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Jonathan Edwards and the “American Difference”: Pragmatic Reflections on the “Sense of the Heart”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

David Jacobson
David Jacobson
Affiliation:
David Jacobson is a Mellon Fellow in the Department of English atthe University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, U.S.A. This essay was first delivered before the session “New Approaches to Early American Literature and Culture,” at the 1986 meeting of the Modern Language Association.
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Extract

Early in Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards formulates a description of logical necessity that has important implications for the way we understand both his philosophical and theological method. He describes the principal forms of necessary meaning, delineating three modes of necessity: philosophical, moral and natural. Of these, the first is most important, for it indicates that, at the highest level, meaning is determined according to the structure of a proposition. Edwards states that “philosophical necessity is nothing different from certainty,” and the form of certainty, he tells us, “[is] nothing else than the full and fixed connection between the things signified by the subject and predicate of a proposition.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , December 1987 , pp. 377 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul, Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 151, 152Google Scholar. Edwards views natural and moral necessity as derivative of philosophical necessity, stating that they are the form the proposition takes when “intelligent beings are the subjects of it” (p. 156). All further references to Edwards's writings, unless otherwise noted, will be taken from the same Yale edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, General Editor, Perry Miller, and cited in the text.

2 Cf. Michael, Colacurcio, “The Example of Edwards: Idealist Imagination and the Metaphysics of Sovereignty,” in Puritan Influences in American Literature, ed. Emery, Elliot (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Jonathan, Edwards, The Works of President Edwards, ed. Sereno, Dwight (New York: published by S. Converse, 1829), Vol. vii, 264.Google Scholar

4 The categorical proposition, which is non-problematic and is said to affirm certain meaning, was considered the primary form of syllogism from Aristotle through the modern period of philosophy, and is still to be found in that role in Kant's Logic and in his treatise on “The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures.” It should be noted that Peirce began his philosophical career and set the base of pragmatic method by publishing an article in which he refuted Kant's reduction of the four forms of syllogism to the categorical proposition (cf. “Memoranda Concerning the Aristotelian Syllogism” in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. II, ed. Charles, Hartshorne and Paul, Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.) Edwards's indication that the basic form of the proposition is hypothetical demonstrates his distance from the modern philosophical tradition and his anticipation of pragmatic logic.

5 “Emerson: The American Religion,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Harold, Bloom (New York: Chelsea Publishers, 1985).Google Scholar