Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology

Introduction

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 2 nature’s man 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 lateeighteenth -century enlightened Virginian. At the same time, it is a discourse...