Zen Judaism: For You a Little Enlightenment

Transcription

>> Lecturer: All right, let's get started. I want to thank those of you who were able to come during for the last session for coming. It would have been a little odd to be here and talking just to the chairs. And not only that, everyone who was here had good things to say. So I'm very grateful for you for making the time. Those of you who had a conflict or weren't able to attend, we are going to try to do something for you. As you know, the class is being taped, and so we're going to attempt to stream it from Blackboard sometime later this week for ten days or two weeks. So those of you who weren't able to see it will probably be able to see it if you wish. Personally, I think since I said it was about Edwards and he was a crucial figure for the course and he tied together the first part of the course and the second part of the course, I'd watch it. But in any case, we'll let you know as soon as that's available. And it will be for a limited time only. So you should strike while the iron is hot, as it were. Okay, so I'll let you know about that later on in the week as soon as we sort out the tech things. Okay, I wanted to remind us we're talking about the Enlightenment. If it's 2:00 o'clock, this must be the Enlightenment. Now we're back in the Enlightenment. And these are some of the things we laid out as principles of the Enlightenment. During the last hour, I was talking about Edwards as somebody who's caught on the cusp of the Enlightenment. He's trying to preserve the principles of old-time Calvinism, but he's very drawn to the kind of new intellectual technology I said that Locke is using -- John Locke -- and thinking about empirical philosophy and the importance of reason. Edwards is trying to understand the appeal of that. He's trying to figure out a way to harness its power without giving up everything that he believes is important in religious terms. So some of the doctrines that come along with the Enlightenment, which seem to be antithetical to any kind of Calvinism, starting with that top one -- the natural goodness of human beings, right? At the end of the hour before we looked at that sermon, "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God," which basically is making absolutely the counter argument: human beings are naturally good or if they were, they weren't for very long after the fall. Everyone is damned to hell and is only hanging by a slender thread with flames licking up all around it. It's only by God's sufferance that you don't drop into hell right now. And who knows? You fall asleep, you may not wake up in a good place. Perfection is the idea. The Enlightenment believes in the perfectibility of the human race and in part is because they say human beings have souls, they have divine reason, God gave us a lot of good stuff and we should use it. And as a result of that, if we all have some of God in us, the logic would go, we should all be equal. We're equal before the law. We have the right to liberty. There should be various things that would flow from that, the ideas of toleration brotherhood, and an emphasis on progress. Human beings' ability to make progress by applying reason and therefore an emphasis on science. All of these things get associated with this guy, with Benjamin Franklin, who is often is pointed to as the absolute embodiment of Enlightenment principles in the Early National Period. And something I said last time, we really ought to remember that this country is founded in a moment of enlightenment, of the Enlightenment. It comes out of the Enlightenment, as I think we will see a little bit maybe toward the end of hour, there are some downsides to that as well. These are the good things that are supposed to come with enlightenment. There are some less good things. Toni Morrison refers to the Enlightenment as the "age of scientific racism," for example. And that's only one of the things we'll talk about, in which there may be some limitations to Enlightenment thought. And that will become important to some of the writers that we're talking about. Franklin mostly lives in the light side of the Enlightenment, or at least presents himself that way. But again, I want to stress that he and Edwards are almost exact contemporaries. Edwards would be a senior and Franklin would be a freshman if they were in college together. But basically once you get out of college, such differences make not so much difference. So they're really contemporaries. Edwards dies young as a result of failed smallpox inoculation or an inoculation that caused him to get it and die of it. Franklin lives a long life, and his life basically spans the 18th century. So they both are men who are caught in, you might say, the interplay of larger cultural forces. And I suggested in the last hour and will suggest again that now I'll say the pairing of these two thinkers is really an excellent way of understanding the interplay of dominant, residual, and emergent cultures. There was a dominant consensus in the religious intellectual life of the Americas in the north, in and around Massachusetts, Boston, even down toward New York, and beyond. Which oriented itself around Calvinism -- that's the story of the Puritan origins of the American self. Edwards wants to preserve that. He comes from a very orthodox family. He's even more orthodox than his grandfather, who was a preacher. And he's trying to figure out a way to diffuse the threat that the Enlightenment poses, although you've got to imagine given the way in he writes and the way he's so clearly drawn to the principles of the Enlightenment and to what almost looked to us like proto-Romantic aesthetics. You got to imagine that he's thinking that this is a kind of inevitability to the triumph of Enlightenment thought, this kind of thinking that will place human beings at the center of what matters, rather than spiritual life or God. The drama of the West becomes the drama of the individual consciousness, rather than man's and woman's relation to God. Franklin's got a different way of mixing these things into a balance. He's interested -- drawn to -- the principles of Enlightenment. But he understands that what is becoming residual, the principles of Calvinism and religion, still exert a powerful force. So he wants to find a way to diffuse those, appropriate those, channel the energies that might be associated with those towards of the direction of Enlightenment. There was a moment in the letter to Benjamin Coleman, the letter that Edwards writes to another minister, describing the revivals in North Hampton that indicates something of the way in the religion. He talks about this period of revival and says that in some sense, "people in other towns kind of ridiculed us." And so before there was a big period of revival afterwards. And so you see that there's a sense in which the Enlightenment is starting to give sway to something else. So as we think about Franklin, I want us to -- and as you look at his prose, I want you to ask yourself these questions: In what ways does Franklin show himself in the way that he writes to be a man of the Enlightenment? If the two of them are contemporaries, roughly speaking, what is it that he shares with Edwards? What strategies of representation even might he share with Edwards? But then also, how is he different? And I think we would want to locate the difference in his at attitudes towards Christian religion. There's a certain way which in which for Franklin the use of Christianity is not deeply felt, but is almost a rhetorical engagement. He needs to show himself in certain moments to perform religion. At one point that we'll look at he talks about the importance of appearance even more so than reality. So there's a certain way in which he has to give a religious performance. But how does he make use of that? We'll look at some particular lines from the autobiography that show us the way in which he actually attempts, through language, destabilize