On Being a Native: Thoreau's Hermeneutics of SelfAuthor(s): Jane BennettSource: Polity, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 1990), pp. 559-580Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3234819Accessed: 28/11/2010 11:43

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On Being a Native: Thoreau's Hermeneutics of Self*

Jane Bennett Goucher College

Henry David Thoreau was jailed in Concord, Massachusetts, for refusing to pay taxes to support the U.S. war with Mexico. But the imprisonment that troubled him more was that which restrained his fellows from becoming individuals or "natives." This article explores Thoreau's vision of individuality, his conception of the ideal self and how it is cultivated. The author puts Thoreau's writings on civil disobedience into a larger context of his concerns about nature, friendship, and individuality.

Jane Bennett is Assistant Professor of Politics at Goucher College. She is the author of Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment: Nature and the State in a Post-Hegelian Era.

Would it not be worthwhile to ... be native to the universe? Henry Thoreau

What haunts Thoreau about civil disobedience is not, as one might ex- pect, the question of its justification.1 It is, rather, the fact of its infre- quency. Why are there so few who "serve the State with their consciences

*The author wishes to thank Charles Hersch, Michael Gibbons, and Timothy Reed for their help in preparing this essay.

1. I found an asymmetry between the concerns I brought to "Civil Disobedience" and the style of the text. I sought a theory of the proper aim of civil disobedience-policy reform? consciousness-raising? a life of integrity? I wanted to know when it was most ef- fective-after other strategies have failed? when one supports a principle implicit in but neglected by the larger culture? And what was its relationship to violent protest-an alter- native? a supplement? Was its scope a particular law or the system of legality? I wanted to know, in sum, the conditions under which "a deliberate and practical denial of... author- ity" was justified. Thoreau had things to say about these issues, but he was not governed by the demand for a "theory" of civil disobedience.

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560 On Being a Native

... and so necessarily resist it for the most part?" Why are "a hundred thousand merchants and farmers... not prepared to do justice ..., cost what it may"?2 Thoreau was less concerned to articulate the conditions under which disobedience would be legitimate than he was to explore those under which men could render themselves capable of disobedience. "Oh for a man who is a man!"3

For Thoreau, civil disobedience was rare because individuality is rare. Both are scarce because the process of forging a self into a true individual or "native" is arduous and precarious, requiring continuous effort. Michel Foucault uses the phrase "technology of the self" to describe the means by which humans effect "a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."4 My essay explores this "technological" dimension of Thoreau's writings.

I. Hegel, Thoreau, and Mutual Recognition

Thoreau's hermeneutics of self begins to appear when one compares it with that of Hegel, another thinker fascinated with the process of iden- tity formation. Hegel describes one of many failed experiments in the quest of consciousness to feel at home as an "I" in an environment ex- perienced as other. Those at the top of a social order of domination fail to achieve precisely that which is implicitly sought by each struggling I: recognition by another, worthy I. The quest for recognition is fundamen- tal to identity, for "self-consciousness exists . . . when, and by the fact that it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged."5 A self achieves its "unity" only in "duplication," i.e., only through the mirror of another.

At first it appears that "in order ... to become certain of itself as a true being" it is necessary to "sublate the other independent being." But this quest is self-defeating, for if either self succeeds "it ... proceeds to sublate its own self, for this other is itself."6 While the slave's identity is,

2. Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," in Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 226-28.

3. Ibid., p. 229. 4. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther

Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 18.

5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1977), paragraph 178.

6. Hegel: The Essential Writings, ed. Weiss (New York: Harper, 1974), p. 71.

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at least, reflected and affirmed in the product of his labor, the master, because he does not work and because he surrounds himself with beings below the threshold of subjectivity and unfit to confirm him to himself, is unable to achieve the identity he desires. The master's victory denies him the possibility of mutual affirmation, of reciprocal recognition of personhood, and of the ability to issue thoughts and judgments peculiar- ly his own. Hegel argues that to be a particular subject is to be psycho- logically, intellectually, and morally interdependent with other subjects, that the fundamental precondition of individuality is an intersubjective context.

The Thoreauian self does not need this sort of mutual recognition. It is more likely that others distort authentic self-understandings, which come from a properly prepared "inward life,"7 than help to reveal it. Loneli- ness is a sign not of the desire for mutual recognition with one on the same ontological plane, but of inadequate attention to the incipiently rich interior of the self.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters . .. has not heard from himself this long while.8

As carriers of gossip, moralisms, prejudices, and platitudes, one's fellows pose a hazard to the robustness of individuality. They can sterilize thought and normalize or render conventional a self. "Exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you!"9

Thoreau's vision of an inward life denies, at least rhetorically, that the conceptual content of "conscience" or "genius" is itself a social and cultural production. In statements like, "Follow your genius closely enough and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour,"10 Thoreau exaggerates the intellectual and moral autonomy of the individ-

7. The following comment by Emerson sheds some light on Thoreau in this regard:

Thoreau goes to a house to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any of the

company offer ..., nay, is merely interrupted by it.

