The Wilderness of Henry Bugbee

Conway, Daniel W.
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 17, Number 4, 2003, pp. 259-269 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/jsp.2003.0051

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J SP III

The Wilderness of Henry Bugbee

DANIEL W. CONWAY Pennsylvania State University

With whatever knowledge we truly stand forth, we stand forth beyond the frontier of knowledge, beyond, indeed, where we have been. Only so do we find out where we have always been, in all creation, a true wilderness. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning It seems to me that every time I am born, the wilderness is born anew; and every time I am born it seems to me that then, if ever, I could be content to die. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning

The concept of wilderness bears an unusual share of the philosophical burden assumed by Henry Bugbee in The Inward Morning. This ambitious book in fact trades on two senses of wilderness, which, though certainly related, are by no means identical. On the one hand, Bugbee regularly appeals to a sense of wilderness that resonates familiarly with popular appreciations of the North American Western frontier. Readers are likely to find themselves very much at home in the wilderness settings he so eloquently describes and in the yearnings for spiritual communion they evoke. On the other hand, Bugbee also trades on a sense of wilderness that bespeaks a distinctly Eastern provenance and sensibility. This sense of wilderness discloses reality as a depthless mystery, which calls to us and conveys the unresolved fluency of our existence. This latter sense of wilderness is likely to strike many readers as foreign, especially since Bugbee does not exclusively associate it with places and spaces that are typically recognized as wild. As we shall see, in fact, he does not restrict this latter sense of wilderness to any
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2003. Copyright 2003 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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particular characteristics of geographical designation, much less to those that most strongly evoke the former sense of wilderness. The imperfect balance that Bugbee strikes between these two senses of wilderness attests not only to the novelty of his project, but also to the difficulties involved in incorporating certain elements of Eastern spirituality into his phenomenological observations. The interplay between these two senses of wilderness is occasionally conflicted, even dissonant, and thus accounts in part for the uneven rhythm of Bugbees philosophical explorations. Our reception of The Inward Morning consequently depends to a great extent on our capacity (or willingness) to appreciate wilderness in the two, not-yet-fully-integrated senses that he employs. As sympathetic readers, in fact, we may inherit from Bugbee the tasks of advancing the synthesis of these two senses of wilderness and negotiating the competing demands they place upon us.

I Throughout The Inward Morning, Bugbee appeals to an extremely familiar sense of wilderness. In many of his journal entries, he either states or implies that wild nature comprises those uncultivated places and spaces wherein human beings have not yet obviously attempted to alter the cycles of nature to suit their own purposes. Some of Bugbees favorite images of wild nature rely, predictably, on the stark backdrop of the Western frontier of North America. One could easily conclude from his reflections that he was most at home while exploring remote mountains, fishing obscure lakes and streams, and generally seeking isolation (and freedom) from the usual markers of human cultivation. In a passage that could have been commissioned by the Canadian Travel Bureau, he recalls,
It was in the fall of 41, October and November, while late autumn prevailed throughout the northern Canadian Rockies, restoring everything in that vast region to a native wildness. Some part of each day or night, for forty days, flurries of snow were flying. The aspens and larches took on a yellow so vivid, so pure, so trembling in the air, as to fairly cry out that they were as they were, limitlessly. And it was there in attending to this wilderness, with unremitting alertness and attentiveness, yes, even as I slept, that I knew myself to have been instructed for life, though I was at a loss to say what instruction I had received.1

Like Thoreau, Bugbee regularly invokes the engulfing vastness of the North American West to remind us of the deep spiritual longings that technology, progress, and material comforts have consistently failed to satisfy.2 Again like

