Thoreau: An Idealist or a Pragmatist?
Dr. K. V. Raghupathi
Before I turn to Thoreau and examine whether he was an idealist or a pragmatist in the context of his life experiences, let me first clarify the distinction between these two words. An ideal is an ideal existing in imagination realistic to the one who firmly believes in it and living in it to perfect it. So, to the practitioner, it is satisfying and perfect but to others in general sense it is unrealistic and so unlikely to be achieved. Idealism is forming, pursuing or believing in such ideals. An idealist is an individualist to the highest degree. Though he looks eccentric and wild to the external world, for himself he appears perfect, perfecting the life. An idealist’s life contradicts the collective behaviour of the society in the usual sense. Idealism has no place in modern politics. On the other, a pragmatist treats things in a sensible and realistic way. In the philosophical sense, pragmatism is a belief that the truth or value of a theory can only be judged by its practical results. In other words, a pragmatist is more practical, wishing to change and adapt himself according to the changing society.
Looking at Thoreau after one hundred and fifty years, it looks as though I were doing post- mortem on his life. Even if it were so, it shows his prominence and the significant contribution he had made to humanity not by virtue of his living singularly at Walden Pond as a protest against the decaying moral and spiritual life that had crept into American society in his times nor by his literary writings which are less in quantity compared to his contemporary Emerson as his “simplicity” to use the key word by Joseph Wood Krutch. When he was alive, experimenting with life, he was ignored as an eccentric and was not taken seriously. But his death created a deep impact on humanity that soon he was regarded and recognised as one of the towering literary personalities in human history, again not so much for his writings as his “simplicity”. No wonder such an ignored personality with his “simplicity” had made a deep influence on Gandhi, Tolstoy, W.B.Yeats, Chekov, the British Labour Party and scores of other distinguished personalities in the world.
His idealism derived not only from his understanding and just reaction to the decaying American society but also from his reading and understanding of the Eastern scriptural texts. Thoreau started to read oriental literature much earlier in life than Emerson. He graduated from Harvard College when he was twenty years old. At Harvard he read English, Greek and Latin classics which included Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer, Horace, Seneca and Juvenal. We have no record that he read any Indian literature at Harvard, but in Emerson’s study in 1841 he found and read with enthusiasm Sir William Jones’s translation of The Laws of Manu (1794), and other Hindu works. In his Journal he wrote with zest, “when my imagination travels eastward, and backward to those remote years of the gods, I seem to draw near to the habitation of the morning, and the dawn at length has a place. I remember the book as an hour before sunrise.” (Journals I, P.261) Manu, according to Hindu Shastras, is considered the progenitor of mankind. He became Menes in ancient Greek. Plato based his Republic on Manu’s teachings. “I know of no book,” writes Thoreau in his A Week, “which has come down to us with grander pretensions than this.” He terms it as “one of the most attractive of those ancient books” that he has ever come across. In the 1843 issue of The Dial, he published selections from the Laws of Manu in an extensive article of ten pages. Later in A Week (1849) he presents a lengthy dithyrambic commentary on it, in which he says, “It belongs to the noontide of the day, the mid-summer of the year, and after the snows have melted and the waters evaporated in the spring, still it speaks freshly to our experience. It helps the sun to shine and his rays fall on its page to illustrate it…
By 1842 he had read
Charles Wilkinson’s Hitopadesa which appealed to him for its intrinsic
wisdom in the garb of pleasure. “It is always singular, but encouraging,” he
writes in the Week, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the
Hitopades of Vishnu Sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as
before, and oversees itself.” In 1845, only after leaving Emerson’s house,
Thoreau read the Bhagvad Gita which became one of his favourite books,
and which went deep down his consciousness and gave him a new birth. In fact he
carried it to Walden Pond. He exclaims in Walden: “How much more
admirable the Bhagvad Gita than all the ruins of the East:” In Chapter
XVI he writes: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and
cosmegonal philosophy of the Bhagvad Gita, since whose composition years
of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its
literature seem puny and trivial.” In A Week he calls it “The New
Testament”, “Remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the Hindu scripture,
for its pure intellectuality.” Further he notes, “its serenity and sublimity
have impressed to the minds even of soldiers and merchants.” In the same essay
he refers to it as “unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred
scriptures that have come down to us.” He continued, “the intelligent Hebrew
will rejoice to find in it a moral grandeur and sublimity akin to those of his
own scriptures.”
