Social Distancing in Solitude

J.R. Davis asks what Thoreau’s experience of isolation can teach us.

- J.R. Davis

What might philosophy have to say about social distancing – and, for some, complete social isolation? Here it may be useful for us to reflect on Henry David Thoreau’s experience as described in his book Walden (1854), which details his own time of self-isolation.

Walden is a unique utopian account about simple living. It is not easily categorized: ‘a social experiment’; ‘a journey of spiritual discovery’; ‘a manual of self-reliance’ – many different epithets have been attached to the work to describe it. Some also criticize it, perhaps rightly, as being overly idealistic. But we might at least say that it describes an application of Transcendentalist philosophy. Walden is quintessentially Transcendentalist. Set in the backwoods of Massachusetts, it teaches us both how to live deliberately and how to be alone with ourselves: how to embrace solitude without feeling lonely. Solitude is a good, and very different from loneliness.

Thoreau and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson were the two most notable figures of Transcendentalism. This was an intellectual movement in early nineteenth century America, intent on positively rethinking contemporary society, transforming culture from unreflective conformity to a purified individualism. It sprouted from English and German Romanticism, and was arguably the first Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks to be directly influenced by Eastern philosophy, such as the Hindu Upanishads. In Walden, Thoreau often quotes Confucius, whose translated works had just reached America. Unlike much Western philosophy, Transcendentalism’s modus operandi