Lect 12: Heller on the Existential Choice and the
Logics of Modernity
1. Now for the moment let us explore Heller's idea of the
modern existential choice of "transforming contingency into destiny"
as the ethical task. Like Weber, she views this as a uniquely modern
predicament. Unlike the pre-modern individual whose character and behaviour
options was largely predetermined from birth and tradition, Heller understands
the modern individual as having to find her character through a choice of
destiny or self-making. Despite the obstacles that an increasingly more
differentiated and functionalist society have placed in her way and the need to
manoeuvre in institutions and make money, Heller judges that the prospects of
real individual self-realisation have been much enhanced. She designates this
choice of self-making as the existential choice because the choice actually
constitutes the self with an irrevocable self-chosen destiny. Such a choice is
irrevocable by definition because revocation would mean loss of self and lapse
into contingency. The existential choice is a metaphorical moment of
life-changing revelation that is not always manifest in a single gesture. It is
the result of a series of intentional acts that lead to increasing moral/existential
rationality.
2. However, the idea of existential choice does not mean artistic self-creation as an act of moulding raw material into a pre-designed shape. Emphasising the conditionality of all human action, Heller acknowledges that the individual actor is already the bearer of infinite determinations of which she is neither creator nor responsible. Nor can such a choice be assimilated to the model of rational choice where steps are chosen rationally in accord with a predetermined goal or life strategy. While this choice can be rendered plausible and consistent in terms of psychology, personal history and moral reasoning, the actual choice itself cannot be reduced to rational explanation. Heller prefers the classical paradigm of "knowing thy self' as the template of self-choice. The character chosen as a personal destiny is not a product of mere introspection but the result of action; this is a "proving" or a "becoming" whereby the self reaches out to find the kind of actions appropriate to the self-chosen character and destiny. This is the meaning of the idea of choosing "to become the person you already are." This framework allows the individual to continue making consecutive choices bound by the telos of the initial existential one. In this sense, existence precedes essence. The individual is already the bearer of an envelope of genetic and social a prioris. Yet, it is only with the choice of all these determinations that she assumes full autonomy and pursues a personal destiny that is beyond contingency and external determination. This account reveals the crux of Heller's defence of the idea of modern subjectivity against its post-modern critique. Against a vision of a palimpsest identity where the emphasis is on forgetting, rewriting, experimenting and disassembling shapes, she opts for a model where gradual or life altering learning constitutes an authentic personal continuity.
3. The notion of authenticity comes to the centre of discussion in the twentieth century with the demise of traditional virtue and increasing consciousness of contingency. Beyond moral virtue, authenticity is a personality term. The authentic person is characterised by the unity of existence and essence. How is this unity achieved if the existential choice involves choosing all previous determinations? Heller relies on the metaphors of "dying" and "resurrection." The existential choice itself is a timeless moment of isolation after which everything is both the same and. different. Paradoxically, the choice of all determinations is supposed to be a release from the past insofar as from this point on the individual assumes full responsibility for all her actions. However, this does not mean that everything in the personality and past is taken as a value. Everything is different because she now evaluates and acts from the perspective of the chosen attributes and their affiliated values. Confronted by infinite possibilities, the authentic person raises herself by "her own hair." By contrast, the inauthentic person avoids the choice, remaining "fake" and not "real." Heller wants to avoid the aristocratic connotations associated with the notion of authenticity. Her commitment to the modern universal value idea of freedom means that the existential choice is open to all. Yet democratisation of the notion of the existential choice raises some key problems that we will return to.
4. Heller's idea of existential choice entails a self-chosen destiny that has to be realised in a series of challenges and subsequent choices put to the character of the individual. But this self-choice is multi-faceted. In one dimension it concerns developing personal endowments into talents. This is the existential choice according to difference. Of course, moral goodness is one aspect of the good life but not the good life itself. In large measure moral capacity is a negative element that resists the transgression of moral norms. But in the choice of difference, the chooser distinguishes herself from, rather than uniting with, others. For Heller, positive virtuosity and accomplishment plays a significant part in any understanding of the "good life." All humans have a variety of endowments. If the "good life" connotes human flourishing, it is essential to explore the full range of potentialities. Only this pole of existential choice fully elevates the distinctive capacities of the individual from the domain of contingency and nature into the realm of a distinctive ipseity and reflective developmental project.
