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Jefferson's Prospect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Extract

Thomas Jefferson's right to membership in the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers is repeatedly argued, in his own writings as well as in writings about him by others, by trope, by the use of vision as a figure for understanding: if we can only clear our thinking of those interferences that are the accumulated clutter of history, the enlightened Jefferson seems to say, our apprehension of the natural and human worlds will be as clean, plain, and immediate as the act of looking at a physical object.

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Research Article
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. de Chastellux, Marquis, Travels in North-America, in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, Vol. 2 (Dublin: 1787), p. 46Google Scholar, quoted in Malone, Duman, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948)Google Scholar. Most of the historical information in this essay is taken from this and subsequent volumes of Malone's comprehensive Jefferson and his Time. Where a specific opinion or interpretation is involved, I will cite Malone, but for the sake of convenience I have not cited Malone for matters of fact, such as Jefferson's part in the clearing of the Rivanna and so on. My reader should therefore be aware that my debt to Malone is greater than the notes suggest. All quotations from Notes on the State of Virginia are from the University of North Carolina Press edition, edited with introduction and notes by Peden, William (Chapel Hill: 1955)Google Scholar. Citations (N,) are in parenthesis following the quotation in the body of the text.

2. Frary, I. T., Thomas Jefferson: Architect and Builder (Richmond, Va.: Garrett and Massie, 1939), p. 4.Google Scholar

3. Peterson, Merrill D., Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 543.Google Scholar

4. Passos, John Dos, The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 154–5.Google Scholar

5. Chinard, Gilbert, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), p. 275Google Scholar: “To the homely wisdom of Dr. Franklin that honesty is the best policy, Jefferson had added a new element. He had combined in one formula two principles which often seem contradictory and which at any rate are difficult to reconcile. Not a mere idealist, nor simply a practical politician, he was, during the rest of his political life, to make persistent efforts to propagate the gospel of practical idealism which remains to this day one of the fundamental tenets of Americanism.” Koch, Adrienne, “Pragmatic Wisdom and the American Enlightenment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 8 (1961), 313, 328CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Jefferson's thought, according to Koch, “‘the empirical and the rational faculty’” are “remarried” after an “unkind and ill-starred divorce” (p. 316).

6. Ferguson, Robert, “‘Mysterious Obligation’: Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia,” American Literature 52: 3 (11 1980), 385.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Quoted in Peterson, Merrill, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 426.Google Scholar

8. Schuyler, Montgomery, American Architecture and Other Writings, edited by Jordy, William H. and Coe, Ralph (New York: Atheneum, 1964), pp. 3236, 5781.Google Scholar

9. Popper, Karl, Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 1106Google Scholar. I admire Popper's writings on induction, which I consider the most formidable challenge to the Lockean tradition to be found in Anglo-American philosophy, though my esteem for his work diminishes as his rancor against the continental tradition rises in The Open Society and its Enemies. Even with respect to his critique of induction, however, there is a difference between our emphases. Popper is most concerned with the difficulty of predicting phenomena from observation and with the logical difficulty of deriving a universal law from a series of observations-the Humean challenge to Locke that instigates Kant's philosophical labor. I, however, am more concerned with the danger of induction becoming excessive reduction than I am with the danger of excessive abstraction from repetition. I will stress the expediency of representation as a deliberate simplification of what I will call the complex object-an object of representation that surpasses the representational schemes brought to bear on it, and that is thus capable of exposing the reductiveness of those schemes and of provoking the kind of break in knowledge that T. S. Kuhn has analyzed. I derive this emphasis from a letter Jefferson wrote to John Manners in 1814. Jefferson contends that nature produces only incommensurable “units” or “individuals.” “Classes, orders, genera, species” are therefore not innate to nature, and cannot be inductively discovered. Instead, for the sake of heuristic and mnemonic appropriation, men select features that are denominated “predominant and invariable.” Systems of classification are therefore interested reductions of the natural object: they enable men to converse intelligibly and to get on with business, but they should not be mistaken as inductive discoveries of the object's essence. So far, Jefferson is presenting a rough corollary to Kant's Copernican Revolution. There are two differences, however: first, for Jefferson the epistemological schemes being considered are cultural systems rather than universal forming proclivities of consciousness; and second, for Jefferson the actual object has the power to enter thought in itself, as “anomaly,” which “sport(s) with our schemes of classification.” Baste Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Foner, Philip S. (New York: Wiley, 1944), pp. 726–30Google Scholar. Jefferson's critique of induction is thus more historical than Kant's, since it accounts for the genesis and disruption of paradigms; and it is more radical than Popper's, since it is concerned with the judgment that a repetition of traits exists rather than with what conclusions can be drawn from such a judgment.

