He writes that government's authority is "impure. The movement toward democracy constitutes progress toward true respect for the individual.
However, democracy is not the last step that can be made. He says that he dreams of a State that respects the individual, a State that would not mind if a few individuals even chose to live independent of it altogether. This kind of State would prepare the way for an even more "perfect and glorious State. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Summary Section Three. Page 1 Page 2. Summary Thoreau now turns to his personal experiences with civil disobedience.
Popular pages: Civil Disobedience. Take a Study Break. As we begin our process of downsizing our lives to fit within a tiny space we start to realize how much we need and what it is we can do without. We keep with us the necessary things to enhance our lives. It seems to me that Living Deliberately is the most important thread in the tiny house movement and this desire was fed by the life that Thoreau built for himself in his tiny cabin in the woods. You can also join our Small House Newsletter!
Thank you! Nailed it. For me, at least! Living Deliberately. DEEP stuff. I wonder, tho, how difficult Thoreau would find it in this present age? We are over crowded, over governed, over regulated, over stimulated, over concerned.
Are we trapped by progress? Now how do I extricate myself? I am working on that and slowly but surely, the physical constraints are lessening. I then think about how half the human population would love to trade places with me! There really is a season for everything. What can man do to me? For me, that makes a lot of sense. Man can try to direct my lot in life. But if I remember the REAL reason for life, the physical trappings of life, or lack thereof, do not matter.
All of the physical stuff falls away and the beam becomes sharp and focused. Taking care of the BIG issue makes the little things fall into place. It feels pretty peaceful…. Wow thanks so much for sharing GW. Such an interesting point about life and how we as humans always seem to have these evolving sets of desires. Always leaving us wanting something else. Just my thoughts! Thanks again and wishing you well.. Hi, Yiy are absolutely right, I had life b4 like milions others.
Happy me — did not have mortgage. I lost much, worked for money and having…. Was slave of work, apt buildings and bbq. He responded, I got wonderful wife, woman of God. Then became New Christian. According to Thoreau, how should individuals relate to the law and why? Men and women should value the right more than the law because the law, decided by mere numbers and not moral principles, may not embody the right.
But in leaving all issues — the expedient and ethical — up to the majority, when justice is at stake, it cannot be just because the majority will inevitably violate the conscience of someone. Here he uses it in the plural. I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
How is voting like betting? They are both passive. In both we relinquish our ability to influence outcomes through action. In both hope takes the place of action. When we bet, we put our money down and hope that our team wins.
When we vote, we put our money down and hope that our candidate wins. On what grounds does Thoreau believe the majority will make its decision? On the grounds of expediency, on what will be most useful to the greatest number of people.
According to Thoreau, when is the majority likely to vote for morality and justice? The majority is likely to vote for morality and justice when the issue has already been decided, when it takes no courage to vote for the right, when, in other words, its vote no longer matters.
All voting is a sort of gaming , like checkers or backgammon [a dice game], with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail.
There is naked Nature,—inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. The ocean can be beautiful, but here Thoreau describes the very inhumane sincerity that gives the ocean its character.
As much as the water supports a lively world below its surface, it harbors within it dead, decaying bodies that find little rest among the nonstop agitations and undulations of the waves.
While the popular perception of Thoreau can focus on his desire to preserve nature, its beauty, and its inspiring qualities, Thoreau does not ignore the potential danger that constitutes a great portion of nature. The ocean could carry commerce and people from continent to continent, but it could also toss boats around, sink them, and drown their passengers. Thoreau, therefore, was not blind to the immense power and dangers of nature, and he knew well the fear this could generate.
Ktaadn, which stands 5, feet high and is located almost in the center of Maine. Thoreau was not ready for the feeling of dislocation he would be subjected to as he crossed a rugged, lightning-charred portion of the mountain; being outside of commonly-encountered surroundings and traversing the harsh portion of Ktaadn, Thoreau explains,. Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature , or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain.
We were passing over Burnt Lands, burnt by lightning. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.
I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,— that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me. Talk of mysteries! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Who are we? Where are we? Here Thoreau becomes dispossessed of the familiarity he has felt in nature; the starkness of the landscape and the raw materiality of the mountain thrust his own materiality into question, which generates a desire for material contact.
He moves from the land that is inhuman to his need for contact; he has encountered a part of nature that does not make him feel at home, but has reduced him to feeling less than himself, or other than himself.
Nature is complex and without a consistent fond engagement with human life. From his earliest journal entries to his last years of journaling, the focus on water is prevalent. This emphasis is most evident in the final years of his life when he logged detailed data in his journals concerning the variations of water levels of the Concord River throughout the seasons. Similarly, the two books published during his life, A Week and Walden , are based on the importance of a source of water for the setting; in A Week , the setting is the Concord and Merrimack rivers, and in Walden , it is Walden Pond.
In his two posthumously published books, The Maine Woods and Cape Cod , Thoreau is dependent on water, as it is inseparable from the overall progression of his writings; in The Maine Woods , for example, Thoreau travels by water from the Penobscot River and Chamberlain Lake to Moosehead Lake, and Cape Cod remains largely focused on the Atlantic Ocean and its impact on Cape Cod and its inhabitants. Sherman Paul makes this clear in his book on Thoreau; he addresses the deep spiritual and ontological significance of water for Thoreau.
The river had become the way of communion with the eternal. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers of their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. They are the natural highways of all nations.
Human life and water are inseparable; water sustains life, travel, and the imagination. Thoreau uses water for more than his settings, however, as he constructs his ontology on the flowing nature of water and the belief that change is a constant part of existence.
