From "Experience"

"The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Parka coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us."

Richard Shusterman's _Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art_.

In a chapter on organic unity--both in terms of its romanticist inception and its new critical appropriations-- Shusterman uses the frame analogy to illustrate poststructuralism's deconstruction of organic unity aesthetics. He describes it brilliantly like this: a work of art is that which is framed. The organic unity concept of aesthetics--that a work of art has essential constitutive qualities--posits that what's inside the frame is what's essential to the work, thus the work possess organic unity. However, deconstructionists such as Derrida and De Mann note that what's outside of the frame makes possible what's inside of the frame. Put another way, literary criticism consists of hermeneutically distinguishing between the essential and the inessential. But this is fundamentally flawed because it presupposes two things: one, that a work has an inside and an outside, and two, that there is an essential constitutive meaning and a margin of meaning--things in the text that one shouldn't pay much attention to. Deconstruction, then, collapses the (false) distinction between inside-outside, inessential-essential by dehierarchicalizing that which has been prioritized.

I'm sure for many of you this is just a review of postructuralist critiques on aesthetics. This is where it gets interesting. Shusterman argues that deconstructionism has a blind spot. Its blind spot is that in its attempt to deconstruct and dereify organicist aesthetic unity, which Shusterman claims to originate from Hegelian idealism, they have in fact only relied on a kind of Hegelian structure of logic.

Here is what Shusterman says: "The essential sameness of difference [Derrida's 'difference'] and the radical concept of organic unity should now appear obvious, especially if we take the notion of whole as representing the (perhaps not fully totalizable) system of structure of linguistic differences" (71-72). In other words, poststructuralism, though critiquing Hegelian totalities, operates on an understanding of mutually constitutive difference based on a kind of radicalized totalization.

The critique against new criticisms still stands intact. New Critical approaches separate inside from outside and deem elements of textuality marginal according to privileged biases--that which didn't support the normative values of literary and academic establishments before the linguistic turn. However, what doesn't remain fully intact in Shusterman's critique of postructuralism is the idea that organicist unity is always already exclusionary. If thought of as a totalizing system it can still be one that is constituted by inescapable difference because in order to to posses unity it must contain difference. 

Shusterman then argues that pragmatism forms an intervention into this debate in the following way. Pragmatism posits that there are valuable uses to seeing a text in terms of organic unity, and, in fact, that which posits itself as a heterogeneous reading is most often, under exegetical inspection, the opposite. In addition, to claim a delineative division between a unified reading of a text and a marginal reading of a text assumes that these fundamental differences can occur on a fully coherent basis (my thought). I wonder: do deconstructionist methods become unitary lens from which to pin down a text? Derrida's aesthetics certainly resist that.

I bring all this up because I find Shusterman's complication of organic unity extremely compelling and totally fresh, even though this book was written over a decade ago.   

"James and the Metaphorics of Transition"

Pertaining to William James's phenomenology of felt relations, James uses a rather straightforward metaphor--that of the stream of consciousness. As Jonathon Levin puts it in _The Poetics of Transition_: "James is responding to two dominant conceptions of mind...the sensationalist account...and the intellectualist account" (46). The former emphasizes the individuated quality of discreet experience, often disjointed from preceding moments of experience. The latter emphasizes abstractions that govern all experience. James's pragmatism often presents a binary system of social sects loosely within broadly historicized philosophical discourse, and then performs a kind of hybridization or middle-grounding of those opposing formations. "Though logic holds that concepts are unchanging" writes Levin "in experience the same concept if subtly different every time it is evoked," thus, thoughts "are always thoughts-in-relation, and no abstract form of those thoughts underlies or secures their shifting relations" (46). James does not deny the sensationalist or the intellectualist position, but instead falsifies the division that separates them to be "as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades" (46). This falsification away from actual experience occurs due to our "habit of confusing a mental process with its end product" (Levin 47). "Since we keep talking about a table, or justice, or the color blue, we imagine a permanent mental or ideal form that we think of as Table, or Justice, or Blueness" (Levin 47). Jamesian psychology collapses the distinction between transcendental mental objects and their spatio-temporal contingencies. To separate any object for discreet contemplation is to imagine it out of its context and to betray the nature of thought itself. This is so because "Consciousness is never reducible to any immediate perception or sensation" (Levin 47). But James is not just attempting to sketch out a theory of the phenomenology of thought. Such a venture would be worthy in itself. But we can see James's early interest in making an intervention into the history of competing philosophical discourses. That intervention, which becomes an elaboration on and integration of _The Principles of Psychology_, is the pragmatist notion of the middle ground between historical philosophical dualisms: mind-body conflicts, empiricisms vs. idealisms, skepticism vs. optimism, because for James, all these dualities and binaries are only opposite ends on the continuum of human thought-experience and its many contingent and yet extending temporalities.  

