## 1. Life and Writings



Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in
1862, at the age of forty-four. Like that of his contemporary
Soren Kierkegaard, Thoreau's intellectual career unfolded
in a close and polemical relation to the town in which he spent almost
his entire life. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he struck up a
friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose
essay "Nature" he had first encountered earlier that year.
Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to
serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound
and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of 1837 that
Thoreau made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would
keep for the rest of his life. Most of his published writings were
developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and Thoreau
subsequently revised many entries, suggesting that his journal can be
considered a finished work in itself. During his lifetime he published
only two books, along with numerous shorter essays that were first
delivered as lectures. He lived a simple and relatively quiet life,
making his living briefly as a teacher and pencil maker but mostly as
a land surveyor. Thoreau had intimate bonds with his family and
friends (the loss of his brother John in 1842 was a major trauma) and
remained unmarried, although he was deeply in love at least twice. His
first book, *A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers*, was
still a work in progress in 1845, when he went to live in the woods by
Walden Pond for two years and two months. This
"experiment" in living on the outskirts of town was an
intensive time of examination for Thoreau, as he drew close to nature
and contemplated the final ends of his own life, which was otherwise
at risk of ending in quiet desperation. Thoreau viewed his existential
quest as a venture in philosophy, in the ancient Greek sense of the
word, because it was motivated by an urgent need to find a reflective
understanding of reality that could inform a life of wisdom. This is
because, according to the belief that philosophy is a way of life,
that very way of life "will necessarily be deliberative and
reflective"; accordingly, for Thoreau, "thinking about his
life in the woods is central to his life in the woods" (Bates
2012, 29). Moreover, it is only after having cultivated "a
meticulous and discerning awareness of the particularities of
nature" in one specific place (Robinson 2004, 100) that he
became able to articulate a vision of the human being's capacity to be
grounded and at home in the world.



His experience bore fruit in the 1854 publication of his literary
masterpiece *Walden*, a work that almost defies categorization:
it is a work of narrative prose which often soars to poetic heights,
combining philosophical speculation with close observation of a
concrete place. It is a rousing summons to the examined life and to
the realization of one's potential, while at the same time it
develops what might be described as a religious vision of the human
being and the universe. *Walden* has been admired by a larger
world audience than any other book written by an American author,
and--whether or not it ought to be called a work of
philosophy--it contains a substantial amount of philosophical
content, which deserves to be better appreciated than it has been.
Stanley Cavell has argued that Thoreau is an embarrassment to
"what we have learned to call philosophy," since his work
embodies "a mode of conceptual accuracy" that is
"based on an idea of rigor" somewhat foreign to the
academic establishment (Cavell 1988, 14). Yet, as Cavell also notes,
philosophical authors have more than one way to go about their
business, and Thoreau--like Descartes in the
*Meditations*--begins his argument by accounting for how
he has come to believe that certain questions need to be addressed. In
other words, his method is predicated on the belief that it is
philosophically worthwhile to clarify the basis of your own perplexity
and unrest (see Reid 2012, 46). And this is only one way of explaining
how a significant part of the challenge in coming to terms with
Thoreau is that his philosophy, like Nietzsche's, has a literary
and poetic quality. The reader is charged with finding the coherence
of Thoreau's whole philosophical outlook. Accordingly, this
entry attempts to delineate the main themes of Thoreau's
project, in the hope of serving as an aid and stimulus to further
study. It draws upon Thoreau's entire corpus, including the
works he left in manuscript that were published after his death.