a religious consensus. And then one of the abiding themes we've had has been the relationship between the individual and community or society, and the individual and God. And we might think about "individualism" as a word that is not even coined yet. Individualism [inaudible] Europe right in around the time of the end of Franklin's life. We'll talk about this again later on. But it doesn't even get used by Emerson -- Emerson, who's supposed to be the great prophet of American Individualism doesn't have the term to use. He talks about self-reliance. It's only later after that famous essay is published that it's in enough currency that he actually refers to it in a piece called "New England Reformers." It comes into the American parlance probably through the translation of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, where the translator has to apologize for it. He says it's an ugly word, but we don't have another word that expresses exactly that idea. So individualism is a new idea and it accompanies the Enlightenment. Again, that shifting the drama of the West, if we could put it in those terms, onto the individual away from God or the church or other larger communal forms. So remember the balance that Winthrop was trying to strike. He understands that there are energies that we later called individualism, energies around the individual, and economic imperatives, and the desire to have certain kind of material prosperity, economic opportunity, as well religious freedom. He tries to harness those, to subordinate those to a community. And remember, we talked about the ways in which the symbol that he chooses, "The City on the Hill" eventually gets recycled later on by Ronald Reagan and the meanings, the relationship between the individual and the community, are flipped around. You can't control how your symbols are going to work later on in culture. And that's one of the things that happened. Reagan reverses that attitude towards individual. Where does Reagan get it? A lot of it has roots in Franklinian thought, Franklin's idea about prosperity. And so I'll try to get at some of those. So we and to think about the ways in which, you might say as one sign of the change from Calvinist modes of thinking to Enlightenment modes of thinking, we can locate a set of attitudes about the place that the individual holds, whether individualism itself as a kind of new idea is something that's being denigrated or celebrated. All right. There's a way in which we might think of Franklin's autobiography as a secular version of a very famous text in early America, which is John Bunyan's Pilgrims' Progress, his allegory. Pilgrim's Progress. This is from the ninth edition. That's actually Bunyan himself figured as the sleeper. Some people often mistake this for a medieval text. It's not a medieval text. It's a 17th century text that draws on the medieval trope of the dream vision. So it starts off as a dream vision -- I think I brought some, yeah. "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den , and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back." And all of the biblical citations. Should remind you of Wigglesworth or even Winthrop. "I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?" And of course as this goes on, this guy, the dreamer, the guy that he sees turns out to be the protagonist of this Pilgrim's Progress. His name is Christian, with a capital "C." Anybody have a sense of what the great burden on his back might be? What's the name of the backpack? That would be sin, the burden of sin on your back. He's probably reading the Bible and looking at it and thinking, "Not good, not good, not good. What am I going to do to be saved?" And he meets another guy who has a name that begins with a capital "E," Evangelist. And Evangelist says go out into the world and go seek the celestial city, which he does. And along the way to the celestial city -- we'll talk about this more when we get to Hawthorne -- it's one of the most famous allegories in the English language and he meets all these people. They have various names like "Help" or "Despair" or "Sloth" and "Anger." And he meets all these people. And then eventually it's an allegory of the Christian life. It's really a sermon by other means. This, however, is a kind of precursor for Franklin. This book, Pilgrim's Progress was in almost every household in New England by the time that Franklin is writing. And so there's a certain way in which his whole career, and particularly the autobiography, is designed to resonate with this, to provide almost a kind of secular version of Bunyan's prose allegory, Pilgrim's Progress. Pilgrim makes a difficult journey. He has doubts, he's propped up, he has help, he finally makes it to the celestial city. Franklin also is recounting for us a progress, his own progress. But I think you would see, if you compare the two texts, not only are they very stylistically different, there's a way in which Franklin's writing is not an allegory per se. But I want you to understand that it has some affinities with allegory. If an allegory comes from Greek words that mean "that which speaks other than openly," remember how allegory works. I mean, it's the story of a guy named Christian who's looking for the celestial city. So you can read it as kind of an adventure story, but really what it is is a sermon about the progress of the Christian life. So the characters map onto ideas and values. Franklin isn't doing that, but he does present himself as a representative person. So he's writing an autobiography. And you think about why it is that you write autobiographies. And in the pattern of autobiography in the West perhaps comes from before this back to maybe St. Augustine. So when you read Augustine's autobiography, his conversion narrative, you'd say that in some sense sets the pattern for autobiographical writing in the West. And therefore, an autobiography is going to be a form of conversion narrative. Now, it doesn't mean you have to have a religious conversion necessarily and Franklin actually doesn't. It does mean that at least one act of conversion has to take place. You have to go from being -- you have to turn into author self and you have to re-render yourself as character self. So you have to have that conversion from where you're living your story to being able to talk about it. When you talk about it, you have to recreate yourself as a character. And I think you can see that Franklin very consciously does that in the course of it. So it does have affinities with a kind of spiritual tradition. It does have affinities with the idea of the representative nature of autobiography. I'm telling you this why? Well, why did Mary Rowlandson tell her story? So that you could learn something from it. Although you might say what Franklin would have you learn from his life is very different than what Rowlandson would have you learn. Or if you want to think about it in a slightly different way, you might say that Franklin's entire autobiography picks up on something that we thought of as a kind of subtext -- an almost elicit subtext in Rowlandson's narrative. You remember we talked about the way in which the natives start to have names and almost personalities once she figures out she can barter with them. Once they become economic agents, once she can engage in relations of contract with them, all of a sudden, they become people -- briefly, and then of course when she's [inaudible], shuts down and she has to go back to the doctrinaire of explanations of the things. So Franklin understands the power of economy to make a person. And that's one of the things that animates his autobiography. So Franklin's autobiography is a kind of Pilgrim's Progress, but what it really is is a kind of [inaudible] perfectionism, the idea of being able to perfect yourself. And he goes, he tells you what programs that he has in the first couple of books of the autobiography that he has for this. But really, there's almost a kind of