Inward Morning Is a Philosophical

Inward Morning is a philosophical text that makes a profound statement against philosophical certainty and the quest for absolute truth. It is a very appropriate work to read by people who are living today, in an age filled with many possible ways of living and many possible truths, an age that is often called the post-modern age of doubt. The availability of so many options and choices can make the modern world seem frustrating and confusing. This book suggests that confusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but a natural part of human experience. The only thing that is anxiety-provoking is the false notion that there is one correct path for all people.

The author of the Inward Morning, Henry Greenwood Bugbee states that it is impossible to know anything for sure, but rather than seeing this state of constant doubt as dangerous, he sees this as one of the blessings of the human condition. "The link between the ultimate claim to know what is right and the tendency toward unresponsiveness on our part in so far as we assert such a claim is often noted" (200) in other words, the more a person is certain something is true, the more that person closes him or herself off from the world, and the less that person learns. As soon as someone says 'I know' that means that the discussion is closed.

Even a small child has experienced this unresponsiveness, in everyday life. A child says that he is late because the bus didn't pick him up on time, and the cruel teacher accuses the child of being a liar, because "I know that you never tell the truth." Regardless of what occurred, in the teacher's mind, the child's character has already been established, so the teacher no longer listens to the child. The teacher feels that he or she knows what is right, and has grown unresponsive to new experiences. The teacher has shut down to the possibility that the child can change, thus the teacher has ceased to learn from the child and the possibility that the child is making a fresh stard. And who really profits from knowing this 'truth' as it just creates further division between these two people?

Of course, it might be protested that there are some things we know for sure. What about scientifically established facts, like the ability of penicillin to cure a bacterial infection? Bugbee would reply that although this might be the case, even scientific truths were not discovered by knowing what was right and closing one's self off to observation and to what existed before one's very eyes. In Bugbee's view, the greatest scientists and philosophers are great observers and experiencers, not people who claim to know everything based upon the past, which might not be valid in the present, or worse, based upon what their elders have told them is right. People who seek hard and fast truth claims that last for all time set themselves up to be disproved by a single and variable instance and shut themselves off to the excitement of human experience and change.

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).