THE WORLDING OF NATURE
It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast … or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.
Walden, 1971, p. 292
Thoreau's “worlding” (Peck 1990)[15] may be fairly regarded as an attempt to capture nature in all of its multitudinous states from a myriad of perspectives to achieve some final synthetic vision.Walden was the most sustained and successful venture, but all of Thoreau's writings aspire to this coherent vision. His project is composed of two elements, critical observation and memory in reconstruction. Like social history, which is only partial, highly selective, and always oriented toward some thematic goal, natural history is similarly personalized and fractured by the hammer of creating an image of the world that conforms to an integrated image. In Thoreau's epistemological “topography” this inner faculty, which I have called a “personal image” or “vision,” must marshal a firstorder perception into an artistic expression. The integrity of that experience, its wholeness, if you will, is thus a product of the creative inner faculty, and in this respect we might see Thoreau as operating with a “split self.” Except during rare mystical reveries, he seemed always conscious of himself observing nature. In this sense his self is divided: the observer of nature is being assessed by
The constant interplay of the self's introspection and the inspection of the other—society, persons, the natural world—leaves Thoreau with a tripartite structure that he attempted to integrate and make whole: the world (nature); the observation; and the observation/observer scrutinized by self-consciousness. Thoreau was very well aware of the integrative challenge this structure demanded, and he sought to find “the point of interest … somewhere between” himself and the natural world (November 5, 1857, Journal, [1906] 1962, 10:165). The particular orientation, and perhaps the core issue for the Romantics, was, given the reality of the world, how to give primacy to the knower without pushing him into the solipsistic abyss. Their stance was intrinsically unstable, and “the interaction—the ‘dance’—of the creative self and the world” (Peck 1990, p. 123) must remain awkward, forever hobbled by the deep tension of the epistemological prominence given idealism and the centrality of the subjectivity inherent in the primacy of imagination and creative seeing. Thoreau himself was very much subject to that tension. Ultimately he strove to personalize the world, real in its own right but meaningful to him only on his terms.
We might best understand his difficulty in the context of Transcendentalism and his relation to that movement. Although often situated there, he seems to me an outlier of that group, and the differences separating them reach deeply into his unique epistemology. Before proceeding further, let me sketch Thoreau's project in the setting of the Transcendentalism with which he is typically identified.
Thoreau struggled to elaborate his own philosophy in relation to Emerson and other Transcendentalists. Indeed, when the secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science questioned him about what branch of science interested him, Thoreau ironically offered a selfdefinition that played to the spectrum of his interests and which finally rested with his Concord friends:
I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing stock of the scientific community—to describe or attempt to describe to them that branch of science which specially interests me—in as much as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law. So I was obliged to
― 94 ―speak to their condition and describe to them that poor part of me which they alone can understand. The fact is I am a mystic—a transcendentalist–& a natural philosopher to boot. Now I think—of it—I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist—that would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.How absurd that though I probably stand as near to nature as any of them, and am by constitution as good an observer as most—yet a true account of my relation to nature should excite their ridicule only. If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or Aristotle was the President—I should not have hesitated to describe my studies at once & particularly. (March 5, 1853,Journal 5, 1997, pp. 469–70)
This Journal passage is interesting in several respects relative to the issues we are now considering. Obviously, Thoreau is rather uncomfortable with his relation to the scientific community, for although he is involved in a “naturalist” project, he does not comfortably assume any recognized scientific persona, an issue discussed in detail in the next chapter. Not that his methods differed so radically from that of a taxonomist, or perhaps even an ethologist, but the rationale for his studies was hardly scientific.[16] Apart from one presentation late in his career, he made no attempt to publish scientific reports in professional journals and was satisfied instead to report his observations in artistic venues: literary essays, books, and, most importantly, his Journal. As he himself admitted, his observations of nature, instead of falling under the rubric of professional scientific discourse, led to another forum altogether, that of the Transcendentalists. Professional scientists, he correctly realized, were only distant intellectual cousins. The Transcendentalists were his brothers. So although Thoreau is, to a certain extent, a “natural philosopher”—or what we would call a scientist—he lists first, and then as a single designation, “transcendentalist.” At this point, his contemporaries, as well as modern commentators, diverge in assessing Thoreau's success in placing himself either within (e.g., Paul 1958) or outside (e.g., Porte 1966) that family.[17] Sketching the contours of Thoreau's differences with Emerson—the major foil to Thoreau's own philsophical identity—will serve to help us better situate Thoreau's epistemology and its metaphysical foundations.
