Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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.
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.
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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
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9. Popper, Karl, Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 1–106Google 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
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