A Philosophical Statement: A Student Of Coolidge by Charles C. Johnson

For a contest, I was asked for a philosophical statement. Here it is.

A Philosophical Statement: A Student Of Coolidge by Charles C. Johnson

Any philosophical statement must be the restatement of the truth. As there can be only one ideal – one Platonic form – there are not many truths, but one. We do not invent truth, but discover it through reason.

In that pursuit, we follow Socrates, the greatest of philosophers, who asked questions of his interlocutors so that he might arrive at it. For that truth, he drank the hemlock, preferring death for an ideal than exile. Like the platonic ideals, perfection is not of this world and men must suffer so that civilization might be but a generation away from savagery. And yet, ideals drive men to sacrifice for the common good, consecrating the ethereal stuff of thought to the world of action. The victories of Yorktown and Saratoga followed the musings of Jefferson, making them self-evident only after blood had been shed and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural could only stand on principles mortared in the bones and toil of the dead at Gettysburg.

If I were to state my observations, it would be that greatness matters and that a people distrustful of greatness – that crucifies its very best – cannot aspire to the higher ideals that move man forward. Calvin Coolidge, a classicist and a statesman, put it best,

“We need a broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people—a faith that men desire to do right . . . a reconstructed faith that the final approval of the people is given not to demagogues, slavishly pandering to their selfishness, merchandising with the clamor of the hour, but to statesmen, ministering to their welfare, representing their deep, silent, abiding convictions.”

Great statesmen are the best of teachers, teaching the people the power of themselves, by forcing them to realize that with their sovereignty, comes responsibility.

If we are agreed that greatness should reign– that Socrates’ philosopher king ought to govern – we must ask ourselves upon what basis that greatness should be energized and toward what end. Great men, the Alexander the Greats, the Napoleons, consummated their ambition for a time with territory, but such tyrants did not govern for a truth larger than themselves. They substituted the rule of force for the rule of reason. They came not as deliverers of new ideas, but enslavers, armed with old ones: that the few ought to govern the many.

The most magnificent of human creations, the U.S. Constitution, sought to enshrine a different idea: that the people are sovereign. Republicanism, we know from Churchill, is not the best form of government, but the least worst. Its weakness is the weakness of us imperfect human beings that administer it. The people can be wrong: Hitler was democratically elected, after all. A majority does not make a policy just. “Laws,” as Calvin Coolidge put it, “must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.”

I aim to be that righteousness’s servant, not its master. I am not so egotistical as to believe that my willing a thing to be so makes it so. I hope to follow Abraham Lincoln – that right might make might – rather than Machiavelli – that willing something makes it so. Fortunately, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence whose tenets ring true, nearly two hundred fifty years hence. Its “self-evident” truths were written not for Americans, but for the hope of mankind. The Revolution, Coolidge reminds us, “was not so much a struggle of the Colonies against the tyranny of bad government, as against wrong principles of government, and for self-government. It was man realizing himself.”

Chief among those realizations is the equality of rights, the founding central principle of our republic. Some men may be wiser, stronger, or richer than others, but their rights are fixed by their very humanness and limited. As there are rights, so too are there duties. The duty of every citizen to defend the Constitution is the only guaranty that our ancient liberty shall be maintained here. The relationship between the citizen and the State is reciprocal. The State calls on its citizens for property and their lives and the government promises laws in accordance with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Governments are not founded upon an association for public plunder but the cooperation of men when each is seeking to do his duty,” Coolidge reminds us. The statesman, following the wisdom of Socrates, serves to make everyone do his duty for the common wealth, ever mindful that he is but the discoverer of laws.