IN SEARCH OF THE SELF
I went in search of myself.
Heraclitus
While Thoreau deserves scrutiny in his own right, his relevance grows if we effectively place him more securely among those who gave serious responses to our own metaphysical predicament. I am not referring here to the environmental crisis, albeit that issue is certainly germane, but rather to a deeper malaise. We live with a deep uncertainty about certainty. We are insecure about criteria of objectivity, rationality, and truth. What indeed is real and how do we know it? Is there a “self,” and if so, what is it? The foundations of knowledge are weakened by the uncertain metaphysics of the knowing agent. These fundamental grounding questions are posed in many different guises under the rubric of postmodernism and seem to dominate discussions in diverse human sciences, art, literature, politics, philosophy, and religion. Thoreau, of course, was no “postmodernist.” But his way of posing the question of epistemological and moral agency resonates with many current such discussions, though his “answer” of course differs radically from postmodern ones.
In many respects, postmodernism may be regarded as a continuation of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, and it is on that continuum that we might place Thoreau's own project. We have yet to complete the deconstruction of the self that began in the early nineteenth century. The Romantics had no intention of eliminating the idea of selfhood, but in their initiating its expansion, the concept of identity began to lose its boundaries. Eventually the very question of an entity that we might designate “the self” became highly problematic, so the very authenticity of such an entity was challenged. Post—World War II literary and artistic expression extended this orientation so that we now speak of the self's “indeterminacy,” the emblematic slogan for the difficulties in identifying the agency of cognition or moral action (Tauber 1994).[19] When the subject is “decentered,” no longer a stable entity—a reference, an origin, or a source—it becomes only the contingent result or product of multiple historical, social, and psychological forces. On this view, the unity of the self is at best a deceptive construction, a remnant of an older and discarded metaphysics. Instead, such an object might only be described in its “doing.”[20] And here we come to a fascinating resonance
Thus in the assertion of agency, in the life work in which he fully engaged, Thoreau defied the forces that conspired to confuse his perspective. Outside any social role or an identification with any movement or group, Thoreau insisted on his own selfmade integrity. Presenting it as the work of a hero, he proclaimed his own personhood. By regarding Thoreau from the vantage point of the assault on personal identity, I have endeavored to show that prior to his various roles as naturalist, historian, environmentalist, or polemicist, Thoreau asserted the knowing self. He assumed this mantle of selfpositing as a task. In his rebellion against the ascendant positivism of his age, in his insistence on personalizing experience, he gave primacy to his individuality grounded in his particular abilities to see and do. Yet, ironically, in the positivist's world, the self is assumed as given. In Thoreau's universe, where the world is known only as refracted through a personal lens, the knowing self becomes a problem, for it has no universal structure, or even a basis for shared experience with other knowers. The self is fundamentally alone, and only through prodigious effort could Thoreau portray the moral universe he appreciated. He did so despite his isolation and angst.
Thoreau's is a critical counterposition to the postmodern dissolution of agency. We peer at him across our historical divide and ponder to what extent his triumph might be our own. The problematic status of the self, irrespective of the force of contemporary critiques, cannot be regarded as an issue unique to Thoreau's era, or our own. Indeed, we may discern the roots of Thoreau's conundrum in earlier thinkers—in Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau—and project the problem in its later forms in late-nineteenth-century psychology, postanalytic philosophy, and post-1945 art and literature.[21] From this perspective, postmodern critiques of the self's unity, even of its very basis, is a current expression of a deep tradition in our culture, where individualism is
energized by an inner dynamic of loss, conflict, doubt, absence and lack which feeds into our culture's obsession with control, its sense that the identity of everything, from self to nation, is under centrifugal and potentially disintegrative pressures which have to be rigorously controlled. This is a kind of control that is always exceeding and breaking down the very order it restlessly seeks and is forever reestablishing its own rationale even as it undermines it. (Dollimore 1997, p. 254)
The elusive self has had a complex history, and Thoreau comes late to the stage, as we do. In attempting to assess his venture from our own vantage
Given his current popularity, it is apparent that Thoreau's mode of inquiry, largely discredited as science and discarded as corrupted Transcendentalism in his own time, remains a potent idealistic and aesthetic philosophy. Why? There are no short answers, and certainly no limits to our speculations, but the perspective adopted here is that Thoreau's lasting appeal resides in his articulation of his own character, what I am calling his “doing.” The selfdetermined agency of his action is guided by a powerful inner sense of himself which brought coherence to his diverse activities and offered a singular direction to his life's work, whether expressed in the acts of writing or in manual labor, political activism, or mystical intercourse. His environmentalism is only one aspect of his project. The power of Thoreau's message consists, at least in part, in the persistent attraction of the Romantic sensibility in our own postmodern era, where the questions he posed remain ours, because the construction of the Romantic self in search of itself still prevails.
