33- ] American Literature
Henry David Thoreau
Henry
David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, environmental
scientist, and political activist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of
these various identities in meditating upon the concrete problems of living in
the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a
way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau’s
work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources.
American
essayist, poet, and practical philosopher renowned for having lived the
doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854),
and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the
essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849).
He
was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy (and poetry), ranging
from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid
student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian
traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes,
Locke, and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German
Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau’s philosophy. He discussed
his own empirical findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the
latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration. His
philosophical explorations of self and world led him to develop an epistemology
of embodied perception and a non-dualistic account of mental and material life.
In addition to his focus on ethics in an existential spirit, Thoreau also makes
unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of science, and radical political
thought. Although his political essays have become justly famous, his works on
natural science were not even published until the late twentieth century, and
they help to give us a more complete picture of him as a thinker. Among the
texts he left unfinished was a set of manuscript volumes filled with
information on Native American religion and culture. Thoreau’s work anticipates
certain later developments in pragmatism, phenomenology, and environmental
philosophy, and poses a perennially valuable challenge to our conception of the
methods and intentions of philosophy itself.
1.
Life and Writings
Thoreau
was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in 1862, at the age
of forty-four. Like that of his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, Thoreau’s
intellectual career unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the town in
which he spent almost his entire life. After graduating from Harvard in 1837,
he struck up a friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson,
whose essay “Nature” he had first encountered earlier that year. Although the
two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical
and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one
another. It was in the fall of 1837 that Thoreau made his first entries in the
multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life. Most of his
published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these
pages, and Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, suggesting that his journal
can be considered a finished work in itself. During his lifetime he published
only two books, along with numerous shorter essays that were first delivered as
lectures. He lived a simple and relatively quiet life, making his living
briefly as a teacher and pencil maker but mostly as a land surveyor. Thoreau
had intimate bonds with his family and friends (the loss of his brother John in
1842 was a major trauma) and remained unmarried, although he was deeply in love
at least twice. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was
still a work in progress in 1845, when he went to live in the woods by Walden
Pond for two years and two months. This “experiment” in living on the outskirts
of town was an intensive time of examination for Thoreau, as he drew close to
nature and contemplated the final ends of his own life, which was otherwise at
risk of ending in quiet desperation. Thoreau viewed his existential quest as a
venture in philosophy, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, because it was motivated
by an urgent need to find a reflective understanding of reality that could
inform a life of wisdom. This is because, according to the belief that
philosophy is a way of life, that very way of life “will necessarily be
deliberative and reflective”; accordingly, for Thoreau, “thinking about his
life in the woods is central to his life in the woods” (Bates 2012, 29).
Moreover, it is only after having cultivated “a meticulous and discerning
awareness of the particularities of nature” in one specific place (Robinson
2004, 100) that he became able to articulate a vision of the human being’s
capacity to be grounded and at home in the world.
His
experience bore fruit in the 1854 publication of his literary masterpiece
Walden, a work that almost defies categorization: it is a work of narrative
prose which often soars to poetic heights, combining philosophical speculation
with close observation of a concrete place. It is a rousing summons to the
examined life and to the realization of one’s potential, while at the same time
it develops what might be described as a religious vision of the human being
and the universe. Walden has been admired by a larger world audience than any
other book written by an American author, and—whether or not it ought to be
called a work of philosophy—it contains a substantial amount of philosophical
content, which deserves to be better appreciated than it has been. Stanley
Cavell has argued that Thoreau is an embarrassment to “what we have learned to
call philosophy,” since his work embodies “a mode of conceptual accuracy” that
is “based on an idea of rigor” somewhat foreign to the academic establishment
(Cavell 1988, 14). Yet, as Cavell also notes, philosophical authors have more
than one way to go about their business, and Thoreau—like Descartes in the
Meditations—begins his argument by accounting for how he has come to believe
that certain questions need to be addressed. In other words, his method is
predicated on the belief that it is philosophically worthwhile to clarify the
basis of your own perplexity and unrest (see Reid 2012, 46). And this is only
one way of explaining how a significant part of the challenge in coming to
terms with Thoreau is that his philosophy, like Nietzsche’s, has a literary and
poetic quality. The reader is charged with finding the coherence of Thoreau’s
whole philosophical outlook. Accordingly, this entry attempts to delineate the
main themes of Thoreau’s project, in the hope of serving as an aid and stimulus
to further study. It draws upon Thoreau’s entire corpus, including the works he
left in manuscript that were published after his death.
2.
