Autobiography - MY LIFE-PATH IN PHILOSOPHY

MY LIFE-PATH IN PHILOSOPHY

(Draft—To be Continued; last updated May 1, 2013)

Clark Butler

My earliest geopolitical memory in my native Los Angeles (more specifically Hollywood) was the normalcy of war under Truman during the Korean War. I was a bit shocked when the war ended. The next such memory was the daily somewhat traumatic practice of curling up under my desk along with the whole class in elementary school for self-protection in case of a nuclear attack. In Hollywood we were surrounded by parents who as children in Our Gang Comedies. I went to elementary school with Sue Lyon, who played opposite James Mason in Lolita, and who came to one of my sister’s birthday parties. In the Hollywood Hills we were immediately surrounded by Chuck Berry, the director of the Jack Benny show, the owner of a screen writers’ guild. My mother, who had lived in Hollywood since she was a child, called it a state of mind. Members of the family succumbed to the temptation of trying to break into the industry. I abstained and became academic in part due to the competition from Chinese and Japanese students in my elementary school. I was a C student, but frustrated because the Chinese and Japanese competition regularly beat me in things like spelling bees. At thirteen  years of age I resolve to no longer be second to them, afterwards my stay-at-home mother said she never 

My earliest philosophical position was that of a positivist. I did not know was “positivism” meant, so it might be more accurate to say that I was Joe Friday of Dragnet. This was in my junior high school years. No fictions, just the facts. I resolved never to read anymore novels unless forced by school, and I bought a world almanac which I started to read from cover to cover just to absorb facts into my mind. As for the world outside, I aspired for a better one, but felt resigned to the possibility of realizing it. My positivism was thus complemented by Stoicism, something I had already read about. As for metaphysics, when in high school I tried to think of all reality, its specific character was, it seemed, to be intrinsically confusing. I hated above all confusion, and so for the time being I more than once cast it out of mind, although its confusing nature periodically returned to haunt me.

            As a child I regularly attended a Presbyterian Sunday school and at thirteen I officially became a member of the church. But it bothered me that my parents, who sent me to church, neither practiced nor believed. My father was a pantheist, following natural law, submitting to the laws of nature, while my mother believed in astrology and the ancient lost wisdom of the past as conveyed by the Los Angeles seer and mystic Manly Palmer Hall. I was a believer nearly up to the time I went to college. But by then creationism came to seem a fairy tale, and I concluded that it was dishonesty to profess to believe something I did not believe. So I tried out secular humanism for about ten years to see if that would pan out.

          I had written a dissertation to refute Hegel, but after ten years as an atheist I had studied Hegel more deeply, and through my teachers, notably Claude Drevet and Jean Wahl at the University of Tunis (Tunisia), I learned of a very different Hegel. I sensed a depth to his thought that I had never suspected. That moved me to try to more clearly articulate this depth. (My cover in 1964-1965 was to be a philosophy student in Tunis. I worked for five years at a very low level for the CIA, doing open source intelligence and keeping track of Communists in North Africa. I found my Communists, and through discussions with them I concluded there was no democracy in South Vietnam to defend. I defied my father figure Lyndon Johnson, and have had no father figure since. I told the Chancellor of my campus decades later that never became a Communist, and he replied “Thank Heaven!” My first publication was a 1966 review (link) of Franz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (Wretched of the Earth). Though no a Communist, I had become through stays in Egypt and Tunis a rather fervent Third Worlder.  

                When I came to Purdue University as an instructor (1968) at the Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne Campus as an instructor (1968) and then Assistant Professor (1969) I had no other publications. Those were the days. The Fort Wayne Department was small at that time, and I had an opportunity to pursue my education beyond the PhD by teaching almost every branch of philosophy. I wrote my dissertation in my first year in Fort Wayne. The title was Negative Feedback and the Dialectic of Hegel (Ann Arbor: Dissertation Microfilms, 1970), 254 pp., which at least show my interest in a topic that has followed me down through the decades, although I consider the analogy to between the dialectic as a thought process and negative feedback as a mechanism in the natural world to not very enlightening. I defended my thesis at the University of Southern California, having studied with Wilhelm Werkmeister as a graduate student. I remained at USC for my doctorate as well as my BA. in philosophy. I took Introduction to Philosophy with a white-haired Werkmeister as a freshman. I had such a high image of what it was to be a philosopher that I was afraid to declare a major in the subject before this class. I discovered that I was not much worse than others in the class who were majors. And so I switched from a major in English, especially since it seemed that one would write better if one had something to write about. A proud Californian, I also remained at USC in part because I knew the faculty well and thought I could maneuver around them and do what I wanted. Fortunately they transformed me. Werkmeister had gone to Florida State by the time I was ready for my dissertation, but I still insisted in doing one on  Hegel even though there was no established Hegel scholar on my committee.

