'Everyday Life:' a sui generis ontology? Some considerations about Agnes Heller's theory of daily life
Gabriella Paolucci
“Everyday Life:” a sui generis ontology?
Some considerations about Agnes Heller’s theory of daily life.
“Tomorrow is already today:” a re-evaluation of everyday life
Everyday Life² was published at a time in which the interest shown by the social sciences in the everyday dimension of life was rapidly increasing.² Historiography, philosophy, psychology, and sociology all began to embrace everyday life as a new area on which to focus theoretical attention and empirical research. It would be interesting to analyse the reasons underlying this renewed attention for a theme that had long been misunderstood and often denigrated, but this would take us too far away from the topic on which I will be focusing here. Suffice it to say that the period during which Everyday Life was published was characterised by the end of the crisis of the ‘grand narratives’ and of the eschatological vision of historical becoming. As has already been widely recognised, it was at this time that the criticism of a linear and progressive vision of history broke out of the confines of philosophical debate to spread at a much wider mass level and become one of the most widespread leitmotivs of collective political action.
The loss in legitimisation to which the philosophy of progress and its effects were subjected led unavoidably to a revision of the underpinnings of the modern political project. This latter was centred on an emphasis on the future, viewed as the dimension in which all ends
¹ Heller, A., A mindernapi élet, Budapest, Akadémai Kiado, 1970.
² Douglas, J. D., Understanding everyday life, Chicago, Aldine Pub. C., 1970.
would be realised, with a consequent devaluation of the present, and from which emerged an increasingly sharp imbalance between paths and objectives, and ends and means. However, the collective movements of the sixties and seventies against the status quo reintroduced the idea of 'becoming in-the-present', and this began to take on its own stature as a political project that was not necessarily dependent on realisations located in the future. In addition, the loss of the symbolic power of the future also injected life into projectual forms that were less rigidly teleological, and which were more highly focused on the possibilities that the 'here and now offered'. As a result, it was natural to take on its reorientation of the telos towards the present would shift the attention of History onto everyday life, from macro social changes to the individual, private and subjective dimension of change. As Heller wrote in 1980 in A Theory of History, if there is no 'tomorrow' that is already today, there is no tomorrow at all." This change in the political projectual horizons sparked off the creating and proliferating of research directions that were therefore concentrated on everyday life – at this point no longer marked by the negative connotation that had it singled out since it had come into being, at the onset of bourgeois society, and now viewed as a sphere crucial for the analysis of social change.
Heller's theory of everyday life finds its rightful place in this environment, already extremely rich with prominent theoretical structures thanks to the Marxist school, which Hungarian philosophy still followed at the time, but thanks also – as is widely recognised – to the theories put forward by phenomenology.
3 Although Agnes Heller has consistently claimed that there are no theoretical breaks in her work I believe, in line with other scholars, that a radical discontinuity can be perceived in her recent work with respect to that of her earlier publications (also following this line of argument, of Rivero, A. Agnes Heller politics and philosophy, "Thesis Eleventh" 59,1999,17-28; Murphy, P., The existential stoic, "Thesis Eleventh" 59,1999,87-94). The first phase of Heller's work can be described as starting with her meeting with Lukács in 1940 and ending in 1977, when she left Hungary. This period was characterised by her work with the 'Budapest School' and her close relationship with Lukács. It was in this period that the Hellerian reading of Marx's "humanism" had such a strong cultural and political impact on the Western left wing. Everyday Life (1970) was one of the most important texts of this phase.
A theoretical project versus the ontologies of everyday life
The philosophical system underlying Agnes Heller's theoretical aims can be understood as a means for detracting the legitimacy of other alternative visions that hypostatised everyday life, rejecting their construction of a negative ontology of everyday life and their exalting of everyday life independently of its socio-historical definitions, as was typical of a particular branch of recent French sociology.
The first theoretical move that Heller made in this direction consisted in establishing the category of 'reproduction' as a fundamental concept of everyday life. This allowed for a notion based on both objective criteria (those objectively observable activities) that a subject carries out in order to self-reproduce) and subjective criteria (the processes of symbolic construction that attribute meaning to self-reproductive activities). In this way, it should be pointed out, a substantial difference with respect to phenomenology can be pinpointed, since the latter mainly used criteria that were symbolic.
