ELIJAH JORDAN: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

Dennis W. MacDonald[1]

Saint Anselm College

The philosopher Elijah Jordan was one of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century. He brought philosophy to bear on the crises plaguing the modern world and offered insights that could still help set the world on a sounder path. Considered “one of the most original social and legal philosophers in the history of American thought” (Reck, 1964, p. 263), his unique approach encompasses most of the major subject areas of philosophy including ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics and epistemology, as well as social and legal philosophy.

In the first half of the 20^th century, Jordan was well known in American philosophy having served as President of the American Philosophical Association (Western Division) in 1942. He published widely in major philosophical journals and several of his major works were published by the University of Chicago Press. In 1940, a session at the American Philosophical Association annual meeting was devoted to Jordan’s philosophy. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, but turned it down in favor of continuing his career at Butler College (now University) in Indianapolis.

On March 28, 1875, Elijah Jordan was born on a farm in Wheatonville, in southern Indiana a couple of miles up the road from Elberfeld.  He was one of thirteen children born to Thomas Jordan (b. Chatteris, England - Aug 7, 1846) and Matilda Kitchen (b. Haubstadt, Indiana - June 10, 1850).

From 1894 to 1897, Jordan attended Oakland City College in Oakland, Indiana. He taught in rural and village schools for several years before enrolling at Indiana University where he studied philosophy under Warner Fite completing his A.B. degree in 1907. (Fisch, 1954, pp. 62-63) (University of Chicago records)

Jordan then went on to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he studied under James Edwin Creighton. Among the courses he took with Creighton were the two semester History of Philosophy in 1907-08, and Metaphysical Theory in the Fall of 1907.  He was awarded the A.M. in Philosophy in 1908. After Cornell, he did additional graduate work at the University of Wisconsin taking courses in philosophy with E. B. McGilvary (Metaphysics, History of Morality), Boyd Bode (Advanced Logic), and E. A. Ross (Social Psychology). In 1909, Jordan went on to the University of Chicago, taking courses in philosophy, sociology and psychology with George Herbert Mead, Addison Webster Moore, W. I. Thomas, among others. He completed his doctoral thesis, “The Constitutive and Regulative Principles in Kant,” and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1911.  (University of Chicago records)

Jordan and his philosophy are largely unknown today. As Andrew Reck (1960-1961, p. 263) has pointed out, the neglect of Jordan has been imputed mainly to the difficulty of his writing. Indeed, Jordan is no easy read, but, as Reck also noted, neither were Kant or Hegel.[2] Instead, the neglect of Jordan must be ascribed to “the discordance between his philosophical outlook and the dominant modes of philosophy and social thought.” (Reck, 1960-1961; 1964, p. 277ff) Thomas Haynes, a student of philosophy professor Max Fisch at the University of Illinois, suggests a similar view in his unpublished manuscript on Jordan (prepared for, but not included in, Fisch’s Classic American Philosophers). Haynes characterizes Jordan’s approach in terms of “a relation of uncompromising opposition” to the predominant themes in theory and practice. These are “the reassertion of faith in the individual,” the “submergence of the individual to all sorts of absolutisms,” and the “fervor for applied science combined with a pragmatic attitude.” (Haynes, 1949, pp. 1-2) Haynes goes on to point out that each of these trends fails to recognize the essential character of modern cultural life, namely, its corporate organization.

Reck and Haynes are undoubtedly correct in characterizing Jordan’s philosophy as one solidly in opposition to the main currents in modern philosophy. However, it is not the case that Jordan’s philosophy is mainly a response to other thinkers. Near the end of his life, in answer to an interviewer’s question about the background out of which his work emerged, Jordan makes it clear that his philosophy is a response to the world and its problems.

