“A Burden Tender and in No Wise Heavy”

“A Burden Tender and in No Wise Heavy”[1]

Michael Palmer

Reading once again certain passages in The Inward Morning in which Henry Bugbee eloquently describes his south Pacific war-time experiences aboard a 137' minesweeper, I am reminded of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s experiences in the French air force during the same period. Describing their situations, both men resort to such unadorned expressions as ‘contingent,’ ‘senseless,’ ‘random.’ Speaking of the way in which in the Pacific theater the United States Navy imposed its inscrutable plans on service personnel, Bugbee poignantly observes, “A motley of backgrounds and personalities went into each crew, a job-lot of men into each ship. These hitherto divergent life streams converging at random, to pour into the ship’s life. None of us exercised much choice in landing aboard a particular ship.” In a similar vein, Saint Exupéry recalls the frightful scene in France during the last days of May, 1940: “When did anyone ever hear, among us, anything else than ‘Very good, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Quite right, sir.’ Throughout the closing days of the French campaign one impression dominated all others – an impression of absurdity.” If Bugbee’s situation was dangerous, at times life-threatening, Saint Exupéry’s (and that of his fellow airmen of the mere fifty reconnaissance crews available for duty in that dark hour) was desperate: “The whole strategy of the French army rested upon our shoulders. An immense forest fire raging, and a hope that it might be put out by the sacrifice of a few glassfuls of water. They would be sacrificed.”^{^[2]}

What impresses me most about Bugbee and Saint Exupéry is not their lucid awareness of the senselessness of their war-time circumstances, but the way in which they reflect on (and bring us to reflect on) how such circumstance might nonetheless yield some measure of sense. In particular, what captures my imagination is the way in which each grapples with the logic of responsibility. Neither man gives much credence to the customary understanding of choice. The usual conceptions of knowledge and control associated with ascriptions of responsibility are not central features of their thinking. And yet for both men – despite how the contingency of their respective situations invited hopelessness and cynicism – responsibility figures importantly in their assessment of what life is about. For example, Saint Exupéry, after returning unharmed from an especially dangerous sortie and while taking supper at the table of a French farmer, speaks movingly of the responsibility he feels for his countrymen. When he arrived at the farmer’s house, the farmer, his wife, and niece were already seated around the table sharing food. Saint Exupéry describes being made to sit down between the girl and her aunt and thinking that here is something besides his flight group that he formed part of.

Behind the silence of these three beings was an inner abundance that was like the patrimony of a whole village asleep in the night – and like it, threatened. Strange, the intensity with which I felt myself responsible for that invisible patrimony. I went out of the house to walk alone on the highway, and I carried with me a burden that seemed to me tender and in no wise heavy, like a child asleep in my arms.^{^[3]}

Responsibility – a burden – tender and in no wise heavy – like a child asleep in my arms. What can be meant by such expressions? How shall we take the measure of them? In an attempt to interpret Saint Exupéry’s portrait of responsibility, we shall make use of certain key concepts explored in The Inward Morning: faith, reverence, and generosity.

Responsibility is a central theme in The Inward Morning. In order to place us on location with respect to Bugbee’s development of the theme, we begin with a review of ‘responsibility’ as the term is customarily used these days.

Moral and legal theorists commonly ascribe responsibility in two related but distinct ways, depending on whether our purpose is to control (produce, modify, prevent) an event or to hold someone accountable for an event. Consider the following statements which exemplify these purposes:

(1) Frozen controls were responsible for the loss of 30% of the French reconnaissance planes in the early days of World War II.^{^[4]}

(2) The sergeant was responsible for the death of the private.

The responsibility ascription in the first statement identifies frozen controls as causing the crashes of a certain percentage of French aircraft early in the war. We can make the same kind of ascription in a concrete statement such as “Frozen controls were responsible for the loss of the reconnaissance plane,” referring here to a specific aircraft. Or we might similarly ascribe responsibility to animate things, as when we say, “The dogs were responsible for spilling the glass of water.” These kinds of responsibility ascriptions, which can be made to things as well as to persons, are commonly referred to as expressions of “causal responsibility.”^{^[5]} When we make them, we are not assessing blame or attempting to hold someone or something accountable. Rather, we are identifying as responsible for something those things which we, the users of the information, will want to modify in order to prevent events unwanted or bring about events wanted by us.

