Kinesis: You seem to have some fairly deep roots in Texas.

Hahn: Mary Anne [Hahn’s wife] and I have been working on the past two centuries or so of my family history. My great-grandfather, Henry Hahn, went to Texas when it was a republic. He was a Texas Ranger for eight years or so. For one who has an interest in looking over old land grants or abstracts, as anyone who gets into genealogy is bound to do, among other things, I discovered that my grandfather, when he moved to West Texas, somehow did not have the proper title for the land that he settled on. It was not until the executor of his estate was going over things, that they discovered that the papers weren’t proper.

Kinesis: Perhaps you could give us some idea of your childhood experience in Texas, and how it prepared you for a life in the university.

Hahn: Fine, that sounds fine. The only problem is that sometimes I tend to hold forth at too great a length. Going way back, I graduated from a small high school, Swenson High, in West Texas. There were five members of the senior class, so that a good many things that go on in college had not seeped through too well with us. But my father, bless him, said, "Well son, you always seem to have a knack for looking on both sides of a thing, so what would you think about going in for law?" He said, "I think you might make a good judge." I told him I didn’t know about that, but I did start with a pre-law curriculum at the University of Texas. As someone fresh from West Texas, working on a farm or ranch every summer until I went off to college, that there were so many interesting things in the University of Texas, now speaks of how small the area in West Texas was then. If I recall, there were about 5000 students at the university, which for someone from a graduating class of five sounds big enough.

Kinesis: If I recall, you once said something to the effect that your early context helps explain the fascination you had later for urban life.

Hahn: One of the things it explains is my appreciation of improved technology. Riding along a barbed-wire fence on a ranch, one carried what one could on the horse one was riding, but if you were going to be out for a few hours, you’d need one or more horses to trail along to carry some of the other equipment. One my age is old enough to remember when the first automobile appeared in our town. My father got one fairly early, and I was in school but not too far along, before Henry Ford’s T-Model and then the A-Model came out. But I can also remember making the trip from the family farm or ranch into the little town of Swenson and I was delighted when my father would take me along. He had a team of horses to pull the wagon. I would say it’s not more than ten miles from the farm to town. When we went into town, we spent the entire day, and a good deal of it was spent going there and getting back. Automobiles had some problems when they came in, especially in loose, sandy soil, but if you let a little air out of the tires, that works very well. These changes in transportation I think are especially impressive for one who has some memory of the way things were.

Kinesis: What are some of the most important technological developments in America that you’ve witnessed during your lifetime?

Hahn: Among them would be such developments as industrialization, machines, and improved transportation. Electric pumps that pump water to homes look good to one who has spent some time hauling water from a creek, down a hill, then up quite an incline, or for that matter, one who has walked behind a harrow drawn by a team of mules to prepare soil for planting. I think anybody who has been through that, especially one with pragmatic overtones, would feel that there were obvious advantages from these mechanized developments. So that looms as a fairly large thing. When I was very young, I drove a sulky while my uncles and other members of the family were busy plowing up grasslands, helping pave the way for the dust storms of some years later. My youngest paternal uncle had the task of making sure my corners worked out, so he was put next to me, and was irritated no end by having to do that. In connection with this, in my home as a boy, we had kerosene lamps. In fact, our pride and joy was a very high-powered one, that put out a brighter light than the others. But one using that certainly appreciates what electricity can do.

Kinesis: It seems that the transition from your hometown in Texas to the university offered significant opportunity for personal change.

Hahn: The sorts of things that one would find in a university city, to one born out in the country some miles away--there are just so many interesting possibilities that one could try out. Once more remembering that the library at Swenson High was infinitesimal, the libraries at the University of Texas looked wonderful indeed to me. In terms of books in our family library, we had, of course, a Bible, a Bible concordance, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which, believe it or not, I read with great interest. But then to go to a university, where there were thousands of books, many of which looked far more interesting than Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress--I still find it very exciting to see what possibilities there are for enrichment of living that were not dreamt of in my boyhood.

Kinesis: What was the effect of your journey to the university upon the religion of your childhood?

