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Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocentrism w i l l i a m r o s s i  As a number of recent critics have argued, while an ecocentric shift in Thoreau’s thinking and writing may have begun during his two-year stay at Walden Pond, the deeper process of environmental bonding and the literary effects of it did not become evident before the early 1850s.1 The first fruit, and in many ways the means of sustaining this bond, was Thoreau’s Journal — ‘‘the record of my love’’ and ‘‘affection for any aspect of the world’’ — which burgeons at this time into a voluminous, open-ended account of his environmental and intellectual explorations around Concord.2 But ecocritical interest in Thoreau’s greening has also brought into sharper focus an abiding contradiction at work in this process , namely, the contradiction between Thoreau’s growing tendency to root his affection in place and the anthropocentric inclinations of his persistent transcendentalism. The tension between these two tendencies is especially conspicuous in the early 1850s. For the very moment when, as Stephen Adams and Donald Ross have noted, Thoreau begins selfconsciously to refer to himself as a ‘‘transcendentalist’’ is the same moment that his scientific interest in Concord environs starts to intensify and the ongoing Journal account of his ‘‘affection’’ deepens.3 And far from fading, this tension persists, as, ten years later, Thoreau continues to identify himself, even in an essay concerned with a ‘‘purely scientific subject,’’ as ‘‘a transcendentalist.’’4 So long as this tension has been construed in epistemological terms, it has posed little problem. Now that the once-potent critical myth of Thoreau’s post-Walden decline has died out, most critics have come to appreciate how ‘‘Thoreau’s interest in scientific approaches to nature . . . merged with rather than replaced his transcendentalist approach,’’ even if that merger also entailed a keen awareness of the ‘‘limitations of scienti fic knowledge’’ in the face of ‘‘the full and ultimately mystical rich28 ness of nature.’’5 Most recently, Laura Dassow Walls has persuasively argued that the major shift in Thoreau’s career beginning in the early 1850s is better understood not as the transformation of ‘‘an Emersonian transcendental poet to a fragmented empirical scientist, but from a transcendental holist to something new which combined transcendentalism with empiricism,’’ a methodology Walls refers to as ‘‘empirical holism,’’which Thoreau derived from Alexander von Humboldt.6 But when the focus changes to include the ontological and ethical dimensions of Thoreau’s transcendentalism in relation to nonhuman nature, the contradictory aspect of the tension is apt to reappear. So far, with the exception of Lawrence Buell, those interested in Thoreau’s ecocentrism have tended to resolve this contradiction by minimizing and even denying it, most often by representing Thoreau as eventually outgrowing this aspect of his Emersonian heritage.7 Buell’s analysis of Thoreau’s ‘‘ragged progress’’ toward ecocentrism, on the other hand, brackets the question, preferring to focus on Thoreau’s journey toward a recognizably modern ecoconsciousness and representation, noting that finally Thoreau ‘‘could not get past the Emersonian’’ vision ‘‘of the natural realm as symbolically significant of the human estate.’’ But while the ‘‘idea that natural phenomena had spiritual as well as material significance appealed strongly to Thoreau throughout his life,’’ it does not necessarily follow that this idea impeded Thoreau’s ecocentric shift or that his transcendentalism remained unmodified.8 As I will argue, situating Thoreau’s environmental writing in the context of mid-nineteenthcentury debates over evolution (or ‘‘development,’’ in the contemporary idiom) suggests that his peculiar transcendentalist commitment may actually have fostered rather than retarded his ecocentrism, a connection that invites us to reconceive both. Transcendental Correspondence Revisited To do so we must first note that the belief underlying Emersonian correspondence, that ‘‘natural phenomena had spiritual as well as material significance,’’ was hardly confined to transcendentalist circles. Emerson ’s habit of pointing to the eighteenth-century scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg may well be an instance of what Buell has described as Emerson’s rhetoric of ‘‘citational provocation,’’ ‘‘gestur[ing] toward foreign [rather than Anglo-American] sources . . . when discussing the key cultural influences of his age . . . despite or because he knew it would affront’’ particularly his Bostonian audience; for, as Buell has Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocentrism 29 noted elsewhere, the idea of correspondence was ‘‘generally in the air.’’9 Thus, according to Walls, Swedenborg may have only confirmed what Emerson had...

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