Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology

By Maurizio Valsania

Although scholars have adequately covered Thomas Jefferson’s general ideas about human nature and race, this is the first book to examine what Maurizio Valsania terms Jefferson’s "philosophical anthropology"—philosophical in the sense that he concerned himself not with describing how humans are, culturally or otherwise, but with the kind of human being Jefferson thought he was, wanted to become, and wished for citizens to be for the future of the United States. Valsania’s exploration of this philosophical anthropology touches on Jefferson’s concepts of nationalism, slavery, gender roles, modernity, affiliation, and community. More than that, Nature's Man shows how Jefferson could advocate equality and yet control and own other human beings.

A humanist who asserted the right of all people to personal fulfillment, Jefferson nevertheless had a complex philosophy that also acknowledged the dynamism of nature and the limits of human imagination. Despite Jefferson's famous advocacy of apparently individualistic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Valsania argues that both Jefferson's yearning for the human individual to become something good and his fear that this hypothetical being would turn into something bad were rooted in a specific form of communitarianism. Absorbing and responding to certain moral-philosophical currents in Europe, Jefferson’s nature-infused vision underscored the connection between the individual and the community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813933580

Book preview

Nature’s

Man

JEFFERSONIAN AMERICA

Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Editors

MAURIZIO VALSANIA

Nature’s

Man

THOMAS JEFFERSON’S

PHILOSOPHICAL

ANTHROPOLOGY

University of Virginia Press

© 2013 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2013

9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Valsania, Maurizio, 1965–

Nature’s man / Maurizio Valsania.

p.    cm. — (Jeffersonian America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3357-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3358-0 (e-book : alk. paper)

1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826—Philosophy. 2. Communitarianism. I. Title.

B885.Z7V35 2013

302.501—dc23

2012024682

Ai miei maestri, Peter Onuf e Mike Zuckerman

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Dissolution of Tradition: The New Affiliation

2 Jefferson’s Communitarianism: In Search of the Affiliated Man

3 Consequences of Communitarianism: The Other Side of Love

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a relief to sit at the desk, at last, and write the acknowledgments. It is like looking back and remembering friends and companions who made an adventurous journey a little easier.

While preparing this book, I had the privilege to share experiences and ideas with wonderful persons. Andrew Burstein, to begin with, has been a source of inspiration for many years. I have read his books over and over again, turning them into a discreet and constant presence in my mental background. This time, however, I asked Andrew to take on a more active role. He generously went through an early draft of the manuscript. He took his ordeal stoically and, in a few days’ time, got back to me with a very encouraging letter. What a delight to discover, a couple of months later, that the University of Virginia Press had already asked Andrew to serve as a reviewer. His criticisms, besides his unwavering support, have been, for me, pivotal.

Francis Cogliano as well served as a reviewer. In the same way he did for my previous project, he pointed out both merits and shortcomings. With uncommon lucidity and erudition, Frank dedicated to my manuscripts time and energy, and made me aware of a number of weak points. Even when he is not an actual reader, I have long internalized the habit of asking myself what Frank would think about almost everything I put on paper.

Everyone who has had the luck to meet Peter Onuf will concur that his mind is amazingly powerful, his dedication total, and his character especially good-humored. When, nearly ten years ago, I entered Peter’s studio at the Corcoran Department of History for the first time, I could not know that he was about to impress a dramatic turn at my entire intellectual life. Ever since, I kept him busy with questions, unsolicited projects, and silly emails. Not only he has always been kind and forthcoming, but each time we had an exchange he always pushed me forward, urging me to think more deeply and thoroughly. Of course, he had no obligation whatsoever to act like the mentor he eventually became. The very idea of this project came to me after I heard Peter’s unforgettable speech at a Venice conference, in December 2008. His take on Jefferson’s acting within the cultural milieu created by the ancien régime, while trying to react to this same milieu, opened up, for me, an entirely new dimension of inquiry.

Hubert Zapf, of the University of Augsburg, Germany, provided a pleasant and stimulating environment. He made me a permanent guest of his Oberseminar. Perhaps more important, he provided unconditional friendship.

Writing a book is a collective endeavor, and the people at the University of Virginia Press, for the second time, have been a trusted company. Richard Holway, Raennah Mitchell, Morgan Myers, Emily Grandstaff, Kenny Marotta, and Robert Burchfield have furnished emotional support, direction, and expertise. They have turned a shapeless draft into a real book.

I have benefited from two generous grants. The first was awarded to me by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York. The second was given by the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS), Virginia. No project on Thomas Jefferson can do without the collaboration of all the persons working at the ICJS. Especially helpful, in the present case, have been Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Mary Mason Williams, Anna Berkes, Mary Scott-Fleming, and Gaye Wilson.