We can ascribe causal responsibility to events (floods, crashes), things (aircraft, trucks), or persons (pilots, guards). When we make such ascriptions, however, we are saying neither that the events, things, or persons are responsible to someone nor that they should be held accountable for what happened. Moreover, since causal responsibility is always ascribed retroactively with respect to something that has already happened, it cannot be assigned or assumed (practices that are ordinarily future-oriented and often carried out in accordance with formal rules or procedures).

The type of responsibility which can be assigned or assumed (and which can be prospective, rather than simply retrospective, in orientation) is customarily called “agent responsibility.”^{^[6]} Unlike causal responsibility which, as we noted, can be ascribed to a wide range of events, things, or persons, only persons are capable of becoming agent-responsible. Moreover, in typical moral and legal contexts, persons can be held agent-responsible only under a limited set of conditions. Kurt Baier succinctly identifies them.

Nobody can have responsibility for some past occurrence ascribed to him unless that occurrence can be attributed to a failure in his responsibility to society, that is, his failure in a task he could have performed and knew he was required to perform; he cannot be held responsible for it except by persons to whom he was responsible for his failure; he can be subjected to corrective measures only if he failed to give a satisfactory answer when held responsible; and there are only certain carefully circumscribed forms of corrective measures to which he may be subjected, for the sake of ensuring that he will not bring about socially unwanted events or prevent socially wanted ones, or for the sake of rectifying states he has already brought about.^{^[7]}

Two related points in Baier’s remarks merit special attention. The first has to do with the notion of task, the second with the notion of being responsible to someone. In morality and law, agent responsibility typically involves at least two persons, one who is responsible for something and another to whom the first is responsible. Often the relationship involves one person performing (or being expected to perform) certain tasks. Task responsibility may arise within the confines of a formal relationship in which specific guidelines prescribe certain kinds of behavior and proscribe other kinds. Employees are task-responsible to their employers as are combat troops to their commanders and professors to their department heads. Within formal institutional contexts, task responsibility is commonly arranged hierarchically so that the supervisor of one or several persons may be task-responsible to another supervisor and so on up the line to the CEO of the corporation, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, or the university board of trustees. Of course, in many moral contexts and some legal contexts, task responsibility need not be spelled out in organizational charts or job descriptions. Sometimes it arises in tacit ways determined by custom and tradition. Children are task-responsible to parents, and marriage partners may be responsible to each other in this way as well. And sometimes task responsibility arises only informally and in accordance with agreements (some of which may be tacit) that grow and change as the relationship evolves. Task responsibilities among friends often develop in this way.

Whether a relationship is or is not a formal one in which roles are overtly defined according to lines of authority and job descriptions, performing one’s task counts as discharging one’s responsibilities as an agent. By contrast, the task-responsible person who fails to discharge a duty is responsible for her or his failure. If the captain is the person task-responsible to the commander for making sure that all members of the flight group receive mission briefings, then if he fails to provide a briefing he must explain why he failed to do so. He is, we say, (answerable-) responsible to the commander for his failure. In order to clear himself, he must offer either a mitigating or exculpating excuse. If the explanation is inculpating, then his failure is culpable, and we will say he is (culpable-) responsible for his failure. The task of holding him responsible for his failure then proceeds to the next step, the taking of appropriate rectifying measures by the person to whom he is responsible: dressing him down, admonishing, reprimanding, warning him, perhaps even punishing him.^{^[8]}

Once we accept the proposition that someone (now regarded as an agent) has entered the realm of responsibility, the preceding account maps some of the basic territory of moral and legal responsibility ascription.[9] But the prior question is: how do we become task-responsible? Is it by reason of holding a particular job with a certain job description? If so, the agent’s task responsibilities extend only to the limit of her or his job description. By implication, if a certain task is not part of the agent’s job description then she or he cannot justifiably be held answerable-responsible for untoward consequences when the task is not completed. In short, on this view, no one can have responsibilities that are not formally assigned.

