Abstract
This is an important book. Scholars of Agnes Heller’s work will find it exceptionally illuminating. Theorists who would utilize the succession of critical theory that runs from Marx through Lukács and the Budapest School will find in it a treatment of Heller’s distinctive critical theory previously unavailable in any literature. More urgently, this study is so important because as Ward identifies Heller’s array of interpretative tools, she also employs them in an argument which ends up placing Heller’s Marx on the developmental spectrum of modern liberalism. Such placement might seem to contradict Marx’s self-assessment. It might horrify generations of Marxists at least as much as it confirms the feints of conservative reactionaries. But this is no reason to shy from the possibility. In fact, by reading Heller and situating Heller’s Marx as she does, Ward recuperates proposals that could motivate contemporary liberal states to face the enchantment with totalitarianism harbored within them. Ward argues for a Hellerian reading of Marx that privileges his philosophical anthropology – with its central feature of a human being with such radical, transformative needs that only freedom as our supreme, uncompromised value can steady them – against the standard Marxian reduction of values and attachments to the model of production. Through Heller, Ward uncovers Marx’s enduring contribution to emergent articulations of modern liberalism, embedded as they are in enlightenment theory and its discontents. Through Marx, Ward arrives at Heller’s mainspring: the good person who has intentionally authorized her own moral agency. Heller’s good person is mature enough to embrace contingency, to cope with dissatisfaction, and to put critical reason to use in maintaining the complexity of personality and of the liberal-democratic state.
Agnes Heller’s (b.1929) initial renown came as a student of Lukács and an influential member of the Budapest School. Heller linked the Budapest School’s reconsideration of Marx’s humanism with a commitment to existential contingency, especially as she found it in Kierkegaard, along with the principles of moral autonomy she took from Kant. As her work developed and her appreciation of Marx grew subtler and more diagnostic, Heller marshaled a unique ethics of personality and an operative theory of modernity from her combination of these same commitments. Heller has now published over 30 books, along with voluminous academic papers and public interventions on topics from comedy to Brexit. At 88, she continues to lecture frequently, often at the request of international student and social justice groups. Despite her prominence, Heller’s philosophical system has received comparatively little sustained analysis, with only a handful of book-length studies and essay collections devoted to elements of it. Although Ward’s book pivots on Heller’s lifelong engagement ‘with and against’ Marx, presenting a discerning take on Marx in the process, the book does so with attentiveness to the organization of Heller’s overall project. Ward has structured the book to lay bare the internal joints of Heller’s system, steadily revealing how the theory of need in Marx and in Heller’s critical appropriation of it (Chapters 1 and 2) develops into Heller’s treatment of affects and feeling (Chapter 3), which are grounded in her ontology of everyday life and its establishment of dynamic, regulative value (Chapter 4). These personal and social elements come together in Heller’s theories of modernity (Chapter 5) and of rationality (Chapter 6). The notions of dissatisfaction and critique around which Ward locates Heller’s theory of modernity allow her to examine Heller’s take on ethical and political justice (Chapter 7) as well as the good life beyond justice and formal duty (Chapter 8). Throughout and in a standalone conclusion, Ward clarifies Heller’s initiative in terms of her confrontation with Marx.
As Ward writes, Heller’s Marx is more philosopher than social scientist. Marx’s messianic grand narrative, his romanticism, his more essentialist glosses on the human species-essence, and his fixation on the forces of production as sovereign drivers of historical advancement – all are dated and dogmatic, Heller is (and was) always ready to say. But they are only aspects of the humanistic well from which, Heller says, she never ceases to draw. Marx provides Heller with a normative standard, by insisting on the ongoing perfection of human powers and the limitlessness of human personality. As Ward cites, Heller’s Marx expresses the ‘most beautiful aspiration of mature humanity, an aspiration that belongs to our Being’ (p. 49).
According to Heller and Ward, Marx was also the first to appreciate the paradox of modernity, as the epoch in which individuals begin to concretize the contingency that can be realized as human freedom. Modernity is the first period people understand historically, and likewise ourselves within it; modern people and societies, we find, have no naturally determined or supernaturally given destiny. Marx’s proto-existentialist notion of freedom leads to a philosophical elaboration of human wholeness (p. 33) and to an implicit but far-reaching theory of human needs as a special kind of anthropological wealth, worth categorically more than any monetary denomination (p. 38). Marx presents a serviceable theory of alienation, which partially accounts for the epistemic and emotional breach experienced by individuals caught up in capitalist relations of production (p. 40). According to Heller, Marx’s identification of modern alienation enables him to discover, in the clutch of estrangement, the stretch between particular and universal values, and therefore our opportunity to choose universal values consciously – that is, morally.
