The Autobiography of Ephriam Edward Ericksen -- Foreword

My association with Professor E. E. Ericksen lasted for over thirty-five years. During the year I was a fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Utah, I had a desk and bookcase in Ericksen's office and was with him daily. After I finished my studies at the university, I maintained a close association with him until his death in 1967. We spent literally thousands of hours together, discussing religious, moral, and philosophical subjects. Of all my teachers, Ericksen had the strongest impact on me personally and on my religious and philosophical views. I was also close to his wife, Edna, a beautiful and talented woman who made important contributions in civic areas and affairs of the LDS church.

Two factors were basic to Ericksen's intellectual development: his Mormon upbringing, with its strong moralistic and practical character, and his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he was influenced by the moral philosophy of John Dewey. Dewey had already departed for Columbia when Ericksen arrived at Chicago, but his presence was still felt in the philosophy department. Ericksen was [p.x] particularly influenced by Dewey's colleague, George Herbert Mead, and by James Hayden Tufts.

In fact, pragmatic philosophy and Mormonism had much in common. According to my own teacher, William Pepperell Montague, who was a close friend and colleague of John Dewey at Columbia, Dewey himself once said that Mormonism in many ways exemplified his philosophy on a large, practical scale. In the summer of 1936 or 1937, I observed a conversation between Ericksen and Dewey, following a lecture Dewey had delivered at the college in Logan, Utah, which confirmed my sense of Dewey's influence on him. (That memorable occasion was the only time that I ever met John Dewey or listened to him lecture.)

Ericksen was not particularly distinguished as a philosophical scholar. He was well informed in the field but made no important contributions in technical areas. Nor was he an especially impressive lecturer, though his lectures were always substantial and worthwhile; and he depended on others to refine his compositions. But Ericksen was a great teacher. He powerfully affected his students and associates and without doubt influenced me more than any other teacher.

Ericksen's strength as a teacher was in his capacity to inspire others to think, and to think carefully and critically. He engaged in endless give-and-take conversations and arguments with students on philosophical subjects—especially those crucial to moral behavior. Like most pragmatists, he was essentially a moral philosopher. He liked nothing better than to act as the Socratic midwife, helping students to arrive at their own ideas. He was fond of the Socratic aphorism, "The unreflective life is not worth living."

Ericksen was a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was unorthodox in his theology and critical of the church in a constructive way, but he participated fully in his own [p.xi] university ward and served for a number of years as a member of the general board of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association. Serving the young people of the church was one of his primary interests. Ericksen had some warm friends in the general leadership of the LDS church—and an occasional enemy. As he explained to me several times, one of those enemies in the Council of the Twelve Apostles managed to get him removed from the general board: the board was dissolved and reconstituted with all former members except for Ericksen and one or two others who were also out of favor.

For me, Ericksen was the leading figure among a group of impressive university and professional people who took an active interest in church affairs during the 1930s but did not hesitate to raise fundamental questions and speak their minds honestly. Needless to say, he was often criticized—and sometimes censured. At one time he went through what he called his "inquisition," but I do not think his church membership was ever in jeopardy.

Ericksen's best scholarly work was his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, The Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life, first published by the University of Chicago in 1922 and reissued by the University of Utah Press in 1975. This was one of the earliest scholarly treatments of Mormonism. It has worn well over the years and deserves to be widely read. It is a profound analysis of the character of Mormonism seen from a pragmatic social standpoint. Social Ethics, a volume which came out in the 1930s, is a very solid text, as well. And his occasional philosophical papers are impressive for their down-to-earth wisdom. Ericksen always entertained a strong interest in economics, even in his later years. However, that field passed him by during the years that he attended primarily to moral philosophy, but his treatment of ethical theory and moral practice always kept economic factors very much in the foreground.

[p.xii] Ericksen's religious beliefs and philosophy more or less paralleled what in those days was considered good Mormonism—a somewhat naturalistic, materialistic, humanistic, and finitistic type of theism with a strong melioristic, moral foundation. His Mormonism also had a strong temporal quality, emphasizing development and pointing to the future. (I say that this was regarded as good Mormonism in those days because I understand that today some members of the LDS church lean toward a more orthodox Christian absolutism with a strong emphasis upon sin.)

