Henry David Thoreau: Prophet of Evolved….Eating?

​Henry David Thoreau:
Prophet of Evolved….Eating?
 
At various times, Thoreau wrote as a philosopher, a scientist, a nature writer, an economist, a moralist, a social activist, a natural theologian, and in a few places, a commentator on, of all things, eating. In this latter role, he perhaps serves as an unintentional prophet of where we are headed as spirituality evolves and the circle of human moral concern continues to expand, even beyond the human species. Of course in doing so, Thoreau, as is sometimes the case, embodies blatant and unresolved contradictions, but that’s part of his charm: he never intended to write as a systematic philosopher who claimed to explain everything in a vast system in which all topics are rationally connected in a comprehensive synthesis. Thoreau just wrote (with beauty and simplicity) what he thought, felt, and experienced, including the contradictions.
 
Higher Laws is one of the chapters in Walden where Thoreau attempts to articulate some of his spiritual ideals and how they are carried out in daily life. But the beginning of this spiritually-oriented chapter begins rather strangely, with an account of a walk in the woods at night, during which he spotted a woodchuck and experienced a “savage delight” at the thought of killing and devouring the animal raw, even though he wasn’t even hungry. This passage is followed by his famous declaration that, “I love the wild not less than the good”(202 ).***
 
And yet, only a few pages later, Thoreau confesses that, “I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect,” and later in the same paragraph, “I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind…..Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal?”(206-207).
 
So in the short span of three to four pages, Thoreau has gone from sharing his desire to kill and eat a groundhog raw to declaring that meat-eating is a shameful human form of eating!
 
But his exploration of eating gets even more interesting shortly thereafter, when Thoreau not only offers a reconciliatory interpretation of such contradictions but, quite remarkably, does so in the context of evolving human spirituality:
 
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals” (207).
 
Could it be that, without realizing it, Thoreau here serves as a prophet of ethical eating in the spirituality of the 21st century? Of course, refraining from eating meat for ethico-spiritual reasons preceded Thoreau by many centuries, as seen for instance in certain schools of ancient Hinduism and Buddhism and the Greek Neo-Platonist tradition inspired by Plotinus (3rd c.). But hearing Thoreau advocate a vegetarian diet for ethical purposes is different, since even in spite of his quirks and self-declared desire for solitude and simplicity, he is a fully “modern” writer and thinker, and as such, his words have the potential to influence today’s readers in a more meaningful way than do the words from ancient sacred texts.
 
Thoreau doesn’t attempt to present an argument to establish the moral wrongness of killing animals for food, but rather suggests that it’s more like an intuitive moral sense that develops as one matures spiritually.
 
 If Thoreau had been familiar with the concept of evolutionary spirituality that has developed in the past century, I suspect that he might have put it this way: As human consciousness has evolved over the centuries, to the point where that consciousness includes the capacity to intuitively recognize the inter-connectedness of all beings, including the human connection to the animal realm and, indeed, all sentient beings, our sense of moral responsibility has widened to include a wider moral circle that is no longer restricted to the human (see the work of Peter Singer on the expanding moral circle).
 
If Thoreau was living today, he probably would be pleased to see the extent to which vegetarianism and veganism have permeated our culture, with even mainstream capitalist fast-food business enterprises offering plant-based alternatives (e.g., the “Impossible Whopper”) and meat-free restaurant chains popping up across the country – a trend that is likely to increase as we develop protein rich synthesized foods that are not only nutritious but also tasty and aesthetically appealing.
 
 
***All Thoreau quotes are from Jeffery S. Cramer’s Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, a wonderful edition of Thoreau’s classic text in which Cramer’s annotations provide invaluable insights into the book and Thoreau’s life. All italics, including those within the Thoreau quotes, are mine.