My wife, Serenella Iovino, is the boon of my existence.

Nature’s

Man

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Jefferson developed specific and personal notions about physical anthropology and races, as well as about cultural anthropology, ethnicity, and human nature. This book, however, does not expressly delve into human nature or races. It is rather a book about the way desires, fears, and historical circumstances qualify the idea of human nature. It is a book about Jefferson’s imagination: the man he thought he was; the man he wanted to become; the man he wished for the future of the United States, but also the kind of individual he feared; the man he was compelled to imagine; and the man like himself, whom he would probably have abolished had the humanist in him been free to make this choice. It is a book about how this eighteenth-century Virginian deployed his masculine self-determination, how he was drawn to both dreams and expediency, how he called on both love and violence.¹

The concept of human nature was central to Jefferson’s thought. Jefferson believed that all human beings were created equal in the order of nature. Humans possessed an innate moral sense, they were constituted as social beings, and they drew on the faculty of reason.

Additionally, besides insisting on these immutable characteristics defining a human essence, Jefferson endorsed Montesquieu’s environmentalist thesis, that human variety was the outcome of climatic and geographical forces. Humans were created equal, with very similar biological needs, but they showed remarkable variations from one place to another, from one culture to another—variations on equality, as Charles Miller puts it. In a similar vein, Merle Curti has spoken of Jefferson’s feelings about human nature’s plasticity.²

The eighteenth-century belief that humans were subjected to variations carried a message of hope. Education, renovation, even a sort of religious conversion were among the cheerful expectations of the whole Enlightenment culture. The Enlightenment tried to popularize the principle that human beings were not haunted by essentialism, the doctrine that the human race is rigidly determined in its characteristics, properties, and possibilities. Jefferson himself sought to create a new individual, and, as Andrew Burstein correctly argues, he was in effect (ironically, then) employing a religious model—conversion—as he reached out with a broad plan of mass self-improvement. Jefferson’s goal was to aid in reconstituting the physical and moral health of those around him—an imperiled generation, as he saw it.³

Western civilization has come of age by embracing the maxim that humans have no nature, but rather histories, and that they can become different from what they were. Determinateness, as we would say today, is something humans acquire in the course of their lives, and not something that God’s act of creation has bestowed on them from the metaphysical outset. Several intellectuals during the last two centuries or so have insisted on this enticing doctrine, from Ortega y Gassett to Sartre, from Dewey to Jaspers, from Kierkegaard to Rorty. The notion of a human being as a mere embodiment of an essence did not please Jefferson either. He contended instead that humans might play an active role, and write their own history. For Jefferson, they were not just flexible and plastic and, so to speak, the passive products of their existence. Humans could become producers as well, and significantly change their lives for the better.

It is always a blessing when someone reminds us that we are not entirely determined by preexisting conditions, that we are not compelled to look back for models and precedents, that there is something new under the sun, and above all that we can create our own future. As Jefferson put it, that we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion & in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion & government, by whom it has been recommended, & whose purposes it would answer, but it is not an idea which this country will endure.⁴

I see such assertions as an exercise in philosophical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology can be defined as a normative discourse, fraught with hope and certainly with fears, about the possibilities humans have to modify their history and rise to excellence. It is a wish that they might learn to act in a commendable way, commendable, at least for a late-eighteenth-century enlightened Virginian. At the same time, it is a discourse expressing a warning about the risk that they can fall into an ominous condition. It means to promote a certain kind of man.

While Jefferson’s ideas about human nature have been adequately explained by students, not too many analyses have been conducted on this Virginian training himself in philosophical anthropology, that is, while acting to envision and implement his own variations. I use the adjective philosophical because it contains in itself an appeal to a tension, and a yearning. This is not anthropology describing how humans de facto are, whether culturally or physically considered. It puts emphasis on moral imagination and how humans should be, and should not be.

