The Senses of Walden

by Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell , one of America's most distinguished philosophers, has written an invaluable companion volume to Walden , a seminal book in our cultural heritage. This expanded edition includes two essays on Emerson.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Essays, Ecology, American

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Stanley Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.

Reviews

[Jay Sandover · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is magnificent.

[Tiffany]

An absolute wonder.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau invites us to Walden Pond through our sense of understanding the self, through the self's need to cut its losses and to engage a life of discovery that is completely individual. Stanley Cavell helps us to see Walden this way. It's not just a book about one man's two year stint in a writer's cabin. It's about us, those readers who need to find meaning in our own lives.

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

És molt bo. Per a qui estigui interessat en la figura de Thoreau, aquí es du a terme no tant un anàlisi sinó una narrativa paral·lela sobre Walden que es nodreix, directament, d’aquest: així, el Walden que apareix al lector com un artefacte tediós i aparentment banal, esdevé un dispositiu que combina la crítica social —condemna epicúrea d’allò que ens subjecta, però també propera a Marx: la religió, el nacionalisme estatal, el capitalisme— amb la cura-de-sí tal i com la defineix Foucault estrictament relacionada amb la Natura. És a dir, que Walden no és tant un recull de dos anys de vida als boscos com l’aprenentatge possible d’una vida lliure, autònoma, que pagui la pena viure. Perquè el que cerca aquí Thoreau, com Nietzsche ho farà després i com el propi moviment situacionista, és un retorn a la vida —si bé des d’un punt de vista certament més conservador.

A veces experimentaba que la compañía más dulce y tierna, la más inocente y alentadora, podía halalrse en cualquier objeto natural […] Fui consciente de pronto de la dulce y beneficiosa compañía de la naturaleza […], un infinito e inexplicable afecto, como una atmósfera que me mantuviera, volvió insignificantes las ventajas imaginadas de la vecindad humana y no he vuelto a pensar en ellas desde entonces.”

“El viento matinal siempre sopla, el poema de la creación es ininterrumpido, pero pocos son los oídos que lo oyen. EL Olimpo no es sino el exterior de la tierra en todas partes” (

“Situémonos, trabajemos y afiancemos los pies en el barro y el cieno de la opinión, y el prejuicio, y la tradición, y el engaño, y la apariencia, esa aluvión que cubre el globo a través de París y Londres, de Nueva York, Boston y Concord, a través de la Iglesia y el Estado, a través de la filosofía, la poesía y la religión, hasta llegar a un fondo duro y rocoso, que podamos llamar realidad, y digamos; éste es, sin duda, y luego, con un point d’appui, bajo crecidas, escarcha y fuego, busquemos un lugar donde poder construir un muro o levantar una propiedad […] Sea vida o muerte, sólo anhelamos realidad”

“Vi una serpiente rayada que se deslizaba en el agua y se posaba en el fondo, al parecer sin inconveniente, mientras estuvie allí, más de un cuarto de hora; tal vez porque no había salido por completo de su letargo. Me pareció que por una razón similar los hombres persisten en su actual conidicón baja y primitiva, pero si sintieran la influencia de la primavera de las primaveras que brota en ellos, por necesidad se elevarían a una vida superior y más etérea”

[Audrey Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in tandem with Walden.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is supposed to be one of the best commentaries on Thoreau's "Walden". I think many of Cavell's ideas and interpretations are very interesting and pretty thought-provoking. It seems like he might be overextending himself a bit at times, but maybe that does not matter.

Cavell contends that Thoreau had a purpose for every word in "Walden" and, in fact, "Walden" is supposed to be the American scripture. Cavell then goes on to describe what they scripture is supposed to say. Some attributions to Thoreau are expected, others are not.

All in all, pretty interesting.

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful and challenging book that brings out the metaphysical consequences of Walden.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Any American writer, any American, is apt to respond to that event in one way or another; to the knowledge that America exists only in its discovery and its discovery was always an accident; and to the obsession with freedom, and with building new structures and forming new human beings with new minds to inhabit them; and to the presentiment that this unparalleled opportunity has been lost forever. The distinction of Walden's writer on this point (shared, I suppose, by the singer of Leaves of Grass and by the survivor in Moby Dick) lies in the constancy of this mood upon him, his incarnation, one may call it, of this mood at once of absolute hope, and yet of absolute defeat, his own and is nation's. His prose must admit this pressure and at every moment resolutely withstand it. It must live, if it can, pressed between history and heaven...

We started thinking along one line about what the writer of Walden calls 'heroic books'; and while I take him there to be claiming an epic ambition, the terms in which he might project such an enterprise could not be those of Milton or Blake or Wordsworth. His talent for making a poem could not withstand such terms, and the nation as a whole to which he must speak had yet to acquire it. (He knows from the beginning, for example, that his book will not come in twelve or twenty-four parts.) In Thoreau's adolescence, the call for the creation of an American literature was still at a height: it was to be the final proof of the nation's maturity, proof that its errand among nations had been accomplished, that its specialness had permitted and in turn been proved by an original intelligence. In these circumstances, an epic ambition would be the ambition to compose the nation's first epic, so it must represent the bringing of language to the nation, words of its own in which to receive instruction, to assess its faithfulness to its ideal."

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A word has meaning against the context of a sentence. A sentence has meaning against the context of a language. A language has meaning against the context of a form of life. A form of life has meaning against the context of a world. A world has meaning against the context of a word.”

[Tim Nason · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book attempts to analyze Walden as a major American philosophical statement and makes many important points. Cavell’s phrasing, syntax and convoluted arguments unfortunately obstruct comprehension. Reading Walden itself is a joy.

[Kristi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Judging from the title, the content of this book was not quite what I expected; (perhaps partly due to the fact that I a not a philosopher?) Rather the book was a short exposition on how Thoreau's "Walden" functions as a book - literally and on a meta level - with the text positioned as an American scripture. This edition includes two additional essays on Emerson. At times I felt that Cavell overstated some of his conclusions (ie when Emerson wrote "shun" one's loved ones when genius calls he did not mean to "hate," but to avoid or ignore any distraction from the spark of original creativity). These essays were originally written as presentations, as such, there were occasions when I sensed that Cavell was still working out parts of this argument. By there very nature brief, these essays often glanced over contexts, as if assuming that readers are coming to the essay with the same knowledge and experience as Cavell and know the texts outside of "Walden" that he is referencing off-hand. To me, as a reader, this was somewhat off-putting - (like inside jokes made in a common party) - and made me less interested in the argument. These essays would be more valuable had they been expanded into a larger and more accessible context.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reading of Walden as a sort of new scripture in design; Calls for a lot of parable-style readings and analysis of how the reader is meant to respond to the imperative of the text. He spends the last part of the book presenting a somewhat tenable proposition that the book offers a new scientific methodology & lexicography of meaning to offer the reader to liberate one from the possessive power of economy and the apperceptive ambitions of teleological science. Some of it is convincing, sometimes he goes too far. Often he ends up either reiterating what the text says point blank, sometimes he imposes a dubious allegory onto passages that don't really seem to merit as such. Appended are two essays about Emerson's role in the philosophic tradition, the first as a sort of practical phenomenology of meaning&analysis that Heidegger receives through Nietzsche's revisions; The other being another view of Emerson's practical language attitudes which enter philosophy through JL austin and late Wittgenstein. The latter essays are more convincing, but already fairly implicit to Emerson readers.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immanently readable critical theory/philosophy, especially if you've read Walden or are working your way through it.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

a (succinct, even compressed) meditation on writing (philosophy) as much as anything else