Remembrances for John Lachs (1934–2023)

John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Vanderbilt University, passed away on 14 November 2023. Notably, he ends his book In Love with Life with a quote from George Santayana: “The time will doubtless come for each of us, if not for the universe at large, to cease from care; but our passage through life will have added a marvelous episode to the tale of things” (Lachs, In Love with Life 125). John's life indeed was a marvelous episode. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, on 17 July 1934, living through World War II as a child. In 1951, his family fled Hungary because of the communist occupation and settled in Canada. John received his BA (1956) and MA (1957) from McGill University, and his PhD (1961) from Yale University. He taught at the College of William and Mary from 1959–1967 and moved to Vanderbilt University in 1967, where he taught until his retirement in 2021. He married his beloved Shirley Mellow in 1967, and they shared a loving marriage until her death in 2016. They raised two children, Sheila Marie and James Richard.John Lachs was a remarkable person, teacher, mentor, author, colleague, friend, husband, and father. Providing a satisfactory account of John Lachs's career and influence extending over six decades is not possible. His lifework is like the best of classical music with themes, refrains, and poetic moments in earlier movements that still inhabit his mature work. And the dominant motifs of his mature work provide refreshing glimpses into his earlier works. His students delighted in his pulsating lectures and wise humor. He was a popular, dynamic teacher and mentor. His undergraduate ethics course was one of the most popular Vanderbilt courses. Over ten thousand Vanderbilt undergraduates took his classes, and he was the first reader of seventy-two graduate student dissertations. This is an extraordinary accomplishment for any professor. He also taught at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Vanderbilt. He twice received the Vanderbilt Alumni Education Award for his significant contributions as a speaker for alumni events (1991 and 2013), and he was awarded the Madison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1972). He was also the recipient of the Herbert Schneider Award for Lifetime Contributions to American Philosophy in 1997, recognizing his career-long achievement of distinguished contributions to the understanding of American Philosophy.John Lachs authored eleven books and over 150 articles in professional journals. He was one of the founders of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (1973). He was president of several professional organizations including The Charles S. Peirce Society (1987), The Metaphysical Society of America (1997), and The William James Society (2007). He encouraged me to be the founding and general editor of The Works of George Santayana (MIT Press, 1976–2003) and served as a prominent member of the Editorial Board. He led me to form the George Santayana Society as well as establish Overhead in Seville: The Bulletin of the George Santayana Society, and he served on their Executive Committees.All his professional accomplishments do not capture the essential character of John Lachs that made him an outstanding scholar, teacher, and person. At least two characteristics made him exceptional. First, he was principally interested in making philosophy relevant to the public, something largely missing in philosophical exchanges today. In The Relevance of Philosophy to Life, he assesses many barbed issues in contemporary life including dogmatism, the relativity of values, resuscitation, euthanasia, the right to die, violence, education, societal bureaucracies, and technological advancement. In these assessments, his overriding concerns are personal integrity and individual responsibility in a society where science, technology, and business dominate individual action and threaten to become predators of human choice and accountability (Lachs, Relevance of Philosophy). Lachs is remarkable in his ability to capture historical themes and make them relevant in our contemporary setting. His writing skills highlight the intellectual challenges of our modern settings as well as render them in a manner open to the everyday reader without a background in the history of thought. His works are replete with careful and articulate reasoning, good judgment, well-chosen examples, a sense of the practical, and a lucid explication of philosophical issues and their relevance to life. His is a jargon-free approach that is readable and applicable, and it provides a philosophical avenue not well-traveled by today's academics.Second, he lived his philosophy. His concern for personal integrity and individual responsibility was essential to his work and his life. In a meeting with John, he told me that his major philosophical contributions were his work on mediation, the love of life, and his explication of George Santayana's outlook. Each of these was embodied in his way of living and was passed along to all those who knew him.Mediation is when one's actions are being performed for one by someone else. One cannot avoid mediation but overdependence on it may result in treating others as impersonal instruments for one's own goals. This may result in a sense of passivity producing a psychic distance between oneself and one's actions that leads to a loss of community and individual responsibility. In his early work, the solution is an education that is involved in our communities, one that gives firsthand experiences to students, teachers, and the community. Such an education would enable everyone to see themselves as integral to society while also being an individual whose integrity and joy in life are cemented in direct, immediate contact with others and with solutions to contemporary problems. Thirty-eight years later in The Cost of Comfort, he gives a more comprehensive account of the response to mediation, noting the many societal aspects that need to be changed or challenged, including education. He writes that age moderated his sweeping enthusiasm for education, and he became aware of the difficulties of reshaping education and modifying social structures. As a result, he builds on the more modest, concrete proposals first mentioned in In Love with Life: “Taking delight in small achievements and in the flowering of energy everywhere can help us face the darkness, which sometimes surrounds us, with courage and in peace. My reflections aim to be a celebration of life that, like a good party or contagious laughter, grabs hold of spectators and pulls them in. It will have done its job if it contributes a little to the joy of life or at least helps us cope with its pains” (Lachs, In Love with Life xi–xii).The subtitle of In Love with Life provides the essential features of the volume: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die. The universal unimportance of individual human lives is clear. We are like the many tree leaves of the world, but we are only one leaf. We are fortunate if we progress through the seasons of life, at first surviving the difficulties of life and thriving in our youth and then maturing in full bloom and, if we are fortunate, becoming colorful in old age, then fading