Marshall
Philosophy Lecture Series
October 2012
Topic:
Henry David Thoreau’s Essay, Civil Disobedience and the Importance of Active
Citizenship
INTRODUCTION
“I went to the Woods because I
wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see
if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to practice resignation, unless
it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out the marrow of life,
to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner…”[1]
Henry David Thoreau was born in
Concorde, New England, in 1817. He died in 1862. Civil Disobedience was
published in 1849. This essay is cited as inspiration for some of the greatest
thinkers of the last 2 centuries, including such giants of history as Mahatmas
Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Thoreau was a rugged
individualist and friend of humanity. He saw the individual as the singular and
indivisible unit and source of morality, and felt that every man's nature was
mutable and amenable to reason. The source of every man's sense of right and
wrong, according to Thoreau, was his conscience. When Henry David Thoreau was
sick and near-death he was asked if he had made his peace with God - to which
Thoreau replied: “I did not know we had ever quarrelled”. Throughout his life,
Henry David Thoreau sought to live by the dictates of his conscience, cost what
may: this manner of living, he thought, rendered God's forgiveness unnecessary.
Thoreau was a friend of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the great transcendentalist philosopher. They lived together, as
friends, for many years. Of philosophy Henry David Thoreau had this to say:
“To be a philosopher is not
merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to so 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.”[2]
This is Henry David Thoreau.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (Published 1849)
There are many ways to read
Thoreau’s 1849 Essay. It is about civil
disobedience – of course - but it is about the events of 1849; it is about
slavery and his nation’s prosecution of an unjust war. It is also about Active
Citizenship.
At the bottom of page 11, Thoreau
states the following: “Action from principle - the perception and performance
of right - changes things and relations…”
Throughout the essay Henry David
Thoreau implores his reader to act from principle.
“The mass of men serve the State…
not as men mainly, but as machines with their bodies. In most cases there is no
free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; [Most men]… Put
themselves on a level with wood and earth and a stone…Why has every man a
conscience, then? I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”[3]
Being human, for Thoreau, is
inextricably tied up with the notion of being “active”, and, of acting out of
principles consonant with one’s conscience. Henry David Thoreau states, on page
6, that men who serve the state as mere machines - or what we might today call
automatons – “have the same worth...as horses and dogs.” This is so, according
to Thoreau, because such people, who allow themselves, unwittingly or
wittingly, to be rendered mere things at the disposal or use of others, degrade
the very thing that makes them different from beasts or objects – their
independence in thought and action and their ability to choose the ends they
seek.[4]
To this end, Thoreau is critical
of his fellow citizen’s inaction with regard to some of the most pressing
social issues of his day - among these, the issue of slavery:
“There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the
war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; while esteeming themselves
children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets
and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing[.] They will wait, well
disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to
regret…there are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous
man.”[5]
Virtue and Active Citizenship,
according to Henry David Thoreau, are one and the same. To be virtuous is to
act with conviction and to “not leave to the mercy of chance” what the dictates
of conscience require be done.[6]
To abandon one's conscience, is to abandon what makes one fully human.
“Is there not the sort of bloodshed
when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality
flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”[7]
According to Thoreau, impartiality
is always partial, for it necessarily favours the status quo. Action from
principle, on the other hand, and the perception and performance of right, stirs
the individual moral agent from his slumber, and enlivens him to the evil he
abets through his disinterest in his own moral power.
“It is not a man's duty, as a
matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most
enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it
is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought
longer, not to give it practically his support… I must first see, at the very
least that I do not pursue [my own aims] sitting upon another man's shoulders.”[8]
Here, Henry David Thoreau states
the obvious: it is not my duty to save someone from drowning but it is my duty
to exercise my moral judgment and ensure I do not contribute to that person’s
plight.[9]
CONCLUSION
At first blush, perhaps,
Thoreau’s idea of Active Citizenship does not appear very active – “its not a man’s duty…to devote himself to the eradication
of any…wrong” he says. But this is to miss the insight Thoreau provides the
attentive reader. Just as Martin Luther King Jr.[10]
would discover in his quest for greater racial equality in the United States,
and, just as Ghandi discovered in his quest to liberate India from the clutches
of the United Kingdom[11],
Thoreau knew that the one condition necessary for the triumph of evil is that
good men do nothing.[12]
As Thoreau rightly asserts, “The broadest and most prevalent error requires the
most disinterested virtue” in order to sustain it – nothing more.[13]
Being an active citizen then, according to Thoreau, means only this: taking
seriously one’s moral agency and duty to act according to the dictates of
conscience in order to avoid either harming another, or lending one’s weight to
the machine that would do so in one’s stead. Why all men have a conscience is
so that they might use it in order to check themselves. Its good use, when “well done, is done
forever.”[14]
DISCUSSION and FACT-SCENARIO QUESTIONS
[1] Walden
[2] Walden
[3] Civil Disobedience, pages 5 and 6
[4]
For those interested in this topic of what it means to be Human, you may wish
to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
[5] Civil Disobedience, pages 8 and 9
[6] Civil Disobedience, page 9
[7] Civil Disobedience, page 15
[8] Civil Disobedience, page 10
[9] Civil Disobedience, See bottom of page 7
[10]
See MLK Jr.’s discussion of what he terms “the moderate” in his Letter from Birmingham Jail
[11]
Ghandi, in fact, used Thoreau’s example as a model in order to mount a campaign
tactic that paralysed British India and ultimately helped hasten the United
Kingdom’s departure from the sub-continent – this tactic became known simply as
“non-cooperation”.
[12]
This adapted phrase is often attributed to the philosopher Edmund Burke; It
also appears, with attribution to Burke, in Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz
[13] Civil Disobedience, page 11
[14] Civil Disobedience, page 14
