Random Reflections of a Founding Witness

I

I am pleased to be part of this distinguished panel that opens the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s (SPEP’s) fiftieth meeting, though I confess to feeling somewhat ill at ease to talk mainly about the past—and a rather distant one at that—when, like most everyone here, my more insistent concern lies with what I am doing in the present in philosophy, pursuing my current obsession: edges, of which there will be at least an echo in these brief remarks. I was present at the founding of SPEP, having attended both of its first meetings in Evanston, Illinois. In truth, there were very few present at those inaugural moments—no more than twenty-five or thirty souls, including the founders and speakers and audience members. The founders were not even designated as such; they were simply “the organizers,” as we like to say in ordinary English about those who take the initiative in getting a group of like-minded people to get together.

The very idea of being “founders” of a society is usually a post hoc assignation based upon a certain historical density and momentum of that which they founded. Looking back, I’d say that the organizing founders of SPEP constituted what Sartre calls a “group in fusion” in his late great work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, which appeared in 1960, just two years before the founding of SPEP. On Sartre’s assessment, such a group is at the origin of creative movements of any kind—whether revolutionary action of the sort that preoccupied Sartre himself (in the Critique he was focusing on the precise origins of the French Revolution in events such as the storming of the Bastille) or that of a comparatively undramatic movement such as SPEP. But SPEP was itself revolutionary in the American philosophical world, where it had been customary to deride Continental philosophy as a mere “fad,” something fashionable coming from Paris (where, ironically, it was the early Sartre who was so immensely popular, thanks as much to his plays and novels as to his philosophy). Only a few brave individuals such as John Wild at Harvard, Calvin Schrag at Purdue, George Schrader at Yale, and Bill Earle at Northwestern had dared to take existentialism—or more exactly, “existential phenomenology”—seriously. All had done so in virtually complete isolation at their home institutions, where they were barely tolerated for what their colleagues took to be “anomalous” or “soft” philosophy. Phenomenology had made an inroad at the New School for Social Research earlier, but it was regarded as out of the mainstream, if not downright eccentric. As a senior philosophy major who graduated from college in 1961, I recall being faced with the stark choice between pursuing phenomenology at the New School or existential phenomenology at the newly shaped graduate program at Northwestern—where John Wild had recently arrived from Harvard.

When SPEP met for the first time in 1962, it was a situation of a remarkable group in fusion. It brought together as founding members in one place and time the very people who had taught and written in very disparate locales across America. These people hungered to share ideas and to create a forum for such sharing. Recall that in that same fateful year, 1962, the English translations of Being and Time and Phenomenology of Perception had just been published—and these alone gave people plenty to talk about! Just as Sartre describes small groups of three or more passionately concerned patriots gathering at street corners in Paris to debate what actions to take next—and as is now happening in the Occupy Wall Street movement all across America today—so a small band of diverse but like-minded philosophers converged that fall weekend fifty years ago in Evanston, Illinois.

Joining with them was a rather random gaggle of graduate students of which I was a part. We were a largely local tribe that first year. By the second meeting of SPEP the next fall, graduate students came from as far as Boston. Word had gotten out that something exciting, something...