The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Rousseau rounded off his indictment of civilization by a “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” which disposed of any evils he had not yet attributed to enlightenment—surprisingly dedicated (with explicit sycophancy) to the Republic of Geneva. He seemed not to regret the destined power of women to govern men. But he is eloquent on the countless other inequalities born of civil society—of property and the power to govern. “Man,” he concludes, is “subject to very few evils not of his own creation.” “Man is naturally good but in Society finds profit in the misfortunes of his neighbor.” Contrary to vulgar prejudice, Rousseau explains, man was not miserable in a state of nature, but was in better health than he would ever be in civilized society. He needed no medicine, for he had not yet suffered the weakness that all animals show when they are domesticated. He was free, healthy, honest, and happy, for he had not yet multiplied his needs or begun to suffer the inequality of civil society.

  Rousseau’s nostalgia for the state of nature, the foundation of his political philosophy, also shaped his philosophy of education. He explained at the opening of his Émile (1762):

  God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, places, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horses, and his slaves. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.

  For Rousseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils.

  Much of the program he described in his didactic novel Émile is what he calls “negative education,” an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called “The Child’s Charter”—a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for “progressive education” in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (The School and Society, 1899; Democracy and Education, 1916). The movement attended to the child’s physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored “learning by doing,” and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil’s own skill at learning from experience.

  In Émile the child was to be kept from books—except one, Robinson Crusoe, which Rousseau called “the happiest treatise of natural education.” “Children begin by being helped, end by being served,” he warned. They become masters, using their tears as prayers. The teacher must guide without seeming to, must never use corporal punishment, but must provide situations in which the child can learn for himself. The teacher, too, must know the stages of a child’s development and introduce subjects only when the child is emotionally prepared. At the age of twelve the pupil must learn a useful trade. “Émile must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher in order not to be as lazy as a savage.” Not until the age of eighteen should Émile turn to moral science and religion, and then he can choose his religion. For “at an age when all is mystery there can be no mysteries properly speaking.” The child must have compassion, “love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers.” But also shun the philosophers (“angry wolves”), who are “ardent missionaries of atheism and very imperious dogmatics who will not endure without fury that one might think differently from them.”

  Just as Voltaire sought a common vision for all mankind, to be fulfilled in “civilization,” of which the France of Louis XIV had provided a model, so Rousseau, having witnessed the varied spectacle of war and civilization in the enlightened Europe of his day, envisioned a liberated mankind. It was only civilization—the arts and sciences and institutions—that separated men from one another and set them at war in pursuit of the unnecessary. If men would only somehow return to their natural bliss they would be free to fulfill their human possibilities. But what were these possibilities? Was there any way of knowing? Rousseau was made the paradoxical patron of the guillotine of Reason of the French Revolution to come. But he was also godfather of the liberated romantic imagination about to create a rich and fantastic new legacy of arts and literature.

  Among the surprising consequences of Rousseau’s vagabond life and encyclopedic writing was the role assigned to him in the early twentieth century as the archenemy of the New Humanism. This American movement in the 1920s, of which Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) was the popular spokesman, made the human elements of experience, embodied in the ancient classical tradition, the source of meaning, and opposed the appeal to nature or the supernatural. In his Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) Babbitt described Rousseau’s role as apostle of the wild, romantic spirit. The New Humanists urged instead a seeking spirit of restraint and proportion. They saw freedom as the “liberation from outer constraints and subjection to inner law.”

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  Jefferson’s American Quest

  In a happy coincidence Voltaire’s Age of Enlightenment in Europe, which celebrated and explored the still-unfulfilled possibilities of civilization, saw a vast and fertile continent sparsely settled and little explored in America. This New World challenged Western Seekers to find new meanings in nature and in society, and stirred spokesmen for New World ways of seeking. Perhaps the most eloquent and effective of these was Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). A leader of the Virginia planter aristocracy, and not entirely exempt from its attitudes, he gave enduring voice to the American quest for new forms of self-government. The American War for Independence drew on the constitution and laws of the mother country to justify the colonies’ independence.

