(Excerpted from: What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression by Jason D. Hill (Emancipation Books/Post Hill Press, October 2021)
When the Founding Fathers turned on the light of reason over 244 years ago and wrote the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they achieved a remarkable feat. It was not just, as hundreds have remarked, the creation of an unprecedented political achievement that was the constitutional republic of the United States of America. This republic, replete with its Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments, was a major civilizational advancement over any other political phenomena that had ever existed. But the major achievement of the Founding Fathers was not political; that was a derivative achievement.
They, the first and last of America’s great intellectuals, had done what no other philosopher had done in the history of mankind. They achieved a revolution in epistemology by discovering the proper application of human nature to its appropriate political configuration. For the first time, the requirements of man’s survival qua man, that is, man’s nature as a rational and conceptual being, were grafted onto a social and political environment that supported its rational upkeep.
The political milieu that they created was a direct corollary of that nature. In other words, they were the first to understand that the teleological endpoint of all human striving—freedom and happiness—required a specific political milieu in which human preservation and the achievement of rational happiness were possible. They were the first to integrate man’s nature with the perfect political environment. America was and remains a metaphysical concomitant of human nature, simpliciter; it is a metaphysical expression in the form of a political republic derived from an unprecedented epistemological feat—the perfect integration of a discovery of man’s nature and the artificial creation of a political system that corresponds to that nature. Until the founding of the United States of America, the history of humankind had been replete (and continues to be) with tragic experimentations in what I shall term political epistemologies, or the attempts to find the right political system consonant with man’s nature as a conceptual and rational being.
The results fell short of the type of life suitable for a rational being, a life that transcends mere preservation and survival to include the possibility of one that embraces flourishing and thriving. Nomadic wanderers, primal tribalists that made no distinction between animal and human life, despotic theocracies, secular dictatorships, rulership by divine order, majority-ruling democracies, and rule by medieval warlords had all failed to realize that negative liberty and absolute freedom to create a conception of the good for oneself were the fundamental requirements of human nature, morally and existentially. In the bad cases of human history, politics had always preceded and superseded morality—by default or in deliberate ignorance of the proper requirements of human nature, human beings had devised political systems that did not correspond to the objective and rational requirements of conceptual and rational beings, who had to live by reason and the judgments of their minds.
The men who devised such systems, from the most primitively tribal ones dominated by hordes to the most exalted of their time such as those formulated under the Roman Republic and Empire, had never sought to question the moral foundations, precepts, and principles that legitimized such systems and made them valid. They never sought to discover that what made a political system valid was the degree to which it corresponded to the requirements of the individual as an individual. A system that secured the rights that protected the conditions indispensable for human self-preservation, flourishing, and the achievement of the end of all human striving had never been properly founded. A political system defended and devised via moral means that secured the achievement of a rational form of happiness that was not based on arbitrary whims, emotions, or desires that could short-circuit the well-being of the individual in the long-term had never existed before the conscious founding of America. America itself was conducive to a form of political happiness that secured the individual’s long-term security, well-being, and flourishing.
This enterprise belonged first not to politics but to the science of ethics—a science that could discover, with a high degree of accuracy, the virtues and method of cognition suitable to the life of a human being. The translation of this discovery into an organic and material social application is what we may describe as a political system. Without the proper morality, political systems are doomed to fail. But without the proper epistemology, or proper ethical and moral system, values and virtues remain obscured from the realm of human cognition. When Thomas Jefferson declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” he achieved a revolution in epistemology. His perception of self-evident moral axioms did not stop at the above proclamations. He extended his list to include the purpose for which “Governments are instituted among Men,” the insight that governments derived their “just powers from the consent of the governed,” and “the Right of the People to alter or abolish” an unjust government.
