According to Professor Albert Borgmann (University of Montana), ‘American philosophy in the twentieth century has produced two masterpieces, one very well-known, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, the other an underground classic, Henry [Bugbee]’s The Inward Morning. … Henry's philosophy … was the articulation [of] and response to the eloquence and claims of reality, of nature, of the sea, of literature, of crewing, of fishing, of teaching. Henry was … a superb observer and writer. His philosophy was deeply engaging. It constituted a turn from rigorous abstraction to the richness of life, of life's burdens and splendors. The Inward Morning was the statement of his philosophy. It was an incisive though fair-minded reckoning with the aggressive and austere approach of the philosophers of Harvard who, with the exception of Quine, said Henry's thought was not really philosophy.’ (Personal communication, June 16th 2018, reproduced with permission.)
David Rodick's new collection has been produced to ‘remove Bugbee's thought from relative obscurity’, making his unpublished and his hard-to-find published writings ‘more accessible to the wider public’ (2). Apart from occasional quotations, The Inward Morning (1958) is not included, but is listed in the Biography; it was last reprinted in 1999 by University of Georgia Press. Rodick explains (63) that the book's title is a phrase borrowed from the title of a poem of Henry David Thoreau, at the same time disclosing one of the traditions in which Bugbee stands.
Bugbee's biography throws further light on his writings. Henry Greenwood Bugbee Jr. was born in 1915. In 1932 he enrolled at Princeton, and graduated with high honours. He taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1937. From 1942 to 1945 he commanded a minesweeper in the South Pacific. Having overcome his earlier writer's block, he was awarded his Berkeley PhD in 1946. After briefly teaching at University of Nevada, Reno, and at Stanford, in 1948 he accepted a position at Harvard, which he enjoyed, but where he was later denied tenure (1954) on grounds of insufficient publication. He taught at Chatham College, Pittsburgh from 1954-1957. He wrote The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, the work for which he is best known, over several years preceding 1958, when it was published by Bald Eagle Press, State College, Pennsylvania. He attained a teaching position at the University of Montana in 1957, eventually retiring in 1979. Earlier he had resigned (over broken promises) in 1961, returned to Harvard (1961–2), and taught at Penn State (1962–7). He then returned to University of Montana, where the administration was now more favourable, and in the early 1970s he introduced an intensive Humanities programme for first-year students. Though he gave visiting lectures at many Universities, he came to regard Missoula as home, and frequently walked trails there, for some of which he was the trailblazer. He died there in 1999.
Rodick describes Bugbee's philosophy as naturalist, but of a non-reductive kind (6). He drew on Paul Tillich's distinction between experimental and experiential verification from his student writings onwards, and stressed our experience of nature, its mysterious depths, and the centrality of reflexive mindfulness of ourselves and our relation to the world around us. This experiential naturalism was first expressed in a student dissertation, written at Princeton, entitled ‘In Demonstration of the Spirit’, which Rodick reprints. Here Bugbee indicates hostility to logical positivism, to relativism and to behavioursim, focuses on moral experience (such as the experience of obligation), and seeks to demonstrate the personalist thesis that ‘the individual personality is in the widest sense the expression of morality, and thus our understanding of people of all times, ages, cultures and creeds relies on the fact that certain elements of morality remain more or less constant throughout’ (31). Bugbee writes in an autobiographical style, and his evocation of familiar experiences and their significance is more convincing than his critiques of logical positivism, relativism and behaviourism, well-conceived as his rejection of these stances may have been.
There follows a selection from his Berkeley dissertation, ‘The Sense and Conception of Being’, where being is fundamentally experiential, something sensed as opposed to conceptualized (38). The sense of being turns out to exclude anthropocentric attitudes to nature, which make it a servant (43). Thus ‘The sense of being implies the transition from an egocentric to a cosmocentric point of view’ (45; Bugbee's italics). As Aristotle remarked, the roots of true philosophizing lie in wonder (52–3); indeed ‘Whenever a man (sic) gets in and takes hold of something, with persistence, sensitivity, curiosity, receptiveness, imagination and some degree of reflectiveness, he is moving towards a sense of being’ (47). Thus for Bugbee, a sense of being is roughly an alert awareness of the world around us.
