Abstract

Based on the assumption that “philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process,” Georg Hegel compared it with the ancient symbol of wisdom: the owl of Minerva. This analogy is well known and has not caused many debates. Much less known is the comparison of philosophy with another bird, the rooster, proposed by Henry Thoreau. The main purpose of the article is to show that the latter analogy also has a deep meaning and can serve as a good addition to Hegel’s one. Both comparisons can co-exist as the symbols of two different ways of philosophizing. The comparison of philosophy with the owl is an accurate symbol of Hegel’s type of philosophizing: impersonal, academic, strictly theoretical, and quite conservative. At the same time, the comparison with the rooster is more in line with the type of philosophizing that Thoreau practiced: deeply personalized, extraacademic, practical, and future-oriented. It has been shown that Thoreau’s “morning-rooster” philosophy became the basis for many innovative ideas and practices, the relevance of which only grows over the time: the fight against racism, civil disobedience, wildlife conservation, animal protection, vegetarianism, and even downshifting. To clarify the specifics of this type of philosophizing, the author recontextualizes the famous episode from Plato’s “Phaedo”, in which Socrates not only sacrifices his own life by drinking a poisonous beverage but also asks to sacrifice a rooster. It has been shown that, to a certain level, Thoreau was like Socrates; however, his philosophy does not require such sacrifices. Thoreau’s philosophy is like the crowing of a cheerful rooster, which wakes up and notices the first rays of a new dawn, even in the twilight of the end of history.Manuscript received 10.08.2020.