Thoreau continues to ride the crest of the Romantic wave that represents the “great break in European consciousness” (Berlin 1999, p. 8), a shifting “away from the notion that there are universal truths, universal canons of art, that all human activities were meant to terminate in getting things right, and the criteria of getting things right were public, were demonstrable” (ibid., p. 14). Romantics adopted a new “universal”—one dominated by the private, by the emotional, by the independent self, bequeathing the relativism that currently dominates. In this post-Enlightenment period, the universe is plastic; there is no abiding structure of things or thought or morality; objectivity has different meanings in different domains; no abiding “method” is universally applicable. The world and the modes by which it may be understood and governed become more pliable, require more tolerance, allow for plurality, and must be understood as amenable to acts of will and free choice. The Romantic world then might well encompass divergent and even contradictory characteristics—harmony and turbulence, unity and multiplicity, integration and fragmentation, joy and melancholia, order and chaos—for these in fact cannot be integrated beyond their own individual metaphysical standing. The radical shift in consciousness is more encompassing than some simplified holistic view of nature or human consciousness, for in its own contradictory fashion, Romanticism must incorporate its own disparate characteristics, which are bound together only in the ultimate
Thoreau offered us a map of this terrain. He followed in the tradition of Rousseau's Confessions (and the Reveries) and Wordsworth's The Prelude, autobiographies that deliberately analyzed personal development and in this fashion attempted to form an understanding of personal identity.[22] Each story is unique, and there is little to gain in any attempt to further compare or contrast him with these other Romantic autobiographers. Instead, let us briefly consider how autobiography articulates themes introduced at the beginning of this study, namely, how memory reveals the character of the self. Thoreau primarily used memory in the particular context of writing history, but even the naturalist writings are recollections, reconstructions of his experience, and thus must build from memory, fashioned around the core issue of his own experience. From this perspective, the nature writing and the cultural history are all of one piece. They are public discourses as distillations of Thoreau's most intimate thoughts of himself in the domains of nature and the past. Each required exercise of creative memory—imaginative, aesthetically driven, and thus deeply personal. For Thoreau, to plumb these depths constitutes an important project in his discovering, and enunciation, of the self. Indeed, autobiography as the expression of such introspection is a critical component of the notion of a developing self, one that not only changes but remains elusive in its evolution.
Thoreau was perhaps most cognizant of this issue as he pondered the moral dimension of his poesis.A Week offers a remarkable testament to his own vision of the poethistorian:
The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet's life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvass or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince's gallery. (1980a, p. 343; emphasis in original)
This is Thoreau's definition of a life of virtue. His morning work and his dreams—waking or sleeping—are unified by a vision of moral action which can be achieved only in doing—in intense experience, deliberate conduct, and artistic achievement. But the completed essay was not Thoreau's final destination; rather, the experienced life, which included the writing, was the object of his efforts. He was “writing” his life, creating in word and deed, so that in the end the presented public record was configured by the imperative to portray a vision of the self—one seen in the doing but only perceived
In the end, the search for the self is a project complete unto itself. But we may well ask, To what end? Modern critics of autobiography have explored the tension between the person who says “I” and the “I” that is not a person but a function of language. In other words, the “I” does not properly refer to an entity inasmuch as it has a split agenda as authorial voice and object of that voice (Gilmore 1994, p. 6). This is simply a reformulation of the self-consciousness problem, and there are many ways to demonstrate it: Autobiography identifies centrifugal forces, which move away from the center—the “I” in one form—and centripetal forces, which move toward the center—the “I” in the other modality (Bergland 1994, p. 160). In this sense, “to find a self in autobiography inevitably fails because of the impossibility of language to represent a whole” (ibid., p. 161). Another way of looking at this issue is the intriguing observation made by Roland Barthes of photographic images of himself:
In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture…. [T]he Photograph represents the very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object. (Barthes 1981, pp. 11–14)
Barthes is describing “a dispersed self,” one that
seems never to coincide with its image. Barthes's treatment of posing is really about the impossibility of not posing. It questions the very concept of authenticity and turns it into a kind of simulacrum in which the subject cannot stop “imitating” himself…. But worse than the specter of inauthenticity is the specter of objectification, the fear that the always inauthentic image does in fact constitute the objectified self. The problem Barthes's remarks on posing [reveal] is that the socalled profound or essential self can never be represented as such. Indeed the very nature of this essential self becomes paradoxical: its subjectivity is linked to a notion of authenticity, yet any image of that self is a sign of its objectification, and hence, its inauthenticity. The authentic self, in Barthes's terms, is finally an impossibility, for it would be a self freed from the process of becoming an object. (Jay 1994, pp. 194–95)
Responses to the existential anxiety provoked by this insight have led either to defense of the essential self or to an admission of the inevitability of its inaccessibility. Thoreau, unlike most twentieth-century existentialists, chose the former option. In a sense, his autobiographical narrative, like the photograph, freezes an image of time and person, a pose, if you will, that assumes a certain identity and then to some extent becomes that identity. Thoreau would constantly expand and refashion that selfportrait and thus attempt to close the circle. The self is constantly being made and remade, so that “in the end,” written memory—the literary product—in large measure becomes the subject itself. The qualifications— “to some extent” and “in large measure”—are important, because the writing project remains incomplete and never can totally capture that “splitscreen” character of identity. But the point is not whether or to what extent Thoreau “succeeds” but rather his moral imperative of attempting to do so. In the doing, the self is asserted.
