A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Ideas and Struggles: Life Without Principle (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Guiding One's Life ---- We most often know Henry David Thoreau for two 
of his books, Walden, or Life in the Woods and Civil Disobedience. 
Fortunately, Le Mot et le Reste is republishing Life Without Principle 
with an introduction by Philippe Granger. This text constitutes a 
distillation of his ethical reflections. In it, Thoreau denounces the 
moral bankruptcy of American society due to its constant pursuit of 
wealth and the inhumanity of mid-19th-century industrial capitalism. 
"This world is the place of business.[...]Nothing is more important than 
work, more work, always work." He matured and enriched this approach 
during his lectures. He hesitated for a long time over the title of this 
essay. Philippe Granger underscores its significance. "Long considered, 
the essay defines his 'art of living,' a term by which he designates an 
economy of life: it clearly expresses the confidence he places in 
himself to know, in complete autonomy, how to determine the right life 
that he deems desirable to lead, off the beaten track."

This passion for work, imposed by society's dominant thinking, extends 
to performing useless tasks, as David Graeber so aptly demonstrated in 
Bullshit Jobs, published in French by Les Liens qui libèrent in 2019. Be 
careful, Thoreau is not hostile to intelligent work, useful to the 
general interest, which leaves the worker time to flourish; however, he 
rejects work, a form of servitude. This servitude is obviously the 
negation of the theoretical foundation of the United States: freedom. 
The reader will find in these pages a denunciation of the political 
class and of the manipulation generated by the media, which diverts 
public interest towards news stories and useless information. Couldn't 
we say that the situation has worsened today with audiovisual media and 
social media? Let's also note this evocative sentence: "What is called 
politics is a thing so comparatively superficial and inhuman that I 
have, so to speak, never honestly acknowledged that it concerns me in 
any way."

Laying the Foundations for Personal, Independent Reflection

His remarks on religion and the principles of pastors underscore their 
teaching of resignation, the acceptance of a world of inequality and 
absurdities. For Thoreau, the individual must become his own moral 
teacher, guide his life, and lay the foundations for personal, 
independent reflection.

The first part of the book multiplies examples of the race for money and 
society's orientation toward money. While the text has a dated 
connotation, set in the 19th century, in the United States, it is 
nevertheless easily transposable to contemporary society. Just observe 
these workaholics on public transportation, hunched over their phones, 
their computers, or even talking about "work" while hiking or jogging. 
Yes, it's serious. You will read with horror the passage devoted to the 
work of gold prospectors, the work of slaves, slaves to Money, to the 
point of dying from it. Think of the famous photographs of Sebastião 
Salgado.

The book is imbued with great poetry, notably in its vision of nature, 
but also in the vocabulary used: man is nature and must not destroy it. 
These words are reminiscent of Elisée Reclus. I quote his conclusion: 
"Why shouldn't we find ourselves, not always like dyspeptics telling 
each other their bad dreams, but sometimes like eupeptics congratulating 
each other on the eternal and resplendent beauty of the morning? I'm 
certainly not asking anything exorbitant here."

* Henry D. Thoreau
Life Without Principle
Ed. Le Mot et le Reste, 2025

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8504
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