Indeed in my book I mostly left out, or open, the question of what is called, or calls for, philosophy. But the difficulty of determining what philosophy is, or rather of recognizing who is and who is not philosophizing, is something that both Thoreau and Heidegger each insist upon.

Walden’s crack on the subject was once famous enough, in its early pages: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” (9). It is a claim that bears various interpretations, perhaps most pertinently by Thoreau’s going on later in this first chapter to characterize what he means by philosophy as “an economy of living,” a description that in effect declares the whole of Walden to be a work of philosophy, hence to establish its writer as a philosopher, and accordingly to offer his unforeseen attributes as the marks by which a philosopher may be recognized (his abode, his dress, his possessions, his companions, his reading, his ways of counting, of walking, of transposing himself into things, things moving and unmoving). An obvious implication is that nowadays philosophers may well not be recognized by that title, hence more than likely not at all. Heidegger rather implies as much when he says, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, that “[Ordinary understanding] … does not reflect upon the fact and cannot even understand, that what philosophy deals with only discloses itself within and from out of a transformation of human Dasein” (292) (a transformation of our existence and in how we conceive its possibilities). Walden explicitly enough declares itself to be a text about crisis and metamorphosis: “Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it.” (15). This is one of a number of Thoreau’s declared identifications with the loon.

What Heidegger refers to as the “preparation” for his transformation (which is the most, according to him, that philosophy can provide) he speaks of as awakening, also a fundamental term for Walden, heralded in the sentence from itself that Walden takes as its epigraph: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” Nothing short of Walden itself could give what it calls a faithful account of what is strung in such a sentence, of the relations among the concepts of awakening, hence dawning and morning, dejection or melancholy, bragging, roosting, standing, singing, neighboring, writing; and then tell why the audience of this writing must be addressed in such a fashion, meaning why thus allegorically, let’s call it, or duplicitiously, and why through precisely these concepts. But what I ask attention to here is that just about all of these are concepts—variously inflected, together with associated others—at work in Heidegger’s texts as well. The beginnings of my project of mutual assessment between Heidegger and Thoreau, hence potentially between the philosophical traditions contending for our allegiance (anyway, for mine), will happen most surely if I can convey a due astonishment at the sheer extent of coincidence, hence of significant difference, between them.

Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics goes on to speak of the alternative to awakening as “the slumbering of the fundamental relationship of Dasein toward beings in everydayness” (xv), and formulates awakening as “letting whatever is sleeping become wakeful” (60), where this “letting” names the relation to being that forms a world, the distinct privilege of the human. The concept of letting things be what they are—as it were leaving things to themselves, but at the same time letting them happen to you—is pervasive in Walden, enacted in the main action of learning to leave Walden (the place and the book, most notably figured in the double concept of mourning/morning—the pun suggesting that English is itself under investigation by an American). Thoreau’s morning means simultaneously dawning and grieving—anticipating the dawning of a new day, a new time, an always earlier or original time, and at the same time undergoing what Freud calls the work of mourning, letting the past go, giving it up, giving it over, giving away the Walden it was time for him to leave, without nostalgia, without a disabling elegiacism. Nostalgia is an inability to open the past to the future, as if the strangers who will replace you will never find what you have found. Such a negative heritage would be a poor thing to leave to Walden’s readers, whom its writer identifies, among many ways, precisely as strangers.

Now a specific linking of awakening with sleeping and with questioning is what Thoreau finds at the moment he actually depicts himself awakening at Walden, in the opening sentences of Chapter XVI, “The Pond in Winter”:

(Thoreau 187)

Heidegger’s problematic of the question (his mode, as often in philosophy, of awakening), comes under repeated suspicion in Jacques Derrida’s text entitled Of Spirit (1987), which also focuses heavily on Heidegger’s Ister lectures. Derrida’s text will come back. I note here that in this late chapter of Walden Thoreau is gently enough mocking the questions which his opening page had cited as “very particular inquiries […] made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life […]. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; […] how many poor children I maintained.” Having initially taken these inquiries as his justification for “obtrud[ing] my affairs so much on the notice of my readers,” he now declares that his attempt to answer such questions as they stand has heretofore been undertaken in a sleeping state; accordingly, as he achieves a state of awakening, he is to awaken from the sense of such questions (from, let us say, their moralism). This is not to deny that he owes his townsmen an earnest effort to make himself intelligible. Walden is what he repeatedly calls his account, the terms in which he finds himself accountable, called upon to settle his accounts. (These interact with the scores of economic terms that woof and warp his text throughout, laid out most graphically in his opening chapter, called “Economy”.) If this is a moral task why does it look so unlike what academic philosophy understands as moral philosophy?