So according to Heller, at the radicle of Marx’s production model a vigorous alternative appears, in which individual personalities acknowledge our accidental relationships with social institutions, and in our restlessness, we begin to express our desire for new ways of life (p. 181). This restless dissatisfaction is the yearning for freedom, or a stirring of freedom itself, which will be contained by no social formation, socialist or otherwise. While the lesser part of Marx’s work was devoted to imagining a utopia in which the antinomies of capitalism are overcome, the better part of the early Budapest School’s work applies itself to unburdening Marx’s humanistic philosophy of its scientistic strain, and then using Marxist demands to address the contradictions of state capitalism and really existing socialism. Heller has never abandoned the motivating spirit of this enterprise.
Heller realizes that Marx’s freely associating, many-sided individual (who famously fishes in the afternoon and criticizes after dinner without becoming a fisherman or a critic) is best understood as a ‘guiding norm for social action’, that is, as a regulative idea (p. 49). Ward shrewdly detects Heller’s transformation of Marx’s ‘radical needs’ into a regulative orientation point for the free (dissatisfied, critical, modern) society. Ward examines Heller’s appropriation of Marx’s person ‘rich in need’ as a standard for evaluating action, and at its other pole, as an expression of anthropological abundance, demanding a parallel reevaluation of human feeling, reason, and indeed of human nature. With Heller, Ward identifies an undeveloped anthropology of feelings in Marx. To demonstrate how Heller’s position remains faithful to Marx’s concern with the paradoxes of freedom for every individual (pp. 55ff), Ward provides a nuanced treatment of Heller’s philosophical anthropology, which Heller develops far beyond Marx’s expressed concern.
I claimed at the outset that Ward places Heller’s Marx on the spectrum of democratic liberalism. In describing this accomplishment, I abbreviated an argument that Ward makes in detail across several chapters dealing not with liberalism, per se, but with its broad theoretical underpinnings. These intellectual supports connect the political expressions of freedom and democracy with their psychological and conceptual treatment as evaluative beliefs and socially shared values. In this organization of modern initiatives, existentialist trends implicit in Kantian critical idealism become the theatre of social development in Hegelian phenomenology and then the relentless individual responsibility at the center of French existentialism, which is turned against Kantian formal duties. Likewise, with a broader view on the trends that coalesce in different demands for liberal-democratic association, we can appreciate how the American and French revolutions worked to encode autonomy and democracy as rights, ultimately underwritten by a state that citizens had to protect from its own possible autocracy.
Another distinction of Ward’s analysis is her lucid account of the evaluative and ethical dimensions woven into different understandings of the political as a condition of individual flourishing, and of the liberal state as a negotiation between the diverse principles that come to characterize modernity. This scrutiny allows her to clarify why, for Heller, Marx’s failure to grasp how moral motivation might matter for liberation movements can be remedied, in part, by returning to Marx’s philosophical allegiances.
Heller charges that Marx overlooks the value of rights and the political-democratic concept of freedom. Nonetheless, as Ward uncovers, for Heller ‘Marx was indeed the most loyal heir to the Enlightenment, sharing all of its values, even if not all its tenets’ (p. 41, quoting Heller in ‘Marx and the “Liberation of Humankind’”). Indeed, Heller’s Marx creates for himself a perfectly modern bind: ‘on the basis of his own account of alienation…one of the central promises of modernity appears, namely, the ability of human beings to appropriate universal norms and species-wealth in a conscious and deliberative way’ (p. 41). But Marx looks to overcome alienation, or the conflict between universal and individual values, ‘by way of an absolute anthropological revolution’. Along with this fateful if not entirely fatal reification of historical contingency, Marx repudiates the rhetoric of political rights as a quantification of human freedom; he sees them as a case of alienation.
Heller will return to Marx’s refusal of merely formal duties and of the formal concept of justice, to avoid what she sees as the Habermasian ‘ethics of duty’ (p. 194). At the same time, Heller replaces messianic history with the fully existentialist vision of the willful personality, able to make use of the strain between where we are thrown and where we should like to be. In making the exchange of a regulative norm for a grand narrative, Heller maintains a keen sense for the theoretical supports that Marx synthesizes: ‘“The formulation of the development of all individual abilities and capacities comes from the tradition of liberalism” [and] John Stuart Mill, who Marx in fact despised, “came precisely to the same conclusion” only through a different route. In this reading Marx’s description of communism can therefore be conceptualized as the “freedom of liberalism realized in full for everyone”’ (p. 177).