There is little doubt that a profound parting of the ways finally, and irrevocably, separated Thoreau and Emerson in 1851, a break that was already well under way by the late 1840s (Harding 1965; Lebrieux 1984; Richardson 1986, 1996). To what extent this represented a psychological clash (personality incompatibilities, dependency needs, personal competition, jealousy) need not concern us here. Rather, it serves to highlight their intrinsic
Although critics have divided on how closely one might place Thoreau in Emerson's shadow,[19] I regard their later animus as indicative of wide philosophical differences. If we attend strictly to the epistemological issues informing their respective philosophies, Emerson embraced a radical idealism, while Thoreau affirmed that, as a Transcendentalist, he was both an idealist and a materialist. This distinction reflects Emerson's general posture vis-à-vis nature, which he regarded only from a homiletical distance. As Sherman Paul noted, “The nature [Emerson] invoked was more programmatic and conceptual than actual: he did not need to go to Walden Pond to find it” (1958, pp. 176–77). Indeed, Emerson built his entire program at a certain distance from nature, so that he might remain an independent observer and so survey the world; Thoreau, in contrast, sought the particularities of nature in careful observation (at times in literal immersion in a river or a pond), bringing himself into the closest proximity to nature to glean from nature jewels of insight. As Olaf Hansen observed, “Where Emerson would claim that ‘every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact,’ Thoreau would have insisted that every natural fact is a spiritual fact” (1990, p. 133). So while Emerson would write philosophically about nature, Thoreau read her (ibid., p. 135).
Idealism was Emerson's linchpin. “Having obliterated the world as matter … [he] could give it back as pure idea” (Porte 1966, p. 53), which was derived from the primacy he gave the soul as finer, higher, and truer than matter.[20] Indeed, idealism fulfilled Emerson's need for a theory to accommodate his essentially religious attitude, which he elaborated as a vision of moral law.[21] Emerson preached against the sensuous trap that matter portended, for in his view, nature must properly be regarded in its higher use— that is, to serve as a spiritual guide and inspiration for man. So Emerson
Thoreau thought utterly otherwise.[22] Nature was to be embraced first and foremost for its own sake, its sensuous beauty, and the pleasure derived from contemplating it. Rather than dominate and use nature, Thoreau was committed to celebrating the wild, seeing it as the primal source of civilization and his own vitality. Nature assumed a value sul generis, and he refused to contemplate nature as the Transcendentalists did, from their parlor armchairs: “We often hear the expression the natural life of man—we should rather say the unnatural life of man. It is rare indeed to find a man who has not long ago departed out of nature” (October 15, 1843,Journal 1, 1981, p. 475). More than anything else, Thoreau was committed to reconnecting this disjointed relationship. Against their comfortable dualism, he strove to find the bridge between spirit and matter, between the knowing self and nature. For him, sensuous experience initiated a cascade of emotive and philosophic responses that might end in some moral understanding, and along the way brought variegated perceptions and experiences, intellectual and mystical. Man's study of nature might direct, inspire, and otherwise instruct morality, but these were ultimately subordinate to nature's own standing, independent of the human use of it. Indeed, nature was real and might be known through perception, through engagement by sensory faculties. Thus an active interplay between the external and inner worlds created images of external reality that could be apprehended and understood. Mind then does not rest above, beyond, or superior to matter, but lives in active exchange with nature. Thus the world “is not a servant merely standing in for its Platonic master” (Porte 1966, p. 123) but is indeed primary and encompassing.