Hahn: In Swenson, when I was a boy, there were three churches, Baptist, Methodist, and Disciples of Christ (known locally as Campbellites). A good deal of the discussion was on the interpretation of the scriptures. One of my aunts, who was what we called a "hard-shell," or Primitive Baptist, was very much concerned about me, since instead of going to one of the good Baptist schools, I had gone way off to the University of Texas. She didn’t expect good things from that, although, bless her, she was trying to do what she could to keep me from getting into a host of things. But with a good deal of time on my hands, I read and re-read the scriptures. Since debating interpretations of them was a local favorite, I did some of this. But in terms of this, I read sections of the Bible that I doubt Aunt Mary ever read, although she maintained that every word of the Bible was literally true. At any rate, it’s hard to suggest what a tremendous sense of opening up I had in going from Swenson to the University of Texas. But speaking more specifically on the effect on the journey of the religion of my childhood, it was to help broaden my outlook. Fairly early on I found Sunday School more interesting than the Sunday sermons. For example, at the University Baptist Church a Texas Supreme Court Justice (Judge Lattimore), with a vast store of well-chosen anecdotes and illustrations, taught a fascinating class of well over one hundred. A few years later I turned to an exciting small Ethical Society class of twenty or so taught by a professor of physics (Kuehne), who used as text Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy rather than the standard Christian texts, and I feel sure that I reported on Judge Lattimore to Aunt Mary.

Kinesis: What were some of your early interests at the University of Texas?

Hahn: I was interested in pretty much everything that came along. I should have taken my required courses early on, and I had to have two physical science courses, but in a free elective system, with little counseling, I decided to take them later. If I had taken Geology earlier, I feel sure that would have been the way I would go, because after geology, no matter where I went, I saw evidence of what I had picked up in an elementary geology and history of geology course. For one, as I say, born on a farm or ranch, whose family moved into town for me and my brother to go to school, the idea that so many millions of years ago, the land I walked on in Austin was the bottom of an enormous sea, sounded incredulous, but the limestone was there by the yard, not by the foot--along with brachiopods and other fossils of one sort or another. Virtually any of them, for a standard geology course, were within easy reach of Austin.

Kinesis: But you also had an early interest in English literature, isn’t that right?

Hahn: I worked primarily in the English Department in American figures. Since I didn’t do very well in freshman composition rhetoric, getting a "D" in my first semester, I was determined to show that I could do better than that. So I took various other courses in English and, about that time, I had the idea that maybe I wanted to write the great American novel. And in my ignorance (this is before the days of creative writing courses) I thought, well, where better than in English to make a start on that. Although in point of fact, the more papers I wrote in English, the further it took me away from writing anything approaching a novel. But I did do a Bachelors, and a Masters in English, writing a thesis on Emerson as a lecturer, and for that matter I guess I got most of the coursework for the Doctorate. But some of the work I liked best was from Clark Slover, a new full professor, who taught comparative literature, which was new at the University of Texas at that time.

Kinesis: How did you become involved with philosophy at the University of Texas?

Hahn: My English professor was a little troubled. He said, "At the rate you’re going, you’re going to be getting your Doctorate so early that you’re going to have a job convincing anyone you’re old enough to teach." He said, "You have some interest in philosophy, what would you think about doing some more work in philosophy? There are a good many problems in connection with Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, that can stand more light from a philosophical point of view." I, of course, had taken certain courses in philosophy, the history of philosophy. As luck would have it, a faculty friend in the Philosophy Department asked me, "How would you like to spend a year on an Oldright Fellowship in philosophy?" And thinking about the relative merits of making a living reading freshman composition and rhetoric papers as over against reading papers in philosophy, at that time, it seemed to me that certainly it would be more interesting to read what bright youngsters had to say about philosophy.

Kinesis: But you eventually headed to California, leaving Texas behind in pursuit of a Doctorate at Berkeley?

