A Transcendental Methodology: drawing from Thoreau’s Walden Experience

In the thawing spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau started constructing and assembled a hermitage at Walden Pond in the northeast region of the United States- in what is today a township called Concord right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. His thoughts and his words, as he recorded them in isolation from civilization, remain a crucial historical part of the transcendentalist movement and its influence on industrialization in the 19th century US. Thoreau’s haptic definitions of shelter, clothing, food, and fire, etc. throughout his opening chapter on Economy in Walden, deliver a form of “very natural and pertinent” contemporary dialogue over issues that are just as pertinent as they were when it was first published. This paper seeks to understand and find placement of Thoreau’s parable below, regarding clothing, within larger contemporary social and environmental issues.

“Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe.... Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.”(Thoreau,1904)

The first thing that we can deduct from this parable, and peel away from it, is Thoreau’s definition of utility in clothing. “ to retain vital heat” and “ to cover nakedness.” Both of these functions are needs that clothing’s functionalism fulfills. From practical science, we know that the need and responsibility to regulate our vital heat, as depicted by Thoreau, is relegated to our skin, then on to our clothing, and then again on to the shelter we live in. If we take Thoreau’s insights on the utility of clothing and it’s uselessness as a social novelty- then the application to contemporary issues over the ethics of defining socio-cultural roles in sustainability can be posited. For instance, what are the similarities/differences in basic human needs from culture to culture? The needs of an American factory worker will be far different than the needs of a farmer in India or Pakistan. Needs are so different because of how needs are defined and prescribed. Understanding this issue and how cultures and societies define their needs must come to a more coherent and inquisitional stance. This issue of social and cultural difference will be essential to fully comprehend and understand before exploring my thesis.

The second part of the selected Thoreau parable regarding clothing maintains that our “garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer’s character…” The ability for Thoreau to be able to see clothing as such an integrated part of the body was very modern for his time. Later on in his Economy chapter, Thoreau calls clothing “our outmost cuticle and mortal coil”(p25) connoting a type of prosthesis or shell that provides a natural extension of the body as protection and shelter for our mortality withholding our softer dermis. He continues the metaphor of clothing continually stripping man and concluding to the point where the shirt is all that remains, the most essential “liber” or “bark” of man that “cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man.” Whether the destruction of the man is based on a conscious mortality or social mortality is to be debated, but it can be called to question that a conscious mortality would presume that the shirt is integral to the body’s existence.

His choice of using clothing as metaphor, amongst other necessary life-giving elements including shelter, fire, etc., is justified, logically, because of the social and anthropogenic underpinnings of its utility. Clothing is the nearest nexus between our bodies and the physical, environmental reality we live in. We allow it to negotiate and compensate efficiently for us to do things our natural body and natural environment cannot. It serves as another system that influences how we live our daily lives- negotiating the physical and social aspects of the places we live in. Clothes are, in these cases, inseparable from our bodies. They are in effect just as permanently a part of us as a tattoo is residing underneath our skin.

Thoreau’s endeavors, and methodologies to obtain them, were questioned through his peers as he wrote- Why not do something that benefits the poor? What philanthropic values lie in such an experiment? Yet, these same thoughts provoke the same inquiries into our lives today as they did for H.D. Thoreau in 1845. These same thoughts inspire us to think outside the box and try new and unorthodox things that we may not otherwise have done. By applying thoughts and methods from H. D. Thoreau’s ascetic experiment at Walden Pond, we can draw out rational strategies to implement and create new ways of thinking.

Thoreau’s parables and thoughts on Economy spring from his analyses and realizations of the necessities in life- shelter, clothing, food, heat, etc. And his methodologies are amazingly just as applicable then as they are now. His methods of “learning by doing” allowed him to stumble across issues far beyond his time. His mission was to simplify life down to the basics of pure utility and necessity so that he could visualize how to live within his own means. To maintain his, what we would call today, “ecological footprint,” and determine the natural capital of the place in which he lived are still very relevant issues within contemporary society. Thoreau’s procedures and methods may have been based on a ‘learn by doing’ philosophy, but were rooted in what today can be known as forms of adaptive learning and environmental feedback (Rees 2003)

It is, perhaps, a bit ironic that it took Thoreau living as an isolated hermit, and completely removing himself from the socio-economic system he was a part of to recognize and comprehend the intrinsic nature of what drove materialism and capitalism in the onset of the industrial revolution. Thoreau came out of his tract on Walden having a much larger, more accurate perspective on environmental economics (another term that was perhaps way before his time) and how re-valuations of nature’s stock and capital. His revaluation of nature in effect took on the neo-classical western economic theories that isolate nature from humanity and combined them to create a symbiosis of sorts- something akin to reliving life in the same context within a different cultural and anthropogenic mindset- that of an indigenous tribesman. His method of starting something from nothing, with a ‘learning by doing’ procedure, provides a potent methodology that could serve as a framework to a project of more contemporaneity. Thoreau reveals, through experimentation and lived experiences, lessons learned that could have occurred to him only by the action of doing. Since Walden only serves as an inspiration to draw from and not a literal transference of methods- there is a limit obviously to what we can gain from Thoreau’s lessons in Economy.

To transform Thoreau’s methods into a contemporary mould we should be more specific about why Thoreau may have decided on this particular methodology, we should speculate- why did he construct this experiment as a living breathing procedural approach? As expressed above, Thoreau developed this methodology to ‘learn by doing’ and his data and results were directly a product of that method. Thoreau also chose to simultaneously make his primary audience, the materialist, industrialist townsmen and countrymen he went to school with in 19th century America, his antagonists as well. He challenged the industrialist economic institution rife with neo-classical thought, and proposed ideas that were far more indigenous and nature-oriented- the beginnings of early environmental economics. He chose this immediate American audience to appeal to by using native Indian references, mythological analogies, and anti-slavery rhetoric. By using Indian American references- he could allow the reader to relate to a common foe and provoke a feeling of vindication- that they might be wealthier or that their necessities are far different than that of the native American Indian. Now comes the hard part: to contemporize Thoreau’s methodology.



If I were to take this mould and directly apply it to the America we live in today,
I would use an informal border settlement along the US/Mexico border and its constituents as my protagonist. Why would I do this? The immigrants today are actually the Native Americans of yesterday (no i'm not necessarily making a generalization). I don’t mean to posit any potential false comparison; I do mean to make a comparison in the sense that one culture is being subdued over another culture because of material wealth. A critical strategy Thoreau utilized to make his analogies crystal clear were social and cultural relationships and how culture and place influenced the differences in the valuation of all capital (natural and social). Since I may not have the time it took Thoreau to complete his experiment using his method verbatim (2 years +), I think it will have to suffice that I devise other creative solutions that compensate for the temporal restrictions of my purposes. What I’d like to add on to Thoreau’s methods for my own speculations is a less reductionist method that will get more specific data and quantifiable results on a narrower discussion. Where his philosophy was broad and far reaching in scope, my methods will be far more focused and literal. I think overall, the genius of Thoreau’s experience in Walden is that it allowed him to capture the essence of and provide commentary on societal and cultural issues, even though he was in complete isolation from civilization. I hope, overall, to use this part of his horizontal and dynamic thinking within my research.




Bib.

Rees, W.E. “Understanding Urban Ecosystems: An Ecological Economics Perspective.,” Understanding Urban Ecosystems. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. Economy. George Routledge & Sons. 1904