Nature and Human Existence
In
his essay “Nature,” Emerson asserts that there can be found in the natural
world “a sanctity which shames our religions.” Thoreau would agree completely
with this statement. But in the same essay Emerson also inclines toward
Platonism, stating that nature is “emblematic” of higher truths, and suggesting
that the material world has value by virtue of being a subsidiary product of
mental reality: each natural object is therefore “a symbol of some spiritual
fact.” For the most part, Thoreau recoils from the idea that we could find some
kind of higher reality by looking beyond nature: in the “Friday” chapter of A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he asks: “Is not Nature, rightly
read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” As he sees
it, the realm of spirit is the physical world, which has a sacred meaning that
can be directly perceived. Accordingly, he seeks “to be always on the alert to
find God in nature” (Journal, 9/7/51), and to hear “the language which all
things and events speak without metaphor” (Walden, IV). Thoreau’s metaphysical
convictions compel him to “defend nature’s intrinsic value,” in a way that situates
him philosophically in a place “far removed from Emerson and most
transcendentalists” (Cafaro 2004, 132–133). In his journal, Thoreau reports
that his goal is to “state facts” in such a way that “they shall be
significant,” rather than allowing himself to be blind to “the significance of
phenomena” (Journal, 11/9/51 & 8/5/51). Evidently, he does not accept that
whatever we register through our aesthetic and emotional responses ought to be
viewed as unreal. Indeed, Thoreau would argue that the person who is seldom
moved by the beauty of things is the one with an inadequate conception of
reality, since it is the neutral observer who is less well aware of the world
as it is. And he exhorts us to unclutter and simplify our lives, by eliminating
the supposed necessities that can entrap us when we mistakenly construe them as
essential (see Hunt, 2020).
To
say that nature is inherently significant is to say that natural facts are
neither inert nor value-free. Thoreau urges his reader not to “underrate the value
of a fact,” since each concrete detail of the world may contain a meaningful
truth (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Note the phrase: the value of a
fact. Thoreau does not introduce an artificial distinction between facts and
values, or between primary and secondary qualities. When we perceive sights,
sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart
from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed
in the sensory world, learning the “essential facts of life” only through “the
perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” (Walden,
II). The philosopher who seeks knowledge through experience should therefore
not be surprised to discover beauty and order in natural phenomena. However,
these properties are not projected onto nature from an external
perspective—rather, they emerge from within the self-maintaining processes of
organic life. And the entire environment, the “living earth” itself, has
something like a life of its own, one which may be going well or badly,
containing but not reducible to the biotic existence of animals and plants
(Walden, XVII). This is what he elsewhere describes as the “slumbering
subterranean fire in nature which never goes out” (“A Winter Walk”).
Thoreau
remarks upon the “much grander significance” of any natural phenomenon “when
not referred to man and his needs but viewed absolutely” (Journal, 11/10/51).
The world is rich with value that is not of our making, and “whatever we have
perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of infinitely more value
to us than what we have only as yet discovered to be useful and to serve our
purpose” (Faith in a Seed, 144). It is when we are not guilty of imposing our
own purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms. One
of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic
universe, containing many different points of view other than our own. And when
we begin to realize “the infinite extent of our relations” (Walden, VIII), we
can see that even what does not at first seem to be good for us may have some
positive value when considered from a broader perspective. Rather than
dismissing squirrels as rodents, for instance, we should see them as “planters
of forests,” and be grateful for the role they play in the distribution of
seeds (Journal, 10/22/60). Likewise, the “gentle rain which waters my beans and
keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.
Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If
it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and
destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on
the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me” (Walden,
V). Our limited view often keeps us from appreciating the harmonious
interdependence of all parts of the natural world: this is not due to “any
confusion or irregularity in Nature,” but because of our own incomplete
knowledge (Walden, XVI). Thoreau declares that he would be happy “if all the
meadows on the earth were left in a wild state,” since in tampering with nature
we know not what we do and sometimes end up doing harm as a result (Walden, X).
In many cases we find that “unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes
of valuation than our improvements are” (Journal, 11/10/60).
In
nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a standard against
which to measure our conventional evaluations. An example of the latter is the
value that is “arbitrarily attached” to gold, which has nothing to do with its
“intrinsic beauty or value” (Journal, 10/13/60). So it is a mistake to rush to
California “as if the true gold were to be found in that direction,” when one
has failed to appreciate the inherent worth of one’s native soil (Journal,
10/18/55). In the economy of nature, a seed is more precious than a diamond,
for it contains “the principle of growth, or life,” and has the ability to
become a specific plant or tree (Journal, 3/22/61). The seed not only provides
evidence that nature is filled with “creative genius” (Journal, 1/5/56), but it
also reminds us that a spark of divinity is present in each human being as
well. One of Thoreau’s favorite analogies—not only a metaphor, as he sees it—is
that between the ripening of a seed and the development of human potential.
