[This is the five-hundredth D&I; this post is dedicated with gratitude to my regular readers.--ES]
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."--Thoreau, Walden.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
In the quoted passage, Thoreau recognizes two axiological dimensions: (i) good (God) vs evil (devil) embraced by the many; low (mean) vs high (sublime) embraced by the elite few. Anticipating Nietzsche, Thoreau wants to reject, or at least experiment with rejecting, good and evil. For, on his view the basic human condition is uncertainty about the end of life. He suggests that the response to this uncertainty, which is exemplified by the Westminster Catechism (which Thoreau quotes here), has solidified the first axiology. He does not, however, explain what the proper end is that belongs to the second axiology; one might wonder if it is merely the experience of the sublime, but it is clear that in a proper experiment the outcome is not fully known in advance.
Thoreau also rejects here the Socratic idea (proposed in his superior Apologia Pro Vita Sua) that philosophy is not just the study of death, but that true philosophers practice dying, (Phaedo 62-7). Or, at least, Thoreau rejects it as a settled fact; it is not obvious that it belongs in the "economy of living" which just is "philosophy." In addition, e strongly implies that the axiology of good vs evil just is life-denying (because ultimately rooted in theodicy and a belief in afterlife) and a kind of practice of resignation.* Moreover, he suggests that while there may be a right to (of) life, this is empty -- or at least merely formal -- prior to an exploration of what is, and what it is good for.
Having said that, there is a certain doubleness in Thoreau's stance. For, he does not merely hold himself up as a more deliberate response to the uncertainty over the nature of life. He also proposes to report his findings to others. It is not fully clear that such reporting is identical to "trying the experiment of living" that he is an exemplar of. As I suggested yesterday, there is a distinction here between being a true philosopher and a true teacher, and it is not obvious that one be both. Perhaps, Thoreau implies that one can be these in successive stages.
A reader may worry that I have turned Thoreau too much into a proto-Nietzsche. This is not altogether unfair concern, but it is worth noting that the impressions offered above are to be discerned, too, in Thoreau's describes of his relationship to the polity:
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, 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.
Thoreau's withdrawal from the polis does not originate in a political act, but does have non-trivial political consequences. His failure to pay the poll-tax -- which is simultaneously a badge of liberty [one has at least property in one's own body] and equality among the citizenry, while also being regressive and marking men as distinct from women, children, and slaves -- is consequentially a refusal to recognize an authority that facilitates the market place in human bodies; an authority that treats men unequally and denies liberty. To be clear, throughout Walden, Thoreau treats commercial life as a species of slavery, too; and so even if chattel slavery is abolished, Thoreau understand the American project as such as facilitating slavery of a different kind (mindless work; work as an end as such; etc.)
Moreover, Thoreau suggests this problem is not just an American problem. I say this not to deny the usual thought that Thoreau's move to the pond on the 4th of July is an attempt at a spiritual re-founding and renewal of the very idea of America (which, of course, has universal aspirations). For, according to Thoreau it is a fact of human nature (or at least male nature) not just American nature that people want to make others complicit in the dirty hands of political life ("men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society"). While the state facilitates domination and servility, none of us are allowed a refuge where are unsullied; because we are all collaborators and we have no mercy on those that try to escape it.
Finally, one may think that the proto-Nietzschean (beyond good and evil, etc.) strain discerned above is belied by the moral condemnation of the state. But the list of Thoreau's charges -- "pursue and paw," "dirty institutions," and especially the two-fold repetition of society's desperation and violent rage (amok) -- suggests that the criticism is not only or even so much ethical, but rather a noting of the state's facilitation of a permanent denial of a life-affirming, true joy and healthy sanity. Rejecting the Hobbesian dictum that the state is conducive to life and its boundaries the locus of rationality, Thoreau insists that to accept the contracted authority of the State, as constituted thus far, is an frenzied act of a kind of permanent despair, that is, the worst form of suicide.
*It is noteworthy that Thoreau is willing to accept resignation, if necessary.
Comments