## 2. Nature and Human Existence



In his essay "Nature," Emerson asserts that there can be
found in the natural world "a sanctity which shames our
religions." Thoreau would agree completely with this statement.
But in the same essay Emerson also inclines toward Platonism, stating
that nature is "emblematic" of higher truths, and
suggesting that the material world has value by virtue of being a
subsidiary product of mental reality: each natural object is therefore
"a symbol of some spiritual fact." For the most part,
Thoreau recoils from the idea that we could find some kind of higher
reality by looking beyond nature: in the "Friday" chapter
of *A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers*, he asks:
"Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly
taken to be the symbol merely?" As he sees it, the realm of
spirit *is* the physical world, which has a sacred meaning that
can be directly perceived. Accordingly, he seeks "to be always
on the alert to find God in nature" (*Journal*, 9/7/51),
and to hear "the language which all things and events speak
without metaphor" (*Walden*, IV). Thoreau's
metaphysical convictions compel him to "defend nature's
intrinsic value," in a way that situates him philosophically in
a place "far removed from Emerson and most
transcendentalists" (Cafaro 2004, 132-133). In his
journal, Thoreau reports that his goal is to "state facts"
in such a way that "they shall be significant," rather
than allowing himself to be blind to "the significance of
phenomena" (*Journal*, 11/9/51 & 8/5/51). Evidently,
he does not accept that whatever we register through our aesthetic and
emotional responses ought to be viewed as unreal. Indeed, Thoreau
would argue that the person who is seldom moved by the beauty of
things is the one with an inadequate conception of reality, since it
is the neutral observer who is less well aware of the world as it is.
And he exhorts us to unclutter and simplify our lives, by eliminating
the supposed necessities that can entrap us when we mistakenly
construe them as essential (see Hunt, 2020).



To say that nature is inherently significant is to say that natural
facts are neither inert nor value-free. Thoreau urges his reader not
to "underrate the value of a fact," since each concrete
detail of the world may contain a meaningful truth ("Natural
History of Massachusetts"). Note the phrase: *the value of a
fact*. Thoreau does not introduce an artificial distinction
between facts and values, or between primary and secondary qualities.
When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as
disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms;
rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world, learning
the "essential facts of life" only through "the
perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds
us" (*Walden*, II). The philosopher who seeks knowledge
through experience should therefore not be surprised to discover
beauty and order in natural phenomena. However, these properties are
not projected onto nature from an external perspective--rather,
they emerge from within the self-maintaining processes of organic
life. And the entire environment, the "living earth"
itself, has something like a life of its own, one which may be going
well or badly, containing but not reducible to the biotic existence of
animals and plants (*Walden*, XVII). This is what he elsewhere
describes as the "slumbering subterranean fire in nature which
never goes out" ("A Winter Walk").



Thoreau remarks upon the "much grander significance" of
any natural phenomenon "when not referred to man and his needs
but viewed absolutely" (*Journal*, 11/10/51). The world
is rich with value that is not of our making, and "whatever we
have perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of
infinitely more value to us than what we have only as yet discovered
to be useful and to serve our purpose" (*Faith in a
Seed*, 144). It is when we are not guilty of imposing our own
purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms.
One of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a
pluralistic universe, containing many different points of view other
than our own. And when we begin to realize "the infinite extent
of our relations" (*Walden*, VIII), we can see that even
what does not at first seem to be good *for us* may have some
positive value when considered from a broader perspective. Rather than
dismissing squirrels as rodents, for instance, we should see them as
"planters of forests," and be grateful for the role they
play in the distribution of seeds (*Journal*, 10/22/60).
Likewise, the "gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in
the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.
Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my
hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in
the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still
be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass,
it would be good for me" (*Walden*, V). Our limited view
often keeps us from appreciating the harmonious interdependence of all
parts of the natural world: this is not due to "any confusion or
irregularity in Nature," but because of our own incomplete
knowledge (*Walden*, XVI). Thoreau declares that he would be
happy "if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild
state," since in tampering with nature we know not what we do
and sometimes end up doing harm as a result (*Walden*, X). In
many cases we find that "unhandselled nature is worth more even
by our modes of valuation than our improvements are"
(*Journal*, 11/10/60).



In nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a
standard against which to measure our conventional evaluations. An
example of the latter is the value that is "arbitrarily
attached" to gold, which has nothing to do with its
"intrinsic beauty or value" (*Journal*, 10/13/60).
So it is a mistake to rush to California "as if the true gold
were to be found in that direction," when one has failed to
appreciate the inherent worth of one's native soil
(*Journal*, 10/18/55). In the economy of nature, a seed is more
precious than a diamond, for it contains "the principle of
growth, or life," and has the ability to become a specific plant
or tree (*Journal*, 3/22/61). The seed not only provides
evidence that nature is filled with "creative genius"
(*Journal*, 1/5/56), but it also reminds us that a spark of
divinity is present in each human being as well. One of
Thoreau's favorite analogies--not only a metaphor, as he
sees it--is that between the ripening of a seed and the
development of human potential. "The finest qualities of our
nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most
delicate handling" (*Walden*, I). What he calls
"wildness" is not located only in the nonhuman world; the
same creative force is also active in human nature, so that even a
literary work of art can reasonably be praised as a manifestation of
wildness (see "Walking"; *Walden*, I). There is
"a perfect analogy between the life of the human being and that
of the vegetable" (*Journal*, 5/20/51), and thoughts
"spring in man's brain" in just the same way that
"a plant springs and grows by its own vitality"
(*Journal*, 11/8/50; 4/3/58). Thoreau's exhortations to
follow the promptings of one's genius are based on the idea that
by obeying our own wild nature we are aligning ourselves with a sacred
power. What inspires us to realize our highest potential is "the
primitive vigor of Nature in us" (*Journal*, 8/30/56),
and this influence is something we are able neither to predict nor to
comprehend: as he describes it in the "Ktaadn" chapter of
*The Maine Woods*, nature is "primeval, untamed, and
forever untamable," a godlike force but not always a kind
one.



At one point in *Walden*, Thoreau quips that he
*usually* does not count himself among the "true
idealists" who are inclined to reject "the evidence of
[their] senses" (*Walden*, XIV). On the other hand, he
scorns the sort of materialism that fails to penetrate the inner
mystery of things, discovering "nothing but surface" in
its mechanistic observations (*Journal*, 3/7/59). Instead, he
argues that we must approach the world as "nature looking into
nature," aware of the relation between the form of our own
perception and what we are able to perceive (*Correspondence*,
7/21/41). There are reasons for classifying Thoreau as both a
naturalist and a romantic, although both of these categories are
perhaps too broad to be very helpful. His conception of nature is
informed by a syncretic appropriation of Greek, Asian, and other
sources, and the result is an eclectic vision that is uniquely his
own. For this reason it is difficult to situate Thoreau within the
history of modern philosophy, but one plausible way of doing so would
be to describe him as articulating a version of transcendental
idealism. If Thoreau is indeed "the American heir to
Kant's critical philosophy," as he has been called
(Oelschlaeger 1991, 136), it is because his investigation of
"the relation between the subject of knowledge and its
object" builds upon a Kantian insight (see Cavell 1992,
94-95). Yet in order to understand why this might be an accurate
categorization, we must proceed from Thoreau's metaphysics to
his epistemology.


## 3. The Ethics of Perception



If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau's
philosophy, it would be hard to identify a better candidate than
*awareness*. He attests to the importance of "being
forever on the alert," and of "the discipline of looking
always at what is to be seen" (*Walden*, IV). This
exercise may enable one to create remarkably intricate descriptions of
a sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by
thawing clay on a sand bank; but its primary value lies in the way it
affects the quality of our experience. "It is something to be
able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to
make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and
paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look"
(*Walden*, II). Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a
moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an
inescapably practical and evaluative activity--not to mention, an
embodied practice. Thoreau portrays himself not from a presumably
neutral or impersonal vantage point, "but from an embodied point
of view" in which his somatic sensory experience puts him
"knowingly in touch with" his surroundings (Goodman 2012,
36). For such reasons as these, he has sometimes been interpreted as a
"philosopher of the senses" (Mooney 2009, 195), who offers
an original response to the central problem of modern philosophy as a
consequence of recognizing that knowledge is "dependent on the
individual's *ability* to see," and that "the
world as known is thus radically dependent on character" (Tauber
2001, 4-5).



