Kelley Dean Jolley analyzes Thoreau’s work based on the perception that human existence should not be reduced to the satisfaction of our desires.
Kelley Dean Jolley is a professor of the Department of Philosophy of Auburn University, USA. His studies are focused on issues related to philosophical psychology, metaphilosophy, the history of 20th century philosophy and ancient philosophy. Outside of the academia he writes poetry and is an avid reader of literature. His writings can be accessed at kellydeanjolley.com
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IHU On-Line - What is your strategy in bringing Thoreau and Wittgenstein together? What is the clearest example in Walden of a description of the needs of human life? Is it just keeping warm?
Kelley Dean Jolley - I have long been most fascinated, most challenged and changed, by philosophers who combine analytical rigor with existential pathos. I strategize that bringing Wittgenstein and Thoreau together makes more visible the existential pathos of the one, Wittgenstein, and the analytical rigor of the other, Thoreau. So you could say that my strategy is to use each to insist on the completeness of the other, and so to offset the tendency to find only analytical rigor in Wittgenstein (if even that) or existential pathos in Thoreau (if even that).
Each writes in a way that creates a desire to refuse him: Wittgenstein constantly targets what Dewey once called the “occupational psychoses” of philosophers (meaning, by ‘psychoses’, not so much psychological disturbances as a pronounced characters of the mind). By doing so, Wittgenstein courts philosophers’ ire--self-knowledge is almost always unflattering, and philosophers (and I include myself) all too often placidly think that their character of mind only promotes the search for truth and does not, could not, hinder it. Philosophers yield that placidity grudgingly. Even worse, Wittgenstein often targets the occupational psychoses by satirizing them, sometimes harshly. And he problematizes the lexicon of philosophy, he takes favorite words and checkers them, creates pangs of worried conscience where before there had been only clear consciousness--’theory’, ‘essence’, definition’. Thoreau constantly targets our existential psychoses, call them our failures of economy. He too courts ire--the citizens of Concord (and they of course stand in for all of us, myself included) are in no hurry to surrender their complacency. They are living good lives, drawing close to the good life itself, and to be told that they are rather living in despair--even a quiet despair--is a dysangel, bad news. The citizens find such news unwelcome, and they surrender their complacency grumbling and grousing. Even worse, he satirizes their lives, makes fun of their clothes, their houses, their very civilization, and his satire is often harsh. He steals off with their favorite words, ‘economy’, ‘law’, ‘neighbor’, ‘living’, and he drags them into the woods and re-natures them, so that they become unfamiliar, unwieldy, partly wild. --Given all this, bringing the two together also helps to highlight the purpose of each, helps to show what each is about, that each is writing “to the glory of God and that his neighbor might be benefitted thereby”. But each reckons that his chosen audience is illusioned, and each knows that the illusions present themselves as rational, prudent, proper. To argue with the illusions, or only to argue with the illusions, drives their anchors deeper, since argument seems to sanction their claimed status as rational, prudent, proper--at least in a generic way. So each man attacks the illusions in other ways, with redescriptions, jokes, satires, rotations of the axes of investigation, shifts of aspect, --across many varieties of lusty crowing, hoping to wake their neighbors up, to disillusion them.
Thoreau emphasizes the necessaries of life, and he rolls them together into “retaining the vital heat”. I have always found that a happy way of presenting what is required for human life, and it seems to me to center Walden well. The question Thoreau asks his reader is nothing more than--and nothing less than--”How do you keep warm, stay vital?” That question has a way of getting at you, since it will not allow you to escape into luxuries of self-justification. However high-mindedly we may spend our days, we are still attempting to do what those who spend their days less high-mindedly are doing: we are keeping warm, we are all keeping warm. Thoreau will not let us forget that. We are all always answering his question, even if we do not want to and even if we tell ourselves we somehow are not. If we do not answer in words, we answer in deeds. Of course, we are most of us doing more than just keeping warm, but that does not mean that we ever stop keeping warm. It is easy to think we do when we do not build our houses, raise our own food, sew our own clothes. We lose track of the necessaries of life, and thus lose track of who and what we ultimately are, believing we can substitute second nature for first nature, to choose or create our own very standing in the world. Forcing us to acknowledge our need to keep warm, the inescapability of that task and the way it equalizes us all, brings our contingency and vulnerability into view, keeps it always before us. I take Thoreau to believe that we live in a motivated forgetfulness of our nature, and that our tendencies to focus on what is unnecessary are both result and cause of that forgetfulness. By going to the woods, Thoreau becomes a living reminder of what we forget. He becomes an externalized conscience--to put it paradoxically--calling each of us back to what we (all) are.
I read both Wittgenstein and Thoreau as first philosophical anthropologists, whatever else they may be, and I take each to be deeply concerned to elucidate the original living context of human life, and to work to rebuild our confidence in everyday human experience, to get us to see that the various uncertainties that attend to everyday human experience are no reason for a blanket mistrust of it. It is what we have: we must make as much of it as possible. Each man wrote a book that endeavors to bring its reader to independence of thought and independence of vision--an independence secured by trusting in everyday human experience and by making as much of it as possible. Properly husbanded, the grey rags and dust of everyday experience contain surprises, and may be shown to hide what, once seen, is most striking and powerful.
