Had a blast today looking through some of the things left when Horace Kallen gave his papers to other archives. Nobody's quite sure where these were found, but they include random correspond-ence, articles he read (meticulously underlined), reviews and prefaces he wrote, notes for some of his lecture courses ... and some very old things, like the notes above from his undergraduate years at Harvard! I was excited to find drafts from the earliest version of his The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, as well as a 1959 new edition - and the script from a version of his "Euripidean" arrangement of Job performed at a Synagogue House in 1926.But what I was there for was the context of a talk he gave in 1950, "Are there limits to toleration in a free society?" at a symposium dedicated to Alvin Johnson entitled "One Globe - Two Worlds." The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal is publishing the talk as part of its centennial commemoration and I've promised to write an introduction for it. The talk in itself is not
that interesting - the tolerant must tolerate the intolerance of the intolerant - but will have meant more interesting things coming from someone who had dedicated a career to understanding the "American idea" in terms of cultural pluralism. Here's something which, judging from its placement in the files, might have been the introduction of Kallen at that symposium.Liberal education, Kallen points out, cannot be truly liberal unless it is intercultural. It must assume the parity of every people's culture in dignity and worth and seek untrammeled communication between them on equal terms. ... Education, says Dr. Kallen, is hyphenation and hyphenation is civilisation. All totalitarianisms, whether political, religious, economic, or cultural, are anti-hyphen and therefore anti-education.
