Manfred Frings

Somehow I missed this until now, but Manfred Frings (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at DePaul) died on December 15, 2008 in Albuquerque, where he had moved about 15 years earlier. The news is deeply saddening.

Frings is best known as the world’s leading authority on Max Scheler. He also edited at least two volumes of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (Parmenides and Heraclitus). And though it’s typical to say such things at such times, the man really was a sweetheart, and he wore his erudition lightly.

I well remember the stories of his conversations with Heidegger. And I also remember the story of how the young Manfred Frings in Köln (very religious and very anti-Nazi: he angrily referred to them as “the Murder Movement in Germany”) saw his mother’s feet sticking from rubble in the basement after an Allied bombing raid on the city. He did manage to save her, as I recall.

If memory serves, Frings’s own father was a personal student of Scheler.

My only class with him was the final graduate class I ever took, and one of the most important– it was on Malebranche, in Spring 1993. Only a few years later did I become more intensely interested in occasionalism, but it was Frings’s course that planted the seed.

There was another strange fluke connection between us… For it was while walking to Frings’s DePaul retirement party in November 1992 that I had my own closest brush with death. Namely, I walked into sparking live wires hanging over the sidewalk on Fullerton Avenue during an ice storm. Without a thick overcoat I would have died, and if I were about 4 inches shorter I would have died (the wires would have hit me in the face in that case; I was looking at the icy sidewalk to watch my step, and didn’t notice the wires until walking into them, thinking they were tree branches until they zapped and hissed in my ear). After hanging around to warn people for about 45 minutes until the fire department showed up to remove the wires, I did manage to get to the retirement party, where Frings and his wife Karin greeted everyone warmly and generously.

Just last summer I was reading his The Mind of Max Scheler. Once I phoned him in Albuquerque to ask a Scheler-related question (having to do with Heidegger) and thought I might do the same the next time back. I’m deeply sorry that none of us will have the chance to do so again.

ADDENDUM. I also like this part: “In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to New Mexico Animal Friends, 2917 Carlisle Blvd. NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87110 or Roadrunner Food Bank of New Mexico, 2645 Baylor Drive SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106-3232.”