Henry Bugbee’s First Thesis:
In Demonstration of the Spirit
Ed Mooney
It’s
nice to be here with folks who love the Inward
Morning and know it inside out. For
those of you who may not know, some time after Henry’s death Ray Lanfear drove
boxes of Bugbee papers down to me in
I.
Henry’s
is an experiential philosophy, inclined toward wilderness – or more
technically, toward the sublime. The sublime was a major theme in his PhD
Dissertation, disguised under the forbidding rubric, “Being.” The full title of his ’47 Berkeley
Dissertation is “The Sense and the Conception of Being.”
It
was considered a Dissertation not in metaphysics but in Aesthetics. The primacy the title gives to the sense of being telegraphs his wish, so
evident in The Inward Morning, to
give experiential readings to the technical terms of metaphysics: terms like
“universal,” but also “simplicity,” “existence,” “substance” and “the
given.”
From
the title of his Dissertation we can also quicken to the thought that the sense
of being will be delivered through something like an aesthetic sensibility, and
hence that the world – perhaps Being itself – will be disclosed, not
scientifically or morally, but in a fashion, aesthetically. The beings of Being will be the luminous
destinate things of Inward Morning. In the beginning origins give forth works of
art. These works will not show on the domesticated scale of the beautiful, but
on the wilder scale of the sublime, that wild terrain where things evoke yet
repel our attempts at representation or recounting.
Much
of this can be heard faintly in his ‘36 Senior Honors Thesis titled “In
Demonstration of the Spirit.” Despite this title, Henry’s is not a philosophy
of demonstration but of reflective clarification, elucidation rather than
explanation. Nowhere is this clearer
than in his claim that an idea can be explained in taking steps – as if walking
it through the watersheds would clarify it in a way no formal blackboard explanation
could. The clarification of wilderness
occurs on foot because it is in moving by foot that one is immersed in
wilderness, in what calls to be undergone, and to be clarified, not in a
classroom, but in its undergoing.
Similarly, the clarification of the sublime occurs as we are immersed,
as Kant puts it, in its bitter-sweet encounter, pushed to tell of it, yet
strangely silenced.
Reflective
clarification means telling the stories that bring wilderness and walking in it
alive to our imaginations; it means painting scenery and action that bring the
sublime and its over-takings of us alive to our imaginations. The wisdom Henry
does not speak is the debris of
wisdom as it’s pounded into lifeless doctrine.
The wisdom Henry speaks is the
bringing-alive of worlds, large and small, to which we can be silently, aptly,
intimately attuned. The attunement is
carried in the lyric wisdom of his stories as much as in the lyric voice of
their correlative worlds.
II.
Clarification
of Henry’s world and of his attunement to it is, he tells us, the clarification
of his life’s central theme. So his
experiential philosophy delivers wilderness, and the sublime, and also his life
– each clarified in terms of the others.
As we share that life, and feel its allure, we also share that
wilderness and its allure; and share the lyric prose that brings both to
us.
Wilderness
is the wilderness of streams and stars and seas; it’s also the sublime, calling
for yet resisting representation and recounting; and it’s also the wonder of
creation merging toward religious awe and gratitude. A frank encounter with
wilderness is simultaneously an aesthetic and religious encounter with
sublimity and creation. It’s only in
analysis that these aspects can be pulled apart and made distinct.
Experientially one aspect will merge seamless with another. Illuminating wilderness is walking through it
and undergoing reverence before wilderness-creation and awakening in the impact
of sublime-creation, each aspect voicing majesty or awe or terror, voicing its
presence in particulars, and voicing its ongoing, unfolding ephemerality.
The
religious theme of wilderness as creation and the aesthetic theme of wilderness
as sublime converge in a moral theme, where the moral denotes a response to the
broad question how I should live.
What
does a life look like, properly attuned to wilderness, to a sublime, and to
creation? One thing is sure. It’s not a self that’s glued to the allure of
fame, riches, or power; to too much safety or consumer self-accessorizing.
