy. Can you go close to your friend without going over to him? In a friend one should have one's best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him . . . Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine for your friend? . . . Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.202

d. Temporality i. the pattern of change Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe is fundamentally in flux. As he puts it, “[p]ermanence is but a word of degrees.”203 This is one of the great themes of “Circles”: “The Greek sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice; here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts, in June and July.”204 As with the flecks and scraps, so with older institutions, systems of ideas, and religious rites: “The result of to-day which haunts the mind

200

201 CW 2:123. CW 2:123–4. Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, 168–9. See Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Random House, 1974), 7–13, and Russell B. Goodman, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy: Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 43, 1–4, 1997, 159–80. My discussion of friendship here is adapted in part from “Emerson and Skepticism: A Reading of ‘Friendship’,” in Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship, John T. Lysaker and William Rossi, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 70–85. On Emersonian Moral Perfectionism, see Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially the Introduction. 203 204 CW 2:179. CW 2:179–80. 202

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

183

and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature, will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization.”205 Human life in both its individual and social manifestations is, according to this view of things, an ever-expanding circle that “rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles.” Each pulse of energy expands the circle, but with less force the further from the origin it reaches. For, it is the inert effort of each thought having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify, and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.206

Emerson bursts through the constrictions of Christianity in “the Lord’s Supper” and “The Divinity School Address,” and over the constricting, conforming ethics of his day (and ours) in “Self-Reliance.” In “Circles,” he develops a genealogical/historical critique of the virtues: The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better . . . There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.207

The fundamental fact of flux—and the pattern of expansion and constriction within it—is the basis for many other Emersonian claims: that life is a “succession of moods,” that language is better used for “conveyance” than for “homestead,” that “everything good is on the highway.”208

ii. forms of the present In this Heraclitean world of flux or change, Emerson’s constant advice is to go with the flow, to accept one’s condition as something one is given to work with: “we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.209 Emerson is close here to the Stoicism of one of his favorite authors, Marcus Aurelius, who also focused on the present and our duties to

205 208

206 207 CW 2:181. CW 2:180–1. CW 2:186, 187. 209 CW 3:32, 3:20, 3:36. CW 3:35 (from “Experience”).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

184

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the common city in which we live. Marcus Aurelius is too restrained and austere, however, to think of the universe as constructed to give him pleasure.210 In the following passage from “Self-Reliance,” Emerson finds Stoical instruction from the roses under his window: These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no more; in the leafless root, there is no less. . . . But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.211

The roses are, and we are to aim at being, “happy and strong” in the present. Emerson figures specifically human forms of this happiness in the walking and skating in “Experience”: To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them . . . To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom . . . Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.212

Filling the hour and finishing the moment constitute advice about managing the flow of events, but there is another relation to time in Emerson’s thought, already suggested in his statement that the rose is “above time.” Compare this passage from “Circles”: It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness, day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me, I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence, which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.213

210 Marcus Aurelius writes: “Hour by hour resolve firmly, like a Roman and a man, to do what comes to hand with correct and natural dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Maxwell Staniforth, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1964), 46, (2:5)). He also states: “If the inward power that rules us be true to Nature, it will always adjust itself readily to the possibilities and opportunities offered by circumstance . . . [I]n the pursuance of its aims it is willing to compromise; hindrances to its progress are merely converted into matter for its own use. It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish, which would have quenched a feeble glow; but its fiery blaze assimilates the load, consumes it, and flames the higher for it” (Meditations, 63 (4:1)). This combination of an acceptance of what the course of nature brings with the conversion of things for one’s “own use” and “higher flaming” runs deep in Emerson. 211 212 213 Emerson, CW 2:38–9. CW 3:35. CW 2:187–8.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

185

The statement that he no longer reckons lost time could be true of someone thoroughly absorbed in walking, skating, or conversing with her contemporaries, but the omnipotence and omnipresence that “asks nothing of duration” is something else. Walking requires duration. It is a way of being with, making use of duration; whereas the “divine moments” Emerson describes are “without time.” In these moments, as Emerson puts it in “The Over-Soul,” “Time, Space, and Nature shrink away,” and “there is no question of continuance.”214 Emerson thus distinguishes between, even as he recommends, the deep present without time, and the finite present of action.

e. The one and the many In “Plato, or the Philosopher” (from Representative Men), Emerson writes: Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the One; and the two. 1. Unity or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by perceiving the law which pervades them . . . But every mental act,—this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and Otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think without embracing both.215

Whether true of Plato or not, this claim is certainly true of Emerson. He finds it impossible to speak or to think, in most of his essays, without embracing both of these “cardinal facts.” Even in “Self-Reliance,” not a particularly metaphysical essay, there is a moment when he writes of the “ultimate fact which we so quickly reach . . . on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE.”216 In “Circles,” he states that “this incessant movement and progression . . . could never become sensible to us, but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.”217 And in “The Over-Soul,” he writes of both unity and succession: The Supreme Critic . . . is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other . . . We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.218

The entanglement of the one with the many provides the drama or dialectic of “Nominalist and Realist.” The realist believes in universal principles, and the nominalist stresses the particular or fragmentary nature of reality. Human beings see both sides. “We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic.” But while these faculties have their

214 217

CW 2:162, 168. CW 2:188.

215

218

CW 4:27–8. CW 2:160.

216

CW 2:40.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

186

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

legitimate uses, they enter into conflict with one another, at least in philosophy, where each “denies and tends to abolish the other.”219 Standing back from their battle, Emerson counsels us to “reconcile the contradictions as we can,” and he moves from the epistemological to the metaphysical in asserting that the universe is itself an “old Two-Face, creator-creature.”220 One is the face of unity, the other of variety. But can Emerson really disengage himself from the dialectic of the one and the many? At the end of his essay, he manages to put into question everything he says when he states: “I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.”221

f. Power Power appears as a theme in Emerson’s early writing, becoming more prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as “Experience,” “Montaigne,” “Napoleon,” and “Power.” Emerson speaks about the power of ideas in “Circles:” “In the thought of tomorrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations.”222 In “Self-Reliance,” he connects power to activity and originality: “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”223 Power is all around us, he maintains in “Experience,” but it cannot always be controlled or even understood. It is like a bird that “alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough.”224 Though we often cannot tell at the time we exercise our power that we are doing so, we sometimes make the happy discovery that much was accomplished in “times when we thought ourselves indolent.”225 Emerson’s essay “Power” (from The Conduct of Life (1860)) is a contribution to his critical genealogy of morals. It examines and celebrates the “bruisers” of the world, who express themselves rudely and get their way, but Emerson is more interested in the transition (that key word from “Circles”) from the bruiser or savage to someone more refined—but not so refined as to be ineffective: In history, the great moment, is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”226

Power sometimes flows through us, but it often opposes us. The world, including the human world, is pervaded by fate:

219

220 221 222 CW 3:135, 143. CW 3:143–4. CW 3:145. CW 2:181. CW 2:40. On transitions in Emerson, see Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Cavell thinks of the moment of transition as a time of transfiguration or conversion, aversion, subversion, unsettling, turning, or dancing in his Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 201. 224 225 226 CW 3:34. CW 3:28. CW 6:37–8. 223

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

187

When a new boy comes into school, when a man travels, and encounters strangers every day, or, when into any old club a new comer is domesticated, that happens which befalls, when a strange ox is driven into a pen or pasture where cattle are kept; there is at once a trial of strength between the best pair of horns and the new comer, and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader. So now, there is a measuring of strength, very courteous, but decisive, and an acquiescence thenceforward when these two meet. Each reads his fate in the other's eyes. The weaker party finds, that none of his information or wit quite fits the occasion.227

In the essay “Fate” to which we now turn (also from The Conduct of Life) Emerson attends with disturbing specificity to our lack of control of our lives.

g. Fate Emerson never maintained that most people exercise their freedom well. Even in an exuberant early essay like “The American Scholar,” he writes that “the mass of men are bugs and spawn.” But in later essays like “Experience” and “Fate” he comes more to dwell on the obstacles facing us, and in a new, more world-weary tone. “In youth,” Emerson writes in “Fate,” “we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. In age, we put out another sort of perspiration, — gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.”228 “Fate” presents a veritable catalogue of disagreeable natural phenomena over which we have no control. The world, Emerson writes, “will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust . . . The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.”229 Fate runs through our character and temperament (which “shuts us in a prison of glass,” as he had already argued in “Experience”). Now he writes: Each creature puts forth from itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell . . . A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to meet, but which exude from and accompany him . . . He looks like a piece of luck, but is a piece of causation.”230

Fate is only half of Emerson’s story, however, and freedom the other half. This begins to come out in the fourth paragraph of the essay: But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power . . . We are sure, that, though

227

CW 6:31. CW 6:22. For the dark political background to Emerson’s essays in The Conduct of Life, see Packer’s “Historical Introduction,” CW 6:xv–lxvii. 229 230 CW 6:3–4. CW 6:22–3. 228

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

188

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.231

Emerson’s essay hammers these strings, over and over. As Barbara Packer observes, “ ‘Fate’ is a kind of debate: not a neat argument-and-rebuttal, like the essays in Representative Men, but an endless, repetitive wrangle, like the congressional debates of 1846–51.”232 If Emerson doesn’t succeed in making the collision of his viewpoints harmonious, he has good company in Kant, whose “two standpoint” moral theory lies in the background.233 For both Emerson and Kant, we are determined in so far as we live in the world of phenomena; but thought or intellect brings a kind of freedom that is more than just an acceptance of the causal conditions that otherwise obtain. Emerson seems to oscillate between two conceptions of freedom in “Fate”: a more stoic view of freedom as accommodation to or harmony with necessity or fate, and a Romantic but also Kantian conception of freedom as an original power or norm not grounded in material causality. We find this more Romantic conception in the following passage: But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history . . . Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe.234

This power, as one comes to expect in Emerson’s writing, is figured in Vedic, Stoic, Neoplatonic, and Romantic terms: The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law;—sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it.235

This passage incorporates the idea of creativity (the “new”), Stoic accommodation (“what is must be”), and a Neoplatonic or Vedic recovery of “Unity.” It is also in accord with Emerson’s view in Nature, some twenty-four years earlier, that we are “part or particle of god.” Although “Fate” is rife with contrary moments and themes, it does not neglect what, in “The Divinity School Address,” Emerson had called the “few real hours”236 of life. 231

232 CW 6:2. CW 6:xlvii. See Cavell, “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending: Reading ‘Fate,’ ” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 201. 234 235 236 CW 6:12. CW 6:14. CW 1:90. 233

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

189

h. Race One of the disturbing elements in “Fate” (and earlier in “Montaigne”) is Emerson’s claim that race is an important determining factor in human life. He writes: The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain . . . The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.237

The references to race here reflect a new “scientific” interest in both England and America in the role that race—often conflated with culture or nation—plays in human evolution. In America, this interest was entangled with the institution of slavery, the encounters with the Native Americans, and with the notion of “AngloSaxon liberties” that came to prominence during the American Revolution, and developed into the idea that there was an Anglo-Saxon race.238 Emerson had high hopes for emancipated black slaves in America, though he was disappointed in the failure of the free men and women of Haiti to achieve stability or prosperity, and he spoke of a “weakness . . . in the black race” in his 1854 address on the Fugitive Slave Law.239 But he took the long view, emphasizing that it was still early in humanity’s history: “The oldest Empires, all that we have called venerable antiquity, now that we have true measures of duration, become things of yesterday; and our millenniums & Kelts & Copts become the first experimental pullulations & transitional meliorations of the Chimpanzee.” From this perspective all the races are in their beginnings, and it is “all too early to draw sound conclusions.”240 Emerson would not be Emerson, however, if he did not conduct a critique of his terms, and “race” is a case in point. He takes it up in a non-American context, the essay “Race” from English Traits (1856),241 the popular collection he published between Representative Men and The Conduct of Life. “Race” begins with a dialogue. The parties are those who assert the influence of race on national character, and those who deny that influence, either because of 237

CW 6:8–9. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981). 239 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 80. 240 241 JMN 13:199 (1853). CW 5:24–40. 238

190

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

countervailing factors or because they question the coherence of race as a concept. Emerson’s critique of his title begins in the essay’s first paragraph when he writes that “each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.” He then lists factors that mitigate the influence of race. Civilization “eats away the old traits,” and religions construct new forms of character that cut across old races: “Each religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners.”242 It is not just “limitations” of the concept of race that Emerson finds, but considerations that “threaten to undermine” it. The “fixity or inconvertibleness of races as we see them,” he writes, “is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point to the duration in which nature has wrought.” Nature’s forms, in other words, are temporary patterns in the flux, just small segments of the vast duration. Moreover, the patterns we see today are not pure anyway: though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us every where. It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas.243

As in Nature and his great early works, Emerson asserts our intimate relations with the natural world, from the oceans to the animals. Why, one might think, should one of the higher, but still initial forms, be singled out for separation, abasement, and slavery? Emerson works this all out without referring to American slavery, however, in a book about England where he sees a healthy mixture, not a pure race. England’s history is not so much: one . . . of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them all. Certain temperaments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear-trees eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard . . . The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities . . . The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still.”244

Although there are no pure races, and the traditions of race and nation are “vague,” Emerson nevertheless observes that “[t]he traditions have got footing.” We must, he argues, “use the popular category, as we do by the Linnaean classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final.”245 Emerson uses the popular category in

242

CW 5:24, 26.

243

CW 5:27.

244

CW 5:28.

245

CW 5:29.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

191

“Fate” and elsewhere, but he would be the first to admit that it is neither exact nor final. If Emerson’s racialism is unacceptable to us in the twenty-first century, we must see it alongside his vision of all human beings as fundamentally equal, and his career as a spokesman for the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, it is striking that Emerson never mentions slavery in “Race” or “Fate,” both of which were written during his intense period of public activity against American slavery.246 Furthermore, with its claim that blacks (and Germans and the Irish) “have a great deal of guano in their destiny,” “Fate” coheres with the racialist theories that were used to justify the institution of slavery.

i. Emerson on slavery i. early years Massachusetts ended slavery in 1783, when Chief Justice William Cushing, in his instructions to the jury in the case of Quock Walker, a former slave, stated that “the idea of slavery” was “inconsistent” with the Massachusetts Constitution’s guarantee that “all men are born free and equal.”247 As a consequence, Emerson grew up in an American environment where slavery did not appear. He is the first of the five American thinkers considered in this book who did not own another person. Emerson saw slaves when he went south for his health in the winter of 1827, and in February recorded the following scene in his journal: A fortnight since I attended a meeting of the Bible Society. The Treasurer of this institution is Marshal of the district & by a somewhat unfortunate arrangement had appointed a special meeting of the Society & a Slave Auction at the same time & place, one being in the Government house & the other in the adjoining yard. One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with “Going gentlemen, Going!” And almost without changing our position we might aid in sending the scriptures into Africa or bid for “four children without the mother who had been kidnapped therefrom.”248

Emerson never questioned the iniquity of slavery, though it was not a main item on his intellectual agenda until the 1840s. In his 1821 undergraduate essay on “The Present State of Ethical Philosophy,” he writes that “the plague spot of slavery must be purged thoroughly out” of American society,249 and in an extended discussion of slavery the following year he states that “[n]o ingenious sophistry can ever reconcile

246 A man who in his 1844 West Indies Address “confessed himself heartsick to read the history of that slavery,” Cavell observes, published an essay on the eve of the Civil War, “Fate,” that is as much about freedom as fate, without mentioning “the sickening facts of the slavery that continue[d] not metaphysically afar but at home” (Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 197). 247 The state constitution, enacted in 1780, was never “amended to prohibit slavery” but “with the courts clearly refusing to uphold it, slavery in Massachusetts was doomed”. Douglas Harper, “Emancipation in Massachusetts,” in Slavery in the North. 2003. . See also “African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” . 248 JMN 3:117. 249 Cited in Len Gougeon, Virtues’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 31.

192

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the unperverted mind to the pardon of Slavery; nothing but tremendous familiarity, and the bias of private interest.”250 (One thinks here of Jefferson.) Emerson also set out in this early journal entry a view from which he never wavered: that slavery was a violation of the fundamental equality of all human beings. If God gives us freedom, he argues, “it is manifestly a bold stroke of impiety to wrest the same liberty from [our] fellow.”251 In 1835, Channing gave an address on “Slavery” that led to his ostracization by mainstream Unitarians. His objectionable view was that slavery would not end naturally and so had to be actively opposed. He did not urge violence or even the organized activities of the abolitionists, but only moral suasion. He favored compensation for the former masters, and a period of education under governmental guardians for the former slaves.252 For all this Channing was shunned by mainstream Boston (in a state where slavery was illegal). His isolation revealed a split in the Boston Unitarian establishment between what came to be known as the “Cotton Whigs” and the “Conscience Whigs.”253 Slavery had its passionate supporters in New England, because northern textile mills and ships were part of the trade in cotton produced by southern slaves. In Massachusetts, abolitionist meetings were often so riotous that Governor Edward Everett tried to have the legislature ban all discussions of the issue.254 As Emerson’s lyceum career was getting under way, his wife and Aunt Mary urged him to give up talking about “great men” and speak directly about slavery. His journals contain pages of reflections on the issue, and question his failure to discuss it publicly.255 “In avoiding the question of abolition in his lyceum lectures,” Kenneth Sacks concludes, “Emerson kept silent before a public he did not wish to alienate.”256 He did take a highly public and pointed stance against the so-called Cherokee Removal in 1838, the same year as his “Divinity School Address.” The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They were one of the more assimilated tribes, whose members owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a removal agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government made an agreement with a minority faction. Despite the opposition of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, the Cherokees were rounded up by the U.S. army and many died

250

251 JMN 2:57. JMN 2:58. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 292. 253 Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 284, 295. 254 Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 64. For contemporaneous proslavery arguments, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 255 256 Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 62–3. Sacks, Understanding Emerson, 65. 252

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

193

along their way west. In his public letter to President Van Buren (Jackson’s successor) Emerson called this “a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?”257 A year after he declared his independence from existing American scholarship in “The American Scholar,” Emerson thus declared his independence from the American government.

ii. slavery in nature and the essays Slavery is inscribed like a scar in some of Emerson’s greatest essays, so that even if we did not have the antislavery addresses of the 1840s and 1850s, we would still have evidence both of the existence of slavery and of Emerson’s condemnation of it. Emerson refers to slavery in the “Prospects” chapter of Nature when he speaks of the “gleams of a better light” in the darkness of history and gives as examples “the abolition of the Slave-trade,” “the history of Jesus Christ,” and “the wisdom of children.”258 In “Self-Reliance,” he speaks of “this bountiful cause of Abolition” while condemning the “angry bigot[s]” who publicly agitate for it.259 Later in the essay he treats abolition as one of the great causes and movements of world history, along with Christianity, the Reformation and Methodism: Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age . . . A man Caesar is born, and for ages after, we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.260

Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) was an abolitionist, a Cambridge-educated clergyman who helped found the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He travelled thirty-five thousand miles on horseback across Britain, gathering information about slavery, interviewing sailors who worked on slaving ships, and exhibiting the tools of the trade: manacles, thumbscrews, branding irons, and instruments for forcing open human jaws. Like Fox and Wesley, Clarkson was a religious man who dedicated himself to a great idea, a moral advance in human development (the British parliament abolished slavery in 1833). Clarkson’s The History of the Rise, 257

Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 3 (letter dated April 23, 1838). CW 1:43. Emerson is presumably referring to the American and British abolition acts of 1807 and 1808. The British parliament abolished the slave trade throughout the empire in 1807. The American act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson in March, 1807, abolished the importation of slaves as early as possible under the constraints of article I, section 9 of the U. S. Constitution, which states: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person” (The Federalist, J. R. Pole, ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005), 478). 259 260 CW 2:30. CW 2:35. “Monachism” is monasticism. 258

194

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808, 1839) was a major source for Emerson’s antislavery addresses.261 Slavery also appears in “Politics,” from the Essays, Second Series. Emerson takes an historically relative approach to political forms, and coolly evaluates the democracy of his own culture as being “not better” than every other, but only “fitter for us.”262 He surveys the two main parties that he sees before him. One, standing for free trade, wide suffrage, and the access of the young and poor to wealth and power, has the “best cause” but the least attractive leaders, while the other has the most cultivated and able leaders, but is “merely defensive of property.” This conservative party, moreover, “vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.”263 Here in an important essay of 1844 Emerson stands for emancipation, not simply for the ending of the slave trade, and as in “Self-Reliance,” he places it among the important movements of world history.

iii. “address on the emancipation of the negroes in the british west indies” (1844) The year 1844 was also the year of Emerson’s breakout antislavery address, which he gave at the annual celebration in Concord of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. In the immediate background was the American war with Mexico, the imminent annexation of Texas, and the likelihood that it would be coming into the Union as a slave state.264 Slavery did not seem to be naturally dying out in America, but expanding. Although Concord was a hotbed of abolitionism compared with Boston, there were many conservatives in the town. No church allowed Emerson to speak on the subject, and when the courthouse was secured for the talk, the sexton refused to ring the church bell to announce it, a task the young Henry David Thoreau took upon himself to perform.265 In his address, Emerson develops a critique of the language we use to speak about, or to avoid speaking about, black slavery: Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized

261 262 264 265

See Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 73–4, 76, and Richardson, Emerson, 395–6. 263 CW 3:121. CW 3:123. See Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 70. Texas entered the Union in December 1845. Gougeon, 75.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

195

world . . . I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers.266

As Cavell points out, “telling,” one of Emerson’s verbs in the above passage, is related to counting, as with the teller in a bank, while “raking” is etymologically related both to reckoning in the sense of counting, and to recking, paying attention. Emerson rakes language in these senses, as he recounts or tells “what negro-slavery has been,” what lies under the surface of these familiar words.267 He uses Clarkson’s book as a source for the details of the middle passage from Africa to the Americas, and he diagnoses a love of power on the part of the slave owner: it is not mere avarice that drives him, Emerson argues, but “a bitterer element, the love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control.”268 As in the “Politics” essay, Emerson takes an historical look at his own culture: “There are many styles of civilization, and not one only. Ours is full of barbarities.”269 The barbarities he reckons include the selling into slavery of free black citizens of Massachusetts when their ships entered the ports of South Carolina and Georgia, and the actions of the master of the slaving ship Zong, who threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to collect insurance money.270 Emerson considers the African arts that Clarkson used in his campaigns for British abolition, and he cites with approval Montesquieu’s sarcastic statement that “ ‘it would not do to suppose that negroes were men, lest it should turn out that whites were not.’”271 These are signs, Emerson holds, of “the annihilation of the old indecent nonsense about the nature of the negro.”272 Yet he still speaks in racial terms, at once condescending and hopeful, when he writes: “the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization.”273 Emerson’s forecast for blacks is positive: they carry “an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.” He sees in the Haitian Toussaint L’Ouverture and the post-slavery societies of Jamaica and Barbados new models of self-reliance,274 and he celebrates not only the accomplishments, but the promise, of West Indian freedom: I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery, that the black race can contend with the white: that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect, and take a master's part in the music.275

266 Emerson, “An Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 9. 267 Cavell, “Emerson’s Constitutional Amending,” 211. 268 269 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 17. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 19. 270 271 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 23–5, 29. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 29–30. 272 273 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 29. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 30. 274 275 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 31. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 31.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

