Admirable Radicals then and Now

And the Future

~An Affirmation and Exultation, if not Modification,  of Thoreauvianism, in the End~

 

SH Bagley

17 May 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have adhered to the Oberlin College Honor Code in the writing of this assignment.

 

 

 

 

SHB 17 May 2004

It is a known fact that as time passes any seemingly solid, permanent institution changes. Sands shift in beaches, mountains grow or shrink, riverbeds expand, contract, or disappear. It is no different with Transcendentalism—it, just as anything else, changes over time. However, the changes that it has gone through may not be readily apparent.  When one thinks of Transcendentalism, one might think no farther than Thoreau, or Emerson, if they even remember him. This is the case with the dictionary definition: it is called a movement philosophical, religious and political of ‘some time ago,’ constrained often to the years 1836-1847. But this definition, in short, is wrong. Transcendentalism, I posit, has not ended, but has simply evolved, as it has been since Emerson. To consider the movement as the dictionary defines it is to consider it in the broadest sense. I intend to narrow this consideration down, and trace the philosophy’s mutations from Emerson to Thoreau and into the 20^th century with Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey. In examining the evolution of Transcendentalism I will consider the intents of the Transcendentalism of each author, including their reasons for writing within the philosophy, their underlying message and their own agenda. The question is, of course, how has Transcendentalism changed? And after these authors, where will the movement find itself? Where has Transcendentalism been and where is it going? To consider these questions, first, the question must be asked: Just what is Transcendentalism?

 

A Definition.

Put very simply, Transcendentalism is a philosophy of overcoming boundaries. Throughout its history the movement has been a mouthpiece through which various philosophers or crackpots—this is not a matter of opposition, rather, it is a matter of point-of-view—could express their own beliefs about what society needed to do to make itself the society that it should be for whatever reason; the future of mankind, say. In considering the various permutations of the movement itself, as I will soon begin to do, it should be noted that if the philosophers were expressing anything in common, it was a reliance on the natural world as an alternative to the troubled entity, ‘that which you call society.’ And this is all, really. Transcendentalism has always been an expression of the natural world as a way to better the world. What the philosophers did with nature remains to be seen, as I will now consider, beginning with the Father of the movement.

 

The Father: Emerson.

Let it never be forgotten that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a preacher. He began as a Unitarian preacher and eventually began to preach against his former brothers, calling the religion ‘corpse-cold’ because it lacked the kind of connection to God that he found in Transcendentalism. Rather than find God in the Church, his Transcendentalism advocated a direct connection to God through Nature.  Fundamentally it was a religious movement: rather than find God in a Church Emerson created a religion that found spiritual fulfillment in Nature. With the spiritual rhetoric came a naturally desperate message: he believed that the people needed to get into nature as soon as possible, to become men again. The Church, his enemy, painted him as a radical man, and necessarily so. To get his message across he needed to separate himself from established social systems, and such fierce rhetoric against the church served to distance him from such a staple of society. Had he compromised at all, he would have simply been seen as preaching a new kind of Christianity, and the rest of the message of his Transcendentalism would have been lost. Frequently he evoked the name of God but still preached a separation from the Church, and this dichotomy was embodied in the Over-Soul, which was described both in terms of a church and a God manifested in nature.

He created an elaborate metaphor for this idea: existence was two sides of a tapestry. In his essay “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson is quick to say that the Transcendentalist is an idealist, and an idealist, who, “speaking of events, sees them as spirits.” He sees more than the material—in everything there is the corporeal and then the spiritual aspect. The corporeal, he says, is ‘the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him.’[1] With the comprehension of this spiritual other side comes a connection to the entire earth in all of its spiritual glory, the ability to see not just the plots of farmland but the entire horizon as one. The Transcendentalist sees not just a bank built on concrete foundations in the ground but a bank built on the surface of a ‘bit of bullet’ spinning through the emptiness of the Universe.

He paints the Transcendentalist, with his secular religious rhetoric, as a person who questions not just the Church, but everything in existence, in order to achieve a divinity that, achieved en masse by the entire population, would effectively make the best world possible. Said he in “Nature:”

 

the problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. […] The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. [2]

 

Emerson’s Transcendentalist ‘adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine,’ wishing that the spiritual principle should be ‘suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man.’ Despite his intense spirituality, he is loathe to establish a complete connection to the church, and in an effort to distance himself from his former bedfellows, he delivered that which has now come to be known as the Divinity School Address. This essay, in my reading of Emerson, embodies his Transcendentalism. It clearly expresses his idea of the nascent Transcendentalism: a reactionary movement based on a spiritual alternative to the Church.

