Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History

Part I: Time

PART I TIME Thomas Jefferson’s thinking was characterized by the remnants of an ageold dualism of time and eternity that had begun to disintegrate. In his eighteenth-century universe, secular time tended to expand, at the expense ofeternity,bothintothepastandintothefuture:ontheonehand,theworld became older as the date of the Creation was located in an increasingly remote past; on the other hand, the secular future of mankind became the subject of a growing number of literary, philosophical, and political reflections . In the process, the contrast between time and a “timeless” eternity tended to fade, taking the form of two different secular concepts of time. These two “times” in the transitional thinking of Jefferson and his contemporaries —a universal time of natural laws and a particular time of human perceptions and actions—are the subject of the following three chapters. The secularization, or “temporalization,”1 of eternity was condensed in the conception of an absolute time existing in its own right: Isaac Newton’s “absolute, true and mathematical time,” which, according to his muchcriticized definition, “of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”2 This absolute time was assumed to be universal (unrelated to sensible objects and their position in space) and homogeneous (flowing at a constant rate). It existed in “its own nature,” as a reality independent from human perception. Newtonian absolute time can be understood, to a certain extent, as a secularization of traditional concepts of eternity. Positively defined as an everlasting duration, absolute time, in the cautious arguments of Newton and his students, was the emanation of a God who had ceased to reside “above” or “outside” time. God’s 22 Time existence was no longer timelessly eternal, but became sempiternal, always present in the infinite, universal, and equable flow of absolute time.3 Newton assumed that human time perception was approximative. He defined two different concepts of time: apart from absolute time, there was also a “relative, apparent and common time.” If absolute time was the secularization of eternity, this relative time was a secularization of traditional concepts of a “merely” human time, a temporality dominated by fortune and chance, by chaotic human actions and limited human perceptions . Unlike Newton’s mathematical absolute time, relative time was measurable by the senses. In his words, relative time was “some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.”4 For Newton, relative time was useful in everyday concerns but should not be the standard in natural philosophy. In retrospect, that this empirical thinker held such an attitude might seem surprising, but Newton was still caught up in a complex theological argument . Although his intellectual heirs among later natural scientists would separate absolute time from theological questions,5 Newton considered the knowledge of his quasi-divine absolute time to be mediate and deductive rather than inductive: natural philosophers were supposed (rationally) to deduce the existence of absolute time from absolute movement, which in turn they had to deduce from their comparisons of the relative movements they (sensorially) perceived. Thus, their observations could approach, but never quite reach, the measure of absolute time. The slowly dissolving Newtonian dualism of absolute and relative time and the approximative empiricism that resulted from it provided the structure of many eighteenth-century reflections on temporality. Newton’s attempts to come to terms with the aporia of objective time measurement created new tensions that eventually inspired Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787). Kant’s arguments put an end, in the long run, to theapproximativecharacteroftheEnlightenmentbyunitingcrucialaspects of Newton’s two concepts within a single definition of time as a pure form of intuition that was at once empirically real and transcendentally ideal. Jefferson , of course, never studied Kant’s Critique and did not think of allowing time the status of a formal a priori condition of all appearances.6 While his reflections on temporality were already characterized by the problems leading up to Kant’s transcendental idealism, they ultimately failed to move beyond the pattern of absolute and relative time. In his version of a Newtonian empiricism, Jefferson continued to assume the existence of an absolute and 23 Time homogeneous “flow” of time according to universal natural laws, while simultaneously understanding human time perception as relative, heterogeneous ,andatbestleadingtoanapproximativeestimateofabsolutetime. To be sure, the details...