Introduction to Enzo Paci's Presentation at the 10th Triennial

"Relation" and "experience" are two words that we hear all the time today. They are key notions belonging to those working in the most up-to-date design activity (Web site design as well as maintenance design). I heard them for the first time fifty years ago while attending the university lectures of Enzo Paci. These are two expressionsas we well know-that have very much to do with our "wetwear" (that is, our bodies). Similar to Per Aldo Rovatti,1 who may be considered one of Paci's most eminent pupils and perhaps his intellectual heir, I too have a very vivid memory of how he made his own body the vehicle and the fulcrum for his lessons on Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, beginning with the theatrical entrance of the imposing figure of this man, with his Etruscan profile, into a crowded, expectant hall and ending with the infinite revolutions around a large ashtray: each movement accompanied by a descriptive, critical, unbiased, that is, phenomenological observation. Enzo Paci (1911-1976) was born in the province of Ancona, completed his studies at Cuneo, and became a precocious reader of the neo-idealistic philosophers Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, and of the ethico-political writings of Piero Gobetti. Enrolled in philosophy at the University of Pavia, he chose to transfer to Milan to take his degree with the prestigious professor Antonio Banfi.2 A major scholar of Husserl, with an autonomous perspective that nonetheless privileged the speculative character of the Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations] and Ideen [Ideas], Paci elaborated his own reflections on subjectivity, objectivity, and consciousness, especially beginning with Cartesian Meditations and Crisis, which brought him to a particularly harmonious attitude with Merleau-Ponty, on the one hand, and Sartre, on the other. Paci essentially interpreted phenomenology in exactly its relational sense, concentrating on the question of temporality, and situating it upon a horizon of the phenomenology of experience. Among his works after Esistenzialismo e storicismo [Existentialism and Historicism] of 1950 and II nulla e il problema dell'uomo [Nothingness and the Problem of Man] of 1954, the originality of the essential Tempo e relazione [Time and Relations] (1954, revised 1965) should be pointed out. To this we add Funzione delle scienze e significato dell'uomo [The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man] (1963) and also Translated by John Cullars