Upon my first reading of the excerpt from Walking, I considered Thoreau’s writing to be poetry at best; too verbose to follow and of a bombastic tone that disqualified the arguments presented from being considered sound reasoning. Tallying how many times the anecdotal, naturalistic and ‘appeal to emotion’ fallacies were committed, I concluded that Thoreau had broken too many rules of logic to be taken seriously. However, a second reading allowed me to discern the ingenuity of how his argument was formulated. Thoreau, claiming that the intrinsic value of nature is in its aesthetic, divine beauty, is not interested in adhering to rigid standards of deductive logic; for how can the premises of such a novel conclusion be defended in a post-Enlightenment context whereby philosophical discourse was analysed using stringent, almost mathematical, standards that reduce subjects to mere static variables?
Thoreau’s reflection on his veneration of nature and its sublimity is followed by an affirmation of the anthropocentric view that nature’s value is instrumental, that is “To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.” In this latter part of the excerpt, Thoreau deduces that the survival of humankind relies on that of nature, aligning himself with the anthropocentrists before him (Kant, Locke, et al.), perhaps in an attempt to engage their followers. However, in conjunction with the first half of the excerpt, in its entirety, Thoreau’s argument is one for nonanthropocentrism and one that I can mostly agree with.
Question: If Kant, Mill, Locke, etc. were alive to read Thoreau’s argument, how would they respond?