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TWO

The American Enlightenment

“. . . America was the embodiment and natural home of the Enlightenment . . .”

—ISAAC KRAMNICK, THE ENLIGHTENMENT READER

UNDERSTANDING JEFFERSON

“Man was destined for society . . . He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality . . . The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of a man as his leg or arm. It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree . . . It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body. This sense is submitted indeed in some degree to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock [amount] which is required for this.”

—THOMAS JEFFERSON

This passage is taken from a letter to his nephew written in 1787, and repeated almost verbatim in a letter to John Adams twenty-eight years later. Here, in the language of Francis Hutcheson, the founder of Scottish moral sense philosophy, Jefferson presents the theory of human nature according to the Scottish and the American Enlightenments: man the social being, endowed with a moral sense and unalienable rights.

The emphasis on the moral sense, and also common sense, sharply distinguish both the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Enlightenment from the Enlightenment in France. As the Jefferson passage illustrates, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment gave the Founders many of the ideas and the arguments they needed for the great task of the Founding.

The American Enlightenment was driven forward by a focus on the theory and practice of political liberty. With the exception of the scientific and technological achievements of Benjamin Franklin, the great works of the American Enlightenment are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. In articulating the principles and fashioning the institutions that would sustain the new republic, Jefferson and the other Founders made for themselves a place of honor among the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment era.

TWO VISIONS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

“Fontenelle [was] the most representative of all the figures of the Enlightenment . . .”

—ISAIAH BERLIN

“If America was the embodiment and natural home of the Enlightenment . . . then the American who best personified the Enlightenment ideal was Benjamin Franklin.”

—ISAAC KRAMNICK

My copy of Professor Kramnick’s book The Portable Enlightenment Reader has Benjamin West’s famous painting Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky on its cover. If Professor Berlin had selected the cover illustration, perhaps he would have chosen a portrait of Fontenelle instead.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle was a member of the French Academy and of the French Academy of Sciences. Berlin explains that he led a “very careful and rational life.” Fontenelle, he also tells us, wrote this: “A work of politics, of morality, of criticism, perhaps even of literature, will be finer, all things considered, if made by the hands of a geometer.” A geometer is, of course, a person skilled in geometry, that is to say, a person skilled in abstract, mathematical reasoning.

These two eminent scholars present two very different visions of the Enlightenment. According to one vision, the Enlightenment’s center of gravity was unquestionably in France and its ideal was skillfulness in abstract rationality. Fontenelle displays very clearly the French Enlightenment’s exaltation of “unassisted reason,” of abstract rationality. Note that he claims that skill in abstract reasoning of the mathematical kind provides the best thinking about morality and politics. He goes beyond this remarkable claim even to claim that someone who is good at geometry might well have exactly what is needed to produce the best in literature. If this claim strikes you as unlikely, you have for yourself a measure of just how distant your own thinking is from the thinking of the French Enlightenment.

Franklin personified a very different vision of the Enlightenment. Capturing the incredible range of Franklin’s gifts and the extent of his contributions is a challenge—and “abstract rationality” doesn’t even come close.

Taking our cue from Benjamin West’s painting, the story of Franklin’s lightning experiment is a great place to begin. Franklin did more than just explain lightning, more even than lay the foundation for our modern understanding of electricity. He went on to make an urgently-needed practical application of his new-found scientific understanding by developing the world-changing technology of the lightning rod. Then he published the technological know-how, sharing it freely with the world. He demonstrated that we could understand nature and that our understanding of nature could change the world for the better for everyone. If a church happened to be struck by lightning and burned to the ground, it meant that the church fathers had neglected to install a lightning rod, not that last Sunday’s sermon had found disfavor with God. Here Franklin the scientist and technological innovator meets up with Franklin the philanthropist who instigated, organized and supported financially and otherwise so many projects to improve the lives of his fellow Philadelphians.

Of course, Franklin the statesman played an important role in shaping both the Declaration and the Constitution, two of the most world-changing achievements of the American Enlightenment, and of the Enlightenment overall. Characteristically, in the course of his many trips back and forth across the Atlantic in the political service of the colonies and the new nation, he also seized the opportunity to discover and map (modern satellites confirm quite accurately) the Gulf Stream, improving trans-Atlantic travel by ship forever. Franklin, the man who has been called “the First American,” genuinely seemed to welcome every opportunity in his life-long adventure of making a better world.