One of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was arguably
abandoned in the period beginning with Descartes is that a person
"could not have access to the truth" without undertaking a
process of self-purification that would render him or her
"susceptible to knowing the truth" (Foucault 1997,
278-279). For Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to
cultivate one's receptivity to the beauty of the universe.
Believing that "the perception of beauty is a moral test"
(*Journal*, 6/21/52), Thoreau frequently chastises himself or
humanity in general for failing in this respect. "How much of
beauty--of color, as well as form--on which our eyes daily
rest goes unperceived by us," he laments (*Journal*,
8/1/60); and he worries that "Nature has no human inhabitant who
appreciates her" (*Walden*, IX). Noticing that his
sensory awareness has grown less acute since the time of his youth, he
speculates that "the child plucks its first flower with an
insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist
never retains" (*Journal*, 7/16/51; 2/5/52). In order to
attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must refine all the
faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become emotionally
attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are
situated. We fully know only those facts that are "warm, moist,
incarnated," and palpably felt: "A man has not seen a
thing who has not felt it" (*Journal*, 2/23/60). In this
way, Thoreau outlines an epistemological task that will occupy him for
the rest of his life; namely, to cultivate a way of attending to
things that will allow them to be experienced as elements of a
meaningful world.



Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so
easily dulled, it requires a certain discipline in order to become and
remain a reliable knower of the world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau
believes that the perception of truth "produces a pleasurable
sensation," and he adds that a "healthy and refined nature
would always derive pleasure from the landscape"
(*Journal*, 9/24/54 & 6/27/52). Nature will reward the most
careful attention paid by a person who is appropriately disposed, but
there is only "as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as
we are prepared to appreciate,--not a grain more. The actual
objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just
as different from those which another will see as the persons are
different" (*Journal*, 11/4/58). One who is in the right
state to be capable of giving a "poetic and lively
description" of things will find himself or herself "in a
living and beautiful world" (*Journal*, 10/13/60 &
12/31/59). Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the eye of the
beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly
colored. Nevertheless, beauty--and color, for that
matter--can exist only where there is a beholder to perceive it
(*Journal*, 6/15/52 & 1/21/38). From all of his experience
in the field making observations of natural phenomena, Thoreau gained
the insight "that he, the supposedly neutral observer, was
always and unavoidably in the center of the observation"
(McGregor 1997, 113). Because all perception of objects has a
subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere centered
around each conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, "the
universe is built around us, and we are central still"
(*Journal*, 8/24/41). This does not mean that we are trapped
inside of our own consciousness; rather, the point is that it is only
through the lens of our own subjectivity that we have access to the
external world.



What we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are
physically located: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we
value, or how our attention is focused. "Objects are concealed
from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our
visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on
them.... A man sees only what concerns him"
("Autumnal Tints"). In other words, there is "no
such thing as pure *objective* observation. Your observation,
to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be
*subjective*" (*Journal*, 5/6/54). Subjectivity is
not an obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau. After all, he says,
"the truest description, and that by which another living man
can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent
one which the sight of it inspires" (*Journal*,
10/13/60). A true account of the world must do justice to all the
familiar properties of objects that the human mind is capable of
perceiving. Whether this can be done by a scientific description is a
vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable
ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist
"discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties
to inhabit"; by contrast, there is "more humanity"
in "the unscientific man's knowledge," since the
latter can explain how certain facts pertain to life
(*Journal*, 9/5/51; 2/13/52). He accuses the naturalist of
failing to understand color, much less beauty, and asks: "What
sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the
imagination?" (*Journal*, 10/5/61 & 12/25/51) For
Thoreau, the most reliable observer is one who can "see things
as they are, grand and beautiful" (*Journal*,
1/7/57)--in other words, the beauty and grandeur of the world
really are there to be seen, even if we are not always capable of
seeing them. We can easily fail to perceive the value of being if we
do not approach the world with the appropriate kind of emotional
comportment.



