Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. He remained in Corcord through his youth, and left only in order to enter Harvard College in 1833. Upon his graduation from Harvard, in 1837, Thoreau returned to his beloved Concord.
For a short time, Thoreau managed a small private school with his brother, John. It was a happy period of time of hiking, canoing, and natural discovery. But John Thoreau, Jr., contracted Lockjaw and died on January 11, 1842. Shaken by the loss of his brother, Thoreau sought the comfort and counsels of his older neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and moved into Emerson's household. Two years later, he secured a position as a journalist in New York and went off to meet the world. That world, however, was not for Thoreau and he returned to Concord quickly.
Emerson owned fourteen acres of woodlands that bordered Walden Pond, on the outskirts of Concord, and it was there that Thoreau settled, in 1845, in a remote area next to the pond. It was his intention to write a book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, honoring a canoe trip with his brother. For two years two months and two days, Thoreau lived in his small cabin and wrote his journals, publishing his reflections, in 1854, as Walden: or, Life in the Woods. While he was living at Walden Pond, Thoreau had refused to pay his poll tax on the grounds that the government supported slavery and was engaged in an unjust war with Mexico. He was arrested and jailed, in late July of 1846, but his Aunt Mary paid the tax, against his will, causing him to be released after a single night. He memorialized the incident in his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" in 1849. In actuality, Thoreau's objections went far beyond the issues of slavery and war and were really aimed at the coercive power of government in general.
Thoreau never married. In the years after Walden, in spite of the book's declarations against travel, he made some treks around the East, Canada, and even to Minnesota. He recorded everything in journals but never published more than a few other essays. The bulk of his time was devoted to natural history of the locality. He died at the age of 44 on May 6, 1862, of tuberculosis.
Sources:
Pearson, Norman Holmes. "Introduction" in Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (Holt,
Rinehart and Winston:1948); and
http://umsa.umd.edu/thoreau/history.html#walden.
Reflections on Thoreau and His Works
Throughout our discussions there has been a certain amount of confusion between Thoreau, the person, and the works of Thoreau, as such. I happen to believe that biography and history are important to philosophy because they help us identify issues and they also help to demonstrate philosophy as a natural activity. Nevertheless, I think that we have to disconnect the person from the thought at some crucial point. The person launches the thought in some permanent form that remains available to us. It is interesting to know the situation in which the thought arose; but it is also important to know the situation(s) in which the thought may still be understood. An idea is not dead the moment that we consider that its author may have negated it in his/her own life. It has a life of its own and remains potential to our lives.
To be specific, Thoreau's few acts of "civil disobedience" may seem small, even timid. But Thoreau's discussion of civil disobedience remains a challenge to anyone. Perhaps it is a challenge that he himself never really met; but that does not excuse us from meeting it, if appropriate. It remains possible to speak the truth and act otherwise. Equally well, when we consider Walden, we may justifiably feel that Thoreau never really exposed himself to the elements in quite the way that he represents himself. It seems to me, however, that this in itself should not diminish the observations that he was able to make and the challenge that he posed to himself, to others in his community, and to us.
Even if Thoreau himself was probably not the heroic paradigm that he might have suggested, his works have been read for 150 years and have challenged many. In this sense, the ideas remain workable and perhaps even inspiring. First among these ideas, is the claim that we should examine our lives deeply. Thoreau himself felt a need to do this because of his brother's death and, perhaps, for other reasons. Why should we? I don't know. Perhaps because the idea of living a whole life without knowing yourself and your potential seems more than just a waste; it seems foolish. At any rate, Thoreau is by no means alone in advising us to examine our lives in some detail; nor is he alone in recommending that some degree of isolation is necessary for this process.
Second, is the claim that in some way an understanding of nature figures into knowing ourselves as human beings. This is something that Thoreau himself does not seem to have anticipated when he first removed to Walden Pond but, instead, discovered while he lived there. Of the two claims, the second is probably the more uncomfortable for us because we seem to believe that nature is irrelevant to us and that humans are really "extra-natural." At the very least, our society seems bound on a mission to alienate nature and replace it in every way possible. Let us explore these claims in detail before moving on to some of the other aspects of Walden.
We like to observe that we are products of our environments, but we seldom stop to explore the implications of that. If what we mean is that we are the products of the environmental factors that shaped us, don't we have to ask whether we are anything else? Most of us like to believe that we are free as well, that is, we make certain choices that are freely ours, outside of environmental determination. But where this is the case, to understand why we choose what we choose requires some insight into ourselves. Isn't this where the examination begins? Why have I chosen this path for my life? Are other paths open to me? Etc.
What tends to escape many of us is the fact that we are, at bottom, natural creatures. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a species of mammal within the vast animal kingdom. As individuals, we are conceived and borne in a natural process. Like all living things we wear out and die, the material of the body decomposing and returning to the earth. Equally well, we tend to ignore the fact that 99% of human evolution has occured within harmonious natural relations with the rest of the animal kingdom. That is, indigenous people (some of whom we can still find, today, in the Amazon Basin) did not distinguish themselves from other animals in nature but, generally, saw themselves as part of a great natural complex of activity. Even after people become agricultural they do not necessarily withdraw from this world view. Thus, the period in which humans have dramatically alienated themselves from nature, what we can call the urban industrial period, represents a very short period of time in human history and has not yet covered the globe entirely.
If we accept the idea that humans are natural creatures, however, then a part of knowing who we are must lie in knowing something about nature and must require something like finding ourselves in nature. Yet this is precisely what we are making more difficult every day. As we destroy nature and replace it with human-built environments for humans, we fail to find natural environments and find only reflections of ourselves. Thoreau could already see this process beginning in the Massachusetts of his age; though he would never have believed the "progress" that we have made since then. One can imagine that he himself did not know what he was missing until he exposed himself to "life in the woods." Then, as he slowed down and as he simplified his own existence, he began to see what was there in detail.
We do not see nature today. We drive through what we call "natural scenery" on our way to the mountains. When we get there, we clump about with our thick boots and fast pace, to get some air and exercise. Plants and animals cower before us. Most things we will never see; they see us long before we arrive. The great blue heron is in the air and flying away several hundreds of yards and many bends in the brushy creek before we might have spotted it, standing knee-deep and exploring the bottom for small clams. Nature, even where it still exists, unfolds to our eyes only when we take the time to merge with it, which means becoming a natural creature ourselves! This, I suggest, is the experience that Thoreau had at Walden Pond. He did not know what nature truly was until he simplified his existence to the point where he could begin to take note of it in detail.
Now, if this direction of thought is correct, it should be clear that we need nature in order to understand ourselves as the natural beings that we are, because observing nature is how we put ourselves back into a natural existence and state-of-mind. If this is Thoreau's message, and I think it is, then it is correct to say that he was one of the first "environmentalists" because what he offers us is a genuine reasoning that requires the preservation of a natural environment. In effect, the human being can know himself or herself deeply only by restoring the natural context of existence. Thoreau does not suggest that we have to remain in that context; and he left the Pond after two years, never to return. But the assertion remains, that to know myself truly, I must experience myself naturally, which means putting myself in a place where I can see nature in detail once more.
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