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Reflexivity as Evolution in Thoreau's Walden
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10762 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
8,889 Words |
| Author
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Frederick Turner
Frederick Turner is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities
at the University of Texas at Dallas. This article is taken,
with permission of Paragon House, from a collection of essays
entitled Natural Classicism, to be published soon. |
I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese or Sandwich Islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England. (Walden, p.2)
Thoreau the Anthropologist of Experience
As Victor Turner points out, "experience" is a volatile word, as hard to contain within a single definition as incandescent plasma, yet perhaps as productive if it can be controlled. Its antonyms indicate its range of meanings; text (as in "did you read that in a book or was it a real experience?"); the socio-cultural norm (as in "my upbringing tells me one thing but all my experience tells me another"); knowledge (as in the French opposition of savoir, to know, and connaitre, to be acquainted by experience); naiveté; ignorance, untestedness; innocence; innate ideas. In this essay I propose to examine what Henry David Thoreau meant by "experience"; it was one of his favorite words, and his thoughts upon it are, I believe, of interest not only to the literary reader but also to the anthropologist.
In one sense the phrase "the anthropology of experience" is a contradiction in terms. If "anthropology" means "the study of human society and culture" and if "experience" means, "first hand knowledge, untainted by socio-cultural givens", then the phrase is equivalent to "the social life of the solitary" or "naming the unnamable". These phrases do have a sort of poetic germ of meaning, though, despite their paradoxical appearance; and it is no coincidence that Henry David Thoreau was fond of them both. "I have a great deal of company in my house", he said, "especially in the morning, when nobody calls." (Walden, p. 148) And:
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, That you shall speak so that they shall understand you. Neither man nor toadstools grow so…I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience…. The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement." (Walden, pp. 346-7)
It does not, I believe, stretch the facts to describe Thoreau as an early "anthropologist of experience," setting out to study the inner man as his contemporary Lewis Henry Morgan set out to study the outer. Natural classicism implicitly predicates the existence and validity of an anthropology of experience: and one of the wisest guides to that field was the man whose greatest achievement, Walden, coincided
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