In The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4), vol. IX, p. 34.

8. Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle," in Walden and Other Writings (New York: Bantam, 1982), p. 366.

9. Ibid., p. 368. 10. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Owen

Thomas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 76.

562 On Being a Native

ual. This philosophical insistence is an effective device for drawing atten- tion to the value of thought that self-consciously resists the tide of con- vention.

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way.1I

In this quotation sociality is portrayed as essentially parasitic, and an all- too-seductive state; note also that Thoreau is ready to attach himself only to full-blooded, i.e., strong and independent, fellows, for the typical ef- fect of human interaction is but to "give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."12

Typically, one's fellows are impediments to individuality. "In our dai- ly intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust."13 But Thoreau also wrote an essay on friendship, and true "Friends" do have the capacity to enhance individuality in so far as each challenges the other to reach for the nobility, divinity, and uniqueness within. However, both to be a Friend and to be challenged effectively by one requires that one is already well along the road to self-reliant individ- uality. To Hegel, mutual recognition is integral to the process of "I"-formation; for Thoreau, the procedures by which one crafts oneself into an individual must exist prior to Friendship, for Friends are already continent, i.e., disciplined, individuals.

The Friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas. Many are the dangers to be encountered, equinoctial gales and coral reefs .... But who would not sail through mutiny and storm ... to reach the fabulous retreating shores of some con- tinent man?14

The Hegelian "other" who confirms one's sense of "I" is a role easily filled: he is a human being of comparable intelligence. Thoreau's "Friend," on the other hand, is extremely rare. He must be able not only to understand and acknowledge another "I" as "I," but also to ennoble it by evoking its inherent virtue.15 True friends have "treated us not as

11. Ibid., p. 90. 12. Ibid., p. 91. 13. Henry Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl Hovde

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 267. His essay on friendship is incor-

porated into "Wednesday." 14. Ibid., p. 262. 15. Friends, as "two solitary stars" (Ibid., p. 288), cannot add anything to the character

of each other. Rather, a Friend draws out and uncovers that fineness which I can only im-

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what we were, but as what we aspired to be."'6 Friends are "transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence"; each is "purified, re- fined, and elevated."17 The qualities required to be a Friend are so rare that "perhaps there are none charitable, none disinterested, none wise, noble, and heroic enough, for a true and lasting Friendship."'8

Another area of contrast between Hegel and Thoreau concerns the role of language. Hegel's crystallization/affirmation of individual identity proceeds, significantly but not exclusively, through language. In the course of mutual discussion, each respects and affirms the existence and value of the opinions, beliefs, and thought-processes of the other. For Thoreau, the relationship of language and Friendship is less amicable- writing is preferable to speech because it affords more distance between persons, but even writing is inessential:

The Friend responds silently through his nature and life .... The language of Friendship is not words but meanings. It is an intelli- gence above language.19

Beware, lest thy Friend learn at last to tolerate one frailty of thine ... There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends, when we begin inevitably to profane one another, and must with- draw religiously into solitude and silence, the better to prepare our- selves for a loftier intimacy. Silence is the ambrosial night in the in- tercourse of Friends .. .20

Language, as the quintessential collective product, is not only a vehicle of conformity, it also transmits the particularity of the self indiscrimin- ately, letting through what is "hostile or indifferent" to one's Friend as easily as what is "kindred and harmonious."21 Despite the perpetual possibility of misunderstood words, language is still a too direct, a too accurate form of communication, a too wide conduit of self to other.

Silence and reserve are keys to friendship, as is the willingness to sur- round oneself with a layer of sheer space.

agine is within me: "We [friends] must accept or refuse one another as we are. I could tame a hyena more easily than my Friend. He is a material which no tool of mine will work."

(Ibid., pp. 283-84). 16. Ibid., p. 259. 17. Ibid., p. 266. 18. Ibid., p. 277. 19. Ibid., p. 273. 20. Ibid., p. 272. 21. Ibid., p. 273.

564 On Being a Native

I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a com- panion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear. .... If we speak reservedly and thought- fully, we want to be further apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate.22

Physical distance allows thoughts to emerge, and be sent and received, beyond the fray of conventional truths or biological desires.

The mutual recognition commended by Hegel takes place through or- dinary (non-enslaving) social relations. Thoreau's Friendship is a counter to the human tendency toward social entanglement. Between Friends, "let there be no acquaintance."23

The hunter [for friendship] has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants. However, our fates at least are social .... [A]s the web of destiny is woven ... we are cast more and more into the centre .... We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not of difference.24

Why do one's fellows rarely invigorate individuality and instead erode and irritate it? Because, Thoreau suggests, humans are in general insuffi- ciently other to one another.25 It is too easy to become familiar with one's own kind and familiarity breeds conformity, homogeneity. The antidote includes not only solitude but a sustained relationship with Nature, the realm of being that eludes and exceeds human reason. Thoreauian individuality requires contrast rather than mirroring; his identity insists upon difference, upon a greater diversity of experiences than that available among humans alone.

