Me And Bobby McGee
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing don’t mean nothing, Honey, if it ain’t free. Ah, our more modern attempt to divine the secrets of philosophy. Like Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life we all have our own idea of what philosophy is suppose to be, or so we think. We Americans are so woefully unaware there are so many different schools of philosophy, we marvel at such a thought. Well, don’t feel so ignorant on the subject, things aren’t that much different on the European continent. Oh, they’ve all heard about Descartes but few can tell you more that something about dualism or the mind body problem. But if I were to tell you that this country was founded on two competing philosophies you might look at me funny. Rather than list all the names of those many philosophers who had an effect on our founding of this great nation, almost all of them you would immediately forget, let me try to explain why we may wish to know who they were and what they tried to do.
Mankind has for eons tried making sense out of this world. It has the irritating habit of wanting to change more frequently than we’d like and it would be damn nice if it , well, explained itself. But god was the more clever one than us and left made this reality self-explanatory, or so we thought. So our first thought is “Damn fools and philosophers, god must have loved them because he made so many of them. Every civilization has had its ‘wise men’ sit around sipping a few beers and trying to make sense of what they see and hear and feel. You laugh but Plato tells us Socrates would host wine drinking parties for his philosopher friends and the rule was that when it was your turn, you would drink a bowl of wine punch and then deliver your oration. Not that no one does this anymore, I’m sure they do, but when one is a young student this seems to be a natural habit at the university.
Religion played a very strong role in the formation of our early colonies and while John Winthrop and Roger Williams were the leading thinkers of their day, their focus was on religion and how it related to the daily lives of the individuals. For the most part both held that religious tolerance was the more important value rather than trying to achieve religious homogeneity (everyone believing the same). Many on the left have asserted that the New England colonies were essentially theocracies but that was never the case. No, American philosophy could be divided into two different halves, the first being the theology of the Reformed Puritan Calvinism influenced by the Great Awakening as by the Enlightenment natural philosophy, the second being the Native American Natural Philosophy. That certainly was a mouthful, but to put it more simply in both England and the Americas religion played a very strong part in the everyday lives of most people. The beginning of what we could call the scientific revolution had begun with the likes of Newton, Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, etc., and provided a counter to the heavy authority wielded by the nobility and their religious leaders.
While Europe would remain embroiled in religious conflicts, those European and English religious dissenters would choose to travel to an unknown shore for the purpose to believe and worship as they liked and, here’s the big part, grant that right to those who came after them. As a people, we have a long history of not marching to the tunes of other nations. The two leading developers of our American philosophy were Samuel Johnson who helped introduce the European enlightenment ideas into out thinking and Jonathan Edwards, who through his ideas of Christian Platonism and empiricist epistemology (the study of how we know what knowledge we know) would bring to metaphysics the fundamental category of Resistance, or what we might call an unwillingness to change for the sake of change. These two men also caused the buying of books from England written by the Scottish Enlightenment authors. And quite a few sons of men of means went to universities in Scotland and learned from many of the writers, bring back not just the libraries but the ideas of moral philosophy that guided the Scottish enlightenment.
What was this Scottish Enlightenment to which I so often allude? Simply put, it was how the Scots invented the modern world. If you were to go to Wikipedia you would see the names most mentioned with the beginning of the study of science as a real discipline with networks of many individuals working in concert for advances. The English were too busy consolidating the gains from their latest civil wars to pay much attention to science, philosophy, literature, and the like. It is said that the Irish saved Christianity in the Twelveth century, their monasteries were the greatest copiers of manuscripts in the world. The Scots opened the world to new learning in science, political science, the beginnings of economics (Adam Smith), moral philosophy (think ethics), literature, and even religious advancements in Christianity. David Hume and Thomas Reid would write on theories of conscious behavior and a great many other topics. Hume greatly influenced the German philosopher Kant, among others. This was the beginning of the school of Scottish Common Sense Realism. And it was also the time of Robert Burns, Scotland’s most widely know poet although now the first of the greats.
If one wanted to become a doctor one went to Edinburgh to study medicine, the center for the study of medicine and other scientific topic for the study of geology was just beginning. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia and came back not only an MD but a minor American Philosopher. John Dickinson of Continental Congress fame has been educated in Edinburgh as had other colonists of major note. The Scots influenced our early architecture and even our music. We would have to wait until the 19th century Romanticism was developed for our next foray into the world of philosophy where we would develop great thinkers and writers. How many of you over the age of sixty ever read Walden Pond by Thoreau? He was a minor figure of that transcendentalist group. George Homes Howison would give rise to the school of pragmatism. Josiah Royce gave us Objective Realism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margret Fuller and others contributed to transcendentalism, which emphasizes subjective experience and is a reaction against modernism and intellectualism (you might find reading Richard Hoffstadter – Anti-intellectualism In American Life interesting) in general and materialistic reductionist world view in particular. It assumes a Holistic belief in an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical and empirical and this perfect state can only be attained by one’s own intuition and personal reflection. Remember that from approximately 1832 on we would see the rise in political extremism (much as we are seeing the same kind of political extremism today) that eventually led to the Civil War of 1860 – 1865 and the reconstruction period after that. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution would make it to our shores during that war and promote Darwinism in America with the American William Graham Sumner and the Englishman Herbert Spenser promoting Social Darwinism.
So our history starts with our own interpretation of ‘Natural Rights’, based on a belief in a supreme god, from which rights are supposed to have come. I come to the firm conclusion that morality comes from the expression of religious belief else we will find ourselves held in the power of men without sufficient conscience for their actions. What are we to think of the behaviors of the likes of Bill Gates or George Soros? Men who have taken that Hippocratic oaths of physicians, the part that says, “Do no harm”, and yet they have subsumed their personal honor and integrity for material wealth and political power, what are we to make of them? When John Adams spoke of King George as being a tyrant he spoke of a man whose position in this world was one of duty and trust, to wit, an individual trusted with the lives of his subjects in his hands and the responsibility to do right by them. John Adams spoke for many men and women the truths he had learned from this new way of thinking, this Moral Philosophy that gave him a body of knowledge about how the world should be, ought to be if religion was to make any sense. If the will of God requires blind obedience then all God has is a bunch of robots, but it God has given us Natural Law, natural rights under that law, then we may exercise our own will and chose what we consider the good according to what we know. And like kings, we sometimes fail in our duty. But we have a choice, a chance to correct the error of our ways, it is the American Way.
Say Goodbye To Our Town 