‘A Venture in the Open’ is an extract from one of three published essays that Rodick now reprints. For a week in 1958, Bugbee took part at Brussels in a ‘Colloque Orient-Occident’. Bugbee felt that their meeting enabled the participants to ‘stand forth in the open in which our encounter with one another becomes fundamental and enduring’ (72); hence the title of his essay. Here he praised both Zen Buddhism and the message of the Bhagavad Gita about liberation from ‘attachment to the fruits of action’ (69).
In his more significant essay ‘Thoughts on Creation’ Bugbee, despite his apparent atheism, explains that belief in creation means that ‘all things implicated in temporal existence derivatively enjoy such being as may be theirs. He writes of creation as mythical, but takes seriously what is being said by those for whom creation is not ‘merely mythical’ (76). For talk of creation pertains to ourselves, as well as everything else, and in a way peculiar to ourselves’ (77).
Being stands in need of care, and ‘Our lives are in essence vocational, however long we may be in realizing it’ (77). Here Bugbee speaks of following Eckhart as his master. Meister Eckhart speaks of creatures as mere nothings; and their being something lies in their being understood as creatures. Yet being is independent of care, and care and being are in an utterly contingent relationship (78).
Surprisingly, he comments here that ‘We become authentically ourselves in the image of the divine and on the strength of the divine’ (80). Of all creatures, we must accept our creatureliness in order to be the creatures we really are. ‘Our true dignity consists in our ability to acknowledge that in and of ourselves we are nothing’ (80). This consenting to be nothing is what is meant by ‘renunciation’, which is what enables us to embrace all creatures as creatures (80–81), and ourselves as agents of creation (82).
The remaining published essay is the source of the title of Rodick's collection, ‘Wilderness in America’, which the editor regards as Bugbee's ‘most sustained reflection on the importance of wilderness’ (83), and could be seen as a major contribution to what was later to be called ‘The Great Wilderness Debate’. In Thoreau's time, the appeal of wilderness was to venturesomeness and enterprise, Bugbee cogently maintains; only more recently have we been obliged ‘to conceive wilderness lands under the rubric of conservation’ (84). There are objections on the part of individuals close to the land against the setting aside of wilderness sanctuaries subject to restrictions’ (85). These objections foreground a dilemma; if the protestors’ view is respected, the attrition of what remains is to be expected, and they ‘will awaken one day to the irretrievable loss’ of what they cherish (85). Yet in setting aside wilderness areas as inviolate, perhaps one ‘inadvertently attenuate[s] their very significance by removing them from the mainstream of life’ (85-86).
Yet the significance of wilderness lies deeper than human enterprise may suggest (86-87). Attentive listening is called for. Wilderness is not to be understood as a place appropriated to human interests; its fundamental gift lies in disinterestedness. Without this, ‘we tend to lapse into a wallow of anthropocentricity and suppose ourselves to be titular on the face of the Earth’ (87). The Indian forebears of modern Americans tacitly understood this. ‘The (Indian) tradition of reverence and respect in which the land was received and acknowledged’ (88) is salient for contemporary reflections. What is left of the wilderness to us may be ‘our vestigial hope of being instructed in such a vein’ (p. 88). The need for this instruction increases as the opportunity for it decreases’ (88).
However, ‘The pervasive culture seems to be in direct contrariety to a wilderness ethos’ (88). It speaks of nature as resources, and of values as being conferred by humans. It embodies claims about rights, and about living one's life as one wishes. People derive a variety of values from the land. And the public buys this package, so long as human uses and value-profits are kept equitably distributed, and the resources made use of are not getting scarce’ (89). But is anyone ‘going to have the temerity to pose wilderness as a scarce resource’? This would conflict with the widespread assumption that resources exist to be developed. For a forest authority to introduce restraint is difficult, when our ‘culture of values’ assumes the paramountcy of ‘economic development’ (90).