The second move can be identified in the distinction that she drew between 'everyday life' as an analytical category and 'everyday life' as historically determined, a distinction that was fundamental to work by Heller as well as other Marxist authors, such as Lefebvre. The function of this distinction was clearly anti-ontological, in that it was capable of overcoming the flattening of the concept of everyday life onto the idea of everyday life as concretely determined, something that was close to the heart of the other alternative ontologies of everyday life, the most important theoretical example of this clearly being that of Heidegger's Being and Time. The conceptual instrument that Agnes Heller used to do this was the notion of 'alienation', and it also allowed her to make her third conceptual move: the developing of a critique of everyday life as this was conceived in capitalist society; towards, that is, the contemporary conditions, historically determined, of the self-reproduction of individuals.
4 Maffesoli, M., (1979) La conquista del presente, (Italian translation) Roma, Ianaa, 1983.
The fourth move was the least successful, but, it should be recognised, also the most difficult. Using Lukács' ideas in The Specificity of the Aesthetic as a guide, Heller developed a theory of dialectics between the everyday and the non-everyday, which took into account, on the one hand, the distinction between analytical category and the factual reality of everyday life and, on the other, incorporated her radical criticism of the alienation of capitalist society. The greatest theoretical problems with the Hellerian approach lie in precisely this last move, which clearly represented the decisive means by which she aimed to launch a victorious attack on the alternative approaches that were also rightfully defined as ontological. However, as I will go on to show, Heller's lack of success in constructing a solid theoretical relationship between the everyday and the non-everyday led her approach to be ranked with the other ontological approaches, even if it was sui generis.
Everyday life as self-reproduction
Let us begin with the first point. The notion of reproduction is one of the basic concepts of everyday life, as Heller explains at the beginning of the book:
If individuals are to reproduce society, they must reproduce themselves as individuals. We may define 'everyday life' as the aggregate of those individual reproduction factors which, pari passu, make social reproduction possible.
Her use of this definition of reproduction – which links the Hellerian proposal to that of other Marxist scholars like Henry Lefebvre, allows her the possibility of anchoring the analysis of everyday life to the possibility of living, to its reality, and of creating in this way a basis for a criticism of those theories that hypostatise everyday life as banality. It is as well to remember that, although the Marxist authors borrowed the concept of reproduction from a single source – from the Marxist analysis of capitalist society, the use of the category takes on different connotations for each of them.
Heller's own use of the term is probably the least literal with respect to the original Marxist formula, despite her respect for the substance. Even though in Marx the notion of reproduction, in its twofold form of 'simple reproduction' and 'extended reproduction', refers exclusively to relations of production, all the same, as for many concepts of the Marxist criticism of political economy, the implications of the term are such as to involve the entire set of social relations. Since for Marx relations of production are not exclusively economic, but are also social, the reproduction of relations of production is also the reproduction of society. As a result, the Marxist concept of reproduction includes the set of actions that determines the preservation and the reproduction of capitalist social structures.
Heller takes on this wider approach of the concept and applies it to the content and structure of the individual's everyday life, viewed as the moment of the most general reproduction of society:
Persons can reproduce society only by reproducing themselves as persons. But reproduction of society does not follow automatically from the self-reproduction of persons, in the same way as a breed of cattle is spontaneously reproduced by reproduction of its individual members. Man can reproduce himself only by discharging his social functions, and self-reproduction becomes the impetus to social reproduction.
1 Lukács, G., Aesthetik Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, Berlin, Verlag, 1964.
2 Heller, A., Everyday Life, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1984, (English translation of A mindennapi elet, 1970), 3.
In other words:
When we say that in everyday life the 'person' directly reproduces himself and his world (his local world) and, indirectly, the social aggregate, the 'wide world', we are using concepts in a very loose and figurative system.
