The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition

90 Pages·1992·6.534 MB·English

by  Stanley Cavell

The
Senses

Also by Stanley Cavell
Must We Mean What We Say?

of

The World Viewed

The Claim of Reason

Disowning Knowledge
Walden

Themes Out of School

In Quest of the Ordinary

An Expanded
Melodrama of the Unknown Woman

This New Yet Unapproachable America
Edition
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome

Stanley Cavell
The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

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......bt mH· ;1r " netted,S"t _~ _
The Senses of Walden was first published in 1972 by

The Viking Press, "Thinking of Emerson" was first

published in New Literary History in 1979 by The

University of Virginia, "An Emerson Mood" was de
­
livered as the Scholar's Day Address at Kalamazoo

College in 1980, To

The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition was Michael Fried,
first published in 1981 by North Point Press,
John Harbison
and
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Seymour Shifrin
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd" London
© 1972, 1974, 1980, and 1981 by Stanley Cavell

All rights reserved, University of Chicago Press edition, 1992

Printed in the United States of America

999897 6543
Cavell, Stanley, 1926­
The senses of Walden / Stanley CavelL - An

expanded ed., University of Chicago Press ed.

p. em.
Originally published: San Francisco: North

Point Press, 1981.

1. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.

Walden, 2, Philosophy in literature. I. Title.

[PS3048,C3 1992]

818' .303-dc20

ISBN 0-226-09813-3 (pbk.) 91-35306

CIP
§ The paper used in this publication meets the

minimum requirements of the American National

Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence

of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI

Z39.48-1984

...
.. .~' "1'1" ,.
Acknowledgments

The initial versions of these chapters were given as
Gauss Seminars at Princeton University in February
1971. Later versions were read at Wesleyan University
in April of the same year and at the University of
California at Santa Barbara in January 1972. Chapter I
was the basis of the Raphael Demos Memorial Lecture
delivered at Vanderbilt University in November 1971.
All readers of Thoreau owe thanks to Walter Har­
ding's notes in his edition called The Variorum Walden
and to James Lyndon Shanley's sorting of the Walden
manuscript, recorded in his The Making of Walden. Of
the secondary material I have read on Thoreau, I know
that I have explicitly responded to the pages devoted to
him in R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam and in
Richard Poirier's A World Elsewhere. In my remarkS
vii
:I
--
11
1 , ,
Vlll THE SENSES OF WALDEN . Acknowledgments ix
about Romanticism I have been helped explicitly by This book was written during my tenure as a Fellow
M. H. Abrams' The Min-orand the Lamp and his paper of Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities in
"English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," which 1970-1971. That year of freedom to write, together
occurs in Romanticism Reconsidered, edited by Nor­ with the encouragement and example of the commu­
throp Frye; and by Geoffrey Hartman's Wordsworth's nity of scholars in and around the Center, have put me
Poetry, 1787-1814. Most generally, I have put myself permanently yet happily in its debt.
as deeply in debt as my present resources permit to
S. C.
Perry Miller's From Colony to Province as well as to Emerson Hall
other of his writings about the development of Ameri­ Cambridge, Massachusetts
can consciousness, and to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of May 6,1972
i
Criticism and to his study of Blake, Fearful Symmetry.
The sentence on page one is from Thoreau's Correspon­
dence. I ought to cite Charles R. Anderson's The Magic
Circle o/Walden as my source for Emerson's remark, to
his journal, about the nervousness and wretchedness
reading Thoreau could cause him. I should also like to
register my awareness that my emphasis on the topic of
Walden's reader was encouraged by the attention paid
to the tOpIc of the reader in the writings and conversa­
tions of Wolfgang Iser and of Lowry Nelson.
I have been fortunate in the audiences that have
attended my various readings of earlier stages of these
chapters. The manuscript underwent specific changes
as a result of discussions at Princeton with Amelie
Rorty and Richard Rorty, and at Wesleyan with Victor
Gourevitch and Louis Mink. It is a pleasure to remem­
ber and to record the seriousness and instructiveness of
the students with whom I broached the study of Wal­
den - at the Indiana University School of Letters in the
summer of 1969, and in a humanities course at Harvard
in the spring of 1970.
I am grateful to the director of the Gauss Seminars,
Professor Joseph Frank, for his invitation to tryout this
material in so congenial a context.
,'t r ;

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II
Contents
Acknowledgments Vll

Preface xiii

• THE SENSES OF WALDEN'

Words 3

Sentences 36

Portions 70

• THINKING OF EMERSON'
121
• AN EMERSON MOOD'
139
I
II
I
Preface
I,
What hope is there in a book about a book? My interest
in this 4uestion of criticism, as I wrote my book about
Walden, lay in determining why Walden is itself about a
book, about its own writing and reading; and in enter­
ing certain experiments to determine how one philo­
sophical text is prompted by another, why the history
of philosophy is a history of such promptings, and
what, accordingly, constitutes an original, or initiating,
text. From this perspective, Walden appeared and ap­
pealed to me in a succession of lights. It was written in
an, as it were, pre-philosophical moment of its culture,
a moment as yet primitive with respect to the sophisti­
cation or professionalization of philosophy, when phi­
losophy and literature and theology (and politics and
economics) had not isolated themselves out from one
another but when these divorcements could be felt as
Xill
II

'trrICr . ) _
xiv THE SENSES OF WALDEN Preface xv
imminent, for better or worse. This pre-philosophical and so protect it from the vulgar; it was meant, on the
moment, measured in American time, occurred before contrary, to demonstrate the fearful esotericism of his
the German and the English traditions of philosophy culture's parlance as it stood, to preserve its words
I
I began to shun one another, and I hoped that if I could against its demented wish to damage and deny them­
show Walden to cross my own philosophical site, I as if his audience were not iUiterate but dysphasic. (3)
,, II might thereby re-enact an old exchange between these My remarks about writing as such are not meant as
traditions. (I assume the rhyming of some of the con­
generalities concerning aU of literature but as specific
cepts I emphasize-e.g., those of the stranger, of the
acknowledgments of the intention of this writer in'this
teacher, of the everyday, of dawning and clearing and
book, in particular two phases of this intention: to rest
resolution-with concepts at play in Nietzsche and in
his achievement of the condition of writing as such
Heidegger.)
specificaJIy upon his achievement of a genuine Scrip­
I have been asked, concerning my treatment of the
ture; and to alarm his culture by refusing it his voice,
dissociation of writing from speaking, what relation I
i.e., by withholding his consent both from society so
propose between things I have said and things implied
caJIed and from what I call "conspiracies" ofdespairing
in the idea of literature as ecriture, as this is broached in silence which prevent that society from being his, or
the writings ofJacques Derridaand Levi-Strauss. Fora
anyone's. This refusal is not in fact, though it is in
while I thought I should say something about this in
depiction, a withdrawal; it is a confrontation, a return,
this book, but I finaJIy thought the attempt would be
a constant turning upon his neighbors. This means,
misguided there, for several reasons: (1) What I had to first, that he has had to establish himself as a neighbor;
say about Walden's declaration of writing as such was which next means, to establish himself as a stranger;
formed before my acquaintance with the pertinent
.I which in turn means to establish the concept and the
views of these authors, so it seemed to me that it would
recognition of neighbors and strangers; this will mean
be irrelevant or presumptuous to engage in a philo­
establishing his reader as his stranger.
sophical dispute over an issue that Walden would merely
iUustrate and not inspire. (2) I do not yet know or
Note (/980)
understand the pertinent views of these authors weJI
The two essays on Emerson that the North Point edition
enough to dispute or agree with them. If, for example,
enables me to add to The Senses of Walden express my
they imply that the written word (as opposed to the
continuing indebtedness to the writing of that book
spoken) is retrograde as the vehicle of cultural expres­ better than any new words of introduction are likely to
sion (as opposed to cultured), then I do not agree, and do. The occaSIOn of the first essay, "Thinking of Emer­
certainly the writer of Walden does not agree. Both son," is explained in its introductory note. The oc­
currents of expression had become, to his mind, equaJIy casion of the second, "An Emerson Mood," was an
retrograde and forward-looking. His insistence on invitation to deliver the Scholar's Day Address at
writing as such was not meant to mystify his thought Kalamazoo College, January 25, 1980.
I
___,J
I
I
I ' For all our life should be baptism, and the
I
fulfilling of the sign, or sacrament, of baptism;
we have been set free from all else and wholly
given over to baptism alone, that is, to death and

resurrection. This glorious liberty of ours, and

this understanding of baptism have been carried

captive in our day.

MARTIN LUTHER

li
I
" ,
IIII
I
iI
I II
The Senses ofWalden
Ii
On the first perusal

plain conunon sense should appear

-on the second severe truth

- and on a third

severe beauty.

[II