196

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

iv. the 1850s Gold was discovered in California in 1849, and that territory was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850. As part of the compromise that brought this about, Congress passed a new fugitive slave law. There was already a fugitive law in the U.S. Constitution, although the word “slave” does not occur in it: No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.276

This law was widely ignored, however. The new law had penalties for noncompliance, and it required all federal officers to assist in the recovery of escaped slaves. In February 1851, a fugitive slave named Shadrach Minkins was rescued from a Boston courtroom by a group of black men, and transported to Canada. President Millard Fillmore, determined to placate Southern secessionists by strictly observing the terms of the Compromise of 1850, sent Daniel Webster to Boston to prosecute Minkins’s rescuers. Meanwhile, another escaped slave, seventeen-year-old Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston and sent back to Georgia by a force of three hundred armed men. These events are the background to Emerson’s May, 1851 “Address to the Citizens of Concord.”277 In his 1851 address, Emerson cites Cicero, Grotius, Coke, Blackstone, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Burke, Mackintosh, and Jefferson, in holding that “immoral laws are void.”278 He calls both for the abrogation of the law and for disobeying it while it is still on the books.279 Emerson offers a series of arguments for the law’s immorality. Employing the “rights” language of Locke, Hutcheson, and Jefferson, he writes: “A man’s right to liberty is as inalienable as his right to life.” He states that the law runs counter to “all the sentiments,” including pity.280 Thirdly, the new law conflicts with Congress’s own prohibition of the slave trade, enacted in 1807: if “it is piracy and murder punishable with death, to enslave a man on the coast of Africa,” Emerson argues, how can it be a crime punishable with a fine and imprisonment “to resist the re-enslaving of a man on the coast of America[?]”281 Emerson also maintains that the law has bad consequences, among them the encouragement of mean and low men attracted by the ease with which someone can simply be kidnapped under the law. The only benefit the law brings, he concludes, lies in its education of the American people: “It has turned every dinner-table into a debating club, and made every citizen a student of natural law.”282 276

The Federalist, 482 (Article IV, Section 2). CW 6:xli–xliii (“Historical Introduction,” by Barbara Packer). 278 279 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 59. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 71. 280 281 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 57, 60. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 62. 282 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 64. Under the law, one could take possession of a human being simply by presenting a sworn affidavit to a court testifying that she or he was a runaway slave. The accused party could not testify in court, and anyone harboring a runaway could be fined and imprisoned. 277

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

197

In his 1854 address on the Fugitive Slave Law, Emerson observes that the law “disclosed the secret of the new times; that slavery was no longer mendicant, but was become aggressive and dangerous.”283 The trial and shipment back to Georgia of Anthony Burns, yet another escaped slave, was part of that aggression, and in the immediate background of Emerson’s “Lecture on Slavery” of 1855.284 By the order of Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Burns was taken to the harbor by Massachusetts militia and U.S. marines. He was then shipped to Virginia, where his owner placed him in a notorious “slave pen” outside Richmond. In his 1855 address, Emerson calls the original 1787 Constitution’s recognition of slavery a “crime,” and he contrasts the written law of the Constitution with the “Laws” and “Right” referred to by Jesus, Menu, Moses, Confucius, Grotius, Mansfield, and Blackstone.285 On the eve of the Civil War, Emerson found himself defending John Brown, an abolitionist who hoped to start a slave revolt by attacking the federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Thoreau introduced Emerson to Brown in 1857, after he spoke about the civil war breaking out in Kansas between pro-slavery and antislavery settlers. Emerson invited him to stay at his home, but he was astonished to learn two years later of Brown’s attack and subsequent imprisonment. He “lost his head,” Emerson wrote in a letter.286 He nevertheless worked with Thoreau and others to raise money for Brown’s defense and, after Brown’s execution in December, to commemorate his life and actions. (Although Emerson was unaware of it, Brown’s actions included the killing of unarmed settlers, among them women and children.) For Emerson, Brown was a great warrior like El Cid, and the justice that he administered was ultimately the responsibility of the slaveholders. “Who makes the Abolitionist?” Emerson asks. “The Slaveholder.”287

v. the status of emerson’s polemical writings Emerson was a reluctant abolitionist, though he had no doubt that slavery should be eliminated. “I do not often speak to public questions,” he writes in his 1854 address on the Fugitive Slave Law: They are odious and hurtful and it seems like meddling or leaving your work. I have my own spirits in prison,—spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits, if I do not. And then I see what havoc it makes with any good mind this dissipated philanthropy. The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is not to know their own task, or to take their ideas from others.

283

Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 80. See Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). 285 286 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 100, 101. CW 6:lxi. 287 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 123. 284

198

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Emerson’s “own task” was to produce the essays and addresses for which we read him today, and he rightly felt that he had little original to say about slavery and its abolition, even though he spoke against slavery on scores of occasions.288 These feelings about his polemical interventions go back to the great period between Nature and the Essays, Second Series. After his potent letter to President Van Buren on the expulsion of the Cherokees, he writes in his journal: Yesterday went the letter to V[an] B[uren]. a letter hated of me. A deliverance that does not deliver the soul . . . I write my journal, I read my lecture with joy—but this stirring in the philanthropic mud, gives me no peace . . . I fully sympathise, be sure, with the sentiment I write, but I accept it rather from my friends than dictate it. It is not my impulse to say it & therefore my genius deserts me, no muse befriends, no music of thought or of word accompanies. Bah!289

In the same vein, he writes to Carlyle after his passionate and detailed 1844 address on slavery: “though I sometimes accept a popular call, & preach on Temperance or the Abolition of slavery, as lately on the First of August, I am sure to feel before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere & so much loss of virtue in my own.290 The polemical addresses are straight-ahead arguments for a position, and they are designed to stir emotion and instigate action. They do not have the shape or living thought of the Emersonian essay, and they were more effective for this absence. Although they are congruent with Emerson’s philosophy at certain points—on freedom, self-reliance, and morality, they are quite different from the rest of Emerson’s writing. It was good of Emerson to give these talks: he played a role in the vast struggle over slavery that was not settled until the Civil War. But if these addresses were all we had of him, we would not be paying much attention to him now. There would be no Emerson as we know him without “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” and “Experience.” Emerson in his own sphere, working at his “own task,” was what Nietzsche found in the German translations of Emerson’s essays that he marked up, excised, and incorporated in such works as The Gay Science, Unfashionable Observations, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Twilight of the Idols.291 Nietzsche writes that Emerson was the author “who has been richest in ideas in this century,” and says of his essays: “Never have I felt so much at home in a book.”292 288 Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 73. A contemporary reviewer of his “Fugitive Slave Law” address called it “a tame repetition of [Theodore] Parker and [Wendell] Phillips, nay a dilution of [Henry Ward] Beecher and a rechaufe´e of Miss Lucy” (Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 214). 289 290 JMN 5:479. Cited in Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 92. 291 See Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to The Gay Science, 7–13; the papers in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 43, 1–4, 1997; and James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Post-Moralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, Richard Schacht, ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181–257. 292 Cited in Kaufmann’s introduction to The Gay Science, 12.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 7/5/2015, SPi

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

199

Emerson at his own task is what William James found as he reread all of Emerson’s works for his address at the Emerson centenary celebrations in 1903. James’s indices in his copies of Emerson’s works show that he identified a pragmatic strain in Emerson four years before he published Pragmatism.293 In his address, he characterizes Emerson as having achieved a blend of the religious and the empirical, something he too tries to achieve in Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism. For Emerson, James writes: “All God’s life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or nowhere, is reality.”294 John Dewey, a generation younger than James, also gave an address celebrating the Emerson centenary, where he calls Emerson “the one citizen of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato.”295 He points out that, like Plato, Emerson was both a philosopher and a poet, and he praises Emerson’s expansive conception of empiricism, which “takes the distinctions and classifications which to most philosophers are true in and of and because of their systems, and makes them true of life, of . . . common experience.”296 The Emersonian idea that each of us has something original and powerful within us is central to Dewey’s educational theory.297 In our own time, Emerson at his own task is what provoked Cavell among the philosophers, and Richard Poirier, Sharon Cameron, and others among the literary critics, to their astonishing new readings of Emerson’s essays, which I have relied on in this chapter in numerous ways. Emerson’s most direct influence on a major writer and thinker, however, was on his younger Concord friend, Henry Thoreau, to whose writing and thought we now turn. That influence or provocation can be measured not only in the degree of their common concerns for nature and self-reliance, but in their differences: the prominent role of the body, and deep immersion in the particulars of the natural world in Thoreau, the grander metaphysical schemes of Emerson, and his exploitation of the essay form. Thoreau was an exemplary scholar in Emerson’s sense: educated by nature, books, and action, with a sense of duty towards his readers “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”298

See Russell B. Goodman, “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, Cheryl Misak, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19–37, and the “Epilogue” to this book. 294 James, Writings 1902–1910, 1124. 295 John Dewey, “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosopher of Democracy,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), vol. 3, 191. 296 Dewey, “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosopher of Democracy,” 188. 297 See Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, 114–24, and the “Epilogue” to this book. 298 CW 1:62. 293

6 Henry David Thoreau 1. Introduction: Life and Writings Thoreau rang the Concord town bell for Emerson’s antislavery address in 1844, and in the following decade he became an equally powerful opponent of slavery with “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854) and his defenses of John Brown. His more theoretical essay, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) (later renamed “Civil Disobedience”) was the most influential political document produced by any of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau is also, like Emerson, a naturalist. He records a series of “experiments” about nature and the human place in nature in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and his masterpiece, Walden (1854). If Emerson’s first book is called Nature, the nature he finds is one of laws and spirit, but also of “corn and melons.” Thoreau, playing Aristotle to Emerson’s Plato, starts with the particular: this day on the river, this conversation with a friend, this particular evening on Walden Pond, this cabin, this particular distribution of flowers on a day in August, 1851. He writes about himself, but he also writes for his audience: to wake us up, as he puts it, to rouse us from our lives of routine and “quiet desperation.”1 Walden records the quest for an intimacy with existence that Thoreau argues we have foregone. It contains a critique of the economic system as powerful as that of Thoreau’s contemporary Karl Marx. It is a work of self-examination and confession, comparable to the writings of Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard. And it explicitly presents its author as seeking a philosophical life, understood as one of “simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” Here Thoreau finds inspiration in a range of ancient philosophical traditions—Greek and Roman, Chinese and Indian—in which philosophy is conceived as a way of life. Thoreau can sound hectoring or preachy, but he also writes in Walden: “I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself .”2 Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817, the third of four children of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau.3 John Thoreau 1 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden, J. Lyndon Shanley, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 8, 84. 2 Thoreau, Walden, 78. 3 Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1965), 3, 10. Thoreau’s paternal grandfather Jean (later John) Thoreau came to America in 1773, when he was rescued from his

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

201

managed a store in Concord, and achieved some success with a pencil manufacturing business. Thoreau’s mother was the “more dynamic” member of the marriage, known for speaking her mind and as a reformer.4 She loved to take the family out for long walks in the country, when she would build a rough fireplace and cook their supper in the woods.5 The Thoreaus were poor. They did without tea, coffee, and sugar so the girls could have music lessons. Mrs. Thoreau took in boarders. Henry’s clothes were hand-medowns or cut-downs, and his pockets were made from old bags.6 Nevertheless, in 1828, at the age of eleven, Henry was sent to the newly formed Concord Academy, where the curriculum included Virgil, Homer, Euripides, Cicero, Xenophon, Voltaire, Molie`re, and Racine in the original languages.7 Five years later, in August 1833, at the age of sixteen, Thoreau entered Harvard College. He was known for his “grave Indian stride” but was sociable enough to be invited to join a student club, the Institute of 1770, where he took part in debates.8 Harvard’s greatest gifts to Thoreau were its 50,000-volume library, its language faculty, with whom Thoreau studied Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German,9 and the society of his contemporaries. Looking back at his education there he observed: “Tuition . . . is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”10 Thoreau criticized the college for its isolation from what he called the “economy of living”: To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.11

In the revived Concord Academy that Thoreau ran with his brother John after graduating from Harvard in 1837, he tried to incorporate some of the “learning by doing” that Harvard lacked. While floating down the Concord River, he pointed out a

wrecked privateer and taken to Boston. (Harding, 4). Thoreau’s maternal grandfather, the Reverend Asa Dunbar, was born in Massachusetts, attended Harvard College, taught school, and was a founder of the Masonic Lodge in Keene, New Hampshire. His wife, Mary Jones Dunbar, was the only grandparent young Henry knew. She operated a tavern after her husband died, married a ship captain, was widowed again, and was so impoverished afterwards that she had to petition the Society of Masons for assistance (Harding, 6–7). Thoreau was christened “David Henry Thoreau,” but changed his name in 1837 (Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 8. 4 6 8 9 10

5 Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 9. Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 19, 10. 7 Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 20, 22. Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 26. Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 32, 40, 41. Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 38, 34–5. 11 Thoreau, Walden, 50. Thoreau, Walden, 52.

202

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

spot that he thought was the site of Native American fishing village. The next week they returned with a spade, and after asking the students to consider on which bank and at what angle to the sun and water might be a good place to have built, he plunged his shovel into the earth at the spot suggested, at first with no result, but then striking a stone: “Moving forward a foot or two, he struck another stone, and then another. He soon uncovered a whole circle of red, fire-marked rocks that indicated an ancient Indian fireplace. But having proved his point, he then carefully buried them as he found them, leaving them for someone else to discover at a later date.”12 Thoreau’s respect for the Native Americans, his eye for nature’s offerings and secrets, and his practical skills were recorded by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who moved to Concord in 1842. He wrote that Thoreau had “a great regard for the memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so well; and strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, a spear-head, or other relic of the red men—as if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth.” Hawthorne was taken with a boat that Thoreau built and which in Thoreau’s hands “either with two paddles or with one . . . seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it.”13 Hawthorne bought it for seven dollars, but found that in his hands “the boat seemed to be bewitched, and turned its head to every point of the compass except the right one. [Henry] then took the paddle himself, and though I could observe nothing peculiar in his management of it, [it] immediately became as docile as a trained steed.”14 Thoreau read Emerson’s Nature while in college, and Emerson gave “The American Scholar” at the commencement in August 1837 of Thoreau’s senior year.15 They became friends in the years afterwards, and Emerson enlisted Thoreau for The Dial, the new journal that he and Margaret Fuller edited from 1840–4. Thoreau published his first pieces there, helped assemble The Dial’s influential “Ethnical Scriptures” section of translations from Hindu, Chinese, and Buddhist works, and contributed his own translations from the Greek classics. Fuller rejected some of his first contributions, writing of one essay that it was “so rugged that it ought to be commanding,” and published others only after pressure from Emerson.16 But Thoreau improved. His mature voice and blend of personal presence, acute observation, and philosophical reflection appear in “The Natural History of Massachusetts” (published in The Dial in 1842), which started as a review of wildlife reports commissioned by the state legislature but turned into a luminous celebration of nature. Discussing a book on entomology, Thoreau writes: “Nature will bear the 12

Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 83. This and the preceding quotation are from Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 138. 14 Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 139. 15 Thoreau may not have been there, but the address was printed and he would have read it (Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 20–2). 16 See Barbara L. Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007) 122, 123, 126. 13

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

203

closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.” Human beings are part of that life. Their fishing nets, stretched across the river: are not more intrusion than the cobweb in the sun. I stay my boat in mid current, and look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets, and wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this elvish work. The twine looks like a new river weed, and is to the river as a beautiful memento of man’s presence in nature, discovered as silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand.”17

In 1843, Thoreau published “A Walk to Wachusett” in the Boston Miscellany of Literature and “A Winter Walk” in The Dial. The idea that a walk or “excursion” in the countryside was the basis for reflection has its roots in Virgil’s Georgics, Goethe’s Italian Journey, and Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” and reaches its greatest Thoreauvian development in “Walking” (1862).18 Thoreau’s reading took a more philosophical turn in the 1840s, as he turned to Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Thales, Plotinus, and Ralph Cudworth, and began to seriously engage with Indian philosophy, first in reading William Jones’s translation of the Laws of Menu,19 and later the Vishnu Purana (also a favorite of Emerson’s) and the Samkhya Karika. His interests turned from the more cosmological side of Indian philosophy to the more ethical side, to “Hinduism as a practical path to individual freedom.”20 Thoreau often proceeds by starting with his own life and branching out from there. “Resistance to Civil Government” was occasioned by the night in jail that is described in it, and particular experiences are the occasions of “A Walk to Wachusett,” “A Winter Walk,” and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Walden (1854) records a particular evening walk, the arrival of spring, the hoeing of beans, the cutting of saplings by the shore of Walden Pond in the spring of 1845. Life, as Emerson said of the scholar, is Thoreau’s “dictionary,” and nature, books, and action, the core of his ongoing education.21

17 Henry David Thoreau, “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 202, 7, 17. 18 Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 28–30, 119–20, 121, 123; see Packer, The Transcendentalists, 126. “Walking” was first given as a lecture in the early 1850s. 19 20 Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 78–82. Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 205, 206. 21 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971—2013), vol. 1, 60 (“Life is our dictionary”); hereafter CW. Thoreau never married, but in 1839 he fell in love with Ellen Sewall, a summer visitor to Concord who was also courted by his brother John. She accepted a marriage proposal from John, but then reversed herself after realizing that she preferred Henry. When Henry proposed to her in a passionate letter, she consulted her father before saying yes, and he persuaded her to turn Henry down. During the rest of his life Thoreau “took an emotional interest in other women who were mostly older or safely married or both . . . but he never again let himself fall in love with an eligible woman.” He told his sister as he was dying that he had always loved Ellen (Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 57–62).

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 2/5/2015, SPi

204

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

2. Walden Thoreau presents Walden as his own modest but intensely serious declaration of independence, not from Britain or America, but from his previous life. As if to make light of that declaration, or to register the role contingency plays in the most important episodes of life, he writes that it was “by accident” that he started his new life on July 4, 1845: When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night.22

This is the Thoreau who investigates the necessaries of life, who finds that in the summer the chinks in the walls make it “cool at night.” This coolness is just one example of the sense throughout Walden that the narrator has a body—in this case one that registers temperature. Walden may be seen as a phenomenological investigation of basic forms of human life: sitting, walking, eating, reading, hoeing; and of basic human categories like the seasons, night and day and dawn. It is about intimacy, especially with nature: I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.23

The chapter from which this passage is taken, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” plays on the ideas of the neighbor and the near in order to record an intimacy with nature that cannot be commanded but just comes—like the birds. (This is a form of what Emerson calls “reception.”) Again we see the importance of a specific bodily posture—quiet sitting—that allows the birds to arrive and stay. Thoreau’s “more thrilling songsters of the forest” are some of the wild things that he cherishes. Thoreau wants a house and the wild birds too, and his “experiment” at Walden shows how they are both possible, at little expense. It is not simply the physical structure of a house that Thoreau wants, though he pays considerable attention to his boards and chimney, but an “abode,” a place to abide or live, or as Heidegger put it, to “dwell.” Thoreau’s house is a “location” in Heidegger’s sense: it “allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted.”24 (Thoreau gives the

22

Thoreau, Walden, 84. Thoreau, Walden, 85. The Harivamsa is a Hindu classic, a supplement to the Mahabharata. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell, ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 333. On the relation between dwelling and neighboring, see 324–5. 23 24

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

205

animals and plants a prominent place, though, which Heidegger does not.) Thoreau’s divinities tend to be Greek or Hindu, as in the reference to the Harivansa. If Emerson is a post-Christian philosopher, working out his departure from Christianity, Thoreau, grounded in the Greeks and Indian thought, is a non-Christian, and a nontheistic philosopher.25

a. Philosophy as a way of life Thoreau was an active, practical person, and he thought of philosophy in practical terms as well: as a way of life. He found this conception enunciated in the classical Greek and Roman philosophers, but equally in those from China, India, and Persia: The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward . . . None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty . . . There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically . . . When [a man] has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.26

Conspicuously missing from this passage, as from most of his writing, is any reference to Christianity. Unlike Emerson, Thoreau did not need to work through his relationship with or establish his distance from Christianity. The idea of philosophy as a way of life that is dedicated to its own transformation or conversion is a feature of all of the ancient western schools—the Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics—as Pierre Hadot chronicles in his Philosophy as a Way of Life.27 Virgil’s Georgics and Stoic works like Epictetus’s Enchiridion and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations show up in Thoreau’s journals from the early 1820s onwards, and Thoreau quotes both Marcus Terentius Varro’s De re rustica and Marcus Porcius Cato’s De re rustica in Walden.28 In all these

25 On Thoreau’s quarrel with Christianity, see Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 50. One can find in Thoreau a Puritan intensity and self-examination, and a continuation of the tradition of the visible saint, but he rarely mentions Christianity or the Bible. For Thoreau as a visible saint, see Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981) 11. One place where Thoreau does mention Christianity is Walden, 58, where he writes that “what you might call Christianity” does not follow the “barbaric and heathenish” practice of building “splendid temples.” 26 Thoreau, Walden, 14–15. 27 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Michael Chase, trans., Arnold I. Davidson, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), especially 264–76. Hadot writes: “Such is the lesson of ancient philosophy: an invitation to each human being to transform himself. Philosophy is a conversion, a transformation of one’s way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom” (275). 28 See Thoreau, Walden, 63, 84, 166, 243.

206

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

works Thoreau found examples of a life of simplicity, self-control, and leisure—and in the cases of Virgil, Varro, and Cato, leisure (otium) in the country. Plato’s Republic also lies in the background of the passage we have been examining. In Book Two of that work, Plato considers precisely what things are necessary to life, and how they may be best secured. Food, shelter, and clothing come first, and Plato envisages a specialization of labor in order to take advantage of different talents. There will be weavers and cobblers and herdsmen and farmers, and tradesmen to buy goods from other states and sailors to carry them home. Socrates describes this minimal but comfortable state as one in which people will produce “bread, wine, clothes and shoes,” build houses, and work naked in summer and clothed in winter. He continues: For food, they’ll knead and cook the flour and meal they’ve made from wheat and barley. They’ll put their honest cakes and loaves on reeds or clean leaves, and, reclining on beds strewn with yew and myrtle, they’ll feast with their children, drink their wine, and, crowned with wreaths, hymn the gods. They’ll enjoy sex with one another but bear no more children than their resources allow, lest they fall into either poverty or war.29

When his friend Glaucon complains that there will be no delicacies, Socrates concedes that, of course, there will have to be “salt, olives, cheese, boiled roots, and vegetables of the sort they cook in the country. We’ll give them desserts, too, of course, consisting of figs, chickpeas, and beans, and they’ll roast myrtle and acorns before the fire, drinking moderately.” When Glaucon replies that this is only a city fit for pigs, Socrates responds ironically that he thought they were looking for the origin of the city, not the origin of the luxurious city. What follows in the rest of Socrates’ portrait of the city—with its “perfumed oils, incense, prostitutes, and pastries”—is not the “true” or “healthy” city but rather “a city with a fever.”30 Thoreau, we can say, builds the healthy republic or city at Walden, in a place apart from the city with a fever. Like Plato, he sees food, clothing, and shelter as essential, and considers the advantages (but also the disadvantages) of the division of labor. He devotes considerable space to what to eat and wear, and to the kind of shelter that is minimally acceptable. Thoreau bakes his bread, builds his house, and works on his own character in a republic devoted to philosophy, nature, and his friends. He also writes a book that records his experiments with, and conclusions about, his life there from July, 1845 to September, 1847. There is one great difference between Thoreau’s way of life and Plato’s, however, that brings into focus Thoreau’s Romanticism. This is the role of nature. Plato’s dialogues, with the exception of the Phaedrus, take place in the city. It is the exception that proves the rule when on a hot summer day Socrates and Phaedrus enjoy walking

29 S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C. D. C. Reeve, eds, Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, third edition, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005), 373–4 (372b–c). 30 Cohen et al., eds, Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 374 (372d–373).

