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Abstract
The following paper explicates and critically analyses the existential ethics of the reflective postmodernist phase in the work of Agnes Heller. Beginning with a brief summary of the biographical and theoretical roots of her development, it goes on to analyse the meaning of her key slogan of “turning contingency into destiny.” After elaborating her version of the “existential leap” and her later attempts to refine her position in An Ethics of Personality, the paper will employ some literary lives from W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee to test the general viability of Heller's model.
Notes
Notes
1. For a fuller account of Agnes Heller's biography and her early Marxist works, see John Grumley, Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
2. Agnes Heller, “The Dissatisfied Society,” in The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 309.
3. Agnes Heller, A Philosophy of Morals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 10.
4. Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 291.
5. For a most useful elaboration of this point, see Agnes Heller's unpublished paper “Ethics of Personality, the Other and the Question of Responsibility” (1997), 18.
6. Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 87.
7. Ibid., 76.
8. Ibid., 73.
9. Ibid., 77.
10. Ibid., 308.
11. Heller, Beyond Justice, 312.
12. In recent times this neglect has come to attention. Note the recent major study by Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); subsequent page references are cited in the text.
13. Heller, A Philosophy of Morals, 15.
14. Ibid., 304.
15. Ibid.,14.
16. Ibid., 313.
17. Heller, “Ethics of Personality, the Other and the Question of Responsibility,” 20.
18. Heller, A Philosophy of Morals, 31.
19. Agnes Heller, “The Human Condition,” in General Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
20. Bauman, The Individualized Society, 77.
21. Agnes Heller, An Ethics of Personality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
22. Heller, An Ethics of Personality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 181.
23. For a video of this session which includes the full lecture but breaks before the end of the questions, see ttp://diobma.udg.edu:8080/dspace/handle/10256.1/108
24. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), 189.
25. J. M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983).
26. Here I give a slightly different reading of a point made by John Burnheim in his insightful introduction to his collection of essays on Heller's social philosophy. John Burnheim, ed., The Social Philosophy of Agnes Heller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 13.