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An eyewitness account of Edmund Husserl and Freiburg phenomenology in 1923–24. Towards reclaiming the plurivocity of historical sources of the Phenomenological Movement

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Abstract

The early phenomenologist József Somogyi was one of, if not the first to write a monograph specifically dedicated to the history of the nascent phenomenological philosophy. The two letters written by him during his stay in Freiburg in WS 1923/24, which are hereby published and discussed for the first time, are, similarly, of interest first due to the rare, valuable insight they can provide – when combined with a detailed microhistorical reconstruction of the surrounding constellation – into the elaborate structures of mid-1920s Freiburg phenomenology around Edmund Husserl (directly after Martin Heidegger’s departure to Marburg). Ranging from Husserl’s teaching style to interactions between phenomenology and Catholic thought and to preconditions of the extraordinary philosophical creativity that distinguished early phenomenology, they offer a snapshot that differs significantly from the established narratives of subsequent privileged members of the Phenomenological Movement. Somogyi’s letters thus exemplify the possibility of reclaiming the plurivocity and philosophical richness of the early Phenomenological Movement by virtue of democratizing the historiography, i.e., giving voice to neglected historical actors (often originating from the peripheries). What is at stake is, however, not merely a more nuanced historical understanding of a particular epoch of early phenomenology. Quite the contrary, as I am finally going to argue on the basis of an adjacent short episode from the reception history of Husserl’s (or Eugen Fink’s) selfinterpretation, Somogyi’s case also exemplifies the possibility of a transformation in our understanding of the history of phenomenology (inspired by the methodological revolutions which took place in other compartments of the historiography of philosophy): namely to make the intricate, simultaneously conceptual and historical phenomena of the history of phenomenology a genuine subject matter of contemporary phenomenological research.

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Notes

  1. This anecdote was told by Gadamer in an essay provocatively entitled The Inability to Conversations (Gadamer 1993, p. 212; first published in 1972). Variants of the story are also included in his philosophical autobiography (Gadamer 1977, p. 31), as well as in Sepp (1988, p. 13). On Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology: Fehér (1994, p. 88). – All translations by the present author, unless noted otherwise. For biographical data not available in standard lexica (e.g., Neue Deutsche Biographie), cf. esp. (Avé-Lallemant 1975; Schuhmann 1977; Wirbelauer 2006).

  2. Moran (2000, p. 257; cf. p. 64).

  3. Husserl (1962, pp. 440, 439). Since the mid-1930s, the reception of such (auto)biographical claims made by Husserl in his private notes has been further complicated by Husserl’s public refusal of any philosophical dialogue with his philosophical critics (which, in turn, was probably not independent of the subliminal influence of his young assistant and co-philosophizing partner Eugen Fink [1905–1975]); see below (esp. note 47).

  4. Somogyi (1926).

  5. Heidegger and Jaspers (1990, p. 42).

  6. See Husserl (1959, pp. 126 ff.), cf. Kern (1962).

  7. Comparatively little has been published about Gerda Walther’s life, except for the excellent Parker (2018, see esp. p. 7).

  8. Off-print publication of his chapter: Somogyi (1930). On Celms’ relationship to Geyser, see Vēgners (2020, pp. 146, 148).

  9. On Geyser’s critique of Scheler, see Geyser (1924, esp. pp. 17 ff.).

  10. Rintelen (1948, p. 309).

  11. As another example of the discrepancy between the received hagiographical view of phenomenology versus what is shown by a closer look at the historical sources, Husserl’s early studies in Vienna were, according to my previous investigations (Varga 2015), far from being influenced by Brentano alone (to whom Husserl later pledged a philosophical oath of allegiance that surprised even Brentano and his loyal, so-called orthodox disciples, e.g., Oskar Kraus [1872–1942]). Quite the contrary, Husserl also had significant exposure to other teachers of philosophy in Vienna, esp. Robert Zimmermann (1824–1898), the only professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna in the 1880s – a fact that might sound even more interesting, given that the young Zimmermann, as well as his father Johann August Zimmermann (1793–1869) were members of the inner secretive circle of disciples around the polymath Czech philosopher Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), whom Husserl later claimed to have rediscovered. The present essay aims to contribute further to such a way of philosophical historiography with regard to the Freiburg phase of phenomenology.