5. Just like Tocqueville who speaks of individual existence as a momentary spark between two abysses, Heller has fashioned her conception of existential ethics between another two abysses: that of marxist Dialectical Materialism, which would reduce the individual to prisoner of laws both historical and natural, and the abyss of recent post-modern critiques of the subject, which declared the rational subject illusory, repressive and a denial of the autonomy of text, of the slippage and play of its cultural meanings beyond intention in the infinite multitude of other texts or singular historical constellations of power. Heller, who took over the concept of the human condition from Hannah Arendt with its stress on the embeddedness of all individual action in webs, certainly does not deny the importance of conditionality. Nor does she dismiss the role played by repression in the constitution of subjectivity. However, she maintains that neither of these genuine insights into subjectivity diminishes the meaningfulness and moral responsibility of individual initiative and action as crucial ingredients of social action. Yet, however worthy these strategic intentions, her conception of existential ethics is provocative and open to fairly obvious critical objections.
6. Heller's focus on strategic moments and key decisions lends to the concept of existential choice a certain non-naturalistic flavour. The insistence on viewing life as a whole with its moments integrated into a unified project with a self-chosen, singular meaning adds to a stilted and quasi-romantic aura of the privileged and elite individual tied to the idea of a personal destiny. Heller's insistence on choosing all the individual's previous determinations as a confirmation of individual autonomy seem extreme. It suggests that no contingency of a past life should stand in the way of the existential model of self-creation. Yet such almost grandiose gestures to individual autonomy tend to invite the common-sense rhetorical objection that few of us would change nothing in their lives. Surely regret is a natural ingredient of any life, successful or not: there are always roads not taken, miscalculated or hasty actions that in retrospect invite the judgement that there were better alternatives, other ways of saying and doing that now seem far preferable.
7. In response to such criticism Heller did try to clarify and moderate the essential meaning of this idea of the existential choice as "transforming contingency into destiny." In a late dialogue she invites one of her characters-- a wise and worldly grandmother-- to clarify the notion of existential choice and to raise some objections not canvassed in her earlier purely theoretical presentation of this idea. For the grandmother, the notion of the existential choice is a beautiful metaphor. However, she is wary of it becoming a standard against which to measure all unique personal histories. The idea of a single, life-transforming commitment falsifies the experiential continuum between essential and conventional living. The grandmother is convinced that we do choose ourselves, but not entirely. The stark opposition between authentic choice and inauthentic indecision fails to recognise a gradient that includes indecision and partial choice. The notion of existential choice really signifies an ideal that can only be approximated, not fully realised. The notion of existential choice under the category of difference seems to allow for only sharp differentiations of success and failure but such clarity is often missing in judgements of decency. The existence of the "good person" cannot disguise the fact that most people live between good and evil. Nor would we want to think that anybody was beyond the possibility of rehabilitation. Can any human destiny annul all contingencies? A rich life is one full of involvements with others and things. This implies that contingency and the possibility of our own loss of self is an ineradicable feature of the modern moral universe. However, Heller is still quick to defend key aspects of the existential model. She thinks it perfectly legitimate to focus on key strategic moments and decisions. In her view, it makes sense to focus on life-shaping crises and junctures where possibilities are narrowed down, where situations are not simply given but dynamic, offering real choices and new options. The idea of transforming contingency into destiny means not the embrace of every detail but the realisation of the best possibilities. This choice is a leap into authenticity neither determined nor directed by any external rule or norm. Authenticity signifies bringing the self’s empirical existence into accord with these chosen best possibilities.
8. These clarifications, refinements and concessions aside, it is worthwhile to focus on the core idea that animates Heller's notion of the existential choice. In 2005 I was present at a series of lecture in Spain where Heller outlined the key aspects of her philosophy. After one lecture on her ethics she was questioned from the audience about the autonomy that she attributed to the existential leap. The questioner seemed sceptical about-the degree of autonomy that Heller ascribes to the everyday subject. Heller replied to this question by citing a news story that concerned a potential murder in a hospital ward. She alleged that in this crisis moment, one very disabled patient, who had previously appeared comatose, managed to alert staff and save the day. For Heller, this narrative exemplified the moral potential of even very disabled human beings to act even in crisis situations when it might seem that conditions and fate had robbed them of their capacity to act autonomously. For others in the audience, including myself, this example raised more questions than it answered, not least about the balance between contingency and autonomy in Heller's understanding of the existential leap. While Heller was not condemning the disabled patients who were unable to raise themselves from their beds to provide assistance in this crisis, her celebration of the miraculous revival of the comatose individual left me wondering about the purported universal potential of the existential leap. There seems to be many instances when contingency invades the very core of the capacity for autonomy in human beings. I'm not here just referring to physical incapacity as in the case of bedridden patients. There would appear to be a whole spectrum of instances from addiction to psychological trauma of various sorts where life history and contingency either robs or significantly impairs an individual's capacity for autonomous action.