Thoreau sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that
will enrich our knowledge and experience: "The true man of
science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will
smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a
deeper and finer experience" ("Natural History of
Massachusetts"). He observes that scientific terminology can
provide the means of apprehending something that we had utterly missed
until we had a name for it (see Walls 2012, 108). Yet he also gives
voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting
quantitative data we may actually be narrowing our vision. The
scientist "studies nature as a dead language," and would
rather study a dead fish preserved in a jar than a living one in its
native element (*Journal*, 5/10/53 & 11/30/58). In these
same journal entries, Thoreau claims that he seeks to experience the
significance of nature, and that "the beauty of the fish"
is what is most worthy of being measured. On the other hand, when he
finds a dead fish in the water, he brings it home to weigh and
measure, covering several pages with his statistical findings
(*Journal*, 8/20/54). This is only one of many examples of
Thoreau's fascination with data-gathering, and yet he repeatedly
questions its value, as if he does not know what to make of his own
penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific
investigations run the risk of being "trivial and petty,"
so perhaps what one should do is "learn science and then forget
it" (*Journal*, 1/21/53 & 4/22/52). But Thoreau is
more deeply troubled by the possibility that "science is
inhuman," since objects "seen with a microscope begin to
be insignificant," and this is "not the means of acquiring
true knowledge" (*Journal*, 5/1/59 & 5/28/54).
Overall, his position is not that an imaginative awareness of the
world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an
exclusive focus on the latter would blind us to whatever aspects of
reality fall outside the scope of our measurement.



One thing we can learn from Thoreau's comments on scientific
inquiry is that he cares very much about the following question: what
can we know about the world, and how are we able to know it? Although
he admires the precision of scientific information, he wonders if what
it delivers is always bound to be "something less than the vague
poetic" (*Journal*, 1/5/50). In principle, a naturalistic
approach to reality should be able to capture its beauty and
significance; in practice, however, it may be "impossible for
the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and
that of the man of science" (*Journal*, 2/18/52). In that
case, the best we can do is try to convey our intimations of the truth
about the universe, even if this means venturing far beyond claims
that are positively verifiable: "I desire to speak somewhere
*without* bounds; like a man in his waking moment, to men in
their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate
enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression... . The
words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are
significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures"
(*Walden*, XVIII). We should not arbitrarily limit our
awareness to that which can be described with mathematical exactitude,
for perhaps the highest knowledge available to us, Thoreau suggests,
consists in "a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all
that we called Knowledge before ... it is the lighting up of the
mist by the sun" ("Walking"). And perhaps this is
not a regrettable fact: "At the same time that we are earnest to
explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious
and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and
unfathomed by us because unfathomable" (*Walden*, XVII).
By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we
open ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience.



As one commentator points out, Thoreau's categories--so to
speak--are dynamic, since they are constantly being redefined by
what we perceive, even as they shape our way of seeing (Peck 1990,
84-85). Every now and then "something will occur which my
philosophy has not dreamed of," Thoreau says, which demonstrates
that the "boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid
than the elasticity of our imaginations" (*Journal*,
5/31/53). Since the thoughts of each knowing subject are "part
of the meaning of the world," it is legitimate to ask:
"Who can say what *is*? He can only say *how* he
*sees*" (11/4/52 & 12/2/46). Truth is radically
perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different
people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds (Walls
1995, 213). Thoreau's position might be described as
perspectival realism, since he does not conclude that truth is
relative but celebrates the diversity of the multifaceted reality that
each of us knows in his own distinctive way. "How novel and
original must be each new man's view of the universe!" he
exclaims, and "how sweet is the perception of a new natural
fact," for it suggests to us "what worlds remain to be
unveiled" (*Journal*, 4/2/52 & 4/19/52). We may never
comprehend the intimate relation between a significant fact and the
perceiver who appreciates it, but we should trust that it is not in
vain to view nature with "humane affections"
(*Journal*, 2/20/57 & 6/30/52). With respect to any given
phenomenon, the "point of interest" that concerns us lies
neither in the independent object nor in the subject alone, but
somewhere in between (*Journal*, 11/5/57). Witnessing the rise
of positivism and its ideal of complete objectivity, Thoreau attempts
"to preserve an enchanted world and to place the passionate
observer in the center of his or her universe" (Tauber 2001,
20). It is an admirable goal, and one that remains highly relevant in
the intellectual climate of the present day.


