Troyer on Jordan
Not Without Honor
By
Isabelle L. Troyer
Read before the Indianapolis Woman’s Club
April 21, 1961
“There was a man in our town and he was wondrous wise.” The second line of the rhyme, “He jumped into a bramble bush, and scratched out both his eyes”, might also be appropriate to introduce my subject, Dr. Elijah Jordan, philosopher, teacher, author, friend in the large sense, and a thinker whose convictions often embroiled him in disagreement with the philosophical theories of his time.
Dr. Jordan lived close to Butler College in Irvington and at 251 Berkley Road, near Butler University until he died in 1953 at the age of 78.
As head of the Philosophy department at Butler, for a long time he was the Philosophy Department at Butler, he taught until 1944. For thirty one years he made a lasting impression upon the minds of many students and vitally influenced a surprising number of them. The size of his classes, even when the enrollment of the school was comparatively small is still legend. No one knows for sure just why.
It has been suggested that his eyes fascinated especially the women students. They were unusual. I have heard them described as, “twin owls peering from the windows of a haunted house.”
Dr. Jordan gave no formal class lecture, 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.
This gesture was not impractical. Unorthodox statements slowly realized by the class as a whole, were exploded with few words, “If you are going somewhere, you would have to come from somewhere”, led to examination of the belief in immortality; or “Our institutions must be changed overnight and preparing the minds of people for such changes by educational methods would be much too slow” –revolutionary proposal!
In Irvington, Miss Graydon used to look darkly in the direction of Professor Jordan’s room and say, “I don’t know what you’ve been hearing down there, but—“.
His critical forte earned for him the suspicion of almost everyone since almost no one could understand him. When asked why he bothered to write and publish books that no one would work to read, Dr. Jordan calmly replied that not more than fifty people in Indianapolis would read them and possibly 500 people in the world would understand them, but he added, “They’re the ones who matters!”
Whether his ideas were accepted or not, his unquestionable integrity and moral sensitivity commanded the respect and loyalty of men who knew him well, or had the patience to study his work. Mr. Hilton U. Brown, Dean Frederick Kershner and Clifton Wheeler, were among his devoted friends.
Dr. Jordan is said to have declared that the first loyalty of a teacher was to his subject. He had complete mastery over his materials. He used to walk into class – any class, often without a note and say, “Are there any questions?” Usually there were – and the class took off from wherever that happened to be.
On one day he might defend one side of an issue only to question his own arguments on the day following.
He thoroughly believed in a broad classical education, and deplored specialization of study before the completion of undergraduate work.
Last fall at Newburg, Indiana, three of us who had studied under Jordan more than thirty years ago were interested in our hostess’ difficulties in a discussion with senior members of her church. She complained that she sparkled and chattered till she felt foolish and for all her frantic friendliness and zeal, the elders had sat, stolidly unresponsive.
“I was on the wrong track”, she concluded, running her fingers slowly through her hair, parting and lifting it as if to free her thoughts, “Jordan would have said that my thinking was subjective – the task of our church as a group in this community – is to work with not for each other toward a common moral object and here I was trying to work on their feelings!”
This account of her struggle to evaluate her problem in terms of what he might have said is but an illustration of the persistence of Dr. Jordan’s teaching – “Objectivity”.
Dr. Jordan’s personal appearance and manner were intriguing although he was by nature shy and conscious of his lack of beauty. It took him a long time to conquer his reluctance to stand up in front of people.
His characteristic deliberate and sustained facial expressions and gestures constituted part of his charm for the young.
I can remember when I was still young enough to dress up in cast off finery, my cousin Rosalie and I went ‘round the corner and down Julian Avenue to call on Mrs. Jordan, motivated by hopeful desire for cookies. Mrs. Jordan’s generosity with refreshment and fondness for children was famous with neighborhood, as well as faculty, youngsters.
Dr. Jordan answered the door. He seemed very tall although he was only slightly above medium height and, like the King of Siam, a spare man.
