Lecture 11: Agnes Heller The Dissatisfied society

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1. The biography of few individuals have so consistently touched many of the great, if often dark, historical events of the 20th century as does that of Agnes Heller. She was born in the year of the Great Depression, she only narrowly escaped death as a teenager in Budapest in 1945 as the Nazis were completing the last leg of their "final solution" by gathering up the 400,000 Hungarian Jews for transport to the death camps in the East; after the war as a young science student she accidentally found herself in a lecture by the great Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs and it was this chance encounter that decided her choice to become a philosopher; she had only recently began to teach philosophy at the University of Budapest at the time of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, for which her teacher and mentor was expelled to Romania and she dismissed from her position at the university; in 1968 at the time of the Prague spring she was at an international philosophy conference at Korscula and, along with her colleagues in the so-called Budapest school she courageously condemned the Soviet intervention and removal of the Dubcek regime before the international media. This outspoken opposition to Soviet policy and her central theoretical role in Lukacs' attempt at a "renaissance" of Marxism, final led to her second loss of career and her eventual immigration to the West as a political dissident. The slogan "Renaissance of Marx" in this context had a double meaning. Firstly, "back to Marx" signified a critique of the official Diamat of the Communist Party. It heralded a theoretical retrieval of Marx's own intentions and the basic ideas of his various efforts at emancipatory critical theory. Secondly, and even more fundamentally, it promised revitalisation. At that time one hundred years old, the original Marxian program needed to be amended and filled out. Classical texts and ideas must address contemporary problems and develop new perspectives. This program to rejuvenate the critical function of Marxism was not merely theoretical endeavour. Official Marxism was viewed as a symptom of the gross distortion of Socialist ideals. 'Really existing socialism' had to be confronted with the emancipatory values embodied in Marx's authentic vision of Communist society. This belief (or illusion as it turned out) was accompanied by a commitment to a broad but vague vision of 'reform Communism'. Only after 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia did the members of the School recognise that their earlier hopes for reform were misplaced and that the regime was not capable of internal correction.

2. For ten years she taught in Australia at La Trobe University before moving to New York to become the Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York until a few years ago. In 1994 she return to live in Budapest but continued to teach in New York for half the year. She was in New York at the time of Sept 11 to round of a close association with some of the great political disasters of the 20th century. Agnes Heller has published over 40 books, won many major awards, mainly in Europe but also in the US, continues to publish on a vast range of topics and travel the world to teach and give conference papers. In the last couple of years she has been fighting charges of academic corruption brought by the present authoritarian Hungarian government. So far these charges have been dismissed by the Hungarian court and appear a thinly veiled attack on critical Hungarian intellectuals. Thus Heller has the dubious honour in her lifetime of being proclaimed a dissident by authoritarian governments on both the right and the left within her own country.

2. In her autobiography Heller reads her philosophical oeuvre as the fulfillment of a duty that stemmed from her sense of responsibility to the victims of the modern world who included her father and other friends amongst the countless innocents consumed in the Holocaust and the Gulags. Approaching old age, Heller viewed her philosophical lifework as a sort of existential detour, albeit a satisfying one, imposed by the vortex of history and the obligations stemming from her survival. Until the age of fifteen, her exclusive interests had been books, poetry, beauty and the mysteries of the heavens. Yet, from that time her fateful existential proximity to the great historical catastrophes of the 20th century saw her childhood wonder displaced by the more pressing need to understand the events and forces that had turned her world upside down. Her chance encounter with Lukacs as a science student in the late 40's provided her with the opportunity to commence this task and she grabbed it with both hands. From that time, she began to construct a theoretical world of her own that allowed her to understand these disasters. This theoretical world centered round ethics and history and Heller returned to these topics continually throughout her life deepening her insights and renovating her philosophical framework. Heller initially understood philosophy from the Marxian perspective of practical engagement. Those who wish to change the world stand before the task of making sense of the flow of contingent historical experiences. While She eventually came to condemn the reckless theoretical ambition that had inspired the Marxian presumption to enlighten everyday consciousness and direct politics, she, nonetheless, has always striven to criticise the existing from the standpoint of ought, to bring clarity and perspective to contemporary experience. When Marxism was no longer able to do this, she struck out on her own to fashion a conceptual armoury that would do justice both to critical ambitions and to the complex dialectics of modernity. Keeping the core values of her life experience always in sight, she was never afraid to innovate, synthesise dispirit traditions and respond quickly to political events and cultural trends as they emerged. This virtuoso talent to draw philosophy from the sinews of the everyday and simultaneously bring her philosophical instrumentarium to bear on the analysis of the quotient is one of the most interesting features of Heller's work as a whole.

