Cristin Ellis, "Feeling What You See" (Long Version)

Feeling What You See: Objectivity and Reflexivity in Thoreau’s Lively Science

Thoreau Annual Gathering 2014

Roundtable “Thoreau and the Material Turn”

Cristin Ellis, University of Mississippi

Thoreau may or may not be a proto-new materialist but he was certainly a cranky materialist: he made no secret of his frustrations with the empirical science of his day. Indeed, even as his lifelong practice of observing nature became more conventionally empirical over his last decade, his objections to the dry and dusty lifelessness of scientific writing remained as pointed as ever. As scholars, we have tended to account for Thoreau’s unorthodoxies by calling him a romantic scientist. Thus critics like James McIntosh, John Hildebidle, and Laura Dassow Walls (among others) variously propose that “Thoreau saw his task to be the joining of poetry, philosophy, and science into a harmonized whole” (Walls 7). Instead of pure objectivity, then, Thoreauvian natural history is a blended practice that anticipates N. Katherine Hayles’ desire to see “literature and science as two mingled voices” (in Walls 8). On this view, scientific materialism needs the supplement of poetry in order to produce a satisfyingly vibrant portrait of the phenomenal world.

Today I propose to tweak that understanding a bit by suggesting that, at least in some instances, Thoreau’s beef with scientific objectivity was not that it is too materialist—not that its vision is impoverished without poetry—but rather that it was not yet materialist enough. That is, I’ll be suggesting that at least one distinguishing characteristic of Thoreau’s observational practice is his effort to chart a more comprehensive materialism that would account materially for the subjective textures—the sense of elevation, significance, or wonder—of aesthetic experience. Consider, for example, the following Journal entry from July of 1851 (3:592-4):

When I am against this bare promontory of a huckleberry hill, then forsooth my thoughts will expand. Is it some influence as a vapor which exhales from the ground, or something in the gales which blow there, or in all things there brought together agreeably to my spirit? The walls must not be too high…the trees must not be too numerous nor the hills too near bounding the view…

Moments like this one have served as examples of how Thoreau punctuates his natural history with “transcendental” or “poetic” eruptions. But of course, this assumes that the phenomenon Thoreau is observing here—that his “thoughts will expand” every time he stands just so upon a certain hill—is categorically different from the other natural phenomena (the leafing out of trees, the arrival of songbirds) with which the Journal is concerned. And to be sure, that’s not a crazy assumption—to this day, few if any ecologists report the felt shape of their thoughts in the field.

Nonetheless, it seems clear to me that the impulse of this passage is analytical more than it is poetic. Although he’s ostensibly describing an experience of natural inspiration (that’s so Thoreau!), what fascinates him here isn’t the content of that inspiration but rather its mechanicity: this happens every time. Instead of painting us a visionary picture of this landscape, then, he proceeds to rather prosaically anatomize the arrangement of walls, trees, hills, and negative space in an effort to put his finger on precisely what about the composition of this site—what single element or combined assemblage—keeps triggering this dilation of his thoughts. And though the identity of that trigger proves more complicated than the local vapors or winds he first suspects, that those are his initial guesses clearly indicates that Thoreau understands the landscape’s influence to be material (on the order of vapors) rather than subjective or spiritual in nature. In other words the causes are, at least in theory, both physical and specifiable.

            In this sense, this passage experiments with something like a science of poetic or aesthetic experience. Another memorable journal entry from later the same year makes Thoreau’s experimental science even more explicit. On Christmas Day, 1851 (3:155-6), Thoreau writes,

I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which you account scientifically to my understanding, but do not so account to my imagination…You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow, and I have new and indescribable fancies, and you have not touched the secret of the influence.

Once again, this passage’s overt critique of the poverty of the scientific account of sunset has been widely read as an argument for the necessity of supplementing science with poetry.[i] And once again, the inflection I’d like to put on that reading is to suggest that where they draw a bright line between objective (scientific) and subjective (poetic) observation, this passage seems more interested in the possibility of articulating the objective, physiological causes of aesthetic experience. In other words, the problem with science’s explanation of the sunset isn’t that it lacks poetry but that it fails to specify the physics by which sunsets trigger aesthetic trembling in human bodies. “I witness a beauty… which addresses itself to my imagination,” Thoreau observes; “this red vision excites me, stirs my blood makes my thoughts flow.” The autonomic physiological responses he describes (the excitation, the increased blood flow, the stimulated cognition) are, he suggests, no less objectively real effects of the light’s striking his eye than is the absorption and reflection of that same light as it bends through the body of the clouds.

So why shouldn’t science be accountable to these physical dimensions of the phenomenon we call sunset? So long as objectivity means refusing to acknowledge, let alone examine, the physical dimensions of subjective experience, Thoreau argues, science will be condemned to taking a woefully partial view of material phenomena. But however damning this critique of science may be, it is also a profession of faith in it. For by calling science out for failing to live up to its own materialist philosophy, Thoreau is not proposing that we reject or supplement empiricism, but rather that we double down on it. And these passages tentatively show us how, envisioning a more thoroughgoing empiricism that will observe the world not as an inventory of inert and alien objects, but as the site of dynamic and mutually transformative relations between our own and other bodies.

In this commitment to investigating the material conditions of subjective experience, Thoreau suggests at least one of the points of affinity between his unorthodox empiricism and the varieties of new materialisms emerging out of the academy today. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost broadly define them, the new materialisms are unified in their effort to remind us of “the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences” (1). To that end, they challenge our tendency to draw stark distinctions between material phenomena (huckleberries, sunlight, global warming) that have been designated the proper objects of science, and those “immaterial” phenomena (mind, imagination, feelings) that have been designated “fundamentally different from matter” (2) and, as such, the proper objects of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Thus one of the things this new materialist reorientation can help to light up in Thoreau’s late work is the consistency with which he, too, systematically undermines this distinction. From the phenological studies of the Journal, to the late naturalistic essays and his unfinished manuscript for Wild Fruits, Thoreau’s late naturalistic work sets out to anatomize the materialization of phenomena we might otherwise assume to be immaterial: things like aesthetic wonder (as at that sunset), the cruelty of April (see Kristen Case’s fine essay here), and even evangelical extremism (“Show me two villages, one embowered in trees…the other a merely trivial and treeless waste,” Thoreau writes in “Autumnal Tints,” “and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists”). In this sense, I think the new materialisms will be very productive resources for Thoreau scholars by encouraging us to recognize the materialism of this late work—to let that work step out, as it were, from the long shadow of the Thoreau we all fell in love with at Walden, the young transcendentalist ever squinting at nature to make out the symbols of its occult poetry.

Of course, we might wish to posit even closer correspondences to particular new materialist concepts. Thus for instance, Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action”—which holds that phenomena are “relations without preexisting relata” (815)—might be useful for illuminating Thoreau’s fundamentally dynamic and relational approach to the phenomenon of the sunset. Or again, Jane Bennett’s vocabulary of agential assemblages could help give new emphasis to the efficacy of that huckleberry hill—drawing out Thoreau’s sense that his experience of inspiration there is not his precisely, but really belongs to the site at that moment, as an emergent dimension of the assemblage “wall-trees-hill-emptiness-human.” As a literary scholar, however, I am always acutely aware of the pitfalls of translation. Transposing Thoreau’s thought into this latest critical vocabulary risks distorting or attenuating the specificity of his thought. For instance, the difference between what Bennett means by an “assemblage” and what Thoreau means when he refers to “all things there brought together” on that huckleberry is potentially considerable, for Bennett’s term bears the full freight of a philosophical apparatus (Deleuzian ontology) under which Thoreau’s sense—entirely unacquainted with Deleuze’s philosophy—may quickly get lost. Moreover, beyond their work with philosophical ideas, studies like Barad’s and Bennett’s tend to share philosophy’s aspiration to build out comprehensive theories of ontology—to provide a view as if from nowhere from which we might, if not transcend, then at least, as Bennett puts it, “stretch ourselves” (230) to comprehend a material system so unimaginably (or not) larger than ourselves. And while Thoreau’s journalizing can and has been read as a technology for acquiring just such a post-human-scaled vision of nature, it seems equally clear to me that his interests remained ineluctably tied to the intimate scale and aesthetic textures of human experience. His materialism was, in other words, a method, even an epistemology, but it was not a theory in the sense that it never aspired to the systematicity, to the god’s-eye view, that constitutes the explanatory power of the new materialisms.

Thus while I embrace this comparative work, and can’t wait to see how it will make once-overlooked aspects of Thoreau’s work begin to vibrate with new resonance, I also approach it with caution. I want to preserve the still tentative, speculative, and inconsistent character of Thoreau’s largely private empirical practice from becoming lost in the more rigorously systematic, if still speculative, materialist philosophies put forward under the auspices of the new materialism. Advancing, then, with trepidation but also in the open-ended spirit of discovery, I look forward to this backward glance, and to discovering, once again, just how far back the roots of even our newest “new” insights might actually run into cultural (and material) history.

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[i] See for instance Irving Hodder’s reading of this moment as exemplary of the “symbiotic” relationship between Thoreau’s “spiritual quest” and his “interest in natural facts” (277-8). In a similar vein, David Robinson describes Thoreau’s practice of “participatory observation” as a method for balancing the “complementary roles” of “empirical observation and metaphysical conceptualization” in his project (178).

Works Cited:

Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter

Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:3 (2003).

Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43:2 (Spring 2012), pp. 225-233.

Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.

Hildebidle, John. Thoreau: A Naturalist’s Liberty. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.

Hodder, Irving. Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness. New Haven: Yale UP 2001.

McIntosh, James. Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Stance Toward Nature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.

Robinson, David. Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal, Volume 3: 1848-51. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark Patterson, and William Rossi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.

—“Autumnal Tints.” The Natural History Essays. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980.

Walls, Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Michelle Neely, "Reading Thoreau's Animals"

Michelle Neely

Connecticut College

“Reading Thoreau’s Animals”

Thoreau writes about animals wonderfully, and often. In Walden, The Maine Woods, the journals, some of the essays, and elsewhere he shows himself to be a careful and sympathetic observer of nonhuman animal life, yet his ethical reasoning from his observations does not always please. Walden’s exploration of the ethical, intellectual, and spiritual consequences of taking animal life in particular seems frequently to annoy both readers and critics put off by what they see as Thoreau’s “exasperating” fixation on purity,[i] but even Thoreau’s fine depictions of squirrels, chickadees, and other “brute neighbors” in Walden, the journals, and other writings, can be dismissed as fanciful flights of anthropomorphism. 

Perhaps Thoreau’s “instinct”[ii] about killing animals and consuming animal bodies cannot be conveyed to any who have never felt its like; ethical insights can be individual and incommunicable, a truth the philosopher Cora Diamond has named “the difficulty of reality.”[iii] But some of the value of reading Thoreau’s animals, and the challenging nature of his thinking about the material world, can, I think, be illuminated. In the longer essay from which I draw my presentation, I will offer a brief close reading of one of Walden’s most famous “animal” passages and then explore some of the more significant ways in which Thoreau’s engagement with nonhuman animals resonates with recent theoretical developments in posthumanism, new materialism, materialist ecocriticism, and Object-Oriented Ontology. Ultimately, I wish to demonstrate that Thoreau’s animal thought frequently decenters the human and displays his commitment to giving “materiality its due,” as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have said of “the New Materialisms” more generally. In the process, I will make a case for paying greater attention to the way that Thoreau’s ethical thought may often be grounded in careful observation the material. Finally, I will argue that Thoreau’s evident pleasure in boundary confusion is an important part of his ability to imagine a more open and ecological form of community.

In the case of Walden in particular, and in much of Thoreau’s work more generally, I would further like to suggest that anthropomorphism is a mode rich with ethical and epistemological possibilities: for Thoreau the naturalist, philosopher, and poet, anthropomorphism is not simply an act of imagination, it’s frequently a fact of attention to the ontology of the nonhuman. Moreover, anthropomorphism has real ethical possibilities. Kari Weil, building on trauma theory’s concept of “critical empathy” as a “conjunction of affect and critical awareness that may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy not grounded in affinity,” has suggested that we “call an ethical relating to animals (whether in theory or in art) ‘critical anthropomorphism’ in the sense that we open ourselves to touch and be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms, but stop short of believing that we can know their experience” (20). Thoreau’s anthropomorphism is indeed a vehicle for imagining nonhumans as fellow subjects, and for noticing the shared experience of being.

What is shared, most fundamentally, is mortality, and a vulnerability to pain, hunger, and “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” as Hamlet put it. “Shall we not have sympathy with the muskrat which gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its sufferings, but, through our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its heroic virtue? Are we not made its brothers by fate?,” Thoreau muses in an 1854 journal entry celebrating a muskrat’s attempt to free himself from a trap.[iv] It is this recognition of the shared bodily experience of human and nonhuman creatures that leads Thoreau to characterize animal killing as “murder” in the passage with which I began.[v] Donna Haraway, following Derrida, claims that the question of murder is at the heart of human exceptionalism, the claim of absolute difference between human and nonhuman animals. In When Species Meet, she writes, “only human beings can be murdered…Every living being except Man can be killed but not murdered.  To make Man merely killable is the height of moral outrage; indeed, it is the definition of genocide” (78). For this reason, using the word “murder” to describe the deliberate killing of animals is not simple hyperbole, it’s a fundamental challenge to the anthropocentric logic by which only human lives merit moral consideration. After Thoreau describes the brutal ant battle he witnesses in “Brute Neighbors,” he disrupts the easy distinction between the value and meaning of human and nonhuman death when he reflects, “I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference” (220-221).

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[i] Richard J. Schneider writes “most readers find ‘Higher Laws’ …to be exasperating in its puritanic insistence on the virtues of a vegetarian diet” (100). Nancy Mayer’s consideration of the ethics on display in “Higher Laws” is also representative of this position when Mayer claims that “Thoreau doesn’t, after all, really have much to say about actual animals, and, towards the end of the chapter, the whole argument dissolves discouragingly into a prudish diatribe against coffee, tea, and gluttony that begins to sound suspiciously like an unwitting revelation of the author’s private foibles” (27). In this essay I hope to demonstrate that Thoreau does, in fact, have important things to say about “actual animals,” and as I have argued elsewhere, Thoreau’s “prudish diatribe” against the substances named by Mayer is in fact a complex intervention into antebellum debates about capitalism, citizenship, freedom and the body. For this argument, see Neely, “Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden.”

[ii] Walden, 206.

[iii] Philosophy and Animal Life, 45-6. See also page 92.

[iv] Journals, February 5, 1854.

[v] In his annotated edition of Walden, Jeffrey Cramer points out that Thoreau made other references to taking an animal’s life as “murder.” In The Maine Woods Thoreau uses the word to describe the moose killing, and in an 1847 letter he uses the word to describe killing animals for scientific specimens. See Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, 204.

Works Cited

Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.

Mayer, Nancy. “Hunting the Human Animal: The Art of Ethical Perception in "Higher Laws." The Concord Saunterer 17 (2009): 27-43. Print.

Neely, Michelle C. “Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden” American Literature 85.1 (2013): 33-60. Print.

Schneider, Richard J. “Walden.” The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Journal Vol. 7: 1853-1854. Eds. Nancy Craig Simmons and Ron Thomas. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Print.

--. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition Ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Print.

"The only real elysium”: Thoreau’s Meeting of Spirit and Matter

I wish to suggest two things: first, that Thoreau’s writings reveal his understanding of spirit as inherent in matter—that is, Thoreau knew the physical world as simultaneously and essentially material and spiritual; and, second, that Thoreau’s experience of spirit offers promising avenues for historicizing New Materialist attempts to theorize the relation between humanity and the rest of the material world.

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On October 18, 1856, Thoreau wrote in his Journal about an afternoon spent “a-chestnutting.”  He describes various aspects of his experience--a tree where he gathered the nuts, the anatomy of chestnut burrs, and the shapes of the fruits within each burr.  The journal entry focuses primarily on the physical characteristics of this particular form of matter: the chestnut.  Thoreau then shifts his focus briefly, addressing his neighbors’ views of his typical afternoon practice—namely, walking and closely observing aspects of the material world.  He writes that in spite of his neighbors’ concern over how he spends his days engaged with natural phenomena, he finds his practice profoundly edifying—even spiritual.  He calls it, in fact, “the only real elysium.”  Here is the statement within its fuller context, where Thoreau describes the great satisfaction he experiences through his daily practice: “I see that my neighbors look with compassion on me--that they think it is a mean & unfortunate destiny which makes me to walk in these fields & woods so much & sail on this river alone-- But so long as I find here the only real elysium I cannot hesitate in my choice” (Journal, Ms. Vol. 21: 67).¹ 

For our purposes here today, it’s notable that Thoreau’s phrase, “real elysium,” is actually an oxymoron, as “elysium” invokes the fanciful, figurative Elysian fields of mythology and therefore can hardly be deemed “real.”  A real, earthly Elysium is comparable to a real fairy, or a real Narnia--but Thoreau knew this, of course, and for him this was likely just the point of his rhetorical construction.  As he would write in his journal for August 3, 1852 of his feelings of what he called feeling “affected” and experiencing “enchantment” when immersed in the natural world, “this enchantment is no delusion”; rather, he writes, it is “fact”—as much a part of “reality” as the ground on which he stands (Journal 5: 271-72).  Similarly, here in October of 1856, Thoreau’s encounters with the natural world produced not merely a glimpse into that ideal, blessed afterlife of the gods and the chosen heroic, but a real state of heightened spirituality.²

Indeed, Thoreau implies, the only route to the ultimate spiritual state available to humankind comes through close attention to the material realm.  What his neighbors can look upon only with compassion—with pity, that is, for his suffering and unfortunate circumstances—Thoreau looks upon as akin to what environmental philosopher Bruce Foltz calls, drawing on the Greek, a noetics of nature.  Foltz defines “noetics” as “the highest kind of knowledge, and therefore the highest moment of earthly life”—namely, “the unencumbered exercise of that highest faculty of alertness and heedfulness and comprehension,” one “‘open to the presence of the invisible within the visible” (7).  Thoreau’s engagements with matter enable his practice of noetics or, in his phrasing, his pursuit of the “only real elysium”—his experience, that is, of the meeting of spirit and matter.

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Bruce Foltz has asked the intriguing question, “Could it be that an environmental aesthetic must ultimately entail something like an environmental theology?” (xii).  In the last few decades, several additional thinkers have similarly suggested that the present environmental crisis is a crisis of culture and, ultimately, of spirit.  In this light, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the theoretical pursuit known as the New Materialism is its theorists’ desire to articulate a conception of the nonhuman material world that is strikingly similar to the one Thoreau pursues—that is, a position that at once acknowledges both the complex natural history of physical life forms and their interactions, and the evasive, unquantifiable, and enigmatic qualities of all matter that seem unfathomable to humans but that nonetheless affect us.  Put differently: in its theory of matter, New Materialism insists upon both the scientifically demonstrable intricate physicality of matter and its indefinable, ineffable nature.  Given its impulse to give both scientific understanding and the elusive vitality of matter their due, I have come to see the New Materialism as an academic-theoretical attempt to ameliorate this crisis of spirit. 

On the one hand, New Materialists emphasize the material world in physical and bio-chemical terms—matter as the hard stuff of reality.  We see this, for example, in Jane Bennett’s work on “things”: she explores the materiality of food, metal, and stem cells (see Vibrant Matter).  We also find this emphasis on the physical essence of matter in Stacy Alaimo’s focus on the complex “trans-corporeality” of all life forms in the universe—that is, in the interconnectedness of all forms of materiality (“Trans-Corporeal Feminisms”).  In the graceful words of Ian Bogost, “[b]eing is various and unitary all at once” (19).  Or as Joni Mitchell sings, we are stardust—yet we are also plastics and pesticides.  The material world, then, is both physical and physically (and chemically) interconnected.

On the other hand, New Materialism also insists upon an aspect of materiality at once part and parcel of its physicality but also beyond it, and this aspect of matter evades easy capitulation to language.  Bennett uses the term “vital” to get at this  aspect of materiality (vii); she explains that she seeks to theorize a “vital materiality” as opposed to the modern “idea of matter as passive stuff, as raw, brute . . . inert” or “dull” (vii).  She wants “to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality” (xiii) and to recognize “the lively powers of material formations” (vii), which she dubs “thing-power” (xvi).  Other scholars have different names for this ineffable, vibrant quality of matter: Manuel De Landa refers to the “inherent creativity” of matter (de Landa 16), whereas Alaimo focuses on “matter as activity rather than passive substance” (Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal” 245).  Physicist Karen Barad’s terms differ still; she describes the material world as “agential,” explaining that “[a]gency is not an attribute whatsoever—it is ‘doing’/‘being’ in its” interconnectivity with all other matter (“Posthumanist” 827).  While these theorists certainly differ in important respects that I do want to diminish here, they also share the conviction that matter contains, embodies, and exists as a heretofore largely overlooked life force.

The point that I wish to emphasize here in that these various theorists emphasize, in their distinct ways, the material world not merely as a conglomeration of interconnected and interrelated, ultimately physical, phenomena, but also, and different from this, the material realm as interconnected forces of vitality, power, and agency.  Bennett goes so far as to suggest that the vitality of matter has the ability to inform feeling or emotion when she uses the phase “impersonal affect” to describe vital materiality; that is, she understands matter to hold a “power” that is “impersonal,” in the sense that it is not responsive to or expressive of human personalities.  Bennett wants to “equate affect with materiality,” not to imagine affect as something additional to materiality (xii, xiii emphasis mine).  This sort of conception of matter’s vitality prevents the sort of naively romantic projection of human emotion onto material life forms that has plagued much nature writing; humans may bring their emotions to encounters with matter, but in this view, matter itself literally embodies affective power, and humans may choose to recognize this or not.  Arguably, however, recognizing this aspect of matter alters one’s relation to matter, leading humans to recognize this vitality as it “produce[s]” “enchantment” in us, or invites humans to be conscious of our own relation to the “‘colliding of particle-forces’” that comprise the universe and our own bodies (Bennett xiii).

Thoreau’s writings suggest a similar conception of the material world—one based in biology, chemistry, and the other sciences—but one also possessing a certain vital materiality, which he sometimes refers to as “spirit.”  Perhaps a reclaiming of the Thoreauvian notion of spirit might help provide historical contexts for—as well as deepen—the New Materialist efforts to articulate a vital power that pervades the material world.³

I invoke this word, “spirit,” in spite of its being a disparaged term in theoretical (and even many popular) circles.  In fact, I invoke the word “spirit” even though Bennett explicitly argues that her conception of the vitality of matter does not suppose “a spiritual supplement” to matter (xiii).  But Bennett’s phrasing here signals an adherence to a fairly modern (and widely embraced) conception of “spirit”--one that causes many of our own contemporaries to bristle but that Thoreau would not have held.  This modern view sees spirit precisely as a “supplement” injected into matter, or added into and thus emanating forth from matter, usually by means of a religious worldview either imposed by the human mind or “divinely infused” (Bennett xiii).  To this understanding, spirit is a faith-based supplement to matter.  For Thoreau, however, spirit is not a religious supplement, nor is it “the raw material for the creative activity of humans or God” (Bennett xiii).  Rather, spirit is both secular and of this world, present whether humans acknowledge it or not; and meaningful in and of itself—in fact, bearing a meaning that most often eludes humanity, rather than that answers its questions.  Spirit is intrinsic to matter, inherent in matter, an inextricable part of materiality itself⁴--much like the vitality, agency, and inherent creativity which theorists seek to claim today.

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Thoreau’s uses the term “spirit” in many ways in his writings—often casually, to refer to his own mood, to what we would call an alcoholic drink, or to the liquid solution in which he stores specimens. He also, however, uses the term to invoke his own interconnectedness with the rest of the material world, as well as a certain energy that pervades matter.  He writes, for instance, of his own “spirit” being affected by a cranberry bog, explaining that he “believe[s] almost in the personality of . . . planetary matter—feel[s] something akin to reverence for it” (Journal: Ms. Vol. 21: 304, 305).  On August 17, 1851, he similarly refers to his own spirit when he writes of attending to nature’s sounds—the wind, the cricket, the stream, and the goldfinch—precisely so he might recover the fullness of his being.  He describes himself as “recovering my spirits, my spirituality,” referring specifically to regaining a sense of his own relatedness to the world around him and of “the steady onward progress of the universe” (Journal 3: 368).  There are many moments like this when, even despite feeling pensive or melancholy, through his self-consciousness regarding his material connection to the world Thoreau says he is led to “endear the earth to me—make me value myself & rejoice.”  This, for Thoreau, is the zenith of spirituality (Journal 3: 369).  Recovering his spirituality, then, means, first, recalling his own corporeal participation in a materiality that transcends any specific moment or place—and then, second, valuing the vast material interconnections in which he is enmeshed.

Sometimes Thoreau experiences this sense of his own interconnectivity with the rest of matter and mentions the spirit of another life form (other than his own).  He speaks, for instance, of the “spirits” of the huckleberry (Journal, Ms. Vol. 33: 42) and of fungus as “so obviously . . . related to ourselves,” “the expression of an idea--growth according to a law--Matter not dormant--not raw--but inspired appropriated by spirit.”  Moreover, he notes, “the humblest fungus betrays a life akin to my own” (Journal, Ms. Vol. 27: 211).  He also recognizes spirit as it pertains to forces that are not specific life forms.  In Cape Cod, for instance, he acknowledges the “spiritual ocean” (127) and refers to a strong wind as “Spirit’s breath” (11).  In his Journal, he declares that the autumnal browning leaves of a shrub oak, in spite of having lost their summer green, “still have a kind of life in them” and are “spiritual” (Journal, Ms. Vol. 22: 147).  On May 12, 1857, he hears the song of a “bay-wing” and recognizes “the spirit of its earth song,” which recalls for Thoreau “the world that we jointly inhabit” (Journal, Ms. Vol. 23: 65).  These are clearly significant moments for Thoreau; indeed, it seems that only when he is reminded to think beyond his own corporeality and toward his interconnectedness with other forms of matter does he deem himself “a competent witness” to the world (Journal, Ms. Vol. 23: 67).

At times, Thoreau’s notion of spirit seems nearly religious--if we acknowledge what one scholar has called Thoreau’s :somewhat indefinite concept of deity” (Friesen 118; see also 117-122)—and if we allow the term “religious” to broadly encompass what John Steinbeck once referred to as “the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.”⁵  For example, in the “Chesuncook” section of The Maine Woods, he asserts that pine trees possess a “living spirit . . . as immortal as” his own (125).  Later in “The Allegash and East Branch” section, Thoreau laments, “The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells” (314).  In fact, he argues, “there are spirits”--“not only [of the] stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises” [sic: orchids] (212).

A tour through Thoreau’s writings suggests that, for him, spirit is the generativeness of the physical world—a vitality that pervades forms of matter.  Spirit also entails the essential connectivity and interactivity of all forms of matter (including human being and mind), as well as--crucially--a self-consciousness of one’s own place in the vitality of matter.  Only when he engages spirit does Thoreau consider himself to be living fully.

Thoreau once wrote in his journal about his spiritual fulfillment in recognizing the mysterious vitality of material “things”:

I seem to see somewhat more of my own kith and kin in the lichens on the rocks that in any books. . . .  I know of no redeeming qualities in me—but a sincere love for some things. . . .  When I condemned and condemn myself utterly—I think straightaway—but I rely on my love for some things. 

Therein I am whole and entire. Therein I am God-propt. (Journal I: 344-45)

At the start of this same journal entry, Thoreau had written, “our spirits never go beyond nature” (Journal 1:343), suggesting his beliefs both that the highest human experiences occur here on earth, and that earth serves as the only source of what some wish for in heaven.  That is, nature—the material realm—provides for Thoreau a deeply spiritual experience, “the only real elysium,” precisely through his own recognition and communion with what he understood as nature’s inherent spirituality.

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Thoreau’s writings demand that we acknowledge that there is nothing “new” about efforts to deepen our knowledge of our own human relatedness to the rest of the material world.⁶  Yet undoubtedly there is much to be gained through this effort to know what Bruce Foltz describes as “the visible elements that are manifest” as well as “the invisible elements that elude the perception of the senses” and “the darkness and mystery that still remain” (4).  As we seek this knowledge in this age of increasing environmental challenge, we will benefit from exploring further Thoreau’s engagements with the vitality of matter, the relation of these engagements to his sense of spirit as inherent in matter, and the undoubtedly related topic of what he elsewhere calls “higher law.”  We might thereby more fully realize Thoreau’s contributions to nineteenth-century efforts to arrive at the environmental aesthetic now sought through the New Materialism.

Notes

I am grateful to Samantha C. Harvey, James Finley, Kathleen Kelly for thoughtful readings of an earlier version of this essay.

1. References to Thoreau’s Journal are, whenever possible, from the Princeton Edition, cited by volume and page number.  Passages drawn from Thoreau’s journal manuscript volumes not yet published by Princeton are quoted from the on-line transcripts made available through the related University of Santa Barbara “The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau” site (http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals.html); parenthetical citations point to manuscript volume and page numbers of this on-line transcript.

2. Thoreau’s sense of a “real elysium” is particularly interesting in light of the recent work of Dr. John Ratey, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, who demonstrates in his 2014 book titled Go Wild that active walking in outdoor settings triggers chemical effects on our brains and bodies that make us not only healthier but also happier individuals.

3.  Thoreau’s understanding of spirit was deeply rooted in his historical moment, as well as steeped in the scientific efforts of his time to articulate a theory of all life forms—neither of which I have the space to discuss here, unfortunately.  The notion of a “dynamic and spiritual creative power in nature” dates back to early philosophy, as is conveyed by the philosophical concept Natura naturans, which has a long history in western thought--including in Coleridge and Emerson (Harvey 63; see also 177-78 n. 35).  Two recent studies suggest the category of “spirit” as central to understandings of Thoreau’s place in American Romanticism; both Samantha Harvey and David Greenham reclaim “spirit” as a crucial foundational concept in Transatlantic Romanticism.  In an important study of Emerson, Coleridge, and Transatlantic Transcendentalism, Harvey demonstrates that “Coleridge’s commitment to mediating the categories of nature, spirit, and humanity characterized an overarching Romantic concern that transcended national boundaries” (2). Greenham argues that spirit functions in the Romantic era not as a notion imposed upon the world or inserted into reality by the mind; nor, he suggests, is spirit necessarily related to a specific theological position.  Spirit is not “a self responding to some mere thing”; rather, spirit is both an “action which unifies subject and object and from which both emerge in their identity and difference,” and “a principle of unity” which “cannot be found in either the subject or in the object but rather in an identity which contains them both” (73).

4.  As Laura Dassow Walls demonstrates, for Alexander von Humboldt and for Thoreau after him, “matter does not embody spirit; it is in itself” (86).

5.  My thanks to Samantha C. Harvey for drawing my attention to this quotation.

6.  I am grateful to Kristen Case for encouraging me through an informal conversation to consider what makes the New Materialism “new.”

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