Questions considering the ‘normative skepticism’ of Ágnes Heller

I. From modernity’s pendulum to undialectical dialectics

During the late-1980s and early-1990s – that is, during the tumultuous period that marked the liberal transition in Central and Eastern Europe – Heller and Ferenc Fehér began to develop new imagery to countenance the changing world. Although their image-metaphor of the pendulum is in many respects largely similar, it is not identical to the notion of ‘undialectical dialectics’ that Heller introduces in A Theory of Modernity (1999). Certainly, both depict the vicissitudes of modernity as oscillating between extremes, limits that are themselves described in ideal-typical terms; and, each account maintains that changes to the orientation of the dynamics of modernity are not mechanistically necessitated. Indeed, both forestall conceiving history as a grand narrative of Progress, founded upon either an independent but augmenting variable (e.g. the means of production) or a utopian vision of a teleologically pre-ordained future. Still, there are significant differences.

Preliminarily, it is helpful to note that Heller and Fehér’s employment of the pendulum metaphor is itself strained in its description of the three interconnected yet irreducible ‘logics’ of modernity. On the one hand, they suggest that a single pendulum swings between two possible extremes of the three logics’ historical concatenations, while also intimating that distinct pendulums swing between the extremes of each logic discretely. On the other hand, there are instances in which the course of the pendular arc, which delineates the path between two foci, is itself opposed to a third alternative, thereby undermining their characterization as dialectical opposition (e.g. with respect to the logic of political power). ⁶ By contrast, the notion of undialectical dialectics does not maintain that all three logics of modernity discretely and necessarily oscillate between extremes – although one or another may do so (e.g. as does the logic of the functional allocation of social positions between the foci of capitalism and socialism) – as the pendular description of modern science and technology is subsequently replaced by a single accumulative tendency.

The differences between the pendulum metaphor(s) and undialectical dialectics are also not adequately explained by citing textual evidence alone, viz. Heller describes the former as amalgamating Platonic and Hegelian dialectics whereas the latter is explicitly opposed to both. Thus, in ‘Modernity’s Pendulum’, Heller claims:

Dialectics is modernity’s dynamics. The term ‘dialectics’ is used here in both the Socratic/Platonic and the Hegelian sense – in modernity they are fused. In the latter sense, modernity asserts and reasserts itself through negation. […] When a conflict, which philosophers call contradiction, is solved (or sublated), new conflicts take its place immediately; and this process of contradiction-sublation has to go on and on. (Heller, 1992: 4) ⁷

Seven years later, she introduces the dynamics of modernity thusly:

It is safe to say that the dynamics of modernity is a kind of dialectics. After all, the philosophical concept of dialectics – in its Platonian as well as in its Hegelian version – has employed the inhered motion of the dynamics of modernity while conceptualizing it. Yet the dynamics of modernity – as I see it – is not modeled in the spirit of Plato and/or Hegel. I will refer to it as the undialectical dialectics. Undialectical dialectics can also be enlightenment, since it introduces, accompanies, and follows the process of enlightenment. (Heller, 1999: 40)

Their different intellectual heritages signal a further difference in the conceptual constitution of their respective ‘objects’ of investigation. The pendulum of modernity is primarily a descriptive metaphor that countenances sociologically the objective spirit of what are modernity’s dynamics; undialectical dialectics – which may employ the oscillating image of the pendulum – is primarily concerned with different possible manners of how one may conceptualize the dynamics of modernity. As I will show, the latter requires a critical-reflective and interpretive attitude towards the theory-laden and objectifying description of the dynamics of modernity, and is, for this reason, an account of absolute spirit that deliberately aims to avoid the reification of its ‘object’.