I found myself asking a version of this question some years ago in recognizing that two of the philosophical texts of this century just past that have meant most to me—namely, Heidegger’s Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—can each of them present themselves, on any and every page, as carrying some urgent message for our lives, while neither raises any issue that is explicitly about any act we ought to be doing or refraining from doing, or any rights we have denied, or any goods we have neglected to share fairly. It seems, reading them, rather that some moral claim upon us is leveled by the act of philosophizing itself, a claim that no separate subject of ethics would serve to study—as if what is wrong with us, what needs attention from philosophy, is our life as a whole (a claim that does not at once require us to articulate what that means, “our life as a whole”).

Heidegger prefaces Being and Time with the charge that our Dasein, our human existence, fails today (and has for an indeterminate time) to be stirred by the question of Being, that philosophy’s first task is accordingly to reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question; and it seems clear enough that for him there is no more urgent task philosophy can assign itself, or us.

When Wittgenstein in the Investigations allows himself to be questioned as to “Where […] our investigation get[s] its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important” (§ 118)— his answer amounts to the implication that we do not know what is truly great and important, that we have lost touch with what really interests us. So that when he comes to say (§ 108), “We need to turn our investigation around—specifically around the fixed point of our real need,” the implication is that what Wittgenstein perceives to need turning around are our lives.

It goes with such a perception of, let me say, philosophical or spiritual disorientation that we will be perceived as having a disturbed relation to our language, that we live willing neither to know quite what we wish to say nor why others say what they say to us. Heidegger attributes this muffled or baffled state to our being sunk in the everydayness of existence, Wittgenstein attributes it to a craving for, or in, the metaphysical, call it the flight from the everyday. This state of inexpressibility, of words not matching our needs, Emerson describes many ways, one time by saying, “Every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.” It is a state that, in a more intellectualized form, or in more proper philosophy, goes under the name of skepticism. Emerson and Thoreau perceive this state of unawakenness, or spiritual imprisonment (most famously depicted in Plato’s myth of the back-lit Cave from which the philosopher is to liberate us)—in an American way and place—as a fear in each of us of liberating ourselves, something as it were producing and produced by a refusal to discover America. They cannot appeal to the great philosophers who have struggled with skepticism—most significantly, I suppose, Descartes, Hume, and Kant—(although they allude to them repeatedly) both because such figures are not part of our common American intellectual heritage and because they are part of the problem not the solution of our intellectual suffocation, or paralysis, or disappointment.

But how can we be told that to understand ourselves we must turn ourselves around, if the language we share has become ineffective, a set of formulas drenched in what Emerson calls conformity, and what, among other things, Thoreau calls business (busyness), something that Nietzsche, Emerson’s other great 19th century reader, early calls philistinism. Modern philosophy since at least the 17th century has periodically dreamt of constructing a perfect language, in which misunderstanding would be impossible. Thoreau learned from Emerson to make sentences that may attract us by their beauty or their curiosity, and at the same time seem to play with our desire for some transformative understanding. He sometimes depicts this process as turning us around (alluding both to what has to happen to the prisoners in Plato’s cave if they are to find the way out, as well as invoking the idea of turning found in the concept of conversion); sometimes he says we need to see that we are lost (that is, to recognize perdition in order to move us to find ourselves); sometimes he shows us how to turn the world upside down in order to reorient ourselves.

This topsy-turvy world makes an appearance in a late chapter, “The Pond in Winter,” in which after Thoreau has depicted his awakening, specifically to an answered question, he continues:

(Thoreau 187)

At some stage, writing of this kind carries its weight with you or it does not. Even when it does in general, we cannot count on it in particular, that is, count on its making sense, say waking us up as to an answered question (learning what answering it), at any moment one of us would speak of it to another.

It is perhaps a good moment, after hearing just now of the possibility that the search for water is perhaps, or is conducted through, a dream, and hearing about some connection between time and a stream, or river, and recalling that Walden’s first chapter ends with a sentence that, with other things, contains a river, the Tigris (which Thoreau allegorizes in this instance not as the transitory but as the perpetual, continuing to flow “after the race of caliphs is extinct”—a good moment for me to cross to the other of Heidegger’s texts I mentioned as motivating these present remarks, that with the title Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” one of his most extended and remarkable philosophical appropriations of Hölderlin’s poetry.

Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister” consists of four stophes, three of twenty or twenty-one lines, the last of twelve lines (perhaps it is incomplete), seventy-three lines in all, many as short as three or four words, a few lines as long as eight words, and all the words, except names, are simple. I have no quarrel to pick with Heidegger’s reading of the poem, that is, no alternative to suggest for his various attributions of the poem’s sense. The mystery of his commentary is that he endows these few words with the strength and depth to bear a whole world of philosophical speculation and realization. Yet I can see that Heidegger’s text would not exist without Hölderlin’s, as though Heidgger’s text would be unable to lend its own words the necessary weight and depth in the absence of Hölderlin’s. And I am interested in Heidegger’s words. It is to them first that I relate Thoreau’s words. The mystery of Heidegger’s interest in Hölderlin will not be solved (not by me) by reading the poem, but we should at least have an idea of it in mind, hence I quote the first strophe from the translation given in the translation of Heidegger’s book:

Heidegger early announces that “The poem poetizes a river” and more specifically, as in the heading of the next section, speaks of “Hymnal poetry as poetizing the essence of the rivers.” In crossing to this text I am encouraged by such a passage from Heidegger as this:

(1)

The pertinence to the project of building at Walden seems incontestable, but my encouragement in imagining that Thoreau’s words may illuminate these, ones hence that may receive illumination from them, is quite at once sorely tested by the following, closing paragraph of this first section of Heidegger’s study, which begins: “Yet we wander around in errancy if we proceed to bring together, in our extrinsic and disjointed manner, suitable ‘passages’ about rivers and waters from Hölderlin’s various poems in order then to construct for ourselves some general idea of what Hölderlin might have ‘meant’ by ‘rivers’ and ‘waters.’” Here is one of those signatures, condescending pedagogical asides of Heidegger’s that I have never learned to take in stride, with their insinuation of depths to come (a place not “extrinsic and disjointed,” and guess who alone knows the measure of what is intrinsic and joined), and a demoralizing description of where, if I fail it, I will be helplessly left, looking hopelessly, tactlessly, for some general idea of what a great writer might have meant by his focal themes. True, Heidegger does say that we wander in errancy, and there is that in his philosophy that requires him not to exempt himself from his insinuations. Do I trust it? Here I am.

The following explicitly pedagogical section, called a “Review” of the opening section, speaks of the Greek word for hymn, “humnos,” which “means song in praise of the gods, ode to the glory of heroes and in honor of the victors in contests. […] The humnos is not the ‘means’ to some event, it does not provide the ‘framework’ for the celebration. Rather, the celebrating and festiveness lie in the telling itself.” This familiar Heideggerean performative turn (away, as it were, from the extrinsic), speaks directly to the duplicitous tone in Thoreau’s epigraph, something I did not stop over when I introduced it a while ago: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag …”. Leaving open what relation he is proposing of his work to Romanticism (for example, whether the allusion to Coleridge’s poem “On Dejection” is meant as invoking an example to avoid or to reconstitute), why does he caution that he does not propose an ode to dejection? Is it because it may turn out, whatever he imagines his purpose to be, that he has written some such thing notwithstanding, or several hundred times one such ode? Is it, before that, to ask why, or how, one could do such a thing as write a song, as of praise, to the victory of spiritual loss? Is it to raise some further question of the relation of dejection to bragging, for example that what he is manic about—his poverty, his civil disobedience, his isolation, his “revising of mythology” (most specifically, the revising of our major Testaments)—will strike others as causes for depression? I am reminded here of Heidegger’s citing “melancholy” as the mood of philosophizing (and his asserting that mourning pervades Hölderlin’s Ister hymn), for which one can imagine the mood of an Ode to promise a certain relief, as it were before philosophy actually catches up with it.

