by Daniel Rodriguez
As we celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary this year, I am sure these famous words have rung in many Americans’ minds: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Perhaps no other words in American history have been more influential and omnipresent as these. They established the principles on which this nation was built, guided its future, and served as a benchmark that allowed individual citizens to ask themselves: are these unalienable rights encouraged in my personal and civic life?
The last phrase, “the pursuit of happiness,” certainly sounds nice on the 250-year-old parchment it was written on. However, it signifies many different things to many different people. To some, it may mean the pursuit of whatever pleases their fancy. To others, it is merely a variation on the broader concept of property. However, I believe that such interpretations either anachronistically impose modern values onto the phrase or place Jefferson in an intellectual vacuum does not give sufficient weight to the philosophical context surrounding the definition of happiness that informed him and the many others present in that stuffy, crowded hall where the Continental Congress affirmed this resolution on July 4, 1776.
In The Pursuit of Happiness, Jeffrey Rosen sets out to define Jefferson’s famous phrase as not merely a substitute for property or a license for pleasure but instead as the cultivation of virtue, inspired by the ideals set forth in the classical world. Throughout the book, Rosen connects Jefferson, as well as several other Founding Fathers, to a variety of classical and Enlightenment philosophers. Here, I seek to investigate the golden thread of happiness that links Cicero, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson, showing how the pursuit of happiness was necessarily wrapped in a pursuit of virtue by the time Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Cicero
Rosen regards Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations as a common origin for the Founding Fathers’ conception of the pursuit of happiness. In fact, Jefferson regarded this work highly enough to include it in a reading list sent to his friend Robert Skipwith.[1] In this work, we see the happy life as synonymous with the virtuous life.
When Cicero wrote the Tusculan Disputations in 45 BC, he was amid a turbulent period in his life. The Roman Republic he desperately tried to save was crumbling as Julius Caesar declared himself dictator. Cicero had recently divorced his wife, Terentia, and suffered the death of his beloved daughter, Tullia. Unsurprisingly, the fifth and final book of this work explores what it means to be truly happy.
After outlining how one should face the various difficulties of life, such as death, distress, pain, and loss, Brutus, who was engaged in a days-long dialogue with Cicero in the book, showed doubt as to how virtue is sufficient for a happy life, especially when facing the tragedies that beset every man’s life. However, Cicero argued that virtue, with the courage, restraint, and satisfaction inherent in it, provides man with what he needs to meet such difficulties and lead a happy life, stating:
Therefore, if there is a man able to regard all human vicissitudes that can possibly befall, as so far endurable that neither fear nor worry touch him, and if the same man should covet nothing, feel no transport of empty pleasure in his soul, what reason is there why he should not be happy? And if virtue makes this possible, what reason is there why virtue of its own power alone should not make men happy?[2]
Virtue and its subsequent happiness are then contingent on the proper ordering of man’s desires that allows him to have the fortitude to remain unfazed by worry, covetousness, and the fickle fortunes of life.
Virtue, in addition to providing man with the best tools for one’s stability and gratification in life, Cicero argued, also makes for a good life, no matter one’s material circumstances. As an illustration, Cicero utilized the story of Dionysius, king of Syracuse who, with one of the most beautiful and wealthiest city-states in the classical world and who was said to have been “exceedingly temperate in his way of life and showed untiring energy in his conduct of affairs,” was nonetheless a cruel and oppressive tyrant.[3] In fact, it is from Cicero’s relation of Dionysius’s life where we get the famous story of the Sword of Damocles.
The story begins with Damocles, one of Dionysius’s “flatterers,” praising his king’s army, wealth, and power. Dionysius replies to the flattery: “Would you then, Damocles, as this life of mine seems to you so delightful, like to have a taste of it yourself and make trial of my good fortune?”[4] After agreeing, Dionysius has Damocles seated upon a golden couch with choice food and attendants at his beck and call—all with one drawback: Dionysius has a sword hung by a single horsehair right above Damocles’s neck. This story and the rest of Dionysius’s life show how one boasting the most magnificent riches and power can be even more miserable when he is enslaved by his vices and unguided by virtue and reason. In Dionysius’s case, the vices of wrath and tyranny enslaved him, leading to a miserable life of near-constant paranoia as he feared retribution from those he oppressed.
Jefferson, having read and highly regarded the Tusculan Disputations, was certainly influenced by these principles when conceiving of how happiness would manifest itself in the new American republic. Rosen makes exceedingly clear the impact that Tusculan Disputations had on Jefferson. According to Rosen, Cicero was the only classical philosopher whose quotes were recorded in Jefferson’s commonplace book after his father’s death.[5] Moreover, Rosen also refers to a letter between Jefferson and Amos J. Cook where Jefferson, offering a Latin quote for his students’ enrichment, copies a passage from Tusculan Disputations, summarizing it and other philosophers saying, “and if the Wise, be the happy man, as these sages say, he must be virtuous too; for, without virtue, happiness cannot be.”[6] According to Jefferson’s own words, then, even if this new republic were to achieve the heights of power and wealth, its citizens still would be miserable if they lived in a society that did not encourage the cultivation and pursuit of virtue, which is the origin of happiness.