Philosophical anthropology deals with desires and fears related to the chance human beings have to create their own future, while modifying themselves. Despite the fact that he never used this precise phrase, Jefferson spoke very clearly on the issue. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he thundered, It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. This statement was Jefferson’s way of expressing his philosophical anthropology, the desire that America, and hopefully the whole civilized world, could nurture and foster what for him was the rightly spirited citizen. The nature of this citizen constitutes the theme of the book: What kind of man did Jefferson advocate? And why was his imagination fired by certain specific options?⁵

This book is a chapter in the history of the rise of modern individualism and the way Jefferson conceived his own version of individualism. Individual and individualism are not transparent concepts. Over the last two centuries and a half, both in Europe and the United States, culture has marched consistently toward individualism and has increasingly placed the individual at center stage. But in no moment has culture ever arrived at a conceptual agreement. What does individual mean? What is individualism? And, as far as we are concerned, what kind of individual did Jefferson advocate?⁶

Modern authors have given the idea of the individual a number of different meanings. Adam Smith, David Hume, and Bernard de Mandeville, for example, contended that the individual was a rational hedonist and an egotist, for them not a bad thing. Wordsworth and Coleridge portrayed the individual as a harmony-man, desperately searching to regain a mystical communion with nature. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche gave voice to an individual human being proud to become a unit detached from society and even from the whole universe. Darwin’s was an individual in competition with nature, and Freud discovered sexuality beneath every drive and every noble motivation. What about Jefferson?

The answer certainly cannot be simple, but Jefferson’s philosophical anthropology—the yearning that the individual could become something good, or, alternatively, the fear that this mysterious plastic being would turn into something bad—was embedded in neighborly sensibilities. Jefferson’s country, Virginia, remained throughout the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century a face-to-face society, deeply hierarchical and deferential. Consequently, Jefferson’s individual was steeped in a specific form of communitarianism. In his influential Inventing America, Garry Wills has made a point of treating communitarianism as the essential characteristic of Jefferson’s thought, especially the philosophy conveyed in the Declaration of Independence. His thesis stirred up controversy. But insofar as he was partially wrong, he was also partially right. Jefferson actually provided a communitarian definition of the individual, albeit not for the reasons that Wills pointed out. Jefferson upheld a communitarian philosophical anthropology, and dreaded the consequences of a private and detached individual without connections and community.⁷

In the 1830s and 1840s, Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow created an American literary culture dominated by liberal individualism and individual freedom, individual empowerment, individual possibilities, individual realization, private initiative, and similar tropes. During the same decades, a stream of Southern reactionary authors like George Frederick Holmes, Thomas Roderick Dew, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and George Fitzhugh resisted what was seen as the dull clash of egotistic interests, chaos, atomization, capitalist exploitation, detachedness, privatism, and other Northern aberrations. Resisting similar aberrations, they tried to justify a social theory that combined communitarianism, feudalism, and hierarchy. Master and slave were deemed to partake in the same community of shared responsibilities. Slavery was thus a fundamental instrument of a harmonious society; it created order and prosperity, it was said, because there was no moral world if individuals did not willingly accept their position. Reactionary Southern authors believed that acknowledging one’s role in a hierarchical society could decide the outcome of the battle for the common destiny. They welcomed the interdependence of master and slave, while despising the North as the land of conflicts, selfish interests, and jealousies, barred of protection, love, virtue, obedience, duties, affection, and contentment.⁸

Jefferson, of course, spoke of the delight that might come from modern individualism. The rights to life, freedom, and happiness ought not to suffer any restriction. The individual is a metaphor important to Jefferson’s philosophy, but it is not the guiding one, in particular when the individual is defined as a private and detached unit. It is one thing to cast the seed of individualism, beginning to explore its potentialities, quite another to pluck the ripe fruit. This does not mean that Jefferson anticipated the absurdities of proslavery Southern literature of the 1830s and 1840s, with its reliance on hoary images of the dangers of unrestrained individualism. But Jefferson was no Emerson, Thoreau, or Longfellow either. The way reactionary authors envisaged the antonyms order-disorder, society-individual, and public-private was largely Jeffersonian. For all his defense of the individual’s rights, Jefferson was not disposed to trade an ordered society for a jealous one, centered on the assent to the doctrine of take who take can. He drew the blueprint of a communitarian and noninterchangeable American man.

The closing of the eighteenth century was an age of political transformation, social experimentation, and cultural curiosity. The modern scientific gaze on human beings revealed that they were imbricated in animality. Science disclosed this terrible truth: how dreadfully alive humans feel when they fight for survival, when they try to satisfy their egotistic animal appetites, especially when they are free of the oversight of their community. Animal nature regains its primacy whenever the human being escapes the checks of inhibitions, conventions, and imposed social rules.

Defining humanity via animality, late-eighteenth-century science triggered high levels of anxiety. Consequently, identification with the community, plus loyalty to one’s social role, was seen as an excellent way not just to enforce the sense of personal identity, but to curb animality as well. Resisting animality became a priority. Community was seen as a repository of heritage, as the promise of continuity, a mystical bulwark, and a concrete reality to be preferred to any abstract individualism.