3. Heller characterises modernity as the "dissatisfied society". The choice of this concept is no attempt to unveil the essence of modernity. Modernity is an inexhaustible theoretical object and how we describe it will depend upon our standpoint. However, the choice of "dissatisfaction" captures the specificity of modernity from the standpoint of human needs. Heller wants to combine the discourse of social theory --its concentration on institutional and other objective structures--with an existential dimension that unfolds the subject’s experience of, and relation to, the modern system of needs. Viewing modernity from the standpoint of needs also allows her to maintain a holistic perspective on modernity without going as far as Adorno and other recent critics who want to see it as a totalised system. However, this does not mean that there is only a single dominant logic to which the others are necessarily interlocked and subordinated. Clearly the theoretical categories employed by Heller are consciously chosen. She make no bones of the fact that her view is a value-laden construct emerging from a conflictual interpretation of history, a commitment to radical action and a sympathy with the needs of the oppressed.

4. Heller designates the attitude that guides her theoretical construction as one of limited skepticism. Skeptical in regard to the totalising claims of the past but not going so far as to renounce emancipatory opportunities. This is a practical attitude that squarely faces the contingency of modernity and its dangers, which endeavours to grasp its open-ended possibilities and take advantage of its novelty. Such an approach is deliberately framed to avoid both extant versions of philosophy of history (the older teleological and the more voguish irrationalist) while still sustaining an emphatic historical dimension. The designation "modern" presupposes a "premodern" and therefore historical thinking. Denizens of modernity understand themselves historically in terms of a past, present and a future that is truly open-ended, thus reinforcing the idea of modernity as the "dissatisfied society" open to alternative visions. A dissatisfied modernity is a dynamic accumulating, restless, searching society: stability, fixity and contentment have been left behind and modern individuals are gripped by the insatiable rhythms of social dynamism, to desire and wrestle with, the unknown, the uncertain and unchartable open horizon of the future. Heller qualifies the Habermasian idea of modernity as an "unfinished project" by underscoring that it must remain forever uncompleted, that a project with a truly futurist orientation can never be completed. Such completion would announce death and the termination of the openness and agitation that is its life's blood.

5. One striking aspect of this contrast between modernity and pre-modernity is the sharp differentiation between the "limited" character of traditional needs compared with the "unlimited" character of the modern structure of needs. In pre-capitalist epochs, needs are strictly allocated and limited according to social hierarchies and their established norms of conduct. The "naturalised" estates with clearly differentiated modes of life define boundaries, which impose "naturally" conceived limitations on the needs of respective groups. Capitalism dismantled all these particularistic forms, eliminated their boundaries and unleashed the free contractual subject and unlimited individual self-development as an increasingly universalised social norm. Before our eyes this is the impact of the deep historical interlocking of the universalising tendencies of capitalism and democracy. The typical expansionary dynamic of the structure of needs in modernity is the basis of Heller viewing it as the "dissatisfied" society. In the middle of the 19th century Marx attributed this dissatisfaction to commodity production. As we have seen, a generation later Weber viewed it as a manifestation of rationalisation. On Heller's reading both were only partly correct. Certainly both commodities and scientific rationality have colonised the lifeworld and advanced the seeds of modern "dissatisfaction". As mentioned, capitalism destroyed particularistic ways of life by allowing the unfettered sway of universal equivalence. The new dominance of market mechanisms unwittingly gave rise to a new social imaginary of unlimited accumulation. Rationalisation makes its contribution primarily in the form of science. Joining forces with the new economic logic, science becomes the new dominant world-view of modernity. It strips the world of its former sense of perfect "wholeness" and meaning; it also liberates thought, values, norms, and ethical action. It propels the modern individual into a vaster cosmos without former securities yet able to chart previously prohibited waters. Yet, Heller maintains that modern "dissatisfaction" is neither a product of commodities, of the modern individual as a consumer alone, nor can it be sheeted home to the modern freethinker or scientific expert. "Disenchantment" and narrow specialisation are only two manifestations but not the cause of modern dissatisfaction.

