Eulogy for Edmund Husserl given at his cremation, April 29, 1938 by Eugen Fink

[iampolsk]

 It was in the midst of work on the text in which to give decisive expression to what for him was the final truth, wanted thus to bring his work to internal completion, that fatal illness struck Edmund Husserl. Because the essential movement of his life was philosophy, his death perhaps seems to us now as untimely and senseless. The question arises: Does the life of him who died remain incomplete, a tragic fragment? In the silence that surrounds him in his death there is no longer place for the words of praise and acclaim that are due the work, the philosophic achievements of Edmund Husserl. By his death he has been taken out of the world of human measure and human honoring. His work stands on its own, and will endure and be appreciated as long as knowledge of the truth is that wherein man sets his rank and worth.

            The meaning of the death that Edmund Husserl died first begins to show by looking at the life of this unique man. He was someone who took up his philosophizing as commission and grace from God; and so from the outset he had removed it from the limited contexts where life, enclosed in the finite, anxiously keeps death out of view. Death was never for him the alien sense-shattering power that can suddenly cut short an existence caught up in self-achievement as its meaningfulness. To him death was always the mystery of life, the real fulfillment of its meaning. Just as the essence of righteousness refers beyond the earthly and points to the gateway of death, so the essence of life always seemed to him pervaded by death and in turn to pervade death itself.

            He held his own life to be a thing not to be ruled, as filled to the brim with passion, that keen enthusiasm with which an unconditional thinking takes the essential and the eternal to be what ultimately counts, the eternal beyond philosophical concepts, which discloses itself to man in the beautiful and the holy. Precisely because Edmund Husserl had, in absolute unconditionality, raised his life beyond captivity to the transitory and this-worldly, and with his whole living fervor existed in the eternal and the essential, he was fulfilled, and as fulfilled could truly die. The truth of his death, the valid meaning of his return home to the eternal is only worthily expressed in Plato’s words: “In fact, then, what those who are really philosophers do is to learn the practice of dying.”
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