| Benjamin Franklin, known in his day as both a philosopher and politician, has long been a mystery. His life represents the tension between the philosophic and political lives, and scholars have interpreted Franklin as either philosopher or politician. Lorraine Pangle interprets him in terms of his political career, and denies that he ever attained the level of philosophic reflection. In her telling, Franklin embraces an essentially moralistic view of the world after a youthful flirtation with philosophic skepticism. Pangle maintains that Franklin's turn to politics reveals that he failed to plumb the depths of his own moral opinions. At the end of his life, having shrugged off the questions of providence, anger, and justice, she argues that he became more pious. Jerry Weinberger, taking the opposite view, argues that Franklin "philosophized with a joke," or used humor to destroy the serious arguments of moral virtue; Franklin did not take his political life seriously, but adopted a mask of public service that enabled him to live a pleasurable life of leisure. His early philosophic inquiry supposedly led him to conclude that there was no distinction between virtue and vice, but that whatever is, is just. For Weinberger, morality rests upon anger, and Franklin took nothing seriously, especially himself in his pursuit of self-knowledge. I argue, providing unique interpretations of Franklin's ironic philosophic and moral essays, that Franklin is neither Pangle's political man nor Weinberger's nihilist. In his youth, Franklin adopted a radical skepticism, and argued that one could know neither God nor his duty as a human being. But he records in his writings his gradual conversion to philosophy. Franklin concluded that one's opinions about God were inseparable from his opinions about virtue, and he reformulated the question of God as the question of human happiness. Through self-examination, which Franklin calls the science of virtue, he engages in a protracted dialectic into the best way of life. He concludes that the happiness of a rational creature is achieved in a life of philosophic rationalism. I conclude with a study of, and offer explanations for, Franklin's turn to political life. |
