The memorial for my mentor John Lachs is this afternoon.
John was a wonderful philosopher of happiness, and of "immediacy" as the key to its attainment. He had little use for the tone-deaf philosophers who are out of touch with their own subjectivity and feelings:
"…immediacy continues to receive little attention in the world of thought. In philosophy, in semiotics, in law and the other professions, thirds occupy pride of place. Our interest is focused on rules and laws, on the intelligible structure of what we do. We seem to think that understanding is possible on the basis of description alone and that living, direct experience, what we might call direct acquaintance, is an impediment to thought. In our urgency to know the outcome of our acts, we overlook how they feel. We appear not to realize that some of the most important consequences we help cause are feelings and emotions. Instead, we relegate private experience to the realm of the "merely subjective" and thereby rob it of dignity and significance. Even worse, some philosophers go so far as to deny the existence of feelings and private minds altogether. In the quiet of their minds, they clearly feel good about holding such positions…
John Dewey… called such immediate experiences and ideas that which is "had." He thought that in the form of direct enjoyments, these moments constitute the only delights or consummations of which we are capable. They are, in this way, the core of value and goodness: all the instrumentalities of life aim at securing and extending these periods of gratification. Dewey's point is as right as it seems forgotten. Pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment, and delight can exist only in being had: they are moments of life that can be shared but not expressed, experienced but not explained. In overlooking immediacy, therefore, we decline to pay attention to the values that make our existence worthwhile. If everything is merely a means to some distant objective, we are left with no intrinsically enjoyable ends at all. If everything is public activity and busy work, we are robbed of exhilaration, of joyful absorption in the moment, of the private smile of the soul."
— The Cost of Comfort (American Philosophy) by John Lachs
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