The account of undialectical dialectics is thereby distinguished by what it deliberately omits: the necessity of sublating a plurality of totalizing visions of the world. In A Theory of Modernity, Heller’s analysis is more skeptical of speculative reconciliation and maintains that ‘if the dynamics of modernity develop as an undialectical dialectics, no sublation can be expected’ (p. 44). This methodological assumption allows Heller to distinguish two forms of conceptualizing the dynamics of modernity without proffering determinant judgment about the normative status of either. Rather than seek to refute alternative accounts, she cautiously asserts the subjective validity of her choice (viz. ‘the dynamics of modernity – as I see it’ [emphasis added]), before then narrating a plausible historical reconstruction of the major theoretical and practical vicissitudes of Western modernity in terms that exhibit her methodological assumption. In this manner, Heller simply opposes her reflective postmodernist theory to those of others (e.g. some variants of Hegelianism), which equally could be offered, albeit with differing methodological assumptions. This warrants the conjecture that a plurality of rational accounts and reconstructions (i.e. theories of modernity) may be possible (if not also desirable), which is precisely how she initiates her historical narrative(s). ⁸

Before portraying the dynamics of modernity as undialectical dialectics, however, Heller preemptively considers Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment’s sublation. Previously, Heller had suggested that Hegel is an advocate of philosophy without presuppositions, whose

grand narrative is meant to grant absolute contingency which can be retrospectively recollected and ordered as a teleologically guided chain of processes and events that leads to the present, [in which case] one attributes a presupposition to the author. In [Heller’s] mind, Hegel was serious enough about doing philosophy without presuppositions to leave the interpretation of his philosophy of history open before different presuppositions. ⁹ (p. 21)

These ‘different presuppositions’ are different methodological assumptions regarding the teleological structure of Hegel’s narrative and the possibility in principle of conceptually exhausting the totality of what is. ¹⁰ Moreover, Heller contends: ‘In Hegel’s mind there was a choice between unreflected absolute presuppositions (which are indeed suspect) and absolutely no presuppositions – he never considered the option of a nonfounded foundation’ (p. 22). ¹¹ How his interpreting recipient construes this methodological choice of the imputed author, Heller implies, has decisive influence over how one interprets Hegel’s system. ¹² When Heller comes to juxtapose her own account(s) of undialectical dialectics, however, this strict choice of either/or – itself contingent, according to Heller’s Hegel – is both negated in its form as absolute knowing and yet preserved (although not sublated (aufgehoben)). It is relativized to permit the consideration of the third option, ‘C’ as it were. Thus, Heller suggests, the Enlightenment may be interpreted in one of (at least) two ways: as a Hegelian (either with unreflected absolute presuppositions or with absolutely no presuppositions) or as undialectical dialectics in accordance with a ‘non-founded foundation’.

The second of the two modern ways of conceptualizing the dynamics of modernity equally takes the Enlightenment as its point of reference, and explicitly claims in some sense an opposition to Hegel’s account of the sublation of the Enlightenment. Yet, Heller does not indicate whether her own account is without precedent, whether a different critic of the Enlightenment is not more appropriate to its logic of ‘bad infinitude’. With some qualification with respect to how each ‘resolves’ (and interprets) the dynamic antinomy animating it, I surmise that Heller’s account is presaged in the formal edifice of Kant’s dialectics of reflective judgments in general and of the critique of taste in particular. ¹³ Herein, one may discern the structure of ‘nonfoundational foundations’ that are claimed in the actual opposition of the rationalistic and romantic enlightenments that I shall countenance after a brief detour.

Kant’s account of the dialectic of the critique of taste evinces (at least tacitly) the formula of the dynamics of modernity that have dominated the practice of Western philosophy since Greek antiquity. This critique implies both dialectical negation (e.g. A’s assertion: ‘B’s claim “x is y” is not true’) and a dialectical position of a different claim that should be recognized (viz. ‘A’s claim: “z is y” is true’). In the occurrence of a particular claim of taste – e.g. ‘x is beautiful’ – one ‘naturally’ refers the judgment about a singular object to an ideal of beauty that exceeds the capacity of our finite cognitive faculties to legitimately determine. However, whereas – in the dialectic of the speculative use of reason – Kant’s metaphysics suggests postulating the hypothetical existence of the regulative ideas of reason is necessary to secure the veracity of determinant judgments, the claims proffered through judgments of taste appeal – in virtue of the legitimate form of reflective judgments – to normative validity by considering only the possible assent of others not actual cultural recipients.

