John Lachs

The long-awaited and much-anticipated day has come, the first of two days (will they be enough?) designated for celebrating the “contagious love of life and learning, playful spirit, boundless generosity, and unimpeachable character” of a great philosopher and man.  The John and Shirley Lachs Conference on American Philosophy at Vanderbilt kicks off this afternoon, friends and former students are coming in for it from every direction, at least one of them will join me shortly for a hot chicken lunch to warm us up for the festivities. Can't wait.

The conference organizer Michael Brodrick invited written and recorded testimonials for John. I submitted this:

I do intend to be present in October at Vandy to celebrate the exemplary, inspiring career and life of John Lachs. But I want also to include for the record the following, originally posted when Scott Aikin invited me to participate in a Tennessee Philosophical Association event in 2021 commemorating the 40th anniversary of Intermediate Man. Unfortunately that event did not eventuate. But these remarks in tribute to my mentor and friend, and many others over the years, belong on the record. Thank you, John. For everything. Phil Oliver

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Thursday, July 22, 2021
Intermediate Man, immediate delight

LISTEN. Yesterday was bookended by delightful surprise at the front end, and whatever you call its opposite at the other. I'll call it gratuitous confusion and acrimony, and I'll say nothing much more about it. Just this: some humans, particularly those in my profession, can be difficult and obtuse. Be better, please, colleagues.

The delight, owing to a different sort of academic: an invitation to participate in a panel at the next gathering of the Tennessee Philosophical Association to commemorate "Intermediate Man at 40."

Intermediate Man was my mentor John Lachs's refreshing paean to immediacy in experience and in life, published August 1, 1981. It caught my eye at about the same time its author did, in my first year of grad school. In keeping with its theme it insinuated no footnotes or other distractions between author and reader, just a smart, humane, extremely unpedantic scholar reflecting on the live-but-latent possibilities of perception for those who resolve to remove mediating obstacles from their direct intercourse with the world.

Lachs writes: "Once attention is shifted from the future and we begin to enjoy activities at the time we do them and for what they are, we have transcended the mentality that views life as a process of mediation toward distant ends..."

I've been wrestling pleasantly and, I think, constructively with that proposed form of transcendence ever since. Distant ends and the remote future matter profoundly for us, I believe, as prime motivation for responsible conduct in the present, and the challenge of becoming good ancestors. If we're going to address climate change and the other existential threats of our time we're going to have to accept our collective responsibility for distant ends. We're going to have to think globally and act locally. We're going to have to care about the future, just as our more enlightened ancestors cared about their future--our present.

But... enjoying present activities presently, extracting the full meaning and richness of the moving spotlight that is the specious present, is the unnegotiable condition of our happiness.

So, balancing Lachsian transcendence and its attendant shift of attention without sacrificing sensitivity and commitment to the "long now" has been my bellwether aspiration in philosophy. I am endlessly and immediately grateful to John Lachs for giving me that perspective, and that reflective frame.

So I anticipate with immediate delight that upcoming TPA event in November. There will be scholarly talk and interchange -- the usual academic exercise in extended mediation -- and then, more delightfully and most appropriately, for a man who always asks after my wife and daughters, a family lunch.

It will be transcendent. Or rather, it already is. The future is now.

"There is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought

without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."

My enduring mental picture of John "barg[ing] into the philosopher's lecture hall with the direct concerns of everyday life" is captured forever by the acknowledgement I wrote years ago, in gratitude for the deft mentorship without which I'd never have stood a chance against the "Ph.D Octopus"...

   

 Thanks again, John. For everything.