## 4. Friendship, Politics, and Environmentalism



Thoreau's ethic of personal flourishing is focused upon the
problem of how to align one's daily life in accordance with
one's ultimate ideals. What was enthusiasm in the youth, he
argues, must become temperament in the mature person: the "mere
vision is little compared with the steady corresponding endeavor
thitherward" (*Journal*, 11/1/51 & 11/24/57). Much of
our time ought to be spent "in carrying out deliberately and
faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius
must have suggested to him... . The wisely conscious life springs
out of an unconscious suggestion" (*Wild Fruits*, 166).
Character, then, can be defined as "genius
settled"--the promptings of conscience in themselves are
only *potentially* moral, until we have integrated them into
the fabric of our everyday existence and begun to hold ourselves
responsible for living up to them (*Journal*, 3/2/42). Hence,
we need to cherish and nurture our capability to discern the
difference between the idea and the reality, between *what is*
and *what ought to be*. It is when we experience
dissatisfaction with ourselves or with external circumstances that we
are stimulated to act in the interest of making things better.



It follows that the greatest compliment we can pay to another person
is to say that he or she enhances our life by inciting us to realize
our highest aspirations. So Thoreau views it as deplorable that
"we may love and not elevate one another"; the "love
that takes us as it finds us, degrades us" ("Chastity and
Sensuality"). He speaks of "love" and
"friendship" as closely related terms which are tainted by
the "trivial dualism" which assumes that the one must
exclude the other (*Journal*, undated 1839 entry). Clearly,
what he is concerned about is the kind of love the Greeks called
*philia*--and in his sustained consideration of
friendship, as in so many other respects, Thoreau is "squarely
in the virtue ethics tradition" (Cafaro 2004, 127). In his
ethical writings, the notion of wishing good on behalf of another
person is often taken to a severe extreme, as if he does not think it
possible to ask too much of love and friendship. In *A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers*, he says: "I value and trust
those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my
performance" (*A Week*, "Wednesday"). This is
well and good, but Thoreau may be going too far when he proclaims that
a friend should be approached "with sacred love and awe,"
and that we profane one another if we do not always meet on religious
terms; it is no wonder that he finds himself doubting whether his
"idea of a friend" will ever actually be instantiated
(*Journal*, 6/26/40). Nonetheless, as a recent interpreter of
Thoreau has pointed out, the "exalted and rarefied ideal"
of friendship that he upholds does not imply that a friend is merely
instrumental to one's own self-realization (see Hodder 2010,
129-142). Above all, Thoreau's discussion of love and
friendship provokes us to reflect upon what we can and cannot expect
from our closest human relationships, and on their role in a good
life.



