Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo

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A Question of Defining The Term 'Philosopher'

Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, born in Washington, DC, on July 23, 1964 is recognized by some of the most prominent intellectuals of our times as an independently-minded (thinking "out-of-the-box") philosopher of the Infinite, whose ideas are an evolution of those held by such greats as Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza. In his book; "The Most Important Thought" (Silver Aleph, 1994 - 2004) Fenyo argues that only by making philosophy and contemplation of the Infinite popular, in its broadest and most diverse sense, will humanity become sufficiently wise so as to be able to reverse and eventually overcome the social and environmental damage and danger that threatens our world. In other words, Fenyo argues that wisdom, which he defines as open-minded, long-term oriented, deep thinking, is instigated by contemplating the infinite and that society would be better off if it would popularize philosophical discourse and debate on a massive scale. According to Professor Hernadi Miklos of the Hungarian National Academy of Sciences Fenyo's philosophical insight into the penultimate practical applications and implications of contemplating and meditating on infinity are no less than revolutionary and a breakthrough in the ages-old effort to reconcile the Western linear and the Eastern non-linear expressions of the concept of Infinity. Professor Howard Robinson of Oxford (Head of The Philosophy Department at The Central European University in Budapest), whose main work is in the field of epistemology, has found Fenyo's ideas noteworthy, albeit not conclusive. Because Fenyo's works are not commercially published and because he is not formally accredited as a PhD. in any academic field (though he has an honorary degree), his stature and credibility have often been put into question. In his own defense Fenyo is quick to point out the difference between those academics who teach philosophy at institutions of higher learning and those who are philosophers in the original sense of the word (e.g. Socrates, Aristotles, and Henry David Thoreau). What is certain is that Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo began the real life of a true philosopher around the time when he gained fame as The Original New York City Free Advice Man (The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, Aug. 17, 1987; pages 18-19), sitting out in public places and engaging people in a truly Socratic dialogue.

A Brief Bio

The Philosopher Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo is the son of Mario D. Feny�, a Professor of History (PhD. in History from The American University, M.A. in History Yale, 1965 Gondos Award for best essay in archival science), and Ileana L.G.V. (double M.A. Anthropology & Archaeology). From his earliest years Fenyo traveled with his parents (including his younger brother, b. 1970 ) throughout some sixty countries. He has lived in the capital of eight countries on four continents, including Budapest, [Hungary]] ( 1976 - 1978, 1994 - 2003 ), London, Great Britain & Northern Ireland, UK (2003 - 2004), [[San Juan] (and Ponce), Puerto Rico ( 1970 - 1972, 1974), Khartoum, Sudan ( 1974 - 1976), Amman, H. K. of Jordan ( 1984 ), Beirut, Lebanon ( 1978 - 1980), Washington, D.C., U.S.A. ( 1964 - 1967, 1986, 2004 - 2005). He is fluent in four languages; English (native), Spanish, Hungarian and Italian, and semi-fluent in French, with some working knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic and Dutch. During the early 1980s, while living in New York City (where he attended City-As-School, 1980 -1982 an alternative high-school for creative and gifted students) Fenyo was involved in the Lower Manhattan cultural arts and social scene, making acquaintances with famous people like Andy Warhol, Quentin Crisp, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Kaufman and a number of other avant-garde personalities, including beatnik Allen Ginsberg, the poet Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroy Jones ), a voice in the SNL TV Show's "Mr.Bill" segments whose name is Larry Alaimo, the famous photographer Marcia Resnick, just to name a few. During the 1980s Fenyo dabbled in several creative activities, including being a DJ at Club Area off Houston Street near the then W.T.C., reading his own original poetry at Time/Life Cafe in the East Village (known as Alphabet City) and at other venues, working on a rare occasion as an Off-Off-Broadway novice thespian, and doing a few stints as a stand-up-comic at The Comedy Cellar under The Olive Garden Restaurant (where incidentally he met Robin Williams and not for the last time either). During those years Fenyo had to contend with occasional housing problems and often found himself staying at the home of friends and new-found acquaintances. In 1986 he moved down to Washington, D.C., his birthplace, and within months got engaged and married to his first wife, a Japanese woman (name kept confidential) with whom he would live for less than a year. His separation (eventually they were divorced) brought him back to New York City in the early Spring of 1987.

