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In Making the American Self, "improvement" becomes the central metaphor for American thought from the mid-eighteenth century until the Civil War, and the work of "improvement" turns principally on the process of "constructing a self" that could be improved upon. The materials for the "construction" of this self were reasonably straightforward: with only a few adaptations, eighteenth-century Americans assumed that the "self" was a collection of "faculties" or "powers," composed of the understanding and will (the moral and rational powers), supplemented by the emotions and instincts (animal powers), and served by the mechanical reflexes (vegetative powers). The great question—in fact, for Howe, "the central problem of eighteenth-century moral philosophy"—was how these elements should be organized and which one of them ought to be calling the shots.
This was not as easy as it looked. Even before the creation of the American republic, there was already sharp disagreement over a proper pattern for American selves. Much as there was general agreement that reason ought to have the chair, with the other faculties bowing submissively, there was also general agreement that reason could be an exceedingly weak moderator of the faculties. So, achieving a stable, "balanced" character meant calling in psychological allies for reason that would keep the will functioning smoothly and the emotions properly subservient to reason.
Benjamin Franklin, who was "one of the most famous exemplars of self-construction who ever lived" (and who was so constantly rearranging his public persona to suit his opportunities that some recent biographers like Francis Jennings, Robert Middlekauff, and David T. Morgan have wondered whether there ever was a coherent self at all be hind his many opportunistic masks) favored enlisting self-interest as reason's sheriff to control the emotions and thus find the way to balance and happiness. Others among the Revolutionary generation, like Washington and Alexander Hamilton, enlisted the "love of fame" as reason's best friend.
It was the weakness of reason as a cognitive monarch that led Jonathan Edwards to offer a very different path to self-construction. Edwards and Franklin were agreed on at least three points: that the self was an arrangement of faculties, that it needed reconstruction from its primitive natural condition, and that the weakness of the rational faculties (and especially the will) meant that reason was incapable of performing the job on its own. But for Edwards, it was original sin and not (as it was for Franklin) one's original station in life that made reconstructing the self necessary, and he certainly looked for no help from prudence or self-interest. Self-interest, in fact, was exactly what needed to be transcended, since self-interest only shaped the outward behavior and did nothing to address any defects within the personality. Reconstructing the self could only begin with a divine initiative of grace, with a dramatic renovation of the faculties from outside. Only then could the process of real self-construction begin properly.
That, as it turned out, was not actually Edwards's most radical departure from the Franklinesque model. Edwards argued that heightened emotions—which he tactically referred to as affections to avoid the pejorative connotation of passion—were not only useful in overcoming the feeble inertia of reason in responding to divine grace, but were in fact the best situated of the faculties to appreciate the beauty of divine grace. Perception was, for Ed wards, the very essence of being; God therefore reveals himself not as a logical argument but as beauty, as "the consent, agreement, or union of being to being." It only made sense to Ed wards to see the emotional response to this beauty as the primary force in re constructing the unregenerate self along the pattern of grace.
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