II. The Return of the Native

We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features.... We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.26

It is, then, only in the presence of an unfamiliar set of entities and creatures, and apart from convention and civilization, that one can dis-

22. Walden, pp. 94-95. 23. A Week, p. 279. 24. Ibid., p. 264. 25. Roger Scruton makes an argument about the moral value of difference in Sexual

Desire (New York: Free Press, 1986). 26. Walden, p. 210.

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cover what it is that makes one unique. And only upon that base is it possible to construct a character, a conscience, a personal identity-an individual. The "friendliness" of Nature is "unaccountable," and therein lies its peculiar value.27 Only immersed in Nature is it possible to discern the remainder that would be left of the self were all common traits and thoughts to evaporate. This hypothetical remainder is also a very real core, for it represents one's authentic self. "Not until we are completely lost, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. ... Not till we ... have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves."28

The ideal self lives in the presence of Nature, but must have the right presence toward it: the attitude of a "native." Only then does Nature "publish" the truth of each individual.29 "I the home-staying, laborious native of the soil"30 refers to the man who spent a whole summer hoeing beans, but it describes also the man who pays attention first and most closely to his immediate surroundings, who listens to the voice of nature, who gives an "account" of the signs and structures he watches.

"Prospecting ... into the unexplored solitude around us," Thoreau is not seduced by the California gold rush: "Is not our native soil auriferous?"31 There are incomparible riches on this very spot at this very moment: "0 the evening robin. . .! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig. '32

A native looks down and observes unique particulars in Nature, but the minutia of the wilderness fly upward to expose an ordered, if still somewhat mysterious, universe. Thoreau's account in Walden often con-

27. Ibid., pp. 88-89. 28. Walden, pp. 114-15. 29. The native is much like Thoreau's Poet, whose

voice will not proceed from her midst, but, breathing on her, will make her the ex- pression of his thought. He then poetizes when he takes a fact out of nature into Spirit. He speaks without reference to time or place. His thought is one world, hers another. He is another Nature-Nature's brother. Kindly offices do they perform for one another. Each publishes the other's truth.

Quoted by Perry Miller in "Thoreau in the Context of International Romanticism," in Walden, p. 393.

In The American Transcendentalists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), p. 69, Miller describes the link for Thoreau between self-discovery and the observation of Nature: "An assiduous observation of Nature throws him who would most suppress his own self back upon an even more acute sense of his own identity, of his utter uniqueness."

30. Walden, p. 105. 31. "Life Without Principle," p. 363. 32. Walden, p. 206.

566 On Being a Native

veys this up-down/down-up theme. Fishing one night, he was startled by a bite:

It was very queer ... when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmological themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward. . 33

The native, with his ear to the ground, can hear angels singing. The provincial man, quite another creature, is merely close to the social dirt, to local prejudices.

To perceive the world as a native is to discover not only an intimacy of earth and universe, but also a link between individual and cosmos. One looks down at Nature and then up to the heavens, and then down to one- self now revealed as a meaningful part of a whole. Again using spatial imagery, Thoreau asks: "Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?"34 One can hear in these words an echo of the view of nature as a vast web of divinely implanted resemblances. For Aldrovandi in 1647, for example, the human face was a microcosm of the sky: twinkling eyes for stars, a mouth that was an opening onto love like Venus, a nose that was the image of Jove's sceptre and Mercury's staff.35 And for Paracelsus, "fire can radiate warmth through the walls of the stove, although ... the fire does not go through the stove; in the same way, the human body can act at a distance while remaining in one place."36 In deploying similar language, Thoreau suggests that while Nature, fortu- nately, is alien enough to provoke self-revelation, it is at the same time, as a link in the chain of being, at one with us.

It is this kinship in difference which situates and anchors the unique particularity of each individual and marks the divergence between Thoreauian individuality and an atomistic view. For Thoreau the ideal self is autonomous only with regard to conventional social life; he is very much intertwined with the cosmos: "Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever."37 The up/down experience unites the tasks of naturalist

33. Ibid., p. 117. 34. Ibid., p. 10. 35. Quoted in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 19. 36. Paracelsus, Selected Writings, ed. Jolande Jacobi (New York: Pantheon, 1958), p.

43. 37. "Life Without Principle," p. 367.

Jane Bennett 567

observation and self-reflection. It bestows both with a larger moral purpose.38

There is indeed a partner in the formation of Thoreauian individuality, and there is reciprocity in his dialectic, as in Hegel's. Nature provides partly legible and most assuredly benevolent "higher laws"; the I, for its part interprets and witnesses Nature. The self interacts with an other, Nature, that is more other/rich than another self but not so alien/dense that no relationship of meaning is possible. After all, says Thoreau, "Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?"39 The native relates to this partner in the construction and maintenance of individual- ity as, perhaps, a long-lost relative, through whom one renews one's sense of genealogy at the same time that one is made acutely aware of how one's own self is a unique permutation of family traits.