The Snow-Storm

 Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

From "Method of Nature"

"Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. There is somewhat indigent and tedious about them. They are poorly tied to one thought. If they are prophets, they are egoists; if polite and various, they are shallow. How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical strata as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically."

From "The Method of Nature"

"The festival of the intellect, and the return to its source, cast a strong light on the always interesting topics of Man and Nature. We are forcibly reminded of the old want. There is no man; there hath never been. The Intellect still asks that a man may be born. The flame of life flickers feebly in human breasts." 

Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” and the Crisis of Democracy

            

          In the opening paragraphs of “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau makes a provocative remark about American government: “This American government- what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.” In rhetorically asking such an audacious question, Thoreau calls the fundamental stability, moral legitimacy, and lasting permanence of the American government into question. Rather than viewing America as the real-life and present-day fulfillment of its revolutionary ethos, within which critiques of law and civil society can be made, Thoreau elevates and separates the American revolutionary impetus over and against America. In making this gesture, Thoreau enacts what Lee A. McBride, III calls the American tradition of “insurrectionist ethics.” According to McBride, III, “Insurrectionist ethics is a corollary of a larger project aimed at universal human liberation. Universal human liberation is concerned with liberating populations from oppressive and debilitating boundaries.” What separates insurrectionist ethics from other movements that seek to eliminate oppression is its tendency toward radical action and systemic critique. What often propelled antislavery movements within the insurrectionist ethos of the nineteenth century was an appeal to the higher laws of God and Nature.

As Deak Nabers notes in his article “Thoreau’s Natural Constitution”:  “…while nineteenth-century antislavery movements were ‘absolutely dependent upon’ the notion ‘of an immutable, higher law,’ the higher law on which they depended ‘tended to be so transcendent that it had little bearing on existing institutions’” (Nabers). From this point of view, Thoreau’s appeal to “a nation of huckleberries” in “Civil Disobedience” seems like ineffectual transcendentalizing. Rather than advocating change within the system or violent insurrection, Thoreau instead appeals to nature and individual conscience as experienced in relation to naturalisms. Why effect does this produce? I would like to suggest that Thoreau’s combining of insurrectionist ethos with a turn towards nature pre-figures what John Dewey terms the failures of civic articulation.

Writing on Dewey’s notion of the failures of democratic society, Naoko Saito tells us that “John Dewey criticized what he saw as a hollow concept and practice of ‘citizenship’ in democracy. In the ‘void between government and the public’ (310), men became, he warned, ‘skeptical of the efficiency of political action’ (319). Indifference and apathy, says Dewey, are the signs of a bewildered public. This leads to what Dewy calls a “crisis of democracy” and citizenship; it involves a situation in which one cannot articulate one's feelings, or where, in the loss of one's own taste, one does not know ‘what one really wants’ (Saito). In light of Dewey’s ideas about the failures of citizenship, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” can be seen not as a text that fails to fill the systemic gap it creates, but rather as a text that consciously strives to enact such a gap. By doing so, Thoreau combines what Harris labels “insurrectionist ethos” with what Dewey terms a “crisis of democracy and citizenship.”  By awakening his conscience in prose, Thoreau suggests a failure of the state to articulate and enact in concrete terms the values it is predicated upon: freedom and individual liberty. Since slavery and the Mexican-American war represent clear failures of the state to enact such principles, it is up to the individual to argue his or her conscience in place of where the state hasn’t. Thoreau’s appeal to nature, in this formulation, represents the failure of human beings to articulate a truly just form of government. If such a just form of government could be articulated, it is would bear resemblance to the higher laws articulated effortlessly by nature. Thus, Thoreau utilizes nature as polemic of shame against such failed state articulations of freedom, justice, and individual liberty.