5. Modernity expands the structure of human needs as a whole. This idea flows from the basic thesis of the multi-dimensionality of modernity. Democracy's propagation of the modern abstract values of freedom and equality also played a pivatol role in universalising the need for self¬-determination and justice. These values feed omnipresent modern dissatisfaction just as much as commodities and scientific rationalism. All three complement each other in order to amplify the dissatisfaction of modern man, despite the tensions that exist between their competing logics. However, democracy makes its own contribution to the generalised modern experience of dissatisfaction. It advances the values of freedom and equality as universal regulative ideas giving force to the modern individual's restless quest for autonomy, uniqueness and self-definition, as well as some form of participation in the processes that govern them. Heller contends that neither capitalism nor industrialisation alone could have brought about the new structure of needs characterised by unlimitedness. They merely further the universalisation of values marking a new social imaginary. This signifies a new constantly expanding system of needs, which induces the individual to conceive their needs as insatiable. The very abstractness of these regulative ideas, their lack of a determinate content underlines the insatiability of this quest. The needs of modern man are insatiable because our reigning universal values define them as such. The modern value of progress is the highest expression of this. The paradox of this idea of progress is a pursuit of perfection simultaneously renouncing the very idea of fulfillment. Inscribed in this notion is an unlimited and increasingly accelerated development towards the higher, the better, more—a quest without end. In this modern phantasy of ongoing accumulation, the present can only be viewed as way station or transitory point in a ceaseless process. As Heller puts it, the modern individual is born into contingency as both nothing and possibility. Formerly contingency was masked by naturalistic stratification and the divine sanctification of the social order. But as these ideological veils over contingency eroded a new truth emerges. The individual is "thrown," he or she didn’t have to be here and his/her story is one of open-ended possibility. As an individual charts his/her own course some of the available options begin to close. This gradual closure inevitably causes "dissatisfaction” as the options not taken sustain the promise of an openness now closed. This is another measure of the restless spirit of modernity. This brings us to the heart of Heller's concept of "dissatisfaction". It is not equivalent to the Marxian notion of alienation, which presupposed the putative end of alienation. The insatiable quest after the satisfaction of endless "wants" may bear all the hallmarks of alienation, but modern "dissatisfaction" is not the sign of a fundamental contradiction or a central systematic dysfunction that we might aspire to remove, emend, eliminate. Heller abandons the perspective of transcendence connected to the Marxian philosophy of history and this involves foregoing the utopian desire for the end of contradiction and alienation. "Dissatisfaction" is the very motor of the dynamic social arrangement we call modernity. This dynamism is a product of the fact that modernity generates more needs than it can possibly satisfy. The resulting dissatisfaction is not eradicable but essential. It signals not only the pain of unsatisfied needs but also the mechanism of negation and of discontinuity within continuity that is the lifeblood of change. As such it keeps the dynamic extremes of modernity in balance without wild swings into chaos.

6. Heller is no longer nostalgic for release from this endless, seemingly self-defeating, labour. Whatever the distortions generated by this dynamism, the universalisation of the values of freedom and life represents for her the only ethical progress achieved in the history of mankind. Against those thinkers who have turned their back on the emancipatory achievements of modernity assimilating them to a monolithic instrumental reason, she reasserts the enlightenment commitment to humanity and the uniqueness of the individual personality as universal values. She maintains it is this commitment that underwrites both the unique regulative humanitarianism of modernity (its capacity to condemn its own barbarisms) and the modern individual’s bold desire to be judged not by local, provincial standards but to assert their unique individuality. Yet she concedes that this demolition of the concrete and limited meanings imposes heavy costs. The new celebration of the individual personality has now assumed the shape of quest for uniqueness as such. Heller muses sardonically that no kind of power, wealth and fame is below the dignity of modern man. The quest for celebrity is not bound by any sense of discrimination--tycoons, sportsmen and criminals--all share the stage with thinkers, statesmen and saints. Modernity's future-directedness, its erosion of tradition, its demolition of former normative patterns of behaviour, rationalised specialisation and universalisation of values combine to propel the modern individual into a chase after unlimited self-development and celebrity. Yet, paradoxically, this generalised motivation towards "success" and innovation only leads to a generalised dissatisfaction. Not everybody can win in this competition and not even the winners in this contest for outstanding achievement rest content. Repose and contentment are neither viable nor ultimately satisfying options facing a retreating horizon amidst universal competition bent on novelty.