There’s a social critique in Inward
Morning, as well as celebration of communal solidarity, conveyed in those
stories of life at sea. There’s a story
of the self, as well – call it the moral or spiritual self, that unfolds in
wilderness. The story of self, a story
of spirit – as that which enfolds and informs us – is what
this
story of spirit is memorably evident in The
Inward Morning as self-less attention and compassion. I’ll return to that,
after filling in some gaps in our story of the sublime.
III.
The
idea of the sublime enters 18th Century philosophy with the
discovery of a first century essay by Longinus, and more to our interest here,
with the reality of travel and travel journals, accounts of journeys in which
the things uncanny yet familiar were recorded in notebooks and passed on to a
fascinated public. Sometimes it was
strange and alluring landscapes, sometimes it was a foreign ways of life. In these travel tales were mixtures of wonder
and repulsion, fear but also delight in seeing, taking note.
Late
in the century, Kant will speak of the impact of the sublime, the impact of
awesome power or size, a dynamic sublime and a mathematically infinite
sublime. The experiencial impact is both
to shrink and to encourage the self.
Awesome power or extent – a storm at sea viewed from the safety of a
beach – diminishes the self, humbling it.
At the same time it conjures what the fury of the storm cannot destroy
-- human spirit, a spirit that transcends the vulnerability of the body to
physical destruction.
Kant
identifies this awakened spirit with a person’s sudden awareness of living in
the space of the moral law, in tune with transcendental ideals of God, Freedom,
and Immortality. I think Henry has
thought long and hard on Kant’s Third
Critique discussion of the sublime and its aesthetic-religious import. In
the pages of The Inward Morning,
spirit is awakened at the sight of geese against the infinite sky, in the fall
of snow against a timeless presence of trees, in the terrifying fall of a plane
toward a fragile sea-bound ship, in the leap of a trout toward an inviting
fly. These are moments of vision, moments
of the Biblical “twinking of an eye” when “all shall be changed,” moments when
one both loses oneself and awakens reborn in a setting of ongoing wondrous and
sometimes terrible creation.
Henry
confesses at the start of Inward Morning
that death has been his companion in these tales of awakening. Kierkegaard confesses to a lively dance with
death. Kant suggests it’s precisely
awareness of how easily we could be crushed by massive overhanging rocks that
prompts spirit to affirm that it is more than what can be so easily destroyed.
For Henry, this awakening in the presence of death is not an awakening to moral
law but awakening to spirit articulated in the particulars of creation, not
least, the spirit in particular persons close at hand.
The
spirit that transcends physical destruction and its terror is found in the
intensity of Chief Johnson spiting fire at a descending plane; in Bugbee’s
thought that he and the pilot might have switched positions, placing each in a
space beyond ally and enemy; in the pure gaze returned from the man just barely
swung from sure destruction in the rapids.
In these instances of awakened spirit one is revealed as one was before
birth, in Meister Eckhart’s terms. In
that moment one is mortal flesh but not mortal flesh alone.
These
moments awaken Bugbee to spirit as the spirit of an embodied other, the purity,
gentleness, and fragility of the other who calls on our compassion. Awakening
to spirit is not awakening to moral law but to a generosity of spirit, a
willingness to walk with others in this world, an awakening toward prayer and
thanksgiving that acknowledges a dimension of this world we all too readily
allow to slip away. There is
transcendence here, not to a non-natural Kantian world of freedom, immortality,
and God, but a transcendence into immanence, transcendence from night into a
day, transcendence of an unawakened
self into an inward morning. Transcendence, in Henry’s case, brings us not out
of the world, but back into it -- renewed, alert, alive.