It is useful to observe that Heller constantly underlines the historically determined nature of everyday self-reproduction, which should be understood as the set of activities of historical man, set in a concrete 'world'. In order to self-reproduce, the individual must, in every society, take possession of the world in which he lives. He must understand the system of habits and is called on to acquire the capacities and faculties that are asked of him in that world. It is during the process of appropriating this world that the subject objectives himself: he gives form to himself and to his world, a world that does not go beyond the limits of the immediate environment in which he lives each day. All the objectifications of everyday life therefore concern only the immediate environment and the single individual, otherwise they transcend the everyday. By contrast, all the abilities and 'affections' by which the individual transcends his immediate environment through their reference to the world in its totality, are acquired during the course of each day, on the terrane of everyday life. As we will see below, the emphasis that Heller places on the distinction between everyday objectivisa-
8 Ibid. 8.
9 (...) All the basic skills, the fundamental affects and attitudes by means of which I transcend my environment and which I correlate with the total world accessible to me, and with the aid of which I objectize myself, are appropriated by me in my everyday life. Here I only mention some of these fundamental affects and attitudes - courage (.), self-control (.), coping with problems (.), feeling pleasure in success; loyalty; gratitude; etc. So, what matters is not merely that the influence which I exert on my environment should continue tacency and covertly: what matters ios that, without the skills I am to appropriate in this environment, without objectivizing myself in everyday life, I would not be able to objectize my abilities in higher forms (Heller, A., Everyday Life, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1984). (English translation of A mindempi èle, 1970b, 7).
10 Constantly polemical with Heidegger's existentialist philosophy, Heller picks up and widens the thinking that her teacher György Lukacs developed in The Speciality of the Anatheme (Lukacs G., Antholk. Die Eienart des Anachisison, Berlin, Veigel, 1964). Come noto, Lukacs critica la visione di Heidegger, il quale, a suo aviso, improvise e defoma la struttura e l'essenza della vita quotidiana. In particolare la critical lukas-sima concentra sulla relazione tra quotidiano e conosenza. Se la vita quotidiana perda la sua connessione dinamica con la conosenza e con la scienza, sostiene Lukacs, come accade nella visione heideggeriana, essa perce con ciò stesso il suo cartere piu geminis, poible la conosenza emerge dai problemi postal quotidiano e il quotidiano si arrisce chinieramente dei risultati della scienza.
of social change in the transformations of the activities necessary for individual reproduction, and which believes that it is useful to pose questions about the variety of everyday actions within the same social system to give substance to differences in class, gender, age, and so forth.
The particular man, alienation and the individual: towards a sui generis ontology?
Heller dedicated much attention to defining the characteristics of the main subject of everyday life, and it is from these characteristics that the entire theoretical system of Everyday Life falls out.
In everyday life, the individual considers his immediate environment as "already made" and "taken for granted." He spontaneously adopts the system of habits and techniques that are characteristic of his own surroundings. To extricate himself from the heterogeneity that is typical of everyday activities, he behaves in a pragmatic way, while the concepts that he uses are, typically, clichés. His knowledge in fact, when compared to the gnoseological parameters of science, are nothing more than "opinion", doxa.
Moreover, the subject of everyday life is a particular person; that is to say, a person who lives every day of his life through the ways of mere existence. The meaning that Heller attributed to the notion of "particularity" was borrowed from the young Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where he distinguished between two scenarios of work and awareness: the "particular situation", of man as pure existence, and the "individual situation", of man who reveals the strength of his essence. Heller, however, took this one step further.
While Marx used the concept of "particularity" to define the human condition uniquely in the presence of estraniated work, Heller widened the meaning of the notion to modify its original connotations to some extent. According to the Hellerian perspective, then, everyday life is built – in every case and no matter how – on particular points of view, even in conditions of non-alienation. Particularity is thus a constituting aspect of everyday life. Only in the scenario of alienated society will we find, so as to say, an excess of particularity.
This description of the concept presents such normative connotations as to constitute a kind of explosive unpredictability in relation to the very same anti-ontological premises posed by Heller herself. As we will see below, this is not so rare in Everyday Life. But now let us see how the question is handled from a more analytical perspective.
