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“The greatest danger of all is losing track of the great danger.” — James Hatley

In a world that seeks to master nature in the pursuit of comfort and security, wilderness has become a scarce resource. Wilderness has been tamed and must now be consciously preserved; the commons has been enclosed and privatized—with each being sold back to us as a commodified, Disneyfied “experience.” This is not to say that nature is no longer dangerous—that grizzly bears do not attack or falling from a cliff is not deadly—nor even that touching the soft, dewy grass of a morning field is no longer “real” when compared to the typical digital domains we generally inhabit. But there is also no denying that something has been lost in this transaction.

The great danger of being a conscious mortal being has lost its “edge.” And yet, many of us feel that we are now living on the edge of something far worse: a great abyss, and that with the slightest provocation the ground beneath us will disappear and nothing will stop our descent. It is no wonder that we cling so tightly to our ideologies today and have tied ourselves so tightly to the political wheel of fortune—it prevents us from looking down from the dizzying heights to which we have climbed and realize the truth of our situation: it is all an illusion.

A great gulf seems to have grown between the decreased mortal danger in which we abide and the increased spiritual danger in which we writhe. But as Dr. Hatley explains, for Henry Bugbee these two phenomena are intimately related, and in fact, have a symbiotic relationship. Our problem, Bugbee believes, is that we no longer understand what “wilderness” is.

If you want to know more about Henry Bugbee check out the introductory essay we published by our friend Joseph Keegin, Thinker, Wanderer, Fly-Fisherman, or dive into the podcast study guide we are releasing on Bugbee’s singular work The Inward Morning.

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For our inaugural episode of Koinos Cast, we discuss T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a brief meditation on the relationship we as individuals have to history, specifically the historical tradition that we are a part of. Eliot’s main focus is on the poetic tradition in which a writer is situated, but it is a theme we believe to have far-reaching implications for us as human beings.

This is really the animating question of Koinos Project as a whole: what ought our relationship to the past be—and likewise, the future?

In this episode, we invite back our friend Jordan Klein who had joined us on our seminar on Henry Bugbee’s The Inward Morning. One of the reasons I thought this piece would be good to discuss with him is that, like us, he too has escaped the countercultural trappings of his youth in search of something more—in search of some sort of order bigger than ourselves that connects us with others and the world. While this journey began during our time at St. John’s College, it will continue for the rest of our lives: either through conversations such as this one, or what we pass down through the families we have created, or in the communities we build.

In the wake of World War I, Eliot could already sense the coming dissolution that we all now feel. Perhaps, like ourselves, you too shall find some of his suggestions useful as you attempt to find your place amongst our present chaos.

IT HAS BEEN SAID, “Luck is when preparation and opportunity collide.” Could something similar be said for Aristotle’s conception of happiness — eudaimonia — in his Nicomachean Ethics?

Along with both hoi polloi and hoi sophoi, Aristotle agrees that happiness is the “highest of all goods” (1095a15), and consists of both “living well and acting well” (1095a20). However, exactly what defines “well” is where these two types part company. Not only do the many and the wise disagree on its contents, but also the means by which it can be acquired. This arises mainly from the fact that “happiness seems to require some external prosperity in addition” (1099b7). But what is the source from which we receive this subsidy: kalē tuchē or arête — is it god(s)-given or is it a product of free will? Aristotle undoubtedly emphasizes the latter cause; yet, he does not seem to wholly discount divine intervention either. How much, then, can we really be held responsible for the outcome of our lives when we do not control many of the elements that compose it?

Even from our earliest years, it is already apparent that some of us have been “blessed” with “natural gifts” (1103a5), giving us an automatic advantage in life. Some are born stronger, smarter, more attractive, naturals at the kithara, which naturally commands esteem from those around us. As we mature, these seemingly divine gifts then bring us what most view as happiness: “pleasure or wealth or honor” (1095a23). Yet Aristotle maintains, it is not because of our blessedness that we are ensured a happy life, believing that “to entrust the greatest and noblest thing to chance would be excessively discordant” (1099b23). In defiance of the gods, Aristotle refuses to throw up his hands and utter meekly — Do with me as you will.

This seems to follow from the way in which he defines happiness: “A certain activity of soul in accord with complete virtue” (1102a5). An emphasis on soul here is the defining factor in Aristotle’s account of virtue, and thus happiness. Unlike the rest of nature, which cannot help but act according to its particular excellence or virtue, humans are divided beings: we are composites of body and soul. We are not simply beasts bound by bodily instinct, yet nor do we possess the freedom of gods. Rather, we seem to be torn between these two competing natures — one that pulls us down into the “base,” the other that directs us up toward the “noble” (1099b30). Aristotle accounts for this partial participation in the divine by the fact that we possess logos, which enables us to overcome our animal, appetitive desires, and instead aim for higher goods (1098a8). This, however, is not an automatic process, but a conscious effort requiring hard work and determination that one must choose to do.

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PRO-(H)AIRESIS IS USUALLY translated as “choice,” but literally means “to select before-hand.” Aristotle contends that before we act, our souls must first decide in which direction our bodies shall move — thus choice is the archē of deeds (1113a10). Led by our powers of forethought, we can be liberated from the tyranny of our stomachs (or any other member of our body). Rather than blindly following the passions stimulated by sense perception, reason allows us to deliberate whether the ends available are truly choice-worthy. And when an “origin is in the person himself, who knows the particulars that constitute the action,” a deed is then said to be a “voluntary” choice (1111a22). However, this necessarily raises the stakes of acting — it means that we are accountable, that we can be praised or blamed for the results.

Because we possess the faculty of deliberative choice, our virtue — as well as our vice — is up to us; and similarly, whether we are good or bad, noble or base. In a word, our ēthos (from which the Ethics derives its name) is revealed by the choices we make. And the more we choose to do a particular activity, the more adept we become, till our character becomes our nature. For as the lawgiver habituates his citizens through wise laws, so too does our internal lawgiver — logos — turn our souls in the proper direction: “By doing just things we become just; moderate things, moderate; and courageous things, courageous” (1103b1). However, the opposite is also possible, for wickedness grows in the same way.

It is essential for those who wish to become spoudaios to “fashion their longings in accord with reason and act accordingly” (1095a10). This seriousness of character becomes especially important when fortune is brought into the mix — for it will do with us as it wills. The vagaries of fortune are what cause the many to equate it with happiness and deem it impossible to be satisfied without the necessary “equipment”: health, wealth, or power (1099a32). But because Aristotle believes happiness to be “wholly and in every way, an end and complete” (1101a18), and to be “always chosen on account of itself and never on account of something else” (1097b), he denies it can be so easily changed or depends solely on divine allotment.

For nothing, he contends, is so secure as that which pertains to virtue.

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IF ONE CONTINUALLY chooses to do virtuous deeds, they become habit, and habit is what forms stable character, which has “authoritative control over happiness” (1100b11). While the wheel of fortune spins round and round, happiness— if it is to be truly considered as such — must be long lasting; and even if one were to endure the fortunes of Priam, we would, at the very least, be able to suffer with dignity. “In the midst of bad fortune, nobility shines through” (1100b30), Aristotle insists, and there is no greater marker of seriousness than one who is able to endure bad fortune well — or for that matter, good fortune, without becoming “haughty and hubristic” (1124a30). Yet, despite the nobility he sees in being capable of gracefully dealing with whatever the gods throw our way, there still seems to be an underlying doubt in Aristotle’s mind as to whether one is truly capable of maintaining happiness in the midst of bad fortune.

I find it very intriguing the word he uses for happiness: eu-daimonia — good-fate or -spirit. Whether it is just his general reliance on beginning with popular opinion, or because he agrees with this assessment, the fact of the matter is: this is the word he chooses to describe the “highest of all goods.” There seems to be a specter haunting our pure autonomy. But does this ultimately undermine his teaching; do we not, then, actually have control over our lives?

Many times throughout his works, including four in the Ethics, Aristotle quotes his philosophic predecessor Heraclitus. It is hard to tell exactly what Aristotle thinks of him, sometimes holding him up as an example of what he sees as the silly superficiality of the pre-Socratics, other times in seeming approbation. But one of Heraclitus’ hundred-some-odd fragments that have come down to us, I think points to a possible resolution to our problem — despite Aristotle not mentioning it.

