A Walden Primer

NINETENNTH CENTURY AMERICAN philosophy was the stepchild of our literature. What we had of it came secondhand from Europe, and often even our best authors garbled the echo. Given this vacuum, it is surprising that our one sensible and consistent 19th century philosophical masterpiece have been so often praised for his least accomplishments (as a naturalist and social entice) and so rarely credited for what he achieved as poet and prophet. Harvard Philosophy Professor Stanley Cavell argues in his newly published essay. The Senses of Walden, that the neglect of Walden stems from the failure of philosophers to take Thereau's book seriously.

Cavell follows the lead of Charles Anderson, who proposed in 1969 that Walden, always a difficult book to assign a genre be taken out of the usual categories of prose essay or autobiography and considered as a united heroic poem. Cavell carries the redefinition a step further he examines Walden as scripture, a holy book with a philosophical doctrine and a prophetic meaning with hymns and parables, epics and parables, epics and a comprehensible symbolic unity. With a swipe he disposes of such essentially irrelevant questions as the importance of Thoreau's mysterious journals or the divergences of Thoreau's thought from his Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson's. He takes interest soles in whether Walden holds up to close philosophical scrutiny in what it has to tell us about how we are to live.

The most original insight in Cavell's essay is his identification of the central philosophical question in Walden the problem of free will and determinism. Men determine themselves through the mythologies they create whether the mystery of predestination or demigod at technology mystery of predestination or the damaged of technology. Thoreau says, He proceeds from there to create a mythic life this own at Walden Ponds which has written call to his neighbors, and to us, to awaken and shed the necessities we have brought upon ourselves Thoreau clearly realizes that the casting off and rebuilding of one's own life, symbolized by his retreat to the woods and construction of his house as well as his book is no easy task. Thoreau hopes that be the model for a personal and national, regeneration.

Cavell demonstrates that we need to learn to read Walden before we can begin to appreciate its senses, that the author's explicit instructions on how to read his book have been ignored too long:

To discover how to cars and speed our most wakeful hours-whatever we are doing-is the lack of Walden as a whole; it follows that its lack, for us who are reading, is epitomized is discovering what reading in a high sense is red, in particular what reading walden is.

CAVELL STRUCTURES FOR ESSAY around his lesson in reading. His first chapter, "Words deals with the most fundamental aspects of approaching its Walden's meanings, its epic and religious conventions and the intensity of its expression. The second part, "Sentences," explores the way in which Thoreau's words work together to lead in into predictive conjecture. Their call to action challenges even our right passively to read them. "Portions," the third and final chapter, carries the reader from ". . . more or less formal question about the kind of book Walden is to matters more or less concerning its doctrine," that is, its philosophy. The progression is symbolized by the quote from Thoreau's letter which appears in thirds below the chapter titles: "On the first perusal plain common sense should appear on the second severe truth and on third beauty." Within this structure, Cavell allows himself free rein to follow the pattern of symbol and image through out Walden without regard to either chronology or, at times, formal logic.

This style of analysis provides a powerful tool for achieving the "higher reading" of Thoreau's complex and diffuse book that Cavell seeks. He synthesizes the economic and natural imagery, and the religious and mythical allusions, fitting them into the author's philosophical framework. However, Cavell's own writing style also begs for a "higher reading," He leaves many ideas and even sentences unfinished and his disjointed logic often requires several readings of a given passage to unravel, Cavell tries to discover how to read Walden "in the high areas." The experience should ideally recreate the life in Walden, a difficult task which requires losing oneself through reading in order to rebuild oneself.

CAVELL ATTEMPTS A GREAT DEAL in a rather slim volume, somewhere between a long, critical essay (he leaves many unanswered questions) and a compact, definitive thesis (he answers more questions that we ought to expect.) He has discovered an authentic American philosopher in the literary tradition right under our noses and he tries to show us how to approach Thoreau and his work, though it is written in a "language dead to degenerate times." He tries to shake our belief that we no longer need a book to tell our lost nation how to live. Cavell can be thoroughly confusing at times, but at his best he provocatively illuminates both Walden and Thoreau.