Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center, speaks as a part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Wednesday in the Amphitheater.
Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, addressed the underlying philosophies of the United States’ founding documents during his lecture Wednesday morning in the Amphitheater, part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Nine theme, “Rising Together: Our Century of Creativity and Collaboration with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.” His most recent book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, framed his talk.
Rosen began his lecture by discussing a reading project he undertook in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdown. The endeavor, he said, “changed the way I thought about how to be a good person and how to be a good citizen, and how I understood the foundation of American democracy.” This reading project was based on a list compiled by Thomas Jefferson and required Rosen to read books from classical writers of moral philosophy on a rigorous schedule.
Through these readings, Rosen hoped to gain a deeper understanding of what, exactly, the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” meant and how people can apply that understanding in the modern day. Rosen found that the famous phrase came from Cicero’s The Tusculan Disputations. Rosen had never heard of this work before — though it had been read by both Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — and it led him further down the path of studying the ancient philosophers that influenced America’s founding fathers.
Rosen also found that both Jefferson and Franklin created lists of virtues for themselves. Franklin had created a system of spiritual self-accounting to judge how well he held himself to these virtues — week by week. Rosen and a friend had actually tried this method about a decade ago.
“We found it incredibly depressing,” said Rosen. However, he also said that, like Franklin, despite their failures, he felt he was a better man for having tried.
Rosen returned to Cicero, who in The Tusculan Disputations wrote that “without virtue, happiness cannot be.”
Franklin used this phrase as the motto for his list of virtues. Jefferson also quoted a passage from The Tusculan Disputations to inform how he practiced his virtues: “He who achieved tranquility of soul, who was neither unduly exuberant or unduly despondent, he has achieved the calm self-mastery of which we are in quest. He is the happy man.”
Rosen was struck by the similarity in Franklin and Jefferson’s thinking, and concluded that the men used Cicero to illustrate that happiness is not the pursuit of pleasure, but the pursuit of virtue.
When Rosen embarked on Jefferson’s reading list, he was surprised to find that, to that point, he had read very few of the books. Furthermore, the scope of Jefferson’s list was broad, encompassing moral and political philosophy, literature, history, science and more. While Rosen said that many of the books had been removed from the curriculum by the time he was pursuing his liberal arts education, he still credits his teachers as “apostles of light to the next generation,” and every day he feels “the spark that these great teachers kindled in (him).”
When Rosen attended college in the 1980s, he said he found himself looking for the kind of guidance that he has since found in the moral writings on Jefferson’s reading list.
“I was craving an answer,” Rosen said, “to the question of, ‘Can the good life be led by reason and reflection rather than by simple authority?’ ”
Rosen wasn’t just reading the books Jefferson recommended, but following the founder’s reading schedule. It was a demanding one.
Following Jefferson’s schedule, Rosen was expected to wake up before sunrise, spend two hours reading moral philosophy, watch the sunrise, then read political philosophy and history. Following lunch, he would read science, astronomy, and late philosophical investigations. After dinner, he would read Shakespeare and poetry. This was the schedule for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. He followed this practice for a year during COVID.
“I found myself writing sonnets,” Rosen said. As he tried to summarize the wisdom of the works he was reading, Rosen found sonnets to be a natural outcome. He was surprised to discover that many during the founders’ era followed a similar practice, including Phillis Wheatley and John Quincy Adams.
Reading those books, following that schedule, changed Rosen’s life.
“What I discovered,” he said, “is that indeed, as Cicero said, for the founders, happiness and particularly the pursuit of happiness meant not feeling good but being good.”
Additionally, “being good” means the pursuit of long-term virtue. In order to achieve this type of virtue, one must pursue self-mastery and self-improvement.
But what kind of mastery and improvement did the founders have in mind? Cicero referred to a “tranquility of soul.” Rosen discussed how Franklin and Jefferson sought to moderate “unreasonable passions and emotions” in order to achieve this tranquility.
“I discovered that, for the founders, happiness was a constant battle between reason and passion,” said Rosen. He further clarified that the classical philosophers were not against emotion; they felt that some emotions were productive and others unproductive, so they sought to regulate these unproductive emotions through reason.
Rosen’s book The Pursuit of Happiness explores these ideas by examining how the founders applied the wisdom of classical writers through specific examples in the founders’ lives.
“It’s striking that, in so many respects, they fell short of their ideals,” said Rosen.
For example, there are inherent contradictions between Jefferson’s philosophy, and his role as an enslaver. Jefferson pursued religious and philosophical improvement, yet held racist viewpoints and only freed a few of his slaves upon his death.
“How is it possible that this founder, like all founders, who insisted that virtue is the key to happiness,” Rosen said, “could have so flamboyantly and notoriously betrayed their ideals when it comes to slavery?”
Rosen reasoned that the founders did not try to make excuses for enslaving people or justify their actions. He cited Patrick Henry, who once said that “is it not amazing that I myself who believes that slavery violates the Bible and natural law, myself own slaves? I will not justify it. I won’t attempt to. It’s simple avarice or greed.”
Rosen also discussed the distinction between reason and passion as outlined by Pythagoras. Pythagoras imagined “reason in the head,” “pathos or emotion in the heart,” and “desire in the stomach.” These three parts should balance each other. An additional point of interest was the connections between the balance of emotion, desire and reason, and the checks and balances designed in the Constitution.
Rosen highlighted how James Madison channeled classical moral philosophy in the writing of the Constitution, saying that Pythagoras’ idea of balance was the same harmony the founders sought to achieve between the three branches of government.
“The whole Constitution was designed to stop people in large groups from becoming mobs,” Rosen said.
He addressed the challenges of the present day, where passion reigns on social media and information, or disinformation, travels faster there than in outlets that are based on facts and reason.
“That’s why it is so urgently important for us, together, to commit to a project of lifelong learning through deep reading and to take this movement across America,” Rosen said.
Finally, Rosen drew connections between his reading project and the Chautauqua Movement of the 19th century.
“The Chautauqua Movement is centrally connected to this project in the 19th century, … to come up with a project of lifelong spiritual self-improvement in a nonsectarian, nonpartisan way through lifelong learning,” he said.
Rosen encouraged those in his Chautauqua audience to rediscover their love of reading that many experienced in childhood or in college, to find the ability to get lost in reading for the sake of reading, and to build their own habits of personal improvement.
“We can’t govern as citizens until we first govern ourselves,” said Rosen.
