This harmony is that never clarified higher law or principle which pervades Thoreau's philosophy. The one who seeks solutions for the problems of his life by examining the natural world insights it's operation: that the inhabitants of this world does not deals with each other but everything is for itself, yet they build a system because they complete one another. The essence of this kind of criticism of Thoreau is that the nature philosopher is not a hermit, neither the political one is a buffoon, but the two are in a constant dialogue. I suppose, that if we read Thoreau organically he became the quite opposite of this – and by organicity I mean the approximation of the nature-and the political philosopher on the ground that in Thoreau's work the main topic is the self-perfection and the self-exceeding. The example of this difficulty is Hannah Arendt who, in her essay on civil disobedience places Thoreau to the private consciousness as one who did not lived his doctrine, one who was a radical individualist, so weak and false in his disobedience. The old burden of his criticism is the approximation of these two – and the pitfall of it, if it does not happen. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) has known as a nature-(Walden) and a political philosopher (Civil Disobedience) nowadays. I establish this claim through a sustained reading of a relatively neglected text that deserves wider attention in political theory: Thoreau’s 1859 lecture defending insurrectionary activities by radical abolitionist John Brown. The aim of the performance is to provoke one’s neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that will make them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship and conscientious political agitation. The performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of conscience from a personally political act into a publicly political one. This essay argues that Thoreau indeed sponsors a positive politics-a politics of performing conscience.
More recent commentators grant that Thoreau has a politics, but they characterize it as profoundly negative in character. Hannah Arendt famously portrayed Thoreau’s commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. Does Henry Thoreau have a positive politics? Depending on how one conceives of politics, answers will vary.
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