Ward employs a range of Heller’s writings spanning from among the earliest to the most recent to make her case for Heller’s appropriation of Marx’s notion of anthropological wealth. She brilliantly conjoins this motivation to Heller’s early theory of instincts, to her central theory of personality, and to her political contributions in Beyond Justice. In her struggle with and against Marx, Ward maintains, Heller creates the axis of her own system: the image of each person as the site of conflicting genetic and cultural a prioris or givens, which we must work to dovetail but can never harmonize fully. The effort to bring together inborn and cultural givens allows for existential self-choice, without which there can be no autonomy, and it accounts for a perpetual tension or dissatisfaction, with which the modern person is tasked to live. Heller’s integrated, mature personality is the psychological aspect of the relational entity Heller studies as the subject of modern social arrangements, who flourishes within Heller’s pluralistic political account, and who can be studied in terms of Heller’s theory of everyday life as the ‘primary sphere of social ontology’.
Ward appreciates a subtlety in Heller’s account of the dynamic relationships people establish between needs, feelings, and values, which is lacking in Marx. Yet she also works to highlight the parallel between Heller’s portrayal of emotions as transformed affects, and Marx’s notion of radical needs, which are sublimated in cognitive interpretation. For both Heller and Marx, emotions may be universally experienced, but they are idiosyncratically expressed. This is because the instincts and affects that gave rise to emotions have been channeled and irreversibly altered by their assimilation. Feelings in Heller and radical needs in Marx are themselves already forms of communication and something we communicate about; they are refined sociability and are a means of socialization (p. 73). Likewise for both Heller and Marx, we can become alienated from our potential wealth of feeling, in particular when we are only partially involved in determining the range of our involvements. This is the sort of alienation that modern life inevitably produces, and that the politics of redemption, or totalitarianism, is so adept at exploiting. To the degree that modern states disavow alienated anthropological wealth, they remain vulnerable to the seductions of authoritarian movements, which claim to have identified the true causes of frustration and promise to relieve it.
I will mention one more among the many merits of this book. In the theory of feelings that she develops into a model of personality, Heller renders the action of learning to feel with an explanatory force yet untapped in the philosophical literature. As I indicated, Ward shows how Heller’s emotions develop out of Marx’s account of radical needs. Both are formerly but irrecoverably affects, transformed by interpretative cognitive activities. We sublimate and channel affects, not destroying them, but regulating them in the process. As such, we express our anger, sadness, and joy distinctively. Our emotional lives bespeak a fundamental self-adjustment and the capacity to continue adjusting. Feelings are the expressions of our involvements and our interpretations of those involvements. In different descriptions of her theory of modernity, Heller portrays modernity, with its social division of labor, as opening an unprecedented realm for human feeling, which might parallel our limitless capacity for it. For all its failings, modernity brings the occasion for individuals to be less reactive and more reflective; it allows people self-consciously to create themselves, by selecting the practices they consciously value (pp. 75–9).
Heller avoids both the Adornian forecast of damaged life and later critical theorists’ cynicism about the colonization of the lifeworld. She goes beyond the Habermasian consensus ideal because, as she argues, our recognition of others cannot depend on whether they can rationally explain their needs, or even on our rational suppositions about their needs, but ought to be validated unconditionally according to the orienting regulative principle of human perfectibility – or anthropological wealth geared toward a culturally embedded interpretation of the human Good. Ward shows how Heller’s critical theory incorporates Habermas’s notion of the ideal communication society (pp. 188–98). Based as it is on her theories of feelings and personality, though, Heller supplants the ideal communication deduced as a transcendental-pragmatic context of discourse, with ‘conscious value preferences towards which individuals orient’ (p. 190). For Heller, individuals choose themselves in and through their evaluations, much as Aristotle’s virtuous people become themselves in and through deliberative ethical action. Contra Habermas, this allows Heller to argue for a principled politics, fully felt and fully lived by modern actors, to paraphrase Ward. The position allows Heller to explain the morality and profound existential commitment that stimulates political action. And as Ward so strikingly argues, Heller’s position prompts us to learn to feel dissatisfaction as a courier of the freedom we must work to advance.
Ward is an adept guide into Heller’s thinking and forceful interlocutor for those who are already taken up with it. Her book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in Heller and in alternatives to the Frankfurt line of critical theory. It will prove valuable also for those concerned with how, as Marx intended, the ideological trappings of freedom might cease to stand against the free development of individual personalities and collaborative alliances.