1 Introduction
Jonathan Edwards was a theologian of the eighteenth century. As two pieces of background on Edwards, I would mention:
- In addition to his background and training in theology, he was also an avid natural scientist (and interested in particular in light). His religious convictions are not only not inconsistent with but may be seen as the foundation of his scientific interests. For Edwards, the study of nature is a way of making out the nature of the world created by God; a way of appreciating God’s creation. There is no tension for him between the mechanistic conception of nature emergent from the advance of Newtonian physics and his own religious commitments.
- His views are Calvinist, which means that he accepts predestination. Predestination is the view that, no matter what choices you make, your fate, as far as whether you have been ‘chosen’ by God, has been decided in advance.
Edwards is particularly interesting for us as a predecessor to transcendentalism: The problems and suppositions of transcendentalism appear here in a particularly clear way.
2 Light and knowledge
He uses as an example here a passage from the New Testament in which Simon professes knowledge of Jesus’ divinity. And the question his sermon attempts to answer is: How is this knowledge possible?
We don’t all share Edwards’ religious convictions, of course, so this question may seem irrelevant to some or most of us. For our purposes, I want to strip away everything but just this question: How is transcendent knowledge possible? For ‘transcendent knowledge’ substitute anything that is immaterial, or that you can’t simply see with your eyes or touch with your hands. It could be knowledge of mathematical propositions, for example. (This isn’t Edwards’ point, but it makes Edwards legible to those of us who don’t share his religious convictions.)
Edwards’ basic claim (the “Doctrine” on p. 4) is that there is a “light,” analogous to actual light, that “imparts to the soul” certain transcendent truths.
Consider the way that light works with respect to vision. Light is not something you see but something that makes seeing possible. Note also that a thing may be ‘visible’ while not actually being seeable. I mean for example that objects in a darkened room are, in principle, things you can see (they have surfaces, and the surfaces have color), but because the lights are out, you cannot actually see them. Once the light goes on, what is visible becomes seeable: not potentially seeable (it was already that) but actually seeable. Light makes the visible capable of being seen.
A similar ‘light’ would thus reveal transcendent truths: truths that are not knowable owing to the light; that are already knowable; but that become available to our knowledge in the way that turning on a light makes the visible objects in a room seeable.
The basic idea then is that: There are certain transcendent truths. They become conspicuously knowable (in the way that the visible becomes seeable) through a certain light.
3 Forms of knowledge
Jesus doesn’t just confirm Simon Peter’s claim (that Jesus is the son of God) but typifies the belief in a rather specific way. He says that Simon Peter is “blessed” and “happy,” and that this blessedness and happiness have a divine source. In a translated version: The knowledge Simon Peter has is moral in scope and of an affective or emotional character, and its source is transcendent.
Some forms of knowledge—such as that of “human Arts and Sciences, and Skill in temporal Affairs”—are described by Edwards as capable of being transmitted entirely through human beings (p. 3). But others are necessarily of a transcendent—for Edwards: divine—sort. See the contrasts on pp. 3–4.
For Edwards, certain forms of knowledge are (at least partially) innate, including a sort of natural moral conscience; other forms are transcendent, or from God; and some are of both sources. See the passages highlighted in yellow on pp. 5–6.
But some knowledge is necessarily transcendent (or divine); see the green passage on p. 6. And this knowledge does not come to us through the imagination or through any “impression upon the imagination” (see p. 8). And this knowledge moreover is not propositional or, we might say, conceptual in nature (see p. 9). And it is not simply “affection,” in the way of being “affected” by a particularly moving drama or story, say.
4 The spiritual and divine light
What is this “spiritual and divine light”? See p. 10.
What makes this particular sort of “light” interesting as a thought about how we come to have an understanding of the natural world is that:
- it is not intellectual; yet
- its content is of, say, a metaphysical sort (we learn how things are through this divine light); and
- there is conviction involved in it.
See this characterization on p. 11. Edwards then draws the distinction, in the continuation (green passage, pp. 11–12) between “speculative” knowledge and knowledge “of the heart,” which involves conviction.
5 Having an opinion and having a sense
See the yellow passage on p. 12. Edwards is distinguishing between (mere) intellectual apprehension and “having a sense,” where “having a sense” involves sensory experience. He’s claiming, in short, that there is a form of knowledge of the transcendent that necessarily involves sensory experience—indeed, that necessarily involves pleasure.
Let’s simplify the insight (radically simplify) by saying that it is a conviction that things are, in some general sense, good. That’s our, say, transcendental conviction, and for even more brevity we’ll just call all of this “the good.”
Edwards’ claim then is that the good is perceived not by the intellect alone (which is more or less exactly what, say, Plato thought, and that was the stock view for many medieval theologians) but that it involves, necessarily, a dimension of sensory experience. See the passage on p. 15. And, inversely, it is interesting that sensory experience is something that, for Edwards, can serve as a vehicle for that sort of insight. These two ideas, or some version of them, are fundamental to the career of American philosophy we’re interested in in this course.
Edwards moreover notes that the conviction that arises from sensory experience is critical to “removing prejudice,” and that in that way sensory experience serves to “engage the attention of the Mind” (p. 13). The idea that knowledge rests on a sort of practical or moral orientation is fundamental, too, for later American philosophy.
6 Lessons
I want to focus our attention on two upshots from this excerpt.
- One is that transcendent knowledge is possible
- The other is that transcendent knowledge is possible and specifically through sensory experience
There is no skepticism here; no qualifying of the knowledge of God in terms of blind faith. Edwards thinks knowledge of the good and of God as author of the good can be directly apprehended. But he views sensory experience as the vehicle of that apprehension. That fundamental truths can be grasped, and that they are grasped through immediate sensory awareness—and, inversely, that sensory awareness is the sort of thing that occasions apprehension of that sort of knowledge—are signature gestures of the philosophical tradition in the Americas.