IHU On-Line - Thoreau and Emerson were authors who gave much attention to the variety of Eastern religious practices. Is there a way to assess how provoking this openness may have been in the intellectual environment of 19th century New England?
Kelley Dean Jolley - There is more to say about Emerson and Thoreau’s bows to the East than I can say here. But let me at least address what I take to be a framing consideration. As is well known, both men wanted America to realize itself--and to do so in a significant independence from Europe. Both feared that the Old World would have the last word for the New World. Now, I do not think either was naive enough to believe that the Old World would not get the first word in the New World. Their worry was about the hegemony of that Old World’s first word. Both knew that much of what the Old World offered had denatured into empty forms (I think here of Emerson’s sermon on the Eucharist, for example). But neither thought that what the Old World offered was fated to be mere dead forms: it might be possible to reanimate it. But that reanimation was not any simple process. And here the East became important. Think about a famous passage of Wittgenstein’s, the one about The Fall of philosophers (Philosophical Investigations 131):
For we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison--as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.)
For Emerson and Thoreau, what the Old World was offering had become, in its way, inept, empty. It was presented, or it presented itself, as that to which reality must correspond. It had become merely dogma. If it was to undergo a second birth, it had to re-presented, it had to become an object of comparison, a model, so that life could re-inhabit it.
Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I do not mean to say that either man wanted the Old World’s first word to end up, reborn, as the New World’s last word--that this was a strategy to reinvigorate Christianity--but I do think they wanted to challenge the dogmatism of dead forms, and to see what might be brought to live again. In a way, their goal was something like Kierkegaard’s--we cannot see Christianity for what it is unless we can see alternatives, other models, other objects of comparison. When Christianity becomes thoroughly acculturated, it no longer knows itself. (Christianity--indeed, religion--is always grammatically a way of seeing the world. When it becomes the way of seeing the world, it can no longer be distinguished from the world, and so is no longer Christianity--no longer religion.) But unlike Kierkegaard, neither Emerson nor Thoreau was hoping to re-make people Christian--but neither was hoping to make people followers of some Eastern religion. No, what both wanted was for people to see past the forms of religion, Western or Eastern, and to see the teeming life of the New World to which those forms often blinded them--to see the New World as New full stop (and not as New York or New England), to see one another as new men and women, to see the new trees and the flowers. In short, to allow the New World to feed their imaginations instead of allowing the Old World to imagine the New. (America is not the new Israel, a land of 2% milk and organic honey, and imagining it to be so is part of what makes it, keeps it, unapproachable.) When I consider Emerson and Thoreau’s use of Eastern religion, a passage of John Wisdom comes to mind (a final paragraph of one of the essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis):
As we all know but won’t remember, any classificatory system is a net spread on the blessed manifold of the individual and blinding us not to all but to many of its varieties and continuities. A new system will do the same but not in just the same ways. So that in accepting all the systems their blinding power is broken, their revealing power becomes acceptable; the individual is restored to us, not isolated as before we used language, not in a box as when language mastered us, but in ‘creation’s chorus’.
I find it hard to think of a more Emersonian or Thoreauvian passage than that, allowing for the differences of philosophical styles. Emerson and Thoreau wanted to hear creation’s chorus in the New World, not just some echo of a bare, ruined choirs of Europe. The East was to help us remember what we all know but won’t remember. The East was to remind us that the West is just the West.
IHU On-Line - At various moments Thoreau belittled his university education. Is it reasonable to disregard the education he received at Harvard when assessing his literary production?
Kelley Dean Jolley - One of the underappreciated themes of Walden is its sense of the power of remembered or acknowledged ignorance. Call it Walden’s Socratic theme. Early in the book, Thoreau asks (of himself and his neighbors): “How can he remember well his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his knowledge?” It is easy to miss or to elide that little parenthetical--”which his growth requires”. Remembered ignorance is the fertile soil of personal growth. Socrates knew this, and it is a shame, I think, that we manage so often to miss it when we talk of Socratic ignorance. For Socrates, remembered or acknowledged ignorance is a source of power, not of weakness. So too for Thoreau. Remembering or acknowledging our ignorance marks out our limits, opens us to our finitude. Realizing that we don’t have the answer allows us to experience the question, to be put in question, and the question, thus experienced, spurs growth. We can’t outgrow our finitude, of course, but we can enlarge ourselves, reckon with our finitude, be more its master and less its thrall--and, at any rate, there is a difference in kind between submitting to our finitude and living in subjection to it.
I mention this theme, and Thoreau’s line about ignorance, because they tell us a great deal about Thoreau’s relationship to his education. We cannot ignore his education for a moment; I do not think that he did. But it is true that his relationship to his education was complicated. Perhaps the most important part of that complicated relationship was Thoreau’s abhorrence for an education as ornament, as something possessed but external, like a watch or a waistcoat. The only education he took to be worth having was one so deeply assimilated that it became indistinguishable from the expression of the educated person’s inner life. By that standard, much that we are taught is not worth having, not worth having learnt. Here, Thoreau’s thinking crosses paths with Gabriel Marcel’s, and in particular with Marcel’s distinction between being and having. Much of Walden is engaged with that distinction, albeit in Thoreau’s own terms. Thoreau is always asking what we can shed, part with, surrender: the things we have and that we could live without. The question about our education is whether it can become part of what we are, digested into our very being, or whether it is to remain something we have, indigestible. Odd as it may sound, I believe that Thoreau rates an education that is assimilated, digested, that becomes part of what we are, is itself something that helps to maintains our vital heat--it is a necessary of life. If we reflect carefully on Thoreau’s life at the cabin, we will see that it was a life of reading and writing and that its being so was internal to the deliberate life he went there to live.