In his conversation and writing on religion, Ericksen repeatedly returned to a distinction between "priests" and "prophets." The priests were and are the conservative religionists who live by rule and ritual, their minds fixed on the historic past and the hereafter. The prophets are the "good guys" who liberate religion from rule and ritual, cant and hypocrisy, and who make it a creative adventure of the good life. Their minds are fixed on the future of this world. Ericksen paid much attention to the Old Testament in his courses on the history of morals, and in the major Old Testament prophets he found the standard against which he judged present religious leaders. Such thinking was common among liberal religious writers of his generation. Although the distinction was and is a useful one, I rather think that he overstated the distance between priests and prophets. The Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, one of the great works in the history of social, moral religion, was probably the product of Ericksen's priests as well as his prophets.

In the context of such thinking, he was fond of saying, "Religion is a crusade, not a consolation." This terse statement places him within the category of prophetic religion, succinctly summarizing his belief that religion must have a strong moral foundation. He often opposed an idea central to Schleiermacher and his school, that religion can be described as a feeling of dependence. He preferred a statement, which I believe comes from Matthew Arnold, "Religion is morality touched by emotion." [p.xiii] He should be remembered for his definition of religion which appeared in his 1937 Social Ethics: "Religion is a way of life that is expressed on the inner or spiritual side as the purposive control of life and on the outer or social side as active participation in the promotion of the highest human values."

I am afraid that Ericksen liked the idea of having disciples, something no philosopher should want. Thus I believe I disappointed him in his later years with my criticism of many facets of pragmatism. He knew that I was inclined toward a somewhat more mystical conception of religion that tended to distinguish rather severely between religion and morality.

True to his pragmatic inheritance, Ericksen was a strong empiricist. He had interest in logic and fully respected mathematics, those distinctly rationalistic pursuits, but he was opposed to a predominantly rationalistic treatment of philosophical problems. However, he was not a positivist. Although his work always exhibited the tendency toward skepticism characteristic of his species, he considered metaphysics a possibility if held within the bounds of empirical knowledge and supported by the methods or findings of science. He paid little attention to aesthetics and was not entirely at home dealing with the technicalities of epistemology. He was not acquainted with symbolic logic, but his work exhibited the influence of classical logic.

Though inclined away from both metaphysics and theology, Ericksen engaged in a metaphysics of his own. He was firmly committed to a materialistic conception of reality, which always seemed to me to reflect his Mormon upbringing. Unlike his early friend and mentor whom he greatly admired, the Mormon philosopher W. H. Chamberlin, Ericksen was not strongly attracted to Idealism. Chamberlin called himself a Realist, but he was much influenced by Josiah Royce and was more an Idealist than a Realist. Chamberlin was far more interested than Ericksen in [p.xiv] developing a systematic metaphysics and theology for Mormonism. In those days he was Mormonism's most capable person in metaphysics. But he was more or less rejected by the church and died at a fairly early age. Ericksen, on the other hand, had more practical interests—social and personal ethics. Invariably his concern for theology and metaphysics was related to practical problems. Although Ericksen's naturalism and materialism were basic to his philosophy, he was not atheistic. I always felt that there were strong marks of agnosticism on him, and he was skeptically inclined. But he was a genuinely devout person and was in no way an opponent of religious faith, nor was he negative toward organized churches. Rather his criticism was essentially positive and constructive.

Like empiricists generally, Ericksen held to a pluralistic conception of reality. Here again, his philosophy suggested his Mormon upbringing. He was clearly influenced by William James, chief enemy of the Absolute, agreeing with him that the world is not a single entity whose relations are internal to its structure but rather a collection of things and events which have realities as particulars and are related only externally. The world is a pluriverse, rather than a universe, and reality as well as value inheres in the individual. Like James, his moral philosophy was relativistic. And like James, he was allergic to the Absolute and to absolutism. These were the matters he emphasized in his teaching. With some embarrassment, I look back on the many hours Ericksen and I spent arguing the problem of moral relativism, since I was unable for some time to live with relatives rather than absolutes. Ericksen agreed with Dewey in his Quest for Certainty that the thirst for certainty in factual matters and the failure to be satisfied with probabilities rather than certainties produces absolutism, and some forms of absolutism produce tyranny.

