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  • Then And Now
  • Ronald Bruzina

For this fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), my idea is to characterize the association then and now in terms of an actual trajectory of learning, thinking, and writing that shows concrete experience of how phenomenology has changed while still remaining what I found it to be then: a philosophic movement vital to the time in which I was living—now, the twenty-first century. I do not think of my experience as the paradigm but, rather, one of many exemplifications, and the one I understand best. It has been a trajectory of four distinct beginnings in phenomenology.

Given the restrictions I must follow, however, I can only offer in outline form the first part that was originally a narrative, allowing the second part to offer substantive points, the lessons that the narrative was meant to lead to. Thus rather than the prepared paper, this will be more like the compact presentation I actually made at the fiftieth anniversary meeting. [End Page 222]

A First Beginning

  • –. 1959–63. Graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame: first beginning in phenomenology, a philosophy at once deeply personal and insistently transcendent.

    *Most significant books: Mikel Dufrenne, La phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (Paris: PUF, 1953); Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, trans. Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution

    (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).

    *Dissertation: “Logos and Eidos: A Study in the Phenomenological Meaning of ‘Concept’ According to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty”

    (University of Notre Dame, 1966).

    *Attendance at the second, third, and fourth meetings of SPEP. Pivotal element: Burt Dreyfus’s suggesting contact with Michel Haar and Jacques Derrida in Paris.

    Summative impression: It seemed that, more than anything, we were explicating and debating the writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as those guides the understanding of which enabled detection and deflection of errors that thinkers are prone to. The main aim of my work (and that of others like me) was to understand the thinking of these great masters correctly.

  • –. 1964–66. University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada: first teaching post.

    *Canada Council Research Grant for study in Paris.

Second Beginning

  • –. 1966–70. Study in Paris.

    *Some significant elements: with/by Derrida—1967–70, seminars (École Normale Supérieure), conversations on Sein und Zeit, lecture “La difference” (Séance de la Société française de Philosophie, January 27, 1968), De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967); [End Page 223] André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, T. 1–2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964); Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfüllingen, Germany: Neske, 1963); Michel Foucault, Les mot et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

    *Doctorat du 3e cycle, “Wittgenstein, Heidegger et la pensée du langage”

    (L’Université de Paris-Nanterre, 1970).

    Summative lesson: In Paris the genuine seriousness exhibited by these other thinkers whom I became familiar with, and in exemplary fashion in Derrida, led to my being wary of taking purported absolutes uncritically. I came to realize later the full import of this lesson, after returning to North America, because at the time I was not yet sure of what kinds of critique of principles ought to be, or were actually, put into action by these newer thinkers, whether on others or on themselves.

Third Beginning

  • –. 1970. Return to North America, University of Kentucky.

  • –. 1977–78. Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Cologne, Husserl-Archiv: “Language and History in Husserl and Heidegger.”

    *Most significant event: Reading Eugen Fink’s unpublished “VI Cartesianische Meditaton”; approval to translate this into English.

  • –. 1985–86. Fellowship for follow-up research, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation: Research in Freiburg in the Eugen Fink Nachlaß.

    *The major portion of reading in the complete research notes and drafts written by Eugen Fink while last research assistant to Edmund Husserl, 1928–38 (and beyond until the end of World War II).

  • –. 1988, fall semester. NIH grant to return to Freiburg to complete the reading and study of Fink’s Nachlaß materials.

  • –. 1988. Publication of Eugen Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation...

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