Henry David Thoreau crafted essays that reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. Now, The Library of America brings together these indispensable works in one authoritative blogger.com by: 14 An essay in which Thoreau praises Sir Walter Raleigh as a flawed but heroic figure, but who failed to use his heroic character to heroic ends. (25 pages) The Highland Light» This is one of Thoreau's Cape Cod essays. The Highland Light is a lighthouse located in Truro, Massachusetts. (12 pages) The Landlord» Henry David Thoreau (–) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human blogger.com sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse
Henry David Thoreau (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Henry David Thoreau — was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Waldendraws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, henry david thoreau essays, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse.
He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He discussed his own scientific findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration.
His philosophical explorations of self and world led him to develop an epistemology of embodied perception and a non-dualistic account of mental and material life. In addition to his focus on ethics in an existential spirit, Thoreau also makes unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of science, and radical political thought, henry david thoreau essays. Although his political essays have become justly famous, his works on natural science were not even published until the late twentieth century, and they help to henry david thoreau essays us a more complete picture of him as a thinker.
Among the texts he left unfinished was a set of manuscript volumes filled with information on Native American religion and culture. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in and died there inat the age of forty-four. Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of that Thoreau, aged twenty, made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life.
Most of his published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and 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, henry david thoreau essays.
He lived a simple and relatively quiet life, making his living briefly as a teacher and pencil maker but mostly as a land surveyor. Thoreau had intimate bonds with his family and friends, and remained unmarried although he was henry david thoreau essays in love at least twice. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Riverswas still a work in progress inwhen he went to live in the woods by Walden Pond for two years and two months.
Thoreau viewed his existential quest as a venture in philosophy, henry david thoreau essays, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, because it was motivated by an urgent need to find a reflective understanding of reality that could inform a life of wisdom. His experience bore fruit in the publication of his literary masterpiece Waldena work that almost defies categorization: it is a work of narrative prose which often soars to poetic heights, combining philosophical speculation with close observation of a concrete place.
Walden has been admired by a larger world audience than any other book written by an American author, and—whether or not it ought to be called a work of philosophy—it contains a substantial amount of philosophical content, which deserves to be better appreciated than it has been.
Yet, as Cavell also notes, philosophical authors have more than one way to go about their business, and Thoreau—like Descartes in the Meditations —begins his argument by accounting for how he has come to believe that certain questions need to be addressed. In other words, his method is predicated on the belief that it is philosophically worthwhile to clarify the basis of your own perplexity and unrest see Reid Evidently, he does not accept that whatever we register through our aesthetic and emotional responses ought to be viewed as unreal.
Indeed, Thoreau would argue that the person who is seldom moved by the beauty of things henry david thoreau essays the one with an inadequate conception of reality, since it is the neutral observer who is less well aware of the world as it is. To say that nature is inherently significant is to say that natural facts are neither inert nor value-free.
Note the phrase: the value of a fact. Thoreau does not introduce an artificial distinction between facts and values, or between primary and secondary qualities, 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, henry david thoreau essays.
However, these properties are not projected onto nature from an external perspective—rather, they emerge from within the self-maintaining processes of organic life. It is when we are not guilty of imposing our own purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms. One of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic universe, henry david thoreau essays, containing many different points of view other than our own. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing.
In nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a standard against which to measure our conventional evaluations. There are reasons for classifying Thoreau as both a naturalist and a romantic, although both of these categories are perhaps too broad to be very helpful.
His conception of nature is informed by a syncretic appropriation of Greek, Roman, henry david thoreau essays, Indian, and other sources, and the result is an eclectic vision that is uniquely his own. For this reason it is difficult to situate Thoreau within the history of modern philosophy, but one plausible way of doing so would be to describe him as articulating a version of transcendental idealism.
This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a sunset, a battle between henry david thoreau essays and black ants, or the shapes henry david thoreau essays by thawing clay on a sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative activity—not to mention, an embodied practice.
In order to attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must refine all the faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are located.
In this way, henry david thoreau essays, Thoreau outlines an epistemological task that will occupy him for the rest of his life; namely, to cultivate a way of attending to things that will allow them to be experienced as elements henry david thoreau essays a meaningful world. Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain henry david thoreau essays reliable knower of the world.
Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly colored. 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. Your observation, to be interesting, i. Henry david thoreau essays is not an obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau.
A true account of the world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects that the human mind is capable of perceiving. Whether this could be done by a scientific description is a vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable ambivalence.
We can easily fail to perceive the value of being if we do not approach the world with the appropriate kind of emotional comportment. He observes that scientific terminology can provide the means of apprehending something that we had utterly missed until we had a name for it see Wallshenry david thoreau essays, Yet he also gives voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting quantitative data he may actually be narrowing his vision.
Overall, his position is not that a mystical or imaginative awareness of the world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an exclusive focus on the latter would henry david thoreau essays us to whatever aspects of reality fall outside the scope of our measurement.
By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we open ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience. Truth is radically perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds Walls It is an admirable goal, and one that remains quite relevant in the philosophical climate of the present day. Hence, henry david thoreau essays, 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. It follows that the greatest compliment we can pay to another person is to say that he or she enhances our life by inciting us henry david thoreau essays realize our highest aspirations.
In his ethical writings, the notion of wishing good on behalf of another person is often taken to a severe extreme, as if he does not think it possible to ask too much of love and friendship. It is, for example, his understanding of wild nature that informs his sociopolitical ideas. As was noted above, nature is a point of reference outside the polis which can provide valuable moral guidance, reminding us that society is not the measure of all things.