Walden notably, if implicitly, once contrasts a river, or rather a stream, with a pond. When the writer asks, “Why should we knock under and go with the stream?” (66), that is, hurry along with the transitory things others institutionalize as necessities, he cites the institution of the dinner; and he assumes the associated customs of our civilization that support one another in his text—big houses and barns that don’t fit us, steady jobs we don’t like, many changes of clothes for no good reason, foreign travel, war, slavery, swallowing things as natural that should disgust us. He goes on to contrast this image of a rushing stream with what he calls, in the preceding paragraph, “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” (65), the image of which is quite evidently a pond, Walden for example. While Heidegger cautions, still early, that “The rivers belong to the waters. Whenever we make remarks on such poetry, we must ponder what is said elsewhere concerning the waters” (6), he does not, as I recall, include enclosed bodies of water, such as the lakes perhaps dearer to English romanticism. He of course comments upon Hölderlin’s line “For rivers make arable/ The land,” that is, suits the land for plowing, hence for settling (instead of wandering, as nomads). I note in passing that the writer of Walden irritably goes as it were out of his way to plow a field for beans. He announces that he would rather do without this, but he undertakes it “to serve a parable-maker one day” (108), namely to share in authorizing his eventual parables of settling, or as he also says, sojourning, so of preparations for departure, adventure, futurity; and since plowing (like settling, and accounting, and warbling in his nest, and hammering a nail, and so on) is one of his concepts for writing, the writing it prepares for is (also) writing about departure, which is to say, in view of his death; so it is a testament. (This little outburst is a sort of summary of my book on Walden.)

There is no likelihood of knowing, in our few moments here, how far the contrast of Hölderlin’s river and Thoreau’s pond may take us. It may well seem unpromisingly banal, or irremediably obvious. It is true that both offer these bodies both as instructions in where and how to live, or dwell, and as bound up with the fate of their nations—Heidegger, in 1942, takes Hölderlin’s Ister as marking a hopeful, privileged destiny for Germany, as well as for the German language; Thoreau, ten decades earlier, fighting despair, takes his Walden as revealing the ways America fails to become itself, say to find its language (he calls it the father tongue) in which to rebuke its pretensions in the Mexican War, in the forced migration of its natives, in its curse of slavery. But the contradictory perspectives of these thinkers arise pretty well at once from the one taking rivers as “marking the path of a people” (Hölderlin’s Hymn 31), and from the other taking the pond as a “perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds it” (80). Instilling and drenching are concepts that articulate the individual’s mode of what the writer calls “apprehending,” that is, thinking, and thinking specifically of whatever is culminating in the present. It is when the writer is kneeling alone on the ice (the posture of prayer?) that he shows himself to drink from Walden, that is, to be drenched by it, to receive what it gives to drink.

The difficulty of measuring such differences, here as elsewhere, is perhaps not so much that there are so many apparent attractions and repulsions in play, but that it seems both imperative and unfeasible to weigh them. Take a coincidence of examples evidently far removed from politics or epistemology. Heidegger profitably devotes the largest part of the first section of his text to the three-word opening line of the Ister Hymn: “Now come, fire.” He comments (with that special innocence cultivated by philosophers): “Were it not for this most everyday event [taking the event as sunrise], then there would be no days. Still, to explicitly call out ‘Now come’ to one thus coming, to the rising sun, is a superfluous and futile act.” (7) As Thoreau, early in his first chapter, “attempt[s] to tell how [he] ha[s] desired to spend [his] life,” he lists, among many others, “trying to hear what was in the wind […] and waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something” (11). Along with, or implied by, such activities, he includes the work of “[anticipating], not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible Nature herself!” (11). Later in that paragraph he concedes: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.” (“To assist” at a social event, for example, a theater performance, is an old-fashioned term for making oneself present, or attending. An importance of his observance, as elsewhere, is his showing that he can make sunrise a communal event even when what is called religion has forgotten how. I observe that “assistance” etymologically contains the idea of standing beside, hence helping. This will find further resonance.) “Assisting the sun” participates in Thoreau’s theme of “making a day of it,” of refusing to live what he will not call his life, so that, in Thoreau’s tone, it would be true to say, in Heidegger’s words, that “Were it not for this most everyday event [namely, now, of Thoreau’s assistance at the sun], then there would be no days.” Heidegger says about Hölderlin’s line, “Now come, fire” that it is a call, and “The call says: we, the ones thus calling, are ready. And something else is also concealed in such calling out: we are ready and are so only because we are called by the coming fire itself.” Thoreau’s anticipating is a case of being ready, something he thematizes as being early, and earlier, and earliest—morning work.

Heidegger reads the tint of earliness in the ideas of anticipation and of dawning and morning more elaborately out of the poetry of Georg Trakl, from which (in connection with Heidegger’s essay, “Language in the Poem”) Derrida takes it up in Of Spirit, where he refers to the idea as one of seeking a more matutinal morning, something he emphasizes (92, 94, 107, 110, 113), but does not, I believe, pursue. How far a fuller occasion should take us is marked in Walden’s great concluding lines: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star” (221)—his rewriting of Emerson’s having said, “We shall have a new dawn at noon”, which is itself a reinscribing of Wordsworth inscribing Milton.

