[balti]

Thoreau’s philosophy begins from an affirmative position, as he reveres, endorses, and remains faithful to wildness around and within him; his concern is to preserve wildness in his life and in every encounter. Where wildness is constrained, Thoreau wants to create the conditions for its liberation or to offer a criticism of the circumstances subjugating it. This constitutes Thoreau’s “feral philosophy,” a philosophy continuously seeking to be free from the domesticating activities of society and a philosophy seeking to liberate the rest of existence from those same domesticating activities. He intends to reframe things in fresh ways to subvert stale, common sense understandings of life and the world. Concerning this approach, Emerson offered an insightful point when he spoke at Thoreau’s funeral; to those in attendance, Emerson offered the following observation in a somewhat critical, hostile tone,

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings—a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. “It was so dry, that you might call it wet.” (“Introduction” xxvii-xxviii)

While his comment is overly reductive, simplifying Thoreau’s creativity and his writing skills too much, Emerson is on target to a certain extent; through paradox and reversals, Thoreau’s philosophy seeks to bring out the uncommon in the common. This is the approach guiding Thoreau’s philosophy, but in his deployment of it on diverse topics, Thoreau’s creativity offers startling observations and insights. His creativity, his highly refined prose, and the autobiographical origins of his writings often conceal Thoreau’s philosophical rigor; but woven throughout his texts are the concept of wildness and Thoreau’s ceaseless attempts to celebrate and elaborate what it means. From his antislavery essays to his travel narratives, wildness is the recurring philosophical theme.