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

207

in a cool stream outside the city walls. Such natural locations are the routine settings for Thoreau’s thinking. We see him hoeing beans, walking in the moonlight, sitting on a hill on his neighbor’s farm, watching the pine tree, the rain, or the squirrel. For Thoreau, as for Emerson, Wordsworth, and Rousseau, nature is a teacher. It teaches by its harmonies and beauty but also by its wildness—a note again not found in the ancient Greek writers, but sounded by the Harivansa’s claim that an “abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.”31

b. Economy Thoreau wrote most of the first and longest chapter of Walden, “Economy,” in 1846, after his first eight months at Walden Pond. Here he gives an accounting of his expenditures and earnings, down to the last half-cent. But dollars and cents are not the main currency of his economy. Central to his position is his theory of value, which he states as follows: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”32 This is not a labor theory of value. He values labor, like building his house or hoeing his beans, but does not think that labor is the fundamental value. The fundamental value is “what I will call life,” and Walden shows us various ways in which he “spends” his life, many of which are not within the money economy: If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished. In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.33 For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.34

Thoreau’s business is with the present. In “Experience,” Emerson had written: “Since our office is with moments, let us husband them.”35 That is to say: let us take care of our proper business, the moments of our lives. Thoreau speaks of trying to “improve” these moments by, for example, living in the present of the snowstorm and the rainstorm, which he finds more valuable than the paid labor he might have exchanged for that portion of his life. He is not averse to contributing to the public good, and gladly performs unpaid labor, keeping paths open and “ravines bridged . . . where the public heel had testified to their utility.”

31 34

Thoreau, Walden, 85. Thoreau, Walden, 18.

32 35

Thoreau, Walden, 31. CW 3:35.

33

Thoreau, Walden, 16–17.

208

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau determined that for about six weeks’ labor a year he could earn enough income—from his crops and occasional work as a surveyor—to live the rest of the year as he wished.36 His life would be that of a small farmer and trader, philosopher, and writer. He accepted the specialization of the shoemaker who mended his shoe, the farmer with his ox who ploughed his field, the miller who ground his flour, the friends who helped raise the frame of his house; and he gladly bought or traded for implements and furniture: My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the rest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away.37

Thoreau likes his comforts, but they are simple comforts. He is advocating neither shiftlessness nor unnecessary poverty or discomfort. He is a New World Roman farmer who reads Cato on baking bread, abandons yeast (because of its explosive properties as he carries bottles of it in his pocket), settles on rye and Indian meal (corn) as his preferred components, and produces bread according to Cato’s recipe.38 He understands his baking experiments to be a participation in an ancient form of human life that he has the leisure both to study and perform: In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet . . . 39

Much as he liked his bread, rice was even more convenient, accompanied by a bit of salt pork, molasses, or wild greens in season. “It was fit,” Thoreau writes, “that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements.”40 From the perspective of his simple life at Walden, Thoreau has the chance to observe his contemporaries. The picture he paints is not a happy one, and he places his critique near the beginning of the chapter, which makes it somewhat hard going

36 39

Thoreau, Walden, 69. Thoreau, Walden, 62.

37 40

Thoreau, Walden, 65. Thoreau, Walden, 61.

38

Thoreau, Walden, 62–3.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

209

for the reader, who is invited immediately to consider how much of Thoreau’s language applies to oneself: I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and every where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach;” or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars,—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.41

In short, we torment and enslave ourselves while failing to recognize that we are doing so. Like Sisyphus, our labors are never over. But rather than take an attitude of noble acceptance of this situation, as Albert Camus does in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Thoreau challenges its necessity.42 Thoreau’s writing here makes us uncomfortable because it pushes us in the direction of a choice about the way we exist in the world. In this respect, Thoreau is as much an existentialist as his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, whose Either/Or was published three years before the first draft of “Economy” and whose Concluding Unscientific Postscript appeared in the same year. Kierkegaard thought that without a commitment—to marriage or ultimately to God—human life, despite its seeming satisfactions or achievements, was basically a form of despair. Thoreau agrees with the diagnosis, even if he does not propose the same cure: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation . . . A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”43 The economy provides incentives for this life of despair in the large farms and houses that it offers: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.”44 Through “ignorance and mistake,” Thoreau writes, people are dominated by “factitious cares”—what Herbert Marcuse was to call “false needs.”45 They have no “leisure” for the finer relations of life and become nothing but machines: “the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by 41

Thoreau, Walden, 4. Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays, Justin O’Brien, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991, (original publication 1955)), 1–123. 43 44 Thoreau, Walden, 8. Thoreau, Walden, 5. 45 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 4–5. Cavell finds Rousseau in the background: Walden’s “opening visions of self-torture and . . . self-enslavement seem to me an enactment of the greatest opening line among our texts of social existence: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he 42

210

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”46 Thoreau is describing what another of his contemporaries, Karl Marx, called “alienated labor” in 1844.47 He saw, as Marx did, that specialization and control of one’s work environment by someone else brings with it an estrangement from the work, from nature, and from the people with whom one lives. For Thoreau, the economic system is a means, and a powerful source of motivation, for our self-imposed torments. His experiments are designed to show that there is nothing necessary about them. Thoreau exchanges his labor or his crop of potatoes for money, with which he buys his Indian meal and molasses, but he mostly spends his time—his life, the fundamental value—on activities other than exchanging or acquiring. He reports on a kind of wealth that comes from not producing, and not owning. If you do not own the oxen, you do not have to feed them, and if you do not own the farm, you can enjoy it all the more, as Thoreau demonstrates in the magnificent opening of Walden’s second chapter: At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind . . . took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk,—cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on . . . Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?—better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved . . . Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in . . . An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard woodlot and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.48

This is how Thoreau spends his life well: dwelling, living in his country seat, taking in the land and the horizon, making plans for it, and then leaving it alone. He walks over his neighbors’ fields, tastes their apples, converses with them (“for I dearly love to talk”), finds that the landscape radiates from him as he makes his home where he is in chains’ ” (Senses of Walden, 87). The citation is from Rousseau’s The Social Contract. One might also compare Rousseau’s diagnosis of artificial needs in the Essay on the Origins of Inequality. 46

Thoreau, Walden, 6. Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, trans, in Lawrence H. Simon, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA and Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 58–68. 48 Thoreau, Walden, 81–2. 47

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

211

sits—all without the burden of a mortgage and the hard labor to support it. Rather than the farmer’s work, Thoreau looks to perform his “morning work,” when he is most awake: “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”49 This may be only an hour a day, but it is powerfully propulsive and it leaves deep aspirations: “for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within.”50 Morning is awakening in Thoreau—leaving the cave in Platonic terms—but it is also a departure, even a relinquishment or mourning. It is accomplished, however, not by drifting up into the heavens like Socrates in The Clouds, but, for example, by plunging every morning into Walden Pond: I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that.51

Thoreau settles himself, wedges himself downward into nature, looking for these moments of daily awakening.52 In fact, he seeks multiple daily awakenings, what Cavell calls the replacement of “anxious wakefulness by a constant awakening.”53 He seeks to occupy something like Emerson’s midworld, where one “find[s] the journey’s end in every step of the road.”54

c. Reading and writing Emerson writes that “books are for the scholar’s idle times,” and that when he has the chance to see directly and think his own original thoughts, he has no need for the writing of others. Thoreau records his direct encounters with nature and his original thoughts, but his writings are nevertheless laced with the thoughts and words of others. Even the simplest cabin, he holds, should contain some of the best books, and he keeps Homer’s Iliad on his table “though I looked at his page only now and then.”55 49

Thoreau, Walden, 90. Thoreau, Walden, 89. Cf. H. Daniel Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Journal, and Walden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 51 52 53 Thoreau, Walden, 88. Thoreau, Walden, 96. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 98. 54 CW 3:35. Rick Furtak maintains that “awareness” is Thoreau’s “cardinal virtue,” and points to Thoreau’s emphasis, like that of many ancient Greek and Indian philosophers, on self-purification as a precondition for its development. “What we are able to perceive,” he writes, “depends not only upon where we are physically situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our attention is focused.” See “The Ethics of Perception,” section 3 of Furtak, Rick Anthony, “Henry David Thoreau”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL = . 55 Thoreau, Walden, 99. 50

212

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau tells us of his adventures as a farmer, baker, and walker, his encounters with a loon or a fox, but there is nothing so dramatic to recount about reading and writing. There are moments, however, when he opens a window on the considerable amount of both that he did at the cabin: “After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free.”56 Then he might walk to the village, and observe the inhabitants as so many more natural phenomena. On many days at the cabin Thoreau was writing the book that we are reading. The writing Thoreau speaks about directly, however, is that of others, and he distinguishes between the “easy reading” that demands almost nothing of the reader, and the classics, which “we have to stand on tiptoe to read.”57 The easy or “Little” readings are mass-produced for machine-like readers, who are happy to consume “the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sephronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth . . . 58 Such readings encourage people to “vegetate and dissipate their faculties.”59 Reading “well,” “in a high sense,” or “on tiptoe,” requires not only great books or words but also a great reader: To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.60

These lines happen to appear in a book, just as Thoreau happened to begin living in the cabin on Independence Day. Thoreau’s aim is to produce not just his cabin at Walden but his book, Walden, and his implied aspiration is for his work to take its place among the world’s great books, in what he calls the “forum of the world”: That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakspeares [sic], and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world.61

Thoreau explores the power of these classics without Emerson’s anxiety about them warping him out of his own orbit. “How many a man,” he exclaims, “has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” There are books waiting for us, potential provocations that will allow us to enter new eras or regions of life, to advance in the perfectionist life task of finding our next self: “There are probably words addressed to

56 59

Thoreau, Walden, 167. Thoreau, Walden, 104.

57 60

Thoreau, Walden, 104. Thoreau, Walden, 100–1.

58 61

Thoreau, Walden, 105. Thoreau, Walden, 103–4.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

213

our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.”62 In aiming to produce a classic that can provide his readers with occasions for leaving or awakening, mourning or morning, Thoreau engages in a deeply social project. He is attempting to produce words that will “possibly put a new aspect on the face of things” for his good readers.

d. Thoreau and the body Walden’s chapter on “Solitude” begins: This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature’s watchmen,—links which connect the days of animated life.63

This is a vision of unity, and of correspondences between the human and the rest of nature—the animal, vegetable, wind, and water. With its emphasis on life, pleasure, and sympathy, it is a Romantic passage that evokes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Eolian Harp”: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?64

The differences as well as the similarities in these passages are instructive. Whereas Coleridge speaks of an intellectual breeze, Thoreau’s breeze is of air, and although Thoreau’s writing has religious overtones, he does not mention God or a world soul in his vision of himself as “a part of ” Nature. Most notable for our purposes, however, is that Coleridge’s poem is entirely general or even abstract, whereas 62 This and the preceding quotation are from Thoreau, Walden, 107. For Thoreau’s moral perfectionism, see Stanley Bates, “Thoreau and Emersonian Perfectionism,” in Rick Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid, eds., Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 14–30. 63 Thoreau, Walden, 129. 64 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, H. J. Jackson, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28–9.

214

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau’s passage is concrete and particular, and not just concrete but of the body. Thoreau employs the word “body” in his first sentence. It is a body that imbibes delight “through every pore,” that registers or tastes the wider world of which he is a part. The phrase “As I walk” begins the third sentence of the paragraph. The verb is in the first person, and its proper use requires a physical body. On this evening, Thoreau’s “I walk” occupies something of the position that “I think” does in Descartes’s Meditations, as a foundation or orientation point for his existence in the world. If we make the claim in a more Kantian register, as Samuel Todes suggests in his remarkable Body and World, we can say that walking and other competent human bodily activities help constitute the world, provide the forms by which we make sense of it. Todes agrees with Kant that experience requires or presupposes a unifying function, but he finds that function not in Kant’s unknowable “transcendental unity of apperception = x,” but in our everyday absorbed coping with the world. “We can have an object in perception,” Todes writes, “only by becoming circumstantially self-aware. And we become circumstantially self-aware by becoming aware of the existence of our active body in the center of our perceptual field of objects.”65 As Hubert Dreyfus puts it in his introduction to Body and World, for Todes, we “make ourselves at home in the world by moving so as to organize a stable spatiotemporal field in which we use our skills to make determinate the determinable objects that appear in that field.”66 Making himself at home in the world through determining the specific character of this cool breeze, these bullfrogs, this evening light is just what Thoreau does by his evening walk on the shores of Walden pond. In the passage from Walden with which we began, and in others to which we shall soon turn, Thoreau enacts and recovers the unifications, settlings, and orientations that are necessary for human experience. The body is implied not only by Thoreau’s verb “walk,” but by the verb “see,” the noun “shirt sleeves” (shirts are made for human bodies) and by the adjectives “cool,” “cloudy,” and “windy,” which Thoreau applies on this particular evening on the basis of his own experience. “I see nothing special to attract me,” he writes, but that is not to say that he fails to pay attention. He is, as Emerson would say, receptive. He tastes or savors the nature of which he is a part in a walking meditation that allows him to register his own finely tuned responses—like Coleridge’s aeolian harp—to the breezes, sounds, and sights of nature that he experiences. He enacts through his walking body something like the free play of the imagination specified in Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. He judges, through his body, that “this is a delicious evening.” In a passage from “The Village” that we have examined in part, Thoreau’s corporeal being is again prominent:

65 66

Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), 206. Todes, Body and World, xvi–xvii.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

215

After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing . . . I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves . . . and washed the dust of labor from my person . . . and for the afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits.67

Many verbs in this passage indicate bodily activity: hoeing, reading, writing, bathing, swimming, washing, strolling, hearing, walking, observing. Thoreau’s body is also directly referred to by the phrase “my person,” that from which the dust of labor is washed in the pond. This is a record of days spent doing things and, one might say, reorienting oneself through these doings: through the labor of hoeing or of writing, the bracing pleasure of a bath in the pond and then the stroll into town to hear the gossip of the day, which, if taken in small doses, turns out to be “as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.” The word “stroll” indicates the relaxed, “absolutely free,” and receptive manner in which Thoreau walks, and it chimes both with the walk around the pond described in “Solitude” and the later essay “Walking,” where Thoreau praises sauntering. Thoreau describes his walks back home to his cabin in the second paragraph of “The Village”: It was very pleasant, when I staid late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing . . . It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absentminded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance.68

67

Thoreau, Walden, 167.

68

Thoreau, Walden, 169–70.

216

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau presents here a compilation of evenings and not just one, as in his description of his walk around the lake, but the body is equally present throughout. He speaks of feeling the path with his feet and trees with his hands, looking up through the trees, waking from his dreamlike, genial thoughts by having to raise his hand to lift the latch of his cabin. In this passage Thoreau’s body, his “outer man,” provides the foundation for action and an absorbed coping for him to do other things, like entertaining his “merry crew of thoughts.” The body is not everything, but it is essential for all that we do and are.

e. Solitude and society The cabin at Walden is a place to view people, to converse with them, to be neighborly, but also obviously a place where Thoreau can be “alone.” He challenges or interrogates what it means to be alone and what it means to be with others in his chapters on “Visitors” and “Solitude.”i “I have a great deal of company in my house,” he writes, “especially in the morning, when nobody calls.”69 He loves to be alone in a certain way, most of the time: I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will . . . The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.70

In close company with himself, rather than dissipated in the affairs of the mass of human beings, he hopes to come close to what he calls “the perennial source of our life”: What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue; as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.71

Thoreau proposes no formula by which everyone can or should live, for we all have different natures. The project he holds up for all of us is to search for such a “source”—what Emerson calls the “gleam of light” in each of us—and to let it guide us towards the satisfaction of our aspirations, rather than the quietly desperate places “where men most congregate.” When he is alone, Thoreau finds a “certain doubleness” in himself:

69

Thoreau, Walden, 137.

70

Thoreau, Walden, 135.

71

Thoreau, Walden, 133.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

217

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you.72

Thoreau views the effective unification of these disparate parts of himself “not as a mutual absorption, but as a perpetual nextness, an act of neighboring or befriending,” as Cavell puts it.73 In this way, the doubleness is sane. The self, Cavell continues, is “the watchman or guardian of itself, and hence demands of itself transparence, settling, clearing, constancy,” but it is also the “workman, whose eye cannot see to the end of its labors, but whose answerability is endless for the constructions in which it houses itself.”74 Thoreau complains that “we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions,” but his workman and his watchman learn to work with both inner and outer, transient and longer-lasting circumstances, in the quest for periods of “awakening or coming to life.”75 Was Thoreau never lonely? He answers this naturally occurring question as follows: I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.76

Thoreau does not recommend that we all go live in the woods. He is reporting on his own experience with nature, on a kinship he finds between human beings and nature that he expresses here in the idea of the pine needles swelling with sympathy and

72 74 76

73 Thoreau, Walden, 134–5. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 108. 75 Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 109. Thoreau, Walden, 134. Thoreau, Walden, 131–2.

218

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

befriending him. William James writes of the sense that everyone has of the universe as friendly or foreign, hostile, alien, or kindred. He calls these our “total reaction[s] upon life,” and writes: “To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses.”77 Thoreau’s deep sense of the universe in Walden is of a great home for human beings and other living creatures, where, nevertheless, human beings do not feel at home. His experiment in learning to be at home in his cabin and in nature requires him to leave the town and, at the end of his book, to leave Walden too. You can get into a rut anywhere: I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.78

Thoreau is reclusive but not anti-social, and he reports receiving more visitors at Walden than in town. He values the society of children, hunters, and fishermen, and, like Emerson, seeks conversations that “assume a loftier and grander tone.” In “Visitors” he explains that he has just three chairs in his cabin, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” but then adds that in one respect the house was sometimes too small: One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port . . . If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate . . . there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough.79

These are the sorts of encounters he describes in the chapter on “Winter Visitors,” where he especially values the visits of a poet who is undeterred by tempests or the deep drifts of snow. “We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth,” Thoreau writes, “and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences . . . We made many a ‘bran new’ theory of life over a thin dish of gruel.”80 77 James in Varieties of Religious Experience, in William James, Writings 1902–1910, Bruce Kuklick, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 39. 78 79 80 Thoreau, Walden, 323. Thoreau, Walden, 140–1. Thoreau, Walden, 268.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

219

Thoreau also enjoys observing and speaking with a Canadian woodchopper whom he meets in the forest: He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression . . . He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house,—for he chopped all summer,—in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink . . . He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes . . . In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock . . . There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it.81

Thoreau sees signs of visitors to his cabin when he returns from a walk—a pine cone or leaf left on a table, or the smell of tobacco smoke in his cabin; and when he meets people there, he observes the variety of their responses to the woods: Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out . . . Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all.82

Better to be alone than with these folks. But there were also “more cheering visitors”: children picking berries, “railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind.”83 Thoreau’s social experiment at Walden is attractive both for the solitude and the society that it permits.

f. Winter and spring The seasons permeate Walden, but towards the end of the book (and late in its composition) they are the subjects of entire chapters. There is “House-Warming,” about the arrival of the cold, then “Winter Visitors,” “Winter Animals,” “The Pond in Winter,” and “Spring.” Thoreau writes about the warm earth on the southwest side of the cabin on a November afternoon, the firelight playing on his sloping ceiling at 81 83

Thoreau, Walden, 145, 146–7, 150. Thoreau, Walden, 154.

82

Thoreau, Walden, 153–4.