His skull was quite wide and roundish with a high, broad forehead, widely spaced eye and cheek bones – high and wide apart. He had generous ears. His breadth of jaw was centered by a rounded chin. Even his nose had a roundish appearance, and when he asked, as he frequently did, “What’s it all about anyhow?”, his thin lipped mouth retained for a moment the O.
Though his enunciation was quite clear, his voice was soft and undramatic except in contrast to what he said. When he said that something was “damned”, in even low tones, he struck conviction.
As he answered the door to us children, waiting for us to state our purpose, which we were too taken aback to confess, his dark eyebrows shot upward in inquiry.
When I walked into his classroom some twelve years later, I had the feeling that he might ask what it was I wanted. He looked just the same, though his moustache was clipped smaller with each passing decade until it finally disappeared.
Whenever I think of Jordan’s classroom it is in the old building between two railroad tracks. A long freight train clanged and banged and rattled its way past each day – and each day Dr. Jordan’s patience was contradicted only by those quizzical eyebrows of his.
Whenever I think of Butler, I think of the Browns. Several members of that family remember their philosophy course with gratitude.
Jean Wagner says that she “signed up” for Jordan’s class because her brother, Tuck, liked him so much.
Old Butler housed the gym with the engine room, where Dr. Jordan slipped away to smoke. The boys discovered the habit and followed him.
Jean doesn’t know what they talked about but Tuck was full of enthusiasm and mental fermentation from the Engine room sessions so she flowed for a course of the same treatment.
Well, she was miserable. As she said, she quoted the book and not a brain cell was working. She was numb in response to challenging statements until one day she said just what she thought. No plaster fell – she found she was entitled to think so long as she could back up her opinions.
Jean recalls Dr. Jordan’s habit of laying finger to nose like jolly Saint Nick, and looking around to see if you were thinking or wool gathering.
Once a member of the class accused of dreaming when she was gazing out the window, furiously cogitating, blurted out indignantly, “I can’t think when I am looking at you!” which amused the professor as much as it tickled the class.
The next Brown who claims that Dr. Jordan (quote) “sparked my sluggish brain out of its complacency”, was Paul who vividly recalls, (and again I quote) “his fearsome challenge to his classes on the first day of each term – “to be ready and willing to think or get out! I have wondered often” says Paul, whether it was the timid or the brave that got up and left. Personally, I never had the courage to allow those great, magnified eyes to follow me out of the room. Then too, it was reassuring to hear his warm chuckle after the exodus.”
Three of the “younger Brown generation”, now approaching middle age, James Stewart whom Jordan pointed toward the Law, his brother Bob and Hilton Atherton, all, claim Dr. Jordan as one of the strongest influences in their lives. Indeed, my cousin Layman Schell, tells me that when, in a depressed mood, he was ready to quit school, Dr. Jordan’s council gave him the courage to go on.
In the office of Dr. Max Fisch, of the Philosophy Department of Illinois University there is an impressive collection of material written by and concerning Elijah Jordan. Dr. Fisch, who graduated from Butler in 1924, is one of the vitally affected of Jordan’s students. This wealth of material is at present being used by other philosophers to further elucidate Jordan’s philosophical wisdom.
I shall quote from Max Fisch’s preface t Jordan’s “Metaphysics” and embroider his account with detail of my own unearthing.
“Elijah Jordan was born March 28, 1875, on a 200 acre farm near Eberfield, Indiana which is about 10 miles from Oakland City. His paternal grandfather came to Evansville in 1812. There is a shady park in Oakland City called Jordan Park. Across the road lives his sister, Mrs. Louella Burdette, who told me something of their family life, though she was more concerned with Brother Lige’s fondness for her custard pies and his troubles with his digestion than with his reputation as a philosopher. The last few years of his life, she said, he had been a frequent visitor with his brothers John, the farmer, and Albert, the banker, who had made their home with her, and they enjoyed sitting together on the front porch looking across into the little park shady with the green of great old trees.
