A brief biography of Thoreau

A Brief Biography of Henry David ThoreauOK

#academic, #historicalbiography, #transcendentalism, #individualism, #fascism

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 as the third of four children of a pencil manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1833, he went off to Harvard, where he was a good student, but he was indifferent to the rank system and preferred to use the school library for his own purposes. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher in his old grammar school in Concord, but found that he was no disciplinarian and resigned after two shaky weeks. Then he helped run a school until his co-director (older brother) died of tetanus. That was the end of Thoreau’s experiments in pedagogy, except perhaps on the page.

During his Harvard years he was exposed to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who later became his chief mentor and friend as he settled in Concord during Thoreau’s sophomore year at Harvard. Emerson introduced the younger man to transcendentalism, a belief that conceded that there were two ways of knowing, through the senses and through intuition, but asserted that intuition transcended tuition. Similarly, the movement acknowledged that matter and spirit both existed. It claimed, however, that the reality of spirit transcended the reality of matter. Transcendentalism strove for reform yet insisted that reform begin with the individual, not the group or organization.

Later on Emerson lent him a piece of land at his pond-side property where Thoreau went to live by himself on July 4, 1845. Then 27 years old Thoreau began to chop down tall pines with which to build the

foundations of his home on the shores of Walden Pond where he spent the next two years. For the next few years he was busy writing Walden, a series of 18 essays describing Thoreau’s experiment in basic living and his effort to set his time free for leisure, which was published in 1854. On and off from his retreat from the Walden pond until his death (at forty-four, of tuberculosis), he worked as a surveyor and in the family pencil factory. But it was only after Thoreau’s death, in 1862, when “Walden” became a cornerstone work of American nonfiction and its author an American hero thanks to vigorous championing by his family and Emerson.[1] Thoreau was known as an outspoken abolitionist.[2] He condemned the Fugitive Slave Law, served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad[3], championed John Brown’s[4] raid on Harper’s Ferry, and refused to pay the poll tax in Massachusetts, partly on the ground that it sustained the institution of slavery, and much of Thoreau’s status stems from his absolute opposition to it. But one may reach good ends by bad means, and so did Thoreau. Emerson wrote of Thoreau: ‘Not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself.’

He believed that every one of us has to figure out life by ourselves, in our own way, we need to reach “the wisdom of life”, we should trust our own thoughts to reach our personal and objective truth. But what makes him eligible is his belief in his own prophetic qualities: ‘sometimes, when I compare myself with other men,’ Thoreau wrote in Walden, ‘it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.’[5] Transcendentalism is what arguably gave him these illusions, based on some deviated beliefs. ‘He, such as his fellow Transcendentalists, was suspicious of tradition and institutions, and regarded personal intuition and direct revelation as superior foundations for both spiritual and secular beliefs.’[6] Not everyone can be a prophet in the end, and I think we have already suffered from those who offered a better transcendent life superior to this earthly life, while the population lived in intolerable conditions, had to survive only with the hope of a greater future but with no change in their actual physical lives.

Thoreau wrote in his essay, Civil Disobedience: ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.’[7] This potential recipe for disaster was his reaction to the unjust

government and “this can be read as a call to obey one’s conscience over and above unjust laws.” But as a broader theory of governance, which it was, it is troubling. People routinely perpetrate wrongs out of obedience to their conscience, even in situations when the law mandates better behavior. (Consider the Kentucky county clerk currently refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples,[8] or certain religious beliefs that stand against human rights, for example in circumcision, or marriage of under aged girls.) How can we run a society where everyone tries to decide and behave based on their conscience and not the law? ‘There is no more insidious political theory than this. When consciences conflict— and antagonism is never worse than when it involves two men each of whom is convinced that he speaks for goodness and rectitude—what then?’ The scholar Vincent Buranelli noted in a 1957 critique of Thoreau: ‘Who is to decide? Thoreau’s theory has overtones of Rousseau’s Legislator who can do what he pleases with the people under his control because he alone can fathom the holy intentions of the General Will.’[9] It was exactly subordinating law to conscience that produced Hitler, Mao and Saddam Hussein, Thoreau’s ideals can create deadly evil if the situation allows it.

Thoreau the Individualist

‘To Transcendentalists the individual is the center to any moral progress. The centrality of individuals means that the solution to any problems is going to come from you as an individual, not as an outside intervention, so too the issue of morality. It is the individual that is central to reform, not government intervention or government coercion.’ [10] That’s the remedy that has been used for centuries to put up with cruel rulers, the church, the mosque and other power structures.