III. The Accountant and the Poet

Self-discovery occurs through the observation of Nature, that is, through a sensitive noting of one's immediate surroundings. Thoreau repeatedly attempts to provide what science and philosophy lack, i.e., a "true and absolute account of things."40 Thoreau reports life at Walden, through careful, detailed observations which are often tedious to read because they are left untheorized. These observations outweigh, at least in terms of volume, the nuggets of poetic analysis interspersed with them. An ac- countant not only of his household budget but of the natural economy, Thoreau, in a way that prefigures Heidegger's critique of enframing and endorsement of "letting be,"41 often listens to the world without attempting to do anything-physical or conceptual-to it.

Despite this, the native is not a passive being. The self-reliant man who hoes beans, raises a house, chops wood, walks for miles, and bakes bread does so with his whole heart and soul. The impassioned poet shares the text with the detached scribe:

I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by

38. Nature stabilizes an identity, but at the same time its awesome scope and majesty af- fords some protection against the human tendency to reify one's unique inclinations, con- victions, facilities into universal standards of behavior. Each individual is so small, and the chain of being so great.

39. Walden, p. 93. 40. "Life Without Principle," p. 364. 41. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,

trans. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977).

568 On Being a Native

which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious ... of a part of me, which ... is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it.42

The native is simultaneously recording spectator for the non-lingual universe and an all-too-human individual of passionate response. Thoreau's prose, in which the reporting mode alternates with the poetic, mirrors this duality.

Thoreau is thus double in that he is both a subjective agent with the potential for submersion in intense personal experience and an objective agent capable of dispassionate awareness of minimally mediated facts of Nature, e.g., a bird's song, an insect in flight.43 While there is, in theory, a tension between a chanticleer of sentiment and a chronicler of data, for the native it is quite possible-indeed, crucial-to live in this tension. For as we have seen, when the native carefully, objectively notes the facts of Nature, his reward is a heightening of subjective individuality.44

But Thoreau's notion of doubleness operates at a second level as well. Here the doubleness of which he speaks refers to the fact that he is both a self-conscious agent and a mere object. "He" is acutely conscious of and can articulate his interior thought, his character, his dual capacity for ex- perience and spectation. But, also, "he" is something that does not think but stands by as an object among objects in Nature, as an object for con- templation. The self-conscious, reflective I-Thoreau moves in tandem with the it-Thoreau that stands "as remote from myself as from another."

The ideal self is one doubled over: he is in partnership with Nature; and the multiple "he's" are in changing but deliberate partnerships with each other. Through the duplicity of experience/observation, he finds himself to be enmeshed with Nature; through the duality of subject- hood/objecthood, he reflexively engages himself.

42. Walden, p. 91. 43. Thoreau mentions this first doubleness again in a journal entry of April 2, 1852. But

there it is described not as a simultaneous state but as a doubleness experienced over a lifetime: one side, "susceptibility" to feelings about Nature, exists in youth; the other, "discrimination," is characteristic of adulthood.

How few valuable observations can we make in youth! What if there were united the susceptibility of youth with the discrimination of age? Once I was part and parcel of Nature; now I am observant of her.

44. Perry Miller has argued that Thoreau achieved at Walden, through this doubleness, a precarious but beautiful solution to the Romantic dilemma of how to strike a "balance be- tween object and reflection, of fact and truth, of minute observation and generalized con- cept." ("Thoreau in Context ... ," p. 393).

Jane Bennett 569

Thoreau explicitly acknowledges a doubleness of self, but this does not imply that the ideal self (capable of civil disobedience) is fragmented. He remains individual. Thoreau posits a core of self that the native uncovers and uses to render himself a coherent whole, much as a magnet unites metal pieces of various shapes and functions.

IV. The Living Kernel

Some of Thoreau's themes-the superiority of a simple, more natural life, the awareness that civilization is a two-edged sword-recall Rousseau. Walden attempts "to show at what a sacrifice this advantage [civilization] is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disad- vantage."45 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality pursues the first task, and On the Social Contract pursues the second. Their responses to the problem of how to "combine the hardiness of... savages with the intel- lectualness of the civilized man" flow, however, in different directions.4 Thoreau cultivates an individuality where the particularity of the self is leavened by experience of the universal in Nature; Rousseau pursues a virtuous community where "each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before."47

Nevertheless, there is a link between Thoreau and Rousseau, perhaps bound to their similar rhetorical styles, that remains: both presuppose an inner core of identity that is sullied by civilization, and both endeavor to reveal or recapture it in a civil state. And for both this requires frugality, simplicity, and rusticity. The assumption of a true self in Rousseau is evi- dent in Emile's training, designed to preserve a precious natural soul while educating and perfecting it. Thoreau also points to a nucleus of self, often through the "nut" metaphor. Manners or civilized behavior (shells) mask the authentic character (the meat):

It is the vice but not the excellence of manners, that they are con- tinually being deserted by the character; they are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged to the living creature. You are presented with the shells instead of the meat.... The man who thrusts his manners upon me . . . introduc[es] ... me to his cabinet of curiosities when I wished to see himself.48

45. Walden, p. 21. 46. Ibid., p. 8. 47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Masters (New York: St.

Martin's, 1978), p. 53. 48. "Life Without Principle," p. 370.