Yes, Jefferson did view all these truths as epistemologically self-evident. He did not intend them to be accepted with argument or further demonstration. This was a mighty feat of epistemological abstraction. To have derived from the Right of Nature which posits man’s self-preservation as both a biological descriptor and a normative duty to protect such a life, Jefferson and the Founders perceived the corresponding social and political existential corollaries. We should not, as some have suggested, regard self-evident truths in a practical sense. To perceive something as self-evident is an epistemological function; it means to grasp an irreducible primary as a single unit and, with lightning and brilliant speed, to see the corresponding social requirements for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (equal counterparts) almost automatically. All the self-evident truths were moral axioms deduced from human moral nature. It is the correct grasp of human nature that led to the infallible, sociopolitical, existential corollaries in one’s cognitive, epistemological feat. Any practical application of the self-evident truth is logically posterior to such truths. An application of a precept of reason presupposes the first discovery of the principle via an epistemological route. Thus, we see that the birth of the United States was one formed in the matrices of a practical philosophic system. It was the first nation forged by consciously held philosophical principles in whose application no breach between theory and practice was entertained. It would be too conceptually broad to state that the United States was created as the first philosophical state. That declaration would not be untrue. It would not, however, capture something fundamental about the new republic. It was the first consciously created ideological state. Other civilizations, such as the Greek and Roman, were guided by explicit de facto principles, as have been the cases with communist, socialist, and fascist governments. America and its civilization were literally formed by the conscious discovery and application of an explicit political philosophy.
America’s political philosophy—its ideology—is a constitutive feature of the civilizational identity of the republic. Without them, America would exist as a geographic entity demarcated by state lines. It would cease to be America, simpliciter. Its de jure founding principles form the core of its political and public culture. It is the foundation which undergirds citizenship and civic identity. But the realm of philosophic abstraction and of social and political reality are expressly integrated by the revolutionary nature of government devised by the Founders. Without the latter, there would have been no way to have tied philosophical principles into concrete reality or into actions guided explicitly and consciously by ideas. Thus, Americans became the first people in history to—consciously or unconsciously—live by holding an explicit philosophy of life. A robust political philosophy that constitutes a nation’s political ideology plays a subtle role of cultivating what we will call civic virtues that cultivate habits of thinking and, thusly, a particular kind of behavior in the public sphere. Such virtues, if only thinly informed by the political principles, still pay explicit attention to the sociopolitical characters of its citizens, what we may call the public face of Americans. That public face was legitimized to the extent that it was grounded in rational principles.
This is not to say all Americans were rational or moral, but those who chose not to live by the dictates of reason—that is, outside the realm of an objective reality—were (and still are) regarded by the very design of the American system as cognitive and social ballasts. They would be free to avoid reality but not free to evade the consequences of avoiding reality. We may say that the Founding Fathers were fundamentally driven by a moral vocation, not a political one. That they produced a scientifically valid political document was a metaphysical concomitant of their antecedently held moral principles. Their moral sensibilities translated into the concrete realm of action resulted in a political system that, in and of itself, is a moral system.
The Founding Fathers could not have established the proper political system suitable to human preservation and long-term survival without discovering and understanding its moral foundations that granted it its legitimacy. And since ethics is a derivative of metaphysics and epistemology, they would have arrived at the correct metaphysical and epistemological procedures before being able to conclusively and immutably understand the political requirements and attendant system for the indefinite upkeep of man’s moral nature. Hence, they were comprehensive revolutionaries in the major branches of philosophy—ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. What type of ethos and mindset equipped them to arrive at the correct moral, political, epistemological, and metaphysical systems that would result in a Constitution that so aptly matched the nature of man? A New Sense of Life Shapes an American Way of Thinking The answer lies in what we may term their sense of life.
A New Sense of Life Shapes an American Way of Thinking
The answer lies in what we may term their sense of life. Philosopher Ayn Rand, who defined the term philosophically, described it as a preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics. It is an emotional and subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It establishes the nature of a person’s emotional responses and the essence of his or her character. Before individuals are old enough to grasp a concept like metaphysics, they make choices from value-judgments. They have emotional experiences and acquire a certain implicit view of life. An individual’s choices imply some estimate of herself and the world around her including her ability to deal with the world she encounters. To the extent that an individual is mentally active, which means she possesses the desire to know and understand, her mind works as a programmer of her emotional life. As a result, according to Rand, her sense of life develops into a positive counterpart of a rational philosophy.
