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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