Awakening
is trembling animation. A wish to sustain this aliveness of the moment keeps us
present to awe, even if the admixture is of terror. The onset of a moment of the sublime gives
two messages. One is that the world we witness
is beyond our control and comprehension and hence a threat – ultimately, a
threat of death. The other is that the
threatening world addressing us wakes us up to something beyond fear or threat,
a liveliness equal to or greater than the sense of fearfulness or threat. Put the two together, and we have something
like Kierkegaard’s lively dance with death. If we were unreceptive to this
imparted animation, just gazing impassively at threat, or if we just took
flight toward safety, it could not be said that it was the sublime that we were present to.
Henry
describes an awe-filled mountain prospect – a raw romantic trope -- in his PhD
Dissertation. He calls the alpine scene
of grandeur -- rising peaks, crumbled talus slopes -- an experience of Being.
This is a predecessor to those familiar stories of instruction in the Canadian
Rockies, or in nights at sea, or being carried past fear by Chief Johnson,
whose bearded steadfastness at his gunner’s post was as awesomely animating as
the descending plane was awesomely terrifying.
Sometimes
a Henry scene might seem too small in scale to be an instance of the
sublime. But then, perhaps his
evocations -- a leaping trout, landscape coming up and passing by on the road
to Mexico -- work precisely to expand the reach of the sublime, allowing it to resonate
in relatively small events that may nevertheless carry infinite significance.
Towering redwoods or the singing of an unseen bird can replace the more
familiar tropes of infinite skies or towering peaks.
The
sublime in wilderness seems to invoke an aesthetic theme that allows a relatively
simple link between Henry’s work and a traditional philosophical topic. We hold Kant’s Third Critique in one hand, and Inward
Morning in the other, and see how far we get. And creation as wilderness seems to invoke a
religious theme, giving access to the problematics of its domain. But there’s a third central theme in Inward Morning that seems absent in
discussions of creation or in Kant’s discussion of the sublime. That’s the
notion that we’re called by peaks or
streams – the notion that no creature or thing in creation lacks voice. Each can speak and teach, in some uncanny
way, guide the attunement and comportment of a life. This third theme opens on the question we
momentarily set aside, the question of the moral, spiritual self.
In
moments of awakening before majestic peaks we might picture Kant as hearing the
voice of the Majestic Moral Law. We’d picture Henry, similarly placed,
listening for the voice of this
Larch, this stretch of moving water,
attending to this face on the
mill-run bank, this face in an
on-rushing fighter plane. Spirit is
embodied in particulars of this ordinary-extraordinary world, not lofted up
above the clouds. Spirit speaks in
particular address: this falling snow
instructs, this moving water, this death-bound pilot teaches, as do
the bells calling from the quad. Things
of creation are joined, voiced in mutual address. And Henry’s voice and listening presence is
part of that communion.
IV.
There’s
much more to say about how sublimity and creation inter-animate a wilderness;
the sketch has been brief. I set out now
to focus on the person immersed in
wilderness. I don’t mean Henry narrowly,
but the sort of life and spirit he exemplifies through the writing in and of The Inward
Morning. If there’s a moral theme
that complements the aesthetic and the religious, it’s a species of what
Henry’s Harvard student Stanley Cavell calls moral perfectionism. As you may know, Cavell has written on King
Lear – a Henry favorite – and at length on Thoreau and Emerson. The moral vision Cavell derives from Emerson
and Thoreau is one I think that Henry would find friendly, though it’s barely
implied in the words of Inward Morning.
Here
are five overlapping and mutually reinforcing themes of moral perfectionism, as
Cavell has it:
1.
In a place of threat or crisis, an
opening for renewing vision appears [as
Henry might say, that place is wilderness, and the vision speaks vocation]
2.
Then we find the self beside itself in
ectasis, in enchantment and transfiguration [as Henry might say, we’re gripped
in wonder and astonishment and fit to be reborn]
3.
The self finds itself answering what
bears decisively on its achieving itself
4.
The self transparently confronts and
answers to an exemplar, or the radiant, lively things of an exemplary world [as
Henry might say, both persons and particulars of creation can speak or call --
and invite answer]
5.
The gift of such call and instruction
is guidance through the passions and the struggles of this unfolding of the
spirit.