  Jefferson the lawyer had expounded the right of the colonies to seek their own form of government in his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). And when the Continental Congress voted independence, Jefferson led the committee drafting its declaration. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, became a manifesto in the next centuries for the communal seeking of people across the world. The document, with wide appeal despite its form as a legal indictment, declared that “the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The crucial phrases that made this a credo for revolutionaries in later generations first affirmed the “self-evident” truths of man’s “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Then it declared the revolutionary communal right of Seekers: “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 institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

  The Declaration of Independence was thus dual—both a classic declaration of the ends of government and a declaration of the communal right to seek forms of a government better suited to those ends. It proclaimed the right of “the people” to carry on their search. To this political quest Jefferson committed himself and his political partisans in the new nation.

  And an auspicious time it was, too, for exploring the experience of a New World. Benjamin Franklin, in his circular letter of 1743 gathering the American Philosophical Society, reminded Americans that the time was ripe for a communal seeking of all that could be learned from nature and from earlier settlers in the New World. “The first Drudgery of Settling new colonies, which confines the attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin observed, “and there are many in every Province in Circumstances that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common Stock of Knowledge.” Jefferson would become presiden
t and guiding spirit (1797-1815) of the Society during the most creative years.

  The “American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia, for promoting useful Knowledge” had been consciously modeled on the Royal Society of London. But its scope, its publications, and its discussions were shaped by the novel openness of the New World and the host of unfamiliar phenomena in nature and among the native peoples. Never before in Western culture had people at a distance from the ancient centers so effectively organized to seek the meaning of their whole environment. The Society brought together a galaxy of asking minds, which included the astronomer and inventive genius David Rittenhouse (1732-1796); the pioneer psychologist and physician Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813); the great American botanist of the age Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815); the chemist and philosopher of revolution Joseph Priestley (1733-1804); the artist, museum founder and amateur archaeologist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827); and a variety of other scientists and political philosophers. The transactions of the Society reveal a lively openness to a novel environment.

  Just as the Declaration of Independence announced that Americans would find their own political way in the New World, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia would reveal a similar spirit at work on nature and all society. This, Jefferson’s only full-length book, was written in answer to the Secretary of the French Legation in Philadelphia, the Marquis de Barbé Marbois, who had posed twenty-three questions that Jefferson answered in detail. Too little read nowadays, it is a remarkably compendious and readable survey of Jefferson’s Virginia—from the geography, mines and minerals, the forests and agricultural products, to the institutions, peculiarities of the Indians, plantation life and slavery, the history and laws, manners and customs of the colony, the manufactures, taxation, standard of living, and commerce.

  The book was an unexcelled prospectus of the promise of this New World. And it provided Jefferson the Seeker with the opportunity to reflect on the meanings of the American experience. In answering Query XIX about manufactures in the colony, after describing the self-sufficiency of plantation life and the relative insignificance of commerce compared with that in the urban life of Europe, he observes:

  In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice, to support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

  Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia would perhaps be the most influential scientific book written by an American. For it invited the Old World to the opportunities of the new. First published anonymously (at Jefferson’s own expense) in Paris, in an edition of only two hundred copies in 1784, it was soon widely translated. French liberals were impressed by Jefferson’s description of free republican institutions and inspired by his vision.

  For Jefferson, America was not only a pristine continent to be discovered but a laboratory of new meanings and purposes for society. When thirty years later, as president, he sent his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark on their exploring expedition (1804-1806) into the American West, the narrative of their travels would provide, in an adventure story, a similar inventory of the vast continental territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. Again, a priceless resource for seeking the meaning of civilization for a new nation on an unexplored continent. Jefferson, the president, would energetically explore these distinctly American possibilities. And he foresaw still more to come. “So we have gone on, and so we shall go on,” he wrote to John Adams in 1812, “puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.”