Every individual possesses "particular" characteristics and points of view, ties, that is, to the singularity of his existence in the world. What Heller defined as the "appropriation of everyday life" would be simply impossible without a certain cultivation of these "particular" qualities and characteristics, just as it is natural for every person to perceive and manipulate the world starting from himself, with the aim of self-preservation and self-reproduction. Together with these particular characteristics and points of view, everyone also possesses "particular motivations – or needs". Heller distinguished at this point between "motivations that are purely particular" and "motivations that are also particular". The first are when the point of view functions as a mover of action ("I'm hungry so I'll take my neighbour's piece of bread away from him"). Envy, vanity, cowardice, jealousy and selfishness all count as examples of motivations that are "purely particular"; those that are not purely particular can refer to both particularity and individuality, or even directly to genericity, i.e. to an awareness of the characteristics, aspirations and history of the human race. Here, Heller wanted to underline the fact that particular motivations can also be dictated by values that are higher than simple self-preservation, as she illustrated through a long series of arguments and examples.
11 In viewing everyday activity as essentially pragmatic, Heller aligns herself with the broad lines of the theories deriving from phenomenology (Berger and Berger, 1972) which identify pragmatism as one of the most important characteristics of everyday life. The Hellerian conception comes very close to that of Lukács, who bases the characterisation of everyday thought on precisely this "close connection between theory and practice" (Lukács, G., Asthalk. Die Eigenart des Akthetischen, Berlin, Verlag, 1964).
In alienated society, which pushes the subject to construct his life around the mere preservation of his existence, particularity becomes all the same a general way of behaving, a system of life that informs the sets of actions and thoughts of each day.
"Up to now – Agnes Heller – during the course of history, for most relationships and social strata, the subject of everyday life has been particularity. More precisely: the individual "organised" around particularity has been enough to carry out everyday activities and to reproduce. This does not mean that those people who managed to elevate themselves to individuality were no longer able to carry out these tasks. It simply means that it was unnecessary to become an individual in order to carry out these tasks; moreover, the world offered most individuals limited possibilities to order their lives on the basis of individuality. Millions of men have carried out their work and have done what there was to do, without understanding their role in the world, without being aware that their faculties were generic faculties, and without imposing the signs of their individuality on the world."12
Heller dedicated many interesting sections to the analysis of the enrichment of particularity and to the intimate relation that it holds with alienation. She exemplified this slow and complex path, from particular behaviour as a simple "base" for everyday life to particularity as the unique perspective that, in alienated society, inhibits the free unfolding of the human essence. The subject of alienated everyday life, she observed, identifies spontaneously with all the conventions and requests of the social system that enable his simple self-preservation and relieve his life of conflicts, rendering it "convenient".13 The particular man, in other words, is nothing more than "pure existence", moved as it is by the preservation of existence oriented towards having and not towards being.
The driving force of this process is represented by those needs, such as the "social need", whose satisfaction implies the transcending of alienated everyday life. The subject of such a path is the indi-
12 Heller, A., A mindenapi elet, Budapest, Akadémia Kiadó, 1970, my translation of Heller, A., Sociologia della vita quoridiana, Roma, Editori Riunititi (First Italian edition, one reprint), 1981. 67.
13 "In defending my particularity I am, of course, not merely defending my particular motivations and other motivations bearing on my particularity, but the whole system which is founded on these as its basis. To this system belong my actions in the past, my views, my thoughts, the various attitudes I have adopted. I have to defend everything that I have done, or everything the group has done with which I identify myself, otherwise I cannot successfully defend my particularity. I rationalize my past. My mistakes were due to other factors – heredity (which I can't help) – another rationalization, the intrigues of others, tracks of fate, or just bad luck" (Heller, A., Everyday Life, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1984, (English translation of A mindenapi elet, 1970), 14).
