Hoernlé, Reinhold Friedrich Alfred, 1880-1943

Person

Hoernlé, Reinhold Friedrich Alfred, 1880-1943

27 November 1880 - 21 July 1943

(from ODNB entry by William Sweet)

Reinhold Friedrich Alfred Hoernlé (1880-1943), philosopher and social reformer in South Africa, was born in Bonn, Germany, on 27 November 1880.

His parents were the Indologist and philologist (Augustus Frederic) Rudolf Hoernlé (1841–1918) and Sophie Fredericke Louise, daughter of R. Romig of Bonn.
R. F. A. Hoernlé was their only son and spent his early years in India, later being educated in Germany before attending Balliol College, Oxford in 1899 where he was encouraged to pursue philosophy. In 1904 he was elected to a senior demyship at Magdalen College, where he studied for a BSc (completed in 1907), but in late 1905 moved to the University of St Andrews to serve as assistant to the professor of moral philosophy, Bernard Bosanquet.

Recommended by Caird, Bosanquet, and Smith, as well as by F. H. Bradley and Henry Jones, Hoernlé was appointed professor of philosophy at the South African College in 1908. From 1912 until 1914 he held the newly established professorship at Armstrong College, Newcastle (England).

On 23 March 1914 Hoernlé married Agnes Winifred Tucker (1885–1960), a former philosophy student at South African College, and the daughter of the South African senator William Kidger Tucker. She later became a leading ethnographer and the doyenne of South African anthropologists. They had one son, Alwyn (1915–1991).

In the summer of 1914 Hoernlé was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University, where he was able to engage at first hand some of the leading American philosophers. In 1920, however, he returned to his former chair at Newcastle.

Hoernlé left Newcastle in 1923 to succeed John Macmurray as professor of philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Winifred Hoernlé was appointed to a post in anthropology. With the exception of visiting professorships at Bowdoin College, Maine (1926), and at the University of Southern California (1930), he spent little time outside South Africa until his death.

Hoernlé's early work was in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical psychology, and in 1916 he and his wife completed an authorized translation of Rudolf Steiner's Die Philosophie der Freiheit (‘The philosophy of freedom’). Hoernlé was particularly concerned with two issues: the relation between the mental and the physical (focusing on volition and mental states), and the current debates between idealists and the ‘new’ realists. He believed he could address these issues through the ‘empirical’ statement of idealism or ‘speculative philosophy’ represented by Bosanquet. In his Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics (1920) Hoernlé presented essays on scientific method and the ‘mechanism versus vitalism’ controversy, insisting that, in biology at least, teleology is dominant over mechanism. His Studies reflected a systematic philosophy, showing that ‘experience, taken as a whole, gives us clues which, rightly interpreted, lead to the perception of … a graded order of varied appearances [in the universe]’ (p. v). It also exhibited his ‘synoptic’ approach, ‘which itself rests on the assumption that truth has many sides, and that to the whole truth on any subject every point of view has some contribution to make’ (‘On the way to a synoptic philosophy’, 138).

Hoernlé's Matter, Life, Mind, and God (1923), based on extramural lectures given in Newcastle to a popular audience, similarly discussed the limitations of both mechanistic and contemporary behaviouristic theories. Critics were somewhat receptive of the book, noting especially Hoernlé's ‘limpid clearness’ in style. In 1924 he published a short volume, Idealism as a Philosophical Doctrine, expanded in 1927 as Idealism as a Philosophy. Designed initially as a ‘map’ to guide students through the different schools of ‘idealism’ still current in Anglo-American philosophy, the key chapters trace the distinction between the idealism of Berkeley on the one hand and of Kant, Hegel, and their successors on the other.

When Hoernlé arrived at Witwatersrand in 1923 his teaching included courses in logic and psychology. He and his wife soon became actively involved in social issues. His wife was a pioneering social anthropologist and one of the first scholars of Bantu studies in South Africa, and Hoernlé himself developed an interest in the black peoples of the region and the impact of western civilizations on them.

Hoernlé was heavily involved in the South African Institute of Race Relations during the 1920s and 1930s. He was also chairman of the Bantu Men's Social Centre in Johannesburg, of the Johannesburg Joint Council of Europeans and Natives, and of the Society of Christians and Jews. In addition from 1934 he was a government-appointed member of the South African Council for Educational and Social Research. During the Second World War he was the initiator of the Army Educational Corps of which he became honorary lieutenant-colonel.

A ferocious critic of the policy of racial segregation proposed by the government of J. B. M. Hertzog from 1924 onwards, Hoernlé viewed segregation as entrenching white domination and the exploitation of the non-European peoples.

In 1941 he had an important correspondence with Geoffrey Hare Clayton, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.

Hoernlé's death, following a heart attack and brief illness, in Johannesburg on 21 July 1943, was attributed largely to the stress of his extensive administrative work.

For more information see: William Sweet, ‘Hoernlé, (Reinhold Friedrich) Alfred (1880–1943)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/view/article/94419 .

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