Hahn: The University of Texas at that time did not have a Doctoral program in philosophy, although they put one in a few years after I left there. But at any rate, I had applied and had been given a tuition remission promise from Harvard. That was in English. But thinking of the cost of Harvard, even with the tuition remission, seemed forbidding. And Harold Chapman Brown, the chair of the Stanford Philosophy Department and a visiting professor at Texas said, "Actually, if you do decide to go into philosophy, and [we] hope you do, the best place to study philosophy at the advanced level is the University of California at Berkeley." At any rate, I ended up applying for admission to the Doctoral program at California and starting on the way, at least, to a philosophical career. So that is roughly how I got into philosophy.

Kinesis: What was your first impression of Berkeley?

Hahn: As far as that is concerned, Berkeley, for a young fellow fresh from Texas, was a very interesting place in 1931. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, of course, presented a vivid account of the migration of refugees from the Dust Bowl areas of Texas and Oklahoma to California with high hopes of a better life. This was a time when my fellow Texans and Oklahomans were swarming into California looking for jobs gathering grapes, but not all of the excitement was in the vineyards. Californians in general seemed to be upset over the influx of desperate newcomers. In Texas at that time we might have talked about Socialists and Communists, who lived mainly someplace other than Texas, but in California there were live Socialists and Communists, and the lines were more sharply drawn than in Texas. In the early 1930s Harry Bridges and his longshoremen were on the verge of pulling a general strike, and the repercussions were felt throughout the San Francisco Bay area. For example, in Alameda, California, a few miles from the University there was "Pipe City," a collection of huge sewer pipes put together as a place to live by a group of homeless Okies and Texans who were pooling whatever resources they had. If any of them got a job, the income was shared with the other citizens of Pipe City. And in setting up housekeeping in a bunch of sewer pipes, they got a certain number of concessions from the local officials.

Kinesis: Why did they get the concessions?

Hahn: Ordinarily it would not have been allowed, but the officials decided that it might be a better way of going than having them turn to vandalizing the area. If nothing else, this certainly gave me proper background for the Grapes of Wrath and for such books as Factories in the Fields. And how things worked there in California was illuminating, although the only thing that was truly surprising was that the owners of the vineyards fully expected that the new people coming in, the Okies, would be tearing up everything there. But they were starving people who were eager for a job of some sort and what they were being offered in pay was less than the going rate, because the owners of the vineyards said that they had a hard enough time, and there were lots of people willing to do it for less than they had before.

Kinesis: Earlier, you mentioned the dust storms. What was your experience of them and the problems the farmers were having in California?

Hahn: I was not fully uninformed on the problems of the dust storms and the banks throughout Texas and, for that matter, Oklahoma. Farmers were paying on their mortgage payments, but increasingly it became evident that they owed far more on their places than they could ever expect to sell them for or get out of them. The banks had all kinds of gimmicks for trying to encourage them to pay on their mortgages, but it doesn’t take very long when you look at it and see, after paying for some years, you still owe several times what you could get for the land.

Kinesis: What were some of the courses you took at Berkeley?

Hahn: My early instructors there, although this may be a bit beside the point, were ones who helped convert my notion of working in the field. I signed up for what amounted to a full-time program, which, as some of my friendly fellow students noted, didn’t take account of the fact that I had a teaching fellowship. So that half my time would be spent on that. So I had a fairly heavy first year, but it was an interesting one. Moritz Schlick, of the Vienna Circle, was there for a year as distinguished visiting professor, and at that time Wittgenstein I had barely heard of, but I signed up for Schlick’s seminar in logic, and we spent the entire year on the rather slender Tractatus. And for that matter, worked hard enough on that.

Kinesis: You also first met Stephen C. Pepper at Berkeley, didn’t you?

Hahn: I signed up for a seminar in aesthetics, but it could just as well have been called metaphysics. It was a course with Pepper, and we got, in effect, the early versions of World Hypotheses. Pepper had us reading two or three volumes to supplement our regular work. But at any rate, it went very well. I also assisted Pepper for two years with an "Introductory Problems of Philosophy" course.

Kinesis: What would you give as a general statement of your philosophy of contextualism?

Hahn: I think of contextualism as a pragmatic naturalistic world view which treats time and change seriously and takes as its root metaphor patterned events, things in process, or historical events. These textured events are not discrete atomic units, but rather complex interrelationships of tendencies each interwoven into an integral whole with its own individual character or quality. In terms of the categories of this view the self-sufficient substances of the older substance-attribute metaphysics are replaced by textures. The external relations in terms of which these substances were to be connected are replaced by contexts, and the antecedent mechanistic spatiotemporal field of location likewise gives way to contextual references.