Albert, the banker, is a kind of legend of eccentricity around Southern Indiana. He was so passionately fond of flowers that his picture was taken on his birthday surrounded by baskets and bouquets brought by friends to do him honor.
Albert and John did not outlive Lige by many years, Mrs. Burdette said sadly. “All the boys are gone. We three sisters are all that’s left of 13 children – 9 boys and 4 girls. George and Anne died young. They had the measles in the winter time.”
Her simple statement of fact only points at the sorrow which left a deep impression on the boy, Elijah. A verse from a long autobiographical poem called “Vita Perdita”, written late in his life reveals his sensitivity to his father’s anguish.
“The man was bowed – From him no word of any kind was ever heard. His countenance framed a dark protest and left God’s conscience with the rent. The will that could Beauty undo could be but ill in his clear view. ‘If that be God! Then first and last. The man could only stand steadfast.”
Of the nine boys, five became teacher. One brother, Floyd, taught English literature at the University of Georgia. A nephew, Floyd’s son, Wilbur, was for a number of years president of Radcliff College, and now teaches history there.
They all worked very hard caring for about 75 head of cattle, and saw little hard money, I imagine, for Charlie Green, husband of Marthey, another sister, recalls driving with a load of fodder to “help out” Joshua, who was teaching at Yankeeville, down by the river.
Thomas Jordan, the father of the family had an unusual mind. “He was a big man,” Marthey remembers, “and not much for foolishness.” He had little education but read a lot; mostly history and the Bible. Dr. Jordan once related an anecdote of his father, who, noticing a small bug on his pant leg, carefully brushed it off and stepped aside in order not to crush it.
That he was a loving father is indicated by another verse of Dr. Jordan’s –
“I saw a little boy approaching in exuberance of joy his tired Father’s chair – to kiss him on his beard and on his hair. He ran with all the joy the world had in his plan, his father’s face to scan and lay his little benediction on the man.”
His mother who sprang from the hill folk of Southern Indiana, was characterized by Elijah as a woman of great and tender courage.
I asked Marthey if such a big family ever quarreled. She paused to consider before she admitted to overhearing a single dispute – one lad had ridden his brother’s horse without permission.
“They were out in the barn lot,” said Marthey, smiling at the memory, “but they made a lot of noise. Father went down there and told them that he never wanted to hear quarrelling again. It was a waste of time – and they never did it again.”
The girls used to drive the boys back to Oakland City College sometimes if they had a lot to carry after the week ends at home. Lige went there between 1894 – 97, then for 11 years taught rural and village schools. Loretta and Marta who were 8th and 9th twigs of the family branch went to school to their brother in the “farmer’s schools,” among 60 children between first and the eighth grades. The young teacher, though strong (he worked as a blacksmith for 10 years) was not healthy. He had to be “carried”
To the school during frequent bouts with “rheumatism”. When he felt better, though, he loved to walk, and frequently stopped by some farm to lend a hand with haying.
After completing his undergraduate study at Indiana University, Jordan spent a year at Cornell where he wrote a thesis on the “Philosophy of Herbert Spencer” for his master’s degree. The next year he was a fellow at Wisconsin, then two years a fellow at the University of Chicago with a minor in psychology, receiving his PhD in 1911 at the age of 36, with a thesis on “The Constitutive and Regulative Principles in Kant.” More or less in spite of the wave of interest in pragmatism, which engulfed that philosophy department at the time. (Now graduate students are earning degrees with thesis on various phases of Jordan’s philosophy).
“In preparation for his French and German examinations, Jordan had been tutored by Linny Anna Woelfing, a German born social worker who had come to Chicago from Paris where she was a member of an organization studying relief measures for the underprivileged. They were married sometime before the fall of 1911, when he returned to Cornell as an instructor.”
The Jordans were a mutually devoted couple.
Mrs. Milton Baumgartner wrote, “Like so many brainy men, Jordan was very clever with his hands and an excellent craftsman. He became quite a connoisseur of antiques and he whiled away many a weekend refinishing old furniture that he found in the antique shops in Indianapolis.” He made several pieces and refers to the image of the table, the selection of the wood, the order of the appropriate tools and realization of the completed object in use, as a satisfying end, to illustrate functions of mind. (My interpolatation).
