6/1/2024 1 Comment Vale Daniel BreazealeBy Lydia Patton A few days ago, a friend’s post on social media brought the news that Daniel Breazeale had passed away. I stared for a few seconds at the picture. There are some people for whom social media is inadequate – the flat bites of representation you get in a post are not enough to get at that person. Dan is one of them. Soon, people began writing tributes: former students, friends, colleagues, bloggers. There are many more people in real life who are remembering Dan through conversations, memories, and laughter. He dug deep into things and his presence dug deep into people. Dan was there for me at a very tricky time, just by being himself. When I was fifteen years old, I transferred from Chatham College to the University of Kentucky. My main goal was to be a dancer, and the director of the Lexington Ballet, Rosemary Miles, kindly allowed me to take daily company classes. I wanted to go into dance right away and not go to college, but my parents asked that I get a degree to have something to fall back on. At first I was a French major, but the required French classes conflicted with ballet classes. My mother and I looked through the catalog and found the major with the fewest course requirements: no surprise, it was philosophy. When I called the philosophy department, they set up an appointment with the advisor, one Don Howard. At the first of many meetings, he told me that I would find many intellectual friends in philosophy. As usual, Don was correct. Over the next few years, I started performing with the Lexington Ballet in the corps de ballet. It was exciting - until an old injury effectively ended my dancing career before it began. That was very hard. But in my final years at UK, two things happened that made it easier. Don Howard taught a course on the history of philosophy of science. Dan Breazeale offered a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. What I learned in those years was much more than the course material. Dan and Don were models of how to be a philosopher. They were fearless and fair in their approach to the material, they didn’t bend to trends in the discipline, and they lived what they studied. Listening to Dan Breazeale talk about Fichte or Nietzsche, you were brought into a living conversation. After twenty more years in the profession, I’m even more stunned at how he did it, because I know much more about how hard it is to assimilate, not only the work of such offbeat figures, but their creative reactions to the traditions to which they belonged. Dan Breazeale established an international center of Fichte studies in Kentucky, and he helped to establish the careers of so many people. He was a natural and talented mentor. Everyone knew that his courses were difficult and that he had high standards. But, as several of his students have observed, Dan was always supportive when it counted. I remember the first philosophy presentation I ever did, as an undergraduate taking his seminar on the first Critique. I thought I’d prepared for it, but I had no earthly idea how to prepare for such a thing. So it was absolutely terrible. I spent most of it staring at my notes and having a panic attack. Dan sat up alertly with a pen and a piece of paper ready to take notes, giving his full attention. You could see the exact moment when he resigned himself to it being awful. But he still sat up until the end, still respected the effort I’d put in, and never said anything to me about it. He taught me that high standards mean nothing if you can’t be kind and support someone as a person when it counts. I rarely live up to that but it is worth living up to. Ever since hearing the news, I’ve felt a stabbing regret for not keeping up more over the years. We did stay in touch from time to time, but it seems so little now compared to the influence he had. I suppose I’m just trying to understand the magnitude of the loss. He should have had so many more years, and we should have had many more years with him around. It’s some consolation that those of us who knew him can still learn more about him by reading his work. Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte's Early Philosophy (2013, Oxford) "Philosophy and “the method of fictions”: Maimon's proposal and its critics." - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2):702-716. "Fichte's Conception of Philosophy as a "Pragmatic History of the Human Mind" and the Contributions of Kant, Platner, and Maimon." - 2001 - Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (4):685-703. "Lange, Nietzsche, and Stack." - 1989 - International Studies in Philosophy 21 (2):91-103.
1 Comment
Patricia Blanchette
6/1/2024 02:49:48 pm
This is a touching tribute, Lydia.
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
|