            My first publication upon arriving in Fort Wayne was a translation of the lilting prose of Louis Lavelle in his essay “La Métaphysique comme la science de l’intimité spirituelle” (Louis Lavelle, "Metaphysics or the Science of Spiritual Inwardness," Philosophy Today, Spring 1972, pp. 66-80 (link). Although I was not a creationist at the time, I found this essay in the tradition of the French philosophie de l’esprit to be quite seductive. "The Mind-Body Problem: A Non-Materialistic Identity Thesis," Idealistic Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, (September 1972), pp. 230-48 (link). These first two publications expressed the metaphysical idealism to which I immediately converted upon leaving a lecture on Leibniz’s panpsychism as an undergraduate. After that lecture, my view of the world was turned upside down probably for life. Yet I never accepted the idea of windowless monads. Minds feel others empathetically. My panpsychism, however, has evolved further over time. In correspondence with Charles Hartshorne in the mid-seventies, I was forced to adopt the asymmetry of the relation of the present event to the past event and that of the past to the present: the past can be deduced from the present, but the future cannot be deduced from the present. He formulated this principle in the context of Alfred North Whitehead’s event cosmology. The present event “creates itself” (spontaneously emerges) as a subject of feeling by objectifying just past felt events. Hartshorne told me in no uncertain terms that I had a choice between accepting this principle or ceasing our correspondence. I agreed with him. I had never thought about the matter before, and I think he is right.

The article just mentioned argued against the materialist identity theses of J. J. C. Smart and U. T. Place, a general thesis by which metaphysics itself began to come back into favor with the decline of logical positivism across town from USC at UCLA, Rudolf Carnap’s final abode. In the 1960’s idealists at USC had been positively frightened by the UCLA Philosophy Department, but things began to change in the ‘70s. I argued that one’s own mind, containing qualia, is the only thing-- namely, the brain--that one can experience from within. Just as a certain brain area has an inner reality unobservable to the scientific observer from the outside, by analogy every material unit has such an inner reality. This supposition is necessary to have a unified view of the universe, i.e., in order to avoid the assumption that the inner reality of material things other than a region of the brain is different in its basic nature from that of the brain. We reduce kinds of substance to a single kind, lopping off purely material beings, to simplify our world-view. This panpsychist thesis, allowing world-wide for external material properties and inner mental properties, is not refutable because we cannot never get on the inside of an atom, for example, to know what it intrinsically is. But it is simpler than a dual-substance theory.

In 1978 I published a follow-up article defending panpsychism from a different angle. Entitled “Panpsychism: A Reconstruction of the Genetic Argument” (Idealistic Studies, vol 8, no 1, pp. 31-39), the paper argued for the evolution of mind from its simplest form to its most complex and highly organized emergent form, an evolution paralleling the Darwinian evolution of matter to human brain, the most complex form of matter discovered thus far. This article was a reply to Paul Edward’s article on panpyschism in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mind on every level but the lowest emerges the nucleation of mental entities on the next lowest level. Emergence stems from the merger of entities on that lower level. Mind on the lowest level is feeling, the empathetic microcosmic feeling of the other such centers of feeling in the cosmic macrocosm. Biological stimulus and reflex cannot be understood without supposing a negative sensation (e.g. pain) connecting them. The stimulus causes tension or pain, and the reflex overcomes it and restores mind to well-being. Pre-biological mentality exists because the evolution of mind starts with the lowest conceivable mind, which must be pre-biological because the simplest biological mind distinguishes well-being and pain and thus is already to a degree complex. What is complex emerges out of what is simpler, and the simplest conceivable mind is that of an indestructible particle experiencing nothing but uninterrupted well-being.