Again Mrs. Baumgartner –
“The perfection of results from his labor always delighted Mrs. Jordan.
Mrs. Jordan was keenly disappointed when she found that motherhood was to be denied to her, and it was at his suggestion that she sublimated her sorrow by devoting herself to outside activities and the service of the community. In Mrs. Jordan’s later years and especially during the last three years of her illness Dr. Jordan devoted himself to her care. He wrote shortly after her death in 1949, that he was so pleased that he was able to place his last book “in her dear hands” three or four days before the end came.
“Mrs. Jordan reciprocated his warmth and affection for her to the fullest measure. To most people she was very free in giving advice and in saying out loud exactly what she thought. On more than one occasion when I ventured a mild opinion, she would take me down a notch or two by saying ‘Mrs. Baumgartner, that is simply not true.’ But toward her husband her attitude was one of complete reverence and awe. She never encroached in any way upon his private domain. She seldom spoke of him in any other terms than ‘That man’ did thus or said so and so.”
To the distaff members of visiting couples she was a pleasantly firm hostess, keeping them engaged in domestic talk when they were longing to hear discussion of the gentlemen in the study.
There was a Philosophy Club at Butler which met at the Jordan’s home. A ’36 graduate writes, “The boys always went into his study. Dr. Jordan would come out with them for the program. According to the boys they “just talked”. Dr. Jordan would never assume responsibility for the food invariably produced by Mrs. Jordan.
Mrs. Jordan left her hand print on the Irvington community. In 1913 when she came to Indianapolis she taught English to immigrants in the Cosmpolitan Chapel.
World War I found her teaching knitting and organizing the Liberty Loan Drives. One of her knitters who never succeeded in fashioning a square was recognized years later with, “Ah, you’re one of the girls I taught to knit!”
Mrs. Jordan founded the Irvington Union of Clubs and was a charter member of the Irvington Public Health Association.
Theodore Woelfing, Mrs. Jordan’s nephew came from Germany in the early 20’s to live with them for the rest of their lives. “The Uncle” helped to establish his nephew in his work as a plumber to their mutual satisfaction.
Several years after his wife’s death, Dr. Jordan sent for a grandniece, Renata, whom he described as bright as a new penny, and sent off to the Herron Art School.
But I must return to Dr. Fisch’s account of Dr. Jordan’s Butler years.
“The ‘load’ was always heavy but the teaching was unlabored. He lectured without notes, and sought more to waken and provoke than to inform or instruct. Philosophic profundity was well salted with Hoosier dialect, humor and anecdote.
“There were texts to be read and the essays and examinations were to be based on them, not on the lectures; and this left the lectures free.
“They did not repeat and they scarcely even elucidated what was in the books. They seemed, and usually were, unpremeditated.
“There were unexpected flights of eloquence and abrupt descents, as if in self-depreciation.
“His large brown eyes would bulge to emphasize a point just made, or at times, it seemed, to fill a pause.
“All his previous life and work were his preparation for each day’ teaching, and he took little or no time to consider what he should teach on that day.
“There was no limit, however, to the time he would spend with a single student who wanted help, or who wanted just to talk with him. Mrs. Jordan and he welcomed students to their home, and many kept coming after graduation.
“In the few years that he survived her, he made of their last home almost a shrine in her memory.”
One of the girls who spent “wonderful hours in the den, talking about Art and Philosophy and Poetry and Politics and all the things you somehow get around to”, was Louise Dauner who now teaches English Literature at Drake University.
Her evaluation of Dr. Jordan as a teacher is appropriate here since dedicated and courageous teachers are in his own opinion keepers of the flame of Civilization.
