THE DEEDS OF LIGHT
I have seen where the mildew on a jar had taken the form of perfect leaves—thick—downy—and luxuriant. What an impulse was given some time or other to vegetation that now nothing can stay it. Some one has said he could write an epic to be called the leaf—and this would seem to have been the theme of the creator himself. The leaf either plain or variegated—fresh or decayed—fluid or crystalline—is nature[']s constant cypher.
Thoreau, 1842–44,Journal 2, 1984, p. 80
Thoreau was a consummate practitioner of the naturalist vignette, a genre inspired by careful observation, but often confused as derivative of science. Highly individualized and personal, the facts of the case are only the beginning of the narrative; and the observer, not the object, assumes primacy. In science, the exact opposite occurs. In characterizing Thoreau's mode of seeing, Buell has aptly noted that “the speaker's fascination with the process of seeing, not the objects seen, is the central subject here” (Buell 1995,
It is incontestable that Thoreau projected his emotional state onto these “intermediary” descriptions. Indeed, one must be struck with the utterly fantastical character marking many of his depictions of animals or landscapes, and one might dip almost at random into any of his works for examples.[9] The emotionalism of his descriptions is one mark of Thoreau's Romanticism, and even if we were to place it within a developing genre of nineteenth-century realism, such writing is “far from being a transparent rendering” inasmuch as, at least by our standards, it is highly ideologically or psychohistorically determined (Buell 1995, p. 87). Thoreau was in this regard only following the lead of Goethe a generation earlier, who selfconsciously allowed his putative separation as perceiver to overlap his object of scrutiny, thus compromising his objectivity and its claims to realism. This was not a naive “error” in the usual sense. Goethe was acutely selfaware of the epistemological challenge of science, and it was precisely the conceit of complete objectification that he would not only attack, but counter with his own projected personalism. In both his biological and physical studies, Goethe would include all human faculties in the employ of his science: intuition, mathematics, accurate measurements, ardent imagination, and not least “a loving delight in the world of the senses” (Goethe [1792] 1988). As stated in his Theory of Colors, a bald attack on Newton, Goethe sought “the deeds of light, what it does and what it endures” ([1810] 1988). Goethe, in seeking “the deeds,” was intent on discovering the full panoply of phenomena in what he considered their dynamic unity of spirit and matter. For him, and for the Romantics generally, there was only nature and man as a
Goethe's treatise on color is a multipronged study of light, both as a physical phenomenon and as psychologically perceived, and includes a rich mixture of history and philosophy of science. In this sense it conforms to the rhetorical style of the day, whose authorial voice, replete with individual impressions and opinions, blatantly ignores our own conventions of the neutral observer who presents us with “nothing but the facts.” The boundaries separating the subject and object are thus blurred and even disappear, so that personal judgments, and even prejudice, are projected.[10] Goethe was reflecting a different vision of science from the one that was to prove dominant in the nineteenth century, and totally hegemonic in the twentieth, namely the idea that the observer, in a radical sense, might be removed altogether, leaving his observation, preferably generated by a mechanical device, standing alone, utterly divorced from the scientist, to report on nature. (This proved to be an unattainable goal and an epistemological conceit.[11] See chapter 4.)
At one level, we might say that early-nineteenth-century science had not developed the disciplinary structure we have today, so that by modern standards, what should have been clearly separated as different modes of study—optical mechanics and visual perception (i.e., physics and physiology or cognitive psychology)—were fused in Goethe's approach. In addition, most would agree that history and philosophy of science began as parts of science proper. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, history of science was primarily a rhetorical and theoretical tool in showing how new science was part of a progressive, and rational, process. Review of the historical development of a particular science was an integral component of the scientific report. When Goethe wrote on color theory, Priestley on electricity, or Lyell on geology, these natural philosophers used history to legitimate their own work. Even into our own era, history of science—when still entertained as relevant to science—was often seen as exercising a beneficial influence on practice, so that the laboratory scientist might profit from history used as an analytical tool (Kragh 1987, pp. 33–34). While the historical perspective as a value in itself governed such innovators as Giambattista Vico, confusions about historical interpretation as an important scholarly activity distinct from doing science itself were only slowly untangled.
But the issue is more deeply grounded than a methodological problem. Goethe's purpose and strategy grew from a metaphysics where individual and nature were intimately connected and could not be torn asunder without
For our purposes, it is important to note that Thoreau was very much influenced by Goethe and frequently referred to him in his Journal and published works. This interest dates from Thoreau's last year in college, and upon graduating, he began to read Goethe in the original (borrowing various books from Emerson's fiftyfivevolume German edition [Sattelmeyer 1988, pp. 26–27]) and quoting him in his Journal (e.g., entries of November 15, 16, December 8, 18, 1837; Journal 1, 1981). The reasons are not difficult to fathom, given the strong correspondence in their views of nature and the self. There are two general ways Thoreau followed Goethe as a Romantic natural philosopher. The first concerns Thoreau's search for the expression of a universal organizing principle in nature, and the second, the underlying rationale that justified this epistemological approach. As discussed in chapter 5, Thoreau took pains to distance himself from Goethe, but the American's pattern of inquiry, and its telos, remain closely aligned to Goethe's own project.
