Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing "ss1.27"

PHILOSOPHICAL INTERLUDE

Peculiarities of the present Age … It is said to be the age of the first person singular.
Emerson, Journal entry, January 30, 1827 (Emerson 1963, p. 70)

“In the wake of Descartes's meditations, modern philosophy becomes a philosophy of the subject” (Taylor 1989, p. xxii). For the Romantics, this became a crisis which has yet to be resolved. From the mid-seventeenth century through the Kantian project, the self, although difficult to define, still remains to offer a perspective on the world and thus order it, becoming the locus of certainty and truth (Nagel 1986; Taylor 1989). For Kant, transcendental

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apperception is the structured unity—the pure ego or self—of consciousness, which precedes (transcends) the content of perception and makes possible its experienced order and meaning. Kant posited that transcendental apperception was the necessary condition for experience and for synthesizing experience into a unity. In this sense, the self is an entity. And therein lies the rub for the Romantics. An entity has boundaries, limits. It would not suffice for the expressive, Romantic elusive self.

The self, for the Romantics, was neither rigidly restricted by social convention nor confined to a particular rationality. The expressive self reveled in the world's splendor and thereby enriched its own experience. One found fulfillment not in preserving identity but in expanding it. (It is no accident that Coleridge took mindaltering opiates and, like Icarus, sought to reach the sun.) The self, no longer set, established, or structured, was imagined as an organic process of experience. In loosening the selfcontained (and selfsufficient) nature of personhood, the Romantic self became largely defined in relation to its object. That object could be the outside world or some inner self-consciousness. Relation became the key precept, for when one is in dialogue, or communion, or rapture, the experiencing self is absorbing and responding. In the process of experience, which now becomes the watchword of Romanticism, the very idea of a set identity, one fixed and unchanging (and thus incapable of evolution), becomes anathema. The cardinal rule is selfreflection, and in an endlessly recursive process, the self experiences itself, more particularly its world, the other, and its own experience.Relation replaces entity.

How did this transfiguration of the self occur? Without digressing too deeply into the history of philosophy, it is fair to say that philosophers at the dawn of Romanticism—and by extension, or perhaps in concert, the poets—were attempting to break the confining impasse in which the self had been placed by John Locke's construction of a detached, observing “eye” that would perceive the world, know it directly, and retain its objective autonomy. In many ways, “autonomy” was the key issue, serving both as the basis of an epistemological system and as the fundamental element of a moral and political philosophy. This idea of autonomy was recognized at the crest of Newton's epochal discoveries in the philosophy of Locke, who effectively translated the objectifying scientific ideal into the political and moral domains. Locke's philosophy hinged upon arguing for the ability of the individual to detach from the world, and from himself, and observe each objectively.

This view had profound ethical ramifications, for objective disengagement becomes a moral requirement in knowing not only the world but also

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the self. Autonomy is thereby a value, limited only to the extent that an individual's freedom infringes upon the freedom of others. Entwined in Locke's epistemological definition we find his legal foundation, for the individual so defined becomes the unit of government, divided between its freedom and the rights of the majority. “Self” becomes a forensic term to which the law is applicable, and “possessive individualism” (MacPherson 1962) is thus celebrated and moreover assured as established by the epistemological system from which an independent ethical unity consistently arose. Liberalism was based on the self as an independent knowing entity, one that might act rationally and freely. Thoreau was a Romantic heir of this seventeenth-century liberalism and became a celebrated interpreter of that tradition. When he proclaimed the essential independence of man in Walden's opening chapter, “Economy”— “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate” (1971, p. 7)—and proclaimed his anthem in the “Conclusion”— “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer” (ibid., p. 326)—we see the figurative bookends of his entire enterprise: the essence of man is the proprietorship of his person.

Romanticism's expanded view of nature and man's place in it resulted in a crisis for this view of the autonomous self. Nature's laws are not moral ones, and thus a distinction between natural law (the mechanical laws of cause and effect) and moral law (governing humans) became apparent. On this view, human free will, the basis of self-determination, thus functions with one form of rationality, while the natural world, governed by deterministic laws, functions with another. Rejecting the idea of the self as an isolated entity then requires a single Reason, one that might both discern the mechanical universe and at the same time operate within the human soul. Here, too, Kant set the terms of this later discussion when he distinguished between “theoretical reason” and “practical reason” as the key categories for understanding human intelligence and moral agency. Kant had attempted to establish a metaphysics of nature (consisting of the a priori principles of our knowledge of what is) and a metaphysics of morals (comprising the a priori principles of what ought to be). While he sought to ground both realms in a unified Reason, Kant recognized that reason assumes a different character in the natural and moral realms. Simply stated, the respective “objects” of thought—nature, governed by one set of natural laws, and human behavior, following a different set of laws—reflected the distinct ontologies of what is and what ought to be.^[4]

In proposing this structure, Kant bequeathed to German and English idealism the problem of seeking the unity of reason, for Kant's distinctions presented

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a necessary tension: Can the view of the world that follows from the principles of theoretical reason (a world of natural events occurring in accord with natural causes) be reconciled with the kind of world required by the laws of man's practical reason? Whether Kant set these forms of reason in opposition or was successful in synthesizing them is a question,^[5] but indisputably, he sought their unification. As he wrote at the end of the second Critique,