Withdrawing into the natural world allows us to view the state in a broader context and to conceive of ways in which social values and political structures could be improved radically. This includes unjust laws that ought to be reformed, about which more will be said in henry david thoreau essays moment, as well as the unwritten rules embodied in prevailing expectations about how one ought to live and what matters. In denouncing a specific pernicious attitude that is widespread among his contemporaries, henry david thoreau essays, Thoreau also seeks to identify and analyze the general tendency it exemplifies to defer to public opinion: for this reason, his project of social critique is not only relevant to his parochial context but has universal implications.
He is acutely conscious of the threat that shared henry david thoreau essays of discourse can pose to authentic intersubjectivity. Not only is it true that a degree of solitude and distance from our neighbors may actually improve our relations with them, but by moving away from the center of town we liberate ourselves from a slavish adherence to prevailing attitudes.
It is outrageous that he is often stereotyped as a lifelong recluse and hermit. Above all, the political issue that aroused his indignation more than any other was slavery. Because Thoreau understood philosophy as a way of life, it is only fitting that philosophical ideals would lead him into political action. He was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many fronts: he participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party.
Henry david thoreau essays importantly perhaps, he provides a justification for principled revolt and a method of nonviolent resistance, both of which would have a considerable influence on revolutionary movements in the twentieth century. Political institutions as such are regarded by him with distrust, and although he arguably overestimates the extent to which it is possible to disassociate oneself from them, he convincingly insists that social consensus is not a guarantee of rectitude or truth.
Passively and quietly allowing an unjust practice to continue is tantamount to collaborating with evil, he claims, articulating a principle of noncompliance that would inspire the philosophically informed nonviolent resistance of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others.
His essay in this respect has a more general pertinence to debates about the individual moral reformer in relation to community norms. It also raises the issue of whether political violence can be henry david thoreau essays as the lesser of evils, or in cases where it may be the only available way of ending injustice. Although at times it sounds as though Thoreau is advocating anarchy, what he demands is a better government, and what he refuses to acknowledge is the authority of one that has become so morally corrupt as to lose the consent of those governed.
There are simply more sacred laws to obey than the laws of society, and a just government—should there ever be such a thing, he adds—would not be in conflict with the conscience of the ethically upright individual. Thoreau has somewhat misleadingly been classified as a New England transcendentalist, and—even though he never rejected this label—it does not fit in many ways. Some of his major differences from Emerson have already been discussed, and further differences appear henry david thoreau essays Thoreau is compared to such figures as Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott.
A history of transcendentalism in New England which appeared in the late nineteenth century mentions Thoreau only once, in passing Frothingham It was suggested above that a better way of situating Thoreau within the Western philosophical tradition is to consider him a kind of transcendental idealist, in the spirit of Kant. For reasons that ought to be obvious by now, he should be of interest to students of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling—all of whom he studied at first or second hand—and possibly Schopenhauer.
Thoreau was a capable and enthusiastic classicist, whose study of ancient Greek and Roman authors convinced him that philosophy ought to be a lived practice: for this reason, he can profitably be grouped with other nineteenth-century thinkers, henry david thoreau essays, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who were critics of philosophy in the early modern period, henry david thoreau essays.
Yet he also has the distinction of being among the first Western philosophers to be significantly influenced by ancient Chinese and Indian thought. He anticipates Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics of the embodied mind, and shares with Peirce and James a concern for problems of knowledge as they arise within practical experience, henry david thoreau essays. Contemporary philosophers are increasingly discovering how much Thoreau has to teach—especially, in the areas of knowledge and perception, and in ethical debates about the value of land and life.
His affinities with the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, and the enormous resources he offers for environmental philosophy, have also started to receive more attention—and Walden itself continues to be encountered by readers as a remarkable provocation to philosophical thought.
Then again, as Thoreau himself notes, it is never too late to give up our prejudices. Others have observed see Slicerhenry david thoreau essays that, based on the amount of prominent work on Thoreau as a philosopher which has recently appeared, his profile seems to be ever so gradually rising on the American philosophical landscape.
Augustine, Saint Cambridge Platonists character, moral civil rights Confucius Daoism Darwinism Emerson, Ralph Henry david thoreau essays epistemology: virtue ethics: environmental existentialism friendship hedonism integrity James, William Kierkegaard, Søren liberalism life Merleau-Ponty, Maurice mysticism naturalism Nietzsche, Friedrich pantheism Peirce, Charles Sanders Plotinus process philosophy Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schopenhauer, henry david thoreau essays, Arthur Stoicism transcendentalism wisdom, henry david thoreau essays.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © by The Metaphysics Research LabDepartment of Henry david thoreau essays, Stanford University. Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Entry Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries. Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top.
Henry David Thoreau First published Thu Jun 30, ; substantive revision Fri Mar 3, Life and Writings 2, henry david thoreau essays. Nature and Human Existence 3.
The Ethics of Perception 4. Friendship and Politics 5. Locating Thoreau Bibliography Works By Thoreau Selected Works by Other Authors Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries, henry david thoreau essays.
Life and Writings Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in and died there inat the age of forty-four.
Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience
, time: 1:45Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau - blogger.com
Henry David Thoreau (–) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human blogger.com sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse An essay in which Thoreau analyzes aspects of forest ecology and urges farmers to plant trees in natural patterns of succession. (10 pages) Walking» Walking is an essay on experiencing the natural world, focusing on relationship between nature and civilization. (21 pages) Wild Apples» An essay about history and variations of the wild apple species Essay: “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” Author: Henry David Thoreau, –62 First published: The original essay is in the public domain in the United States and in most, if not all, other countries as well. Readers outside the United States should check their own countries’ copyright laws to
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