“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 these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
Countless Americans and others have read this sentence from Declaration of Independence and no doubt most have simply nodded in agreement, but I always wondered where its author, Thomas Jefferson, came up with the unique concept that the pursuit of happiness was a self-evident truth.
That phrase from the Declaration reveals Jefferson’s philosophical turn of mind while the rest of the document is a legal argument for severing relations with England in order to establish a separate and sovereign nation.
It was not until I read a new softcover edition of Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” ($16.95, W.W. Norton) that I finally found the answer to my question.
Greenblatt’s book is devoted to the discovery in 1417 of a book thought to have been lost, De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things, a philosophical epic written around 50 BCE by the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus, believed to have been born around 99 BCE and died around 55 BCE.