The concept of calling as questioning the given names of things and as naming a vocation permeates Thoreau’s work. More specifically, anticipating Nature herself seems interpreted by Thoreau’s announcing, “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions,” which I have taken as a mock summary of Kantian Idealism and its progeny, implying a quarrel about how to get our concepts (say of the understanding) pure. That is, you can get the world to call things houses that are prisons, or to call things necessary which are the merest luxuries, or to call things accidents (such as the deaths of a certain number of workers building the railroads) which are not accidents but inevitabilities of the way we live. When he asks, “Which is the real bed?” he is similarly mocking Plato’s picture according to which the real bed is not the one we actually sleep on, and at the same time mocking our inability to recognize that the one we actually sleep on may be an arbitrary measure of what we need a bed to be.

I quoted a moment ago Heidegger’s saying “the river determines the dwelling place of human beings upon the earth.” Substituting “pond” for “river,” it might be an epigraph for Walden. It is in fact Heidegger’s gloss on Hölderlin’s line: “Here, however, we wish to build.” Comparably early in Walden, its writer says, somewhere around the pond, “here I will begin to mine” (66), namely to prepare the ground for his house. Thoreau’s context is the paragraph in which he has declared his head to be hands and feet and adds: “My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, […] and with it I would mine,” another identification of his writing with the details of his building and his preparations for building. Hölderlin precedes his naming of his site with the lines, “Not without pinions may/Someone grasp at what is nearest/Directly.” The “however” in Heidegger’s declaration “Here, however, we wish to build,” suggests that, however it may be with things with wings, with human beings and their hands and feet, nearness is a matter of not of grasping but of dwelling. Now it is when a few chapters later, in “Solitude,” Thoreau recurs to the moment of discovering “the place where a wise man will dig his cellar” that he asks, “What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?” (raising the old Emersonian theme of the distance and the point at which souls touch), and declares: “Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are” (90). This is brought on as his response to the sense that “For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions” (shall we say, to provide the events of our appropriation?), make our day, make our living, make our excuses, make our escapes, make our friends and our enemies. In Heidegger’s formulation: one’s own is what is most remote (vii).

Nextness is a task then, a poise or stance of existence, as of assistance, not assignable or measurable from any given place, for it is the sign that you are at home in the world, such as home might be for the essentially strange creatures Thoreau has visions of at the opening of his book (“I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.” [2]). He is not there speaking alone of others, but confessing his own strangeness, and first of all to the way others confess or express theirs. Heidegger’s book on the Ister Hymn takes Hölderlin’s text to be locating the work of becoming at home, namely as “the encounter of the foreign and one’s own as the fundamental truth of history” (v). The river poetizes the human being because, in providing “the unity of locality and journeying,” it conceals and reveals Dasein’s being and becoming “homely,” homelike, I might say homebound. Walden’s word for maintaining something like this unity is, in its opening paragraph, sojourning, living each day, everywhere and nowhere, as a task and an event. I have called this state, in speaking of Emerson’s idea of abandonment, the essential immigrancy of the human, a pertinent feature for an American thinker of democracy to wish to ground philosophically.

Heidegger’s term for the stance of maintaining the unity of locality and journeying is “to be in the between” (166), between gods and humans. This is to be what Heidegger names demigods, and since both poets and rivers are in the between, both are demigods. Thoreau’s word for being between is being interested. And Heidegger too, elsewhere, takes up this registering of what is “inter-”. But in Thoreau the word takes its part, not surprisingly a disruptive part, in the immensity of economic terms I have noted his text to put in motion, for, in a counter-move within what is commonly called economics, Thoreau’s interest names a withholding or displacement as well as a placing of investment. I went so far in my book about Walden as to relate its concept of interest to what, in translations of the Bhavagad-Gita (a work mentioned in Walden), is called unattachment.

Does it take a demigod to learn and exemplify the interval of being between? Let’s at least note that the writer of Walden as surely identifies himself with the pond as Heidegger’s poet does with the river. In chapter nine, called “The Ponds,” Thoreau records that, having seen Walden almost daily for more than twenty years, he is struck again by its sheer existence, that it is the same woodland lake, still drenching, reviving, its surroundings; and he continues: “I see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?” (129) He sees his reflection in the pond. Is it him? He can almost say, but perhaps he is still unsure of his right to praise, to raise a hymn; or perhaps he is at the moment simply stripped of words.