Thoreau could not abide the uncertainty of our own age, and looking forward into the western sunset, he could proclaim, “As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country” (“Walking,” 1980b, p. 111). The American hero was about to add his “fables to those of the East” (ibid., p. 121), for this time, in this place, demanded a response to an epic opportunity:
If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar…. For I believe that climate does thus react on man,—as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? … I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal as our sky,—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas…. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered? (Ibid., pp. 110–11)
This spiritual hymn to patriotism invokes divine purpose, and in that tradition, man, the divine's agent, has been made in His image. To be sure, this was not jingoistic patriotism, the blind ambition of imperialism, but a sense of the land's spirit. Without “self-respect … [p]atriotism is a maggot in their heads” (Walden, 1971, p. 321; emphasis in original).
The optimism such a view celebrates belongs only to a great individualist, who can assert the primacy of his own selfhood and its accompanying mandate. There is, in fact, a mission, and he knows its character and its demands. If presented with the postmodern challenge, Thoreau would have answered that the self indeed exists as groping for selfexpression and knowledge in a world potentially alienating and distant. But rather than deconstruct the self and leave ourselves in limbo, untethered and floating in a sea of contingency, he would maintain that our deepest and most abiding core of “personhood” must be the assertion of that individuality as a moral mandate. Such is the stuff in which heroes are cast. The project he thus assigned himself, and us, is to capture our essence as character. His “solution”—to the extent that he had one—was to live in elusive nature, appreciate and internalize her, and in the process of the acute self-consciousness of his scrutiny, actualize himself.
But Thoreau's recognition that he was a separate mind—in nature, yet segregated in his own self-consciousness—created an inner tension, never fully resolved. He was stretched between the autonomy of his own person and the world in which he lived. This balancing of the “autonomousself” with the “selfintheworld” is a dialectic in continual play. One way of gauging the tilt of Thoreau's balance is simply to look directly at a text. For instance, Buell (building on Clapper's [1967] key insight) makes the interesting observation that as Walden unfolds, the speaker as the selfcreator of his environment, as evinced by the frequent appearance of “Thoreau's favorite pronoun, ‘I,’” gradually yields, as the text proceeds, to the cluster of “Walden,” “pond(s),” and the various nominal and adjectival forms of “wild” in which the self lives (Buell 1995, p. 122). This inverse relationship of the “autonomousself” and the “selfintheworld” reflects the thematic intent of the narrative and reflects, in perhaps a crude measure, the complex structure of the book. As Thoreau reaches out to nature, and to his audience, we see him pushing aside the narcissistic mirror, and the inordinate “I” becomes contextualized. This represents the to and fro of Thoreau's struggle of defining his very personhood.