220

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

night, dying to the “root” in winter’s depths,84 and the rebirth of the self in the spring. The seasons, night and day, birds and squirrels, ice and pine trees, are, as Cavell writes, “objects of human attraction” in Walden, appropriated through “human forms of feeling,” forms that are “as universal and necessary, as objective, as revelatory of the world, as the forms of the laws of physics.”85 In this way Thoreau conducts a transcendental deduction not of the twelve categories delineated by Kant, but of an open-ended set of the categories of human life, by showing their legitimate use or employment.86 Prominent among the natural forms to which Thoreau is attracted is ice, a subject of all five chapters mentioned above, and a register of the progression of the seasons. In “House-Warming,” he observes: The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass . . . There are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms made of minute grains of white quartz.87

The ice is a window offering a clear view through the shallow water to the bottom of the pond, accessible to an embodied observer who “can lie . . . on ice only an inch thick.” By the beginning of winter, there are not merely patches of ice in the shallows but a completely frozen lake. We see Thoreau’s interest in dates and lists, and can infer his walks from the different ponds he surveys: In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th of January; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed.88

Thoreau walks, carries, collects with legs, arms, and shoulders, somewhat like the “animal man” he knows in the person of the Canadian woodchopper. But Thoreau’s body is in the service of the meticulous readings of nature that he conducts. His labor

84

85 Thoreau, Walden, 311. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 104. Cf. Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, David Justin Hodge, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 113, where Cavell describes Emerson as working from the sense that “any and every word in our language stands under the necessity of deduction, or say derivation.” 87 88 Thoreau, Walden, 246. Thoreau, Walden, 249. 86

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

221

is, as Timothy Gould puts it, “one of the forms in which we make contact with the necessities of the world.”89 As he reports in “The Pond in Winter,” Thoreau drills holes through a foot of ice to plumb the depths of the pond, and stares down through them into “the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer.”90 In “Spring,” he keeps track of the ice’s breakup: One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary . . . On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honey-combed and saturated with water . . . but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away.91

Thoreau had “leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.” As Thoreau knew, “leisure” in Greek is skhole¯ (Latin schola), the source of the English school.92 Leisure and study go together, and for many ancient philosophers, including Aristotle, leisure meant a fundamental attitude towards life and a condition of the soul: receptive, calm, silent. As Joseph Pieper explains in Leisure: the Basis of Culture: the silence of true leisure “does not mean ‘dumbness’ or ‘noiselessness’; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed.” Thoreau seeks a place, whether at Walden, in town, or in the transitions between the two, where he can be undisturbed in his daily responses or “answers” to the world. Pieper identifies “a certain happiness in leisure, something of the happiness that comes from the recognition of the mysteriousness of the universe and the recognition of our incapacity to understand it, that comes with a deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course.”93 Thoreau’s recognition of the mysteriousness of the universe paired with a deep confidence in the adventure of life may be found in his discussion of wildness near the end of the “Spring” chapter: Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe . . . At the same time that we are

Timothy Gould, “Thoreau, Henry David,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Craig, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), vol. 9, 390. 90 91 Thoreau, Walden, 283. Thoreau, Walden, 302. 92 Josef Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture, Alexander Dru, trans. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 2. 93 This and the preceding quotation are from Pieper, Leisure: the Basis of Culture, 27. 89

222

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.94

Thoreau records the forms of the thawing earth in the spring, “flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village.” The sand “takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth.”95 Spring is also the time of what grows out of the earth, of the color green, and of rebirth: The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire . . . as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame . . . the grass blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below . . . So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”96

3. Thoreau’s Journal Like Emerson, Thoreau kept a journal for decades, drawing on it, as Emerson had done, for his publications. But in the early 1850s a thought occurred to Thoreau that never occurred to Emerson: that his journal, rather than the more composed Walden, was the best expression for his literary and philosophical project. Although he had a third version of Walden in hand by February, 1851, Thoreau wrote in his journal: “I do not know where to find in any literature whether ancient or modern—any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any.”97 Thoreau was looking to create a record not only of the laws but of the concrete contingencies of nature, what Emerson had called “the potluck of the day.”98 He writes in 1851: No one to my knowledge has observed the minute differences in the seasons—Hardly two nights are alike—The rocks do not feel warm tonight for the air is warmest—nor does the sand particularly. A Book of the seasons—each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be—.99

The term “journal” contains the Old French “jour” or “jur”, meaning day. Thoreau has the idea of a day book or a book of days that would be written at the time and in the place of the events it records. A journal has a sequence, but it may have no order, since it is constructed largely by the events of the writer’s life as he meets the life of nature, rather than by the logic of a plot or narrative. Walden, in contrast, has the structure of its chapters on “Reading,” “Solitude,” “Economy,” “Winter,” “Spring,” where Thoreau distills his experience into essays. The journal has entries, lists, 94 97 98

95 96 Thoreau, Walden, 317–18. Thoreau, Walden 304–5. Thoreau, Walden, 310–11. Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851 (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 14. 99 CW 3:36. Thoreau, Journal 1851, 67.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 7/5/2015, SPi

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

223

disquisitions, but no essays or chapters. In Writing Nature, Sharon Cameron argues that because of these differences in structure, the Journal is a more perfect embodiment of Thoreau’s project than is Walden.100 One need not agree with this conclusion to agree that the Journal is a formidable accomplishment, and that the experience of reading it is quite different from the experience of reading Walden. Thoreau’s dutiful attentiveness attunes the reader to the daily differences of plants, light, and weather in her own life. As Thoreau compiles his daily record, the pattern of the seasons emerges not only in his explicit comments about seasonal changes, but in the shortness and paucity of the entries for the frozen months of January, February and March, and the easy expansiveness of the entries for August or September. In the early months of 1851, for example, there is no entry in the time between February 27 and March 19, and what entries there are tend to be quite short. The entry for March 27th, for example, consists in its entirety of two sentences: “Walden is 2/3 broken up. It will probably be quite open by to-morrow night.” Three days later, the mood is more relaxed and the entry longer: “March 30th Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises or rather I hear them drop from the bank.”101 By July and August, Thoreau is writing in the Journal on most days, often for three or four pages in the printed version. In the first five months of the year—through the end of May—the entries occupy fifty-eight pages, while those for the next three months, June, July, and August, occupy 128 pages, and September alone takes sixty pages. The year closes out with fifty-eight pages for October and November, and twenty-three for the reflective and somewhat bitter month of December. These trends of verbal outflow and reticence reflect the seasons and the “human forms of feeling”102 the writer discovers. When the birds are singing, so is Henry Thoreau. When the muskrat hibernates or emerges from its den only every fortnight, the writer on nature slows and stays mostly in his den too, by the fire. Some of the most beautiful passages in the Journal were written during Thoreau’s moonlit summer walks. They contain descriptions of a silvery-white world, and the thoughts of a philosopher. For example: Sep 9th 2 A M: The moon not quite full. To Conantum via road. There is a low vapor in the meadows beyond the depot—dense & white though scarcely higher than a man's head—concealing the stems of the trees. I see that the oaks which are so dark & distinctly outlined, are illumined by the moon on the opposite side. This as I go up the back road. A few thin ineffectual clouds in the sky. I come out thus into the moon-lit night—where men are not, as if into a scenery anciently deserted by men.103

100 Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 3–26. 101 This and the preceding quotation are from Thoreau, Journal 1851, 26. 102 103 Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 104. Thoreau, Journal 1851, 212.

224

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Into such settings walks the writer, who depicts himself writing by moonlight, or sometimes just searching for a pencil in the darknesss. Later in his walk, he reports: “The eastern horizon is now grown dun colored . . . Some bird flies over making a noise like the barking of a puppy. It is yet so dark that I have dropt my pencil and cannot find it.”104 Writing by moonlight has its technical problems. Another passage, from early August, depicts the writer working more comfortably: The mosquitoes hum about me. I distinguish the modest moon light on my paper. As the twilight deepens and the moonlight is more & more bright—I begin to distinguish myself who I am & where—as my walls contract I become more collected & composed & sensible of my own existence.105

The writer is the part of nature that records its phenomena, and that takes them as suggestions for thought and occasions for self-awareness. Thoreau’s Journal is often repetitive and unstructured. Yet over the weeks and months, his attention to detail allows seasonally evolving nature to show through, as the changing profusions of words on his page reflect the changing composition of the meadows, woods, and rivers through which he journeys. It is difficult to get a feeling for this profusion, repetition, and randomness in a short time. As Cameron writes: “When we train observation on single passages . . . we appear to see the work too close-up.”106 Stepping back would require reading the Journal for a while. Keeping in mind the difficulties of reading only a slice of the Journal, we may nevertheless dip into its profusions by considering a passage from August 21, 1851: The prevailing conspicuous flowers at present are. The early golden-rods-Tansy-The Lifeeverlastings-fleabane though not for its flower Yarrow (rather dry)-hardhack & meadow sweet (both getting dry also may-weed) Eupatorium purpureum-Scabish-Clethra (-really a fine sweet scented and this year particularly fair & fresh flower-some unexpanded buds at top tinged with red)-Rhexia Virginica-Thoroughwort-Polygala sanguinea-Prunella & Dogsbane-(getting stale) &c &c . . . In some fields fresh clover heads appear. This is certainly better than fields of lodged & withered grass. I find ground nuts by the RR causeway 3/4 inch long by 1/3 inch. The epilobium still.107

The passage begins with a list, as so often in the Journal, but Thoreau is in the picture too, not only as a writer in two languages, but as one who registers the fine sweet scent of the Clethra and the freshness of the clover heads, and who finds nuts. Consider the sentence: “I find ground nuts by the RR causeway 3/4 inch long by 1/3 inch.” Thoreau had no plan to write about these nuts; they are not part of any scheme, such as a list of presently observable flowers. Whereas the measurements indicate Thoreau’s own activity, the verb—find—tells us that Thoreau is not a creator but a finder, one who comes across what is already there. In this manner Thoreau’s 104 106

Thoreau, Journal 1851, 214. Cameron, Writing Nature, 9.

105 107

Thoreau, Journal 1851, 145. Thoreau, Journal 1851, 172.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

225

daily entry is occasioned by the nature he encounters. But on the other hand, it is his interest in and attraction to the nuts, as well as the direction of his walk on this particular day, that allow the nuts to drop into his journal. These nut descriptions— not just of any nuts, but of the ones Thoreau finds on his walk on August 21, 1851— are one way the Journal gets closer to raw nature than does Walden, whose chapters are often distillations of many days. But intimacy with nature may be attained in many ways. In his discussion of the “classics” in the “Reading” chapter of Walden, Thoreau remarks about writing, as compared with other arts such as painting, that it is the art “nearest to life”: “A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.”108 Like the Iliad or King Lear, Walden comes near to life in a way different from, but not inferior to, Thoreau’s Journal.

4. Political Writings Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) (posthumously called “Civil Disobedience”) was provoked by his arrest for non-payment of taxes in July, 1846, as he came into town “to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended.”109 (As we have seen, Thoreau did not pretend to be completely independent of human society while at Walden.) His one night in jail and subsequent release showed him the familiar town from another angle, revealed the crudeness of the state’s actions (“halfwitted”), and led him to develop his theory of “resistance to civil government.”110 There is power in the individual, Thoreau argues, but also power in numbers: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”111 This is the part of Thoreau’s essay that inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and much of the American resistance to the Vietnam War.112 Thoreau likens the state to a vast “machine” that may contain elements of injustice that one cannot or may not wish to address; but if the machine requires one to “be the agent of injustice to another,” then one has an obligation to resist, he holds, even to “break the law.” In such a case one must let one’s “life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”113 108

Thoreau, Walden, 102. Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau: Political Writings, Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi, 16. “Civil Disobedience” was an editor’s title (xii). 110 Thoreau, Political Writings, 13–16. It began as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum on January 26, 1848. See the editor’s “Textual Introduction” to The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Reform Papers, Wendell Glick, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 313–21. 111 Thoreau: Political Writings, 11. 112 Thoreau, Political Writings, xxiv (editor’s “Introduction”). 113 Thoreau, Political Writings, 9. 109

226

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Thoreau counsels withdrawal from and resistance to a state to which he feels no deep allegiance, whose claim on us, as Nancy Rosenblum writes, is “conditional and intermittent.”114 He does not see us as ontologically or essentially related to the polis or the commonwealth, as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius did. Nor was he a republican like Jefferson who thought that we have a basic civic responsibility to the state. Thoreau does not think the state is necessary to the good life: I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.115

Thoreau’s state must earn his allegiance. His deeper allegiances are to his writing, and thereby to a wider audience—but not via politics—and to nature and his friends, as he indicates in the “Resistance” address, describing the morning he left jail: I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,—for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.116

This is the Thoreau we meet in Walden, out of view of the state, at home in nature, with or without other people. For Thoreau, Cavell writes, “the state is not to be obeyed but, at best, to be abided. It is not to be listened to, but watched.”117 Thoreau was not committed only to peaceful resistance, even in “Resistance to Civil Government.” Like Jefferson and Locke, he believed in starting anew when conditions warrant, and he called for a new American revolution or rebellion over the issue of slavery: All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of '75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them . . . But . . . when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.118

114 116 118

Thoreau, Political Writings, vii. Thoreau, Political Writings, 16. Thoreau: Political Writings, 4.

115 117

Thoreau, Political Writings, 1. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 88.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

227

The “invading army” to which Thoreau refers is the U.S. army that defended the annexation of Texas and invaded Mexico in 1846, which led to the United States’s acquisition by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hilalgo (1848) of what is now California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Slavery was illegal in Mexico but after the war the new American territories were potentially open to it.119 Thoreau, like Emerson and many others, became even more exercised after the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted as part of the Compromise of 1850. In “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), he records the absurdity of the Massachusetts justice system “trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE,”120 and the deep perversion of that system in the case of Anthony Burns: The whole military force of the State is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped! Is this what all these soldiers, all this training has been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico, and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?121

The people of the north and the south lack principle, he argues, and willingly obey the unjust commands of the state. Thoreau is haunted by thoughts of violence towards the state in “Slavery in Massachusetts,” even in his withdrawal amidst “the beauty of nature”: I walk toward one of our ponds; but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.122

Five years later, on the eve of the Civil War, Thoreau took up the case of John Brown, who took violent action against the state. In his long address “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859) he pleads not for Brown’s life, but for his “character,” and for his cause.123 Brown was a man, Thoreau writes, “of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles.”124 “It was his peculiar doctrine,” Thoreau states, “that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.”125 Thoreau gave all his antislavery addresses many times, and he had them published. He may have been reclusive, but his words were out there in public, something he acknowledges in the “Resistance” address when he writes: “I have never declined 119

See Packer, The Transcendentalists, 218–74, for an account of the political and military events of the period. 120 121 Thoreau, Political Writings, 124. Thoreau, Political Writings, 126. 122 123 Thoreau, Political Writings, 135. Thoreau, Political Writings, 156. 124 125 Thoreau, Political Writings, 140. Thoreau, Political Writings, 153.

228

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and, as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now.”126 As such an educator, he seeks an audience, and in the case of his antislavery addresses he sought to encourage a political result. In Walden, where he addresses and criticizes his contemporaries, his aim is both to wake people up to their own self-imposed captivities and to show them, through a record of his free life at Walden, the “fabulous” reality that lies around us.

5. Wildness In “Walking,” published just a few months after Thoreau’s death in 1862, he writes: “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”127 Wildness runs through Walden, in the forms of the birds who visit his cabin, the loons he hears on the pond at night, the pine tree to which he becomes a neighbor, the ice of winter, and the green fire of spring, even the Canadian woodchopper with whom he loves to talk. Walden’s chapter “Higher Laws” opens with a key statement about wildness, and an unforgettable image of it: As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature . . . Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.128

Thoreau is partly a savage who wants to ingest the savage: the wild and primitive, and also the repulsive. There are places in Walden where he presents himself returning home to the cabin with a string of fish, or marveling at the colors of the pickerel he has laid out on the ice. “The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still

126

Thoreau, Political Writings, 17. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions, Joseph J. Moldenhauer, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 202. 128 Thoreau, Walden, 210. 127

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

229

recommended it to me,” he states, and he thinks that fishing and hunting provide “the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself.”129 But having practiced and learned from fishing and hunting, Thoreau comes to find them unclean, cruel, and unnecessary: I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished . . . there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh . . . Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.130

There is a cruelty to fishing and hunting that is part of the education they provide. Although Thoreau holds that “[w]e cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,” he adds that no “humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual phil-anthropic distinctions.”131 Thoreau does not make the usual distinction between the child and the hare, but loves them both. He predicts that human beings will eventually give up eating meat, as they have given up eating each other.132 Thoreau looks for wildness at his cabin door or in his moonlit walks, but also goes farther afield, in the vast wilderness of the Maine woods. In “Ktaadn,” he recounts his journey with a party of climbers. One afternoon, he “improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone . . . [P]ulling myself up by the side of perpendicular falls of twenty or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and birches, and then, perhaps, walking a level rod or two in the thin stream . . . ascending by huge steps, as it were, a giant’s stairway, down which a river flowed, I had soon cleared the trees, and paused on the successive shelves, to look back over the country.”133 Another day, he ascends the peak of Ktaadn alone, finding it “a cloud-factory” from which he can occasionally see out and below. Glimpsing a vast damp crag, he observes that “Aeschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this . . . vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits.”134 Coming down the mountain with his companions, he again sees the less friendly face of the wild: “we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature is here something savage

129

130 Thoreau, Walden, 210, 212. Thoreau, Walden, 213–14. 132 Thoreau, Walden, 212. Thoreau, Walden, 216. 133 Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 3, The Maine Woods (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1906), 66. 134 Thoreau, “Ktaadn,” 70–1. 131

230

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

and awful, though beautiful.” It is not “Mother Earth,” but rather something that is “not bound to be kind to man.” Thoreau feels his own savage kinship with the stones, wind, and trees of the mountain: “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.”135 Nature is not always a neighbor, but whether in its neighborly or its awful varieties, it provides the “tonic” of wildness. Thoreau’s most sustained discussion of wildness occurs in “Walking,” an essay as much about the wild as about the walk. Not just any walk qualifies: not a walk for mere exercise or one in which one is still thinking of affairs back in town. It should be at least four hours long and constitute “the enterprise and adventure of the day.”136 Thoreau calls for a leisurely, open manner of walking that he names sauntering, applying the art of “having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”137 Most of his townsmen, on the other hand: would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession . . . I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements . . . I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance—to say nothing of the moral insensibility of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months.138

Thoreau needs the adventure of the wild for his body, spirit, and intelligence. His critique of the torments his contemporaries inflict on themselves echoes the opening pages of Walden. As in Walden, Thoreau identifies his practice as philosophical: When we walk we naturally go to the fields and woods; what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves since they did not go to the woods, "They planted groves and walks of Platans" where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticoes open to the air.139

Thoreau also acknowledges his relation to the English Romantic tradition, telling the story of a traveler who asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study: “She answered ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’”140 In his ascent of Ktaadn, Thoreau seeks a wilder setting than Walden, where he hears the sounds of visitors to the woods, sees the cut of the new railroad, and can walk into town in an hour. But he also speaks of the wild—even the dreary uncaring wild—as present in cities. In “Walking” he maintains that the wild may be found close to home, and that it is compatible with the presence of people: “Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of Dahomey.”141 135 137 139 141

Thoreau, “Ktaadn,” 77–8. Thoreau, “Walking,” 185. Thoreau, “Walking,” 190. Thoreau, “Walking,” 190.

136 138 140

Thoreau, “Walking,” 187, 189. Thoreau, “Walking,” 186–8. Thoreau, “Walking,” 189.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

231

But what exactly does Thoreau mean by wildness? We have seen a host of examples: the untrammeled, uncaring wilderness of the Maine woods, the golden pickerel laid out on the ice, the woodchuck Thoreau wants to eat raw, the friendly pine tree at Walden, a conversation with a woodsman or child. Clearly nature, as exemplified by the woods and fields and pond, plays a central role in Thoreau’s notion of wildness: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”142 Thoreau pairs freedom with wildness when he writes that “all good things are wild and free.”143 Applying this principle to literature, he states: “In Literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the Schools, that delights us.”144 Wildness is vigorous and energetic, and Thoreau finds examples of the energy, freedom, and naturalness of the world breaking out from time to time in the domesticated cattle that are his non-human neighbors: I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.145

Wildness is nourishing or sustaining. “The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence, have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source.”146 When he seeks to “recreate” himself, Thoreau seeks the darkest woods and the most dismal swamp: “I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength—the marrow of Nature . . . A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.”147 Wildness, then, is found not only in individuals, but in environments: “To preserve wild animals, implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.”148 We need the nourishment, vigor, freedom, and non-human otherness of the wild to be fully human, but we cut ourselves off from it and concentrate only on the “interaction of man on man”: “Here is this vast, savage, howling Mother of ours, Nature lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children . . . —and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society—to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of

143 Thoreau, “Walking,” 202. Thoreau, “Walking,” 210. 145 Thoreau, “Walking,” 207. Thoreau, “Walking,” 210–11. 146 Thoreau, “Walking,” 202. Compare Emerson’s idea in “Power” that great cultures have an essential savage component, that the great moment in history occurs “when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility” (CW 6:37–8). 147 148 Thoreau, “Walking,” 205–6. Thoreau, “Walking,” 206. 142 144

232

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”149 There is yet another element in Thoreau’s wildness: its incomprehensibility or unsurveyability. Just as it is good for us to leave some land alone, so it is good for us to acknowledge a vast domain of ignorance, which on its other face is the possibility of surprise. Thoreau puts this by saying that there is a distinction between useful and useless knowledge, and there is likewise a distinction between useless or even dangerous ignorance on the one hand, and a more useful ignorance. He proposes the establishment of a “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance” that will “go to grass” in the unexplored regions of the universe. The ignorance and fallibilism of the society’s members will be useful in sustaining its freedom and openness in the warm, green spring and beyond: We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that Knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense; for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? . . . By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers,—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he as it were goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The Spring has come with its green crop.150

Thoreau teaches the lesson of letting go, of allowing things to happen, including things within oneself. In Emersonian terms, this is to draw a new circle and abandon oneself to the nature of things. Thoreau values knowledge. He does not wish to give it up but only “sometimes” to leave it in the barn. His useful ignorance is in the service of a higher state that he calls “Beautiful Knowledge” in the passage above, and figures as deeper than knowledge toward the end of “Walking”: My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.151

Thoreau would rather exist in sympathy with the pond, the ice, the pine needles, and his friends, than accumulate much of what passes for knowledge. He was a 149 151

Thoreau, “Walking,” 213. Thoreau, “Walking,” 215.

150

Thoreau, “Walking,” 214–15.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

233

meticulous surveyor, observer, and recorder of nature, and a leader in the moral and political struggle against slavery, but he knew that knowledge is but one of the goods of life, and that letting go of our knowledge for something “undefined in front”152 and not fully definite, is sometimes the wisest course.

152

Thoreau, Walden, 324.

Epilogue Some Continuities in American Philosophy

Many of the questions raised by Emerson and Thoreau are still with us. But were they with the pragmatists in any way, or is there a vast gap between the professionalized philosophy of James and Dewey, and the “amateur” speculations of the Transcendentalists? As I promised in my introduction, I want here to consider not only Emerson’s relation to pragmatism, but the Emersonianism and, more broadly, the Romanticism, of the pragmatists.1

1. Emerson and William James When Emerson visited his new friend, the Swedenborgian writer Henry James Sr., at his home on the east side of Washington Square in New York in 1842, he first met Henry’s son, the two-month-old William James.2 William grew up in a household in which Emerson was both a personal and a literary presence, as indicated by a letter his father sent to Emerson almost thirty years later (March 23, 1870), reporting that he had not yet gotten to the new book Emerson had sent him, because he had been “reading . . . aloud in the evening to Mama and Willy and Alice” from “the new edition of [Emerson’s] old essays.”3 We do not know when William James first read Emerson, but his copies of the first two volumes of Emerson’s writings (including Nature and the early addresses, and Essays, First Series) are inscribed “William James, Scarboro, July 5, 1871.” These volumes are heavily underlined in pencil, pen, and blue pencil, indicating multiple readings. There are notes in the text, as well as notes, quotations, and indices on the flyleaves of these and the other seven volumes of Emerson’s collected works that James owned.4 1 Parts of this chapter are adapted from my “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism,” in Cheryl Misak, ed., The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19–37. 2 Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 401. 3 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1935, vol. 1 (“Inheritance and Vocation”)), 100. 4 Frederic Ives Carpenter, “William James and Emerson,” in American Literature, vol. 11 (1939), 41. See Heikki A. Kovalainen, Self as World: The New Emerson (Tampere: University of Tampere Press, 2010), 118–23.

