THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF
Around 1800 the self stood in unprecedentedly high esteem.
Cunningham and Jardine 1990, p. 1
Thoreau may easily be placed in the Romantic tradition of unfolding the expansive, selfdetermined self. When Goethe left Weimar to journey to Italy and Coleridge hiked with his friend Wordsworth through the hills of England, their poetic quests were more than aesthetic excursions, as were Thoreau's own sojourns. They sought to redefine themselves in the broadest context of their natural setting, driven by the conviction that their own true selves were best situated there. This projection of the individual psyche into the cosmos with a preoccupied concern for nature is a basic Romantic sentiment. It represents a dethroning of Rationality's dominance to be replaced with a more comprehensive participation in the world. To achieve such an integration of self and world, the boundaries of the self were first loosened and then set free altogether. And the entire enterprise required a selfwilled self, whose action in the world determined that world and the moral orientation to it. The Romantics' expressive psyches were expansive, even plastic to the contours of their experience of nature and the selfreflexive process of their awakening to its glory. Deliberately and selfconsciously, they sought to refashion
Recall Thoreau's “prayer”: “Let me forever go in search of myself–Never for a moment think that I have found myself. Be as a stranger to myself never a familiar—seeking acquaintance still” (Journal 3, 1990, p. 312). The “self” is an internal other, and Thoreau in a sense is divided between one who observes this inner self—indeed, he writes an ode to it—and a core self that is somehow oblivious to this examining eye. So there is this innermost identity, the “source” of his personhood, and a conscious observing self who is taking note of this familiar, yet different, self. In the famous discourse on solitude in Walden, after rhapsodically discussing how he was never truly alone in nature, how “[e]very little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me” (1971, p. 132), Thoreau entertains the themes concerning self-consciousness discussed above:
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature…. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene so to speak of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. (1971, pp. 134–35)[9]
Thoreau is aware that he is splitting his consciousness, but he asserts that he is “sane.”[10] This is interesting, inasmuch as he must take cognizance that such an introspective exercise is not “normal.” We do not characteristically look at ourselves as some kind of interior object, yet he does so, and in that act he realizes that his selfhood is subject to the same kind of scrutiny as is his examination of the rest of the world, both nature and society. This selfreflection also prompts from him an important admission: “We are not wholly involved in Nature,” which, by admitting his separation from nature, in a sense undermines his mystical aspirations, restraining his rapturous
One of Thoreau's clearest statements about the self is contained in a lengthy Journal entry of 1852, which has three parts: The first third is an evocative landscape description, poetically recording a play of fog and sunlight; the last third predominantly catalogues flora and the weather. But the middle third is a commentary on personal identity. Thoreau begins by noting the ability of thought to carry him from one era to another, and thus he feels contiguous with “Sadi” who “entertained once identically the same thought that I do—and thereafter I can find no essential difference between Sadi and myself” (August 8, 1852,Journal 5, 1997, p. 289). No longer a Persian seer, lost in time, “by the identity of his thought” with Thoreau's, Sadi
still survives. It makes no odds what atoms serve us. Sadi possessed no greater privacy or individuality than is thrown open to me. He had no more interior & essential & sacred self than can come naked into my thought this moment. Truth and a true man is something essentially public not private. If Sadi were to come back to claim a personal identity with the historical Sadi he would find that there were too many of us—he could not get a skin that would contain us all. The symbol of a personal identity preserved in this sense is a mummy from the Catacombs—a whole skin it may [be] but no life within it. (Ibid.)
At one level Thoreau is commenting on the integrated character of the life of the mind, how he might attain intimacy with the ancients through common thought. But at another level he is writing on the nature of personal identity, where the essential character of the individual holds some kind of universal confluency, open to others of like mind. He then goes on to deconstruct his own identity with a pronouncement: there is no sanctity of the self—we are in some sense composed of a “conscious” self, which is aware of a deeper self that in a fundamental sense is not ourselves as we might “know,” consciously. This schizoid splitting of personhood is destabilizing to say the least. But then there is another recasting of the identity of the individual ego and some universal Mind, where various minds, in communication through shared thought, merged, thus obliterating the integrity of individual identity. Personal identity is only some kind of a mummy, a shell of who we really are.
