The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0418; Leadership

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and new and white and mid radio network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in March of 2004 and it is part two in the Jeffersonian Leadership Series. Please join us as our host Janie Will speaks with Thomas Jefferson portrayed by Humanity Scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. My name is Janie Will and I'm the producer of the program. Today we're doing a section on leadership in particular on visions. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you, citizen. Mr. Jefferson, in addition to visions, what I would like to hit first is optimism. In all the current books about leadership, they talk about how a leader must be optimistic. Can you speak to that and your leadership style please? Well, I was by nature an optimist. I did not groom myself for a

leadership. In other words, I didn't stand back at some point in my life and say I would like to become a leader and I need now to prepare for that through a certain course of discipline or mastery of certain talents. I simply was what I was and I probably can be regarded without exaggeration as the most optimistic man in American history. And why wouldn't I be optimistic? We had a continent to develop. Its resources were infinite. I mean compare the trees alone of the United States to those of Great Britain or Scandinavia or Germany or Italy or France or Spain. We had unbelievable resource base from which to build our republic. We were a highly educated people who had broken with the mother country in a benign revolution. I don't underestimate the number of people that were displaced or hurt or killed. But of all the revolutions in human history, ours was the most benign in every possible regard. And suddenly

we're free and we're writing our own constitutions and designing our republic for the 19th century. If you aren't optimistic in the face of those benefits that no other nation at any time in human history has had, then you aren't I think fully alive. In addition to which that's my rational optimism observing the world and seeing who we are. I also was temperamentally optimistic. My motto is Neil Desperandum. Nothing is to be disparate of by a person of capacity. So I'm an optimist both by temperament. I'm a cheerful man. And I'm also an optimist by conviction by looking at the scene around me. Thank you Mr. Jefferson. You made an interesting statement. You said that you did not groom yourself for leadership. And yet when you were a young man, you read the classics and you can you give us a just a taste of the books that you read that helped you form your leadership style or help form your character or whatever.

Yes, I was a classicist because I loved the classics. I wasn't a classicist to mine them for wisdom about the world or capacities of leadership that I might be able to apply in our country. I did not want to be a leader. I'm not a natural leader. I'm naturally a quiet and retired man. And if you had said to me at any point in my life, what is your bent Mr. Jefferson? What is your genius? And we use genius in a much more general sense in my time than you seem to use it in yours. What is your genius, Mr. Jefferson? I would have said my genius is for literature and science and agriculture that I would have liked to have been left alone as a quiet scholar, agronomist, and architect, a dabbler in the sciences who attempted to lead a life of mastery and good sense and even elegance. And perhaps in some limited way that life would be exemplary and others would would be inspired by it or wish to live equally

rational lives. But I never thought of myself as a leader. I'm not a natural leader. There are many natural leaders. The greatest, of course, is George Washington in American history. Alexander Hamilton had a thirst for leadership. Dr. Franklin had charisma. Other people, Patrick Henry, was a spellbinding orator. John Adams was a man of indefatigable energy and strongly driven by the ideology of freedom in a republic. All of them were better leaders than I was. And I was of all the leaders of my time. I was the one with the least natural capacity for leadership. And I only became a leader because I lived in the times that I did, which were revolutionary times. And I said early during the revolution that times like these call out the energies of our our best people. And if they refuse to serve their country in this moment, then they have abdicated the dream of republic and their own responsibility

as citizens. So I did allow myself to become a leader, but it was out of a sense of duty and really counterintuitive to my to my natural bent. I said, wants to depart. Nature fitted me to be a scientist by rendering that my supreme delight in scientists meant something a little broader than it does in yours. It meant someone who was fascinated by ideas and information. So I must disclaim again any thought that I might have groomed myself for leadership. What did I get from the classics? Well, pleasure to read Homer in the original is worth learning Greek to do. It's that simple. The Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the first great pieces of literature in the Western tradition. They're sublime, marvelous works of moral fiction of poetry, and it is worth spending before five or six years of hard work on paradigms and conjugations and grammatical structures and memorizing vocabulary to be able to read Homer in the original. I also read the complete classical

corpus from Aristotle to Plato to Polybius to Livy and Tacitus and Cicero and Salist and and so on and so forth. Horus was one of my favorites. He's a Roman satirist and a pastoral poet. Livy was one of my favorites. He's a Roman historian who wrote about the origins of the Roman Republic. Tacitus is I think the greatest prose stylist in human history and Tacitus perhaps has something to say to this question that you're asking because Tacitus wrote in these extraordinary very terse unemotional histories of Rome but he also provided a warning of what happens when a nation ceases to be a republican and becomes an empire instead. So I learned from all of this and these were lessons. I haven't even mentioned the book that focused most on leadership yet but in all of these cases you read literature for pleasure and for instruction and the instruction is how to be a complete human being first, how to find happiness, how to temper your own life so that it is moderate and

