Philosopher James Spencer Churchill (1920–1989): A History of his Life
James Spencer Churchill — known to his friends and family as “Spence” — was born on September 6, 1920 in Brockton, Massachusetts. Churchill was active in higher education from the late 1950s until 1975, when he retired from his professorship at Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He earned a B.S. from Bowdoin University in English, before pursuing graduate study at Harvard, and finally earning his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington in 1960. While enrolled at Harvard, he was a special student of philosophy at the University of Freiburg from 1950 to 1951, when he studied with Martin Heidegger. His undergraduate study was interrupted from March 1943 to November 1945 by his tour of duty in Belgium in World War II. Both his time studying with Heidegger and his war-time activities were formative for his study of philosophy.
He was blown up by enemy mortar fire in the Battle of the Bulge. During his life, it was believed that this event accelerated the development of his Multiple Sclerosis. In this way, therefore, combat was both the condition for the possibility of his becoming a teacher — insofar as it motivated him to study philosophy — and yet it was also the event that defined the range of his physical movements through which he could manifest his identity as a teacher. His symptoms didn’t become evident until many years after the war. As he grew older, his condition became more severe, yet he continued teaching despite his limitations. At various times in his life, this duality between his identity as a teacher and his acceptance of his physical limits was a source of conflict — once driving him to devise a suicide plot in a trip to Ireland. In a 1981 newspaper interview, he said,
I had an idea of going down to Belfast in a rented car from southern Ireland. The rebels [Irish Republican Army] had an interest in commandeering cars from the South. I knew they would stop me and I figured when they did, I would say a few four-letter words and they would shoot me. There’s an old military saying, ‘when I die I want to die with an arrow in the front not the back.’ I wanted to die like a soldier, with my boots on.
The story of Churchill’s life presents us with a lesson in how to live a meaningful life where we can accept our finitude, while not defining ourselves by it. It also tells of a man who I believe was a Heideggerian, and indeed he even walked through the Black Forest with Heidegger. As an expert in existentialism and phenomenology, Churchill denied that human beings have an essence, or to put it in his teacher’s technical terminology, “the essence of Dasein lies in its existence.” What does this mean? My personal interpretation can be summed up with a quote from the psychoanalyst Alan Wheelis, “we are what we do, and we choose what we do.” Churchill chose to teach. It was written in his life that he would die of complications due to his disease, but he wasn’t his disability, nor was he his symptoms:: he was a teacher. Throughout different times in his life, I believe his attitudes towards his disease wavered, but he was steadfast in his existential choice to teach.
He was the second of three children born to Howard L. and Mary J. D’Amato Churchill. His older brother, Howard W. was born in 1916. His sister Helen was born in 1925. After their parents divorced, their father remarried and had another child, Maria Churchill (later Maria Kennedy), in 1943. His brother, Howard W., was also a World War II veteran, having stormed the beaches of Normandy. During his active duty, Howard met General Eisenhower who thought Howard was joking when he told him his last name was “Churchill,” an irony, of course, owing itself to the famous leadership of the same name in England. James Spencer Churchill was not mentioned in either his brother’s or his half-sister Maria Kennedy’s obituaries, although his sister Helen let Churchill and his colleagues stay in her penthouse in Boston during an American Philosophical Association meeting in the 1970s.
While it is said that Howard seldom talked about his time in the war, Churchill was certainly vocal about his military activity, and it was one of the reasons he turned towards philosophy. When Churchill was interviewed by officials at the time, he said that he and his sergeant set up an observation post about two miles north of Bastogne to direct their division artillery on the approaching Germans.
Toward evening we spotted them and had just directed an aiming round into their positions when I was hit by shrapnel. My sergeant applied the emergency first aid dressing to my wounds and we took cover under a tank until the next morning.”
He was to have been sent back to the United States, but inspired by a very patriotic grandmother, he insisted on being sent back to his unit, saw further service, and was in Germany at the close of the war. One of his most poignant moments in the war occurred near the close when a large German shepherd sprang out of a house they had approached and he was ordered to shoot it. Years later, in a 1981 interview, Churchill claimed that in war he encountered the God of “ground zero”. “He’s not a Christian God,’ says Churchill. ‘He’s the God of the mystics. He’s not the kind who’s going to work miracles, certainly. I’m an atheist and almost think I would be indignant if a miracle took place.”
But in the decades prior to his 1981 interview, Churchill was looking for a miracle. According to a former colleague, Churchill hoped for a long time — and perhaps even believed — that he would become cured of his disease, even as he traded his crutches for a wheelchair and subsequently around the clock care, when he eventually became a quadriplegic. Eventually, though, it seems that he came to terms with his condition. But at first, he searched for treatments all throughout Europe, and in the 1970s he spent time someplace in the Black Forest in a German spa where he hoped to see his symptoms diminish.