570 On Being a Native

Thoreau also says that to pursue "worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty" is to act "as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us."49

The reality of the living kernel is clear for Thoreau, its existence guar- anteed perhaps by the divine ensoulment of each human. But it needs constant care. The man who hopes to have it govern him must be diligent and determined. "I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself."50 In fact, growing the living kernel, which seems to have a decidely intellectual and moral bent (although Thoreau is less clear about its content than about its function as the locus of individuality), is a lot like growing beans. The chapter in Walden on "The Bean-Field" works, I believe, as an allegory of self-cultivation. Thoreau devoted a summer to husbandry not because he "wanted beans to eat, ... but ... for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day."51

What does Thoreau's account of bean growing reveal about his tech- niques of selfhood? The chapter centers around hoeing. In the rich, virgin soil of Walden (the unorganized self with its many potentialities), weeds will compete with the favored plant (the living kernel). On my reading, the living kernel stands for that which is unique to each self; the weeds include everything else-internalized norms, non-consciously chosen ideas, cultural definitions of material necessities, truisms, unreflective biological urges. These last are troublesome because they have the power to supercede reflection and prevent an independent judg- ment. The favored plant, by definition the one against the many, is not likely to flourish without the aid of a conscientious gardener. In short, if one is "determined to know beans,"52 one must be willing to engage in a "small Herculean labor"53 of weeding "from five o'clock in the morning till noon."54 This exhausting work is, however, for the sake of a most precious plant; Thoreau calls his hoeing "self-respecting."55

To hoe beans, or to cultivate one's higher self by weeding out other

49. Ibid., p. 369. Thoreau continues with this theme in a critique of the obsession with

making a living: "Commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres I make of their land-since I am a surveyor .... They never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell" (p. 355).

50. Ibid., p. 355. 51. Walden, p. 108. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., p. 103. 54. Ibid., p. 108. 55. Ibid., p. 103 (my emphasis).

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dimensions of self is, we learn next, to come into contact with other "cultivators of the soil."56

As I drew still fresher soil about the rows of my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of . . . nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens.... They lay mingled with other natural stones.... When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop.57

Others who have managed to become natives are inspirational models. Thoreau remembers these ancient gardeners with a respect even while he views his fellows in town "with as much pity as pride."58

Beans require daily attention, but they do not require esoteric knowl- edge. Anybody can grow them, i.e., everyone has the capacity if not the will, for beans let you know what they need. "My beans ... were impa- tient to be hoed .. .; indeed they were not easily to be put off."59 Beans put pressure on the gardener to hoe; the living kernel of identity, also called conscience, speaks with a clear voice, commanding discipline of historically and culturally contingent aspects of personality and then of bodily urges which can mask or overpower what is unique to the self.

But Thoreau urges caution when disciplining the body. The next lesson in the parable of the bean-field is that over-cultivation ruins the soil. Thoreau deliberately hoes alone, using only the simplest hand tools, and so his weeding is crude and not highly effective. His bean-field has the special status of "the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and other savage . ., my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field."60

He is troubled by the recognition that from the perspective of the non- human inhabitants of Walden, beans are weeds. His sweat has made "the earth say beans instead of grass,"61 but he wonders "what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their [the woodchucks'] ancient herb garden?"62

The ideal self must not exclude sensations, urges, desirings, that, while rooted in a perceptual apparatus common to all humans and thus

56. Ibid., p. 106. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 103. 60. Ibid., p. 106. 61. Ibid., p. 105. 62. Ibid., p. 104.

572 On Being a Native

suspect, might also open a window onto one's own, true self. Thoreau seems also to suggest that violence is done to the self, as to Nature, in making it conform too closely to the rule of rational reflection. He longs for a reflective, moral being who can "rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds."63

The native, accommodating both the need to hoe and the rights of the weeds, practicing both moral self-discipline and a child-like openness to truths of Nature which are one's own, is such a self. It becomes clear, then, that Thoreau's native is made, not born. He is a conscious self- creation. Born into a world of conventions, norms, beliefs, into Heideg- ger's they-world, 64 the ideal self must learn to undo the conformities and dependencies built into her without sinking into beastly life.

The native disciplines herself not only through the voice of conscience but through the will to refrain from moral judgment. Only then will she be open to the cosmos. The will to refrain is developed through a sus- tained relationship with Nature, whose sheer complexity and grandeur can overwhelm consciousness of one's self as distinct from all being. To over-weed is to deny Nature a place in the self and to deny the self a place in the universe. In a true native, a reason-disciplined mind turns up im- portant truths that are not reason-derived.

