The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form

as advertised

A very deep exploration into Philosophy the majority of which went way over my head. Although I did enjoy some of Bugbee's thoughts, If you have to read this for class...I feel sorry for you.

To read "The Inward Morning" is to witness the emergence of thought. Bugbee explores interwoven themes of an experiential philosophy, that finds its grounding in the concretization of thoughts that emerge from a reflective life. There is a kind of lived certainty, that doesn't acquire its certitude from without, either in logical truths or empirical deliverances, but from an internal deepening. Bugbee considers life, existence, reality as such to be best understood along the lines of wilderness, but not, as it once appeared in the context of American life, as what lies beyond the frontier and invites our exploration and subjugation. In the end we must acknowledge we are adrift in a cosmos for which no final map or plan is apparent or forthcoming; and, yet, we do start somewhere and can find our way about from there, and as we explore we can form bonds with others and establish familiar routes, and make for ourselves a semi-permanent dwelling. We may also gain intimations, in our very awareness of our own impermanence, of that which endures, in relation to which alone we can find orientation.Where we begin is not up to us. We find ourselves situated. With each new step, each new acquisition of skill, each seeming arbitrary selection among alternatives, we open up new possibilities but also close them off, setting for ourselves a specific path and limited horizon. Our fundamental options, Bugbee argues, lie between destiny and fate. We can float along or resist and find that either way we end up somewhere we hadn't wanted to be or at least hadn't chosen; or, we can allow that our situation, who we are and what we have become and what options there are for us, is uniquely our own situation, and the possibilities it affords are our givens, our grace, our potentials. Then action becomes more like creation from a sense of compulsion, or like heeding a call, like the acceptance of who we alone can be, of a kind of destiny, than like either resistance or floating. I'm being vague here, and not because the book is unclear (though I should say it's not always easy to follow Bugbee's thought in transition), but because I do not wish to solidify a set of isolated upshots from a text whose message is in the drift of ideas rather than in the form of a set of theses. Bugbee's journal is well worth studying, and ought to be on the shelves that house Emerson and Thoreau and James, but also Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger (and, of course, Marcel); it is, certainly, an important contribution to the idea of philosophy as a way of life, rather than a set of doctrines

Look, the dude wrote an entire book and had a relatively lucrative career; he is not a moron. Yet he writes a book, and 100 different people interpret it 10000 different ways, and suddenly it's considered philosophy? This is not philosophy, it's poetry disguised as philosophy, and the prospect is fueled by hipster wannabe intellectuals.I don't care who the author is, be it Bugbee or Hegel, if the author's message can't be read loud and clear, the author is plainly either a rambling psycho or a con artist. Either way, it's the most pseudo of pseudo intellectuals who attribute brilliance to this kind of piece. I'm reading this for class, and we're in week 3 and still on the first 4 paragraphs. So far my professor has interpreted the reading as proof of God, while I have gleaned a secular interpretation involving natural selection but also a lot of gibberish and incorrect assumptions regarding the usefulness of intuition...while yet other students of course have endless interpretations of their own.If you want to read a book equivalent to someone covering themselves in paint and having sex with a canvas, and then try to derive the meaning of life from it...then buy this book. Otherwise, do something more useful, like clipping your dog's toenails.

Edward Mooney is owed a great debt of thanks for reprinting this lost classic from the 1960s in the tradition of Thoreau's *Walden Pond.* *The Inward Morning* is a reflection on life in journal form comparable to Dag Hammerskold's *Markings,* but far more profound philosophically. Bugbee, a former Harvard professor, records his own most provocative thoughts about the nature of individual selfhood, our relations to others and the environment, how we articulate our goals and passions, our way of finding a place in the world and a sense of attentive/responsive connection to being in general, and so much more. It is a book not only for professional philosophers (who will find it full of insights in moral psychology and philosophical anthropology), but just as much for students and laypersons still searching for answers to life's most profound questions. It would make an excellent addition to a syllabus for a course on the Meaning of Life, or Philosophy in the Wilderness (say along with Thoreau, Emerson), or perhaps even Deep Ecology (along with Leopold and Naess). It would also make a great gift for anyone with a love for a penetrating and endlessly novel perspective on human existence.

I am reading The Inward Morning by Henry G Bugbee, currently up to page 172 of the Collier Books 1958 edition. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph must be read and then re-read. Why? Because no one ever taught Bugbee how to write clearly. His writings are dense, turgid, lots of passive tense, impossible to decipher. I recommend The Inward Morning for readers to see how to shroud and conceal one's thoughts in obfuscation and impossible word constructions.