| Ágnes Heller | |
| Birth Date: | 12 May 1929 |
| Birth Place: | Budapest, Hungary |
| Death Place: | Balatonalmádi, Hungary |
Ágnes Heller (12 May 1929 – 19 July 2019) was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.[1]
Ágnes Heller was born on 12 May 1929, to Pál Heller and Angéla "Angyalka" Ligeti. They were a middle-class Jewish family.[2] During World War II her father used his legal training and knowledge of German to help people get the necessary paperwork to emigrate from Nazi Europe. In 1944, Heller's father was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he died before the war ended. Heller and her mother managed to avoid deportation.
With regard to the influence of the Holocaust on her work, Heller said:
I was always interested in the question: How could this possibly happen? How can I understand this? And this experience of the holocaust was joined with my experience in the totalitarian regime. This brought up very similar questions in my soul-search and world investigation: how could this happen? How could people do things like this? So I had to find out what morality is all about, what is the nature of good and evil, what can I do about crime, what can I figure out about the sources of morality and evil? That was the first inquiry. The other inquiry was a social question: what kind of world can produce this? What kind of world allows such things to happen? What is modernity all about? Can we expect redemption?[3]
In 1947, Heller began to study physics and chemistry at the University of Budapest. She changed her focus to philosophy, however, when her boyfriend at the time urged her to listen to the lecture of the philosopher György Lukács, on the intersections of philosophy and culture. She was immediately taken by how much his lecture addressed her concerns and interests in how to live in the modern world, especially after the experience of World War II and the Holocaust.
Heller joined the Communist Party that year, 1947, while at a Zionist work camp[4] and began to develop her interest in Marxism. However, she felt that the Party was stifling the ability of its adherents to think freely due to its adherence to democratic centralism . She was expelled from it for the first time in 1949, the year that Mátyás Rákosi came into power and ushered in the years of Stalinist rule.
After 1953 and the installation of Imre Nagy as Prime Minister, Heller was able to safely undertake her doctoral studies under the supervision of Lukács, and in 1955 she began to teach at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest.
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was the most important political event of her life, for at this time she saw the effect of the academic freedoms of Marxist critical theory as dangerous to the entire political and social structure of Hungary. Heller saw the uprising as confirming her ideas that what Marx really means for the people is to have political autonomy and collective determination of social life.
Lukács, Heller and other critical theorists emerged from the Revolution with the belief that Marxism and socialism needed to be applied to different nations in individual ways, effectively questioning the role of the Soviet Union in Hungary's future. These ideas set Heller on an ideological collision course with the new Moscow-supported government of János Kádár: Heller was again expelled from the Communist Party and she was dismissed from the university in 1958 for refusing to indict Lukács as a collaborator in the Revolution. She was not able to resume her research until 1963, when she was invited to join the Sociological Institute at the Hungarian Academy as a researcher (Tormey 4–18) (Grumley 5–15).
From 1963 can be seen the emergence of what would later be called the "Budapest School", a philosophical forum that was formed by Lukács to promote the renewal of Marxist criticism in the face of practiced and theoretical socialism. Other participants in the Budapest School included together with Heller her second husband Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihály Vajda and some other scholars with the looser connection to the school (such as András Hegedüs, István Eörsi, János Kis and György Bence).
Heller's work from this period, concentrated on themes such as what Marx means to be the character of modern societies; liberation theory as applied to the individual; the work of changing society and government from "the bottom up," and affecting change through the level of the values, beliefs and customs of "everyday life".
Until the events of the 1968 Prague Spring, the Budapest School remained supportive of reformist attitudes towards socialism. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces and the crushing of dissent, however, the School and Heller came to believe that the Eastern European regimes were entirely corrupted and that reformist theory was apologist. Heller explains in her interview with Polony that:
the regime just could not tolerate any other opinion; that is what a totalitarian regime is. But a totalitarian regime cannot totalize entirely, it cannot dismiss pluralism; pluralism exists in the modern world, but it can outlaw pluralism. To outlaw pluralism means that the Party decided which kind of dissenting opinion was allowed. That is, you could not write something without it being allowed by the Party. But we had started to write and think independently and that was such a tremendous challenge against the way the whole system worked. They could not possibly tolerate not playing by the rules of the game. And we did not play by the rules of the game.
