Episode #083 ... Henry David Thoreau
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Hello! If you value the show as an educational resource and you want to be a part of keeping philosophy available for everybody out there for years to come, support the show at patreon.com slash philosophize this. Hope you love the show today. Henry David Thoreau was an American author and philosopher who in the year 1845 resigned himself from public life to a shack in the woods next to a lake for two years, two months, and two days of his life. Now why would somebody ever do that?

Well, if you wanted to get a little closer to finding out why, it might not be a bad idea to visit the actual shack that he lived in. You can do it. It's a replica shack. They rebuilt the shack, alright? But you can visit the actual site where he built his shack before it got torn down. You know, they found the hearth or the bottom of the fireplace buried just underneath the dirt, and from there they extrapolated where the rest of the cabin had to have been. But the fact remains: to this day,

You can go to Concord, Massachusetts, and you can stand on the exact spot where Thoreau stood. You can look around you. You can see the actual beautiful views that he talks about in his writing. You can close your eyes, and if you listen carefully, if you're able to drown out the constant drone of SUVs and motorcycles passing on the road just behind you, you can hear many of the same things that he heard. But let's say you did it. Let's say you did visit Walden Pond in today's world. What you'd see...

are narrow trails. And as you're walking down these narrow trails, fairly dense woods all around you. And when you approach the actual site where Thoreau built his cabin, you'd come to a clearing and you'd see a big piece of wood staring at you straight in the face. And etched into this piece of wood is one of the most iconic lines from his famous account of the time that he was out there. And it goes like this, quote, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life.

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. End quote. Do you ever worry about that? Ever worry about what he's talking about here? Waking up one morning, 50, 60 years old, and having some epiphany about life that had been staring you in your face for your entire life? And if only you had done things just a little bit differently, you would have realized that when you were 20 and not wasted decades of your life? Do you ever worry about that? I do. I do. Worry about it all the time. Kind of a

strange thing to be worried about. The worry doesn't really solve anything. All it really does is keep you motivated to keep thinking about life and your place in the world so that at least if you do wake up 60 years from now and realize you've wasted it all, at least you put in all the work you could have. Well, Thoreau seems to be of a similar mindset. He wants to live deliberately, which it seems by that quote is a very active process. And he wants to do this so that he doesn't come to the end of his life and realize that he had never lived at all.

I don't think many people would disagree with the idea that they don't want to come to the end of their life and feel like they wasted it all. The confusion that I think a lot of people have with this quote is his method of achieving it. I mean, yeah, I don't want to waste my life either, Thoreau. But when I'm brainstorming all the ways I'm going to try to prevent that from happening, I don't land on, let's go camping for two years. Why would Thoreau go into the woods to accomplish that goal in particular?

Well, make no mistake, the lessons that Thoreau learned in this little unassuming cabin of his would go on to change the lives of untold numbers of people, not to mention his own life. But to understand why he landed on the woods in particular, I want to briefly talk about two things that are going to help set the stage. One is the psychology of Thoreau living during the time that he did, and the other is the psychology of his life.

And the other is the approach to life commonly known as transcendentalism. Let's get right into it. Long before Thoreau ever decided to isolate himself at Walden Pond for two years, he knew he didn't really fit in with the rest of the kids on the playground. He knew he just didn't think about things the same way as the average person that was living back then. And you'll find example after example of this if you just take a quick look at his life. For example, Thoreau had just graduated from college, went to Harvard, by the way,

And, I mean, I can just imagine the tremendous pressure he must have been under from himself, from his family, to make this degree that he had just worked so hard for actually do something for him. And he gets a job as a schoolteacher. Well, the policy of the school that he worked at at the time, what the majority of the community of people he was serving wanted him to do if the kids started misbehaving, is to use corporal punishment to keep them in line.

Thoreau, living during a time when that kind of thing was totally acceptable and wanted, didn't like it, didn't agree with it. So he quit his job, quit his brand new job right out of school. Thoreau was a conservationist during a time when we didn't have these grisly images of evil corporations sawing down acres of trees, leaving pandas with nowhere to sleep. No, Thoreau saw the environmental writing on the wall before most people even realized that it could potentially be a problem.

Thoreau was a huge opponent of slavery during a time when people owned slaves all around him and weren't being morally denounced for doing so. Point is, given where society has gone since his day and age, Thoreau seemed to be way ahead of his time. But whether he knew he was right or wrong or not, he still has to live in a world surrounded by people that don't see any problem with this stuff. Now, this raises a very important question if you're Thoreau. What do you do about it?

What do you do about the fact that you live in a society that endorses all kinds of stuff that you think is immoral? Not an easy question to answer. I mean, after all, you're just one citizen. Why are you so special? Should the rest of the country have to bend to your will so that you can get what you want? And the extension of that is, democracy is majority rule. Do you have an obligation to your fellow citizens to go along with what the majority has deemed to be morally acceptable?