“I suppose the greatest challenge came from reflecting on the impact of the first world war. One would have to recall the period of prosperity and optimism preceding the war to understand the shock which came with the deluge of suffering -- physically, economically, and socially -- which was brought about in the first great world conflagration of our century. My own reflective reaction and my own particular problem was: How is one to explain the objective situation which brought home so powerfully the moral bankruptcy of our so-called culture at the very moment when people’s subjective states of mind were running in a completely opposite direction. Almost everyone – except those behind the locked chamber doors – those who really know – expected humanity to soon be reaching the mecca of prosperity which science from the 18th century French Enlightenment on had promised us; instead came the most fearful rain of blood that the modern world had ever known, the god of progress crumbled – and you as well as I know what the result was. Man had asked for a drink of cool spring water and had received a cup of warm blood. This then was the background against which my thinking took place – why did the war happen? What were its real causes? Why should it have come as such a surprise to everyone, to prick the bubble of progress just as it was to reflect myriads of beauty and prosperity? I found my key to the situation and I think it still unlocks the mystery of our manifold difficulties today, when mankind is threatened with permanent annihilation.” (Jordan, 1952b)

Jordan’s philosophy as set forth in his extensive publications on ethics, metaphysics, social and legal philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics, does not lend itself to simple summarization. Several closely related ideas stand out, however, as characterizing his philosophy.

1. Objectivity. Jordan’s insistence on objectivity is a theme that runs throughout his philosophy. As he explains in the opening chapter of Forms of Individuality, what appears to be “the one fatal tactical blunder to be recorded against the history of human thought“ is that “the new element of subjectivity which emerges at the dawn of the modern era was mistakenly received by philosophy and science as the new element of method, as the ground of a new logic, as a new dispensation as to how the objects of the world should attain their embodying orders and organizations.” (1927, pp. 3-4) Jordan does not deny the reality of the subjective, but sees it “as a new distinction in the content of thought, viz., that between the objects of nature, on the one hand, and purpose, motive, objects of particularized mind, on the other….” (1952b, p. 3)

Toward the end of his introductory chapter in Forms of Individuality, Jordan claims that in the book, he “attempted to reach whatever degree of objectivity I might be able to find, and I have undertaken to discuss human affairs in what seem to me their fundamental aspects with as little mention as possible of specifically mental facts.” (1927, p. 39) The “realities of life” for Jordan “are not mere ‘ideas,’ not mere abstract states of mind whose very existence is often questionable, but complex organizations of fact which include ‘hard,’ ‘brute’ facts along with the more intimate mental phenomena, and in which the distinction between the two types of fact is not, in many important cases, capable of being drawn with precision.” (Jordan, 1952b, p. 39) Of his use of the term, “objective,” Jordan says it is meant “primarily as a reference to external relations among realities made up in the main of relatively independent fact, facts whose ‘dependence’ upon mind constitutes the least of their claims to immediate contact with the real.” (1952b, pp. 39-40)

2. Corporate idea. Jordan was convinced that the attempt to make subjectivity into the principle of order in human affairs, “the one fatal tactical blunder” in the history of human thought, was the source of disorder in practical affairs.[3] As he indicated in the 1952 interview, the “key” to resolving the problem is the principle of corporeity or “corporate individuality.”(Jordan, 1952b) The corporate principle emphasizes that mind and will are always embodied and that the body is not primarily the human being, but what he calls the “corporate” or “institutional” person. As Jordan makes clear in his Preface to the second edition of Theory of Legislation, the corporate idea is “the common metaphysical ground for ethics, politics and law” as well as for aesthetics. “This ground I convinced myself that I found in the institutional structure of the public life, as life itself is grounded in nature and as life and nature have their corporate identity in the ‘world’ which is the ultimate ground of all distinctions. (Jordan, 1952c, p. 14)

In the concluding chapter of The Good Life, Jordan elaborates on the nature and importance of the corporate person.

“That men should have food, shelter, a reasonable degree of comfort, recreation, intelligence, books, love, truth, beauty, it is necessary that these should be organized as public obligations, since they are beyond the competence of the individual person to provide. They constitute in their active aspects the moral life, and the moral life is the public life, the life that man lives outside the narrow confines determined by his mental limitations…. The ultimate ends that men can think out for themselves cannot be left to the limited capacities of individual men to be accomplished; they are too important to rest upon a basis so weak. They are therefore tasks for the corporate body and can be accomplished only by corporate agencies.”

