New APPS Interview: Charles Dyke

Today’s New APPS interview is with Charles Dyke, Professor of Philosophy at Temple University.

Hello Chuck, thanks very much for doing this interview with us. Can you tell us about your personal practice of philosophy? 

Well, I’m not sure that’s one of my personal practices.  It’s probably about thirty years since I was in the B section of the library.  I’ve never belonged to the APA.  The only times I’ve been to the APA meetings were when I was on a search committee.  Does that make me a fellow traveler?

Ha! So you have a complicated relation to what goes by the name of philosophy nowadays. How do you do what you do then?

I teach three days a week.  The other days normally have me reading or writing in the morning, very often with music on.  The afternoons are for gardening, maintenance, woodcarving, carpentry – or more reading.  My best thoughts have always come as I was drifting into or out of sleep.  I take siestas to maximize my productivity.

You do a good bit of collaborative work.

My opportunities for collaboration, with John Jungck, with David Depew and Bruce Weber, and more recently with my son Carl, and Yrjo Haila and the crew in Finland have been priceless.

Tell us a little about your home life if you would.

I lived in the same house (when not in a dorm) for my first 22 years.  I’ve lived where I do now for the last 43 years, except for the two years when I taught at the Temple campus in Rome.  If you live in the right place, you don’t have to move. 

How about high school?

In high school, I knew that there was philosophy, but I wasn’t at all sure what philosophy was.  Nothing has changed. 

Undergrad?

My first undergrad days were at Caltech, where I was a fish out of water.  I migrated to Brandeis.  At registration for my first semester there, my schedule was one course short, with not a clue about what to add.  A guy who lived down the hall was standing in a line, and I stood in line with him to chat.  We got to the desk together and I signed up for the intro Philosophy course.

So not exactly what you had always planned on! What was the course?

The course turned out to be dramatic readings from Plato’s dialogues by Aron Gurwitsch.  I was also signed up, that first semester, for Marcuse’s section of Soc. Sci. 1, the bellwether of the general education requirements.  I cowered in the back row.  Also in that section was Louise Lasser, possibly seeking all she wanted to know about the social sciences, but was afraid to ask.  She sat right down front among the stalwarts drenched with Teutonic sibilants and fricatives.  Think Daffy Duck with dignity, adumbrating the Gracchian reforms.

Lousie Lasser! I got the reference, but let’s see if the readership (without Google) does! So, Gurwitsch  and Marcuse: legendary names! Who else was at Brandeis then?

At the time, Red Weissberg, with the foreign aid and encouragement of Sid Morgenbesser and Izzy Scheffler (the three had gone through Rabbinical school together), was trying to establish an Analytic Philosophy department in the Columbia mode.  Partly because it was so ectopic among the refugees from the Weimar Republic, it became a cozy major and a safe haven.

Morgenbesser too! Everyone knows the “yeah, yeah” story don’t they? More names, please: this is great stuff!

Part of the building process was a succession of visiting professors.  John Passmore was my favorite, taught me Hume, and remains a model for me.  Another was Philip Frank, by then a dear loveable old man of the old school, but, politely put, past it.  Each seminar of the semester he would come in, sit down, peer up over the top of the table, and begin “Zee rupture of zee chain between Science and Philosophy,” then something else that I can’t remember.

Ouch. I once had a prof who would build a wall of books on the seminar table and sort of crouch down behind it.

The collateral faculty was important.  Kurt Wolff on the Sociology of Knowledge was a great experience, as was Alexander Altman, of the History of Ideas program, on medieval philosophy.  From the latter I learned much more about medieval Jewish neoplatonism than does the average young philosopher.  Later I was able, on a notorious occasion, to put that knowledge to good use by demonstrating that Evolution as Entropy, by Brooks and Wiley, was a rewriting of Ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae.  Brooks, in particular, was not amused. But the best teacher I had at Brandeis was Harry Zohn, who taught me my Grosmutter’s Mutter tongue.  He too remains a model for me.

What about graduate school?

The graduate school experience, at Brown, was also gemütlich.  I married the sister of one of my fellow graduate students.  I also learned some philosophy, most of it from my fellow grad students, but the rest from John Ladd, a wonderful friend and mentor.  He was my dissertation advisor for a dismal tome on Rawls, Hannah Arendt, and civil disobedience.

Not how we met, which was through your work on dynamic systems and self-organization. Now how about your early professional life?