process of trial and error through which he engages in this perfectionism. Now, to give you a sense of the way his autobiography works, I want you to take a look at one little passage here. This is on the bottom of page 509, part one of the autobiography. Now you'll notice that -- I mean, he uses many of the same kind of devices that we would see in Taylor and Edwards, even in Bunyan. This isn't a really good paragraph for that. But the use of capital letters to highlight words is something that Franklin also is making use of. But he doesn't have the same kind of religious investment in them. Bottom of 509: "I grew convinced that truth, sincerity, and integrity" -- and don't ask me why they're capitalized and italicized. I don't know. Super-important. "Truth, sincerity, and integrity." It sounds like the Superman motto. "In dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life. And I formed written resolutions which still remain in my journal book to practice them ever while I live." And here's a sentence I want you to pay attention to: "Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such." Okay, so we're talking about what I said with Locke, that revelation is one way the getting the truth. Franklin downgrades it. "Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such, but I entertained an opinion" -- putting himself front and center -- "that those certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it or good because it commanded them" -- revelation, that is -- "yet probably those actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us or commanded because they were beneficial to us in their own natures all the circumstances of things considered." Now again, if you read this in tandem with "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" you'll see that that sermon is making the opposite case. It's "God's sovereignty, God's sovereignty, God's sovereignty, stupid. Only God's sovereignty." God can will whatever He wants and that's the way it is. That would be the same line of argument that would say, "actually there's nothing particular about the truth, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God just picked that one." It could have been some other tree, a tree of the knowledge of 3D special effects that you weren't allowed to do. But no, he picked that one. Other people like Franklin would say, "No, I don't think so. I think there was something special about good and evil, and that in fact, there's a reason for it being that particular one." So it depends on how far you want to push the God's sovereignty argument. Franklin wants to undo that argument. So revelation has no weight with him as such. But he's not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Again, you might say he sees that if something has a long-standing tradition, it may have started out as "Fiat: Revelation do it because we say so" or it says so, or he says so, or whatever says so. He said, "But maybe there actually is some good common sense behind that." So he first destabilizes the authority of revelation, and then look what he does here. He says, "And this persuasion, with the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian angel, or accidental favorable circumstances and situations or all together preserve me through this dangerous time of youth and the hazardous situations I was sometimes in among strangers, remote from the eye in advice from my father without any willful gross immorality or injustice that might have been expected from my want of religion. I say willful because the circumstances I have mentioned had something of necessity in them from my youth, inexperience and the knavery of others. I had therefore a tolerable character to begin the world with; I valued it properly, and determined to preserve it." I want you to look at that sentence. "This persuasion with the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian angel, or accidental favorable circumstances in situations are all together preserved me without any willful gross immorality or injustice that might be expected from my want of religion." So what is it that preserves him from the "willful gross immorality that might have been expected" from his want of religion? What does he say preserves him? >> Persuasion. >> Lecturer: What's that? >> Persuasion. >> Lecturer: Well, the persuasion that he has is from the previous sentence. It's the idea that revelation -- he's persuaded that his opinion is the same thing. His idea that revelation didn't have any weight, but it might have some beneficial -- if you think about what it's telling you to do, maybe it is a good reason it's telling it. It's kind of like when your mom says, "Because I said so," but actually she probably has your best interest at heart. So you think, "Okay, Mom really is being kind of a pain, but nevertheless she's probably got my best interest at heart and there's a good reason for this." Not always, but sometimes. I'm just asking you to repeat what he says, and then I'm going to ask you to think about how he says what he says. So what does he say? It's like multiple choice. Yeah? >> [Inaudible] Providence and guardian angels, that kind of -- >> Lecturer: Okay. And the third thing? >> Favorable circumstances. >> Lecturer: What kind of favorable circumstances? >> Oh -- accidental. [Inaudible] circumstances. >> Lecturer: And what's choice D? We love choice D, right? It's all of the above. Okay. Now if you are this guy, what are you going to say about that? >> That it's only got Providence that would be guiding you through life. >> Lecturer: Exactly. It's only going to be God's Providence that's guiding you through life. What do you need the other two things for? Or the other three choices? Just God's Providence, right? That's how he would write that sentence. "The kind hand of Providence preserve me without any willful gross immorality or injustice." End of story. What's the effect of adding the other two things, even if we want to include the third choice, the three things? Yeah? >> [ Inaudible ] >> Lecturer: Is it individualistic? What does he actually say? I mean, where's the agency in there? So if you're saying it's individualistic, it's like, "yes, you make your own luck." He doesn't quite say that, although he says it in other places, but he doesn't quite say that here. No. He says "Providence, or some guardian angel, or accidental favorable circumstances and situations." Now, how compatible is "accidental favorable circumstances and situations" with the idea of Providence? >> Is he saying fate as opposed to Providence? >> Lecturer: I don't know, did he say fate? >> I don't know. >> Lecturer: "Accidental" means what? >> Not because of Providence. >> Lecturer: Not because of Providence. Accidental means not by intention, not planned. Providence means it's all planned, all intention. He's gone. He has a triptych of three phrases, and the first and the third are absolutely opposite to one another and shouldn't be in the same sentence together -- not if you had any strong conviction about the first thing. How does he get to it syntactically? He puts in a middle term, which is somewhat compatible with Providence. "Providence or guardian angel." Now think about that. My guardian angel. Angel, okay that's good. We're down with angel and the Providence thing, that's good. But my guardian angel? What's that? >> That's individualistic. >> Lecturer: That's sort of individualistic in so far as you might say, "Okay, you have a particular guardian angel looking over you," but -- so there are actions the guardian angel is protecting you. Think about It's a Wonderful Life. Clarence comes down, has to make this guy not commit suicide. Yes. But think about that: that's already in this moment something from pop culture. I mean, it's not religion reference to talk about a guardian angel in that way. But it's compatible with Providence. So you go from Providence, you slide over to guardian angel, and then from guardian angel it's just a hop skip