For Kant, the dynamic antinomies among actually opposed and irreconcilable claims is introduced due to misconstruing the nature of the concept – e.g. of beauty – as determinant. Kant famously ‘solves’ the antinomy of their incongruence by circumscribing to each the subjective validity of claims of taste, thereby affirming the insuperability of their empirical plurality in respect of an objectively indeterminable concept. Additionally, Kant asserts, the regulative principles orienting reflective judgment may differ according to aesthetic experience, principles that may be legitimately contested but not disputed (for they are not falsifiable). In their interminable contestation, Kant seeks to attenuate the conflict between incongruent judgments of taste by claiming that all that ‘is needed to solve an antinomy is only that possibility that two seemingly [dem Scheine nach] conflicting propositions are in fact not contradictory but are consistent, even though it would surpass our cognitive power to explain how the concept involved [i.e. how what the concept stands for] is possible’ (Kant, 1987 [1791]: 213). Kant merely ‘points to’ this possibility in the ‘supersensible substrate of humanity’.

Heller deliberately avoids palliative appeal to the metaphysical postulate of a ‘supersensible substrate of humanity’ and does not venture to ‘solve’ the antinomies of the dialectic of the critique of taste that are evidently generated by different conceptualizations of modernity. ¹⁴ Instead of resolution, there are endless challenges among an objectively inconsistent plurality of subjectively valid claims in respect of what is true, or good, or beautiful, etc. There is no assumption (on her part) either that the contestation will come to an end or that its doing so would be desirable. Here, in nuce, one finds the metastable kernel of Heller’s undialectical dialectics. According to Heller:

It is not difficult to see that the deconstructive move of the dynamics of modernity cannot be stopped from within the dynamics itself. If the dynamics are stopped or required to be stopped, the stopping power must be external to the dynamics. The dynamics cannot be stopped from within because its logic is that of bad infinitude. Everything is open to query and to testing; everything is subject to rational scrutiny and refuted by argument. Now, rational argument can come to a resting point only under the condition that it is backed by something final (an archē or axiom) that is taken for granted. Finally, the argument or demonstration must have recourse to something that does not need to be demonstrated. (Heller, 1999: 41)

The philosopher, however, does not need to accede to the methodological assumption that any particular claim of an individual’s taste (or reflective judgment generally) ought to be normatively binding on those who do not also affirm it. Rather, s/he may sociologically survey and describe the empirical plurality of the various claims perspectivally and without determinant endorsement. Indeed, this kind of sociological analysis of the cultural practices of dialectical philosophers and their works Heller exhibits in considering Hegel and Márkus. In such a manner, the philosopher exhibits a form of ‘normative skepticism’ with a nonfoundational foundation appropriate to (at least) one version of undialectical dialectics, which I now consider.

II. Two versions of undialectical dialectics

I would like to suggest that Heller’s account of the dynamics of modernity tacitly exhibits two distinct conceptualizations of its undialectical dialectics, which belie different understandings of how opposed theoretical claims (and reflective judgments in general) can contest one another in practice and over time. ¹⁵ In the first, an idiosyncratic methodological decision conditions how she will present the actual opposition; in the second, the empirical process of recent history seems to compel Heller to choose the method she has. Each is of Kantian provenance, interpreting modernity’s undialectical dialectics by historicizing the contestation of inconsistent claims to normative universality in terms of their contingent cultural hegemony. However, the second version appears to further illegitimately posit the necessary intensification of the essential antinomic structure described in the first. The two versions of undialectical dialectics thereby employ distinct manners of conceptualizing temporalized dialectical opposition. To suggest that the dialectical opposition intensifies over time, however, in no way entails that the opposition will be overcome as the empirical practice of contestation appears to become more violent.

For Heller, a desirable response to the question ‘Can modernity survive?’ is conditioned by the adoption of a self-critical attitude that does not commit the philosopher to tendencies of violent intensification, viz. an attitude that is both skeptical about the necessity of the future sublation of pluralism as well as cognizant of the fallibility of one’s reflective judgments claiming normative validity. Yet, in A Theory of Modernity, where one finds her main account of undialectical dialectics, Heller says rather little about this apposite critical attitude. After considering how she depicts the dynamics of modernity as exhibited by her conception(s) of undialectical dialectics, one can understand better how and why Heller’s interrogation of the ‘normative skepticism’ evident in György Márkus’s defense of an Enlightenment project is itself an attempt to address this lacuna in her own work.

