Inward Morning - by Henry Bugbee (Paperback)

About the Book

When first published in 1958, The Inward Morning was ahead of its time. Boldly original, it blended East and West, nature and culture, the personal and the universal. Readers, however, later embraced Bugbee's lyrical philosophy of wilderness, making it an underground classic.

Book Synopsis

When first published in 1958, The Inward Morning was ahead of its time. Boldly original, it blended East and West, nature and culture, the personal and the universal. The critical establishment, confounded, largely ignored the work. Readers, however, embraced Bugbee's lyrical philosophy of wilderness. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s this philosophical daybook enjoyed the status of an underground classic.

With this paperback reissue, The Inward Morning will be brought to the attention of a new generation. Henry Bugbee is increasingly recognized as the only truly American existentialist and an original philosopher of wilderness who is an inspiration to a growing number of contemporary philosophers.

Review Quotes

The Inward Morning has been an underground classic for several decades. Softly written, its message is strong. . . . A lean, subtle yet explosive diagnosis of the human condition.

--John J. McDermott "author of Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture"

The Inward Morning is a classic of American philosophy and deserves a place alongside Quine's From a Logical Point of View and Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Its great contribution is the evocation of reality in all its force and poetry. In this it is a unique and pioneering work whose real influence on contemporary culture is yet to come. The new edition of Bugbee's masterpiece will help immeasurably in getting The Inward Morning a proper hearing.

--Albert Borgmann "author of Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium"

The Inward Morning is one of the rare books in American philosophy that give the reader a feeling of what it is like to do philosophy, a picture of a thinker at work. The best thing about it is that somebody is at home; it does not seem to be written by an anonymous mind. One feels Henry Bugbee thinking things through while trout fishing and looking at the mountains. . . . It is a book to be enjoyed, rather than classified.

--Sam Keen "author of Fire in the Belly"

What can be learned from The Inward Morning is something of the first importance about the place that philosophical theses and arguments might have in our lives.

--Alasdair MacIntyre "author of After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?"

Like its distant cousin, Thoreau's Walden, Henry Bugbee's The Inward Morning is one of those rare and beautiful chronicles of self-exploration and self-recovery which burrows beneath the platitudes of thought and convention into the subsoil of truth and certitude. Call it what you will--a philosophical journey, a spiritual autobiography, a religious meditation--its movement is always downward toward bedrock, where it practices the art of what Gabriel Marcel called 'recuperative reflection, ' a kind of inquiry which seeks to bring us once again into the presence of those things we cannot possibly not know and remain human.

--Giles Gunn

This is an original piece of work, one which has lasting value for an audience interested in the unfolding of philosophical meditation in a nontechnical and nonacademic mode. It provides a firsthand account of the way in which serious meditation is carried on by a thinking man.

--Maurice Natanson

About the Author

HENRY BUGBEE, who began his career at Harvard University, was a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Montana.