American Transcendentalism...?

Question

After reading "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" and "The Pond In Winter" from Thoreau's Walden, I was wondering if someone could clarify the concepts of Thoreau about the over-soul and the preference for nature over civilization?

Answer 1

Most people define "American Transcendentalism" in terms of European, or Kantian, transcendentalism. Actually, most of the members of the US Transcendental Club were more interested in avoiding conformity to conventional thinking and of establishing their own uniquely "American" approach, in fact their own free, individual, non-conforming way of thinking. Especially Thoreau.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was interested in defining "transcendentalism"; Thoreau was more interested in having transcendental experience. Emerson was more at home in the academy and in society; Thoreau was more at home in the outdoors and in solitude. Hence, Emerson focused more directly on a unitarian, theological Oversoul; Thoreau focused more on his own personal (one might say, spiritual) experiences.

So Emerson spoke of Nature; Thoreau lived in and studied and wrote about nature. "The Pond in Winter" is a perfect example. You probably noticed that most of that chapter actually dealt with observing and describing fish in the pond, measuring and speculating on the depth of the pond, and watching workers with farm implements harvest ice from the pond to enhance the pleasurable experiences of people throughout the year. Occasionally, Thoreau (almost as a tangent) draws upon nature as a metaphor for human experience; for example, the depth of the pond and the depth of the human mind. But mostly he loses himself in the experience of nature itself. When we actually "see," when we directly experience fish and sand and ice, we are likely to be surprised, envigorated, delighted, broadened, enlivened, made wiser and more sensible and more sensitive by what we "see" or experience. We lose ourselves in nature (or the experience) of nature and so we find ourselves. The selves we find in that way are more important to Thoreau than a universal oversoul. These wiser selves (found in the experience of nature first-hand) are our own "oversouls."

That's why we might say that Thoreau preferred "nature over civilization." What he really preferred was honest personal experience. Experience thus could be a matter of time (hours, months, years, eras), or it could be timeless (such an intense experience of the moment that one loses consciousness of time). "Time," he said, "is but the stream I go a-fishing in." This intensity of experience is another way of thinking of the self, or of one's "oversoul."

But guess what? Such experience brings one into a deeper, broader, more sensitive, more imaginative connection with others who have shared the same depth of experience. Hence, civilization may reach well beyond Concord or the US or the Western World, or one's own lifetime. Each such experience brings one in touch (one's soul, one's consciousness, one's imagination) with all such Experience. That's Thoreau's broader view of civilization.

"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed . . . . I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides . . . and is landed in ports of which Alexander [the Great] only heard the names."

So the quality of experience (drawing water from one's own well) brings us into the presence of others' experience (like the priest of Brahma), and the water of Walden mingles with that of the Ganges and even that bathing the mythical islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides. That's not so much the Oversoul of Immaneul Kant; that's the soul of Henry David Thoreau as he gives himself to the experience of Walden Pond, and as he frees his imagination to soar with the signficance of his experience.

But Thoreau had to give himself (lose himself, if you will) in order to experience such intensity (to find himself). He had to begin by determining to live "deliberately," not in conformity to second-hand experience. He had to "lay down the book [even the Bhagvat-Geeta] and go to my well for water." That' s what he prepared himself for in his two years, two months, and two days at Walden.

"I went to the woods because I wished 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Answer 2

What I remember most about Thoreau is actually from Walden.

When he talks of the over soul he is speaking of the connectiveness that we all have with nature. Imagine walking through a forrest and seeing the trees, each leaf placed a certain way. The birds are singing different songs. There is a breeze that blows through the grasses and you hear a brook off in the distance. I think Thoreau looked at all this and thought that in any given moment, all the elements of nature fuse together and many spirits become one. Nature-Earth is the over-soul.

I think he prefered nature because it was simple, and so inspirational and pure. Nature is where you can live deliberatly. Nature is where you can get back to those basic human roots, and not be tempted to conform.

Just my thoughts. Its rather deep stuff and I could be interpreting it wrongly.