and falling, not to be seen again. But this unimportance brings a rebirth of energy. He writes: “The best thing to do with old age is to accept it and to enjoy the glorious glimpses of life it presents. Up to a point at least, the mind rises to the mountains as the body goes down.” And he closes with “Mastery in life is to remember death and yet live joyously” (Lachs, In Love with Life 121).This approach to living is rooted in Santayana's philosophical outlook and his focus on individual integrity and fulfillment. John Lachs's study of Santayana began as an undergraduate and continued throughout his life. Lachs published George Santayana in 1988, providing both an explication and criticism of Santayana's philosophy. He concludes: “[Santayana's] system, at its best, represents as high a level of thought as we have attained in the twentieth century. It is sensitive to the full range of human experience and responsive to the most stringent demands of consistency, comprehensiveness, and good sense. In spite of current neglect, it will stand as a major achievement of thought, one of the great philosophical systems and, in private reflection, a permanently attractive home for many minds” (Lachs, George Santayana 147). Since the mid-1980s, he often noted his pleasure at the major increase in publications regarding Santayana in Overheard in Seville, now edited by Richard Rubin, and other journals. He greatly appreciated the work of Daniel Moreno and José Beltrán in Limbo: Boletín internacional de estudios sober Santayana. Recently, John and I coauthored the introduction to the critical edition of Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith that will be published in 2025 in The Works of George Santayana led by Martin Coleman as the Director and Editor. Having worked with John since 1967 when I entered Vanderbilt's PhD program, coauthoring this introduction with John is one of the most significant honors of my career. And other students of John have furthered his scholarship, bringing it to new heights in the modern age. The most recent publication is by Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński's A Meaningful Life amidst a Pluralism of Cultures and Values: John Lachs's Stoic Pragmatism as a Philosophical and Cultural Project (published by Brill). Skowroński had a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship (2001–2002) enabling him to study with Lachs at Vanderbilt. During John's last hospitalization, he was delighted to receive a copy of this book.Lachs's family was a major focus of his life, and their unmediated love and care were central to his living life well. In 1967, John introduced me to his parents. John and Shirley lived in a duplex with John's parents occupying the other half of the duplex. John's love and care for his parents are sometimes missed in tributes, but John and Shirley cared for his parents in a most admirable way. His father was not fluent in English, making it difficult for him to find a decent job. But John cared for his parents throughout the remainder of their lives, always providing support and one floor of their home for his parents to live. His mother lived to be 103. This remarkable attribute was passed on to their children, Sheila and James. Both loved their parents deeply, and Sheila particularly cared for John over the last year of his life, coordinating healthcare providers and hospice care. The dedication of Intermediate Man reads: “For my family . . . three generations of immediacy” (Lachs, Intermediate Man). In Love with Life's dedication is “To my family, friends, and community, for making life vibrant.”John Lachs's philosophical life is embedded in all those who were influenced by him.I'm so very proud to have studied with John Lachs and grateful to him for being a member of my dissertation committee. A year before my defense, in the Spring semester of 1990, as I recall, I took a graduate course on aesthetics with Dr. Lachs. In the first class of the semester, he came into the seminar room and stood at the end of a long oak table, around which we students sat. He carried with him a slick magazine—Vogue or GQ or Glamour. He opened it to an advertisement for perfume or clothing or luggage and slid the magazine skillfully from one end of the seminar table all the way to the other end. He then put his hand on his bald pate and said, in his inimitable accent and unique way, “Eees dat aurrt?” So started one of the most interesting, challenging, and engaging courses I ever took. I still return to the now yellowed and frayed copy of Dewey's Art as Experience I had in that seminar, and I still see Lachs's questions in the margins where I hastily wrote them. What a remarkable experience it was and what an enduring influence Lachs still is.We lost a giant of philosophy when we lost John on 14 November. Perhaps you've encountered one or more of those audio productions in the Giants of Philosophy series John edited beginning in the 1980s. He was an ideal choice to chair the American Philosophical Association'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 2008, John came and delivered a timely morale-lifting talk on the value of philosophy that caught the attention of our university president and our dean. John was no ivory tower philosopher, but he did defend tenure as the institution that allows us to show the dean (and the president, if we dare) any finger we like. Fortunately, it never came to that, for us.Those audiobooks are good, by the way. 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 convinced 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 John Lachs'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 a 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. 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. (qtd. In Skowronski 319)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. His good-humored positivity and personal energy, even in the face of debilitating illness and the inescapable undeniable end, was striking. 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” (115).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 William James Society 2007) and the founding of SAAP in the early 1970s, 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 is the enduring keynote of this extraordinary life. 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 (jposopher.blogspot.com) and search his name. Here, he has the last words. From the epilogue of Stoic I am grateful for living at a time when I can to the of American a great and greatly The founding of the Society for the Advancement of American in which I as that just a and can have a on the of a We need to the by to it whose work is but who for one or over the years. I work on as I work on bringing philosophy into contact with a broader public, with the that the energy and of a small of can make all the we need . . . In the end, I do not to be in the of the of philosophy. My is to philosophy to with the issues that face us as as a and as of the human is a public for what philosophy can careful and the of our is where the of philosophy that is where American philosophy has always us, and that is where I will to (Lachs, Stoic Pragmatism so he was, and so in our and he is still very for me to him at in John Lachs.

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