Sunday, February 17, 2013

Time and Epistemology in Thoreau's Walden


In the final paragraph of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau advances his own notions of time and intellect to reveal what he views as the limits of epistemology. In this blog post, I first intend to pull apart the meaning of the paragraph to discern Thoreau’s thoughts towards time and its connection to epistemology. I will then conclude this post by postulating how Thoreau’s opinions on epistemology inform Walden as an entire work.

For Thoreau, nature has no time. Time, as we conceive of it, is but a human construction. It is shallow like a stream with a sandy bottom. As a human, Thoreau must participate in constructed, organized time. However, he recognizes that “human time” is merely a current passing quickly through nature, which is an eternal cycle. Rather than spend time meditating upon the shallow, human conception of time, Thoreau wishes to meditate on the “universal time” of nature. Following the stream metaphor, universal time has a bottom of infinite and unique pebbles (stars), as opposed to the unstable, sandy bottom of human time.

While dealing with universal time, Thoreau is unconcerned with basic knowledge, but he is instead focused upon a deeper wisdom. As time passes and life makes its imprint on an individual, that individual replaces wisdom with ideology, knowledge, and common sense. As a babe, human beings are more connected to the universe or higher power that governs nature. They examine their world through the honesty of sensory perception and not through the culture lens of knowledge. However, that connection fades and the child forgets the wisdom of innocence as he or she grows and is further acculturated into society.

Thoreau uses a violent metaphor to represent the intellect. Intellect is a butcher’s knife, hacking its way to the secrets it seeks. It appears that Thoreau aligns intellect with the shallow pursuits of human time. Thoreau believes humans are slaves to their manmade time and empty intellect, which prevents them from living in the present. People are either laboring for a future gain or looking back at memories from the past. This poses an epistemological limit because mankind is unable to experience immediate reality, which is a requirement for appreciating and attuning oneself to nature.

I think that Thoreau’s theory of epistemology informs the style in which he writes Walden. Instead of writing in an extremely organized, assertive fashion like Emerson, Thoreau’s writing is more of a flow. He loosely organizes Walden according to the seasons. He compresses two human years to one seasonal cycle. He builds his cabin in spring, begins inhabiting it on July 4th and the text concludes again with spring. Thoreau’s writing is also densely packed with metaphors, observations, and reflections that build upon each other. The first paragraph of Walden that we discussed last class is a perfect example. The paragraph is only two sentences long and includes qualification after qualification that situate the reader to Thoreau’s location in a remote cabin in the woods of Concord. These observations and reflections display the lucidity with which Thoreau wrote Walden. While occasionally fishing in the stream of the deeply constructed human time, Thoreau focuses on expanding the limits of conventional epistemology by living within the present moment and connecting with the flow of nature.

1 comment:

  1. Very good—no one else has mentioned the cleaver. I like how you link this to Emerson—but I wonder if this passage isn’t assertive, too? And if it’s not, what is different from Emerson’s style of writing? Some strategies are the same, obviously (e.g,, the lack of connectives between sentences). Is the use of imagery different? And if so, what is different about it?

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