IHU On-Line - Do Thoreau and Emerson have a better reception in North American academic philosophy after the efforts made by Stanley Cavell? Or do we still have a long road ahead of us in this respect?
Kelley Dean Jolley - This is a hard question to answer. Cavell’s work has certainly brought people to Thoreau, and gotten them to take Thoreau seriously as a philosopher--but I do not know that Cavell’s work has established Thoreau in analytic philosophy. I think most academic philosophers regard interest in Thoreau as, at best, a ‘soft’ interest, comparable to interest in applied ethics or the history of philosophy. Maybe they would think it ‘Continental’ if it weren’t for the embarrassing wrong continent thing. Anyway, as wonderful as Cavell’s work is--and it has been of the first importance to me--his own bona fides as a philosopher are often challenged in academic philosophy, if not dismissed. All hands concede his brilliance--but many have little patience for his work. So, Cavell’s own position in academic philosophy is not such as to garner Thoreau as reception; Cavell himself has never wholly been received into academic philosophy.
I guess that means that there is more work to do where Thoreau is concerned. But I am lukewarm about the prospect of that work. I do not know if it matters very much whether Thoreau is received into academic philosophy. He was clearly less than sanguine about professors of philosophy. “Honorable to profess because it was once honorable to live…”--that is not a compliment, unless you count left-handed compliments as actual compliments. It is really a rather severe asteism. I don’t think Thoreau himself would have been too worried about where the readers of Walden are housed, in the academy or out of it. He would have cared how they were housed--and why they were so housed.
I used to worry about this sort of thing, and used to worry about why so many of the philosophers I care about are so deliberately and purposefully shunted aside by academic philosophy. The answer is complicated--but one part of it is what academic philosophers know how to teach and what they don’t. They do not know how to teach Thoreau. You simply cannot teach a page of Thoreau in the same way that you can a page of Frege or a page of David Lewis. Teaching it requires a set of habits most philosophers do not cultivate--particular habits of reading and novel habits of tracking conceptual accuracy (especially when that accuracy is achieved by means other than formalizable argumentation). Should philosophers cultivate those habits? Well, some do and that is good; I hope that continues, and I try to teach students to cultivate them. But no one can cultivate every habit that might be useful in teaching a page of a worthwhile text. I hope Walden continues to find readers and I trust that it will. I trust some of them will be somewhere in the academy, sometimes even in philosophy, and that now and then the book will find its way onto a syllabus or at least that now and then copies will get pressed into the eager hands of poor students.
IHU On-Line - Keeping Emerson in the background, what conceptually relevant parallels might be established between Nietzsche and Thoreau?
Kelley Dean Jolley - Both Thoreau and Nietzsche are philosophers of the morning. Both want their readers to awaken. Both take their readers to be worse off than their readers know. For each, an inflection of the concept of ‘repetition’ is central. But they part company, it seems to me, in a way that can be captured by reference to a passage from Emerson, that passage about “sitting at the feet of the familiar, the low”. Emerson is willing to surrender the past and future worlds for the tutelage of the commonplace, to surrender the great, the remote, the romantic. There are of course moments like this in Nietzsche, but I do not think that he is willing as Emerson is willing--certainly he is not as willing as Emerson is willing--to accept the tutelage of the familiar and the low. Thoreau is. In fact, Thoreau is willing to submit himself to that tutelage to a degree that even Emerson did not equal. This difference makes itself felt in the specific way that Thoreau and Nietzsche are philosophers of the morning. Thoreau is always thinking about tomorrow, the next day of the week, a Monday or a Tuesday or.... Nietzsche is always thinking about the end of an age, the end of some abstract noun with a majuscule first letter, Morality, Christianity, Philosophy, Truth. Thoreau worries about the workaday, about our work week. Nietzsche worries about the Eternal. Nietzsche strides abroad in seven-league boots. Thoreau saunters in cowhide boots, boots that cost him a dollar and a half a pair. This may make it sound that I think less of Nietzsche than I do of Thoreau, and that is true. But I think very highly indeed of Nietzsche, so it tells you more, perhaps, about how I rank Thoreau.
There are many passages in Nietzsche I can imagine Thoreau enjoying, but I cannot imagine him writing them. Take, for example, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”. I can easily imagine Thoreau chuckling over that, and finding justice in it. But wouldn’t he also have found it a bit much? Overheated? Thoreau may intend to, and may succeed at, crowing as lustily as Chanticleer, but Thoreau’s crowing has no ambition to be “the cockcrow of positivism”. Incipit Monday, not Zarathustra.