7. Despite Heller's appreciation of the positive side of "dissatisfaction" as an appropriate symbol of the dynamic core of the modern social imaginary, the negative aspect never escapes her. She recognises the emptiness and vulgarity of a ceaseless chase after "success" and celebrity for its own sake. This is a distortion of the real existential task facing modern individuality. The dissolution of tradition and the collapse of normative estatist and class ways of life have placed the modern individual before an unprecedented task. No longer decreed by fate to a "given" station in life, they confront the radical openness of life's possibilities. Heller formulates the primary existential question of modernity in the following way: how can we transform our contingency into our destiny without sacrificing freedom. The Enlightenment affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual lies not in the acquisition of the trappings of success and the satisfaction of lusts for wealth and power in universal bourgeois competition but in a self-choice which strains to unfold the individuals finest potentials in a way that allows them to remain their own master. Turning contingency into destiny does not mean resignation before the accidentalities of received fate. Rather it posits the task of achieving a prevailing satisfaction with the shape of a chosen life as a meaningful realisation of the individual's intrinsic potentials given the concrete range of possibilities. The satisfaction the individual can derive from the thought that their life has made a difference. Clearly even the successful accomplishment of this challenge will not entirely eliminate dissatisfaction. But it is the only antidote against the modern discrepancy between expectations and experience. Even a rising standard of living cannot overcome this abyss as the structure of needs and their expectations rise from generation to generation. And of course, even this rising standard of living is not assured today. Ultimately, the gnawing dissatisfaction of the limitless spectrum of possibilities in modernity is never sated but only pacified by the choices we make constituting a personally meaningful shape. Such individual meaning should not, however, reconcile the modern individual to the general conditions of the modern world.

8. Despite her affirmation of modernity's dynamism, Heller clearly recognises that the ideology of progress and unlimited accumulation represents one of the deepest problems of modernity. This underlies her fear of the dominance of the logics of capitalism and industrialisation. Nevertheless, she consciously dismisses both the traditional conservative and radical leftist totalising critique of mass society. While unlimited consumption is a serious problem with both moral and ecological implications, the consumer society does not signify the triumph of instrumental reason or the sedation of the total population through a "false" homogenisation of manipulated needs. On the contrary, mass society has resulted in an enormous pluralisation of tastes, needs and practices. The modern mass media must now appeal to an increasing variety of individualised tastes and the multitude of consumer options has become embedded in differing lifestyles which maximise the possibilities of individual self-determination and choice. While concurring that the further democratisation of society would lead to even greater diversification and pluralism of lifestyles, tastes and needs. Heller explicitly repudiates the substitutionalist strategy of dismissing consumerism as mass deception from some allegedly higher standpoint. Not only is consumerism beneficial in maximising the range of individual's life-styles and expanding need structures, it is also the most democratic of modern lusts. Unlike the quests for wealth and power, which ultimately lead to the instrumental usage of other individuals as means, consumerism hurts no one directly (the issue of ecological limits and North/South disparity is acknowledged but does not alter this basically positive assessment of consumerism). Moreover, in the fierce competitive dynamism of modernity consumerism does provide a modicum of genuine satisfaction. While not everyone can attain the heights of excellence and outstanding achievement, consumerism provides everyone with a harmless outlet wherein they participate in, and identify with success¬. Heller is more readily reconciled with consumerism than her predecessors in the critical theory tradition because she witnessed the real scarcity of the Eastern Bloc societies and has completely abandoned the idea of a completely satisfied society. General dissatisfaction is a fundamental motivational force in modernity. Modern individuals never expect to be completely satisfied. While they still seek happiness and achievement, the very idea of the cessation of seeking and striving is almost incomprehensible. However, this affirmation of the intrinsic dynamism of modernity is no unqualified endorsement of rampant consumerism. Heller recognises the moral implications of the consuming passion of modernity. Consumerism may be the least dangerous of the modern lusts but it is infantile and irresponsible. The moral implications of the fact that the industrial world consumes in the face of immiserating poverty and hunger all over the Third World can hardly be ignored.  

