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Robert S. Hartman
Article written by Dr. JOHN W. DAVIS, Professor and Department Head,
Emeritus The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Robert S. Hartman, Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Tennessee and the National University of Mexico, died on September 20. 1973
and was buried near his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
He was born in Berlin on January 27, 1910. He attended the German College of
Political Science, the University of Paris, the London School of Economics,
and Berlin University, where he received the LL.B. in 1932. For a brief
period, he taught at Berlin University and served as an assistant district
court judge.
As a school boy in the Germany of the Kaiser Wilhelm II, he was required at
his gymnasium each day to repeat the loyalty oath: "I was born to die for
Germany." He became convinced that this oath was false. He believed in the
infinite value of a human life, and that the state has a moral obligation to
keep violent hands off that life. War, he thought, is madness. His rejection
of all violent creeds, whether of Communism, Nazism, or Fascism, which he
expressed in speeches and articles, brought him into conflict with the Nazi
party, and forced him to leave Germany to escape imprisonment. Using a fake
passport, he left Germany in 1932 for England. In order to hamper the Nazis
in their efforts to keep track of him, he changed his name (Robert
Schirokauer) legally to that on the passport, Robert S. (for Schirokauer)
Hartman. For the next two years he worked as a professional photographer in
London and Paris. During this period he and a young German rocket inventor
attempted to interest the British government in the use of rockets for
postal service. The inventor, Gerhard Zucker, was later executed by the
Nazis for "an attempt to sell an invention important for Germany to a
foreign power."
From 1934 to 1941, still under surveillance by the Nazis, he was Walt
Disney's representative, first in Scandinavia, later in Mexico and Central
America. In 1938, using a Swedish alien's passport, he and his wife, the
former Rita Emanuel, and son, Jan, left Europe for Mexico, where they lived
until their immigration in 1941 to the United States, where they later
became citizens.
Dr. Hartman's first teaching position in the United States was at Lake
Forest Academy in Illinois. While there, he enrolled at Northwestern
University (Ph.D., 1946). He later taught at the College of Wooster in Ohio
(1945-48), and at the Ohio State University (1948-56). He was a visiting
professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1955-56), and at Yale
(1966). He was Smith Mundt State Department Research Fellow and Exchange
Professor at the National University of Mexico (1956-57). He held more than
fifty lectureships in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe.
He was a research professor of philosophy at the National University of
Mexico from 1957 until his death in 1973, and at the University of Tennessee
from 1968 until his death in 1973.
As the author of more than ten books and over 100 articles, and translator
of six books, he acquired a world-wide reputation. While an extremely
industrious and productive scholar, he yet found time to carry on a very
intensive correspondence with many persons throughout the world who had
become acquainted with his work. He and his wife were cosmopolitan, with
friends everywhere, many of whom they entertained in their lovely Cuernavaca
home.
His life-long quest was to answer the question, "What is good?" - And to
answer the question in such a way that good could be organized to help
preserve and enhance the value of human life. He believed that he had found
this answer in the axiom upon which he based his science of Axiology, "A
thing is good when it fulfills its concept." His formal axiology, as the
ordering logic for the value sciences, receives its most complete expression
in his major work, The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific
Axiology (1967), which one reviewer described as "one of the most
constructive and revolutionary undertaking suggested in modern times." He
applied his value method to economics in the Profit Sharing Manual (1948),
Die Partnerschaft von Kapital und Arbeit: Theorie und Praxis eines neuen
Wirtschaftssystems (1953), and La participacion de utilidades en Mexico
(1963). In the field of psychology, he applied his axiology in The Hartman
Value Inventory, a value profile, widely used in Mexico and by some
psychiatrists in the United States, which measures with exactness the
character of an individual. This profile exists in English, German, Spanish,
Swedish, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, and in other languages. Before his
death, five of the largest corporations in this country used the Hartman
value concepts in developing the sensitivity of their executives to the
human value aspects of management decisions.
His international reputation and the esteem in which he is held by scholars
throughout the world are reflected in Value and Valuation: Axiological
Studies in Honor of Robert S. Hartman (1972). He was much loved by his many
friends. Many of his students and colleagues would agree with the sentiment
expressed in the above work by one of them: "I have never known a more
brilliant, comprehensive, creative mind; or a more enthusiastic, eloquent
teacher."
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