Or on the other hand, you might feel the exact opposite way. You might feel like, you know, whenever you see something that's going on that you think is wrong, you might feel like you have an obligation to not keep quiet. No, you need to stand up for what you believe in and try to change the world for the better during your time here. This was not an easy question to answer for Thoreau early in his life. But then something changed. Then it became really easy to answer that question for him.

Probably the strongest conviction Thoreau held throughout the latter stages of his life. And the seed that was planted, that would eventually grow into this strong belief about the answer to that question, was when Thoreau read an essay that was written by a good friend of his named Ralph Waldo Emerson. And the title of this essay was Self-Reliance. Self-Reliance was an essay that called for everyone who read it to understand the importance of being, well...

Self-reliant, but maybe a better way of putting it is that it called on people to understand the value of being an individual. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, quote, There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion. End quote. What Emerson's saying here is that as a human being, we're born into this very unique condition where we need to find out who we are.

We need to find out what we care about, what kind of person we're going to be, what sort of legacy we're going to leave behind us. The problem is, none of us are born with a full understanding of what that's going to be. So an alluring trap that a lot of people fall into is to look around them and just conform to the way that other people act. Certainly gives you a quick and easy answer to the question of what you're going to be. Unfortunately, as Emerson says, imitation is suicide.

You going around doing your best imitation of what the people around you are doing in the interest of avoiding a difficult conversation with yourself is effectively suicide. Suicide of your individuality. Now, self-reliance preaches a sort of radical nonconformity. Anyone who just blindly believes anything that's told to them or just blindly goes along with whatever people are doing around them are foolish people to Emerson. Now, maybe the best way to do this crazy thing called life

is to figure it out for yourself. Go out and find your own way. A little bit of context. See, Thoreau and Emerson are living in a world where advances in science and philosophy show that this thing that we call objective truth is a pretty slippery thing to define, if not entirely impossible for us to ever arrive at. So as a response to this, what transcendentalism does—and self-reliance espouses transcendentalist ideas all throughout it—

is it takes ideas from all over the world at various points throughout history. You know, there are ideas from Romanticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Vedism, even further east at times to Confucianism. It takes all these ideas and it creates an approach to life that's not just about living wisely, but understanding that ultimately that wisdom is something that you as an individual need to arrive at for yourself. That inside of everyone is a genius of sorts, the infinitude of the individual, as Emerson writes.

And that maybe you should trust your own thought more than the thought of people around you that are considered wise. Maybe what we should all be aiming for is not understanding objective truth about the way that things are, but understanding a personal truth about the way that things are. Let's slow down for a second because at this point there's a very specific type of person that just starts slowly clapping, nodding emphatically. Yes. Yes, what's true for me is not true for you. This is my truth.

Yeah, I believe in some stuff. Yeah, I believe that, you know, the ghost of a witch that was wrongly convicted in the 1700s is haunting the property lines of my house. But that's my truth. That's what I believe. You can't disagree with that. I'm impervious to criticism.

No, it shouldn't be like this. It wasn't designed to be like this. It shouldn't be some sort of catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card to not take the process of arriving at truth seriously, and then you can conveniently wave it around whenever somebody tries to tell you that what you believe is ridiculous. No doubt it will be used this way. But the point of the personal truth is to accept the elusive nature of objective truth and to show who the onus is truly on, you. This truth is yours.

And yours alone. The only people it should ever affect should be you and the people you care about the most. And think of how important your personal pursuit of truth becomes in that world. Now, if this is what you believe, one of the things that naturally goes along with that is that one of the worst things you can do is just look around you, see how other people are acting, and just blindly copy whatever it is they're doing.

You're not working to try to figure it out on your own. You're not trying to arrive at a better personal truth with that strategy. You're just trying to get by. You're just killing time in a waiting room. But for what? What are you waiting for? Death? Ralph Waldo Emerson thinks that, quote, society is in conspiracy against the manhood of its members, end quote. And what he means by that is that civilization...

These societies that we live in with our cities and our cul-de-sacs and our farmers markets, all these activities that have us in close quarters with each other bound together by a social contract. These things promote this mentality of being a passive, quiet drone that just conforms with everything going on around them and is protected from the baptism of having to take your views about the world to task.