I got my first (and only) job at Temple in the sixties – I mean The Sixties.  I very quickly reverted to the Brandeis part of my education.  It wasn’t hard.  I’d been hired to take over the very popular Social Ethics course, taught for years by Barrows Dunham, most famously a victim of HUAC. 

What were the students like?

A couple of vignettes:

I spent a whole summer putting together a syllabus for a course in social philosophy that would suit the needs of my sixties activist students.  Busted my butt finding that perfect collection of things they ought to read to solidify and deepen their activism.  I handed out the syllabus, and the discussion began: “We’ve all read that.” “There’s no point in wasting our time with this other guy.” “We’ve been wanting to read so and so.”

I’m easy.  I changed the whole course around in their terms.  I also formulated the rule of thumb that I still use.  No course I teach is a good one unless I learn a lot too.  I liked Temple.  I still do.

Then, a couple of semesters later, I was able to invite Henry David Aiken as a visiting scholar.  (He was a good friend of John Ladd’s, and, by then, mine.)  Among other duties, he visited my class.  We got into a discussion of something – I can’t remember what – and at one point it emerged as a theorem that we needed a quick candid answer from the Dean of Students.  Without further signal, we all got up and started for the Dean’s office.  Henry was rafted along saying “I can’t believe this.” “Is this happening?” Etc.

We piled into the Dean’s office.  Three or four secretaries simultaneously crossed their legs and locked their drawers.  “Who are you?” “Philosophy 23.” “What?” Anyway, the Dean proved unavailable.  I suppose we could have sat in.  That was the tradition.  But we all had better things to do.  I had to squire Henry around, etc.  So we got an appointment with the dean a couple of days later, and sat through an absolutely stupid set piece that, I’m happy to say, Henry missed.

Things like that don’t happen these days, but the conditions for them keep emerging in the classroom, and if you can sense them bubbling up, you can still have a rousing good time.

I’m happy sometimes to keep them awake! (Gross exaggeration, actually. If anything it’s the other way around, at least with the Honors kids, who are driven and need to chill out sometimes.) Back to your career. What were your first publications?

My first publication was “Collective Decision-making in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Mill.” I got tenure on the strength of it: tenure was a breeze in those days.  The most fun was a paper for the 200^th anniversary of the New York Bar Association that came out in a volume edited by Eugene Rostow: Is Law Dead. I was in the session with Hannah Arendt, and of course that took me right back to my Brandeis days as well as my doleful dissertation.

And then?

In the late sixties my colleagues were busily trying to build a top notch Analytic Philosophy department, a scenario I seem always to have my foot caught in.  For a while they actually did pretty well at it, squatting on analytic aesthetics with Monroe Beardsley, Joe Margolis and JAAC.  I managed to find a useful place on the team, usually as the dissertation advisor to the dissident.  But by the time I came back from Rome in 1975 the situation was already becoming unstable.  More of that later.

You mention not being entirely at home with Temple’s drive to be an Analytic Philosophy department.

I’ve actually lived my entire life in philosophy, at every stage, in the midst of the tension between continental and analytic philosophy.  Just at the time the analytic excellence aspirations were unraveling in the department, and partly contributing to the unraveling, the Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium was formed.  Briefly put, Margolis got the idea that a rapprochement was needed, and the initial steps were taken by him, Doug Porpora, a sociology grad student now at Drexel, and Kyriakos Kontopoulos, of our Sociology department – with me trotting along.  Soon Michael Krause from Bryn Mawr and Jack Caputo from Villanova became central as well.

I remember the Consortium from my days at Villanova in the early 90s. Shame we didn’t meet then.

Well funded European presences graced the shores of the Delaware for about four or five years.  It was great fun, but it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot for rapprochement: least of all internally to the Temple philosophy department.

Others can tell the long of it.  The short of it in an anecdote.  One Saturday, Jürgen Habermas and Georgy Marcus were the visiting speakers.  Packed room with terrible acoustics, so I can’t summarize the presentations.  But there was a ceremonial dinner afterwards.  About 20 people sat around talking for more than an hour after dinner was over.  17 of them were at one end of the table wrangling about and anecdoting on Nelson Goodman.  Habermas, Marcus and I sat way at the other end of the table talking about the rise of the green parties in Europe.

Ooof! Someone needs to do a movie about bad conference dinners. But who would want to relive them? I hope there wasn’t a fight about the check. “I only had soup and salad…”

Meanwhile, Richard Shusterman’s sojourn at Temple, and especially his chairmanship, pretty much made it impossible for Temple to be the premier analytic philosophy department some still wanted it to be.  He was one of the good colleagues.  We share a lot of respect for each other.

