November 04, 2005
Jefferson and Abstraction
We have been watching Ken Burn's documentary on Thomas Jefferson in class this past week and I have found it to be a wonderful teaching experience. The students are more engaged in this film than they are in my lectures. And I am able to walk around the room and monitor my students, making sure they take notes. And I periodically make comments, drawing things to their attention and writing notes on the white board throughout the film for them to note afterwards. Periodically we will stop the film and break for discussion, and this film does a great job of giving me interesting and immediate points of discussion.
For intance, today I had a wonderfully integrative experience in my classroom. We broke from the film and began to discuss Jefferson's internal contradicitons and his personal retreat into philosophical abstraction. The film argues that Jefferson became most comfortable in the realm of abstraction, in the realm of ideas and ideals. He was not comfortable with real life, with the pain that life in the flesh can bring. He lost his wife, three daughters, and experienced lost love in France with a married woman. He found the life of the flesh excruciating and sorrowful. Therefore he lived in abstraction. He separated his head from his heart so that his heart would stop hurting.
This is why, the film argues, Jefferson was able to say something like "all men are created equal" and yet have slaves and view them as inferiors who in his opinion have a "most disagreeable odor." Jefferson was a paradox, wrought with self-contradiction. His life was like his home, Monticello. Monticello was perfect in its blueprints, but always under construction and practically unliveable at times. In this sense, Jefferson was a perfect picture of the United States: a nation with an unreconcilable paradox at its heart, a nation nearly perfect in its ideals put full of pain and sorrow in its flesh, a nation under construction in an "age of experiments."
This was our topic. And integration just flowed from it like a fountain. First, I was able to bring in points about the philosophy of history that we studied at the beginning of the semester. I was able to remind them of Hegel's model: thesis working against antithesis to form a synthesis. In Jefferson existed the thesis and antithesis that ultimately existed in America, a nation founded on his words. This thesis and antithesis would ultimately collide in crisis in the Civil War creating a new America, a new synthesis. I think this idea really clicked for them.
But then beautifully I was able to discuss how this relates to the Christian life. Paul writes in Romans 7 that with his mind he serves the Law of God but with his flesh he serves the law of sin. Within his very being is a contradiction, a thesis and antithesis, flesh and spirit. The entire Christian life is this way. Christianity is defined by abstract ideals that we cant attain in this life. And the fact that we cant bring our fleshly life fully in line with our spiritual mind brings us great pain. Much like the contradictions in the US eventually spilled out in blood across the nation, the contradictions of the Christian life spilled out in blood on the cross. These contradictions bring pain, death, and sorrow. But if we endure this pain and sorrow, as our Saviour endured (Hebrews 12) we will yield the fruit of true righteousness in which flesh and spirit can finally be joined back together in completeness. If we refuse to endure, we become like Jefferson, retreating into abstraction and irrelevance. Our words and our life no longer meet.
It was a good class, and I think several of these things clicked with the students. And I was encouraged.
Posted by todd at November 4, 2005 12:42 AM