Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings by Henry Bugbee (review)

Henry Bugbee is a curious figure in the annals of American Philosophers. It seems that most philosophers either cherish his work dearly or have never heard of him. Albert Borgmann described his work as “both inconspicuous and consequential” (187). As of this writing, he has no entries on The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or even Wikipedia. Among those who know his work, most only know his book, The Inward Morning. And few of those who know the book have seen fit to write about it. It is not that Bugbee’s career was on the margins. To the contrary, with a Princeton BA, a Berkeley PhD, and a faculty position at Harvard, a colleague of both C.I. Lewis and W.V.O. Quine, he begins on the main stage. And Bugbee worked closely with prominent figures such as D.T. Suzuki and Gabriel Marcel, who wrote a foreword for The Inward Morning. Rather it is his conception of what it means to be a philosopher that was on the margins. Finding fly fishing and walking alone in the forest to be more important than publication, for a truly philosophical life, he left the ivy league and settled in Missoula. It is his dedication to the examined life above the published life that makes what he did write so rich and that makes collecting his work into an accessible volume such a great service to the reader.

David Rodick has edited just such a collection in Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings. In fact, this slender volume contains a good deal more than a sampling of his published work. It includes substantial selections from his undergraduate thesis and his doctoral dissertation, essays published and unpublished, and a selection of correspondence, journal entries, interviews and remembrances. It is an anthology, such as it can be, of his person. And this is as it should be. From the student papers on, Bugbee’s focus is clearly on the importance of the person, and of moral experience and culture as constitutive of the meaning of the person. At a time when philosophy was aspiring to be a science, Bugbee pursued a broadly humanist version instead.

The first work in the collection is an abridged version of Bugbee’s undergraduate thesis, written under the direction of Warner Fite. Evident even from this early work is the developing elegance and voice that characterizes his mature work, and he is already grappling with themes which are recognizable, with some development and transformation, in The Inward Morning. His perennial concern with moral and aesthetic experience, for example, may be found in passages like the following:

Before I get through, I want to suggest that the more an experience transcends or interpenetrates categories in general the more significant it may be. This will be made a point of contrast between the broader type of aesthetic experience and the more restricted scientific type.

(21)

Repeated acquaintance with something of such aesthetic value [Brahm’s C minor Symphony], or with people in moral relations, and other similar situations stimulate the receptive consciousness to an awareness of a compelling meaning, and this in turn is richly developed in the vistas of the imagination. Here, I maintain, is the ground upon which the comprehension of reality, and especially of values is rendered possible.

(25)

A world of experience—including years of naval service during World War II—intervenes between this and the writing of his doctoral dissertation, which is also included in an abridged form. Indeed, the time at sea, minesweeping in the South Pacific, seems to have broken his dissertation writer’s block. “The Sense and Conception of Being” tries to elucidate a sense of being that pervades all experience. This sense, although it may at times be strongly felt, tends to remain “but a nameless and inarticulate undertone” (42). But Bugbee insists that we can turn our attention to this and that it calls for a certain response from us. Pointing to...