  12. On the ambivalent relationship between Husserl and Hildebrand (before and after Hildebrand’s conversion), see Varga (2020a).

  13. Cf. Husserl (1994, vol. IV, p. 137, esp. n. 407).

  14. § 175 of the Penal Code of the original Wilhelmine Empire (URL = https://lexetius.com/StGB/175,7; last accessed: April 9, 2023). See Wirbelauer (2006, 966).

  15. Somogyi’s translation of his academic mentor’s monograph: Pauler (1929).

  16. Somogyi has been ignored by the subsequent period of the historiography of Hungarian philosophy. Despite some laudable attempts to re-introduce him into the Hungarian philosophical canon (see esp., Laczó and Galgóczi 1998; facsimiles of his Freiburg university documents: pp. 128 ff.), his relationship to the international Phenomenological Movement has not yet been investigated in detail.

  17. Arthur Liebert (until 1905: Arthur Levy; 1878–1946), long-time deputy chair of the Kant Society and co-editor of its organ, the Kant-Studien. Despite his central position in the network of interwar German professional philosophy, Liebert failed to obtain a habilitation qualification until 1925 (hence Somogyi’s form of addressing him was, technically, incorrect). He later was exiled into Belgrade where his émigré journal Philosophia (philosophorum nostri temporis vox universa) published Husserl’s Crisis. The “Jubilar Issue” 29/1–2, published on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s birth on April 22, 1924, was indeed exclusively dedicated to the memory of the »sage of Königsberg«; but, inter alia, it also contained a short notice by Somogyi on a Hungarian journal, the Athenaeum that was co-edited by him (Somogyi 1924). Maybe in exchange for that, his paper on Pauler was delayed by another issue (Somogyi 1925).

  18. For Pauler, too, the reductive method amounted to a regress with regard to strata of justification (which underpins Husserl’s family of reductions, cf. Lohmar 2002); however, Pauler’s philosophy differs metaphilosophically from phenomenology and is more indebted to the influence of Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) in Hungary (Somos 1999), as well as to the Gegenstandstheorie of Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), another heterodox student of Franz Brentano; furthermore, Pauler’s use of the term “phenomenology” was idiosyncratic.

  19. Pauler’s term for non-intuitive synthetic judgements, cf., e.g., Somogyi (1925, p. 183).

  20. Cf.: “We await the further developments of this system, which appears to us as the most valuable achievement of Hungarian philosophy.” (Somogyi 1925, p. 188.).

  21. Cf. the 27th lecture, dated on Dec 18, 1923, on the course of modern philosophy after Descartes, which concludes the edition of Husserl’s Critical History of Ideas (Husserl 1956, pp. 191–199; cf. Schuhmann 1977, p. 278).

  22. Cf. Husserl (1959, pp. 3 ff.).

  23. Husserl’s advanced seminar (announced under the nondescript title “Phenomenological Exercises for Advanced Students”) is undocumented.

  24. Yamauchi Tokuryu (1890–1982), who authored an influential introduction to phenomenology in Japan in 1929 (Toru 2013, pp. 20, 26 f.), studied in Freiburg between SS 1922 and WS 1923/24 (Husserl 1994, vol. III, p. 44, n. 114). Marvin Farber (1901–1980), then a doctoral student at the Harvard relied on a Sheldon fellowship to study in Berlin and Freiburg, where he spent the 1923–1924 academic year (cf. Strassfeld 2019, p. 16).