and exhibits the the lovely steadiness and harmony of character which which produced the greatest classical models in men like Solan but of course in reading all of this one can't help but see models of historical leadership and then perhaps finding some way to apply some of those lessons in one's own life. Mr. Jefferson thank you very much. We actually have a question by a listener wanting to know if you actually read Plato's book The Republic. Yes I read it in a number of times I read it in English I read it in Greek I read it in the original Greek and including once very late in my life during my retirement and I wrote to John Adams then when we had renewed our friendship that I had dutifully struggled through Plato he is perhaps the finest of all Greek prose stylists but I found him tedious and I regard Plato as the phogiest brain of antiquity. I don't find much to admire in Plato's political thought.

I was put off by the mysticism you know his there's a mysticism and a kind of a metaphysical ladder of a scent towards a spiritual fulfillment that is at the center of Plato's thinking. None of that struck me as very useful and I didn't find the republic a useful practical guide to the creation of an ideal state but I did read Plato a number of times in the course of my life I would not say that there was any particular attribute of leadership that I would have taken from Plato. In terms of leadership I would have chosen two texts one is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle shows that the complete human being is in the middle state between passions that the golden mean that symphrosity the quality of being harmonious in one's own

character and not tending towards excesses that leading a life of steadiness and reliability and moderation is in the long run more important than being passionate. That comes from Aristotle he's though as we say the locus classicus meaning the the place where that great idea that so central to the Western tradition has its first and finest expression and then the other book that that mattered to me so much on leadership was Plutarch's lives of the eminent Greeks and Romans and that book of all the books of antiquity that's the one that is most pointedly dedicated to the study of leadership styles in different Greek men and different Roman men. Thank you Mr. Jefferson at one point I believe someone referred to as being stoic can you explain to us of what stoic means and how you applied that in your life where it came from and how that impacted your leadership style. The stoics were ancient philosophers both Greek and Roman who believed that

we should be impervious to passion so that there should be no great ecstacies and there should be no great sorrows that we should take life in a kind of steady manner and that nothing should shake our core confidence and core sensibility very much and the stoic philosophers were profoundly influential on my own character and I tried to be the kind of man who could accept what came with equanimity I did I do not like shows of emotion the word enthusiasm was was a dark word during the enlightenment because it literally it's a Greek word and it literally means God in you and we I'm not in favor of enthusiasm of any sort I believe a rational approach to life is the right one and that we the purpose of in a sense and I wrote this in a letter to Mrs. Cosway in 1786 but I was being playful then but I

but I mean it too that the the way to find happiness is to be impervious to pain because there's pain everywhere pain in our bodies pain in our souls pain from the losses that we endure of our of our loved ones pain and setbacks both personal and political and so the avoidance of pain is is the great desert erotum of life I would say and the way to avoid pain is to brace yourself for it and to know that if I lose a child however however grief struck I am others have lost children it's the nature of life for people to live and to die and that the the complete man has has built a matrix of understanding of the processes the organic circumstances of life and therefore is not prostrated by every dislocation every disruption every calamity that comes along and so I would say that I am

a stoic epictetus was my favorite of the ancient philosophers Epicurus is is another one of them but I for example I can give you one example late in my life when I was retired some gentleman came down from New England to visit me and we were having breakfast at Monticello and there had been a storm the night before and one of my overseers came in and whispered in my ear and I said very well thank you I appreciate that and went on with my breakfast and only later did my New England guests learn that the the fresh it had swept away my mill and that the lost to me in finances was perhaps twenty five or thirty thousand dollars which would be a million dollars in your time and I had simply absorbed this information and gone on with my meal because there wasn't a darn thing I could do about it for one thing that that flood had come and gone and I could weep if I wished or ring my hands or tear my hair or clothes but that wasn't going to change the facts and these are the these are the exigencies of life that same storm probably put

much needed rain on our crops so the stoic is somebody who learns to be centered and not swept up by the circumstances of life Mr. Jefferson how do you propose that someone become a stoic it sounds like this requires some training of some sort well it requires an understanding of the nature of life I mean everyone dies without a single exception in my time many people died suddenly and it could not appear to be just four of my six children died in infancy they didn't deserve death they weren't courting disaster they weren't taking unusual risks they weren't in war they weren't mountain climbers they just died but the medicines of my time could not save them and so I knew the death is common and if you know the death is common and that all life tends towards death and for some it will come sooner and for some it will come later but to everyone it will come then you have a rational matrix of understanding to absorb