Perhaps the facts most astounding and more real are never com- municated by man to man. The true harvest of daily life is... a lit- tle stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.65

Something extraordinary happens while Thoreau hoes his beans; he finds them to be "cheerfully returning to their . . . primitive state."66

V. The Good and the Wild

But the tension between cultivation and authenticity crops up again in Walden in the chapter "Higher Laws," this time in the form of a conflict within the self between "the good" and "the wild." After recounting a startling incident where he "was strongly tempted to seize and devour .. [a woodchuck] raw," Thoreau experiences yet another form of doubleness: "I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a

63. Ibid., p. 111. 64. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper, 1962), chapter

IV. 65. Walden, p. 144. 66. Ibid., p. 106.

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higher, or ... spiritual life,... and another toward a primitive rank and savage one."67 Just as he concluded earlier that the chanticleer must co- exist with the chronicler, and human agent with human object, Thoreau now claims to "love the wild not less than the good."68 His spiritual side is "higher," but he reveres them both.

But does he? As the chapter unfolds, the self that in "The Bean-Field" incorporated the power of Nietzsche's Dionysus, now has affinities to a certain sort of asceticism. Nature, or the external environment in its wild state, remains important as a fund of difference for the creation of a robust individual, but Thoreau's estimation of the difference interior to the self-"the wild" or "the weeds"-seems to have gone down.

On behalf of his claim to love the wild in himself, Thoreau offers a defense of the urge to hunt or, more specifically, a defense of getting out in the woods and onto the ponds where "Nature is not afraid to exhibit herself."69 If a bloodlust brings you in contact with this benevolent, moralizing force, then it too is something to love. Thoreau qualifies his love of the hunter in himself in another way: it is an attitude appropriate to youth only. His higher instinct has the floor when he says that "no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does."70 The savage instinct, a "stage of development" to pass beyond, is indeed "the most original part of himself" but temporal priority does not bestow moral priority, which belongs, as we have seen, to "the good" or the living kernel. Insofar as the savage instinct exposes the in- dividual to intimacy with Nature, thus strengthening the living kernel, it is lovable-in children. The adult goes ahunting and afishing for truth, and for that no gun or rod is needed. Political concerns and social con- ventions must also be shed; only the doubleness of experience and specta- tion is required, that "hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait."71

Another manifestation of the wild is appetite. Again, this dimension of self is lovable insofar as it can be transmuted into something support- ive of the good. Eat only "to sustain our animal" (a "fried rat" if necessary) or to "inspire our spiritual life" (as with berries so beautiful they provoke poetry). The ideal is to eat in such a way that does "not of- fend the imagination"72-a difficult task, for there seems to be an in-

67. Ibid., p. 140. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., p. 141. 71. Ibid., p. 142. 72. Ibid., p. 143.

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verse relationship between appetite for food and the "higher or poetic faculties": "Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live ... by preying on other animals; but this is a miser- able way."73 The individual, in order to be led "that way ... his road lies" should listen not to appetite but "to the faintest but constant sug- gestions of his genius, which are certainly true."74 Conscience or genius nags; the living kernel demands to be hoed. And this higher instinct never errs: "No man ever followed his genius till it misled him."75 There is a sacrifice involved in this life of reverent observation-"bodily weakness"-but "no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted."76

VI. Thoreau, Augustine, and Continence

By the end of "Higher Laws," the wild, which Thoreau claimed to love, has become "slimy, beastly life" and "reptile." But "it... perhaps can- not be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, oc- cupy our bodies." This necessary evil, the wild, is also an evil necessary to good, for its "generative energy" can be consciously reordered into that which is higher. How does one "transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion?"77 Nativism, an intense sen- sory awareness of the universal at one's feet, is one way. Thoreau intro- duces "continence" as another.

This existential stance of chastity, moderation in appetite, drink, and even sleep assures "that the animal is dying out ... and the divine ... established."78 Continence, "a command over our passions and over the external senses of the body"79 is a mode of the self-cultivation discussed earlier in "The Bean-Field." Thoreau signals this relationship by repeat- ing the Hercules imagery-hoeing is "a small Herculean labor"; as for continence, "if you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable."80

Thoreau's discussion here, in particular its religious vocabulary and insistent focus on purity, evokes Augustine, who also developed a notion of continence. For Augustine, continence works in tandem with self-

73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., p. 144. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., p. 146. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., p. 147.

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examination or confession. To gain control over the body requires identi- fication of the characteristic strongholds it has over the spirit. And to confess those sins is to take the first step toward subjecting the self to spiritual laws. Book X of his Confessions opens with a prayer that links self-knowledge to self-revelation to God: "Let me know you, my known; Let me know Thee even as I am known."'8 The exemplary self is under an injunction to probe its innermost regions, and this self-inquisition knows no bounds-even dreams are sites for investigation:

Certainly you command me to restrain myself from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world.... But there still live in that memory of mine . . . images . . which ... come ... in sleep.82

Self-examination is central also to Thoreau's ideal. Thoreau himself, and not only Nature, is an object of unrelenting observation.83 Indeed, the native experiences the true intimacy of these two objects: "I ... see a crimson cloud in the horizon .... This red vision excites me, . . . makes my thoughts flow, and I have new and indescribable fancies."84 The self capable of civil disobedience must be thoroughly familiar with the in- terior moral judge, and this familiarity is bred by regular checks of one's interior.