Kinesis: In keeping with the issue of problem-solving, would you say that there are important tasks for which reflective inquiry is inadequate?

Hahn: In the essay you mentioned a few minutes ago, it seems to me that what we have as a general context is a heavy emphasis on changing things. With change, goes the notion of fallibility. The idea of genetic analysis also has a ready place. Reflective inquiry and problem solving are crucial. If one looks over the contextualistic categories, one notes that both for myself, John Dewey, and various others, it is important to be able to solve problems. But "are there important tasks for which reflective inquiry is inadequate?" I don’t know that I would put it quite that way, but there are situations for which the main need may be taking in the quality, rather than solving the problem. Every texture that enters into any problematic situation has a distinctive or unique quality. And the ones who stress only problem-solving are ones who are leaving out part of the reason for solving problems, enhanced quality, or taking in or appreciating unique qualities of things.

Kinesis: This issue is related intimately to your critique of traditional notions of analysis and perception, isn’t it?

Hahn: One of the things I find still being the case is that many philosophers say, "Ah, yes, the problem of perception." But what is "the" problem they’re talking about? For the most part, what they are talking about, is the problem of Descartes and Locke, who start with an inner mind trying to know a real, external world. From the point of view of the contextualists and the pragmatists, this problem doesn’t arise. If the contextualists were the only ones for whom it did not arise, this might call for a good deal more extensive discussion. But the problem in this form does not arise for a Platonist, Aristotelian, or Hegelian. And one could think of various others. Yet, there are very few books that have been done on the problem of perception, which do not proceed as if everybody had to solve that problem.

Kinesis: What is the contextualist alternative to the traditional formulation?

Hahn: One of the reasons why we think that we can do a better job than Descartes, Locke, and company is because there are various other assumptions upon which this problem doesn’t even arise. In my early work on perception, I try to make the point that there are various forms of perception. One of the more important ones is practical drive perception. For example, if you are driving someplace, you will, for the most part, not run into other cars, and go around various obstacles. But all you do is recognize, for the purpose at hand, the object and go on your way. This is another chapter of Dewey, which I think is an important one. If it were not for our habits, life would be too complex for us to get out of our chairs and leave this room. But when all we have is practical drive perception, we are not taking in any of the unique quality Dewey and the contextualists think that every texture has. So, in addition to practical drives, there are also aesthetic drives. The practical drive perception is what helps you get a chance to take in that quality, or take it in on more favorable terms. Taking in the quality of a situation or a texture is a good part of what makes life worth living. I think this is very central for contextualism.

Kinesis: Would you say that taking in the qualities of a situation is a fairly passive act? Does enjoyment of quality depend upon our being in any particular kind of situation?

Kinesis: Could you give an example of the role of conflict in enhancing the experienced quality of a situation?

Hahn: What one can do, instead of simply getting rid of the conflict, is present the conflict in such fashion, that you get the added quality or vitality, the vigor. If the conflict is overwhelming, you get into a situation where it may be positively painful to insist on this. But in general what the playwright tries to do is get a strong or important drive, build it up in the protagonist as strongly as you can get it, and see where this puts you. Shakespeare, for instance, does this repeatedly in his plays. You can watch him stepping it up, and then when he thinks he’s got it built up maybe a little too strong, we get something like the grave-digger scene, which takes us away from that level of conflict for a while. After which, he comes back to the same thing, after we’ve had a period of release. To take another example, consider the knocking on the gate in "Macbeth." This is to provide a toning down of things, so that instead of it being too much for you to handle, you spread it out where you can enjoy it. But at any rate, I think that is a very central thing.

Kinesis: You mentioned that for Hickman there are situations within which techniques, presumably technological in nature, can be used to help us focus on quality. One hears objections to technology, such as that it privileges control, even domination. How does contextualism confront that issue, and what does this have to do, if anything, with your emphasis upon ecology?

