6. Thoreau's Moral Universe
Our whole life is startlingly moral.
Walden, 1971, p. 218
What is Thoreau's enduring moral appeal? That question generates responses that revolve around many issues: the first, and the most accessible, pertains to his formative effect on modern environmentalism. In many respects he set that agenda. His genre of nature writing became an exploration of the unstable relationship between the wild and the pastoral; of the predicament of defining or constructing nature; of the metaphysical placement of the self in the universe. Thoreau relentlessly pursued these issues with an honesty and poignancy unique and powerfully evocative. To get to know Thoreau is to achieve an enriching dialogue, and to know him well is to engage a worthy confidant to explore these matters. But more than as a premier American naturalist, an admirer and chronicler of natural history, Thoreau was philosophically selfconscious in these pursuits. This introspective cognizance reflects a deeper source of inquiry as he engaged in perplexing and oftentimes agonizing meditations on his personhood and the meaning of his life in the context of nature.
This leads to the darker side of Thoreau's moral vision, one that dates to the birth of the social universe. How does one balance the interests of the individual with that of the community in which he lives? From Antigone to our present day, this question has been at the heart of ethics, and Thoreau's response is noteworthy for the adamant and uncompromising primacy he gives the individual. The moral vision which so guided his life was derived from an inner sense of his own personhood, the preservation of his own autonomy, the sanctity of his selfdetermined choice. In the end, Thoreau's moral philosophy is dangerously solipsistic; narcissistic to the extreme, Thoreau's morality was built from the precept that the protection of his autonomy was the crucial and abiding parameter of moral action. In striving for that independence, Thoreau erected a universe around himself.
Belying the mystical aspirations, Thoreau's selfconscious appraisal of the world and himself left him selfcontained and thus often isolated from the larger communal universe in which ethics are ultimately enacted.
Thoreau effectively exercised his perspectivism to bring his nature writing to a new standard of literary achievement. And in his history writing, we discussed how he engaged and reconstructed the “radically irrecoverable pastness” (Krell 1990, p. 7) into his own vision that prefigures much of our own historiography. I have stressed the personal imprimatur with which Thoreau stamps each project, for in each instance the moment of creation can only be reenactment, and ipso facto “the whole performance of writing becomes such a reenactment” (Hansen 1990, p. 135). In both genres, Thoreau's imagination celebrates his vantage on the world and time, and he fashioned narratives of vitality and verve that in the process affirmed—and defined—his own selfhood. Indeed, we might note a strong resonance between the writing of a history of culture and autobiography, for both are, in fact must be, cohered by what Husserl called “the hidden unity of intentional inwardness which alone constitutes the unity of history” ([1935] 1970, p. 73). But there was, of course, a high cost for this independence and individuality. Thoreau suffered the throes of isolation and was keenly aware, in this second aspect, of a solitude based on the divide of knowledge—moral and otherwise—separating him from his fellow citizens. The poignancy of writing to himself about his existential solitude speaks volumes:
The stars go up and down before my only eye–Seasons come round to me alone. I cannot lean so hard on any arm as on a sunbeam–So solid men are not to my sincerity as is the shimmer of the fields. (March 17, 1841,Journal 1, 1981, p. 289)
This is not simply a theme of a disaffected youth but one that continued to haunt him. As he confided to his Journal during the Walden period, he, at the very least, felt sequestered from any true sharing of experience:
No man lives in the world which I inhabit—or ever came rambling into it–Nor did I ever journey in any other man's–Our differences have frequently such foundation as if venus should roll quite near to the orbit of the earth one day—and two inhabitants of the respective planets should take the opportunity to lecture one another[.] (December 2, 1846,Journal 2, 1984, p. 355)
Thoreau did not always feel so despondent (see, e.g., May 21, 1851,Journal 3, 1990, p. 229), and his entire literary output as a public activity belies this assertion; but at the same time he was all too aware of the difficulty, and at times the futility, of communicating his experience and, more to the point,
Thoreau responded to his isolation by both further retreating into a world of his own making, a place in nature (or what he described as having “a room all to myself; it is Nature … a prairie for outlaws” [January 3, 1853, Journal 5, 1997, p. 422]), and also by reaching out to the world of men by writing a grand, albeit idiosyncratic, autobiography. The everdominant “I” of Walden, the vigilant observer and commentator of the essays,A Week, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, the introspective Journal, all attest to a vast attempt to reach to another—the listening ego of Thoreau's splitscreen consciousness. Indeed, in the “Solitude” chapter of Walden, Thoreau forthrightly uncovers the deepest stratum of his isolation, which is neither emotional (i.e., psychological) nor social, but rather metaphysical, the solitude of the core self, which he refers to as his “doubleness” (already discussed in the previous chapter): “I only know myself as a human entity; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another” (Walden, 1971, p. 135; written in somewhat different form in the Journal, August 8, 1852,[1906] 1962, 4:291). One might hear this statement as an early voice of existentialism if Thoreau had lingered peering at himself as some sort of post—World War II French literary character, pondering his alienation and ennui. But after acknowledging this existential solitude, Thoreau marched on with purpose and selfassertion, capturing his dual identity as it voiced its musings and doings of a man in constant dialogue with himself.
Thoreau recognized how the self might be imprisoned by its selfness, and in the Romantic tradition of actualizing in the context of the other, he relentlessly pursued a transfiguration, which would exchange his autonomous self for one whose boundaries have been blurred in the communion with nature. But there is an unresolved tension between an expansive, expressive view of the person, and the selfactualization of an autonomous entity. So on the one hand there is a circumscribed character to the self, where a moral mandate defines the telos of one's development; and on the other hand, the entity cannot be defined in any circumscribed fashion. In short, there are competing claims for the self—one of independence and one of responsibility; one based on autonomy, the other on relation. Thus the Romantics' preoccupation with the psychological independence of the individual also inherited the Enlightenment tradition of relegating responsibility and freedom to a selfgoverning ethical agent. Obviously, adherence to a divinely inspired moral code characterizing this latter case long predates the Romantic reaction that asserted the primacy of the “expressive
VIRTUE
How to observe is how to behave.
Thoreau, March 23, 1853, Journal, [1906] 1962, 5:45
[E]ach of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear himself to inhabit.
William James [1890] 1983, p. 401
Much of my discussion has been based on a persistent yet unarticulated view of Thoreau's moral philosophy. Here I wish to outline its configuration explicitly. The foundation is the exercise of self-determination, the Romantic mandate to build the self from within in the face of the challenge of “the other.” He was thus beholden to Fichte's notion of “selfpositing,” which by these lights is fundamentally moral:
Ethics thus considers the object of consciousness not as something given or even constructed by necessary laws of consciousness, but rather as something to be produced by a freely acting subject, consciously striving to establish and to accomplish its own goals. The specific task of Fichte's ethics is therefore to deduce from the general obligation to determine oneself freely the particular obligations of every finite rational being.