In the ordinary ebb and flow of social interactions, being assigned responsibility is one way we become task-responsible. Saint Exupéry certainly recognized and accepted this arrangement when, as he tersely notes, “I was posted to Group 2-33 in November 1939.” Being “posted” means being assigned a position and a set of responsibilities in a military setting. It has little to do with choosing from among available options, though it does imply being answerable-responsible. It also evidently has little to do with the kind of responsibility which, in Saint Exupéry’s words, is “a burden that seemed to me tender and in no wise heavy, like a child asleep in my arms.” To take up responsibility in this latter way requires a very different orientation of the self – one that cannot simply be assigned or commanded by another.

Assuming responsibility comes closer to describing the dynamic underlying Saint Exupéry’s remark. One freely picks up the burden. But here, too, we must exercise caution. There are different ways to assume responsibility. Understood in its most generic sense, to assume responsibility for a certain task means nothing more than that one has not been formally assigned that task. One undertakes it voluntarily – that is, one undertakes it with the requisite minimum awareness of what one is doing and with some level of control over one’s bodily actions. In the sense now in question, one assumes responsibility for ordinary, day-to-day tasks, such as the many informal and unspoken things that friends and neighbors regularly undertake for each other. But if responsibilities thus assumed are only occasionally regarded as burdens (to borrow Saint Exupéry’s word) they are also therefore rarely morally weighty.

It becomes intelligible to say that Saint Exupéry assumed responsibility only if we are prepared to consider a deeper and more intense sense of what it means to assume responsibility. For the responsibility he felt toward the farm couple and their niece and the patrimony they symbolized, though not something he in any way resented or wanted to put away, is not precisely and strictly described as something voluntarily accepted. It seems to have devolved on him as a burden in precisely the way that our ordinary conception of assuming responsibility seems to miss.

I looked at the beautiful niece beside me and said to myself, “Bread, in this child, is transmuted into languid grace. It is transmuted into modesty. It is transmuted into gentle silence”. . .

I had made war this day to preserve the glowing light in that lamp . . . for the particular radiation into which bread is transmute in the homes of my countrymen. What moved me so deeply in that pensive little girl was the insubstantial vestment of the spirit. . . .

I was moved. I felt mysteriously present, a soul that belonged in this place and no other. . . . Strange, the intensity with which I felt responsible for that invisible patrimony.^{^[10]}

Clearly, given the gravity and immediacy of the threat to his countrymen and the particular power of the moment, it makes little sense to apply the word ‘assume’ in the same sense that, say, one assumes responsibility for making loan payments on a new automobile or agrees to water plants for a vacationing neighbor.

In the moral sphere, there is a special moment of assuming responsibility that seems akin to the type of responsibility described by Saint Exupéry. The moment I have in mind is one in which we feel ourselves constrained – not by an external authority figure, but by the exigency of the situation. We may not particularly want to perform the task in question and would readily turn it over to someone else. It may be something for which we would not assume responsibility under less urgent conditions. But when no one else knows what to do (or even that something needs to be done) and we do know, and when we are in a position to perform the required action, then we may find ourselves saddled with responsibility. Responses to emergencies, when undertaken by someone not specifically assigned the relevant task responsibilities, are often instances of being saddled with responsibility.

Is Saint Exupéry’s intense experience of acknowledging himself as responsible for an invisible patrimony an instance of being saddled with responsibility? Not precisely. The experiential texture of being saddled with responsibility, when we do experience it, is our sense that the stakes are high (something out of the ordinary confronts us) and we (perhaps we alone) are able to respond. These factors seem consistent with Saint Exupéry’s experience. But there are important differences as well. To be saddled with responsibility suggests something that runs contrary to our first inclination. It suggests internal conflict. When we are saddled with responsibility, we would prefer not to respond, even if in the final analysis we do respond. Saint Exupéry’s feeling of responsibility for the invisible patrimony – the burden that seemed to him tender and in no wise heavy, like a child asleep in his arms – seems cleaner, less fraught with ambivalence, less conflicted than what we see in cases where someone is saddled with responsibility.

