Thoreau, like Plato, treats moral truth as requiring a shift in perspective.
Evidence
Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective. “Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution never distinctly and nakedly behold it,” he says. One must ascend to higher ground to see reality: the government is admirable in many respects, “but seen from a point of view a little higher they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 277
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the perspectival framework Odell later needs for her own refusal model.
- XREF: connects to: Thoreau and Emerson split over whether concrete detail or ideal beauty deserved attention — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 800; Moral truth lives in impulse, not in rationalized abstract principles. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 640; Existentialist ethics proceeds from lived experience rather than abstract moral calculus. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 33 (+1 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Thoreau and Emerson split over whether concrete detail or ideal beauty deserved attention — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 800; Moral truth lives in impulse, not in rationalized abstract principles. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 640; Existentialist ethics proceeds from lived experience rather than abstract moral calculus. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 33 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Moral truth lives in impulse, not in rationalized abstract principles.
#complicates(0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 640