9. This ambivalence to consumerism translates into an antinomy clearly lying at the very heart of the modern concept of progress. The idea of progress incorporates a multitude of contradictory values. It synthesizes not just the universalised values of freedom, equality and self-determination but also growth orientated values like increased production, money and power. This uneasy ensemble of partially conflicting values expresses the conflictual multi-dimensionality of modernity with its competing logics. The outcome is the explosive cocktail of progress, which forges ahead according to its own internal logic of accumulation. Simultaneously, it gives rise to the modern sensitivity that condemns the irrationality of ever ¬increased growth for its own sake.

10. The multiple paradoxes of modernity (progress/non-fulfillment, success/disatisfaction, irrationality/critique of irrationality) resist easy unraveling. Heller dispenses with the politically dangerous strategy of imputing "true" and "false" needs to others. Nevertheless, she attempts to preserve the distinction in a morally acceptable form. She offers a non-ontological rendering of the distinction, which still discriminates between needs and wants but only on the basis of value priority which endorses the need for self-determination over wants fulfilled by all other satisfiers. Needs find their orientation in the universalised values of modernity like "freedom" and "equal life chances" whose opposite cannot be chosen while wants conform more to the category of lusts, which are not necessarily compatible with modernity's universal value ideas. Modernity is characterised by the predominance of wants over needs in the sense that the great majority of modern individuals gain their satisfaction indirectly through the avenue of want satisfaction. While not diminishing the importance of wants, Heller favours the primacy of the needs for self-determination. She asserts that these needs are present within broad stratums of modern individuals but typically latent. Such needs should not be imputed to subject populations by ideologues or bureaucrats but can only emerge in unrestrained democratic dialogue. All the logics of modernity contribute to the perpetuation and expansion of individuals wants. Capitalism and industrialisation also provide satisfiers of self-determination but only the logic of democracy can uphold and extend those needs, which aim at self-¬determination. Only this latter logic allows for the transformation of a "given" social context into one that is an expression of the agent's freedom and desire for self-determination. Heller clearly hoped that a victory for the logic of democracy would expunge the antinomy at the heart of the modern concept of progress. She hopes the triumph of the democratic values of autonomy and self-¬determination will gradually dampen the modern penchant for ceaseless growth associated with capitalism and industrial technology. Yet, here she also recognised a serious problem. The process of universalisation of values whereby modernity has destroyed all particularistic value systems has also emptied these universal values of all concrete content by way of virtues constituting a good life. Without consensually accepted virtues of this type, the qualitative orientation towards the good is replaced by a quantitative one of the "more", "better" and "success".

11. In the early eighties, Heller and Feher saw the solution to this problem in the creation of mediating norms between universal and personal values. In their scenario of a democratised future, these mediating norms would be supplied by a variety of communities with diverse ways of life engendered by the progress of democratic self-management. This scenario has an important role to play in a non-coercive damping of the antagonism between the industrial logic of growth and the democratic logic of self¬determination. Only if self-determining individuals decide democratically to choose needs over wants can the contradiction between growth and self¬-determination be resolved in a harmonious and sustainable fashion. In this way the "unlimitedness" of the modern structure of needs orientated by universal values could be harmoniously reconciled with the "limitedness'" of diverse ways of life and concrete virtues amidst a plurality of communities. In Heller's dream, a plurality of divergent ways of life would suppress the cancerous growth of any 'single need on the level of humankind as a whole while the moment of universality is sustained in the individuals retention of the right to choose the community 'most adequate to their personality' and leave it for another if this proved to be necessary. For Heller, this solution remained "theoretical" in as much as she could not predict its chances of realisation nor would she want to impose her dream on others who may also offer viable solutions to the antinomies of progress. Yet, it is questionable whether this purported "theoretical" solution was really any solution at all. Heller's dream certainly appears to reconcile "limitedness" and "unlimitedness" in a single vision but is it tenable? In this dream, the perspective orientated to universality not only always has the upper hand (as Heller would want it) but it also inevitably erodes the meaningfulness of the plural "limited" ways of life whose authenticity largely rests upon their unquestionable character. Just as the modern anthropologist can never completely share the "closed" world of the "primitive" tribe even while participating in their way of life, I suspect that the meaningfulness of limited horizons and parochial virtues would be similarly diminished by the ever-present awareness of their utter contingency. Perhaps it is an awareness of the inadequacies of this theoretical "solution" to the antinomies of progress she so eloquently describes that has led to the fading of this dream.