some death by somebody when it actually occurs so understanding is the key to it it's also a form of self-discipline you know I'm sure that I felt like shouting when I learned that my meal had been swept away but what good would it have done and you know humans are our civil creatures and we have to exercise the arts of civilization at every turn if we succumb to our instincts and to our animalism then we will descend down the chain of being to some more bestial state and I believe that it's characteristic of a fully civilized man not to be perturbable and if you're perturbable by this or that then there's a certain mechanical nature to your life and so it comes from from reading and understanding particularly and looking at these great models of of men of the ancient world who were Stoics and

and who exhibited to us what ideal character can be and I would and I would urge everyone who's interested in the Stoic tradition to read Marcus Aurelius or the works of Hadrian or Zeno or particularly my favorite epictetus but so some of it comes from reading and reflection some of it comes from disciplining oneself and if you if you lose in love that's no reason to weep on a mountaintop if you gain in love that's no reason to cheer I mean these are the processes of life and the more you know about it the more common it all seems so in Stoicism it's not just the hardships that you bear without emotion it's also the uptimes yes it's not that you you know it may sound as if I'm somebody who who's afraid of emotion and I suppose I am in certain regards but that's not the point the point is that

that you want to be centered and the rule that I would urge on everyone this will sound grim in an age of such hedonism as yours but I think that the that the model that everyone should bear in the best of moments and in the worst of moments is this two will pass when you are at the height of your career or in romantic or sexual ecstasy or you have just had an extraordinary adventure in the wilderness or your child has just been born and you are ecstatic remember this two will pass and there will be bad times to counter those good times and that this is the nature of life and so we want to be steadier not to be swept around like a leaf in the wind and it's not that I didn't know intense joys but I tried to discipline those intense joys through this set of culture codes that I had picked up from the Roman Republic and particularly from the Greek

stoic philosophers and when I see people who are well take marry whether Lewis my dear protege Lewis killed himself he did not have a stoical character he did not realize that whatever was wrong at that moment was something that A is common to other human beings and B would certainly pass and so he took his own life which was not only a terrible shock to all of us who loved him but it was in a sense an act of disrespect because he did not live to publish his book and he left his family in disarray when my troubled son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph was about to fight a duel I said how dare you you know not only is dueling foolish and shows a susceptibility to a very antiquated notion of honor but if you get killed in the duel you leave a family in a desperate state which is exactly what Alexander Hamilton did in dying

in July of 1840 he left his poor long-suffering patient and loyal wife in in a state of abject poverty and grief and this showed such a selfishness in his character that that I found it appalling that that Hamilton would do this he had a duty to live on and be a good father and a good provider for his family Mr. Jefferson we need to take a break but we will be back in just a moment in honor of the Jeffersonian leadership series Clay Jenkins and in his producer Janie Guil have been selecting leadership tools from today's marketplace the first recommended tool is a single CD entitled little voice management systems by Blair Singer Blair Singer is one of the nation's leading voices in sales management for a donation of $40 you will receive the first of the modern day Jeffersonian leadership tools the CD entitled little voice management systems please call 1-888-458-1803-1888-458-1803 to order your copy today

please stay tuned we will be back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour my name is Janie Guil and I'm the

producer of the program today we're talking with our third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson about leadership this is an ongoing series and we have been speaking about stoicism Mr. Jefferson you mentioned that stoicism is basically the ability to stay neutral during tranquil yes tranquil tranquil it's a harmony program to be tranquil in the face of everything that happens okay and if you were to take the founding fathers the primary founding fathers who I would say were Ben Franklin George Washington John Adams Alexander Hamilton and yourself how would you rate each one of them according to their ability to be stoic well you're asking me to turn the mirror on myself which I always am low to do I would say I was the most stoic of them and that I had the greatest life mastery of all of the founding fathers in this

regard which is frankly why some just trusted me because I was always civil and polite and non-committal and generous in public but I had very strong private views and they many people thought Mr. Jefferson how can you hold such passionate private views when you are so bland in a sense in public and they would have I think preferred that I were less stoical than I was I was the most stoical Washington was second he had a volcanic temper which I did not have I didn't really have a temper but Washington did and he actually spent some of his life struggling to overcome his impulses and had a program of self-mastery that is truly admirable and he largely succeeded and so I think he is a perfect example of an American stoic even though just beneath the surface was a very very passionate and often angry man didn't George Washington have a list of something like 112 rules to live by that he kept

