What does being Gay have to do with it? Perception my Friend

Thoreau and homosexuality. What does this have to do with the Romantic Movement you might ask? Well at first I thought nothing. But thinking about it a bit more I think it might have relation to at least two topics that we have been discussing: The microcosm and the macrocosm, and perception (of the self). In the sense of the micro and the macro I mean that if one separates and divides our outer differences-then we see two separate genders. If one focuses on the inner nature (or as I like to say the ‘essence’ of someone) ignoring the physical, then how can one say what being gay is? How is love confined to what gender the other person is? In the sense of Perception: We are all natural beings..... A rose by any other name would smell as sweet regardless of its name.

It seems as though this passage from 'Thoreau’s Bottom' touches upon a couple of things: Perception of one’s self and how Thoreau viewed men as not “the same” but an “other” -a third sex...therefore making homoeroticism ok? Another thing brought up is Thoreau's emphasis on reflection as well this Passage also seems to go along with our discussion that we had in class the other day about th edifference between solitude and individuality. Since there is so many good things contained within this passage I will split the blog into two in order to make it more cohesive. Part one will try to deal mainly with Thoreau's sexuality.

On the Self/Other
*In Thoreau's bottom, Michael states that “in the second paragraph of Walden, Henry Thoreau describes a self/other dilemma at the horizon of knowledge, not only for him but for all persons, everywhere and throughout time: "In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience." What Thoreau describes here is a condition special to post-Enlightenment society: the domination of everyday life by a self/other problem. He assumes opposition between self and other that is not so much moral or religious as phenomenological: "self" now stands for all he knows, perceives, and feels. ‘Himself’ are both objects of knowledge and a limitation on knowledge, his "theme" and his "experience" of that theme. The irony in Thoreau's last sentence suggests that his experience therefore might be considered inexperience, since it is not experience of anything other than his experience. The other has become an inaccessible horizon because ‘self’ includes all means of access to it. "History is the record of my experience," he writes in his journal. "I can read only my own story, never a syllable of another man's." No wonder he also thinks "It is a mange world we live in--With this incessant dream of friendship and love where is any?" Thoreau encourages his readers to think of themselves as having selves in such an encompassing way that their very experience of the world becomes part of the selves proper to themselves. He thus calls his readers to undergo a crisis to which heterosexual romance was already being offered as the natural solution. But he does not offer that solution. Erotic desire promises the self-transcendence of subjective experience, but Thoreau does not find the promise fulfilled, either in official sexuality or in other existing social relations. "Intercourse with men!" he exclaims in another journal entry. "How little it amounts to! How rarely we love them!" Loving men and being loved by them -- and Thoreau means "men"-- define the telos of personhood and social interaction, but remain unrealized possibilities.
*While living at Walden Thoreau wrote in his journal, "What the difference is between man and woman--that they should be so attracted to one another I never saw adequately stated." Adequately for what, he does not say. Does Thoreau simply mean that no one has ever paid enough tribute to the appealing mysteries of gender difference?
*Thoreau seems to have a very different emphasis in mind. "I love men with the same distinction that I love woman," he goes on to say, in a sentence dropped from the essay version, "--as if my friend were of some third sex."
*The journal version challenges what the essay version pretends to celebrate: the notion that sexual desire derives from the mere fact of gender difference. Thoreau suggests that he has never seen an account of gender difference adequate to make what is now called heterosexuality its normative consequence ("that they should be so attracted to each other"). The emphasis is on the nice question of what makes a difference or distinction sufficient to allow "love": "I love men with the same distinction that I love woman." Not quite with the same distinction, we might notice, since "woman" remains an abstract category here, given in the singular, while "men" are plural. Thoreau's inconsistency on this point shows that "woman" is a kind of ‘Other’ for him. But the same sentence shows that the ‘othering’ of "woman" is not the only way that people can become erotic objects to him. Gender difference and erotic difference are, so to speak, different differences.
*Thoreau seems to register the most abstract and formal oppositions--self/other. same/different--as immediate problems in his erotic life. In this language of self and other, sameness and difference, alternatives are difficult for Thoreau to conceive. Where gender difference and erotic difference are assumed to be equivalent, erotic relations among men would seem to be a sexuality of sameness. Thoreau asserts that men are others to him in a different way, distinct enough from self and sameness to be a "third sex."
*In the wake of sexology, "heterosexual" and "homosexual" then entered currency as ways of organizing sexual desire around difference and sameness.
*What Thoreau struggles to prevent--the collapse of desire into the same/different-self/other language of gender difference--is exactly what has come to govern the discourse of sexuality.
*Thoreau says "I love men with the same distinction that I love woman--as if my friend were of some third sex," he takes for granted a self/other opposition as the point to be gained, stressing the difference between himself and the other man in order to make the seemingly obvious point that he and the other man are not the same--as though it were a point in danger of being forgotten.

On the Individual
*In Philosophy of Right, Hegel declared that "love" could be defined as the experience of a problem: "The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent person and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction."
*The contradiction, for Hegel, is that we both do and do not want to be independent persons. A really self-subsistent person would be defective because we have no position from which to imagine and appreciate our independence except the standpoint of another. In requiring that standpoint we compromise our self-subsistent unity, which we nevertheless seek to confirm through the other's eyes; you cannot be a self and have it too. The contradiction between these wishes appears in the realm of feeling, including the erotic, though Hegel has the manners to use the label "love." Love both propounds and resolves the contradictions of individual selfhood.
*Hegel presupposes that the difference between self and other is a gender difference. His definition derives the experience of love from the dilemmas of an abstract self, not a gendered one. If the other is required only as another individual, the gender of the other should (in theory) be arbitrary. But he assumes that the outcome of a self/other erotics will be a male-female coupling
*Hegel's explicitly suggests that love as he defines it is one of the cultural forms of modernity. In the experience of love, as in the doctrine of Romanticism and the institutions of civil society, we act upon the "subjective principle of the modern world"--the basic postulate of "the right of the subject's particularity, his right to be satisfied, or in other words the right of subjective freedom." Without this socially sanctioned primacy of the self, the tension he describes would not be felt very acutely. Both sides of the contradiction experienced as "love" imply that an individual's whole-being is at stake in the question of his or her independence vis-a-vis the other.
*Hegel's love therefore presupposes and extends a practice of imagining oneself as detached and autonomous, as for example in possessive individualism. To possess rights of property in oneself, as liberalism demands, is both to objectify a self and to transcend that object as its possessor; the possessive individual thus becomes the site of a contradiction. The same problem is further aggravated in other contexts of modernity and consumer capitalism where we trade on abstracted and ideal images of ourselves and our autonomy. Indeed, dominant culture in countless ways demands that we think of ourselves not as having a certain status or a certain body or a certain locale but simply as selves. There is a kind of capital to be made in doing so--or at least in seeming to do so.
*Thoreau virtually embodies the principle of "voluntary association" that places the individual self at the source of civil society: "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined." More than anyone else before or since, he gives voice to the subjective principle of modern society. Thoreau believes that this principle results in an intensely felt contradiction between the need to count for another and the desire to be an independent individual. Thoreau finds the contradiction most fully realized in erotic relations.