Books, Rocks, and Sentimental Education: Self-Culture and the Desire for the Really Real in Henry David Thoreau

Abstract

If one seeks to elucidate the contemporary significance of the Rortyan notion of a poeticized culture, one cannot avoid a discussion of the American Renaissance. The question that interests me is how one can make the profound differences between Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman productive for a discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and Romanticism. We shall see in this chapter and the next that the foundationalist quest for certainty, which Emerson often vehemently rejects without being able to leave it completely behind, plays a crucial role in Thoreau’s thinking. It is this difference between the Thoreauvian and the Emersonian theoretical frameworks that adds an important dimension to our understanding of American Transcendentalism. While Emerson’s concept of truth is directly linked to terms such as transitoriness, volatility, inconsistency, and expediency, Thoreau, although he pluralizes the notion of truth, often demonstrates that a radical rejection of a foundationalist epistemology would be incompatible with the goals he pursues.¹ Laying the foundations of his own thinking, the narrator of Walden warns against the danger of “illusory foundations” (1992: 65). In this chapter, I wish to illuminate the enormously fruitful tension in Thoreau’s texts between, on the one hand, his foundationalist epistemology and, on the other, his pluralization or pragmatization of the concept of truth.