Take none of this to suggest that I think that studying Thoreau in conjunction with Nietzsche a bad idea (or vice versa). They are both Emersonian--but in different ways, taking different things from him, both acting in his spirit while acting differently. (Some proof, I suppose, that Emerson was no slave to a foolish consistency.) Nietzsche occasionally sneaks a look down, at the commonplace, just as Thoreau does a look up, at the Eternal, but their orientations in thought remain quite different.
Thoreau writes to an audience of poor students, not collectively, but rather distributively, in a way that individualizes them, that speaks to their individual, shaky hearts and consciences. Even Thoreau’s crowing carries a sense of privacy, as if he crowed just for me or just for you. Nietzsche writes to everyone and no one, massively, in a language of plate tectonics, of ponderous, vast, lithospherical movements, spoken by mysterious subterranean forces, spoken to the blue sky above.
IHU On-Line - What is the role of Thoreau’s writings in Trump’s America?
Kelley Dean Jolley - There’s an idea of which I have long been convinced, namely that the more conscience we have, the more consciousness we have. Walden is written to the individual conscience (there is no non-individual conscience, conscience always has one individual owner). President Trump, so far as I can tell, does not just lack a conscience, conscience itself is his aversion. (Who is Trump to tell Trump what he may and may not do?) And an important reason for that is that he does not himself seem to want to be more conscious, and he certainly does not want others to be more conscious. He would entrap us all in a dubious twilight--a twilight in which we reconcile ourselves to our limitations of conscience and consciousness by dallying with stuff: cell phones, flat screen televisions, clothes and cars. Satiety replaces clarity. Orange is the new stupid.
Thoreau would force us from that dubious twilight, into the white light of the sun. He would turn us from our relationships toward stuff and to our relationship toward ourselves. I don’t know that Thoreau would think the most crucial lines of resistance to Trump are to be drawn between groups on the streets of Washington or of...Anywhere, USA. I don’t know that he would think the most crucial lines of resistance are to be drawn between any us and them. The most crucial line of resistance must divide my own heart: I must set my face against the Trump in myself, against the glacial, self-diddling sloth that threatens eventually to consume me. If I pretend that I have no Trump in myself, I strengthen both that Trump and the one in the White House. My guess at Thoreau’s advice to us in Trump’s America (even, dare I say it, in Trump’s world)? --Disobey yourself! Not in the sense, of course, of slighting conscience, but in the sense of acquiring an effectual self-command, enough of fortitude and temperance to actually do what prudence and justice reveal to be right. If we can’t say No to ourselves how can we say No to Trump?
IHU On-Line - There is an echo of Thoreau’s themes in you poetic production (Stony Lonesome). What is your view on Thoreau’s poetry?
Kelley Dean Jolley - My impression is that Thoreau’s poetry is not much read. If that is right, it is too bad; the poetry is quite good. But it is true that Thoreau’s best poetry is in Walden itself, in those passages in the book that--looked at from the right angle--clearly anticipate some of the best poetry of Francis Ponge (consider, for example, Ponge’s “The Frog”). It is those passages, somewhat more than the acknowledged, less prosing poetry, that have influenced my own poetry most--along with Thoreau’s various observations on writing, most importantly his observations on writing and seeing, on seeing as a writer and writing as a seer.
I shrink from comparing my poetry to Thoreau’s, but I will briefly compare it with his. Like Thoreau, I am concerned with place, with the sense of place. I am happy to write poetry that concerns itself with the abstract. And, more importantly, I am endlessly fascinated by paths, trails, creeks, rivers, ponds, trees and barns. I believe they have meaning in themselves and that they can withstand the gaze sub specie aeterni--because that gaze, rightly practiced, does not see through things but sees them, in all their imponderable hic-et-nunc-ness. That great reader of Thoreau, Henry Bugbee (Inward Morning) writes:
Only as things are dense and opaque do they stand forth in the light of eternity, and take the light. To take that which exists as existing, and not as a symbol for something else; to find something to which one gives full heed, and not merely to push right through it in search of a beyond, or to have from it only a message at once directing the mind away from it and on to other things; such is the experience of things as eternal, in the making. To experience things in their density is to experience containment in reality. But the agile mind and the distraught soul militate against true perception; for true perception requires stillness in the presence of things, the active, open reception of the limitless gift of things.
To experience things in their density as they take the light of eternity: there’s an aim for a Thoreauvian poet. And like all expressions of high-mindedness, it is profoundly humbling--for I have never gotten close to doing it, despite bending myself and my words that way again and again.
IHU On-Line - Would Edward Snowden be a correct personification of the ideal of civil disobedience in terms that Thoreau would approve of?