The most emphasized aspect of his Transcendentalism is Man’s access to the Divine though nature. To free himself of the material and the secular, Man is to go out into nature, where he can ‘become a man again’ and open himself up to the influence of God, which Emerson says in the “Address,” incarnates himself in Man.  Emerson spoke out against the Church in this essay because he saw the Christian church as deemphasizing Jesus’ idea to this end, to the point where the “divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury.”[3] And so, he advocates leaving the church, finding divinity in Nature, within oneself, as according to his reading of Jesus’ teachings. Regarding Jesus, Emerson said that he “saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul,” which, rhetorically, echoes his iconic Transparent eyeball metaphor: “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”[4] It is in the woods, not in the Church, that Emerson returns to reason and Faith, for  there, in the thick of Nature, man can communicate directly with God and his own divine power: asserts Emerson, the God of the Church is identical to the rejuvenation found in Nature. Where in the Church this connection is deadened by the intermediary force, an inherent, unavoidable distortion, standing up at the pulpit.

And so Transcendentalism is born, a cry to find the divinity in yourself, to return to Nature, to reason and faith. This is its first incarnation, and its many students take it in just as many directions. Even Emerson’s star pupil, Thoreau, eventually split so far from his original vision to the degree that Emerson, in response, distanced himself in kind. Where did Thoreau’s Transcendentalism go that Emerson dared not follow?

 

The Son: Thoreau.

It is said of Thoreauvian Transcendentalism that in relation to that of his teacher, Thoreau is the body where Emerson is the mind. This is a fairly accurate way of thinking about their differences. Where Emerson wrote and, no doubt, believed many of his philosophical doctrines, Thoreau truly lived them. Where Emerson preached social radicalism, he stopped short of living a Transcendentalist life-style, condemning the Brooke Farm commune, a Transcendentalist collective in which the doctrine of Emerson and other Transcendentalists were made material. Thoreau, perhaps to a greater degree than the inhabitants of Brooke Farm (who lived together removed from society, questioning the aspect of Transcendentalism that calls for Solitude), took the doctrine of Emerson to heart and built his legendary cabin on the beaches of Walden Pond, where he spent two years and two months of his life. His rhetoric is post-Emersonian, the rules and methodologies of Emerson’s Transcendentalism already in place. As such, his prose focuses rather on the application and the results of Emerson’s Transcendentalism. We don’t see the internal end—the thought process—so much as Thoreau uses it. Where nearly all of Emerson’s writings emphasize the internal, what we see in Thoreau’s writings is mostly the ends rather than the means; where Emerson tells the reader what to do, Thoreau illustrates his doing, teaching by example rather than lecture.

Thoreau was a social radical as well as a Transcendentalist, and was once arrested for refusing to pay income tax. Legend has it that when visited by Emerson in prison, the older man asked his pupil, “What are you doing in there, Henry?” to which the response was, “What are you doing out there, Ralph?” And here the major distinction between their Transcendentalisms is made clear. Emerson never went as far as Thoreau, taking the middle path instead of the path into the dangerous and unknown. Where Emerson chose to base his ‘questioning of everything’ on the Church, Thoreau literally takes the fuel for his retreating from society into nature. Rather than take on a part of the whole, Thoreau’s reactionary politics were against the entire system. As such, I would argue that in a certain way “Civil Disobedience” embodies his Transcendentalism. Walden, to be sure, is his canonical work—I do not seek to disagree with that. However, its inception is fueled by a feeling identified in “Civil Disobedience,” even though its own rhetoric and purpose are not terribly divergent from Emerson’s rhetoric emphasizing the divinity in nature and man. The major difference between Emersonian and Thoreauvian Transcendentalism, then, is that the former is concerned with the elevated, the spiritual, no matter how much he puts it in the realm of Man, and the latter is the embodiment of that grounded secular, natural faith. As such, his major societal critique focuses on the government, the secular ruling body, just as Emerson’s critique focuses on God, the divine ruler.

