Die Transzendenz des Konkreten: Anmerkungen zur Kunsttheorie Henry David Thoreaus

Abstract

Henry David Thoreau’s scattered remarks on problems of aesthetics have often been frowned upon as a rather uninspired paraphrase of Emerson’s transcendentalist doctrine. But a lifelong friendship with Emerson did not prevent Thoreau from using Concord Transcendentalism merely as a starting-point for the development of his own theory. In the course of his literary career his insights into the nature of art gradually clarified and finally proved to be incompatible with those of his tutor.

Thoreau abandoned Emerson’s conviction of a metaphysical and symbolic transparency of things in favour of the more tangible and factual aspects of nature, an absolute ‘haecceitas’ which art was to reproduce. The poet — divested of his ‘divine’ inspiration, but not of his down-to-earth talents — had to relay to his readers his experience of total immersion. Unrestrained by a conventional moral code his works would thus assume a new and more genuine ethical quality, that of an open-eyed ’naturalness’. Thoreau’s utilitarian and pragmatic attitude, however, soon clashed with his idolatry of the phenomena as such. Wavering between a desire for meaning which depended on systematic abstractions and his love for a nature which evaded the snares of metaphysical deductions and existed beyond the reach of the human mind, he finally decided in favour of the tangible. Henceforth he had to regard every work of art as a futile effort to imitate the inimitable, its true aesthetic dimension depending on being corroded and reabsorbed by a beautiful nature. Thus Thoreau’s anti-transcendentalist ‘concretism’, which foreshadowed a positivistic methodology, involuntarily ended in a secularized mysticism of its own.