As with the majority of Heraclitus’ seemingly oracular pronouncements, this could be taken in many ways. But when in conjunction with Aristotle’s desire to place responsibility in our own hands, I think it takes on a particularly incisive sense: Our eudaimonia depends on how we have learned to interact with our daimon. Our choices and habits compose the path upon which opportunity and preparation unite to birth happiness. Virtuous choices place us in situations where good fortune will meet us — and if it does not, we will at least have the strength to make it through till tomorrow. And as Heraclitus also observes, “The sun is new each day” (DK 22B6). By properly using the gifts with which we have been blessed, we become capable of seeing the signs revealed by the gods. For a sign reveals itself when it wishes, and only eyes that are open will see it.

It seems that the history of the western mind has come full circle. There are now many brave souls once again taking up a rebellion against the rule of the academy in much the same way that many rebelled against the “schoolmen” at the dawn of the Enlightenment. But whereas then it was the partisans of Metaphysics, Philosophy, and even Theology who had become overly rigid, it is now these same partisans who seek to use these tools to elaborate a true vision of the way things are — in every way elevating the soul to its supreme place in the human person, freely inquiring into the truths of God, man, and the cosmos. It is, on the other hand, those children of skepticism and rigor, heirs of the Enlightenment — humanist in the gross sense of the word — who have now become rigid, close-minded, exclusive. While they once sought the general enlightenment of all, they now impose their learning in the form of dogma, excluding any thinker who drifts from the mainstream they now control.

Science is not thought of by the masses as it should be — as a diligent and exacting inquiry into the nature of things — rather as the magisterial pronouncements of those meritorious enough to occupy important positions in institutions. Should not all students take to their own inquiry of nature that they might understand it in a manner less abstract? And worse, poetry is not given to these same masses as a means of binding together the disparate aspects of reality, symbolically ordering the soul and imagining a beautiful whole of things, but is rather critiqued and dissected until it is deprived of all beauty. Did the medieval schoolmen ever do anything so monstrous as deprive poetry of Beauty?

Finally, philosophy today has been reduced to a mere game of logic. If philosophy, so called, ever manages to break out of these logic games, it simply serves science. Everything is directed towards an endless accumulation of facts to the end that mankind may, perhaps, stumble upon another technological innovation making the sciences a game of smoke and mirrors, whereby people find it true only because of the marvels it produces. We thus have a science which does not enlighten and a poetry that has been treated in the manner of an atom, yet spend much time wondering why so many have been driven to great, sometimes fatal, psychological distress.

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Science needs philosophy to return to its original purity. Those who study science, did they not take up their pursuit in a spirit of innocence and wonder? Were they not captivated by the immense vastness of the universe or the grand complexity of the body? But under our current regime, the order that a young man or woman experiences when they first come to love the sciences is stolen from them by a cold, calculating, utilitarian mindset. All their strivings are forced into the logic of accumulation and technological progress. Only through philosophical and theological grounding will this original vision return. Only then will science justify itself by something other than the almighty dollar.

Philosophy need not be a harsh mistress, nor the servant of the elite. What else is philo-sophia but a love of Wisdom diligently sought after and patiently cultivated in a mind bereft of order and meaning? How is it that those enlighteners of mankind have taught so many to neither love Wisdom nor seek her diligently? If there is such a thing as Wisdom, must she not reside in a well-ordered soul. Yet they have taught us to also reject the soul, making it an “epiphenomena” of matter — whatever that may be. If they had not also destroyed our literary tradition, and with it literacy in any meaningful sense of the word, they would have read in Pascal that “it is impossible for matter to think itself.” With one line their scheme dismantled.

While these subjects have been retained in disfigured form, there is one subject that has been banished all together — Theology. In almost all our reasonings, it is assumed a priori that God either does not exist or that he does not have a Voice. While some universities maintain their Theology departments, are these not mere relics of ages gone by? Do they have any real effects on thought in other subjects? When they do speak, must they not completely subject themselves to the findings and methods of the sciences? It is clear to many of us that God has not only spoken in a special way, but also in a broad way. This special way was once so powerful that it did not fail to affect a single person on the planet earth; and the broad way is so all-encompassing that it should not fail to affect a single one of our thoughts.

To exile Theology from thought is to strand man in a world of uncertainty where thought is ultimately taken captive by the powerful who see the sole purpose of knowledge to be power. If we ignore God, we do not thereby live in a godless world, but will find new gods for ourselves. The tendency among the powerful will be to think of themselves as gods. What then will be the status of those they rule over? How can anyone stand with the oppressed under these conditions and not with the oppressor? Are not “disenfranchised” people and “underserved” communities some of the greatest believers in a God who reveals Himself both by word and in life? Is this not the God of “widows and orphans”? It seems impossible then to be an atheist and not insult the oppressed. Yet we wish not to force anyone from their atheism, but instead to reclaim our own freedom.

If I have written in polemical terms, it is not to appear haughty or boastful, but it is out of a spirit of discontent and righteous anger for those who have fared so poorly under the current culture that their souls and sometimes their very lives have been destroyed. This discontent is clearly shared by many who are now in full revolt, but how barbarous is this revolt becoming? Let us then take up the mantle of that first great western thinker Socrates who after a lifetime of diligent inquiry could claim to know only the things he did not know. For many have been in dialogue with modern western culture for a good portion of their lives and have come to doubt as to whether, for all our great material progress, we are truly better off. Some fear that the effects of this culture are detrimental, not only to the soul, but to our very existence. Thus we put our own culture to the question, just as it was done in Athens long ago.

“But as we learn to take things in their darkness, their utter density and darkness, as we can acknowledge them in the intimation of their finality, then we stand upon the threshold of receiving the ultimate gift of things, and obscurity within us gives way to utter light.” (163)

It is said that we live today in the “postmodern” age, in a world “after virtue” flickering about amongst the “twilight of idols” long dead and soon to be forgotten. The supposed cause of this is that after our old mythos — and the categories, symbols, and values supported by it — had become unbelievable, the rationalism that was to take its place became intolerable. A romantic revolt arose positioning the subject, the unique individuality that each of us inhabits, against the brave new world of homogenizing objectivity. Away from reason, we fled into the warm embrace of feelings, emotions, sentiments, premonitions and intuitions: an impenetrable bubble of Self.

Apparently Bugbee did not get the memo.

In this episode, we explore his notion of “things”: their relationship to us and their relationship to eternity. For Bugbee, a thing is not some object over there that we subjects look upon from afar, but rather co-creators in our existence that form the inextricable “tissues of meaning” in which our lives are immersed. Not only do these relationships connect us in space, but also across time — and beyond. Our participation with things is also our participation with the “light of eternity” that shows us what is.

Bugbee seeks a place to stand beyond both modernity and beyond the supposed post-modernity we now inhabit — beyond the opposition of subject-object, rationalism-romanticism, materialism-idealism.

Perhaps, it would be wise to for us join him there?

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a conversation I had with my late friend and mentor Eva Brann as the gathering storm of new technologies approaches ever closer. The most obvious of these worries of course is AI and what it will do to our society and our humanity. It will take so much individual fortitude to remain human under these new circumstances. The question, however, that hangs amongst these clouds is — why remain human? When weighed against all the tragedy that the human condition necessarily entails, what is so good about human being it even ought to be preserved?

I think that remains an open question. Yet anyone who through fortuna happens to stumble across the conversation above will no doubt answer yes, unquestionably we must persist in retaining our humanity! And there was really no one better to have conversations such as this with than Eva Brann. With her death on October 28, 2024, the world lost one of the most humane individuals that has ever graced this earth. And it is in that spirit, I wanted to pull this discussion out of the archive and release it again here at Koinos — an organization dedicated to restoring humanity to the Humanities.

I firmly believe a great humanistic revolt is brewing against this gathering storm. We live in an age of superb technical proficiency — perhaps the greatest that has ever existed. For instance, the musicians and artists that daily bombard me on my social feeds are absolute masters of their craft. Yet I can’t help feeling that something is lacking in these clips — something that I think points us towards why we wish to preserve the essence of our species against these emerging threats.

Technical proficiency is what machines do best. The most ambitious of our age, I believe, will take this as a challenge to be overcome. It is only our humanity — a humanity based on a dimension of reality that machines have no access to — that will elevate them, and us along with them, above the machines. Skills are not enough. Only a renewed cultivation of the soul will save us.