1987; The Year That Changed Everything

It was after several weeks of trying to make ends meet as a sidewalk comic that one early morning, following a strange and long conversation with a Park Avenue chap turned speed addict, Fenyo came up with the idea that he would best make it as a street-corner philosopher, sitting on a metal box that concealed a water-pump in front of The Niagara Falls Laundromat on Seventh Avenue South and Bleecker Street, where he first held a sign that initially read: Free Advice - Donations Accepted. From day one he was a spectacular success. A brief encounter with a policeman followed by a short talk with the Community Affairs Officer at the local police precinct (in Greenwich Village) led to his amending his sign, which subsequently read: "Free Advice, J.P.'s Free, Objective, and Realistic Advice On Almost Any Subject, Not Qualified To Give Medical or Legal Advice, Make No Assumptions Please, Not a Religion or Mystic". By the end of the second week on the 12th of May, 1987, Lloyd Kramer, then a Feature Reporter with WNBC-TV4 in New York City, conducted a taped one-on-one interview with Fenyo that suddenly made the young novice philosopher an instant New York City celebrity. (Lloyd Kramer is known as the Director of The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2004), and Report from Ground Zero (2002)). Throughout the late Spring and Summer of 1987 Fenyo was interviewed for TV, radio and print-media more than a dozen times. What finally put Fenyo and his The Original New York City Free Advice Man character in the annals of New York City history was Alec Wilkinson's fine article about him in The New Yorker, on the 17th of August, 1987. By the end of 1987 Fenyo has met a number of New York's rich and famous, including Woody Allen, the quintessential New York City talk-show host and radio personality Joe Franklin (with whom he would spend countless hours answering telephone calls at the celebrity's offices overlooking Times Square), and the quintessential 80s artist Mark Kostabi to name a few.

The Rise And The Temporary Fall

Fenyo was now a Greenwich Village fixture who occasionally ventured further up and down town, setting up his folding chairs and holding his sign high throughout Manhattan, including on Wall Street, up by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in front of the [United Nations]], at Washington Square Park, outside The Second Avenue Deli, just to name some of the more prestigious locations. By late 1988 he had reached another fork in the road, and, unable to afford the rising cost of rent, Fenyo moved back down to Washington, D.C. and eventually found himself living in Baltimore and studying at Towson State University. It is at Towson in the Fall of 1989 that he would have, as a freelance writer for The Towerlight, an hour-long one-on-one meeting with Isaac Asimov. This chance meeting allowed Fenyo to get some invaluable feedback on his "ideas concerning the penultimate practical benefits of contemplating the infinite". Over the next four years, 1990 - 1994, Fenyo re-established his fame as The Free Advice Man, but now only in Baltimore & Washington, D.C. It was in late 1992 that he began to be attacked, mostly verbally, for being perceived as a copy-cat of three office workers who had billed themselves as The Three Free Advice Ladies! Apparently, as Fenyo later confirmed when he arranged for a surprise meeting with them at their main location in NoHo, they had read the New Yorker article, assumed Mr. Fenyo had died homeless on the streets of New York and thought that no one would notice. For a while these advice ladies, whose advice was mostly superficial and concerned with topics such as "how to color your hair" and "how to get rid of your jerk", managed to get major national media attention, much at the expense of Fenyo's own reputation, track-record, and public image. Eventually, Fenyo had had enough, and in an attempt to make his case known, wrote to Robert DeNiro, whose Tribeca Studios film company was considering doing a movie about the three free advice ladies. Eventually the three advice ladies were dropped, split up and lost their recognition, but Fenyo never fully recovered from what he felt had been an assault on his good name and character, which was defamation, and plagiarism at its worst. By 1994, in spite of some modest media coverage in Baltimore, DC and L.A., Fenyo left the States, bitter and dejected. While all this had been going on Fenyo was also involved from 1989-on, to a minor extent, in the early days of The Middle East Peace Process and had published and released a peace plan proposal of his own that he knew very well was nothing more than an exercise in helping the various parties, namely [[Israel], the Palestinians, Jordan and the U.S., put things in perspective. Fenyo, being the grandson of a prominent Hungarian-Jewish intellectual (Miksa Fenyo), and having lived in the Middle East as a young teenager (nearly killed by bombings and a kidnapping incident), was well qualified and motivated to write his peace plan and get it the attention it deserved (it is an interesting side-note that Shimon Peres was one of only a few to send a personal reply). Finally 1994 came around and Fenyo, who had just insured a copyright registration on his first philosophy book ("Infinitism: Secret Key To The Doors of Wisdom", Silver Line, 1994), left the States, having gone through some truly unfair and unpleasant experiences, and settled down in the birthplace of his father and the city that had once honored his grandfather, Budapest, Hungary.