The narrative that most gets told about American antebellum political conflict is one that emphasizes robust disagreement over systemic critique. Rather than maintaining a historical awareness of radical elements and persons within the antislavery and anti-imperialist factions of American antebellum society—factions comprised of those who questioned the foundational legitimacy of a republican democracy that continued to allow slavery, and indeed had slavery built into its very constitution—such elements in the American collective conscious have been notably suppressed in favor of narratives that tend to emphasize disagreement within democratic systems rather than systemic challenge.  “Excluded from [this] narrative,” Mcbride reminds us, “are those associated with denouncing America as such, those agents of philosophies grounded in denying that the ‘founding principles’ or an ‘American character’ ever existed, especially those who proffer bellicose means of liberation. Thus the story of the classical American philosophical tradition tends to lack slave narratives, blatant hypocrisy, moral indignation, and insurrections.” Mcbride’s description of hegemonic and counter hegemonic political narratives is derived from political philosopher Lenard Harris’s elaborations on insurrectionist ethics. Harris argues that ethical insurrectionism was predominant during the 19^th century and the suppression of it has been due to narrative exclusions that serve hegemonic interests. Such narrative exclusions become habitual and self-regenerative. In an attempt to uncover such lost narratives, Harris has engaged in a project to uncover narratives that deployed radical, systemic critiques of foundations of the American political system and its ability or inability to ensure and realize the project of democracy and human rights.

            In uncovering such narratives, an attention to language becomes fundamental. As McBride shrewdly states: “Quaint platitudes about democracy, sympathy, and communal discourse are grossly inadequate in negating the material conditions that have debilitating effects on denigrated populations.” Thus, to enact counter hegemonic discourses it becomes necessary to imagine discourses or narratives that exist outside of familiar narratives and discourses. To put it another way, any discourse that operates within larger discourses or narratives of containment do not go far enough to challenge oppressive hegemonies. This is so because debates couched within always already legitimized foundations assume a legitimate foundational basis upon which to stand and deliver critique. Such critiques, then, fall short because they do not challenge fundamental flaws that subtend structures that become, in the symbolic networks of statehood, universalized and transcendently ahistorical and apolitical. For Harris, material and structural changes in fundamentally oppressive systems, both governmental and economic, is what is needed to begin to end oppressive institutions (McBride). However, to change systems of oppressive government requires more than mere debate; for Harris it requires discourses and rhetorical moves that are fundamentally disruptive. Such a systemic critique is what Thoreau deploys in “Civil Disobedience” when he reanimates revolutionary discourse. “All men,” says Thoreau, “recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution Of '75.” By invoking a historic proximity to the American Revolution, Thoreau reminds his audience that revolutionary discourse is not merely a discourse enshrined in history and therefore static; rather, he suggests that such discourse is available to us at any given time.

According to McBride, antebellum ethical insurrectionists shared these common features: They recognized that America was founded on the systemic brutality of slavery and believed in the “use of civil disobedience, irreverent protest, subterfuge, and, in some cases, violence against prevailing authority”; they viewed “slavery, racism, and other denials of a population’s humanity” as “insults that justify enmity, if not vengeance, as a natural response”; they believed in representative heuristics, that is, the idea that individuals can stand as representatives of a whole population and its conditions (though not without acknowledging variety within social typologies), and they celebrated as virtuous certain character traits not commonly associated with virtue, such as audacity and aggression. They in turn viewed these traits as justifiable in the face of injustice (McBride). In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau manifests these traits. Thoreau recognizes the problematic foundation of America in the form of its sanctioning of slavery within the constitution: “But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is a change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body.” Here Thoreau foregrounds the founding document of the country, the constitution, as being an entity of “evil.” Thoreau also uses metaphors of death and rebirth to suggest that the foundations of any “body” or nation, though it may be painful, though it may cause them to “convulse,” can and should be subject to radical change if said foundations do not adequately serve and/or perform their purported values. Thoreau applies the same systemic critique to the then active Mexican-American war: “…when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” By siding with Mexico in the conflict as the aggrieved party, Thoreau grafts the philosophical grammar of the American Revolution onto a transnational space. Granted, Thoreau’s grievance is with his own country; however, he demonstrates sympathetic identification with the Mexican people, and does so within discourse commonly reserved for America and Americans.

