Abstract

According to Stanley Cavell, Thoreau finished the job Kant started. He shows us the externality of the world, of the "other"—the noumena, in Kant's parlance—while Kant only deduced the things-in-themselves as limits or conditions of knowledge. Insomuch as Thoreau pulls this off at Walden and in Walden, his contact is evanescent and he uses evanescence, the poetic device employed widely by the English Romantic poets, to communicate his experience.