After the Authentic Self—An Existential Interpretation of Thoreau’s <i>Walden</i>

在超验主义作家梭罗的作品《瓦尔登湖》中存在着对自我问题的探索。通过将对美好生活的追求与对自我的理解相联系，梭罗揭示出日常状态中人们的自我理解总是类似于海德格尔的“常人”，从而让自我成为一个问题。继而，在回到自然中生活的切身体验里，让固执于同一化活动的我思主体性与他异的自然遭遇，他者自在的他异性使人们开始反思自身的认知方式。在“本真–非本真”这一自我的两重性中，本真自我具有决定自我存在方式的可能性，而具有这种可能性的自我最终被揭示为能够向着价值维度的“好(善)”去生存的自我。In Walden, the work of the transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau, an inquiry into the nature of the self is undertaken. By linking the pursuit of the good life to an understanding of the self, Thoreau reveals that people’s ordinary self-understanding in everyday life often resembles what Heidegger describes as “the they” (das Man), thereby making the self a problematic issue. Through his personal experience of returning to a life in nature, Thoreau facilitates an encounter between the cogito subject, stubbornly fixated on the activity of identification, and the otherness of nature. The otherness of the Other prompts reflection on human modes of cognition. Within the duality of the self as authentic and inauthentic, the authentic self possesses the possibility of determining his mode of existence. The self endowed with this possibility is ultimately revealed as the self capable of living toward the dimension of value, that is, toward the “good”.