According to Thoreau, “What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.” Such systemic critiques and interventions represent, according to McBride, Thoreau’s insurrectionist ethos. This insurrectionist ethos has been left out of common and popular narratives concerning Thoreau: “Almost nothing is mentioned of his condemnation of slavery, his descriptions of blatant hypocrisy, his refused allegiance to state and federal government, his reverence for abolitionists, or his approbation of violent rebellion” (McBride). However, what McBride does not adequately account for is the Garrisonian pacifism of moral suasion running throughout “Civil Disobedience.”

 Thoreau characterizes civil resistance in terms of conflict: “I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless,” and Thoreau characterizes governmental oppression in terms of a human resistance to non-human machinery: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth- certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” The first line of the passage suggests that oppression within governmental systems may eventually self-ameliorate. If this is the case, then nothing need be done about it. The “machine” of oppression will simply wear itself out. Thoreau’s next line, however, suggests a systemic problem: the oppression is a function of the machine itself. Thus, says Thoreau, one must weigh whether or not the means justifies the ends in one’s attempt to resist oppression. Lastly, Thoreau says that if the injustice is so egregious that it goes against one’s own moral and ethical constitution, then you must “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” The metaphor of machinery and friction sounds bellicose enough. However, Thoreau in fact prefers passive resistance throughout the essay: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.” For Thoreau, the system is institutionalized violence and the individual who abandons, symbolically and materially, the machinery of the system is committing an act of peaceable resistance. Thus, Thoreau’s suggested solution is moral suasion: “A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.” Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience,” embodies all of the traits of Harris’s insurrectionist ethos except for an open advocating of violence as a necessary means of civil resistance. Thoreau tacitly acknowledges that such violence is a possibility, but to a large extent prefers the violence of rhetoric to the violence of bodies and guns. Why doesn’t Thoreau openly advocate violence as a last-resort means of just resistance to slavery and American imperialism? Rather than historicize this question, I want to follow Thoreau’s text closely to see what it is interested in. However, before doing so, I will touch upon the trope of natural law within antebellum antislavery movements.    

The appeal to a law higher than the US constitution was a common trope of the antislavery movement: “In the nineteenth century, natural law bore a curious relationship to slavery. The call for abolition was almost universally accompanied by an appeal to nature; so too was the defense of slavery” (Nabers). Thus, the appeal to natural law could be appropriated in both pro- and antislavery directions. While an appeal to natural law was made popular in various ways, particularly within Garrisonian abolitionism, debates in the 1850s concerning the abolition of slavery continued to be placed within legalistic frameworks (Nabers). According to Nabers,  “Gregg Crane has recently examined the ‘higher law tradition’ in the nineteenth century, whose ‘core idea is constant and may be expressed (if not implemented) simply: to be legitimate, law must be just.’” Thus, any law that does not conform to God-given and/or natural principles is see as disposable, including the US constitution. As McBride states of Thoreau’s ethical insurrectionism: “Thoreau maintains a conception of humanity that militates moral action against obvious brutality or injustice. According to Thoreau, human beings have a duty to serve humanity. This moral obligation issues from a source beyond human legal statutes—a higher law.” Thus natural law created a space outside of American legal sovereignty and constitutionality from which to operate and deploy its critiques, challenging the legitimacy of the nation’s foundational government. However, as Nabers points out, this discoursive appeal to higher law, to the law of God and nature, began, in the 1840s and 50s to wear thin: “If slavery’s peculiar legal standing stressed the law’s necessary implication in the maintenance of the peculiar institution, the debates in the 1840s and 1850s surrounding fugitive slaves and slavery’s standing in the US territories exerted a countervailing influence. They suggested that freedom, however much it may have been a matter of ‘natural right,’ was ultimately just as dependent upon the law as the ‘brute forces’ of bondage.” Thus, as Nabers shrewdly summarizes for us, it became increasingly clear for antebellum antislavery factions that while the law was the instrument of slavery it was also the necessary instrument of freedom. The radical outsideness to an appeal to natural law beyond human law, while initially kickstarting the bellicose rhetorics of antislavery movements, eventually became a kind of nowhere territory. However, according Nabers, Thoreau was able to align such appeals to nature with a pragmatic reformist framework:                           Thoreau’s 1850s essays constitute an extended effort to specify nature’s political                           function in a world where the law has become a necessary instrument of justice.                                   In testifying to nature’s dependence upon the law as well as its superiority to it,                                they amount to a systematic elaboration of the terms on which nature could                            exercise normative political authority. More than any other abolitionist operating                          in the broad Garrisonian paradigm, Thoreau recognized the danger that the natural                         right could drift away altogether from the realm of human institutions. (Nabers)  If Thoreau’s 1850s essays attempted to maintain a healthy balance between natural right and human institutions, then “Civil Disobedience,” written in 1849, I wish to suggest, offers a slightly different program.