This view was completely incompatible with Kadar's view of Hungary's political future after the Revolution of 1956. According to an interview with Heller in 2010[5] in the German newspaper Jungle World, she thought that political and criminal processes after 1956 were antisemitic.
After Lukács died in 1971, the School's members were victims of political persecution, were made unemployed through their dismissal from their university jobs, and were subjected to official surveillance and general harassment. Rather than remain as dissidents, Heller and her husband the philosopher Ferenc Fehér, along with many other members of the core group of the School, chose exile in Australia in 1977.
Heller and Fehér encountered what they regarded as the sterility of local culture and lived in relative suburban obscurity close to La Trobe University in Melbourne. They assisted in the founding of Thesis Eleven in 1980, and its development into a leading Australian journal of social theory and forum for "politically independent" left wing thought.[6]
As described by Tormey, Heller's mature thought during this time period was based on the tenets that can be attributed to her personal history and experience as a member of the Budapest School, focusing on the stress on the individual as agent; the hostility to the justification of the state of affairs by reference to non-moral or non-ethical criteria; the belief in "human substance" as the origin of everything that is good or worthwhile; and the hostility to forms of theorizing and political practice that deny equality, rationality and self-determination in the name of "our" interests and needs, however defined.
Heller and Fehér left Australia in 1986 to take up positions in The New School in New York City, where Heller held the position of Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Studies Program. Her contribution to the field of philosophy was recognized by the many awards that she received (such as the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Philosophy, Bremen, 1995) and the Szechenyi National Prize in Hungary, 1995 and the various academic societies that she served on, including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2006 she visited China for a week for the first time.
Heller researched and wrote prolifically on ethics, Shakespeare, aesthetics, political theory, modernity, and the role of Central Europe in historical events. From 1990, Heller was more interested in the issues of aesthetics in The Concept of The Beautiful (1998), Time Is Out of Joint (2002), and Immortal Comedy (2005).
In 2006, she was the recipient of the Sonning Prize,[7] in 2010 she was of three recipients of the Goethe Medal,[8] [9] and in 2014 she received the Wallenberg Medal.[10]
In 2010, Heller, with 26 other well known and successful Hungarian women, joined the campaign for a referendum for a female quota in the Hungarian legislature.[11]
Heller published internationally renowned works, including republications of her previous works in English, all of which are internationally revered by scholars such as Lydia Goehr (on Heller's The Concept of the Beautiful), Richard Wolin (on Heller's republication of A Theory of Feelings), Dmitri Nikulin (on comedy and ethics), John Grumley (whose own work focuses on Heller in Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History), John Rundell (on Heller's aesthetics and theory of modernity), Preben Kaarsholm (on Heller's A Short History of My Philosophy), among others.
Heller was professor emeritus at the New School for Social Research in New York.[12] She worked actively both academically and politically around the globe. She spoke at the Imre Kertész College in Jena, Germany, together with Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,[13] at the Tübingen Book Fair in Germany speaking together with Former German Justice Minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin,[14] and other venues worldwide.
Heller married fellow philosopher István Hermann in 1949.[15] Their only daughter, Zsuzsanna "Zsuzsa" Hermann, was born on 1 October 1952. After their divorce in 1962, Heller married Ferenc Fehér in 1963,[16] also a member of Lukács' circle. Heller and Fehér had a son, György Fehér (1964). Ferenc Fehér died in 1994.
Ágnes Heller mentions that prominent Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer was related to her family on her mother's side. Heller is second-cousin of 20th century contemporary composer György Ligeti.[17]
In 2018 November, Heller participated in the first international conference on Eastern European Marxist Critical Theory in Sichuan University for one week. While going for a swim in Lake Balaton on 19 July 2019, Heller drowned in Balatonalmádi.[18] [19]
In 2023, the University of Innsbruck named a new building on its campus after the philosopher: Ágnes-Heller-Haus.[23]