What wilderness can do is give the lie to this culture, and send its ‘emissaries’ to the crowd that accepts it. They speak (at wilderness hearings) of places and creatures having claim upon us to be recognised in their own right (91). ‘Their plea is … to acknowledge what is given us in a manner appropriate to it, with gratitude, with forbearance, with respect …’. For them wilderness is the stronghold of a new ethos (91).
Our relationship with wilderness and with nature is one of participation, and requires mutuality. ‘Without respect for nature man cannot stand, not even in the mutual regard of men’ (92). The peroration of this profound reflection warrants quotation. ‘Permission is granted to participate in the world, and nature invites it. … That nature is with us more surely than we know seems sure. … some places might be kept sacred to us. They will bless the lands in which we dwell. But nothing can bless us apart from being acknowledged in its own right (93).
The unpublished writings now presented by Rodick throw further light on Bugbee's perspective, but are less resonant pieces. In ‘The Revolution in Western Thought: Another Step’, Bugbee responds to his friend Huston Smith's newspaper article ‘The Revolution in Western Thought’. His emphasis is on appreciating concrete reality in a self-critical manner. Despite our technological progress, we are in an uneasy position with respect to ourselves and the significance of our lives. The kind of modern Western thought developed from the seventeenth century onwards requires not only scientific objectivity but also ‘the reflexive appreciation of concerned selfhood in the activity of thought’ (p. 105). Underlying the radical reflective task there is a more silent one, that of meditation, or prayer. Once again, biblical phrases were found indispensable to express Bugbee's message.
The next essay, ‘Nature and a True Artist’, is a contribution to aesthetics, and also to an understanding of the human condition. This essay revolves initially around quotations from Vincent van Gogh, with whom Bugbee agrees that ‘Nature always begins by resisting the artist’. After a struggle to follow nature, despite its resistance, man and nature receive transfiguration and agreement. ‘Beauty is the intimation of that harmony; the sublime is that veritable harmony itself.’ (109)
‘Trust in nature cannot mean leaning on her or merely relinquishing ourselves into the keeping of the natural. … Our status as natural beings is … taken up into awareness, so that what is and remains natural about our lives in this respect, their beginning and coming to an end, cannot remain merely natural. But this holds good for ‘things’ as well as for ourselves. ‘We must be on our guard in thinking of “the things of nature”. As so conceptualised, the “things” we may have in mind … may be something less than concrete things. Things-in-their-beauty, for example, are nearer concrete thinghood than are things-taken-in-relative abstraction. … We have to waken and remain alert to the inflections of meaning by virtue of which “things” may become things, as constitutive for what they may become’ (112).
‘Creation is realization, concrete realization. This is the point. Myth, poetry and narrative are intrinsically germane to the telling of it. … Yet creation does not occur apart from nature, or at least as excluding her. Rather we and nature in partnership become creaturely, co-creaturely. … Then nature herself appears as “fitting” in a cosmic order to which we belong. (112) … Only in so far as we participate in the coming to pass of such an order, in resolute partnership with nature, does our finite existence admit of resolution and find completion’ (113). Bugbee now looks around for other ways of expressing all this. After discussing Buddhist and Hindu approaches, he affirms that ‘For the finest reflective discussions of things in Western literature it seems to me one must turn to Heidegger's essay Das Ding (and its companion essays), in Vorträge und Aufsätze. This essay speaks of what it may mean ‘to dwell in the proximity of things, in contrast with all attitudinal positions which might be adopted in and through representation and objectification.’ (113). Bugbee's essay thus turns out not only to concern ‘the true artist’, but human fulfilment and the human condition in general, as well as the conditions in which the things of our representation attain reality or concreteness. In this essay, the sense of ‘creation’ is subtly different from that of ‘Thoughts on Creation’, discussed earlier, for here the agent of creation is much more clearly humanity.