Viewed from the perspective of practical philosophy, the world really is nothing more than what Fichte once described as “the material of our duty made sensible,” which is precisely the viewpoint adopted by the morally engaged, practically striving subject. (Breazeale 1998, p. 650)
So in this fashion, Thoreau's moral project might be seen in the same way Nietzsche was to construct his own forty years later:[2] Self-Responsibility as moral action is grounded in itself; moreover, that self is always striving toward some ideal of itself. Self-Consciousness then becomes moral as actions are scrutinized as meaningful and ethically significant. Selfawareness is not only a virtue: it is the origin of morality. But there is a more social or public aspect to Thoreau's ethics, one that in many ways is traditionally ethical and conforms to a moral system that is less abstract and better articulated
What was virtue for Thoreau? This is a complex issue, for he offered no succinct pronouncement that might guide us. In fact, one might easily argue that Thoreau's entire life's work might be regarded as a project in virtue ethics. Virtue ethics revolve around the idea of the “good life.” There are, to be sure, many ways in which a happy and good life has been defined. Consider, for instance, Homeric arete (excellence), Socratic selfknowledge, Aristotelian friendship and phronesis (wisely applied knowledge, practical wisdom), Christian faith, hope, and love. Plato advised turning our attention to the idea of pure Goodness, which might guide our own lives through disciplined attention to purification of the intellect and passions. Augustine believed that only divine grace might bestow the power to act virtuously, but he advised that prayer and a contemplative religious life would help achieve such grace. Kant argued that virtuous people act precisely from, and because of, respect for moral law which is universalizable. Knights of the Round Table and Victorian gentlemen had their respective codes for a life of virtue, and our own era seems to have evolved to the position that in a pluralistic society virtue comes in various forms and standards, of which tolerance of diversity is itself a cardinal virtue. Indeed, each era and culture has adopted a set of virtues which might even characterize that society. What standards are then applied remains a perplexing quandary for moral theorists. There seemingly are no core virtues or even a unity to the concept. There is simply too much variation in the history of social orders and accompanying philosophical theories to suggest a coherent “doctrine” of virtue.
Nevertheless, Alisdair MacIntyre (1985) does offers us a conceptual scaffolding by which we might understand the nature of virtue, and from this point we can turn to Thoreau's own venture. MacIntyre's approach is to glean from the history of ethics the major conceptions of virtue and then search for an underlying conceptual structure that may hold them all (1985, chap. 14). To be sure, virtue has served as a quality which 1) enables an individual to discharge his or her social role (Homer); 2) makes possible the achievement of a specifically human telos, whether natural or supernatural (Aristotle, Christianity); and 3) enables one to attain earthly and heavenly success. To bring these characteristics together, MacIntyre argues that virtue must rest on character and that character in turn must rest on a common sense of the meaning and purpose of life which is firmly lodged in the philosophical and religious tradition of a particular society. He builds a neo-Aristotelian
a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationship to those people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices. (Ibid., p. 191)
All this depends on seeing a human life as a continuous narrative rather than as a series of isolated acts and events, which of course raises a profoundly disturbing question for the moderns to answer:
The question is: is it rationally justifiable to conceive of each human life as a unity, so that we may try to specify each such life as having its good and so that we may understand the virtues as having their function in enabling an individual to make of his or her life one kind of unity rather than another? (Ibid., p. 203)
In other words, is virtue in some fundamental sense a lens by which we peer at a life, or is it the internal compass by which an individual orients his or her own behavior? In either case, it is the narrative of selfhood that is being told. In this regard, narrative itself formulates ethical problems and solutions. Novels, poems, plays, and personal accounts offer vivid moral lessons not by elaborating a systematic ethics but by tapping into collective experience and the wellsprings of the “social imaginary.” It is here that we encounter moral choice—solution and impasse—in the full range of human behavior. As MacIntyre observes, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (MacIntyre 1985, p. 216). Narrative thus not only becomes a legitimate source for philosophical comment but presents us with
The question remains, What did Thoreau regard as virtuous? A study of his political writings—from “Resistance to Civil Government” (1973b) to his late defenses of John Brown—offer us a political philosophy both particular to his time and more generally relevant to our own. (We will consider this aspect in the next section.) In addition, or alternatively, we might glean from Thoreau's correspondence and the rich trove of biographical anecdotes a moral portrait of the man. And perhaps most richly, we could simply cite Walden and list the opinions, stipulations, criticisms, and exonerations offered in each chapter, and come up with a virtual moral index ranging from abolitionism to the Zen of direct and intuitive insight. There is an explicit moral code elaborated there in detail, so that one might attain a utopian economy, a utopian life based on its principles (see, e.g., Cafro 1997). But do any of these strategies present a core formulation by which we might understand Thoreau's singular concept of virtue?
“Virtue” hardly appears as an explicit issue in Thoreau's Journal after April 1842. There are numerous references in his early entries, but the problem of virtue as an abstract, philosophical issue largely disappears from his musings, only to erupt occasionally again (e.g., a “prayer” discussed in the next chapter: July 16, 1851,Journal 3, 1990, pp. 311–12). Although one might perceive that Thoreau is alluding to “virtue” throughout his oeuvre, after the first volume of the Journal—noteworthy for nineteen separate entries on “virtue”—there are scant direct references. And even in these early writings, “virtue” is given no sustained comment and is cited only in aphorisms, punctuating inferences to an underlying ethos.[4] Virtue was clearly on his mind, but these ethical nuggets can only be understood in the context of a fuller accounting of what virtue might be for Thoreau.
Most obviously, to live a virtuous life was to live deliberately, or, as we might put it, selfconsciously. Whether as a day laborer, naturalist, or writer, Thoreau carefully chose his path of action, one he determined as meaningful. When he wrote in Walden's “Higher Laws,” “Our whole life is startlingly moral” (1971, p. 218), he was obviously advising us of what he perceived as a fundamental fact.[5] We see this most evidently in those activities which were guided by his sense of a proper relation to the natural, where he attempted some communion with nature in an immediate awareness. Under these auspices, Thoreau approached nature as a member of its congregation: “The constant query Nature puts is Are you virtuous? Then
In examining Thoreau's vision of time, history, memory, and natural observations we are struck not only with the personal aspect of his recording but with his selfconscious intention of fulfilling a selfdefined quest directed toward a moral vision of himself in selfconscious awareness of his relation to nature. This is the vision of the ethical life as one that champions the wild as the first principle of nature herself, but more saliently, as the basis of our own link to the world. In seeking the core of our own being, Thoreau asserts that the wild is the essential element and that by domesticating it through civilization we lose contact with the deepest source of our spirituality. Justly, “Walking” is regarded as a national anthem to a new moral standing of nature. The essay begins with a cry to arms:
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement. (Thoreau 1980b, p. 93)
The slogan “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (ibid., p. 112) truly captures Thoreau's moral stand.