It would be a mistake to consider Thoreau's political views in
isolation from other aspects of his thought. It is, for example, his
understanding of wild nature that informs his sociopolitical ideas. As
was noted above, nature is a point of reference outside the
*polis* which can provide valuable moral guidance, reminding us
that society is not the measure of all things. Considering the human
being as "an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature,"
rather than a cultural artifact merely ("Walking"), he
looks to the nonhuman natural world and to our inherent
"wildness" as a source of evaluation which can empower us
to discover that the standards of our civilization are profoundly
flawed. His conviction that nature provides us with "a
different, truer, and more significant moral reality" than what
we find in society provides the "crucial and often overlooked
political core" to what has been called his "pastoral
environmentalism" (Taylor 1992, 12-24). Withdrawing into the
natural world allows us to view the state in a broader context and to
conceive of ways in which social values and political structures could
be improved radically. This includes unjust laws that ought to be
reformed, about which more will be said in a moment, as well as the
unwritten rules embodied in prevailing expectations about how one
ought to live and what matters. Anticipating Heidegger's
critique of *Das Man* in section 27 of *Being and Time*,
Thoreau describes the source of these culturally prevalent attitudes
as the "They" (*Walden*, I; see also Bennett 1994,
18-19) and is critical of their pervasive and corrupting influence,
their way of making people content with distorted values. For
instance, most of his fellow citizens of Massachusetts are able to
greet each other politely on the street and in church, thinking of
themselves as morally decent while remaining complacent to uphold and
perpetuate the institution of slavery in America (see "Slavery
in Massachusetts" and "A Plea for Captain John
Brown"). In denouncing a specific pernicious attitude that is
widespread among his contemporaries, Thoreau also seeks to identify
and analyze the general tendency it exemplifies to defer to public
opinion: for this reason, his project of social critique is not only
relevant to his parochial context but has universal implications. He
is acutely conscious of the threat that shared modes of discourse can
pose to justice and authentic intersubjectivity.



Thoreau is only half-joking when he tells us that, after becoming
frustrated with society, he turned "more exclusively than ever
to the woods, where I was better known" (*Walden*, I).
Not only is it true that a degree of solitude and distance from our
neighbors may actually improve our relations with them, but by moving
away from the center of town we liberate ourselves from a slavish
adherence to prevailing attitudes. "The greater part of what my
neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad," he claims,
providing this kind of example: "If a man walk in the woods for
love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a
loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off
those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an
industrious and enterprising citizen" (*Walden*, I and
"Life Without Principle"). This warped sense of value is
all too common amidst the desperation of modern life, with its
"restless, nervous, bustling, trivial" activity
(*Walden*, XVIII). Thoreau builds a critique of American
culture upon his conviction that "the mind can be permanently
profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our
thoughts shall be tinged with triviality" ("Life Without
Principle"): his polemic aims at consumerism, philistinism, mass
entertainment, vacuous applications of technology, and the herd
mentality that conforms to the dictates of an anonymous
"They." During his life Thoreau spoke out against the
Mexican War and the subjugation of Native America, and campaigned
aggressively in favor of bioregionalism and the protection of animals
and the natural environment. It is outrageous that he is often
stereotyped as a recluse and hermit. Above all, the political issue
that aroused his indignation was slavery. Because Thoreau understood
philosophy as a way of life, it is only fitting that philosophical
ideals would lead him into political action.



He was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many
fronts: he participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against
the Fugitive Slave Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party.
Most importantly perhaps, he provides a justification for principled
revolt and a method of nonviolent resistance, both of which would have
a considerable influence on revolutionary movements in the twentieth
century. In his essay on "Civil Disobedience," originally
published as "Resistance to Civil Government," Thoreau
defends the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which
he claims ought to be transgressed at once. Political institutions as
such are regarded by him with distrust, and although he arguably
overestimates the extent to which it is possible to disassociate
oneself from them, he convincingly insists that social consensus is
not a guarantee of rectitude or truth. One of the most valuable points
he makes against the critics of John Brown is that a person should not
be dismissed as "insane" by virtue of dissenting from the
majority: Brown's anger is grounded upon an awareness of the
fact that slavery is a violation of human rights, and Thoreau berates
the law-abiding citizens of Massachusetts for looking the other way
("A Plea for Captain John Brown"). Passively and quietly
allowing an unjust practice to continue is tantamount to collaborating
with evil, he claims, articulating a principle of noncompliance that
would inspire the philosophically informed nonviolent resistance of
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others.