The Hungary Years

Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo arrived in [[Budapest], not intent on looking back but eager to start a brand new chapter in his life, and found himself making a modest living as a private English (E.S.L.) teacher and tutor, translator/interpreter (Hungarian to English) and as an improvisational tour-guide for visiting foreign college students. Fenyo was quite familiar with Budapest, as he had already lived there numerous times (even for a period as long as two years during the times of the Kadar (see Janos Kadar Regime), and had already worked on a couple of occasions at Radio Budapest, the International Short Wave English section, as a translator and radio broadcaster/announcer (he once translated a collection of poems by the Hungarian-Jewish poet Miklos Radnoti) . Within months of his arrival he was interviewed several times on TV, radio and in print, with numerous articles about him and his philosophical ideas published. He was now becoming established as a serious philosopher and began working on a revised version of his first book. Meanwhile, Fenyo also worked hard to restore and nurture the memory of his grandfather, and help save the memory and record of [[The NYUGAT] literary and social review, of which his grandfather was a founding editor and, in its early heyday, one of its major financial backers. In 1996 Fenyo suggested to the citizens of his grandfather's town of birth, Melykut (a town in southern Hungary not far from the Serbian border), that it would be nice if they would name a street or library after him. In the Fall of that same year he was the guest of honor at the re-naming and inauguration of the Miksa Fenyo town library, and for this special event Fenyo sculpted etching on Carrara marble depicting his grandfather's bust (it was placed on the wall outside the library). By 1998 Fenyo was a regular V.I.P. guest at embassy events, literary events and events to show support for the rights of the Roma, Jews and other minorities in Hungary. Then in 1998 the FIDESZ political party of Viktor Orban, along with help from a coalition of other right-wing parties (some virulently anti-Semitic and xenophobic) came to power. Since Fenyo had been involved, speaking openly in public on minority rights issues, and since he had tried, in vain, to have family property stolen by the NAZIs and Stalinists, returned by the Hungarian government (which, unlike the Czech Republic, voted against the right of return of properties to their rightful owners), Fenyo became a target of the right-wing inner circle and their proxies. Eventually Fenyo got more involved in Hungarian politics than he had ever intended and in the Spring of 2002 his appearance and thought-provoking statements (between the two rounds of a close elections) on the most-watched morning TV news program (TV-2) in Hungary were a factor in the narrow defeat of the government of Viktor Orban and FIDESZ. However, this only aggravated things further and Fenyo, along with his companion (his future wife), were forced to leave Hungary in 2003, mainly out of safety concerns. Also, following the 9-11 attacks in 2001 Fenyo wrote an article for The Budapest Sun, which caught the attention of policy makers in the US and elsewhere, and some of the ideas and language in it were plagiarized by top US government officials. The events of 9-11 had a profound, upsetting impact upon Fenyo, given that New York City was his home for years and it was where he first tasted real fame as The Original New York City Free Advice Man..