But as I have endeavored to show, as central as this relationship is to Thoreau, it is an epiphenomenon of something deeper—the discovery of the self and its perfection. In this Romantic context we see Thoreau's relationship to nature as the expression of that effort. He might have sought selfdefinition in another context, but he chose nature, and thereby nature became the moral vehicle by which he explored his own identity and developed his personhood. The Journal, more than other project, became the narrative
The telos of a good life in Thoreau's view is best described by Thoreau himself:
Virtue is incalculable, as it is inestimable. Well man's destiny is but Virtue—or manhood—it is wholly moral—to be learned only by the life of the soul. God cannot calculate it—he has no moral philosophy—no ethics[.] The reason before it can be applied to such a subject will have to fetter and restrict it—how can he step by step perform that long journey—who has not conceived whither he is bound–How can he expect to perform an arduous journey without interruption who has no passport to the end? (April 3, 1842,Journal 1, 1981, p. 401)
One might read this passage as a prayer, where “the life of the soul” is its own life, beyond morality—that is man's rational construct, which will only fetter it—and is given directly to man by God's grace. There is indeed some “passport to the end,” and we are obligated to pursue our destiny, which, because it is chosen, could only be virtuous.
Thus, according to Thoreau, our destiny is prescribed as following the character of our personhood. In this sense our lives are composed both from the contingencies of circumstance and from the creative responses arising from our moral personalities. To the extent that each of us is able, we pursue, and discover, our own selfmade fortune. Thoreau does not develop the philosophical foundations of this thought, but he draws from implicit assertions of free will the imperative of the rational, and the core organizing force of moral agency. Like Nietzsche after him, morality becomes the ethics of self-responsibility, and Thoreau, the Romantic individual, answers only to himself.[6]
In the “Conclusion” to Walden, Thoreau writes perhaps the clearest credo for a life governed by the virtue ethics of what Coleridge had called individuation (see chapter 3). It might be termed, in the American context, the creed of individuality. All of the elements for virtue ethics—practice, telos, and achievement—are contained here, encapsulating the life of simplicity, communality with nature, and the paramount place of self-actualization:
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common
The key to this passage, and indeed to Walden, is that one's life may be constructed from within—as a germ that must be cultivated to flourish. In this respect, the self is fundamentally organic and selfdetermined.
The Imagination—as close to a vital center as we might find in Thoreau's moral cosmos—is more than our faculty by which to understand nature, or create art, for it serves as the means by which the self might grow according to its own telos. The stultification of a repressive culture is the gravest threat to this thriving, and besides the direction nature offers us, more basically, it is the freedom from civilization's inhibition that affords us the opportunity to flourish. This is Thoreau's wellknown and celebrated credo. But I venture to argue that his moral attitude extended beyond ethical action as normally understood. When he declared that “our whole life is startlingly moral” (Walden, 1971, p. 218; emphasis added), I take him literally. Beyond social consciousness and individual action, Thoreau's moral universe extended to investing the natural world with his own vision. Plainly stated, Thoreau's worldmaking is valueladen, which simply means that he chose how to see, and in so doing, he discovered a world that was uniquely his own. No doubt there is a “real” world to encounter, but how that engagement occurs is a moral, namely human, choice—one dictated by a host of factors which play together to direct attention, perception, and final signification. As already detailed in previous chapters, by focusing on certain elements of a panorama or the behavior of a particular animal, Thoreau allowed his inner eye—the poetic and spiritual “organ”—to direct his optical vision and attune his ear. Thus there is a cognitive component to Thoreau's moral vision, one fully integrated with ethical conduct in a more ordinary sense. To see creatively was itself, for Thoreau, a value.
And now we come to Thoreau's dilemma: How might he translate his private experience into the public domain? His own tortured path fell precisely at this divide. In one sense, he protected his inner life and regarded his virtue as a private affair:
Men should hear of your virtue only as they hear the creaking of the earths' axle and the music of the spheres. It will fall into the course of nature and be effectually concealed by publicness. (February 10, 1841, Journal 1, 1981, p. 263)
On the other hand, he was not shy to lecture his fellow Concordians on politics and the moral life more generally. Indeed, following MacIntyre, Thoreau's virtue ethics required the discharge of a social role and the attainment of some private telos. Both elements are important to Thoreau—the public and the personal—indeed, they are not easily separated. Thoreau was well aware that he, in the endeavor to create a life he regarded as honest, was doing so in a public forum. After all, for all of his talk about solitude, Thoreau lectured actively. But more to the point, he was frustrated by the lack of the literary success that would have enabled him to assemble a large, attentive audience. He aspired to being recognized as a seer, one whom the ordinary would hear and follow. His was the work of the prophet, and Thoreau unabashedly regarded himself as engaged in heroic work.[7] But heroes are not always successful; indeed, the tragic hero is defined by his failure. So in terms of his moral venture we must now assess Thoreau's achievement, first as a writer of nature and than as a political moralist.
THE LIMITS OF WRITING
The sound of the dreaming frogs prevails over the others.
Thoreau, June 13, 1851, Journal 3, 1990, p. 263
Thoreau's claim of showing us a life of virtue rests most apparently upon his position as godfather of the environmental movement, the leading figure in the pantheon of naturalists. He has achieved that status not because he was a selfconscious and careful observer. To be sure, he was, but the character of that enterprise was to seek the metaphysical origins of his morality. This aspect of his moral project ultimately “succeeds” despite the “failure” of his epistemology, by which I mean that Thoreau could not capture nature in his writings as he experienced it. At best, he might “present a scene in which the gap between man and nature will seem virtually closed” (McIntosh 1974, p. 156; emphasis added)—but not quite. As beautiful and evocative as any of his descriptions might be, there was a gulf separating his primary encounter with the self-consciousness of reflection and composition. And even more fundamentally, no matter how deeply he sought correspondence with nature, he realized that “[h]is [the poet's] thought is one world, her's [Nature] another. He is another nature—Nature's brother”
Thoreau's entire project depends on the personalization of experience: “the truth respecting his things shall naturally exhale from a man like the odor of the muskrat from the coat of a trapper” (November 1, 1851,Journal 4, 1992, p. 158; emphasis in original). Note the emphasized possessive adjective,his. Truth is not assessed or attained through some positivist standard, but rather falls squarely within the personal domain. This is not to say that Thoreau creates “truth” in the idealistic sense: for him, the world indeed exists independent, real, and knowable. But a dialectic plays here between the subject and his object of inquiry. Ultimately, the observing eye must gather “facts,” but these are ordered into an interpretative description of nature, whether under the guise of science or poetry.