I have to look for some place to stop soon. What relation do I propose between Heidegger and Thoreau in saying of Thoreau, as I do in that early book of mine, that he is his own Hölderlin? This apparently takes for granted that Thoreau is also his own philosopher, which accordingly would, according to Heidegger, imply both that he poetizes and that he philosophizes what he poetizes. Are there in Walden what Heidegger calls philosophical concepts, as examples of which, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he takes “death, freedom, and the nothing” (300).

Heidegger’s attention to how the concepts in question are to be taken does not invoke a systematic listing of philosophical or metaphysical concepts. Do the terms “nearest” or “earliest” or “between” or “dwelling” or “whiling” or “building” name peculiarly philosophical concepts? Let’s grant that what makes them philosophical is the controlling feature in Heidegger’s account, that understanding them requires a transformation of our Dasein, our existence (going, I assume, with Heidegger’s various affirmations that philosophy calls one out of the realm of the ordinary, everyday understanding). Then in principle any concept, used in such a way as to require such a transformation, might count as philosophical. Then if Walden is, as it seems everywhere to insist, an account of transformed understanding, any and every word in it may perhaps be philosophical. The transformation would be of our relation to our language and therewith—or because of—a transformation in our relation to the world. When Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations, “What we do is return words from their metaphysical to their everyday use,” he is speaking of such a transformation in our relation to words. But in his case, as in the case of the philosophical practice of J. L. Austin, it follows that there are no peculiarly philosophical concepts, none requiring, or entitled to, super-ordinary understanding; which in a sense means that there are no ordinary concepts either, none exempt from philosophical strain.

When Emerson defines thinking as transfiguring and converting our words (as in the opening pages of “The American Scholar”), traditional philosophical words notably rub elbows with civilian words, words familiar in philosophy such as “experience,” “impression,” “form,” “idea,” “necessity,” “accident,” “existence,” “constraint”; here the idea is not so much to deny that there are philosophical concepts as to assert, if somewhat in irony, that an American can handle them. Heidegger says that philosophical concepts are indicative of a further meaning. Wittgenstein says that in philosophy concepts sublime themselves. Derrida says they haunt themselves. Whom do you believe?

If there can be religion without religion, can there be philosophy without philosophy? Do not both Wittgenstein and Heidegger in a sense desire it? Is this a reasonable proposal for what Thoreau enacts?

Go back for a moment to my crossing of Heidegger with Thoreau on the matter of letting things lie as a condition of knowing them. I have elsewhere linked with them on this point Wittgenstein’s claim, or challenge, that “Philosophy leaves everything as it is,” a claim blatantly, to most ears, conservative. But if Wittgenstein is naming a philosophical task there, then in the light of the other claims for leaving or letting, Wittgenstein may be seen as detecting and resisting philosophy’s chronic tendency to violence, principally toward the ordinary, measured in its treatment of ordinary language, against letting it speak, having decided time out of mind that it is vague and misleading, to say the least. Heidegger also detects violence in classical philosophy’s association of concepts with grasping and synthesizing. Should Wittgenstein find Heidegger companionable here?

In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger goes at length, in the effort to characterize the human and what he calls world, into the differences between man as world-building, animals as poor in world, and stones as worldless. Early along this path he observes: “There is […] an important and fundamental question here: Can we transpose [versetzen] ourselves into an animal at all? For we are hardly able to transpose ourselves into another being of our own kind, into another human being. And what then of the stone—can we transpose ourselves into a stone?” (201) Heidegger calls this fundamental question a methodological one. How is it fundamental? How can we locate it?

Compare this with Wittgenstein’s Investigations:

(§ 283)

Here the idea of getting over to the other is shown as motivated by a prior step in which we take our own case as primary. What makes that step, perhaps seemingly obvious, in turn fundamental? An importance to me of making this issue explicit is that taking one’s own case as the given from which to transfer concepts to others is a moment in a certain portrayal of the progress of skepticism with respect to other minds. The idea of transfer here, or of transposition in Heidegger’s discussion, should accordingly come under philosophical suspicion. Heidegger’s pleasantry about our being “hardly able to transpose ourselves into another being of our own kind, another human being,” is part of what is suspicious. It seems to me an indication, as of a somewhat guilty intellectual conscience, of avoiding the issue of skepticism. (Heidegger perhaps inherited this avoidance from Husserl.)

