Thoreau’s yes to the world

Stanley Bates draws our attention to the thought of the writer who transformed the ode to disobedience into a way of life.

Stanley Bates is a professor emeritus of the Department of Philosophy of Middlebury College in Vermont, USA. He did his doctorate at the University of Harvard, where he worked closely with John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. He also taught at Oxford University.

See the interview.

IHU On-Line - How would you characterize the role played by Stanley Cavell in the dissemination of Thoreau’s texts in the North American academic philosophical context?

Stanley Bates - When I was a student there was no place at all for Thoreau in the “North American academic philosophical context.” He had a place in the curricula of American Studies and American Literature. (Of course, in those days there was almost no place for Hegel, or Marx or Nietzsche or Heidegger in that North American academic philosophical context.) Cavell’s book The Senses of Walden, changed that. He was the first in that era in the USA to see the work of Thoreau, and then naturally enough of Emerson, as profoundly responsive to the great crisis of European philosophy in the post-Kantian, and then post-Hegelian, age. Thinkers as different as Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all were responding to that crisis—very differently, of course. (I have written about the Kant/Hegel crisis in “The Mind’s Horizon,” in Beyond Representation.) It now seems impossible to miss, when reading Walden, that it is an exemplar of “philosophy as a way of life.” The reason that it is impossible is due to Cavell, and a (small) generation of philosophers who have been influenced by him, who have explored Thoreau as a philosopher.

IHU On-Line - Does Emerson’s perfectionism offer us some new perspective on the always controversial relations between literature in the fiction genre and moral philosophy? Still, on the same topic, when can your readers expect to see the publication of your recent project, “The Unattained but Attainable Self”?

Stanley Bates - I believe that Emersonian Perfectionism (as Cavell understands it) does help us think about the relationship of literature to human life, and therefore to human concerns about how to live one’s life. (I have written an article on this subject entitled “Character” in The Oxford Handbook to Philosophy and Literature.) As moral philosophy in the English-speaking world became an academic specialty at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it first went through the dead end era of “metaethics” (inspired by various forms of positivism) and then into a reckoning of major types of theories—teleological and deontological—which concentrated on prescriptive moral rules. (I, by the way, think of Kant as a perfectionist, not a rules rigorist.) This latter is, indeed, a crucial central part of moral philosophy, but from the point of view of an individual it is mostly negative—about what actions are forbidden or required. This is no doubt a constitutive part of what Barbara Herman calls “moral literacy” but it leaves open the central issue for the individual human being of how one is to live one’s life. It is surely the case that fiction (certainly in the age of the novel, but in fact, much further back) has always presented models of human life. In fact, I would argue that it has been the principal way in which the variety of ways of being human has been conveyed to new generations. (In the age of movies, television, video games, etc. this may not still be the case.) I include the various traditions of oral lore in that notion. The relationship is, of course, complex. Rarely does a work of fiction teach a particular moral lesson. There are moments of moral reflection in some of the major works of the European tradition, but the main task of the narrative (in traditional fiction with a “default” realism) is to present the complexity of the particular.

I’m still working on my project on the self, but I’m putting it in the broader context of what it is rational for us to believe about ourselves as human beings—who we are, where we come from, what this implies about “ultimate belief.”

IHU On-Line - The non-existence of a final stage of moral development is one of the features that distinguish Emerson’s perfectionism from the traditional versions of perfectionism. Is there some genealogical relationship between the “perfectibilité indéfinie de l'homme” described by Tocqueville in De la démocratie en Amérique as something peculiar of the American ethos and Emerson’s “unattained but attainable self”?

Stanley Bates - For good or for ill, the United States has always had a kind of mythological self-understanding of the priority and importance of the individual. For good—because it did lead to a constitutional arrangement which established a legal basis for human rights (starting of course with human rights for white men. The moral evolution of the US constitution continues now, and is quite fragile.) For ill—because it permits a denial of social responsibility when such a denial is politically attractive. See our national discussions of “gun rights” or of health care or the current attempt to present the intrusion of sectarian religious bigotry into public life as an exercise of “religious liberty.” Of course, as in every nation, the mythological self-understanding does not necessarily correspond to the social reality, but it is a part of that social reality. Emerson joined many of the writers of the 19th century in the US in seeing the advantage of a great break with European traditions; he tried to work out for the individual the implications of his understanding of the philosophical conception of the self.

IHU On-Line - Thoreau was an attentive reader of English romanticism. Out of the six great names of Romanticism in the English language, viz. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, which one would you highlight as a privileged interlocutor for topics that are central in Walden?