The degree to which their respective critiques differ is actually a fairly small one. If Emerson believed that religion and the power to connect with God should be within the hands of the people and not who stood behind the pulpit, Thoreau, too, saw that the government and its decisions should be within the hands of the people. Call him a populist, then. Where Emerson condemned the Church for placing the power and the relation to God in too few, Thoreau condemns the government: “it finally amounts to this, which I also believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”[5] He wishes a government that leaves the power to the people, governed not by majority but by a society-wide sense of what is best for everyone, by what Thoreau calls ‘conscience.” He asks:

 

Can there be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man conscience then? [6]

 

Herein is pretty well encapsulated his feelings on the government. Like Emerson he wishes that the people had the power, the ability to make their own decisions. The essay focuses, admittedly, little on nature itself, but for Thoreau much of his political agenda is such that Nature is less the ultimate answer than an alternative. In “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau condemns the multitude, his ‘friends’ within society, and the State, and with this in mind, his sojourn on Walden Pond was not only a way to get closer to the divinity in Nature but to live simply and deliberately, and to learn how best to reform society. His modus operandi to that end is discussed obliquely in “Civil Disobedience,” much of his response to the problem of the state is to propose a much more individualistic way of life and reform; says he,

 

if one honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership [between citizen and State], and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. [7]

 

Then, a citizen wants reform, let the citizen do it himself. This is a reflection of the idea that the Transcendentalist is a lonely person, often preferring to do his own thing than conform to societal norms. Of course, it is a notion made clear in Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist,” which, it has been said, was written with Thoreau in mind, but the boldfaced statement of such a radical notion forced even Emerson to distance himself from Thoreau. But the question is, why?

It seems unlikely that Emerson would disapprove of Thoreau to such a degree, but he did. It returns to the story of Henry in prison—“what are you doing out there, Ralph?”—Thoreau’s response, with his philosophy as presented in “Civil Disobedience,” is a grave insult to Emerson. Thoreau sees Emerson as “out there” with the rest of the people, not in a prison cell that is, under an unjust government such as the one incumbent at the time, the only place for a just man.[8] Thoreau saw Emerson as a failure for not being as far outside of society as was he, and this is a valid concern.  Thoreau, willing to stage a two-year protest by living at Walden Pond for as long as he did and refusing to pay taxes, saw Emerson, living in his large house in Concord center, literally in the middle of the society that he so vehemently critiqued, as a failure, for as he said in “Civil Disobedience,”: “Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.” Emerson, a man of a fair wealth, then, is not a virtuous man, despite all of his preaching to the contrary.

Thoreau’s transcendentalism is more socially-oriented than the high-minded philosophizing of his teacher, more concerned with secular reformation of society as a whole. Looking back on it, it is no surprise that it is his version that has remained in the hearts and minds of the people, Emerson having faded into the background of the movement. Especially with the movement’s resurgence in the early 20^th century in mind, by the social reformers of that era, and later the hippies in the 1960’s and 70’s, preaching, if you will, a need for a more natural way of life, away from the military industrial complex. Yet the ‘admirable radical’ was not the only form of 20^th century Transcendentalism.

 

The Holy Ghosts: Dillard and Abbey

20^th Century Transcendentalism is a very different beast from its predecessors. It finds itself with a canonized unchanging body of texts from which to base its philosophy, and it exists in a world predicted fairly accurately by Thoreau—the mass of men, now more than ever, lives in a state of quiet desperation, and Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard sought to propose models by which they could free themselves, if not society, from this desperation. Now that the Father and Son have long since entered onto the pedestal of Great American Writers, Dillard and Abbey function as a pair of writers of what I would term ‘post-Transcendentalism’ Transcendentalism. We see them writing similar texts, expressing similar ideas, as the creators of the movement, aware of their ongoing philosophical homage: Dillard structures her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) in much the same way as Thoreau’s Walden and Abbey’s Down the River (1981) actively discusses and interprets Thoreauvian Transcendentalism in his most clearly Transcendentalist chapter. What I wonder about is the degree to which their status as post-Transcendentalism Transcendentalists implies that their writings are, in fact, Transcendentalist.

Dillard, for example, uses Tinker Creek in a way similar to Thoreau’s use of Walden Pond in his novel. Similar themes are discussed—notably, sight, and the power of nature—but Dillard’s book is much different in tone. In much a similar way as Thoreau and Emerson, many of her ideas can be broken down into aphoristic summations, and one, in particular, sticks with me: “Evolution loves death more than it loves you our me.”[9] She emphasizes the destructive, dirty parts of nature to a much greater degree, her basic philosophy on nature encapsulated by the scene with the praying manti mating—first the female decapitates her partner, eating his body as his abdomen continues to copulate with her. The strongest image of the novel—I call it so because I know no other word for it—was in the “Flood” chapter, in which the river rose up to previously unrecorded, impossible heights and destroyed everything—natural and man-made—in its path. Her nature is one that teaches her about life, but it does not teach through gentle instruction and quiet, meditative reflection. Oh no. Dillard’s Transcendentalism is one born of a nature that will tear your life apart before it builds it anew.

