“It is not that we fail to know what is good; we just believe that nothing is good enough.” -John Lachs, Stoic Pragmatism

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Numerous Erraticus essays this year waded deeply into the literary.

Nick Gall reminded us that ironists must learn to listen poetically. Donovan Irven’s three-part essay series on meditation showed how one might embrace Zen Buddhist practices to cope with life crises. And Rick Joines explored what happens when we treat religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.

Additionally, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm offered a path he believes moves us from postmodernism into the metamodernist paradigm. It may, in fact, be time we did a little less deconstructing and a bit more building once again in philosophy and culture.

The recent passing of a great philosopher enables us to reflect deeply on our mortality and why we should be contented with that which is good enough. 

Read “2022 Year in Review: More Meliorism, Please”

Saying a Few Farewells

The death of 2023 brings to mind the people we have lost, including their contributions to our lives. 

Last year we saw the passing of philosopher Richard Bernstein, a thinker whose commitment to democracy and pluralism lives on in his many students. Another solar rotation and we’ve had to say farewell to yet another paragon of pragmatist thought, philosopher John Lachs.

He died November 14th at his Nashville, Tennessee home, following his more than fifty years at Vanderbilt University educating students in moral philosophy, pragmatism, and the role of philosophy in society.

“In his decades-long career as a philosophy professor, Lachs made the case for the relevance of philosophy to life,” writes Michael Brodrick, a former student of his. “The rise of the modern university wrought a change in the way philosophy was practiced. Philosophy narrowed its horizons. Its largely abstract and theoretical preoccupations bore little resemblance to the ancient quest for the good life. Lachs’ objective was not merely an effort to theorize about philosophy in a different way. Lachs embodied the philosophical ideas he championed in the classroom, in writing, and in leadership positions across the profession.”

Read “Michael Serres, a Poetic Philosopher”

Toward a Philosophy of Daily Life

Ever resisting the pull of detachment that’s become so endemic to professional philosophy, Lachs toiled toward a philosophy of daily life, finding increased clarity as he neared the end of his career.

“In the course of a life of reflection, one’s attitude to the weightiest questions emerges only slowly,” he states in Stoic Pragmatism (2012). “Given the demands of the academic world, professional philosophers are likely to start their careers writing about technical problems. The dialectic and the swirl of footnotes this requires obstruct self-discovery, so that they may think of the positions they take as capturing their deepest beliefs. That this is not so comes into view only late in life or not at all.” 

It is only through experience, he argues, that we can lay ahold of knowledge. Well, self-knowledge, at any rate. But we must turn toward the practical to realize that.

“Perhaps we need the varied experiences of life to determine where we stand,” he continues. “We may have to turn from the problems of philosophy to the issues that confront us in daily life. Possibly we need to live awhile with our favorite ideas to realize that they really do not matter.”

He isn’t implying that we should disregard the world of ideas or intellectual pursuits, but rather that we ought to hold to them gently, and be willing to sacrifice them on the altar of experience, making room for new hopes and fresh empirical facts. 

Yes, even the many ideas central to pragmatism are not exempt from this. When a belief becomes too fixed and worshipped, it hardens like a molten calf, turning sterile, too, far less useful than a muddied dairy cow that provides a household daily milk and nutrition.

Like many people, I’ve been pestered by the pursuit of perfection throughout my life. It’s our protestant heritage, after all. Its corrosiveness takes many forms; holding others and oneself to impossible standards; applying a critical eye to everything one consumes or experiences, be it art, food, or social life; constantly striving for something more; and grasping so absolutely for flawless beliefs and principles. 

This perfectionism frequently produces bitter fruits. 

It’s exhausting trying to meet somebody’s impossible standards, our psychological well-being collapsing beneath their weight. It pains me to think of the many people close to me who sadly have had to shoulder my sometimes exacting expectations and idealistic beliefs. This demand for something akin to perfection eventually frays relationships, burdening all parties.

Put simply, always looking to improve something robs us of the deep joy that comes from good enough. 

A vital thread of stoic pragmatism, Lach’s personal philosophy and one of his final great offerings, is the mentality of good enough. 

Read “Philosophy on the Danube River”

Being Good Enough

It’s a mistaken belief that everything falls short and needs to be improved upon. “We want not only more of everything but also more perfect versions of the goods we have and the experiences we enjoy,” Lachs observes. 

In part, this endless grasping grows out of mass consumerism and its promise that each subsequent product or service will be “new and improved,” he points out. This bleeds into every aspect of contemporary life in the age of market triumphalism where nearly everything is a commodity that can be enhanced or later upgraded.

