From Fixing to Caring
A Lesson From Henry Bugbee
The air is warm and crisp in Southwest Virginia, and my little family has moved back from Kentucky, returning to the region of Appalachia in which my kin have lived for two centuries.
The boxes are (mostly) empty. Family is close. And I feel like a Rilke poem: “hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.”
At such a time, when long stretches of fishing and reading and enjoying each other’s company are glittering over the summer months, I can think of no better thinker on which to ruminate.
Here’s a rebroadcast from two years ago, exploring how American philosopher Henry Bugbee can help us better understand how to deeply care for one another.
Things break. You and I try to fix them. The internet shuts down; the printer jams (did it ever actually work?); the faucet leaks; the car won’t start. We encounter a world which, as Heidegger might put it, is present-at-hand, forcing us to confront objects as they interrupt our tasks.
To live is to fix. As such, our minds have developed deep grooves of procedure: “What’s the problem? What’s the solution?” We examine the situation from the outside, using objective thought to find an answer. This approach, while crucial for human survival, is deadly in an adjacent context.
As much as we encounter problems to be solved, we also interact with other human beings who are often in need of our help. Our reflex is usually to ask, “What’s wrong?” Although well-intentioned, this question makes use of the “fixer” paradigm. In such a case, we equate human experience with a broken toaster. Both are technical problems which, given the right information, have technical solutions.
Henry Bugbee, in his profound (in the fullest sense of the word) The Inward Morning, describes life from the perspective of the objectivist:
What shall we say of a man whose attitude toward us is consistently objective? Is he not the man who withholds himself, who speaks to us over a wall and asks us not to bother him too much? Is he not the man who receives us as a kind of specimen or instance of humanity, to whom he is prepared to extend the rights which he claims for himself, perhaps, because he is concerned with the consistency of his position far more than he is concerned with us? Is he not the man who fails profoundly to respond to us? Is he not one who insists on treating us abstractly, who sits over us with the reservation of one who assumes the role of our judge? What intimacy and open reciprocity can there be with a man whose attitude toward us remains only objective? … Who among us has not been through the abdication of responsibility and the sterility of the objective attitude in human relationships?
The fix is not a true response. The other person is reduced to an “instance of humanity,” an abstract self with a set of technical problems. What intimacy, Bugbee asks, can we have with someone who “speaks to us over a wall”? As long as the other remains an abstraction, we keep them at a distance. While this distance can be accompanied by callousness, it is also the plight whenever we reach to help someone we love. Our best attempts can alienate the other, making them feel as if they are not seen. And indeed, in such objectivism, the other is never truly seen. They do not become a Thou (in Martin Buber’s sense), whose reciprocal presence we meet beyond the details and problems of life.
So how do we avoid falling into this objectivism? Must we abandon any attempts to help? Assuredly not. However, our help must be transformed by a different, more human paradigm. This paradigm relies on understanding rather than knowledge. This is a crucial distinction for Bugbee.
Knowledge denotes the realm of propositions, statements about something. Bugbee writes that such statements rely on conceiving of ideas as within spatio-temporal dimensions. In other words, we treat propositions like objects. We assemble statements about the world as we would arrange a series of toy trucks on the floor. Our arrangement creates a picture of the world, and such pictures are fundamental to our conception of reality.
Consider the proposition: “My coffee is black.”
In this statement, I make a claim about the world. I order the overdeterminate sensory perceptions into a claim. In such a case, each word has its spatio-temporal referent.
However—don’t miss this—what enables us to order the world in this way? What is the ground that makes possible propositions and enables knowledge? Bugbee rightly notes that any answer to this question cannot be a proposition. If we tried to explain our use of propositions by propositions, we’d fall into a vicious circle. Furthermore, when we turn our inquiries toward existence (not a cup of coffee), we realize that knowledge is an unwieldy tool.
We cannot know our existence because human experience is not a series of atomized objects that we can arrange. Experience is much more fluid and non-identical. Thus, we must approach existence (the ground of knowledge) with something other than knowledge.
Enter understanding.
Bugbee argues that understanding denotes a personal involvement. Because we are within our experience, we might understand reality by the nature of this privileged pre-knowledge position. Consider an example: One can know about fishing from reading a book or understand fishing through the experience of standing in the river with outstretched rod.
The latter is an experience in which we are involved and can approach through understanding. Bugbee summarize this difference: “our position is less akin to that of knowers and more akin to that of testifiers, witnesses.”
Bugbee connects this experiential understanding with responsibility. In our involvement within a situation, we encounter the call of responsibility. Regardless of what this demand might be, it beckons us. We are not the actors in the play, we are the characters themselves.
To answer the call of responsibility involves answering another’s call for help. But instead of approaching them through knowledge, we come to them within their situation. We recognize that we too are involved in their crisis by the nature of being alongside them (Heidegger’s mitsein). This is a dramatic shift. We no longer try to quantify and fix someone’s hurt. Instead, we come beside them, noting that the human experience is not solved like a puzzle.
We intuitively recognize this. For example, how do you fix grief? We can’t assemble the right ideas and solve it. Knowing a series of facts about the mourner is brittle and insignificant. Facts fail because the human experience cannot be comprehended and mastered. It’s a mystery we must undergo.
By mystery, I don’t mean the absence of knowledge (something we don’t know yet). Instead, mystery communicates the inability to ever achieve full comprehension. Pierre-Jean Jouve aptly summarizes this idea: “Mysteries are not truths that lie beyond us; they are truths that comprehend us.” Bugbee communicates this comprehending truth in his concept of the wilderness, that which is always too big and uncontrollable and yet also sustains us.
Recognizing this mystery is recognizing our experiential involvement. When we embrace our being alongside in mystery, we no longer come to fix from afar, over the wall. Only in this state, can we begin to recognize the ground of our action and orient knowledge. Then, we might graduate from fixing to caring.
Roanoke native here. Appreciated this greatly.
I loved this essay the first time it came out and I love it now