Individual consciousness and autonomy: the contemporaneity of Henry Thoreau

Glaucio Aranha *

I have just reread a classic by Henry Thoreau today. It was an important exercise in recovering ideas that, some time ago, were dear to me, although they ended up being placed on the side of the road. The work I reread was Walden; or, Life in the Woods, in an edition that includes the celebrated text Civil Disobedience. This reading happened to coincide with the exact moment in which I am working with an undergraduate class on Byung-Chul Han’s The Palliative Society and The Burnout Society. The good chemistry among the texts led me to the present reflection, which came, in a Thoreauvian image, as listening to something asleep behind the contemporary noise.

A satisfactorily uncomfortable question in the reading was to think about how much of the life we call “ours” is neglected. Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, USA, in 1817, and died in the same city in 1862, having crossed nineteenth-century North America as a writer, naturalist, essayist, and thinker linked to transcendentalism, in dialogue with Ralph Waldo Emerson and with a tradition that sought to think individual experience, nature, and moral life beyond mere obedience to inherited customs.

He carried out an experiment in living, between 1845 and 1847, which gave rise to Walden, the work to which I initially referred. During this period, Thoreau lived in a cabin, built by himself, near Walden Pond, on land belonging to Emerson, seeking to experiment with a form of life reduced to what seemed essential to him. The book was published in 1854 and is usually described as an account of simple living, philosophical reflection, an essay on work, and so forth, besides being a decisive piece of what is known as American nature writing. However, when I read it today, what gains prominence for me is the way in which Thoreau took everyday life as a kind of moral laboratory. He resignified the cabin, the pond, cultivation, walking, and silence, taking them as signs of a larger question concerning the way we inhabit the world.

There is, in Walden, a dimension of signification that seems central to me: the forest, in the text, is presented as a kind of alternative grammar of life, where every gesture, however ordinary it may be, going from the building of a humble cabin to planting beans, passing through the observation of the thickening of the ice on the pond during winter and the listening to the sounds around him. These signs gradually acquire a new semantic value, more centered on the relationship between desire, necessity, and dependence. In my reading, Thoreau thereby suggests that modern life, even in his century, had already produced a profound confusion between means and ends. Contained in his proposal is a view that one works to sustain a way of life that demands more and more work, that we accumulate more and more objects which begin to command subjectivity itself. All of this running toward a progress whose direction is uncertain and imprecise. In this sense, Thoreau’s contemporaneity stands out to me precisely in this invitation to interrupt the naturalization of excess. And, here, he converses closely with Han and his perception of what he calls the palliative society and the burnout society.

Rereading him through the lens of the present made me think that we need to re-edit, to some extent, as metaphor, Thoreau’s withdrawal to live in the woods, understanding the symbolic gesture of this withdrawal as a form of self-care. This is because, in a society increasingly traversed by digital platforms, permanent exposure, continuous productivity, and the capture of attention, Thoreau’s cabin is a welcome metaphor for the possibility of reconstructing the centers and peripheries of our lives, what is central to us and what is excess. Therefore, what is at stake is not literally following him and abandoning the city, technology, or social life, since this would not be salvation, but mere utopia of purity. I understand it more as a matter of asking ourselves which devices, material and symbolic, organize our habits even before we are able to deliberate about them. What degree of autonomy still belongs to us? Autonomy, perhaps, has ceased to be a morally elevated word. If this has occurred, perhaps it has been transformed into a concrete practice of selection, which brings implicit within itself the possibility of refusal.

Obviously, what I bring here is only a reflection of a personal nature, which at this moment seems particularly relevant to me. It seems to me that Thoreau thinks freedom on a very intimate scale, one that distrusts great proclamations. This is clearly an aspect that echoes in me. I feel that existence is, more than ever, bound to small servitudes, debts, appearances, conventions, manufactured desires, fear of judgment, or, as Han thinks, fear of pain, which impels people toward a palliative, anesthetized existence. The reading of Walden then led me to think whether it is possible today to defend great public ideas while one lives, on the everyday plane, according to a logic of almost complete heteronomy. Obviously, the postmoderns have already made and have already given their answers to this question, but what is my answer, if I think the question in the light of Walden? The Thoreauvian question is not “what do I think.” He is more concerned with “how do I live what I say I think?”, which is a very strong formulation and which, certainly, will not be answered here. What remains is this ellipsis before an opinion not yet formed in me. But if it is not formed, why write about it? Perhaps because of my inclination to appropriate Tynianov’s thought, taking the art of this text as its creative procedure.

Also for this reason, I cannot completely separate Walden from the essay later known as Civil Disobedience, originally published as Resistance to Civil Government, in which Thoreau defended conscientious objection in the face of laws considered unjust. Without doubt, the same matrix seems to run through the two texts, that is, the perception that individual consciousness should not be delegated entirely to the State, to the market, to the majority, or to customs. However, this consciousness, for Thoreau, has a price to be paid, since it demands the willingness to sustain a life less comfortable, less approved, and less protected by collective justifications. This, perhaps, always perhaps, is one of the reasons why his thought continues to be relevant today and, at the same time, still difficult to domesticate, although, as in his own time, few are willing to pay this price.

