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

Those who are already familiar with Henry Bugbee's written work will almost invariably have encountered it first through his 1958 text The Inward Morning, subtitled A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. This book, which originally appeared with an introduction by the French existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel, was reissued in a 1999 edition thanks to Edward F. Mooney, who served as editor and added a new introduction of his own (while retaining the one by Marcel). In the volume under review, David W. Rodick brings more of Bugbee's work back into print, a development that will surely be appreciated by admirers and newcomers alike. Or, in Rodick's own words, the aim of Wilderness in America is "to remove Bugbee's thought from relative obscurity, making it more accessible to the wider public" (2). It makes readily available some hard-to-find writings along with many that had never been published before.

Readers who cringe upon learning that this volume begins with Bugbee's undergraduate thesis can rest assured that it holds up remarkably well—and, indeed, offers a glimpse into some of his enduring preoccupations. Entitled "In Demonstration of the Spirit," it defends what Bugbee at this early stage of his career describes as a form of "Personal Idealism" (18), which amounts to what might be called theistic personalism. "My interest," he writes, "is manifestly in persons" and "the consciousness whereby they exist, and I have held these to constitute the primary elements of Philosophy" (29). Bugbee affirms the intrinsic worth of human life while admitting the difficulty of providing air-tight philosophical justification for this belief. Although, as he argues, each of us has an inner conviction that existence is valuable in itself, nonetheless "when we try to justify these beliefs," it seems to be "inevitable that our efforts will culminate in an insecure skepticism" (23). Citing a passage from Saint Paul at the outset of nearly every section, Bugbee proceeds in the spirit of Thoreau by showing that the terms which express our faith and piety are bound to be indefinite, even as they register the reality of the values that we have experienced. Moreover, the knowledge brought to us in such experiences must be affectively felt. Quoting in a footnote his mentor Warner Fite, Bugbee agrees that "thought without emotion is mere words" (206). It is no surprise, based upon this student work, that Bugbee will later begin to write philosophy in a concrete, meditative idiom, moving beyond the limits of a standard, abstract expository method.

As Wilderness in America demonstrates, in graduate school and beyond Bugbee strove to articulate the implications of an insight that is fundamentally Aristotelian: namely, that just as the purpose of one's entire life does not lie outside that life itself, to live meaningfully is to engage in activities that are worth doing for their own sake. Thus, if our mode of transportation means "far more than getting from here to there," and we enjoy the process of walking, driving, or the like, then such a practical enterprise may afford us nothing less than an "opportunity for a growing realization of the significance of existence" (46–47). Furthermore, life as a whole ought to exhibit teleological finality: it is "destinate," as Bugbee likes to say (see, e.g., 102, 112). His philosophical vision includes a sense that what transpires in temporality reverberates in the widest scheme of things. In other words, Bugbee attests that "what may come to be and pass away" has an "eternal meaning" (69), which the appreciative perceiver should recognize. Theoretically, how does he flesh out this intuition? Wild nature both within us and in our surroundings appears to carry a sort of moral authority: it makes a claim upon our lives (111). To answer this claim is to be receptive to the promptings of conscience and also toward the beauty of the natural world. What we must endeavor to cultivate, therefore, is a...