Henry Thoreau was a vigorous, good-natured rebel. He repudiated not only the Puritan conscience but the transcendental conscience as well and gave expression to paganism as a principle of self-culture. He was the Nietzsche of New England. His doctrine of "civil disobedience" was merely the conscientious and philosophical justification of his wholehearted scorn for society, especially his society. He discovered a critical, practical scheme for private rebellion. It was not that he loved nature more, but that he found his spirit (i.e., his reflections on reading) to be freer in solitude and open air. He was not a naturalist except incidentally; he was a poet who felt no need for institutional morals...But his religious and moral rebellion is very unlike Nietzsche's paganism in that it is genial, unpretentious, and pious...If we may be guided by his Journal, we must picture him as becoming what the orientals [sic] call a "forest ascetic" writing "forest treatises"...This absorption into nature was not a Spinozistic worship of the order in nature or a love of observing natural creatures and processes, but a sense of the endlessness of the life in which man participates. Thoreau could as spontaneously merge himself in nature as Whitman could in Brooklyn.
--Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 2nd edition, New York: Columbia University Press (1963), 251-255.
No comments:
Post a Comment