Shared by me as well. I very much enjoy talking with Richard about all sorts of “body consciousness” topics.  Switching gears a little, we’ve talked quite a bit about your attempts to get students to look at the political economy of public higher education, something we try to focus on here at New APPS as well.

Big public universities like Temple have Philosophy departments for the same sort of reason that people have garden gnomes and lawn flamingos: they’re tawdrily classy.  But they lose their interest, have no use, and end up in the garage sale.  “Short-term economic criteria” are invoked, because that’s the acceptable default reason. 

What’s the real reason in your view?

The “humanities” share the fault – a long story – but here we need a distinction: either Philosophers vs. Philosophy, or real philosophy vs. academic philosophy industries.  None of the four real philosophers I’m closest to is in a philosophy department.  All kinds of things can be done philosophically except philosophy.  If you ask me what I do, the former is what I do when I do what I do, despite the fact that I’m in a philosophy department.

What’s taken the place of philosophy and the liberal arts?

At Temple, as at many other similar places, the College of Liberal Arts is no longer the core of a college education.  A General Education program has been installed, focused on the urban scene in its many dimensions.  I actually think that’s a good idea, in some configuration of some world.  Unfortunately, the dummies who run the program haven’t a clue about how to provide it with serious intellectual content.  Of course if they did, you’d hear the whimpering and whining from the Schuylkill to the Delaware.  There’s nothing wrong with academia that isn’t wrong with the society at large.  At any rate, the humungous course constituting the liberal arts component is, as usual, taught by the local losers in the academic race, who now absorb around a half of the teaching budget of the college. 

How do Temple graduate students fare in this system?

Graduate student placement has never been a department strong point.  Early on, a couple of stars managed to place their students, but, by and large, students have gotten their own jobs.  Usually they start by adjuncting at one of the community colleges or one of the many little Catholic colleges in the area, and work their way to de facto permanence, or less frequently, tenure.  Significantly, this pattern is exactly what the department argued when it proposed to have a PhD program way back when.

Where do you see the APA in the current scene?

We now cash in on the distinctions again.  The APA is exclusively concerned with the academic philosophy industries.  As a guild, it couldn’t do otherwise.

What about the AAUP? Temple has collective bargaining, right?

We have an AAUP union.  This means, by the labor law of the land, that the faculty opted to center their collegiality on money wage and job security, with everything else relegated to management prerogative.  Did I hear the word “commodification?”  From the get-go I’ve been the most notorious anti-union person on campus.  (E.g., the phrase “lumpen bourgeoisie,” that’s recently gotten some currency, was coined while passing through the picket line.  That was 30 odd years ago, and they still haven’t forgiven me.)

Trading the birthright of collective action for a mess of pottage. Not without controversy, but a powerful indictment. Too much for this interview format, though. Let’s finish by a look back at your work. Have you found a core idea that animates you?

Yeah, I’ve found a core.  Teach students what they need to know as best you can.  And learn what you need to know in order to do that.  In a way, that’s moved me back from my Brown education to my Brandeis education, then, for the last quarter of a century, to my Caltech education.

What’s been the most rewarding experience for you?

Every time I walk into the classroom.  But, beyond that, the two years I taught at our Rome campus were immeasurably important not only for me but for my family.

APPS stands for art, politics, philosophy and science. How do you integrate them in your work and your life?

Effortlessly.

We should all be so lucky! What are your current projects? 

What I’d really like to do is learn enough to escape into the theoretical foundations of quantum gravity and the pre-conditions of the big bang.  But that ain’t gonna happen.  I’ll have to be content to be an interested spectator.

Then there's the environment. I’d love to continue to work at the economy/ecology edge – I have a manuscript floating slightly beyond the grasp of various presses.  But the frustrations in this discursive space are enormous.  I’m not even sure that there’s anything more to be said that hasn’t been said, in one way or another.  It’s high time for doing, but the politics, including the intellectual politics, are unbelievably nasty.  Yrjo will probably drag me into something that I’ll do pretty much for the sake of the continued collaboration.

In the short run I’ll probably do some more things in the pedagogy of science.  Carl and I have a paper just about done at the interface of science and the arts: mobiles as models, symmetries and asymmetries, and so on.  I have lots more to say in that area, something I was already working on during my time at BioQuest.

Thanks, very much for this, Chuck. From Gurwitsch, Marcuse and Morgenbesser to BioQuest: it’s been quite a ride, and thanks for sharing some stories from it with us.