In the preceding section, we reached a kind of impasse. None of the three customary notions of agent responsibility examined there adequately explains Saint Exupéry’s portrayal of the responsibility he experienced in the encounter with the farm family. Neither the notion of assigning responsibility nor the usual way of thinking about assuming responsibility adequately accounts for the kind of responsibility portrayed by Saint Exupéry. The experience of being saddled with responsibility bears some experiential affinities with what Saint Exupéry describes. But here, too, both the name (‘saddled’) and the core experience (inner conflict) fall short. What is needed is an account of responsibility which, like the experience of being saddled with responsibility, achieves a level of cognitive and affective intensity consistent with the realization that something is truly at stake in the situation and which culminates in action. But what is also needed is an account of responsibility which, unlike the experience of being saddled with responsibility, explains how the agent can think and speak univocally and act unhesitatingly, decisively, and with integrity. For assistance in clarifying and extending the discussion, I find it useful to turn to Henry Bugbee’s exploration of responsibility in the journal entries of The Inward Morning. Doing so, however, requires that we reach down to a more fundamental ground than we can touch with the customary language of moral and legal responsibility.

For Bugbee, the logic of responsibility exhibits three moments. These moments are not isolated instants or discrete states of being but more like three movements of a symphony: distinct yet integrated and thematically unified. Bugbee sets them forth in a single, succinct sentence. “I confront myself, then, with a movement in thought, at any rate, from faith, into reverence, and into generosity (with its two moments of respect and compassion).” Of his own admission, this movement among three moments, schematized in this way, seems lame. “It invites one to a tidiness from which the experiential weight of these ideas is liable to drain away.”^{^[11]} Perhaps if we attentively attend the movement of the sequence in the journal entries where they are worked out in the context of reflection on experience they will assist us in making sense of Saint Exupéry’s portrait of responsibility.

We begin with faith. The first way to go wrong in attempting to grasp Bugbee’s notion of faith is to take him as referring to anything like “articles of faith,” propositions of belief, or ideological statements. Faith, for him, is less a believing that than it is a believing in, by which he means something like entrusting oneself. In the last analysis, faith is a kind of readiness, wholehearted openness, anticipation. In this respect, faith has a twofold reference. To begin with, it shows itself as “sensitization to intimations of finality in things.”^{^[12]} Quite literally, to sensitize is to become sensitive. Sensitization has to do with learning how to attentively attend things and persons that present themselves in one’s field of attention. Intimations are announcements. To be sensitive to the intimations of things is to notice them, to listen to them, to care for them. Finality is a certain character of things and persons. In their finality things and persons have a way of seeming settled, irrevocable, complete. And as such they carry authority (moral weight?) for those who reckon with them. To put the matter in slightly different terms, to be sensitized to intimations of finality in things and persons is to have prepared oneself to encounter them as presences.

Second, faith appears as a certain posture of the self which, when assumed, transforms the self. The opposite of faith – its denial, so to speak – is self-assertion and presumption. The latter is the mind-set that one retains ultimate control over his own actions and circumstance. The dialectical contrary of this mind-set is the belief that nothing one does matters, since all human initiatives eventually get subverted by other persons (one’s competitors), blunted by the implacable forces of nature, or lost altogether in one’s own death.^{^[13]} By way of contrast, faith is the posture of a person who neither presumes that he is the master of his own life (the autonomous agent) nor acquiesces to the view that he is completely subject to external controls and impositions (the heteronomous victim). For Bugbee, faith is finally an exercise in responsiveness, what Gabriel Marcel calls disponibilité – availability. The transformation of the self that occurs in faith is the transformation from agent to respondent. From the standpoint of responsibility this transformation implies thinking of one’s self as responsive to a call in a way that is not arbitrary.

