Stress and Freedom

"Peter Sloterdijk’s work is extensive and difficult. But this title jumped out at me when I was looking at the range of what he’s done, and I ordered it to see what he was saying. It’s a short book, an address originally, but it packs a lot in. I don’t know that Sloterdijk has any idea that Thoreau ever lived or wrote. But what strikes me is that it’s plotted almost exactly like Walden . Sloterdijk opens by describing how we are joined in a ‘stress collective’—we’re always, every morning, jointly and collectively stressed about whatever outrage is in the headlines for that moment. And this bonds us together in a constant state of excitation. Well, that’s the opening to Walden . And then in the middle of this very short book, he speaks of Jean Jacques Rousseau retreating to an island in a lake as an escape from what he, too, experienced as the stress collective. It was in these months of solitude that Rousseau discovered, in solitude, a space of freedom. That, of course, is the Walden journey. But what really did it for me was the way Sloterdijk concludes. I think a lot of us can fantasize about why Thoreau went to Walden. There’s a familiar logic to that. But why did he leave? It’s the return to the village that has always intrigued me. As I turn Sloterdijk’s pages, I find him criticizing Rousseau: having discovered the space of freedom, having initiated the project of freedom for all people who read his Reveries of the Solitary Walker , Rousseau blows it by not returning in the proper way, by instead subsuming individual freedom into groupthink. For having discovered this space of freedom, one does not stay withdrawn, but hears anew “calls from the real.” So on must commit, return, turn towards practical action. I starred this sentence in Sloterdijk’s book. The next thing I write about Thoreau, I might use this as the epigraph: Whoever acts out of freedom revolts against the meanness they can no longer bear to see. Thoreau returned, having satisfied himself that it is, despite all, a beautiful world, and that beauty needs to be cherished, witnessed, passed forward. Annie Dillard does the same. This return to the collective, this revolt against the no-long-bearable meanness of the collective, means opening a space of freedom and redemption to other people, for they—we—all equally share this potential. So this is a very classic narrative: the social stress, the movement away and recovery of self apart. But then, it’s followed with the return. That’s not just Walden , it’s most of Thoreau’s writing: “Excursion” is the name for it, going out to a new place, experiencing it for some time, and then returning—but when you return, you come bearing some kind of gift. Thoreau tells this kind of narrative over and over again. The part that is, to me, most moving is Thoreau coming back bearing that gift, literally showing it to people on the street. He’ll bring a flower, or autumn leaves, something out of the woods, and he’ll be walking down the street literally buttonholing people saying, ‘look at this.’ That’s the gift, and of course the writing is the gift. So, that’s why I chose this book. It helps us see Thoreau is writing out of the deep structure of modern thought and experience. But, not until this little book by Sloterdijk did I have so clear a sense of how it links up."