Late-eighteenth-century philosophers may have intellectually craved a universal, cosmopolitan republic where individuals, qua mere individuals, could realize themselves fully. But modern science also taught them that the animal-man was constantly lurking, and such a beast could hardly live up to those ideals. The philosopher extolling the idea of a republic founded on individualistic principles of justice, universality, and egalitarianism could not disregard the necessity of caging the animal. The paradoxical conclusion that haunted Jefferson’s generation was that the individual, at the same time, should and should not be liberated.

More readily than their progressive antagonists, political conservatives consented (and still consent) to the identification between communities and hierarchical structures. They clearly saw the advantage of this kind of organization. Conservatives did not embrace the principle of the rights of human beings qua human beings. They were not inclined to support the idea that individuals were endowed with an intrinsic value from the very moment they come out of the womb of nature. They acknowledged the need to put clothes, fetters, and every sort of rules upon naked individuals. They were rarely taken by the dream of a cosmopolitan citizenship based on perfect justice. Conservatives were certain that communities must exist as exclusive and discriminating groups, because these structures are intended to tackle a vital problem: realizing order effectively while thwarting anarchy and the animal-eats-animal effect. Modern materialistic science displayed the brutal fact that humans were largely governed by the same laws governing other animals. And conservatives were ready to declare that hierarchical communities increased both control and, ultimately, the chance of historical success.

Universalism and the ideal of justice exerted a strong fascination on Jefferson. He really wanted to liberate the individual. But notwithstanding this genuine enthusiasm for individual empowerment, he remained a conservative. Dismantling old hierarchies to make room for the new converted men and women, for him, meant inventing alternative modes of exerting control.

History, in effect, teaches that old hierarchies always give way to new ones. A close reading into the history of real human societies reveals a truth that Jefferson could not have ignored. The dispersion of power and authority in the name of a real inclusive society has never taken place, and likely would never. Since the beginning of human history, oppression has followed oppression, and new devices to silence radical voices have always been contrived. Differences have never been simply described; they have been ranked, and the people who embodied them have always been categorized. It is no wonder that some historians conclude that Jefferson’s accession to power in 1801, like too many other accessions before or since, was part of the conservative backlash against the radical possibilities envisioned in the 1790s, especially for white women and African Americans. This chapter of human history, the Revolution of 1800, does not seem to be so new a phenomenon under the sun.⁹

To be sure, we have to resist reading Jefferson’s communitarianism and his neighborly sensibilities as a reaction against modernity. Jefferson was undeniably attracted to modernity. Nonetheless, the man his philosophical anthropology was envisioning and promoting was still largely traditional despite his modernity.

Formed within a society that was so typically in-between, a sort of marchland, Jefferson’s stance may plunge the historian into complete puzzlement: how could modernity and tradition coexist? The answer is that real life can tolerate paradoxes with which no systematic philosophy could ever put up. The paradox of cosmopolitanism versus provincialism, or universalism versus particularism, represents a good case in point. Late-eighteenth-century society was not faced with an either/or choice. Virginia society was to become more cosmopolitan and universal, increasingly based on the ideal of justice without borders, while retaining several traditional traits. Virginia society was just beginning to yield to the lure of modernity and cosmopolitan culture. Cosmopolitan culture, David Hoeveler has written, is marked above all by a love for rationalism and scientism; it has a noticeable attraction for the theoretical and abstract, for the universal in contrast to the particular, the unique, and the individual.¹⁰

Virginia society was centered on the unique, the particular, just like any other face-to-face society. Of course, historians both can and must spell out the cosmopolitan discourses that were part of Jefferson’s intellectual experience—but without forgetting that an extreme tension remained between cosmopolitanism and provincialism. The praise of cosmopolitanism implicit in the language of the rights to life, liberty, and happiness did not offset Jefferson’s perception that the course of history threatened to destroy the emotional attachment to the particular, the country, the generation. By championing rights, Americans had come to merit being greeted as members . . . of the universal society of mankind, Jefferson was convinced. The unlikely failure of the Republic, he wrote, would be a treason against the hopes of the world. And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.¹¹

Still, despite his cosmopolitanism, the voice of Jefferson the provincial resounds very clearly: I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world role on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give. I believe it gratuitous to ascribe such statements simply to a passing mood, a posture, an episode of nostalgia occurring to Jefferson in the role of the silly aristocrat. They bespeak something of larger import and reveal a tension running through Virginia society. Jefferson did not just pine for old times. Like other Virginians of analogous rank, he always felt himself rooted, embedded in a preexisting social reality, with its rock-solid hierarchies, while longing for modernity and the larger world. Like other provincials, he upheld a way of life that was at once modern and yet still attached to our fathers’ place. The individual advocated by his philosophical anthropology always looked back and forth, as it were, perceiving no contradiction between modernity and an ordered, face-to-face society.¹²

