For more than 30 years,
since 1919 to be exact, Stephen Pepper has been a member of the
University faculty. His colleagues know him as a warm and genial
friend, as a distinguished writer on philosophy and aesthetics,
and as an administrator who has helped to give the University
the look it has to students and alumni.
His students know him in a
way only a few of his younger colleagues can, as a memorable
teacher at all levels from the introductory lecture in a big
freshman course to the last, private serious discussion of a
doctoral dissertation. Freshman usually see him first in a room
which seats more than five hundred. He appears there on the
platform, a tall man without much hair on top of his head, often
dressed in tweeds. They hear a very rich, carrying, easy voice
with a slight New England accent which does something to the a's
and r's. I recall that his "a" in "Kant" was a little less broad
than the "a" in "can't" and that after a certain lecture members
of the class could be heard asking each other, "Is it Kant can't
or Can't Kant?"
They like him immensely.
For some years a number of men in his classes paid him the
compliment of copying his ties which were made of some rather
rough material in solid blue or red. The women have always liked
him at least as well as the men. Their typical reaction may be
illustrated by the incident of the chocolate cake. He once used
this confection as an illustration in the course of a lecture
designed to explain Platonic ideas. Naturally the coeducational
members of the class presented him with a large chocolate cake
at the next meeting. His students are obviously responsive to
him in more than intellectual ways.
But they are also
responsive intellectually. There is always in his lecturing a
most serious and discriminating and even affectionate
understanding of what philosophy is. He once said to me that
when he was a young instructor he told occasional jokes to
enliven the hour, but that he soon discovered the way to make a
lecture go was to appreciate in yourself the intrinsic
importance of the material. There are very few jokes now, but
there is a fine communication to a class of the nature and
subject matter of philosophy. It would be hard to number the
students who first discovered under him the fascination of the
philosophical mind at work and to have affection for both the
subject and the man.
He was born in New Jersey,
an odd place for one with a New England heredity, but eight
years later he settled in Concord, and he still, after thirty
years in California, thinks of the old town with nostalgia. From
two until eight he lived in Paris where he rolled hoops in
Luxembourg Park and did other things small boys do in France,
and moreover did them in such a wholeheartedly Gallic way that
his parents decided to come home and live in Concord. The house
they built there, a very handsome dwelling, was up the road from
the old Emerson home, the road where the British soldiers
marched, on the side of the street where the Alcotts lived. He
learned to swim as a matter of course in Walden Pond nearby,
where Thoreau once spent an observant and economical time with
good results for literature.
He grew up in Concord,
riding a long-legged brown pony, collecting birds' nests and
butterflies, and hunting Indian Arrowheads. Because these
pursuits were regarded by the local small boys as less
fashionable than football practice, it was necessary at times to
keep a wary eye on the force of public opinion, but he stayed
with the rivers and woods rather than the football field and, to
use his own words, learned "an early lesson in the discipline of
standing by my own values." He has been standing by those values
ever since.
In his junior year at
Harvard he happened to take a course in ethics from Professor
Palmer and by midyear had decided to become a philosopher. It
was a case of love at first sight as such matters usually are.
Palmer gave the customary good advice --- the field was small
and overcrowded, better look elsewhere. But a few years later,
after much study with Ralph Barton Perry and numerous contests
with an exceptionally sharp-witted group of graduate students,
he emerged from Harvard, a Doctor of Philosophy.
After a year of teaching
at Wellesley and a time, cut short by the armistice, in an
Officers' Training Camp of the first world war, he wrote to
Washington and California asking if there was a place for a
philosopher. Our University wisely said yes and offered an
assistantship at $650 a year. It turned out to be a very good
bargain.
There are three things
most college professors do. They teach, they write articles and
books, and they take a hand in the conduct of the university.
For almost any man the order of importance of these will be
different because each takes a different talent and
preponderance of interest. But with Stephen Pepper the three are
so evenly balanced that it is difficult to judge which comes
first. His reputation comes from all three.
His national prestige has
brought him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from
Colby and has resulted in a number of offers of lucrative and
distinguished positions, of which it is not, by a very
reasonable convention, polite to speak in detail.
His publications have had
a great deal to do with this prestige. His major works are
Aesthetic Quality, and important step in the development of
pragmatic or contextualistic aesthetics; World Hypotheses,
an exciting book examines and criticizes the bases of
philosophies which are at present important; The Bases of
Criticism in the Arts, a book made from a series of lectures
at Harvard, of great value to people who wish to understand the
ideas that lie behind the practice of criticism; and
Principles of Art Appreciation, a big book published in
1949, which contains much of his thinking over many years about
the nature of critical principles and their application to art.
There are also many articles and reviews, like the books, show a
man who is a leader in the field. All of this activity in
publication is paralleled by a continuous, vital, uninhibited
discussion of philosophy with his colleagues and students which
is in itself a kind of publication.
Among the many
administrative positions he has held, the one closer to his
heart is the chairmanship of the Art department, a job which
requires constructive sagacity and resourcefulness. Since 1938,
when he was made Chairman, he has created a department which,
unlike the usual university department of art, puts great
emphasis on learning how to paint with all that implies and
makes instruction in painting at least the equal of historical
and critical study. His intention has been to make a policy for
an art department which will be suitable not only to California
but for art departments in general. Evidences from other
universities shows that he has been successful, and the
California Art department which is made up of unusually talented
painters and historians is, largely as a result of his policies,
one of the most distinguished in the nation.
His old friends on the
faculty know all about these achievements and appreciate them,
but most of them like him best when he appears in a more
informal way as the leader of a unique organization called
The Arts Club which he created and has sustained. It is a
dinner club whose monthly meetings reflect the personality of
its mentor, always called Father Stephen, in convivial eating
and drinking, high spirits, wit, and serious discussions of
serious papers on the arts. There he shows qualities that are
proved many times over the years and that only long standing
among old friends can give. They are various and widespread, but
they can be summarized. He is a man of rich experience and good
humor, a loyal friend and a wise one.
__________
McKenzie,
Gordon. "Our Distinguished Faculty: Professor Stephen C.
Pepper."
California Monthly. Vol. LXI, Alumni
Publication, University of California
No. 7 (May, 1951), pp. 16, 30-31.