In 1850 he had read parts of the Vedas, probably Raja Rammohan Roy’s translations and John Stevenson’s translation of Samaveda. He eulogised them in his journals. The other Hindu scriptural texts he had read included: Sir William Jones’s translation of Shakuntala, Charles Wilson’s translation of the Sankya Karika in 1850, and of the Vishnu Purana in the same year; Wilkinson’s translations of Hitopades of Vishnu Sarma, Langloi’s French translation of Harivamsa which Thoreau put into English. In 1855 he received from an English friend Thomas Cholomondes, a veritable treasure-chest of 44 volumes dealing with Hindu literature. All this goes to prove that Thoreau read a great deal in Indian literature, perhaps more than Emerson.
The philosophical thought in the Hindu scriptures highly suited his temperament. Thoreau’s mind was intuitive and opposed to consistency, a death to the spirit. Horde says, “he valued imaginative insight more than coherent system.” With all his philosophic thought well grounded and moulded in the Hindu scriptural writings, he was never inactive. He never speculated things. He never preached them on the pulpit. Philosophy, in his usage, does not mean speculation or analysis of problems in thinking, but rather the intelligent shaping of one’s way of life. He wanted to prove and demonstrate whether man could lead such a life of simplicity and contemplative mind in the physical world. This was his chief concern. In fact he went to the Walden Pond with an object “to front only the essential facts of life.” Not merely this; he “wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life”, the essence of life being spiritual, and not material. It was again for him neither spiritual nor material. He struck a balance without taking recourse to any extremity. At Walden, he evidently did his work to earn his livelihood and not lived on the biksha (alms) as the monks usually do. It was a great experiment with life in which he had succeeded. His intent was to make a satisfactory life for himself and next to go on with the reporting of his experiences for the benefit of humanity. This was his perspective, and he fulfilled it and the purpose was served, and he left the pond unashamedly with the same spirit he had occupied it. Thoreau believed that it was more important to live than to make a living, and life would be what it is if it is less mauled by multiplicity of wants and desires. His experiment at Walden was not the result of his economic thought, or to please himself or his contemporaries or much less a revolt against the society, but essentially a spiritual thought. It is a spiritual confession of an American who wanted to discover the purpose of his life, his own peculiar genius and having learned it, he lived the way he wanted to live, though he was disliked and looked upon with contempt.
After leaving Walden, he did not try his simple life because life in the town was much complex. He often exclaimed afterward how “odious the present modes of living were.” Life after Walden was increasingly a compromise between his simplicity and the growing complexity of the social conditions around him. Nevertheless, as a true transcendentalist he shared Emerson’s conviction that the individual’s conscience is the safest guide, and he never swerved from it. While participating in social activities, like opposing slavery and the Mexican war, he never deviated from his inner convictions. He relied on his inner voice.
It might seem paradoxical that Thoreau failed to make deep impression on humanity. If this were to be a fact, he would have been dismissed as a mere crank, nothing to do with human history. His relevance would have long ago been consigned to the flames of time. Further, it was maintained that he was much more inconsistent than Emerson and that his individualism was rather extreme, primitive and crude, and an impossible idealist to be imitated. There might be truth in such interpretations. Taking the cue from his living outside Walden in Concord, it may be said that it is hard to believe that he was totally an incorrigible idealist, often contradicting himself. In fact for him consistency is a death to the spirit. His uniqueness lies in his sincerity, his moral courage, his genuine inquiry into his conscience and his dogged insistence on living his principles.
At Walden he did not propound any systematic philosophy. He just lived. He said, “I have no designs on society, or nature, or god. I am simply what I am or I begin to be that. His greatest creation at Walden was himself. He lived like a true yogi. He approached life from the spirit and mind. His chief concern was with the quality of life. He wondered what it would matter even if man gained the whole world by losing his own soul. He believed in the individual. It was his firm belief that social reform must come from within; that the only way to reform the world is to begin with the individual.