John Locke
This concept of virtue as the seed of happiness continues in the works of John Locke, one of the most influential forces behind Jefferson’s thought. Locke’s discussion of the will in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding presents a clear continuity of Cicero’s concept of happiness in the Tusculan Disputations.
Locke strictly defined the will as that which leads the human person either to physical action or to inaction. The will is determined by a sense of uneasiness stemming from desire “fixed on some absent good.”[7] According to this definition of the will, man should necessarily be determined to seek an infinitely greater good that points us toward God and heaven. However, Locke also wrote that even if a man is “ever so well persuaded of the advantages of virtue,” he cannot move his will to act towards it unless he truly “hungers or thirsts after righteousness” and feels the true uneasiness stemming from the desire for it.[8] The will, though constantly seeking some higher good, is ultimately beset by all kinds of desires and acts to satisfy the desire most immediately attainable, for it “cannot at any time be moved towards what is judged at that time unattainable,” such as the ultimate good.[9]
The will, then, though seeking an infinitely greater good, cannot be moved toward it, since it is distracted by the many sources of uneasiness and desire that besiege us in our daily lives. According to this definition, humans are seemingly and necessarily enslaved by their most immediate desires and needs.
Locke, however, stated that human liberty and free will lies in the “great privilege of finite intellectual beings” that can “suspend their desires, and stop them from determining their wills to any action, till they have duly and fairly examined the good and evil of it.”[10] The ability of man to utilize reason to determine whether an action will lead to a certain good forms the foundation for Locke’s conception of happiness.
Though Locke defined happiness, also inextricably tied to goodness, as “the utmost pleasure we are capable of” and that which determines desire, he did not view it as a license to give into our basest passions.[11] Locke wrote that “any extreme disturbance” such as “love, anger, or any other violent passions . . . allows us not the liberty of thought, and we are not masters enough of our own minds to consider thoroughly and examine fairly.”[12] Such restraints on our desires do not limit but rather encourage human liberty. As Locke wrote, “To break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worse” does not produce free men but “madmen and fools.”[13] Like Cicero, Locke acknowledged that without restraint we too can be enslaved by our passions and prescribed a correct ordering of the desires as key to happiness.
It is worth noting, however, that Locke went further than Cicero, showing how a knowledge of God and His ultimate goodness is key to this happiness:
Change but a man’s view of these things; let him see that virtue and religion are necessary to his happiness; let him look into the future state of bliss or misery, and see there God, the righteous Judge, ready to ‘render to every man according to his deeds; to them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory, and honour, and immortality, eternal life; but unto every soul that doth evil, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish.’ . . . For, since nothing of pleasure and pain in this life can bear any proportion to the endless happiness or exquisite misery of an immortal soul hereafter, actions in his power will have their preference, not according to the transient pleasure or pain that accompanies or follows them here, but as they serve to secure that perfect durable happiness hereafter.[14]
Rosen clearly demonstrates the influence coming from John Locke and Cicero in the writing of the Declaration, citing a letter to Henry Lee where he directly names Locke and Cicero among others as “corroborative of the facts and principles advanced in that Declaration.”[15] Based on a direct examination of the writings of Cicero and Locke, it seems sufficiently clear that Jefferson was working from Locke and Cicero’s construction of happiness when he wrote those timeless words in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, if we look toward Cicero and Locke in the examination of those words, we see that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inextricably tied to each other, with one being necessary for the existence of the other.
Conclusion
As wonderful as a pursuit of virtue is for the citizen and his republic, we as Christians know that it is not enough. In fact, we should be all the more aware of our inability to achieve a state of perfection or freedom from desire. Though a pursuit of virtue is a good start, our only true hope lies in the restoration of our souls through faith in Jesus Christ. Though even in a state of salvation we falter, true faith results in a holy pursuit of righteousness in which we can find a happiness beyond what this flawed world can offer any one of us. In Christ and the perfect world to come, then, we put our hope.
About the Author: Daniel Rodriguez is a resident of Gallatin, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Anna. He holds a B.A. in History and English from Welch College and is currently pursuing his M.A. in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University. Currently, he is working as a historical interpreter at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. In his spare time, Danny enjoys writing, kayaking, reading, and knitting.
[1] Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (Simon and Schuster, 2024), 4.
[2] Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Harvard University Press, 1927), 443.
[3] Ibid., 483.
[4] Ibid., 487.
[5] Rosen, 90.
[6] Thomas Jefferson to Amos J. Cook, January 21, 1816, in The Pursuit of Happiness, 3.
[7] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; repr., Dover, 1959), 1:334.
[8] Ibid., 335.
[9] Ibid., 339.
[10] Ibid., 349.
[11] Ibid., 340.
[12] Ibid., 350.
[13] Ibid., 347.
[14] Ibid., 356.
[15] Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in The Pursuit of Happiness, 4.
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