                                              (Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b 11-22)

IT WASN’T ALWAYS “Sugar Plum” that first wafted out of the studio and into our ears each September. Often, it was the “Waltz of the Snowflakes.” There is, as with Sugar, such a dark brightness to that music, equal parts haunting and playful, entirely crystalline. Cold and clear and frozen and glittering. My sense of this music is compounded by the immediate image that accompanies it of waiting in the wings, watching and stepping closer—but not quite—to the stage with each count. The palpable sense of anticipation in each of these pieces comes partly thanks to those sparkling notes and partly thanks to that image: the black of the wings, the brightness of the lights out there, waiting. And then—into it, dancing.

I’ve been trying to figure out why Nutcracker does what it does to us. Why do my cousin and I, both dancers, cry every single time Clara lifts that nutcracker up onstage by herself at the end, safely back at home from the Land of the Sweets? Why did my sister, just a few years ago, turn to me and start silently sobbing (and laughing at herself) as the very first notes of the overture began at a younger cousin’s performance? My sister is not a dancer, though she did spend ten years watching me grow through Party Guest (chassé, chassé, shuffle-shuffle-shuffle—we were eight, and shuffle really was the choreo) to Mysterious Doll to Sugar Plum, with everything in between.

But I learned recently it’s not just dancers, or those who live with dancers, who cry at Nutcracker. It might be a nostalgic viewer who remembers seeing the ballet as a child, or sometimes it’s just someone in the audience who is struck by the absolutely perfect chords of this masterpiece. They might learn later any number of contextual facts: that Tchaikovsky composed the score alongside strict instructions for sound and movement from Petipa, the choreographer, or that Tchaikovsky’s beloved sister died just as he began work on this ballet. The latter is, some say, one reason for the sound of the Grand Pas de Deux in Act II—the sadness of which I never liked as a dancer, which was why I yearned every year for the Sugar Plum solo rather than the pas.

But it may be that the viewers never learn these facts, and that they simply sit spellbound, feeling in their bones that the regalness of the pas is as undeniable as the magic of that most famous solo. In those first eight counts of Sugar Plum, they might realize: I don’t know what a sugar plum is, but these strings are without question what one sounds like when it drops or is plucked from its tree. Heavy, sweet, deep, dark. Heady and inviting. They may not know what a celesta is, but they will know that they have rarely been so acoustically enchanted.

For all this, I think the reason Nutcracker disarms us must be two-fold. The first is the music. No better word to describe it than magic. That Tchaikovsky was successful in stitching an entire musical fabric of a glittering winter, a youthful love, an adventure beyond, and home again without one wrong note is one of the best magic tricks we have ever received. Beautiful Baryshnikov in his version and Pacific Northwest Ballet in theirs have understood most clearly the deeper magic of that second item, of Clara’s desire for her Prince and the dream that turns him into a flesh-and-blood man.

The second part of the evocative power of Nutcracker is dancer-specific, and I think this is apt. “A dancer,” said Martha Graham, “more than any other human being, dies two deaths,” because dance is everything, and so, as with most dancing, there must be something almost inexpressible in words. What happens is that Nutcracker gives you a dream for every year of your adolescence. Because it is repeated every year (and it is this magical music that is repeated every year), and because dance means so much to you in the first place and dance requires nothing short of a total involvement from body, mind, and spirit, and because you watch these parts come to you every year that you’ve watched others do for a decade of your life (which at that point is almost your whole life), as a dancer you grow into Nutcracker in a way that is all heart, that is almost impossible to explain. That is perhaps mirrored by the literal dream that Clara grows into across the ballet.

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THE COMBINATION OF this consummate music and this evolution full of movement and meaning and dreams danced in studio and on stage, this is the reflex toward tears. It’s ten years of watching, hoping, growing, fulfilling. And dancing, dancing, dancing. And what happens during a six-hour Nutcracker rehearsal on a Saturday in early December, after months in the warmly lit studio with the cold night outside, is that the music is embedded in your body. It becomes a part of your DNA. When you sit on the marley, back against the mirror, and watch the older dancers in their pointe shoes as the music plays from a record—stops—correction—plays again—stops, from the top—plays through—again (and again and again), the notes are being written into your heart, and into each muscle. And really, you are never freer than when you are moving in this intricately structured art form. And perhaps you’d read Jill Krementz’s A Very Young Dancer, an exquisite 1970s look at a School of American Ballet student chosen to play Clara at Lincoln Center—and you will remember the page where she is taught how to fall on the bed and dream. Nutcracker is a world of dreams: of Clara’s and of dancers who are rooted in it for a third of every year and of viewers who follow them from party to battle to sugar plums and back. But because those dancing it have worked and stretched and warmed up for three months prior to performance, breaking in shoes and bandaging toes, the dream is anchored by reality.

Studio and stage are both sacred, but the studio is sweat and life, holy in the earthiest of ways. And let’s not forget the village that builds backstage like an anthill, invisible to those in the seats. Nerves travel in the hallways in direct correlation to the dressing room. Shimmying on tights, checking pointe shoe laces an eightieth time, running through the tile hallways to the stage to wait in the wings—nerves accumulate until the moment of dancing. After a piece, after this triumph, after applause, back through the wings down the tile hallway—a physical seeping out of nerves and immediate desire for legwarmers and Doritos in the noise and chaos of the dressing room. Bobby pins everywhere, smiles in the mirror, and the counters sticky with hairspray. The air permeated by humidity and hairspray. The youngest group, identical in tights and tutus, legs dangling off the edges of a large table and playing a game of telephone during a long wait between dances, laughing with a kind of joyous energy entirely unique to their circumstances. If the stage is otherworldly, the dressing room is bright, loud, tangible cheer. Equally isolated, equally electric, but real, grounding.

Between studio and stage, there is dress rehearsal. Between waking and dreams, this moment of quiet calm in an empty auditorium, both safe and thrilling. And this, too, marks years from eight to eighteen, where you sat, young, feet in tights not reaching the floor with your group in the first rows of seats, waiting for your turn and watching the stage, always watching the turns en pointe, the leaps and lifts and extensions. Or you paused on stage, older, revered—glanced over your shoulder to the wings to hear the correction, adjusted, looked out onto the little groups watching you, and waited for the music to start again. Rise onto those pointes. Feel the support of the box and the shank, don’t sink, pull up through your arch and your ankles. My studio’s surprise intro for the lead-in of Sugar: arms up to fifth, shoulders relaxed, bourrée… and leap.

At the show, there is one more in-between moment. It’s the one in the wings, just between the moments where no one can see you and the ones where you’re in front of everyone. You might, jumping up and down, wave to friends across the stage who are preparing to run on opposite you. You might have to book it behind the backdrop from one side to the other. Maybe you wiggle, shaking out your limbs. There is nothing like this moment. And the one clearest in my mind is the one before Snow: the scene that moves us from the house into the dream, the one that shimmers perhaps more than any other, the one my mom, not a ballerina or a ballet lover by any standard, cried at every year. “Why, Mom?” I was surprised when she told me this; as a dancer it’s not the variation that first jumps at you, and it is always exhausting. “It’s just beautiful,” she said. In the dark of the wings, the light on stage shining, prep your body to meet the notes that twinkle like snow—petit jeté, petit jeté, and up! passé en pointe—and then go.

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This post first appeared on Front Porch Republic.

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There is nothing new under the sun. This may be the most basic insight of what might be called “classical wisdom.” This of course conflicts greatly with contemporary notions of progress and the pursuit of the “cutting edge” in science and technology. But which of these notions leads to a truer conception of how things really are?

A question such as this illustrates well what ought to be a part of any “higher” education. One ought to ask deep questions about the nature of this thing we call life—about our purpose and what sort of person we ought to be, about what will bring our lives meaning and the inherent tradeoffs of various choices. Yet, at the majority of colleges today, instead of seeking the higher, we are only taught to get hired.

In our latest video, we chat with Dr. Eric Adler, a professor of classics at University of Maryland about his wonderful book The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today. To prove his classical bonafides, he shows how the conversations we are having today about the content and purpose of education is nothing new. We have been down this road before, he warns, and we would be wise to learn from our past mistakes.

