Lester H. Hunt - The Philosophy of Henry Thoreau: Ethics, Politics, and Nature

The Philosophy of Henry Thoreau

The Philosophy of Henry Thoreau

Ethics, Politics, and Nature

Lester H. Hunt

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First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright Lester H. Hunt, 2020

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Cover image: Circa 1850: Henry David Thoreau (18171862) Hulton Archive / Stringer / Getty Images

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7902-1

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In Memoriam

Stanley Louis Cavell

19262018

To the states or any one of them, or any city of the states,

Resist much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved....

Walt Whitman, To the States

Contents

This little book is a personal one, as I think any book about Thoreau should be. The first time I read Walden I was living alone beside a pond in the woods. When the head came off my ax, I reattached it by following the method of doing so that Thoreau describes in chapter I (which involves slipping the handle back into the head and soaking it in the pond). I also tried the recipe for making bread without leavening that he quotes from his beloved Marcus Portius Cato. (It tasted much as I imagine a cedar roofing shingle would taste.) More importantly, I was at that time very much preoccupied with the practical problem around which the whole book revolves: namely, how to earn a living without losing ones soul. I weighed Thoreaus general strategy for solving this problem (which, roughly, amounts to reducing your material needs until the effort required to earn a living is no longer onerous), together with the many concrete applications of it suggested by him, testing in my imagination their applicability to my situation. This experience colored my interpretation of Walden considerably. I see this book as quite literally a self-help book (while admitting it is many other things as well). In particular the notion of Walden as provoking thought experiments that must be taken seriously is central to my understanding of the book. I would even go so far as to say that those who have not read it at a time of life when his problem is the paramount one, who do not carry out his mental experiments in deadly (or lively) earnest, or who do not at least imagine themselves in such circumstances as they read it, have missed the unique experience of reading Walden altogether. He tells us on the first page of the book who comprises the principal audience of the book: Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

At any rate, the autobiographical facts I have just recounted might help to explain one feature of the present book that some readers might find just a trifle eccentric. I will sometimes refer to my subject as Thoreau and sometimes as Henry. One of the things that make him a unique author is the extent to which readers and scholars relate to him in a personal way. If I heard a Melville scholar refer to Melville as Herman, I would suppose they were making a joke of some sort. Not so with Henry. I think of Henry as a respected older brother, one whose influence I feel strongly but must to some extent resist.

This is related to another, more important feature of this monograph. Earlier philosophical writers on Thoreau, notably Stanley Partly because of their excellent work, I will assume that I will not need to work so hard just to get Thoreau a hearing. My main purpose will be to untangle what in his thinking can stand up to criticism from that which is vulnerable to weighty objections. Accordingly I will sometimes defend him and sometimes argue against him.

Finally, I think I should comment briefly on Cavells classic book, The Senses of Walden . I was very privileged to be in the audience when in January 1972 Prof. Cavell came to the University of California to present his book as a series of three lectures. I had already read Walden by my pond in the woods and taken Thoreau very seriously indeed as a thinker and a potential guide on the path of life, but I think that hearing Cavell on Thoreau was probably one of the things that gave me the idea that I should one day write about him myself. I still think that Cavells book is a very fine one for the sensitivity and insight with which he often discusses particular passages in Thoreau. If for that reason alone, his book is indispensable for the serious student of Thoreau. But I long ago came to realize that his broader interpretation of Thoreau is very different from mine. To some extent, this is a matter of emphasis. Cavell is very impressed with the way in which Thoreau uses literary means to display the beauty of the world to us, almost as if Thoreau holds a Wittgenstein

I agree that this is an aspect of Thoreaus writing, but, partly because I think Cavell has already explored it so effectively, I choose to emphasize another aspect of the Thoreauvian corpus: that it presents us with doctrines. It is true, and important to realize, that Thoreau is often trying to show and not to theorize. But the reason for this, in my view, is not that he holds anything like a Wittgensteinian theory that thinking about value is radically different from dealing with the truths of science and mathematics. It is rather that, like Plato and Aristotle This is the tradition that holds that the telos , the natural goal, of love is to contemplate the love-object. Thoreau loves nature and treats it as divine: consequently, he wants to show us what it is like to contemplate the sacred aspect of things.

In addition to his insightful discussion of particular passages in Thoreau, Cavell also does sometimes attribute doctrines to him. When he does so he often