The Life and Work of Hartley Burr Alexander

Thomas M. Alexander, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

No man can live all his possibilities and no actual world can exhaust
the possible: yet apart from the possible no man nor world at
all could be.
— Hartley Burr Alexander, God and Man's Destiny

HARTLEY BURR ALEXANDER (1873–1939), a native of the Nebraska prairie, was known primarily as a philosopher, having been at one time or another president of all three divisions of the American Philosophical Association, a professor at the University of Nebraska and, later, the creator of the humanities curriculum of Scripps College, where there is now a chair in his name. He was also a poet and dramatist, a scholar of Native American mythology and ritual, and the thematic director and consultant for the Nebraska State Capitol and the Los Angeles Public Library, among many other buildings. In fact, today he is primarily remembered by Nebraskans who visit the capitol, with its powerful limestone figures emerging from the buttresses, rich mosaics and tile work, and inscriptions that include Native American prayers as well as quotations from Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy has forgotten him entirely. The last of his books to be published in his lifetime, God and Man's Destiny (1936), came out the same year as A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, and one could not imagine two more diametrically opposed conceptions of philosophy in terms of subject matter, method, or aim. Hartley believed that philosophy had more in common with art than science, that it should confront reductionisms of human nature with the fullness of our existence as persons, and that it should speak from a deep grounding in the humanities and world-lore with sensitivity to the role of ideals and spiritual needs in human experience. Philosophy, for him, was not some "method" but the love of wisdom that bore the responsibility of passing on to the future all that was best in the accumulated heritage of wisdom from the past. And the very nature of human wisdom required pluralism and creativity, as the world did, so that such an effort as to make philosophy a science—not to mention the thought of a "unity of science"—would violate its soul. Not only was his thought thereby set against the rise of forms of positivism, logical analysis, and their spawn, but it held at arm's length the American naturalists and pragmatists. Of the latter it was William James he admired most, but above all contemporary thinkers, he esteemed Henri Bergson (see esp. Alexander, "Socratic Bergson"). Thus, even in the recent revival of classic American philosophy, mainly construed now as pragmatism, his work does not command attention.