The aim of this book is to analyze Jefferson’s complex philosophical anthropology, his emotionally rich discourse on how man should develop. The reader will quickly notice that, to reach my aim, I did not set as the first methodological task tracing Jefferson’s factual sources and specific influences. Jefferson, indubitably, bought and collected a number of books and read several authors, including actual or potential anthropologists. Books can help us ascertain his philosophy as they struck either his reason or his imagination, often both. But to shed light on Jefferson’s mind, I believe it is likewise important to go beyond books, external influences, and specific sources. In addition to insisting on the books he bought and owned, on those he mentioned in his writings, on those he read and on which he made his notes, I tried not to forget that ideas migrate and enter cultures and societies, whether one acquires them by reading a book or not. The historian Paul Rahe makes this point clearly when he writes that one does not have to cite an author or, for that matter, even peruse his works to absorb something of his doctrine and to come under his sway. In the eighteenth century, just like today, some ideas exercised a species of intellectual hegemony.¹³

Ideas do not have a life of their own, obviously. Metaphysical, literary, political, and scientific views are strongly influenced, although not determined, by social and economic structures, and by social practices. Society exerts a pressure on the way reality is classified and interpreted. It makes some ideas more important and urgent than others. Even so, ideas travel across time and space. They can use books and take advantage of authors to propagate themselves, but they are not confined to them.

More important than Jefferson’s reading, for my analysis, was making sure that my theoretical tools were refined and adapted to the circumstances. This was my methodological priority. Jefferson’s philosophical anthropology spoke of communitarianism, individualism, modernity, naturalism, tradition, egalitarianism, hierarchy, authority, democracy, and so on. But to avert confusion, these operative terms must be perfectly calibrated.

Take Jefferson’s famous trust in the populace, for instance: State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. Does this confidence translate automatically into an unreserved praise of democracy, progressivism, universalism, egalitarianism, and modernity? Jefferson may have been convinced by Francis Hutcheson, as Wills argued, that the human race is one big family made equal by sharing a moral sense. But Jefferson’s democratic bias might not be equivalent to what twenty-first-century political scientists mean when they speak of democracy. Jefferson’s egalitarianism might not overlap with our idea of egalitarianism. Did Jefferson believe that all persons were equal, had an intrinsic value, and should therefore be liberated? Did the ploughman make a shrewd decision on the moral case qua human being or qua ploughman? More important, did Jefferson’s philosophical anthropology believe in persons, namely, in the fact that everyone is immediately and unconditionally a bearer of dignity, an end in itself, never just a means?¹⁴

My advice is that we should not take these terms—communitarianism, individualism, modernity, naturalism, tradition, egalitarianism, hierarchy, authority, democracy, and others like them—as if their meaning were immediately clear and obvious. We have to qualify them. The terms I have just listed above—and others like liberalism, republicanism, liberty, and justice—can be defined in many ways. Individualism, to take an example that involves this book directly, can signify either a good or a bad thing. Generally speaking, individualism can be construed as the process of becoming aware of one’s rights—the harbinger of modern autonomy. Or it can be seen as the process of one’s losing position in the real community—the signal of social atomism, alienation, and the disintegration of noncommercial neighborhood networks. Individualism can either enforce or weaken the creation of one’s identity. The problem is that treating these terms as concepts or, worse, as quasi-scientific notions, might prevent a detailed discussion of the issues raised by the terms themselves.

All the explanatory terms I have listed above, as well as, of course, others that occur in the book, are treated as metaphors—metaphors and descriptors that do not refer to an absolute. They do not reveal the true nature of a phenomenon. We can never discover, for instance, what are the constants beneath the words individualism, justice, liberty, democracy, modernity, tradition, and so forth. There are no constants in history. Such metaphors should better be understood as containers whose content and meaning have to be drawn each time from the context. Therefore, to become meaningful, the question should take a form such as this: what does individualism (or justice, modernity, and so on) mean, in this situation? What did it mean for Jefferson?¹⁵

Aware that I am employing metaphors and descriptors, not scientific concepts, the discourse on Jefferson’s philosophical anthropology will traverse three progressive stages. In chapter 1, I examine the proper meaning and the limits of Jefferson’s modernity. This allows us to appreciate the exact nature of his individualism, the way he broke with tradition while retaining elements of the past wisdom. Specifically, he never conceived of individuals as separated from a nature