Henry David Thoreau’s defense of John Brown has been interpreted as an inconsistency in his political philosophy. Since Thoreau was best known for his commitment to civil disobedience, his critics argued that his support for Brown constitutes a break in Thoreau’s political thought. However, I argue that "A Plea for John Brown" should be seen as a radicalization of Thoreau’s transcendental politics rather than an inconsistency in his writings. To understand this decade-long process of radicalization requires (...) an analysis of Thoreau’s four main essays from "Resistance to Civil Government" in 1849 to "The Last Days of John Brown" in 1860. (shrink)

This paper argues against Pierre Hadot's view that Thoreau in Walden displays Epicurean and Stoic traits in roughly equal proportion. Of the two schools, he is much closer to the latter. However, the similarities between Thoreau and the Stoic are practical or generic. In terms of ethical practices, Thoreau exhibits many of the qualities found in the Stoic school. However, the theoretical discourse used to justify those practices is different in each case. If one is to say (...) that Thoreau is a Stoic, it is not a very profound sense. Thoreau shares with both the Stoics and the Epicureans an interest in what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" or philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)

: Thoreau's journal contains a number of passages which explore the nature of perception, developing a response to skeptical doubt. The world outside the human mind is real, and there is nothing illusory about its perceived beauty and meaning. In this essay, I draw upon the work of Stanley Cavell (among others) in order to frame Thoreau's reflections within the context of the skeptical questions he seeks to address. Value is not a subjective projection, but it also cannot (...) be perceived without the appropriate kind of emotional orientation or attunement toward the world: that is, an attitude of trust or acceptance. Without this affective receptivity, or "perceptual faith," our knowledge of reality is limited. The beliefs we hold onto in the face of objective uncertainty establish the framework within which we make particular evaluations, and in this sense they are a necessary condition of practical reason. Every understanding has its mood. (shrink)

L’ambition du présent article est de montrer la filiation entre le naturalisme d’Henry David Thoreau et ses positions antiesclavagistes. Je défends que cette filiation se fait voir par la façon dont l’éthique de Thoreau s’appuie sur une certaine conception de la nature et par la manière dont ses vues abolitionnistes découlent de cette éthique. Je fais valoir, plus précisément, que la fuite de Thoreau dans la nature n’est pas seulement, comme le prétend le politologue Malcom Ferdinand, un (...) moyen comme un autre qu’emploierait Thoreau pour protester contre l’esclavagisme. Il faut plutôt voir en l’idée que se fait Thoreau de la nature ce qui nourrit ses positions antiesclavagistes. L’éthique de Thoreau est une éthique de la vertu qui repose sur l’idée que l’être humain est un être de nature. L’accomplissement humain doit être pensé en rapport avec une certaine idée de nature – la nature sauvage – et l’esclavage condamné parce qu’il dénature l’homme. L’abolitionnisme de Thoreau n’est donc pas, comme le défend Ferdinand, la cause du naturalisme de Thoreau. C’est bien plutôt de son naturalisme que découlent ses vues abolitionnistes. (shrink)

This review is slightly negative. It shows how the author is not up to date in understanding Thoreau.

American Muslims increasingly negotiate their relation to a government that is suspicious of Islam, yet which is legally obligated to recognize them as rights-bearing citizens. To better understand how the post-9/11 state is reshaping American Islam, I examine the case of Muslim American dissident Tarek Mehanna, sentenced to seventeen years in prison for providing material support for terrorism, on the basis of his controversial words (USA v. Mehanna et al, 2012). I situate Mehanna’s writing and reflections within a long history (...) of American activism, in particular the traditions represented by Henry David Thoreau and John Brown. -/- . (shrink)

In Walden Henry David Thoreau argues for and against patriotism. This paper argues that thoughtful environmentalists should do likewise. It explicates Thoreau’s accounts of “settling” and farming as efforts to rethink and deepen his connections to the land. These efforts define a patriotism that is local, thoughtful and moral. Thoreau’s economic philosophy can be seen as applied patriotism. Likeother virtues such as courage or prudence, patriotism is liable to a skewed development and various kinds of misuse. Yet (...) properly developed it is a part of a good human life. Thoreauvian patriotism provides a strong base from which to oppose militarism and xenophobia, which many intellectuals mistakenly equate with patriotism. (shrink)

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David (...) Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