She wrote in answer to my plea for her recollections; “He combined an innate dignity with a puckish and irrepressible kind of humor – the sort that makes folk-tales and legends; and then he was so utterly simple in his manner. He could talk to anyone from an old negro fisherman on the riverbank on a spring day – to the best philosophers America could produce and then somehow, it all combined into a kind of humanity.
“Once I asked him what the secret of his teaching was (you see I was very young then in teaching, 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 (before he came to Butler) which was about 25, jumped to about 125. He overheard some of the other men talking about this and wondering how h 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’.
“I suppose another factor was that Jordan had the fine sensitivity of a woman combined with a firm masculinity. He had a rare family feeling; also he had seen enough suffering in his immediate family to make him very cognizant of the real fact of suffering in life. He was himself subject to the kind of depression that can overtake any sensitive man in the modern world.”
“He did not, I think, believe in organized charity – I don’t think he had much use for Community Funds et cetera, but more than once, during the depression, he took a boy off the streets, fed him, put him up for the night, and then sent him on his way with five or ten dollars.
“He used to walk, as you know, with regularity every day, until the last year or so – at four o’clock (like Kant), you could almost set your watch by his going out – and a walk with him was a kind of a revelation. He knew birds and trees and flowers – he had a sort of Wordsworthian response to Nature.
“Toward the last ten years, he began to write some poems, many of them rather 18thcentury-ish, but some with a real originality, a complement of Feeling Form and Theme, which remind me of Hardy’s poetry. (He looked like Hardy when he was young, and his penmanship resembled Hardy’s too.)”
Dr. Jordan once told Professor Baumgartner that he would like to have more time for birds but so long as there were still a large number of people suffering in the world he felt that he must put them first. “However”, says Mrs. Baumgartner, “that did not prevent him from being a keen observer of what was happening in their own yard or neighborhood, and he always had time to restore a lost fledgling to its nest and to frighten away any stray cat in search of its prey.”
These few lines show something of his delight in Nature.
“I like to see the flowers grow and hear them purl and coo and crow like babies do, and when the chaff they shed and burst out with the laugh of the full blossom, I can feel the fun they have and I can steal a little of their color.”
Mr. Louis Kirkhoff, who was a frequent walking companion of Jordan’s traces their path from Irvington streets out South Arlington to Reading’s farm, which included within its boundaries large uncultivated meadows and woodland through which a stream curved its way. Nature was undisturbed for the most part, and in later years even the tow path from Butler to the River never measured up as a walk away from the city.
Max Fisch says, “The automobile never ceased to stink in his nostrils. His sense of the togetherness of culture and nature … was in part a farmer’s sense of agriculture in nature, and of the family, the church, the school, the market and the bank in agriculture; in part a craftsman’s feeling for materials, hand tools, and ‘natural finish’. He did not walk at night, and the astronomer’s immensities did not impress him. But he had a pungent sense of the rank vegetative and animal growth of nature, and sensed something like it, as well as something different, in human situations”
Doubtless some of you have seen Dr. Jordan walking along the way, deliberately swinging his cane, more to emphasize than to assist his movement. Truth to tell, he was uncomfortable about strange dogs.
During the last years of his life he was denied his walks, and that was when I renewed my association with him. He consented to ride with me to our grocery and back.
One day, just before he went into his house – we had been talking about the mad state of things, and I hopefully suggested that special people, like Gandhi or Schwitzer, had through history turned the tide of senselessness to a degree – he turned and looked at me sadly and said, “My dear, the day of the individual is past.”
I couldn’t forget it. I didn’t know what he meant, but I’ve tried to find out.
Dr. Jordan was intensely concerned with practical life. He not only read and studied the thinking of ages past and present, but spent much time in thoughtful observation of people in their various situations. He has been seen talking with men sitting around the court house square, or questioning a man who was digging in the street. He was moved by man’s helplessness to change the facts of his environment.
He was conscious of the tragedy inherent in life itself. “Man, as individual, can see more than he can do.” Only the artist who creates a satisfyingly beautiful object can hope to realize the complete, completely; to comprehend the meaning in the end of his endeavor.