To the extent that he remains stuck in his selfawareness, the separated self is always peering at nature rather than being truly connected to it. This is, then, despite his extraordinary success as a writer, ultimately the “failure” inherent in the “autonomousself,” which in its various epistemological projects can never fulfill the experience of that other “selfintheworld.” But the “problem” of self-consciousness might well be turned on its head. As Hans Jonas wrote in answer to the nihilistic challenges of our own era, it is precisely our consciousness that provides the guarantee of our
This brings us to a central debate about Thoreau, namely the “egocentric” versus “ecocentric” construction of his thought. Buell correctly notes that this division hardly allows a neat separation; placing Thoreau into one camp or the other is to oversimplify a complex shifting of contexts. Nevertheless, he would read Thoreau's nature writing with far more emphasis on its ecological and environmental ethical perspectives, portraying him in close proximity to the current green ethos. Thoreau is thus postured as moving toward a biocentrist awareness (1995, p. 394) but hardly as its full author: “the environmental imagination cannot live by Thoreau alone. But with him as a point of reference, we can move in all the necessary directions” (p. 395), that is, “helping to make the space of nature ethically resonant” (p. 394). Thus Walden, from Buell's perspective, should not be read solely as an autobiographical narrative (p. 394), but for its key moral lesson: “The path to biocentrism must lead through humanitarianism” (p. 386). This is what Buell refers to as “Walden' s plot of relinquishment: the protagonist in the act of becoming weaned from the project of a solely individual fulfillment as primary subject of interest” (p. 389).
It is erroneous to read Thoreau as asserting either the disappearance or the selfassertion of the persona (Buell 1995, p. 178); as Peter Fritzell observes, there is rather a constant interplay, even a dialecticism at work:
To present an environmentalist's point of view in a personal voice. To immerse the person, the personal voice, in an environment. To deny the self and affirm the environment. To deny the environment and celebrate the self. To view the self as a product of its environment and the environment as a product of the self. To view the self as a metaphor for the environment and the environment as a metaphor of or for the self. Such is the habit of the selfconscious ecologist, the man at Walden. (Fritzell 1990, p. 189)
Thoreau shared the great Romantic quandary of finding his place—the vantage point from which the world might be known—and in so doing, he would define himself. But Buell basically sees the ethos of nature writing,
The effect of environmental consciousness on the perceiving self, as I see it, is not primarily to fulfil it, to negate it, or even to complicate it, although all of these may seem to happen. Rather the effect is most fundamentally to raise the question of the validity of the self as the primary focalizing device for both writer and reader: to make one wonder, for instance, whether the self is as interesting an object of study as we supposed, whether the world would become more interesting if we could see it from the perspective of a wolf, a sparrow, a river, a stone. This approach to subjectivity makes apparent that the “I” has no greater claim to being the main subject than the chickens, the chopped com, the mice, the snake, and the phoebes—who are somehow also interwoven with me. (Buell 1995, p. 179)
That is certainly true at one level: each component of nature (including ourselves) is just that, an element—a part of the whole. But that is not the issue as I see it. Rather, the question underlying this debate is that a story is being told, a narrative elaborated, with all the force that narrative bestows—a human perspective, imbued with meaning and signification.
Such questioning of the status of the self reflects a postmodern ethos, the insecurity of doubt about the “I” 's very standing. Thoreau, I expect, if given only a single choice, would cast his lot with the other side. Indeed, he might well have said, How can one know the world from a river's perspective? Aside from the absurdity of assigning consciousness to chopped corn or a stone, what could such a perspective be other than our perspective of the river's or tree's respective point of view? In the end, such a sighting is simply another one of our multitudinous vantages of the world in which we seek meaning and in the process project our own intentionality or rationality onto that world (Tauber 1998a). The question then becomes, How do we fool ourselves into thinking that we might shed our “Iness”? Or more to the point, Why do we need to?[23] To seek a more intimate and caring relationship with nature need not necessitate deconstructing ourselves in the process. The very integrity of our own agency would be threatened. Why not simply promote a sympathy, recognizing that it is an “I” that must sympathize? Fritzell comes closer to the mark in claiming a play of perspectives as we build a multidimensional universe about ourselves. This Thoreau did with acute self-consciousness and consummate skill.
The controversy about Thoreau's placement as an “ecocentrist” versus an “egocentrist” is conclusively resolved in favor of the latter designation if one appreciates his diverse projects of one piece. His nature study was in
From this reading, the critical issue is not whether Thoreau was an ecocentrist or not, but rather what are the implications of his egocentrism. On the one hand, Thoreau's celebration of autonomy countermands the seemingly inescapable anomie of our own mass culture and offers an appealing answer to the quandary of conformity; yet, on the other hand, the ethics of his isolating individualism leaves us uneasy about the moral implications of such a stance in a world ever searching for an ethics to govern an increasingly complex, interdependent society. Thoreau, in the end, offers us only an incomplete portrait of moral identity, because he was so rigidly focused on the individual. This indictment may seem ironic considering how relentlessly he pursued an integrated, holistic vision of himself in the world. However, bereft of a sustaining social ethics, Thoreau was all too often left in splendid isolation with nature, whose responses to him, he testifies, were found at Walden Pond, whose surface—sometimes glassy, sometimes ruffled—always reflected his own image.