EPILOGUE

235

Emerson’s words, like those of many others, were in James’s head, part of his thinking and writing about almost anything. He cites Emerson’s poetry and prose in his letters and publications, early and late. In his early “Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (1878), for example, he quotes Emerson’s poem “Brahma” at length, and uses its line “They reckon ill who leave me out” in arguing that (Herbert) Spencer leaves out teleology from his account of nature.5 In a letter (dated August 1895) from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, to the French philosopher The´odore Flournoy, James quotes a portion of “Spiritual Laws” from memory in explaining why he will not apologize for his failure to write sooner: I will waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don’t know about the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express themselves.6

Five years later (May 14, 1900), James sends his son, William, Jr., then a student at Harvard, a postcard from Germany recommending that he read “Spiritual Laws,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Self-Reliance,” while also wishing him success in his boat race.7 Later (April 30, 1901), before leaving London on his way to Edinburgh to give his Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience, James writes that he looks forward to some time in the English countryside, “with its infinite dreamy distances,” and to his return home to the wilds of New Hampshire and Lake Champlain “and other sich [sic] places where man in the bush with God may meet.” Today only a devotee of Emerson’s poetry or a reader of the annotated edition of James’s letters would know that “where man in the bush with God may meet” is a quotation from Emerson’s poem “Good-bye.”8 It expresses a view of life that James shares with Emerson, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and other Romantics. As Jacques Barzun writes in his wonderful book A Stroll with William James: [W]e find the Romanticists, beginning with Rousseau, turning to the spectacle of nature as inspirer and object of religious feeling. The greatest artists of the period that follows are worshippers, regardless of their theology—Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Berlioz, Keats, Thoreau, Shelley, Beethoven, Emerson, and many others “sing” their cult of nature. Some call 5

William James, Writings 1878–1899, Gerald E. Myers, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 905. The Correspondence of William James, Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), vol. 8, 71, 73. The differences as well as the similarity to Emerson’s text indicate that James is quoting from memory. Emerson writes: “If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest organ” (The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al., eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 2, 93; hereafter CW). 7 The Correspondence of William James, vol. 9, 597–8. 8 The Correspondence of William James, vol. 9, 471, 472. 6

236

EPILOGUE

themselves atheists, others pantheists, others Christians of one denomination or another, but they all feel transcendence and lodge divinity either in the human breast or in visible nature . . . Nothing shows more clearly William James’s kinship with these men of the Romantic period than his passionate love of nature.9

In The Principles of Psychology (1890) James refers to Emerson in the chapter on “The Perception of Reality,” where he is discussing the way that moral and religious truths: come ‘home’ to us far more on some occasions than on others. As Emerson says, “There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments . . . Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.”10

James is quoting from “The Over-Soul,”11 and the moments of varying authority and depth that he notes in The Principles become the subject of The Varieties of Religious Experience, his “study in human nature” published a decade later in 1902. What Emerson calls the “depth in those brief moments” becomes in Varieties the “noetic quality” and “transiency” of mystical experience.12 Emerson and James share the view that the heart of religion is religious experience, not dogma, ritual, or institutions. Emerson, coming from Unitarian Christianity, emphasizes the experiential aspect of religion, while James, coming from the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, emphasizes the spirituality of experience and, late in life, characterized his basic project as “to unite empiricism with spiritualism.”13 Emerson appears in Varieties as an example of a religious writer who, like the Buddhists, does not posit a god: “Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult.” He also appears, along with Walt Whitman, as a representative of the “optimistic,” “blue sky,” “religion of healthy-mindedness” with which James contrasts the “religion of the sick soul.” As such, he is cast as a little naı¨ve, for James plainly favors the more comprehensive view of life of those “who must be twice-born in order to be happy.” The “self-reliant” attitude will not suffice, James argues, for those who have fully tasted the “cup of bitterness” that life offers.14 For these sick souls surrender rather than resolute overcoming is the path to a second birth. In his address at Emerson’s centenary (May 25, 1903), James is less critical of Emerson, and more appreciative of his acknowledgments of the “squalor” and

9

Jacques Barzun, A Stroll With William James (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 255. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 935. 11 Emerson, CW 2:159. 12 William James, Writings 1902–1910, Bruce Kuklick, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 343. 13 Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2 (“Philosophy and Psychology”), 443. 14 James, Writings 1902–1910, 37–8, 82, 155, 174. 10

EPILOGUE

237

disappointments of life. He praises Emerson’s devotion to “spiritual seeing and reporting” and his opposition “to borrowing traditions and living at second hand . . . This faith that in a life at first hand there is something sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson’s writings.”15 He sees Emerson as a champion of the authentic and the particular—much in line with his own way of thinking: “The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson’s way of thinking, from persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine.”16 (Something called “existentialism” is commonly thought to have been imported into America by Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, but the language of authenticity here indicates the existence of a homegrown American “existentialist” tradition in the writing of Emerson and his successors.) After raising the subject of genuine or authentic life, James then reproduces one of Emerson’s characteristic descriptions of his life in nature, with other people, and with himself: In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet,—in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution . . . Be lord of a day and you can put up your history books.17

Being “lord of a day” is something one can do, or fail to do, but it is more of an attitude or an existential balance, than an action like walking or building—a point to which we shall return in discussing Emerson’s relation to pragmatism. James emphasizes both Emerson’s this-worldliness and his sense of divinity: “there is no other world,” he quotes Emerson as saying; for Emerson, James writes, “Divinity is everywhere.”18 The divine world in which we live, however, is a mixture of “puny execution,” “disquieting comparisons,” and “ennui,” with the sighing of the woods, meetings with boys and maidens, afternoon sauntering, and “the great idea.” The letters James wrote in the months after delivering his Emerson Centenary address show that he was refocused on his own vocation as a philosopher, his own “reporting” about the universe. In a long letter from Cambridge dated May 3, 1903 to

15 James, Writings 1902–1910, 1121, 1125, 1120. Morton White maintains that in his Emerson address, James plays down Emerson’s “Absolute Idealism” because of this strong strain of “individualism” (Morton White, Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 113–15. 16 James, Writings 1902–1910, 1123. On James’s existentialism, see Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” in Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 190–7. On Emerson’s existentialism, see Stanley Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe),” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, David Justin Hodge, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 83–109, and Chapter 5 above. 17 James, Writings 1902–1910, 1124 (Emerson, CW 1:103–4 (from “Literary Ethics”)). 18 James, Writings 1902–1910, 1124. See “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (1878) in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904), 199.

238

EPILOGUE

his brother Henry, who had by this time published The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, he writes: The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month . . . seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute clearness, that greatly as I have been helped & enlarged by my University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has received from the Universe.19

In Pragmatism, the book he published four years later, James argues that making a report of the “impression” that one’s “own intellect has received from the universe,” is just what the great philosophers do. Each of their books has “an essential personal flavor,” the appreciation of which is “the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education.” We work over the details of each system, but “it is on the resultant impression itself that we react . . . The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.”20

2. Pragmatism James does not mention Emerson in Pragmatism, but his indexing of Emerson’s writings (in the flyleaves of the nine volumes he possessed) shows that he was well aware of the connections between Emerson’s thought and what James was beginning to call his pragmatism. Under the heading “Pragmatism” he lists passages that include the words “action,” “deeds,” or “work”; for example: “An action is the perfection and publication of thought”; “Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and work-yard made”; “Let [the man of letters] endeavor . . . to solve the problem of that life which is set before him. And this by punctual action, and not by promises or dreams.”21 James also underlined two sentences from the “Prospects” chapter of Nature that anticipate the robust, Promethean side of his pragmatism: “Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it . . . Build, therefore, your own world.”22 James defines “humanism” as the view that we never encounter reality straight, but only cooked up or interpreted; so that, as he puts it, “[t]he trail of the human serpent is

19

20 The Correspondence of William James, vol. 3, 234. James, Writings 1902–1910, 502, 503. Carpenter, “William James and Emerson,” 40–3. 22 Carpenter, “William James and Emerson,” 43 (Emerson, CW 1:44, 45). This is the side of Emerson accentuated by Cornel West in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). See also Kovalainen, Self as World, 123–38. 21

EPILOGUE

239

thus over everything.”23 In Pragmatism’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” he states: “we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.”24 Putting it even more forcefully, he adds: “In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative . . . The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it.”25 These remarks, complete with a biblical reference, echo Emerson’s statement in the “Discipline” chapter of Nature: “Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful.”26 Although such passages show a line of continuity between Emerson and James, the concept of action is not so simple in either writer. In one of James’s favorite essays, “Spiritual Laws,” Emerson distinguishes between a whole and a partial act: “I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution.”27 Later in the essay, Emerson associates what he calls “real action” with silence, rather than with “visible facts.” “We are full of these superstitions of sense,” Emerson writes. We call the poet inactive, because he is not a president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded on a thought which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says,—“Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.”28

The thought that revises our entire manner of life is like the “conversions” James describes in The Varieties of Religious Experience, many of which are of the “selfsurrender” type, events that happen to us, rather than events we control. Emerson’s reorientations are like this in that they come by surprise, by the wayside; but Emerson nevertheless thinks of these reorientations as the real actions of life. We can find such “real actions” and “whole acts of the man” in the “Will” chapter of The Principles of Psychology, where James speaks of our “consents” (a favorite word of Jonathan Edwards) to existence: ‘Will you or won’t you have it so?’ is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words.

23

24 James, Writings 1902–1910, 515. James, Writings 1902–1910, 597. James, Writings 1902–1910, 599. The idea of carving out or sculpting our experience goes back further in James, to The Principles of Psychology, 277. 26 27 Emerson, CW 1:25. Emerson, CW 2:82. 28 This and the preceding quotation are from Emerson, CW 2:93. 25

240

EPILOGUE

What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things!29

These dumb responses are not stupid, just silent, like Emerson’s thought by the wayside that revises our entire life. Writing as a psychologist in The Principles (but already overstepping his official bounds), James suggests that these responses have epistemological significance: they “seem” to be “our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things.” Eight years later, in The Will to Believe (1897), James asserts: The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenleben (as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears . . . Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of the soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments . . . sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth.30

This “dumb region of the heart” is the territory where the action of the whole man, here figured as “movements of the soul,” takes place. Notice that James asserts that “our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things” is not the community of inquirers—as in Peirce—but “alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses.” In this respect as in others, James lies in the Romantic tradition initiated by Rousseau, which holds that our deepest access to nature is inward, not outward.31 James may be vitally interested in the action of the whole man—what Mathias Girel calls l’acte, as distinct from l’action—but does it show up in his thinking about pragmatism—assuming for the moment that we can separate “pragmatism” from the rest of James’s philosophy?32 As background to an answer to this question, consider that James introduces pragmatism in his book of that title as a mediator between the tough-minded and the tender-minded philosophical temperaments, and therefore as a philosophy that can satisfy the religious and the empirical demands of our nature: “[i]t can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts.”33 At the end of the book’s second chapter, “What Pragmatism Means,” he writes that pragmatism “widens the field of search for God . . . Pragmatism is willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences.”34 And Pragmatism ends with a chapter on “Pragmatism and Religion,” one of eight chapters in the book.

29

James, Principles of Pyschology, 1182. On Romanticism and the inarticulable, see Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 120–1. 30 James, Writings 1878–1899, 502. 31 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 369–72. 32 See Mathias Girel, “Les angles de l’acte. Usages d’Emerson dans la philosophie de William James,” in Cahier Charles V, vol. 37, 2004, 207–45. 33 34 James, Writings 1902–1910, 500–1. James, Writings 1902–1910, 522.

EPILOGUE

241

In that chapter, James considers the sense we have that our “ideals” make a difference in the world, that, as he puts it, “our act [can] create the world’s salvation,” at least in spots and patches. He is not talking about routine acts like walking or asking a question but about summonings or expressions of our whole being that contribute something new to the universe: Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world—why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?35

Although he does not proclaim the silence or “dumbness” of these acts, this passage resonates with James’s earlier question “Will you . . . have it so?” and his assertion that our responses to that question constitute our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things. Our “turning-places” or deep acts, in which we revise “our entire manner of life,” are the parts of the world about which we have “the most intimate and complete” knowledge. Emerson’s philosophy and James’s pragmatism cohere in many other areas, of which I will mention three. The first is James’s view that our beliefs form evolving systems that we use to navigate and articulate “the everlasting weather of our perceptions.”36 We have already encountered the moral version of this view when we used James’s “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” to discuss slavery. James posits evolving equilibriums of ideals, with any given moral equilibrium being imperfect in some ways, suppressing “rumblings and grumblings” that lie in the background. Emerson presents an evolutionary view of ethics in “Circles,” where he writes: “There is no virtue which is final; all are initial . . . The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”37 For Emerson and James, as for Nietzsche, a history or genealogy of morals makes perfect sense, as does the search for new and better values. Secondly, Emerson and James are both process philosophers, for whom flux, succession, or transition is fundamental. Richard Poirier points to their common use of the word “transition,”38 which we have encountered in “Circles” and “Self-Reliance”: Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit . . . No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled, is there any hope for them.39 35

36 James, Writings 1902–1910, 613. James, Writings 1902–1910, 562. Emerson, CW 2:187. 38 Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987), 47. 39 Emerson, CW 2:189. 37

242

EPILOGUE

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state.40

Emerson also employs the term in “Plato, or The Philosopher,” where he writes: “Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating.” He praises Plato for his “poetic creativeness, which is not found in staying at home nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible.”41 As elsewhere in the “Plato” essay, Emerson’s description of Plato is also a description of his own writing. James writes in his Psychology of the “ ‘transitive parts’ of the stream of thought.”42 They are left out of most psychological accounts, he holds, because the straightforward examination of them results in their disappearance, like “a snowflake caught in the warm hand.”43 James’s exchanges with Henri Bergson in the first years of the twentieth century were motivated in part by their mutual interest in giving a proper philosophical account of these “transitions.” In “A World of Pure Experience” (1904) James writes: Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn.44

Thirdly, there is temperament. In the first chapter of Pragmatism, “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” James characterizes the pragmatist as a mediator between the tough and the tender-minded philosophical temperaments, and in his chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism,” he writes that for the rationalist mind “the phrase ‘must be’ is ever on its lips. The bellyband of its universe must be tight.” The pragmatist, by contrast, “is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature. If he had to live in a tub like Diogenes he wouldn’t mind at all if the hoops were loose and the staves let in the sun.”45 Remarks like this are the basis for Poirier’s claim that a “central aspect of the Emersonian pragmatist contribution [is] its laid-back, rather quiet way . . . of imagining and responding to cultural crises [such as] the death of God.”46 Emerson’s casualness shows in his use of the essay form, as in the opening of “Self-Reliance” (“I read the other day some verses . . .”), and in his characteristic withdrawals (“I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics”; “I am not careful to justify myself ”).47

40

41 42 Emerson, CW 2:40. Emerson, CW 4:31, 32. James, Principles of Psychology, 236. 44 James, Principles of Psychology, 237. James, Writings 1902–1910, 1181. 45 James, Writings 1902–1910, 600. Richard Rorty is a pragmatist who fits this description, but not his student Robert Brandom. 46 Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 155. 47 Emerson, CW 2:27, 3:47 (from “Experience”), and 2:188 (from “Circles”). 43

EPILOGUE

243

One of James’s favorite laid-back characters was Walt Whitman, who figures prominently in Varieties of Religious Experience and “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In the latter, citing Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” James writes that Whitman “felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one’s mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man.”48 James reproduces Whitman’s description to a friend of an early morning walk by the river, and then a period of writing, a bath, and a journey down Broadway from Twenty-third Street to Bowling Green and back. Whitman writes: “you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes.”49 James’s essay is about human blindness to other people’s ways of life, and his point is that although the “your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker” may not appreciate Whitman’s easygoing, receptive life, it may well be the superior one: Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less—Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?50

James passes from Whitman, to Tolstoy, and then to Emerson’s Nature and his walk across “a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight.” He draws a lesson about attentive receptivity from them all: “The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its lifecurrents absorbed by what is given . . . Life is always worth living if one have such responsive sensibilities.”51

3. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) Charles Peirce, along with William James, was a founder of pragmatism who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and knew Emerson. He did not, however, recognize Emerson as a predecessor of his pragmatism, as James did; he did not, as did James and Dewey, celebrate Emerson’s philosophy in an address at the Emerson centenary celebrations in 1903.52 Yet it is Peirce himself who asserts the connection

48

49 James, Writings 1878–1899, 851. James, Writings 1878–1899, 853–4. James, Writings 1878–1899, 854. 51 James, Writings 1878–1899, 856; Emerson, CW 1:10. 52 For Dewey on Emerson, see below. The key early papers for Peirce’s pragmatism are “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), originally published in the Popular Science Monthly, contained in The Essential Peirce, Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel eds., vol. 1, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 109–23, 124–41; hereafter EP followed by volume number. 50

244

EPILOGUE

between his thought and that of Emerson in a tantalizing statement in “The Law of Mind” (1892). This paper was part of a series of five papers on metaphysics published in The Monist 53 more than a decade after Peirce’s first pragmatist publications, when Peirce was in his early fifties and still working out the details of what he called his “pragmaticism.” Near the beginning of this paper Peirce writes: I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord,—I mean in Cambridge,—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous mysticism of the East. But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations.54

The immediate context for this remark is a reference to the “Schelling-fashioned idealism” Peirce endorses in his paper, “which holds matter to be mere specialised and partially deadened mind.”55 “The one intelligible theory of the universe,” Peirce had written in “The Architecture of Theories,” one of the companion papers to “The Law of Mind,” “is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.”56 Though he rejects the “monstrous mysticism” of Plotinus, Boehme, and “Concord transcendentalism” (without explaining why he does so), he acknowledges that a benign form of the disease is surfacing “now”— certainly in “The Law of Mind” and presumably in the series of five essays in the Monist Metaphysical Series of which it is one.57 Peirce’s debt to Schelling is beyond the scope of our discussion, but the connection to Emerson is not.58 Whether Emerson is “an idealist” and of what sort is a complicated matter, but we have seen that from Nature onwards he was attracted to Neoplatonism, and specifically to the idea of a fundamental unity or “fountain of power,”59 of which each of us is a scattered part. He calls this “the over-soul” in the essay of that title,60 and, in “Experience,” he assembles a parade of names for it, while

53 The papers are “The Architecture of Theories” (1891), EP 1:285–97, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (1892), EP 1:298–311, “The Law of Mind” (1892), EP 1:312–33, “Man’s Glassy Essence” (1892), EP 1:334–51, and “Evolutionary Love” (1893), EP 1:352–71. 54 55 56 “The Law of Mind,” EP 1:312–13. Peirce, EP 1:312. Peirce, EP 1:293. 57 See the editors’ introduction to “The Architecture of Theories,” EP 1:285. 58 See Felicia Kruse, “Peirce, God, and the Transcendentalist Virus,” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society,” vol. 46, no. 3, 2010, 386–400, and Paul Franks, “Peirces ‘Schelling-Fashioned Idealism’ ” and ‘the Monstrous Mysticism of the East’ ” (forthcoming). Kruse argues that there is an Emersonian background both to Peirce’s notion of abduction and to his paper “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908). 59 60 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” CW 1:53. Emerson, CW 2:159–75.

EPILOGUE

245

asserting that it “refuses to be named.”61 But Emerson’s “idealism” is as much about laws and universals as it is about mind; and, unlike Platonic ideas, Emerson’s ideas proliferate and develop historically. “There is a genius of a nation,” Emerson writes in “Nominalist and Realist,” “which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.”62 Peirce states that a benign form of the Transcendentalist virus now comes to the surface, and his view that matter is “effete” or deadened mind is one way in which the virus shows up.63 But the connections to Emerson are more striking when we turn from this basic metaphysical view to the question of what laws or ideas govern the world of mind—robust or effete as it may be. Summing up near the end of “The Law of Mind,” Peirce writes that ideas are “not mere words” and not mere empirical associations, but “just as much, or rather far more, living realities than the feelings themselves out of which they are concreted.” To say that “mental phenomena are governed by law,” he continues, “does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling, which pervades them, and to which they are docile.”64 Two things emerge here. First, by “idealism” Peirce means the reality of ideas, of what he sometimes calls “real generals.” In this sense his idealism is a form of realism: a thesis not first and foremost about minds, but about the reality of ideas, laws, types, and characters.65 Secondly, Peirce understands the reality of ideas and types as something alive, capable of growth, even of creativity. Peirce develops this aspect of his “idealism” in detail in “Evolutionary Love,” one of the companion papers to “The Law of Mind,” to which we now turn. In “Evolutionary Love (1893) Peirce holds that there are three “modes of evolution” at work in the universe: “evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love.”66 The action of love or the

61 Emerson, CW 3:42. On the Over-Soul, see Russell B. Goodman, “Oversoul,” in American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, John Lachs and Robert Talisse, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 557–8. 62 Emerson, CW 3:135. 63 In 1870, some twenty years before Peirce published “The Law of Mind,” Emerson (aged 67) and Peirce (aged 31) each gave sets of lectures at Harvard organized by President Eliot. Emerson’s first lecture was called “Metres of Mind—The Laws of Mind.” In that lecture he maintains that “matter is dead mind.” Whether Peirce attended this lecture is not known. See John Kaag, “Returning to the Unformed: Emerson and Peirce on the ‘Law of Mind,’ ” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 14.2 (2013) 189–202. 64 EP 1:330. 65 A few years later Peirce writes: “Realism, in the proper sense of the word, sanctioned by continual usage of nigh on a thousand years, is the doctrine that reality and idea are not contrary, but that ideas are sometimes real; that the highest realities are laws and types and characters and personalities and that these are living ideas. The real thing is that which forces us sooner or later to acknowledge it . . . The real is a thought but it is a thought that is alive and has persistence” (“On Nominalism and Realism,” MS 860 (c. 1896), cited in Kipton E. Jensen, “Peirce as Educator: On Some Hegelisms,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society), vol. 40, no. 2, 2004, 288 (see n. 39, 287–8). 66 Peirce, EP 1:362. Although he asserts that “chance begets order” at the level studied by physics, he is suspicious of Darwin’s claim that biological evolution takes place by chance and “mechanical necessity” alone (EP 1:358–63).

246

EPILOGUE

“agapastic development of thought,” proceeds by “attraction” and sympathy, and comes in three varieties: First, it may affect a whole people or community in its collective personality . . . Second, it may affect a private person directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or to appreciate its attractiveness . . . The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently of his human affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been well called the divination of genius.67

Conversion, attraction, and genius are recognizably Emersonian themes which come to the surface in Peirce’s discourse here as laws of the creative evolution of the universe. One law to which Peirce pays particular attention concerns the inadequacy of “direct endeavor” for conscious beings: Direct endeavor can achieve almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one’s stature, as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by merely straining for it, before it is ready to come . . . the deeper workings of the spirit take place in their own slow way, without our connivance. Let but their bugle sound, and we may then make our effort.68

Now, this a point Emerson makes in “Intellect”: What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.69

Peirce’s distinction between the bugle’s sound and the effort we are then able to make is anticipated by Emerson’s distinction between the spontaneous and the more willful intellect: “The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible.”70 Another tantalizing confluence between Emerson and Peirce emerges a few pages later in “Evolutionary Love,” as Peirce argues for the power of ideas by considering the history and evolution of the Gothic cathedral: All attempts to imitate it by modern architects of the greatest learning and genius appear flat and tame, and are felt by their authors to be so. Yet at the time the style was living, there was quite an abundance of men capable of producing works of this kind of gigantic sublimity and power . . . Were individuals in general, then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high intellect? Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.71

67

68 Peirce, EP 1:364. Peirce, EP 1:361. Emerson, CW 2:194–5. Kruse argues that “Intellect” is a key essay for Peirce (“Peirce, God and the ‘Transcendentalist Virus’,” 392–5). 70 71 Emerson, CW 2:199. Peirce, EP 1:369–70. 69

EPILOGUE

247

Emerson uses the same example to make a similar point in “History”: A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder. We remember the forest dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased . . . When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have, as it were, been the man that made the minster.72

Emerson maintains that such grand projects are at once human and the working out of an idea that transcends individuals: “Has any thing grand and lasting been done?—Who did it? Plainly not any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an idea.”73 As he states in “Circles”: “Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions.”74 This is exactly Peirce’s point in describing the work of evolutionary love as “distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the development of an idea.”75 Emerson finds such living ideas in poetry as much as in culture. It is “not metres,” he writes in “The Poet,” “but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”76 Peirce equally stresses the life of ideas, as we have seen. When he speaks of the law-like character of mental phenomena, he writes in “The Law of Mind,” he “does not mean merely that they are describable by a general formula; but that there is a living idea, a conscious continuum of feeling, which pervades them, and to which they are docile.”77

a. Surprise In “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce sets out the opposition between habit, on the one hand, and originality, spontaneity, and surprise on the other: there is the operation of the environment, which goes to break up habits destined to be broken up and so to render the mind lively. Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas . . . Where [habits] abound, originality is not needed and is not found; but where they are in defect, spontaneity is set free. Thus the first step in Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play.78

Spontaneity, succession, surprise, freedom, life or liveliness, originality: here again Peirce presents a set of Emersonian themes or master-tones. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson speaks of “the active soul,—the soul, free, sovereign, active.”79 Similarly, in “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce writes of mental activity and a “lively” mind 72 74 77

Emerson, CW 2:7–8. Emerson, CW 2:179. Peirce, EP 1:330.