So, how would Thoreau appreciate reality, not just an intellectual distillation of it? As he wrote in A Week, “Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” (1980a, p. 382). Thoreau accordingly shed excess intellectual and moralizing baggage, which he deeply mistrusted.[23] Instead he immersed himself in a sensuous engagement with nature. Consider the following Journal passage, one of Thoreau's myriad reports that celebrate the sensuality of his experience:
I am thrilled to think that I owe a perception to the commonly gross sense of taste—that I have been inspired through the palate—that these berries have fed my brain. After I had been eating these simple–wholesome—ambrosial fruits—on this high hill side—I found my senses whetted—I was young again. They fed my brain—my fancy & imagination—and whether I stood or sat I was not the same creature. (July 11, 1852,Journal 5, 1997, pp. 215–16)
Thoreau could hardly have distanced himself further from Emerson's circle: “We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life” (A Week, 1980a, p. 382). This orientation in turn became the direction of Thoreau's own moral trajectory: “Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become” (ibid.). And to what purpose? Simply because of the pure wonder of nature and the amazement evoked in her contemplation.
In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world was all man I could not stretch myself–I should lose all hope. He is constraint; she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world–She makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he touches he taints–In thought he moralizes–(January 3, 1853,Journal 5, 1997, p. 422)
So much for Emerson's moralizing and the constraints that intellectual strictures would put on Thoreau's immediate engagement of nature.
Given his celebration of nature's sensuousness, the intensity of his communion, the exuberance of his pleasure, and the detail in which he recorded his naturalist experiences, we might fairly conclude that if Thoreau truly was a Transcendentalist, he represented the opposite pole to Emerson's idealism. I emphasize their differences, but there is no neat divide, and Emerson was to experience a continuum of feelings for Thoreau from outright disapproval[24] to admitting a susceptibility to Thoreau's own mystical inclinations. There are many levels at which Thoreau and Emerson parted company, and in an intellectual study we are bound to examine the more prominent philosophical issues. But just as I have read Thoreau's epistemology through what I regard as his own “personalized” prism, so too might we enlist another glimpse of Thoreau from the same general vantage point with Emerson's own testimony, one offered before their rupture. In a telling journal entry, Emerson writes poetically and enchantingly of Thoreau as a latterday Pan who, conversant with a dark and mysterious nature, appears as a guide to the deeper, perhaps mystical currents that might have similarly drawn Emerson, but which he resisted:
Then the good rivergod has taken the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau here & introduced me to the riches of his shadowy starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as close & yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one of streets & shops as death to life or poetry to prose. Through one field only we went by boat & then left all time, all science, all history behind us and entered into Nature with one stroke of a paddle. Take care, good friend! I said, as I looked west into the sunset overhead & underneath, & he with his face toward me rowed towards it,—take care; you know not what you do, dipping your wooden oar into this enchanted liquid, painted with all reds & purples & yellows which glows under & behind you. Presently this glory faded & the stars came & said “Here we are,” & began to cast such private & ineffable beams as to stop all conversation. (June 6, 1841; Emerson 1969, p. 454)
But this sympathy did not characterize their later relationship; and Thoreau soon grew increasingly independent. A telling discussion recorded by Emerson's wife, Lidian, illustrates how far Thoreau—already in February 1843—had fallen outside Emerson's circle:
Mr Lane decided … that this same love of nature—of which Henry was the champion … was the most subtle and dangerous of sins; a refined idolatry, much more to be dreaded than gross wickedness, because the gross sinner would be alarmed by the depth of his degradation, … but the unhappy idolators of Nature were deceived by the refined quality of their sin, and would be the last to enter the kingdom. Henry frankly affirmed to both the wise men that they were wholly deficient in the faculty in question, and therefore could not judge of it. And Mr. Alcott as frankly answered that it was because they went beyond the mere material objects, and were filled with spiritual love and perception (as Mr. T was not), that they seemed to Mr. Thoreau not to appreciate outward nature. (Letter to Emerson; Thoreau,Correspondence, 1958, pp. 91–92)
And Thoreau was hardly shy in voicing his disdain for parlorbound Transcendentalists, as he wrote in A Week.