Throughout this essay, we will be forced to use the unfortunate and misleading words “right” and “left”—as if anyone knew exactly what they mean and who belongs to each group. These words are more phenomenal than precise or scientific, which is to say, they can only show us a general pattern understood through great theoretical rigor. This is not the place for that rigor, and I doubt even a work of many volumes could separate and organize all the various ideological strains that appear at this moment. Let us assume, then, everyone knows what is meant by these words. But let us also keep our prejudices at bay, whether favoring one side or the other, and consider both simply as phenomena of the current moment.

The first thing that jumps out is that both sides are serious—although it is often difficult to tell what they are serious about. Their visions are clearly important to them, extremely important, and they seem willing to sacrifice to achieve their desired ends. But what is it that they see, and perhaps more importantly, foresee? This combination of seriousness and vagueness has a disorienting effect on the few remaining impartial observers. One wonders if this same vagueness exists in the mind of the participants. Perhaps when the disordered mind seeks something with great seriousness, this is exactly the phenomenon we label “extremism.”

An extremist wants to take his project all the way. Maybe they will settle for a partial compromise at first; but as events continue to unfold, the remaining unfinished business becomes intolerable to them. They feel compelled to achieve the end of their project—but what exactly is that end today? If you were to ask a conservative or liberal twenty years ago what they wanted society to look like, it was fairly easy to get a clear answer. Ask a person of the left or right today and you will get one of two responses: the first will be so unreasonable and confused as to be unintelligible; the alternative will be the stuff of nightmares—that is, the nightmare scenario of their opposition.

What each side really wants is no longer a vision for “the world,” or “the west,” or “the country,” but more whatever springs to mind when opposing their enemies. Conflict itself seems to have become the point. For all the supposed seriousness, the only goal is continuation of the fight. But how can this be a goal? Conflicts are of necessity in motion, going back and forth; goals, however, progress towards an end. We must then question our presupposition that people today are indeed serious about a project, and perhaps instead are only serious about victory.

The victory they seek to achieve is victory in a “culture war.” Yet culture seems rather to have something to do with creation. We could suppose that the total annihilation of one side or the other will allow room for the winner to then create. However, both sides define each other in the process of fighting, and in fact have come to look more and more like one another. Since the battle seems to each side “existential,” each side must build itself up to be more “total.” Totality means that a thing is affected in all its parts. This is to say, each side leaves less breathing room for something different from itself to emerge.

Thus, both left and right are too busy assuring victory to allow one of their parts to deviate from this greater memetic imitation game. If one side is being exclusionary, then the other must do so as well. If one side is fearful of free speech, then the other must mirror it. If one side wants blood, then… In the process of fighting for their own cultural vision, they have inaugurated an anti-culture of destruction. Through their fanaticism, they have made the very thing for which they fight impossible.

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But what is culture? As was said, at its most basic level, it is an act of creation—but more specifically, the creation of a way of life with shared customs, beliefs, values, visions, and above all loves. It is what a group of people living in peace and harmony create together. Culture, then, is not merely a given, but a goal. And moreover it is a goal that distinguishes us: what we mean when we speak of “cultured” and “uncultured” persons. Assuming we have not fallen victim to a gross philistinism, we consider a cultured person to have reached a certain “height” that an uncultured person has not.

Etymologically, the concept “culture” derives from the Latin cultura: agriculture. Likewise, it is a cultivation of soil, a preparation of ground for seeds, that one hopes will one day sprout into a bountiful harvest. A plant, if not properly cared for, grows wild. But if a talented horticulturalist comes along and shapes it, it can become even more beautiful. We would seem foolish to assume that people need less attention than plants. Culture thus requires shapers—what might otherwise be called educators.

The educator or teacher—be it a parent, a professional, or perhaps member of the clergy—is entrusted with overseeing the growth of human persons. Yet American education today focuses almost solely on preparation for participation in the economy. This would seem to assume the goal of cultivation is not to make a way of life, but to make a living. However, who would agree that a fulfilled person is merely a person that has been prepared for the busy-ness of money-making? Education, it is also said, prepares us for life by means of “socialization.” That is, we learn how to live amongst others through the social life of a school. Whatever our humanity is, it at the very least must be both social and economic. But if culture was truly reducible to these two things, it is doubtful that people would fight such an agonizing war over it.

If these categories are the sole ends of education in America, then it is safe to say that Americans are no longer “cultured,” and indeed have been bred to create our present “anti-culture.” Is it any wonder our so-called culture war is so full of sound and fury, yet ultimately signifies nothing? Of course, all of this assumes that there is something like a “human nature” that can either reach its goal or be diverted from it. Perhaps one source of the culture war is that we can neither agree as to the goal of human nature, or worse, that it even exists. Perhaps then we begin today at the wrong end of our problems.

We fight for the right to rule over an abyss. What would victory even mean in such a contest?

What is the meaning of Thanksgiving? As with most holidays today, we usually describe it with general platitudes: an occasion to “be thankful,” or a chance to “get together” with loved ones. It is likely the case that these and other cliches do indeed capture the spirit of the feast—cliches are cliches for a reason. However, this spirit can only be summed up so simply because of the totality of the holiday (i.e. holy-day) that we do not consider.

Americans are not a religious people. This does not mean we are completely faithless or that we are a majority atheist country. It is just that compared historically to other peoples, there is a much more limited number of rituals that bind us together. Indeed, we have such a slight sense of ritual that we often think we have none—even when participating in one! We assume that the “reason for the season” has no real effect upon us when, in fact, the opposite is true. What else would compel family members separated by the vast expanse of this country to travel and participate in such practices? Even when we have ceased to like one another, the ritual itself seems to compel us to continue the ritual. It may even be the very reason a family remains a family—or the nation remains a nation.

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As in a religious ceremony, there is a period of preparation that takes place. Year after year, more or less the same meal is prepared. While there are occasional innovations, the most pleasing are always added to each family’s idiosyncratic traditions (so word to the wise: don’t get too fancy or you will find yourself performing this mighty feat again next year). Like an ancient mystery rite, this stage is often frenzied, and only slowly does order arise from the chaos. Next, there is a procession of sorts. Family members, arriving on their pilgrimage, enter one by one to exchange greetings and reconnect. The table is then set with our finest earthenware and we gather round for a communal meal.

We usually begin with an invocation—either a prayer, a call to give thanks, or a general well-wishing is made. For families that keep up the tradition of offering their gratitude, a sort of doxology, a sermon on all the good things of life, takes place. We underestimate the effect these paeans have on us. Uniting the spoken word with the act of feasting ties all things together in a grand metaphysical way as an unconscious reminder of the order and priority of things; while the very act of cooking unites the world of nature with that of society, implicating us in a whole web of relationships and affinities. As food theorist Michael Pollan observes in Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, “Is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for the people you love?”

“To eat out of the same cauldron,” the Greeks used to say, means to share the same fate. Even when disagreements over which ingredients ought to be added to our cooking pot ruin a particular gathering, the common table reminds us of our common cause. And on a higher level, the common ritual reminds us Americans of our common destiny. Perhaps we will remain a country only as long as we keep the feast and the cult of giving thanks for all that we have been blessed.

“Philosophy is not a making of a home for the mind out of reality. It is more like learning to leave things be: restoration in the wilderness, here and now.” (155)

Bugbee is a very subtle philosopher. This trait is exhibited nowhere better than in the opening question of this episode in his invoking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and there being a “somewhat absolute” in our experience. I think this has not a little to do with the fact that Bugbee is not writing for us—for an audience. What we are reading are his private thoughts, intended for no other and nothing other than his own edification.

This, I believe, makes his critique of where we find ourselves today—experientially, metaphysically, educationally, culturally—extremely valuable. They are the thoughts of a man highly sensitized to the world he inhabits, rendered naked, in an earnest search for a way beyond that world and its limitations. And because these thoughts are jotted down as a journal, there is no “looking over his shoulder” as to how they might be perceived by, and thus affect, anyone else. There is no rhetorical camouflage, no need to flatter or exaggerate, to lead toward or astray.

What we experience in these pages is a mind of the highest caliber at work on the deepest questions of life—and above all, a man trying to find a place to take a stand against the encroaching wasteland in which we now find ourselves. His intention in writing down these thoughts was not to save anyone but himself. He did not wish to start a political movement or cultural revolution. These “solutions” to the problems he addresses have never gone very well when attempted in the past.

