After all, once upon a time it was supposedly a scientific truth that the earth was the center of the universe. "Insular self-sufficiency" or the sense that one person's framework of knowledge and ideas is perfect and complete is a great danger, because things can always change (70). "Self-control," determining what are the "proper attitudes" to display and finding a sense of a firm ground for moral reason has been the focus of Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks, as if human experience could be calculated, and every moral problem anticipated (110-111).
Why are we as a culture so obsessed with hard, fast, and unalterable facts? Why has the need for a single standard of morality become an unquestioned truth, why must a code of morality be certain, rather than vary from situation to situation? Why not involve feelings as well as facts in determining morality?
This quest for certainty and objective reality shuts out the real truth, that we live in a wilderness, a wilderness of the "everyday" (76). The metaphor of the wilderness is one of the most striking aspects of Bugbee's book. Unlike Thoreau, whom Bugbee admires as one of the greatest American philosophers, Bugbee did not go searching for a real-life wilderness like Walden. He says instead the wilderness of necessary doubt is all around us, and we must experience every moment as new....
"Let us not neglect to think of the ground being under our own feet; and let us no talk as if we placed the ground under our own feet. A ground which our feet do not discover is no ground" (111).
In other words, we do not create or discover the laws of nature. Instead we walk on the ground and learn from the ground. Also, just learning something by rote does not teach us. Think of how we learn about science. We are told the ground is a solid. But do we understand this until we feel the ground, hard and fast beneath our feet? No. Bugbee says that "neither objectivism nor subjectivism" is correct, what is right is "realism" (168). Of course, we cannot get up every morning and live in a state of pure subjectivism, not knowing who or what we might meet or do every single second of the day. But it is just as impossible to completely anticipate every possible twist and turn of life's experience.
Bugbee's book inspires the reader to live and learn from the world like a child, as if every day is a surprise. Remember the freshness with which you anticipated every day, when you were very young, before you felt that you knew it all? Bugbee says that everyone, philosophers and students alike, must return to this state of being and enthusiasm,
Works Cited
Greenwood Bugbee, Henry. The Inward Morning. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press,