[p.xv] Ericksen's concept of reality led him to stress process—reality as becoming rather than being. I do not recall his paying much attention to the metaphysical writings of Alfred North Whitehead, but his disposition and temperament were clearly in the Whitehead direction. I rather think that if Ericksen were living today, he would favor the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, which is a philosophy of process and becoming rather than substance and being. Ericksen's theories of reality exhibit influences from Charles S. Peirce, Henri-Louis Bergson, as well as James and Whitehead. Here again his philosophical commitments are closely related to his version of Mormonism. His emphasis on event and becoming rather than on substance and being was also supported by his interest in evolution and the development of the species. He often referred to the genetic fallacy—judging a thing by how it originated rather than what it had become or was becoming.

However, such concerns were secondary. Ericksen's primary interest was always ethics. He gave attention to ethical theory, particularly psychological and ethical hedonism and the formalistic ethics of Immanuel Kant. But he concentrated most of his time and energy as a teacher and writer on concrete personal, social, and moral problems. He was influenced by Dewey and Mead, who held that the individual person cannot be considered in isolation from his social context, that personality is largely a product of social environment, that there cannot be a genuine person in total social isolation. And again I felt that such beliefs were influenced to some extent by the strong social character of the Mormonism in which Ericksen was reared. He seems to have adhered to Dewey's position that there is no substantive human nature. Rather the human person is susceptible to change through environmental influences. Of course, he recognized genetic inheritances, but his emphasis was always on the possibility of improving the quality of life and moral character through education.

[p.xvi] Ericksen often commented that the teaching of ethics carries with it the responsibility to improve the life of the individual and society. This is clearly exhibited in his book Social Ethics and in various published and unpublished papers. Of course, this attitude is consonant with his approach to the matter of prophetic religion, which he defined by referring to Old Testament prophets such as Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. I should say here that he regarded Mormonism as, in principle, a prophetic religion. Given his practical approach to ethics, he frequently objected to the formalism of Kantian ethics, insisting that what is good or bad, right or wrong, must be determined by considering consequences. Here he was fond of the British utilitarian definition of morality: the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But he always added "over the longest period of time."

What counted for Ericksen in matters of morality was not simple adherence to abstract principle or casuistic rules but rather high motive, intelligent decision, and good results. He pounded endlessly on the importance of rationality and knowledge in moral behavior. To borrow a comment from one of my teachers, Heinrich Gomperz, referring to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Ericksen was "a philosopher who philosophized with his fist on the table." He had little use for sophisticated wranglings and endless linguistic and logical analyses, which even in his day were becoming characteristic of academic philosophy. Philosophy for him was the serious business of life, and he insisted that what went on in the classroom should make a difference in human disposition and behavior.

His courses at the university demonstrated this interest in concrete human problems. For example, his course on Social Ethics, one of the two most popular courses at the university (the other was Ralph Chamberlin's course on evolution), dealt with problems relating to courtship and marriage. For this, he received considerable national notoriety [p.xvii] because such a thing in a department of philosophy was more or less unheard of in those days.

Ericksen established a strong philosophical tradition at the University of Utah, and for some years thereafter the Department of Philosophy was clearly the intellectual center of the university. His chief associates were Milton Bennion, dean of the School of Education, and Waldemer P. Read, Ericksen's student and successor who faithfully followed the pragmatic philosophical line. They developed a curriculum which dealt with all of the familiar moral problems that have come to the forefront of attention in recent years—economic, political, and moral problems having to do with shortages of food, starvation, marriage and divorce, abortion, euthanasia, excessive litigation and lawyers' fees, medical costs, authority and the individual, disarmament, and peace.

Ericksen was thus in many ways ahead of his time. If he had not been in an out-of-the-way place like Salt Lake City and had not been tied in various ways to the Mormon church and tradition, he would easily have been recognized as a national leader in his field. As it was, he became president of the American Philosophical Association, was well known in philosophical circles in the West, and had a powerful influence on his numerous students and colleagues and on the culture of which he was a part. I can only say again that he was a great man and a great teacher.

In 1965, two years before his death, the regents of the University of Utah bestowed on Professor Ericksen its highest honor: it created the E. E. Ericksen Chair of Philosophy. Mrs. Ericksen told me that soon after the regents' action was announced in the press, an old friend called up and said, "Edna, about this chair for Ephraim—will it be up at the university or are you going to keep it at your house?" Thereafter, Mrs. Ericksen embroidered a handsome chair-cushion with the words "E. E. Ericksen Chair of Philosophy."[p.xix]