Thoreau thus seeks his truest self beyond his conscious self, exploring the depth of his personal identity to delve for that core, generative self.
Physical solitude is then insignificant, for in this vast mental syncytium, Thoreau was never truly alone (although in a conventional way he might admit, “I love to be alone” [Walden, 1971, p. 135]). Physical isolation was trivial, the life of the mind bringing him into intimate contact with himself, other minds, and the world. From this perspective,
no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, … but to the perennial source of our life…. [which] will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. (Ibid., p. 133)
The trope of loneliness simply articulates Thoreau's deep existential awareness that his moral character demands attention not to the protection of personal identity but rather to its development and expansion. He would not rest “alone” in society, distracted by the demands of those whose values were inimical to this quest. Thus he writes confidently, “I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself” (ibid., p. 137). The loon and the pond have no self-consciousness and thus have no consciousness of being separate, or, in this parlance, “alone.” Thoreau, by identifying with nature, achieves a communion with God, who visits him in various guises—as the old settler “who is reported to have dug Walden Pond” and an elderly dame whose “memory runs back farther than mythology” (ibid.).
Nevertheless, there is an unresolved tension. In the insistence on maintaining his personalized view of the world, Thoreau dangerously skirted the black hole of solipsism—one's consciousness (mind, self) cannot know anything other than its own content. The balance between confinement and maintaining a selfaware identity which was always tested against some version of objective reality—natural and social—represented a pervasive epistemological challenge arising from the very metaphysics of selfconscious awareness of oneself as alien in the world (Jonas 1958, 1963; Evernden 1985, 1993). And to whatever extent he might have engaged the world and written of it, the solipsism issue simply would not go away, but always hung over Thoreau and threatened to envelop him in the exclusive universe of his own making. In short, the danger of asserting the self as constitutive of its world is the peril of constructing a world known only to that self. Thoreau was no solipsist. He recognized that “it is vain to think either that the mind can be a place, or that the mind alone can find a proper place for itself or for us. It must look outside of itself into the world” (Berry 1983, p. 179; quoted by Buell 1995, p. 279). At the same time, however, he was relatively isolated as
Thoreau became acutely aware of his selfness, and, indeed, it became a problem for him. His dilemmas were symptomatic of the age, and there are many testaments—poetic and philosophic—of others' attempts to deal with them. To better situate Thoreau's conundrum and his own achievement, we must better understand the notions of selfhood which undergirded his own formulations, which in fact “allowed” him to proceed. Thoreau employed, knowingly or not, a philosophical scaffolding that bestowed primacy on the self—in particular, on a selfconscious ego.
The theory of subjectivity proposed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) best articulated the Romantic understanding of the self that Thoreau himself utilized. Thoreau need not have been intimately familiar with Fichte's philosophy itself to have benefited from its formal articulation. The ethos was in the air, and others composed similar rhapsodies in different keys and with assorted harmonies. Thoreau had many sources to learn the particulars of Fichte's program, if he so desired.[11] That is not the issue. Fichte's orientation of the self in action was widely accepted in its most general outline, and, more to the point, Thoreau's response to this Romantic challenge closely followed Fichte's philosophical prescription, or other ones that approximated it. Today few know Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, while Walden is part of the canon, but they belong on the same library shelf.
