"Some Dart and Wound of Love..."

Nietzsche's advice concerning "the fundamental law of the authentic self" echoes throughout a variety of religious writings, pre-modern and modern--and, in the latter category, I include Thoreau's Walden.

What distinguishes the two approaches (pre-modern and modern) are the assumptions that underlie them. For the pre-moderns, physics and metaphysics are intimately inter-related and irrevocably entwined; for the moderns, the Gordian knot of pre-modern assumptions has been severed.

Thoreau's assertion that "The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision" attempts to bridge the chasm between pre-modern and modern approaches by a kind of metaphorical asymptosis: an aspirantly post-modern achievement. In other words, the Thoreauvian mode is a true alternative to "metaphysical fundamentalism" (on the one hand) and modern estrangement (on the other), for Thoreau handled metaphysics as any other literary or rhetorical genre (a la Alfarabi).

As Thoreau understood, human beings of any epoch are after the same thing: contact with Truth or Reality. What most pre-modern approaches grant and many modern approaches deny (actual contact with capital "T" truth) post-modern approaches literalize. By that I mean they blur the distinctions between fact and fiction, life and literature (Alexander Nehamas's study of Nietzsche, Life As Literature, demonstrates the manner in which this move was anticipated by his subject). Like Nietzsche, Thoreau perceived that the quarrel between physics and metaphysics had grown stale--and in this he anticipated Wittgenstein's Tractarian observation that "even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer" (6.52).

Wittgenstein counseled silence on metaphysics and then changed the subject--becoming preoccupied with observations on language use (see his post-Tractatus writings). Thoreau, however, had already arrived at the place that Wittgenstein would eventually reach: the writing of the book. For Thoreau, this is Walden, or Life in the Woods (here one can re-trace the steps of Stanley Cavell); in Walden, what Origen (d. 254) had identified as a "heavenly love and desire" for "the beauty and glory of the Word" (for Origen, the Word of God) becomes the aspirantly post-modern "answer" to "the problems of life." Richard Rorty offered an elegant summation of this insight in his adoption of Gadamer's dictum: "Being that can be understood is language" (LRB, March 16, 2000, 23-25).

The lines from Origen's Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs that supply the title to this post merit fuller quotation: "Indeed the soul is led by a heavenly love and desire when once the beauty and glory of the Word of God has been perceived; he falls in love with His splendor and by this receives from Him some dart and wound of love." It is that dart and wound of love that dared Thoreau to gaze upon the same glory as "the oldest Egyptian or Hindoo"; that "dart or wound" is the "I in him that was then so bold" and the "he in me that now reviews the vision."