In Boston, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), I'll have the privilege of chairing the William James Society's session on Thursday afternoon.
The first order of business at that session will be to honor the legacy of John Lachs, SAAP's co-founding (and confounding, I'm sure he'd delight in saying) first president and WJS's president in '07. He left us in November, was memorialized at Vanderbilt in December, but will never leave my grateful memory.
I've been sweating all day over just what to say. I still don't think I've said enough, but he'd remind me that enough is good enough.
He'd remind me too of William James's admonition in Will to Believe. "Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher."
So, inevitable errors of commission and omission notwithstanding, here's what I plan to say Thursday:In Memoriam: the Legacy of John Lachs (1934-2023)
Good afternoon and welcome, on behalf of the Wm James Society. I’m Phil Oliver, honored currently to serve as vice-president of the Society. I was a member of the inaugural executive committee, way back in 2001-2. Before that I talked James (and Emerson and, I recall, James Taylor) with our eventual founder Randall Albright, whom I met (and from whom we’ll hear shortly) via the old James Family listserv. Remember those?
So good finally to really meet you, Randall, and to publicly thank you for taking the initiative all those years ago to launch a far-flung community that has meant so much to so many of us. That’s the spirit of Wm James, to follow talk with action.
And that’s the spirit of SAAP’s first president John Lachs, who said “there is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."
We lost a giant of philosophy when we lost John on November 14. Perhaps you’ve encountered one or more of those audio productions in the Giants of Philosophy series John edited in the 80s. He was an ideal choice to chair the APA’s centennial committee, tasked to “create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness.” That’s exactly what John did, always, throughout his long career (from which he formally retired only a couple of years ago at age 87).
When, for instance, my department at Middle Tennessee faced its existential crisis in the wake of the financial collapse of ‘08, John came and delivered a timely morale-lifting talk on the value of philosophy that got our university president’s and our dean’s attention. John was no ivory tower philosopher, but he did defend tenure as the institution that allows us to show the dean (and the prez, if we dare) any finger we like. Fortunately it never came to that, for us.
Those audiobooks are good, btw. Some of my best friends and former teachers are featured in them as authors, as channeled by professional actors. How strange to hear my old teacher John Compton talking about Sartre in the voice of Charlton Heston, or my old grad school pal and best man Daryl Hale on the Stoics and Epicureans… read by Lynn Redgrave.
John also got John Cleese to record a series of short PSAs “from the philosophers of America” extolling the value of philosophy in its centennial year of 2006. They reflect JL’s own voice, somehow elegant, earthy, funny, and profound all at once.
I’ve had occasion to pay public tribute to John before. In 2007 I was president of the Tennessee Philosophical Association and participant with a panel of my peers in tribute to John at that organization’s annual meeting. We thought he must surely be contemplating retirement at that time, at age 73. We were wrong.
I later contributed a very personal “addendum” to Krzysztof Skowronski’s festschrift tribute, in John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy (Brill, 2018). It was so gratifying to be recognized, in his reply, as a “kindred spirit”--I hope so– “and [he wrote] our love of William James brings us even closer together.”
John’s winking last words in that volume deserve to be heard, and smiled at, and pondered:
“Sad as it may sound to say it, the probability favors the view that death is final. Our delights are like the joys of the butterfly that hovered over a flower for a precious minute a thousand years ago. And then it is over in a moment of grace.
Of course we can hope for more. And, indeed, if the universe has an administration, we may be employed, like faculty, beyond our useful years.”
The last time I spoke with John, at his Nashville home not long before his precious time with us was at last over, we had a wide-ranging conversation that displayed once again his lifelong love affair with life. And his good-humored positivity and personal energy, even in the face of debilitating illness and the inescapable undeniable end. He said philosophers “ought to have the courage to look into the abyss alone and to face sudden tragedy and inevitable decline with equanimity born of joy or at least of understanding. I am prepared to be surprised to learn that we have a supernatural destiny, just as I am prepared to be surprised at seeing my neighbor win the lottery. But I don't consider buying tickets an investment.”
John left specific and detailed instructions for his memorial service in December, including these words from In Love With Life: “our lives can find meaning at each stage, and not lose usefulness even after death.”
He was a force of nature. He was a happy man. He was, monumentally to understate the case, “useful.” His example will endure.
There is so much more I’d like to say about John Lachs, his legacy, his contributions to this organization (president of the WJS 2007) and the founding of SAAP in the early 70s, his instrumental role in granting me and so many of my peers our profession, his professional and personal civility and kindness and decency. His fundamental humanity. He was a humane teacher, in a profession not always known for placing human values ahead of career ambitions. I’ll never meet a more exemplary model of genuine care and concern for the well-being of others, especially those others lucky enough to have entered his orbit.
Time presses here, though, so I invite you to go to my blog site Up@dawn and search his name. Here, he has the last words. From the epilogue of Stoic Pragmatism:
It is still very hard for me to picture him at rest, but: requiescat in pace, John Lachs.
