Henry David Thoreau and the Untranslatable Real

Far from being mere light-hearted playfulness or idiosyncratic musing over seasonal change, the latter part of Thoreau’s Walden most clearly articulates the defining tensions within Western modernity, in which desire for scientific knowledge, economic appropriation, and aesthetic enjoyment have reached an unprecedented level of intensity. Thoreau here strives to comprehend and redefine man’s relation to the world in the context of the triumph of scientific and economic “modernity.” He meant to induce his readers to reflect about the terms which characterize our relationship to the material world, while also tipping the scales toward a new equilibrium, one in which the human desire for dominion is kept in check by a counterbalancing sense of reverence and wonder. He posed exhaustive challenges to the standard ways we relate to the world, from a perspective that drew on and supported a definition of “the wild” that is not merely topographical (a separate sphere elsewhere), but intellectual—a mental frontier, central to our very existence, relocated as the necessary, nurturing questioning of what we assume is human and defines humanity. Orchestrating his narrative so as to emphasize his distance from two common ways of “translating” the real (scientific knowledge and economic exploitation), Thoreau thus made it clear that his environmental advocacy is grounded in a more encompassing focus on the untranslatability of the real.