in his pocket at all times yes he did he had a self-caticism as as did Dr. Franklin by the way and I in a sense I did with my own ten commandments which I wrote so this was the self-categizing habit was very common in our time and think of it in your time I mean how many how many political leaders do that in your time how many individuals in your time you prize spontaneity and authenticity much more than you prize moderation and temperance so it's a different age and you you have different concepts of what the fulfillment of the individual is in your time you'd probably say we were in denial or we were radically at odds with ourselves or you know we were sublimating or I don't know what terms you would use but we really regarded self-control as a very important thing and George Washington could never have been the commander in chief of the armies of the president of the united states if he hadn't shown all of that self-control in public that was his genius I'd say Adams and Hamilton come at the bottom on the stoic category Adams was was very forthright about his feelings he put them in letters

he expressed himself very candidly on almost all occasions and he if you read his correspondence carefully there's there's a great deal of self-pity in it and there's a great deal of ego-tism in it if you read my correspondence you see almost no ego now that doesn't mean I didn't have one but it means that I kept it off the table which is what I think a stoic does and Hamilton you know Hamilton basically committed suicide he didn't have to fight that duel he fought that duel because he was a he was he was a slave to a narrow and I think silly concept of honor and he allowed himself to be drawn by Aaron Burr who was an evil man into a duel that need not be fought over an issue that wasn't important and in doing so lost his life that's the farthest thing from being stoical mr. Jefferson on behalf of Alexander Hamilton

did he not lose his son just a year before that no I don't know what that explains except that the father should have learned that his concept of honor which he had imposed upon his poor son Philip had led to Phillips early death and then that might have been a good time for Hamilton to revise an idiotic notion of that sort yes I felt sorry for Hamilton because no one wants to lose a child particularly a child that has grown up and under such horrible circumstances and as I think you know the child Philip was defending his father's honor in that duel at Wehawken in the same place that Hamilton himself was cut down in July of 184 so there's a certain pathos to this and I feel sympathy with the Hamilton family for the loss of their son but that son died because his father imposed upon him an outrageous concept of honor and I think that Hamilton bears some responsibility and frankly although I didn't ever publicly or really even privately comment on

on the death of Hamilton I think Hamilton in some regards was courting death interesting I'll leave this and let's go to Ben Franklin you mentioned that he was probably one of the most stoic next to you Franklin was a tremendous man and he he had a different kind of master I wouldn't call it stoical I would say that Franklin was a truly wise man one of the rare truly wise people who ever get a chance to live on earth and Franklin had seen enough of the cosmos to be amused by it I had not I was an extremely earnest man and so was was was Hamilton and I mean they all were we were that we lived in a very earnest time and we were all earnest men we were revolutionaries after all but Franklin saw more than we did and he had a kind of Homeric bemusement at the foibles of humanity including his own and so he was impervious to common human

events for a better reason that he in a sense understood more than the rest of us and the more you understand the less any one event means for example the French Revolution this is an easy and perfect example I lost friends in the French Revolution very close friends the Duc de la Rochefico and others who were of the intellectual set men of letters men of of the Republic of ideas were killed in the terror but of course I felt terrible loss over dear friends who were beheaded for no good reason just because they were aristocrats they had never harmed anyone they were harmless philosophers and yet suddenly they're dragged and beaten in front of their wives and children and taken to the the guillotine and their heads are lopped off by these terrorists of course that's appalling but it's now step back if you step back one step you realize that they are symbols of a hated aristocracy which is

lorded it over the French people for millennia and so and there is in a sense it's less appalling when you realize that they are victims by way of symbolism of something that had to get righted before France could move on if you step back another step all right so 10 or 15,000 people will go to the guillotine what is that in the in the life of a country in the wars that Napoleon fought he killed hundreds of thousands the religious wars that have racked France for centuries killed millions the plague swept off one in three people of France or at least one in four the the bubonic plague the the famous black plague if you think of the number of people who have been starved to death by hotty kings and aristocrats and priests and have led lives of extraordinary deprivation and and life on earth has been nightmare for them the killing of 15,000 aristocrats doesn't seem very important in the face of that and if you step one step farther back and look

at it from the moon you just see these animals around earth scurrying around full of self-importance and if if some of them get swept off by this or that calamity humanity is still fine there's the species is not extinct France was in no danger of losing its population so the the larger the perspective you have the less concern you can have over the the petty issues that rack our lives and that's the heart of stoicism to find a better lens get out of your own skin when my daughter or my wife died I could barely survive I had a nervous breakdown when my wife died but then if you realize well in an age before obstetrics lots of wives die there's a certain comfort in that and if you realize that the Jefferson family is in no danger of being extincted there's there's greater joy and so you have to find a platform of tranquility with which to look up