Although Heller claims the value of freedom to be the ‘ungrounding ground’ of the modern social arrangement, she implies that ambivalent Enlightenment projects evince differentiable ways of addressing the proper ends of life itself. In the first version of undialectical dialectics, Heller clearly states that there are two opposing types of enlightenment projects: rationalistic and romantic. ¹⁶ Their opposition is in turn opposed to historically prior traditional and/or religious forms of life. For Heller, neither form of enlightenment requires the speculative sublation – much less the refutation – of the antinomies generated by its simple opposition to other forms of socio-cultural integration. Indeed, different grounds may be posited according to various relative values conditioned by freedom and upon which can be constructed distinct yet equally totalizing visions of the world. In this respect, Heller suggests: ‘Rationalistic enlightenment relies on technology as the archē of modernity, whether or not it makes this explicit. […] Romanticism soon discovers the ugly face of [the rationalistic] enlightenment. Everything solid melts into air. For the men and women of romanticism, life is not a technological problem to be solved. It needs to be lived’ (Heller, 1999: 44–5). Romanticism thereby endeavors to stem the universalizing tendency of the technological imagination by resuscitating those non-instrumental values of yesteryear that are conducive to individuals’ flourishing and, in this regard, Heller suggests that it is associated with the historical imagination (Heller, 2011b: 145). In fact, through their perennial contestation the rationalist and romantic enlightenments exhibit the double-bind of the modern imagination.

By stipulating the actual opposition of their distinct grounds in different forms of imagination, Heller suggests that their opposition is mutually imbricating, for, just as the Romantics found the unattractive face of the rationalist enlightenment, the latter also found disagreeable the old and new mythologies that confronted it in different cultural forms. At the same time, she avoids postulating that historical processes had progressed linearly and refrains from positing a determinant conception of the future towards which they will approximate. Hence, there is no immanent reason to infer from this description and critical interpretation of their cultural disequilibrium that their opposition must henceforth intensify or abate. At this point, all Heller may infer is that modernity’s survival depends upon preserving socio-cultural conditions that allow the dynamics of modernity to find suitable cultural forms of expression that do not threaten the existence of the modern social arrangement.

Nevertheless: ‘Modernity’s dynamics – the undialectical dialectics – are both destructive and self-destructive. After having destroyed everything, after having transformed the world into a spiritual desert’, she maintains, ‘it might destroy itself’ (Heller, 1999: 45; emphasis added). Far from being a rhetorical slippage on Heller’s part, the historically contingent modality of this self-destructive tendency is echoed when Heller addresses György Márkus’s positive appraisal of the orientative function of philosophy conceived as enlightenment:

The critical employment of philosophy can have and often has a destructive power, it can orient the recipient as much in the direction of anti-enlightenment as in that of enlightenment. […] To return to one of my previous thoughts: enlightenment can be also nihilistic, destructive and so on. (Heller, 2002: 31; emphasis added)

In this latter regard, Heller continues A Theory of Modernity, suggesting that the conceptualization of modernity’s dynamics as undialectical dialectics evinces two further decidedly different responses to the enlightenment: nihilism and fundamentalism.

After intimating the mere possibility of modernity’s dynamics exhibiting a self-destructive tendency, Heller re-commences her narrative from the beginning and addresses the enlightenment differently. She again refers to Hegel, but now to his contention that ‘infinite subjectivity will run amok if not united or sublated into thought, into the totality of the truth of the philosophical cum religious tradition’ (Heller, 1999: 45). In what I am calling Heller’s second version of undialectical dialectics, the salient differences that had been evinced between the two visions of the world (viz. the rationalistic and romantic enlightenments) are completely effaced. To show that the unrestrained dynamics of modernity are (not merely can be) self-destructive, Heller recounts that ‘the enlightenment’ – now referred to in the singular – began by contesting all forms of traditional socio-cultural distinctions in the name of the principle of universality. Its destructive tendency, she claims, ‘reaches its limit if there is nothing left to deconstruct, for nothing remains outside. If there is nothing external, finitude as such becomes destroyed by the undialectical dialectics’ (Heller, 1999: 46; emphasis added).

While Heller is not suggesting that Western modernity has found this ontological limit, others may claim such in their appeal to a particular archē of the enlightenment as a constitutive norm determining the manner in which the world must be understood necessarily. This determinant conceptualization of the meaning of the Enlightenment (qua rationalist or romantic) yields one of two ends: either of maintaining that all values as such are vacuous in a disenchanted world or of stipulating that values of the present world are merely and negligibly contingent in contrast to absolute values found in the remote past or the future beyond (or elsewhere).