Thoreau was not always sanguine about his ability to transmit his vision, and some of his “facts” are not ordinary perceptions readily transmitted to the public domain. Many times Thoreau recognizes the ultimate privacy of his experience. Consider, for example, the following early Journal entry:
Perhaps I may say that I have never had a deeper and more memorable experience of life—its great serenity, than when listening to the trill of a treesparrow among the huckleberry bushes after a shower. It is a communication to which a man must attend in solitude and silence, and may never be able to tell his brother. (September 28, 1843,Journal 1, 1981, p. 469)
This is a particularly poignant passage. It stands alone, and we are witness to Thoreau's solitude—indeed, isolation. This takes on deeper significance as we recall Emerson's famous judgment in his eulogy of Thoreau:
I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days, but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!— (Quoted in Rossi 1992, pp. 331–32)
Many commentators have been struck by Emerson's lack of insight into Thoreau's enterprise, and the choice of the huckleberry setting is particularly revealing given Emerson's own lost dreams of youthful exuberance.[9] Further, the slap at the hoeing of beans is particularly callous considering the ethical import of the entire Walden experiment. Emerson, who himself had followed the same deserted path into the woods in his youth had apparently come to deny or ignore one of Thoreau's key messages:
at the same time that we exclude mankind from gathering berries in our field, we exclude them from gathering health and happiness and inspiration and a hundred other far finer and nobler fruits than berries. (Thoreau,Journal, [1906] 1962, 14:56)
If Emerson misunderstood Thoreau, only finally to reject him, no wonder Thoreau so profoundly felt his solitude. And this was not solely a function of the limits of language or the adequacy of facts to convey his experience. The other intractable limitation was the inability of others to hear, to comprehend, to appreciate the world as Thoreau did:
I heard the dream of the toad. It rang through and filled all the air, though I had not heard it once. And I turned my companion's attention to it, but he did not appear to perceive it as a new sound in the air. Loud and prevailing as it is, most men do not notice it at all. It is to them, perchance, a sort of simmering or seething of all nature. That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it. (October 26, 1853,Journal, [1906] 1962, 5:453)
Dreaming frogs appear frequently in the spring Journal entries of 1851 (May 21, 25; June 13, 14) and 1852 (April 30, May 3, 5, 7, 8) during Thoreau's Romantic turn. He only alludes to their significance for him, and we may surmise that in hearing the frogs' inner voice, he detects the faint pulse of nature itself, the measure of its nearness. But beyond the intimacy of nature, Thoreau is keenly aware of its supernatural standing, and he uses the frogs to declare that reality:
The frog had eyed the heavens from his marsh, until his mind was filled with visions, & he saw more than belongs to this fenny earth–He mistrusted that he was become a dreamer & visionary—leaping across the swamp to his fellow what was his joy & consolation to find that he too had seen the same sights in the heavens—he too had dreamed the same dreams.
From nature we turn astonished to this near but supernatural fact[.] (May 21, 1851,Journal 3, 1990, p. 229)
This passage immediately follows an almost rapturous observation of Thoreau's deepest hope to communicate with his fellow citizen:
There is a representative of the divinity on earth—of all things fair & noble are to be expected. We have the material of heaven here. I think that the standing miracle to man is man—behind the paling—yonder come rain or shine—hope or doubt—there dwells a man. an actual being who can sympathize with our sublimest thoughts….
― 176 ―I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts–It is a fact which few have realized. (Ibid.)
Thoreau is like the frogs, consoled by the ability of another sentient being to appreciate that which he perceives as a “supernatural fact.” Unfortunately, two years later Thoreau admits that his companion could not hear the dreaming frogs, and we thus witness the unresolved tension between Thoreau's striving to communicate his vision and the inability of his fellows to understand him. He is left essentially alone: “I hear the dreaming of the frogs–So it seems to me & so significantly passes my life away. It is like the dreaming of frogs in a summer evening” (May 25, 1851,Journal 3, 1990, p. 237).
At the same time, Thoreau was compelled to write. As he confided to his Journal well in his maturity:
I see that my neighbors look with compassion on me, that they think it is mean and unfortunate destiny which makes me to walk in these fields and woods so much and sail on this river alone. But so long as I find here the only real elysium, I cannot hesitate in my choice. My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything. (October 18, 1856,Journal, [1906], 1962, 9:121)
The “life” of writing indeed is Thoreau's life; he is in effect writing his autobiography, but it is a most circumscribed aspect of his full experience. More, in the process of writing ostensibly about nature, the self emerges:
We touch our subject but by a point which has no breadth, but the pyramid of our experience … rests on us by a broader or narrower base. That is, man is all in all, Nature nothing, but as she draws him out and reflects him. (Ibid.)
Much has been written regarding Thoreau's imperative of writing (e.g., Cavell 1981; Cameron 1985; Garber 1991), which builds basically on Thoreau's own aspiration: “As you see so at length will you say” (November 1, 1851,Journal 4, 1992, p. 158), and I hardly would dispute Thoreau's principal identity as writer. He selfconsciously and ambitiously pursued his art and adopted the ethos of the literary circle.[10] After all, Thoreau's primary vocation was writing, and he pursued his craft with passion, distinguishing “recording” from “creation.”
Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed.
It is nobler when it is a deed…. Its productions are then works of art. And stand like monuments of history–To the poet as artist his
― 177 ―words must be as the relation of his remotest and finest memory. And older and simpler antiquity–Contemporary with the moon and grasshoppers. (After January 1, 1844,Journal 1, 1981, p. 495)
The moon and the grasshoppers refer to the supernatural, and while Thoreau claims that the memory of that experience might inspire his writing, he does not assert that he accomplishes more than the creation of a work of art that might well stand in history. That is, of course, worthy in itself, but that is not the issue with which we are now concerned, namely, What is the relation of the writer—the conscious intellect, the knowing ego—to his immediate experience?
Thoreau was keenly aware of the “levels” of experience by which objectivity divided the world. While partaking in the keen observation of nature, albeit ultimately for poetic or spiritual purpose, he recognized, like the phenomenologists after him, that experience was distilled and in the process “refined”—categorized, objectified—and thus filtered through various conceptual channels and changed accordingly. The implications of that selfconscious appraisal had farreaching effects, most directly in the experience of nature. Nature was always “processed” by the mind and accordingly was experienced as a product of “the Wild” (as a Kantian noumenon) and a cognitive faculty.[11] This represents a personalization of the radical other: “Through our conceptual domestication of nature, we extinguish wild otherness even in the imagination” (Evernden 1992, p. 116).
