Laudatio for Ágnes Heller

It is both a great honour and a great challenge to introduce Ágnes Heller as the recipient of the Goethe Medal. This lies not only in the enormous range of her work – more than 40 substantial and original books – but also in the nature of her productivity, which cannot be reduced to a position, a theoretical construction or a school. The inescapable observation that she was Lukács’s favourite student is no help here as she had already rejected in Budapest, in a respectful and affectionate manner, ¹ practically everything her teacher stood for as a communist theorist and had absorbed what he had abandoned with his sudden conversion to Bolshevism in 1918: in particular ethics and existentialism. ² Her life’s work documents the stations of an independent thinker, who again and again raised fundamental questions under the impact of events and arrived at new concepts and orientations for action in critical dialogue with an ever expanding tradition and experience – until the next question appears. Ágnes Heller is a philosopher of history and ethics, whose direct experience in her youth of the Holocaust and communism imposed the basic duty of gaining step by step the philosophical insight needed to come to terms with this twofold experience and to serve as a guide to conduct.

She became best known here in West Germany through her early work, much of which appeared after 1968 and resonated especially with the New Left. This Ágnes Heller was the survivor of the Holocaust, whose father, originally from Vienna, died of an epidemic in Auschwitz after the Germans had left, the person who opted in 1948 at the height of Stalinism for Marx and Lukács (after her Zionist school days) before she knew or understood much about them. This was the pupil of the highly cultured Lukács, who would reanimate Marxism with a subjective theory of everyday life, a return to the young Marx, the reception of existentialism, feminism, and theoretical studies on the instincts and feelings, only to then leave Marxism behind. This was the dissident, who moved between Berlin (where she was a visiting professor in 1972), Warsaw and the rendezvous of Eastern and Western intellectuals in Yugoslavia, who opposed to the Western New Left the existential seriousness of Eastern dissidence and then her post-Marxism, but combined with a rare curiosity, immediacy and classical education.

Who else has written a PhD on the 19th-century Russian utilitarians, devoted her higher doctorate to the ethics of Aristotle (which in the reactionary climate after 1956 led to her expulsion from the university and from the Party) or been inspired to explore the birth of modern individualism on her first visit to the West, staying in Italian youth hostels, so that after her return to the university in 1963 during the period of thaw she could frame the question of choosing one’s history in the distant mirror of the Renaissance? ³ When her Renaissance Man finally appeared in Germany in 1982 she had already moved on intellectually, had emigrated from Kadar’s Hungary and was for the moment a visiting professor in Konstanz and was awarded the Lessing Prize in Hamburg. Earlier she had protested against the Soviet intervention in Prague, had fallen into disfavour again in 1973 and emigrated in 1977 to Australia with the core members of the Budapest School. In this period the Hamburg publisher VSA-Verlag (a bastion of 1968) published in German almost everything that documented her path from a renewal of Marxism to Leftist dissidence and the beginnings of post-modernism (Heller, 1977a, 1978b, 1980; Heller and Adornato, 1981). But when with her second husband Ferenc Fehér she hailed the 1956 Hungarian uprising as a ‘socialist revolution’, analysed in an insightful fashion the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime in Diktatur über die Bedürfnisse (Dictatorship over Needs) in 1979 and then a decade later Yalta as the basis of Europe’s post-war history (Heller and Feher, 1990), the interest of the German Left faded (along with the movement itself). ⁴

But it was only when Ágnes Heller had made herself at home in the English-language world and above all when she became Hannah Arendt Professor for Political Philosophy at the New School of Social Research in New York in 1986 that she finally found herself and progressively developed her fundamental position as a leading post-modern thinker. In her two main areas of ethics and philosophy of history she published a dozen major works, culminating in A Philosophy of History in Fragments and An Ethics of Personality. ⁵ These summations of her thought are, however, in no sense conclusive; that she concludes her ethics with a plurality of voices and presents her philosophy of history in the form of fragments and each as the unfolding of different kinds of truth has irritated some of her philosophical colleagues, among them close friends. ⁶ For my part I am delighted rather by this sovereign sense of the poverty of spirit; the grand narratives have gone but philosophy continues, without interpretative arrogance, in fragmentary and plural forms, which pay closer attention to tradition and reflect the subject’s existential concerns and experiences. Let me illustrate how the philosopher of history states her insights laconically and with a kind of joyous modesty.

The world of people who chose themselves existentially is a significant world. A world in which modern men and woman can settle in and dwell is composed of the world of significant subjects. Every work stands for itself in the friendly company of other works. One thing might still be shared: the ‘common thing’, res publica, a world as a political habitat. But nothing else, or very little beyond this. Can a world like this create something that endures?