When one considers her background it’s no surprise that she wrote, even about Nature, in such a negative manner. She wrote A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek after recovering from a devastating near-fatal attack of pneumonia, so this fixation on death is, really, no surprise. But what surprised me about her Transcendentalism is that even at the end of the whole affair she still comes away from Nature with a negative view on life. Nature taught her nothing, it seems, except that, even if “beauty is real,” you must “read the fine print” of nature  or you will be transformed by it not in a way that you would have wanted or expected, but “dribbling and crazed.”  In Dillard’s text, there is none of this do-or-die Transcendentalism in Thoreau or Emerson; while their own exhortations both smack of desperation it is much less plainly stated. In Dillard we see the “quiet desperation” that Thoreau spoke of in Walden manifest in a woman trying to get her life back on track with the help of Nature.

Then, at least one aspect of the past incarnations of Transcendentalism is lacking: the political nature of the philosophy. This is what separates Dillard’s Pilgrim from Thoreau’s Walden in a very clear way: for all the meditations on nature in Dillard’s text, it lacks the society-wide call to change with which Thoreau began his Great American Novel. There is nothing quite like “Economy” in Dillard, and perhaps this is where the greatest amount of contention arises when her status as a true Transcendentalist is brought into question. Her use of Nature is a very personal, very internal one, as was that of Thoreau to a degree, but his was also very reactionary: we know that he moved to Walden Pond so that he could “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” and that he left the woods for as good a reason as he went into them. [10] Thoreau’s sojourn was for his own benefit, yes, but the first chapter of Walden focuses not only on him but also on his reasons for leaving society, speaking of its evils and what he wished to do to combat them. Dillard speaks little, if at all, of society, and this is where I think a new model of Transcendentalism is created. Her “Post-Transcendentalism” is used as a deeply, deeply internal, individual resurgence of faith with the help of Nature. It seems to bear a greater degree of similarity to the Transcendentalism of Emerson than that of Thoreau; though Emerson, spoke out against society (admirable radical that he was, of course) he emphasized the spirituality of Nature and the Divinity of Man, that which would elevate man up from the mire, to the higher plain that exists within Nature. But Dillard is not entirely Emersonian, either. She’s really neither here nor there: not entirely a social radical but not a searcher for the divine. She focuses on the power of nature but very infrequently believes that it is God. Dillard is looking for a kind of elevation in her text, if for no other reason than to get herself out of her depression. Society, she seems to believe, can come later.

Although this is the case, it must not be forgotten that Dillard’s use of Nature was not the only manifestation of Post-Transcendentalism. Edward Abbey is, if Dillard is a latter-day Emerson, the latter-day Thoreau, focusing not only on a personal connection with and use of nature but also society’s need for it. Abbey is the near-complete opposite of Dillard: his text focused on the liberating aspects of nature and society’s need to return to it, return to it immediately. His desperation is not quiet—indeed, he was the ‘admirable radical’ just as much as was Thoreau. Much of his book was geared toward highlighting his social activism—the chapter about the man in the teepee on the train tracks, for example, and Abbey’s support for his cause—and he does not shy away from the classification of a radical. In the “Preliminary Notes” to Down the River, Abbey describes a postcard that he wrote to a friend of his, saying:

 

Be of good cheer, the military industrial complex will soon collapse. Meanwhile we must do all in our power to oppose, resist, and subvert its desperate aggrandizements. As a matter of course. As a matter of honor.[11]

 

The rhetoric strikes me as distinctly Thoreauvian—‘be of good cheer’ is an anachronism even for the 1980’s, when the book was written. Abbey owes much of his presentation to Thoreau, as well, and I believe that he is well aware of this connection. People have called him the modern Thoreau and, especially with his chapter “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” he acknowledges what he intends to do. The social activism of his novel is very Thoreauvian, as is his constant questioning of the government and his bold, inflammatory style, and all of this leads me to classify him, as with Dillard, as a Post-Transcendentalist. He does not call himself a Transcendentalist, rather, an ‘Environmental Journalist,’ whose job it is to break through the “years of indifference” and demonstrate how “the managers of the corporate sector and their hired scribes […] have finally awakened to the fact that environmentalism, if taken seriously, is a greater threat to the Perpetual Power & Growth Machine than labor unions of Communism.”[12] With this radicalism in mind, a theme constantly running through the book, a parallel becomes clear, and is only bolstered by his reading of Thoreau “in a high sense,” in the first chapter of the book, actively questioning, arguing with, and trying to analyze the theories of Thoreau’s Walden in order to fit into today’s world. In this analysis he both separates himself from Thoreau and attaches himself to it, which is where the question of modern-day Transcendentalism comes in.