How can one respond to the dilemma implicit in these constructions of nature? One may simply acknowledge the duality of the subjectobject dichotomy, leaving man to “know” the world as best he might, a consequence of our epistemological posture. On this view, we accept different degrees of dualism and different degrees of knowing, so that there may be things we might vaguely appreciate but not know, such as the wild. With this concept of the wild, there must persist a domain that remains “unknown,” that is, unapproached by human understanding. Thus Thoreau's battle cry, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world” (“Walking,” 1980b, p. 112), becomes a slogan celebrating this inexhaustible reservoir for human experience. So while we may study nature scientifically, employ it for technology, model it for art, and ponder it as a spiritual resource, each modality adheres to the basic epistemological subjectobject divide. Thus nature (the Wild) is never truly tamed or known.
Yet Thoreau “sensed” the Wild, both in mystical revelry and as some kind of personal savagery. These were elusive experiences, and oftentimes we get the sense that he was incapable of offering us the descriptive means to witness his vision. “Frogs' dreams” is a fecund metaphor, an allusion to an appreciation
So much of Thoreau's writing seems to move toward an ephemeral point—an imprecise triangulation between nature, himself, and his reader— because frequently the experience he is recording is preconscious and must employ in these cases, as the best approximation, prose poetry. Thoreau would valiantly push the limits of language, but he was caught on the horns of an intractable dilemma: on the one hand, he sought the “miracle” of man to hear and respond to him; on the other hand, no matter how carefully he wrote, Thoreau could barely achieve a fair transmission of his experience and vision into words. His was a lonely vigil. No wonder he felt as if he resided with the frogs in their dreams—and they in his.
Thoreau's frustration may be the reason why he intrigues us so powerfully. To refer to Thoreau's naturalist writings as in some sense a disappointment may be jolting. He is, after all, justly celebrated as a seer of the environmentalists' imagination, a consummate practitioner of his art. As an observer of nature, his careful descriptions, meticulous notetaking, comprehensive recordkeeping, and eloquent accounts of encounters with landscapes and natural life of all sorts are exemplary naturalist writings. If indeed he is a naturalist extraordinaire, on what basis did he “fail”?
His was no ordinary failure. But if one sees Thoreau as striving for metaphysical integration as his ultimate ambition, his writing repeatedly forced him to face his own self-consciousness. He was all too well aware that he
Thoreau was ever mindful of not “writing nature.” The reconstruction of experience accomplished in and by his writing is an artistic rendering of that experience. But Cameron has pointedly brought into focus the intriguing question that deserves fuller attention, for it falls squarely in the midst of the epistemological standing of Thoreau's writing: namely, What is the relation between the object of inquiry—the natural world—and this method of study and reporting (whether as formal scientific description or as descriptive narrative, namely natural history, or its philosophical or psychological extensions of those observations)? I do not contest that in mystical union the subjectobject divide may be dissolved. I acknowledge that Thoreau suspended the selfother dichotomy in mystical states, and that he quite forthrightly attempted to report those experiences. But his testimony is a mere allusion. And when he engaged in studying nature, seeking careful measurement and observation in many different venues, he divested himself of his mystical cloud and strode forth to engage the world in minute detail, well aware of the selfother separation. He certainly knew what it meant to apply systematic thinking to a problem, whether to record the first appearance of flowers or to determine the best mixture of clay and graphite to make a better pencil (Petroski 1989). In other words, Thoreau knew what it meant to engage in the science of his day, and he readily drew upon the
Cameron's description best suits not what Thoreau accomplished but rather what he attempted. This venture sustained him, because of its moral intent: attending many needs, most importantly Thoreau's writing satisfied an ethical calling. As readers, we readily perceive that he is prescriptive: Integrate experience! Personalize knowledge! See selfconsciously with a poetic eye! Boldly stated in many places, his exhortations have no ambiguity and no subtlety. But he also enacts another morality play. In this less direct guise, Thoreau remains coyly evocative, offering us only vague indications where we too might pursue a path similar to his own, but one which we must discover individually. This is Thoreau's deeper lesson: the recognition that there are no formulae or prescriptions, but only a nebulous approximation of the vision a great mystic might hope to report. He indicated the direction he followed: each, he tells us, must find his own path. Thoreau's writing can only suggest the contours of his own insights. His rhetoric is full of dreams, frogs, mists. It is a world of mirages, symbols, fables, myths, and fantasies. It is the world of poetry.
At about the same time as Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, Kierkegaard was writing of the leap beyond rationality to the dominion of the divine. There was no philosophical hope of adjudicating belief, and Kierkegaard clearly voiced a religious existentialism that would have reverberated sweetly in Thoreau's Massachusetts woods. Thoreau would indeed have agreed with Kierkegaard's cardinal point about the immiscible nature of logical discourses and metaphysical experiences. At the nexus of the selfconscious rational mind, each of them would have forgone the attempt to reconcile that faculty's knowledge of the world with the frogs' dreams emanating from supernatural or moral universes. Each approached the issue from his unique perspective—as religionist and naturalist—but each testified to the same lesson. As Thoreau wrote,
The destiny of the soul can never be studied by the reason—for its modes are not extatic–In the wisest calculation or demonstration I but play a game with myself–I am not to be taken captive by myself.
I cannot conceive myself—God must convince–I can calculate a problem in arithmetic—but not any morality. (Thoreau, April 3, 1842,Journal 1, 1981, p. 401)
Thoreau recognized that indeed there was a spiritual domain that might be exhibited to him, but his analytical tools were not to be applied in its understanding. His “wisest calculation” is only reduced to “a game,” and morality resides beyond reason. That is not to say that the ethical life was beyond man, only that its call is not derived logically, nor understood in a conventionally rational sense.
Aside from the differences in orientation, this is Kierkegaard's theme in Fear and Trembling, a work published in October 1843, written precisely when Thoreau penned this Journal entry. The Dane was dealing with “understanding” of the divine encounter, the “beyond rationality” of faith, and the inability of language to convey that experience, for, being outside comprehension and the intellect (in any logical sense), speech can grasp no hold to express the meeting of God and man. Kierkegaard's discussion revolves around Abraham taking Isaac for sacrifice to God, and toward the end of the essay, he discusses the role of language in the context of Abraham's inability to explain what he is about:
Abraham is silent—but he cannot speak, therein lies the distress and anguish…. He can say what he will, but there is one thing he cannot say and since he cannot say it, i.e. say it in a way that another understands it, he does not speak…. [H]e doesn't say anything, and this is his way of saying what he has to say. (Kierkegaard [1843] 1985, pp. 137 and 142)
This is the same conclusion Wittgenstein drew in his famous adage at the end of the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” ([1922] 1981, p. 189). Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein meant that language—using the presumption of logic—could make no sense of the metaphysical. From this point of view, when we speak of such matters, it is either “nonsense” (Wittgenstein) or “universal” (Kierkegaard); nonsense is nonsense and the universal is the universal, that is, prosaic. In both cases speech is, at best, distorting, and, more fairly, simply false to the experience. Thus both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, despite their vastly different orientations, arrived at the same point— “[F]aith [the metaphysical generally] begins precisely where thinking leaves off” (Kierkegaard [1843] 1985, p. 82)—and language stops at that point.[12] When Kierkegaard explores the domain of faith, he offers us a few hints about this unintelligibility:
Here we see the need for a new category for understanding Abraham…. Abraham cannot be mediated, which can also be put by saying he cannot speak. The moment I speak I express the universal, and when I do not no one can understand me…. Perhaps what the
Language is, after all, the expression of our thinking; without thought there is nothing to say. Thoreau might well have concurred: he wrote of dreaming frogs that their sound “is such a sound as you can make with a quill on water—a bubbling sound” (Thoreau, May 5, 1852,Journal 5, 1997, p. 29). Hardly language anyone else might understand. And even more explicitly,
There is no name for this life unless it be the very vitality of vita–Silent is the preacher about it—and silent must ever be. for he who knows it will not preach. (August 1, 1841,Journal 1, 1981, p. 315)
So Thoreau swings between the requirement that he write, knowing that he can capture only a small portion of his experience, and the admission that the profoundest insight cannot be discussed at all.