Emerson, CW 1:134–5 (from “The Method of Nature”). 76 Peirce, EP 1:369. Emerson, CW 3:6. 79 Peirce, EP 1:361. Emerson, CW 1:56. 73

75

78

248

EPILOGUE

as essential for “Lamarckian evolution of mind,” that is, for the creation and inheritance of new, living ideas—like the Gothic cathedral, the Roman empire, or the plays of Shakespeare. When Peirce writes of a “succession of surprises,” he joins two of the “lords of life” that Emerson names in “Experience” in a recognizable rendition of Emerson’s claim that “life is a series of surprises.”80 Peirce is also in accord with Emerson’s praise of Goethe’s “Helena” for the surprising wildness and freedom of its images: “it is much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary images,—awakens the reader's invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.”81 If Peirce is drawing on Emerson, Emerson draws on a Romantic tradition of surprise exemplified in Wordsworth’s “There was a boy”—published in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads: Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents . . . 82

The poem illustrates the two poles of surprise, one subjective, one objective. In Wordsworth surprise gently shocks the mind, but it also reveals something: the “voice of mountain torrents,” the voice of nature. This receptive, revelatory, objective pole is present in “The American Scholar” when Emerson writes of reading one of the great poets: “There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”83 Emerson’s claim is about himself but also about the recognition of someone else, whose thought comes to him from across the centuries. Surprise brings discovery and the new. “In the thought of genius,” Emerson writes in “Experience,” “there is always a surprise.”84 Cheryl Misak argues that Emerson’s notion of surprise is one of the two main legacies of Transcendentalism for pragmatism (the other is a broader notion of experience than in traditional empiricism). Surprise, she writes, “is the stuff of discovery. . . . The fact that we can be surprised suggests that experience is not illusory and the world is not structured entirely by us. Although we may color the universe, there is something real that we are coloring.”85 Surprise highlights what Peirce calls secondness, the way we are “continually bumping up against hard fact” in “the rough

One of the few formulations Emerson repeats, in “Circles” (CW 2:189) and “Experience” (CW 3:39). Emerson, CW 2:19 (from “History”). 82 “There Was a Boy,” in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Paul D. Sheats, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982), 111. For Emerson’s relation to Wordsworth, see Chapter 5, Section 1e. 83 Emerson, CW 1:57–8. Emerson mentions Wordsworth at CW 1:68. 84 Emerson, CW 3:39–40. 85 Cheryl Misak, The American Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12. 80 81

EPILOGUE

249

and tumble of life.”86 Even in mathematics, we bump up against surprising results. The mathematician’s “hypotheses are creatures of his own imagination,” Peirce writes, “but he discovers in them relations which surprise him sometimes.”87 For Peirce and Emerson, surprise represents what Peirce calls a “gain of experience,”88 an opportunity to expand our conception or adjust our interpretation of things. In Emersonian terms, surprise stimulates us to draw a new circle. Some of Peirce’s detailed, careful, and original remarks about surprise concern what he calls the “double consciousness” involved in perception. He denies the Cartesian, Lockean, Humean view that our awareness is basically subjective. Rather it has an objective and a subjective pole, with surprise drawing attention to the former. The “series of surprises” in our experience draw attention to a mode of consciousness which can be detected in all perception, namely, a double consciousness at once of an ego and a non-ego, directly acting upon each other . . . My appeal is to observation,—observation that each of you must make for himself . . . I ask you whether at that instant of surprise there is not a double consciousness, on the one hand of an Ego, which is simply the expected idea suddenly broken off, on the other hand of the Non-Ego, which is the Strange Intruder, in his abrupt entrance.89

Peirce offers some examples where the Strange Intruder comes to the foreground: At one time a ship is sailing along in the trades over a smooth sea, the navigator having no more positive expectation than that of the usual monotony of such a voyage,—when suddenly she strikes upon a rock.90

Such shocks occasion the “genuine doubt” that induces inquiry.91 Surprise is thus a crucial element in the quest for truth: [A]s ideas flow from their springs in the soul, the truths are almost drowned in a flood of false notions; and that which experience does is gradually . . . to precipitate and filter off the false ideas, eliminating them and letting the truth pour on in its mighty current. But precisely how does this action of experience take place? It takes place by a series of surprises. . . . It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us.92

b. The Sphinx Another thread of Emersonian influence on Peirce lies in the image of the Sphinx, which Emerson introduces in Nature and makes the subject of “The Sphinx,” one of his best-known poems, and one that Peirce often cites.93 In Nature, the Sphinx poses 86

87 Misak, The American Pragmatists, 38. Misak, The American Pragmatists, 42. 89 Misak, The American Pragmatists, 33. “On Phenomenology” (1903), in EP 2:154. 90 “On Phenomenology” (1903), in EP 2:154. 91 In “Issues of Pragmaticism” (1905), Peirce writes: “genuine doubt always has an external origin, usually from surprise” (EP 2:348). 92 EP 2:154. 93 EP 2:504 (editor’s note). See the discussion of “The Sphinx” in David A. Dilworth, “Elective Metaphysical Affinities: Emerson’s ‘Natural History of Intellect’ and Peirce’s Synechism,” in Cognitio, vol. 11, no. 1, 2010, 22–47. 88

250

EPILOGUE

a riddle about the “relation between the mind and matter . . . the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began . . . There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle.”94 Emerson revisited the Sphinx and her riddle three years later when he published his poem in The Dial in 1841. In the two editions of his poetry that Emerson edited during his life, he placed “The Sphinx” first.95 The poem is almost as difficult to interpret as the riddle of the Sphinx itself and it became notorious, according to Barbara Packer, “as an emblem for Transcendentalist unintelligibility.”96 Nevertheless, three key elements may be discerned. First, the riddle is not just a game, but concerns the “secret” and the “meanings” of the Sphinx: “Who telleth one of my meanings,/Is master of all I am.”97 Secondly, a theme of identity or unity runs through it, and the Sphinx asserts to the poet who questions her: “I am thy spirit, yoke fellow, Of thine eye I am eyebeam. Thou art the unanswered question; Couldst see thy proper eye.”

And thirdly, love is a theme in the poem: “Love works at the centre.”98 Peirce was thinking about the Sphinx in the period before and after he published his Monist papers on “Evolutionary Love” and “The Law of Mind.” He planned a book called “A Guess at the Riddle” that would have used an image of the Sphinx on its front page and was to incorporate many of the leading ideas of the Monist papers. Even in its incomplete form, the book constitutes, according to Peirce’s editors, “Peirce’s greatest and most original contribution to speculative philosophy.”99 So, while there is a connection between the Monist papers and the Sphinx, is there any more definite relation to Emerson? For this we must turn to a paper written a year after the Monist series concludes, called “What is a Sign?” (1894), where Peirce writes: Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs . . . We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts . . . A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors. The symbol may, with Emerson’s sphinx, say to man, Of thine eye I am eyebeam.100

94

Emerson, CW 1:22. Emerson, CW 9:3 (editor’s introduction). The poem appears at CW 9:5–9. 96 Barbara L. Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2007), 120. 97 98 Emerson, CW 9:5, 9. This and the preceding citation are from Emerson, CW 9:8. 99 100 EP 1:245. EP 2:10. 95

EPILOGUE

251

Peirce’s assertion that symbols grow out of other signs, that they have a life in their human “use” and “experience,” is continuous with his discussions of “living ideas” in the Monist papers—complete with whatever benign form of the transcendental virus they may embody. But what is new here is an analogy between what “Emerson’s sphinx” says and what “the symbol says.” The Sphinx turns the question back on the questioner to assert that she is, let us say, the advancing or discerning glance (one meaning of “beam”) of something that belongs to the questioner. “Thou art the unanswered question; Couldst see thy proper eye,” says the Sphinx in Emerson’s poem. For Peirce, we, the community of inquirers or questioners, work with and through our own systems of signs and symbols, casting light over the dark terrain, from time to time “finding out the truth.”101 Peirce thought enough of Emerson to acknowledge a debt to him in some of his most ambitious writings, and the influence may be discerned—as in the case of surprise—even where the debt is unacknowledged. Here is a final suggestion concerning the way that their approaches run together. Peirce entitles his Emersoninspired proposed speculative book, “a guess at the riddle”—not “the solution to the riddle,” as he might have done in one of his mathematical or logical treatises. He knows that “the truths are almost drowned in a flood of false notions.”102 He nevertheless thinks very well of his “guess,” writing in a variant first page that “this book, if ever written, as it soon will be if I am in a situation to do it, will be one of the births of time.”103 Emerson too thinks well of his guesses at the riddle of the Sphinx, which he calls his essays, but he has a modesty and sense of fallibility that must have appealed to Peirce. “I am only an experimenter,” he writes in “Circles”: “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.”104 And just after presenting his scheme of the lords of life at the end of “Experience”—including Reality, Surprise, and Succession—Emerson writes: “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics.”105 Emerson likes his pictures, but shares with Peirce a sense of the youthfulness of his enterprise.

4. John Dewey (1859–1952) Dewey came to pragmatism through Hegel, whose thought, Dewey writes in his 1929 autobiographical essay, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” supplied a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy. It is more than difficult, it is

101 104

102 EP 2:10. EP 2:154 (from “On Phenomenology”). 105 Emerson, CW 2:188. Emerson, CW 3:47.

103

EP 1:245.

252

EPILOGUE

impossible, to recover that early mood. But the sense of divisions and separations that were, I suppose, borne in upon me as a consequence of a heritage of New England culture, divisions by way of isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God, brought a painful oppression . . . Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation.106

This liberation set Dewey’s philosophy on a path of disentanglement from traditional categories of western thinking, first in a Hegelian version that he called “absolutism,” and then in the more experimental versions that he called “operationalism” and “pragmatism.” In Dewey’s great works of the 1920s and 1930s—such as Experience and Nature (1925), The Quest for Certainty (1929), and Art as Experience (1934)107— religious, aesthetic, moral, and, in general, human phenomena are not portrayed as apart from the rest of the world in a “subjective” or second-class domain, but as interwoven with and emerging from what Dewey calls “transactions,” “situations,” or “affairs.” Dewey reflects on his quest for a more adequate notion of experience in “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms” (1935).108 For the Greeks, he argues, experience meant the trial-and-error competence of craftsmen, which was inferior to the revolutionary power of thought in the theoretical sciences, especially mathematics. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, experience rather than reason played the revolutionary and critical role, but there were defects of this second conception of experience: its passive conception of the mind, the skepticism or distance from the world which it embodies, and its failure to make a place for the features that bring drama, interest, and poignancy to life. Dewey sees the beginnings of a more adequate empiricism in John Stuart Mill, whom he places in a line of English Romantic thinkers: “through the direct influence especially of Coleridge and Wordsworth [Mill] felt the defects of historical empiricism and the need of something that would give a more stable, constructive ground for belief and conduct.”109 Dewey’s own philosophy takes its place in this more adequate, Romantic empiricism, construing human beings as creatures for whom “seeing, hearing, loving, imagining” are all ways of being “intrinsically connected with the subject matter of the world.”110 Dewey’s philosophy receives its most explicitly Romantic formulation in Art as Experience. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who in the Lyrical Ballads sought to “make these incidents and situations [of common life] interesting,”111 Dewey seeks

106

John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–53, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), vol. 5, 153; hereafter LW. 107 Dewey, LW 1, LW 4, and LW 10. 108 109 Dewey, “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms,” in LW 11:69–83. Dewey, LW 11:81. 110 John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), vol. 9, 174; hereafter MW. 111 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Paul D. Sheats, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Cambridge Edition, 1982), 791.

EPILOGUE

253

the aesthetic in the incidents and situations of ordinary life: in “the tense grace of the ball-player” and “the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals.” Poking the coals is a form of inquiry; yet it is not inquiry for a particular purpose or goal, but just for the pleasure of it: What Coleridge said of the reader of poetry is true in its way of all who are happily absorbed in their activities of mind and body: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, not by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.”112

This “happily absorbed,” pleasurable journey—poking the coals, catching the ball—is worth taking for its own sake. Dewey is a naturalist, but he does not shy away from the words “spiritual,” “ideal,” and “ethereal” in talking about a renewed relation to the world. The second chapter of Art as Experience, entitled “The Live Creature and ‘Ethereal Things’,” is expressly indebted to John Keats’s statement that: “The Sun, the Moon, the Earth and its contents, are material to form greater things, that is, ethereal things—greater things than the Creator himself made.”113 Dewey brings a biological emphasis to his natural supernaturalism, naming his first chapter (where he discusses the ballplayer and the poker at the fire) simply “The Live Creature.” In his second chapter, “The Live Creature and ‘Ethereal Things,’ ” Dewey posits a “union of material and ideal”114 in which: “The senses are the organs through which the live creature participates directly in the ongoings of the world about him. In this participation the varied wonder and splendor of this world are made actual for him in the qualities he experiences.”115 As an example of such wonder and splendor, Dewey cites Emerson’s Nature: “ ‘Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thought any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.’” Something of “the same quality” is found, Dewey maintains, “in every spontaneous and uncoerced esthetic response.”116 Dewey makes use of Emerson’s thought not only in Art as Experience but in Democracy and Education (1916), where he finds Emerson to have struck the proper balance (“the true principle of respect for immaturity”) between respect for the child’s powers and for the teacher’s responsibility for finding the direction in which the child’s “impulses” appropriately point.117 Central to Dewey’s educational theory is the Emersonian idea that each of us has something original and powerful within us. Deweyan education is the cultivation of this self, a lifelong task.

112 114 117

113 This and the proceeding quotation are from Dewey, LW 10:11. Dewey, LW 10:26. 115 116 Dewey, LW 10:34. Dewey, LW 10:28. Dewey, LW 10:35. Dewey, MW 9:57.

254

EPILOGUE

Dewey’s most sustained consideration of Emerson is his 1903 essay for the centenary of Emerson’s birth, entitled “Emerson: The Philosopher of Democracy.”118 He begins by criticizing the line often drawn between philosopher and poet, in particular by Plato, and points out that Plato himself works on both sides of that line, for he is both a philosopher and a poet. Emerson is too, Dewey maintains, and indeed he is “the one citizen of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato.”119 Dewey praises Emerson’s expanded empiricism and his humanizing of philosophy: he “takes the distinctions and classifications which to most philosophers are true in and of and because of their systems, and makes them true of life, of the common experience of everyday man.”120 But like Peirce, Dewey sees the power that Emerson attributes to ideas. Citing Emerson’s statement in “History” that “the state of the world at any one time is directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in the minds of men,” Dewey writes that there are “times . . . when one is inclined to regard Emerson’s whole work as a hymn to intelligence, a paean to the all-creating, all-disturbing power of thought.”121 As for democracy, a key term in many of Dewey’s writings, Dewey emphasizes not structure or procedures, but rather a fundamental respect for each individual. Emerson compliments his readers, Dewey asserts, by presupposing their intelligence and speaking to their higher or further selves. He displays a pervasive “reverence for the instinct and impulse of our common nature,” an appreciation of a “tranquil, wellfounded, wide-seeing soul [that] lies in the sun and broods on the world.” This common nature, Dewey holds, must be the basis for “any system which democracy may henceforth construct.”122

5. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington Massachusetts, among his mother’s family, the Burghardts, descendants of a slave from West Africa who was freed after fighting in the Revolutionary War. His paternal grandfather came to America from Haiti as a free man and worked as a boat steward and storekeeper; his father abandoned the family soon after his birth.123 Du Bois was the only black

118

Dewey, MW 3:184–92. Dewey, MW 3:191. On Dewey’s evaluation of Emerson as a philosopher, Morton White writes that Emerson “was a moving critic of retrospection, of dead morality, and of religious formalism, as well as an eloquent advocate of individualism, imagination, and democracy. Readers who are not primarily concerned with Emerson the philosopher may find other virtues in him but those I have mentioned are enough to explain the honor in which he came to be held by his broad-minded successors in American philosophy” (Science and Sentiment in America, 119). 120 121 Dewey, MW 3:188. Dewey, MW 3:187. 122 This and immediately preceding quotations are from Dewey, MW 3:191. 123 W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings, Nathan I. Huggins, ed. (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 1281 (editor’s chronology). 119

EPILOGUE

255

graduate of his high-school class, attended college at Fisk University in Nashville with the help of funds from local churches, entered Harvard as a junior in 1888, and eventually received Harvard’s first Ph.D. (in history) awarded to an African American. In 1890, some fifty years after Emerson delivered “The American Scholar” to open the academic year, the twenty-two-year-old Du Bois, a senior graduating from Harvard College with a degree cum laude in philosophy, gave one of the commencement addresses. He chose as his subject “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization,”124 with the aim of “facing Harvard and the nation with a discussion of slavery as illustrated in the person of the president of the Confederate States of America.”125 Delivered some twenty-five years after the end of the American Civil War, the address reveals that issues of slavery, race, and war were still alive and unsettled in America. But its delivery by a man of African heritage was a new development. Du Bois thought enough of his address to reprint portions of it in his Autobiography along with contemporary newspaper reviews and editorials, including this one from The New York Nation: When the name of William Edward Du Bois was called and a slender, intellectual-looking mulatto ascended on the platform and made his bow to the President of the University, the Governor of Massachusetts, the Bishop of New York, and a hundred other notables, the applause burst out heartily as if in recognition of the strange significance of his appearance there. His theme . . . heightened this significance. Du Bois handled his difficult and hazardous subject with absolute good taste, great moderation, and almost contemptuous fairness.126

We see that “almost contemptuous fairness” in Du Bois’s claims that Davis was “a naturally brave and generous man” and a “noble” “hero.” And we also see it in his assertion that Davis was taken over by the powerful and dangerous idea of “the Strong Man” or “Individualism coupled with the rule of might.” That idea presents “a field for stalwart manhood and heroic character, and at the same time for moral obtuseness and refined brutality.”127 It “made a naturally brave and generous man, Jefferson Davis—now advancing civilization by murdering Indians, now hero of a national disgrace called by courtesy, the Mexican War, and finally, as the crowning absurdity, the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free.”128 Du Bois flourished in the affectionate and accepting atmosphere of Harvard College, even though he knew that in segregated Cambridge he could not live in Harvard Yard and would have to board with a “colored” family. When a student

124

Du Bois, Writings, 811. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, Herbert Aptheker, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 146. 126 127 Du Bois, Autobiography, 147–8. Du Bois, Writings, 811–12. 128 Du Bois, Writings, 811. 125

256

EPILOGUE

from the south refused to sit next to him in class, the paleontologist Nathaniel Shaler invited the student to leave. “He wasn’t doing very well, anyway,” Shaler told Du Bois.129 As a philosophy major, Du Bois studied Kant with the young George Santayana and ethics with William James. He was repeatedly a guest in James’s home: [H]e was my friend and my guide to clear thinking; I was a member of the Philosophical Club and talked with Josiah Royce and George Palmer; I remember vividly once standing beside Mrs. Royce at a small reception. We ceased conversation for a moment and both glanced across the room. Professor Royce was opposite talking excitedly. He was an extraordinary sight; a little body; indifferently clothed; a big red-thatched head and blazing blue eyes. Mrs. Royce put my thoughts into words: “Funny-looking man, isn’t he?” I nearly fainted; yet I knew how she worshipped him.130

Although Du Bois was “a devoted follower of James at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy,”131 pragmatism, with its emphasis on the concrete and on results, turned him away from the profession of philosophy: “it was James with his pragmatism and Albert Bushnell Hart with his research method, that turned me back from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic speculation, to the social sciences as the field for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my program for the Negro . . . I conceived the idea of applying philosophy to an historical interpretation of race relations.”132 Two early outcomes of this new approach were his Harvard Ph.D. thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896), and his study for the University of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Negro (1899).133 Du Bois was appointed a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University in 1897. He had experienced life in the south teaching in rural Tennessee during his college years, but he returned with a book in print and a growing reputation as a public intellectual. Yet, as he writes in his Autobiography, he learned how difficult it was to be “a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.” A particularly telling incident for Du Bois was the murder in 1899 of Sam Hose, a poor Atlanta black man who was accused of killing his landlord’s wife. Hearing about the accusation, Professor Du Bois “wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office.” On the way, he heard that “Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store further down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the university.” Du Bois had regarded it as “axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth were sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man’s 129

130 Du Bois, Autobiography, 143. Du Bois, Autobiography, 143. 132 Du Bois, Autobiography, 133. Du Bois, Autobiography, 148. 133 Du Bois, Autobiography, 150, 198. Du Bois received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895 (editor’s chronology, Du Bois, Writings, 1286). 131

EPILOGUE

257

idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true.”134 Debois was no cynic. He never abandoned his belief that people are to some degree interested in learning the truth, though he more and more faced up to the ways in which they avoid or obscure it. His time in Atlanta is the background for the transition from the considered and cool tone of the address on Jefferson Davis, to the more anguished tone of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois’s influential masterpiece, published in the year that James and Dewey commemorated the life of Emerson. Emerson had begun Nature (1836) with a rhetorical question—“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”135—and Du Bois begins The Souls of Black Folk with a question of his own that for him precedes or interferes with Emerson’s question. “How,” Du Bois asks, “does it feel to be a problem?” He answers with an anecdote: I remember well when the shadow swept across me . . . away up in the hills of New England . . . In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.136

Although slavery ended in America with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, race continued, Du Bois found, not only to divide Americans, but to divide Americans from themselves: [T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and . . . this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Du Bois sought this reconciliation in his life and writings, although he became increasingly pessimistic about achieving it. The Souls of Black Folk sets out the hopeful perfectionist project of merging “his double self into a better and truer self,”137 even as Du Bois’s turn to the concrete realities of race in America revealed the existential problem of being a black American, and America’s incomplete integration of black life and culture. Du Bois’s attempts to find his better and truer self led him to found and edit The Crisis (1910), organize the First Pan-African Congress (1919), work with and then resign from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1910–34), publish his monumental Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935), and finally, in his ninety-fifth and last year, become a citizen of Ghana. 134 135 137

This and the previous three citations are from Du Bois, Autobiography, 222. 136 Emerson, CW 1:7. Du Bois, Writings, 363–4. This and the preceding citation are from Du Bois, Writings, 364–5.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/5/2015, SPi

258

EPILOGUE

6. Whitman. Democracy, and the Open Universe In 1855, an unknown thirty-six-year-old printer and writer named Walt Whitman (1819–92) sent Emerson a slim volume called Leaves of Grass. Emerson immediately recognized a great American writer and thinker. He wrote back to Whitman that his work was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. . . . I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”138 Emerson saw the political ramifications of Whitman’s poetry as well. He recommended Leaves of Grass not only to his friends Alcott and Thoreau, but to President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward. Whitman’s poems, Emerson wrote to Seward, “are more deeply American, democratic, and in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet.”139 The interest of political liberty is addressed, for example, by Whitman’s inscription of American slavery in his “Song of Myself ”: I am the hounded slave . . . I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me . . . crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence . . . 140

Whitman nevertheless seeks and finds an “open road” for himself and his country, discovering that he need not “ask . . . good-fortune” because “I myself am good fortune”:141 All seems beautiful to me, I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you . . . I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them, Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me, Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.142

Whitman accepts and blesses all those he encounters, but he looks especially for “the great Companions” who are with him “on the road”: “they are the swift and majestic men—they are the greatest women.”143 These are versions of Emerson’s moral perfectionist, aversive, and self-reliant friends and heroes, who are, as Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance,” to “work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men.”144

138 Quotations are from Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 527. 139 Quoted in Richardson, 528. 140 The Portable Walt Whitman, Mark Van Doren, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 72. 141 The Portable Whitman, 156. From “Song of the Open Road.” 142 143 The Portable Whitman, 159. The Portable Whitman, 163. 144 Emerson, CW 2:44.