The texts of these two authors present two very different uses of Transcendentalism, if not different Transcendentalisms altogether. Dillard’s use of the mystical strangely spiritual-yet-not-divine power of Nature extends not terribly far beyond her desires for her own spiritual and mental fulfillment, making it not Emersonian in particular and not Thoreauvian by any means, as it lacks the radical social activism inherent in both texts; Abbey’s active discussion of Thoreauvian Transcendentalism and a constant  updating and application of it to Today’s world make it all too Thoreauvian, ‘Neo-Thoreauvian’ one might say, but the modern world begs the question: whether or not much of what of Thoreau’s time can still be applied to today’s world. Both texts directly address the Transcendentalists, put them onto pedestals by the active never-responded questioning and discussing by the authors, and in consciously and reverently using the works of the Father and Son they create something new. If there is any similarity between the works of these two relatively contemporary authors, it is that they are both children of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” of which he spoke in the opening chapter of Walden.  They turn, as did their treasured forefathers, to Nature for their own answers, using it as their own means to their own ends. Dillard has no interest in saving the world so much as she does in saving herself, and Abbey, clearly, lumps himself with the rest of the world and says that everyone needs to be saved. In them both the desperation is all the more powerful, and where it consumes Dillard in the end, Abbey’s admirable radicalism is unfulfilled by his own death. Though he clearly identifies the problem in his text and proposes some sort of solution—simplified, the solution is a return to nature and a destruction of the artificiality of a capitalist, consumerist society—he never sees it through, is never given the chance to see it through.

So thirty years have passed. Where does that leave the Transcendentalist today?

 

The Pew: My own perspective

If anything the way I see the movement retaining a great degree of Abbey and Thoreau. It is no surprise that the writings of the latter have survive, having pushed his teacher into the background: Thoreau’s writings are applicable to everyone’s lives. Everyone who sees something to be changed in the world lives in a state aware of the “quiet desperation” of their peers, and today there has been a move toward a more individualistic take on activism—If one person wants a change, he can change it, and once he begins others will follow, and then the previous status quo is destroyed. It might take years, it might take decades, but truly, Thoreau had it right when he espoused his philosophy on social activism. Mahatma Gandhi carried a copy of “Civil Disobedience” with him—this is the legacy of Thoreau: One man, one act, well done.

The problem of my Transcendentalist perspective is that it is even more synthetic than that of Dillard or Abbey, for I am now a Fourth Generation Transcendentalist. Emerson was processed and built upon by Thoreau, who was processed and built upon by Abbey, who was processed and.. I do not claim to hold myself up next to those who have come before me.

If Transcendentalism is dependent on a degree of social radicalism and activism, what is there to speak out against, to condemn and combat, that has not been taken on by a previous Transcendentalist? Is a degree of newness essential for a new Transcendentalism? Even for her internal turn, Dillard spoke out against depression and the darkness of the human soul; Edward Abbey had the gumption to take on the entire military industrial complex. What else is there to fight against? Everything? I face the same problem as did Abbey thirty years ago: things have changed. Though, they have not changed to all that great a degree since Down the River. There are more franchise coffee bars and more fast food restaurants, however.  And they are in no respect natural at all—the mass production that Abbey spoke against has come to pass, and as a result the “quiet desperation” that he lived in and wrote about has been nothing but amplified. The world, today, is everything that Abbey feared and more. Had he lived into the 21^st century he would have continued to write, probably been elevated and ostracized to the degree that Hunter S. Thomson or Al Franken is today—we hold them on pedestals and shy away from them just as people did with Thoreau and Emerson.