“The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved
only by the most delicate handling” (Walden, I). What he calls “wildness” is
not located only in the nonhuman world; the same creative force is also active
in human nature, so that even a literary work of art can reasonably be praised
as a manifestation of wildness (see “Walking”; Walden, I). There is “a perfect
analogy between the life of the human being and that of the vegetable”
(Journal, 5/20/51), and thoughts “spring in man’s brain” in just the same way
that “a plant springs and grows by its own vitality” (Journal, 11/8/50;
4/3/58). Thoreau’s exhortations to follow the promptings of one’s genius are
based on the idea that by obeying our own wild nature we are aligning ourselves
with a sacred power. What inspires us to realize our highest potential is “the
primitive vigor of Nature in us” (Journal, 8/30/56), and this influence is
something we are able neither to predict nor to comprehend: as he describes it
in the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods, nature is “primeval, untamed, and
forever untamable,” a godlike force but not always a kind one.
At
one point in Walden, Thoreau quips that he usually does not count himself among
the “true idealists” who are inclined to reject “the evidence of [their]
senses” (Walden, XIV). On the other hand, he scorns the sort of materialism
that fails to penetrate the inner mystery of things, discovering “nothing but
surface” in its mechanistic observations (Journal, 3/7/59). Instead, he argues
that we must approach the world as “nature looking into nature,” aware of the
relation between the form of our own perception and what we are able to
perceive (Correspondence, 7/21/41). There are reasons for classifying Thoreau
as both a naturalist and a romantic, although both of these categories are
perhaps too broad to be very helpful. His conception of nature is informed by a
syncretic appropriation of Greek, Asian, and other sources, and the result is
an eclectic vision that is uniquely his own. For this reason it is difficult to
situate Thoreau within the history of modern philosophy, but one plausible way
of doing so would be to describe him as articulating a version of
transcendental idealism. If Thoreau is indeed “the American heir to Kant’s
critical philosophy,” as he has been called (Oelschlaeger 1991, 136), it is
because his investigation of “the relation between the subject of knowledge and
its object” builds upon a Kantian insight (see Cavell 1992, 94–95). Yet in
order to understand why this might be an accurate categorization, we must
proceed from Thoreau’s metaphysics to his epistemology.
3.
The Ethics of Perception
If
one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau’s philosophy, it would be
hard to identify a better candidate than awareness. He attests to the
importance of “being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking
always at what is to be seen” (Walden, IV). This exercise may enable one to
create remarkably intricate descriptions of a sunset, a battle between red and
black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a sand bank; but its primary
value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. “It is
something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and
so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and
paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” (Walden, II).
Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual
virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative
activity—not to mention, an embodied practice. Thoreau portrays himself not
from a presumably neutral or impersonal vantage point, “but from an embodied point
of view” in which his somatic sensory experience puts him “knowingly in touch
with” his surroundings (Goodman 2012, 36). For such reasons as these, he has
sometimes been interpreted as a “philosopher of the senses” (Mooney 2009, 195),
who offers an original response to the central problem of modern philosophy as
a consequence of recognizing that knowledge is “dependent on the individual’s
ability to see,” and that “the world as known is thus radically dependent on
character” (Tauber 2001, 4–5).
One
of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was arguably abandoned in the
period beginning with Descartes is that a person “could not have access to the
truth” without undertaking a process of self-purification that would render him
or her “susceptible to knowing the truth” (Foucault 1997, 278–279). For
Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to cultivate one’s receptivity to the
beauty of the universe. Believing that “the perception of beauty is a moral
test” (Journal, 6/21/52), Thoreau frequently chastises himself or humanity in
general for failing in this respect. “How much of beauty—of color, as well as
form—on which our eyes daily rest goes unperceived by us,” he laments (Journal,
8/1/60); and he worries that “Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates
her” (Walden, IX). Noticing that his sensory awareness has grown less acute
since the time of his youth, he speculates that “the child plucks its first
flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent
botanist never retains” (Journal, 7/16/51; 2/5/52). In order to attain a clear
and truthful view of things, we must refine all the faculties of our embodied
consciousness, and become emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of
the place in which we are situated. We fully know only those facts that are
“warm, moist, incarnated,” and palpably felt: “A man has not seen a thing who
has not felt it” (Journal, 2/23/60). In this way, Thoreau outlines an
epistemological task that will occupy him for the rest of his life; namely, to
cultivate a way of attending to things that will allow them to be experienced
as elements of a meaningful world.
Since
our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it
requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain a reliable knower
of the world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau believes that the perception of truth
“produces a pleasurable sensation,” and he adds that a “healthy and refined
nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape” (Journal, 9/24/54 &
6/27/52). Nature will reward the most careful attention paid by a person who is
appropriately disposed, but there is only “as much beauty visible to us in the
landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual
objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as
different from those which another will see as the persons are different”
(Journal, 11/4/58). One who is in the right state to be capable of giving a
“poetic and lively description” of things will find himself or herself “in a
living and beautiful world” (Journal, 10/13/60 & 12/31/59). Beauty, like
color, does not lie only in the eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are
indeed beautiful and brightly colored. Nevertheless, beauty—and color, for that
matter—can exist only where there is a beholder to perceive it (Journal,
6/15/52 & 1/21/38). From all of his experience in the field making
observations of natural phenomena, Thoreau gained the insight “that he, the
supposedly neutral observer, was always and unavoidably in the center of the
observation” (McGregor 1997, 113). Because all perception of objects has a
subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere centered around each
conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, “the universe is built around us,
and we are central still” (Journal, 8/24/41). This does not mean that we are
trapped inside of our own consciousness; rather, the point is that it is only
through the lens of our own subjectivity that we have access to the external
world.