In brief, Goethe aimed at establishing “new relations and discovering the manner in which Nature, with incomparable power, develops the greatest complexity from the simple” (Goethe [1786–88] 1982). His quest was the
Thoreau, in one of his earliest Journal entries, records his own sympathetic response to this Goethian problematic,[12] and this theme was to reappear as Walden's climactic conclusion in the sandbank description, where Thoreau describes his own epiphanic insight into nature's vitality and unity (1971, pp. 304–9). Less than a year before Walden's publication, the sand bank as an aesthetic and natural image appears in Thoreau's Journal (first entry, December 31, 1851 [Journal 4, 1992, p. 230]), and we see the full harvest of the seed planted by his reading of Goethe fourteen years earlier:
On the outside all the life of the earth is expressed in the animal or vegetable, but make a deep cut in it and you will find in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder, then, that plants grow and spring in it. The atoms have already learned the law. Let a vegetable sap convey it upwards and you have a vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, which labors with the idea thus inwardly. The overhanging leaf sees here in its prototype. The earth is pregnant with law. (March 2, 1854,Journal, [1906] 1962, 6:148)
This conclusion, “the earth is pregnant with law,” epitomizes Goethe's specific concern with finding a template for plant diversity and, more generally, the intimation of nature's ordered unity—indeed, of the idea that nature is lawful. This insight and the foundation upon which it rests is important evidence of Thoreau's full embrace of Romanticism (Adams and Ross 1988, pp. 143 ff.), but note that its first expression is one we detect in Thoreau's earliest musings. It is for this reason that I would prefer to regard this Romantic orientation as a maturation or crystallization of an earlier, perhaps less well articulated understanding than a conversion as some critics argue (ibid.).
Goethe was an ardent holist, an orientation formed from both his aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities, and no doubt Thoreau found in him a clear articulation of this Romantic ethos with which he held a strong affinity. But there is a second important countervailing aspect of Romantic organicism,
Perhaps the clearest articulation of this second point of view encountered by Thoreau was Coleridge's Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life ([1848] 1970). As Sattelmeyer and Hocks (1985) have argued, Thoreau's reading of this work in late 1848 strongly influenced, or at minimum legitimated, his own work as a naturalist, offering an important epistemological and aesthetic rationale of Romantic thought to guide his own endeavors. Heavily influenced by Kant, Hegel, and the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, Coleridge, in the Theory of Life (written in 1816), characterized life according to three cardinal characteristics: First, nature manifested a creative force that had universal properties, namely vitality, but was also characterized by the individual expression of that power in the particularity of species and individuals.[13] The discerning eye would recognize the aesthetic unity of nature both in the universal elements of creative vitality and in the individuality expressed in the multifarious details of animal and plant life. Because of an underlying correspondence between the human mind and intelligence, the naturalist might discern the moving spirit of the world, the divine creative force of the universe in individuality.
Second, following Kant's third Critique (Critique of Judgment [1790]), Coleridge judged the integration of organisms as a reflection of an overarching telos where cause and effect are selfreferential, that is, effects inevitably influence initiating causes because all parts are interconnected and related to the whole that orders each constituent relative to that whole. As Coleridge put it in his own context of individuation, “a whole composed, ab intra, of different parts, so far independent that each part is reciprocally means and end, is an individual” ([1848] 1970, p. 44). In this general Kantian view, organisms not only had purpose but were structured by all components incorporated under the auspices of an organizing principle, the integrity of the organism. Accordingly, a central scientific pursuit was to understand the fundamental organization of animals or plants by some regulative principle, and in this respect, Romantic naturalists and biologists may be regarded as universally committed to this pursuit. It was this principle that informed Goethe's Urpflanze. The third element in Coleridge's Theory of Life pertains to a particularly strong sense of the Hegelian dialecticism that was so influential during this
For our purposes, the question of individuation is paramount, and the other two themes of Theory are subordinate to our immediate concerns. In passing, I note that in regard to the question of the telos of nature, Thoreau repeatedly takes delight in witnessing the great design and artistry of divine order, a Romantic sentiment that is most evident in the perceiving of nature's beauty, a topic reserved for later in this chapter. And in regard to the role of “polarity” in Thoreau's work, while for Coleridge, as well as for Goethe and Emerson, polarity was a deep characteristic of nature, expressed as properties of forces and matter (e.g., magnetism, color, light, sex), this concept was far less prominent in Thoreau's metaphysics. McIntosh (1974, pp. 38–39) observes that rhetorically Thoreau used polarity in a variety of ways: in Walden juxtaposing chapters “Solitude” and “Visitors” or in A Week prominently contrasting masculine and feminine, East and West, Hindu and Yankee, or even in a phrase, like “a wilderness domestic,” and perhaps more importantly in assessing the complexity of a moral thought (e.g., “I find in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life … and another toward a rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good” [Walden, 1971, p. 210]). But I do not regard polarity guiding Thoreau's basic presuppositions of how nature works or is designed. Perhaps he simply assumed this characteristic or subsumed it in his general understanding of perception and moral understanding. In any case,polarity as such does not possess the metaphysical interest for Thoreau that it seems to have held for his Romantic predecessors.
