Hume, the Analytic and the Declaration of Independence
by Fred Seddon
At first reading, one might think that my title collects together a rather odd trio. What, after all, does Hume and the analytic have to do with the Declaration of Independence? Ayn Rand thought little of Hume and describe his philosophy as the voice of Attila. Peikoff tore into the analytic-synthetic distinction in an article title “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” calling it an “epistemological black plague.” But while Objectivists have contempt for the first two items of the title, they love the Declaration, and Rand declares that it is the greatest political document ever written.
You can imagine my surprise in seeing these three tied together by Walter Isaacson in his biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. In a section of the book on the Declaration he reveals some interesting facts. First, the document was not the product of Jefferson alone. It was in fact quite a “text by committee.” Jefferson himself borrowed freely from George Mason and “incorporated some changes from Adams” before sending it on to Franklin asking his to “suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate.” (311) Then the document went to Congress where they made much more substantial cuts and edits than those made by Franklin.
Of the few changes that Franklin made, the most important concerns one of the most resounding phrases in the Declaration, to wit: the passage that begins with the words, “We hold these truths…” As Jefferson originally wrote it the phrase read, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Franklin rewrote this as the phrase we all know, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
Before asking what exactly Franklin meant by the word “self-evident” I want to mention that draft still exists and can be viewed at the Library of Congress, and if you buy the book you can see a picture of it as plate #23 with Franklin’s distinctive back slash correction of Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable” plain and easy to read.
Now where did Franklin get the word “self-evident?” Well it doesn’t take a half-crazed New Zealander to figure this one out, just read the title and the mystery is solved. I will simply quote Isaacson since he says it all in one paragraph.
The idea of ‘self-evident” truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. In what became known as Hume’s fork, the great Scottish philosopher . . . had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as ‘London is bigger than Philadelphia’) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (‘The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees’ and ‘All bachelors are married”). By using the word “sacred,” Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality. (312)
Whether this means that the Declaration of Independence has a dash of Attila and the black plague, I will leave for SOLO posters to decide.
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