What
we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are physically
located: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our
attention is focused. “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because
they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our
minds and eyes to bear on them…. A man sees only what concerns him” (“Autumnal
Tints”). In other words, there is “no such thing as pure objective observation.
Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be
subjective” (Journal, 5/6/54). Subjectivity is not an obstacle to truth,
according to Thoreau. After all, he says, “the truest description, and that by
which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured
and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires” (Journal, 10/13/60). A true
account of the world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects
that the human mind is capable of perceiving. Whether this can be done by a
scientific description is a vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he
shows considerable ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist
“discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit”; by
contrast, there is “more humanity” in “the unscientific man’s knowledge,” since
the latter can explain how certain facts pertain to life (Journal, 9/5/51;
2/13/52). He accuses the naturalist of failing to understand color, much less
beauty, and asks: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding,
but robs the imagination?” (Journal, 10/5/61 & 12/25/51) For Thoreau, the
most reliable observer is one who can “see things as they are, grand and
beautiful” (Journal, 1/7/57)—in other words, the beauty and grandeur of the
world really are there to be seen, even if we are not always capable of seeing
them. We can easily fail to perceive the value of being if we do not approach
the world with the appropriate kind of emotional comportment.
Thoreau
sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that will enrich our
knowledge and experience: “The true man of science will know nature better by
his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than
other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience” (“Natural History of
Massachusetts”). He observes that scientific terminology can provide the means
of apprehending something that we had utterly missed until we had a name for it
(see Walls 2012, 108). Yet he also gives voice to the fear that by weighing and
measuring things and collecting quantitative data we may actually be narrowing
our vision. The scientist “studies nature as a dead language,” and would rather
study a dead fish preserved in a jar than a living one in its native element
(Journal, 5/10/53 & 11/30/58). In these same journal entries, Thoreau
claims that he seeks to experience the significance of nature, and that “the
beauty of the fish” is what is most worthy of being measured. On the other
hand, when he finds a dead fish in the water, he brings it home to weigh and measure,
covering several pages with his statistical findings (Journal, 8/20/54). This
is only one of many examples of Thoreau’s fascination with data-gathering, and
yet he repeatedly questions its value, as if he does not know what to make of
his own penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific
investigations run the risk of being “trivial and petty,” so perhaps what one
should do is “learn science and then forget it” (Journal, 1/21/53 &
4/22/52). But Thoreau is more deeply troubled by the possibility that “science
is inhuman,” since objects “seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant,”
and this is “not the means of acquiring true knowledge” (Journal, 5/1/59 &
5/28/54). Overall, his position is not that an imaginative awareness of the
world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an exclusive
focus on the latter would blind us to whatever aspects of reality fall outside
the scope of our measurement.
One
thing we can learn from Thoreau’s comments on scientific inquiry is that he
cares very much about the following question: what can we know about the world,
and how are we able to know it? Although he admires the precision of scientific
information, he wonders if what it delivers is always bound to be “something less
than the vague poetic” (Journal, 1/5/50). In principle, a naturalistic approach
to reality should be able to capture its beauty and significance; in practice,
however, it may be “impossible for the same person to see things from the
poet’s point of view and that of the man of science” (Journal, 2/18/52). In
that case, the best we can do is try to convey our intimations of the truth
about the universe, even if this means venturing far beyond claims that are
positively verifiable: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man
in his waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I
cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression… . The
words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are
significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures” (Walden,
XVIII). We should not arbitrarily limit our awareness to that which can be
described with mathematical exactitude, for perhaps the highest knowledge
available to us, Thoreau suggests, consists in “a sudden revelation of the
insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before … it is the lighting up of
the mist by the sun” (“Walking”). And perhaps this is not a regrettable fact:
“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we
require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be
infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (Walden,
XVII). By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we open
ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience.
As
one commentator points out, Thoreau’s categories—so to speak—are dynamic, since
they are constantly being redefined by what we perceive, even as they shape our
way of seeing (Peck 1990, 84–85). Every now and then “something will occur
which my philosophy has not dreamed of,” Thoreau says, which demonstrates that
the “boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity
of our imaginations” (Journal, 5/31/53). Since the thoughts of each knowing
subject are “part of the meaning of the world,” it is legitimate to ask: “Who
can say what is? He can only say how he sees” (11/4/52 & 12/2/46). Truth is
radically perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different
people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds (Walls 1995, 213).
