Tibor Janak[1]
Radio Free Europe
29th September 1989
Tata, Hungary
It is a great and bitter pain to write an obituary of an old and good friend. I am forced to write it though, because I do not think anyone in the Hungarian-speaking communities will remember Julius Kovesi, a philosopher from Western Australia, professor of the University at Perth, who died on the 17th of August [1989] at the age of fifty-nine. We got to love each other in the warm years of our youth, and now after forty years I learnt of his death from friends in Hungary.
He was born in Tata,[2] where he was educated by the Piarists. He always maintained that Tata is the most beautiful town in Hungary. We met in the Ranolder Institute in Budapest in 1947 or 1949 at a catholic student assembly, then later on the 6th of May in a late snowstorm he re-entered my life in the Mentelberg Castle[3] in Innsbruck, then a refuge for students. He wanted to study philosophy, like myself. We spent our time commuting between the mensa of the Jesuits and the turret room of Mentelberg Castle constantly discussing what we thought we understood of philosophy. We often sat on the roof of the castle to gaze over the valley of the Inn and the huge range of the Nordkette with the small desperately struggling mountain trains on its side. We both loved the mountains and read with romantic enthusiasm the “Northern Light” by Father Weiser whose young student hero falls to his death from the Serles. Kovesi felt an immediate need to climb this 2719 metre high peak, but got no further I think than Fulpmes, where most of the action of the novel is set.[4]
He looked for security in philosophy in those days. Unlike many young philosophers, he set out to know the classical figures not with the intention of dismissing Plato or Kant, Descartes or Heidegger, but to find a secure base from which to view them. With that aim in mind he turned to scholasticism first of all as a firm starting point. We both tasted some of the existentialist views, but both of us felt instinctively that a number of preliminary steps must be taken and that there were a number of premises to clarify before the great questions of existentialism can be attempted: whether metaphysics is viable or not; or is it possible to place the centre of existence in individual subjectivity.
We lived and studied in high spirits in Innsbruck until one day the rest of the Kovesi family arrived from Vienna.[5] His father was an architect[6], his brother and his brother’s fiancée wanted to study medicine. His mother, “Aunty” Iren, spoilt everyone with her fine cooking. They lived above Innsbruck in a little village called Sistrans, with a wonderful panorama across the valleys to the Stubai mountains. Julius, or as we called him Jules, or “Zsul”, loved the vast expanse of mountains and settled down to the prospect of years of university studies in Tyrol. But the family decided otherwise. They wanted to emigrate to Australia. A great debate followed and Julius piled argument on argument in defence of Europe and against the far away continent. He feared a life outside Europe, and called himself Julius Brenner (a reference to the nearby Brenner Pass). All this did not prevail. The family emigrated to Australia in April, 1950. They settled in Perth.
This is when Julius’s second life began. We wrote monumental letters to each other. After a few months he left the world of scholastic philosophy behind him together with other European traditions. One day he sent me Pál Kecske’s work Main Elements in the History of Philosophy: I still have it. Inside the cover he pasted the emblem of the University of Western Australia with the words: “From the wandering library of J.K.” He felt no need for such a book any more. Well of course, he was wrong. Not that he ever went back to neo-scholasticism, yet the past of Hungarian philosophy caught up with him. Whether he wished it or not, at the University of Western Australia he was “the Hungarian philosopher”.
His turning away from metaphysics and scholasticism had a simple reason. He entered the world of English philosophy and acquainted himself with positivism, neo-positivism, linguistic analysis and the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I came across the name of this philosopher first in one of Julius’s letters. He was proud of his ability to expropriate[7] English philosophy with such ease and success. He wrote that the Indian Ocean is less of a divide between Australia and England than the Channel between Europe and the culture of the Anglo-Saxon world. While he worked hard at his profession he was totally uninterested in a “career”. When he became professor of philosophy he constantly played down his rank and status.[8] Instead he created a close and intimate circle of friends and students who were free to talk and discuss their thought and problems with him at all times. He disliked the “cathedra”, the lecture, the pronouncements from above. He was deeply embarrassed by his mother’s reference to him in conversation with friends as “my professor son”.