  25. Somogyi was far from being the first Hungarian student of Husserl (cf. Varga 2017). The title of »a Hungarian who was the most embedded in Freiburg phenomenology« goes, furthermore, to Wilhelm Szilasi (Szilasi Vilmos; 1889–1966) and his wife Lili Szilasi née von Rosenberg (1897–1973) who were close family friends of both the Husserls and the Heideggers (!). As if that were not enough, there was a romantic relationship between Lili and Martin, resp. Vilmos deputized Martin Heidegger’s (and Husserl’s) chair in Freiburg after 1947 (see Szalai 2017).

  26. Question mark in original.

  27. Phenomenological Seminar for Introductory Level Students. Somogyi also attended Becker’s more promising lecture courses Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Interpretative Psychology and Phenomenological Foundations of the Geometry of the World held in the same semester. During Somogyi’s time, the original Volume Two of Husserl’s Logical Investigations was most recently published in a bipartite edition: Husserl (1913), (1921).

  28. Instead of Geyser’s lecture course on Aristotle and Thomas of Aquino, Somogyi opted for the lecture course on psychology, in which Geyser also maintained an independent research and publication profile.

  29. Somogyi’s review of Geyser (1922) is notable because it criticizes Geyser for focusing “only one direction of phenomenology, the Husserlian one” (Somogyi 1923, p. 79). This kind of awareness of the plurivocity of Phenomenological Movement – well before this recognition became public knowledge – must have been a fruit of Somogyi’s stay of Freiburg.

  30. German in original. – This way of rhetorical metaphilosophical questions were in vogue in early postwar German philosophy, cf. Liebert (1923).

  31. Besides historical philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant), Somogyi also drew detailed comparisons in his own book between Husserl’s phenomenology and Bernard Bolzano (Somogyi 1926, pp. 19–29), as well as with Alexius Meiong (pp. 66 ff.), Johannes Rehmke (1848–1930; pp. 69 ff.), then an emeritus professor voluntary transferred from Greifswald to Marburg, and, unsurprisingly Pauler (pp. 72–81).

  32. In response to the collective political trauma of the Treaty of Trianon (1920) that led to the loss of ca. two thirds of Hungary’s former territory, the Hungarian minister of culture Kuno von Klebelsberg (1875–1932) championed a pivot to culture.

  33. See note 33 above.

  34. Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849), poet of the romantic national revival, killed by Russian troops who crushed the Hungarian war of independence.

  35. Maybe an allusion to Kant’s well-known dismissive description of metaphysics as a “battlefield of […] endless controversies” in the original Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason (A viii, transl. Paul Guyer).

  36. See note 18 above.

  37. Somogyi (1925).

  38. Somogyi et al. (1939, p. 8). The meeting took place on Dec 13, 1938.

  39. Müller-Freienfels (1923, p. 62); this characterization quoted by Somogyi (1926, p. 6).

  40. Somogyi (1926, p. 139), compare: Parker (2021, p. 9).

  41. Somogyi (1926, pp. 138 ff.). Linke studied in Munich from 1896 (i.e., before the onset of Munich phenomenology) and was then directed by Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) towards studying empirical psychology in Leipzig, where Linke earned a doctoral degree under the guidance of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) in 1901 (cf. Dempe 1957, p. 263). Beginning with Linke 1916, he published a series of not entirely uncritical articles on phenomenology in central venues of German philosophy; yet, Husserl apparently regarded Linke as a representative of a variant of non-transcendental phenomenology as late as in 1918 (“phenomenology of Linke’s coinage;” Husserl 1994, vol. IV, p. 405). In the late interwar period, Linke’s category of irrationalism increasingly expanded to include phenomenology in its entirety (explicitly including “Husserl who, intoxicated by the tremendous success of his Logical Investigations, gradually lost the sense of self-criticism and started to view himself more and more as the great fate-chosen reformer of philosophy;” Linke 1961, p. 65). Correspondingly, Linke became focused on its perceived antidote, the rigorous philosophical logic, which he credited to Frege who allegedly “discovered the intentionality independently of Brentano” and, “instead of Husserl,” was also “the first one who really overcame psychologism” (p. 54).