Kinesis: You’ve had an experience just recently with traffic on the East coast, having traveled to the World Congress in Boston by car. This is an experience quite different from when you were a child, I would imagine.

Hahn: That’s right, it made quite an impression on Mary Anne and me. It is immensely different from my childhood. One of the things that I enjoyed immensely was going into town with my father--no paved roads, some of them sandy. We would go into town, and we had sardines, cheese, bananas, all of which struck me as wonderful. It took just about all day, to go in, transact what little business we had, and go back. Now, fifteen or twenty minutes over a good highway gets you there. But I think the kind of thing I was getting at was that technologies, as Larry Hickman and various others would point out, increase the range of possible values that we might have, and afford means of improving certain of the values we have had. For one who rejects technology in blanket fashion, they’re going to be in a very bad way. And if going back to getting their water the way I remember getting ours, is what one gets out of that, I think improved techniques would be very much in order.

Kinesis: Are you on the internet? Do you have an email account?

Hahn: I haven’t really done that much with it. I’m in a highly technological world, but I feel rather naive about some of the things.

Kinesis: Are there other problems for technology with which contextualism is able to contend?

Hahn: I think my childhood experiences helped make me a bit suspicious of those who complained about what an industrialized society has done. This is not to deny that some of it is very bad. I was paired with Margaret Chatterjee for various sessions in connection with the Golden Jubilee celebration of the Indian Philosophical Association, and then for some sessions at Tagore’s Santiniketan, a place of peace. But one found in any of the large Indian cities, pollution on a wide scale, which Professor Chatterjee equated with pragmatism. Pollution of various sorts does put our world in jeopardy, but I think what Dr. Chatterjee didn’t see was that the pragmatists are the ones who are also striving for a stronger ecology to handle it. What she saw was would-be industrialists who jumped in doing hasty, unfortunate things to pollute the environment. We are still, I hope, very good friends, and I hope she has modified some of that outlook.

Kinesis: On the topic of what the race to acquire various technologies can accomplish, the so-called "space race" was responsible for some funding decisions for higher education. You were a part of this legislation, isn’t that right?

Hahn: Some very important academic developments came through the setting up of the National Defense Education Act fellowships. In October 1957 the Soviet Union put their first unmanned satellite into the air, and this was something that gave a tremendous shock to the old educational and political system over here. To be able to put an artificial satellite, Cap5, into orbit indicated that the soviet mathematicians and scientists were ahead of the ones in this country. There was extensive discussion of what should be done about that. The mathematicians and the scientists felt that they simply had to have more support for their programs. At the time, I was Dean of the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis, and was on a committee charged with setting up the NDEA Program. We thought, "If we are going to do something for the mathematicians and scientists, what about the other fields?" A committee of The Association of Graduate Schools drew up some guidelines on this and decided to recommend to Congress that we provide what the mathematicians and scientists wanted, but, what better time to also strengthen the humanities and the social sciences? Congress did go along with that.

Kinesis: What kind of impact did this have upon graduate programs such as the one here at SIU?

Hahn: The legislation also provided support for the graduate schools. The doctoral program here, which I was brought here to help move along, did move, in good part because it was possible to get bright students, and give them fellowships and various supporting materials. The graduate programs in this country originally centered about a relatively small fraction of the universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr and other universities had good graduate programs, because they had the means of funding, and fellowship funds from alumni. The significance of the NDEA program is that it broadened the base for graduate education and made it possible to provide substantial funding for any doctoral candidate who met certain provisions. It was in effect during the latter part of my time at Washington University and the early part of my time here at Southern Illinois University, and this resulted in our getting a tremendous improvement in our graduate programs. The NDEA was a major factor in higher education in this country.

Kinesis: You mentioned that you were also part of another program for funding higher education.

Hahn: I was chair of a Woodrow Wilson Regional Fellowship Program for some years, starting with my time at Washington University, and continuing after I came here. The program was designed to take up some of the slack after the NDEA started cutting back. The initial funding was generous, because Congress was afraid that the Soviets would be in our towns before we knew it, but after we made enough headway on this, they weren’t so sure about whether they should put out all that money on education.