Since the early Medieval Time people contested theological legitimation and rational discursive discours on authority as well as retreated to refuges to escape from any secular or ecclesiastical authority. Modern attempts formulated rational legitimation of authority in several ways: pragmatic authority by Monteigne, Bodin and Hobbes, or the contract authority of Locke and Rousseou. However, Enlightened Anarchism, first formulated in 1793 by the English philosopher William Godwin fulminated against all rational restrictions of human freedom and self-determination. However, we do not (...) analyze anarchism by the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, but by looking for the best actual approach of Anarchist’s ‘Promised Land’. Furthermore, we follow the footsteps of Thoreau’s Walden Pond experiment considered as a place of salvation and prototype of 19th century romantic’s extreme individualism towards Leopold’s ethics of the land. Indeed, Thoreau’s and later Muir’s concepts of refuges are tightly connected to territorial and temporal bio-regional constraints and imply an internally organized public area based on mutualism and Hannah Arendt’s agape. From these ideas of refuges, Aldo Leopold formulated his Land-ethics that claimed integrity and autonomy of the ‘Land’. His foundation is a prototype of the eco-centric free space version of eco-anarchism as formulated by Bookchin. In order to formulate a philosophical foundation of eco-anarchism we reject Newtonian homogeneous space-temporal conception, preceding the whole Modern discours about authority and state. On the contrary, we adopt the pluralistic Leibnizian space-time from which thinking-humans do not dissociate themselves, but participate as part of the rational infrastructure of eco-refuges. In eco-refuges, citizen belong to the civil society that stays in equilibrium with the landscape and all forms of biological life. Space is the boundary condition of human activity and determines how borders, environmental organization and institutes are sustained. Space has its proper essence of sustainability, unity and integrity. The individual feelings of security are embedded in a timelike tradition and evolution of the free space, while individual particular conceptions of space and time integrate into the social processes of identification with the refuge. Therefore, the creation of eco-refuges transforms the actual world of national authorities into a world of anarchistic democratic eco-regional homelands. (shrink)

There is a remarkable trend in contemporary environmentalism that emphasizes ‘accepting responsibility’ for the natural world in contrast to outdated preservationist thinking that shirks such responsibility. This approach is often explained and justified by reference to the anthropocene: this fundamentally new epoch—defined by human domination—requires active human intervention to avert planetary catastrophe. However, in this paper, I suggest this rhetoric encourages a flight from history. This often jubilant, sometimes anxious, yearning for unprecedented human innovation and—ultimately—control in our new millennia mirrors (...) the Futurist movement that took off near the beginning of the last century. Despite the significant differences in the details of how academics have defended this twenty-first-century environmental outlook, they all represent the true flight from history; they too quickly jettison the ideas of historical environmentalists and so misunderstand the environmental values at the heart of preservation that are more salient than ever. (shrink)

Through a close reading of the works of John Dewey and Aldo Leopold, I demonstrate that it is possible to reframe debates about the environment in language better suited to robust and inclusive public discourse. There are at least two ways of framing the instrumental relationship between human and environmental health: (i) in terms of control and (ii) in terms of restraint. On the one hand, means of control are associated with an anthropocentric view of environmental value: the environment has (...) worth only insofar as it provides resources for human benefit. On the other hand, means of restraint reflect greater concern for environmental health, sustainable living, non-anthropocentric (whether eco- or bio-centric) environmental value and lifestyles in harmony with nature, similar to the rhythmic relationship between human and environment captured in the writings of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. While John Dewey defends an instrumentalism of control, Aldo Leopold supports an opposing instrumentalism of restraint. At first blush, these two concepts appear to form a dualism, as incompatible dyads in a permanently bifurcated relationship. However, the matter is not quite so simple--or so I argue. Dewey and Leopold's concepts of environmental instrumentalism prove more compatible than this simple control/restraint dichotomy suggests. Nevertheless, it is helpful to frame environmental issues in terms of these two competing instrumentalism. To test the distinction's usefulness, I examine the wilderness debate, the global warming controversy and a more local matter, attempting to frame these environmental discourses in terms of an instrumentalism of control and an instrumentalism of restraint. (shrink)

In Gandhi's Printing Press, Isabel Hofmeyr introduces readers to the nuances of the newspaper in a far-flung colony in the age when mail and news traveled by ship and when readers were encouraged by Gandhi to read slowly and deeply. This article explores the ways in which Thoreau's concept of slow reading influenced Gandhi and Hofmeyr herself. She discusses the community that surrounded Gandhi and the role it played in supporting the newspaper. Yet, I argue, the role of women (...) of all races as well as Coloured and black South African men in leading, modeling, and shaping the movement of resistance to pass laws and other racist legislation might have been integrated more into the main narrative. Gandhi's newspaper, Indian Opinion, reported on the pass law protests of the African women of Bloemfontein, and Abdurahman's APO newspaper (popular in the Coloured community) reported on Gandhi's protests. Indian Opinion included speeches given by John Dube, and it often praised Dube and the work at Ohlange and reprinted stories from the black press. I offer these remarks to supplement Hofmeyr's fascinating account by providing additional information in portraying the newspaper in its historical and social context. (shrink)