For Thomas Reid, as we have noted, Newton’s rules for doing science were “the way of observation and experiment.” Franklin the scientist is a perfect exemplar of Newton’s method. But there was more to Franklin than Newton’s method, and more to the American Enlightenment than even Franklin can symbolize.

In any case, by now it should be clear that there is a world of difference between the French Enlightenment and the American Enlightenment. Consequently, when someone makes a general statement about the Enlightenment, we need to ask “which Enlightenment?”

SORTING OUT THE ENLIGHTENMENTS

If we set out to get clear about the various Enlightenments, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments ought to provide us with the answers we are looking for—and, in many ways, it does. Where the book is good, it is very good indeed. Unfortunately, although the author accomplishes the task brilliantly in two magnificent chapters, she also creates confusion in a third chapter.

The two outstanding chapters are the ones on the French and the American Enlightenments. They are models of brevity, clarity, and scholarly command of the subject. The French and the American Enlightenments are brought into sharp focus, and their profound differences are made clear.

Professor Himmelfarb brilliantly contrasts the French Enlightenment, which she terms “the Ideology of Reason,” and the American Enlightenment, termed by her as “the Politics of Liberty”:

“The idea of liberty . . . did not elicit anything like the passion or commitment [from the French] that reason did. Nor did it inspire the philosophes to engage in a systematic analysis of the political and social institutions that would promote and protect liberty.”

The French philosophes and the American Founders were working in very different directions on very different projects. These differences help explain the sharply contrasting outcomes of the American and the French Revolutions.

Because the study of the Enlightenment has traditionally focused on France, these two chapters provide the interested reader with an opportunity to make a great leap forward not just in understanding the Enlightenments, but also in understanding America. Himmelfarb’s thoughtful analysis makes a powerful case for the significance and the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment.

Himmelfarb also ably demonstrates that the philosophes’ concept of reason explains their disdain for the common people. Voltaire, for example, never concealed that disdain, habitually referring to the people as “la canaille” (the rabble), and Diderot wrote that “the common people are incredibly stupid.” The philosophes’ statements about mankind are very different from Jefferson’s comparison of a ploughman and a professor quoted above or his ringing declaration that “all men are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”

What explains this difference? Himmelfarb correctly assigns the difference to the role of two conceptions that were elevated to great prominence during the Enlightenment, the moral sense and common sense. Moral sense and common sense doctrines were central to the American Enlightenment:

“The moral sense and common sense . . . gave to all people, including the common people, a common humanity and a common fund of moral and social obligations. The French idea of reason was not available to the common people and had no such moral or social component.”

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why the French and the American Revolutions had such different outcomes. Here you have a key difference, stated with brilliant clarity. The difference between the philosophes and the Founders is this: the primacy of unassisted reason versus the primacy of the moral sense and common sense.

However, always pairing the moral sense and common sense, as Himmelfarb very correctly does, raises a problem. The moral sense and common sense together practically define Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. This is so well established that the heading for a chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment virtually writes itself: “The Moral Sense and Common Sense.” Yet there is no chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead, there is a single chapter combining the English and the Scottish Enlightenments under the single label of the British Enlightenment. Combining these two very different Enlightenments obscures an important part of the story.

The Enlightenment certainly began in England. It began with the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the publication of the first of Locke’s Letters on Toleration in 1689. But the Scots soon achieved prominence in the Enlightenment project, especially in science and in philosophy.

In philosophy, Locke’s theory of the mind quickly got the Scots’ attention. As you may remember from school, according to Locke the mind is like a sheet of blank paper. Experience writes on that blank sheet by means of sensations of pain and pleasure.

It is important for us to understand that Locke was not himself a skeptic; he believed that there are things that people know and he believed that there really is right and wrong. However, David Hume and others showed that Locke’s account of the mind left the door wide open for skeptical challenges. So Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid set out to provide what was missing.

Francis Hutcheson set himself the task of finding a philosophical foundation for moral judgments. In doing so, he put Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in motion, and at the same time, put moral philosophy at the center of Scottish thought. He argued for the existence of the moral sense, relying on the analogy of our external senses, just as Jefferson, himself relying on Hutcheson, did in the earlier quote:

“Man was destined for society . . . He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this. This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality.”

Hutcheson believed that Locke’s account, based as it was only on pleasure and pain, left convention as the only possible foundation of morality.