A Short London Story

Unable to afford Cathy, his future wife, a visa and other means to enter the United States, Fenyo and his companion arrived in [[London], England in the hope of finding long-term residency. In London Fenyo was able to realize one of his long-time dreams of speaking at Speakers' Corner at the north-east corner of Hyde Park. Here Fenyo had a mixed reception, inspite of the fact that he has a natural ability to air a British accent (something he picked up as a child at The British Embassy Club in Khartoum, Sudan, a relic of the days of The British Empire), for to some he was just another Yankee daring to show-off on British Royal soil and to others he was quite a charmer, speaking words that show his love for knowledge, wisdom, peace, tolerance and living lovingly. Eventually Fenyo and his companion had to make a brief parting, with their right to stay nearly at an end (and some glitches over Hungary's impending membership of the European Union), and it was only a year later, after much effort, that Fenyo was able to save enough money to get Cathy over to California, U.S.A.. They married in the Fall of 2004 and moved to the Washington, D.C. area, where he was busy regenerating The Infinity Society Universal & International, a fledgling NGO (Think Tank & Educational Org.) established in 1988. As of Spring 2008 The Infinity Society is no longer based in Washington, D.C., but is based inside the relative infinity of universal cyberspace. J.P. Fenyo now resides in London, England, but travels throughout the European Union and between Europe and America. He foresees that Senator Barack Obama will be President of The United States of America on the 20th of January, 2009, after the Obama-Biden Democratic Party's Super Ticket wins the U.S. General Elections on November the 4th, 2008. In fact, J.P. Fenyo correctly foresaw that Obama would be the nominee after his astounding victory in the Iowa Primaries Caucus, and he correctly foresaw, in December 2007, that it would be an Obama-Biden Ticket (he even created a mock Rollingstone magazine cover showing Obama & Biden side-bby-side, which was first published at The DNC's Partybuilder site. [Click this link http://www.infinitysociety.org/images/Roalingstone.jpg]).

Currently

Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo lives in London, UK, where he is working on several new projects and writing a couple of books.

For more details about this venture you may contact him through the official Infinity Society web-site.

He is also working to get Senator Barack Obama elected, with the hope of being appointed as The First National Philosophical Advisor.

The Infinity Society

Fenyo is the Founder and self-appointed Director of The Infinity Society (Universal & International), whose purpose as an independent, freedom of association non-governmental educational organization is to mass disseminate the concept of infinity and other deep philosophical concepts and ideas, as well as to popularize philosophy in general (in terms of philosophical inquiry, introspect, discourse, discussion and debate), in an effort to generate greater wisdom worldwide. The organization has rouhgly 800 members wordlwide, and is in the process of developing affiliated groups such as The Infinity Society India. The Infinity Society's first official website has been closed down (www.infinitysociety.org). A new website is in the works and will be up and running in the not-too-distant future (updated Sept. 2, 2009).

References

He was listed in MARQUIs Who's Who In The World, Millenium Edition (2000), is listed in MARQUIs Who's Who In America 2007, and the article in The New Yorker that first propelled him to fame has recently reappeared in the first section ("Cameos", in second place) of Alec Wilkinson's book, "Mr. Apology and other essays", Houghton-Mifflin, 2003 (ISBN: 0-618-12311-3). The article is also to be found in the digital archives of The New Yorker.

Further Reading

Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo's books, which were published through a small press, are currently unavailable commercially.

  • Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, Infinitism: Secret Key To The Doors of Wisdom Silver Line (1994)
  • Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, The Most Important Thought. Silver Aleph Books (2004).

External links


Correction! The article above, in its current form, is the definitive auto-biographical mention of the Philosopher Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo on Wikinfo. It is not the same as the one that originally appeared on Wikipedia, which has since deleted that article (primarily authored by Mr. Fenyo himself). It is the understanding that Wikinfo has no reason to either endorse (as of yet) or negate the statements contained herein. What is certain is that Mr. Fenyo has had some significant media attention throughout the 80s in New York City, including the mentioned write-up in The New Yorker magazine, as well as media attention in Hungary, all of which confirms that he is some kind of philosopher of some degree of originality. It is also obvious that Mr. Fenyo's idea on the need to promote deep philosophical concepts (infinity in particular) and philosophy in general is proof of his love of wisdom (which by implication defines him as a philosopher). What is yet to be determined is the degree of importance of his person.

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