14 This is here once again a change in Marxian terms (Mars, K., (1844), Economic and Philosophical Manuscript, (English translation), Penguin, 1975.)
vidual, "the person for whom his own life is consciously an object, since he is a conscious species-being." Individuality is therefore not a definitive status, but a process:
"Individuality is a development; it is the coming-to-be of an individual. This coming-to-be takes different forms in different ages. But whatever form concrete individuality, or its ideal, takes in a given age, individuality is never complete but is always in a state of flux. This flux is the process of transcending particularity, the process of 'synthesization' into individuality."[16]
The individual does not identify with alienated forms of behaviour. He does not subordinate all his life, in any case and no matter what, to self-preservation. An individual is thus a person who "is aware in his relationship with the generic and who, on the basis of such awareness, gives homogeneity and hierarchical order to the heterogeneity of everyday life. The process of appropriation of individuality is conditioned by the concrete situation in which the subject finds himself, given that the path from particularity to individuality is created by the aspiration to satisfy "social needs, historically conditioned and socially codified", as Grumley observed in a recent paper on the theory of needs by Heller.[17] The first and most important need of this type is the radical need[8] to overcome the alienation of everyday life:
"Even within the framework of social alienation, subjective rebellion against alienation is always a possibility. In such circumstances, the origination of a bujectively non-alineated everyday life is a declaration of war on alienation."[19]
We thus find ourselves facing a conception that, although placing a normative emphasis on the distance between behaviours and subjective attitudes towards alienation, does not move beyond the environment of the analysis of the everyday dimension. It is limited, that is, to linking the relation between everyday life as an analytical category where everyday life is the materially determined factual entity. In other words, we find ourselves facing the interpretation of different tonalities that the life of every day can empirically take on in the modern world, according to the objective and subjective conditions in which the individual finds himself living. Even if a certain normative emphasis risks annulling the objective foundation of the concept, we continue to remain with the boundaries described by the category of "everyday life" as the environment for self-reproduction. Theoretical problems that are much more serious arise when Heller set herself the objective of establishing the links between everyday life and what transcends it.
What is Thomas Mann's everyday life like?
As her starting point, Heller took the binary pair particular/individual to lead the discussion to one of the most complicated questions that every theory of everyday life must handle: the relation between the everyday and the non-everyday. She declared more than once that she did not intend to juxtapose the everyday dimension against the non-everyday. On the contrary, given certain socio-historical conditions, this last could, in her opinion, be structurally installed within everyday life. The key to accede to the non-everyday dimension is therefore to be found inside everyday life and it consists in a process of orientation and discipline by the individual. This is a process in which morality (practical morality and not abstract morality) plays the role of guide. It is in this way that the status of non-everyday life appears to be, in a certain sense, twofold: on the one hand, it transcends the everyday, but on the other it drives its roots into the concrete dynamics of everyday life. Everyday life constitutes the actual foundations of the non-everyday.
[15] Heller, A., Everyday Life, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1984, (English translation of A mindenapi elet, 1970), 17.
[16] Bidl. 15.
[17] Heller, A., A Theory of Modernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999.
[18] As is widely recognised, the theory of radical needs is one of the strong moments of the philosophy of Heller's Marxist period, cf. Romero (1999).
[19] Heller, A., Everyday Life, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1984, (English translation of A mindenapi elet, 1970), 258.
the starting point of the process that allows the individual to reproduce himself above and beyond his mere alienated particularity and to conquer in this way that aware relationship with the indefiniteness that substantiates individuality. The non-everyday dwells therefore, as Heller discussed in her long and complex articles, in the everyday life of those who are capable of equipping themselves with a unified and homogeneous personality, of initiating a process of externalisation of themselves that leads to the stamp of a personality, objectifying themselves in activities that, in themselves, transcend the everyday: generic objectifications for themselves, which can be distinguished from generic objectifications in themselves, also through the fact of activating oneself only through the human intention that is consciously directed towards these.
Any exit from the everyday takes the form of a complex process of construction of the self, which takes on different characteristics and manages to achieve different levels of success according to the different historical and social conditions in which it finds itself taking place. Virtually impossible and very rare in the alienated society, easier to achieve in social systems that do not come under the dominion of alienation/entanglement, the transcending of everyday life remains today, following the Hellerian vision, the prerogative of the few, although it is beginning to take on the shape of a possible condition that will be collectively shared in the future by the disalienated human condition.
Now, to me, this seems to place such a strong emphasis on the personal and subjective dimension that it contradicts the objective bases which Heller wanted to attribute to the concept of everyday life. To base the distinction between the everyday and the non-everyday on the construction of the self, or, to use Hellerian terminology, on the level of subjective awareness of the relationship with indefiniteness, risks bringing unobtrusively back the ontological approach that the use of the concept of reproduction had previously openly rejected. Moreover, the strongly normative approach that Heller adopted to place the 'superior' activities beyond the boundaries of everyday life risks leading her theoretical system into the reassuring channel of the hypostatisations of everyday life.