Stanley Bates - This is a very good question for which I don’t have a good answer. I know that Thoreau, probably via Emerson, valued Wordsworth highly, (but, of course, Wordsworth’s greatest work The Prelude was not published until his death in 1850.) I know that some critics have seen influence of Byron and Keats. I do think that if Thoreau used anything as a kind of poetic model it was probably Virgil’s Georgics which he had always loved and which provided a kind of literary model for the representation of a year in nature.

IHU On-Line - It is known that Coleridge’s Aids for Reflection played a key role in the dissemination of German Idealism in America. Would you indicate some aspect of that work by Coleridge that echoes in Thoreau’s texts?

Stanley Bates - My impression is that Coleridge’s work first percolated through to Thoreau when he returned to Concord, after his Harvard graduation, and became close to Emerson. Thoreau rarely comments directly on it, but he did a great deal of philosophy reading over the next 6 or 7 years. I’ll want to comment later on the relationship between Emerson’s and Thoreau’s ways of writing and of viewing the world. (Roughly Emerson’s writing tends to abstraction; Thoreau’s always particularizes.)

IHU On-Line - Can Thoreau’s work be considered an antidote against the legacy of nihilism that Nietzsche identified in romanticism?

Stanley Bates - Nietzsche of course identified has own early work (especially The Birth of Tragedy) as the product of a Romantic. When he had, in his own mind, thrown off the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner, he saw that early Romanticism as potentially leading to nihilism. Nietzsche in his later work sees above all the crucial avoidance of Romanticism to consist in saying “Yes” to the world and oneself in the world (as opposed to Schopenhauer’s “No.”) I think that it is fair to identify Thoreau as one who said “Yes” to the world.

IHU On-Line - What would Thoreau tell Trump about the latter’s recent decision to abandon the Paris Agreement?

Stanley Bates - I think Thoreau might have great difficult in making sense of Trump. Of course, Thoreau disdained many contemporary politicians, based on their relationship to slavery, but there was no 19th century figure (with the possible exception of Andrew Jackson) who compares to Trump. Because Thoreau respected science, and the physical environment, of course he would want anything, even as modest as the Paris agreement, that might help the world and the peoples within it, but he would want much more. The question he raises in Walden, after all, is “what is necessary for a full human life?” There are many aspects of our modernity that would trouble him.

IHU On-Line - In The Senses of Walden Cavell writes, directly referring to Max Weber’s classic work: “What we call the Protestant Ethic, the use of worldly loss and gain to symbolize heavenly standing, appears in Walden as some last suffocation of the soul.” Could you comment on this?

Stanley Bates - This continues the topic of my previous answer. I take this to identify the same issue as Heidegger deals in The Question Concerning Technology. How do we as human beings inhabit the world? This is why Thoreau presented as the initial chapter, and by far the longest chapter, of Walden, his conception of “Economy.” Thoreau, like every major thinker of the 19th Century, is dealing with the necessary reorientation of human beings to their new intellectual situation in modernity. He already, like Emerson, has left the customary precincts of Christianity. He is well aware of the industrial revolution, and the newly emerging economy. Every human being has to navigate his or her life, without the certainty of tradition. What can be put in its place? (Or—as Nietzsche framed it—how can nihilism be avoided?)

IHU On-Line - The concept of alienation (Entfremdung) in Marx and Thoreau’s characterization of the lives of his contemporaries as “quiet desperation” offer us clear indications of the critique of both of them on the way in which the economy and moral value were connected in the 19th century. What other parallels can be drawn between Marx and Thoreau?

Stanley Bates - I have tried to work out an extended comparison of Marx and Thoreau in “Thoreau and Emersonian Perfectionism” in Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy. I find them to be dealing with the philosophical situation that I mentioned above. Naturally there are vast differences between them. The most important difference seems to me to be their view on the nature of the human individual. Thoreau is, like Marx, convinced of the social nature of the individual human being—but it is that individual perspective that is crucial for him. For Marx, especially the early Marx when the Hegelian vocabulary is most important to him, individualism seems inevitably to be what C.B. Macpherson calls “possessive individualism.” Still they both start from the supposition that the critique of religion has been largely completed, and that that critique inevitably leads to a moral/political critique. I am working on a comparison of their reinterpreted understandings of the “transcendental” that I hope to discuss at our conference.

IHU On-Line - Would you like to add anything?

Stanley Bates - Only that I look forward to our discussions.