Philosophy is called the homesickness of the soul.
Thoreau as Philosopher
Below is the Prefatory Statement I wrote for an issue of Reason Papers devoted to Thoreau that I edited back in the 90’s. Ed Mooney’s recent blog entries on Thoreau have me thinking about Thoreau again.
Thoreau as philosopher: Why does this theme still seem a bit strange, a bit forced – like
an attempt to fob off something phoney on us? Well, one problem is that most of us
met Thoreau too early. We met him in adolescence, and we thought of him then as a quirky nature prose-poet; or, as a rustic rebel whose name connected up vaguely with peaceful political protest. Did we think of Thoreau as a philosopher? – No; we poeticized him; we rusticated him. How, then, to reclaim him?
At a time when philosophy is increasingly professionalized, Thoreau is worth reading
because he reminds us of the distinction – and of the relationship – between philosophy
professed and philosophy lived. Like the Greeks, Thoreau heard philosophy’s call, heard
philosophy call for a life, heard philosophy call for professing – in Thoreau’s case, for
writing. What Thoreau understood was that the authority of philosophical writing must
always be won anew, word by word, inkling by inkling. The authority of philosophical
writing is won anew not by displays of virtuosity, whether literary or argumentative, but
by displays of vitality, by finding words that incorporate, and are incorporated by, a
well-lived life. Philosophically authoritative words are words that stand face-to-face with
a well-lived life; such words and such a life reciprocally implicate one another. Thoreau
demonstrates his understanding of this by writing in the first-person and by providing
what he demands from others – “a simple and sincere account of his own life.” Clearly,
this understanding of philosophical authority is dangerous – by that I mean, has its dangers: empty self-obsession, stultifying idiosyncracy, blank unintelligibility. But perhaps worse than these dangers is the danger that such an understanding of philosophical writing renders philosophy written in its service unavailable to contemporary professional philosophy. Put crudely, the danger is that philosophy written in the service of such an understanding and contemporary professional philosophy will end up out of even spitting distance of one another. To contemporary professional philosophy, Thoreau’s writing is writing ad hominem, or worse, writing ad personam: philosophical writing conceived in a matrix of fallacies, not to be borne. If philosophy as Thoreau writes it and contemporary professional philosophy continue to recoil from each other, philosophy will lose much of what has made it admirable – its stubborn efforts to make ends meet, to keep body and soul together. Philosophy will then exist only as a zombie, or as a ghost, of its former self, demanding either voodoo or exorcism.
Thoreau’s philosophical writing alternately provokes and pacifies. It knots together
paradox and platitude. Thoreau does not write books to be held at arm’s length; he writes
books to be either pitched angrily or clutched greedily; or, maybe, both. Thoreau gives
and requires a live response, the response of a life. Call this Thoreau’s Concordian
Revolution: Copernicus taught us that our sun with all its furies is at the center of the
galaxy; Kant taught us that our mind with all its categories is at the center of space and
time; Thoreau teaches us that our life with all its forms is at the center of things. Kant set
reason after reason, because reason is fated to ask itself questions that it cannot answer.
Thoreau set life after life, because life is fated to ask itself questions it cannot answer.
Reason and life are alike antinomian: both require transcendental responses. Thoreau
requires that we read him against our lives, and through our lives.
Before clearing the way for the essays that follow, I acknowledge the overwhelming
debt this collection owes to the pioneering work of Stanley Cavell. I also record my
sadness, and the sadness of others, at the death of David L. Norton. Had David lived, he
would have contributed an essay to this collection. If time is, as Thoreau said, “a stream
we go a-fishing in,” David was the Compleat Angler.
K.D.J.
Auburn, Alabama
Immortal Openings, 9: Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender and Catch
Perhaps this book on surrender-and-catch begins thus (or even: thus begins).
After this walk. After this–so it might seem–initiatory walk. For it is to walk, between the stones and walls between which the walking goes, to communicate with the gates and the houses, the ochre paint, or the outrageous red, on the walls around the olive gardens, to greet the forbidding fort, whose walls preclude the view of our cupola, our campanile, our civic tower. And the cypresses: black brush slips in the towering sky–for the weather is not good. The olive trees shimmer, shivering in their own mean color of graygreen against the dark-gray lumpiness of a sky. And yet: nothing can happen because one returns home, out of the wind that makes itself known as possibly not joking, and there it is still and warming, and soon expectant. Expectant? These words. I can wait a while.