and a jump to "or accidental favorable circumstances." So we've moved very quickly from Providence or not Providence at all. And to say "or all of the above." See what he's done, he's given something for everybody in a kind of common sense, low style that you find it hard to disagree with and then he says, "or whatever." But the effect of that "or whatever" is to radically undermine the first term. So there's a sense in which you can see in this passage all of Franklin's technique: he kowtows to religious belief; he attempts to be compatible with it; but by the end, in this case it's through simple syntax and the creation of association he has completely undone the reasoning underneath it, right? To say "Providence or this or that" as if all things were equal means that somehow Providence is just as culturally weighty or as religiously weighty as accidental favorable circumstances? Not what Edwards would do. So I want you to see that Franklin is actually a very careful stylist. This autobiography is a rhetorical performance. And he knows he is performing for us. And I think that's one of the things that we want to bear in mind. In terms of Franklin's own religious beliefs, he is, you might say the religious equivalent of someone like John Locke. The kind of belief that he has is usually identified with what's called "deism" -- I don't think I brought it today -- which is basically a belief in God but established by reason and by evidence, most notably the evidence is usually the argument according to design, that there are too many things about the world that seem to be designed for there not to have been a maker, but not on the basis of any special information, not on the basis of revelation. The revealed religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam, they all are based on a scripture that's revealed from God to a prophet. He doesn't believe in the efficacy or the importance of revelation, but he does believe there's a God and he believes you can see the workings of God out there in the world. Deism is that broad position; it has lots of different philosophical forms. It's almost always rationalistic you could say. It depends on the use of reason, but it can veer very close to atheism to think there's a kind of weak principle of -- I don't know. If you believed in The Force as opposed to God, you'd probably be very close to one of the positions that's out there that was called deist. The archetypal deist is probably Voltaire. Voltaire believed that God's evidence could, in fact, be proved by arguments about cosmology and the design of the universe. But he didn't believe in the idea of Providence. So in this he squares with. There's no plan, but there seems to be a kinds of design and you can see it in what Voltaire would have called "natural religion." And as a result of that, Voltaire was very committed to a lot of these principles here: toleration, brotherhood, progress, equality. He thought that religious impulses were served best if they were directed towards that. So that's where Franklin -- Franklin is a deist, and you can see it even in that little passage, the way in which he is destabilizing the idea of revelation. Now he's also a printer, right? So you have to understand that in comparison to Thomas Jefferson, whom I'm praying we're going to get to, Thomas Jefferson was an aristocrat or the closest thing we had to it in the Early National Period. I mean, he came a wealthy family, he was a gentleman farmer, college was his birthright just like John Adams, too. They were patricians. Not Franklin. Franklin had humble origins, although you can see at the beginning of the autobiography is -- and this will become important to us later on -- it's addressed to his son. It's about the importance of those humble origins as a kind of pattern. So at the very beginning, this is on page 473, he talks about the way in which he has "emerged from poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred." But he celebrates that because by the time he's writing this, he's a celebrity -- a diplomat, a man of science, a member of the Royal Academy. He's the ultimate self-made man and seen as that. So it's a story about material success, paving the way for other kinds of success. And yet he can point to his family. His family is a little bit obscure, but it's still there for him, not always in ways that he likes, but it's there. This will be for us contrasted to experience of Frederick Douglass, who in some sense out-Franklins Franklin because he can't even point to origins as humble as these. So Franklin in some sense bears out the kind of argument that Jefferson makes about merit. Remember this quote from last week? "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of hopes for others." Franklin's autobiography was also meant to be the ground of hope for others. It showed you that you could take humble origins and transform them into something that's far from humble because the early republic was going to be based primarily on the concept of merit. So a lot of people who were poor took heart from reading Franklin's stuff. And he writes explicitly about the idea of achieving wealth. There's one pamphlet that's given to you in the Norton, which is called The Way to Wealth. Let's take a look at it. It's on 451. It's a preface to one -- it's separate but it's published 1757. It's a very successful thing. It's kind of addendum to his Poor Richard's Almanac in which Franklin adopts the persona of an elderly minister, Poor Richard, and then produces this stuff. This is widely translated. By the end of the century, by the end of Franklin's life, it's been translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Chinese, Hungarian, Russian, Welsh, Gaelic, and Catalan. And there are ten printings in Italian alone. So a lot of people are reading this. It's about 100 maxims or so delivered by this elderly speaker named Father Abraham. It resembles a sermon. So I want you to see if you look at this, you will see that there are ways in which he is drawing on the sermonic form. And yet, he's giving a rather anti-Calvinist lesson. For example, what would John Winthrop or Jonathan Edwards say about this on the bottom of 453? He's talking about maxims. "And again, the eye of master will do more work than both his hands; and again, want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge; and again, not to oversee workmen is to leave them your purse open." And then he says this, "Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the Almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it." I mean, think about that. That's an even more open and slightly jokey way of talking about his difference from Calvinism. "Men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it." I mean, it's a pun on faith. We're not talking about divine faith; we're talking about faith in other human beings. But even then, compare that sentiment to John Winthrop at the end of A Model of Christian Charity, "We must be knit together in this work as one, make others' cares our own," right? That vision of community? Not so much for Franklin. Or how about this one? Bottom of 452. "Industry need not wish, as poor Richard says, that he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains without pains; then help hands for I have no lands, or if I have, they are smartly taxed." I mean, it's kind of witty common sensical joking thing. He's trying to write prose that will get you to agree, even though he's giving you a kind of mock sermon that in many senses is turning a lot of well-received religious wisdom on its head. Or this one: "God helps them that help themselves." Famous maxim. Some of you who have been in one of my conwest courses might remember a piece by the environmentalist and Christian, Bill McKibben, who talks about the fate of Bible religion in the United States. And it's called the Christian paradox. And it asks why the United States is by profession the most Christian nation in the world, so how come