  42. Somogyi et al. (1939, p. 89).

  43. „It has often caused offense that I have refrained from engaging in negotiations [Verhandlungen] with critics […]. I have occasionally explained one motive for my silence. All the criticisms that became known to me missed the main thrust of my phenomenology […]; despite the citation of my words”—Husserl wrote in a surprising preface to a rejoinder to the Neo-Kantian critics of phenomenology, published by Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink in the last issue of the influential Kant-Studien, before the journal was brought into Nazi party line (Fink 1933, p. 319, quoted during the discussion meeting: Somogyi et al. 1939, p. 87, paraphrased by Somogyi: pp. 82–83).

  44. Somogyi et al. (1939, p. 82).

  45. Critical edition of the manifesto: Husserl (1987, p. 63), for its underlying history, see Schuhmann (1990, esp. p. 4).

  46. See Fink (1933, esp. pp. 339 ff.; cf. note 44 above); for an entirely undisguised, contemporaneous formulation by Fink, see Fink (1988, pp. 14 ff.). Similar to other cases, here Fink picked up an idea and a corresponding terminus that was first employed sporadically by Husserl (see esp. Husserl 1959, p. 450; dating: probably 1925; i.e., years before the commencement of Husserl’s ambiguous cooperation with Fink). Husserl himself might have deemed this idea (and formulation) being on the verge of the fictional “[Baron] Münchausen who pulls himself out of the swamp by his own hair” (Husserl 2002, pp. 340, 675, for deciphering the exact placement of this marginal note, see the original facsimile [signature: M II 3a/95a] at https://husserl.hu/read/nachlass/M_II_3a_548?page_no=96 [last downloaded: Aug 9, 2023], dating: Husserl’s marginal note to the typescript of his London Lectures by Ludwig Landgrebe [1902–1991] in ca. 1923; more permissive, earlier parallel passage: Husserl 2001, p. 207). – As I have argued elsewhere (cf., e.g.: Varga 2016, pp. 127 ff.), Husserl’s lack of awareness for Fink’s short-cut pseudo-Hegelian idealism – which misled not only Somogyi – fits into the pattern of Husserl’s unfortunate, rigid approach to academic cooperation that was not only rooted in Husserl’s contingent psychological predispositions but it was ultimately due to Husserl’s insistence on enforcing his metaphilosophical conception of phenomenology as the actual framework of his collaboration with the assistants.

  47. For a recent overview of methods employed in Konstellationsforschung and its fields of application (which, sadly, do not yet officially include the historiography of phenomenology), see: Mulsow (2005).

  48. Concerning the development of Husserl’s specific views on the history of philosophy (as opposed to the more encompassing and possibly different topic of the philosophy of history in general), see my Varga (2020b). Notwithstanding the complexity of Husserl’s subliminal early exposures to the history of philosophy (inter alia, by virtue of his secondary school studies in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, cf. pp. 4 ff.), as well as his increasing receptiveness in the 1920s towards problems of the philosophy of the history of philosophy (cf. pp. 17 ff.), Husserl arguably failed to develop a philosophical theory of the history of philosophy that is worth our contemporary attention on its own. At the same time, as I have argued elsewhere (see Varga 2022), Husserl’s partly subliminal awareness of the historicity of philosophy might be intertwined with his equally elusive views on religion, especially the historicity of revealed religions (albeit this interpretation admittedly reads Husserl against the grain, while also involving cross-sectional analysis of the Husserlian corpus and making ample use of bizarre micro-historical explorations).

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Varga, P.A. An eyewitness account of Edmund Husserl and Freiburg phenomenology in 1923–24. Towards reclaiming the plurivocity of historical sources of the Phenomenological Movement. Cont Philos Rev 56, 517–533 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09619-x

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