Another verse from “Vita Pedita” expresses his acceptance of tragedy. “But this I know, Experience leaves on the man of finer sense – a man of sense, I mean, who feels in nature’s complicated wheels, and blind machinery the urge of life, the pulse of blood, the surge of will – the man so sensitive – will find it difficult to live. Will find it hard to live, I mean, in every sense, if he be clean; his sensuous mood is misery. Even the hurt of joy will be a mode of pain – Pain follows pain as substance of the endless train of sense. And pain, throughout his life. To surpass pain, the constant strife.
“Even the body life is pain. Perhaps the body is life’s strain incorporate. The sense are but attributes, the car left by its ground in being; and where being’s found. It is in pain. Being hurts. In this all thought, all knowledge, wisdom is.”
Elijah Jordan had known the hardness of life tempered with the sympathetic neighborliness that shared a common lot. He had seen the contrast to that intimacy in the teeming city of Chicago, where poor elbowed poor to grab at the means of existence.
This contrast between the ideal of the Good Life and the actual facts was accentuated by the impact of the first world war. Looking back from 1952 Dr. Jordan recalled the challenge presented by the world war of 1914.
“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 country. 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 locked chamber doors – those who really knew – expected humanity to be reaching the Mecca of prosperity which science from the eighteenth century French Enlightenment on, has promised us; instead comes the most fearful rain of blood that the modern world has ever known, the god of progress crumbled – and you as well as I know what the result was.
This then was the background against which my thinking at the time 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 myriad beauty and prosperity?”
(The following is from an unpublished writing by Peyton Richter entitled “An Interview with Jordan March 30, 1952)
“In Jordan’s opinion, the responsibility for this unrelatedness of what is, to what mankind would have it be, lies with philosophy. It is the function of philosophy to furnish basic conceptions of the world’s structure on the ground of existing fact which can serve as principles for human action; this – as the world of fact changes with each generation, “for change it will,” says Jordan, “whether we philosophize or not, and whatever may be the type of our philosophizing.”
“This does not mean (continues Richter) that each generation should find a new philosophy, but that what is already known needs to be reexamined and reformulated in the light of existing fact, that is, what’s going on?
“Philosophy has neglected its chores for the last 150 years, ‘and this during a period when the conditions of human existence perhaps shifted more than in any other equal period in its history.’
“The negligence of metaphysics in modern thought mean that men have come unreflectively to adopt a false metaphysics, for a basic theory of knowledge there must be.
“Jordan declared, ‘Either there must be something wrong with the conceptions upon which civilization appears to have rested, or the principles and agencies which dominate the practical life, the life of action, are metaphysically evil. Either those influences that lead to universal war and strife are wrong and false, or else war and strife and hatred are right.’”
Andrew J. Reck in a recent article in the Vanderbilt Law Review about E. Jordan comments, “Although Dr. Jordan condemns the contradictions which inhere in democracy (which he calls a political method only), he was completely opposed to the totalitarianisms of Fascism and Marxist Communism. He rejected the socialist creed, but his attitude toward a civilization built upon private business was absolutely hostile – no mere academic attitude – for through the whole of his works is the urgent insistence, ‘Civilization is here at stake!”
Man’s thinking turned wrong side out when he looked to his own experience for guidance.
The philosophy of the ancient Greeks had been focused on the nature of the universe but with the coming of Christianity and religious concentration on individual spiritual salvation, man’s attention turned inward.
Dr. Jordan believed that this was due to a mistaken interpretation of Christ’s life and teaching, which he considered a definitely objective approach to practical life.
As science in the last 300 years has made such tremendous achievements in discovering and utilizing the world of nature, the scientific methods of careful classification of minute detail and investigation of origins has affected the mode of man’s thinking in the western world.
Our present conception of man seems to be that of numbers of single human beings each with his own private interests usually limited to making a living, raising a family, and winning a place of respectability in his community.
As such he is usually helpless to affect his situation much as he might desire to do so. Important as he is, theoretically, he is submerged in a bewildering chaos of conflicting interests.
