The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.2 (2003) 122-132

Thoreau's Emotional Stoicism

Rick Anthony Furtak
University of Chicago

1. Introduction

"Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree. . . ."

—From William Butler Yeats's "The Trembling of the Veil" (1922), in Yeats (1938, 134)

To Yeats, who associated passion with foolishness, the life of contemplative wisdom epitomized by Thoreau seemed incompatible with an emotional existence, and it was the latter that he would ultimately opt for: one of his poems gives voice to the hope that age will find him, not a serene sage, but "A foolish, passionate man." ¹ This reading of the stoical Yankee is defensible: in his notion that being a philosopher is not merely a matter of theory but more importantly of practice, as well as in his tendency to speak as if knowledge is consummated in tranquility, Thoreau is basically in accord with ancient Stoic ethics. ² In his writings, he expresses deep agreement with the Stoic idea that, while most of us live in an antlike state of petty agitation, it is within our power to liberate ourselves from the belief that trivial and superfluous objects are essential to our well-being. ³ For the Stoics, of course, all objects of possible attachment, outside of one's own moral agency, are by definition unworthy of concern: the virtue of apathy and the vice of passion are logically exclusive of one another. ⁴ But this is where Thoreau parts company with his Greek and Roman precursors: he questions what for [End Page 122] them is a truth by definition, namely that only dispassionate existence could be unfoolish. Acknowledging the tension between apathy and passion, he attempts to redefine these mutually exclusive categories so that his reverence for both may be coherently maintained. This attempt, if successful, would allow him to attain the Stoic ideal of moral virtue, without systematically eradicating the passions. In order to evaluate Thoreau's unorthodox neo-Stoicism, ⁵ it is necessary first to examine his correspondent headings of purity and wildness alongside the concepts of apathy and passion, and then to consider how they might possibly be harmonized.

2. Purity

The attainment of complete apathy is fundamentally at odds with our distinctively human tendency to form attachments to the world: such involvement with mundane reality disposes us toward pathos—that is, toward being moved or affected. The Stoics saw every passion as a false judgment, saying that we should not make the mistake of finding value in anything outside of rational moral agency. Thoreau, on the other hand, dismisses the myth of such abstract practical reason; viewing cognition as not just nominally but palpably embodied, he attends to the "thoughts which the body thought" (Journal 3:99). ⁶ While seeing passion as an indispensable part of human reason, Thoreau retains the distinction between emotions that are ennobling and those that are degrading: the difference is made, in a given case, by the object of the affection (see Thoreau 1975, 15-16). The integrity of one's being is dependent upon how one allows oneself to be moved. To discipline oneself toward being able to distinguish the higher from the lower is to pursue not apathy but what Thoreau calls either chastity or, most often, purity.

In order to articulate a position that avoids both the antipassionate extreme of Stoicism and its equally unacceptable opposite, the "Whitmanesque" stance that indiscriminately embraces every new stimulation (see Johnson 1991, 123), Thoreau embarks in Walden upon a method of distrust. Although he does not take this questioning of what is ethically best in himself to the extremes of Cartesian skepticism—he plays with the idea of an evil demon for no longer than he entertains the thought that his life might be merely...