It is likely that the spa in the Black Forest was a brief respite and a reminder of the past for Churchill. In 1950–1951, he attended the University of Freiburg, where he attended philosopher Martin Heidegger’s first course after World War II.
Churchill interacted with Heidegger personally, having once walked through the Black Forest with the man, which Heidegger often did with his students. On one occasion, Churchill and a few others were walking with Heidegger, when an overweight, female student walked alongside them. Heidegger remarked on her physical appearance, “All that meat, and no potatoes!” This was an old slur for an attractive, large woman with small breasts. On another occasion, Heidegger was once on a bus with Churchill, where he saw him reading Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead. Heidegger commented, “you know, Churchill, the problem is that you read too much.”
As this quote indicates, there’s no doubt that Churchill was brilliant, and by all approximations, he was something of a polymath. He taught Chemistry, English, and Mathematics at Depauw University, East Carolina College, University of Bridgeport, and Centenary College. He also taught English and Physics at Middlesex School and Wilbraham Academy in New England, shortly after coming home from Freiburg.
In 1951, he divorced his first wife, who had aspirations to become a dancer. His first teaching position following his time at Harvard was the Searing Tutoring School, where he taught high school students with his second wife, Dororthy, whom he met when she was a secretary at Harvard. The couple lived together for many years. But Dorothy was bipolar and in her mania she was known to hit him on the head. Yet they remained married for several years and it was during their relationship that the severity of his symptoms advanced. Accounts of their relationship vary. Churchill’s condition was quite debilitating to him and it often required the attention of his friends, and even on some occasions colleagues carried him up stairs in his wheelchair in old buildings that didn’t accommodate his needs. It may have been similar requirements that put a strain on his second marriage.
Churchill was above all a warm and kind person, and he was said to be a very funny man with a puckish sense of humor. In the classroom, these sensitivities were hidden behind a more austere exterior. Many students, I believe, were intimidated by his intelligence and the intensity of his teaching style. He was described by one former student as, “intense, aggressive, intelligent, Oxfordian at times, sometimes a bit intimidating, genuine, authentic, enraptured with theology and philosophy, unbending in defending himself or his friends from what he perceived to be slights or unfair treatment.” But it truly was his calling to teach. Having performed in a theatrical production himself in his years as an undergraduate at Bowdoin University, he led the drama club at the boarding school Wilbraham Academy from 1953–1955. He once said of his former university students, “I love the students; they are my children. They’re so alive; so interested in engaging in verbal combat that shoots up all over the room like a Platonic dialogue.”
Churchill never published journal articles. He taught at a time when universities were struggling to fill faculty positions and the tenure system operated differently. Philosophy at Purdue Fort Wayne was at its height, and it was no doubt a golden time in academia. Churchill was one of the first humanities faculty members on the Fort Wayne campus when he arrived in 1961, and he oversaw the philosophy program from its infancy to the time that the university started to offer a Bachelor of Arts in 1970. In fact, he was the first chair of the department.
Most of Churchill’s scholarly work was spent on translation. His dissertation work was his translation of Heidegger’s work Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. He intended to co-translate one of Hegel’s works with Professor Clark Butler, but his condition prevented him from doing so. In the final years of his life, Churchill disposed of most of his unpublished original work, some of which he dictated to his third wife, Mary D. Churchill, so his writings have been lost to time. He translated the 1928 edition of Edmund Husserl’s manuscripts on time-consciousness, and Emeritus Professor at Georgetown University, John Brough, commented on the importance of Churchill’s translations in completing his own work.
After he retired from Purdue in 1975, Churchill sought Bariatric oxygenation treatment in Marietta, Pennsylvania, where he met his third wife, Mary Davis.
Mrs. Churchill recalled the story of their life together, “we married and started a life-long learning group patterned after the one at Harvard with which he had been engaged. People attended from all over the country. We held two classes a week. The sole cost was the price of the textbook used which we tried to keep minimal, using paperback texts wherever feasible. We had college professors, ministers, authors, housewives, young, older folks and people of all walks of life as students. Spence loved it and the people loved him. Spencer was a very warm, perceptive and caring man. He lived for those classes and so very much welcomed all those dear folks who came to the classes.”
They held their seminars in their front room, but after some time passed, they were too much for Churchill to sustain, so his wife taught poetry from the history of Western civilization, which even became too much for him with his worsening health.
He spent his final years with his wife, receiving care from nurses from 9AM to 9PM, and in the company of his animals, whose shenanigans he cherished. He once said that he had no regrets about his life: “since I am what I am I cannot imagine what it would be like if I didn’t have this disease.” Churchill passed away on October 11, 1989, and his wife says of his death, “Spence suffered no pain and passed away quietly. A good and kindly man.”
For many years, Purdue Fort Wayne offered a scholarship in his name, awarded each year to one deserving undergraduate philosophy major. It is my hope in this article to bring to the spotlight one of Purdue’s early philosophy faculty. My only regret in choosing to research his life is that I will never meet him myself.