He may long for peace, but find himself in an army; he may be fond of his neighbor, but he forced to compete with him for a job, or e a party to cheating him by selling him inferior merchandise at a high price. If he is a member of the legislature, though he may be convinced that a measure is wise, he also knows that to the bulk of his constituents it merely means higher taxes, and so he votes against it, lest his reelection be jeopardized.
The plight of the individual is that of accepting a life of divided worlds; one of private personal relationships, the other of public impersonal forces – the one to be preserved, the other to be appeased.
We hear of a popular song entitled “Man Is Not an Island”, (Shades of John Donne!), but each of us strives to keep his “I” free and inviolate, yet complains because the world he lives in is disorderly and threatening.
There can be no separation of private and public worlds, according to Jordan. There are three persons involved in every practical relation, “whether that relation be selling a carrot or saluting a saint”, Tom, Dick and the Community Interest, which he calls the Corporate Person or the Institution.
He believed there was no possibility of order in a world of private, separate interests.
Modern civilization, based upon the subjectivist metaphysics of individualism, defining mind as individualized consciousness and reducing individuality to the isolated, atomistic individual, has entailed the doctrine of interest. This doctrine of interest has undermined the principles upon which a sound and jut social order must rest, because interests are subjective forces, and have no moral significance.
As Jordan put it, “Interest is incompetent as principle. The doctrine that the state is a harmony of interests, that law is the instrument of effecting and maintaining the harmony, that the purpose of morality is to find and define the characteristics of interest that make harmony possible, that religion should look upon conflicting interest and call it good; all this neglects the simple fact that no organization of subjective phenomena is possible, that subjective facts do not submit to order, that the order of mind is not the superficial juxtaposition of mental states.”
Practical relations, he insists, can only be understood when considered independently of ordinary person. Inner mental states or the contents of you or my mind are too slippery, shadowy and shifting to be intelligible either to you or to me, and are inadequate as a basis for understanding practical life.
Mind can serve as principle of order only if it can become objective, be embodied or congealed in objects, that is, be incorporated in Institutions.
The term “objectivity” with the related terms “object” and “objective” are used by Jordan in three separate yet interwoven ideas: (1) an external, material thing, (2) the ordering of fact, (3) an independent ideal or end – the objective of willed action. He calls “objects” the forms and realities of ideas. “Thought”, he says, “expresses itself in objects which are either logical or aesthetic.
For example – I am considering a new home – my objective. I can imagine the home in its appropriate setting, and anticipate the pleasure of using a new kitchen, and looking at the stream outside where the children are playing – my ideal or end might be a happy home. Then I may begin to list or order the means or “objects” necessary to the end of my purpose; the materials (wood or brick), the plumbing, an architect, contractor, a lot, the money to pay for it – these objects are real and necessary or appropriate to the end I have in mind ( a happy home). I’d be wiser to “order” the money first.
Dr. Reck sums it up in the Vanderbilt Law Review, “For Jordan mind is precisely te objective linkage of using objects to attain objectives, of transforming objectives into objects, and of constituting wholes of objects and objectives through universal laws.”
The whole or all-inclusive concept of life was the only approach for Jordan “Life”, he says, “as an activity, is, or continuously strives to be, a whole.”
The three primary principles of mind, which he calls the juncture of nature and culture, basic to his philosophy are first, Mind always acts through its body, and is known only in and through its action. Second, Mind always acts as a whole or as a unity, and is known only as such – so that mind can be defined as the active unity which manifests itself in, and comprehends the organization or objects in our world. And finally mind completes itself in the objects of our external or practical world, and is controlled only through the manipulation of the things of the practical world.
Dr. Jordan worked out a profound and complicated web of speculation in an attempt to find the concepts and principles by which to make the facts of life and growth and human relations more fully intelligible and hence thus more subject to deliberate control.
He takes for granted the doctrines of philosophical idealism, as proved by the development of philosophic thought from Plato to Hegel and to our own day.