10. Chinard, Gilbert, ed., The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928), pp. 40–1.Google Scholar

11. Jefferson, Thomas, Papers, vol. 9, edited by Boyd, Julian et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 369–75.Google Scholar

12. Whately, Thomas, Observations on Modern Gardening (London: T. Payne, 1771), pp. 1, 2, 119, 118, 1516.Google Scholar

13. Heely, Joseph, quoted in O'Neal, William Bainter, Jefferson's Fine Arts Library: His Selections for the University of Virginia Together with His Own Architectural Books (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), p. 150.Google Scholar

14. Jefferson, Thomas, Papers, vol. 10, pp. 443–55.Google Scholar

15. Basic Writings, pp. 240–81; p. 246 quoted.Google Scholar

16. Ferguson, , “‘Mysterious Obligation,’” pp. 383, 387, 388–9, 390, 401, 405Google Scholar. Franklin, Wayne, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 30, 26, 27, 29.Google Scholar

17. Peterson, Merrill, introduction to his anthology, Thomas Jefferson: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. ixGoogle Scholar. For another statement of the myth of Jefferson, see Horace M. Kallen, “The Arts and Thomas Jefferson,” in the same volume. Kallen notes Jefferson's interest in contradiction between site and edifice, but fails to consider its implications for his own rephrasing of the Jefferson myth.

18. Malone, , Jefferson the Virginian, p. 381Google Scholar. See also Jefferson, 's letters to John Taylor [in Writings, Vol. 10, edited by Ford, Paul Leicester (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), pp. 2731Google Scholar] and to Stuart, Archibald (Writings, Vol. 5, pp. 408–11).Google Scholar

19. Jefferson, to Manners, John, 1814. See n. 9.Google Scholar

20. Byrd, William, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929), pp. 54–5.Google Scholar

21. Malone, , Jefferson the Virginian, pp. 2133Google Scholar on Peter Jefferson.

22. Breaks, Thomas, in A Complete System of land Surveying, Both in Theory and Practice (Newscastle on Tyne: 1781)Google Scholar, presents a clear summary of the methods and devices common in Jefferson's period.

23. Lewis, Thomas, The Fairfax Line: Thomas Lewis's Journal of 1726, edited by Wayland, John W. (New Market, Va.: Henkel Press, 1925), pp. 20, 29, 35, 85.Google Scholar

24. Beverley, Robert, The History and Present State of Virginia, edited by Wright, Louis B. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), pp. 117–56.Google Scholar

25. Malone, , Jefferson the Virginian, p. 378.Google Scholar

26. “Description of Louisiana,” Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Eighth Congress, Second Session: November 5, 1804 to March 3, 1805 (1852), pp. 1, 498–526.

27. In addition to Ferguson's and Franklin's discussions of these passages, see Lewis, Clayton W., “Style in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia,” Southern Review, 14 (Autumn 1978), 668–76Google Scholar; Scheick, William J., “Chaos and Imaginative Order in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Essays in Early Virginia History Honoring Richard Beale Davis, Lemay, J. A. Leo, ed. (New York: Burt Franklin and Co., 1977), pp. 221–34Google Scholar; and Ogburn, Floyd Jr., “Structure and Meaning in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia,” Early American Literature, 15 (Fall 1981), 141–50.Google Scholar

28. Wills, Garry, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 259–72.Google Scholar

29. Alpers, Paul, “Convening and Convention in Pastoral Poetry,” New Literary History, 14 (19821983), 277304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Lovejoy, A. O., The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 242–87Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 166302.Google Scholar

31. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 60–9.Google Scholar

32. Brodie, Fawn, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974)Google Scholar; on the importance of first memories, see Adler, Alfred, Superiority and Social Interest, edited by Ansbacher, Heinz L. and Ansbacher, Rowena R. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 197–8.Google Scholar

33. Miller, John Chester, The Wolf By the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 46.Google Scholar

34. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 10, pp. 226–32.Google Scholar

35. Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 1, pp. 8791.Google Scholar

36. Quoted in Malone, , Jefferson the Virginian, pp. 220–21Google Scholar; Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 10, p. 343.Google Scholar

37. Quoted in Malone, , Jefferson the Virginian, p. 66.Google Scholar

38. Dumbauld, Edward, ed., The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), p. 99.Google Scholar

39. I agree with Leo Marx that Jefferson's agrarianism, like Franklin's physiocracy, is as much a result of his aversion to economic combination as it is an attraction to farm life. See his The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 117–44Google Scholar and my Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 221–22.Google Scholar

40. Dumbauld, , Political Writings, p. 138.Google Scholar

41. Locke, John, Two Treatises on Government, edited by Laslett, Peter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 3971–98, 403, 339, 303–20, 386, 425–26.Google Scholar

42. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 9, pp. 305–10.Google Scholar

43. Dumbauld, , Political Writings, p. 56.Google Scholar

44. de Montesquieu, Baron, The Spirit of Laws, translated by Nugent, Thomas (New York: Hafner Press, 1949), p. 120.Google Scholar

45. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 10, pp. 2731.Google Scholar

46. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 1, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

47. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 7, pp. 26.Google Scholar

48. de Montesquieu, , The Spirit of Laws, p. 116.Google Scholar

49. Jefferson, Thomas, Papers, Vol. 11, pp. 9297Google Scholar; Vol. 10, p. 629; Vol. 12, pp. 355–56.

50. Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, Vol. 10, pp. 294–95.Google Scholar

51. Dumbauld, , Political Writings, p. 126.Google Scholar

52. Lukacs, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, translated by Livingstone, Rodney (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 1861.Google Scholar

53. Quoted in Betts, Edwin M. and Perkins, Hazelhurst Bolton, Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1971), p. 1.Google Scholar