Thoreau’s position might be described as perspectival realism, since he does
not conclude that truth is relative but celebrates the diversity of the
multifaceted reality that each of us knows in his own distinctive way. “How
novel and original must be each new man’s view of the universe!” he exclaims,
and “how sweet is the perception of a new natural fact,” for it suggests to us
“what worlds remain to be unveiled” (Journal, 4/2/52 & 4/19/52). We may
never comprehend the intimate relation between a significant fact and the
perceiver who appreciates it, but we should trust that it is not in vain to
view nature with “humane affections” (Journal, 2/20/57 & 6/30/52). With
respect to any given phenomenon, the “point of interest” that concerns us lies
neither in the independent object nor in the subject alone, but somewhere in
between (Journal, 11/5/57). Witnessing the rise of positivism and its ideal of
complete objectivity, Thoreau attempts “to preserve an enchanted world and to
place the passionate observer in the center of his or her universe” (Tauber
2001, 20). It is an admirable goal, and one that remains highly relevant in the
intellectual climate of the present day.
4.
Friendship, Politics, and Environmentalism
Thoreau’s
ethic of personal flourishing is focused upon the problem of how to align one’s
daily life in accordance with one’s ultimate ideals. What was enthusiasm in the
youth, he argues, must become temperament in the mature person: the “mere
vision is little compared with the steady corresponding endeavor thitherward”
(Journal, 11/1/51 & 11/24/57). Much of our time ought to be spent “in
carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which
every man’s genius must have suggested to him… . The wisely conscious life
springs out of an unconscious suggestion” (Wild Fruits, 166). Character, then,
can be defined as “genius settled”—the promptings of conscience in themselves
are only potentially moral, until we have integrated them into the fabric of
our everyday existence and begun to hold ourselves responsible for living up to
them (Journal, 3/2/42). Hence, we need to cherish and nurture our capability to
discern the difference between the idea and the reality, between what is and
what ought to be. It is when we experience dissatisfaction with ourselves or
with external circumstances that we are stimulated to act in the interest of
making things better.
It
follows that the greatest compliment we can pay to another person is to say
that he or she enhances our life by inciting us to realize our highest
aspirations. So Thoreau views it as deplorable that “we may love and not
elevate one another”; the “love that takes us as it finds us, degrades us”
(“Chastity and Sensuality”). He speaks of “love” and “friendship” as closely
related terms which are tainted by the “trivial dualism” which assumes that the
one must exclude the other (Journal, undated 1839 entry). Clearly, what he is
concerned about is the kind of love the Greeks called philia—and in his
sustained consideration of friendship, as in so many other respects, Thoreau is
“squarely in the virtue ethics tradition” (Cafaro 2004, 127). In his ethical
writings, the notion of wishing good on behalf of another person is often taken
to a severe extreme, as if he does not think it possible to ask too much of
love and friendship. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he says: “I
value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my
performance” (A Week, “Wednesday”). This is well and good, but Thoreau may be
going too far when he proclaims that a friend should be approached “with sacred
love and awe,” and that we profane one another if we do not always meet on
religious terms; it is no wonder that he finds himself doubting whether his
“idea of a friend” will ever actually be instantiated (Journal, 6/26/40).
Nonetheless, as a recent interpreter of Thoreau has pointed out, the “exalted
and rarefied ideal” of friendship that he upholds does not imply that a friend
is merely instrumental to one’s own self-realization (see Hodder 2010,
129–142). Above all, Thoreau’s discussion of love and friendship provokes us to
reflect upon what we can and cannot expect from our closest human
relationships, and on their role in a good life.
It
would be a mistake to consider Thoreau’s political views in isolation from
other aspects of his thought. It is, for example, his understanding of wild
nature that informs his sociopolitical ideas. As was noted above, nature is a
point of reference outside the polis which can provide valuable moral guidance,
reminding us that society is not the measure of all things. Considering the
human being as “an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature,” rather than a
cultural artifact merely (“Walking”), he looks to the nonhuman natural world
and to our inherent “wildness” as a source of evaluation which can empower us
to discover that the standards of our civilization are profoundly flawed. His
conviction that nature provides us with “a different, truer, and more
significant moral reality” than what we find in society provides the “crucial
and often overlooked political core” to what has been called his “pastoral
environmentalism” (Taylor 1992, 12–24). Withdrawing into the natural world
allows us to view the state in a broader context and to conceive of ways in
which social values and political structures could be improved radically. This
includes unjust laws that ought to be reformed, about which more will be said
in a moment, as well as the unwritten rules embodied in prevailing expectations
about how one ought to live and what matters. Anticipating Heidegger’s critique
of Das Man in section 27 of Being and Time, Thoreau describes the source of
these culturally prevalent attitudes as the “They” (Walden, I; see also Bennett
1994, 18–19) and is critical of their pervasive and corrupting influence, their
way of making people content with distorted values. For instance, most of his
fellow citizens of Massachusetts are able to greet each other politely on the
street and in church, thinking of themselves as morally decent while remaining
complacent to uphold and perpetuate the institution of slavery in America (see
“Slavery in Massachusetts” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown”). In denouncing
a specific pernicious attitude that is widespread among his contemporaries,
Thoreau also seeks to identify and analyze the general tendency it exemplifies
to defer to public opinion: for this reason, his project of social critique is
not only relevant to his parochial context but has universal implications. He
is acutely conscious of the threat that shared modes of discourse can pose to
justice and authentic intersubjectivity.