Yet much of Thoreau's accomplishment as a writer hinges on his ability to describe nature and his relation to it, and it would be perverse simply to dismiss his literary efforts as a doomed effort to speak the unspeakable. A tension then needs to be further explored to make the point I wish to stress here. Indeed, other philosophers, most notably Stanley Cavell, have vexed themselves over this issue. Cavell makes the salient point that language, despite the problem of transmitting private experience does, must, carry meaning. “Writing is a labor of the hands” (Cavell 1981, p. 27), and it is in the doing, in the effort, that meaning is forged, both for the writer writing and for the reader reading. Each must do his own work. Somewhere then, between the inert deadness of words and understanding, we must translate.[13] And here we find language's meaning: “What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?” (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 128e). Wittgenstein's thesis is that the miracle of language is in its use—that, indeed, language is fundamentally functional in its own doing. So too would Thoreau regard his writing as the act of giving life to words that could only point to experience, and hopefully beckoning his reader to his or her own work in the reading of those words. The reader is intimately linked to Thoreau's project, for “reading is not merely the other side of writing, its eventual fate; it is another metaphor of writing itself” (Cavell 1981, p. 28).
Obviously, some writing is more amenable to communication than other kinds. For instance, when Thoreau describes the economy of his experiment, it is clear what he is about; when he draws a word picture describing a landscape, he evokes an image and its accompanying emotion with broad, if indistinct, strokes of his pencil; when he refers to feelings of the sublime,
But there is another level of insecurity with the writing project. Although Thoreau endeavored to capture nature in his writing as a translation of his unmediated experience, beyond what he directly perceived through his senses and intellect, there were intimations that a supernatural world beckoned, more ideal and real than nature as he might see or understand it— Plato's cave in a different guise. This then represents a second level of inaccessibility: that is, beyond what he experienced but could not express, there were clues of a spiritual dimension he did not even apprehend. While we might sense this hidden sublime reality, it is not accessible to our imperfect intelligences and thus remains unarticulated even by our most profound poetic or aporiatic language. Ideal nature is not only simply out of reach of rational consciousness, it is unknowable in any sense and thus beyond Thoreau's pencil, in any mode.
I believe that there is an ideal or real nature, infinitely more perfect than the actual as there is an ideal life of man. Else where are the glorious summers which in vision sometimes visit my brain[.]
When nature ceases to be supernatural to a man—what will he do then? Of what worth is human life—if its actions are no longer to have this sublime and unexplored scenery. Who will build a cottage and
― 184 ―dwell in it with enthusiasm if not in the elysian fields? (Thoreau, November 2, 1843,Journal 1, 1981, p. 481)
In fact, Thoreau did, by moving into his Walden cabin less than two years later.
Thoreau was modest in his expectations of Rational Understanding, but he was stalwart in pursuing nature's moral order, for he indeed had seen a spiritual vision that sustained and guided him. For all the homage Thoreau paid the critical faculty, when he faces the metaphysical, reason is subordinated to the insight offered by divine revelation:
On one side of man is the actual and on the other the ideal–The former is the province of the reason[.] it is even a divine light when directed upon it—but it cannot reach forward into the ideal without blindness. The moon was made to rule by night, but the sun to rule by day. Reason will be but a pale cloud like the moon when one ray of divine light comes to illumine the soul. (April 3, 1842,Journal 1, 1981, p. 401)
From this perspective, the nature of language, for all its breadth and miracle of communication of experience, simply cannot eclipse its inherent limits. Our overreliance on language is simply the product of an older metaphysics. So discussions regarding the self's relation to nature can offer no bona fide knowledge. Instead, we speak in generalities, poetics, and metaphors, which may easily be misunderstood or disputed, depending on the perspective adopted or the evidence that one chooses to bring to discourse. Although such discussions may be important, we must recognize their true character: perhaps holding relevance and revealing erudition within religious, literary, psychoanalytic, political, ideological, or historical contexts, such communications may never be confused as meaningful in Wittgenstein's sense.[14] Yet, Thoreau no doubt persisted in his own attempts to capture his experience in words. At the same time, he knew, and told us, that the deepest experience and the clearest sightings of reality were private. As he wrote in Walden, “perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man” (1971, p. 216). Note that Thoreau was not stating that we could not perceive such reality as nature offered us, but that each of us must engage that spiritual realm independently and directly. The poet might guide us there, but ultimately we are responsible for our encounter, individualized and personal.
Thoreau was indeed a writer, one who could not abide the impasse later philosophy might have offered him. Despite his frustrations, he would write, and in so doing, would deny Wittgenstein's solipsism. Even in the splendid seclusion of his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau always had his eye directed
A HERO AMONG US?
Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.
Thoreau, October 21, 1857, Journal, [1906] 1962, 10:115
To note Thoreau's self-consciousness is only to place him among Romantics generally; what distinguishes Thoreau from other Transcendentalists of his neighborhood was how he engaged nature actively and, unlike Emerson, went forth into the wild, leaving the armchair for active engagement as a selfappointed hero in the American quest of the West. Thoreau's moral example falls into two categories: the first is this environmental ethic which he espoused so eloquently; the second is, in a sense, even more universal, namely, the basis of moral action as residing in a radically selfdetermined agent. In the end, we must ponder how these two moral elements relate to each other and what are their ethical consequences. Thoreau certainly saw them as of one piece, crucial to a grandiose, heroic selfimage.