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Thoreau, Bugbee presents this Western frontier as a promising site of connection to, or communion with, a numinous spirituality.3 In appealing to this familiar sense of wild nature, Bugbee happily aligns himself with those environmental hyperopes who champion a macroscopic, or picture-postcard, view of wilderness. This is the wilderness that is faithfully represented by towering spires, snow-capped peaks, breathtaking expanses, blazing sunsets, noble predators, and pristine potable waters. It is the view of wilderness that has enthused preservationists and conservationists alike, inspired the Sierra Club coffee-table book series, and lured tree-huggers and RV-enthusiasts into the woodsoften in uncomfortable proximity to one another. And this is also the view of wilderness that advertisers continually feed to house-, beltway-, and pavement-bound urbanites in the sclerotic metropolitan centers of the Eastern United States. This is not to say, of course, that Bugbee is unappreciative of less conspicuous manifestations of wild nature. For reasons that will soon become clearer, his taste in wilderness ran surprisingly catholic. In addition to his devotion to the rugged, mountainous regions of the North American West, he also displays a childlike fascination with the useless, forgotten, and ordinary bits of wild nature. This is the microscopic view of wilderness that is represented by destitute swamps, ruined sand farms, stubborn weeds, harmless microfauna, and unendangered species. Here Bugbee pledges his allegiance to the awe-deflating places celebrated by those environmental myopes who revel in the commonplace wonders of wild nature. He vividly describes his memories of swamping, a schoolboy pastime that involved tramping about the nearby swamps in late winter, aimlessly smashing the ice and plumbing the murky depths of the pooled water. Framed by gray skies and brisk winds, the scene whispered of death and desolation. It was not particularly pleasant, Bugbee recalls. But, he continues, there was no mistake about the gladness of being in the swamp or the immanence of the wilderness there.4 In fact, it turns out, Bugbee was able to partake of wilderness almost everywhere he traveled. He equally appreciated the macroscopic wonders revered by environmental hyperopes and the microscopic miracles treasured by environmental myopes. He found wilderness while rowing, while standing watch in the South Pacific, while angling for trout, while stranded in a snowstorm, and while saving a drowning stranger. One suspects that he also found wilderness in the approach and arrival of his own death. Bugbees catholic taste in wild things reflects his unique, and occasionally unwieldy, understanding of wilderness. While he is obviously drawn to places and spaces that anyone might regard as wild, he also believes that we can access wilderness from virtually any set of geographical coordinates, including those hyperurbanized places that some environmental purists have left for dead. According to Bugbee, that is, wilderness need not be understood to exist only in

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opposition to (or exclusion from) sites of cultivation and civilization. In fact, some of his most instructive transactions with wilderness take place in sites characterized by serial cultivation. Bugbee is aware, of course, that sites like these are not usually recognized as wild. (How many other rowers discovered wilderness in the rhythmic strokes they applied to the glassy surface of the water?) This lack of popular consensus points not only to the uniqueness of Bugbees experience, but also to the limitations of our familiar sense of wilderness. It has become customary, I believe, to conceive of wild nature as immediately and unmistakably recognizable as such. It is no coincidence, I further believe, that this familiar sense of wilderness ignites intense, quasi-religious experiences of personal limitation and insignificance. If wilderness typically presents itself as a brute, irresistible force, then how can we possible ignore it or refuse its intensity? While intuitively appealing for any number of reasons, this sense of wilderness is also extremely narrow and artificial. By definition and intent, it excludes from the domain of wilderness most of the places and spaces that most of us will ever inhabit. This familiar understanding of wilderness thus depicts wild nature as necessarily residing at a distanceboth spatial and conceptualfrom most of us. From Bugbees perspective, the main problem with this conception of wilderness is that it that it encourages the conviction that we can (and therefore should) do nothing to prepare ourselves to behold wild nature. If wilderness is understood as an overwhelming, irresistible force, then the only contribution required of us is to place ourselves in its proximity. Once there, we expect wilderness to perform in its entirety the labor of captivation that will make possible our transient experience of communion with it. Such is its native power, we commonly presume, that we expect wilderness to engulf us simply and completely, regardless of our current mood, temperament, or state of mind. As Bugbee sees it, however, simply presenting oneself for assimilation by an engulfing intensity only reinforces the limitations of our familiar sense of wilderness. Seekers of genuine communion with nature must actually transact with their surroundings. In particular, he explains, they must endeavor to immerse themselves in the reality of the settings they occupy:
I think of immersion as a mode of living in the present with complete absorption; one has the sense of being comprehended and sustained in a universal situation. The absorption is not a matter of shrunken or congealed attention, not a narrowing down or an exclusion. One is himself absorbed into a situation, or by it, and the present which is lived in does not seem accurately conceivable as a discrete moment in a series. The present in question seems to expand itself extensively into temporal and spatial distances.5

As this passage implies, the communion Bugbee seeks (and recommends) with nature promises to deliver far more than what the typical experience of wilder-

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ness involves. As he explains, in fact, the discipline of immersion enables us to penetrate to the very nature of reality itself:
Our experience of the world involves us in a mystery which can be intelligible to us only as a mystery. The more we experience things in depth, the more we participate in a mystery intelligible to us only as such; and the more we understand our world to be an unknown world. Our true home is wilderness, even the world of every day.6

Here it becomes clear that the task of philosophy is not to fashion a home for us in a hostile or indifferent world, but to immerse us in the reality of the place that sustains us. In so immersing ourselves, we actually return to our original homein wilderness.

