Students on Walden

In one of my classes, my students are reading Thoreau’s Walden, which engendered some interesting discussion (interesting being a relative term and all, and my standards being what they are since I’m an academic). I’m always pleased when students can challenge a position taken by an author, and a couple of them impressed me with their responses. We were talking about the Transcendentalists’ idea that one should look to one’s own conscience for truth—that the individual is a higher authority than society. In most respects, I agree with Thoreau here myself: how else but by my own conscience can I give authentic assent to faith? But a couple of my students articulated the problem I’ve had with Thoreau that I don’t think I could have articulated at their age. They argued that the self must exist in context, that our connections with others (“society”) and with history help to make us who and what we are—and, most significant, that if we lose those things, we lose parts of ourselves.

The ideas the students were talking about are central to my dissertation, which I’m about to start revising more seriously (Godwilling . . . now there is a task that almost no one would consider interesting). But these issues also relate to personal situation that I’ve been thinking about lately, which I’m about to post on in my next blog.