it's the least among the least Christian by its actions, if you look at things like giving to charity, and providing healthcare, and doing all these other things. And he starts the article by asking -- I think he cites a poll in which people are asked: Is this in the Bible? And the majority say yes. It's not. It's from Franklin. So that has a larger point. I mean, again you think about what happens in culture, something like this. Franklin makes use of the sermonic form. He gives you this maxim, which is really fairly anti-Christian in a sense. And it somehow becomes associated with mainstream Christianity in the United States. I guess be careful what you wish for. I don't know, maybe Franklin would actually say that was a poison pill that will bear fruit later on. In any case, this is an example of the way in which Franklin is using the sermonic form for these kinds of -- to basically produce a set of meanings that are other than -- strictly speaking -- Calvinist. All right, let's take a look at couple of other things because I want to show you just some key moments in this, so that you can understand how it works as a whole. I talked a little bit about it as a rhetorical performance. And he actually does talk about performance here. Take a look at the middle of 515. So okay, so he's had to apprentice himself, but he manages to get out of his apprenticeship and he eventually opens a stationer's shop. He says here, "I had in it blanks of all sorts, the correctest that ever appeared among us, being assisted in that by my friend Breintnal. I had also paper, parchment, etc. I now began gradually to pay off the debt I was under for the printing-house. In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances of the contrary. I dressed plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting; a book, indeed, sometimes debauched me from my work, but that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal; and, to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom; others proposed supplying me with books, and I went on swimmingly." Look at the prose, a kind of nice neo-Classical [inaudible] balanced prose and then "I went on swimmingly." Franklin is always in some sense performing. He gives you sort of what you expect and then he brings you up short. But think about it here: His commitment is to what? The reality of all these things? Not so much, although that's nice but it's to the appearance of it. He needs to cultivate a reputation. And one of the things to say about that is he is aware, therefore, that he is performing for people in his life. And that's the way he represents it. But the other thing I want to suggest to you is that he is aware that he is performing for you, the reader or putatively, his son. And therefore he is able to step back at certain moments and think about the story as almost a critic would or in this particular case, as a printer would. And so he has a metaphor that's linked to the idea of perfectionism that comes from the printing trade. And that's the metaphor of the erratum, the defective font of type. If you go to the library, and I don't know how late this would be, you might see bound into it there's a slip of paper that says "errata" on it. This is because they had found some things that were wrong with it and they couldn't reprint that printing, so they slip in a sheet of errors. "Erratum" is Latin singular for "error," "errata" is the plural. [ Inaudible ] You still find that in books at the library. So printers would do that, they would come up with a list of those things. And then when they reset the plate later on, they would pull out the defective font of type or errors and plug new ones back in and to create a new edition. So this idea of the erratum becomes for Franklin a kind of governing metaphor for his life. Let's take a look at the middle of 485. I think that's the first time that it comes up. He's talking about the printing house. And at the bottom, about six lines up from the bottom of the first paragraph on 485. He says, "At length a fresh difference arising between my brother and me, I took upon me to assert my freedom, presuming that he would not venture to produce new indentures. It was not fair in me to take this advantage, and this I therefore reckon one of the first errata of my life; but the unfairness of it weighed little with me, when under the impressions of resentment for the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me, though he was otherwise not an ill-natured man. Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking." So that's the first time he talked about the erratum. Take a little bit further on and you'll see that this recurs as a motif. Page 494 he talks about he had some care of money from Vernon and he misuses it. First full paragraph on 494. "The breaking into this money of Vernon's was one of the first great errata of my life; and this affair showed that my father was not much out in his judgment when he supposed me too young to manage business of importance." Or turn the page. The first paragraph on 496 tells us, "I had made some courtship during this time to Miss Read. I had great respect and affection for her and had some reason to believe she had the same for me; but, as I was about to take a long voyage, and we were both very young, only a little above eighteen, it was thought most prudent by her mother to prevent our going out too far at present, as a marriage, if it was to take place, would be more convenient after my return, when I should be, as I expected, set up in my business." But a few pages later it doesn't turn out that way. Take a look at the bottom of 499. He's with his friend Ralph. And it's kind of like a bad buddy movie, right? "I immediately got into work at Palmer's, then a famous printing-house in Bartholomew Close, and here I continued near a year. I was pretty diligent, but spent with Ralph a good deal of my earnings in going to plays and other places of amusement. We had together consumed all my pistoles, and now just rubbed on from hand to mouth. He seemed quite to forget his wife and child, and I, by degrees, my engagements with Miss Read, to whom I never wrote more than one letter, and that was to let her know I was not likely soon to return. This was another of the great errata of my life, which I should wish to correct if I were to live it over again. In fact, by our expenses, I was constantly kept unable to pay my passage." You see the next paragraph there's another errata. It continues for a while. The courtship with Miss Read is one of the errata that he is able to correct, as is the repaying of Vernon. He repays Vernon on page 513. And on page 517 we find that when he comes back, he does get together with Miss Read again. So there is a way in which he is able to correct some of these errors that he's made actually in his life. But I want to suggest to you is that in writing the autobiography, he is able to correct all of the errors because in the act of writing them down, and owning up to the mistake, and pointing them out as errors, he has done the equivalent of slipping in that piece of paper that would be an error slip, the errata slip. He's having his cake and eating it, too, by stepping back and saying, "Character Ben Franklin made these mistakes and now, I, author Ben Franklin wish to change them," he's able to suggest to you the way that you should properly behave. And you know, in fact, that his life has worked out okay. So he reaffirms the entire process of being able to correct error in your life. You don't have to be perfect, in other words, you just have to aspire to be perfect or you aspire to what we might call "perfectionism." And so this metaphor of the erratum becomes his way of talking about how you can, if it's possible at any time to identify these faults, you can remedy them. Later on in the second part, he does a little bit more to talk about some of his actual attempts to promote this idea of perfectionism. And I just wanted to show you one