Fichte's thought is notoriously difficult to summarize, and his philosophy of the self evolved most radically after 1800 (presented in various versions of his Wissenschaftslehre). But if we focus on his formulations during the 1790s, a relatively coherent picture emerges, one very useful for posing the issues Thoreau implicitly, and at times explicitly, dealt with. Fichte was one of those post-Kantians who sought to mend the fault lines separating theoretical and practical reason. As Thoreau did later, Fichte gave primacy to the knowing self in whose unity all forms of knowing must be derived. In other words, Fichte sought to establish the nature of a self that comes prior to any faculty of knowing, and this fundamental activity of the mind Fichte called “selfpositing.” Thus the nature of consciousness, most specifically self-consciousness, is at the heart of Fichte's philosophical project, and specifically the effort to find the unity and coherence of the knowing subject. Whereas Kant posited the coherence of the ego in a transcendental quality, the unity of apperception, Fichte investigated the “unconditionedness” (Umbedingtheit) of the “I” as residing in a radically selfreferential metaphysic:
Life does not begin with disinterested contemplation of nature or of objects. Life begins with action…. External nature impinges upon us, and stops us, but it is clay for our creation; if we create we have freedom again. Then [Fichte] makes an important proposition: Things are as they are, not because they are so independent of me, but because I make them so; things depend upon the way in which I treat them, what I need them for…. “I do not accept what nature offers because I must”: that is what animals do. I do not simply register what occurs like some kind of machine—that is what Locke and Descartes said humans do, but that is false. “I do not accept what nature offers because I must, I believe it because I will” …. [E]xperience is something I determine because I act…. I make my world as I make a poem. (Berlin 1999, pp. 88–89)
Fichte's Romantic anthem attests to the yearning expression of a free self, which was commonly celebrated, one that sought its own selfperfection.[14] The implications for moral philosophy cannot be overestimated.
The other cardinal feature of Fichte's philosophy posits that the self could not exist alone and could only be constituted in tension with, or even in opposition to, an “other.” In fact, there are two levels of otherness: the self itself in its own selfpositing, and the empirical world that must be brought within the self's knowing—incorporated and integrated only as the self might comprehend it. In this process of knowing, the self would be articulated in tension with the “outside” world. Fichte's basic construction of alterity became widely utilized. For instance, otherness for Coleridge was the divine other; more radically, for Hegel the other became an ontology.[15] Hegelian dialecticism regarded all action as governed by confrontation and synthesis. Applying the ipseityalterity axis to the self, the sovereign subject would relate only to that which it constructs or confronts. In that meeting the realization of the self is determined in a complex duality, the encountered world comprising one element of the synthesis and the person's own self-consciousness the other. Their meeting—their synthesis—modulates the self, which thereby evolves. Like Fichte's construction, the self becomes a relation, fundamentally an activity which never rests. The general lesson was universally applied: the self depends intimately on its relation to the other, whether God, nature, culture, history, or other selves. Otherness becomes constitutive of the self—quite a different vision of the self from that of Kant, where the person retained individuality by some postulated transcendental quality.
Alterity revolves around whether, and how, in response to an encounter, the self articulates itself or is altered as a consequence of that engagement. How might the engaged self alter its object and their shared world? How
The I posits itself, and it exists by virtue of this mere selfpositing…. What was I before I came to self-consciousness? The natural answer to this question is:I did not exist at all, for I was not an I. The I exists only insofar as it is conscious of itself. (Fichte,Wissenschaftslehre [1794], quoted by Neuhouser 1990, pp. 45–46)
According to Fichte, this self-intuition is the grounding, indeed the selfgrounding, of the self, and from it all forms of human knowing are derived.[12] From this initial formulation, he further developed his philosophy upon the notion of the self's practical freedom, what he described as a “feeling of [one's] freedom and absolute selfsufficiency” (Fichte,Wissenschaftslehre [1797], quoted by Neuhouser 1990, p. 54). If the self existed as selfpositing, then the self's self-determination of itself and its world rested on regarding the “absolute selfactivity of the I as independent of everything outside of oneself” (ibid.). The goal was genuine autonomy. But Fichte drew a crucial distinction between the “intellectual intuition” of the self and the self as a knowing faculty, and thereby made autonomy a “problem”:
If, in intellectual intuition, the I is because it is and is what it is, then it is, to that extent,selfpositing, absolutely independent and autonomous. The I in empirical consciousness, however, the I as intellect,is only in relation to something intelligible, and is, to that extent, dependent. But the I which is thereby opposed to itself is supposed to be not two, but one—which is impossible, since “dependence” contradicts “independence.” Since, however, the I cannot relinquish its absolute independence, a striving is engendered: the I strives to make what is intelligible dependent upon itself, in order thereby to bring that I which entertains representations of what is intelligible into unity with the selfpositing I. (Fichte [1792] 1988, p. 75; emphasis in original)
Three key features highlight this passage: first, the primary selfsufficiency of the I;[13] second, the aspiration for autonomy; and third, the dialectic of the other in the self's selfconstitution. This construction of the world's dependence on the knowing I was a “solution” to Kant's challenge of defining a unifying Reason, but Fichte's radical primacy of the self also begat solipsism. Before delving into that quandary, let us consider what Fichte did offer.