For Augustine, continence requires confession because the self is a cloudy pool that must be purified before it is ready to receive God. Augustine's ideal self, like Thoreau's, is an arduous achievement. Using agricultural metaphors in much the same way as Thoreau, Augustine describes his confessional quest: "For me, Lord, this is hard labor, hard labor inside myself, and I have become to myself a piece of difficult ground, not to be worked over without much sweat."'85 We do not find in Augustine, however, even the fickle warning of Thoreau against over- cultivation of self. Given Augustine's view of the deeply entrenched nature of carnality, too much weeding can not appear as a danger. Thoreau fears that excessive intellectual discipline might diminish rich experience of Nature and its transcendental possibilities; since Nature does not contain these possibilities for Augustine, sensory experience cannot be so valued.

81. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner, (New York: Mentor, 1963), p. 210.

82. Ibid., p. 237. 83. See Perry Miller, The American Transcendentalists, p. 69. 84. Thoreau's Journal, December 25, 1851. 85. Confessions, p. 226.

576 On Being a Native

Augustine, like Thoreau, does presuppose an inner core of identity; this soul is precious because of its possibilities (for holiness):

And now, my soul, I say to you that you are my better part; you animate the whole bulk of the body, giving it life-a thing which no body can do. ... It is by my soul herself that I shall ascend to Him.86

The Augustinian soul lacks the vitality and goodness that seems to infuse Thoreau's "living kernel." The soul is marred by an original sinfulness that reaches below individual will. Although Thoreau speaks too of a shamefulness in our nature, his formulation does not match Augustine's self-renunciation. Thoreau softens his version of original sin with "perhaps," "I fear," and "to some extent":

Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the in- ferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts ... and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.87

Despite original sin, for both Thoreau and Augustine there is a non- corporeal part of the self capable of redemption (Augustine) or worthy of cultivation (Thoreau). For both, moreover, continence is the will to resist bodily imperialism (or "lust," "concupiscence," "drunkenness," to use Augustinian terms). Continence comes from the Latin continere, which means to hold together, to re-press parts into a whole; in geography a continent is a continuous body of land, of a whole piece. In Augustine this unifying function of continence comes to the fore. He first explores the possibility of overcoming body-soul doubleness by eliminating all that is bodily, but finds this impossible, for while fasting and chastity can eliminate some carnality, perception and memory, themselves dependent upon the body, are ineradicable. The Augustinian remedy for doubleness, then, is not to eradicate one side of the self but to subdue it so thoroughly that there is no longer a conflict. Continence, which liberates the self from the tumultous activity of multiple senses, is the earthly approximation of the unity of self before the Fall. And this willful unification has beneficial consequences for communion with God: only the self who is one can be one with the One God. Note how continence is both a psychological and a spiritual elixir, how it simul- taneously ensures sanity and innoculates against polytheism: "Certainly it is by continence that we are brought together and brought back to the

86. Ibid., pp. 215-16. 87. Walden, p. 146.

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One, after having dissipated ourselves among the Many."88 The re- pressed, continent self is an ordered whole, united with itself and thus open to unity with God.

Thoreau likewise views continence as a way to resolve an existential tension, but he emphasizes, in a way Augustine does not, the creative potential of bodily experience. Says Thoreau: "The generative energy, which when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us."89 For Augustine, the senses do provide "reports" of the outside world ("the inner man knew . .. things by means of the ministry of the outer man"90), but the body's urges and

capacities are not inspirational or ennobling. There is no doubt that it is difficult, according to Thoreau, to extract

this potential from the body ("from exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality"91). But the unreconstructed self from which Thoreau creates the true individual is more susceptible to a consciously chosen identity than is the sinful creature Augustine describes. Thoreau speaks of a John Farmer, who upon hearing a flute, found awakened in himself "certain faculties which slumbered," and all that was left to do was for him "to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever in- creasing respect."92 Continence, like hoeing, is self-respecting labor. The living kernel, itself divine, already exists in each self and needs only to be re-activated by continence or a "new austerity."

Because of the inherent potential of the self for the higher, Thoreau's ideal does not require the powerful external agency of a God who inex- plicably bestows grace. It does require a non-human entity, but Nature, having less subjectivity than God (just how much it has remains obscure), throws the bulk of responsibility for self-cultivation upon each particular individual-in-the-making.93

88. Confessions, p. 236. 89. Walden, p. 146. The white water lily symbolizes for Thoreau this creative potential:

"what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth." From "Slavery in Massachusetts," in Civil Disobedience in America, ed. David Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 168.

