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5 Impossibility & Despondency Jefferson’s language of satisfaction, we have seen, was a radical strategy to resist the burden that the Enlightenment imposed on its adepts. More interesting , at least for those readers who look for tension and conflict, he also made frequent use of the languages of projection and possibility, and even with that of anxiety and precariousness. Whoever relies on the heart and hope by living in the continuous anticipation of a better future likely becomes prey to anxieties, fears, tremors of reservation, confusions, forebodings, and a sense of threat. As an enlightened traveler, he confronted limits, and negativity had always been acknowledged in his realistic platform. The Enlightenment mission was itself accompanied by the awareness of specific forms of darkness and negativity. In this chapter, negativity is still the central character of the story (as in the previous two chapters), but here the subject goes beyond anxiety, the negativity that haunts one’s expectations as an ominous possibility. An enlightened realism like Jefferson’s was also consistent with—and to a certain extent called for—a definitive and absolute negativity and a sense of impossibility . In the previous chapter, negativity takes the form of both natural and historical necessity. We are here concerned with the sense of impossibility, which is the psychological aspect of necessity, and with those reactions that necessity routinely triggers in people’s mind. Impossibility, in other words, is necessity described a parte subjecti. Jefferson was an experienced traveler who spoke several languages. There is no wonder that under certain conditions he was inclined to jettison hope. Quite often, his heart was muted. Jefferson confronted limits in a very radical way, going beyond the languages of hope, activism, and meliorism. Jefferson’s philosophy of the Enlightenment did not yield to a delusive self-confidence both because it took into consideration the possibility of failure and, also, because it was familiar with the certainty that human life is limited, that as such it is open to an abyss and to a realm of impossibilities. Jefferson’s philosophy was not one of naïveté in that it allowed for both a strong sense of hope (and anxiety) and, in addition, for the acceptance of an essential powerlessness. • • • • 2 Impossibility & Despondency 115 Being limited, human hopes, endeavors, and aspirations have by definition a contour, and something—an overwhelming something—must always lie out of their reach. Jefferson knew that the realm of impossibilities, so to speak, casts its lethal shadow on everything that is human. Not that he delved into that realm as if he were a speculative philosopher and an American Schopenhauer. If he did so in the solitude of his alcove in Monticello, he left no trace in his writings . Nevertheless, he was a very perceptive human being, and the historian can safely surmise that he acutely sensed the impossibility of all his projects. The paralyzing effects that such a realm triggered on his ideas and discourses are quite visible. These effects are evident, albeit the realm from which they spring never became the object of Jefferson’s direct speculation. The aim of this chapter is to uphold the hypothesis that the realm of impossibilities was an important presence in Jefferson’s enlightened philosophy. By this expression I mean a negativity lying beyond human reach and, correspondingly , an appalling ocean that humans can neither conquer nor control. Jefferson had experience of this eerie realm, and its repeated intrusions can be inferred by the effect—despondency—it triggered. It was the realm of impossibilities , as we have seen, that prompted a dogged, almost desperate commitment to projects. Optimism qua hope was for Jefferson a virtuous response, a compensatory activism aimed at resisting precariousness and the specters of despondency. Occasionally, as we have also seen, he compensated with a form of precritical boldness of rhetoric. But the realm of impossibilities also prompted a deep-rooted hopelessness. • • • Jefferson responded to impossibility in quite different terms than did, for instance , his long-standing friend John Adams. Not surprisingly, indeed, given the huge difference between the two men. Often alleged to suffer from bad temper and even from mental instability, Adams nurtured very negative feelings about the character of both the American people and the human race at large. He often made very “existentialist” and anti-Jeffersonian reflections on the emptiness of human life. Let me just quote a famous example: “After all, What is human life? A Vapour, a Fog, a Dew, a Cloud a Blossom a flower, a...

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