In the logic of responsibility, faith deepens into reverence. But reverence is a difficult concept. It can connote deferential honor, adoring awe, even amazement, for something or someone. But taken in any of these ways, reverence has the potential to emerge as a kind of aggrandizement of the thing or person. Bugbee intends neither this view of things and persons nor the implied corresponding diminution of the self. If ‘faith’ identifies a posture of readiness, wholehearted openness, anticipation, availability, then ‘reverence’ qualifies the direction, so to speak, of faith. If faith is an exercise in responsiveness, then reverence implicitly identifies what we are to be responsive to: things and persons. The denial of faith is self-assertion and presumption – the aggrandizement of the self. But faith, issuing in reverence, does not thereby warrant aggrandizement of things and persons; it warrants only opening one’s self to them (extending one’s hand to them, so to speak). The reverence that issues from this expression of faith will be the act of receiving or welcoming things and persons. “[R]everence seems to be a matter of accepting their ultimate gifts, and not reverence for them.”^{^[14]}

For Bugbee, the core meaning of reverence is what he calls “understanding-communion.” The understanding element of this reciprocal pair he speaks of in various ways: “understanding of reality supervening upon the decisive act of informed will,” “the flowering of human consciousness,” “a discovery of ‘raison d’ être’ which is no reason at all,” “a funding of intelligibility,” “the fulfillment of a life of reason worthy of the name.” Reverence as understanding-communion seems to be a basic appreciation of the meaning of things and of one’s placement among them. Such an appreciation is the product of contemplation, which itself is a work of solitude. Reverence as understanding-communion speaks of the nature of the interaction one has with things and persons: mutual participation (as distinct from domination), acts of sharing (as distinct from competing for or withholding), and rapport or intimate fellowship (as distinct from strife or indifference).^{^[15]}

Here I find Bugbee and Saint Exupéry in complete accord. The complex nexus of relations in reverence that Bugbee works out in his journal entries and brings under the title of ‘understanding-communion’ is exemplified in Saint Exupéry’s supper scene at the farmer’s house.

Silently my farmer broke the bread and handed it round. Unruffled, austere, the cares of his day had clothed him in dignity. Perhaps for the last time at this table, he shared his bread with us as an act of worship. I sat thinking of the wide fields out of which that substance had come. To-morrow those fields would be invaded by the enemy. . . . To-morrow that wheat will have changed. Wheat is something more than carnal fodder. To nourish man is not the same as to fatten cattle. Bread has more than one meaning. We have learnt to see in bread a means of communion between men, for men break bread together. We have learnt to see in bread the symbol of the dignity of labor, for bread is earned in the sweat of the brow. We have learnt to see in bread the essential vessel of compassion, for it is bread that is distributed to the miserable. There is no savor like that of bread shared between man.^{^[16]}

Saint Exupéry’s treatment here of sharing bread around the farmer’s supper table is no mere description. It is essentially a contemplation on the meaning of things in context and of his participation with them. To paraphrase Bugbee, Saint Exupéry achieves understanding within the context of communion. There, in that place, with those unassuming people, reflecting on the wide wheat fields which are the source of the bread they share together, his will is informed. About what? – The dignity of the farmer, the grace and modesty of the little girl, the meaning of bread shared with others as an expression of compassion and received as a gift symbolizing the dignity of labor. In sum, his will is informed about the invisible patrimony so mysteriously present to him. And it is this patrimony that finally evokes an intense sense of responsibility.

In the logic of responsibility, Bugbee tells us, reverence issues in generosity. The mark of generosity is abundance and ample proportions. The generous person is openhanded, magnanimous, prepared to recognize others and give them their due. If faith and reverence are intimately bound up with contemplation, generosity is their outward expression: concern with or responsiveness to things and persons. Or again, if faith and reverence are works of solitude in which we prepare ourselves to heed a fundamental call, generosity is the way we dwell in the world as respondents to that call.