To better understand this step, it is useful to clarify two key notions of her argument: the concept of objectivisation and the binary pair heterogeneity and homogeneity. In order to raise himself above the level of everyday life, the individual must, in the first place, concentrate on a sphere of homogeneous activity that goes objectively beyond everyday life and thinking. The process of homogenisation is for Heller, following Lukács, "the category of 'emergence' from everyday life."
"Homogenization means that the individual is 'absorbed' in a given homogeneous sphere of objectivisation, and concentrates his activity upon one single objective homogeneous sphere of action. In this case, a man's activity is not only indirectly but directly also, a component part of general human praxis: from being 'a whole man' the subject becomes 'man-as-whole' - by which we mean an individuality who concentrates all his stealth and ability on discharging a task within a homogeneous sphere of objectivization. The human activity which takes place in the process of homogenization is creation or re-creation."20
Second, the subject's actions must be placed within the sphere of objectivisation for itself. That is, it is necessary that he "carry out aware generic activities" at the highest level. In hierarchical order, these are: work, morality, religion, politics, and the law, sciences, art and finally - philosophy.
In my opinion, an approach of this type risks invalidating and contradicting the conceptual premises of the Hellerian theory of everyday life, which consist in the reciprocal anchoring of the two concepts "everyday life" and "self-reproduction." If, in several cases and for several people, the indefinite objectifications which effectively constitute the basis for their own self-reproduction as socially and historical-
20 Heller, A., Everyday Life, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul plc., 1984, (English translation of A mindennapi elie, 1970), 57.
ly situated subjects are excluded from the scenario of everyday life, there is a serious risk of limiting both the understanding of the social determinisms of everyday life and the analysis of social change.
In reality, already at the beginning of the book
"It is widely known that Thomas Mann used to write several pages every day, but this does not mean that this was an 'everyday activity'
Already in this quotation it is possible to perceive a certain normative flavour to this approach, which, while aiming to base the definition of the concept of everyday life on objective criteria (reproduction), in reality reproposes depreciating everyday thinking and action. What does Thomas Mann's life consist of if one of the main activities in which he is involved – writing – is not understood? Can we reasonably maintain, without falling into a new negative ontology of everyday life, that Thomas Mann, like all writers, scientists, artists and philosophers, leads a daily life that can be defined as "halved" given that he dedicates a great deal of his day to activities that are higher than those of eating and sleeping? If everyday living provides the framework for self-reproduction, why exclude from it those activities, although finding their place at one of the higher levels of the hierarchy of human objectification, constitute in fact reality an occupation that is repeated on a daily basis
certainly not be able to self-reproduce Thomas Mann without writing? All in all, it would seem to me that the distinction made between the different levels of objectification cannot be used to draw a line between the everyday and the non-everyday, even though it is indispensable to capture the effective difference between the different modalities of self-reproduction that socio-historical determinations favour or hinder – unless, of course, one wants to take the actual presuppositions underlying a theory of everyday life as the self-reproduction of the individual.
Questions of this kind involve not only the issue of normativity that is so common to the different approaches, but also the problem of the operational features of a theory whose aim is to study society and its changes. How can a concept of everyday life that excludes a priori some of the actions that are actually carried out every day be used to study society? How can we read the differences that exist between the everyday life of subjects belonging to different classes, genders, and ages if we exclude from our enquiry exactly those activities that in many cases determine precisely these differences?
The ambiguities that come into being as a result of the normative emphasis of Heller's theoretical approach also pose important questions on the wider theoretical plane. Constructing a relation between the everyday and the non-everyday on a normative basis normative already means in some way reproposing a negative understanding of the everyday and giving space to theoretical outcomes that in one way or another hypostatise everyday life at a hierarchically lower level than other dimensions of human life. It means, in reality, flattening once again the category of everyday life onto factual everyday life.