We’ve
mentioned the things of the place that might give vocational address – moving
waters, the song of an unseen bird – but the presence of exemplary persons
might seem less obvious in Inward Morning. Yet there are portraits of shipmates to
remember, and the presence of Gabriel Marcel.
There is the ghost of his father as he learns of his father’s death, and
a young man just escaped from death. And
there are the figures whose exemplary presence shimmers in their texts: Eckhart
and Melville and Thoreau lie close at hand.
It is their words but also their worlds and their persons, as they
inhabit both words and worlds, that beckon Henry forth.
As
befits what Cavell calls perfection (as opposed to “realism”), these exemplary
figures and the creation in which they are inter-animating participants, are
always one step ahead, calling Henry forward to be reborn in their exemplary
dawning light.
This
perfectionist moral stance gives no access to a universal justification for a
way of life; but it does illuminate exemplary ways of living and the worlds
these exemplars inhabit. Such paragons
address particular persons, but also invite a wider audience to test the
worthiness they instantiate: to test their staying power through dialogue,
meditation, and continuing exploration.
They invite universal consideration through an intended universal
resonance. We see Henry addressed by
such luminous exemplars, and test the power of that address by its resonance in
our own case: are we called forth in the moment he is?
This
sort of ethics does not lie easily beside the standard academic fare of Kant or
Aristotle. It invokes the mysteries of receiving oneself; of losing oneself to
find oneself; of encountering a call to stand forth; of relating transparently
to others and to the luminous things of creation, intimately at hand yet always
somewhat out of reach. Spiritual mettle is tested as one undergoes and
undertakes the passions these mysteries call out.
V.
The
interweaving themes of creation, the sublime, wilderness, and a call to the
rebirth that Cavell calls perfectionism create a kind of unity to Henry’s work
in Inward Morning. Looking back before its birth, we can see
forecasts in his Dissertation and in his undergraduate Honors Thesis.
I
find it striking that as early as the Honors Thesis we sense the deep
earnestness so familiar in the pages of The
Inward Morning. He confides to his professors that the search undertaken in
its pages is of more than academic interest to him, that he senses a vocational
stake – his life at risk -- in the pages they have before them. That deep earnestness speaks from the
preface, where he addresses his readers intimately, but also from the
bibliography, which shows that this has been no ordinary academic exercise. There he registers a compendious list of
classical recordings from Bach to Schubert to Rachmaninoff that on his account
were as informative for his writing as any of the books he also lists. He
credits as seminal to his thinking the Met’s production of the complete cycle
of Wagner’s Operas, and Beethoven’s Fidelio.
He has attended each performance at least once.
It’s
not immaterial that the infinite power that defies representation in the great
works of Beethoven, say, are paradigms of the sublime. I sense he sensed his words could not compete
in expressive power with the music he so cherished. Writing was never easy.
The
sweep of his concerns in that early thesis is broad, and especially broad, by
undergraduate standards. And he takes
deep soundings. He searches in the
familiar sub-disciplines of philosophy for a source of meaning to inform his
life. Yet he confides from the start
that his writing may stray from what a standard academic philosophical approach
would recommend. There’s a chapter on science and objective accounts of
experience, a chapter on moral outlooks, one on aesthetic orientations, and a
final chapter on the thought of the then still-living Spanish existentialist
Unamuno. Henry ends inspired by the
living thought and thoughtful life of this man who articulates a tragic vision
– yet not devoid of hope. He thinks in the light of this exemplary figure and
we can sense his spirit animated in its light.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Henry characterizes the clash of dignity and
defeat that we witness in tragedy in Kantian terms, and as a clash Kant explicates
in terms of the sublime.
I
find the closing gestures of this undergraduate effort especially moving. That his effort had been religious throughout
had been evident by the thesis title, invoking
The
thesis has that rough, seasoned look that manual typewriters create. Just above
Henry’s longhand signature is a simple closing to his prayer.
“Amen.”