In the first instance, one is led to nihilism, to renouncing belief in the existence of meaningful value(s) tout court. ‘There is truth in the insight’, Heller claims, ‘that the end of enlightenment is nihilism. But if the end of enlightenment is nihilism, enlightenment as such is nihilism, for the tendency that leads to its fulfillment is “presencing” in every move of the dynamics of modernity as undialectical dialectics. This seems to be a logical problem, but it is very real, and not only in the language game of philosophy or cultural discourse’ (Heller, 1999: 46; emphasis added). The belief in the vacuity of all or some values is one possible consequence of enlightenment, but it is neither necessary nor the only one possible. Various forms of fundamentalism react against nihilism and, ‘[i]n fact, contemporary fundamentalism is the offspring of the nihilistic enlightenment. One absolute truth is artificially established on the ruins of the destroyed old truths, and their destroyers will be hailed as repositories of supreme wisdom’ (Heller, 1999: 47). In this manner, Heller suggests: ‘Undialectical dialectics negates destruction and becomes constructive’ (Heller, 1999: 47). ¹⁷

Just as Heller suggested the radical ‘choice between unreflected absolute presuppositions (which are indeed suspect) and absolutely no presuppositions’ precluded Hegel from considering ‘unfounded foundations’, so too does she imply the ontologization of the archai expressed in the enlightenment visions of the world lead to the dogmatic pursuit of their respective programs to the occlusion of a third option. In opposition to both nihilism and fundamentalism, this option – again, ‘C’ as it were – may consider the rationalistic and romantic enlightenments as actually opposed Weltanschauungen without recourse to speculative metaphysics. While these may be ideologically interpreted by their particular adherents, the critical philosopher may regard the enlightenment with normative skepticism as befits its undialectical dialectics. For Heller, this position seems to be exemplified by György Márkus.

III. Undialectical dialectics and normative skepticism

In the preceding sections, I have suggested that Heller’s account of undialectical dialectics evinces two dimensions – the one descriptive and sociological, and the other critically interpretive and philosophical. If one considers their respective dialectical positions of distinct archē as appeals to differing non-foundational foundations (or regulative principles), I contended, the actual oppositions among different speculative tendencies and practical orientations (e.g. the rationalist and romantic enlightenments) are thereby conceivable as dynamically antinomic, viz. with equal claims to subjective validity but only an empirically contingent claim to greater or lesser cultural approbation. This manner of describing the dynamics of modernity, however, exhibits a radically historicizing methodological skepticism about the sublation of the opposing claims it critically interprets as contingent from the perspective of the present. Dialectical philosophies of this kind abjure the suprahistorical form of consciousness tacitly supposed by (at least one interpretation of) Hegel’s methodology.

However, I have also indicated that – other than refraining from postulating the necessity of their sublation – A Theory of Modernity gives little account about the critical attitude apposite to construing the dynamics of modernity as undialectical dialectics. I now wish to suggest that this attitude is countenanced by the manner in which Heller interprets the philosophical practice of György Márkus. Surprisingly, at no point in her critical essay on the works of György Márkus does Heller use the term ‘dialectics’. This is noteworthy in itself, for Márkus is one of the most consistently dialectical of contemporary thinkers on at least the first interpretation of Heller’s account(s) of undialectical dialectics. Thus, before turning to consider Heller’s notion of ‘normative skepticism’, it will be helpful to briefly indicate in what respect Márkus is a dialectical thinker.

As does Heller, Márkus renounces prescient knowledge; he maintains that the paradoxical unity of cultural modernity and the actual opposition of its imbricated and irreconcilable Weltanschauungen ‘impl[ies] no less the radical openness of [cultural modernity’s] future: the persistence of its identity due to the continuity of its crisis, the maintenance of its structuration only through practices which, posited as innovative, not only change its concrete content, but also as much challenge as reconfirm its normative principles’ (Márkus, 2011b: 520). ¹⁸ In at least one of its cultural forms, philosophy may elucidate the culturally efficacious principles of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which differently structure the hierarchical orderings of various meaning-creating and meaning-transmitting practices. ¹⁹ To this end, Márkus distinguishes these actually opposing world-views in an ideal-typical manner, suggesting that their actual contours are negotiated in perpetuity through their heterochthonic empirical influence upon one another.