example of this. This is on page 526. He talks about what he calls "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection." He says, "I wish to live without committing any fault at any time. I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew or thought I knew what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other." This, by the way, is his alternative to going to church. He goes to church and he's not satisfied with what he hears. So he's individualistic, he says, "I'll make up my own precepts. I'll make up my own conduct manual. It will serve me better." And so you can look at what the virtues and precepts are. You can see that there is some affinity to the Puritan's idea of self-denial, or abnegation, of even a kind of calling. But his calling is almost entirely material. There's a sense in which if he perfects his material life and is successful, he will be able to raise a family, he will be able to then even think beyond the family, to the good of human kind, to the good of his country, all of that stuff. So the 12 virtues that he gives us here plus the baker's dozen, the 13th, are derived from classical and Christian traditions both. And again, there's a certain kind of common sense or practically that he tries to get across. Oh, I don't know. My favorite one I suppose is Chastity, number 12: "Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation." I mean, that's not what the Puritans would say. There's other reasons not to do that. So what I want to suggest to you is there are certain ways in which one of the things he's really doing is kind of reversing the Puritan ethos. And I think that's an important way in which he's sort of using religious forms against themselves to reverse the generally larger Puritan ethos behind it. One other thing about Franklin -- this comes from a piece called "Information for Those Who Would Remove." It's from 1784, so I think it's around the same time as that Jefferson quote that I showed you. It's in 465 of your text. But if you look at it, you can see the logic here taken out of Franklin's own life and applied to kind of larger national terms. "Tolerably good workmen in any of those mechanic arts are sure to find employ," -- here in the United States -- "and to be well paid for their work, there being no restraints preventing strangers from exercising any art they understand, nor any permission necessary. If they are poor, they begin first as servants or journeymen; -- as he did, as a kind of apprentice -- "if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters," -- as he did, he made himself sober, industrious, and frugal -- "establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respectable citizens." [Inaudible], but back to Reagan quote where you start with the individual, then you move out families, neighborhoods, communities, our nation. It's the same kind of logic here. You radiate outwards. "Also, persons of moderate fortunes and capitals, who, having a large number of children to provide for as desirous of bringing them up to industry and so secure states for their posterity have opportunities of doing it in American, which Europe does not afford." So the idea the Franklinian story becomes known not only in America, but in Europe as one of the myths of America very early on. This Franklin story becomes one of the things that Americans consider to be distinctive about their country and it comes about because there's no aristocracy, because theoretically, this is supposed to be a place where merit and industry will be rewarded. And that's the kind of Franklinian mythology. This is where it comes from. And I think you can you can see it has long legs and we're still a part of it. Jefferson is another person that's often identified with the American Enlightenment. And his autobiography is briefer. And you can see that it's quite different. I mean, it really is a text that makes you -- that presents him as a public person from the getgo and that makes an argument not about primarily material success, but always the idea of himself as a statesman, someone who has the best interest of the nation at heart, right? And people would argue perhaps that some of the principles that Franklin is able to take for granted are established in some of the founding documents and perhaps even particularly in the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote the first draft for. And he includes his draft, as you saw, in the autobiography. He shows you exactly what he wrote and what changes were made to the document by Congress. Yes? Did you want to say anything? No. Okay. So I wanted you to see the way in which that document works in that context. And in a way, I want you to get a sense of the way the document had to be altered in order to get consensus in that moment. I mean, the kind of compromises that Obama has to make over healthcare -- you always have to compromise in a democratic system. Jefferson wanted to condemn slavery. Being a slave owner, he knew about it firsthand. He wanted to condemn it, and couldn't get the South to sign on. I'll have some more to say about Jefferson and slavery a little bit later on. I think I was hard on Jefferson earlier in course, but today I really want to talk to you about the way in which the Declaration of Independence actually works brilliantly as a piece of rhetoric. So one, I've talked about Franklin's autobiography as a rhetorical performance. Clearly Jefferson's is, too. All right, he's performing this statesman's role. The body of Jefferson and the body of the nation become almost the same thing in this autobiography, which comes across in the text. But I want to suggest to you that the Declaration of Independence is a conscious performance as well and that it's a brilliant document because it creates a sense of inevitability. With Franklin, you might say you were almost cajoled into agreeing with him. He presents his things in a kind of diction that seems like it's common sense, how would you argue with that? How do you argue? Oh, it's Providence, or a guardian angel, or some accidental favorable circumstances. Sure, why not? So he presents it as common sense. Jefferson wants the Declaration of Independence also to embody common sense. But he presents it not in that kind of offhand way. Franklin never appears to be arguing with you. Jefferson wants to make a kind of -- give the appearance of a kind of rigorous argument that will be so simple and elegant that it will seem to be inevitable. So he's promoting the document in a sense of rhetorical inevitability. And one of the things we might say is that it is thought to have come in part from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Locke is the one that I think I've already said in the Second Treatise of Government, he comes up with a defense of individual property in which he says that in the state of nature, we are all born with property, which is ourselves. So for him, the big triple is life, liberty, and property. That's not what it is in the Declaration of Independence. What is it in the Declaration of Independence? >> Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. >> Lecturer: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now you might want to think about what the relation is between property on the one hand and the pursuit of happiness on the other. Is it a more idealized version, Jefferson's version? Is it in some sense bad faith because it's covering up what we're really thinking about? We're really thinking about property, but we're going to call it the "pursuit of happiness"? There's a kind of complicated rhetoric around that. But one of the things he would say is even that revision is not Jefferson's own. People now have suggested, I think Garry Wills most famously in a wonderful book about where all of these texts of this documents come from called Inventing America that in fact, Jefferson owes a lot to Scottish common sense philosophy in various forms of more communally-oriented philosophies in