The main concept in the formation of a sense of life is the idea “important.” Since the term belongs to the realm of values, one can surmise that that which is important establishes the base of ethics. There can be no such thing as unimportant values or values that are bad since, by definition, they are life enhancing phenomena. One can no more hold a bad value as one can properly hold something that is falsely important. People may be mistaken in their beliefs about what constitutes a valid value in their lives, as someone who claims that injecting heroin is valuable to him and the opiate a value in his life. Here, we would claim that the person has a definitional problem—he has misapplied usage of the term to describe a thing in life that he believes is important. A drug addict may claim heroin as a value in his life; however, for “important” to have a proper application to the life of a rational person, it would have to constitute a real good. The integrated sum of a person’s concept of what he thinks (rightly or wrongly) as important and valuable is his sense of life. For Rand, it represents a person’s early value-integrations, which remain in a fluid, plastic, easily amendable state, while she discovers knowledge to arrive at a consciously directed process of cognitive integration. This means she arrives at and lives by a conscious philosophy of life.
We may say that living by a conscious philosophy of life is the most mature expression of a sense of life. It is the explicit validation of one’s values translated into a comprehensive and well-integrated form of philosophical stylized living. It involves translating into fully conceptual terms the emotional approximations and appraisals by which a person has lived. It means going from living and experiencing the world from a wordless, feeling-bound form of existence into being led by a rational and conceptually valid road map that will direct the course of one’s life. What, then, was the sense of life of the Founding Fathers that may be established against the preceding definition? What emotional projection did they enact upon the universe, and how did the ethos they each commonly held translate into a rational philosophy of life? I believe that the Founders held a passionate love for man and this earth. The most blatant expression of their love of man was to be found in the recognition and defense of him as a rational and autonomous, sovereign individual and all that was entailed in the recognition and affirmation of this truth—that he was deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own individual conception of happiness. Their love of man took the form of a deep respect for him, such that he should choose his own conception of the good life for himself with the explicit understanding that it was impermissible for the state to regulate, coerce, or encourage one conception of the good life over another; each man, based on a rational observation and analysis of his station in life and his values, was to be left alone to determine what was good for him and his life. It was no more the business of the state to tell a man whom to marry or whether to marry, whom to worship or whether to worship at all, than it was his neighbors’ business to do so.
The discretionary power to choose from a broad array of values was his and his alone. The Founders started with a civic love for humanity and man that they translated via a political system that secured the individual rights of each person. The rights, which secured moral axioms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were as unassailable as the moral axioms themselves. Their exalted sense of life finds its proof not only in the respect for man’s sovereignty and his rightful place on earth as an autonomous agent who had a moral property in his body, labor, and mind but also in their belief that metaphysically speaking, this was to be man’s heaven on earth. Their proclamation of man’s inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness was a reversal of traditional Christian rejection of this earth and this world and the idea of suffering as man’s proper existential fate. Happiness was man’s natural end, and this earth—not heaven or some ineffable notion of an afterlife—was the place where he could successfully achieve it. The theological implications of this philosophic system were vast. Despite the theistic commitments of many of the Founders in creating a secular nation in which the state could establish no formal religion, they were the first political eugenicists in recorded political history. The American man or woman was to be the prototype for a new type of human being—one who needed no redemption, no religious atonement and/or salvation.
Reversing the mythology of Edenic man, America was its own Edenic paradise where the new and first people could achieve happiness and fulfill their purpose and meaning right here on earth. The Founders of a consciously created secular nation where the primacy of the individual supersedes that of faith, church, and even God are not those who—protestations to the contrary—believed in the concept of man as born with the stain of original sin. Their actions in the creation of America spoke louder than any of those among them who were Deists. Unlike their historical predecessors who had terrorized man, sought to rule, and coerce him, and subordinate him to the wishes and whims and fiats of society, the Founding Fathers saw men as their metaphysical equals, with each possessing no greater share of humanity than any other and with an equal apportionment of moral value. Indeed, it was this recognition that would be the moral foundation for the emancipation of slaves and abolition of chattel slavery, which they did not create but inherited from the old world.
Excerpt to be continued in Part II.
BioJason D. Hill is a professor of philosophy and Honors Distinguished Faculty at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of five books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People (Bombardier Books, 2018). His latest book is: WHAT DO WHITE AMERICANS OWE BLACK PEOPLE: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression. (EMANCIPATION BOOKS/Post Hill Press) He specializes in ethics, politics, foreign policy, and moral psychology.