Principles, he says, whatever else they may be, are stable and universal and not dependent on anything as frail and fleeting as states of mind.
The problem is how to unify nature and culture in a new objectivity.
He does not formulate a better life of a nature totally different from the one now being lived, but rather points out the cultural form resulting from the direction in which life has already moved.
“The practical aspects of the facts of human relations reach outward, and while hey constitute the principle of the personality, it is not the isolated personality that they intend, but the personality of the outward and objective law of human unity as embodied in life-institutions.”
According to Jordan, institutions develop because ideas, to become significant, must take on body, must be realized in some non-mental object. All characteristic human acts become realized in institutions which are simply the embodiment of these acts.
Examples of institutions are the family, the school, the church, art, labor unions, property, industry and the state.
Jordan calls these Institutions Corporate Bodies or Corporate Individuals.
They are analogous to the natural human being, absorb him, and are used by him to realize himself.
There is an important difference.
Institutions possess the potent will (will is an objective act of mind – a propulsion toward ends) – and it is their will that is usually done.
But it is the capacity of the human being to think ideals though he is unable to enact them.
For Jordan the will of Institutions, separated from human conscience yields results acceptable to no one.
Business, which he calls the control of industry he regarded as a sort of Frankenstein Monster, which, never having been moralized, has rapidly grown large and powerful and has affected the other institutions by force and fraud to their and its own misfortune.
It is the task of Politics which is institutionalized in the State (which he understands more as a Platonic State) to reorganize our social institutions, conceive the direction of objects, and ends in a harmony and mutuality of ends to The End which is the Good Life.
Nothing will work in the world but the right and the true and morality is the principle by which all action is guided and by which the values of all specific ends find their relation to each other.
Mine is but a feeble and fragmentary effort to suggest the magnitude of Dr. Jordan’s work.
On the basis of composition his books fall into two groups. In the first period, 1924 – 1931, he wrote “The Life of Mind”, “Forms of Individuality”, “Theory of Legislation”, “Business Be Damned”, and the early drafts of “The Good Life”, his ethics.
In te second and much longer period, 1932 – 1952, he composed “The Aesthetic Object”, “Essays in Criticism” and “Metaphysics”, and published “The Good Life” which was rewritten several times – and all this with no relief from teaching until this retirement in 1944.
His first and last books have two things in common, rapidity of composition and insufficient revision. “The Life of Mind” was withdrawn soon after publication because Jordan was dissatisfied with both its form and its content (he confessed to a fellow professor that it “caught him in his underwear.)”
He was writing his “Metaphysics” the eve of his death. He worked almost alone, separated from the prevailing currents of opinion. And then too his writing was so terribly difficult to read. He held that “the primary function of language is to constitute an object and that it’s used for communication is a secondary function”.
Jordan was no saint. He could lose his objectivity, when attacked, and indulge in the most subjective form of bitter humor, though he would be the first to recognized and decry it. In the midst of a violent argument he would smile and suggest that he and his wordy adversary step out in back of the building and “settle the matter like gentlemen”.
Like most great men, he considered himself a failure. Though he received signal honor at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association – it being very unusual to devote an entire meeting to the work of one philosopher while he was still alive, he was disappointed because no one came forward to extend his work. These verses show his dejection: “I cannot work with other men. And yet I know our destiny of ends and means and methods, and the joining every head and hand in the high enterprise. We go together to the Good, also to hell together if we fail. Alone man works to no avail. – I say I know all this, but then I cannot work with other men. I must go on alone or sink, for I can neither work nor think with them. I hate their ways, their fears, their motives – Claims to me are dead. It is my fault, I know – I can’t my way exalt.”
Dr. Jordan had no confidence that his plan would be realized but he didn’t stop working – He lived up to the obligation that remain for the individual – to know – As he put it: “As a practical capacity – the individual’s obligation is the obligation to think; to prepare in idea and anticipation the intent of the whole of experience, which, as objective agency, may become the execution of a plan.”
There was a man in our town…