We got a sense of why when Jeff (most of his later students referred to him as "Stout" but he was Jeff to us) gave some autobiographical remarks at the end of today’s talks. He was an activist in high school and college, and his experiences with the coalitions of religious and secular people in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s defined a trajectory studying and making explicit the sources of democratic moral engagement – sources not only overlooked by scholars both secular and religious but inconceivable to them. His most recent books Democracy and Tradition (2004) and Blessed are the Organized (2012) make the connection to democracy clearest. His earlier The Flight from Authority (1981) and Ethics after Babel (1989) were more concerned to challenge received ideas about the incommensurability of religion and modernity.
We arrived just after the publication of Ethics after Babel and couldn’t have predicted the direction his work would take after that. Jeff probably couldn’t have either. As he put it yesterday, as he was approaching forty he realized there was a whole world of texts which he needed to study to challenge mistaken narratives about a great separation of religion and politics, and about democracy as opposed to tradition. He was working intensely on them when we were his students, and encouraged us to read them, too. But Jeff was seeking, not yet finding, and didn’t have an explanation yet for why Edmund Burke and William Hazlitt and Harriet Martineau mattered, certainly not one we could understand. Wasn’t Burke one of the fathers of modern conservatism, the others justly forgotten? Now the story is clear – the early Burke inspired others in the tradition of democracy – but it wasn’t then. The three of us did our own things for our dissertations, a little hurt that he had little to say about them.
Noticing the caesura in the rhythm of Jeff's books - 1981, 1989, [ ,] 2004, 2012 - I’ve thought for a while that his intellectual career was like the movement of an inchworm. We had caught him at the moment when the worm had drawn its hind legs (?) up right next to its front legs in an omega-shape before shooting forward another full body length ... but who knew in what direction that would be, how it decided? Perhaps that image came to me because inchworms can seem a little tentative when they stretch out again, waving back and forth before somehow committing to a direction. With the advantage of hindsight I see that Jeff was not lost but seeking, truly open-endedly seeking – as all scholars claim to be but few truly are. And that he eventually found what he was looking for. It would have been nice to be there when it all came together!
Jeff Stout with Cornel West on Friday night
Jeff’s retirement from teaching doesn’t mean his seeking – and sharing his findings - has ended. He has his recently delivered Gifford Lectures to turn into a book (given the rhythm, I predict they'll appear in 2020!), among other things, and doubtless has much more up his sleeve. He still looks as young and energetic as he did when we worked with him. The passion of his loves burns as intense as ever. But his retirement does feel like the end of an era - the kind of talk that predictably goes on especially at retirement events like this but no less real for that. And if he’s retiring then we must not be students anymore! Perhaps the most confusing realization of this gathering was that he was quite a bit younger than we now are when we first met him! Where are we on our own trajectories as scholars, teachers and citizens? Have we found our way, remained true to our vocation, kept seeking? I’m certainly no stranger to the inchworm dance.
Hearing from those who were able to work more closely with Jeff than we were made some other things clear – things that were happening even if we didn’t appreciate them. I've long recognized that some of my pedagogical moves come from him. From him I learned a patience with opposing, especially conservative, views which strikes some true believers as misguided. It is also from him that I learned to believe in democracy as more than the worst system but for all the others – as, rather, our best hope for a genuinely human culture. But at this gathering it became clear to me that he wasn’t indifferent to our work after all. As grateful student after grateful student testified, he's not interested in making disciples, but in helping students find their true voices. Several said that, although they differed with Jeff on various things, he’d made it possible for them to become the best version of themselves.
Pedagogical kenosis: perhaps the signal was a bit muffled during that period of inwardness, but I can see it now, belatedly. Jeff practices what he preaches: a radical democratic ethics which takes every person you meet seriously not only as a fellow citizen but as an individual. Each of us is striving to live well, using norms and giving reasons and appealing to examples and paying tributes to sources in ways we hope others would recognize – and not just the others who are like us. We can recognize the power and beauty of others' norms, reasons, examples and sources of being without sharing them. Friendship is potentially as big as the moral community is wide. Our commitments can become more explicit in mutual recognition without converging into uniformity - and thank goodness for that. As Jeff put it with characteristic exactitude: “that's why I say the cloud of witnesses is essentially plural.”