II Bugbees account of immersion appeals to the second sense of wilderness that informs The Inward Morning. This second sense of wilderness is far less familiar, and far less typical, than the first, and the relationship between them is not immediately apparent. It is not at first clear, in fact, why the second sense he wishes to invoke even merits the designation of wilderness. Why does he not avoid confusion and find another name for it? This second sense of wilderness furthermore reflects the influence on his thinking of various traditions of Eastern spirituality, most notably Taoism and Zen Buddhism.7 What Bugbee apparently wishes to convey here is that reality itself is best described as a depthless mystery that we can never hope to fathom. Reality is wild in that it altogether lacks the structure, order, design, and purpose that would enable us to come to know it. This second sense of wilderness thus intimates a reality that is formless, nameless, and potentially indistinguishable from nothingness. What we customarily take to be real is in fact nothing more than an artificial superstructure of prejudice and supposition, which, through overlapping processes of habituation, have become fixed in our experience. We have come to know our world, that is, only on the basis of unsupported generalizations, convenient simplifications, and outright falsifications. Bugbee thus presents this second sense of wilderness as place- and spaceindependent. If, as he suggests, we may immerse ourselves in the reality of any place, then we may enter (or re-enter) wilderness from virtually anywhere. This means that we maintain access to wilderness in the second sense even when we are unable to place ourselves in proximity to wilderness in the first sense. Rather than rely on wilderness in the first sense to engulf us in the irresistible sweep of its intensity, we may create wilderness in the second sense wherever we might happen to be.

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According to Bugbee, this second way of understanding wilderness corresponds to the wilderness of things appearing just as they are8not as isolable, discrete objects, but as interconnected moments and currents within a shifting field of existence. He thus writes,
But instead of things being fixed points of reference from which and to which attention proceeds in a succession of steps and stops, there is no stopping, precisely because each and every thing is a consummation of fluency. And our minds, in the Zen manner of speaking, are gourds dancing on the waves, resilient, flexible, swift and apt. There is this bathing in fluent reality which resolves mental fixations and suggests that our manner of taking things has been staggeringly a matter of habituation.9

As this passage confirms, the goal of immersion is to dissolve the fixed points and acquired habits of our everyday experience, thereby delivering us to the wilderness of an undetermined, unbounded reality. This is not to suggest, however, that the decision to immerse oneself in any particular place need be arbitrary. All places and spaces hold the power to claim our deepest allegiances, but only a very few actually ever do so. Although Bugbee believes that wilderness is potentially accessible from any set of geographical coordinates, his most memorable experiences of wilderness are catalyzed by his immersion in places that virtually anyone would recognize as wild. In particular, as we have seen, he tends to record his immersion in familiar wilderness settings located throughout the North American West. These are the places that claimed him most profoundly, and to which he felt summoned to return. In fact, he expressly links the second sense of wilderness to the condition of having been claimed: Wilderness is reality experienced as call and explained in responding to it absolutely.10 By characterizing the experience of wilderness as call, Bugbee softens somewhat the brute mystery of our existence. Although we are always at sea in the fluency of reality, we may also find a home in wilderness if we respond absolutely to its call. The potential dangers involved in doing so are mitigated by the countervailing appeal of homecoming. By actively transacting with wild nature (as opposed simply to yielding or surrendering to it), we may recover our native wildness. To be sure, responding absolutely to the call of wilderness will exact a heavy toll. We will experience the recession of our autarkic individuality, the dissipation of our causal efficacy, and the blurring of the familiar boundaries of personal identity. We will exchange our hard-won certainties for the non-negotiable ambiguity of an unfathomable mystery. We will surrender the precious ego-consciousness of Western spirituality and take on the fluid, intersubjective consciousness that is emblematic of many forms of Eastern spirituality. Wild nature will appear to us not so much as the sheltering womb presented by Emerson and

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Thoreau, but as an unbounded sea, the aimless currents of which we must somehow learn to follow. As we immerse ourselves in this sea, its unpredictable movements will gradually become our own, such that we may temporarily misplace any differences separating ourselves from the swells that buoy us. To advance Bugbees own borrowed image, we might picture our minds not merely as gourds dancing on the waves, but as actually indistinguishable from the waves themselves.

