Benjamin Franklin

From Philosopedia

Franklin, Benjamin (17 January 1706 - 17 April 1790)

Franklin, the Boston-born printer, publisher, inventor, author, aphorist and statesman quit the Presbyterian Church in 1734, according to his Autobiography. He was something of a Deist in the mode of the Enlightenment, retaining only a belief in a god and future life. As such, he irked the theists with his common sense philosophy devoid of supernaturalism and religiosity.

“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches,” Franklin declared. Joyfully pursuing French women while being the United States minister to France, he set a pace that Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson found difficult to match. William Franklin, the last royal governor of New Jersey, was his illegitimate son.

In 1728, he had written his views in Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion:

• When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

According to Joseph McCabe, Franklin was a member of and financial contributor to the First Unitarian Church in London. Many consider his Autobiography (1771—1778), which covers only his early years, one of the finest examples of the genre in any language.

His proposal for a one-chamber Congress was not accepted - the sole example of unicameralism in the United States is Nebraska.

Turgot summed up Franklin’s services: Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis. [He wrested the thunderbolt from heaven and the sceptre from kings.] A different view was held by theologians: Franklin by developing the lightning rod denied to deity an avenue of punishment for the wicked. A different view was also held by his political enemies, who knew of his early devotion to England and the king, his being twenty-six years older than Washington and almost fifty older than Madison and Hamilton, his aristocratic notions (he proposed at the Constitutional Convention that all members of the executive branch in the new federal government serve without pay), and his willingly spending over one-third of his lifetime outside his country.

After the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had been underway for a month, the octogenarian Franklin suggested that the so-far secular convention conduct a prayer. Records show that Franklin's proposal created polite embarrassment, and that the convention adjourned without any vote on the motion. Franklin was part of a distinguished committee, including Adams and Jefferson, which adopted the United States' secular motto, "E Pluribus Unum" (From many, [come] one). At one point, the pragmatic Franklin suggested currency contain the phrase "Mind your business."

To President Ezra Stiles of Yale University, Franklin in a 1790 letter just before his death wrote,

• Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. . . . I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments, without reflecting on them for those who appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd.

At the age of eighty-four, Franklin was in great pain and left the world willingly and peacefully. His daughter was with him and said she hoped he would get better and live many more years. “I hope not,” he retorted, escaping pain only by the use of opium. Later that day, April 17, 1790, he was advised to move on his bed in order to breathe more easily. His last words were, “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

On Humanists, Believers, Self-Castration, and Farting

(Jerry Weinberger in The New Atlantis (Number 15, Winter 2007, pp. 77-91), a journal of technology and society, discusses Franklin and the cultural divide in 2007 between humanists and believers. Franklin's serious humor, he wrote, includes making up and publishing some spoofs of believers and the clergy as well as hoaxes including

• a report of a deranged man near Sahaukan who demanded that his wife stick her tongue in his mouth, which out of fear she did. The man then bit off a large chunk and “taking it between his fingers threw it into the fire with these words, Let this be for a Burnt-Offering.” This bit of grotesquery was followed up by a mocking story about Benjamin Lay, whom Franklin described as “the Pythagorean-cynical-christian Philosopher,” who protested tea drinking by making public sacrifice of his dead wife’s expensive china. The sacrifice failed, however because the crowd knocked Lay down and made off with the stuff before he could do much with his hammer. And then there was the most amazing gag of them all:

About two weeks ago, one John Leek, of Cohansie in West-New-Jersey, after twelve months deliberation, made himself an eunuch (as it is said) for the Kingdom of Heaven’s Sake, having made such construction upon Matthew xix.12. He is now under Dr. Johnson’s Hands, and in a fair way of doing well.

• These stories - about dancing sheep and psalm-singing hogs, the absurd trial by scales and water, the deranged tongue roaster, the crack-pot china breaker, and the lunatic self-made castrato for the kingdom of heaven’s sake—surely make us think of the believers as candidates for bedlam. Moreover, when we’re told that the witches outweighed Moses and all the prophets and apostles, it’s impossible not to think of all the miracles depicted in the Bible, which if they were described as having happened yesterday would be written off (at least by rationalists and even by many believers) as frauds or as the ravings of foam-at-the-mouth lunatics. That’s close to what Hobbes - the greatest rationalist and atheist of the Enlightenment - did in fact say.

Weinberger, a professor of political science at Michigan State University and the author of Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought (2005), questions describing Franklin as a Deist, a pragmatic moralist, and "The First American." Rather, he was "the first American Baconian,"

• He was also a profound philosopher, deeply skeptical of religion (especially the metaphysical conceits of Deists) and of our everyday moral intuitions. He was also profoundly skeptical of the intellectual foundations of rationalism and the Enlightenment. And he was, to put his politics in a nutshell, a political constructivist and libertarian. Franklin was not as American as apple pie, but he was as American as the corndog.

Franklin's comical proposal in a work about farts, Weinberger writes, was scientific, for the discoverer of a gas pill would do more for mankind than have philosophers who have achieved fame for much less useful discoveries:

• Are there twenty men in Europe happier because of what they have learned from Aristotle? What are Descartes’ vortices compared to the whirlwinds in men’s bowels? What is Newton’s mutual attraction of matter by comparison to matter’s mutual repulsion, with its cruel distensions? Can the pleasure of a few philosophers when they gaze on the seven threads of light separated by the Newtonian prism compare with “the ease and comfort every man living might feel seven times a day, by discharging freely the wind from his bowels? Especially if it be converted into a perfume.”

Indeed “this invention, if completed, would be, as Bacon expresses it, bringing philosophy home to men’s business and bosoms.” By comparison to the universal utility of such a project, says Franklin, the science of all the philosophers mentioned and the mathematical question posed by the academy are “all together, scarcely worth a farthing”—although he puts a hyphen in the word farthing between the “t” and the “h” (FART-HING). It would take a pretty stuffy sourpuss not to laugh at this joke. Bringing philosophy home to our business and bosoms? Guess again. Imagine the spectacle of well-dressed, elegant diners (perhaps at a state dinner) eating foie gras, drinking fine wines, and gassing each other, often loudly, with their intestinal perfumes.

{BDF; CE; CL; EU, A. Owen Aldridge; FFRF; FUK; FUS; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; U; UU}