In Saito’s article  “Citizenship Without Inclusion: Religious Democracy after Dewey, Emerson, and Thoreau” Saito writes that Dewey “reminds us today that the crisis of the ‘eclipse of the public’ has a bearing not only on democracy as a matter of deliberative procedure or political participation but also on one's ways of living, on an ethical dimension of life that precedes political and ideological dimensions—the dimension that involves the question of how one should live, and how one should relate oneself to others.” It is here I am suggesting that Thoreau’s ethical philosophy elaborated in “Civil Disobedience” bears some commonality with Dewey’s notion of the “eclipse of the public,” that is, the gap that exists between democracy’s purported values of inclusion and universal rights and the actuality of its legal institutions. Dewey tells us that a space exists prior to our being constituted as a subject of the state. This is the “ethical dimension of how one should live,” which “precedes political and ideological dimensions.” By combining an insurrectionist ethos with an appeal to nature’s higher laws and the law of one’s own conscience, Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience” attempts to access this prior space. This space exists in the form of one’s own ethical conscientiousness. However, in order to articulate the existence and primacy of this space, Thoreau must disarticulate the dominant grammars of the state. Such grammars seek to turn men of conscience into an instrument and subject of the state, that is, into an army: “A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporeal, private, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their will, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed.” In their service of the state, that is, in the sublimation of their consciences, they become the instruments of the state’s injustice: “Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?” Thoreau thus attempts to generate a gap between self and state and exploit and dwell on the potentiality for conscientious objection existent in such a gap. In this sense, Thoreau is attempting to desubjectivise or deconstitute the subject: “I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

In providing a gloss of Michel Foucault’s concept of Panopticism in relation to state power and its control over the subject, Mohammadreza Arghiani writes: “The genius of the panopticon lies in the fact that the threat of surveillance replaces the need for actual surveillance, so that the role of the guard is internalized and enacted by the prisoner” (Arghiani). Within Foucault’s framework of the modern structures of power, the question of what constitutes self-subjectivity becomes inextricably bound up with historically contingent power structures, particularly those of the state. Foucault’s primary interest, then, was how such historical, discoursive processes end up constituting the subject, both in terms of what we might loosely call the “individual” as well in terms of how state power executes dominance over individuals and populations. Thoreau, both like and unlike Foucault, is greatly interested in how the subject becomes constituted by the state and social apparatuses. In revealing and exploiting the gap between state action and individual conscience, Thoreau offers us the possibility of not only a disposition of insurrectionist ethos, but also a space that exists outside of state formations:

When I meet a government which says to me, ‘Your money or your life,’ why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. (Thoreau)

One interpretation of this passage is that Thoreau is an acorn and the US government is the chestnut. Thoreau says he does not accommodate himself to the self-destructive failures of the chestnut, that is, the government, because it is not in his nature to do so. However, I want to propose a slightly different interpretation. Rather than allegorizing the state and the individual in terms of acorns and chestnuts, Thoreau is making an actual comparison. Nature, unlike man, allows for its own greatest health. It does not stall its own development and natural trajectory in order to accommodate elements within it that are destructive to it. Thus, to side with nature, a non-human model for human conscientiousness, Thoreau praises nature for its health and shames man for his self-destructive impetus.     