If the problem is the same as in Abbey’s day—only stronger—then perhaps the solution, if it could be called that, must be the same. There is no longer a great deal of hope for the destruction of the Military Industrial Complex.  The rest of the world has been colonized either literally or culturally by America, by way of sympathy and a desire to emulate the McJohnWayne mass-produced cowboy that our nation has come to be, or by a hatred of our nation and a desire to be what we are not. What can the Transcendentalist do today? We cannot retreat into nature to live deliberately or shed our selves to become a transparent eye-ball any longer: the woods are all owned by a national park service, and public undress is punishably by a lengthy trial and a prison reputation like that of Paul Rueubens.  But then, anyone can read Thoreau or Emerson and simply live their life simply and the best they can. Perhaps, in the simplest sense, this is the key to latter-day Transcendentalism: simple living. One of the major ideas of the movement is to avoid a cluttered desk, to do with what you need and not what you want. We can still do this today, and a conscious effort to live simply and truly eliminates much of the intercession into one’s daily life by the hated Military Industrial Complex and Consumer Culture. You don’t need that Big Mac, after all, and you will regret it afterwards. Who needs a house in the Hamptons and an apartment in New York City? Pick one, and live there deliberately. The television functions today the way the bad writing of Thoreau’s day did: abandon it, “for the result is a dullness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off  of all the intellectual faculties.”[13] Much of what Thoreau proposes in Walden still is applicable today, and here is perhaps the solution to the problem of modernization. Just as the concerns of Abbey’s writings still exist but only more so in today’s world, so was he concerned with the contemporary equivalent of Thoreau’s societal woes.  The quiet desperation exists yet. We do not all need to retreat to the side of a body of water to live deliberately—with the literature in hand we can do it from within ourselves. Because of the commoditization of Nature, perhaps it is all the more important to return to it, to save it and protect it, but we need not try to destroy society in order to return to an era where the trees were your neighbors and the wolves your night-music. No—that would be impossible.

Instead I would propose that we look back to their texts on our own time. Thoreau demanded to be read in a high sense—so if Transcendentalism and its doctrine are to return then it is up to the mass of men to read it and consider it. A very good model for how to do so is found, in fact, in Abbey. He, for all his gruff mountain-man exterior, builder of coffee and condemner of vegetarians, may very well demonstrate best how to live extra vagantly in today’s world—but his way is not the only way. Do as Thoreau suggests and read in a high sense.. Debate with his texts, the texts of Emerson, the texts of the World. Always always question all authority.

To destroy what “that which we call society” has built up since the writings of Thoreau would be in no means helpful at the scale that we would have to affect a change—the stakes are much to high for global quick-fixes like the aphoristic “return to Nature.” The solution to the world’s problems can not rely on a mass social overthrow, then. It must rely on a single person’s own desire to change the world, except, more like 6.5 billion people wishing to change the world. But this returns to the fact that since the entire world is run by the men with the deepest pockets, these men will do everything they can to prevent the global overthrow. Which is where the ultimate solution is made clear: Change your own world. Live the ideas of the Transcendentalists on the largest scale that you possibly can: your own. Live simply and deliberately, live critically, question everything always. Live outside, of your house, of your room, of cyberspace, of boundaries. Live naturally—do not, for example, eat what you cannot identify: is that Big Mac really beef? What is that film on the roof of your mouth? Do not go looking for answers, for if you look you will not find them. Just accept the answers at face value: outside of your window there is a world that is full of peace, and if Transcendentalism is to continue today it is up to the individual to go out and live it.

Conclusion

I realize now that much of what my own philosophy, my own synthesis of the entire movement, says is much less factual than it is rhetorical. As such allow me to conclude in the traditional way. The philosophy that is Transcendentalism has gone through many steps of evolution since it was created by Emerson. Slowly but surely his precepts were written out of the doctrine, and future followers and believers in Transcendentalism chose instead to follow the words of Henry David Thoreau, the man concerned with the grounded, the earthy, the social problems rather than the problems of a higher existence.  Thoreauvian philosophy, merely a canonized application of Emersonian doctrine, has become the guidebook for social reformers, advocating a change first incited by the actions of one single impetus and then followed by the mass of men seeking to escape their lives of quiet desperation. He focuses on Nature not as a source of divinity but as a source of Truth, as the antithesis to the falsehood that has become that which we know as society. It is this notion, that society is false and Nature the true guide to ideal living, that has remained in the consciousness of the Post-Transcendentalists Abbey and Dillard, though they apply this notion in distinctly different ways. For Dillard, Nature was a way to find solace and her own spiritual healing, not through a connection of the divine but instead through an understanding and an overcoming of the truth about the natural world. For Abbey, Thoreau’s politics and admirable radicalism were at the forefront of Transcendentalism, and his own philosophy and modus operandi both reflected and amplified Thoreau’s own calls for a simpler, more natural way of life. Thirty years later, with the Military Industrial Complex still going strong—if not stronger—this route is the only way to the betterment of civilization and the eventual rescue of mankind from their quiet desperation. Really it is all that we can do, for now, to return to the woods ourselves, and therein hopefully find some answers.