While Hegel Smiles in His Grave: A Colorful Explanation of Jefferson’s Racism

A review of Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (University of Virginia Press, 2024) by Hannah Spahn

Following philosopher Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment, says Hannah Spahn, can be summed by the formula sapere aude (“dare to know”), Spahn focuses on two figures she takes to be representative of that climate: black “poet” Phillis Wheatley and white “politician” Thomas Jefferson, neither of whom, says she, were particularly original, though both have been influential, and her aim is to magnify that influence: that of Wheatley’s rationality and that of Jefferson’s irrationality. Each gives us a different “version” of late Enlightenment thought: “Wheatley’s Enlightenment of Principle” and “Jefferson’s Enlightenment of Feeling” (4). She adds: “these versions interacted on various levels, sometimes undermining and sometimes consolidating one another. Eventually, they moved beyond their own confines to create a new, modernized Enlightenment philosophy”: one not white or black and one not male or female. That synthesis of reason and feeling is at the “core of American universalist ideals” (4–5).

We begin with polarities (e.g., white and black), ideas collide, and we wind up with a pleasing synthesis, at least, for the time, till the synthesis is itself is proven unaccommodating and we need an antithesis to the synthesis; and so on. Hegel smiles in his grave….

What typifies this neo-Hegelianist hermeneuticism, postmodernism, or deconstructionism is, as we shall see, usage aplenty of technical terms, always undefined, for clarity in exposition makes one vulnerable to criticism. Moreover, postmodernism, hermeneuticism, and deconstruction make obsolete analytic criticism. Precision and clarity are passé: typical of the modernism that we have overcome. See, for instance, my review of Irene Cheng’s essay.

Jefferson, says Spahn, gave us a “subjectivist epistemology.” “His Enlightenment of Feeling had the primary aim of making the new American Nation subjectively plausible to equal republican citizens” (5).

There are two problems with that claim.

First, Jefferson nowhere ever says anything like that. That is not especially troubling to neo-Hegelians, for their claims are not grounded in a precise reading of sentences. Obfuscation is fundamental. Recall, Hegel on Being and Non-Being in his Logic: “As yet there is nothing and there is to become something the beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning therefore contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing; or is non-being which is at the same time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.”

That takes us to the second problem: Just what does the sentence mean??? If we grasp “subjectivity” as something felt or grasped uniquely by the person feeling or grasping, just how does one, like Jefferson, pass on plausibly what he feels or grasps to other Americans? In sum, a true subjectivist epistemology forbids epistemology—that is, any possibility of knowing, or at least, shared knowing. (Solipsism is always a possibility.)

The perplexity, however, is perhaps in Jefferson, for Wheatley’s disciples “were not simply inverting his racist allegations in binary terms [Hegel again smiles in his grave!] by the tautology of their own intellectual achievements. Instead, they were ‘co-fabricating’ something new: a Jeffersonian Enlightenment capable of consolidating the strengths, and overcoming the weaknesses, of Jefferson’s original Enlightenment of Feeling.” Hegel a third time smiles in his grave.

Well, “tautology” is a wonderful term and Spahn is to be lauded for using it, since it is a term typically that only logicians use. It means and only means “a necessarily true statement” such as “A bachelor is an unmarried and unwidowed male.” The terms are mutually entailing: Every bachelor is an unmarried and unwidowed male and every unmarried and unwidowed male is a bachelor. One might say that the claim is “so true”—wait a minute, can there be degrees of truth?—that it is wholly uninformative! And so, we are fronted with another vacuous claim when we are exposed to the highfalutin phrase “the tautology of their own intellectual achievements.” Intellectual achievements are not sentences, so they cannot be necessarily true sentences, but they can be put into the form of sentences.

Jefferson has bequeathed to us, through his Enlightenment of Feeling, “his combination of subjectively experienced race, feelings of guilt, and group prejudice”—all of which somehow (again perplexing because something genuinely subjective cannot be shared) plague us to this day (5). Yet “African American intellectuals,” having seized on Jefferson’s disconcertion and confusion, “had the insight and motivation to place rational constraints on Jefferson’s postcolonial experiments.” Through their “rationalist hermeneutics of the Declaration of Independence,” Black contemporaries and immediate disciples of Wheatley took “prejudice” and transformed it into “racism.” Thus, the condemnation of Jefferson today by Wheatley’s disciples—all critics of Jefferson today seem to be her disciples though in Jefferson’s day only Blacks were suitable critics—in conjunction with some slight degree of acknowledgment of his achievements explain the “‘Jeffersonian’ double consciousness that has become the dominant interpretation of Jefferson’s life and writings today” (6). Or, as she says to dizzy further readers at book’s end, Jefferson’s contribution as an Enlightenment thinker is the “creation of a modern American concept of race as subjective experience, self-consciously based, not on reason and knowledge, but on a laissez-faire attitude to both individual ‘pillows of ignorance’ and ‘deep-rooted prejudices’” (197) Q.E.D.!

The argument seems to be—and I cannot be sure—that we are indebted to Wheatley and her black disciples for setting the stage, through their rationalism, for clarification of Jefferson’s felt confusion. They allowed us to synthesize feeling and reason and among other things they give us an interpretation of Jefferson’s Declaration that applies to Blacks as well as Whites, and that takes us from Jefferson’s prejudice to his racism. In sum, today’s critics of Jefferson are indebted to Wheatley and her ilk for our grasp of Jefferson’s duplicity today.

Astute readers will note only one reference beyond the introduction. I did get through chapters 1 and 2 (ending at p. 44) and I did skim through other parts of the book, hence the quote on page 197. Yet it took me several readings of the introduction to settle on the view that this is just another book—draped in postmodernist, deconstructive, and hermeneutic language—that languishes in obfuscation. The sentences are movingly festooned (a good Christmassy term!) with terms like “Enlightenment of Feeling,” “Enlightenment of Principle,” “tautology,” “versions … sometimes undermining and sometimes consolidating,” “rational hermeneutics,” and a “new American Nation subjectively plausible to equal republican citizens.” When Spahn does aim to explain what she means by such terms, the explanation is equally foggy, incomprehensibly so.

And so, to the objection that someone who has not read through the whole of the book cannot be a meet reviewer, I reply in the words of the Hippocratic physician, who once said,

“Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή.”

“Life is short; Art [or Science] is long.”

In vulgar terms, “If the early parts of a book are incomprehensible and indecipherable, is there any reason to believe that the rest of it will be comprehensible and decipherable? If not, shelve it and move on to a book that is.

Enjoy the accompanying video….

M. Andrew Holowchak

M. Andrew Holowchak, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and history, who taught at institutions such as University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, and Rutgers University, Camden. He is author/editor of over 70 books and over 325 published essays on topics such as ethics, ancient philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, and critical thinking. His current research is on Thomas Jefferson—he is acknowledged by many scholars to be the world’s foremost authority—and has published over 230 essays and 28 books on Jefferson. He also has numerous videos and two biweekly series with Donna Vitak, titled “One Work, Five Questions” and "The Real Thomas Jefferson," on Jefferson on YouTube. He can be reached at [email protected]

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