So good finally to really meet you, Randall, and to publicly thank you for taking the initiative all those years ago to launch a far-flung community that has meant so much to so many of us. That’s the spirit of Wm James, to follow talk with action.
And that’s the spirit of SAAP’s first president John Lachs, who said “there is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it."
We lost a giant of philosophy when we lost John on November 14. Perhaps you’ve encountered one or more of those audio productions in the Giants of Philosophy series John edited in the 80s. He was an ideal choice to chair the APA’s centennial committee, tasked to “create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness.” That’s exactly what John did, always, throughout his long career (from which he formally retired only a couple of years ago at age 87).
When, for instance, my department at Middle Tennessee faced its existential crisis in the wake of the financial collapse of ‘08, John came and delivered a timely morale-lifting talk on the value of philosophy that got our university president’s and our dean’s attention. John was no ivory tower philosopher, but he did defend tenure as the institution that allows us to show the dean (and the prez, if we dare) any finger we like. Fortunately it never came to that, for us.
Those audiobooks are good, btw. Some of my best friends and former teachers are featured in them as authors, as channeled by professional actors. How strange to hear my old teacher John Compton talking about Sartre in the voice of Charlton Heston, or my old grad school pal and best man Daryl Hale on the Stoics and Epicureans… read by Lynn Redgrave.
John also got John Cleese to record a series of short PSAs “from the philosophers of America” extolling the value of philosophy in its centennial year of 2006. They reflect JL’s own voice, somehow elegant, earthy, funny, and profound all at once.
I’ve had occasion to pay public tribute to John before. In 2007 I was president of the Tennessee Philosophical Association and participant with a panel of my peers in tribute to John at that organization’s annual meeting. We thought he must surely be contemplating retirement at that time, at age 73. We were wrong.
I later contributed a very personal “addendum” to Krzysztof Skowronski’s festschrift tribute, in John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy (Brill, 2018). It was so gratifying to be recognized, in his reply, as a “kindred spirit”--I hope so– “and [he wrote] our love of William James brings us even closer together.”
John’s winking last words in that volume deserve to be heard, and smiled at, and pondered:
“Sad as it may sound to say it, the probability favors the view that death is final. Our delights are like the joys of the butterfly that hovered over a flower for a precious minute a thousand years ago. And then it is over in a moment of grace.
Of course we can hope for more. And, indeed, if the universe has an administration, we may be employed, like faculty, beyond our useful years.”
The last time I spoke with John, at his Nashville home not long before his precious time with us was at last over, we had a wide-ranging conversation that displayed once again his lifelong love affair with life. And his good-humored positivity and personal energy, even in the face of debilitating illness and the inescapable undeniable end. He said philosophers “ought to have the courage to look into the abyss alone and to face sudden tragedy and inevitable decline with equanimity born of joy or at least of understanding. I am prepared to be surprised to learn that we have a supernatural destiny, just as I am prepared to be surprised at seeing my neighbor win the lottery. But I don't consider buying tickets an investment.”
John left specific and detailed instructions for his memorial service in December, including these words from In Love With Life: “our lives can find meaning at each stage, and not lose usefulness even after death.”
He was a force of nature. He was a happy man. He was, monumentally to understate the case, “useful.” His example will endure.
There is so much more I’d like to say about John Lachs, his legacy, his contributions to this organization (president of the WJS 2007) and the founding of SAAP in the early 70s, his instrumental role in granting me and so many of my peers our profession, his professional and personal civility and kindness and decency. His fundamental humanity. He was a humane teacher, in a profession not always known for placing human values ahead of career ambitions. I’ll never meet a more exemplary model of genuine care and concern for the well-being of others, especially those others lucky enough to have entered his orbit.
Time presses here, though, so I invite you to go to my blog site Up@dawn and search his name. Here, he has the last words. From the epilogue of Stoic Pragmatism:
“I am grateful for living at a time when I can contribute to the recovery of American philosophy, a great and greatly neglected national treasure. The founding of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, in which I gladly participated, serves as clear evidence that just a few determined and persevering individuals can have a lasting effect on the future of a profession. We need to continue expanding the canon by adding to it thinkers whose work is excellent but who have, for one reason or another, been neglected over the years. I work on this, as I work on bringing philosophy into contact with a broader public, with the conviction that the energy and vision of a small band of people can make all the difference we need…And so he was, and so in our hearts and minds he continues.
In the end, I do not want to be absorbed in the technical details of the problems of philosophy. My passion is to deploy philosophy to deal with the important issues that face us as individuals, as a nation, and as members of the human race. There is a large public waiting anxiously for what philosophy can offer—for careful thinking, clear vision, and the intelligent examination of our values. That is where the future of philosophy lies, that is where American philosophy has always pointed us, and that is where I will continue to be.”
It is still very hard for me to picture him at rest, but: requiescat in pace, John Lachs.
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