Very few men can speak of Nature … with any truth. They overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no favor. They do not speak a good word for her … The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealymouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. Better that the primrose by the river's brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less. (1980a, pp. 108–9)
The Journal was more caustic: “Better that the primrose by the river's brim be a yellow primrose and nothing more, than the victim of his bouquet or
But there was a second dimension to Thoreau's criticism, one derived from what he must have regarded as a naive and narrow view of nature, which spoke even more persuasively to the distorted posture of Emersonian Transcendentalism. Like Emerson's “pastoral” vision of nature, Thoreau's vision allowed for intimate intercourse. After all, Thoreau's socalled immersion took place in the placid confines of a subdued, harnessed, rural setting, which allowed the free interplay of a cultivated man in his “wild garden.” But Thoreau was jolted out of this complacent posture on an excursion to Maine's Mount Ktaadn in September 1846. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the Ktaadn experience forced Thoreau to recognize that nature was not always benevolent. In contrast to the pastoral setting, natureintheraw has an independent integrity (absent from most of his nature writing) which disallowed Thoreau free and easy access or projection of humane value. The Transcendental project thus could be brought up short by not scrupulously picking one's object. So while Thoreau characteristically engaged in a close interplay between himself as observer and his object of scrutiny, the stunning experience on Mount Ktaadn forced him to recognize that nature might not always comply with our sympathetic demands and thus might deny service as a congenial “canvass to our imaginations” (A Week, 1980a, p. 292). This experience thus had profound metaphysical meaning for him, and epistemological significance as well.
The standing of facts, their grounding in the world, and their relation to the knower remained a quandary for Thoreau and stimulated much of his selfreflection regarding his own relation to nature. Indeed, we might regard Thoreau's facts as the counterpositions to Emerson's Ideas. No matter what “facts” Thoreau presents, he regarded them as material to be arrayed for another mission, namely to construct a portrait of reality, in the process enunciating a metaphysics of the self. As discussed most extensively in chapter 5, facts became the vehicle by which a knowing self might mediate the world, and thus they would served as the linchpin of Thoreau's deepest epistemological contemplations. This was an understanding that matured during his young adulthood. In an early Journal entry Thoreau wrote: “How
In reading a work on agriculture I skip the author's moral reflections, and the words “Providence” and “He” scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. There is no science in men's religion—it does not teach me so much as the report of the committee on Swine. My author shows he has dealt in corn and turnips—and can worship God with the hoe and spade—but spare me his morality. (April 1, 1841,Journal 1, 1981, p. 295)
Thoreau went public in A Week:
What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils[.] He should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed. There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion. (1980a, p. 78)
And he was no less harsh on himself in this regard:
What offends me most in my compositions is the moral element in them[.] The repentant say never a brave word—their resolves should be mumbled in silence. Strictly speaking morality is not healthy. Those undeserved joys, which come uncalled, and make us more pleased than grateful, are they that sing. (January 8, 1842,Journal 1, 1981, p. 361)
In other words, nature would address him directly, and abstract, referential musings are inauthentic as well as ultimately spiritually unhealthy as they distort or interfere with direct experience. To see nature is to move in a realm beyond ordinary human categories of good and evil.
The best thought is not only without sombreness—but even without morality. The universe lies outspread in floods of white light to it. The moral aspect of nature is a disease caught of man—a jaundice imported into her–To the innocent there are no cherubims nor angels. Occasionally we rise above the necessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning light–… to live right on and breathe the circumambient air.
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)
In short, Emerson's cosmic vision of moral law, and the Transcendental Correspondence which must support it, have been upstaged. Thoreau rejects moralizing about nature, since in his view, one should not, indeed cannot, speak of the deepest recesses of what we might perceive as nature's spirituality. This is not to say that Thoreau's relationship with nature is “amoral,” only that to commune with nature has an “untranslated,” indeed untranslatable, moral standing.
