On the Contemporaneous Hungarian Reception of Early Phenomenology by Akos Pauler, Bernat Alexander, Geza Revesz and Eugen Envyvari Peter Andras Varga (Institute for Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of...
moreOn the Contemporaneous Hungarian Reception of Early Phenomenology by Akos Pauler, Bernat Alexander, Geza Revesz and Eugen Envyvari
Peter Andras Varga (Institute for Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Abstract: For the contemporaries, the Hungarian reception of Early Phenomenology was embodied by Akos Pauler (Pauler Ákos), whose engagement with the doctrines of Brentano and his School was believed to have been initiated by a personal encounter between Pauler and Brentano. According to modern scholarship, however, Pauler’s preoccupation with the basic tenets of the School of Brentano antedated his encounter with Brentano in 1910, and I point to the early reviews written by Pauler that might have constituted one possible source of his knowledge of Brentano. In fact, Brentano himself told in an unpublished letter written to a Hungarian correspondence partner in 1913 that Pauler had appeared to him well versed in his ideas when they first met. This hitherto unnoticed statement, at the same time, exemplifies the possibility of direct personal encounters between Early Phenomenology and contemporaneous Hungarian philosophy, to which the present paper is dedicated.
First, I rely on unpublished sources at the Archives of the University of Vienna to investigate the Hungarian students who were attending Brentano’s classes during his professorship in Vienna. While there was a steady flow of Hungarian students to Vienna during this period, those interested in philosophy appear to have missed Brentano’s classes. This regrettable pattern is epitomized by Bernat Alexander (Alexander Bernát), one of the most influential late nineteenth century philosophers in Hungary. As archival records demonstrate, he had stayed in Vienna for several semesters, studying under Robert Zimmermann, but he left just in time to miss Brentano’s inaugural lecture in April 1874.
What makes Geza Revesz (Révész Géza) promising are not only his studies in Munich, Berlin, and Göttingen, during which he is believed to have attended classes by Stumpf and Husserl, but, foremost, his extensive correspondence with Brentano that commenced in 1912 and lasted until Brentano’s death (he also met Brentano at several times during this period). Based on Revesz’ literary estate, I reconstruct the details of his studies in Germany between 1900 and 1905. I provide a detailed presentation and assessment of his unpublished correspondence with Brentano, which allows a glimpse into the structure of the orthodox wing of the School of Brentano and also reveals Brentano’s attempts at securing an appointment for Revesz in Innsbruck (as a successor of Franz Hillebrand) or Prague (under the guidance of Anton Marty). The nascent academic alliance between Brentano and his young Hungarian disciple was, however, strained by the Great War that intensified the tension between Revesz’ narrow focus on experimental psychology and Brentano’s more encompassing of philosophy that had a pronounced theistic outlook.
It was already known that Eugen Enyvvári (Enyvvári Jenő) had studied in Göttingen and published extensively on Husserlian phenomenology in Hungary. He is, however, mostly perceived by the historiography of Hungarian philosophy as someone who closely adopted Husserl’s ideas without any original contribution. This view is epitomized by the disparate assessments of Enyvvari’s counter-critique of the critique of Husserl written in 1902 by another Hungarian, Melchior Palagyi (Palágyi Menyhért). Based on the survey of these assessments, it seems to me that it is Enyvvari who represents the most promising instance of the Hungarian reception of Early Phenomenology and thus his case deserves more scholarly attention.
I also believe that my investigation exemplifies a different optional approach to the history of Hungarian philosophy, i.e. an approach that is not focused on the perceived degree of originality or the supposed differentia specifica of Hungarian philosophers, but rather their actual position in the networks of the contemporaneous international currents of philosophy.