It is perhaps a bit odd to think of his quiet, uneventful life as heroic, but Thoreau certainly considered himself engaged in some epic contest. From his early Journal, we glean a cardinal principle of Thoreau's life: “any age is a heroic age to the heroic individual” (Richardson 1986, p. 26). Thoreau's identification with the Greeks and Romans suggested to him how he might envision “a new heaven and a new earth for Greece” (Thoreau, February
A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crestwaving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. (Pp. 161–62)
This is a humorous passage, sustained by a dose of ironic selfmockery, but nevertheless the moral lesson stands in relief. Thoreau cultivated himself: “my labor … yielded an instant and immeasurable crop” (ibid., p. 159). While he tabulates his expenses and yields, and calculates a profit, his profit can hardly be measured in dollars and cents:
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. (Ibid., pp. 216–17)
Just as in the battle of the ants in “Brute Neighbors” (Walden, 1971, pp. 228–31), we are indeed in struggle, and the point is to choose our battle and engage fully. Are we to live some false materialism or commercialism to no end, or cultivate our own fields, vanquish the inner enemy of our own weaknesses, and become the best that we might be? How to enlist ourselves to better purpose is the basic theme of Walden, and Thoreau regarded that matter very seriously. Indeed, the metaphysical import of his business—to glimpse “a life unlived,” to “trust the remotest,” to “look under the lids of Time”—was “all that I have imagined of heroism” (January 30, 1841,Journal 1, 1981, p. 242).
We are repeatedly summoned to enlist and march in Thoreau's army, albeit in pace with our own drummer (Walden, 1971, p. 326). This military image portends a cosmic struggle, one witnessed by heavenly forces.[16] And so Thoreau ended Walden, imploring us to follow our dreams, by which he meant pursue a heroic contest. His own meanderings over the cultivated hills and through the manicured forests of Concord's suburbs was heroic in
The West, of course, is “but another name for the Wild” (Thoreau, “Walking,” 1980b, p. 112). The West, the Wild, is the mythic source of civilization, for “the founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source” (ibid.). To experience “the Wild” renews and invigorates us in our epic struggle to free ourselves from the clutches of civilization. A bit overstated? Not at all, if one perceives this battle as one of life and death: “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him” (ibid., p. 114); there is no substitute—no philosophy, no poetry (“the best poetry is tame” [ibid., p. 120])—although, not surprisingly as the discourse of the heroes, mythology comes nearest to adequately expressing this yearning for the wild, for life. For Thoreau, the struggle is a morality drama, for “all good things are wild and free” (ibid., p. 122). So not only must we protect nature, we must find our own goodness within our own wildness. To the extent that Thoreau regarded himself as fulfilling that search, he was a hero. Whether we recognize him as misguided or as prophetic, the integrity of his pursuit should not be denied.
Heroic leaders almost always earn this role by their own personal triumph in struggle. Like Jacob at Jabbok, Thoreau wrestled with himself;[17] again like Jacob, he took a new name, exchanging “David Henry” for “Henry David” shortly after he graduated from college (Harding 1965, p. 54). Scholars have since debated the psychological significance of this shift,[18] and I would suggest that he changed his name, at least in part, because he regarded his personal quest as heroic, one requiring a selfappointed name to signify his own selfwilled forging of a new identity. In assuming a “new” name, he also put on a mantle to lead his fellow Concordians upon the beckoning road to the West.Walden may be read as “scripture” (Cavell 1981, p. 14), and Thoreau himself may be seen, following a line beginning with Emerson's eulogy and continuing through Joseph Wood Krutch (1948) to Edward Abbey and the Sierra Club, as “prophet,”[19] or perhaps “heroprophet”—a mix of both types.
Thoreau's strong emphasis on individuality, on isolation, and on experience bind together the way he saw the world and how he led his life. To break out of his selfimposed confinement—real and potential—and speak
Thoreau lived in turbulent political times, and counting himself a Transcendentalist, he was hardly noteworthy for being nonconformist. After all, the likes of Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Elizabeth Peabody took critical stances against church and state at times more radical than Thoreau's. But opinion has been sharply divided about the nature of Thoreau's political philosophy (Taylor 1996), ranging from Emerson's lament that Thoreau was content with leading a huckleberry party to Bob Taylor's recent assessment “that contrary to Emerson's evaluation … there has been no writer with more ambition for America than Henry Thoreau, nor one more deeply concerned with the future moral character of our political community” (1996, p. 13). To draw such a sympathetic portrait, Taylor reads A Week and Walden as political accounts, where the problem facing the nation “is not primarily moral error [so much as] moral fear and indifference” (ibid., p. 33). On this reading, Thoreau rejects simple moralism (“conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than the heart or head” [A Week, 1980a, p. 74]) and attempts to bring history and memory into moral action. Thus memory becomes a moral exercise (e.g., “When the Indians die, we do not even remember, or care to remember, where they are buried” [Taylor 1996, p. 21]). In constructing the past, we must make our own reckoning of our social inheritance. This understanding of history served as the theme of chapter 2. We might also regard Thoreau's natural history through a political prism, where the deeply humanistic link with nature, the respect for nature in all of its manifestations, has broad social and political ramifications.
More accessible to political analysis are Thoreau's reform writings, which may be divided between more general statements that outline his political philosophy (e.g., the “Economy” chapter of Walden, 1971, and “Life without Principle,” in Reform Papers, 1973a) and those more specifically addressing
Because of the tensions between his social maladroitness and his need to lead his fellow citizens in a radical moral reform, Thoreau moved along a privatetopublic continuum in the political writings. Various commentators have noted that Thoreau eschewed reform organizations as vigorously as churches, but despite this aversion, he did become actively involved with the abolition movement. Beyond his early lectures, Thoreau exhibited little overt activism, restricting himself to limited participation in the underground railroad and going to jail for a night (July 1846) as a result of refusing to pay the poll tax—an act of civil disobedience over the issue of the slave status of Texas and the resulting Mexican War. But Thoreau's political posture also embraced a more overt activism, for while he regarded personal reform, rugged moral selfreliance, and the assertion of individual virtue as constituting the bedrock of social responsibility (e.g., “The Service” and “Reform and the Reformers,” in Reform Papers, 1973a), he also asserted that the individual ultimately acts in a political context to effect his moral agency—either actively (e.g., “Wendell Phillips,” in Reform Papers, 1973a) or passively (e.g., “Resistance to Civil Government,” 1973b).[21]
We can see Thoreau's political philosophy unified if we understand that his underlying moral philosophy underwent no significant modulation but that his participatory politics did. Thus we can trace a progression of his activism from the mid-1840s to that reached with the fugitive slave issue revolving around Anthony Burns (“Slavery in Massachusetts,” 1973c). From passive noncompliance and selfremoval, Thoreau, by the time John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry in 1859, was fully, even passionately,
Thoreau's political philosophy rested on one key principle, as famously declared in “Resistance to Civil Government”:
The authority of government, even as such as I am willing to submit to … is still an impure one: to be strictly just it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person or property but what I concede to it…. There will never be a really free and enlightened State, 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. (1973b, p. 89)
In short, for Thoreau, government, majority rule, and courts of law would never compromise sacrosanct individuality. The quiet militancy of nonviolent, passive resistance reflects a deep and uncompromising resoluteness, and Thoreau's later more overt activism hardly reflected a shift in his basic philosophy, for the essential lesson of “Resistance to Civil Government”— that government must protect the freedom of its citizens—was to be reiterated in later activist writings. Let us consider “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1973c) as illustrative of the themes I wish to emphasize.