Perhaps all we can do is save ourselves—to take a stand and lead by example. But as Bugbee elaborates, a genuine standing on our own two feet must be a standing shoulder to shoulder with everyone and everything. We must stop being simply passive observers and critics—gawking mindlessly or telling everyone else what they ought to do with their lives. Ultimately, all critics are really talking to themselves. Thus, all we can do is try and fail and try again.

We must learn to act while leaving things be: subtly at its most refined.

“That which enables anything to be necessary is no thing, no super-thing, no ghost of a thing, yet it dwells in the necessity of things. And for us, it is at the heart of our earnestness, saving our earnestness from deadlines, enabling our belief, and the lightness of heart of our true belief and decision. Our freedom lies in the realization of what must be. ” (103)

What is it that grounds human equality—that is, in what way are human beings equal? There are a million and one ways in which we are, of course, not equal: talent, looks, brains, brawn—money. Yet, as Americans, we remain committed to the belief that all are created equal. Indeed, this proposition has now been stretched and extended further than ever—despite the fact that its most ardent advocates accept neither the religious nor secular basis upon which this claim was originally made.

In episode four, we explore what might be considered a new way to think about our innate equality put forth by Bugbee, and the attitude, orientation and lifestyle that is demanded by it. To find out what this new thing might be, you will just have to listen and follow along.

“It takes many, many days to learn of what may and may not be in the river. Let us wade right in and keep fishing where we are, with our fingertips touching the trembling line. It is just in the moment of the leap we both feel and see, when the trout is instantly born, entire, from the flowing river, that reality is knowingly defined.” pg. 86

In this third installment of our exploration of Henry Bugbee’s “philosophical exploration in journal form,” we dive deep into an image that pervades his text: water.

From the childhood memories discussed in our first episode about building dams, swamping, and rowing to the oceans of World War II and the fished-filled rivers of Montana, it is a theme that Bugbee returns to again and again. It is also an element that has been present since the very origins of philosophy itself, with Thales conceit that water is the fundamental building block of nature and Heraclitus’ claim that “one cannot step into the same river twice.”

Bugbee seems to invoke water in both a literal and metaphorical, even metaphysical sense. The ever-renewing current of the river, the ever-returning ebb and flow of the tide — both somehow encompass his vision of the nature of reality. There is a cyclicaity to the novelty, a way about things that we can come to know by our constant returning and immersion in them. Or to mix metaphors, one must learn to distinguish between the becoming of the river and the being of the riverbed. Yet for Bugbee, not even the riverbed is soilid. Erosion or a chance landslide is constantly reshaping it, requiring us to re-engage and revise our understanding.

This vision of things ultimately undergirds Bugbee’s sense of meaning, values, and responsibility, and the way in which he connects them all together is a wild rapids-ride in itself. So strap in, grab your oar, and come navigate the river Bugbee with us — your life may just well depend upon it.

“Indeed true deeds, even when wrought with the tongue, seem massive with the vast silence from which they emerge. There is this silence which fosters endurance and begets the steadfastness of men: a silence scattered with stars and cloven into rhythmical wash beneath the bows of the ship.” (54)

In this second section of the text, Bugbee presents a range of challenges to what might be summed up as the “modern” attitude: the drive to not only know the world in some final, all-encompassing sense, but to become the creators of our own world. Although these are diametrically opposing desires, they are ultimately conjoined twins, he reveals, born out of the same metaphysical belief: nature is mute and has nothing to tell us about how we ought to live.

The first may be summed up as “rationalism,” the second as “romanticism” — with the latter arising out of disillusionment with the former, and then attempting to proactively build off of this disillusionment. When married together, they become Scientism: the belief that through sufficient knowledge-acquisition we can overcome the human condition to create a new world of our choosing. Scientism is science become ideology, which (as is the case with all ideologies) attempts to impose itself upon the world — without paying heed to what the world is.

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In our opening question, we discuss two opposing ways Bugbee presents on how we come to know the world: “understanding in order to believe,” and “believing in order to understand.” The first is the modern, scientistic view. Bugbee believes that if you really study the phenomenon, though, it is clear that all human beings actually practice the second.

All knowledge-acquisition rests upon a belief that there is something rather nothing that we are capable of knowing. Bugbee calls this “faith.” Without a faith in the regularity of the world — that the world, as Aristotle would say, tends “always or for the most part” to act in certain ways — there would be no drive for knowledge because in principle there would be nothing to know. Everything would be random and incomprehensible. The act of science rests upon faith, so to speak, that the sun will always rise again tomorrow. But why do we believe this; what ground do we have to support it?

The correlate to this alternative approach to the natural world Bugbee explores is a faith that the world also speaks to us about how we ought to live — that there is a “something” deeply embedded in the nature of things that calls out and beckons us to live and act in certain ways. This is the true meaning of the word “vocation” (from the Latin vox, “voice”). The world, Bugbee believes, is calling us to do something particular with our lives, something that only we as an individual are capable of.

What we practice today may generally be described as a “scientism of the soul.” It is the modern attitude turned inward: we can “hack” ourselves to become whatever we wish. Otherwise put, it takes the knowledge acquired by rationalism and employs it to romantic ends. But as Bugbee challenges, “I do not think that we can be, or would want to be, professionals — experts — in the conduct of our lives.” (41) What does the alternative to this look like? Listen and find out!

“If one works out the thoughts, the perceptions that press upon him with the demand for completion, as they lead to one another, in time the actual themes of his philosophy may have a chance to define themselves. Such a philosophy will not be set up like the solution of a puzzle, worked out with all the pieces lying there before the eyes. It will be more like the clarification of what we know in our bones.”

It is said that one must write what one knows. For the mid-twentieth century American philosopher Henry Bugbee, one must think where one is—with the goal being roughly the same: honesty. Honest about who one is and honest in our attempt to express this understanding to the world.

Today, Koinos is proud to release the first of our eight-part seminar on The Inward Morning: A Philosophic Exploration in Journal Form by Henry Bugbee. It is not an easy book, yet it is all complete common sense. Before diving into the episode, I would highly recommend watching our interview with his student, Professor James Hatley, or read the introductory essay Thinker, Wanderer, Fly-Fishermen by our good friend Joseph Keegin.

The book, a beautiful prose poem about the nature of being, was written while on paid sabbatical at Harvard in 1952-53 — instead of the expected academic treatise. As a result, Bugbee became one of the early victims of the "publish or perish" paradigm now plaguing higher education.

Henry Bugbee can rightly be considered both the greatest American philosopher AND poet of the last century — yet he remains in almost complete obscurity. We hope to do some small part in changing that.

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America is not known for its great philosophers. We are a people of action—of doing, not thinking. And when we do take a break from our restless activity to think, it is usually only to contemplate how better to make our next move. For us, the “how” of things tends to overshadow the “why” and “what for.” This is what makes Henry Bugbee, the now mostly forgotten mid-twentieth century American philosopher’s thought so interesting: he effortlessly and seamlessly does both. While descending to the absolute depths of things, he never looses sight of life. There is no distinction for him between fly-fishing and philosophy, duty and dialectic.

The above video is an interview we conducted with Bugbee’s student Dr. James Hatley, a professor of Environmental Studies. He reminisces about his experience with Bugbee during his graduate studies to help paint a portrait of the man behind this unique form of thought. And in the case of Bugbee, such an introduction is eminently warranted. For him, thought is personal or it is nothing; it either arises from and inhabits our very beings or it is worthless.

This video also serves as an introduction to an eight episode seminar we will be releasing on his singular (meaning both remarkable, and only) work, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form. Written over the course of fifteen months in 1952-53, Bugbee leaves no stone unturned, as he attempts to layout a new mode of philosophizing that breaks free of the abstraction and depersonlization of the modern world. For a deeper dive into his life and thought, we have also published an introductory essay by our friend Joseph Keegin, Thinker, Wanderer, Fly-Fisherman.

His ideas, but moreover his life, embody the very essence of The Koinos Project. We hope these brief introductions will inspire you to follow along with our discussion as we begin releasing the seminar over the following weeks—and even more, to pick up the book yourself, go for a hike, and immerse yourself in the wilderness of Being.

