EPILOGUE: MENDING THE WORLD
1. Much vexed, Thoreau confided to his Journal:
Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible—that he has prejudices. He is then only prejudiced in our favor. What is the value of his esteem who does not justly esteem another?
Alas! Alas! When my friend begins to deal in confessions—breaks silence—makes a theme of friendship–(which then is always something past) and descends to merely human relations …
I thought that friendship—that love was still possible between—I thought that we had not withdrawn very far asunder–But now that my friend rashly thoughtlessly–prophanely speaks recognizing the distance between us—that distance seems infinitely increased. (February 15, 1851, Journal 3, 1990, p. 193)
Later in the year, Thoreau continues to lament:
Ah I yearn toward thee my friend, but I have not confidence in thee. We do not believe in the same God. I am not thou–Thou art not I. We trust each other today but we distrust tomorrow. Even when I meet thee unexpectedly I part from thee with disappointment. Though I enjoy thee more than other men yet I am more disappointed with thee than with others. I know a noble man what is it hinders me from knowing him better? I know not how it is that our distrust our hate is stronger than our love. Here I have been on what the world would call friendly terms with one 14 years, have pleased my imagination sometimes with loving him—and yet our hate is stronger than our love. Why are we related—yet thus unsatisfactorily. We almost are a sore to one another.
…We do not know what hinders us from coming together. (October 10, 1851, Journal 4, 1992, p. 137 ; see also the Journal entry for January 22, 1852, Journal 4, 1992, pp. 276–77)
Indeed, he did not, at least not consciously. [BACK]
2. “There is some advantage in being the humblest cheapest least dignified man in the village—so that the very stable boys shall damnyou. Methinks I enjoy the advantage to a unusual extent. There is a many a coarsely well meaning fellow,
3. See n. 2 above. [BACK]
4. The testimony of a fellow townsman, James Hosmer, is illustrative: “He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pinecone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with faraway musings, an empathetic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps” (quoted by Harding 1965, p. 255). [BACK]
5. In the domain of the everlasting spirit, Thoreau is only the product of his Maker: “I did not make this demand for a more thorough sympathy. This is not my idiosyncrasy or disease. He that made the demand will answer the demand” (Journal 3, 1990, pp. 313–14). [BACK]
6. This post-Kantian theme was developed by later American philosophers, most prominently William James, who reduced the various philosophical systems to “just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole preferred—there is no other truthful word—as one's best working attitude” (James [1909] 1987, p. 639). Russell Goodman, in observing how James regarded the relationship of the intellect and feeling, also summarizes Thoreau's own project:
James makes four different claims about the feeling intellect that he discerns: 1) the phenomenological claim that thoughts are inseparable from feelings, 2) the causal claim that feelings produce or determine our thoughts and beliefs, 3) the epistemological claim (so common in Romanticism) that we know the world as much through feeling as through thought or sensation, and 4) the metaphysical or existential claim that in certain circumstances our feelings produce not our thoughts but the objects that our thoughts or feelings posit, anticipate, or acknowledge. (1990, p. 70) [BACK]
7. From another perspective altogether, Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, focused upon the question of praxis, which in the form of “language games” and “forms of life” directed philosophical attention on how we know and act in the world as lived experience as opposed to the private (and inaccessible) domain of the mind. Thus language and other overt behavior became suitable subjects for analysis. Tying together Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and most directly the later pragmatists, especially John Dewey, the human knower, as removed from the objects and processes she observes, is set aside and replaced by another epistemological model: Instead of some private mental domain as the core of personal identity, hidden in an “internal” realm of the sensorium (à la Locke) and thus separated from the “external” world, the knower is constituted in interaction with that world. This represents a major shift in philosophy, as questions about language and thought, meaning and reason, are shifted from the private domain to the public arena of praxis—i.e., practical operations and overt procedures (Toulmin 1984, p. xix). [BACK]
8. The phenomenologists formally attempted to address whether, and how, we might encounter nature as “uncaged experience,” that is, before we formally
9. “Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience, and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas. Reason itself and its [object], ‘that which is,’ become more and more enigmatic…. [W]e find ourselves in the greatest danger of drowning in the skeptical deluge and thereby losing our hold on our own truth” (Husserl [1935] 1970, pp. 13–14). [BACK]
10. Edmund Husserl saw scientific rationality as usurping the wider project of philosophical Reason, assuming in its practical victories the place of a more comprehensive theoretical Reason. Herbert Marcuse offers a succinct description of Husserl's criticism:
The new science does not elucidate the conditions and the limits of its evidence, validity, and method; it does not elucidate its inherent historical denominator. It remains unaware of its own foundation, and it is therefore unable to recognize its servitude…. What happens in the developing relation between science and the empirical reality is the abrogation of the transcendence of Reason. Reason loses its philosophical power and its scientific right to define and project ideas and modes of Being beyond and against those established by the prevailing reality. I say: “beyond” the empirical reality, not in any metaphysical but in a historical sense, namely, in the sense of projecting essentially different, historical alternatives. (Marcuse 1985, p. 23) [BACK]
11. The most comprehensive account of Nietzsche's view on science may be found in the collected essays edited by Babette Babich and Robert Cohen (1999). A succinct summary is best offered by Nietzsche himself: “[P]recisely the most superficial and external existence … would be grasped first, and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped. A ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world … might therefore be one of the most stupid of all interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning” (Nietzsche [1882] 1974, p. 335; emphasis in original). [BACK]
12. What began as Descartes's Dream, a philosophy that seeks to encompass in the unity of a theoretical system all meaningful questions in a rigorous scientific manner, has left science as “a residual concept” (Husserl [1935] 1970, p. 9). By this, Husserl notes that “metaphysical” or “philosophical” problems that should still be broadly linked to science under the rubric of rational inquiry are separated over the criterion of “fact.” In a powerful sense, “positivism … decapitates philosophy” (ibid.) by legitimating one form of knowledge at the expense of another. For Husserl, the crisis was not limited to “science” or “philosophy” but reflected a fundamental challenge to European cultural life— indeed, to its total Existenz—and betokened the very collapse of a universal philosophy. He thus renewed the Romantic attempts by Wordsworth ([1800] 1965), Shelley ([1821] 1977), and their compatriots to unify poetry and science. [BACK]