A philosophy of Western cultural modernity such as Márkus’s, however, need not ontologize the ‘hard core’ methodological assumptions of the programs associated with these Weltanschauungen (and in their various hybridizations), for neither of these visions of the world is simply reducible to (nor identical with) the cultural sphere it most esteems (of the sciences or the arts). Márkus thereby avoids conceiving modernity in accordance with Heller’s second version of undialectical dialectics, despite exhibiting a clear preference for the legacy of the Enlightenment. Minimally, the negative heuristics of each program are conceivable as delimited by non-conscious patterns of institutionalized exclusion from the effective traditions of the different cultural spheres, iterations that may only be defended as regulative principles of demarcation on the condition of their subjective validity and contingent cultural efficacy, and which assumes their inviolability until such time as a better program is offered. This neither deprives the positive heuristics of their normative status and orienting function nor implies that the ends pursued function as constitutively determined by the world-view in a practical sense alone. Considered culturologically, Enlightenment and Romanticism are totalizing visions of the world for their participating advocates, which may be described and critically assessed in terms of their ability to realize the stated objectives posited as valuable in themselves according to the autonomous norms of their constitutive practices.

When introducing the notion of ‘normative skepticism’, Heller nominally stipulates its three aspects with respect to Márkus’s methodological assumptions. To this end, she interprets him as presupposing:

Philosophy cannot do anything with contingency. [1] Philosophy cannot know or understand contingent events, factors and the like. This is why I call Márkus’ philosophy normative. Yet [2] the same (normative) philosophy has to acknowledge contingency, as the main factor of social, political, cultural life. This is why I speak of Márkus’ skepticism. The two combined I term normative skepticism. True philosophy is normative, yet [3] the contemporary philosopher has to reflect upon his normative philosophy with skepsis; in this, secondary sense, skepticism is also normative, for it is also via this secondary skepticism that the philosopher lives up to his/her responsibilities. I came to this conclusion after having read Márkus’ recent works in a single reading. (Heller, 2002: 15–16) ²⁰

When Heller considers Márkus’s normative skepticism, she asks about (at least) two further issues directly related to contemporary philosophical practice in general: about how a particular philosopher’s critical attitude is exhibited by the existential commitment to a deliberately chosen methodology and about a particular cultural form of philosophy conceived as ‘orientation in thought’. ²¹ In this respect, the secondary sense of skepticism attempts to instantiate a homology between the critical attitude exhibited by the philosopher’s existential choice under the category of difference (i.e. to be a philosopher), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to the manner in which the objectivation of her or his work participates in and extends an effective cultural tradition. The remarkable consistency with which Márkus has produced his oeuvre in accordance with his conception of philosophy renders him an eminent candidate for testing the normative status of this homology. As Heller notes, Márkus’s concern with contemporary hermeneutics is for the tendency it betrays to refrain from making normative claims, either about the ends facilitated by engaging the historical tradition of philosophy or about how to construct an effective tradition that can meaningfully address ‘existential problems presumed to be universal’ in the wake of the deconstruction of pre-critical metaphysics. According to Márkus – I contend – philosophy has precariously languished as a distinct cultural genre since the natural sciences began to assert their autonomy in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and wrested cultural authority over matters of truth from divine revelation and systemic speculation. Whether philosophy can remain nevertheless an edifying and meaningful cultural practice is the question.

In the first part of her study, Heller argues that, for Márkus, a ‘truth claim and normativity cannot be divorced’ (Heller, 2002: 21). She then formulates her essential question for the first time, describing what I shall call a ‘cultural space of reasons’ as the mise en scène of philosophical discourse and practice.