So while one would be hardpressed to argue that Thoreau followed Coleridge in any programmatic sense, there are elements in Coleridgean themes that resonate in Thoreau's own work. Consonant with our present concerns, we will consider the issue of individuation. Coleridge may well have inspired Thoreau to pursue the poetic notion of individuation,sui generis. This project was enacted in Thoreau's Journal, where it is apparent that he regarded the recording of fine detail as legitimate in its own right, albeit toward a universal insight. And in Walden, Thoreau indeed makes the particulars of his world a deep metaphysical question (one already alluded to in chapter 1): “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?” (Walden, 1971, p. 225). Peck reads this line appropriately as meaning that the world as we know it seems to correspond exactly to our
A third character must also be permitted entry to this intellectual drama, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Laura Dassow Walls (1993, 1995) has made a compelling case that Thoreau was inspired by, and followed the example of, Humboldt's style of natural history. Documenting that Thoreau was both knowledgeable about Humboldt's works and sympathetic to his approach, she goes on to show how they shared what she calls “Empirical Holism,” in contrast to “Rational Holism,” as a guiding philosophy of discovery. The latter philosophy is based on connecting observations and facts of the natural world to some underlying Divine Law, in the Coleridgean sense of Law as Logos. Empirical Holism, on the other hand, while sharing the same commitment to holism, sees facts as connected to each other in a more modern ecological sense, rather than to some preexisting Truth. This is best seen as a Baconian, inductive philosophy, where
out of the sum total of all the interconnections the observer determines the laws, or inherent properties of matter that appear to govern the phenomena observed. This method of connection does not rely on a central axis but on an understanding of the “network” of interacting factors. (Walls 1993, p. 57)
This Humboldtian approach, like those of Goethe and Coleridge, regarded nature as a unified and harmonious whole, but advanced an empirical method heretofore undeveloped in natural history. Indeed, from Humboldt's perspective, nature might only be known through its constituent parts empirically, in a firstorder way. This method thus required careful observation and a thorough commitment to the interplay of facts and theory— objective datacollection and thoughtful synthesis. Goethe was well aware
We might construe several unifying themes at work concomitantly. Thoreau and his mentors, separated by more than a generation and living in three different countries, shared a common sensibility—the organic unity of thought and the harmonization of all knowledge—each linked by an aestheticism of Imagination. And putting Thoreau closer to Goethe and Humboldt in their respective scientific alignments than to Coleridge (primarily because of the highly speculative character of Coleridge's thought—he had a deeper sympathy for Schelling's Naturphilosophie), we see, nevertheless, that each was firmly committed to certain precepts about nature: 1) nature was unified, and thus material independence was countered by polar or some other principle of connectedness; 2) nature was composed of active beings, as opposed to passive materiality; and 3) forces and objects were inextricably entwined, so the same laws must apply to both the organic and inorganic domains. But there is a fourth element that served as the point of departure, namely the relation of mind and nature, the socalled correspondence between them. Do mind and nature have the same source (thereby exhibiting harmonies, symmetries, and parallelisms), or is there an irredeemable split between ourselves and the cosmos?
“Correspondence” comes in two Romantic modes (Cameron 1985, pp. 44–45). The Emersonian variety plays on the mirroring of man and nature, a sharing of vital rhythms and an epistemological “sympathy”; the other type, inherited from Coleridge, “suggests that a fertile tension, a rise in consciousness, results from the recognition of the ‘polarity’ of man and nature rather than their connection” (Slovic 1992, p. 21). Of course, “polarity” demands connection along some continuum; after all, dipoles cannot exist apart. But the point of emphasis is the difference or tension. Recent critical comment has emphasized, as evidenced by the later Journal, Thoreau's growing distance from Emersonian harmony and confluence, and it is fair to concur that Thoreau's original position regarding Correspondence, and his understanding of nature more generally, evolved from something close to Emerson's ideas to something quite different (Porte 1966, pp. 117 ff.; Cameron 1985, pp. 44 ff.; Slovic 1992, pp. 21 ff.). This is the critical issue which focuses Cameron's provocative argument concerning Thoreau's writing. She notes how the later Journal revolves around Thoreau's contemplations of the relation of the mind and the world it contemplates (“Apparently to write about nature is to write about how the mind
[T]he Journal proposes and subverts the idea of correspondence. The whole of nature may be a metaphor for the human mind, but Thoreau's formulations emphasize failed attempts to make sense of the congruence. (Ibid., p. 45)
Without reiterating my differences with Cameron, at least on this fundamental matter we agree: Thoreau wrestled with defining the gap between the inquring mind and the world of its scrutiny. Our differences lie in my interpretation that Thoreau, except in the extraordinary mystical state, saw the self and its world as irredeemably separate. Support for that position has already been offered above and will be reiterated in different ways in the ensuing chapters. My argument now turns to the “currency” of thought—facts—as illustrating Thoreau's pervasive selfconscious awareness of himself as a “knower”—a self distinct from and yet in nature.