And what shall we say of Thoreau, as when, for example, in “Brute Neighbors“, he depicts himself, in what he calls a pretty game with a loon on the pond, trying for better than an hour to predict this fowl’s sailings out and to anticipate his divings, a pastime the writer describes by saying, among many things, “While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine” (156). Here one is taking the problem of the other in rather the reverse direction from the way philosophers tend to conceive the matter, letting it provoke him to learn something about himself from the encounter: it is not the other that poses the first barrier to my knowledge of him or her, but myself. The direction is confirmed early in Thoreau’s recounting of his “business” prospects at Walden (anticipating Nature, assisting the sun, waiting for the sky to fall), when, finding that his fellow-citizens were not likely to offer him a living, “I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known” (“Economy,” 12). Do I trust these sallies of speculation in Thoreau? I treasure them.

But what are Thoreau’s native notes, or local gems (however many of them we might go on to unearth), worth?—let’s say on the international market. What good is this testament, or legacy, or what bad is it, compared with the legacies, Heidegger’s principally among them, that, in the text I mentioned earlier, Derrida gestures at inheriting and disinheriting at the close of Of Spirit? Well, for one thing, since Heidegger’s political sensibilities (shall we call them?) should not on the whole inspire the democratically inclined, or let’s say, the immigrant, with much confidence, a thinker who, as in the case of Thoreau, matches, I would say uncannily, so many of the philosophical configurations of Heidegger, while reversing his political sensibilities, is a notable curiosity, one which I find curiously heartens me—as when, coming upon Heidegger’s rivers that carve the historical path of a people, I recall Thoreau’s cautioning, “Every path but your own is the path of fate” (Chapter IV, “Sounds” 80), having declared, “I would fain be a track-repairer somewhere on this earth”, meaning, I take it, not that he wishes to repair the track we are on, but that he would have us repair, each of us, to a different track, one we have lost, and at once to a different way of thinking about paths and destiny.

At this point it is worth quoting Heidegger’s appropriations of the Ode to Man from Sophocles’ Antigone, containing the great lines (roughly in Heidegger’s version) “Many the wonders but nothing more uncanny than the human,” where he takes centrally the lines in which the chorus expels uncanny man from its hearth; I put this together with Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger’s Ister text as an attempt to de-Christianize and thus inherit the poetry of Georg Trakl, in whose terms Heidegger has invoked the concept of the spirit as flame; and put these further together against Thoreau’s account of his laying the bricks for his fireplace (in the chapter of Walden called “House-Warming”) where he casually announces his surprise, in watering the brick, at what it takes “to christen a new hearth.”

I ask in effect, about this announcement, whether we know how to balance its strange playfulness with its utter seriousness, whether it is metaphor, myth, inheritance, rejection. Here I ask a question about it, or what perhaps amounts to the same question asked another way, that concerns so many of the citations I have taken up in these remarks, namely whether it should find a welcome place in an ambitious philosophical classroom on what Emerson calls these bleak rocks, namely the place of America.

Heidegger includes in the opening paragraphs of his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics a meditation on a fragment of the German romantic writer Novalis that says: “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.” If for a moment a serious philosopher who respects, or say wishes to inherit, the English tradition of philosophy after Kant, or after the interventions of Frege and Russell, may suspend her or his sense of the indecorousness of this procedure, may such a one reconsider in this light a familiar moment of Wittgenstein’s Investigations (§116)?: “When philosophers use a word—’knowledge,’ ‘being,’ ‘object,’ ‘I,’ ‘proposition,’ ‘name’—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it has its home” [Wittgenstein’s word for home here is “Heimat”]. I mean, may this one reconsider that if, in Wittgenstein’s articulation, philosophy’s task becomes that of—as his following sentence puts the matter—“leading words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use”; and if this proves to be a process of endless challenges to the expressions of our lives, alienated or turned from home, needing return; and if the tasks of philosophy are to be compared (not identified) with therapies; then is it strained to speak of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing as the study of homesickness?

It goes without saying—does it not?—that if such a remark is the only sort of thing you say about Wittgenstein’s work then you are refusing to let it inspire you to philosophize. I wish it equally went without saying that if you shy always from saying or conceiving such things, you are bound to miss the stakes of such philosophizing.