ACCORDING to the German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas, life was radiating from Agnes Heller until the last moment. “Her brain could never get tired.” The Hungarian philosopher passed away on July 19. Her friends and students around the world who celebrated her 90th birthday in May and paid tributes to her prolific life will miss her greatly.
Professor Agnes Heller had taught at the New School for Social Research, New York; La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia; the University of Szeged, Hungary; and the University of Budapest, Hungary. She was a Marxist communist, a critic of existing socialism, and a dissident in the 1960s. In the last years of her life, she became a critic of the European autocratic systems, the “illiberal democracies”, as she called them. She always positioned herself in the controversies of our times.
In the last interview before her death, she spoke about her multiple identities: “Hungarian, Jew, woman and philosopher. I stand up permanently only for the last one, philosophy.” She was first of all a philosopher whose most important influences were, apart from Georg Lukács and classical German philosophy, Habermas, the polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt and the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. She was a core member of the Lukács School, which was formed after Lukács’ return from exile in the Soviet Union to Budapest in 1945. Lukács wrote: “Very important: contacts and conversations. My first students. Discover myself through teaching…. Hence gradually: a highly promising young generation.” On Lukács’ 80th birthday, in 1965, Agnes Heller wrote an article on the Ethical Mission of the Philosopher: “What the philosopher ‘represents’ is nothing else than the unity of thinking and behaviour, world view and ethics, the totality of theory and action. Being a philosopher is a representative of what exists in everyday life.”
Agnes Heller speaks about events of her life in two autobiographical interview books, where she is introduced as, what Isaac Deutscher calls, “the universalist non-Jewish Jew”. While she grew up with the discrimination and the persecution that was characteristic of pre-Second World War Hungary, her father, other relatives and many of her childhood friends died in Auschwitz and other concentrations camps.
In 1945, the first summer after the War in a Zionist summer camp in Hungary, she met her first husband, Istvan Hermann.When they decided to apply to the university instead of going to Israel, they were removed from the Zionist organisation. Agnes Heller joined the Communist Party in 1947 after she saw the performance of Moliere’s play George Dandin and met the communist actor, Tamás Major.
Agnes Heller was admitted to university in 1947 to study physics and she attended Lukács’ course on the “Philosophy of Culture from Kant to Hegel”. She fell in love with philosophy and decided to devote her life “to understand what I don’t understand even today”. Lukács’ classes were wonderful, “where we could elaborate our ideas any time”. “He [Lukács] found pleasure in anybody who could interestingly and intelligently contradict him.” In October 1956, at the time of the Hungarian uprising, Lukács became Minister of Culture in the Imre Nagy government. After the failure of the Imre Nagy government, Lukács along with other members of the government was sent to exile in Romania and was released only when the Italian Communist Party protested against his arrest.
Agnes Heller was sacked from the university and from the Communist Party, and her passport was taken away. Her articles were not published for five years. She took up a job in a secondary school where she taught Hungarian literature. Agnes Heller could overcome the isolation and the depression of the memories of the War by the development of a new friendship circle, new friends, Gyorgy Markus and Mihaly Vajda, and her second husband, Ferenc Feher. The name Lukács School stuck to them after Lukács spoke about his students by this name to The Times Literary Supplement. Lukács’ intention was to create the renaissance of Marxism with this informal group of students.
In 1963, Agnes Heller could finally get a job in the Institute of Sociology. There was an exciting cultural and political upheaval in the 1960s in Eastern Europe, which was marked in Hungary by Miklos Jancso’s films, absurd plays, and the publication of Janos Pilinszky’s and Sandor Weores’ poetry. Agnes Heller was first invited to Korcula in 1965 to the workshop of the Marxist Praxis group. This is where she first met Habermas and the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse. When in August 1968 the Warsaw Pact countries entered Czechoslovakia, Agnes Heller and her friends, Maria and Gyorgy Markus were in Korcula and protested against the intervention and expressed their support to “socialism with a human face”. The protest was published, and this led to their exile in the 1970s.
Agnes Heller’s philosophy evolved around the question of modernity. Her book The Renaissance Man (1967), with the idea of a “dynamic man” , deals with the theory of the modern man, the birth of the individual that also marks the creation of the term “humanity”. In her work, the contradictions and tensions that characterise individual fate and the universal change of society contain the enigma of the future evolution of humanity.
Agnes Heller’s Everyday Life (1970) is connected to her work on ethics and anthropology, and this is what is called “earthly” by the Hungarian philosophers Erzsebet N. Rozsa and Sandor Radnoti because of its proximity to what “real” life is. Everyday Life maintains that philosophy as part of culture has to be made accessible to everybody to give sense to life and be understood as a common, joint legacy of the human species. In Agnes Heller’s theory of everyday life, the way of life and its two main elements of individual consciousness, happiness and freedom, play a crucial role.
In the 1970s there were a number of experiments with the transformation of everyday life and the “normal”, “conservative” forms of family. Communes were formed in attics, basements and rented flats. Agnes Heller and Mihaly Vajda wrote about the advantages of bringing up children in the communes, where it is “decisive change that not only its parents ‘related by blood’ take care of the child, but each adult individual and older child of the commune”.
Ten years ago, Steven Aschheim, an Israeli philosopher, wrote about Agnes Heller and her friends: “I first met her in Philadelphia at a conference about Hannah Arendt where in the circle of Hungarian intellectuals and their friends from the New School of Social Research she was clearly the key personality. The dedication and excitement of this circle was striking and it became contagious. These days there is no limit to official practitioners of philosophy, but Agnes Heller and her friends were very different. They are real intellectuals, passionately devoted to the exchange of ideas who are convinced that they have a place and an important role in the world.”
Agnes Heller has written how she and Istvan Hermann went on walking tours on weekends and visited concerts, theatre and the opera. Such activities were present in Agnes Heller’s life until the very end. One would come across her on walking tours of the Buda hills, at theatre or music performances. Towards the end of June, a month before her death, I met her at the performance of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods in the MUPA, one of the modern concert halls in Budapest. Her book on Friedrich Nietzsche and Wagner’s Parsifal is well known. Agnes Heller died of cardiac arrest when she was swimming in the Balaton, a large lake in Hungary. It was a poetic death, perhaps. She went out to swim and never came back.
Margit Koves teaches Hungarian language and literature at Delhi University.
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