JEFFERSON’S “SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS”: A Response to Roger Berkowitz
At the end of the 2/7/2025 Zoom session of the Hannah Arendt Virtual Reading Group’s discussion of Arendt’s essay, “Truth and Politics,” the host Roger Berkowitz insisted that Jefferson’s claim in the Declaration of Independence that certain truths are “self-evident,” particularly the claim that “all men are created equal,” is actually a lie – a claim that Jefferson knew to be false. I challenged him on his reading, but we did not have time to argue the matter out. Here, then is my response.
First, I agree with Arendt’s argument that “by saying ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ [Jefferson] conceded, albeit without becoming aware of it, that the statement ‘All men are created equal’ is not self-evident but stands in need of agreement and consent—that equality, if it is to be politically relevant, is a matter of opinion, and not ‘the truth’.” She justifiably warrants this judgment by noting that truths whose provenance is transcendent (such as the purely rational truths of mathematics or the objects of religious beliefs) remain “outside the realm in which human intercourse takes place.” She adds that “We [that is, today’s citizens of a modern democratic republic] hold this opinion [ i.e., “all men are created equal”] because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding dominion.” Nowhere does Arendt say or even imply that Jefferson’s claim is a lie. Rather, she describes it as a tendentious rhetorical gambit “to put the basic consent among the men of the Revolution beyond dispute and argument.” If we understand a lie to be “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive,” then Jefferson’s statement is not a lie but rather something else. I would characterize it rather as a principle, or even a statement of faith that forms one of the cornerstones of what sociologists such as Robert Bellah, following Rousseau and Tocqueville, have called the “civil religion” of America.
The key to understanding the meaning of the Declaration’s assertion “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is to recognize the rhetorical force of “We hold” within the context of the Declaration as a whole. Jefferson’s motive was not to deceive the philosophically naïve. The purpose of the statement was to announce to the world a new kind of polity based on a new concept of humanity. The fifty-six men who signed the Declaration are declaring for themselves and for the people they represent that the new nation they are about to form is to be composed of people who believe that universal human equality, correctly understood, is in fact a self-evident truth! They knew that they were breaking with the political order they had inherited, the order whose implicit premise is that only some people are fit to rule, while most people are only fit to be ruled. That premise is at the foundation of all monarchies and oligarchies, however the ruling elite may be defined (aristocracy, plutocracy, theocracy, stratocracy, etc.). Of course we now realize the ironic limitations of the Declaration and of the following Constitution that sought to institutionalize its principles: the Founding Fathers were blind to the full implications of the Declaration’s language, particularly as they limited political agency to white men who owned property, thus excluding non-whites, slaves, women, and poor white men. By “men,” they clearly did not refer to “human beings.” Those limitations have since been largely corrected.
The claims for “self-evident truths” in the Declaration, I think, can be clarified by paraphrasing them thus:
We the signatories to this Declaration of Independence hereby declare that we justify legal and political separation from the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Great Britain by proposing our unshakable belief that all human beings are fundamentally equal in their status as rational and self-conscious beings, thus making them fit not only for self-government, but indeed obliging them to institute self- government to secure the rights such beings are entitled to. While other nations identify their unity and jurisdictions based on such factors as tribal consanguinity, geographical boundaries, a common language, a common religion, and other such adventitious determinants, we the undersigned seek to define our essential identity and jurisdiction on the basis of fundamental principles, the core of which are the concepts of human equality, individual liberty, and the rule of law that secures them.
President Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address delivered 87 years later, closed part of the Founders’ awareness gap by glossing Jefferson’s “self-evident truth” of universal human equality as a proposition, an affirmation the “truth” of which is prerequisite for the establishment of a political order dedicated to the fundamental political value of freedom, which, as Arendt said, “is possible only among equals” (my emphasis). The truth of that proposition less than a century later was put to the test when half of the “new nation” disagreed that it applied to “all men.” The crux of the disagreement was the question of whether people of black African descent, who constituted the population of American chattel slavery, were fully members of the species of hominids called homo sapiens. Lincoln and the abolitionists who supported him insisted that perceived racial differences among the various groups of human beings are superficial properties contingent upon the essential substance of the human species. The slave-owning class and the culture that evolved with the institution of slavery and slave labor justified chattel slavery in the belief that black Africans belonged to a subspecies of inferior mental, moral, and spiritual character. The “great civil war” consequent upon this disagreement, said Lincoln, put the Founders’ “self-evident truth”/“proposition” through a kind of trial by combat, “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Implicit in his statement is a question: “Is the American Founders’ proposition consistent with human nature?” Does it articulate a truth, even a “self-evident truth,” rightly understood? I don’t think we can say that with any assurance. I do think, however, that what Lincoln characterized as a “proposition” constitutes an article of faith that led and guided the Founders to create, and for later generations to augment and sustain, a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
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John R. Holt
2/10/2025
RES PUBLICA 