Thoreau is comfortable with how all aspects of the world are changing; he made this discovery toward the end of his boating voyage with his brother, as he describes the flowing nature of all existence:. The hardest material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the long run it does. Trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the surface.
And in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current of the hour.
Instead of allowing readers to think that returning to land would be the halting point for encountering flows, Thoreau honors the changes going on below our feet and all around us. Instead of stability, there is flux everywhere, and this challenges our desires for permanence. Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale.
When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.
I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artists who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work.
I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth babe fingers on every side. This thawing, which is taking place around the railroad tracks, is a small portion of what is occurring on a larger scale.
The flow of the sand and clay reminds Thoreau of the flowing taking place within the human body, and it convinces him that Earth is still in a process of changing and maturing. It is philosophically incorrect to emphasize permanence or stagnation over change. Societal structures like to keep things orderly, and societies like to categorize aspects of the world and rank them according to which aspects are extremely valuable compared to those things that are insignificant.
He links this with domestication, taming, and scripted hospitality. In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. There is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures. The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.
Excursions 5. Despite the potential dangers found in the natural world, there is a rejuvenating element that restores the person to health and maintains a more agreeable perspective on life.
To be trapped indoors and in the grips of customs and habits is anathema to Thoreau; he sought the healthy, resilient fluctuations of the natural world until he was bedridden in the last days of his life because of tuberculosis. The wildness of creation always called to him. Thoreau has been quite influential in environmentalist circles. His unwavering respect for the natural world and its processes is part of a lineage of ecological concern in the United States. Beyond his emphasis on the scientific and aesthetic sides of the natural world, however, Thoreau also honored the religious or spiritual dimensions of the environment.
He did so with a pluralistic penchant that allowed him to remain open to religious insights across traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Native American teachings. Albanese and Bron Taylor, respectively.
Indeed, both Thoreau and these progeny have assumed iconic status within the pantheon of saints favored among those who participate in contemporary nature religion. He found conservative and liberal Christianities to be irreligious; instead of honoring creation, they profaned it. In the end, he was uncomfortable with dogmatic certainty. Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried,—very dry , I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks,—which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off.
Some to me seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations, are for them everlastingly settled,—as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my wanderings, I never came across that least vestige of authority for these things.
They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. Here Thoreau offers disparaging comments against such religious doctrines as the Trinity; instead of turning to the Bible for the veracity of such doctrines, Thoreau turns to his experiences within the natural world.
As he sauntered in the natural world in Massachusetts and beyond, Thoreau found nothing to justify the Trinity and other outlooks that others believed to be accurate understandings of Earth and the universe.
Quite the contrary was true; instead of opening up the complexity of the universe and life, such doctrines actually exclude the richness of life and creation. Instead of allowing for intimate encounters, religious and nonreligious dogmas actually prevent more authentic relationships from growing. Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol? It is incorrect to think of God as somewhere beyond the natural world; for Thoreau, when we interact with and experience the natural world properly, God is present.
It is no longer the symbol pointing beyond to God; the natural world is divinity itself. Pan is not dead, as was rumored. Instead of being in front of altars and preachers within churches, Thoreau turns to Pan: the god most comfortable in wild places, a god who dances and is supportive of shepherds and goatherds.
Thoreau links immediacy, wildness, and playfulness to his religious orientation and worship. The Unnamed plays an important role. First, all creation takes part in the divine processes of creation and recreation, and this implies that we need to honor these five qualities in the natural world, in ourselves, and in all human relationships. Second, the five qualities point to an ability to resist constraints, burdens, and rigidity.
Instead of drowning in the difficulties of the world, we should rise above them. Instead of being constrained, we should maintain liberty.
Instead of being inflexible, we should be more pliable. Instead of being comfortable with homogeneity, we should engage heterogeneity. Instead of focusing on those things that are unquestionably possible, we should move more toward unexpected and new potentials.
These five qualities are best encountered in the natural world, and the natural world reminds us of their presence within every human being. To many, this may seem an odd religious construct, and it may seem irrelevant and without much ability to shape or engage the world. It is from within this religious context that he develops an ethic of preservative care and a political outlook focused on a higher law, both trying to maintain the five qualities of the Unnamed.
This religious perspective, therefore, is inseparable from his ethical and political concerns. In his first letter to his friend Harrison G. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good—be good for something. There is something in morality, if taken too seriously, that can diminish life, which means Thoreau establishes a tension between joyous living and a purely moral life.
Against a Kantian appraisal of morality that foregrounds the moral law in all we do, Thoreau foregrounds how life exceeds morality, a dominating conscience, and an abstract goodness divorced from content or contexts. Those who come to humanity early see that killing such animals is less than a moral necessity; it is a disgusting act.
When necessity demands it, when survival is the criterion, however, the morality of eating animal flesh changes. Changing conditions may alter the ethical demands we face, so a type of situational ethics or a pragmatic moral posture appears to guide Thoreau. A better way to frame his ethics, however, is to concentrate on the ever-changing nature of the inward condition of human beings and their dynamic relationships with the world, both human and nonhuman.
Part of the ethical task is to be aware of these shifts, meteorological alterations of the mind that affect life and relationships. In other words, any ethical position that seeks to impose stability and necessity on human life will encounter problems as the internal world, like nature, is filled with fluctuations.
Ethics, then, needs to take account of this wildness within, or this undomesticated nature of our inner world. Watchfulness and reawakening oppose inattentiveness and sleep.
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