9. To my mind the idea of a singular quest, of drawing the various dimensions and possibilities of a life into a unified whole, still smacks of a romantic sensibility that privileges one aspect (usually creation) and downgrades all the other values that lie in the ordinary performance of life. The idea of an existential leap, even in the wise grandmother's attenuated form, has the tendency to homogenise the myriad sources of meaning and possibility in everyday life by imposing the idea of a singular, coherent narrative. In most lives, particularly whose of the disabled and disadvantaged, the weight of contingency is heavy, and the prospects for meaning must often be won from moments, from fragmentary episodes and actions, and also from enduring care that co-exists with the rhythms of practical necessities and their contingencies. If this is true, then the idea of an existential leap need not even be a regulative idea for all. What is required is a further concession to modern pluralism that acknowledges that the ordinary performance of life has its own meaning and values. These do not require validation by a higher purpose or a singular narrative. In fact, the idea of radical choice that seems so essential to Heller's idea of existential choice might often lose more than it gains by sacrificing the rich diversity of the everyday web of life for a singular, holistic meaning. We know that the post-modern spirit has abandoned the grand narratives of history in the interests of emancipation and pluralism. Maybe it is time to do the same for the individual life and abandon the idea of an existential leap into singularity in the interests of inclusiveness, true diversity, and the intrinsic richness of the web of contingency.
10. Now I want to begin to discuss another aspect of Heller's theory of modernity. I should, have pointed out that this was a joint theory conceived with her husband Ferenc Fehér who died in 1994. Unlike the pioneers of modernity thinking who thought they had captured the secret of modernity in a single logic or process, Fehér and Heller abandoned such monolithic visions to capture complexity and opacity of modernity. Despite Heller's slogan of the "dissatisfied society", they refuse to equate modernity with a single dominant logic, given constellation of characteristics and processes. Political refugees from the recently demolished "real socialism" who chose to theorise it as unique version of modernity dominated by state power and the logic of industrialisation, they want to raise the profile of civil society and democracy as basic ingredients of a radical discourse on the future shape of the modernity. This perspective and reflection on the errors of the past made them acutely aware of the tensions and complexity of modernity. Their method is to focus on and extract those multiple elements and tendencies which appear to be the source of contemporary tensions. They nominate three fundamental and distinct logics--capitalism, industrialisation and democracy--which reinforce, complement, countervail and check each other in a constellation that is dynamic and self-expanding. They underline that it is the invariant complexity and conflicting character of this historical symbiosis, which explains the lack of transparency in modernity. This is why it is so difficult for the modern subject to locate problems, sheet home responsibilities and know what needs to be done. Modernity is a decentred society without a single centre. Talk of complexity and antagonistic elements reinforces the multi-dimensionality of modernity stressing the volatility of these dynamic and interwoven logics. Heller dismisses the myth of the closed totality in the sense of a homogeneous system of institutions bent on manipulative uniformity or normalisation diagnosed by the famous Frankfurt School image of the "totally administered society" or Foucault's "Carceral". It is the multi-dimensionality and tensions of modernity that Heller wants to explore. This means roundly facing the grave difficulties and uncertainties underlined by totalising critics, without neglecting the real but always fragile achievements and contemporary opportunities. In the main, it is these opportunities/dangers that forms the focus of their own theorising.
11. However, before detailing the main elements of their diagnosis we must clarify the Fehér/ Heller conceptualisation of modernity and its linkage with the notion of multiple dynamic logics. This no easy task as in their considerable body of writings on this topic they provide no systematic conceptual clarification. These authors do not equate "modernity" with this constellation of multiple logics. "Modernity" is both a historical region and site of the simultaneous appearance of these "logics" and more strongly a creation of the European social imaginary ultimately exported with its technology, wealth and statecraft. Without discounting the structural and institutional aspects of modernity, they want to move beyond the sterile debates over causal determination. They give no causal primacy to any logic. They lay equal emphasis on modernity as imaginary project whose spirit can be encapsulated in various ways: sometimes as "a cumulative fantasy of infinite progress", sometimes as "dynamic justice", sometimes as "philosophy actualised" but always born along these three dimensions or logics.