III These two senses of wilderness are neither identical nor entirely unrelated. Wilderness enthusiasts regularly report being drawn to particular settings, even if they tend not to respond absolutely to the calls they receive. Indeed, it is not particularly difficult to imagine, or even to anticipate, the convergence of these two senses in a dialogical relationship with wilderness. As we will see in the final section of this essay, Bugbees goal is to prepare us to take up our disowned partnership with wild nature. It is no coincidence that so many of Bugbees favorite images of wild nature include depictions of unimpeded flows of water: heaving seas, rushing rivers, mortal rapids, babbling brooks, and sedulous streams. It was in proximity to wild water, in fact, that he was most likely to confront reality point-blank, as he puts it.11 But one need not share Bugbees affinity for moving waters to appreciate the relationship he detects, and the connection he hopes to cement, between the two senses of wilderness that inform The Inward Morning. Although his attraction to moving waters is irreducibly personal, it is neither entirely accidental nor exclusively subjective. These untamed surface flows provide him with tangible reminders of the underlying fluency of reality itself. Much as Thoreau claimed that we are drawn westward by the subtle magnetism in Nature,12 so Bugbee observed that many of us are naturally drawn to wild flows of water. They are markers of our fluent reality. Bugbees attraction to moving waters thus suggests that these two senses of wilderness are intimately related. He apparently believes, in fact, that our more familiar sense of wilderness can serve as a prelude or introduction to the less familiar sense of wilderness as call. As his affinity for moving waters indicates, our familiar understanding of wilderness not only reminds us of the fluent reality of our existence but also invites us to immerse ourselves in it. It is here that East most obviously meets West in Bugbees philosophical explorations. He apparently wishes to connect our familiar, occidental sense of wilderness with an Eastern sensibility, which, he believes, might free us from mental fixation and the prejudice of habit. This Eastern sensibility, pertaining to the fluent reality of our existence, finds its most promising home in close asso-

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ciation with our more familiar sense of wildernesshence his use of the term wilderness to describe both senses. We should not be surprised, then, that his own most successful attempts at immersion take place in familiar wilderness areas. If his own experience is representative, then such areas may provide us with our most promising points of entry into the Eastern sensibility he hopes to cultivate. Whereas the spiritually evolved practitioner of Taoism or Zen Buddhism may be able to attain a heightened state of consciousness from any place and at any time, we may require the staging afforded us by the grand expanse of the North American West. In availing himself of this staging, Bugbee thus promotes a convergence of the two senses of wilderness that inform his philosophical explorations. If this is what Bugbee is up to, then his project is as audacious as it is original. We North Americans, who have long sought to experienceand to voice a primal sense of connection to something older, grander, and holier than ourselves, might immerse ourselves more completely in the mystical spirituality that emanates from our wilderness. Rather than continue to take our bearings from other cultures and traditions, we may someday look instead to wilderness, especially the wilderness of the Western frontier. If Bugbees project is successful, moreover, then wilderness may yet serve as the mystical, unifying core of a spiritual tradition that successfully blends the process-sensibility of Eastern religions with the object-sensibility of Western science and ontology. To put the point bluntly: Wilderness may yet become our Tao, our nameless unifying principle and unquenchable source of mystery and wonder.13 In this light, The Inward Morning is perhaps best appreciated as an experiment in spiritual husbandry. In particular, Bugbee wishes to graft an Eastern sensibility onto a more familiar, Western experience of wilderness. The aim of this experiment is to nurture the rooting and growth of this exotic transplant, so that it might eventually alter the spiritual landscape of Western (and particularly North American) philosophy. The new, nourishing fruit that he hopes to coax from his experimental hybrid must emerge from a plant that is also recognizably Western. If successful in this endeavor, he might hope that his exotic transplants will someday grow as tall and broad as a California redwood, as hearty and resilient as the aspens that sway in the snow-swept Rockies.

IV Bugbee returned to the theme of wilderness in his 1974 essay, Wilderness in America. In this essay, he endeavors to communicate the results of his attempt to ponder anew the potential significance [wilderness] might yet hold within the shaping of our destiny as a people.14 Rejecting the standard (i.e., utilitarian) arguments for the protection of designated wilderness areas, he instead pro-

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motes an appreciation of wilderness prior to any consideration of its potential uses. He thus explains:
In wilderness the partnership of man and nature dawns on our surmiseprior to all undertaking and use to which nature may lend. The partnership seems to be a dialogic affair, in which we are charged with responsibility in the way things come to mean, having been placed in that way. Even as the things of the place command attention in the presencing of the world they are discovered to us from within the depth of responsiveness in confirmation of our mutuality with them.15

Bugbee thus recommends wilderness as the transactional setting in which we might reevaluate the most basic principles and commitments that guide our communal endeavors. In dialogue with wilderness, he proposes, we may actually determine the true breadth of our responsibilities to nature. By attending in particular to the terms of our disowned partnership with nature, we might learn to attend more intimately to ourselves and to one another. For his own, very different reasons, then, Bugbee agrees with Thoreau that our salvation lies in wilderness.16 As he explains,
True solitude is as a wellspring of communal life; its return affords measure of what has become of communal life, perhaps most closely in the dissipation of ones own resolutions, the forgetting of ones whence and whitherto. For wilderness puts our standard of living to the test. What can stand to the mutuality of man and nature can be affirmed in the relations between men.... And without respect for nature man cannot stand, not even in the mutual regard of men.17