When Thoreau argues that all of Brown's actions were justified
*because* he was an inspired reformer with a sacred vocation,
he is appealing to something like the notion of natural right. His
essay in this respect has a more general pertinence to debates about
the individual moral reformer in relation to community norms. It also
raises the issue of whether political violence can be justified as the
lesser of evils, or in cases where it may be the only available way of
ending injustice. Usually, he prefers nonviolent forms of advocacy
such as creating "counter friction to stop the machine" by
opposing, and acting in defiance of, practices and laws that are not
righteous ("Civil Disobedience"). Speaking about the act
of protest that led him to spend a night in jail, he expresses
characteristic irony by saying that "I might have resisted
forcibly with more or less effect, might have run amok against
society; but I preferred that society should run amok against me, it
being the desperate party" (*Walden*, VIII). Although at
times it sounds as though Thoreau is advocating anarchy, what he
demands is a *better* government, and what he refuses to
acknowledge is the authority of one that has become so morally corrupt
as to lose the consent of those governed. "There will never be a
really free and enlightened State, " he argues, "until the
State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent
power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and
treats him accordingly" ("Civil Disobedience").
There are simply more sacred laws to obey than the laws of society,
and a just government--should there ever be such a thing, he
adds--would not be in conflict with the conscience of the
ethically upright individual.


## 5. Locating Thoreau



Thoreau has somewhat misleadingly been classified as a New England
transcendentalist, and--even though he never rejected this
label--it does not fit in many ways. Some of his major
differences from Emerson have already been discussed, and further
differences appear when Thoreau is compared to such figures as Orestes
Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. A history of
transcendentalism in New England which appeared in the late nineteenth
century mentions Thoreau only once, in passing (Frothingham 1886,
133). And a more recent history of the movement concludes that Thoreau
had little in common with this group of thinkers, who were for the
most part committed to some version of Christianity, to a dualistic
understanding of mind and matter, and to the related idea that sense
experience is unreliable (Boller 1974, 29-35 & 176). A
crucial step in Thoreau's intellectual development occurred when
he "disassociated himself from Emerson's Transcendentalist
view of nature as symbol" (Slicer 2013, 181), as one scholar
notes. It was suggested above that a better way of situating Thoreau
within the Western philosophical tradition is to consider him a kind
of transcendental idealist, in the spirit of Kant. For reasons that
ought to be obvious by now, he should be of interest to students of
Kant, Fichte, and Schelling--all of whom he studied at first or
second hand--as well as Schopenhauer. Thoreau was a capable and
enthusiastic classicist, whose study of ancient Greek and Roman
authors convinced him that philosophy ought to be a lived discipline:
for this reason, he can profitably be grouped with other
nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who
were critics of philosophy in the early modern period. Yet he also has
the distinction of being among the first Western philosophers to be
significantly influenced by ancient Chinese and Indian thought. He
anticipates Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics
of the embodied mind, and shares with Peirce and James a concern for
problems of knowledge as they arise within practical experience.



Contemporary philosophers are increasingly discovering how much
Thoreau has to teach--especially, in the areas of knowledge and
perception, and in ethical debates about the value of land and life.
His affinities with the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, and
the enormous resources he offers for environmental philosophy, have
also started to receive more attention (see, e.g., Balthrop-Lewis,
2019)--and *Walden* itself continues to be encountered by
readers as a remarkable provocation to philosophical thought. Still,
it remains true that the political aspect of Thoreau's
philosophy has come closer to receiving its due than any of these
others: whether or not this is because such prominent figures as
Gandhi and King cited Thoreau as an inspiration, it has resulted in a
disproportionate focus on what is only one part of an integral
philosophy, a part that can hardly be understood in isolation from the
others. Even if it is a sign of Thoreau's peculiar greatness
that subsequent American philosophy has not known what to make of him,
it is a shame if his exclusion from the mainstream philosophical canon
has kept his voice from being heard by some of those who might be in a
position to appreciate it. Then again, as Thoreau himself notes, it is
never too late to give up our prejudices. Others have observed (see
Slicer 2013, 182-183) that, based on the amount of prominent
work on Thoreau as a philosopher which has recently appeared, his
profile seems to be ever so gradually rising on the American
philosophical landscape.