For the penultimate unpublished essay, Rodick gives us ‘A Way of Reading the Book of Job’ (1963), commenting that ‘This essay was never intended as a fully-fledged study of Job; it was rather an attempt ‘to fledge something central in his own thinking …’. Bugbee's essay returns to drawing on reflections of Van Gogh about the arduous business of fathoming nature, so as to face the future calmly, firmly and quietly. The catastrophes befalling Job are to be seen as acquiring the force of affliction (123). Job's belief in cosmic justice suggests that he should ‘knuckle under’ (124) and acquiesce in the view of his friends that his sufferings are just retribution. But Job's belief involves a different belief in the significance of events entering human life (124). The voice from the whirlwind calls attention to the transcendent speaker and his power in a way sufficient to still any human doubt about his authority. Job accepts that he is not in a position to understand, and ‘covers himself with contrition’ (124). This revelation consists in a vision of the things of heaven-and-earth ‘seen as if for the first time’. Job had presupposed an explanation, but this presupposition is held to be irrelevant (125). Instead, the vision speaks in accord with his situation and condition. ‘Thus it is [in] a certain appreciation of things … that a basic mode of understanding comes to pass (126). Accordingly the book of Job is represented as conveying the importance of a sense of being.
The final unpublished essay ‘Notes on Objectivity and Reality’ continues, to some extent, Bugbee's reflections on Job. ‘We are objective when we submit to the control of what presents itself … I mean this as Job saw it to be so’(128). ‘What does responsibility have to do with reality? … reality is more fundamentally a theme of meditation than it is an affair of observation and description. … there is a non-pictorial … style of thinking which we carry out in being meditative that seems to me … to be nearer to what we might come to understand by reality’ (129).
‘I believe that dyed-in-the-wool and inveterate philosophers are … most in their element when they are venturing a fresh start in their reflections’ (130). Yet ‘At the same time revolution in philosophical thinking is necessarily always reinterpretation of a complex heritage' (130). Bugbee's seven-point summary of his findings begins: ‘Reality is a matter of reflective concern in so far as we assume responsibility for reality in thought' (132). It continues: ‘reality, then, is a matter of realization …’ (133). It ends: ‘Realization is creation’ (133). Has Bugbee's stress on meditation turned him from a realist into a constructivist about reality?
The book turns now to an interview with Bugbee conducted in the early 1990s, and entitled ‘Experience, Memory, Reflection: An Interview with Henry Bugbee’. It features Bugbee, his wife Sally Moore, and his colleague Ray Lanfear. It is a good source for Bugbee's career, and particularly his career in charge of a minesweeper during the second world war, but adds little to the reader's understanding of his philosophy. We learn, however, of his friendship with Quine (while at Harvard), and something of the intensive (and clearly fruitful) humanities degree programme that he and colleagues pioneered at Missoula in the early 1970s.
Among the Appendices to the book, we find a letter from C.I. Lewis in response to Bugbee's essay ‘The Moment of Obligation in Experience’. Lewis recognises that Bugbee was writing in the great tradition of the philosophy of past ages, but goes on to say that ‘as a thesis in ethics’ the essay ‘fails to jibe’ with Lewis's sense of the moral, or concern for a theory of objective rightness (181-2). Here we may wish to agree with Lewis, since one can be under an obligation despite having not the slightest subjective awareness of it.
Another Appendix gives Bugbee's Curriculum Vitae; another shows how he managed to preserve for posterity a small nature reserve, named for his father. There is also a list of the distinguished presenters of Bugbee Annual Lectures, created after his retirement, as a tribute to his legacy as teacher, philosopher and outdoorsman. Equally striking is Albert Borgmann's obituary, which relates how The Inward Morning helped redirect philosophy in America to a greater awareness of the philosophical value of everyday experience (187-8). Rodick's book, though flawed by numerous typos, may well serve its intended purpose to ‘remove Bugbee's thought from relative obscurity’, and serve as a memorial to his complex but innovative thought.