Kelley Dean Jolley - I often think about that passage in “Economy” in which Thoreau talks of the slave trade. That passage can be read as if Thoreau fails to condemn slavery as he ought. But that is not the right way to read it. His point is that slavery exists in many forms, Southern, surely--a form he terms ‘gross but somewhat foreign’--but also Northern, less gross but more native. And, worst of all, that form of enslavement to self that is the lot of most of us, self-enslavement. Thoreau is not trying to rank these slaveries as social ills, in terms of their consequences, but rather as moral evils, in terms of their structures. The southern form, which, remember, we know Thoreau detested, is in this context treated as less worse than the other two only because there is no blameworthiness as such that falls on the slaves themselves. Each of the other two requires, to differing degrees and in different ways, that the slave be blameworthy for his status as slave. He could make other choices. He could live in other ways. And he I would, he might also help to end the enforced slavery of those in the South, to which his voluntary slavery contributes. Thoreau writes in his essay on John Brown that
Our foes are in our midst and all about us. There is hardly a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice; and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds. We are mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts. The curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself…
When I think about people like Edward Snowden--who I do not know and of whose character I am uninformed--I wonder about our reaction to them. Is Snowden a hero of civil disobedience? I see no reason to deny it. Snowden, hurrah! --But what do we learn from him? Does he increase our desire to root the foes out of our own breasts--the woodenness of our hearts, our lack of vital heat. Or do we want to turn on others, as if their breasts were wooden but our fleshly? Do we ask what it is about ourselves that has made us willing to live in the Five Eyes Panopticon? Why tolerate constant surveillance? What are we getting in trade? Can we live the lives we currently want without making ourselves liable to global surveillance? I find it hard to believe we are not more worried about these questions. But we are not, are we?
Instead we cluck-cluck at Five Eyes and wish away the Panopticon, all the while living the life of Panopticism. We want instant access to everything, without remembering that we number among the everything. (What we really want is to see everything without being seen, like the eye that limits the visual field in the Tractatus.) We worship idols that petrify us. We want our vices for free. We will to live lives of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “muzzled freedom” just so that we can have the stuff we want. Snowden should remind us of that fact. And then, after we have come to some just settlement with ourselves, perhaps we can seek a just settlement with Five Eyes without docilely handing over the very thing that we keep loudly protesting that we will never yield.
IHU On-Line - The secondary literature on Thoreau produced by philosophers has grown remarkably. Is there a recent commentator or text that aroused your attention in a special way?
Kelley Dean Jolley - I do not keep up with scholarly work on Thoreau in any disciplined way. Ed Mooney’s recent work means a lot to me. But the work that matters most is work that is older, and not, as such, Thoreau scholarship: Henry Bugbee’s Inward Morning and his essays, John M. Anderson’s The Individual and the New World and David Norton’s Personal Destinies. What matters most about Walden is where you go from it. Thoreau himself did not stay.
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.
Edward F. Mooney was a professor of the Department of Religion and Philosophy of Syracuse University in the state of New York, USA. He has dedicated himself to the study of authors such as Thoreau, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, Lao Tzu, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Iris Murdoch. He is the author of several works, among which we highlight Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell (Bloomsbury Academic, 2009); Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford University Press, 2009), written in partnership with M. G. Piety; and Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements (Indiana University Press, 2008); On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time (Routledge, 2017).
See the article.
Am I that unusual or touchy to think that “scum” is an unpleasant, if not vulgar, label to have squarely pinned to your back?
In “Pond Scum” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2016) Kathryn Schultz does just that as she blithely presents a “misanthropic,” “horrible” Thoreau. Apart from the vulgarity of greeting him thus, the piece offers a deeply distorted picture of the iconic writer of woodlands and ponds, rivers, meadows, and mountains.
As it happens, Thoreau loved people as well as ponds. He created a healthy swamp around his brother’s grave in Sleepy Hollow so that John’s nutrients could be naturally recycled. Out of love he wanted to extend John’s life.
“The Ecstasy of Influence” (The New Yorker, September 9, 2016) gives us a revealing aside from Emerson, who speaks of his protégé’s exuberant affection for kids: “Thoreau charmed Waldo [the father’s five year old] by the variety of toys, whistles, boats, popguns & all kinds of instruments he could make and mend. He was famous for concocting Saturday games for the neighborhood boys.”
Though he’s charged with misanthropy, by Schultz and others, Thoreau could gaze at throngs at the county fair and exclaim, “I love these sons of earth, every mother’s son of them, with their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from spectacle to spectacle” (A Week on the Concord, “Friday,” para 5).
And there’s this startling confession: “Even the tired laborers I meet on the road, I really meet as traveling gods” (Journal, August 15, 1845)
He loved his brother profoundly. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, commemorates their shared life. He didn’t forget the good friends he regularly walked with, nor the Canadian wood chopper, introduced in Walden. The two read aloud, more or less arm in arm, focused on the scene from the Iliad where Achilles and Protroclus renew their loving friendship.
**
Schultz is not the first to unload on Thoreau. A string of expletives – “hypocrite,” “misanthrope,” “prig” – predictably follows him like barking dogs, in print and in casual conversation. Why do critics nip at his heels?
For one thing, Thoreau loves to provoke with unexpected and often unpopular sentiments. The sentiments don’t fall into a single pattern, making it easy to cherry-pick sentences likely to particularly offend the unwary.
Then again, perhaps it is Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence” -- rather than an more uplifting ecstasy of influence. If Thoreau gains too much cultural traction the ill-tempered watchdogs get anxious and warn us away.
An imposing cultural or political icon presents a tempting invitation to uncover clay feet. It’s a great leveling device. And it’s a sad commonplace that critical reading is meant usually to undermine, seldom to generously commend. The greater the stature of the writer considered, the greater the potential vituperation. The result? “Pond Scum,” “Horrible Thoreau,” “Misanthrope,” “Sanctimonious Hypocrite.”