This lecture was delivered in 1854 to an abolitionist audience shortly following the abortive attempt to free Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, from being returned to Virginia (von Frank 1998, pp. 276–85).[22] The federal Fugitive Slave Law had superseded the state's Personal Liberty Laws, which were enacted to protect runaway slaves in the 1840s. Thoreau then, ironically in respect to the clash over states' rights resulting in the Civil War, argued heatedly against the loss of state sovereignty: “The whole military force of the State [Massachusetts] is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from
The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls— the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballotbox once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning….
Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve his union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty…. Only they are guiltless, who commit the crime of contempt of such a Court. (Ibid., pp. 104–5)
There is a dark streak of elitism in Thoreau's confidence in knowing the Right, in his disdain of the democratic process, and in his lofty self-righteousness.
The key indictment against Thoreau's moral authority is how he casts Burns's rights in his own: Thoreau regards the return of Anthony Burns to enslavement as a critical infringement on his own freedom: “the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business” by interrupting “me and every man on his onward and upward path” (ibid., p. 107). And so the underlying rationale for protest rests on Thoreau's outrage that his own freedom had been compromised—not that of Burns! Here we come squarely to the moral implications of Thoreau's narcissism. I can offer no better critique than that offered by Orestes Brownson about Emerson's Divinity School Address (1838), but which could just as easily have been written about Thoreau:
“The highest good they recognise is an individual good, the realization of order in their own individual souls.” Can a person who adopts this moral rule really be called moral? “Does not morality always propose to us an end separate from our own, above our own, and to which our own good is subordinate?” It is indeed necessary to achieve harmony within the individual soul, but that is only a preliminary step. “Above the good of the individual, and paramount to it, is the good of the universe, the realization of good of creation, absolute good.” The man who forgets himself is “infinitely superior to the man who merely uses others as the means of promoting his own intellectual and spiritual growth.” (Cited and edited by Barbara Packer 1995, p. 437)
So, on the basis of Thoreau's own sense of personal infringement, action was now justified, and he lauded those who acted to free Burns.[23]
Thoreau, in this most public exhortation, cannot remain in the public sector, and instead returns to the private sphere as the ultimate source of action. How then would Thoreau proceed in his everyday life? Or, as he asks, How can one “be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle?” (Thoreau 1973c, p. 108). He quickly answers: in nature—as mediated by a sensitive soul. Thoreau turns, as he did in Walden, to the higher laws and the eternal truths he perceived in the natural world, and thus in the pursuit of his art he affirmed a moral order, as exemplified by natural beauty. Almost rhapsodically, Thoreau closed his tormented remarks by citing the simplest pleasure of observing flowers, in which he found solace for, if not specific answers to, the pressing political questions and moral laxity of his feverish time:
But it chanced the other day that I scented a white waterlily, and a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the emblem of purity. It bursts up so pure and fair to the eye, and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth…. What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man's deeds will smell as sweet…. If nature can compound this fragrance still annually, I shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the waterlily. (Ibid.)
This passage is noteworthy in three respects: The first is that Thoreau's moral direction is selfdetermined, selfperceived, and ultimately selfcentered as he uses his intercourse with nature as the foundation for his political action. It is evident, then, that he uses no corrective external standard—political or moral principles—and relies entirely on his own sensibility, which to our ears appears precious and even drunk with rapturous delight. Second, given the egocentric character of this essay, Thoreau still is able to move beyond himself and offers his ultimately optimistic prediction about the political process for social justice. Indeed, the reformer, in the very act of arguing his case, must, at some basic level, believe that he might effect change for the better. In Thoreau's case, given that natural laws are the oldest and ultimately the dominant ones, man must—if he only sees what nature provides, that is, if properly attuned to her lessons—achieve the same
By this reading, the perfectibility of the collective and the reform of the individual each stem from the same crucial source: selfexamination. Thus, whether regarded from the perspective of the political arena of social choice or from that of a particular person's ethics, Thoreau's reform writings derive from his central celebration of individuality, one he achieved through his unique manner of communing with nature. As the intensity of debate surrounding slavery increased, Thoreau's own rhetoric also heightened in intensity, but the basic political themes were already clearly articulated in the moral philosophy of Walden's first draft—the assertion of the individual's sanctity, the willed pursuit of selfimprovement, the denial of false social values at the expense of the attainment of meaningful personal ones, and the centrality of man's relation to nature and the discovery thereby of his own divine character. Thus, we may understand the basic structure of “Resistance to Civil Government” (written during this same period) as an applied civics lesson from the Walden experience. When Thoreau asserts that “the only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right” (1973b, p. 65), he does so fully confident that he has been inspired by the “higher laws” of nature and that he indeed perceives them correctly because “through the exercise of an active conscience a person maintains a transcendent spiritual life” (Gougeon 1995, p. 202). Thoreau's movement from passive resistance to a more rigorous activism is of secondary concern to the underlying moral precept: each individual is responsible for his or her own actions, and the sense of right is not to be found in
Thoreau's selfimage of hero, prophet, and political conscience rested on an assured sense of personal identity. But our age is wary of heroes, selfproclaimed or otherwise. And the banner of the self—under which a hero, if there is one, must appear—has been tattered. We are unsettled by the suspicion that the self is but an interpretative scheme, an almost discarded remnant of an eclipsed sociohistorical period. Our very identities seem all too plastic and contingent. And guidelines vanish as mysteriously as they appear. Philosophically, the very notion of selfhood was a problem bequeathed to Thoreau by his own era. What we glean, putting aside the vexing psychological issues, in studying the quest for his personhood is the assertion of the self's reality, and a powerful affirmation at that. From our vantage, this posturing may seem a “conceit” (Cavell 1981, p. 19), but such a judgment says as much about ourselves as about Thoreau. We are deaf to prophets, and we mistrust leaders. In Thoreau's selfcreative effort of making himself into a political voice, we see the moral boundaries of his personhood in highlight. On this note, which addresses the particularly vexing modern conundrum of the self, we most clearly hear Thoreau's trumpet. Is his song a rhapsodic melody or the cacophony of postmodern atonality? In the concluding chapter, we consider Thoreau's basis of moral agency, the putative “triumph of the self.”