Bugbee on the Ground of Unconditional Affirmation

In his foreword to wilderness and the heart, a collection of essays on Henry Bugbee’s philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre commends Bugbee’s book, The Inward Morning, for the way in which it integrates form and content. How it is written and what it says, MacIntyre writes, “are to be grasped together or not at all” (xiii). “What can be learned from The Inward Morning,” MacIntyre continues, “is not primarily a set of philosophical theses and arguments—although such theses and arguments are to be found in it—but rather something of the first importance about the place that philosophical theses and arguments might have in our lives, the relevance to our lived experience of the reading of philosophical texts” (xiii). In this description MacIntyre states elegantly what many readers have found in The Inward Morning. At the same time he acknowledges that Bugbee’s book contains philosophical theses and arguments. While I agree strongly with MacIntyre that Bugbee’s unique authorial voice is one of the great strengths of The Inward Morning, I also think that it contains distinctive philosophical theses that are worth exploring quite apart from the way in which Bugbee expresses them. In this essay I will explore one of these theses, one that Bugbee regards as all important: that a certain kind of action provides a ground for unconditionally affirming the value of one’s life.

Bugbee introduces the topic of unconditional affirmation by commenting on the passage in Book I of The Republic where Socrates asks Cephalus, now an old man, whether life is harder on “the threshold of old age” (Plato 328e). Cephalus replies that it is not. He admits that the pleasures of youth have gone, but he finds a replacement in the great calm and freedom that comes with the lessening of his passions. The truth, he says, is that regrets and complaints about old age are to be attributed not to age itself but to a person’s character. “The man who knows he has not sinned has a sweet and good hope as his constant companion,” Cephalus tells Socrates (Plato 331a). This discussion, which introduces Socrates’s initial questions about justice, also provides Bugbee with an occasion to raise the topic of unconditional affirmation. Echoing Socrates, Bugbee finds Cephalus’s remarks of “the keenest interest” (Inward Morning 74).¹ “What can he disclose to us,” Bugbee asks, “of what may stand a man in good stead, not merely in the long run, but more fundamentally, when the obscurity of death becomes imminent? What in the life of a man can place his life in such a light that he can live his last moments in the most profound affirmation?” (Inward Morning 74). Bugbee then goes on to write:

I will not hesitate to say that questions such as these seem to me to set the ultimate philosophical issue in a very clear manner. And the whole drift of my own positive thinking has been imbued with belief in the possibility of such affirmation, with the concern to understand how unconditional affirmation is possible, and with the responsible articulation of that very affirmation.

(Inward Morning 74)

Although no serious reader is likely to be misled here, it is worth emphasizing that Bugbee describes his questions as raising the ultimate philosophical issue. He is not concerned with identifying the particular life experiences that enabled Cephalus or that have enabled any other particular person to affirm his or her life in the most profound manner. His concern is with a more general question: What makes such affirmations by particular individuals possible? This is a Kantian question, a question about how something in experience is possible. Bugbee’s answer to this question has two parts. In the first he specifies that it is reality as it is given in experience that makes unconditional affirmation possible, while in the second he describes how reality as given allows us to affirm unconditionally the value of our own lives in the face of death. My topic in this article is the first part of his answer, the one dealing with reality as what is...