Kinesis: But shouldn’t education be a priority? What role does education play in Contextualism?

Hahn: Certainly education is very important for the contextualist. One can pick up on Dewey’s notion of education as growth, which ties in also with the contextualistic or pragmatic notion of what’s better. As a matter of fact, Dewey from early on, said what we should be concerned with is not "the" good, but rather what is better in a given situation. As luck would have it, I happened to study at the University of Texas with A. P. Brogan. Brogan developed a betterness theory of value, that is, the notion that the key term in value is not "the" good, not even "the" best, but what is better in a given situation. And Brogan parallels Dewey in many ways. He also set it up in terms of logical formulae, so that the analysts liked what he had, much better than they liked Dewey, though both of them come out in the same place. However, it certainly is true that that is a central point for Dewey, as well as for someone as old as myself.

Kinesis: What is the responsibility of the university to its students?

Hahn: I think that a state university owes it to their students to offer as broad a range of options for their students as their budget will permit. The future of any area is dependent on what education their citizens have. If you don’t provide them with education, you are depriving your own people of what they need to survive. It seems to me that any state legislature ought to be able to make a very good case for funding for education.

Kinesis: You mentioned that your father said you "have a knack for looking on both sides of a thing," and the success of your educational experience seems to have been enhanced by your willingness to engage in such dialogue. On a slightly different note, do you see the philosophies of Gadamer and perhaps Buber as one way of approaching a dialogue between European and American philosophies?

Kinesis: What can philosophers learn from dialogue?

Hahn: Dialogue is very important. Buber is certainly one very important one, Jaspers is another who gets into a host of material that is very helpful for this. I think that Gabriel Marcel, in some ways, does an account of the I-Thou relationship, that is easier to follow even than Buber’s. What both Marcel and Buber are after is treating people as persons, not simply as things. Both of them are shocked to think that many philosophers treat the people they’re talking to, or with, as if they were simply things, rather than partners in dialogue. But I think one of the beauties of dialogue is that if you can get any two philosophers concerned to discuss a topic, most of the time, they will turn up with some things neither of them has suspected, which they have in common.

Hahn: I think that dialogue between cultures is quite central for contextualism. As far as that is concerned, you can see why Dewey thought that education, growth, and democracy are always getting at very similar things. It is fairly obvious how a program or publication designed to make possible dialogue, affords a means of improving communication. With the improved communication, you can be clear on what you differ on, how much you differ, and what needs to be done about it. In some cases, what needs to be done is to see which view is better and go with that. In most cases, where you have a dialogue going, each side of this, but it is not just a two-way thing, has something to contribute. The broader the dialogue, the better. The Library of Living Philosophers, and the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, which had its first meeting in 1900, are two of the most important agencies for furthering dialogue. What they wanted, and what they have continued to stress, is the importance of broadening the discussion.

Kinesis: The issues of dialogue and learning from the differences of others, seem to have something to do with your notion that we need to experience things afresh.

Hahn: As far as that’s concerned, Emerson in many ways has some things that are worth picking up on even today. Referring to the point about getting a fresh look at things, Emerson said that something as simple as bending over and looking back through your legs can give you a fresh look at things. Somehow I had a picture of Emerson as a rather stiff person, but anyone who can say things like that has more than that going for himself. He was one of the most popular lecturers of his time, and you know this led on into the days of the chautauqua.

Kinesis: On the topic of getting a fresh look at things, which I assume at least means dealing with novelty, how did Classical American philosophy take a clue from Emerson in the notions of novelty developed by its chief proponents? Specifically, how essential for contextualism is the viability of the notion of change involved in evolutionary theory? Can contextualism endure without a successful theory of evolution?

Hahn: As a matter of fact, contextualism and evolutionary theory go hand-in-hand. Contexualism centers about change, and the evolutionary theories are putting it in terms of whether we have gradual, cosmic, or other large sets of activities changing gradually, or whether they change in revolutionary fashion. I suppose any contextualist needs to keep a weather eye out for William James’ notions of novelty. With novelty you can get quite a graded series, from mild surprises that add some life or viability to the quality, to ones so sweeping that one wonders about how to get a handle on them. Evolution is a form of change. We have, of course, a fairly wide range of evolutionary theories. You have something different if you start with Samuel Alexander’s version, for example, from what you have if you start with Darwin. And, for that matter, some of the details of Darwin trouble both the scientists and the dominant religious outlook.