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On October 28, 2024, our dear friend and mentor Eva Brann passed away at the age of 95. The consummate teacher and dissentient, she continued her engagement at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD right up until the end, and never shied away from asking difficult questions. Radical in the best sense (from the Latin radicalis meaning “roots”), her final of more than 20 books and translations queries, Is Equality an Absolute Good?—to which she answers with her typical capaciousness of view, no, but…

In her last filmed interview, recorded during her appearance on Continuing the Conversation, Eva explores the contradiction inherent in education: the necessity of giving a student something of substance, but to not shackle them to it. Additionally, she offers insight into the nature of philosophy, the Great Books, and the immigrant’s journey of becoming American—which she underwent in 1941 when she was forced at the age of twelve to flee Nazi Germany.

If you enjoyed this brief introduction to Eva and her thought, you can check out this longer biographical sketch in the Higher Gossip series. The world is a poorer, less thoughtful realm without her in it. May her spirit live on in the countless sparks she has ignited in her students and the immortal words she has left to us.

Until we continue our conversation upon isles of the blessed.

“If one works out the thoughts, the perceptions that press upon him with the demand for completion, as they lead to one another, in time the actual themes of his philosophy may have a chance to define themselves. Such a philosophy will not be set up like the solution of a puzzle, worked out with all the pieces lying there before the eyes. It will be more like the clarification of what we know in our bones.” — Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning

IN 1946, HENRY BUGBEE stepped off the deck of the United States Navy minesweeper he’d commanded in the Pacific Theater and walked back into the classroom at the University of California, Berkeley he’d left four years earlier. Newly humbled by his time at sea, and with the problem of the universe swirling in his head, Bugbee sat down to write his dissertation. What he produced there—and what he would develop over the course of the subsequent decades in professorships at the University of Nevada at Reno, Stanford, Harvard, Chatham College, Penn State, and finally the University of Montana—would become the seeds of a new, distinctly American existential philosophy.

Throughout the course of his career, Henry Bugbee attracted a diverse collection of friends and defenders. William Van Orman Quine, chair of Harvard’s philosophy department during Bugbee’s tenure, once referred to him as “the ultimate exemplar of the examined life.”1 He befriended the French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who in the 1950s joined Bugbee and D. T. Suzuki in a series of conversations with Martin Heidegger. C. I. Lewis, the founder of conceptual pragmatism and a colleague at Harvard, wrote of one of his essays, “it bespeaks and expresses that elevation of mind which has made philosophy philosophy in past ages, and the complete absence of which at present makes this period in philosophy contemptible.” And Albert Borgmann, German philosopher and theorist of technology, recalls: “There is only one person of genius I have known and learned from personally; I mean Henry, of course.” Bugbee participated in seminars with Hans-Georg Gadamer, was the subject of a series of lecture series by Alasdair MacIntyre, Hubert Dreyfus, and Hilary Putnam, and was a teacher of Stanley Cavell, the twentieth century’s foremost philosopher in the American personalist tradition of Thoreau, Emerson—and Bugbee himself.

Yet after this rather illustrious and public career, Bugbee drifted into obscurity. His single published work, The Inward Morning—a philosophical exercise conducted through 15 months of journal entries—was met with a flurry of positive reviews at the time of its publication in 1958, but then almost immediately dwindled to the status of cult object for environmentalists, nature mystics, and philosophers with a penchant for the obscure. These decades of obscurity constitute a genuine tragedy. Our age’s frantic obsession with glimmering machinery and transcending natural limitations through technology—and our simplistic quasi-scientific ideology that reduces the complexity of the world to a handful of counterintuitive propositions—find a balm in Bugbee, whose patient work is to reorient our vision to the proximate, unassuming, and seemingly mundane world around us and show us that it has always been charmed.

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HENRY GREENWOOD BUGBEE, JR. was born in New York in 1915. Little is known about his early life: his father was a surgeon; he had two sisters. At age 6, he escaped his parents’ Manhattan apartment and was discovered observing fish in a local pool. He was educated at the Hotchkiss School, a preparatory academy in Connecticut of impressive WASP pedigree. In his freshman year at Princeton, he nearly died of appendicitis; during his summers there, he hopped freight trains to work harvest jobs in Wyoming and Iowa. Harvard plucked him from Berkeley to teach from 1948 to 1953, but he was ultimately denied tenure—an early casualty of the university’s newfound “publish or perish” mindset privileging sheer discursive production over teaching or contemplation. He relocated to Missoula. There, he writes, he hoped to “build a strong Philosophy department” at the University of Montana, “but a change of the university administration did not support this understanding.”2 He resigned in 1961 and moved back east to teach at Penn State, but finally returned to Missoula in 1967—without any formal offer of employment from the university. Retiring in 1977, he would remain there for the next two decades. On December 18, 1999, Henry Bugbee died.

Bugbee devoted as much time to fly-fishing and mountain-climbing as he did to philosophy. Indeed, he lived by the principle that no division exists between philosophical meditation and meditative activity: “My philosophy took shape mainly on foot,” he writes in the preface to The Inward Morning: “It was truly peripatetic, engendered not merely while walking, but through walking that was essentially a meditation of the place.”3 Fishing, too, was an occasion for the same deliberate thoughtfulness that marked walking and writing. “He fished with the same eloquence he lived,” his obituary records.

Philosophy, for Bugbee, was first and foremost rooted in the concrete, granular details of life as it is lived, and in the process of decision-making that shapes it: “For meditation is the thoughtful reckoning of the will with its own life: Its concern is that of truth underlying human decision. . . . My task has been that of overcoming such abstraction, to accommodate the life of spirit with all the mind.”5

“He was a kind of quiet, unassuming genius,” says Edward F. Mooney, professor of philosophy and religion at Syracuse University and author of several books about Bugbee. “If philosophy is a personal search for the quick, the soul of personal life and the unknown wilderness in which we trek, then Bugbee’s is one of the few philosophers you can read as exemplifying this search,” he writes. “Where most philosophers focus in a detached way on abstract arguments for this or that, Bugbee dares you to immerse your soul in the wonders of nature.” Mooney befriended Bugbee shortly after his departure from Harvard, shortly after his relocation to Missoula. “I just showed up at his office,” he relates, “where he was smoking his pipe and dressed—all handsome 6’2” of him—in Western jeans. I stammered incoherently. He politely chatted. I was smitten.” After their meeting, Mooney would become instrumental in assembling and publishing Bugbee’s written manuscripts and establishing his legacy. “Every few years after I’d visit him again,” Mooney relates, “and I organized a ‘party’ for him where contributors to an essay collection devoted to his writing gathered. I attended his funeral two years later.”

The Inward Morning—for which Mooney’s essay “Philosophy in Wilderness” serves as a beautiful introduction—wanders through styles and subjects like a mountain hiker through altitudinal biomes. Conceptual analysis gives way to meditations on the writings of Gabriel Marcel and Meister Eckhart, flowing into impressionistic depictions of memories drawn from early childhood, his years as a champion rower, his time at sea. All the while, Bugbee refuses the declarative register of professional academic philosophy in favor of a ruminative, questioning, almost confessional tone: “I have yet to discover,” he confides in his first entry, “how to say what moves me to the endless search and research, the reflective turning over in my mind of experience. The turning over is all so much tilling.”6 The work that follows is Bugbee’s record of the tilling and cultivation of his mental garden. The results—like beans dried on the vine, pumpkins forgotten in the field—constantly supply him with seeds for new questions and investigations.

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AT THE HEART of Bugbee’s philosophy stands the primacy of the question. The thinker revealed in the course of the book is a perpetual wonderer caught in perplexity, for whom reality arrives as an inexhaustible mystery—one that is deciphered not by weaving elaborate tapestries of philosophical language, but through the action of daily living. “Creation is inexpungably mysterious,” Bugbee writes, “and can only be understood through participation in it.”7 The act of explanation, which professional philosophers cherish, is “an endless business”, a never-exhaustive attempt at discovering what’s solid within the fluctuating substance of thought.8 Philosophical writing for Bugbee becomes a kind of cartography: the drawing of a map while finding a way through the wilderness of reflection.