12. How is a logic of modernity to be understood? If "modernity" is a symbiosis does it make any sense to speak of distinct, multiple, separable logics? Does capitalism, industrialisation and democracy all exhibit a "logic" in the same sense? These are important questions. The idea of the logics in this sense is more than metaphor and takes its meaning from the bourgeois market: this has an immanent tendency to expand as an increasingly self-enclosed, self-¬unfolding system based on the accumulation of private capital, class inequality and domination. In this sense, capitalism as a logic involves both institutional structural and imaginary components taking the form of a developmental tendency or dynamic. In each case the dynamic is born through institutions and institutional networks involving learning processes and more or less formalised modes of behaviour as well as strong social imaginary aspects. The logic of industrialisation is similar to that of capitalism: it involves an unequivocal dynamic of technological development similarly future-orientated and motored by the revolutionary practice of science. In both these cases the fundamental idea inscribed in' the notion of an internal logic is that of an immanent cumulative dynamic with a universalising developmental tendency. Heller points out that the expansion of the market during the European Renaissance and the monetarisation of the economy disrupted the smooth functioning of particularistic life-worlds. Monetarisation announced the passing of the isolated and parochial community standards and the reign of universal equivalence. Such universalisation has both economic and socio-cultural dimensions. Around the same time we witness the shift of cultural objectifications towards universality. Both universal values like freedom and autonomous culture like Art in the singular are both products of universalisation. Universalisation permeates these objectivations. Science is characterised by a universal language. All scientists accept the pursuit of true knowledge as the universal value guiding their endeavours. This commitment to scientific rationalism must subordinate all else in the practice of science. Science also institutes 'a symbolic language which is the common medium of communication between all scientists, irrespective of religious beliefs, race or nationality.' The universalisation of science is not confined to language. Heller underlines that both the logic of capital and that of science involve moral indifference. Each follows its own independent value--profit and truth--according to a logic of universalisation, of dynamic self expansion increasingly emancipated from alien fetters. The dynamism of each logic is also expansive: new territory is constantly appropriated and subordinated to its own internal standards be they economic efficiency or rationality. It is this universalising logic exemplified by voracious appetites of the market and scientific rationalism that Habermas associates with the colonisation of the life-world.
13. For our authors, this interpretation of the logics of modernity in terms of universalising developmental tendencies is also applicable to democracy. Yet they are nowhere able to provide it with the same degree of conceptual definition. Interesting in the light of their assertion of separable logics, Heller sees a common ancestry between science and democracy. It was philosophy with its attack on conventional views and traditional authorities, which not only elevated truth as a universal value and thus initiated the logic of scientific rationalism but also raised the other values of freedom, humankind, personality. Exemplifying this philosophical spirit, anti-authoritarian struggles breached pre-modern social arrangements by challenging the authoritative interpretation of virtues and privileges and their natural linkage with specific social estates and raised questions concerning the validity of certain norms. The authoritative interpretation of social norms by small groups according to a social hierarchy was undercut and norms rendered more abstract and universalising in their application and appeal. The outcome was the universalisation of a few abstract values like freedom and equality and they ceased being the exclusive province of specific social estates. Thus the logic of democracy is also bound to a process of universalisation. The logic of democracy resides in the unfolding of freedom, human rights, equalization and decentralisation of power; it universalise these abstract universal values to realise them as empirical universal values.
14. 0n the question of the separability and relative independence of these logics, Fehér offers the following clarification. Despite the intricate independence of these logics in the western constellation of modernity, they both existed separately both in history and the recent past. The Soviet system functioned, according to Fehér, without the logics of democracy or capitalism, ancient democracy survived for long periods without capitalism or industrialisation and capitalism has appeared unaccompanied by industrialisation (Fehér I the W56-57).