upon all events in life and Franklin had found it and he had taken it to an even higher level it led to a smile in him rather than a grimace wow if we take John Adams with the loss of his daughter he found his comfort in knowing that the daughter went into the hands of a power much greater than his and yet what you just described had nothing to do with religion or god no the stokes are fatalists we believe there is a grim determination in the universe that a meteor is on a collision course with Jupiter and there's nothing that can be done about that and when it strikes Jupiter there will be storms in the atmosphere of Jupiter and that you can't defy gravity you can you can whine about gravity but you you can whine about it for the rest of your life but that doesn't change the fact that if you throw an apple into the air it necessarily will come crashing down to earth or an egg and so we looked upon the iron laws of the universe as immutable and deterministic and that humans were caught

up in this in cycles of birth and death and seasonality and love and the loss of love and friendship and the betrayal of friendship and that that these things had to be seen as processes that were deeper than human intervention and probably deeper than divine intervention and if Adams got comfort from thinking that his daughter went to heaven i have no quarrel with that but i am very skeptical of the idea that my four children who died in infancy went to heaven i i think i don't know where they went but i am not as a rationalist i would not wager much on the idea that they had an existence after their death thank you mr. Jefferson you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour where we are having a conversation with our third president of the united states Thomas Jefferson today's conversation is about leadership in particular we are talking about stoicism mr. Jefferson you mentioned before the break that Maryweather Lewis took his own life and that had he just believed in the

motto this two will pass then this would not have happened might not have happened he you know he he had an alcohol problem and when there's a chemical problem we are no longer rationally in control of our lives and he suffered from what i called sensible depressions of mind which means in your terms that he had mental illness so i'm not saying that Lewis all it Lewis needed to do was to adopt a stoic temperament and he could have survived there are clearly people who are beyond help my son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph was a hypokondriac and by i don't mean that in a physical sense but in a kind of metaphysical sense and suffered from nervous depressions and i i noticed little hints of that in my own character from time to time and my my antidote to it was to get busy to do something to make a project to build something to make a break to write a letter to read a book to reorganize my library to take temperature readings to go for a walk to ride my horse to to do something but to keep busy because that's i think the best defense against depression

for all of us so i understand that not everybody can do this and perhaps Lewis was was just one of those troubled souls but i'm more likely to believe that Lewis could have made his life much better if he had understood the principles give me another example William Short one of my greatest of all my protege is really he's been called my my adoptive son by some historians William Short was a virginian he served as my as my private secretary when i was the ambassador to France and each of us had a romance with a european woman i had a romance with the married Mrs. Cosway and he had a romance with a wife of a of a friend of ours who was an aristocrat and he unfortunately let it go too far and it it had a negative effect on his life and the life of Rosalie and the life of her husband and so i was the stoic knowing in a sense to stay centered

even when you're swept up with sexual passion and romantic urges to stay centered and he didn't and then he went off on the grand tour i went off on the grand tour although mine was an agricultural grand tour and i came back highly successful and went on to become the president of the united states William Short went off and he he went to Naples i didn't get that far into Italy and he he caught the clap by going to horhouses there and so in both of these cases we had the same human and animal impulses of course humans want sex men want to spread their semen as widely as possible through the world that size i suppose how we were created and for the fulfillment of the demographics of the universe but that doesn't mean you succumb to those urges doesn't mean you turn away from them and discuss but it means you keep your life in moderation and under control at all times and when you lose control it's almost invariably the case that bad things happen to you thank you mr. Jefferson

i'd like to go back to what you called the dream of the republic we will continue talking about visions in another program but i'd like to start that in this program according to today's leadership guru such as steven cubby or ron Hubbard or alan walters vision is the most important criteria that a president can have or that a leader can have can you speak to what your vision was and how you thought your vision helped you as a leader please i was certainly what you would call a visionary because i had a dream of america that was far out of keeping with the gritty thing actually going on around me in other words i instead of looking at the world and saying what's how shall we maneuver it tomorrow or this week or this year i looked at the future and saw an america with a capital a maybe in all caps

this dream of america and i was willing to indulge that dream and to try to to articulate what it's what the the constituent elements of it would be and so it's an agrarian dream i wanted a nation of family farms even in my time that was already not coming to pass our farmers showed a decided interest in creating commodities for market rather than being the self-sufficient agrarians that i was envisioning and i wanted a nation of limited government and i already and this partly thanks to me our government was was growing larger than than i think is right and i had a picture of states being more important than the nation and a highly educated citizenry who would need almost no government whatsoever and a nation that would be honorable in its foreign policy and have no ambitions in the world except to provide happiness and security for its own people and so on and so forth