Thoreau’s first published piece was an obituary in his local newspaper for an inconsequential woman who otherwise would have been forgotten. It is as if he took no life to be forgettable.
**
No one likes to be preached down to, but Thoreau isn’t a non-stop moralist except in his gripping political polemics — say his defense of John Brown. In writings like Walden, he is much closer to Rousseau’s reflective and mostly gentle Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Ms. Schultz is not alone in having a decidedly tin ear for Thoreau’s reverie and musing, his irony, merriment, and hyperbole.
Walden‘s well-crafted excursions in parody, hyperbole, reverie (and the like) are not meant to announce doctrine or to force dogma down throats. Thoreau is a master of sly exaggeration and wicked caricature.
How much of his opening chapter, “Economy,” is a slightly-tongue-in-cheek elaboration of Franklin’s “A penny saved is a penny earned”? Another chapter, “Reading,” has him wishing that all his town folk could read classics in the original languages. He candidly calls some of the most extravagant moments in his writing “dreaming awake.”
A freight train heard across the pond is an indication of suspect commercialism (not to say noise) but also, as in a dream, it unravels “its steam cloud . . . like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths.”
A page further he muses amazed at the heroic rail delivery to elsewhere of loads of intriguing goods. Each boxcar of bundles has unexpected meanings:
This carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books.
Mishearing subtle tones of voice, their registers and modulations, leads to
wildly mistaken attributions. We needn’t buy into “Saint Henry,” but the alternative needn’t be a sour and trashy “Horrible Henry.”
Thoreau leads us over and over to unexplored and bracing depths of human desire and to alluring, achingly marvelous possible perceptions. When the path gets tangled or the ascent too rough, some quit the walk and write a complaint.
After these pointed words, this rather whimsical thought occurs to me: Maybe understanding Thoreau is like understanding a journey around the world; you understand him one day at a time, and try to keep up with the conversations as they change and dart this way and that, like kids at play. And remember that for all the changing scenery, there’s a thread — however hard it is to recreate short of starting the journey again. Of course his travels stopped short of going much beyond Maine, Minnesota, Staten Island, and Mt. Greylock. But they covered worlds.
Notes
• For detailed discussions, see my Excursions with Thoreau: Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Bloomsbury, 2015, and Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy From Thoreau to Cavell, Continuum, 2009.
• For the shallow swamp around John Thoreau’s grave, and for his obituary of an otherwise unknown woman, see Branka Arsić’s, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard, 2015), pp. 385–7. The obituary for Anna Jones is in Yeoman’s Gazette, 1837, discussed in Arsić, pp. 340–6.
• Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford, 1975) considers poets suffering under the crushing accomplishments of forebears. Why not suppose that critics suffer under the crushing accomplishments of original writers?
• Thoreau’s defense of John Brown is found in almost any collection of his essays.
• For “hearty hearts,” see A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Princeton, 1980) p. 358. See Walden, ed. Jeffrey Cramer, (Yale, 2004).
• For “dreaming awake,” “The Ponds,” p. 185 [para 21].
• For his extensive and shifting view of freight trains, see “Sounds.”
• For wonderful browsing, see The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, Bradford Torrey (ed.) (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) Vols I–XIV, available on-line: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: The Digital Collection.
Jeffrey Cramer, curator of the Walden Woos Project, analyzes the thought and present relevance of Thoreau and his civil disobedience.
Jeffrey Cramer is the curator of collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods Library and is in charge of projects such as the Walden Woods Project and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. He is the editor of several books on American literature.
See the interview.
IHU On-Line - How can one characterize the influence of German Idealism on the emergence of American Transcendentalism in general and on Thoreau’s writings in particular? Is there any evidence that Thoreau read any of Kant’s works?
Jeffrey Cramer - Although the ideas of Kant were brought to the Transcendental Circle through Frederick Hedge, who undoubtedly shared those ideas with his friends, and through the writings of Thomas Carlyle, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflections, there is no evidence that Thoreau himself read Kant or other German idealists. His main contact would be filtered through other writers.
IHU On-Line - By the way, how can one characterize American Transcendentalism?
Jeffrey Cramer - Very simply, it is, as Emerson said, idealism. Or, faith in things unseen. It is the idea that we can intuit truth directly from God, that truth transcends our day-to-day experiences, and we know right from wrong without needing to learn it. American Transcendentalism carries with it a strong sense of social reform through self-reformation.
IHU On-Line - How can one explain the fact that such a small town like Concord became the epicenter of American Transcendentalism?
Jeffrey Cramer - Simply because Emerson, himself the epicenter of American Transcendentalism, moved to Concord in 1835. He had been temporarily living there the year before, staying with his step-grandfather, Ezra Ripley, at the Old Manse (made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne) and where Emerson wrote his book, Nature. Thoreau was a native-born Concordian. Bronson Alcott moved to Concord because of Emerson.
IHU On-Line - Was Thoreau an attentive reader of William Paley in Resistance to Civil Government or was he responding to a scarecrow created for rhetorical purposes?