Moreover, on a completely different level, are we really so sure that other dimensions are so distinct and different from everyday life as to transcend it? Or would it not be more appropriate to maintain that the life of every subject, including here the "criticisms" of everyday life as it is and any aspirations to change, is played out exclusively on the level of everyday life, as Lefebvre claims? Paraphrasing Deleuze, should we be asking ourselves on what other level of life we can count apart from that of everyday life? To answer these questions would
clearly necessitate a completely different approach to the one that I have used in this short paper. What is certain is that it is a task that the social sciences will have to take on if they aim to use the conceptual tools offered by the theories of everyday life to analyse and interpret social reality.
The antinomies of autonomy
Several aspects of Everyday Life can be better understood by investigating the thinking of Heller which followed this work. Although when referring to her theoretical path, several clearly distinct phases are often singled out, particularly regarding her abandoning of Marxism, it is possible all the same to highlight several common traits that contribute towards an understanding of certain ambiguities of the theory of everyday life in the two periods.
First, it is useful to ask ourselves if the reconciliation between “the essential dynamism of modernity” which went hand in hand with her moving on from the categories of the Marxist analysis of capitalist society takes away from the theory of everyday life the basis on which the whole construction was constructed. Naturally, the problem that this leads to is not limited to the theory of everyday life, but concerns more in general the relationship between her Marxist period and the
again on the theory of needs, Heller claimed in 1993:
“The ideal-type of a modern democratic society is a population where there are rich and poor, or at least where some people have more money than others, but there are no single other distinguishing features among men and women. The way of life, taste and everything else that one encompasses in the term of ‘system of needs’ becomes identical – it is just that satisfiers can be of greater or lesser monetary value.”
In the new theoretical scenario that emphasises the personal rather than the social dimension of autonomy, how is the device that should allow the subject to be released from the enriching of the particularity of alienated everyday life formed?
If we think about the ethical anthropology that has been developed by Heller over the last few years, particularly the concept of responsibility, we can identify several traits of the theory of individuality that were developed in Everyday Life. Postmodern men and women – who accept living in radical contingency – take on responsibility for the present by assuming responsibility for building a “meaningful life” for themselves and their contemporaries, independently of the prospect of its transcendence. As Heller wrote in A Theory of Modernity:
“A responsible person is in charge. But one cannot be in charge of an unknown and unknowable future. One carries responsibility for the present. This means roughly that one is in charge of one’s contemporaries, of one’s Togetherness.”
The *responsible individual does not wait for his own and others’ realisation to be entrusted to the train of history which will take him forward into the Future, using the striking metaphor in a Theory of Modernity. He will accept the provisionary nature of “life on the railway station” since he knows that the historical future is absolutely unknown and unknowable, and that it makes no sense to take responsibility for things that are unknown. Heller’s abandoning of Marxism,
with the consequent disappearance of the prospective of transcending alienated society, pushed Hellerian philosophy to emphasise the autonomy of the individual in the construction of individual paths towards the ‘good life’ even more than in the past.
So, even if the shift in social philosophy detracts the theoretical framework of reference from the system of Everyday Life, we can all the same identify in the postmodernist period a pattern of development that is coherent with the premises of moral philosophy that can already be found in the theory of everyday life. The category of the individual, for example, is mainly built on an ethical basis that is analogous to that supporting the ethics of responsibility of the following phase. From this point of view, suffice it to remember even only the guiding role played by morality in the process of conquering autonomous individuality, and of its exit from the everyday dimension. Observed from the viewpoint of the theory of everyday life, those needs for the realisation of which the everyday subject is pushed towards achieving autonomous individuality, do not have, so as to say, any theoretical need for the perspective provided by the ‘grand narrative’. We can ask ourselves, then, to cite yet another of the metaphors used in A Theory of Modernity, whether ensuring that the chair around the table of modernity stays empty can really stop the reduction to a mere interval as a function of the future from constituting an alibi for detracting ourselves from the practical criticism – severe and rigorous – of the lack of humanity and authenticity characterising the concrete everyday lives of the majority of people living on the earth today.
30 Heller, A., ‘A theory of needs revisited.’ Thesis Eleven, 35, 1993, 21.
31 Heller, A., A Theory of Modernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999, 10.
32 Ibid. 7-9.