these were these were called utopian by my enemies who thought that i was just to kind of bubble headed theorist or a philosopher out of touch with life but i don't think that's fair first of all i think that my vision was the right one and i think that if we had become that people or remained let's say that people that you would be infinitely better off than you are now in your time and i believe that we have come closer to fulfilling that vision than any people in human history and that it took that kind of envisioning to lift the people to their best selves and so so that we would create something like a true republic in the united states and the pessimists and the realists like Hamilton and Adams and Patrick Henry and others they looked around life and saw what it was and they wanted to tinker with it i don't want to tinker with it i want to refashion it and to liberate the enormous dignities and energies and aspirations of humanity because i believe that we all have them we all have a dream of the ideal world and there's actually no reason why we can't live in it and

the only reason we don't live in it is because we have lived under tyrannical systems and we have self tyrannized by looking to the past rather than to the future looking to tradition rather than to reason looking to habit rather than to good sense and we see sacred sacred arenas you know the priesthood the church the the doctrine of christianity the nature of kingship and aristocracy class hierarchies gender circumstances we look at all these these habits we've inherited from the past and we think they must be right because they've always been but that's simply not true most of them are without foundation and reason or justice or good sense and we should sweep them away we swept away the british coinage system and replaced it with a decimal system we should use the same analogy to sweep away every bad idea and every bad habit until we have cleansed the earth of all nonsense and then in on the tabula rasa that we have wiped clean we should use reason and good sense and justice alone is our criterion if we would follow that there would be paradise on earth and so i don't i don't see myself as as a utopian i see myself as an

articulator of human aspiration mr. Jefferson we need to take a break but on our next program we're going to re-enter the topic of vision and talk about how you spread your vision to the american people at this point though we're going to take a break and when we return we'll be talking to the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson Clay Jenkinson welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour my name is Janie Guilin on the producer

of the program in this last section of the Thomas Jefferson hour we're speaking with the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson Clay Jenkinson good day to you Clay hello Janie and hello to all of our listeners around the united states it's great pleasure Clay we were just speaking about Jefferson on leadership this will be a series of programs that we do in particular today you were talking about stoicism and i believe the letter of the day is one that Jefferson wrote to William short on october 31st 1819 regarding stoicism it's true you know we we're now adding some new features to the Thomas Jefferson hour one of which is a letter that we feature every week by Jefferson i've been noticing how i've been rereading Jefferson's letters over the past few months and noticing how extraordinary they are and so rather than try to paraphrase some of them i thought it would be fun to really just let our audience hear the quality of Jefferson's thinking and the quality of his prose and this one turns out to be right on subject it's about stoicism and and i think as as Jefferson said today he was

rebuking William short for not being a true epicurean he said that that William short had veered from the purity of the of the stoic approach so here's what he says is october 31st 1819 i'm quoting only a short section of the letter as you say of yourself writes Jefferson i too am an epicurean i consider the genuine not the imputed doctrines of epicurus is containing everything rational and moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us epic Titus indeed has given us what was good of the stoics all beyond of their dogma's being hypocrisy and grimace so Jefferson is basically saying here that the stoics taught us how to be tranquil but it's a little on the grim side an epicureus who was the the ancient philosopher of pleasure but rationally based pleasure is a nice balance to to a severe stoicism so now he's sort of defined his terms epicureanism which is rational pleasure seeking not hedonism and stoicism which is life mastery and tranquility but maybe a

little on the life denying side and then he says this to his protege this is i mean we don't talk about short much but short was basically Jefferson's favorite of all of his protege's i take the liberty writes Jefferson of observing that you are not a true disciple of our master epicurus in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding one of his canons you know was that the indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure or produces a greater pain is to be avoided your love of repose will lead my friend in its progress to a suspension of healthy exercise a relaxation of mind and indifference to everything around you and finally to a debility of body and a hebertude of mind the farthest of all things from the happiness with which the well-regulated indulgences of epicurus ensure fortitude you know is one of his four cardinal virtues that teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties not to fly from them like cowards and to fly too in vain for they will meet and arrest us at

every turn of our road way this matter well brace yourself up so Jefferson is saying to short don't and this is really a very interesting historical point don't misread epicurianism to mean pleasure seeking it is pleasure seeking by a disciplined rational and restrained human being so it's not do your own thing watch all the television you want eat whatever you like follow follow whatever whim you have that's not epicurianism that's license for Jefferson and he's trying to reclaim his favorite protege from a life of two great pleasure seeking to more of a moderate approach to pleasure I think that's right to the heart of Jefferson's view of life how does Jefferson define happiness then if he's believing that happiness needs a disciplined approach to it happiness for Jefferson is the rational pursuit of virtuous pleasure and so for example when Jefferson committed