… the modern mind prefers Leibniz’ proposition that all truths of facts are contingent (they could be otherwise). Would it follow from this that it is impossible to form true opinions or claim that certain opinions are true without too excessive self-delusion? […] This might involve dividing true opinions and opinions, delimiting the space within which a variety of true opinions compete with one another or even conducting conversations with each other. Those boundaries can be elastic, different for the members of different ‘sects’ […. Márkus] would prefer to establish a few common standards for a great variety of ‘sects’, and his own standard can, indeed, be accepted by various ‘sects’, since he voids it of all contents. Except one formal requirement: they should be normative, generalizing, consistent, that is in one word, they should exclude contingency. (Heller, 2002: 21)

For Heller, Márkus’s ‘normative skepticism’ rests on how Márkus countenances the founding of these ‘few common standards’, and how they thereby secure the relationship between rival claims to truth that are equally posited as normative. Following Kant, Heller suggests that dialectical philosophies are susceptible to construing this relationship in one of two ways: according to constitutive or regulative principles. Considered as undialectical dialectics, there is no necessary logical contradiction between maintaining that truth claims imply normativity, while simultaneously recognizing a plurality of inconsistent claims compete in a cultural space of reasons. That is, if one also renounces the claim to determinant judgment. It is this skeptical attitude that allows one to rationally reconstruct and delineate the elastic boundaries appertaining to an insuperable plurality of the enlightenment’s opposing tendencies. Heller’s mention of ‘excessive self-delusion’, therefore, is not merely rhetorical; it inquires whether Márkus’s normative skepticism can avoid reactionary fundamentalism in establishing ‘a few common standards for a great variety of “sects”’. ²²

With this question posed, Heller then identifies two instances wherein Márkus himself recognizes the unavoidable incursion of contingency into his normative claims. In one of his rare ventures into political philosophy (Markus, 1999), Heller suggests that Márkus’s argument regarding the inability to simultaneously and universally realize the norms implied by the modern concept(s) of freedom – viz. to exclude power – does not lead him to reject this project of the Enlightenment (as one might have expected); rather, it becomes the occasion to posit the value of freedom as a transcendent ideal that may be indefinitely approximated. By using the standards of the Enlightenment, Márkus posits, moderns can know – ‘with certainty’ she attributes to him – whether and how they are progressing towards the utopian ‘realm of freedom’. In ‘Antinomies of Culture’ (Markus, 2004), however, Heller maintains that Márkus is more skeptical about the indubitability of the normative standards of the Enlightenment. In this paper, he expressly discerns the chimeras of Romanticism and the Enlightenment Weltanschauungen, suggesting we moderns reconsider their idealized notions of ‘the good’ in light of their historical legacies so as to avoid their illusions in the future.

Having discerned in the interim that Márkus’s attitude seemingly vacillates – in respect of the inextricable values of freedom and the good – Heller re-assesses and clarifies her notion of ‘normative skepticism’ in the third section of her study. She vociferously asks again her question about the self-delusion of a philosopher. Here, the cultural space of reasons populated by the claims (or ‘true opinions’) of a plurality of philosophers recedes into the background, and the scope of Heller’s account is restricted to the perspective of the single individual, viz. to the philosopher as s/he exists as a contemporary participant to (and producer of works for) the cultural genres of philosophy. For Márkus, philosophy conceived as ‘orientation in thought’ selects the questions it will address from among ‘existential problems presumed to be universal’, and – as Heller interprets him – this cultural form of philosophy

can still provide our world with a certain meaning and diminish its conflicts, lessen its anxieties [but not eliminate them, I would add]. But this can happen, if (and only if) philosophers take upon themselves the responsibility that as a result of their theoretically well-founded considerations and from the perspective of certain chosen values, history can be construed to continue in this or that direction. (Heller, 2002: 28)

In light of this post-Kantian understanding of history, Heller poses her own essentially Kantian question to Márkus: assuming that – under contemporary conditions – philosophy can be orientative (even if not necessarily also for its recipients) for the philosopher himself, how is this possible? ²³ At this point, she inquires about both the choice of one’s orientative norms and values as well as their fallibility – not about perspectivism and fallibilism in general, but of the perspective and fallibility of the philosopher, of one who has chosen themselves as a philosopher under the category of difference.