Individualism is an advocate of a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control. It

demands that everyone be independent and self-reliant, and also imagines a self-centered egotistical society full of individuals who live by themselves. What individualism neglects is the innate quality of human beings as a social creature and the power of living together. In John Dewey’s view: “men are not isolated, non-social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations to one another, and the state in turn only represents them, so far as they have become organically related to one another, or are possessed of unity of purpose and interest”.[11] Democracy is a form of moral and spiritual association that recognizes the contribution that each member can make in his or her particular way to this ethical community. And each of us can contribute to this community since we each only become the individuals we are through our engagement in the institutions and practices of our society.

But Thoreau didn’t believe in the ruling of the majority, as he didn’t see that it is most likely better to decide about how to run the society with all our wisdom. He critiqued democracy on many occasions: ‘Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?’12] Or where he wrote ‘All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon… I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.’[13] John Dewey who also shared some critiques on democracy believed that it’s through education that we can overcome this problem of election in democracy, we have to be very precise and responsible for our votes as they’re crucial to the future of all of us. But Thoreau gets close in his critique of Democracy to Plato, and Rousseau, but unlike them he doesn’t propose new methods to run the state, instead what he offers is a passive form of ‘civil disobedience’.

After all, he is not that concerned with society, as long as you are living a life that corresponds with your conscience and beliefs about things, nothing can really bother you. He doesn’t think that it is your duty to actively lobby for change. ‘...the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought-free (free in his thinking), fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.’[14] And that to me sounds similar to the teachings of Dalai Lama, or other spiritual leaders, let the bad rule, we meditate instead and fix the world from the inside. We live in our minds, let the rich steal and cruel rule. ‘I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.’[15]

But what happens if this place that we came to live in is a suffocating bad place? According to Thoreau ‘It is not a man’s duty as a matter of course to devote himself to the eradication of any even the most enormous wrong, he may still properly have other concerns to engage him, but it is his duty to wash his hands a bit, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and compilations, I must first see at least that they do not pursue themselves sitting upon another man’s shoulder, I must get off him first that he may pursue his contemplation too.’[16]

But are we at least obligated to be respectful to the majority or are we obligated to

speak up and change things for the better? Thoreau’s idea is not about standing up against society, and it doesn’t stand for what is morally right but it is more about how we should go about standing up against society. His passive version of ‘civil disobedience’ is merely a weak form of resistance with not much of value because in the end, he was indifferent towards the society. ‘Hatred of slavery compels John Brown to pick up his rifle and head for Kansas, Thoreau curses and raves in print—and then strolls into the woods to look, with completely engrossed attention, for the first breaking up of the ice on the pond, for the earliest buds of spring, for the appearance of beaver and blacksnake after their winter’s hiber-nation.’[17] So in the end, this form of Transcendentalism and Individualism that Thoreau understood and acted upon, are not advocating revolutionary ideas, although it might have looked so. Thoreau in some ways endorses rebellion against societal norms, but for him the natural way of life is the truest form, and as a naturalist he wouldn’t revolt against the will of nature: ‘I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so does a man.’ [18] The weak will be eliminated naturally so that the healthier, the better, and the stronger will flourish. It is not so difficult to connect that to some of his possible German apostles a couple of years later, who could master the art of soap making based on his teachings. His carelessness for society and humanity is jaw breaking. To Thoreau most people are not individuals but passive ignorant subjects that constantly seek for others to define who they are in exchange for the security that society brings them. He could not differentiate that absolute autonomy of individuals and living in a society doesn’t always contradict each other. Unfortunately, he could not see that a balanced life is somewhere in between the will of an individual and the society they live in, and if everyone was to live like him, in the woods, then there would be no social life, no books, no ink, and no readers to attend his revolutionary writings after all!

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, and used by enslaved African-Americans to escape into free states and Canada. Members of the Underground Railroad often used specific terms, based on the metaphor of the railway. For example: guides were known as “conductors”.

[3] John Brown was a militant American abolitionist who felt that violence was necessary to end American slavery, as years of speeches, sermons, petitions, and moral persuasion had failed. An intensely religious man, Brown believed he was raised up by God to strike the death blow to American slavery. He led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, but he got killed which made him a martyr to the antislavery cause. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, and On the Duty Of Civil Disobedience. The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2008. p.91. Podcast, Philosophize this! Episode 83 - Henry David Thoreau. Mostly based on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[6] Ibid. p.225. Schulz, Kathryn. The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau. New Yorker, October 12, 2015. Buranelli, Vincent.The Case Against Thoreau. JOURNAL ARTICLE, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Jul., 1957), pp. 257-268. Podcast, Philosophize this! Episode 83 - Henry David Thoreau. Mostly based on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[10] From The Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Ethics of Democracy. EW1, 231-2. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience. The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2008. p.225. Ibid. pp.228-229.

[13] Ibid. pp.240. Ibid. pp.231. Ibid. pp. 229-230.

[16] Buranelli, Vincent.The Case Against Thoreau. JOURNAL ARTICLE, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Jul., 1957), pp. 267. Ibid. p.236.