The relationship of Emerson and Thoreau is obviously complex (e.g., Paul 1958; Porte 1966; Richardson 1985), and I will not further delve into it here, except to note that a key separation, evinced by Thoreau's scientific interests and frankly greater “immersion” in nature, suggests that, far more than Emerson, Thoreau was interested in defining nature's structure, both spiritual and material, for its own sake as opposed to discerning how nature might subserve humanity (Buell 1995, p. 116). Emerson's judgment that “Nature … is made to serve” and that it “receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode” (Emerson 1983a, p. 28) can hardly be more anti-Thoreauvian in sentiment. Thoreau was, of course, to make his own translation of the basic Emersonian precepts concerning how he might understand nature's coherent system of signs and her Transcendental meanings, but this radically opposed orientation in regard to man's integration versus domination of nature may be the key to their eventual separation.[27]
Thoreau, of course, did contemplate nature and drew ethical inferences, but this kind of referencing was only one faculty of the complex exchange between observer and his object of study. It was not the goal of his project in the same way it was Emerson's. And more, Emerson would hardly have recognized Thoreau as advocating a formal ethical or religious agenda: “The Wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky” (A Week, 1980a, p. 70). But indeed, Thoreau was erecting a moral agenda for himself, and his community:
Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. Men would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. He needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth. (A Week, 1980a, p. 379)
“Correspondence attempts to divert our attention beyond the visible reality; Thoreau was determined to stick with the thinginitself” (Porte 1966, p. 122). His engagement of nature—pantheistic and direct, sensuous and immediate—forthrightly rejected Emersonian Idealism and helped create a new way of relating to nature, one that has had a more lasting appeal.[28]
All these differences being cited, still, Thoreau's commitment to empiricism did not obviate his search for meaning. So, while Emersonian Idealism was radically transfigured by Thoreau's project, we must not lose sight that in his nature writing, Thoreau, like Emerson, was committed to seeking the same basic Romantic metaphysical truths: evidence for nature's unity and beauty; man's harmonious placement therein; clues as to the moral structure of the universe by which man might be ethically informed and guided. Their underlying vision of nature and man's relation to her were divergent, and their modes of knowing were separated by a great divide. Yet, while Thoreau practiced a more complex epistemology, one in which he sought natural facts, oftentimes in the guise of science, he still lived in Emerson's metaphysical neighborhood and therefore called himself a Transcendentalist. Thoreau's nature study, as empirical and “immersed” as it might be, was still characteristically Romantic—personalized and placed within a poetic vision: “We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy” (“Natural History,” 1980c, p. 29). This personalized faculty, the poetic and spiritual modes of knowing, were thus integral to his project; and thus Thoreau's vision of himself, the very metaphysics of the self, underlies each and all of the epistemological matters we are addressing. This will serve as a key theme
I draw these caveats not so much to blur the differences Thoreau exhibited with Emerson as to reemphasize Thoreau's Romantic character. I do so to keep in mind our own goal of discerning the structure of Thoreau's notion of his own personhood, the foundation by which we might better understand the distinctive quality of his project. Perhaps the philosophical differences that developed between Thoreau and other Transcendentalists over Correspondence is the key point upon which Thoreau would create his unique approach to the study of nature. But this is only one of the multiple issues that were at play in Thoreau's creation of his own worlding. So while it is interesting to cite Thoreau's rebuttal of Emersonian Transcendentalism, or to demonstrate his use of Humboldtian empiricism, or to show his employ of Coleridgean notions of individuation and polarity, or to trace his Goethian self-consciousness in the pursuit of the universal, Thoreau's endeavors cannot be readily placed in, or compete with, one schema or another. His was a complex calculus of thought and feeling, one that swung between established styles of discovery and exposition, and new ones that would be made uniquely his own. The question remains, after we dissect the intellectual forces being exercised in Thoreau's creative selfdiscovery— the one which is at the heart of my own inquiry—What was the relation of the observer to the object of study? And more specifically, How was (subject/object) “synthesis” achieved? What indeed did such a “synthesis” depend upon? Thoreau's distinction must be sought in understanding the responses (not answers!) he offered, and to do so we must place him struggling against the onrushing currents of positivism. To press further, let us unpack the amalgam of “science” and “sympathy” Thoreau attempted and determine how he dealt with the ascendancy of a radical separation of the knowing agent from nature, which not only objectified nature but isolated the self. To do so, we must first present a portrait of science during his era.