To Philosopher, Discipline Is Beacon

When Abraham Melden moved with his parents from Montreal to Los Angeles a few years after World War I, the first place he explored was the Los Angeles Public Library. He remembers the day vividly. “I was just wandering, exploring, and I found a book by Plato--one of the early Socratic dialogues. I was fascinated, and I took the book home and devoured it.”

That incident took place more than 60 years ago, and it put Melden on the track that tonight will bring him the highest honor UC Irvine can bestow. Along with Walter B. Gerken (chairman of Pacific Mutual’s executive committee who recently established an endowed chair in Enterprise and Society) and Robert and Meryl Bonney (local residents who established a $1-million trust fund for the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and have strongly supported research and education in the College of Medicine), Melden will receive the UCI Medal at the Bren Events Center.

Melden, who has shown few signs of slowing down since he retired as chairman of UCI’s philosophy department in 1977, uses the word emeritus to describe his current relationship with UCI. Retired , he said emphatically, “I hate that word.”

At 78, about the only thing he has given up are his administrative duties at UCI, and he has more than filled that void with regular teaching assignments, writing, work with professional societies in his field and a dedication to UCI’s new Humanities Research Institute. All this in spite of a recurring cardiac problem that finally resulted in surgery in April.

Today, relaxed in his Newport Beach ranch-style home, surrounded by the books he loves, Melden said the surgery was completely successful and he’s feeling fine. “It’s the only real health problem I’ve ever had,” he said, “and now it’s behind me.”

Poor health is especially intolerable to Melden because it gets in the way of what he considers the primary mission of a human being: the life of the mind. “Without intellectual curiosity and a sense of wonder,” he said, “we’d all be dullards.”

He has believed this stoutly since he was a small boy enjoying “a marvelous public school education.” That’s when discipline became a guiding light to Melden in all of his thinking processes. “My teachers came out of well-disciplined schools in England,” he recalled. “One of the best courses I ever had was in Latin because it made me understand for the first time how to construct and craft an English sentence.”

Melden graduated from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles in 1927, then went on to win a BA degree in philosophy from UCLA, an MA from Brown and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1938. He taught at Berkeley until 1946, when he began an 18-year run at the University of Washington, the last eight as a full professor of philosophy. By that time he had published several landmark books and was known worldwide for his work in ethics.

He got into the field almost accidentally (“because I had to”) when he was asked to teach a course “that was not being taught in an intellectually responsible fashion. I thought it should be a tough academic discipline, and I dug it out myself from classical texts.” As a result, he began to write and publish on ethics and philosophy, and his name became associated with moral rights. He had enormous international stature when he came into the view of UCI in 1964.

Then-Vice Chancellor Ivan Hinderacker called Melden to check the references of a teaching applicant at this new university that existed mostly on William Pereira’s drawing boards. Almost as a footnote, Hinderacker added that if ever Melden thought about making a change, UCI would welcome him with open arms. The offer came at a time when Melden had decided to leave the University of Washington and was considering several other prestigious jobs. So before he made a commitment, Melden and his wife, Regula, flew to Los Angeles, rented a car and drove out to have a look at this new university.

They asked for directions to Irvine and ended up at a crossroads gas station surrounded by citrus groves. The attendant gave them directions to the “new university” 8 miles away and Melden was instantly attracted.

“I saw the ground all chewed up,” he remembered, “and I got excited. I had moved with UCLA from Los Angeles to Westwood, and I saw the same beginnings at Irvine. I thought, here’s an opportunity few people ever have--to develop one’s own department from scratch. To make my own mistakes and not have to live with the mistakes of others. When I turned down a fine offer from a well-known, established university, they couldn’t understand how I could pass them up for this new and unknown school.”

He described early planning sessions in which “one table held all the administrators and founding chairs. We did incredibly well in view of budgets that were inadequate for 16 years. We always wanted to build on quality and that’s what happened. Orange County should be very proud of UCI. This is the most successful in the whole country of the new universities that were established in the 1960s.”

Throughout these years, Melden was attracting more laurels and writing more books. He was awarded fellowships from the Ford and Guggenheim foundations, was a distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in Japan, and twice a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Research Center in Bellagio, Italy. And in 1972, he received the UCI Alumni Assn. Lauds and Laurels Extraordinarius Award as best exemplifying the spirit and purpose of UCI.

