There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to 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…. The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

—Walden (“Economy”)

Throughout Walden, Thoreau makes repeated reference to philosophy and living as a philosopher. By this he means to live a life in pursuit of wisdom, which is marked by the application of wisdom learned. For Thoreau, the path to wisdom lies in self-examination.

As part of my preparation for Not Less Than the Good, I am reading critiques and analyses of Walden. I’m curious to learn how others react to and interpret this book–a process helping me arrive at my own understanding. One book I’ve been reading is Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy, a book of essays that call for an examination of Thoreau’s work as philosophy texts, even though they do not fit the conventional for of such writings.

This weekend I read the essay How Walden Works (by Jonathan Ellsworth) from this book. He suggests that what Thoreau has done is to create a kind of Socratic discourse designed to encourage self-examination in his readers. Ellsworth argues that Walden is “one of our greatest philosophical aids and deserves to be considered one of our most valuable philosophical texts.”

The key to Thoreau’s discourse is to model philosophy as self-examination. Rather than removing the philosophical discussion to abstract absolutes, he frames it in the context of his own life and struggles. We can see ourselves in his experience and struggle, but we must be prepared to then examine ourselves, to “think—that is, to examine, to test, and to explore [our] beliefs and their consequences.”

One of Thoreau’s strategies to encourage our own self examination is to present contradictions in his opinions and ideas. Ellsworth suggests that these contradictions mean that we as readers are unable to easily adopt his positions.  There are two temptations for readers that can keep us from making “philosophical progress.” The first is to stop thinking about the subject “once we’ve puzzled out the author’s position” and the second is to simply imitate the author’s position. Through the use of contradiction and paradox, Thoreau keeps us from merely imitating him. He want’s to “provoke in us an awakening of consciousness, as well as the courage to live by our principles.”

Ellsworth’s essay is well worth the read, and has more subtlety and depth than my quick summary here.

Reading Walden for the first time I was struck by how often I would pause reading to think about an idea he was discussing. I wasn’t thinking about what the experience or idea was like for him, I was curious what it meant for me and how I was choosing to live. Without realizing it at the time, I was deep in self-examination as I read.

In January of this year, I finished 16-months in therapy. I started going to deal with feelings of depression and anxiety. The particular manifestation of these problems in me were rooted in my being out of touch with how I felt—both emotionally and physically. I was not very good at understanding my emotions in a subtle sense. I was also not aware of how what I was feeling physically was effecting my mood and motivation. A lot of my time in therapy was spent learning to understand how I felt, learning to pay attention to things that trigger anxiety and stress and frustration as well as those things that trigger feelings of joy and accomplishment. For me therapy was a course in self-examination.

(Obviously, therapy is not that for everyone, and different mental health problems require different kinds of treatment.)

Having my first experience reading Walden overlap with a successful conclusion to therapy helped me tune into the need for examination of myself and my environment that Thoreau is modeling for us. He’s asking (and demanding that we ask) a lot of difficult questions about how one lives a life. His most commonly quoted sentence—”the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”—is one easy example. Thoreau confronts us with a sobering truth: it’s easy to sacrifice the things that would make us happy in order to conform with the culture of materialism around us.

For me, the passage that struck at the heart of my struggle is the story about the Indian who makes baskets:

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

I can be conflicted about the time and energy I spend composing. There’s rarely any material reward for doing so, and when there occasionally is it’s not enough to justify the time in a purely bookkeeping sense. When I can factor in the joy that creating brings and the pleasure of having others listen and enjoy, it is usually worth the time spent. I need to compose the kind of music that I want to write. It doesn’t matter that there’s not much material reward for doing so. My challenge now is to determine how to “avoid the necessity of selling.”

This seems very straightforward to say here, but it’s not. For a long time it was easy to take on projects that I thought would be “good for the resume” or else would “create a valuable connection” with someone perceived to be important. The problem (at least for me) is that using that criteria often meant working on projects I didn’t enjoy. While it’s not selling in the usual sense, I think that pursuing this kind of professional benefit is similar enough to make it tricky. I found that I would feel more desperate about those opportunities. I would focus on the possible career advancement so much that I’d overlook the fact that I wasn’t enjoying the music anymore. In fact, I kept putting off the kinds of projects that I really wanted to do in order to make time for the ones that seemed to be “good for me.”

I don’t know where this thinking will take me. I do know that it feels right (emotionally, philosophically). It feels like the kind of wisdom Thoreau is talking about; the kind of wisdom that should dictate a life.