Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

26. Philosopher

104 verso runningfoot 2 6 . P h i l o s o p h e r Compare the following: Thoreau: To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically (13). Nietzsche: I have at all times written my works with my whole body and my whole life; I don’t know any “purely intellectual problems.” Wittgenstein: My father was a business man, and I am a business man: I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled. Following his fellow Viennese Sigmund Freud, Wittgenstein conceived of philosophy as a kind of therapy, one that would bring relief from certain torments brought on by language’s misuse. (Because language enables us to say that a “mathematical problem” has a solution, we assume that other nouns, like “life,” do as well.) What would this “therapy” have done for Thoreau? Prevented his going to Walden? Forestalled his Platonic urge to read Nature symbolically? Diagnosed his post-Walden depression as resulting from the idea of a single, elusive “solution” to life? Or would Wittgenstein have P recto runningfoot 105 seen Thoreau as a precursor, similarly devoted to solitude, austerity, walking, and handiwork? For this Thoreau, Walden was less theory than practice: there, he became a writer, a citizen, and a businessman , thereby solving simultaneously the practical problems of vocation , reputation, and income. He had, in effect, redefined the crucial term: “The economy of living ,” he now maintained, “is synonymous with philosophy” (39). Wittgenstein expressed the same attitude. “What is the use of studying philosophy,” he once angrily asked his friend Norman Malcolm, “if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?” Wittgenstein, however, cautioned against mistaking a homemade method for the discovery of “the meaning of life”: Suppose someone thinks he has found the solution to the “problem of life” and tells himself that now everything is quite easy. To see his error he only has to remind himself that there was a time when this “solution” had not been discovered; but even at that time people also had to live. In that light the solution he has discovered seems something quite inessential. Did Thoreau think that with Walden, he had solved all of life’s questions ? He has occasional bouts of modesty: “There are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre” (11), he admits, insisting further that “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (52). But the I that begins Walden (“In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained” [5]) often gives way to you, the second person that opens up the imperative, the direct address to “you who read these pages” (6), which occasionally become a sermon. Walden’s sermon, however, preaches not a doctrine but a practice . As Wittgenstein would do in the next century, Thoreau was reconceiving the role of the philosopher, who would now become, in Wittgenstein’s words, someone who “demonstrate[s] a method, by examples, and the series of examples can be broken off.” This way of working can be puzzling. Confronted by Wittgenstein’s meticulous analysis of particular language games (e.g., a tribe of builders using philosopher 105 106 verso runningfoot only a handful of words, an order for five red apples), his students could feel lost: It was hard to see where all this often rather repetitive concrete detailed talk was leading to—how the examples were interconnected and how all this bore on the problem which one was accustomed to put to oneself in abstract terms. As Wittgenstein himself admitted about his Philosophical Investigations , “If this book is written as it should be written, then everything I say must be easily understandable . . . but it should be difficult to understand why I say it.” This remark gets at one of Walden’s basic problems. As the book leaves behind its first two chapters, originally designed as Lyceum lectures, to embark on detailed accounts of fishing at night...