For instance, we try to find the perfect job, endeavoring one position or project after another to finally uncover our supposed “calling in life,” the career or vocation we are somehow destined to realize. 

We may leave behind a mass of hurt or betrayal in pursuit of the ideal romantic partner, to say nothing of the pernicious beliefs surrounding soulmates or fated lovers. Insisting on perfection in “our experiences and relationships,” Lachs cautions, “is a certain way of making life miserable.” 

We also create ruthless moral duties, believing that infinite obligations or eternalized principles are suitable for finite beings such as ourselves, where we encumber each other with a lifetime of shame, guilt, or resentment: No matter what we do, it will never be good enough. 

“In any case, the best we can offer in moral exertion is not good enough,” he laments. “This reveals perhaps more clearly than anything else what is at stake. The demands on us are infinite even though our resources are clearly finite.” 

This observation should be heard as a rallying cry for common satisfaction or stoic acceptance, not an ode to mediocrity or resignment. 

For a stoic pragmatist like Lachs, it’s important to make the distinction between “that which will do and that with which, in the absence of better instruments and experiences, we can make do.” Lachs creates a spectrum between something that partially satiates our desire or goal, or with what “we can make do,” and those in the realm of “good enough,” avoiding the ensnares of perfection.

For instance, while hoping for an evening at a local music venue only to learn no tickets remain, I may realize that listening to one of my favorite bands on my home surround system “will do.” Sure, I may have wanted to hear a live performance, but my in-home experience still meets my underlying desire to hear emotionally stirring music. 

Upward we move on this continuum until we reach the threshold of “good enough.”

As Lachs puts it: “Things good enough are truly good or colloquially speaking, even great, in fact so good that they do not need to be better. This does not mean that they are perfect or that they could not perhaps be improved. But they are good enough for me or for us as finite, thoroughly limited beings operating under circumstances we may not be able to improve.” 

This acceptance doesn’t mean we are satisfied with the meager crumbs of life or abandon the notion of excellence. It maintains that stoic pragmatists “enjoy what is fine and permit themselves to feel fulfilled, refusing to search for some elusive ideal.” 

Read “Look for Things That Don’t Change”

The Search for the Perfect and the Permanent

This prescription for good enough isn’t limited to experiencing joy or pleasure, however.

“The search for the perfect and the search for the permanent seem to have an oddly close connection,” Lachs remarks. “In seeking the flawless, we seem to want something we will be able to remember forever.”

I encounter this impulse when reflecting on the impermanence of an evening of good conversation or the beauty of the Appalachian landscapes near my home, worrying whether anything matters all that much since it will surely fade away and be forgotten, eventually. 

The stoic pragmatist philosopher believes this reaching for permanence, whether in eternal ideas or forever-remembered experiences, is an effort to make “a warm home in the coldly changing world, something stable that will always welcome, accept, and shield us” from the harsh realities of our foundationless, chaotic, and deeply unsettling existence.

In an attempt to buttress against this sometimes frightening situation, many religious-minded people turn to the concept of a changeless God fixed in the cosmos, or the Absolute, while the more scientistic or secular may reach for immutable and abstract truths upon which they can build an unshakeable foundation. 

Lachs invites us to interrogate this drive for perfection.

• What is there about perfection that exercises such a magical influence over the human mind?
• Why should we not break off our search for the good when we find something good enough, without reference to whether it or something else could be better?
• Why is the good enough not good enough for us?

The history of Western philosophy is rife with attempts to articulate exactly what these standards of perfection are by which we are to judge our experiences or society regarding love, justice, peace, virtue, and knowledge, to name a few.

However, each of these expressed perfections is most often an abstraction we will never experience. 

“We can recite empty formulas,” Lachs prods, “such as that omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions along with knowledge that each of an infinite number of false propositions is false. But this tells us nothing about lived omniscience—how it is, for example, for someone so well informed to be denied the delight of surprise.” 

Read “The Pragmatic Truth of Existentialism”

Are Our Deeds Ever Morally Good Enough?

For me, the good-enough mindset is particularly profound when integrated into moral life. 

One wonders: Can an individual ever do enough good? Are we ever warranted what William James refers to as “a moral holiday”? What amount of good done in the world is the barometer for becoming a moral person?

If given the choice between championing our so-called “infinite obligations,” as thinkers from Josiah Royce to Emmanual Levinas have, and that which is “good enough,” I lean toward the route that is possible and fruitful for finite beings. 

