I’m not planning on doing the whole document in such tedious detail, but the opening bits are really chewy.
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 Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
OK first of all, what does it mean for something to be self-evident? When I use the word, I generally mean something like obvious with a connotation that the obviousness is prima facie. That is, I might say that the evidence of Sousa-style military march music on the New Orleans jazz of Louis Armstrong is self-evident, meaning that you can hear it right away, and don’t need to bother with doing much research. In fact, I almost always use the word negatively, saying that something is claimed to be self-evident which is not, or that something that appears self-evident is in fact false. The universe is more complicated than first glance indicates. Now, I can’t say that it is evident to me at all that all men are created equal, and certainly it isn’t obvious. It isn’t obvious to me that Governments are created among men for the purpose of securing certain Rights. It may be so, but it would require a good deal of evidence, and frankly I would be inclined to say that there’s a lot more going on there.
There are a couple of other shades of meaning that Mr. Jefferson may have had in mind. First, self-evident is a term of art in philosophy, and although I don’t claim to understand it properly, I suspect Mr. Jefferson did. As near as I can make out and rephrase, to say a statement is self-evident means that its truth does not rely on evidence external to the statement itself. “I call myself Vardibidian” is something of a self-evident statement; if I didn’t call myself Vardibidian before saying that, I did while saying it. In other words, to describe a statement as self-evident releases you from the obligation to provide evidence. Thus, Mr. Jefferson can state that it is the purpose of Government to secure rights equally to all men, and claim that it is self-evident (perhaps due to an implied definition of Government that includes that purpose), and dispense with an analysis of the history of government and rights.
I should also add that dictionaries and thesaurussessii seem to claim that self-evident is a synonym both for obvious and axiomatic. Those are two very different things. It is axiomatic that any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line, but it is far from obvious. What the obvious has in common with the axiomatic is that you cannot argue with them. They are undeniable. Well, except of course that the obvious is often wrong, and an axiom can be rejected (and a new argument made from a new axiom). But what obvious and axiomatic have in common with self-evident in the philosophical sense is that they all encompass a sense of undeniable. I think that, ultimately, is what Mr. Jefferson (et al) are going for, here. They have already claimed the authority of unanimity, and also the authority of decency, and now they claim the authority of undeniability. OK, that’s not a word. But the background here is all decent people think this way, so you should agree. In fact, you should not agree, you should just accept and then move on. After all, these are truths. You don’t want to argue with truths, do you?
Again, all I want to do here is point out the way in which before making any argument at all, a call for revolution has positioned itself as simple, reasonable, lawyerly and even scientific, and most of all a matter of intellectual truth. Undeniable. And it does so immediately before making amazingly bold and ballsy statements. People have the right to depose a king? To choose their own method of governance? Don’t you have to have evidence for shit like that? No, you don’t, not if you position yourself correctly beforehand.
More later on the rest of the paragraph. Maybe I’ll get through it all someday.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
When they say “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, who’s the we? Could this also be read as another tactic of separation from their former brethren in Britain — We hold these truths to be self-evident, while they apparently don’t?
…don’t you have to have evidence for shit like that?…
You better not have to have evidence, because, honestly, what would it be? And why hasn’t it come up before in the last thousand years?
OK, here’s a question: they’re clearly attempting to differentiate themselves from the usual pack of rebels who want out because taxes are too high and the cops are mean. These rebels are motivated by philosophy! On the other hand, they certainly did want out because taxes were too high and the cops were mean. So which came first — were they disgruntled with British rule in part because they had come to understand that people should be free, or did they adopt that philosophy to elevate their desire to get out above the level of mere whining?
Well, and the principle of liberty was proved in facts, and the facts (as presented) were that the taxes were high and the cops were mean. The other rebels, who might just have wanted low taxes and nice cops, were short-sighted. These rebels wanted low taxes and nice cops as a signifier of liberty and justice. And if you wanted to argue that the taxes were, in fact, ludicrously low (and they were), well, that put you against liberty and justice, didn’t it.
I kid, I kid, I kid because I love. In fact, what they were doing was exactly what I would love to do myself: take the observable universe and place it in a philosophical context. The facts without the philosphy are misleading, and the philosophy without the facts is misleading. If you seek to know what to do, you have to have both. I think they did. The rhetoric that they use to portray themselves as having both is, therefore, honest, if sneaky.
Thanks,
-V.
I know you kid because you love, but in kidding, I think you’re choosing the more complicated dim view over a simpler, less interesting interpretation.
If Jefferson is using self-evident in the sense of axiomatic, he isn’t saying “all decent people think this way,” he’s informing the reader that the following argument will be based on those axioms. If you don’t accept the axioms, the argument and conclusions aren’t likely to wash.
I think Jacob might be getting at something with the idea that stating those axioms at the top may be a way of differentiating the secessionists from the British. I, the spherical geometer, hold this truth to be self-evident, that all pairs of line segments may be extended so that they intersect at some point.
I think there’s a lot to what you’re saying. I don’t know the history of the formal proof (shock! He must not have been paying attention) but this looks suspiciously like a syllogism (as Stephen Lucas points out), and these at the top are our Knowns, or our axia.
The problem is that they are completely preposterous as axia. All men are created equal? There is a natural (Gd-given) right to pursue happiness? Governments exist to secure individual liberties? People have the right to depose government if they think it will make them happier and safer?
Not that I disagree with them, myself, but it can hardly have been persuasive to his readers in 1776 that if you wanted to say that, oh, kings were intended to be kings by Divine Providence, or that loyalty demands that you must not depose a government to which you have sworn fealty, or that Governments exist to carry out the Divine Plan, or that Governments exist to carry down to posterity our heritage, or that governments exist to keep the rabble down, well, that was all right, and you shouldn’t support this revolution.
Unless, as I read it, Mr. Jefferson wants us to accept the premises without decision, without consciously deciding to accept them, without thinking about them first. That’s what I think he’s doing, and that’s what I think a lot of very persuasive people do. By the time you get past the word self-evident to the controversial stuff, you are already nodding your head in agreement, and the next thing you know you are agreeing that law enforcement does need to have the power to wiretap without a judge’s warrant. Mr. Jefferson is using his power of rhetoric for good (as I see it), but what I am interested in most is the way it works, the mechanics of it, because not everybody uses that power for good.
Thanks,
-V.