  This theme of the new American nation as a place for seeking the future possibilities of civilization would resound in the eloquence of political leaders. And would be declared again and again even before the great influx of adventuring immigrants and refugees from the Old World. The seeking spirit resounds in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—affirming that the history of this “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” was a “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

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  Hegel’s Turn to “The Divine Idea on Earth”

  There is no more surprising or ironic episode in Western thought than the story of how the threads of the Enlightenment and Western Europe’s quest for freedom were brought together by G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) into dogmas that would be used to justify the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were an era of emerging modern nations when the communal search for meaning and purpose would find forms arising out of the peculiar history and experience of each nation. The vortex of Italian city-states had led to the quest for a nation that provided Machiavelli with the experience and precedents for his search for an Italian nation and his prescriptions for nation making. The English experience provided Locke and his followers with a theory of limits—limits of knowledge and of government. Voltaire and his companions of the French Enlightenment saw civilization—human renewal everywhere—foreshadowed in the culture of France and the promise of its Revolution. So, too, the trials and travails of numerous small contesting German states and principalities would include a quest for national unity. Perhaps this would have to be a kind of coherence not yet seen in history or on earth. This distinctively German quest was expressed in the miraculously abstract ideas of Hegel, which would have an uncanny appeal across the world in later centuries.

  The appeal of idealism, which Hegel gave its most influential political expression, is understandable in a land of peoples speaking a common language but fragmented into many small communities. While the emerging new nations of Western Europe were unified into governments that could be restrained by constitutions and influenced by public opinion, in eighteenth-century Germany there was yet no central government that could be influenced by debate or revolution. Political power was diffused into warring small communities—sometimes loosely confederated, but not organized into a nation. Since there was not yet a central government to be influenced by public opinion, unlike the age of Voltaire and Rousseau in France and Pitt and Burke in England, it is not remarkable that no comparable shapers of public opinion appeared in a diffuse Germany.

  Thinkers in these numerous small competing German communities took refuge in abstraction and introspection—idealizing their thought and the state. So it was that in the late eighteenth century Germans were coming to think of their land as the refuge of philosophy and poetry. For this idea there was ample evidence in the bright constellation of German writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Winckelmann (1717-1768), a leader in the rediscovery of Greek art; the critic and dramatist Lessing (1729-1781), librarian to the Duke of Brunswick; Schiller (1759-1805), poet and playwright, who led the Sturm und Drang movement, a revolt against convention inspired by Rousseau; and the lyric poet and critic Heine (1797-1856). The great figure of German literary awakening was, of course, Goethe (1749-1832), who spent most of his life under the patronage of the Duke of Weimar, and directed the ducal theater there.

  It was Hegel who gave an appealing new form to the idealism of the period that would shape thinking about the communal quest. Hegel’s ideas were built on those of Immanuel Kant (1724-180
4), founder of German idealism. Kant, who spent all his life in and around Königsberg in Prussia, was the prototype of the obsessed and focused philosopher. His neighbors would set their watches by his daily walks. An early sympathizer with the French Revolution of 1789 (until the Reign of Terror), Kant admired Rousseau’s works, and was so engrossed in Émile that he allowed reading it to disrupt his rigorous schedule.

  Kant is commonly considered the greatest modern philosopher, but his works are difficult to grasp and their influence is most visible through his followers, among whom Hegel is conspicuous. His copious, involuted works do not bear concise summary and should be explored in the histories of modern philosophy. But the influence of Kant’s leading ways of thought appears in the writings of Hegel. The axiom of Kant’s ethical system—that every man must be treated as an end in himself and not as a means—has sometimes been considered a form of the French Revolutionary doctrine of the Rights of Man. His own concept of freedom was that every man must legislate for himself. Which led him to believe “that there can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another.” For Kant, then, freedom did not mean mere personal whim, but was the highest realization of law in the universe. His “categorical imperative” is widely known even to those who have not read his philosophy: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Adapting the natural rights doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to his new critical idealist philosophy, Kant separated the natural laws of the physical world from the laws of society. So he created his own philosophic universe in which the “noumenal” world of the intellect was opposed to the “phenomenal” world of the senses. And this opened the way to his definition of freedom.