What we stand to gain from a partnership with nature is precisely what we supposedly have been seeking all along: a nonsubjective, immanent standard of a sustainable way of life. The test to which we might put our standard of living is that of wilderness itself, to which Bugbee assigns an ethical priority. Wilderness commands this priority insofar as it supports the solitude that Bugbee identifies (and recommends) as a wellspring of communal life. Periodic returns to solitude would enable us to accept our partnership with wild nature, which would in turn furnish us with a model for our relationships with other human beings. Bugbee thus implies that sustainable human communities are possible only as outgrowths of an antecedent partnership with wild nature. Before we can attend meaningfully to the preservation of wilderness, that is, we must enter into dialogue with it. Hence the irony of our current estrangement from wild nature: We have set aside designated wilderness areas so that we or our descendants will be in a position to enjoy (or otherwise dispose of) them, provided that we or they ever determine how to enjoy these areas without also destroying them. According to

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Bugbee, however, our most promising opportunity to arrive at this determination actually lies in an ongoing dialogue with wild nature. In protecting these wilderness areas, we thus prevent ourselves from evaluating our standard of living, which in turn limits our capacity to protect anyone or anything. If Bugbee is right, then our well-intentioned reliance on political legislation has actually thwarted our efforts to foster ecological awareness. The true solitude he recommends as a measure of our existence may be impossible to achieve in a protected wilderness area. In such a setting, how likely is it that we will hear the call of the wild, much less respond to it? And if we hear no call, then we are likely to persist in our self-serving belief that a partnership with wild nature is either impossible or frivolous. In this light, it would appear that our efforts to protect designated wilderness areas have more to do with our own needs for self-protection. In setting aside these areas for future disposition, we postpone the fateful moment of selfreckoning that a partnership with wild nature would require of us. Although Bugbee does not say so, I believe he would agree that we can trace our current environmental crisis in large part to our abiding wish not to hear (and, so, not to heed) the call of wilderness. For whatever reasons, we continue to recoil from the dependency and vulnerability that are implied by a genuine partnership with nature. We continue to suspect that the sacrifice required of such a partnership will prove to be debilitating, even fatal, to us. We thereby deny ourselves the inward morning that might otherwise herald the dawning of a genuine partnership with wild nature.18 Notes
1. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 140. 2. Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 609. 3. Thoreau, Walking, 613. 4. Bubgee, The Inward Morning, 43. 5. Ibid., 5152. 6. Ibid., 76. 7. Feenberg, Rothenberg, and Strong all document the influence on Bugbee of the Zen Buddhism of D. T. Suzuki. 8. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 106. 9. Ibid., 52. 10. Ibid., 128. For an examination of Bugbees account of the call, see Daniel Conway, Answering the Call of the Wild, 915. 11. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 172 12. Thoreau, Walking, 607. 13. In a back cover blurb to the 1999 edition of The Inward Morning, Huston Smith hails it as the most Taoist Western book he knows, Thoreaus Walden not excepted. Smiths decision to place the adjective Taoist in quotes strikes me as a timely admonition that no Western book should be considered authentically Taoist, either in provenance or inspiration. 14. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 614. 15. Ibid., 619, italics added. 16. Thoreau, Walking, 613. 17. Bugbee, Wilderness in America, 620.

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18. This essay was originally prepared for the 2000 meetings of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. I am grateful to my fellow panelistsDoug Anderson, Ed Mooney, and Bruce Wilshirefor sharing their enthusiasm for the thought and life of Henry Bugbee. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

Works Cited
Bugbee, Henry. 1974. Wilderness in America. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (4): 61420. . 1999. The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Conway, Daniel. 1999. Answering the Call of the Wild: Walking with Bugbee and Thoreau. In Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbees Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney, foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre. Athens: U of Georgia P. 317. Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Zen Existentialism: Bugbees Japanese Influence. In Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbees Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney, foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre. Athens: U of Georgia P. 8191. Rothenberg, David. 1999. Melt the Snowflake at Once! Toward a History of Wonder. In Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbees Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney, foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre. Athens: U of Georgia P. 1831. Strong, David. 1999. The Inward Wild. In Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbees Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney, foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre. Athens: U of Georgia P. 92112. Thoreau, Henry David. 1950.Walking. In Walden and Other Writing of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 597632.