Dialogical relations with nature

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 391-410

  Friskics, Scott ^a  

^a Fort Belknap College   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 8344273649     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics20012345     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. This passage came to my attention, appropriately enough, as part of a memorial tribute to Henry Bugbee, who died in Missoula on 18 December 1999. He is best known for his book, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1958). In 1999, the book was reissued by the University of Georgia Press, along with a collection of companion essays entitled, Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbee's Philosophy of Place, Presence and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney with a foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre. The Inward Morning is the rarest of books - a book, not about, but of philosophy. In it, Bugbee draws upon a variety of sources - Eckhart, Zen Buddhism, Thoreau, Marcel, etc. - to articulate a philosophy of "life in the wilderness."
2. This passage came to my attention, appropriately enough, as part of a memorial tribute to Henry Bugbee, who died in Missoula on 18 December 1999. He is best known for his book, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1958). In 1999, the book was reissued by the University of Georgia Press, along with a collection of companion essays entitled, Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbee's Philosophy of Place, Presence and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney with a foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre. The Inward Morning is the rarest of books - a book, not about, but of philosophy. In it, Bugbee draws upon a variety of sources - Eckhart, Zen Buddhism, Thoreau, Marcel, etc. - to articulate a philosophy of "life in the wilderness."
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 89.
4. Ibid., p. 135.
5. Ibid., p. 125.
6. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1958), p. 141.
7. John Lawry, "Henry Bugbee's Interpretation of the Book of Job," Wilderness and the Heart: Henry Bugbee's Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 190.
8. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), p. 7.
9. Ibid.
10. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), p. 69.
11. Robert Wood, Martin Buber's Ontology: An Analysis of I and Thou (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 66.
12. Emmanuel Levinas, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed., Paul A. Schillp and Maurice Friedman (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1967), p. 136.
13. See Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1974), especially chaps. 2 and 6.
14. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 10 and 12.
15. Henry G. Bugbee, Jr., "Loneliness, Solitude, and the Twofold Way in Which Concern Seems to be Claimed," Humanitas (November 1974).
16. Henry G. Bugbee, Jr., "L'Exigence Ontologique," in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, ed. Paul A. Schillp (Evanston, Ill.: Open Court, 1968).
17. Buber, I and Thou and Between Man and Man.
18. Buber, Between Man and Man, p. 36.
19. Buber, I and Thou, p. 62.
20. Buber, Between Man and Man, p. 16.
21. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), p. 261.
22. Of course, the question "How does nature speak to our concern?" which Bugbee asks in his essay entitled "Wilderness in America" remains unanswered. I address this question in a companion essay that attempts to flesh out an environmental ethic of responsibility in greater detail. See my "How Does Nature Speak to Our Concern? The Case of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front," in Philosophy and Everyday Life, ed. Laura Duhan Kaplan (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001). For the context of Bugbee's question, see "Wilderness in America," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 4 (December 1978): 614-620.
23. Of course, the question "How does nature speak to our concern?" which Bugbee asks in his essay entitled "Wilderness in America" remains unanswered. I address this question in a companion essay that attempts to flesh out an environmental ethic of responsibility in greater detail. See my "How Does Nature Speak to Our Concern? The Case of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front," in Philosophy and Everyday Life, ed. Laura Duhan Kaplan (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001). For the context of Bugbee's question, see "Wilderness in America," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 4 (December 1978): 614-620.
24. Buber, Between Man and Man, p. 76.
25. This understanding of faith draws heavily on the works of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, especially Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and The Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). For a related discussion, see also Bugbee, Inward Morning, pp. 217-20.
26. This understanding of faith draws heavily on the works of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, especially Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and The Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). For a related discussion, see also Bugbee, Inward Morning, pp. 217-20.
27. This understanding of faith draws heavily on the works of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, especially Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and The Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). For a related discussion, see also Bugbee, Inward Morning, pp. 217-20.
28. Buber, Between Man and Man, p. 12.
29. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 116.
30. Buber, I and Thou, p. 62.
31. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 110.
32. Ibid., p. 192.
33. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 17.
34. Ibid.
35. Politically, this imperial "we" is a short step from totalitarianism and fascism. In terms of gender, the masculine "we" has silenced or ignored women's voices by the misguided universalizing of male experience for human experience - in toto. That is, the universalizing male subject has taken itself for the exclusive subject of the universe, either denying the existence of other subjects altogether or assuming the role of speaking on their behalf. For an insightful analysis of this pattern in thought and language, see Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996).
36. Quoted in David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 4.
37. Quoted in N. Scott Momaday, "A First American's View," National Geographic, July 1976, p. 15.
38. Ibid., p. 18.
39. Henry Bugbee, "A Way of Reading the Book of Job," typescript, III-7, 8.
40. Bugbee, Inward Morning, pp. 51-52.
41. Bugbee, Inward Morning, pp. 52 and 207.
42. Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 60-68.
43. Henry G. Bugbee Jr., "Thoughts on Creation," Essays in Philosophy (State College, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962).
44. Bugbee, Inward Morning, p. 221.
45. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), p. 251.
46. Bugbee, "Loneliness, Solitude, and the Twofold Way in which Concern Seems to be Claimed."
47. Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 86.