No major tapestry can be woven from the mosaic of difference. No single-minded idea raises its pyramids here, and no grand style creates cathedrals on the soil of our homes. This may be still ahead, but we have no knowledge about it. At the moment, we keep digging into the past. We dig deep, we collect traces, we restore the ruins of the past to resurrect bygone worlds. Our work is maintenance and preservation. It is done for the other’s sake, for they are the ones to be immortalized by us, not us. Yet it is also done for our sake, for it is like a blood-transfusion; we, free people of a free age, give meaning to our life by infusing the blood of the dead into our anaemic veins. (Heller, 1993: 243)

Ever since Ágnes Heller has employed the lingua franca of globalization, she is of course also read in Germany by the relevant specialists, but she has seldom found a larger public here. This is a shame, because this post-modernist writes attractively and clearly in a language rich with experience. Making the works of her maturity finally available remains a desideratum. In this respect the Goethe Medal is also an appeal to German publishers.

But Ágnes Heller has also given us a corpus of late works, which have found a greater resonance here, at least when they are written in Hungarian or German. Since 1990 she has been an external fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and commutes between New York, where she still teaches, and her – despite everything – beloved Budapest. In her late work she has exchanged obligation for pleasure. It has allowed aspects to appear which the reader could only sense: her warmth and vitality, her humour, her delight in laughter, her rare gift for undistorted perception of ambivalence (including close at hand) – but also for decisiveness (including the public sphere). We can now observe her talent for aesthetics, which she had held back out of respect for Lukács and Fehér, but to which we now owe several major works, above all, her work on the historical-philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare’s plays (Heller, 2002b) and on the immortality of comedy (Heller, 2005). Not to forget her talent for oral narrative – detailed, self-possessed yet self-critical, drastic and comic but always self-reflective – which makes her autobiography Der Affe auf dem Fahrrad (The Monkey on the Bicycle) into one of the most readable and enjoyable documents of a journey through the systemic blows of fate and the great challenges of the 20th century. Just one example: after the description of how, aged 16, she escaped deportation through the help she enlisted from some Arrow Cross members and German officers and her own presence of mind, she refuses all charges of collective guilt and makes the individual’s space for manoeuvre and the domination of perverted science the focus of her reflexions:

That was when I realized…that evil is based on evil maxims.… To murder millions out of evil instincts, that is not possible. Millions are murdered when perverted reason suggests that what one does is not evil but good. The totalitarian systems of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks were able to destroy millions of persons because…their principles were the monstrous births of a perverted reason. (Heller, 1999: 67)

When Ágnes Heller received from Bremen the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Philosophy, this insight became the essence of her ‘requiem for a century’, in which she summed up in German a lifetime of thought: eloquent, sovereign, enlightening and moving. She calls the 20th century in Europe an age of apocalypse, which turned all the promises of the 19th century into fatalities, and allots a special place among the victims of the century to all those who staked their hopes on these promises, when they had already been politically perverted, simultaneously realized and destroyed through mass violence. I don’t wish, however, to summarize this beautiful highly condensed text. Let me rather quote just one passage:

The constellations, which we are now burying, were bad received ideas, such as, we occupy a privileged position in so-called history,…we are living the age of the death of God,…violence is redemptive,…‘we’ (masters or slaves) have the historical right to enslave or to destroy ‘them’ [or] we can magically produce a completely new age through human will and decision. To be liberated, we must bury these received ideas, and then we can mourn the dead. (Heller, 1995: 17)

Finally, let me mention the contribution of this agnostic to religion: in her essay Die Auferstehung des jüdichen Jesus (The Resurrection of the Jewish Jesus) (Heller, 2002a) she discusses recent Jewish research on Jesus and raises far-reaching perspectives for the present. Without hiding the Christian misuse of the Chosen People as the negative other of their own faith or the Holocaust, she argues for the recovery of the prophet Jesus for Judaism and calls on Christianity to abandon its claim to a universal mission in the context of globalization. Her intention is not religious relativism but, on the contrary, recognition of every particular religious truth. She rejects the fundamentalisms of all religions, including the Jewish, declares the Polish Pope the greatest statesman of the last decades and singles out his encyclical ‘Fides et Ratio’ as an appropriate basis for dialogue in the postmodern age. It is the task of interreligious dialogue to reconcile scientific globalization with all the different cultural and religious projects in order to create meaning and values that lie beyond the reach of science.

The intellectual journey, thought-provoking and rich in suggestions, of this wonderful woman continues and we must be grateful to her that she has made her way through the great and the little worlds of the 20th century, always conscious of the risks and the duties, and has set an example for us all. But let us not forget that we have hardly begun in Germany to enjoy the ripe fruit from her tree of knowledge.

Translated by David Roberts