Ominous Parallels (14 page)

In every area of thought, the American Enlightenment represents a profound reversal of the Puritans’ philosophic priorities. Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of God—and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy:
secularism without skepticism.

In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from God to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of
nature.
For centuries of medievalism, nature had been regarded as a shadowy reflection of a transcendent dimension representing true reality. Now, whatever the vestigial concessions to the earlier mentality, men’s operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm—solid, eternal,
real
in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural. Now, when men looked at nature, they saw not erratic intervention from beyond (nor inexplicable chance), but order, stability, “eternal and immutable” principles, i.e., the reign of absolute, impersonal cause and effect.

In such a universe, the fundamental epistemological principle was the sovereignty of human reason. For centuries men had sought primary truth in revelation, submitting docilely to the alleged deliverances of supernatural authority, or—later—had sought a compromise between the domain of the secular intellect and the domain of faith. Now the animating conviction was that the rational mind is man’s only means of knowledge. Faith, revelation, mystic insight, along with the whole apparatus of Christian dogmas, mysteries, sacraments —all these the spokesmen of the Enlightenment swept aside as the futile legacy of a primitive past. Reason the Only Oracle of Man, Ethan Allen titled his work, expressing the widespread viewpoint. “Fix reason firmly in her seat,” writes Jefferson to a nephew, “and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
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Reason—according to the characteristic Enlightenment conception-is a faculty which acquires knowledge on the basis of the evidence of the senses; there are no divinely inspired, innate ideas. It is a faculty which, properly employed, can discover explanatory principles in every field and achieve certainty in regard to them. Since these principles, thinkers held, are absolute truths stating facts of
reality,
they are binding on every man, whatever his feelings or nationality; i.e., knowledge is
objective.
It was not heavenly illumination or skeptical doubt or subjective emotion that the Enlightenment mind extolled (“enthusiasm,” i.e., irrational passion, was regarded as the cardinal epistemological sin); it was the exercise of the fact-seeking
intellect
—logical, deliberate, dispassionate, potent.

The consequence of this viewpoint was the legendary epistemological self-confidence of the period—the conviction that there are no limits to the triumphant advance of science, of human knowledge, of human progress. “The strength of the human understanding is incalculable, its keenness of discernment would ultimately penetrate into every part of nature, were it permitted to operate with uncontrolled and unqualified freedom,” writes Elihu Palmer, a militant American spokesman of the period. “[I]t has hitherto been deemed a crime to think ... ,” he says; but at last men have escaped from the “long and doleful night” of Christian rule, with its “frenzy,” its “religious fanaticism,” its “mad enthusiasm.” At last men have grasped “the unlimited power of human reason” —“Reason, which every kind of supernatural Theology abhors—Reason, which is the glory of our nature....” Now, “a full scope must be given to the operation of intellectual powers, and man must feel an unqualified confidence in his own energies.”
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A being who has discovered “the glory of his nature” cannot regard himself as a chunk of depravity whose duty is self-abasing obedience to supernatural commandments. After centuries of medieval wallowing in Original Sin and the ethics of unthinking submissiveness, a widespread wave of
moral
self-confidence now swept the West, reflecting and complementing man’s new epistemological self-confidence. Just as there are no limits to man’s knowledge, many thinkers held, so there are no limits to man’s moral improvement. If man is not yet perfect, they held, he is at least perfectible. Just as there are objective, natural laws in science, so there are objective, natural laws in ethics; and man is capable of discovering such laws and of acting in accordance with them. He is capable not only of developing his intellect, but also of
living
by its guidance. (This, at least, was the Enlightenment’s ethical program and promise.)

Whatever the vacillations or doubts of particular thinkers, the dominant trend represented a new vision and estimate of man: man as a self-sufficient, rational being and, therefore, man as basically good, as potentially noble, as a
value.

For centuries the dominant moralists had said that man must not seek his ultimate fulfillment on earth; that he must renounce the pleasures of this life, whether as a flesh-mortifying ascetic or as an abstemious toiler, for the sake of God, salvation, and the life to come. With the new view of reality and of man, this could no longer be taken seriously. Now a new concept of the good moved insistently to the forefront of men’s mind. The purpose of life, it was held, is to live, to live in this world and to enjoy it. Men refused to wait any longer. They wanted to achieve
happiness—
now, here, and as an end in itself.

For centuries, whatever their concern with the individual soul, the medievals had derogated or failed to discover the
individual
man. In philosophy, the Platonists had denied his reality ; in practice, the feudal system had (by implication) treated the group—the caste, the guild, etc.—as the operative social unit. Then, in post-medieval Europe, a dawning appreciation of the individual had appeared in two different forms, in the Renaissance and the Reformation movements. Now, particularly in America, that generalized appreciation became a specific, ruling conviction.