(For Ed Mooney–in belated (alas!) celebration of his being Ten Days In)
Gerard Manley Hopkins on the Keontic Hymn (Phil 2: 5-11)
Photo by Rowan Gillespie
From The Letters of G. M. Hopkins to Robert Bridges (Letter xcix)
Christ’s life and character are such as appeal to all the world’s admiration, but there is one insight St. Paul gives of it which is very secret and seems to me more touching and constraining than anything else: This mind he says; was in Christ Jesus–he means as man: being in the form of God—that is, finding, as in the first instant of his incarnation he did, his human nature informed by the godhead—he thought it nevertheless no snatching-matter for him to be equal with God, but annihilated himself, taking the form of a servant; that is, he could not but see that he was, God, but he would see it as if he did not see it, and be it as if he were not instead of snatching at once at what all the time was his, or was himself, he emptied or exhausted himself so far as that was possible, of godhead and behaved only as God’s slave, as his creature, as man, which also he was, and then being in the guise of man humbled himself to death, the death of the cross. It is this holding of himself back, and not snatching at the truest and highest good, the good that was his right, nay his possession from a past eternity in his other nature, his own being and self, which seems to me the root of all his holiness and the imitation of this the root of all other moral good in other men.
Summer Posting
I have started my summer teaching and so will have much less time for the blog. I expect that over the next few weeks the blog will be relatively quiet, and will likely serve primarily as a place to post some teaching material and for commonplace book entries (quotations, etc.) I do still have some outstanding obligations in the Comments to some of my previous posts, and I hope to discharge those soon.
My best wishes for everyone’s summer!
Weekend Music
A couple of weeks early, I suppose.
Leavis on Johnson the Augustan
Every word in a piece of Augustan verse has an air of being able to give the reason why it has been chosen, and placed just there. The thoughts that the Augustan poet, like any other Augustan writer, sets himself to express are amply provided for by the ready-minted concepts of the common currency. What he has to do is to put them together with elegance and point according to the rules of grammar, syntax and versification. The exploratory-creative use of words upon experience, involving the creation of concepts in a free play for which the lines and configurations of the conventionally charted have no finality, is something [Johnson] has no use for; it is completely alien to his habit. So that even when he is Johnson, whose perception so transcends his training, he cannot securely appreciate the Shakespearean creativeness.
Agency?—Cartoon
Bij Mist—Poem
Eliot had his Ash Wednesday,
But I had his Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,
And a Wednesday of my own.
Volcanic ash farted by some
Unnameable Icelandic volcano (April 2010)
Grounds flyers
In the UK, intending no prophecy, I quote Hecuba’s words as the ash cloud drifts
South and east:
“Nunc trahor exul, inops.”
Clouds of unknowing
Reveal my deordinate self—
Anxiety quietly unmans me.
Aboard a bus, a coach
On a carriage-way,
13 hours, Manchester to Amsterdam
white tulips in a lamplit English village
stretch and harden into white cliffs at Dover
We ferry to Calais.
Conferring in Crewe
Take-away northern industrial village
Ordinary language (philosophy)
In a place consternatingly plain.
No pile of Galaxy chocolate
Can sweeten this ashy mess
Nothing colligates these loose ends.
(“Get me off of this English Roundabout!”)
Oh, Eliot!
“Teach us to care and not to care:
Teach us to sit still
Even among these ashes,
Our peace in his will.”
Well, not so much.
George Schrader Channels Thoreau
Today’s been a reading day for me. I am preparing to begin summer classes; I am teaching a course on The Seven Deadly Sins. I happened upon a paper by George Schrader, a philosopher whose work I always find admirable, called “Monetary Value and Personal Value”. It ends thus:
The problem for contemporary man is, I believe, to free himself sufficiently from the tyrannical dominance of monetary value to be able to judge in his own terms what things are worth to him as an individual with his own needs and purposes. To do this, he must programatically turn aside from the prima facia monetary value of his own needs, his labor, and the goods he confronts and look toward that dimension of himself and his world which stands in contrast to the entire domain of monetary value. He must ask such simple questions as: Do I really care that my clothes should be so white? Do I really wish to look so pretty? What do I really care about, and what will in fact and not simply in representation answer to that concern? Only by insisting on asking such questions can he avoid having all of his values decided for him. And only thus can he have his own world.
Of course the texture of the prose here is not Thoreauvian (except, perhaps, for the questions)–but the thought, well, it sure sounds like the “Economy” chapter of Walden.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 