And so, for Jordan, “The corporate person is the good life.” (Jordan, 1949, p. 439)

3. Relation as constitutive. Central to the corporate idea is relation. For Jordan, relation is not mechanical or causal, but, rather, constitutive. There is, he argues, no such thing as an isolable object; all persons and things are constituted by their relations to the larger world, to other persons and things. One simple example from Jordan’s, Forms of Individuality, will illustrate the relational nature of Jordan’s thinking. “My mind, for example, is the sort of thing you would expect from the sorts of thing that interest me. I am what my pencil, my pipe, my hoe, my pocket-knife, my books, my wife, my god, my associates and friends, the public instruments I want to use or have to use, make me. Not of course in the crude causative sense, but in the sense that the sum of enumerable means which I use indifferently (publicly) constitute me…” (Jordan, 1927, p. 161)

Erich Ahrens, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois and a long-time friend of Jordan and student of his philosophy, succinctly outlines Jordan’s position.[4]

“(T)he fundamental contention of Jordan is that no isolable object exists in the universe. If such a thing, existing in and for itself, were assumed to exist, he argues that it could not be known, since things are known only in and through their relations…. He asserts that object and relation are not separate things, rather that an object is constituted by its relations, or that the object has its being in relations. Every object he says is what it is by virtue of its relation to other objects and to the world to which it belongs. That is obviously true of an idea. Every idea is what it is by virtue of its relation to other ideas, to the whole of thought in which it stands. One idea enters into the other, is part of the others, logically implies the other. The same is true of words, of acts, of persons, and of all things, Jordan says. Accordingly, when speaking of the nature of things, the reference is not to a metaphysical inner essence of the object as is often supposed, but to the being of the object in the totality of its relations. To speak of the nature of things is then one and the same with speaking of the mutual interdependence and implications of things to one another; it is speaking of things in terms of the world to which they belong.” (Ahrens, c1955)

 

4. Fact and Value. In his discussion of the relation between fact and value in Chapter V of The Good Life, Jordan rejects the near universal modern assumption of a disjunction between a subjective realm of value and an objective realm of fact, a distinction “between what is mind [value] and what is not mind [fact].”(1949, p. 75). Fact and value have a relation of “constitutional mutuality, since each is implied as a necessary element in the structure of the other….” (Jordan, 1949, p. 76) The relation of fact and value is one of analogical identity, that is “experience as fact is what is necessary to make experience as value real, and experience as value is necessary in order to make experience as fact intelligible or to give it meaning.” (Jordan, 1949, p. 76) Jordan thus argues for an objective conception of meaning and value. As Ahrens points out in his essay, “The Ground of Moral Judgment,” the world, the larger whole of related fact, is determinative of value or meaning.”(1950) An important implication of Jordan’s stance on the mutuality of fact and value is that sound value judgments depend on a sound knowledge of things, of the world.

Although Jordan’s philosophical writings undoubtedly constitute his greatest contribution, he was by all accounts an outstanding teacher. With the exception of a brief stint at Cornell, he spent his career at Butler University in Indianapolis teaching philosophy and psychology courses and chairing the department for most of that time. “Because of his reputation and the informality of his classes, Dr. Jordan’s courses were among the most popular offered at Butler, and his advice on personal problems was constantly being sought by his students.” (Butler Alumnus, October 1944)

Several students have commented on Jordan as a teacher. One described his approach to teaching: "Dr. Jordan gave no formal class lectures, but followed the Socratic method, always seeking to help the students to find their own answers to the questions he put to them, sometimes slyly, and sometimes in a bold somewhat drastic statement; first, with a conspiratorial air, testing the door and transom to prove them closed.” (Troyer, 1961, p. 1) Another former student who herself became a teacher asked Jordan “what the secret of his teaching was (you see I was a very young teacher, and since he was, and I still think this true, the greatest teacher I ever sat under, I studied him in that role quite cold-bloodedly). He said, ‘I don’t know – I guess I just try to remember that the students are human beings.’ He was so big that he could afford to be simple and approachable, and he learned it all the hard way. I remember how he told me once that in one semester the Ethics class at Cornell, which was about 25, jumped to 125. He overheard some of the other men talking about this and wondering how he did it. He said, ‘They didn’t know I had had the hardest kind of training – a one room country school where I had taken many a kid’s hand and showed him how to make an ‘A’.” (Louise Dauner quoted in Troyer, 1961, p. 13)

Much is made of the informality of Jordan’s teaching, his Socratic method, his emphasis on critical thinking and questioning assumptions rather than of conveying specific information. One student said, “All his previous life and work were his preparation for each day’s teaching, and he took little or no time to consider what he should teach on that day.” (Troyer, 1961, p. 12) Nonetheless, Jordan was quite capable of crafting brilliant, finely organized lectures when he thought appropriate. The notes that Erich Ahrens took from his courses on Ethics and on Plato attest to this.