When Heller asks about Márkus’s ‘self-interpretation as an ‘orientative’ philosopher’, she does not inquire about ‘a few common standards for a great variety of “sects”’ to the reproduction of a particular cultural form of philosophy conceived as ‘orientation in thought’. In other words, she does not ask Márkus about the fallibility of the historically contingent norms sustaining the re-production of philosophy as an autonomous cultural sphere. Her question concerns exclusively the dialectical relationship between the individual philosopher and her or his philosophy (which, for Heller, is secondary to the literary form of its objectivation); that is, between the philosophical personality, their chosen values, and how their value-commitments are expressed in practice. The question of fallibility thereby introduces not merely the temporal-historical dimension in respect of the contingency of the cultural salience of one’s value commitments; it also identifies an ethical – indeed, moral – dimension of Márkus’s philosophical practice, ‘if’, as she suggests, ‘one interprets “moral” in a broad manner’ (Heller, 2002: 28). The ‘moral’ of Heller’s story is both a subjective and existential claim under the guise of a series of rhetorical questions:

If our understanding of the world (which is connected to our values and norms, even if ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘Is’) must always account for contingency, the throw of the dice, is it not normative to also expand our skepticism to our norms? Not insofar that one admits to have chosen them but insofar as one admits their fallibility? Is not the greatest paradox of modern philosophy that one takes responsibility for norms, values, narratives, demonstrations and truths in the absolute awareness of their fallibility? Is it not entirely secondary what kind of genre a philosopher practices? Is this attitude not what normative skepticism is mainly about? (p. 29)

Heller’s question about fallibilism is a question not merely of the philosopher’s possible misunderstanding of the existential problems s/he presumes to be universal; nor even of the potential obsolescence of the cultural orientation towards the ‘realm of freedom’ and/or the good; nor still of the prospective loss of philosophy as a distinct cultural form. The question about fallibility is one about how to confront the possibility of becoming an ‘existential failure’. Must a radically historicizing yet normative skepticism avow fallibility – in a paradoxically normative fashion – in order to maintain the unity of life-conduct and philosophy, i.e. to avoid becoming an existential failure; or, rather, is it precisely the demand for this unity about which we must remain skeptical of its claim to normative universality? And, in its eventuality: would such a failure imply the irresponsibility of the individual, or are there not social and cultural forces of production that inhibit the feasibility of this ideal in spite of its continued validity? If the latter is the case, is it not possible that the pendulum(s) of modernity would need to be re-calibrated in order to render the transformation of contingency into destiny a reasonable and valid norm for those who have chosen themselves under the category of difference as philosophers?

IV. By way of conclusion

Nearly four decades before her essay for Márkus, Ágnes Heller wrote a paper for a Festschrift devoted to her mentor, György Lukács. As I previously mentioned, in that early essay, Heller postulated the normative unity of life-conduct and Weltanschauung, of subject and thought. ²⁴ Heller’s early conviction in the Marxist grand narrative of history permitted her to affirm that this normative unity was constitutive of the rationalization of life in accordance with the proper ends of humanity. In this, she opposes ‘the moral mission of the philosopher’ to Lukács’s conversion by faith as attested in ‘The Moral Mission of the Communist Party’. There, Lukács had suggested:

Genuine revolutionaries, and above all Lenin, distinguish themselves from such petty-bourgeois utopianism by their lack of illusions. They know what can be expected, not only of an economy ruined in the World War, but also – and above all – of human beings who, under capitalism, have been spiritually corrupted and depraved and indoctrinated with egoism. However, freedom from illusions never leads the true revolutionary to lose heart or to despair; his understanding of the situation as it really is serves rather to strengthen his faith in the world-historical mission of the proletariat. This faith can never be shaken, no matter how long it takes to realize it, no matter how often it is beset by adverse circumstances. It accepts all these disruptions and obstructions, but never allows them to distract him from his goal and the indications of its imminence. (Lukács, 1975: 64–5)

My suspicion, which Heller may or may not corroborate, is that it is precisely this kind of infallibilist attitude exhibited by Lukács that Heller implicitly contests in developing a notion of normative skepticism capable of conceptualizing modernity as undialectical dialectics; and, that she does so both by abjuring the Hegelian-inspired eschatological vision of world history and by remaining skeptical about essentially fallible normative claims that are advanced from the individual’s contingent and conditioned perspective. While ostensibly posing questions to her friend from the years of dialogue – who also had claimed emphatically that ‘the moral mission of the philosopher’ (in 1965) is a preposterous notion – Heller shows that she has self-critically accepted the validity of Márkus’s initial criticism (albeit indirectly and performatively), while paradoxically intimating: ‘it is my friend Gyuri who confirms rather than refutes my sometimes obscure ideas about the moral mission of the philosopher’ (Heller, 2002: 32).