PHIL 101: The Pursuit of Happiness
Thomas Jefferson and the founders were all classically educated. So his definition of "happiness" was Aristotle's, not ours.
It’s early July, 1776. You’re sitting in a fairly small upstairs room in Philadelphia that usually houses the Pennsylvania legislature with 50 other mostly old men. The windows are closed because your conversation is treasonous. It’s stuffy from 3 days of rain and now it’s 80 degrees and humid.1 You’re wearing all wool and deodorant won’t be invented for another 100 years.
A letter to King George is being read aloud itemizing a series of complaints about British rule in the colonies. The other delegates keep requesting minor changes to the wording, adding their personal grievances to the list. The secretary of the meeting, Thomas Jefferson, has been scribbling down something that will serve as an introduction to the letter. He finally stands and reads it.
“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 Virtue.”
Oh, that wasn’t the word you were expecting? (If you didn’t catch it, look at the last word above.)
Imagine for a moment if that’s how the Declaration read. Because it’s very likely that’s what Jefferson intended. Jefferson et-al were educated men, and in their day that meant ancient and modern philosophy. So when Jefferson included an innate right to “the pursuit of happiness”, he was almost certainly using Aristotle’s definition of the word. From the last post, remember that Aristotle views happiness as “a life lived in accordance with virtue.”
The modern Left tends to redefine Jefferson’s phrase as “everyone has an innate right to do whatever he wants”. This is essentially John Stuart Mill’s redefinition and we’ll get to him eventually.
Today’s Right prides itself on originalism but also redefines it, adopting a rough translation that “everyone can pursue his profession or livelihood freely.”
Both of these are wrong.2 Jefferson would never recognize the first. He explicitly rejected the second. John Locke penned the progenitor phrase “life liberty and property” 100 years earlier, but Jefferson changed the last term, clearly intending a meaning beyond making money.
A clue to Jefferson’s intention comes from another founder, a letter written by President John Adams to a militia commander about 20 years after the Declaration was signed:
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Sounds like President Adams thinks America requires a people who have conquered their individual vices and found the mean of virtue, lest they be derailed by their passions and the republic fail.
This was not an abstract concern. The context is a letter from 1798 to militia officers lamenting how the promises and opportunities of the French Revolution have been derailed by immorality and debauchery and envy and greed. "…our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World…” He never names France out loud, but he doesn’t need to. Anyone who as paying attention over the prior decade could see the effect on a republic of losing its moral and religious character (its virtue). The Reign of Terror was fresh and within a year, France will under Napoleon. While not particularly virtuous, he at least keeps the country together for a few decades. Adams is well aware the same forces threaten to shred the young American republic he now leads.
While back-dating Adams’ sentiment to 1776 is a stretch, the idea that the Founders generation was concerned with more than either maximal personal or financial autonomy is pretty clear historically. In fact, they were very willing to curtail both in defense of the common good, and “the common good” is really just another term for our collective definition of goodness.
Finally we have the elder member of the Founders generation, Benjamin Franklin. Eliza Powell might well have been a delegate to the Convention herself had women been allowed. At the close of the convention she is said to have asked Franklin whether he had created a monarchy or a republic. The old man allegedly replied, “a republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
It takes a virtuous, a moral, and (I believe) a religious people to keep a republic. It takes a citizenry committed to, as the prior posting on Aristotle said, never resting on their laurels but constantly seeking to better themselves and achieve a standard of virtue (or holiness). Why? Because only a people capable of individual self-government (subduing their private passions and lusts to their reason) can ever be capable of collective self-government.
So the next time someone demands they “have a right” to whatever they want to do, give them a little Plato and Aristotle to chew on. The “pursuit of happiness” isn’t about doing whatever you want and it isn’t about making money. Your innate right is to become the best, most noble, most educated, most dignified, most virtuous person possible given your innate abilities, and the lesson of Jefferson is that a society best promotes happiness not by facilitating your personal fancies and passions but by helping keep you on the path to becoming that person.
Thomas Jefferson was a diligent recorder of the weather and Monticello actually has the weather diary he started on July 1st, 1776. He took several observations each day, although the afternoon of July 4th was a little scant. He was kind of busy that day.
As a side note, this unity — Left demanding maximal personal autonomy and Right demanding maximal financial autonomy — is a sign that both of them are actually derived from the same modernist, Enlightenment source. We really do have a uni-party. If this is something you’re interested in learning more about, I recommend The Cunning of Freedom by Rysard Legutko or Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen.
Please find some brief quotes very wise modern Buddhist Sage or Spiritual Master.
"Always remember that your inherent heart-disposition wants and needs Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness".
"Evert living being has the instincts and the Destiny of Infinite Life"
"Eternal and total Freedom, Wisdom, and Happiness are the primary needs and ideas of Man (male & female"
"Sin is hell or samsara or un-enlightenment or un-happiness. The pursuit of heaven, nirvana, enlightenment, or re-union with God is itself a form of sin, since it is based on and motivated by the prior and present presumption of separation from happiness or or prior condition of Sat-Chit-Ananda.
All the conventional acts and states and experiences of the presumed separate self are sinful, hellish, tormented, samsaric, un-enlightened, un-happy, and Godless."
"Collectively sinners always create hell on earth"
Of course, not knowing your politics precisely, I wouldn’t want to preach, but of course Jaffa was unimpressed, underwhelmed, to put it mildly, with supposedly ‘originalist’ strict-constructionist jurists, holding that these men were not nearly ‘original’ enough:
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-disputed-question/
See also:
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/rehnquists-court-and-the-living-constitution/