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe … the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence. (Kant [1788] 1993, p. 169)

Generally, three possible solutions were sought (Neuhouser 1990, pp. 12 ff.): theoretical and practical reason 1) were compatible with each other, 2) were derivative of a unitary and complete system of philosophy (and requiring some first principle), or 3) comprised a structural identity constituting in essence a single activity. Hardly restricted to the esoteric debates among philosophers, this presentation of unified knowledge had profound cultural ramifications, refracting in different ways the deeper philosophical issue raised by Kant's attempt to establish the distinctive metaphysics of nature and morality and to conceptualize the forms of rationality that operated in each.^[6]

The philosophers attempted to resolve this issue in the terms of Critical Philosophy, but artists, poets, and novelists of the period also responded to a form of the same basic problem: How might a common Reason unify science, religion, and aesthetics? Admittedly, this issue was of a different order and was posed in a different context than as originally presented by Kant, but a shared motivation drives the question of how to formulate a unitary Reason to account for both theoretical and practical knowledge, since each of these human activities seemed to be governed by different faculties of understanding. The fundamental issue was the unity of knowledge.

The question whether a single rationality could bind both science and art was close to the quandary that Thoreau himself faced. In seeking to unify the world as seen spiritually, aesthetically, and scientifically, he likewise sought some basis for a common mode of knowing, what the philosophers were calling Reason. Beginning with the Transcendentalist legacy, he pondered that question in the form of deciphering the character of human reason that bridges the gulf between the autonomous self and the seemingly separate natural world (e.g., How might one place human action and understanding in concert with nature's perfect harmony?).

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But Thoreau moved beyond the strictures of seeking a common Reason, to an answer so ingenious and fecund that I suspect it is still not fully appreciated: instead of seeking a unifying Reason, instead of attempting to bridge a divide between ourselves and nature, he admonished that we should recognize that we are nature, or, as he put it, that we should acknowledge our own wildness. In asserting that nature, the wild, is within us, our mission is to discover and become intimate with that primitive essence which connects us with the cosmos. The wild, because of its very character, cannot be “known,” that is, tamed or rationalized, made a species of consciousness. All those modes of knowing that we must pursue are sorry residues of a primary knowing. In the wild, Reason does not rule; it can, at best, only mediate. So in some sense, Thoreau “solved” the Kantian imbroglio by asserting that no essential divide separated man and nature, only one's self-consciousness. We are at base wild and thus integral to nature. The “problem” of human agency arises only when we become selfconscious knowers, who must contemplate and objectify our experience so that the recognition of our primary experience may be reported—to others and, more fundamentally, to ourselves. So while it is true that Thoreau's philosophical mileu was idealism, he reached beyond Reason to a realm of unprocessed experience that required translation, which in itself was only a derivative problem of self-consciousness. In that formulation, Thoreau fundamentally reframed the defining question of his age.

Thus Thoreau would not postulate unified Reason, thought, or consciousness to unite his experience, but would take a phenomenological approach in experiencing the wild. By “phenomenological” I mean that Thoreau thought that the experience of the wild was primary and unmediated, in contrast to its later translation into consciousness, which is mediated by various “reasons” in the effort to capture that primary experience. Ever mindful of his own experiencing, Thoreau processed the wild through various intellectualized formats, drawing on his intuition of the originally immediate experience. In his Journal we see him struggle with the expression of these different faculties of knowing, which were in essence his attempts to harness the wild into his selfconscious pursuit of nature. This translating process was multilayered and most conspicuously required different kinds of reporting to effect a full synthesis.^[7]

But derived from the spiritual epiphany of his own sense of wildness, unknown and preconscious, Thoreau's attempts, at some level, must “fail.” He lived an intense paradox: to be was not to be. He understood that in his merger with nature (to truly “be”), his self was “dissolved” (he no longer existed as a knower, his self-consciousness suspended). This natural state

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was the source of vitality, creativity—the truest self—and in this preferred condition, he was freed from the shackles of civilization and exuberant in that liberty. Yet the gulf between that original epiphany and his writing of it remained as a constant reminder that Thoreau was not (ordinarily) wild, and to the extent that he remained civilized, reasoned, literary, and selfconscious, he denied his full vibrancy. This is the conundrum of self-consciousness and those actions based on a reflective faculty. The “self” only appears in its own selfawareness, and the products—selfreflection, memory, and writing—are the voices of the knowing ego trying to recapture its primary experience. But in that capture, both the object (nature) and the knower's own subjectivity (feelings and perceptions) become something else from the original “dissolved” state experience. While the “spiritual birth” Thoreau described to Harrison Blake^[8] remained his inspiration, he would not be satisfied with his mystical epiphanies. In his commitment to writing, Thoreau translated that experience by the typical Romantic modes of self-consciousness. Thus to recognize and appreciate nature and to integrate it in order to effect some kind of metaphysical unity were problems presented to Thoreau as a result of his self-consciousness, namely, in his confronting the mystery of his independent ego.