Since reality is this world of particulars, thinkers held, the individual is fully real; the potency and value of man the rational being means the potency and value of the individual who exercises his reason. Thus when the Enlightenment upheld the pursuit of happiness, the meaning (Christian contradictions aside for the moment) was: the pursuit by each man of his own happiness, to be gained by his own independent efforts—by self-reliance and self-development leading to self-respect and self-made worldly success.

The leaders of the American Enlightenment did not reject the idea of the supernatural completely. Characteristically, they were deists, who believed that God exists as nature’s remote, impersonal creator and as the original source of natural law. But, they held, having performed these functions, God thereafter retires into the role of a passive, disinterested spectator. This view (along with the continuing belief in an after-life) is a remnant of medievalism, in process of fading out. It is in the nature of a vestigial afterthought, whose actual influence on the period is minimal. The threat to “Divine religion,” observed one concerned preacher at the time, is the “indifference which prevails” and the “ridicule.” Mankind, he noted, is in “great danger of being laughed out of religion....”
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The result of the Enlightenment ideas, from every branch of philosophy, was a surging sense of liberation. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” says Thomas Paine. “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand. . . .”
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The father of this new world was a single philosopher: Aristotle. On countless issues Aristotle’s views differ from those of the Enlightenment. But, in terms of broad fundamentals, the philosophy of Aristotle is the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The primacy of this world; the lawfulness and intelligibility of nature; the reality of particulars and therefore of individuals; the sovereign power of man’s secular reason; the rejection of innate ideas; the nonsupernaturalist affirmation of certainty, objectivity, absolutes; the uplifted view of man and of the human potential; the value placed on intellectual development as a means to self-fulfillment and personal happiness on earth—the sum of it is Aristotelian, specifically Aristotelian, as against the mysticism of the Platonic tradition and the self-proclaimed bankruptcy of the skeptical tradition. If the key to the Enlightenment is secularism without skepticism, this means: the key is Aristotle.

In the deepest philosophic sense, it is Aristotle who laid the foundation of the United States of America. The nation of the Enlightenment is the nation of Aristotelianism.

Aristotle provided the foundation, but he did not know how to implement it politically. In the modem world, under the influence of the pervasive new climate, a succession of thinkers developed a new conception of the nature of government. The most important of these men and the one with the greatest influence on America was John Locke. The political philosophy Locke bequeathed to the Founding Fathers is what gave rise to the new nation’s distinctive institutions. That political philosophy is the social implementation of the Aristotelian spirit.

Throughout history the state had been regarded, implicitly or explicitly, as the ruler of the individual—as a sovereign authority (with or without supernatural mandate), an authority logically antecedent to the citizen and to which he must submit. The Founding Fathers challenged this primordial notion. They started with the premise of the
primacy and sovereignty of the individual.
The individual, they held, logically precedes the group or the institution of government. Whether or not any social organization exists, each man possesses certain
individual rights.
And “among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—or, in the words of a New Hampshire state document, “among which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; and in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.”
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These rights were regarded not as a disparate collection, but as a unity expressing a single fundamental right. Man’s rights, declares Samuel Adams, often termed the father of the American Revolution, “are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.” Man’s rights are
natural,
i.e., their warrant is the laws of reality, not any arbitrary human decision; and they are
inalienable,
i.e., absolutes not subject to renunciation, revocation, or infringement by any person or group. Rights, affirms John Dickinson, “are not annexed to us by parchments and seals.... They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power without taking our lives. In short, they are founded on the immutable maxims of reason and justice.”
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And “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....” The powers of government are, therefore,
limited,
not merely de facto or by default, but on principle : government is forbidden to infringe man’s rights. It is forbidden because, in Adams’s words, “the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights....”
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In this view, the state is the servant of the individual. It is not a sovereign possessing primary authority, but an agent possessing only delegated authority, charged by men with a specific practical function, and subject to dissolution and reconstruction if it trespasses outside its assigned purview. Far from being the ruler of man, the state, in the American conception, exists to
prevent
the division of men into rulers and ruled, It exists to enable the individual, in Locke’s words, “to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”
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“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Jefferson—and the other Founding Fathers—meant it. They did not confine their efforts to the battle against theocracy and monarchy. They fought, on the same grounds, invoking the same principle of individual rights, against
democracy,
i.e., the system of unlimited majority rule. They recognized that the cause of freedom is not advanced by the multiplication of despots, and they did not propose to substitute the tyranny of a mob for that of a handful of autocrats.

We must bear in mind, says Jefferson, that the will of the majority “to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.” In a pure democracy, writes Madison in a famous passage,

there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
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When the framers of the American republic spoke of “the people,” they did not mean a collectivist organism one part of which was authorized to consume the rest. They meant a sum of individuals, each of whom—whether strong or weak, rich or poor—retains his inviolate guarantee of individual rights. “It is agreed,” says John Adams,