There is always the risk, naturally, of taking Thoreau as a simplified icon of self-sufficiency, and this is not the idea in this reflection. I simply understand that his work offers an aesthetics of simple living or a decorative philosophy that also harmonizes with our present time of exhaustion. What I have (re)encountered in Walden is a stronger tension, considering that Thoreau writes against a type of moral laziness disguised as normality. Thus, he ends up forcing us to look at certain forms of comfort that cost us far too much, especially when we pay for them with time, inner freedom, and the compromising of consciousness and autonomy. I therefore read the space he describes as Walden and its surroundings, as well as the situations that arise, visits, seasons of the year, hunters, and so forth, as an element that surpasses scenery and characters. I think this may be the reason why the reading, at certain moments, ends up provoking some discomfort: just as in his time, we have lost today the time of contemplation, of patience, of the slowness of the gaze surrendering itself to the duration of observing, simply observing. Thoreau’s descriptions, at many moments, caused me a double discomfort: because of the lack of a more accelerated “evolution” and because of my accommodation, or would it be submission, to the speed of the present time.

There is something profoundly contemporary in this critique. Something that made me come to the computer and write. And allowed me the slowness of writing that flows from me to me, without haste, without interference from software, applications, or artificial intelligence devices. Just like Thoreau’s experiment, deliberately entering the forest to suck out the essence of life, I allowed myself to enter this forest of letters and words in order to suck out my time, which today is sucked away by multiple instances. In the end, so that, as Thoreau proposes, upon reaching the end of life I may not discover that I have not lived.

Today, excess rarely presents itself as excess. It is far more likely to appear as opportunity, connection, update, performance, visibility, information, investment, and so forth. Not as the excess and waste that characterize it. The social language of the present seems to tend toward transforming everything, or almost everything, into advantage, into profit, even if a deceptive gain. And it is in this schizoid scenario that rereading Thoreau helped me recover the self-questioning about what truly enlarges a life? Certainly, not everything that gives the appearance of a promised enlargement, through the quantity of stimuli, will, in fact, enlarge the experience of living. Just as not everything that promises to accelerate access to the world will, in fact, deepen our relationship with it. Being available to others, through the visibility of networks, does not make us more visible to ourselves; perhaps it only erases us a little more.

For this reason, when I think of individual consciousness and autonomy, from this rereading I made of Thoreau’s texts, real or metaphorical isolation ends up seeming less arrogant to me. Perhaps it is necessary for us to be more arrogant in the sense of saying, without fear, “I will not do what they ask of me,” “I am alone because my own company illuminates me, while being with you only erases me.” I recall here Seneca, and his considerations on On the Shortness of Life. It is necessary to have a little indifference toward the common in order to reach the uncommon that inhabits and personalizes us. Would an ethics of lucidity be possible, in which the subject would need to examine the signs that command his existence, recognizing that habits and objects, material devices, institutions, and social expectations, also speak for us and take our voice away from us? Thoreau’s life in the woods, then, is not a mere act of bucolicism, but, perhaps, a proposal for the alphabetization of the daily experience of living. He went to nature in order to relearn how to read the world, and perhaps, above all, in order to relearn how to read himself within it.

For me, Walden is absurdly contemporary because it illuminates the possibility of reopening the relationship between life and meaning. On the other hand, and precisely for this reason there is a certain discomfort in the reading, Thoreau chooses the account of an experience instead of presenting a “manual for living.” He offers his own life as experience, while emphasizing that this was his experience, that it cannot be copied; that it does not contain only glories, also comprising ambiguities, limits, and contradictions, with which even he is sometimes surprised. Am I living deliberately, or merely administering demands that I have learned to call destiny? In rereading Thoreau, this question kept echoing in me. I have the impression that autonomy begins at this point of discreet discomfort, in which the subject suspends haste, examines what governs him, and decides, even if only partially, to recover the authorship of his own days.

References

THOREAU, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. São Paulo: Planeta, Brazilian edition.

* Glaucio Aranha — He is an Associate Professor at the NUTES Institute of Science and Health Education (NUTES), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), working at the Educational Video Laboratory (LVE), where he develops teaching and research activities in the field of educational technologies in science and health education, as well as in science communication. He also serves as an associate researcher at the Center for Science Communication and Neuroscience Education at UFRJ (NuDCEN/IBCCF/UFRJ), conducting research on semiotics and linguistics applied to neuroscience education. He is the lead researcher of the research group Technologies, Arts, Science and Health (TACS) and co-leader, in partnership with Prof. Dr. Alfred Sholl-Franco (IBCCF/UFRJ), of the research group Neuroeduc – Neurosciences Applied to Education (OCC/UFRJ). He is a member of the Organization Sciences and Cognition (OCC), where he currently serves as vice-president, and of the Brazilian Association of Linguistics (ABRALIN). He has experience in the areas of media studies, literary and narrative theory, linguistics, semiotics, mass aesthetics, and science communication.