“I cannot think of myself as a moral monster,” Lachs writes, “yet I am unable to detect any universal duties that tie me to humanity or the world. I have no problem identifying and acknowledging obligations to many people near and dear, and to animals whose care I have voluntarily assumed, but not to anyone and everyone, including individuals I have never met and those whom, for one reason or another, my agency is unable to reach.”

Here, Lachs is perhaps a bit too individualistic, and maybe even too atomistic, for my liking, but I take the thrust of his thought to mean we ought to be most concerned with those within our immediate field of experience, the human and non-human animals most closely affected by us or standing in our direct line of influence.

Naysayers may believe Lachs’ focus on the local or embodied is appealing because it is an easier road to take when compared to bearing concern or responsibility for all humanity.

I disagree. As the adage goes, it’s easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor.

Universals are abstract. Avoiding the messiness of experience, they are made to appear more noble or desirable. However well-meaning universal obligations might be, they are impractical at best, and debilitating or damaging at worst. We wish for the loftiness of perfection without the emotional, psychological, and intellectual burdens that such an unachievable quest begets.

Read “Love Originates in Shared Suffering and Pity”

Be Wary of Bigness

“Feeling that we must fix everything is surely due to a perverted egoism propelled by the thought that nothing short of infinity is big enough for us,” Lachs writes. “In reality, much less than infinity or perfection is good enough—must be good enough—because more we cannot reach.” 

In an 1899 letter, the pragmatist William James expresses his skepticism toward what he calls “bigness”:

"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results.”

Few things exhibit greater bigness than moral universalisms, including those peddled by well-intentioned moralists. 

In contrast, I am contented—on more days than I used to be, anyway—with moral obligations that are good enough. We are limited beings, constrained by the frailties of mortality and our shortage of time and resources. It’s futile trying to identify the exact amount of goodness, good deeds, or meliorative effort one must practice to qualify any given action or day as morally good enough.

In fact, one could even argue there is no perfectly good act, for every deed requires us to sacrifice or “butcher,” as James puts it, other values we hold dear. In economic language, there are trade-offs to our moral decisions and we must balance which ones are most pressing in our immediate present. 

For example, when my commitment to help the downtrodden leads me to volunteer at my local soup kitchen, at that same moment I’m choosing not to spend time acting according to any number of other commitments or values, such as strengthening my marriage by going to counseling or writing a letter to the editor asking local leaders to better conserve our natural environments. 

Any way you slice it, some ideals will fail to be satisfied. It seems we are destined to fall short of any moral ideals we construct.  

Nonetheless, I believe that lightening my neighbors’ burdens, uplifting my family’s spirits, reducing the amount of harm I cause, regenerating the ecosystem around me, and realizing a greater degree of justice and inclusion in my local community today than yesterday is, more or less, what morally good enough looks like, or rather feels like, to me.

Ultimately, determining whether something is good enough is “a spontaneous feeling evoked or judgment made on the basis of a relationship among events, persons, and their value,” Lachs says. And we’ll only know that through our daily encounters with others. You see and hear it in the eyes, faces, and voices of those who experience the wake of your actions, the practical consequences of your beliefs on their lives.

When we marry a modest resolve to improve the world with an awareness of our mortal limits, we develop a balanced moral temperament capable of doing a great deal of good.

It’s easier to do good when you have a light heart and energetic mind, as compared to when you’re burdened by the weight of shame that comes from failing to meet perfection. 

Embracing good enough “negates our Faustian tendency to want to have and do everything. It rejects the relevance of the ideal of perfection and strikes at the root of our compulsion to pursue unreachable ideals,” Lachs writes. “It liberates us to the enjoyment of the possible without eliminating standards or moral effort. It enables us to still our will by achieving what we can and celebrating what we do. By no means least, it dissolves the eternal dissatisfaction that permeates Western industrial society and substitutes joy in the immediacies of life for all-encompassing guilt.” 

If being a stoic pragmatist centers around a commitment to “making life better until [ones] powers are overwhelmed,” as Lachs states, then I believe there are many and much worse philosophies out there people can choose to live by. I’ve experimented upon and lived out several of them.

Concrete experience, after all, is the best way I know how to evaluate ideas.  

“Stoic pragmatism would be of little interest to me if it were only a theory,” Lachs concludes. “I mean for it to guide practices and express attitudes that shape life and that can meet the pragmatic test of making it better.”