Although he looked upon publications as by and large external to his deepest convictions about what philosophy is all about, he published a few highly original works. These dealt mainly with the problems of ethics. His approach was not that of the Vienna school, with its descriptive method: rather he worked out the enormous differences between the world of ethics and the world of science: how different it is to think scientifically as opposed to morally –– and he mapped out the respective conceptual and linguistic areas which belong to these two modes of existence and thought. His writings are witty and concise with little effort spent on “literary” qualities but full of fascinating evidence of his processes of thinking –– thought processes which never suggest wrinkled brows but exude humour and engaging charm. At one of our meetings in Vienna he explained to me the connection between reality and the world of ethics. He drew the illuminating schema on a piece of paper. I treasure still this small but characteristic memento.
When he emigrated we doubted if we would ever see each other again. Six years later however he appeared in a splendid old Austin car and revisited his favourite European places: Rome, Assisi and of course the Tyrol. In Innsbruck I got in next to him and among the astonished populace we drove up in his tiny old car to the scene of our former life, to Natters. Jules was unchanged, especially in his admiration of the mountains, mainly the Serles –– which Goethe called as he travelled in its shade to Italy the “principal altar of the Tyrol”.
Time passed, two, then three decades. He returned after a while to European themes, indeed to Hungarian philosophy as well. He also occupied himself with Marxism and wrote a witty article in The Journal of the History of Ideas called “Marxist Ecclesiology and Biblical Criticism”.[9] He was interested in the English connections of Hungarian philosophers, and wanted to write on Alpácai Csere János and wrote the Hungarian section for an Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[10] Larry Steindler in his book on Hungarian philosophy not only acknowledges Kovesi’s contribution but calls it “perfect”, since it concentrates successfully on the essentials of development in Hungarian philosophy.[11]
I saw him for the last time in 1983, in Vienna. We lunched together in Tony Wagner’s restaurant, hidden away in a corner of the Messepalast. Julius asked me to come to England, to Bath and to other places; he wanted me to see the glories of English Gothic architecture. He told me of his heart bypass operation a few years ago, how much it helped him to regain his active life, and how he now runs every morning on the seashore. This year he needed another heart operation, which he did not survive.
I try to picture him among his students in Perth, or as he runs on the distant seashore; and again in his small Austin, driving through the narrow streets of Assisi. But for me his authentic background remains the mountain world of Tyrol which we explored and admired together. I see him at the terminus of the Innsbruck-Igls tramway as he enjoys the view –– the threefold peak of the Serles and the blindingly brilliant glaciers of the Stubai range which glow with luminous intensity even at night. I cannot look at them –– they hurt my eyes and they fill with tears.
[1] Tibor Hanak was a journalist in Vienna and author of two books, Die marxistische Philosophie und Soziologie in Ungarn (1976) and Azelfelett reneszasz: A magyar filozófiai gondolkodás századunk első felében (1993). [Alan Tapper]
[2] He was brought up in Tata but actually born in Budapest. [Janet Kovesi, Julius’s wife; later Janet Watt]
[3] Schloss Mentlberg. [AT]
[4] He did climb it –– there is a photograph of him standing by the cross on the summit dated July 30th 1949. [JK]
[5] The dramatic story of how Julius’s parents escaped from Hungary and reached Vienna is told by his mother in Irén Kôvesi, Three Silver Spoons: A true history of a border crossing in 1949 and what happened afterwards, edited by Janet Kovesi Watt, 2020.
[6] In Tata he managed a brickworks. Explaining why they left Hungary Irén writes: “My wonderful and beloved husband … was dragged for a whole year through a Calvary of nerve-racking accusations, trials and self-justifications, which killed in me all possible vestige of faith in justice. Finally, however, the unimaginable miracle happened, since the workforce cleared him of the charges and demanded his reinstatement” (p. 1). [AT]
[7] “appropriate”? [JK]
[8] For most of his career Kovesi was a “Senior Lecturer”. He became an “Associate Professor” in the 1980s, but never a full “Professor”. In Australia the term “Professor” applies only to those at the top of the academic hierarchy. [AT]
[9] “Marxist Ecclesiology and Biblical Criticism”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 37, 1976, pp. 93–110. [AT]
[10] The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards ed. (1967). London and New York: The Free Press. Entry on “Hungarian Philosophy”, Volume Four, pp. 93–95. [AT]
[11] Larry Steindler, Ungarische Philosophie im Spiegel ihrer Geschichtsschreibung (1988). [AT]
The University of Western Australia