louise langevin's List: Henry David Thoreau Essay #1

• during

• States was founded —
• that it is a person’s duty to resist injustice where it is found
• As a naturalist, Thoreau understood that the path to a greater understanding of our life on earth is through an understanding of the natural world around us and of which we are part:
• As a philosopher and Transcendentalist, Thoreau found a pantheistic sense of spirit and God: "I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another
•    As a writer, Thoreau was one of the most powerful and influential writers America has produced. His prose style was unequaled. And although only a small part of his work was published in his short lifetime, he was a prolific writer whose works filled twenty volumes when collected in 1906.

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• He worked for several years as a surveyor and making pencils   with his father,  but at the age of 28 in 1845, wanting to write his first book, he went to Walden  pond and built his cabin on land owned by Emerson
• He opposed the government for waging the Mexican war (to extend slavery)  eloquently in Resistance to Civil  Government, based on his brief experience in jail; he lectured against  slavery in an abolitionist lecture, Slavery in  Massachusetts. He even supported John Brown's efforts to end  slavery after meeting him in Concord, as in A Plea for Captain John  Brown.

• Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in 1862, at the age of forty-four.
• . 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.
• Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, so 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.
• remained unmarried although he was deeply in love at least twice
• asserts that there can be found in the natural world “a sanctity which shames our religions
• since he understands the universe as an organic whole in which mind and matter are inseparable
• The philosopher who seeks knowledge through experience should therefore not be surprised to discover beauty and order in natural phenomena.
• (Walden, XVII).
• ). 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
• he has nothing but scorn for 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, 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).

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    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 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 situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our attention is focused.
• ). 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).
• 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.

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• Thoreau encouraged others to assert their individuality, each in his or her own  way. When neighbors talked of emulating his lifestyle at the pond, he was  dismayed rather than flattered.
• Thoreau also believed

• that independent, well-considered action arose naturally from a questing  attitude of mind. He was first and foremost an explorer, of both the world  around him and the world within him.  

   

   

  be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds
• Thoreau considered   the ownership of material possessions beyond the basic necessities of   life to be an obstacle, rather than an advantage.

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• This act of defiance was a protest against slavery and against the Mexican War
• Thoreau has no objection to government taxes for highways and schools, which make good neighbors. But government, he charges, is too often based on expediency, which can permit injustice in the name of public convenience.
• Thoreau's essay has had a profound influence on reformers worldwide, from Tolstoy in Russia and Gandhi in South Africa and India; to Martin Luther King, Jr's civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States; to recent demonstrations for civil rights in the former Soviet Union and China

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• As it is, government rarely proves useful or efficient.
• It is often "abused and perverted" so that it no longer represents the will of  the people. The Mexican-American War illustrates this phenomenon.
• Thoreau says that government does not, in fact, achieve that with which we  credit it: it does not keep the country free, settle the West, or educate.
• character of the American people
• Thoreau also complains about restrictions on trade and commerce. However,  Thoreau then says that speaking "practically and as a citizen," he is not asking  for the immediate elimination of government. Rather, for the moment, he is  asking for a better government.
• Too much respect for law leads people to do many unjust things
• Thoreau's work is the notion of individualism

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• . He practiced civil disobedience in his own life and spent a night in jail for  his refusal to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican War. (Thoreau was opposed to  the practice of slavery in some of the territories involved.)
• It is thought that this night in jail prompted Thoreau to write Civil  Disobedience
• By the late 1840s, slavery had driven a wedge in American society
• In the 1850s, the country became even more polarized, and the introduction of  slavery-friendly laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law , prompted many  abolitionists to protest the government's actions via various forms of civil  disobedience

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• Published in 1849, his essay has since become the classic justification for acts  of civil disobedience
• I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least;"
• Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to  amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them  at once?

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• THE EMERGENCE OF the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and
• 1830s,
• The liberalism Unitarians displayed in their embrace of Enlightenment philosophy was stabilized by a solid conservatism they retained in matters of social conduct and status.
• It was at Harvard that most of the younger generation of Transcendentalists received their education, and it was here that their rebellion against Unitarianism began.
• By opening the door wide to the exercise of the intellect and free conscience, and encouraging the individual in his quest for divine meaning,
• it evolved almost as an organic consequence of its parent religion.
• he Transcendentalists developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what we today would call intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics, subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth
• Transcendentalists believed in a monistic universe, or one in which God is immanent in nature
• or the reading or listening audience of the Transcendentalists, however, the question remained whether this kind of spiritual experience was the inevitable result of a walk in the woods. It is a question that the Transcendentalists would have answered indirectly, implicitly, through the demonstration of spiritual transformation rather than instruction in its causative methods.
• Experiencing nature was of critical importance because the natural world was the face and essence of God; becoming physically closer to nature, contemplating it, understanding it—these were the actions that brought man closer to his maker.
• . As a distinct movement, Transcendentalism had disintegrated by the dawn of civil war;

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• In July 1846, Thoreau's  stay at Walden Pond was interrupted by his famous one-night imprisonment  in a whitewashed jail cell in the town o
• f Concord. Opposed to  slavery, Thoreau had protested for several years by refusing  to pay his poll tax. (He paid other taxes willingly.)

• A Wave of Protest. Thoreau's individual resistance  was part of a mounting wave of reform activism that had begun  in the 1840s.

   

   

    
   
   
   
   
• The idea of tax refusal as a protest tactic was being  raised in free black communities. Declaring "No  privileges - no pay" as early as 1841, Massachusetts  antislavery activist Charles Lenox Remond "anticipated  Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' and argued that African Americans  should be willing to go to jail rather than pay taxes to institutions  that discriminated against them."
• • ome a national and international  example, extending Thoreau's individual model onto huge scales  of mass action. 
   
   
   
    

   

   
• For the rest of his life, Thoreau was engaged in the cause  (but not the organizations) of abolitionism. Essentially, Thoreau  upheld individuals' responsibility to live their lives well. That included opposition to government when it interferes  seriously with that pursuit.

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• I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"