making that revision. But one of the things that he does, so he brings together lots of different philosophical traditions but he gives it this form: it's a syllogism. Can anybody tell me what a "syllogism" is? What is a syllogism? It comes from logic. No one has taken philosophy? Syllogism has a major premise and a minor premise. So it goes something like this: All A is C. All A is C. Minor premise. All B is A. What's the conclusion? All B is C. It will be easier if you see it. A equals C, B equals A. But equals isn't quite right, so B equals C. What it basically says is this is a larger principle. This is a manifestation of that larger principle that leads you to conclude something about B, right? So in the Declaration of Independence, the major premise is the opening proclamation of a people's right to overthrow a tyrannical government. This is on 652. "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and the Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation." That's the Preamble. Then, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall see most likely to effect their safety and happiness." That is the major premise. Governments are instituted among men to preserve rights and happiness and a government that does not do that can be overthrown. The minor premise, which is most of the declaration itself, most of you what read afterwards is the minor premise, takes the form of accumulated evidence that British rule in the Americas has been destructive. A long train of usurpations, right? And a conclusion, therefore, is that the British government is exactly this kind of government that's destructive and therefore that the colonies have a right to free themselves from this destructive rule. So it takes that form of inevitability: we assume that we have the right to overthrow a destructive government, we prove that the British government is a destructive government, therefore, we have the right to overthrow that destructive government. Now the reason to use the syllogistic form, again, is to give it a sense of rhetorical inevitability. And again, we might say that Jefferson is drawing on what he takes to be common sense arguments. And most of the arguments in the declaration are not original with him. In fact, afterwards he wrote this: "The object of the Declaration of Independence was not to find out new principles or new arguments never before thought of, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent." He wrote that, "it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that occasion the proper tone and spirit called for." This is close to the end of his life, 18-something. I forget when it is. That's too late. So that's what he's remembering, that he was trying to give it this sense of common sense. Now there's a couple of other things that he does that are quite brilliant. How is it that he goes about proving that the British government is a destructive government? What does he actually do in the language on pages 653, 654? How does he actually go and list all of these things? It's almost if it were a poem, it would be kind of anaphora. Yeah? >> He uses [inaudible]. >> Lecturer: So that procession of "he's" -- he has refused, he has forbidden, he has refused, he has called together legislative bodies, he has [inaudible] gives it that stately sense of rhetoric and a sense of inevitability. That's certainly true. But who is the "he"? Who is the he? Oh, come on. Who is the he? >> [ Inaudible ] >> Lecturer: Yes, it's the King of England. Did the King of England do all this stuff actually all by himself? Exactly, right? "He" is standing in for the British government. And you have to imagine that the people in the Second Continental Congress have ties to people back in Britain. You don't really want to get in the business of necessarily, you know, criticizing Parliament too much. But everybody can get behind criticizing the king, who was thought at the time to be mad. So the king serves as a kind of synecdoche for the larger British government. If he lays the charges of the British's government being destructive onto the footsteps of the king, you might say, that has the effect of getting everybody behind him. We can all get behind this. It's easier to criticize the king. It in some sense compels a certain kind of inevitability. That's one thing. The other thing is: Why is it called a declaration? Well, a "declaration" is a legal document. The English jurist, William Blackstone, describes it as the "foremost form of pleading." So this is a legal document of a plaintiff against the defendant. So who is the defendant? Who is the defendant, if that's what this is? It's King George. And if King George is the defendant, who is the plaintiff? Yeah, all the American colonists. And what's just happened if you are suddenly on equal legal standing with the king? That's ennobling. It's a radical assertion of self-confidence, you might say. And one of the things to suggest about this is that the document works brilliantly in that way. It has a sense of rhetorical inevitability. The language is beautiful. I mean, it's like a play by Shakespeare. It has many sources. You could look at other things. I brought the [inaudible] along. The preamble to the have a Virginia Constitution, which he had worked on, George Mason's Declarations of Rights from the previous year, even the English Petition of Right -- all of these things have echoes in the Declaration of Independence. We don't tend to remember their language because somehow the language of the Declaration of Independence is not only better, but it's had a certain kind of cultural weight. It's again, exactly the way that we read Shakespeare's plays and forget that there are sources for them. We don't care about those sources. We care about Shakespeare. But we care about this document. That's one of the things to remember. And I think it has something to do with that sense of inevitability. And it works through the creation of syllogistic logic, drawing on all these phrases that are in the air, drawing on different kinds of philosophies that are in the air. It appeals to many of the people who were the founders because they were all lawyers themselves. So they understood the symbolism of being able to create a declaration and charge the king with this long train of usurpations and abuses. And in the end, the document itself almost stands in. I mean, this brings us almost full circle from where we started out. Again, with Jefferson I'm saying the importance of writing. We told you about Jefferson telling Lewis and Clark to go off what write and when you're off looking for the Northwest Passage. It's almost like a nation can be born, or deserves to be born, or deserves to be created if it can produce a document like this one, a document that is so brilliant at compelling assent. And you might even say people who give US culture more of the benefit of the doubt than somebody like Toni Morrison would, would say, "Look, this is a document that is so brilliant that it even manages to transcend aspects of its ideological moment." "All men are created equal, we hold these truths that all men are created equal." On the first day of class I said, "Okay, come on. They really meant men." They didn't let women participate fully. They didn't even mean all men. They didn't allow slaves. But people say, "Okay, look. That's true." And yet there's a way in which the formulation with just with a little adjustment can accommodate all those people, that there are certain basic principles that are being laid down here that can outlive the limitations of the ideological moment that produced them. You'll have to think about whether you think that is true or not. But that's what people say who think about these documents, this continuing cultural power. What is July 4th, 1776? That's our nation's birthday, right? We all celebrate July 4th. Well, what happened on July 4th? What happened on July 4th? >> They signed -- >> Lecturer: They signed this version of the