A Taste for the Wild

At first blush, it seems far-fetched, even perverse, to suggest an affinity between Thoreau and Nietzsche. Although a neighbour is said to have described Thoreau as a “dirty little atheist” (Harding, Handbook 141), in general there is little trace of the Antichrist in New England transcenden­talism. Yet, it was the American critic Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in the 1940s, who first commented on the striking similarities between the extreme vitality of Thoreau’s prose, which represents nature as beyond moral considerations, and Nietzsche’s more uncompromising vision of life beyond good and evil.2 Krutch’s observations suggest some merit in reading Thoreau with the more philosophically acute observations of his German contemporary in mind. Not only do Nietzsche’s writings explain some of the difficulties in Thoreau’s work, most notably this tension between the wild and the good in his view of nature, they also show Tho­reau to be on the same philosophical road as Nietzsche, rejecting the dec­adence of his nervous and bustling nineteenth century in favour of an individualistic ideal of health and vitality that requires, in Nietzsche’s words, “good teeth” and a “strong stomach” (Gay Science 63)

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · German · Good and evil · Ideal (ethics · Individualism · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Taste · Theology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Vitality · Zoroaster · American Literature and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Thoreau and American Literature

• The Senses of Walden

  Stanley Cavell•Senses of Walden•1992

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• Thoreau

  Sherman Paul, Walter Harding•The New England Quarterly•1955

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• Henry Thoreau

  Richard Lebeaux, Robert D Richardson•The New England Quarterly•1988

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