Despite a heavy teaching load and the need to teach also in the summers to make ends meet, Jordan stayed at Butler from 1913 until his retirement in 1944. He turned down offers from the University of Chicago and apparently had a standing offer from Cornell to join its faculty. There are a couple of explanations that have been offered, both likely true. Jordan was immensely devoted his wife who was very active in civic affairs in Indianapolis and had many friends there. Jordan also feared that if he went to Chicago, his time would be taken up with supervising PhD students, not leaving him time for his own writing.

Elijah Jordan continued to work in retirement, publishing his ethics in The Good Life in 1949, and Business Be Damned in 1952 (though he had written it many years before). In December, 1949, Jordan’s wife, Linny, died after a long illness. At the time of his own death in 1953, he had done substantial work on his Metaphysics, subsequently prepared for publication by his former student, Max Fisch.(Jordan, 1956)

 

SOURCES CITED

Ahrens, E. A. (1950). Order and Disorder in Society: Edited and with an Introduction by Melvin Bobick.

Ahrens, E. A. (c1955). [Letter to Max Fisch on Jordan's Metaphysics].

Dr. Elijah Jordan, Philosophy Head, Retires. (1944). Butler Alumnus.

Fisch, M. H. (1954). Elijah Jordan. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 28, 62-63. doi: 10.2307/3129222

Haynes, T. (1949). The Philosophy of Elijah Jordan. University of Illinois Archives. Max Fisch Papers.

Jordan, E. (1927). Forms of individuality; an inquiry into the grounds of order in human relations. Indianapolis,: C. W. Laut and company.

Jordan, E. (1948, July 7). [Letter to Ahrens].

Jordan, E. (1949). The good life. Chicago: University Press.

Jordan, E. (1952a). Business be damned. New York,: H. Schuman.

Jordan, E. (1952b). An Interview with Jordan. P. Richter (Interviewer). Urbana, Illinois: Illinois Historical Survey - Elijah Jordan Papers.

Jordan, E. (1952c). Theory of legislation; an essay on the dynamics of public mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jordan, E. (1956). Metaphysics, an unfinished essay. Evanston, Ill.,: Principia Press of Illinois.

Reck, A. J. (1960-1961). E. Jordan: Critic and Metaphysician of Modern Civilization. Vanderbilt Law Review, 14(263), 263-289.

Reck, A. J. (1964). Recent American philosophy; studies of ten representative thinkers. New York,: Pantheon Books.

Troyer, I. L. (1961). Not Without Honor. Illinois Historical Survey - Elijah Jordan Papers. Read before the Indianapolis Woman's Club, April 21, 1964.

 

[1] I gratefully acknmowledge the significant contributions of Professors David R. Wrone (University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point),Melvin T. Bobick (University of New Hampshire), and Gerald A. Ginocchio (Wofford College) to this biographical sketch.

[2] Jordan is, no doubt, difficult to read. Nevertheless, many have read his work. After sending a manuscript (probably The Good Life) to his good friend Ahrens, Jordan responded to Ahrens’ comments. “I was especially glad to have your comments…, and to know that they are not unintelligible to any one who is accustomed to doing rigorous thinking and will consent to put in a little of the effort it cost me to work them out.” (Jordan, 1948)

[3]In the Preface to Forms of Individuality, Jordan observes the contradictory nature of individualism, suggesting that “It seemed strange that the system of practical principles whose primary purpose is to exalt the individual should nevertheless produce a complete submergence of the individual in what appears to be a sub-human or super-human mechanism….” (1927, p. v) Jordan instead emphasizes the corporate or institutional person. It is the corporate or institutional person which acts, not the bio-psychological individual. (Jordan, 1927)

[4] Ahrens’ statement is part of an extensive discussion of Jordan’s metaphysics written in response to a request from Max Fisch for suggestions for the “Introduction” to Jordan’s unfinished manuscript, Metaphysics. Fisch was preparing for the book for posthumous publication. Unfortunately, Fisch did not see fit to use any of Ahrens’ insights.