Lessons from Walden

Bob Pepperman Taylor

Description

Throughout this original and passionate book, Bob Pepperman Taylor presents a wide-ranging inquiry into the nature and implications of Henry David Thoreau’s thought in Walden and Civil Disobedience. Taylor pursues this inquiry in three chapters, each focusing on a single theme: chapter 1 examines simplicity and the ethics of “voluntary poverty,” chapter 2 looks at civil disobedience and the role of “conscience” in democratic politics, and chapter 3 concentrates on what “nature” means to us today and whether we can truly “learn from nature.” Taylor considers Thoreau’s philosophy, and the philosophical problems he raises, from the perspective of a wide range of thinkers and commentators drawn from history, philosophy, the social sciences, and popular media, breathing new life into Walden and asking how it is alive for us today.

In Lessons from Walden, Taylor allows all sides to have their say, even as he persistently steers the discussion back to a nuanced reading of Thoreau’s actual position. With its tone of friendly urgency, this interdisciplinary tour de force will interest students and scholars of American literature, environmental ethics, and political theory, as well as environmental activists, concerned citizens, and anyone troubled with the future of democracy.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Themes
• Subjects
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Walden Pond
• American literature
• History of the United States
• Politics
• United States
• Étang de Walden
• Henry David Thoreau

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268107352
• Langue: English

Extrait

ADVANCE PRAISE for Lessons from Walden
“A reading of Thoreau for the age of Trump—and really for any moment when our courage as individuals and as a polity seems to be flagging. This is a book that will make you think, and perhaps even act!”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Falter
“ Lessons from Walden delivers exactly what its title promises—an educational guide for an individual life committed to simplicity, moral responsibility, and ethical integrity. Like Thoreau, Taylor’s goal is to wake us up.”
—Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, author of Thoreau in His Own Time
“ Lessons from Walden is a welcome tonic in this moment of political and environmental crisis. Bob Pepperman Taylor’s always-trenchant and insightful analysis reveals Thoreau’s enduring relevance for modern democracies. His lessons are both important and timely.”
—Kimberly Smith, author of The Conservation Constitution
“Bob Taylor’s measured and fair-minded mediation on Walden allows the fullness of Thoreau’s stance to appear to the reader with all his contradictions intact. The result is a true conversation in which Thoreau becomes the springboard to further deliberation.”
—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life
“Bob Taylor’s Lessons from Walden brings Thoreau’s classic text to bear on the present moment, into Trump’s America, into an age of environmental degradation, into a time of cultural self-absorption, instrumental rationality, and neoliberal indifference to what is local, communal, and particular.”
—Shannon Mariotti, author of Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal
LESSONS FROM WALDEN
LESSONS FROM WALDEN
Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy
BOB PEPPERMAN TAYLOR
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019054909
ISBN: 978-0-268-10733-8 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10736-9 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10735-2 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Challenge of Walden
ONE | Simplicity
TWO | Different Drummers
THREE | Learning from Nature
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Henry David Thoreau occupies two critical positions in the American story, one as an advocate of “civil disobedience” to unjust political authority, and the other as an advocate for nature and its appropriate role in our economic, moral, and spiritual lives. Both of these matters are central to what Thoreau has offered our American literary, political, and environmental traditions. The most expansive expression of his views is found in his masterwork, Walden .
When we begin probing these contributions we find, not surprisingly, that they are more complex and challenging than may first appear. In what follows, I will discuss three central claims found in Walden , each of them familiar even to those only casually familiar with Thoreau’s book. (1) He believes we need to simplify our lives and that we may, in fact, need to cultivate what he calls “voluntary poverty”; (2) he encourages us to follow our moral intuition (to follow our own “drummer”) for the sake of maintaining our moral integrity; and (3) he recommends that we live close to and learn from the natural world. All three of these pieces of advice have been embraced (or criticized) with more or less enthusiasm (or vitriol) by generations of Walden readers, even as what these recommendations might mean has not always been clear. My purpose in this book is to explain what I think Thoreau had in mind, what I believe his ideas demand of us, and the ways in which these demands resonate in our own time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ben Minteer, Patrick Neal, Fran Pepperman Taylor, and Alex Zakaras all read an early draft of this book and provided comments that were (as always) of great value to me. Three anonymous reviewers for the University of Notre Dame Press offered equally interesting, provocative, and helpful reports that guided me as I worked my way through another draft of the manuscript. Stephen Wrinn, director of the press, was the source of both insightful comments and encouraging support for the project. I am, once again, overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness, scholarship, and generosity of my friends and colleagues. My heartfelt thanks to all.
The bulk of the writing for this book was completed during a sabbatical leave for 2017–18. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont for providing me with the leisure to work on this project. I would also like to thank the library staff at Saint Michael’s College for greeting me with such good cheer each morning as I sought a quiet writing space in their lovely facility.
INTRODUCTION
The Challenge of Walden
To spend even a little time with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is to recognize that an overriding image of the book—perhaps the overriding image—is that of awakening. Early on, Thoreau boasts that he hopes to crow like a rooster, like chanticleer, in order to wake his neighbors up. 1 He reminds us that “we are sound asleep nearly half our time,” 2 and suggests that, in truth, this slumber extends, all too often, to our so-called waking hours: “The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.” 3 Walden Pond is asleep (perhaps even dead) for three months at a time under the ice of winter, resurrected by the warming of spring (“Walden was dead and is alive again” 4 ), and this reawakening becomes Thoreau’s metaphor or symbol for our own moral awakening (he confides that he is “thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol”). 5 All reform, he suggests, is an effort to “throw off sleep,” 6 and, in the final sentences of the book, he shifts from speaking of the dawn of spring to the dawn of morning in the hope of inspiring us to wakefulness: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” 7

