David Barral

Thoreau did not write an essay entitled “Civil Disobedience”; at best, he may have retitled so an essay first published as “Resistance to Civil Government.” Despite the wealth of scholarship on Thoreau’s concept of resistance in general, and some very insightful comments on its physical sense in particular, no study has systematically investigated the word following the interpretive method Thoreau lays out in the “Reading” chapter of Walden: etymological probing as uncovering the material foundations of language and ethics. In this article, I contend that the essay and its central thesis—government does not really matter—hypogrammatically shoot from the physics at the root of the word “resistance” and constitute a prime example of Thoreau’s philological philosophy.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” In order “to look again at the actual words of _Walden_, the main literary monument to the era’s eccentric etymological speculation” (Michael West), “deliberately” is the best place to start. This article aims to subject Walden’s most notable (instance of the) adverb to Thoreau’s hermeneutic methodology, “laboriously seeking [its] meaning” and minding the “perpetual suggestions and provocations” of etymology. In other words, it is an attempt to read the word as deliberately as he, a Harvard-trained translator of the Classics and connoisseur of Enlightenment and Romantic philological theories, wrote it. This article focuses on wordplay stemming from the pseudo-etymological root “_liber_”—from freedom, through bark and leaves, to books. Throughout, the multi-layered ad-verb is shown to illustrate Thoreau’s idiosyncratic conception of ancient _askesis_.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” In order “to look again at the actual words of Walden, the main literary monument to the era’s eccentric etymological speculation” (Michael West), “deliberately” is the best place to start. This article aims to subject Walden’s most notable (instance of the) adverb to Thoreau’s hermeneutic methodology, “laboriously seeking [its] meaning” and minding the “perpetual suggestions and provocations” of etymology (100). In other words, it is an attempt to read the word as deliberately as he, a Harvard-trained translator of the Classics and connoisseur of Enlightenment and Romantic philological theories, wrote it. The article tracks the appearance of the adverb in Thoreau’s writing of his best-known line and paragraph, tackles its lexical meaning, and delves into the wordplay that its proper etymology offers: deliberare = to weigh; libra = the scales. Throughout, Thoreau’s philosophical ambitions for the word—and the activities of reading and living—are tied to the ancient practice of askesis.