adultery with his neighbor's wife or tried to at least Betsy Walker that's not happiness because he knows that once this once he gets caught that this is going to be a terrible crisis and so it's not true happiness happiness is virtuous restrained acceptance that pleasure is one of the prime purposes of life but it's pleasure that's based in good sense and as Jefferson said in his famous letter to Mrs. Cosway never snatch at the bait of pleasure tell you know there is no hook beneath it if you're trying to sleep with your neighbor's wife there is a hook and so it may be pleasure but the pain that will follow will offset the pleasure and more and and Jefferson says in a letter about young men studying in Europe he says that you know they get a passion for horrors but in doing so the consequences are great they get venereal diseases and they lose interest in the rational pleasures of

monogamy and so Jefferson's view is you have to you have to have a real vision of your life and you know who you are and what you want and then pursue pleasures that will pay off and not have hidden consequences that will become debilitating in one way or another very interesting clay that is very interesting is there anything else that Jefferson has to say about pleasure or about stoicism before I move us on to another topic well let me say he was not a pure stoic because there were several other elements in Jefferson's consciousness that need to be indicated here first of all he was a very emotional being we know this but he he was disciplined in his in the way he expressed his life to his inner circle and to his public but but beneath that there was a highly emotional man and he was equally attracted to aweshen the gaelic the fate turns out fake gaelic poet of the of that he had come to light there was there was a kind of a discovery quote unquote of the of the poetry of aweshen and Jefferson's time and it was

highly romantic you know the warrior who's lost his lover standing on the heath and looking up at the empty universe that kind of thing Jefferson was attracted to that acheonic side too there's a wonderful book about this by a friend of mine that named Andy Bernstein which which examines Jefferson's love of aweshen and also he was a devotee of Lauren Stern and Tristram Shandy and a sentimental journey so there's a streak of sentimentalism in Jefferson so he's not a pure stoic and he also was partly Christian he he believed that the stoie is as this letter suggests the letter to William Short of 1819 suggests he saw stoicism in its in his pure form is too much grimace that it wasn't it didn't accept it didn't embrace life enough and so he added to that this epicurean energy that we've been talking about and also some Christian ethics that that there needed to be the the love that Jesus represents the unconditional agape love

needs to be added to this mix so Jefferson is far from being simple but if you asked him of all the things that could be used as identifiers of you which one is the is the most accurate he would say stoic i think thank you Clay when we were talking about Jefferson and the classics you mentioned that Jefferson's favorite book was by epictetus do you know the name of that book and you get that to our listeners long ago jane on the Jefferson hour we did a program on epictetus but it might be useful for us to do one again epictetus's dates are the first century and a little bit more ad roughly 55 ad to roughly 135 ad so after the time after the after the crucifixion of Jesus and he wrote a couple of books we really only have his work in fragmentary form one is called the discourses and the other is the end chrydian and chrydian means the it's a catechism it's a set of basic precepts of self inquiry those books are in print

i forget who did it but some in some film a few years ago epictetus came up and so they reprinted the book and it's now in all the bookstores and so people can read the discourses but if you go to any any bookstore and go to the philosophy section and look up epictetus ep ic t-e-t-e-s his book is there and it's it's quite a remarkable book in Jefferson was clearly an admirer of it is it something that we should do a book review of yes we that's well let's just pledge to that let's let's revive our study of Jefferson and epictetus and and have a review of the book in a in a program soon epictetus is not particularly an advocate of leadership he's an advocate of self mastery which is of course as you know an important element in leadership but it's only a foundation element well it might be one of the most important foundation elements in all of leadership so we'll go ahead and we'll do a review of the book which which book will we do the review of? well i think that they basically have been melded together so i think we'll

be doing the discourses okay we also have a request from all about a year ago from a gentleman in uh southern virginia to please do plateaus the republic and so we will be doing that there's anyway i mean i jevres we will do it but jevreson hated it john adam said the only thing he learned and it was that frank on it plagiarized an idea from it and he learned a cure for hiccups you know these the founding fathers were not fond of Plato and i have taught the republic many times and it is tough sledding as a teaching problem i'll here's my advice we will talk further about this but don't start with book one of the republic start with book two if you start with book one you will never come out alive and so buy a good translation and we'll we'll mention some shortly but start on book two and we will go through this together clay i have a better suggestion wait for our book review program and listen to it versus reading the book no no there's no substitute it is you know jevreson and and Adams were wrong plateaus republic is one of the truly great texts in human history it's certainly one of the

