1. Henry David Thoreau was born
in 1817 in Massachusetts, USA. A
graduate from Harvard, Thoreau
was a prolific writer who left
behind a vast body of work from
poetry to philosophy, from
transcendentalism to history,
from resistance against unjust
states to abolitionism,
compiling in over 20 volumes of
work.
2. Thoreau invested in a philosophy of life and praxis as
opposed to a way of thinking and writing, he was a
thinker that thought in terms of nature and the
human condition.
He was a very well read thinker with an excellent
knowledge base from ancient Greek thought, passing
through Asian traditions, and the western philosophy
of his time.
3. He is most famous for his literary work Walden and
for his political work Civil Disobedience, although he
also greatly contributed to the philosophy of science.
Thoreau had a long term relation with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, whom he saw as a guide and a friend and
with whom he constantly argued due to their different
philosophical and personal positions.
4. In his early works he
followed
Transcendentalism, the
philosophy, supported
by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
based on the idea that the
individual spirit
transcends the material.
He was also one of the
first supporters of the
evolution theory
from Charles Darwin.
TO GO BEYOND
5. During his life time, Thoreau only published two
works, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, and Walden, neither of which gave him any
sort of income.
Thoreau also worked in his family's pencil factory and
as a land surveyor for most of his adult life.
6. He died at the age of 44 after
almost thirty years struggling with
tuberculosis, and is buried in
Concord, Massachusetts.
His work has inspired thinkers well
beyond his time, specially in the
field of ecology, phenomenology,
and radical political thought.
After Thoreau's death, many groups
were founded in his honour most
notably The Walden Woods Project
and The Thoreau Society.
7. Here is how Ralph Waldo
Emerson described
Thoreau:
He was bred to no profession; he
never married; he lived alone; he
never went to church; he never
voted; he refused to pay a tax to
the State: he ate no flesh, he drank
no wine, he never knew the use of
tobacco; and, though a naturalist,
he used neither trap nor gun. He
chose, wisely, no doubt, for
himself, to be the bachelor of
thought and Nature. He had no
talent for wealth, and knew how to
be poor without the least hint of
squalor or inelegance. .... Thoreau
was sincerity itself ...
8. His most famous literary work is Walden, or Life in
the Woods, based on two years he spend at the
Walden Pond, on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land. There,
he build for himself a cabin where he lived between
1845 and 1847.
After this experience, he spent nine years editing and
re-editing the work, trying to get it published.
The work takes up the seasons as a metaphor for the
human life and explores the relation to, and
preservation of, nature, harmony, and the idea of
beauty, claiming that those ideas should frame the
social, the cultural, and the political.
9. The work does not fit into a clear genre. It is not a really a
poem, nor a novel, nor a philosophical essay or an
autobiography though contains elements of all such genres.
It is a work full of contradictions, more busy with the
formulation of ideas than with giving them a final shape.
The book is a highly paradoxical mixture of a dialogue with
Western philosophy and a plea for simplicity. Like
in Nietzsche's writings, the book consists of a series of
aphorisms which gives the work a fragmented character.
The book had few enthusiasts in his time (his second and
last book to be printed in his lifetime, it sold only 2,000
copies) but was later elevated to the status of a North-
American classic.
10. His most famous political work, Civil Disobedience,
influenced a great variety of thinkers after his time
including Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi,
John F. Kennedy, and Leon Tolstoy.
The propeller for this work may well have been an
anecdote of Thoreau's life.
11. In 1846 he was asked to pay six years of delinquent
taxes which he refused due to his opposition to slavery
and to the Mexican-American war.
He had to spend a night in jail and was only freed,
against his will, when an aunt paid his taxes for him.
12. A couple months after this incident Thoreau gave a lecture
in the Lyceum about the relation between the individuals
and the State where he developed on the notion of the
right to self-government in opposition to an unjust State
and the ideal that an honorable man could never adjust to
injustice.
A revised version of this lecture was published in 1849 as
Resistance to Civil Government (better known as Civil
Disobedience).
The opening line of the essay is "That government is best
which governs least" and he argues that governments tend to
distance themselves from the people making it hard to the
people to find their voice through it.
13. He specially dwells in the Mexican-American war as an
example of how a small oligarchy controlled
government and had it make decisions in their
interest, against the will of the people.
Thoreau is seen by many as an anarchist but he
actually saw in the resistance against an unfair
government, not an anti-governmentalism but quite
the contrary, a patriotism as it would stand for the
desire for a better government.
Thoreau closes the essay affirming that Democratic
government is not a final form of government and that
the government he would think as fair as just is
nowhere to be seen.
14. Thoreau was a lifelong defender of abolitionism, with
his most famous work on the subject being a lecture
entitled Slavery in Massachusetts, following the
conviction of a fugitive slave in Boston.
Thoreau was a fierce critique of slavery and a strong
supporter of John Brown, who tried to help slaves
fight for freedom and was later hanged on the charge
of treason.
He was also a strong critique of the Fugitive slave act
of 1850 that effectively spread the question of slavery
through the whole country.
Thoreau wrote about the many times he helped slaves
to flee by driving them to the station and buying them
train tickets.
15. Another important work of Thoreau is Life Without
Principles where he lays out an ethics for life.
In this essay, he attacked institutions, notably religious
ones, that prevented subjects from dealing with questions
outside of it, as if censoring or limiting the field of interest
of individuals.
Thoreau also advised to live life for what it is rather than to
live in order work, in order to make money.
He also claims that more time and energy should be spent
on spheres of life other than politics, which he refers to as a
"grotesque public sport.“
Most important, Thoreau stressed the distinction between
civilization and economic progress arguing that the latter
produced slavery as well as products while the former
produced people with high purposes.
16. In the later years of his life, Thoreau became
interested in botany, natural history, and travel
writing.
He observed the migration of birds, the change of
weather, the blooming of the flowers in an attempt to
anticipate the seasons.
Throreau also dedicate much of his time analyzing the
way in which forests recover after partial destruction,
by dispersing seeds through the wind and through
animals.
His annotations on natural history add up to a
document of two million words and his most
important writings on the subject are Wild
Apples,The Succession of Trees, and Autumnal
Tints.
17. Deep Notes :
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery , whether
formal or informal. In Western Europe and the
Americas, abolitionism was a historical movement to
end the African slave trade and set slaves free.
19. Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical
movement that was developed during the late 1820s and
1830s in the Eastern region of the United States as a
protest against the general state of culture and society, and
in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard
University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church
taught at Harvard Divinity School.
Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the
inherent goodness of both people and nature.
Transcendentalists believed that society and its
institutions—particularly organized religion and political
parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual.
They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-
reliant" and independent. It is only from such real
individuals that true community could be formed.