            Like the ethical insurrectionist, Thoreau makes himself a heuristic representative. Rather than merely claiming a self-separation over and against society, Thoreau turns to an alliance with nature in order to utilize its civic and ethical pedagogies. Thoreau is not apart from society, he is separating himself from this society, instead favoring a potential society wherein individuals legislate not according to expediency but according to conscience: “Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?” This is possible for Thoreau if the individual is not divided against himself: “It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.”

            However, nature also for Thoreau signifies, I want to suggest, the failures of the American government to articulate justice. Thoreau’s account of his night spent in jail is characterized by his silence rather than his speech. While in jail, Thoreau listens to what the imprisoned have to say of their imprisonment: “The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered.” Thoreau describes this scene of conversation as a democratic moment wherein subalterns articulate democracy in ways the American congress has failed to: “I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing.” In this depiction of verse making by healthy, robust youths whom the nation has rendered invisible within the machinations of political institutions, Thoreau suggests a alternative mode of speech, one that is more democratic in that it is unmediated by political expediency.

            When Thoreau exits the jail, he describes how his experience has transformed his localized perspective: “When I came out of prison,—for some one interfered, and paid that tax,—I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in youth, and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet change had to my eyes come over the scene,—the town, and State, and country,—” Thoreau’s former insurrectionist speech has been becalmed by a silent recognition of what the State is. Thoreau then says: “When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,—for the hose was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of the highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.” While Thoreau’s joy at rejoining his “huckleberry party” suggests the constancy and permanence of nature over the ephemerality of the government, it also suggests, I want to argue, a sense of elegy for human institutions which have failed to articulate justice within their governmental frameworks.

By replacing the act of constitutive or representative speech with the silence of huckleberries, Thoreau both playfully and mournfully bears witness to a crisis of democracy, as he does throughout “Civil Disobedience.” The crisis he bears witness to is the failure of America to legislatively articulate its founding principles. This leaves Thoreau in a state of “bewilderment” as Dewey says. In such a state, one floats in the “void between government and the public” (Saito). However, rather than merely being in a state of mourning over his government, Thoreau seizes on this gap between stated revolutionary values and their concrete legislative articulation as a moment to remind his audience that they are representative owners of their own government. In other words, government operates on the illusion that it is entirely separate and more powerful than its subjects; however, Thoreau suggests, government is only oppressive to the extent that its subjects allow it to have power over them. Thus, Thoreau enlivens revolutionary rhetoric to enact an insurrectionist ethos. At the same time, he combines this insurrectionist ethos with nature and an appeal to natural law in order to show how nature, in its silence, articulates what the American government has failed to article: its own claim of justice and human equality.

Works Cited

Arghiani, Mohammadreza. “Diminishing I’s: The Unnamable’s Absent Subjecthood and the

            Disintegration of Meaning in the Face of Foucault’s Panopticon.” Philosophy and

            Literature. Vol. 36, N.2. (2012). Project Muse. Web. 

McBride, III, Lee A. “Insurrectionist Ethics and Thoreau.” Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce

            A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy. Vol. 49, N. 1. 2013. Project Muse. Web. 

Nabers, Deak. “Thoreau’s Natural Constitution.” American Literary History. Vol. 19. N. 4. 2007.

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Saito, Naoko. “Citizenship Without Inclusion: Religious Democracy after Dewey, Emerson, and

            Thoreau.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18.3 (2004) 203-215. Project Muse.

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Thoreau, Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems. DC: Library of America, 2001. Print.

West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison,

            WS: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Print.

William James, from "What Pragmatism Means"

"The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly--or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology, and its 'prescription,' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity."