A Taste for the Wild: Some Nietzschean Themes in Thoreau

Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32 (2002) 165 A Taste for the Wild: Some Nietzschean Themes in Thoreau1 Ian Box At first blush, it seems far-fetched, even perverse, to suggest an affinity between Thoreau and Nietzsche. Although a neighbour is said to have described Thoreau as a “dirty little atheist” (Harding, Handbook 141), in general there is little trace of the Antichrist in New England transcendentalism . Yet, it was the American critic Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in the 1940s, who first commented on the striking similarities between the extreme vitality of Thoreau’s prose, which represents nature as beyond moral considerations, and Nietzsche’s more uncompromising vision of life beyond good and evil.2 Krutch’s observations suggest some merit in reading Thoreau with the more philosophically acute observations of his German contemporary in mind. Not only do Nietzsche’s writings explain some of the difficulties in Thoreau’s work, most notably this tension between the wild and the good in his view of nature, they also show Thoreau to be on the same philosophical road as Nietzsche, rejecting the decadence of his nervous and bustling nineteenth century in favour of an individualistic ideal of health and vitality that requires, in Nietzsche’s words, “good teeth” and a “strong stomach” (Gay Science 63). The following remarks take their cue from a suggestion of Stanley Cavell’s that Walden was written in a “pre-philosophic moment” in American culture before the divergence of the German and English traditions of philosophy (Cavell xiii). With this observation in mind, I suggest that Thoreau’s literary attempts to express the vitality of life amidst the quiet desperation of his age represents a pre-philosophic anticipation of the more sophisticated amor fati of Nietzsche’s equally untimely meditations . II While there is a convergence of perspective in the writings of Thoreau and Nietzsche, there is clearly no suggestion here that one exercised any influence over the other. Neither writer seems even to have been aware of Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 166 the other. Thoreau died ten years before the publication of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, and Thoreau’s Walden wasn’t available in a German edition until 1897, long after the onset of Nietzsche’s final madness. And while he could read both French and Italian , these editions didn’t appear until after Nietzsche’s death. Although neither writer influenced the other, there is considerable textual evidence pointing to a number of shared concerns. This is most apparent in their close attention to the style of writing in general and to what they see as the link between style and substance. In Nietzsche’s case, this stems from a visceral hostility to any kind of systematic philosophy and a deep mistrust of anything firm, fixed, or static. Here is a philosopher with a suspicion of philosophy who prefers to see himself as a psychologist, a philologist, or just a free spirit anticipating a new style of philosophy. The notion that “a will to a system is a lack of integrity” (Twilight 35) and that even a residue of intellectual conscience ought to steer one clear of the system (Gay Science 238) finds extreme stylistic expression in the repudiation of anything German and an equally passionate embrace of everything Italian and French. That “presto” style, which treats “deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again” (Gay Science, 343–44), has been impossible to achieve in German. This is apparent not only in the grandiose philosophical systems with their clumsy moralizing about categorical imperatives or the divinity of history, it is rooted deep in German culture itself. To experience writing as “dancing with the pen” (Twilight 77) requires a noble education, the very idea of which is simply incomprehensible to the German of Nietzsche’s day. Here again those “little causes” of politics, climate, and diet have made the German spirit not a vital cultural force but rather “an indigestion” (Ecce Homo 238) such as might result from too much beer-drinking. Whatever the reason for German spiritual sluggishness, it is clear that for Nietzsche, it is only...