EPILOGUE

259

Whitman’s concern with the relation between this “revolution” and these “constantly transforming selves” carries over to his post-Civil War book, Democratic Vistas (1871). Democracy, Whitman holds, is founded on “the idea of that Something a man is (last precious consolation of the drudging poor), standing apart from all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what is called religion, modesty, or art.”145 This is a version of that radical individual independence found in Thoreau and Emerson, John Stuart Mill, and ultimately Rousseau and Locke. This “democratic individuality” (as George Kateb calls it) proceeds from the sense found also in classical republicanism, that, as Whitman says, we all “stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest.”146 But it differs in what Kateb calls its “uneasy relation to law.”147 Emerson writes in “Politics” that “[g]ood men must not obey the laws too well,” that “[e]very actual state is corrupt,” and that our democratic political institutions are not necessarily “better” than other forms of government, “but only fitter for us.”148 Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and, I would add, Jefferson and Du Bois, share the sense that our laws and institutions are contingent, imperfect instruments and that, as Kateb writes, “individuals are likely to be better than the laws.”149 In Democratic Vistas, Whitman identifies three stages of democracy’s development in America: first, the republican government of the founders, including the “Declaration of Independence” and “the planning and putting on record the political foundation rights of immense masses of people—indeed of all people”; second, widespread material prosperity, with its railroads, steamships, mining, books, and newspapers; and a third, as not fully formed stage of cultural florescence, “to make them and all illustrious,”150 led by “a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers, fit for us, national expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men and women of the States, what is universal, native, common to all, inland and seaboard, northern and southern.”151 Whitman draws on Mill’s On Liberty for two essential conditions for the success of this third emerging stage: “a large variety of character,” and “full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions.”152 Democracies make possible the “large variety of character” that Mill, Whitman, and Emerson call for, and this is a great source of their strength. They also foster the aversive thinking, the criticism of society from within, practiced by Emerson,

145

The Portable Whitman, 329–30. The Portable Whitman, 336. See George Kateb, “Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics,” in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 77–105. 147 148 Kateb, “Democratic Individuality,” 88. Emerson, CW 3: 122, 121. 149 150 Kateb, “Democratic Individuality,” 87. The Portable Whitman, 364, 365. 151 152 The Portable Whitman, 323. The Portable Whitman, 317. 146

260

EPILOGUE

Thoreau, Whitman, and Du Bois, without which democracies lose their intelligence and flexibility.153 Like most of the American thinkers we have considered, Whitman operates with a sense of openness. We don’t even know, he states, “the real gist [of the word Democracy,]” a word “whose history . . . remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”154 We also fail to understand, he continues, “another great and often-used word, Nature, whose history also waits unwritten.”155 The twin themes of nature and an open universe susceptible to human powers run through this history: in Franklin’s almost constant experimentation (on shipboard, on his walks) and his practical inventiveness; in Jefferson’s assertion of our right to pursue happiness and his proposals for a new kind of agrarian republic; in Emerson’s conception of nature as a set of ceaselessly expanding circles. For Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, America is still to be discovered and built, and a renewed intimacy with nature is part of that discovery. “[F]ew adult persons can see nature,” Emerson observes. “At least they have a very superficial seeing.”156 Philosophies and religions, Whitman finds in “Song of the Open Road,” “may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.”157 Thoreau records his experiments in seeing nature in Walden and his essays. He walks around the pond, lies on the ice, or finds that “[w]herever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.” He saunters into the future, declaring: “There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness . . . There is more day to dawn.”158 Here, as elsewhere, we find continuities with the pragmatists: with Peirce’s emphasis on “chance” and “evolutionary love,” Dewey’s sense of democratic possibility, and James’s insistence in Pragmatism that our encounters with the world are at once creative and receptive, and that the universe is both “unfinished” and “still pursuing its adventures.”159

153 On democracies and intelligence, see Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy,” 180–200. 154 155 The Portable Whitman, 348. The Portable Whitman, 348. 156 157 Emerson, CW 1:9. The Portable Whitman, 160. 158 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden, J. Lyndon Shanley, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 81, 332–3. 159 James, Writings 1902–1910, 600, 599.

Bibliography Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971. Adorno, Theodor W. “The Essay as Form.” Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature, Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 3–23. Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Anderson, Wallace. “Editor’s Introduction.” Edwards, Jonathan. Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. 1–143. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press, 1965. Aristotle. The Politics of Aristotle. Ed. Ernest Barker. Trans. Ernest Barker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985. Arsic´, Branka. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010. Austin, J. L. How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll with William James. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Bates, Stanley. “Thoreau and Emersonian Perfectionism.” Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy. Ed. Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, James D. Reid. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 14–30. Becker, Carl L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 (2nd ed.). Behrendt, Stephen D. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas. Ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 251–74. Beiser, Frederick C. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin, Isaiah. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. Ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 191–242. Bernstein, R. B. Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Broadie, Alexander, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Broadie, Alexander. “Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2009 Edition. . Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974. Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

262

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cameron, Sharon. “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal.” Impersonality. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 79–107. Campbell, James. Recovering Benjamin Franklin. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999. Campbell, James. “The Pragmatist in Franklin.” The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Carla Mulford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 104–16. Camus, Albert. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991 (original publication 1955). 1–123. Capper, Charles. Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life, Vol. 1, The Private Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Capper, Charles. Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life, Vol. 2, The Public Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Carpenter, Frederic Ives. “William James and Emerson.” American Literature 11.1 (1939): 39–57. Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Cavell, Stanley. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Ed. David Justin Hodge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Channing, William Ellery. The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. Vol. 3. Boston: George G. Channing, 1849. Clebsch, William A. American Religious Thought: A History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Cochran, Elizabeth Agnew. “Consent, Conversion, and Moral Formation: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 39.4 (2011): 623–50. Cogliano, Francis D. Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Cohen, I. Bernard. Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity as an Example Thereof. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1956. Cohen, S. Marc, Curd, Patricia, and Reeve, C. D. C., eds. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. Third Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1975. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. New York: Random House, 2003. Conant, James. “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator.” Nietzsche’s Post-Moralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future. Ed. Richard Schacht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 181–257.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

263

Conkin, Paul K. Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005 (originally published by Dodd, Mead, 1968). Crisp, Oliver D. Jonathan Edwards on God and Creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Daniel, Stephen H. “Edwards as Philosopher.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 162–80. Dawson, Hannah. “English Republicanism.” The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy. Ed. A. C. Grayling et al. Vol. 4. London: Continuum, 2006. 2697–700. Descartes, Rene´. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Vol. 1. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Descartes, Rene´. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. John Dewey: The Middle Works (1899–1924). Vol. 9. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976. Dewey, John. “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosopher of Democracy.” John Dewey: The Middle Works (1899–1924), Vol. 3. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977. 184–92. Dewey, John. “From Absolutism to Experimentalism.” John Dewey: The Later Works (1925–1953). Vol. 5. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. 147–60. Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty. John Dewey: The Later Works (1925–1953). Vol. 4. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. John Dewey: The Later Works (1925–1953). Vol. 10. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Dewey, John. “Presenting Thomas Jefferson.” John Dewey: The Later Works (1925–1953). Vol. 14. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 201–23. Dewey, John. “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms.” John Dewey: The Later Works (1925–1953). Vol. 11. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. 69–83. Dilworth, David A. “Elective Metaphysical Affinities: Emerson’s ‘Natural History of Intellect’ and Peirce’s Synechism.” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 11.1 (2010): 22–47. Dole, Nathan Haskell. “Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: T. Y. Crowell & Company, 1899. vii–xl (introduction). Douglass, Frederick. What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2, ed. John W. Blassingame, et. al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 359–88. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers, 1968. Du Bois, W. E. B. Writings. Ed. Nathan I. Huggins. New York: The Library of America, 1986. Edwards, Jonathan. Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. n.d. . Edwards, Jonathan. Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vols. 1–26. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. (Concord Edition) Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1909.

264

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk (Vols. 1–6) and Eleanor M. Tilden (Vols. 7–10). 10 vols. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1939–95. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–82. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 3 vols. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–72. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. Ed. Robert E. Spiller, Alfred R. Ferguson, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings. Ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (R.W.), Clarke, J. F., and Channing, W. H., eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. 1. Boston: Phillips Sampson, 1852. Epicurus. “Letter to Herodotus.” Epicurus. Letters, Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings. Trans. Russel M. Geer. New York and Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964. 8–34. Everdell, William R. The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Faust, Drew Gilpin, ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Fiering, Norman. Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and its British Context. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Fleischacker, Samuel. “The Impact on America: Scottish Philosophy and the American Founding.” The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Alexander Broadie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 316–37. Flower, Elizabeth and Murphey, Murray G. A History of Philosophy in America. New York: Capricorn Books, 1977. Foster, Eugene A. et al. “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.” Nature 396 (5 November 1998): 27–8. Franklin, Benjamin. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–. Franklin, Benjamin. Writings. Ed. J. A. Leo Lemay. New York: The Library of America, 1987. Franklin, Benjamin. The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Ralph Ketchum. Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003. Franks, Paul. “Peirce’s ‘Schelling-Fashioned Idealism’ and ‘the Monstrous Mysticism of the East’.” (forthcoming). Fuller, Margaret. “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” Transcendentalism: A Reader. Ed. Joel Myerson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 383–427. Furtak, Rick Anthony. “Henry David Thoreau.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2014 Edition. . Furtak, Rick Anthony, Ellsworth, Jonathan, and Reid, James D., eds. Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. 1. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

265

Girel, Mathias. “Les angles de l’acte. Usages d’Emerson dans la philosophie de William James.” Cahier Charles V 37 (2004): 207–45. Goodman, Russell B. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Goodman, Russell B. “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century America: Emerson and Hinduism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 51.4 (1990): 625–45. Goodman, Russell B. “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy: Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 43.1–4 (1997): 159–80. Goodman, Russell B. Wittgenstein and William James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Goodman, Russell B. “Cavell and American Philosophy.” Russell B. Goodman, ed. Contending with Stanley Cavell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 100–17. Goodman, Russell B. “Oversoul.” American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia. Ed. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York: Routledge, 2007. 557–8. Goodman, Russell B. “Two Genealogies of Action in Pragmatism.” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 8.2 (2007): 213–22. Goodman, Russell B. “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism.” The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. Ed. Cheryl Misak. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 19–37. Goodman, Russell B. “Emerson and Skepticism: A Reading of ‘Friendship’.” Emerson & Thoreau: Figures of Friendship. Ed. John T. Lysaker and William Rossi. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. 70–85. Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Gougeon, Len. Virtues’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform. Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Gould, Timothy, “Thoreau, Henry David.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward Craig. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. 388–92. Greene, Lorenzo. The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. Haack, Susan. Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Haakonssen, Knud. “Republicanism.” A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. 568–74. Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Trans. Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John. The Federalist. Ed. J. R. Pole. Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005. Hamowy, Ronald. “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.” The William and Mary Quarterly 36. 4 (1979): 503–23.

266

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. Harper, Douglas. “Emancipation in Massachusetts.” Slavery in the North. 2003. . Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics. Ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hartle, Ann. Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hedge, Frederic Henry. “Coleridge's Literary Character.” Transcendentalism: A Reader. Ed. Joel Myerson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 78–97. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 319–39. Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 283–317. Hemings, Madison. “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1.” Pike County (Ohio) Republican, 13 March 1873. Hobbes, Thomas. Elements of Philosophy. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Ed. William Molesworth. Vol. 1. London: John Bohn, 1839. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Jonathan Edwards: An Essay.” The Complete Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Vol. VIII. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co, 1892. 361–401. Hopkins, Samuel. Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards Together with a number of His Sermons on Various Important Subjects. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981. Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Eric Steinberg. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977. Hume, David. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985 (2nd ed.). Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hume, David. Selected Essays. Ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008. Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Israel, Jonathan. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981. James, William. Writings 1902–1910. Ed. Bruce Kuklick. New York: The Library of America, 1987. James, William. The Correspondence of William James, Vols 1–12. Ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

267

James, William. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” James, William. Writings 1878–1899. Ed. Gerald E. Myers. New York: The Library of America, 1992. 595–617. James, William. Writings 1878–1899. Ed. Gerald E. Myers. New York: The Library of America, 1992. Jefferson, Thomas. “Anecdotes of Benjamin Franklin.” The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 18. Ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb. Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905. 166–72. Jefferson, Thomas. The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson. His Commonplace Book of Philosophers and Poets. Ed. Gilbert Chinard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928. Jefferson, Thomas. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1. Ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. Jefferson, Thomas. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Jefferson, Thomas. Jefferson: Political Writings. Ed. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Jefferson, Thomas. The Jefferson Bible. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2011. Jensen, Kipton E. “Peirce as Educator: On Some Hegelisms.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 40.2 (2004): 271–88. Jordan, Don and Walsh, Michael. White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Kaag, John. “Returning to the Unformed: Emerson and Peirce on the ‘Law of Mind.’” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 14.2 (2013) 189–202. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. H. J. Paton. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals. Trans. Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. 41–8. Kateb, George. “Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics.” The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. 77–105. Kierkegaard, Sren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Kierkegaard, Sren. The Point of View. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619–1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Kovalainen, Heikki A. Self as World: The New Emerson. Tampere: University of Tampere Press, 2010. Kramnick, Isaac. Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990. Kruse, Felicia E. “Peirce, God, and the ‘Transcendentalist Virus.’ ” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46.3 (2010): 386–400. Kuklick, Bruce. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Larmore, Charles. “Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom.” Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice. Ed. Daniel M. Weinstock and Christian Nadeau. 2004. 96–119. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: The Viking Press, 1964.

268

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lear, Jonathan. Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lee, Sang Hyun. The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Lee, Sukjae. “Necessary Connections and Continuous Creation: Malebranche’s Two Arguments for Occasionalism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.4 (2008): 539–65. Lee, Sukjae. “Occasionalism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Spring 2014 Edition. . Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. Trans. E. M. Huggard. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985. Lincoln, Abraham. “Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857.” Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 2. Ed. Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953. 398–410. Locke, John. Some Thoughts on the Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth. Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1741. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Ed. C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980. Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010. Lopez, Claude-Anne and Herbert, Eugenia W. The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975. Lopez, Michael, ed. Emerson/Nietzsche. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 43.1–4 (1997). Lovejoy, Arthur O. “The Thirteen Pragmatisms.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 5.1 (1908): 5–12, 29–39. Lucretius. On Nature. Trans. Russel M. Geer. New York and Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965. Lysaker, John T. and Rossi, William, eds. Emerson & Thoreau: Figures of Friendship. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. McClymond, Michael J. and McDermott, Gerald R. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. McDermott, Gerald R. Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. McDermott, Gerald R., ed. Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. McGinn, Colin. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenna, Michael. “Compatibilism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2009 Edition. . Malone, Dumas. The Sage of Monticello. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981. Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the Virginian. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Mander, William. “Pantheism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2012 Edition. . Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius. Trans. and ed. C. R. Haines. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1930.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

269

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. Maxwell Staniforth. London: Penguin Books, 1964. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Marsden, George M. “Biography.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 19–38. Marshall, Megan. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Marx, Karl. “Alienated Labor.” Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Ed. Lawrence H. Simon. Trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. Cambridge, MA and Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994. 58–68. Massachusetts Historical Society. African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts. n.d. . Miller, Fred. “Aristotle’s Political Theory.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2012 Edition. . Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949. Minkema, Kenneth. “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery.” The Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 23–59. Misak, Cheryl, ed. The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Misak, Cheryl. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Trans. and ed. M. A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Montesquieu, Charles. The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. and eds. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. monticello.org. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account. n.d. . Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975. Morgan, Edmund S. “Jefferson & Betrayal.” New York Review of Books 55.11 (26 June 2008), 46–8. Morgan, Edmund S. and Morgan, Marie. “Jefferson’s Concubine.” New York Review of Books 55.15 (9 October 2008), 15–17. Mulford, Carla, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Myerson, Joel, ed., Transcendentalism: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nash, Gary B. “Slaves and Slave owners in Colonial Philadelphia.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 30 (1973): 223–56. Nash, Gary B. “Franklin and Slavery.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150.4 (2006): 618–35. Nelson, Eric. The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1968. 179–435. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1968.

270

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Noonan, John T., Jr. Persons and Masks of the Law. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1976. Oxford English Dictionary. Compact Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Packer, Barbara L. Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays. New York: Continuum, 1982. Packer, Barbara L. The Transcendentalists. Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Paquette, Robert L. and Smith, Mark M., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Peck, H. Daniel. Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journal, and Walden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Peirce, Charles S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1 (1867–1893). Ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Peirce, Charles S. The Essential Peirce, Volume 2 (1893–1913). Ed. Nathan Houser et al. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1935. Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pieper, Josef. Leisure: the Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998. Plato. Crito. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. Ed. S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C. D. C. Reeve. Trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Third Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005. 141–53. Plato. Republic. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Ed. S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, and C. D. C. Reeve. Trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Third Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005. 331–603. Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1969. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New York: Random House, 1987. Poirier, Richard. Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Polybius. The Histories. Ed. and trans., W. R. Paton. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Putnam, Hilary. “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy.” Putnam, Hilary. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 180–200. Ramsey, Paul. “Editor’s Introduction.” Edwards, Jonathan. Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1, Freedom of the Will. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. 1–128. Reid, Jasper. “Jonathan Edwards on Space and God.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003): 385–403. Reid, Jasper. “The Metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards and David Hume.” Hume Studies 32.1 (2006): 53–82.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

271

Richardson, Joan. A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rorty, Richard. “Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reification of Language.” Rorty, Richard. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge University Press, 1991. 50–65. Sacks, Kenneth S. Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for SelfReliance. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Sandler, S. Gerald. “Lockean Ideas in Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.” Journal of the History of Ideas 21.1 (1960): 110–16. Selby-Bigge, L. A., ed., British Moralists. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897. Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of). “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour in a Letter to a Friend.” Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 29–69. Sloan, Douglas. The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal. New York: Teachers College Press, 1971. Smith, John E., Stout, Harry S., and Minkema, Kenneth P., eds. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Stae¨l-Holstein, Madame the Baroness de. Germany. Ed. O. W. Wight. (originally published in London, 1814). Vol. 1. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1859. Stein, Stephen J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sterne, Laurence. The Works of Lawrence Sterne, Vol. 8. London, 1790. Stout, Harry S. “Edwards as Revivalist.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 125–43. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Thoreau, Henry David. “Ktaadn.” The Writings of Henry Thoreau. Vol. III, The Maine Woods. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1906. 3–92. Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Reform Papers. Ed. Wendell Glick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Thoreau, Henry David. A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Thoreau, Henry David. Thoreau: Political Writings. Ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 185–222.

