As the last posting
leaves the reader, it suggests that one can pick up much of the political
theorizing among colonial Americans through the tensions between Enlightenment
advocates – some being Deists – and religiously influenced colonists. A lot of that tension will lead to ideas
concerning tolerance.
And
further, tensions within the religious faction arose between the New Lights or
as known in Europe, Pietists – those affected by the Awakening – and Old Lights
who tended to disparage Awakeners. This
last group tended to be supporters of established churches and their ministers. But to get to tolerance, one needs to take a
developmental view of how constitutional ideals got started.
One finds that such views result from a
dialectic struggle. While this overall contention
was being expressed among Americans, several institutional developments
occurred. Probably the most prominent
was the upstart of various higher education schools in many of the colonies. This blog has already reported on the first two
of these efforts, those of Harvard and Yale.
Other
colonies followed suit, but what seems a bit ironic, as with Harvard and Yale, religiously
motivated people played central roles in getting things started. For example, Rhode Island College, which
became Brown University, Queen’s College in New Jersey, which became Rutgers, Dartmouth
in New Hampshire, College of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania,
and King’s College, which became Columbia University in New York all were
started through the influence of the Awakening.
Allen
Guelzo comments on this irony:
That
the Awakeners were interested in founding colleges at all may seem unusual,
given the cold shoulder that Harvard and Yale turned to the Great Awakening … [The
belief was that] Enlightenment’s glorification of reason and nature was all
well and good, argued the Pietists, but only if one did not forget the limits
placed upon the operation of the reason by the countervailing power of the
other faculties, and especially the will … This was not necessarily an
anti-intellectual stance. It was, in
fact, little more than an updating of scholastic-style voluntarism, and it was
shared, without any dimming of intellectual energy … by John Wesley, and by Jonathan
Edwards.[1]
In that, various personal stories can be
discovered. For example, the story of
Thomas Clap illustrates how eventful the twist and turns of these schools were
and how they survived low enrollments, rambunctious student bodies, and less
then competent administrators.[2] All of them survived and all would drift
toward Enlightened views, especially as science became more prominent.
As
backdrop to these developments on this side of the Atlantic, events in Britain
would also have meaningful effects not only on how higher education curriculum
would turn, but also on the substantive political ideals the founding
generation would generate. And a lot of
this evolving had to do with the politics of religion in Britain.
The Crown found it beneficial
to close campuses of Cambridge and Oxford in England to all except Anglicans. This proved to be a windfall for Scottish
schools. It was there that the
Enlightenment would have its greatest impact that would extend to America with
its influence on the founders of the US.
Of specific effect, the
work of various Enlightened thinkers tackled the philosophic problems that the
Enlightenment bestowed on the intellectual development of Western thought. And one train of thought worth mentioning
here involves John Locke (often referred to in this blog). Of interest is that philosopher’s thoughts on
epistemology or questions regarding how people know what they know. Specifically, his claim as to the inability
of humans to know directly the objects they are aware of; they only know their
ideas of those objects, became problematic.
While one persuaded by
this view could rely on those perceptions reflecting reality, this
disconnect bothered religious thinkers such as Bishop Berkeley who argued that Locke
had no evidence for his claim. But, in
addition, a whole school of thought, the school of common sense, led by such
thinkers as Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid, argued that all that constructed
distinction between what is perceived and what is known was essentially
nonsense.
They argued that people
know things because they perceive them.
They basically argued that Locke was being unrealistic and that he rendered
the mind as being some passive organ (his tabula rasa). That is, the mind does not only take in ideas
over factual perceptions passively, but configures what it perceives
conceptually, inductively, and deductively.
It forms from bare factual
explanations, relationships, stories, claims of importance, and other
judgmental or semi-judgmental opinions.
One does not see from a scene of New York City a bunch of buildings, but
a sense of human progress, ambition, fortitude, challenge, and human folly or
degradation. When one sees a painting,
to use a Guelzo’s example, one does not “see” oils and canvass.
And this leads to a
sense of morality, what is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. And this referred to qualities beyond the
individual and his/her perceptions.
Instead, a moral sense was universal among humans. And this seemed to attack Locke’s claims that
one could not have any assurance of what was perceived. This Lockean claim was further strengthened
by the arguments of David Hume. He
reasoned that one could not arrive at any conclusions – such as concluding a
billiard ball one saw hit by another ball moved as a consequence of the
collision – from perceptions. To this,
Thomas Reid responded.
Reid argued for the
strength that common agreement had in formulating one’s views and conclusions. Basically, he argued that it was the height
of idiocy to not accept what one sees as being what is true. As Guelzo describes Reid’s point,
Without trying to
explain how it worked or implying that one could know how it worked, the fact
that there was “common sense” which attested to the real existence of objects
outside the mind was so elemental and reflexive a fact of consciousness that denying
it, questioning it or being cleverly philosophical about it, was absurd.[3]
In one respect, this “common sense” further
strengthened a Locke initiative in that it supported what was evolving from
Locke’s thoughts, scientific study – in that one could rely on perceived
observations – while at the same time picking up on scholastic bias for
reasoned arguments.
The former aligned with
the ideals of natural rights, while the latter could be attached to natural
law. And this combination will be
appealing to such politicians and Enlightened thinkers as Thomas Jefferson.[4] This notion of “common sense” among all led
to such conclusions as the “self-evident” quality human rights possessed. For example, all do not agree to what is
beautiful, but all agree that beauty exists.
[1]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I
– transcript books – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 61-62. The factual claims of this posting based on
Guelzo’s lecture.
[2] Another story of note is what happened to Aaron
Burr’s father, Aaron Burr, Sr. and mother, Esther Edwards Burr (daughter of Jonathan
Edwards), as their fate intertwined with the early days of Princeton
University.
[3]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I
– transcript books – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 68.
[4]
Gary Wills, Inventing
America: Jefferson’s Declaration of
Independence
(New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978/2018).
