Nature Gives the Rule

About a mile from Concord village, in the second summer at the pond, Henry David Thoreau got to know a French Canadian woodchopper who had never read a book he hadn't been made to read, and he couldn't decide what he was looking at. "I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child," he writes in Walden (1854), "whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity." John Kaag, in his Rebind commentary on Walden, reads that sentence and reaches, of all places, for Kant:

"If we think about the comment that Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, makes, that genius is a natural gift by which nature gives the rule to art, Thoreau sees in the woodchopper something of this naive genius, the sort of natural force or natural insight that oftentimes gets beaten out of a person through their formal education. And Thoreau is wondering whether this man could not be something like a Shakespeare."

The sentence Kaag is quoting is section 46 of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, from 1790, and he quotes it from memory four times across his sessions. Paul Guyer, in his Rebind commentary on Kant, has a whole episode on that section. His own illustration is a museum rather than a woodlot: the one time he visited the Prado, he walked through rooms of Velázquez in which "the people are alive," then rooms of imitators whose "paintings are dead," then Goya, alive again, and then "14 rooms or something" of what he calls Goyistas, "copying Goya's manner, but there's no life to them."

So a Thoreau scholar and a Kant scholar are reading the same sentence, and neither mentions the other's author. Where they agree is on what the gift is and how it can be passed on. Where they part is over the one condition Kant attaches to it. For Guyer's Kant, genius is answerable to an audience: "taste must clip the wings of genius," and a true work has to invite other people in. For Kaag's Thoreau, nature's gift runs through everyone, its product is a life rather than a painting, and the only thing it owes anyone is that you own up to having followed it. The question underneath both books is whether being a genius comes with an obligation to be understood.