Remembering John Kimmey by Robert Hood

I first met Professor Kimmey when I was a freshman in his aesthetics course in the Honor's program in 1986. He would enter the room and pose a question about the book we were reading, and then ask of the ensuing silence: "Well?" -- and then he would laugh. He would gently prod and help us develop our questions. His own views were presented in a remarkably self-effacing way -- I remember being struck by his humility. The next year when I had him as part of a year-long team-taught Honors seminar, I witnessed an amazing intellectual collaboration -- the class brought together aesthetics and philosophy of art, music, and the visual arts. After that second year honors seminar, we gathered in a circle in the backyard of his house under the tall oak trees amongst birdbaths and flowerbeds and presented our projects, and afterwards had punch and sandwiches.

Later, I and another student had an independent study with John on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. We met at his house around the kitchen table, drinking lemonade and eating cookies. One day I was struggling unsuccessfully to make sense of Derrida's writing, and appropriately enough one of John's many cookoo clocks sounded -- we laughed: apt commentary. After the Derrida course I asked for another independent study, but he suggested that instead I might come by that Friday "to sup," and when I did, I found myself in a group of people going to a Mexican restaurant.

One Friday led to another, and for the next two years until his death, almost every week I would stop by after classes and my own teaching was finished (I was a graduate student by then). Sometimes it was just the two of us, and we would talk about philosophy -- Plato -- the Stoics -- phenomenology. Or we would talk about teaching. Or he would ask me about what I was working on in environmental ethics, and it was amazing how he helped me begin to learn to clarify a question or cut to the heart of an issue.

But more often others came along, musicians mainly, and we talked about the technicalities of harmony or the development of the symphony form or one evening we kept coming back to something he wondered out loud, "Why do humans sing?" I was always amazed at his ability to be interested in so many things. I don't doubt that I learned on these Friday evenings about a life of philosophy -- how a life could be no different from a classroom -- I saw the way an idea would strike him, and I think that was when I first got a sense of how to hold an idea, turn it, explore it, enjoy it -- patiently, playfully, carefully.

Robert Hood
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Middle Tennessee State University
rhood@mtsu.edu

KMSF - PHIL - CAS - UNT - July 3, 2000