Romanticism

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Reaction Against
Enlightenment
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
1817-1862
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Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord,
Massachusetts, and lived there all his life. A writer,
naturalist, and philosopher, he was an important
forerunner of American environmentalism and remains
a key source of insight and inspiration for millions of
environmental and political activists around the world.
Walden is his most famous work. His influence on the
development of environmental ethics has been
profound.
 Major Works
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 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
 Natural History Essays
 Faith in a Seed
 Wild Fruits
 Excursions
 The Maine Woods
 Walden or, Life in the Woods
 Thoreau and Romanticism
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“The Romantic approach to nature was
fundamentally ecological; that is, it was
concerned with relation, interdependence,
and holism. Nowhere is this similarity of
outlook more clearly revealed than in the
writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817-
1862), the nineteenth-century inheritor of
Gilbert White's arcadian legacy.
 Thoreau and Romanticism
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 Thoreau was both an active field ecologist and a
philosopher of nature whose ideas anticipated much
in the mood of our own time. In his life and work we
find a key expression of the Romantic stance toward
the earth as well as an increasingly complex and
sophisticated ecological philosophy. We find in
Thoreau, too, a remarkable source of inspiration and
guidance for the subversive activism of the recent
ecology movement.” – Donald Worster
 Non-anthropocentric Ethics
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The view that only human beings have rights or
‘‘intrinsic value’’ and that other creatures may
be used in any way people see fit. For example,
his first book, A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers (1849), discussed the plight of
anadromous fishes formerly found in great
numbers in New England’s rivers but by that
time mostly blocked by dams.
 Non-anthropocentric Ethics
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 Thoreau made one of the earliest explicit calls for a
nonanthropocentric ethic, writing: ‘‘Away with the
superficial and selfish philanthropy of men”
 One hundred thirty years before Earth First! Thoreau
suggested that unjust treatment of the shad was grave
enough to justify civil disobedience. This was a method
of social protest which Thoreau pioneered, influencing
both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
 Thoreau pioneered the method of civil disobedience as
a pro-environmental technique.
 Non-anthropocentric Ethics
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To be closely united with nature was for him
a profound introspective experience. A day-
to-day physical intimacy with nature was the
foundation for Thoreau a kind of intense
empiricism.
 Thoreau as a field ecologist
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 "My body is all sentient… As I go here or there, I am
tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I
touched the wires of a battery."
 "I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral,
vegetable, and animal in me."
 Thoreau’s ambition to become a field ecologist: “I
dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with
free gaze, from some mountain-side… I to be nature
looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the
blue-eyed grass looks in the face of the sky.”
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"We must go out and re-ally ourselves to
Nature every day,"
 "We must make root, send out some little
fibre at least, even every winter day. I am
sensible that I am imbibing health when I
open my mouth to the wind."
 Thoreau as field ecologist
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 Maturity did not prevent Thoreau from being with
nature: "With regard to essentials, I have never had
occasion to change my mind." His observations are
profoundly introspective which can be seen in the
statement: "nature looking into nature". For Thoreau
it was the essence of being a naturalist. To look
inward is really to see the cosmos.
Objectivity versus sympathy
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 All knowledge is profoundly ethical. There can be no true
understanding that is not founded on "love" or
"sympathy”.
 Love is the recognition of interdependence and that
"perfect correspondence" between spirit and matter.
Sympathy is the capacity to feel intensely the bond of
identity or kinship that unites all beings within a single
organism. If he does not come to nature by these avenues,
the naturalist cannot make any convincing claim to
genuine truth. More than that, he violates the moral union
of soul and world.
Objectivity versus sympathy
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But by the middle of the 19th century
scientific community emphasizes detachment
and objectivity instead of sympathy. The
Romantic introspection is subjective. Their
rebellion therefore was against this scientific
objectivity.
"Our science, so called, is always more barren
and mixed up with error than our
sympathies are."
Objectivity versus sympathy
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Thoreau says that one of the major faults of
modern science was its contention that "you
should coolly give your chief attention to the
phenomenon which excites you as something
independent on you, and not as it is related
to you. The important fact is its effect on me."
Objectivity versus sympathy
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 His intention here was not to promote an
anthropomorphic outlook to the denigration of
nature but to see nature from an inner, personal,
human perspective. It was a humble
acknowledgment of correspondence and kinship. If a
man could not study nature as an extension of
himself, then it would become an alien world. Hence
for Thoreau the manifestations of nature in and by
themselves were not the focus of his studies around
Concord.
Objectivity versus sympathy
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 "The point of interest is somewhere between me and
them," he explained. Not a detached, foreign world of
objects as "things," not even a system of merely economic
relatedness, but a confluence of spirit and matter, must
be the vision of the naturalist. Objectivity did not admit
this deeper dimension of relationship. Worster says that
for the Romantics, knowledge was nothing less than this
process of attachment. They sought to reintegrate man's
consciousness into the physical world. Truth is nothing
but the experience of cosmic commingling. This is what
is called co-evolution.
 An outdoor man

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 “The true man of science will know nature better by
his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear,
feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and
finer experience. We do not learn by inference and
deduction, and the application of mathematics to
philosophy, but by direct intercourse and
sympathy.... The most scientific will still be the
healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more
perfect Indian wisdom.”
 Walden
“In wilderness is the preservation of the
world”
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