Kinesis: What is the nature of the evidence offered by proponents of evolution? What is its strength?

Hahn: It is significant if one finds fossils of creatures that normally develop in fairly deep water, say at two- or three-thousand feet of elevation in the limestone in and around Austin, Texas. If these were the only things that one had, there might be some question. By the time you see how many different lines of evidence you have for it, however, even the religious fundamentalists say, "Well, perhaps Bishop Ussher’s timetable is too restrictive." I think what one has, whatever the topic you take up, is the matter of making it consonant with what we think are other important things that one wants to center upon. I think one of the virtues of the pragmatic outlook is that it doesn’t bet everything on a single line of evidence, in fact we have supporting lines of evidence. This tends to be crucial whether you’re talking about value theory, the nature of our universe, or what have you. It has taken quite a time for even some scientists to give up the notion of certainty. Think of logical positivists, who might have been expected to be somewhat closer to the pragmatists, and in many ways they are close to them. They want to hang on to logic as something that provides a form of certainty, and I think what Dewey has said on the quest for certainty pretty well covers the waterfront on that.

Kinesis: It seems that sooner or later, the issue of God’s nature will emerge from considerations of the nature of change and evolution. How does Classical American philosophy understand the relationship between God and novelty?

Hahn: As I interpret A Common Faith, what Dewey is trying to do is at least two things. One, he finds no use in his system for a supernatural deity, though this is not true of all pragmatists. Two, he interpreted God as an active relation between the actual and the ideal rather than as an eternal completed being; and his account is strongly humanistic. Melvin Tuggle, one of our Ph.Ds, and also a devout Baptist, thinks that the Dewey of Dewey’s Hegelian period, carries over to some extent for a much longer time than standard pragmatic critics say.

Kinesis: Does Dewey get criticized for moving in the direction of humanism in religious matters?

Hahn: Henry Nelson Wieman, James, and Dewey all speak about a deity, but Dewey, after the time of his volumes on the psychology, has relatively little approaching a supernaturalistic deity. Wieman, however, thinks of God as a complex of activities making for creativity. He, at least, thought that if Dewey interpreted the ideal he speaks of in the Common Faith in those terms, it would be something that Weiman would have been happier with, and would tie in with more of the traditional outlook. James is somewhat hot, then cool on this, but James wants to leave open the possibility of whatever may turn up, and I think that’s a good pragmatic doctrine. There may be ideals becoming actual, which point the way to more than we have previously dreamed of, but if you stick in novelty, and the fact that there needs to be some way of checking up on whether we’re on the right track or not, you get something that one could live with handily enough. In some ways, Dewey is closer to humanism, it seems to me, than either of the other two. Weiman explicitly denies that humanism is sufficient.

Hahn: One of the nice things about Unitarianism, though many Unitarians think of this as one of their lacks, is the fact that Unitarians make heavier use of lay speakers than most of the other religions. The local Unitarian group is aiming to get a minister, and thinks that as soon as they have one, they will have made some progress. There is a sense in which having someone who has the problems of the congregation as his or her full-time job, has something to commend it. I should hope, though, that even if they do get a continuing minister, that they would still have room for bringing in something from some of the philosophers, various of the sciences, and the arts.

Kinesis: What is an important advantage of humanism over traditional religious views?

Hahn: What I probably have developed in my essay would be of a piece with my understanding of the final words of A Common Faith. A professional minister somehow tends to move in the direction of a fairly well formulated religious outlook, and from my point of view, one of the advantages of Unitarianism is that there is no set of dogmas or central beliefs that everyone must have to be a Unitarian. Further, you have the full range from ones who think that there is a supernatural deity to ones who think that we might be better to emphasize various forms of social action and see what are the ways of developing better life conditions. Even on this, Unitarians from the early days of this country, have emphasized social causes. They emphasize the fact that having a supernatural deity may not add as much as one might think to the body of beliefs constituting a religious outlook. Royce, who spoke of himself as a pragmatic absolutist, has been ridiculed by many pragmatists, who regard this as a kind of oxymoron. Some of the finest things we have on interpretation come from Royce, and a good many of the things that we get on value from him may be closer, as he himself thought, to pragmatism than to standard forms of idealism.