Even those who have not spent any significant time with Walden may have heard that Thoreau believed that most of his neighbors lived lives of “quiet desperation.” 8 He thought his contemporaries were discontent, were alienated not only from their society but from themselves, that they were unhappy, confused, and in grave danger of losing control of their lives even while enjoying great, even unprecedented, social and political freedom; his audience, of course, consisted primarily of white citizens of Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, living in the wake of the Jacksonian expansion of democratic sentiments and practices. He even audaciously suggests that his neighbors were less free than African Americans held in servitude in the American South. 9 But it is less widely recognized that Thoreau did not spare himself in this critique. He explains in the opening passages that he will write autobiographically, as he believes that a responsible author must, indeed, can’t help but give an account of him- or herself: “Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” 10 He explains that he has “travelled a good deal in Concord,” 11 his native town, and has observed not only himself but his neighbors and surroundings. He writes, however, not as one condescending to those around him—although he is accused of this often enough. 12 Overall, he is writing to the “discontented” not because he is superior to them, but because he is one of them and has learned some significant lessons about how to address this discontent. 13 That is, he is offering advice to his peers. Make no mistake about it: Thoreau, like those he addresses, has experienced loss and sorrow, even if he is rather oblique about the nature of these troubles. 14 He explicitly denies any moral class distinction between himself and others; he’ll never know, he bluntly admits, a man worse than himself. 15 He offers advice, as from one who knows discontent but has learned something about how to address it, to others whom he assumes understand what discontent is and who are equally capable of not only coping with, but perhaps even of transcending, their own “quiet desperation.” He suggests that if he brags from time to time, it is on the account of all humanity. He thinks of himself in significant ways as a representative man, and speaks as such. 16 His outlook is egalitarian and democratic: “When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.” 17 That is, if one man can willfully and positively transform his life on the strength of an imagined alternative, all people have an equal potential to do the same.
The initial concern that Walden addresses, therefore, is explicitly private and personal. Thoreau makes clear that he went to Walden Pond to transact some private business. 18 His assumption is that his audience also has private concerns to address. And his message is deeply optimistic and inspirational. To his audience, who he believes is desperat