272

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tindal, Matthew. Christianity as Old as the Creation. Vol. 1. London, 1730. Todes, Samuel. Body and World. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001. Trenchard, John and Gordon, Thomas. Cato’s Letters: or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and other Important Subjects, 2 vols. Ed. Ronald Hamowy. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995. Van Doren, Carl. Benjamin Franklin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. Van Doren, Carl. ed. Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Versluis, Arthur. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Veto¨, Miklos. La Pensee´ de Jonathan Edwards. Paris: Les E´ditions du Cerf, 1987. Veto¨, Miklos. “Edwards and Philosophy.” Understanding Jonathan Edwards: An Introduction to America’s Theologian. Ed. Gerald R. McDermott. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 151–70. Von Frank, Albert J. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Walters, Kerry. Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011. Ward, Roger A. “Jonathan Edwards and Eighteenth-Century Religious Philosophy.” The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. Ed. Cheryl Misak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 1–18. Waring, E. Graham, ed. Deism and Natural Religion. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. 129–56. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Ed. Richard Swedberg. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. White, Morton. Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. White, Morton. Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Whitman, Walt. The Portable Walt Whitman. Ed. Mark Van Doren. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Wills, Garry. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. Wills, Garry. Mr. Jefferson’s University. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2002. Winkler, Kenneth. “Continuous Creation.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 35.1 (2011): 287–309. Winslow, Ola E. Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

273

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Womersley, David, ed. Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006. Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Wootton, David. “Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: ‘Checks and Balances’ and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism.” Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. David Womersley. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006. 209–74. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Ed. Paul D. Sheats. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company (Cambridge Edition), 1982. Zakai, Avihu. Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Index action 27, 83 n. 155, 124, 154, 172, 203, 245–6 and the “Declaration of Independence” 101 Emerson on 148, 154, 156, 170, 239 of God 14, 19, 24 and the greatest happiness principle 34, 38–9, 110 and Jefferson’s concept of a republic 126 and the moral sense 38 and pragmatism 238, 239, 240 Adams, John 72, 107, 108, 125 Addison, Joseph 52, 102 Adorno, Theodor W. 178 Alcott, Bronson 164 Anderson, Wallace 11 anthropocentric shift 34 Arendt, Hannah 114, 129 Aristotle 85, 90, 109, 200, 221, 226 on law 96 on political corruption 92–3, 94–5 Politics 94, 125 on slavery 46 as a source for the “Declaration of Independence” 112 and Thoreau 203, 205 Arminianism 40, 47 Arsić, Branka 160 atheism 53, 54, 117, 118 Atlanta University 256 Augustine, St. 11, 16, 74, 200 Austin, J. L. 114, 160 Bacon, Francis 11, 74, 102 Banneker, Benjamin 137 Barlow, Joel 125 Barzun, Jacques 235 Bayle, Pierre 17 Becker, Carl L. 54, 58 Beethoven, Ludwig van 235 Behrendt, Stephen D. 133 Bergson, Henri 242 Berkeley, George 15–16, 19, 29, 30, 153, 168 Berlin, Isaiah 98, 111 Bernstein, R. B. 101 n. 1, 106–7, 133 n. 145, 135 n. 159, 137 n. 171, 139 nn. 189, 191, 142 nn. 200–203 Bhagavad Gita 150, 162 Blackstone, William 134 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John 104, 105, 123 Boyle, Robert 11, 12, 52 Brodie, Fawn 137

Brown, John 197 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc 64, 86, 106, 127, 143 Burke, Edmund 74, 103, 143, 163, 196 Burns, Anthony 197, 227 Cameron, Sharon 160 n. 80, 199, 223, 224 Campbell, James 66 n. 78, 68 n. 87, 73 n. 110, 83 n. 155 Camus, Albert 209 Capper, Charles 165 Carlyle, Thomas 145, 148, 163, 174, 198 Carpenter, Frederick Ives 234 n. 4 Carr, Peter 124 Cato, Marcus Porcius 205, 208 Cavell, Stanley 160 n. 75, 205 n. 25, 209 n. 45, 217, 226 on democracy 86 on Emerson’s 1844 Emancipation Address 195 on Emerson’s epistemology of moods 155 on “human forms of feeling” 220 Channing, William Ellery 149, 150, 151, 166, 192 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 35, 83, 90, 92, 104, 112, 123, 171, 196, 201 Collins, Anthony 52 Claghorn, George S. 9 n. 7 Clarke, Samuel 157 Clarkson, Thomas 193, 195 Clebsch, William A. 2, 3, 10, 21, 35 Cochran, Elizabeth Agnew 36 Cogliano, Francis, D. 104 n. 11, 108 n. 30, 115 n. 57, 139 n. 185 Cohen, I. Bernard 64 n. 68, 65 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 142, 153, 156, 159, 161, 213, 252 Coles, Edward 138 College of William and Mary 67, 75, 102, 104, 132, 133 compatibilism 39–41 Conant, James F. 198 n. 291 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de 54, 78, 82, 121, 124, 125, 137 Confucius 197 Conkin, H. Paul 2, 3, 53, 55, 58, 69 continuous creation 17–20, 42 Cousin, Victor 162 Crisp, Oliver 18, 19, 20, 21



INDEX

Dalibard, Thomas-François 66 Davy, Humphrey 147, 162 Dawson, Hannah 59, 88 deism 3, 4, 18, 31–5, 145 Franklin and 47, 49, 51–6, 58 Hutcheson charged with 39 Jefferson and 104, 105, 122–3, 124 and politics 63 and Unitarian Christianity 148–9 democracy: Emerson and 194, 253–4 Franklin and 81, 84, 86 Jefferson and 125, 128–9 and republican theory 89–90, 91–3, 95 Whitman on 258–9 Descartes, René 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 50–1, 156, 157, 214 determinism 39–41; see also fate. Dewey, John 7, 40, 83 n. 155, 234, 243, 251–4, 257, 260 on Emerson 199, 253–4 on Jefferson 128–9 Dial, The 164, 166, 202, 203, 250 Diderot, Denis 3, 54, 65, 103, 124 Dilworth, David 249 disenchantment of the world 49 Doolittle, Benjamin 45, 46 Douglass, Frederick 141 Dreyfus, Hubert 214 Du Bois, W. E. B. 254–7 education 131–3, 175 Edwards, Jonathan 9, 11, 39 “Beauty of the World” 21, 29 “A Divine and Supernatural Light” 36 The End of Creation 21 A Faithful Narrative Concerning the Surprising Work of God 9, 23 A History of the Work of Redemption 27, 28, 34, 45, 119 “The Mind” 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 22 The Nature of True Virtue 8, 35, 39, 103 “Of Atoms” 14, 15 “Of Being” 12, 13, 16 Original Sin 8, 18–19, 41–3 Personal Narrative 9, 11, 24 Religious Affections 24, 36, 103 “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” 9, 28, 29, 42 and slavery 43–5 Emerson, Mary Moody 73, 74, 157 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 235 “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” 44, 194 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” 196 “The American Scholar” 3, 159, 169–74, 175, 176, 199, 247

“Circles” 47, 71, 146, 151, 158, 160, 168, 177, 182–3, 184–5, 186, 198, 241, 242, 247, 248, 251 on “contrary tendencies” 87 “Divinity School Address” 150, 168, 174–7 “Experience” 47, 148, 151, 155, 158, 181, 184, 207, 251 on friendship 180–2 on Franklin 73–5 on Fuller 165, 166 and Hinduism, 150 “History” 167, 168, 180, 247 and Hume 157 “The Lord’s Supper” 162, 176 “The Method of Nature” 247 “Manners” 180 “Milton” 70, 73 “Montaigne; or the Skeptic” 158 on moods 186 Nature 9, 148, 152, 154, 167–9, 174, 176, 257, 260 “Nominalist and Realist” 185 one and many 185–6 “The Over–Soul” 177, 185, 235, 236, 244 and Plato 5, 152 “The Poet” 151, 175, 247 on his polemical writings 198 “Politics” 194 “Power” 51, 186–7, 231 and pragmatism 3, 162, 234–43 on the present 183 “Race” 189, 191 on reception 5, 152, 156–7, 158 n. 61, 171, 248 Representative Men 158 “Self–Reliance” 168, 169, 178, 184–5, 241 and slavery 189–97 “Spiritual Laws” 180, 239 on virtues 183 on Whitman 258 Enlightenment, The 1, 4, 32, 96, 145, 147 Edwards and 35 and Emerson 157 and Franklin 48–51, 54, 57–8, 60–1, 63–4, 72, 77 n. 126, 79, 80, 82 and history 27 and Jefferson 103–6, 109–10, 132, 140 Kant on 63–4, 157 radical vs. moderate 82, 124–5 Scottish 38, 103 Epictetus 36, 104, 120, 123, 124, 205 Epicureanism 104, 122–3, 145 Epicurus 31, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124 Everdell, William R. 90 evil 41–2 existentialism 237; see also Kierkegaard

INDEX

fate 187–8 Fauquier, Francis 102 Faust, Drew Gilpin 192 n. 254 Fiering, Norman 29, 36, 37, 39 Fisk University 255 Fleischacker, Samuel 103, 104, 112 Flower, Elizabeth 3 Fox, George 69, 163, 193 Franklin, Benjamin: “Albany Plan of Union” 61 “Apology for Printers” 59 at the Constitutional Convention 83 “Conversation on Slavery” 77 and the “Declaration of Independence” 80–1, 107 and electricity 1, 50, 51, 64–7, 74, 77 Experiments & Observations on Electricity made at Philadelphia in America 64 “Father Abraham’s Speech” 73 on freedom of worship and speech 57 “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” 83 and moral perfection 69 “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc.” 76 political philosophy 81–3 and pragmatism 73 “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania” 60 “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North– America” 56 “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers” 79 and slavery 43, 75–80, 140 “A Thought Concerning the Sugar Islands” 78 freedom 8, 20, 39–41, 97–8, 188; see also liberty Fuller, Margaret 164, 165–7, 202 Furtak, Rick Anthony 211 Gassendi, Pierre, 11 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 135, 136 Gérando, Joseph–Marie de 162 n. 88 Gerry, Elbridge, 84 Gibbon, Edward 27 Girel, Mathias 240 Glick, Wendell 225 n. 110 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 147, 151, 156, 165, 173, 203, 235, 248 Goodman, Russell B. 162 n. 88, 182 n. 202, 199 n. 297 Gordon, Thomas 59, 62, 63, 91, 113 Gordon-Reed, Annette 137, 140 Greene, Lorenzo 45 Grimké, Sarah 167 Grotius, Hugo 109, 196, 197 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of 227



Haack, Susan 64 Haakonssen, Knud 88, 98, 109 Habermas, Jürgen 56 Hadot, Pierre 205 Hamilton, Alexander 88 n. 1, 91, 125, 142 Hamowy, Ronald 104 n. 11 happiness 38, 110–11, 131, 132 Harding, Walter 201 Harper, Douglas 191 n. 247 Harrington, James 5, 9, 89, 95, 96, 113 Hartle, Ann 159 Harvard College 2, 67, 165, 169, 201, 235, 245 n. 63, 255–6 Harvard Divinity School 147, 174 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 202 Hedge, Frederic Henry 163–4, 165, 244 Heidegger, Martin 53, 76, 204–5 Hemings, James 136, 139 Hemings, James Madison 139 Hemings, Sally 101, 136–7, 138, 139 Herbert of Cherbury 31 Herschel, Alexander 162 Hinduism 152, 162, 188, 202, 203, 205, 212, 217 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 12, 59, 96 Holbach, Paul-Henry Thiry, Baron d’ 3, 53–4, 124, 125 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 30 Homer 201, 211 Horsman, Reginald 189 n. 238 Howe, Daniel Walker 192 n. 252 Hume, David 1, 37, 73, 127–8, 136, 153 and atheism 54 contrasted with Montaigne 159 and Edwards 19, 35, 39 and Emerson 157, 168 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 40 and Franklin 57 on freedom 20, 39, 40 A History of England 27 on identity 43 and Jefferson 103, 105, 122 “On Miracles” 105 on monarchy and republics 89 as a moral sense theorist 3, 38 “Of the Original Contract” 127 on reason and the passions 97 and skepticism 4, 156, 157 A Treatise of Human Nature 43 Hutcheson, Francis 1, 3, 9, 10, 49, 196 and deism 39, 58 and Edwards 35–6, 37–8 and Franklin 60 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue 34, 37–9, 110 and Jefferson 103 and Romanticism 156



INDEX

idealism 15, 168, 244, 245 invention 4, 142 n. 204 Emerson on 5, 172, 248 and Franklin 49, 50, 56–64, 67, 72 of virtues 178 Isaacson, Walter 51, 55, 60, 62, 73 n. 110, 85 Israel, Jonathan 82, 96, 124, 125 James, Henry 238 James, Henry, Sr. 234 James, William 3, 7, 47, 148, 240, 242 and Dubois 256 and Emerson 199, 234–8, 243 “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 5, 46, 101 on mysticism, 152–3 Pragmatism 6, 73, 199, 238, 260 The Principles of Psychology 121 on slavery 5, 141 Varieties of Religious Experience 10, 25, 30, 152, 199, 218, 235, 236, 239 on Whitman 236 Jardin des Plantes 163 Jefferson, Thomas: “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” 115 and “The Declaration of Independence,” 101, 106–115 on education 131–3 and Emerson 196 on inequality 95, 130 “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” 120 and Locke 116, 130 on a national day of prayer 119 on Native Americans 130 and natural law theory 109 Notes on the State of Virginia 43, 86, 101, 118–19, 131, 132, 135, 137, 142–4 on race and slavery 43, 133–41 on religion 104, 118–24 and Romanticism 144 and Sally Hemings 139–40 and slavery 43, 133 “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” 106 “Syllabus of an estimate of the merit of the doctrines of Jesus, compared with those of others” 123 “Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus” 120 on taxation 95 Jensen, Kipton E. 245 n. 65 Jesus 11, 28, 197 Channing on 149, 150 and deism, 34 Emerson on 150, 154, 160, 162, 167, 175, 193 Franklin’s opinion of 54–5, 70

Jefferson on 120–4 Locke on 117 Priestley on 123 Tindal on 32 Unitarians on 148 Johnston, Adrian 140 n. 196 Jordan, Don 133 n. 147 Junto, The 57–8, 60, 63 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 38, 103, 105 Kant, Immanuel 3, 32, 63, 64, 105, 136, 147, 154, 157, 256 and Coleridge, 153 and Emersonian “self–reliance,” 157 and Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” 157 on the Enlightenment 4, 63, 105 discussed by Hedge, 164 and Madame de Staël 153, 155, 156 moral theory 156, 188 and Thoreau 214 on the unifying function in experience 214 Keats, John 253 Kierkegaard, Sren 1, 2, 24, 29, 173, 176, 200, 209 Kolchin, Peter 46 Kramnick, Isaac 27 Kuklick, Bruce 40, 153, 236 Lafayette, Marquis de 138 Larmore, Charles 96, 97, 98 La Rochefoucauld, François 86 law 96–7 Lawrence, D. H. 2, 71 Lear, Jonathan 46 Lee, Sang Hyun 9 n. 5, 15 Lee, Sukjae 17, 19 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9, 28, 41, 64, 152, 153, 155, 156, 168 LeMay, J. A. Leo 57 Leyden jar 51, 66 liberty 96, 97–8 Lincoln, Abraham 115 Locke, John 3, 10, 13, 52, 88 n. 3, 124, 156, 259 on atheism 117 on Christianity 117 and Coleridge 153 and the “Declaration of Independence,” 107, 110–12, 114 and Edwards 9, 11, 15 Emerson on 70 n. 99, 73, 171, 196 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 9 n. 5, 80, 104 and Franklin 59, 60 on God and space 13 and Jefferson 96, 102, 104 A Letter Concerning Toleration 116–18

INDEX

on matter 14 and natural law theory 109, 110 and negative liberty 98 Second Treatise of Government 82, 93, 107, 108–9, 111 on slavery 46 Some Thoughts concerning Education 106 Some Thoughts on the Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth 104 and Thoreau 226 and Toland 31, 32 use of “self-evident” 80, 109 Lovejoy, Arthur 6 Lucretius 31 Luther, Martin 11, 74, 163, 193 Madison, James 90, 99, 142 as a conservative 127 on factions 93 on Jefferson’s proposal for cancellation of debts 127 on representation 91 on republics 89 on reverence for the laws 97 slaves not full persons 100 Maitland, F. W. 91 Malebranche, Nicolas 9, 11, 17, 19 Malone, Dumas 104, 105, 115, 119, 133 Marcus Aurelius: and Edwards 36 and Emerson 145, 183–4 and Jefferson 104, 120, 123 and natural law theory 109 on the polis or commonwealth 226 and Thoreau 205 Marcuse, Herbert 209 Marsh, James 154 Marx, Karl 1, 200, 210 McClymond, Michael J. and McDermott, Gerald R. 9, 12, 21, 22 McDermott, Gerald R. 9 n. 5, 31 n. 145; see also McClymond, Michael J. and McDermott, Gerald R. Menu 197, 203 Mill, John Stuart 252, 259 Miller, Perry 22, 47, 49 Milton, John 59, 60, 70 n. 99, 71, 73, 102, 147 Minkema, Kenneth 22, 44, 45, 46 miracles 1, 31, 56, 105–6, 116, 124, 148, 150–1, 152, 154, 165 Misak, Cheryl 248 mixed constitutions 89 Montaigne, Michel de 74, 147, 157–9, 161, 177, 200 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de 79, 92, 104, 155, 195 on “equality of distribution” in republics 129



on corruption 95 on liberty 98 “power must check power” 91 on separation of powers 90 More, Henry 5, 9, 11, 12, 131 Morgan, Edmund S. 134, 138 Morgan, Marie 138 Morris, Robert 82 Moses 167, 197 Murphey, Murray 3 mystery 33, 63, 148, 149 Nash, Gary B. 75 nn. 118, 120, 78 nn. 131, 133, 135 natural law 33, 88, 109, 110, 196 Nelson, Eric 83, 88, 92, 93, 95 Neoplatonism 150, 151, 164, 244 Newton, Isaac 3, 4, 12, 13, 22, 64, 162 on conservation of momentum 65 and Edwards 22 Emerson on 74 and Hutcheson 37 read by Jefferson 102 Opticks 13, 22 on time 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich 55, 173, 182, 241 and Emerson 172, 198 On the Genealogy of Morals 123, 178 Noonan, John, T. 134 occasionalism 17, 19 Packer, Barbara 157, 164, 169, 187 n. 228, 196 n. 277, 202 n. 16, 203 n. 18, 227 n. 119 on Bronson Alcott 165 on Emerson’s attitude toward Jesus 175 n. 164 on Emerson’s “Fate,” 188 on Emerson’s “The Sphinx” 250 Paine, Tom 82, 98, 125 pantheism 20, 32 Peabody, Elizabeth 164 Peirce, Charles Sanders 7, 64, 84, 243–51 personal identity 41 Pettit, Philip 88, 90, 91, 96, 98 Pieper, Josef 221 Pierce, William 84 Plato 13, 16, 97, 165, 199, 200 and Emerson 151 in Emerson’s Representative Men 177, 185, 242 and Franklin 70 Laws 95 on philosophy as a way of life 205 Republic 92, 94, 152, 170, 206 and the republican tradition 83, 92 on slavery 6, 46



INDEX

Plato (cont.) and Thoreau’s Walden 206 Plotinus 152, 153, 162, 203, 244 Plutarch 36, 105 Pocock, J. G. A. 59, 89, 90, 92 Poirier, Richard 186, 199, 241, 242 Pole, J. R. 88 n. 1, 97 n. 54, 100 political corruption 92 Polybius 93 Poor Richard 1, 49, 60, 67, 68, 69 power 186 pragmatism 6, 22, 73, 83, 186, 248, 256, 260 and Emerson 162, 234–43 Priestly, Joseph 65, 120 Princeton (College of New Jersey) 8, 103 n. 11 Putnam, Hilary 161, 237, 260 Pythagoras 147 Quakers 47, 68, 73, 75 n. 118, 117, 118 Emerson on 163, 190, 193 race 75–80, 133–41, 189–91, 257 Ramsey, Paul 40 Raynal, Abbé 86 realism 16, 168, 245 reception 4, 69, 239, 260 and Edwards 22, 24 in Emerson 5, 152, 156–7, 158 n. 61, 171, 248 and leisure 221 and Thoreau 5, 204, 214, 215 and Whitman 243 in Wordsworth 248 Reid, Jasper 12 n. 27, 19, 42–3 Reid, Thomas 38, 80, 103, 104 n. 12, 109, 112 representation, political 91–2 republic, concept of 83, 89, 92, 99, 151 republicanism 88–100, 124 Richardson, Joan 22 Richardson, Robert D. 152, 154, 155, 169, 203, 205 Ripley, George 164 Romanticism 3, 7, 111, 151 n. 18, 240 n. 29 Cavell on 160 n. 75 and classical American pragmatism 199 n. 293, 234 and the Enlightenment 73 n. 110, 77 Jefferson and 144–6 and Thoreau 206 Rorty, Richard 50, 242 Rosenblum, Nancy 226 Rotch, Mary 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 71, 73, 81, 102, 155, 200, 207 Confessions 74 and democracy 259 as a Romantic 235, 240 The Social Contract 209

Sacks, Kenneth S. 170, 192 Sand, George 165, 167 Sandler, S. Gerald 116 n. 60 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 154, 244 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 152 n. 25 Scottish Enlightenment 38 Seneca 36, 123 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of 35–6, 37, 52, 53, 58, 103 Shakespeare, William 74, 103, 248 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 165, 235 Sherlock, William 105 Sherman, Roger 84 Short, William 120 n. 76, 121, 122, 124 Sidney, Algernon 59, 61, 112, 104 Skipwith, Robert 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 116, 120, 127 slavery 107, 133, 191 Blackstone on 134 and Clarkson 193 and Du Bois 255, 257 and Edwards 43–5 and Emerson 3, 189, 190, 194–7, 198 and Franklin 75–80, 82 n. 150 and Jefferson 101, 113 n. 49, 133–41 and Lincoln 115 in Massachusetts 191 in the “Moderate Enlightenment” 125 at Monticello 137 in Plato and Aristotle 46 and race in America 44, 76, 136 and Thoreau 6, 200 and the U.S. Constitution 2, 86, 97, 99–100 in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” 258 Sloan, Douglas 61 n. 53 Smith, Adam 3, 38, 58, 155, 201 Socrates 46, 52, 55, 68, 70, 72, 83, 104, 120, 123, 151, 206, 211 solitude and society 216–19 Spinoza, Benedict 109 Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame the Baroness de 147, 153, 155–6, 162, 168 Steele, Richard 52 Sterne, Laurence 102, 103, 105, 112 Stiles, Ezra 54 Stoddard, Solomon 8, 23 Stoicism 35, 70, 104, 205 surprise 64, 71, 159, 172, 178, 181, 232, 239, 247–9, 251 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 152, 154, 164, 234 Taylor, Charles 4, 28, 125, 147, 180 on “the background” 53 on inwardness 145 on “nature as source” 151 on ontic logos 48

INDEX

Taylor, Thomas 152 Thoreau, Henry David 194, 235 and the body 213 “Economy” 207 “Higher Laws” 228 “House–Warming” 220 Journal 222–5 and Kant 220 “Ktaadn” 229 on leaving 218 on leisure 221 and Locke 226 on morning 211 “The Natural History of Massachusetts” 202 “A Plea for Captain John Brown” 227 “Resistance to Civil Government” 200, 203, 226, 227 on sitting 210 and slavery 200, 226, 227 “Slavery in Massachusetts” 227 on society 218–19 “Solitude” 216 “Spring” 221 on bathing as a religious exercise 69 “The Village” 215 “Visitors” 218 Walden 67, 200, 203, 204–22, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230, 260 “A Walk to Wachusett” 203 “Walking” 47, 144, 203, 215, 228, 230, 231–2 winter and spring 219–22 “A Winter Walk” 203 “Winter Visitors” 218 time 28, 182–5, 20 Tindal, Matthew 3, 31, 32–3, 34, 58 Todes, Samuel 214 Toland, John 3, 31–2, 34, 63, 119, 148 Transcendental Club 164 Transcendentalist Trivium 170–2 transitions 242 Trenchard, John 59, 61, 62, 63, 91, 113 Unitarian Christianity 148, 236 University of Leyden 66 University of Pennsylvania 51, 256 University of Virginia 2, 101, 104, 115, 121, 132–3, 142 U.S. Constitution 83–7, 90–1, 93, 94, 127, 196 Van Doren, Carl 22 n. 93, 52, 72 n. 106 Varro, Marcus Terentius 205 Versluis, Arthur 162 Vetö, Miklos 9, 15, 17



Volney, Constantin François de Chassebuf, comte de 138 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 1, 3, 106, 147, 155, 201 Candide 41, 64 and Franklin 2, 54, 81 History of Charles XII, King of Sweden 27 on Newton 22 n. 90 on Phillis Wheatley 135 Walsh, Michael 133 n. 147 Ward, Roger A. 10 n. 17 Waring, John 77 Washington, George 74, 106, 125, 136, 141, 142 Weber, Max 49, 71, 178 Wesley, John 193 West, Cornel 238, n. 22 Wheatley, Phillis 135–6, 137 White, Morton 3, 40, 94, 99, 237, 254 Whitefield, George 28, 45, 49–50, 51, 60, 61, 135 Whitman, Walt 47, 236, 243, 258–9, 260 wildness 207, 208, 221, 228–33, 248 Wills, Garry 103, 127 n. 118, 130 n. 128, 142 n. 204, 143 on the “Declaration of Independence” 80 n. 147, 109 n. 37, 111, 112, 113 n. 49 on Lincoln 115 on the University of Virginia 133 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 6, 50, 53, 88, 151, 160 Wollstonecraft, Mary 167 Wood, Gordon S. 92 Wordsworth, William 5, 142, 156, 174, 252 “The Excursion” 203 Lyrical Ballads 144, 159 meets Emerson 147, 163 on nature as a teacher 207, 230, 243 “The Recluse” 161 “The Tables Turned” 145 “There was a boy” 248 “Tintern Abbey” 160 and William James 235 “The World is Too Much with Us; Late and Soon” 5 n. 9 Wythe, George 102, 134 Xenophon 52, 104, 201, 203 Yale College 8, 11, 22, 54, 67, 147 Zakai, Avihu 9, 23, 27, 28, 35, 52 on Edwards’s conversion 11 on Edwards’s theologia gloriae 21 on the “reenchantment of the world” 49 n. 2