ethics

Remembering Stuart Levine in Charlevoix

Stuart Levine, about 2010, heading out to fish

* I first published a version of this piece in 2020, and I would like to share once again what this friendship meant to me.

For me, getting to know Stuart began with seeing a boat, an old boat. From when I first visited the northern Michigan harbor town of Charlevoix in about 2005, I noticed and was attentive to a classic fishing boat. It was a lapstrake wooden-hulled motor boat from the late 1950’s, painted in a beautiful dark forest green. Yet, I was also attentive to the easy skill and confident style of the boat’s captain, an older man whose approach to open water I admired and wished to emulate. During my increasingly frequent summer visits to Charlevoix, I took note of this boat and its persistent captain, who obviously knew what he was doing when going in and out every day to fish on Lake Michigan.

After about seven or eight years of seeing him and his boat each summer, and having taken photographs of them during many of those years, I finally met Stuart. One morning, early in the summer of 2013, I saw that venerable boat in my marina. The next afternoon I saw it again, while her captain was tying her up, having come in from another fishing trip. Plucking up my courage, I walked over and introduced myself. I told him of my admiration for his boat and for what I had inferred from my limited observation about his daily practice. As it turned out, both Stuart and I loved old boats. And, serendipitously, Stuart and I hit it off. We were weekly correspondents, and fellow summer boaters from then on.

As time has shown me, I had encountered and begun to be acquainted with a person of remarkable ability, sensitivity, and enhanced intuition. From first knowing him, Stuart seemed to look beyond the apparent limitations of the present moment, attend to what might be hoped for, and reflect on how the future could really be different. As I came to see, Stuart’s approach to life was nothing like the proverbial person who ‘sees things through rose-colored lenses.’ Stuart’s optimism was grounded in a belief that a different and more positive future results from actually choosing to live in a different way now, not just from believing or hoping differently.

A great example of this aspect of his character took place one summer. Standing with him on the Charlevoix dock while he was stowing his fishing gear after an outing, I asked about all the fishing tackle and gear he left on the boat, openly visible to anyone who might come by. Stuart told me about a valuable fishing rod that he had once left on the boat in a similar way. Upon discovering the rod’s disappearance the next day, he wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, describing the theft but saying that he would not change his usual trusting practice. He wanted to spend his summers in a community where people modeled trust, rather than self-protective fear.

I am reminded of an episode in a video by the former National Geographic photographer, Dewitt Jones (Celebrate What’s Right With the World). On assignment, Jones visits a living national treasure of the UK, a woman who was an acclaimed weaver up in the northern Hebrides Islands. Jones asks her, what do you think about when you weave? She responds by first saying, “I wonder if I will run out of thread!” Jones admits to being surprised by this. But then, she says, “When I weave, I weave…”

Stuart lit up when I told him this story, and he then said, “When I fish, I fish.” He told me that his delight was in the process, more than in the results. His comment then struck me, as it still does, as absolutely authentic to him. Even though this was a man whom the Michigan DNR highly regarded for having documented every lake trout he had caught and released for decades!

At a marina cookout in 2019, Stuart and I talked about the evolving challenge of evaluating college and graduate students in this current era. With several other boaters attentive to his comments, Stuart talked about his commitment to trusting his students. As always, he spoke positively about how placing trust in others encourages them to live into our imputed and projected hope for them. He often reflected on this principle with me, hoping to commend it. After all, it is founded (among other places) in Aristotle and in the Hebrew Scriptures. For what we practice, and live into, shapes who we are becoming. Stuart exemplified this insight.

And yet, at that cookout, as a less-wise and less-experienced former academic, I responded by describing my disappointing prior service on a national examination board. As he invariably would in such conversations, Stuart challenged my apparently less-than-positive view of such processes. He did this in a way that was shaped by his long life experience of having served as a reflective scholar. By his comments in conversations like this, he would disclose how he was both intellectually curious as well as spiritually sensitive. In this way, he showed how he was often a mentor not only for young intellects but also for older souls.

Stuart reminded me of some my favorite teachers. He did this by how he modeled a particular virtue. It was his disposition to value good questions over what often seem to be important answers. For me, Stuart was an excellent example of one who always encourages others to wonder, and then ask, “But, what is the question?” For when we come to appreciate the horizon of a beautiful question, we are then more open to discovering meaningful answers to which it may give rise. Stuart displayed an abiding curiosity about finding good questions. And this led him to discerning an ever-expanding body of insightful answers.

