FINK, EUGEN
(1905–1975)

Eugen Fink was born and first educated in Konstanz, where his reading in philosophic classics (Giordano Bruno, Kant, and Nietzsche) began in the Gymnasium. He took up the formal study of philosophy at Freiburg in 1925 during a period of extraordinary richness: Edmund Husserl, in the chair previously held by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, was at his peak in both philosophic labor and renown when he retired in 1928; he was succeeded by Martin Heidegger—Husserl's own choice—after several years at Marburg. Fink's dissertation under Husserl was completed in December 1929 with Heidegger as coevaluator (Korreferent ), at a point in time when a long-smoldering break between Husserl and Heidegger was fully manifest.

On Husserl's retirement he chose Fink as second research assistant, alongside Ludwig Landgrebe—who had been Husserl's assistant since 1923. As Landgrebe turned to his Habilitation, he relinquished his assistantship with Husserl (March 1930), and Fink, who was just then entering more closely into Husserl's regimen of work, became not only sole assistant with Husserl in his retirement, but indispensable. Their daily walks in the hillside park near Husserl's residence and the tasks Husserl had Fink take up in furthering and consolidating Husserl's manuscript studies made for a unique philosophic collaboration. Husserl drove himself to produce manuscript after manuscript in an effort to present new work to the public to demonstrate the breadth, solidity, and relevance of his phenomenology in the face of Heidegger's ascendancy, and Fink worked at projects of integration, critique, and recasting so as to bring Husserl's massive output to coherence and philosophic clarity. In particular, he was able—as Husserl was not—to come to terms in phenomenology with Heidegger's thinking, along with that of others such as Hegel and Nietzsche, who had not really figured into Husserl's consideration. At the same time, Fink worked on writings that would counter two misperceptions: that transcendental phenomenology was a brand of idealism not much different from neo-Kantianism, and that Husserl's logic-driven abstractness was incapable of dealing with the existential trenchancy of actual life in the world.

Fink's essay in Kantstudien (1933), "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism" (Elveton 2003), attempted to counter the first misperception, and was widely influential upon the French grasp of Husserl's phenomenology, most notably in the work of Gaston Berger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Unfortunately National Socialism's taking power in January of 1933 cut short Fink's providing a similar defense against the second misperception, influentially expressed in Georg Misch's Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie: eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl (1931). At the same time, Fink's Habilitation project, "Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method," was prevented from being pursued in that it purveyed "Jewish" philosophy, namely Husserl's. Fink recounts that, as he was not of Jewish background, Nazi authorities tried to get him to abandon his work with Husserl. He would not, and as a result lost all prospects for an academic future in Germany. He remained with Husserl until Husserl's death in April 1938. During that time he managed to get but two articles published, the Kantstudien essay, appearing just as that journal was being "coordinated" to Nazi policy, and "What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?" in Die Tatwelt (1934), a cultural review edited by one of the few resistance circles in Freiburg around the well-known political economist Walter Eucken. It was only in 1939, after Fink emigrated to Belgium subsequent to Husserl's death, that he was again able to publish his work; but that was not to last long.

Nevertheless, it was Fink's contribution to the ongoing final development of Husserl's phenomenological program that must be noted. The unpublished "Sixth Meditation" was read and reread by Husserl, bringing home to him the need to be theoretically self-critical about the status and character of transcendental assertions. More concretely, Fink's drafts of projects he was involved in with Husserl—paradigmatically exemplified in the two-volume German edition of the "Sixth Meditation" (Fink 1988)—showed how earlier formulations of transcendental phenomenology needed radical recasting in order for their philosophic sense to stand forth in coherence and relevance. Here one can see Fink's ability both to develop an integrative perspective on Husserl's work and to make the critical moves that would express the philosophic core of transcendental phenomenology, an ability for which Husserl valued Fink's "cophilosophizing" so highly.

Upon Husserl's death in 1938, the visit of the Belgian Franciscan, Herman Leo Van Breda, in search of materials for his dissertation, led to Van Breda's finding a way to move out of Germany all Husserl's manuscripts as well as his entire library. Van Breda also arranged for Malvine Husserl, now widowed, as well as Fink and Landgrebe, to emigrate to Louvain. This was accomplished by the spring of 1939, and the Husserl Archives were born; and, as it happened, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became the first visitor to consult Husserl's manuscript materials in its new home at the University of Louvain (April 1–6, 1939). Here Fink finally began university lecturing, and the work of transcribing and interpreting Husserl's shorthand manuscripts began anew, only to be ended in May 1940 with Germany's attack upon the Low Countries and the onset of a Europe-wide world war. By the end of that year, Fink and Landgrebe were back in Germany, excluded from university involvement.

After the war's end in 1946 Fink was given a beginner's position as lecturer at Freiburg University, and in 1948 finally took up there a newly established chair in Philosophie und Erziehungswissenschaft. Fink's work after the war was unlike that of others influenced by Husserl. Rather than explicate Husserl's writings, in the books of his own thinking he turned to developing the dimension of the phenomenological program that he found Husserl had left too implicit and unrealized, what he termed the "speculative" component of the program, the overarching philosophical sense of its findings (Fink 1957, 1958, 1960). He did, however, occasionally present essays on Husserl (Fink 1976) that were highly respected and accorded high authority—given his intimacy with Husserl's thinking; but these papers stood in some contrast to dominant interpretations other scholars made of phenomenology. Ultimately in his writings and lecturing Fink dedicated himself to ways of awakening listeners to philosophical questioning. Rather than establishing definitive theses, it was the ever-increasing radicality of realizing what lay in philosophical problems, what was at issue in them, that mattered most. He kept apart from the various postwar philosophical currents and avoided fostering a following of disciples. Heidegger was one who especially appreciated discussions with him, and his closest philosophical comrade was Jan Patoĉka, of unique renown and importance for his underground seminars in Prague under Communist rule.

See also Husserl, Edmund; Phenomenology.

Bibliography

works by fink, including the only translations of his writings into english

VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1: Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre, edited by Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl, and Guy van Kerckhoven. Teil 2: Ergänzungsband, edited by Guy van Kerckhoven, Husserliana Dokumenta II/1-2, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988.

Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method. Translated by Ronald Bruzina. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Nähe und Distanz: Phänomenolgische Vorträge und Aufsätze, edited by Franz-Anton Schwarz. Freiburg, Germany: Karl Alber, 1976.

"Operative Concepts in Husserl's Phenomenology." Translated by William McKenna. In A priori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, edited by William McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E. Winters. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.

Sein, Wahrheit, Welt: Vor-Fragen zum Problem des Phänomen-Begriffs. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958.

Spiel als Weltsymbol. Stuttgart: W. Kohlammer, 1960.

"The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism." In The Phenomenology of Husserl, Selected Critical Readings, edited by Roy Elveton. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 2003.

"The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl." Translated by Robert M. Harlan. In A Priori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, edited by William McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E. Winters. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.

"What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?" Translated by Arthur Grugan. Research in Phenomenology 7 (1972): 5–27.

Zur Ontologischen Frühgeschichte von Raum-Zeit-Bewegung. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957.

Ronald Bruzina (2005)