Thoreau
is only half-joking when he tells us that, after becoming frustrated with
society, he turned “more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better
known” (Walden, I). Not only is it true that a degree of solitude and distance
from our neighbors may actually improve our relations with them, but by moving
away from the center of town we liberate ourselves from a slavish adherence to
prevailing attitudes. “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I
believe in my soul to be bad,” he claims, providing this kind of example: “If a
man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of
being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator,
shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed
an industrious and enterprising citizen” (Walden, I and “Life Without
Principle”). This warped sense of value is all too common amidst the
desperation of modern life, with its “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial”
activity (Walden, XVIII). Thoreau builds a critique of American culture upon
his conviction that “the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of
attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with
triviality” (“Life Without Principle”): his polemic aims at consumerism,
philistinism, mass entertainment, vacuous applications of technology, and the
herd mentality that conforms to the dictates of an anonymous “They.” During his
life Thoreau spoke out against the Mexican War and the subjugation of Native
America, and campaigned aggressively in favor of bioregionalism and the
protection of animals and the natural environment. It is outrageous that he is
often stereotyped as a recluse and hermit. Above all, the political issue that
aroused his indignation was slavery. Because Thoreau understood philosophy as a
way of life, it is only fitting that philosophical ideals would lead him into
political action.
He
was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many fronts: he
participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave
Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party. Most importantly perhaps, he
provides a justification for principled revolt and a method of nonviolent
resistance, both of which would have a considerable influence on revolutionary
movements in the twentieth century. In his essay on “Civil Disobedience,”
originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government,” Thoreau defends the
validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which he claims ought to be
transgressed at once. Political institutions as such are regarded by him with
distrust, and although he arguably overestimates the extent to which it is
possible to disassociate oneself from them, he convincingly insists that social
consensus is not a guarantee of rectitude or truth. One of the most valuable
points he makes against the critics of John Brown is that a person should not
be dismissed as “insane” by virtue of dissenting from the majority: Brown’s
anger is grounded upon an awareness of the fact that slavery is a violation of
human rights, and Thoreau berates the law-abiding citizens of Massachusetts for
looking the other way (“A Plea for Captain John Brown”). Passively and quietly
allowing an unjust practice to continue is tantamount to collaborating with
evil, he claims, articulating a principle of noncompliance that would inspire
the philosophically informed nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King, among others.
When
Thoreau argues that all of Brown’s actions were justified because he was an
inspired reformer with a sacred vocation, he is appealing to something like the
notion of natural right. His essay in this respect has a more general
pertinence to debates about the individual moral reformer in relation to
community norms. It also raises the issue of whether political violence can be
justified as the lesser of evils, or in cases where it may be the only
available way of ending injustice. Usually, he prefers nonviolent forms of
advocacy such as creating “counter friction to stop the machine” by opposing,
and acting in defiance of, practices and laws that are not righteous (“Civil
Disobedience”). Speaking about the act of protest that led him to spend a night
in jail, he expresses characteristic irony by saying that “I might have
resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run amok against
society; but I preferred that society should run amok against me, it being the
desperate party” (Walden, VIII). Although at times it sounds as though Thoreau
is advocating anarchy, what he demands is a better government, and what he
refuses to acknowledge is the authority of one that has become so morally
corrupt as to lose the consent of those governed. “There will never be a really
free and enlightened State, ” he argues, “until the State comes to recognize
the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power
and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (“Civil Disobedience”).
There are simply more sacred laws to obey than the laws of society, and a just
government—should there ever be such a thing, he adds—would not be in conflict
with the conscience of the ethically upright individual.
5.
