A Taste for the Wild: Some Nietzschean Themes in Thoreau1
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
At first blush, it seems far-fetched, even perverse, to suggest an affinity between Thoreau and Nietzsche. Although a neighbour is said to have described Thoreau as a “dirty little atheist” (Harding, Handbook 141), in general there is little trace of the Antichrist in New England transcendentalism. Yet, it was the American critic Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in the 1940s, who first commented on the striking similarities between the extreme vitality of Thoreau’s prose, which represents nature as beyond moral considerations, and Nietzsche’s more uncompromising vision of life beyond good and evil.2 Krutch’s observations suggest some merit in reading Thoreau with the more philosophically acute observations of his German contemporary in mind. Not only do Nietzsche’s writings explain some of the difficulties in Thoreau’s work, most notably this tension between the wild and the good in his view of nature, they also show Thoreau to be on the same philosophical road as Nietzsche, rejecting the decadence of his nervous and bustling nineteenth century in favour of an individualistic ideal of health and vitality that requires, in Nietzsche’s words, “good teeth” and a “strong stomach” (Gay Science 63).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it