In other words, the same way society protects the physically lazy, it also protects the mentally lazy. Society, for all the good stuff it seemingly does for us, it may be the biggest boulder in the way if you're truly someone that wants to try to live deliberately. This is why Thoreau removes society from his life. And it wasn't long after he read Emerson's self-reliance that he went to his good friend Emerson and he asked him if he could live in a shack on his property in Concord, Massachusetts. At which point Emerson said,

Oh God, what have I done? I'm obviously just kidding. He let them. They were friends. They were friends! Honestly, who's not going to let their friend live in a shack in their backyard? Any one of you? Didn't think so. Now, as you can imagine, this move to the wilderness seems like it must have been a pretty big shock to Thoreau's system, at least initially. I mean, to go from all the comforts of modern living to, you know, just having a desk, a couple chairs, and a bed, must have been a pretty rough adjustment phase, right?

Well, the reality was no, it was actually kind of nice to Thoreau. See, Thoreau realized something as he was thinking about all the ways society is, you know, in conspiracy against the individuality of its members. He realized that the more you own, the more your stuff owns you. He said, we often find ourselves in this place where we're not totally happy with our lives. We're not feeling that strong sense of self-worth. We start to think about the ways that we might bring about that self-worth and

And a trap that a lot of people fall into is they look outside of themselves for the answers to what's going on inside of themselves. He says, we tell ourselves this lie all the time that, oh, if only I get that new pair of shoes or if only I get that car I've been wanting, then everything's going to be great. But he says that what we should realize is that even if you were trapped like a lost hiker underneath an avalanche of new shoes, you would still be trapped. You would still be there.

All of the negative mental holding patterns that contributed to that lack of self-worth initially, all of them are still there. You just now have a Nike symbol imprinted into your forehead. This goes beyond just stuff, by the way. It's interesting. Both he and Emerson talk about how people often do this with travel. You know, they say, what's going to finally make me feel right in life? Oh, well, it's when I can travel the world and meet all kinds of new people and see all these new, different, amazing cultures. That's going to fix it.

But just like in the other example, he says that whether you're in China or Russia or India or wherever you are, the common thread in all of those examples is you. The solution to your problem is inside of you, not a lack of some special thing outside of you that you don't have yet. And this is just one of the many lessons he learns by removing society from his life and just opening his eyes to what's going on around him in nature. This is one of the hallmarks of Thoreau's work. There's a wisdom in nature.

If you're creative and can spot it. There's a beautiful passage where he talks about, you know, what happens when a chestnut and an acorn fall on the ground right next to each other in the dirt? Does one of them yield or concede to the other one? Does one decide to just not grow so the other one can grow? No, they both live in accordance with their respective natures until one day one of them overpowers the other one and it dies. One thing's for sure in that example, regardless of whatever adversity was thrown that chestnut's way,

It was a chestnut through and through until the day it died its chestnut death. It didn't live its life a facsimile of an acorn or a facsimile of a juniper bush or a geranium. It was a chestnut. And in that sense, we as people can learn a lot from that chestnut about how to live life. You know, personally, something I commonly use as a means of cultivating acceptance about things that are out of my control is actually a reworking of an idea that Thoreau had in Walden. You know, I...

I live in the Pacific Northwest, as you all know. And if there's something there's a lot of up here in the Pacific Northwest, it's methamphetamine and trees. Meth's a little bit expensive for me. I like to go with trees. So point is, no matter what direction I'm facing, pretty good chance there's always going to be a tree within eye shot, right? Now think of trees not as plants for a second. Think of them as living things that have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. Now how do you survive for hundreds and hundreds of years? You got to be doing something right.

Well, consider the fact that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while you're sleeping, while you're working, you're watching Netflix, whatever it is you're doing constantly, these trees are met with the ceaseless onslaught of the elements. Rain, wind, snow, lightning. Here are these wise elders, these beings hundreds of years old that deal with this adversity constantly. And how do they do it? They sway. They sway in the wind, gently back and forth.

If they resisted it too much, their branches would break. If they didn't resist enough, they would have no foundation, no roots. What a cool metaphor for how we might approach the ceaseless onslaught of adversity that the world throws our way. But anyway, I highly recommend Walden Pond if this stuff fascinates you, but let's get on to the significance of philosophy.

Thoreau accomplished his goal when he was out there for those two years. He comes back to society, looks around him more clearly than ever before. He sees not individuals, but passive, ignorant subjects that constantly seek for others to define who they are in exchange for the menial crumbs of security that society brings them. He says, man, isn't it crazy that when people are given absolute freedom to be anyone they want to be, they all just end up acting like everyone else.

This isn't life. This is the opposite of life. He says a scarecrow can do everything these people are doing. But this seems to be what the tendency is whenever we decide to congregate around each other and conform to society. He says, quote, End quote.

So I guess another upside to throw spending all this time away from people is that he found an answer to that question that we talked about at the beginning of the episode. You know, whether we're obligated to keep quiet and be respectful of the majority or whether we're obligated to speak up and change things for the better. We can probably guess his answer to that question now. Of course we should speak up. We should never just passively go along and conform to what people are doing around us. Now, this in itself is far from a novel concept. But what is novel?