In one other important respect I would like to offer a tribute to Stuart. From time to time he would share with me words of respectful remembrance he had shaped in his effort to honor former colleagues, friends and students. His approach to this sometimes difficult task was compelling. For Stuart embodied a desire to recognize and express appreciation for the gifts, strengths and achievements of others, as a kind of spiritual practice in itself.

May Bard College and other teaching institutions always be blessed to have persons like Stuart Levine among their faculty and in their administrative staffs. And may we all be blessed to have a friend like him.

 

I first offered this tribute in memory of Professor Dr. Stuart Levine six years ago, who died on May 1, 2020. He was formerly a Dean and Professor of Psychology for many years at Bard College, Annandale on the Hudson, New York. Stuart’s cultural and spiritual roots were within Judaism, and Bard College’s early history was associated with The Episcopal Church, within which I was ordained as a deacon and priest.

Beauty: Found, Received, and Made
A photo from Èze, France (by my brother)

While undertaking my studies in ethics and moral theology, I discerned a significant parallel that has continued to shape my world-view. The parallel I have in mind connects how we understand law with how we understand ethics. In turn, I have come to see how this discernment applies also to how we appreciate beauty. 

First, about where law comes from. As I understand it, there are three principal theories about our source or sources for law, formally termed theories of jurisprudence. They are not mutually exclusive, and may function for us in overlapping ways. 

A common understanding regarding the source of law views the concept of law as fundamental to and discernible within the structure of reality. Law in this first sense is something we find, written into the patterns of the world, and of its many aspects. This idea gives rise to, but is not the same thing as, the so-called ‘laws of nature,’ or the principles that order the function of many things from the most basic particles within matter, and the function of waves like light and energy, the functions we discern within complex biological organisms however malleable they may seem to be over time, as well as within the structure of rationality. 

A well-known expression of this first concept of law is latent within the familiar phrasing regarding what it means to be a human being: “we hold these truths to be self-evident…” That is, certain truths or principles are there to be found, by those who exercise our capacity for reason and discernment. A simple but sometimes misleading label for this first concept of law is ‘natural law,’ which some skeptics might argue is neither!

The second most commonly recognized theory of the source of law can be articulated by observing those principles and ‘rules’ long-rooted in the history of our communities, which we receive from those who have come before us. British Common Law, which undergirds much of our tradition of law in the United States, is a prime example. ‘Received from history,’ and long relied upon by communities, are two basic ways to label and identify this concept of law. The familiar refrain, ‘we have always done it in this way,’ provides a ready example. 

The third way of understanding the source and character of law perceives law to be comprised of those principles and or rules that have been decided by individuals and communities. It is commonly called ‘positive law,’ a label that refers to the law that we posit, or put into place. The existence of law in this third category represents the assertion of will and of choice, for law in this sense arises from us as something we make, and is dependent upon our projection of what we wish or believe to be true. Many examples, from neighborhood clubhouse rules to Louisiana’s state constitution (resting upon the French Napoleonic legal tradition), are expressions of this approach. 

These three theoretical understandings of the source of law are relevant for my own field of ethics. For in ethics, there are three principal bases for our concept of the Good, and upon which our notion of the Good rests, which correspond to three principal forms of jurisprudence or theories of the source of law. 

Moonrise off the harbor breakwater in Antibes (photo also by Gregory Holmgren)

If this is correct, and I believe it is, then surely we can reason appropriately toward the same conclusion regarding Beauty as well as for Truth. For Beauty and Truth as Transcendentals play the same foundational role in our thinking as the Good, which functions as a principal reference point for ethics in human reasoning and experience.

This leads me to recognize how there are three principal ways of accounting for the source or sources of beauty. With regard to Beauty, positivists will contend that ideas regarding beauty are projections of those who hold them, whether by individuals or by communities. Historicists, in parallel with the common law tradition of jurisprudence, will say that notions of beauty are rooted in the histories of communities and the traditions, and are to this extent reliable guides for thinking about things. And – as follows from the preceding, those who accept the natural law tradition in jurisprudence are those most likely to view beauty as a given feature of reality, here and there for us to encounter, regardless of our shared traditions and personal aspirations. 

In closing, I want to restate a point I made above. Whether we are accounting for the source or sources of Beauty, Goodness, and or Truth, we may prefer one or more of three ways I have articulated based on the three principal approaches to the sources of law. Yet, all three approaches are likely to figure into and be a part of our thinking. For example, we may think that notions of beauty are rooted in nature, while valuing how our Western tradition of art has shaped our thoughts and those of our community, while still also recognizing how we may be somewhat arbitrary regarding the forms or standards of beauty that we prefer to value and pursue! Especially because the first or second of these three approaches may serve as a corrective to and perhaps as also a check against the potential liabilities associated with the third.