Dougherty-Emerson/Thoreau blog

Henry David Thoreau’s essay, Civil Disobedience, was written in response to the Mexican War
and slavery, both of which he viewed as an affront to his sense of morality and the U.S. Constitution. He purposely assaulted government in this essay.
He opens his essay with his most famous aphorism, “That government is best which governs least.” However, he does believe that government has a place, albeit a very limited one. “Government is at best an expedient.” For instance, he argues that government oversteps its authority when it becomes involved in moral issues. Only the individual has a sense of morality and conscience. Government gets in the way of the individual (“The character of the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”) Government is also subject to great abuse, such as in establishing a standing army and forcing men to go to war against their will, conscience and common sense. Thoreau disabuses the reader from the idea that the will (majority) of the people should prevail. “A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.” Moral issues must be decided by the individual and his conscience, not by the majority.
Thoreau is not inclined to reform the government either. “It is not man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.” He does have “the right to revolution, to refuse allegiance to, and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.” Thoreau promotes action versus words and offers the withholding of taxes as a vehicle of protest against government abuse. To be imprisoned in the furtherance of justice is after all honorable.
Thoreau, however, does more than critique the government and lay out a technique for civil disobedience. He provides the reader with the shape of the ideal government. At the end of his essay, he states, “I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”
The ideal government that Thoreau is proposing is a government which does not govern. At the beginning of the essay, he writes, “Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe – That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” The ideal individual is a spiritual being with a “conscience” and “moral sense” who resists and stands outside the state (“to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it”).
Although a challenging read, Emerson’s essay, Nature, was nothing, if not optimistic and idealistic. Evidently, these were characteristics of Transcendentalists. Although not mentioned in the essay, Emerson clearly did not believe in the depravity of man. Rather, he was confident in man’s great potential for goodness and perfectibility toward the divine. “A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall belong and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams.” Emerson believed in the unity of God, man, and nature – the Universal Being. “Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”
Emerson proposed that God could be felt directly through nature by the use of intuition as opposed to using reason. He defines nature as everything separate from the inner individual – nature, art, and our own bodies. Man is thus capable of a metaphysical appreciation of his own separateness and insight into the workings of the universe through nature. He can see the connectedness of everything. Emerson holds up man as the best of nature. “No man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.” Man’s affinity to and appreciation for nature affords access to God’s mind.
Emerson concludes his essay with a prognostication. “The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation, - a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God, - he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.”