Probably the most influential idea given to us by Henry David Thoreau, an idea that would go on to affect the hunger strikes in India and Mahatma Gandhi. It would go on to shape the civil rights movement in America and countless other movements. It wasn't that we should stand against society if it doesn't stand for what's morally right, but how we should go about standing up to society.

He wrote a book called Civil Disobedience, the opening line of which cites the infamous quote, the government that governs best governs least, now often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson. But keep in mind, what Thoreau is saying there is not that the smallest government is the best government. He's saying the government should be as simple as possible, but not any simpler and not any more complex than is necessary.

See, Thoreau realized that majority rule is by its very nature coercive to the individual. Now, this wouldn't be that big of a deal if it didn't force that individual to live in a society that doesn't go along with their conscience or beliefs. He said, quote,

In other words, as long as you're living a life that corresponds with your conscience and beliefs about things, nothing can really bother you.

So how do we accomplish that given the unfortunate state of affairs that the coercive nature of majority rule often forces us to not live that life? What do we do about it? Well, if you're expecting Thoreau to say, grab your pitchforks and I'll meet you down at City Hall, well, I guess you got another thing coming. It's quite the opposite, actually. He doesn't even think it's your duty to actively lobby for change at all. He says, quote, "...it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong."

So Thoreau's position here is even more nuanced than just, stand up for what you believe in and write a letter to your congressman.

No, he makes it very clear at multiple points in Civil Disobedience. Look, I'm a man first and a subject second. I'm an individual above all else. I got a lot of other stuff to do in this existence. I didn't come to this world to make this a good place to live in. I came into this world simply to live as an individual, whether it was a good place or a bad place.

So the question then becomes, if it happens to be a bad place when you're here, how can the individual still continue to live freely and deliberately without having to feel morally guilty by association to all of these bad things going on? Thoreau's answer to this question is civil disobedience. He has a really interesting question at the beginning of the book. Why do we necessarily need to have the government meddling in issues of morality?

Look, the government has a lot of other stuff on their plate in addition to having to be the moral arbiter of the United States, Thoreau would say. They gotta fix our crumbling roads and bridges. They have to collect taxes. Why not give them a break? Better question is, why is the government in the business of legislating morality at all? The government's great at doing some stuff,

To Thoreau, maybe not so much when it comes to morality. See, Thoreau seems to think that the government, quote, has not the vitality and force of a single living man, end quote. No, to Thoreau, the individual is the center to any moral progress. And the centrality of the individual is one of the most profound ideas he'd ever give to us. In the same way, if you're feeling really bad on the inside, quote,

The solution's going to come from you as an individual, not some outside intervention like a pair of shoes or a car. So too in issues of morality. It's the individual that's central to reform, not government intervention or government coercion. Best thing we can do, Titherow? Nonviolent protest.

Now, living in an age where we've seen nonviolent protests play out so seamlessly over the years, it may be tough to put ourselves in the shoes of the people living back then where it wasn't an obvious option that they could go to in times of political strife. No, really. During this time, and overwhelmingly throughout human history, the torch and pitchfork approach was the go-to method if you wanted to get something done. Here's Thoreau offering a different solution. But how would this look?

Well, for example, Thoreau lived during the generation that gave rise to the Mexican-American War. Now, it was commonly seen at the time that this was a war not based on any sort of moral foundation. It wasn't a necessary war. It was a war waged for the economic expediency that came along with the eventual expansion of slave trading to a larger territory. Now, if you're Thoreau, staunch opponent to slavery...

How can you, in good conscience, pay taxes and support a system that's taking those tax dollars and waging a war that's nurturing the positive growth of slavery as an institution? Well, you can't. So Thoreau didn't. He stopped paying taxes in protest of the state getting involved in issues of morality that he thought it really had no business being a part of. The beauty of this is that if enough people follow suit, the state no longer has the resources to fund the Mexican-American War.

Now, the significance of this is, for this change to come, no one had to bomb City Hall or punch anyone in the face. Or worst of all, no one had to start a hashtag. No, this civil disobedience has brought about a, quote, peaceable revolution. Yeah, Thoreau went to jail for not paying his taxes, but he didn't see that as being so much of a bad thing. In fact, he saw it as the only way to truly be an individual.

Sure, he could have pouted instead. He could have paid his taxes, complained to everyone around him, publicly attacked the leadership of the war, written a book. But he would have been doing all of that, all the while monetarily contributing to a system that didn't correspond with his conscience. It's really interesting as we talk about these different economic models and systems of government. No question we've talked about at least one on this show that you don't agree with or is one that you think is immoral. Well, try to put yourself in the shoes of Thoreau here. Thoreau, in a weird way,

went to jail in order to be truly free, not the other way around. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.