For Bugbee, generosity expresses itself in two primary ways: respect and compassion.¹⁶ Both are ways of giving particular attention to another. Their place in the logic of responsibility—last in sequence – implies that we must finally respond to others in some specific and concrete way. We see both moments in Saint Exupéry’s description of those gathered at the table. The farmer is unruffled, austere: “. . . the cares of his day had clothed him in dignity.” In his demeanor and presence, the farmer evokes Saint-Exupéry’s respect. The niece, with a child’s limited understanding and an inarticulate but felt grasp of the family’s imminent loss and suffering, evokes his compassion.^{^[17]}

III

We have come full circle. Our earlier criticism of the way in which certain moral theorists speak of assuming responsibility is that it too often seems to be a routine if not casual affair. Assuming responsibility may then appear to be as simple as signing one’s signature on a contract. Or, if the situation is morally complicated and thickly textured, we run the risk of construing responsibility as something with which we are saddled. In this instance, we don’t really want the responsibility but we accept it because we see no other satisfactory resolution. We accept the burden, but we do so, as it were, under protest. Moreover, we keep very much in the forefront of our mind that we will give it up at the first opportunity.

What is evident in Saint Exupéry’s narrative reflection is that many factors converged at the point where he declares his responsibility for “that invisible patrimony.” The convergence of these factors makes his expression of responsibility more an acknowledgment of what he needs to do than a statement identifying an option available to him. Part of our debt to Henry Bugbee is that he helps us understand why this is so. If we conceive of responsibility as unfolding in accordance with the sequence he describes – “from faith, into reverence, and into generosity” – responsibility shows itself as both necessary and freely taken up. It is necessary in the sense that we ourselves are at once unconditionally claimed (“We are laid hold of”) and also cannot realistically imagine abandoning that for which we feel responsible; it is freely taken up in the sense that when we commit ourselves and our resources, we do so without mental reservation. Responsibility so conceived and so experienced is a burden willingly borne – a burden that seems tender and in no wise heavy, like a child asleep in one’s arms.

How our friend and mentor, Henry Bugbee, embodies these ideals! What a debt of gratitude we owe him for teaching us!

[1] This essay first appeared in Edward F. Mooney, ed., Wilderness and the Heart, Henry Bugbee’s Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory, foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 1999), 150-163.

[2]Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form (Bald Eagle Press, 1958, reprint, with a new introduction by Edward R. Mooney, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 179; Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Flight to Arras (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,1942), 3,4.

^{^[4]}In Flight to Arras, Saint Exupéry describes the constant problem he and other French pilots had with aircraft controls freezing while flying at high altitudes. I am only speculating at the actual percentage that crashed their aircraft as a result of losing control due to frozen controls.

^{^[5]}Kurt Baier, “Guilt and Responsibility,” in Individual and Collective Responsibility, ed. Peter French (Cambridge, Mass: Schenkman Publishing, 1972), pp. 47-53.

[9] For a fuller discussion of what it means to enter the realm of responsibility, see, Herbert Morris, On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

^{^[13]}11. “Fate is the way of a man whose assumption of responsibility is an attempt to take charge of his destiny; no matter that he sets about this with right-minded convictions.” (Bugbee, 146).

^{^[15]} Bugbee, 220. Bugbee’s treatment of contemplation in solitude is worked out in detail in “Loneliness, Solitude, and the Twofold Way in Which Concern Seems to Be Claimed,” Humanitas (November 1974).

^{^[17]} Bugbee’s most thorough discussion of respect appears in “The Moment of Obligation in Experience,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. XXXIII, no. 1, January 1953, 1-15. In one particularly notable passage, he says, “In general, respect seems to involve the focus of attention either on that which can inspirit us and call out our aspiration or on that which can offer us the resistance, the mettling condition, or the medium upon which the clarification and embodiment of spirit through action depends. Of course these phases of respect tend to intermingle, as when a man raising a crop may look upon his fields, finding them good, and then move in a vein of unbroken contemplation to meet the demands of a day’s work. Thus the fields call out his love and exact his effort, and each of these phases of his caring for them permeates the other.” Saint Exupéry, 126, 127.