Although most of his writing is directed toward his peers and most of his recognition has come through academic achievements, Melden is quite aware that philosophy is seen as abstruse by lay people, and he’s both willing and able to talk about it in a pragmatic context.

“How many times,” he asked rhetorically, “have I been asked at cocktail parties what I teach. And when I answer ‘philosophy,’ the person asking the question invariably says, ‘Oh, isn’t that nice.’ That attitude is a carry-over from the 19th Century when people thought of philosophy and ethics as close to the clergy--and a lot of people still see it as a noble topic about which one can engage in lay preaching, a kind of academic Norman Vincent Peale.

Although he refused to be critical of self-help books--”I feel the fact that people want to read them is important”--he also refused to suggest specific answers to ethical questions. Armed with the normal wariness of an academic intellectual toward a lay reporter, he seemed to be saying that ethics can’t be reduced to a rule book or a code of conduct. Asked for an example of a specific moral right, he hesitated, then answered, “Life.” When pressed for other examples of moral absolutes, he chose to take issue with the word “absolute.” When the questioner let go of that, he said there were no easy answers to ethical questions but they could best be approached through intellectual discipline. “These aren’t simple matters,” he said with mild exasperation. “You surely didn’t expect a philosophy professor to give you simple answers.” “But philosophy examines fundamental issues that have to do with the understanding of things. We try to make sense of a whole variety of disciplines and see them in relation to one another. We’re concerned with basic notions of conceptual questions, how things are in a basic way. We hope that the study of philosophy improves the lives of people but even more important that it fosters an intellectual curiosity.”

He has at his fingertips a number of examples to illustrate his conviction that the study of philosophy “can have important practical applications.” He told about a former philosophy instructor at UCI who looked in other directions when he was denied teaching tenure. He took examinations for the U.S. State Department and American Express and came out with top scores in both. He accepted a job with American Express and is now stationed in Paris where he deals with complex banking problems. “He’s able to solve these problems,” said Melden, “because of the analytical skills he acquired in philosophy.”

He rattled off other examples of philosophy students who used the discipline to become successful in business and the professions: a young woman high in a Portland, Ore., brokerage firm; a graduate student who took a teller’s job at the Bank of America and mastered it so well and so quickly that he is moving rapidly up in the organization; his own grandniece who is about to get a cum laude law degree from Harvard after majoring in philosophy as an undergraduate.

Although Melden said that philosophy and ethics “can be generated into schmooze by teachers who are not disciplined thinkers and get carried away into what they regard as edifying talk,” he also refuses to put down religion. “I’ve never been a church member,” he said, “but I certainly don’t take an atheistic stand. Religion should instill certain attitudes toward the world and other people. In its best form, it can be civilizing, and in its most excessive form, it can be very divisive. At its best, religion can enlarge the human spirit and offer a sense of wonder.”

Throughout his long academic career, Melden has been able to combine this sense of wonder with intellectual discipline and pragmatic action. He set up the structure of UCI’s Academic Senate and headed it during much of the explosive Vietnam period. “We were determined,” he said, “not to make the same mistakes that were made in Berkeley, and I think we turned away a lot of student hostility toward the Establishment at UCI.”

He recalled wishing in the 1970s that students would “show interest in things beyond jobs and careers; I regard that as unfortunate.” But he sees that attitude changing drastically today in the face of new and difficult problems.

“Kids today,” he said, “are concerned with a whole new set of issues like affirmative action. Latinos feel deprived--and rightly so. There’s a lot of resentment toward Asians who are outperforming Caucasian students. We’re becoming a collection of minorities, and that causes tension. I think it also influences young people to become more politically interested.”

Melden--who will celebrate his 52nd wedding anniversary next month and has one daughter living in Menlo Park but no grandchildren--intends to be very much a part of this changing scene. He has a new book entitled “Rights in Moral Lives” from which he will teach a class at UCI next year. He also has a number of other writing commitments, but his principal energy will be channeled into his work with the Humanities Research Institute.

“One job I have,” he said, “is to explore what people in my field can do to alert physicians to the ethical problems and dilemmas currently in the foreground of modern scientific and medical practice. I’ve become very friendly with my cardiologist, and he said he would be enormously interested and wants to be involved. There’s no question that important ethical concerns have been raised by recent developments in genetics, for example.”

So the UCI Medal to be awarded him tonight will be a way station and not a destination for Abraham Melden. He still has a lot of wonders to explore.