Empiricism applied to native peoples in Jefferson's 'Notes'

After reading the English translation of our excerpt's opening statements, I expected to find Jefferson defending the inferiority of natives throughout his work. I assumed Jefferson would use his reason to dehumanize the natives and reflect the attitude of his time.

I was wrong, and instead found a clinical point-by-point comparison of whites and natives. I would like to highlight two of Jefferson's well-crafted phrases:

"The man with them is less strong than with us, but their woman stronger than ours; and both for the same obvious reason; because our man and their woman is habituated to labour, and formed by it."

This is nothing more than an application of cause and effect, but the context in which it is written could have been startling at the time. As Count de Buffon noted, the man is smaller because his race is inferior. I mean c'mon, everyone knows that. Now Jefferson explains the observed difference without appealing to European superiority.

"... to form a just estimate of their genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and great allowance to be made for those circumstances of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only."

This key phrase, "circumstances of their situation, which call for a display...", is nothing less than the idea of natural selection which we take for granted today. But in Jefferson's time, how strange it must have been to read! That one should judge the strength of a people by how they adapted to their given circumstances. Europe, lacking any such thought at the time, happily used themselves as the standard to judge the rest of the world. Jefferson, ahead of his time, decided otherwise.

Sensation and reflection in Locke's "Essay"

Locke arrived on the crest of the Enlightenment and published his second major work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in 1689. His influence on civilization in the period that followed was indisputable. Thomas Jefferson happily applied Locke's ideas about freedom from The Second Treatise of Government while drafting the U.S. constitution in 1787. Aside from social and political theory, Locke made great contributions to human thought in his demonstrations of empiricism. One such demonstration is found in this Essay.

What makes the Essay such a powerful force in the Enlightenment is its explanation of empirical methods in non-philosophical terms. Any literate person can read his work and participate in the new best practices of thought. Locke is careful to re-iterate throughout this excerpt that he is appealing to "everyone's observation and experience". After challenging recieved knowledge at face value, he guides readers through his empirical claim that "all ideas come from sensation or reflection". Locke calls readers to provide evidence of his claims about the nature of ideas by drawing on their collective bank of knowledge. In attempting to find any idea that could not have originated with either sensation nor reflection, a reader is collecting and analyzing evidence of a hypothesis put before him. He or she may not know it, but they are in fact flying in the face of generations before them who would not dream of challenging the cultural acceptance of "recieved doctrine".

Introductions

This blog will be my collection of ramblings on American literature throughout the spring of 2007. It exists for this sole purpose and it does its job well. I am in section 1 of Kelly Ross's English 122 class at UNC Chapel Hill, and many other blogs like mine should be appearing. Perhaps we will figure out the workings of Blogger well enough to trap you in our discussions and never let you out. I certainly hope so.