Jeffrey Cramer - Thoreau read Paley and was attentive. Whether a “scarecrow created for rhetorical purposes” or not, Thoreau found something to which he felt compelled to respond. How much of “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”) was a direct response to Paley and how much Paley was merely a spring-board is open to debate. Thoreau was an attentive reader but also an uncommitted one. As he said, “When I read an indifferent book it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with the least regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.”
IHU On-Line - What kind of contact did Thoreau have with Unitarianism? Was there a lasting influence of it on his writings?
Jeffrey Cramer - He was baptized in the Unitarian church but, as an adult, signed off from it, officially severing his ties with is. He was not an advocate of formalized religion, and took a pantheistic approach to God and spirituality. What he experienced first-hand in relation to the divinity within us all could not be found in any one religion.
IHU On-Line - Are Thoreau’s activities with the Underground Railroad his clearest example of civil disobedience? In what way was this expressed?
Jeffrey Cramer - Certainly this would be one clear example – housing fugitive enslaved persons, feeding them, nursing them back to health, buying tickets on the railroad and seeing them safely on their way to Canada – although more famous would be his night in jail as way to protest a government that allowed for the institution of slavery to exist. His writing of this experience in the essay now known as “Civil Disobedience” has been a major influence around the world in the obligations of the individual to fight against injustice.
IHU On-Line - Would it be possible to trace Thoreau’s autobiographical effort in the Journals to some inspiration in classic literature? What was the origin of his almost obsessive interest in accounts in the first-person singular?
Jeffrey Cramer - It actually came from a discussion he had had with Emerson, who was perhaps Thoreau’s greatest influence, in which Emerson asked Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” From that day forth Thoreau wrote in his journal almost until, in his last year, he was too ill to do so.
IHU On-Line - When rendering accounts in the chapter called Economy Thoreau tells that he spent U$ 28,12 ½ to buy the materials for his cabin. Have you ever wondered what would be the equivalent amount of that in the present?
Jeffrey Cramer - It is equivalent to about $860 today.
IHU On-Line - What would a face to face conversation between Donald Trump and Thoreau look like? Would there be any urgent topic?
Jeffrey Cramer - Would not happen. Period. Thoreau would have found it a waste of his time to discuss political issues with a politician.
IHU On-Line - Could you give us a brief personal account of your activities in The Walden Woods Project? And also of the importance of the Thoreau Institute for the preservation of his legacy?
Jeffrey Cramer - As Curator of Collections for the Walden Woods Project I maintain the world’s most comprehensive collection of Thoreau-related material. I help people with their research on all aspects and at all levels, from Pulitzer Prize-winning scholars to high-school students, from writers to enthusiasts, whether in our Thoreau Institute library or over email, or talking with students around the world with our “Skype in the Classroom” program.
By collecting all work by and about Thoreau in one place – more than 60,000 items that include books, manuscripts, periodicals, art, music, maps, pamphlets, correspondence, and personal histories – we are stewards of his legacy. There is no comparable collection anywhere.
IHU On-Line - Would you like to add anything?
Jeffrey Cramer - Too often Thoreau is dismissed by those who know him by reputation and myth but have not taken the time to really read his works. I would recommend that anyone who is curious about this iconic American author take one of his books or essays or a selection form his journals and see for themselves. It may be one of the best things they do.
“Algo que ou não foi realizado, ou se o foi, não esteve a contento, seria o acompanhamento do Decreto Presidencial de Número 3810/2001, ou segundo a denominação completa, Acordo de Assistência Judiciária em Matéria Penal entre o Governo da República Federativa do Brasil e o Governo dos Estados Unidos da América, celebrado em Brasília, em 14 de outubro de 1997, corrigido em sua versão em português, por troca de Notas, em 15 de fevereiro de 2001”, escreve Bruno Lima Rocha.
Bruno Lima Rocha é doutor e mestre Ciência Política pela Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS, graduado em Jornalismo pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ e é professor de Relações Internacionais da Universidade do Vale do Rio do Sinos – UNISINOS.
Eis o artigo.
Para começarmos este debate, é necessário estabelecer uma pergunta-chave, algo que nos faça compreender o nível de vulnerabilidade que o Brasil sofre – ou vem sofrendo – dentro do Sistema Internacional, e especificamente quanto à soberania decisória.
“Quais são as vulnerabilidades externas que podem ser internalizadas no Estado brasileiro, de modo a violar nossa soberania e diminuir as posições do país no Sistema Internacional?”
Estamos na América Latina, nosso hegemon são os Estados Unidos da América - EUA, país com o qual hoje temos mais laços de dependência financeira, cibernética, cultural e em parte militar, do que necessariamente dependência econômica.
As violações de soberania e hostilidades, quando não se trata de operações especiais permanentes - como os EUA coordenam através do Estado Maior Conjunto de Forças Especiais - USSOCOM (ver socom.mil), particularmente pelo exército privado da Casa Branca (ver socom.mil/pages/jointspecialoperationscommand.aspx), podem se dar através de modalidades de ataque eletrônico, como os perpetrados pela NSA (Agência Nacional de Segurança, ver nsa.gov), agências afins ou forças-tarefa conjuntas. Outras modalidades de agressão vêm sendo debatidas nesta publicação, como as chamadas revoluções coloridas, a guerra de 4ª geração, ou a variável mais recente de guerra híbrida. A possibilidade bastante presente em países de sistema liberal-democrático e separação entre poderes, é a Guerra Legal (Lawfare) ou a guerra dentro do aparelho Judiciário e do Ministério Público dos países-alvo destas ações.