90. Confessions, p. 215. 91. Walden, p. 146. 92. Ibid., p. 148. 93. Nature, the essential other, is also accessible, if only sporadically, from within the

appropriate nativist stance. This is not to say that Thoreau does not make appeals to God as the author of higher law: "The question is ... whether you will, for once and at last, serve God ... by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being" ("Slavery in Massachusetts," p. 166). Thoreau's God, however, is both less mysterious and less active in earthly affairs than is Augustine's.

578 On Being a Native

Christian influences surface in Thoreau's use of the techniques of self- reflection and continence to discipline the unruly beast within the in- dividual. But his thought draws upon Greek as well as Christian ideals. An example of this is his use of the term "devil," when, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he says that Friendship is rare and sporadic because "everyone has a devil in him."94 This devil refers to those aspects of self which, while not necessarily base or beastly, conflict with the priorities, desires, or tendencies of one's Friend. It refers also to extravagant emotions and thoughtless urges, to intemperateness within the self: "It is proof of a man's fitness for Friendship that he is able to do without that which is cheap and passionate."95 But even these cheap and passionate dimensions are not placed within a Christian framework of "sin" or "flesh" or "concupiscence." Indeed, his conception of virtue or nobility is, as he calls it, downright "heathenish":

Friendship . . . consists with a certain disregard for men and their erections, the Christian duties and humanities, while it purifies the air like electricity .... We may call it an essentially heathenish in- tercourse, free and irresponsible in its nature, and practicing all the virtues gratuitously. It is not the highest sympathy merely, but a pure and lofty intercourse . . . which . .. does not hesitate to dis- regard the humbler rites and duties of humanity. . . . When the Friend ... forgets his mythology, and treats his Friend like a Chris- tian, . . . then Friendship ceases to be Friendship. ..96

VII. Building the Civil Disobedient

Every man is the builder of a temple ... to the god he worships.... We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.97

I have read Thoreau to be an architect of an ideal self, of what one might describe as a self-reliant individual. Let me summarize the tools and tech- niques by which this edifice may be built.

(1) Social Recalcitrance. This technique enables one to resist the allure of conventional wisdom and the comfort of conformity which can mas- querade as "community" or "neighborliness" or "decency." It involves periodic withdrawal from social intercourse. It even can include bouts of

94. A Week, p. 284. 95. Ibid., p. 274. 96. Ibid., p. 276. 97. Walden, p. 147.

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self-induced aphasia, or at the very least a wariness of language and a new respect for silence and aloofness. This withdrawal should be accom- panied by

(2) Microvision. This refers to a deliberate and keen attention to the minutia of the natural physical world, where one refrains from the urge to interpret or contextualize what one sees: the trees, not the forest.

(3) Nativism. This requires an alertness to perceptual experience and an openness to spiritual dimensions of that robin, that twig. The native's immersion in minutia ushers in a distinct sense of its link to the order of the universe and to oneself. These links are revealed more than they are conceptualized or theorized. Nativism includes a lifestyle of material simplicity.

(4) Weeding. Through this technique one disciplines those aspects of self that draw one back toward that which is simply bodily or simply con- ventional.

(5) Self-Investigation. One explores one's interior mental space or character or conscience. Thoreau himself demonstrates this technique in his articulation of the complex notion of doubleness. Reflexivity allows the self access to the living kernel.

(6) Living in Doubleness. Here one wards off the attempt to see oneself as either objective or subjective, or as either subject or object.

(7) Friendship. The self in pursuit of individuality will seek out those who goad him, who demand that nobility rise to the surface and show itself.

Like many others, I first turned to Thoreau because of an interest in civil disobedience, in the question of how citizens might protest unjust forms of state power. Thoreau led me down a somewhat different path-to reflection into the type of self capable of an act of conscien- tious dissent (or consent) and into the processes through which that in- dividual may come into being.

Not "What is civil disobedience?" but "Who can be disobedient to civil authority?" This approach throws a different light on the practice of civil disobedience and generates a new set of questions: Given Thoreau's understanding of the relationship of the individual to society, to Friends, and to Nature, what are the prospects today for the forma- tion of self-reliant individuals? Are Thoreauian techniques of self ade- quate to challenges posed by contemporary forms of power?

As the Chinese students have recently shown, acts of courage against the state still exist, despite the fact that no political dissidents arrested to- day are likely to spend time in Thoreau's jail where cells are "white- washed monthly" and where they serve "a pint of chocolate with brown

580 On Being a Native

bread for breakfast."98 But what happens to Friendship, for example, in an intensively interdependent world where solitude and retreat involve great hardship or sums of money? And can "the environment" play the role of Nature whose otherness enables a conventional self to become an individual? Can the native still flourish in a world where Walden is a "$2.5 million state erosion control and beautification project that in- cludes construction of a path around the pond?"99

98. "Civil Disobedience," pp. 237-238. 99. "Crowds, Commerce and Conflict at Thoreau's Walden," Washington Post,

1 August 1988, p. Al.