Locating Thoreau
Thoreau
has somewhat misleadingly been classified as a New England transcendentalist,
and—even though he never rejected this label—it does not fit in many ways. Some
of his major differences from Emerson have already been discussed, and further
differences appear when Thoreau is compared to such figures as Orestes
Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. A history of transcendentalism
in New England which appeared in the late nineteenth century mentions Thoreau
only once, in passing (Frothingham 1886, 133). And a more recent history of the
movement concludes that Thoreau had little in common with this group of
thinkers, who were for the most part committed to some version of Christianity,
to a dualistic understanding of mind and matter, and to the related idea that
sense experience is unreliable (Boller 1974, 29–35 & 176). A crucial step
in Thoreau’s intellectual development occurred when he “disassociated himself
from Emerson’s Transcendentalist view of nature as symbol” (Slicer 2013, 181),
as one scholar notes. It was suggested above that a better way of situating
Thoreau within the Western philosophical tradition is to consider him a kind of
transcendental idealist, in the spirit of Kant. For reasons that ought to be
obvious by now, he should be of interest to students of Kant, Fichte, and
Schelling—all of whom he studied at first or second hand—as well as
Schopenhauer. Thoreau was a capable and enthusiastic classicist, whose study of
ancient Greek and Roman authors convinced him that philosophy ought to be a
lived discipline: for this reason, he can profitably be grouped with other
nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who were
critics of philosophy in the early modern period. Yet he also has the
distinction of being among the first Western philosophers to be significantly
influenced by ancient Chinese and Indian thought. He anticipates Bergson and
Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics of the embodied mind, and shares
with Peirce and James a concern for problems of knowledge as they arise within
practical experience.
Contemporary
philosophers are increasingly discovering how much Thoreau has to
teach—especially, in the areas of knowledge and perception, and in ethical
debates about the value of land and life. His affinities with the pragmatic and
phenomenological traditions, and the enormous resources he offers for
environmental philosophy, have also started to receive more attention (see,
e.g., Balthrop-Lewis, 2019)—and Walden itself continues to be encountered by
readers as a remarkable provocation to philosophical thought. Still, it remains
true that the political aspect of Thoreau’s philosophy has come closer to
receiving its due than any of these others: whether or not this is because such
prominent figures as Gandhi and King cited Thoreau as an inspiration, it has
resulted in a disproportionate focus on what is only one part of an integral
philosophy, a part that can hardly be understood in isolation from the others.
Even if it is a sign of Thoreau’s peculiar greatness that subsequent American
philosophy has not known what to make of him, it is a shame if his exclusion
from the mainstream philosophical canon has kept his voice from being heard by
some of those who might be in a position to appreciate it. Then again, as
Thoreau himself notes, it is never too late to give up our prejudices. Others
have observed (see Slicer 2013, 182–183) that, based on the amount of prominent
work on Thoreau as a philosopher which has recently appeared, his profile seems
to be ever so gradually rising on the American philosophical landscape.
Literary career
In Emerson’s company Thoreau’s hope of becoming a
poet looked not only proper but feasible. Late in 1837, at Emerson’s suggestion,
he began keeping a journal that covered thousands of pages before he scrawled
the final entry two months before his death. He soon polished some of his old
college essays and composed new and better ones as well. He wrote some poems—a
good many, in fact—for several years. A canoe trip that he and his brother John
took along the Concord and Merrimack rivers in 1839 confirmed in him the
opinion that he ought not be a schoolmaster but a poet of nature.
As
the 1840s began, Thoreau formally took up the profession of poet. Captained by
Emerson, the Transcendentalists started a magazine, The Dial. Its inaugural
issue, dated July 1840, carried Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” and his essay on the
Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus. The Dial published more of Thoreau’s poems
and then, in July 1842, the first of his outdoor essays, “Natural History of
Massachusetts.” Though disguised as a book review, it showed that a nature
writer of distinction was in the making. Then followed more lyrics, and fine
ones, such as “To the Maiden in the East,” and another nature essay, remarkably
felicitous, “A Winter Walk.” The Dial ceased publication with the April 1844
issue, having published a richer variety of Thoreau’s writing than any other
magazine ever would.
He
spent long hours observing and recording the local flora and fauna, reading,
and writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). He also made
entries in his journals, which he later polished and included in Walden. Much
time, too, was spent in meditation.
Out
of such activity and thought came Walden, a series of 18 essays describing
Thoreau’s experiment in basic living and his effort to set his time free for
leisure. Several of the essays provide his original perspective on the meaning
of work and leisure and describe his experiment in living as simply and
self-sufficiently as possible, while in others Thoreau described the various
realities of life at Walden Pond: his intimacy with the small animals he came
in contact with; the sounds, smells, and look of woods and water at various
seasons; the music of wind in telegraph wires—in short, the felicities of
learning how to fulfill his desire to live as simply and self-sufficiently as
possible. The physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond is what gives
the book authority, while Thoreau’s command of a clear, straightforward,
elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic.
