Agnes Heller's philosophical Life

The story of Heller’s philosophical life is profoundly different from the other stories of her life, first because it did not begin with the birth, but at twenty, and then was held in parallel with the other stories. With the only exception of the Hungarian '56, her “more meaningful and memorable political experience", it had a linear trend, a basic unity, despite the changes, which were always independent from political events. The history of Heller’s philosophical life is not marked by turning points, but by a sort of weaving of threads that, even when lost or torn, are taken up and reassembled. Heller’s philosophical life, or the life of her philosophy, was the only continuous, linear life within an existence marked by sudden ruptures. Heller destroys various clichés about the relationship between philosophy and life, and tells us that between the two there is neither conflict nor identification. Philosophy does not coincide with life, but is not a profession completely independent of it. The gap between work and life exists, but requires a choice. The philosophy is in fact a form of life with specific characteristics, the result of an existential choice, never comparable to others, and never absolute. The history of Heller’s philosophy is therefore the story of her life in the specific form of the concentration on a unique thing (die Sache selbst). As she summarizes: my mind is changed, sometimes radically, but the puzzle is still the same. She adopts the image of the ship of Theseus: man can change the pieces, but the ship remains the same. What is then a philosophical life, entirely devoted to philosophy? A philosophical life is not made up of a training period, of some ruptures, possibly of a "late style" (Said). A philosophical life is characterised by the research of the autonomy of a philosophy that continues to have a claim to universality. The decisive significance of the "construction" of Heller’s philosophy is the emergence of ethics not only as a central theme, but as lookout point where Heller’s philosophy expresses entirely its originality within the contemporary horizon. Ethics represents both the unity of the disparate threads that unfold over many years of philosophical work and the backbone of the "construction", the explanation of her idea of philosophy.