In Fichte's philosophical system the self is no longer an entity but rather is regarded as an activity, one which is selfconstituting in a way that an object cannot be. The guiding characteristics of this sensibility (epistemologically) assert the self in a pragmatic mode and (metaphysically) free it with self-determination. In offering the architectonics of a free, selfwilled self, Fichte provided the Romantics with a philosophical foundation by which the Romantic quest might proceed:
The relational construct as applied to the specific issue of personhood converges on how the potential for self-aggrandizement must be realized in the world, and the self must ultimately actualize itself in the encounter with the other. The “ other”—as self-consciousness—includes the self itself, and herein lies the essential mystery of the Romantic understanding of selfhood. On the one hand, we are selfconsciously aware of our selfhood as arising from our thinking about being a self; but there is a critical caveat to that observation: the self thereby dissolves. We become locked into a relentless recursive reflection where “the self” no longer abides as a circumscribed, selfcontained entity. In The Principles of Psychology (written from a very different orientation but still indebted to this Romantic sensibility [Goodman 1990]), William James clearly articulated the elusiveness of mind, specifically the core of the self-consciousness: “[I]t [consciousness] is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection” (James [1890] 1983, p. 290). Accordingly, like Fichte before him, James held that consciousness can only be regarded as a process, where, in the attempt to objectify experience—that is, to share it and make it public—consciousness is transformed into something else altogether. Our reflection on our thought, perception, and feelings is irretrievably distinct from the source of that process, which we would like to refer to as our inner or core self. The act of recognition is a function of our selfawareness; and as consciousness or actions are reviewed, a continual generation of new experience must in turn be contemplated. The act of introspection is thus perpetually incomplete in the attempt to capture the primary experience. Because the review process is fundamentally oriented as a retrospective act of analysis, it can never be the act itself. The reflection itself is a thought, but then the recursive spiral begins and there is no end, as Kierkegaard so elegantly observed forty years earlier.[17]
The psychological elusiveness of “selfhood” elicits a beguiling puzzlement. The self has become immersed in its world, and when one attempts to arrest that experiencing subject by reflecting on its experience, subjectivity
From the orientation adopted here, we might say that Thoreau found the “other” in several contexts, of which nature is the most prominent. As a naturalist, he saw nature not as a reflection of himself but as radically other: “Man is but the place where I stand & the prospect (thence) hence is infinite. It is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me—when I reflect myself—I find that there is other than me” (April 2, 1852,Journal 4, 1992, p. 420), or as he might have said, the other establishes the finitude of the self. He embraced his self-consciousness to turn his peering at the world into an aesthetic and spiritual order, and accepted his metaphysical separation from nature with a selfwilled mandate to explore that relationship. In so doing, he articulated and, in the context of this philosophical formulation, created his personhood. To know Thoreau's work is to perceive that he was in constant dialogue with nature, not only absorbing her beauty and facts of being but, more personally, ascertaining himself in relation to the natural. Various critics assess that process by different criteria and see this project in different lights. I will not attempt any further adjudication here, for my purpose is not to further show how nature as other served as constituent to Thoreau's selfdefinition of his personhood—it clearly was to a large extent the measure and counterpoise of his own identity—but rather to see this examination as a means of exploring an even deeper other, namely the otherness of himself, one he discovered as the wild.
So, as with Fichte, Thoreau would give primacy to his agency—the knowing self and the self in selfdetermined action. But unlike the idealist philosophers—from Fichte to Emerson—Thoreau would articulate himself in dialogue over his place in nature through active empiricist pursuit. In a