RE: Thread for the Analysis of Henry David Thoreau's Writings
July 21, 2019 at 9:08 am
(This post was last modified: July 21, 2019 at 9:09 am by vulcanlogician.)
@Alan V
LOL. Yeah... forgive me for being in "Passionate Transcendentalist Idealist" mode there. You were laying down some thoughtful and measured criticisms there and my response was a little belligerent.
Still, the idea that ordinary people are imprisoned by conformity is one worth exploring. It's tempting to juxtapose it with Thoreau's Harvard elitism, but what if you looked at the phenomenon of common conformity in a vacuum? Does it not imprison people?
Also, passive resistance was Gandhi's idea, not Thoreau's. I feel that passive resistance is an important elaboration on civil disobedience (one that is necessary for civil disobedience to really change the world in the way I think it can), but Thoreau's imperative wasn't that we "stand in the way" of injustice. His imperative was that we stop participating, stop obeying, stop lending our strength to the cause of injustice... because injustice cannot survive uless we continually nourish it with our participation-- which is what we all do by being obedient members of society.
LOL. Yeah... forgive me for being in "Passionate Transcendentalist Idealist" mode there. You were laying down some thoughtful and measured criticisms there and my response was a little belligerent.
Still, the idea that ordinary people are imprisoned by conformity is one worth exploring. It's tempting to juxtapose it with Thoreau's Harvard elitism, but what if you looked at the phenomenon of common conformity in a vacuum? Does it not imprison people?
Also, passive resistance was Gandhi's idea, not Thoreau's. I feel that passive resistance is an important elaboration on civil disobedience (one that is necessary for civil disobedience to really change the world in the way I think it can), but Thoreau's imperative wasn't that we "stand in the way" of injustice. His imperative was that we stop participating, stop obeying, stop lending our strength to the cause of injustice... because injustice cannot survive uless we continually nourish it with our participation-- which is what we all do by being obedient members of society.