Documentary film is that genre of filmmaking that lays bare the fact of all film, which is that it presents "a world past" (Cavell, The World Viewed). This fact of film seems to point to a paradox of time in our experience of movies: we are present at something that has happened, something that is over. But what if we were to take this fact to show that film has the power to place us outside our ordinary, unreflective relation to (...) time? In this essay I examine three pre-cinematic descriptions of relations to time – in Emerson, Thoreau, and Weil – that anticipate the paradox of time inherent in film. I then put that examination to use in a reading of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film ostensibly about prehistoric cave paintings but whose achievement is its declaration, not to document some past time, but to liberate the present moment. (shrink)

The paper charts both the interpersonal connections between historical anarchist figures and the beat poets as well as the philosophical similarities between them. Almost all the beat poets were anarchists, though their politics was secondary to their attempts to transform consciousness. Among the anarchists, the romantic socialist Gustav Landauer, who was especially popular in post-war American anarchist circles, came closest to the political perspective of the beat poets. Like the beats, Landauer was a poet, a pacifist, an anarchist, a communitarian, (...) a romantic, and a mystic. In northern California, the circle of anarchists surrounding Kenneth Rexroth provided support and inspiration to the early beat movement. In New York, the beats had an affinity with anarchists such as David Thoreau Wieck and the publication "Why?" (later "Resistance"), as well as Dwight Macdonald's "politics" and Holley Cantine's "Retort". (shrink)

The current economic/political system, neoliberalism, has touched every aspect of life globally. The doctrine of neoliberalism consists of three central propositions, that the market is real and part of the natural universal law; that unlimited economic growth is both possible and even desirable; and that human nature is coincident with market values and based solely on self-interest. All three of these propositions are seriously flawed and have caused immense human suffering and staggering environmental destruction. This paper is a reminder of (...) the failures of neoliberal policy and an appeal for change to a new institutional arrangement in which development trumps economic growth. This position is in contrast to Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis. He alleges there are no economic/political ideologies to compete with neoliberalism, the “TINA principle: There Is No Alternative”: the West has won. It is time to reintroduce Henry David Thoreau’s, and to a lesser extent, Adam Smith’s moral economies. Both have encourgaging insights, often overlooked by current academic economists, which could figure prominently in the conception of a new economy. (shrink)

the two-and-a-half years that Dewey lived in Japan and China offered him an East-West comparative standpoint to examine Euro-American presuppositions. In subsequent work, he took steps in the direction of a global philosophical outlook by promoting a fusion of aesthetic refinements with democratic experimentalism. The year 2021 marks the centennial of Dewey’s return to the United States, yet philosophers in this country have only begun to take in an emerging global philosophical scene that includes unfamiliar questions, angles, idioms, and emphases. (...) This includes American pragmatists. In a sense, as Gregory Pappas has observed in the context of Latin American philosophies, pragmatism did not “grow up” in the United... (shrink)

The vulgar democracy of the USA. Texts from Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Zinn.

Stephen Cox writes of the complexities that guided this well-known columnist, literary critic, best-selling novelist, avid reader, and intellectual, Mary Isabel Bowler Patterson, better known as Isabel Paterson or “I.M.P.” This edited collection includes a well-chosen selection of her essays, reviews, and letters. Combining both formal and colloquial prose, Paterson’s writings incorporated quips about such people as Sinclair Lewis and Henry David Thoreau, as well as candid discussions of William F. Buckley, Jr., Buffalo Bill, and Cecil Rhodes. The more (...) than one hundred names mentioned in the collection included such diverse figures as Virginia Woolf, John Pierpont Morgan, H.G. Wells, Henry Hazlitt, and Jasper Elliot Crane. (shrink)

Define “patriotism” as love for one’s country and devotion to its well-being. This essay contends that patriotism thus defined is a virtue and that environmentalism is one of its most important manifestations. Patriotism, as devotion to particular places and people, can occur at various levels, from the local to the national. Knowing and caring about particular places and people and working to protect them is good for us and good for them and hence a good thing overall. Knowing and caring (...) and working less on behalf of more remote places and people is also good, since it allows us to focus our efforts, act effectively, and do more good in the world. Philosophical analyses of patriotism by Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum are complemented by the more “down to earth” understanding of the virtue presented here. While patriotism’s dangers are undeniable, so are the dangers stemming from lack of patriotism. The proper answer to bad patriotism is not cosmopolitanism, but good patriotism: the kind illustrated by environmental activists. (shrink)

The encounter with critics of Western civilization, from vegetarianism and British anti-industrialist socialism, Thoreau's theories of civil disobedience and Tolstoy's evangelical Christianity, led Gandhi to a rediscovery of Indian tradition. Unlike other forms of Afro-Asian cultural nationalism, this claim was neither conservative nor separatist but led to a fresh reading of some key concepts from the Indian tradition combined with ideas from the Christian, the Islamic and the European humanistic traditions.