Kinesis: Would you say that the friendship of Royce and James, in its overcoming distinct religious differences, embodies some of the core principles of contextualism?

Hahn: I think that’s right. Royce’s notion of community is another central thing. Royce said that, the fact that the rowdy set of people he encountered in the mining camps of his youth in California should constitute a community, is what got him thinking about what’s involved in a community.

Hahn: That’s right. I am firmly convinced of that. I think the world would be the poorer if all it has was contextualism, in spite of the high esteem I have for contextualism. But the insights and some of the outlooks that grow out of a pluralistic setting open the way, at least, for not overlooking some things important for whatever the topic is that you’re talking about. Even a poor world view is likely to suggest some things that aren’t emphasized by what one regards as the better world hypotheses or theories.

Kinesis: As a final question, what might you share from your experience with a student just starting out in philosophy today?

Hahn: Well, my emphasis is heavily pluralistic. I think that one ought to get something that one knows enough about so that one feels comfortable branching out in various directions. In addition to this central nucleus, one needs to have a weather eye out for what the other possibilities are. Granted that one has chosen a particular set as of special interest, you have what appears perhaps to be a contradiction. On the one hand, you’ve got to see what you can do to maximize the central nucleus you have selected, but on the other hand, it’s hard for you really to know as much as you should about what you’ve chosen for your central nucleus, if you don’t keep a weather eye out for alternative possibilities. One of the virtues of a pluralistic program, and most of the programs I have worked with have been pluralistically inclined, is that they help give your students an opportunity to get some inkling of other things than whatever the central interests of their teachers may be. I think one of the strengths of our graduates here at Southern is that it’s relatively easy to find undergraduate schools who have people who are doing some good work in a field central to our program, but it is much harder to find other programs with the pluralistic emphasis. That means that our graduates, in addition to whatever they take as their central interest, will know something about other philosophies. They will come with an overview of what the possibilities are. I think that is a tremendous advantage for our graduates, and an enormous boon for the program they become affiliated with. One of the things that you run into if you are pushing a pluralistic program, is that the tendency is, when a vacancy comes up, for everybody to think, "how nice it would be if we had someone who is in the same general field as I am, it would give me someone to talk with and bounce things off of." But if it’s a program set up in that way, it may develop into great centers for that particular philosophical outlook. Much of the time, however, such a program explores the things they find most interesting, but they don’t know enough about the alternatives to see ways of enriching what they have. If one is limiting one’s self to what every set of administrators tend to say, "that no one can do everything,"--to cut it down to something manageable, which is to say something which is not going to run the cost way up, shuts many deserving students out from any chance of seeing what some of these other views are like.

1. See The Library of Living Philosophers, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court).

2. See Lewis E. Hahn, "Creating: Solving Problems and Experiencing Afresh," in A Contextualistic Worldview: Essays by Lewis E. Hahn (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 92.

3. See Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1942).

4. See Lewis E. Hahn, "A Contextualistic Theory of Perception," in eds. George P. Adams et al., University of California Publications in Philosophy, v. 22 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1942).

5. See Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

6. See Larry A. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

7. See Sidney Hook, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1996).

8. See Sandra Rosenthal, The Pragmatic A Priori: A Study in the Epistemology of C.I. Lewis (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, Inc., 1976).

9. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Airmont Publishing Company, 1965), 44.

10. See Lewis E. Hahn, "Contextualism and Cosmic Evolution-Revolution," in A Contextualistic Worldview.

12. John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," LW5.

13. See LW9.

14. Presented at the Unitarian Fellowship of Carbondale, Illinois, on May 12, 1985.

15. Lewis E. Hahn, "Metaphysical Categories: Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, and Cabbages and Kings," in A Contextualistic Worldview, 65.