But of course, perplexity itself is not the goal. Like Socrates before him, for whom perplexity is an opening for learning, Bugbee’s confusion quickly resolves into a reverence for the overabundant, miraculous nature of our experience of things. Wonder, “the only beginning of philosophy,” stirs us to openness—to a receptive, inquisitive comportment toward the world—the true and only source of the certainty so desired by philosophers. Certainty, in Bugbee’s reading, comes not from developing a logically watertight, systematic doctrine that answers the fundamental questions that nag us (the meaning of life, the existence of God, and so forth), but rather from reflection upon experience.

Contrary to the empiricist belief in experience as sensory data “from which we are removed to the capacity of observers” and “from which we are in a position to make assured reports,” for Bugbee experience is always shot through with wonder: “a tissue of meaning . . . permeated with meaning by invasion.”10 Against the dogma of empiricism, Bugbee insists upon a richer, deeper, and altogether more basic understanding of experience—one that recognizes the genuine philosophical potential of our otherwise mundane daily comings and goings. “The mystery of each thing,” no matter how commonplace, “is the mystery of all things; and this—not generalization or the broadening of our scope of attention to wider and wider complexes of things, is the foundation of the idea of universe: the omnirelevance of the experience of something as sacred.”11

Ultimately, though, this reconceptualization of certainty and experience proves to be preparatory work for finding a new foundation for ethics. Unlike Heidegger (whose silence on ethical matters famously motivated the career of his student Emmanuel Levinas), Bugbee’s existentialism directly confronts the question of how to act well. Against modern moral philosophy’s emphasis on autonomous rational choice, Bugbee maintains that the conditions of our day-to-day life, if properly understood, are already a source of “pre-ethical” phenomena that guide our activity toward the good. Proper reflection upon our situation reveals that before conducting any abstract rational speculation about actions we should or should not take, we already find our lives marked by obligation, commitment, hope, and faith.

Action is genuine or it is nothing. It is concrete or it is nothing. An act emerges only from the texture of the everyday, from a place; to consider an act abstractly is interesting only inasmuch as it actually happens. But its ultimate source is life, not thought—and any investigation into how good action is possible will have to begin where one is.

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WHAT, THEN, DOES Bugbee have to offer us today? What does a solitary peripatetic fly-fisherman have to say about the problems facing twenty-first century America? Nothing directly. His project has no concern for history, no sense for timeliness or contemporary issues. Like Virgil, his work attempts to lead us out—out of some of the foundational problems of modernity: the loss of transcendence; the siloing of “philosophy” into an increasingly narrow and professionalized discipline; the obliteration of meaning from the transformation of place into space.

Bugbee’s corpus offers an utterly undogmatic approach to thinking, somehow weaving a fabric between philosophy and religion. Nowhere in his writing does he ever insist upon the truth of a particular religious creed—there’s no evidence he was ever a religious practitioner. His works, however, are written in an unmistakably theological register, and the picture of life and thought he gives is shot through with a religious character.

Faith becomes constitutive for understanding, an attitude undergirding every engagement with the world. To live presupposes faith in the grounds of one’s living—a ground that is never fully comprehensible and can never be mastered. His few surviving essays include one on the Book of Job, in which understanding is portrayed as “a relation of mutual address” between being and the one seeking to understand it.14 And in an essay on the concept of creation, Bugbee concludes: “Creation uniquely involves us as agents of creation in what necessarily comes to pass. . . . It is simply and eternally to be done.”15

Nor did Bugbee limit himself only to drawing from a “philosophical” canon. Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant make their appearances—but so too do Herman Melville, Charles M. Doughty, Franz Kafka, Sophocles, Faulkner. At his first meeting with his new students and faculty colleagues at Harvard, Bugbee gave a short speech on awe and terror drawn from a passage in Melville; and the first journal entry in The Inward Morning begins with a quotation from the autobiography of William Carlos Williams. “Moby Dick seems to me an articulate introduction into the presence of things in their finality,”16 he writes, an inquiry into “things exist[ing] in their own right.”17 Literature, for him, can have just as much a philosophical character as canonical philosophy. And in his engagement with the East through his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, Bugbee demonstrated the universality of his approach, drawing eagerly from a source deemed alien to the Western tradition of philosophy beginning with Plato and Aristotle.

But perhaps the most significant and lasting characteristic of Bugbee’s reflective philosophy is the importance of place. Philosophy, for Bugbee, is inextricable from life, a life lived somewhere—among specific people in a specific landscape, in which one walks and performs specific activities. “This day is the place of meeting with the lives of persons, yes, even with one’s own life.”18 We cannot ever achieve complete control over the place we inhabit in the world of things: rather we are placed, we already inhabit an environment, and our philosophizing must begin here. Philosophy is reflection on place, and upon ourselves in place—and as place informs our thinking, so too does our thinking reciprocally inform the world in which we move. As Mooney describes it in his introduction:

Our age is defined by pointless chatter, restless busyness, the constant low hum of anxiety. Children are trained from grade school to seek positions in elite colleges, or they are forgotten and left to fall into the degrading morass of drugs, crime, and institutional life-support schemes. Yet, the wilderness of Being still awaits us, if we only dare to encounter it as such. As Bugbee reveals again and again, the possibility of philosophizing never ends; there is always truth to be found in quiet and calm for anyone with eyes to see, a few memories, and an honest heart.

                                   This piece first appeared in Athwart Magazine, 2020.

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WE TALK A LOT about trying to “understand” differences these days. By exposing ourselves to differing ways of life—different lifestyles and perspectives—we believe that we will come to understand the world and ourselves better. But when you look at the actual actions taken in service of this goal, it seems to me to be the wrong verb. The result is less understanding than tolerance, at best, acceptance. We seek to make difference comfortable—both for the different, but above all, for ourselves.   

Upon this day in American history, many find themselves faced with the necessity of accepting something different that makes them profoundly uncomfortable. History has not gone according to plan, and now we must learn to live with the consequences. Whether one judges this to be a positive or negative development is not the question here. How we are to now live together is. Tolerance and acceptance (of fate) is certainly one option—it managed to somehow get us through the first time. Or we could use this as an opportunity to live up to our ideals and learn to actually understand what living in a world of difference demands.

Ultimately, coming to understand things other than what we are or know entails exploring the contrasts: comparing it to our own way of life and assaying its values, and thus its value. What our current practice of tolerance does is ignore differences in the hopes of bringing those on the outside into the fold—of making the pariah into a neighbor. These actions, however, are hindrances, not aids, to understanding. In so doing, we unwittingly shut off our faculty of judgement in order not to judge a thing by our standards. But is not judgment the very mechanism through which understanding occurs? 

Now don’t get me wrong, acceptance is certainly a necessary first step—if we are too prejudiced, we will never become judicious. By being too quick to judge something, we are liable to place it in a predetermined category that obscures vision just as badly. But whereas prejudice is a wall that prevents approach, unreflective acceptance is an overpass that keeps us equally distant. Both are barriers that prevent getting close enough to appreciate who or what we seek to know.

But now that we have been awoken from the dogmatic slumber of the last thirty or so odd years, how are we to move forward as a nation? How are we to understand this new paradigm, and how are we to understand those miscreants who interrupted our self-satisfied somnambulance? Must we resign ourselves to simply tolerating the next four years as another waking nightmare?

I believe that if we instead make an earnest attempt to understand those who differ from us, it can be a teaching moment by which things we have too long suppressed and ignored may be brought to light. Difference is a good thing; acceptance, equally as good. And in a society as large and diverse as ours, tolerance is paramount. Yet in our rage to make difference comfortable, we have forgotten how to think properly about the consequences of our decisions and what they mean for the lives we wish to lead. Understanding why others believe what they do can be equally revealing about the nature of our own most deeply held convictions. Alternatively, we can say, “Hell with it, may the best team win.” Historically, though, this has never turned out well for anyone involved.

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ONE OF THE MOST instructive sources from which I have come to understand the nature of difference is by comparing the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. These two societies are a complete study in contrasts, and could almost be said to represent our two fundamental human alternatives in their purest forms.

Modern social scientists would describe Athens as an “open society” par excellence, whereas Sparta embodied the “closed society.” Athens was a sea power: democratic and individualistic with open borders, they engaged in trade and exchange of ideas with foreign lands, and allowed art and philosophy to flourish in its midst. Sparta, conversely, was a land power: oligarchic and collectivist with closed borders, they prohibited all foreign trade and influence, and concentrated their entire society around military virtue. Despite these vast differences, however, at the height of their power in the 5th century BC, they equaled and rivaled one another for supremacy of the Hellenic world, engaging in one of the largest wars up until that time. I believe that by holding these two deeply antagonistic societies up against one another, the true consequences of difference are exposed—of what is gained and what is lost in making choices for oneself and one’s society. 