Ao tomar posse em 1º de janeiro de 2003, estou afirmando que o então presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva e sua equipe de governo, apesar de contar com a participação de dezenas de ex-guerrilheiros, jamais pensara nesta possibilidade. Se o fez, a efetividade foi nula (e o proceder dos ministros à frente da pasta da Justiça comprovam essa afirmação), pois não deixou para a sucessora uma mentalidade operacional de vigilância permanente sobre as possíveis dissidências dentro do aparelho de Estado a servirem de aliados internos das projeções de poder dos EUA sobre nós.
Quando digo atenção e alerta permanente, não estou me referindo a ter uma agenda do Executivo. Trata-se de uma atitude prévia à tomada de posse, partindo do princípio evidente que na América Latina, por mais abrandada que seja a postura de um governo marcado ao centro, sempre pode ter uma virada de mesa. Outra postura, que pode ser generalizada para outros países da Semi Periferia, em especial a Estados com capacidade de se tornarem Potências Médias, é a visão do hegemon sobre nós. Obviamente, esta preocupação deveria se materializar em alguma comissão de acompanhamento, ou grupo de trabalho, de extrema confiança política, poder de influência sobre as decisões do núcleo duro do governo e imune a “vazamentos” ou infiltrações.
Não há necessidade de explicar agora, após o golpe de 2016, as razões desta necessidade não realizada. Para além dos conflitos internos da sociedade brasileira, nas regras duras do Sistema Internacional, sabe-se que qualquer possibilidade de projeção de poder nacional que ultrapasse certos limites, ou que impeça a presença transnacional em setores estratégicos do capitalismo brasileiro, poderá ser vista como potencial hostilidade. Considerando o peso do Brasil no Continente e no eixo do Atlântico Sul, além das relações com a África, simplesmente Washington jamais poderia aceitar de modo passivo o crescimento do Estado brasileiro na mundialização capitalista. Esse aceite torna-se ainda mais improvável quando há inclinação para o estabelecimento de alguns acordos no âmbito dos BRICS (Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China e África do Sul).
Agrava a situação de partida quando se sabe que há uma profunda internalização de valores liberais e idealizações de sistemas de vida em sociedade dos países anglo-saxões (com os EUA no centro do imaginário da elite brasileira) em frações de classe e estamentos do Estado brasileiro.
A evidência do primeiro descontrole nas relações de cooperação judicial entre Brasil-EUA
Uma observação necessária, algo que ou não foi realizado, ou se o foi, não esteve a contento, seria o acompanhamento do Decreto Presidencial de Número 3810/2001, ou segundo a denominação completa, Acordo de Assistência Judiciária em Matéria Penal entre o Governo da República Federativa do Brasil e o Governo dos Estados Unidos da América, celebrado em Brasília, em 14 de outubro de 1997, corrigido em sua versão em português, por troca de Notas, em 15 de fevereiro de 2001.
O acordo Brasil-EUA, iniciado em 14 de outubro de 1997 (durante o primeiro mandato do governo de Fernando Henrique Cardoso - FHC), foi reiterado através de Decreto Presidencial No. 3810/2001 (ver http://migre.me/vHGW3), após um Decreto Legislativo de No. 262, de 18 de dezembro de 2000. Neste decreto presidencial, afirma-se que os termos do acordo só podem ser alterados com a aprovação do Congresso Nacional. Tais termos indicam no Artigo II, item 2, para operarem implicam uma autoridade central de cada país, sendo que no texto original, a centralidade brasileira estava com o Ministério da Justiça (MJ) e nos EUA, o Procurador-Geral ou pessoa por ele designada. No Artigo III, itens a), b) e c), constam todas as restrições para o acesso de informações do Estado Requerido pelo Estado Requerente. No item b), especificamente, os temas de que possam vir a prejudicar o Estado Requerido podem ser negados.
Como o Decreto 3810/2001 continua válido, logo se entende que não houve uma aprovação formal do Congresso Nacional para a transferência da autoridade central brasileira do MJ para a Procuradoria Geral da República - PGR. Se houve, não temos a publicidade necessária como pressuposto de serviço público. Se a autoridade central brasileira passou do MJ para a PGR, através de sua Secretaria de Cooperação Internacional - SCI, tal fato não é formalizado nem na própria página da SCI (ver: http://migre.me/vHH9I). Como, quando, por que, com o aval de quem, a Autoridade Central mudou, são perguntas que necessitam de respostas urgentes.
Concluímos este debate, demonstrando tanto o argumento central como resposta inconclusa da pergunta-chave, assim como apontando as evidências de possíveis descontroles e internalização do poder do hegemon dentro do Estado brasileiro. Se leitoras e leitores se mostraram apreensivos diante do que aqui foi exposto, reforço o temor e digo que mal começamos a desenvolver o tema.■
Expediente:
Coordenador do curso: Prof. Ms. Álvaro Augusto Stumpf Paes Leme
Editor: Prof. Dr. Bruno Lima Rocha