Jumping ahead by decades, my latest statement of panpsychism was published in 2010: “Panpsychism and the Dissolution of Dispositional Properties,” Southwest Review of Philosophie, vol 24, no 2, link). This article was a reply to Paul Churchland’s 1996 (link) reply to my panpsychism that panpsychist doctrines were worthless because they had no explanatory value. Here I shifted from my earlier dual-property panpsychism to single-property panpsychism. Only mental properties were admissible. Except for space-time location, physical properties like mass, energy, and force are all dispositional. Mass is a body’s capacity to be accelerated by some force that impinges upon it, but mass can exist without that capacity being realized. Identity as the identity of indiscernibles, or the discernibility of non-identicals, means that an entity is what it is, is self-identical, through all its properties, the complete set of them. The distinction between essence and accident is convention, varying according to our varying interests. In truth all properties are essential. The consequence is that a body with unactualized mass or energy is discernible from, and hence not identical with, the body that actualizes the body’s potential for acceleration or for its capacity to do work through a distance. Hence there are no Aristotelian subjects of change. Only unchanging momentary events exist. As such they cannot have physical properties, but they must have some properties. For to exist is to have distinguishing properties. The only type of property other than dispositional properties that we can propose are occurrent properties, and the only occurrent of which we can think are phenomenal mental properties. Physics must be translated into psychology. To say that a body is accelerated, in particular that it goes faster, for example, is to say that a static briefly enduring purely phenomenal event fall into a series of such events in which the space gap between each successive pair of successive events increases. I stated a version of panpsychism that attributed explanatory power to it. When a photon changes course, a string of photon events all in a state of well-being is followed by such an event in a state of some kind of pain as it hits a reflective surface, and then restores its well-being by bouncing off in another direction. That momentary pain helps explain why it changes direction. It is a response to a pain-provoking stimulus, a response that restores well-being. (As this formulation shows, we can continue to speak with commonsense and assert changing bodies when we are not in a metaphysical mood.)

I became a Hegelian in October 1974 while teaching at Trent Polytechnic, now part of the University of Nottingham. Participating in the Nottingham faculty seminar, I presented a paper on panpsychism to silent smiles. But the result of further study revealed to be stronger than I. I adopted his position as a trial, setting myself up as a target. I really wanted the truth more than I wanted to be a Hegelian, but so far as far as I can see no one has hit the target. After Nottingham I went to the Hegel Archiv at the Ruhr Universität where a summer Fulbright grant and a sabbatical allowed me to say over a year as a Gastarbeiter (1974-1975). The Archiv director, Otto Poggeler, said in the seminar I was attending that there never was more than one Hegelian and he died over a hundred and seventy years ago. Scholarly interest in Hegel seemed antiquarian, as afterward also seemed in the United States.

I wanted to help bring Hegel into mainstream English-speaking philosophy, which I still want to do, and this despite the fact that Kenneth Schmitz, then President of the Hegel Society of America, told me that Hegel was so difficult that he would always remain esoteric. He meant that my project of bringing Hegel back into the center of philosophy in America was useless. More specifically I wanted to translate Hegel’s thought into the language of analytic philosophy, which I still want to do, a clear sign that I have not yet succeeding. I attempted to translate dialectical logic into deductive logic by a version of indirect proof, a project that I have been refining ever since.

Yet I never held that all the twists and turns in Hegel’s texts are deductive. And I no longer hold that in the standard dialectical that I analyzed is purely deductive. Generally, to be in general or indeterminately is to be in particular or determinately. But from particular determinate being (e.g., being green) in general we can deduce only that some singular determinate being exists (e.g; a singular shade of green. But we can only empirically discover, not deduce, that this singular green exists. Being in general particularizes itself in ways that cannot be deduced.

I presented my first version of my translation of dialectical logic at the Georgetown Hegel Society meeting in 1974 (link). I argued against J. N. Findlay, and as commentator on my paper he gently dismissed my project as misguided because advance in the dialectic from one category to another could not unfold in the object language, but could only result from a meta-linguistic reflection (link). I thought about this objection and decided that if dialectical logic cannot unfold in the object language, and if my translation using indirect direct proof has validity, then indirect proof in standard deductive logic cannot unfold in the object language, contrary to the accepted view.

The basic idea of my analysis of the standard dialectical cycle is that it consists in six steps, not three (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). The six are abstraction of x from a context, the absolutization of x because no related y in the context has yet be noted, the notice of such a y, the negation of the absolutization of x which is now seen to be relative rather than absolute, the reabsolutization of x for thought to maintain its fixation on x, the self-negation thought that absolutized x at the hands of the negated y, and finally the negation of the negation, i:e:; the negation of thought’s negation of y. I soon discovered in 1974, while teaching a class on psychoanalysis, that these six steps unfolded independently of Hegel in Freud’s analysis of the rise and cure of neurosis.