Thoreau: "Wildness as Political Act"

The question has been: How can we characterize Thoreau's political stance — not only his vision, but his entire reflective and affective disposition towards political life? 

My teacher and friend Douglas Anderson claims in this regard that Thoreau’s aim “was not to defend a general political stance, but to seek the possibility of amelioration of human culture through responsible political agency” (93). By “political” Anderson means its “broad, original sense of dealing with issues of the polis in practically wise ways” (86). Thoreau, in the political dimension of his thought and action, did not seek to defend a general position such as specific forms of anarchism, libertarianism, and so on. He was rather trying to experiment with, and perhaps recommend, ways to cultivate ourselves for living well and in preparation for political agency, for being effective persons in realizing natural goodness and justice. Anderson draws specifically from Thoreau’s “Walking” and interprets the essay as “the poetic suggestion of a discipline prefatory to political action” (93).

This discipline of self-cultivation, the “art of walking,” is the condition for the possibility of effective political action. In “Walking” Thoreau’s ameliorative political aim, the progressive shift he sought, is “to move us—the polis, if not the cosmos—in a certain direction: from the civil toward the natural” (86), where “civil” means tame, cowed over-civilization. As I noted before, this is akin to José Martí’s aim in “Nuestra América” or “Our America”—political resistance depends on naturalness and authenticity. Thoreau’s point, at any rate, is to resist debilitating conformity to expedient mores and laws that violate natural goodness and justice. The resistance is to be carried out by the person as “Walker Errant,” as a nonconformist who, in Thoreau’s words, “stands outside of Church and State and People” (87). 

Anderson interprets the discipline of “walking” as consisting of three interrelated aspects. First, seeking experience at the margins of culture and even in nature (87). Witness Thoreau’s daily walks into fields and woods and his life experiment at Walden Pond. Second, experiencing and living one’s inner wildness—our raw, untamed natural way of being as part and parcel of Nature (88). Third, commitment to experimenting and living our lives with purpose, even against the grain of debilitating mores, conventions, and unjust laws (89). This is hard—it is easier and more expedient to conform, even in the sight of injustice.

What must we do in order to become apprentices in the “art of walking”? First, we must be willing to get lost, and then we must actually get lost (90). When we walk in the woods, to discover new places in uncharted terrain, we may become disoriented. But we must we willing to take the risk, we must go into the woods, and we must find our way out of our lostness in order to find ourselves. As in walks, so in life. We can only find our own “wild” way in life if we try. Your family and social group, for example, may want you to be a physician, lawyer, or engineer; you may want to be a writer or teacher. It is up to you whether you try. 

Second, we must find and preserve “wild” spaces for walking at three metaphorical levels—within our spirits, in our society, and in nature around us. In Anderson’s words, there are “three sorts of wild spaces that might preserve our freedom and agency as persons: a space in the soul to house the ‘wild savage in us,’ a social space where one’s ‘friend and neighbors’ can be ‘wild men,’ and a natural space, a wilderness” (91). There is an order of reciprocal dependence among these spaces; that is, each is a condition for the preservation of the other. Only if we preserve our inner wildness will we allow and enjoy it in others and deeply appreciate untrammeled nature. If we don’t preserve our own experimental wildness, if we, say, become spoiled oil or real-estate magnates, we may want to force others to conform to our arbitrary mores and conventions, and we may see no problem in digging oil fields or building pipelines, walls and fences all throughout the wild prairies and deserts and forests.

In Anderson’s interpretation, the “wider field, the wilderness, that Thoreau calls for in an apprenticeship to walking, and so to political agency, has the task of presenting us with possibilities. There is no agency without possibility…It is in the achievement of actual possibilities that we can arrive at the threshold of political action” (93). Experimenting with possibilities for better, more just, wilder or more natural ways of living is to act.

Thus we arrive to Anderson’s idea of Thoreauvian “wildness as political act.” Cultivating the art of walking is the condition for the possibility of free, responsible action—freedom not merely civil but absolute. To act is different than merely to behave. Conforming to mores, laws, and conventions is to behave. Seeing possibilities for a better, more just life, and to try them out is to act—in this case, to act politically. 

Here lies the distinction between civil and absolute freedom. For Anderson, “Civil freedom is the liberal’s negative freedom in which, if we behave, we can live an undisturbed life” (92). We can obey unjust laws or policies, for example, look the other way, say they don’t affect us, and live undisturbed, earning our wages and perhaps enjoying a pension until we die. But the price is economic and moral slavery. In contrast, 

The movement toward the wilderness that Thoreau speaks for initiates two freedoms. First, it provides an enhanced negative freedom by removing some of the social constraints placed on the tamed, social self. More important, it conditions the possibility of an empowerment to act on one’s own. ‘The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.’ Only at this juncture does one become responsible and able to act politically. (92-93)

This way interpreting Thoreau’s political stance is most appealing to me. Prior to defending any general stance such as anarchism or democratic individualism, the point of Thoreau’s political thought and action is to experiment with and try out avenues of self-cultivation that prepare us for the possibility of effective, transformative, resistant, even revolutionary political action.
  
Reference: Douglas R. Anderson, “Wildness as Political Act,” in Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 85-93.