Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon

Nature, Knowledge, and the Method of Thoreau’s Excursions

173 In the opening section of “Autumnal Tints,” one of his late natural history essays, Thoreau explains that he will be offering the reader extracts from notes he had compiled for a book he never managed to complete. The book would have consisted of colored reproductions of “a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown state. . . . What a memento such a book would be! You would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the Autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves themselves unfaded, it would be better still” (Exc 225). Thoreau ’s remarks correlate three notions that are central to his thought: walking (“a ramble”), reading, and nature. As Lawrence Buell pointed out some time ago, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to the late natural history essays, Thoreau’s preferred genre was the excursion (Literary Transcendentalism 188–207). With few exceptions, the protagonist of his essays is a walker. Even where he doesn’t announce a walk in the very title of a work (as he does, e.g., in “A Winter Walk,” “A Walk to Wachusetts,” “Walking”), the motif of walking pervades his writing just as it was his favorite activity in life. Apart from physical pleasure, for Thoreau walking was a hermeneutical exercise . Nature should be studied much as one reads a book, for in a profound sense nature is a book—a web of signs, a text (literally, “that which is woven” or “web”) to be deciphered. Conversely, books should be natural; the ideal book would reproduce and preserve the operations of nature. Such a notion harks back to the ancient topos of the book of nature, the liber naturae; from this perspective Thoreau offers yet another romantic version of a concept familiar from Dieter Schulz Nature, Knowledge, and the Method of Thoreau’s Excursions 174 Dieter Schulz classical antiquity on down through the Middle Ages to such early modern writers as Paracelsus and Jakob Boehme (St. Armand; D. Schulz). At the same time, he anticipates some of the most exciting recent developments in linguistics, the sciences, and philosophy. Some of these developments can only be touched upon briefly here; for reasons of space, I will only indicate significant new departures in linguistics and biology. In the major part of my argument, I will focus on the walker-as-reader by analyzing the relationship between knowledge and method as that relationship has been addressed in philosophical hermeneutics. As Hans-Georg Gadamer, the key figure in modern hermeneutics, has reminded us in Wahrheit und Methode (1960), the Greek notion of method presupposes a fundamental unity of Being and Knowing (467–68 [Truth and Method 463–64]). Greek methodos originally means “following or accompanying something on its way”—a definition that captures Thoreau’s philosophy of walking in a nutshell. Gadamer invokes the ancient meaning of “method” in an attempt to set the humanities off from the sciences, thus by implication widening the gap between what C. P. Snow dubbed “the two cultures.” But as Reinhard Schulz argues in Naturwissenschaftshermeneutik (Hermeneutics of the natural sciences), the reach of Gadamer’s reflections extends well beyond Geisteswissenschaften, beyond the humanities and into the sciences; his approach has considerable potential for overcoming the two-cultures dichotomy. If my claim for an affinity between Gadamer and Thoreau makes sense, then, another look at Thoreau’s excursions promises far-reaching consequences. Nature as Text, or, the Walker as Reader The characteristic and perfectly legitimate response to Thoreau’s imagined book of specimen leaves in “Autumnal Tints” is summed up by William Rossi in the introduction to his edition of the natural history essays when he refers to Thoreau’s “ironic dream of ‘preserv[ing] the leaves unfaded’ in a scrapbook”— ironic because the specimen leaves inevitably would provide no more than “a pale, ersatz ‘memento’” of the original experience (Introduction xx–xxi). But while the tone of Thoreau’s remarks does suggest a heavy dose of facetiousness, the passage also points to the innumerable and quite serious hints in his writings at a more profound affinity between writing or composing a book, on the one hand, and the operations of nature, on the other. Nature, Knowledge, and Excursions 175 Thoreau’s plea for natural writing and a natural...