Basically everything we mean when we refer to “Ancient Greece” today (the art and architecture, the philosophy and, of course, democracy) happened in only an eighty year period, in a single city of 40,000 free men. This situation was anticipated, in fact, by one of our greatest resources for knowledge of these two societies, the historian Thucydides. As he observes at the outset of his on-the-ground account of the war that would bring this golden age to an end:

Suppose the city of Sparta were wiped out and all that was left were its shrines and the foundations of its buildings, I think that years later future generations would find it hard to believe that its power matched up to its reputation. . . . On the other hand, if the Athenians were to suffer the same fate, they would be thought twice as powerful as they actually are are just on the evidence of what one can see.1 (1.10)

Yet despite this disparity, 2500 years later both cities continue to ignite the popular imagination, confirming that other famous forecast made by Thucydides: that his work would become a “possession for all time.” As long as “the human condition remains what it is,” (1.22) he contends, his document will continue to shine light upon the dark contours of existence to help illuminate our path.

As the Greek proverb contends, “the beginning is half of the whole,” thus the dialectical nature of these two cities can be seen from their very origins. Whereas the Spartan legislator Lycurgus enacted his vision by force; Athens’ lawgiver Solon did it through persuasion. Whereas Sparta’s laws were divine revelation; Athens’ were epic verse. While Lycurgus fashioned an individual out of a community; Solon made a community out of individuals. As Plutarch, our second greatest source of information about these cities, frames it: Solon merely re-formed Athens to give it “the best laws they would accept,”2 while Lycurgus revolutionized Sparta and instituted “the best laws in the world.”3 And the fact that the latter’s work went practically unchanged for nearly five hundred years (only giving out because of Athens’ imperial ambitions), only reinforces this judgement.

Sparta maintained its continuity through a harsh educational regime that married personal excellence with unquestioning obedience, habitually reinforced by a lifelong regimen of military training. Because Lycurgus forbade his laws from being committed to writing, they needed to be written, and continually retraced, on the heart of each and every citizen. To this end, there was a complete erasure of the family unit, private property, luxury, money, privacy and autonomy. As Plutarch summarizes, “The citizens lost both the will and the ability to live as individuals,” becoming simply “organic parts of the life of the community.”4 Other than in wartime, or when a general was sent out to aid another city, citizens were not permitted to travel abroad, nor were foreigners welcomed into theirs. For novel ideas, bring novel choices, which disrupt the harmony of the whole. Yet just because no one was able to live as they pleased, it did not in turn mean that everyone was equally nothing. Life in Sparta was a continuous struggle for dominance and personal recognition—it was just that they only wanted to see and be seen for the sake of Sparta, not for themselves. Ambition was constantly encouraged and rewarded at every moment of every day, but the only available outlet was in service to the whole.

Athens, by contrast, took a much more laissez-faire approach in enculturating its citizens. As Thucydides describes, the Athenians were “natural innovators . . . bold beyond their means.” (1.70) Their proximity to the sea brought opportunity both for expansion, as well as for incorporation. Athens thrived as the crossroads of the Aegean where ideas met the material to move from ideality to reality. A “spirit of freedom,” (2.35) he elaborates, permeated their society that allowed citizens to live as they pleased—as long, that is, as their choices did not break any laws or undermine the public good. Constant change was not only welcomed but embraced, and the names that have echoed down through the ages—Pericles and Alcibiades, Sophocles and Aristophanes, Socrates and Plato, the Parthenon and the Agora, to name but a few—attest to the city’s liberality and enlightenment. These luminaries, however, also represent the final Athenian epoch to be so commemorated. In their contest for supremacy of the civilized world, Sparta was ultimately to defeat them, and no one was ever able to make Athens quite so great again. While you can still admire the city’s ancient shrines and buildings even today, one is visiting only ruins.

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SO AS WE BRACE ourselves for the possible drastic changes to our way of life that many of our fellow citizens voted for, what can we learn from these ancient images?

When we in the modern West say that we “value difference,” or that “diversity is important to us,” we mean this is in an entirely Athenian way: everyone should be legislator of their very own lifestyle. A Spartan existence of austere submission to authority is practically unthinkable—and certainly undesirable—to the majority of us. Difference means individual innovation; and even when we are talking about a company or brand that is “innovative” (which by definition involves some sort of collective enterprise), it means breaking free of the traditional way of doing things. Yet despite the greater individuality granted by Solonic law, there were still particular qualities that made a citizen of Athens an Athenian; likewise, despite its guardedness, a Spartan was given vast leeway to differentiate themselves from their comrades. The ancient conception of both individuality and community seems to have been much broader than how we envision them today.

Indeed, this is the inherent logic of modernity: to move away from a collective identity given by tradition towards autonomy (from the Greek auto-nomos: “self-law”). The last thirty years of radical politics perfectly reveals this fact, as we have witnessed the quiet substitution of the term “multiculturalism” for “diversity.” Equal cultural representation once dominated the leading edge of progressive politics. But once other cultures were sufficiently brought into the fold and these pariahs became neighbors, the push has again returned to acceptance of everyone as a unique individual. But apparently people can only be pushed so far.

Sparta has once again defeated Athens. Upon issues of border, culture, economy, community, and harmony, the Lycurgian desire for unity has reasserted itself against Solonic openness. But the question remains as to what makes those who live in America American? Is it simply shared interests, or a shared set of ideals; or perhaps a shared history and a shared future? More likely the monocultural vision of Pax Americana inaugurated in the 1990s shall go the same way as the “multiculturalism” of that era. So what constitutes the positive vision that underlies the negative vote given to our former historical trajectory?

Today is not a period, but a question mark—at worst an ellipsis. How we fill in the blank is now to up each of us as an individual to decide. America shall always be Athenian to the core, but that does not mean we cannot learn from the Spartan. This is the true value of openness. To me at least, it seems that the latent message underlying these surprising events is a desire for the reconstitution of some sort of real community. But in a world of expanding digital connectedness, and increased mobility and crosscultural exchange, what does such a thing look like?

What this election may have ultimately revealed is the limits of the possible. History has not ended; it possibly has not even begun. Only through a better understanding of ourselves and the nature of the human condition that studies such as Thucydides illuminate may we begin to answer such questions. Building community now requires that we study community. Never before in human history have we possessed such autonomy. Join us here at The Koinos as we begin this most exciting of all human odysseys.

Joining us also on this episode is Siobhán Petersen, a fellow alum of the St. John’s Graduate Institute. Ms. Petersen is currently teaching a class on the Philosophy of AI at the Johns Hopkins Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Together we search for the essence of the mind of the machine—its relationship to our own and to the world. Is it an analogy or analogue, image or idea, artifact or artificer? Through the gateway of Book X of Plato’s Republic, we dive into the cave beneath the cave—a world of images of images of images—that AI threatens to create to see what of truth is reflected there.

With the release of Chat GPT3 a year and half ago, the public was thrust into a new world that we (myself included) seem to understand little about. Our imaginations have been set ablaze with the possibilities of what could be accomplished with the increased power of machines that appear to be able to think and create for us. What new secrets of the universe might we unlock; what new tools and toys might we invent; in what ways might we even enhance human being; or alternatively, what new tragedies might we bring upon ourselves? The possibilities at the moment seem limitless—which, in my opinion, is always a dangerous proposition. By developing this revolutionary technology publicly, we seem to be performing a massive social experiment at scale, with little social control of how this new technology is to be implemented—and thus with little idea of what the outcome will be.

What better book to utilize, then, for delving into such a discussion than Plato’s Republic—a work, that is at least nominally, about how to create the perfect society through the proper social and political mechanisms? Although a closer reading reveals that it is in fact a warning against such attempts, there really is no greater work in the Western tradition for stimulating such questions. And of course there is the greater fact that, as in Alfred North Whitehead’s formulation, all philosophy is simply “a series of footnotes to Plato.” So why settle for pale imitations, when you can get it straight from the source? ¹