document. It wasn't when they actually voted for independence, it wasn't when they actually approved the document, it's when they actually got up there and signed this text and made it the official text. And again, it's kind of a weird symbol about how important texts were in the period leading from colonization to the moment when the early nation comes into being. We can think of the Declaration of Independence as a kind of emblem of that, of the Enlightenment in many ways, and also as an emblem of the continuing importance of writing to this culture in a way that maybe writing is never going to matter again. I should say something about Jefferson's shortcomings. I mean, people have often asked, "Well, you're saying all these great things about Jefferson and he was a slaveholder. So how do you square the wanting to condemn slavery in the Declaration of Independence and actually being a slaveholder and fathering children from slaves and all of that?" And there's two things to say about that: one is that Jefferson, having had firsthand knowledge of slavery, understood or believed he understood that you couldn't simply abolish slavery, that the system of slavery had turned into a paternalistic structure in which the slaves were kept as if they were children. To release them with no further help into the world would be doing them a disservice. And he felt that a free population of blacks that migrated to the north would be disastrous socially. Many people believed that. Wheatley's own career, as I told you, bears this out. Her life was disaster after she was freed because she didn't have protection or patronage and because her writing was appreciated in London, which with the Americans were at war, she wasn't able to support herself. She was an inspiration to many people but not to Jefferson. And this is one of the things Jefferson writes in Notes on the State of Virginia: "Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. Never seen an elementary trade of painting or sculpture. In music there are more generally gifted than whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they've been found of capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody or of complicated harmonies is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough? God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum" -- madness -- "of the poet. Their love is ardent but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately" -- he doesn't get it right on both counts -- "but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism, the heroes of the Dunciad are to her as Hercules is to the author of that poem." What do we say about this? Well, again, it's why Jefferson is an excellent example of the Enlightenment as a whole. He is the author of that document which embodies all those wonderful principles that I put on this screen at the outset. He is also quite clearly someone who thinks in a sense what we call "essentialist terms," as if people have certain characteristics according to race. And he's pretty much a racist. I mean, he does believe that blacks have certain limitations. It doesn't mean that he can't care for individual blacks or even love someone who happens to be a slave of his, it just means that when he thinks about human characteristics, he thinks that some people are less capable and he divides them up according to race. That makes him exactly a man of the Enlightenment. I mean, all of those things go together. The Enlightenment is about all of those wonderful principles and it's also about the denial of the benefits of those principles to large segments of the population. The Enlightenment strains against its ideological and cultural moment. It's pushing against aristocracy. But there are certain ways in which it remains unable to transcend those moments. Arguably, we still haven't. If this nation is the child of the Enlightenment, the whole slavery thing -- that had to take a while to get worked out and it didn't work out very well. And some would say it's still not quite working out. You know, equal rights for women? Yeah, that took even longer. But there are those would say we're making progress of various kinds. But what I wanted you to see is the roots of contemporary political and intellectual problems run deep. They run back into the very founding moments of the United States. All right. I am supposed to get to Joel Barlow. Do I really want to do this? Let me give you a little bit on Joel Barlow, just so that it makes sense that I can play my last song. So Joel Barlow -- when you read the Hasty Pudding, one of the things I want you to look at is the way in which he embodies many of these kind of neoclassical principles and principles of the Enlightenment that he's talking about. Like Franklin, Barlow is very interested in economy, particularly in the possibility of trade as a way of promoting peace. Interestingly, he goes to Yale. He starts off as a kind of doctrinaire Calvinist in the Edwards [inaudible], but then he gets converted. He's really moved by the French Revolution. He ends up spending a large period of time in France. And one of the things that he writes is this famous mock epic poem called the Hasty Pudding. And I think we'll take a look at that next time, but I just wanted to get you to thinking about this because Barlow's career is another way -- he's another one of these people that seems to exemplify all of the opportunities and also the contradictions of Enlightenment. The Hasty Pudding is very much about the possibility -- not even the possibility -- but the opportunity for producing poetry and culture in this new land, in the new world. Columbus said there were nightingales. There are no nightingales. Many poets would say, "How can we write without nightingales? How can we write without aristocracy? How can we write without these kinds of long cultural histories that exist in Europe?" And Barlow makes an argument as the trope of the Hasty Pudding for saying that, "Guess what? Neoclassical poetry has pretty much exhausted itself. It needs a new subject. It needs kind of new inspiration. And we can find it here in the new world with Hasty Pudding." So in some sense, it's a rewrite of the Rape of the Lock. It's showing how neoclassical poetic devices are perfectly well-suited for thinking about the new world and the particular materials that we have here. He begins the poem much as Bradstreet begins her first prologue poem by disavowing the epic tradition, even as he sort of invokes it. And we'll take a look at that next time. But the thing I wanted to say to you is that in the course of his career, Barlow becomes disenchanted with all of these things that he believed. I'll talk about Windsor Forest next time. Barlow ends up writing a poem called Advice to a Raven in Russia. He's been sent off as a diplomat. So like Franklin he has a diplomat -- he has been sent off to negotiate with Napoleon. Napoleon is in a bad way militarily. He wants to put off the negotiations as long as possible. So he is sent off to find Napoleon and go through Poland into Russia. Can't catch up to Napoleon -- in fact, never does -- sees the remnants of Napoleon's battles, which are all of these corpses strewn across Russia and Poland. I think he writes the poem Advice to a Raven in Russian, which is a really horrific poem about ravens eating the dead off the battlefield. It's kind of horrifyingly brilliant in the imagery that it produces. And we'll look at it next time. But one of the things I wanted you to see is that Barlow also comes to realize that the Enlightenment may not be everything that it's cracked up to be. And so when we look at that poem and the beginnings of Romanticism, one of the things I want you to ask yourself is: What are the limitations of Enlightenment thinking, even beyond the racism and sexism? What happens if human consciousness, if human reason and intellect are not all that they are cracked up to be? All right, thanks a lot and we'll continue there on Wednesday.