the base texts from which all of western civilization was built you know i forget who said it a modern philosopher said all philosophy is a footnote to Plato that Plato basically covered the ground not fully but laid out the basic map of the philosophical tradition in the fourth century BC and we are now doomed to work variations refinement's refutations of Plato so you know Plato is critically important and i'll just say and i know this sounds ridiculous but i think every adult human being should have had a serious run at Plato's republic at some point in her or his life okay we will do a book review on Plato's Republic and on epic start with book two start with book two please by book i mean chapter the ancient ancient literature was designed by books rather than chapters and so when i say book two i mean the second great chapter of Plato's Republic thank you for that clarification you are listening to the tomas jefferson

hour where we are speaking with the scholar behind tomas jefferson clay jinconson clay you also mentioned jefferson's decalogue his ten commandments you know i was i had not ever thought of this before jenny but as you were asking those questions i realized how self categorizing the founding fathers were you know franklin in his autobiography has a famous list where he tries to set up a grid of temperance and virtue and promptitude and other qualities that he prizes and then he has a grid and he checks them off he works on one a week and tries to get his life under control and washington had very significant self mastery campaign as a young man and kept this piece of paper apparently nearby at all times with a list of of things that he wanted to do a jefferson in a more whimsical spirit laid in his life wrote his own decalogue his own ten commandments he didn't mean it to be blasphemous our listeners will have heard some of these many times but here they are quickly this comes from a letter by the way to a name sake of his that tomas jefferson smith and he wrote it in 1825 so not about a year before he died here's what he said number one of the ten

commandments sounds like david letterman doesn't it number one never put off till tomorrow what you can do today number two never trouble another to do what you can do for yourself number three never spend your money before you have it and that by the way in an earlier program led to the longest sustained laugh in the history of the jefferson hour never put off till tomorrow what you can do today never trouble another for what you can do yourself never spend your money before you have it that's three number four or never buy what you do not want because of this cheap it will be dear to you i wish i'd followed that one a thousand times number five pride costs us more than hunger thirst and cold certainly true number six we never repent of having eaten too little number seven nothing is troublesome that we do willingly number eight how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened oh my goodness yes number nine take things always by their smooth handle and number ten when angry count ten before you speak if very angry count and hundred if we would follow those jane either would be paradise on earth they're probably would be how well did jefferson follow these claim well pretty

well let's go through them never put off till tomorrow what you can do today that's jefferson no procrastination there's absolutely no spirit of procrastination jefferson never trouble another to do what you can do for yourself well i mean obviously you're gonna have to factor slavery in here or making Madison do all the dirty work in politics but basically in day-to-day things jefferson was equal to this he was he was a indefatigably busy man who took care of his own life and he was unmarried for forty years and and so he was in a sense his own help me that of course begs the question of Sally Hemings to number three never spend your money before you have it he failed miserably on this he always spent his money before he had it he spent money that he was never going to have number four never buy what you do not want because of this cheap it will be dear to you i depends on how you read that but jefferson bought quality things and i think that's what he means never buy something because it's a bargain buy the best and jefferson always bought the best which is a great quality if you have money pride costs us more than hunger

thirst and cold that's true and but jefferson lived very well by this and he he was not a slave to pride unlike Hamilton who got himself killed over pride we never repent of having eaten too little there's no evidence that jefferson was ever overweight at any time in fact he was lean and spare all of his life not a not an ounce of fat on him said one of his overseers so he he was temperate let's say he didn't need a diet because he had a diet he had a way of life number seven nothing is troublesome that we do willingly that certainly applies to jefferson how much pain across this the evils which have never happened we don't know about his private agonies but that's certainly true of his public life and he followed that take things always by their smooth handle that might as well be jefferson's basic methodology as a human being he's a harmony lover to his cost as a leader i would say and when angry count ten before he speak of their angry hundred you know if you read six volumes of two mosquilones biography of jefferson you will only find a couple of instances of anger ever i think he was one of the least angry people who ever lived now all of us feel anger but he counted

ten and then counted to one hundred wow it would be nice if we could master that one great it's time to end the program but before we end i'd like to do a quote by contemporary of jefferson's Alexis de Tocqueville in democracy in america actually wrote i prefer to quote jefferson rather than anybody else regarding him is the most powerful apostle for democracy there has ever been amen absolutely tokeville had it right i prefer to court jefferson more than anybody else and he is the greatest articulator of the democratic spirit in human history the possible exception of people like martin Luther King play thank you very much goodbye everyone bye bye music for the town as jefferson hour was provided by steven swinford of reno Nevada you can visit mr jefferson's home page on the worldwide web at www.th hyphen jefferson.org again our website is www.th hyphen jefferson.org to ask mr jefferson a question or to donate nine dollars and receive a copy of

today's program on cd please call 1-888-458-1803 again the number is 1-888-458-1803 thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas jefferson