Later life and works
When
Thoreau left Walden, he passed the peak of his career, and his life lost much
of its illumination. Slowly his Transcendentalism drained away as he became a
surveyor in order to support himself. He collected botanical specimens for
himself and reptilian ones for Harvard, jotting down their descriptions in his
journal. He established himself in his neighbourhood as a sound man with rod
and transit, and he spent more of his time in the family business; after his
father’s death he took it over entirely. Thoreau made excursions to the Maine
woods, to Cape Cod, and to Canada, using his experiences on the trips as raw
material for three series of magazine articles: “Ktaadn [sic] and the Maine
Woods,” in The Union Magazine (1848); “Excursion to Canada,” in Putnam’s
Monthly (1853); and “Cape Cod,” in Putnam’s (1855). These works present
Thoreau’s zest for outdoor adventure and his appreciation of the natural
environment that had for so long sustained his own spirit.
As
Thoreau became less of a Transcendentalist, he became more of an activist—above
all, a dedicated abolitionist. As much as anyone in Concord, he helped to speed
people fleeing slavery north on the Underground Railroad. He lectured and wrote
against slavery; “Slavery in Massachusetts,” a lecture delivered in 1854, was
his hardest indictment. In the abolitionist John Brown he found a father figure
beside whom Emerson paled; the fiery old fanatic became his ideal. By now
Thoreau was in poor health, and, when Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry failed and
he was hanged, Thoreau suffered a psychic shock that probably hastened his own
death. He died, apparently of tuberculosis, in 1862.
Legacy of Henry David Thoreau
In
terms of material success, Thoreau lived a life of repeated failures. He had to
pay for the printing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; when it
sold a mere 220 copies, the publishers dumped the remaining 700 on his
doorstep. Walden (the second and last of his books published during his
lifetime) fared better but still took five years to sell 2,000 copies. And yet
Thoreau is regarded as both a classic American writer and a cultural hero of
his country. This opinion of his greatness stems from the power of his
principal ideas and the lucid, provocative writing with which he expressed
them.
Thoreau’s
two famous symbolic actions, his two years in the cabin at Walden Pond and his
night in jail for civil disobedience, represent his personal enactment of the
doctrines of New England Transcendentalism as expressed by his friend and
associate Emerson, among others. In his writings Thoreau was concerned
primarily with the possibilities for human culture provided by the American
natural environment. He adapted ideas garnered from the then-current Romantic
literatures in order to extend American libertarianism and individualism beyond
the political and religious spheres to those of social and personal life. “The
life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why,” Thoreau
asked in Walden, where his example was the answer, “should we exaggerate any
one kind at the expense of the others?” In a commercial, conservative,
expedient society that was rapidly becoming urban and industrial, he upheld the
right to self-culture, to an individual life shaped by inner principle. He
demanded for all the freedom to follow unique lifestyles, to make poems of
their lives and living itself an art. In a restless, expanding society
dedicated to practical action, he demonstrated the uses and values of leisure,
contemplation, and a harmonious appreciation of and coexistence with nature.
Thoreau established the tradition of nature writing later developed by the Americans
John Burroughs and John Muir, and his pioneer study of the human uses of nature
profoundly influenced such conservationists and regional planners as Benton
MacKaye and Lewis Mumford. More important, Thoreau’s life, so fully expressed
in his writing, has had a pervasive influence because it was an example of
moral heroism and an example of the continuing search for a spiritual dimension
in American life.
Selected
works
Many
of Thoreau's works were not published during his lifetime, including his journals
and numerous unfinished manuscripts.
Aulus
Persius Flaccus (1840) , The Service (1840) , A Walk to Wachusett (1842) , Paradise
(to be) Regained (1843) , The Landlord (1843) , Sir Walter Raleigh (1844) , Herald
of Freedom (1844) , Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845) , Reform
and the Reformers (1846–48) , Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847) , A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) , Resistance to Civil Government, or
Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849) , An Excursion
to Canada (1853) , Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) , Walden (1854) , A Plea for
Captain John Brown (1859) , Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859) , The
Last Days of John Brown (1860) , Walking (1862) , Autumnal Tints (1862) , Wild
Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862) , The Fall of the Leaf (1863)
Excursions
(1863) , Life Without Principle (1863) , Night and Moonlight (1863) , The
Highland Light (1864) , The Maine Woods (1864)[181][182] Fully Annotated
Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, ed., Yale University Press, 2009 , Cape Cod (1865)
, Letters to Various Persons (1865) , A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and
Reform Papers (1866) , Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881) , Summer (1884) , Winter
(1888) , Autumn (1892) , Miscellanies (1894)
Familiar
Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894) , Poems of Nature (1895)
Some
Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898) , The First and
Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905) , Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906) , The
Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode
(Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958) , I Was Made Erect and
Lone , The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back (Stanyan, 1970) , The
Dispersion of Seeds published as Faith in a Seed (Island Press, 1993) , The
Indian Notebooks (1847–1861) selections by Richard F. Fleck , Wild Fruits
(Unfinished at his death, W.W. Norton, 1999)
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