15. 1n emphasising the unstable character of the constellation of modernity, Fehér and Heller underline not only the common features of these logics but also their potential and real antagonism, not only their complementarity but also their mutual checking and delimiting. Ultimately this is only the other side of their universalising tendency: one universalising tendency finally collides with the others. The logic of capitalism in the form of the modern market tends to enforce the values of freedom and equality behind the back of individuals by universalising its own mechanisms and relations. Yet, the capitalist utopia of the entirely self-regulating market meets resistance from the other countervailing logics stemming from industrialisation and democracy. Democratic struggles impede expansion and resist the universalisation of market mechanisms whereas the logic of industrialisation counteracts the market through processes of rationalisation, which centralise the allocation of resources and institutes various forms of regulation and planning. This phenomenon of mutual checking and limiting appears pervasive. The incursions of science into modern democracy in the form of bureaucracy as well as the increasing problem of the degree of expertise required in decision making are well known. Although it is equally clear democracy increasingly tends to question and limit the imperium of scientific rationality, Heller maintains that democracy has clearly not had the same impact on everyday life as science. Science is the dominant worldview of modernity in as much as it has taken over the mantle of religion. While acknowledging this, Heller wants to suppress the cannibalising tendencies of the logics of capitalism and industrialisation. She wants to redress the situation where democracy is retreating before the combined thrusts of capital, science and technology. However, Heller's advocacy of the logic of democracy is tempered by an appreciation of the vital contribution of the other logics to the vitality of modernity. Not only is it impossible to envisage a modernity without industrial technology and science: more specifically because she recognises that the logic of democracy is not the only bearer of an emancipatory potential. She points to the early historical contributions made by the market to social emancipation: its corrosive impact on the traditional rigidly hierarchical community and its systematic and unconscious propagation of the values of freedom and equality. The modern domination of the scientific worldview, despite its costs, is also truly emancipatory. The explicit avoidance of a normative vision imposed by science has lowered the former pressures to internalise conventional norms and provided the psychological space for subjects to assume real autonomy in relation to their social environment and its values. However, our authors clearly associate the projects involved with such universalising dynamics as both potentially destructive and ultimately illusory. Not only do they run up against each other but Capitalism and industrialisation run up against the question of limits both ecological and economic. Even democracy until now has faced fierce cultural resistance beyond its Western home.
16. If this brief exposition aids our comprehension of what Fehér/Heller mean with the idea of modernity as a constellation of multiple logics, it also raises some doubts. The apparent historical interlocking of these "logics" and their dynamics raises questions regarding whether even in modernity we are dealing with separable logics at all. As well there are other difficulties with which it might be easier to begin. Let's begin with our authors' derivation of their "logics" of modernity. They find the origins of the modernity project in the European legacy of wealth, technology and statecraft. These historical elements duly undergo theoretical metamorphosis as the principal logics of modernity. While it is fairly straight forward to translate the former two into the project of modernity as capitalism and industrialisation, the translation of statecraft as democracy is clearly one-sided and tells only part of the story. Fehér and Heller make no attempt to conceal this. They openly acknowledge that the totalitarian systems of the 20th century were just as much a product of the western cultural tradition as were their liberal-democratic opponents. Yet, this admission demonstrates the potential political ambiguity of European statecraft and what appears to be the fragile position of democracy within the constellation of modernity. Certainly, it is not the case that a logic of democracy arises out of statecraft with anything like the "automaticity" that a logic of capitalism emerges from the accumulation of European wealth or a logic of industrialisation from the dynamic of technological development. The Janus-face of European statecraft is registered in the chequered fate of democracy within the project of modernity. This corroborates Heller's observation in The Power of Shame:
2. However, the idea of existential choice does not mean artistic self-creation as an act of moulding raw material into a pre-designed shape. Emphasising the conditionality of all human action, Heller acknowledges that the individual actor is already the bearer of infinite determinations of which she is neither creator nor responsible. Nor can such a choice be assimilated to the model of rational choice where steps are chosen rationally in accord with a predetermined goal or life strategy. While this choice can be rendered plausible and consistent in terms of psychology, personal history and moral reasoning, the actual choice itself cannot be reduced to rational explanation. Heller prefers the classical paradigm of "knowing thy self' as the template of self-choice. The character chosen as a personal destiny is not a product of mere introspection but the result of action; this is a "proving" or a "becoming" whereby the self reaches out to find the kind of actions appropriate to the self-chosen character and destiny. This is the meaning of the idea of choosing "to become the person you already are." This framework allows the individual to continue making consecutive choices bound by the telos of the initial existential one. In this sense, existence precedes essence. The individual is already the bearer of an envelope of genetic and social a prioris. Yet, it is only with the choice of all these determinations that she assumes full autonomy and pursues a personal destiny that is beyond contingency and external determination. This account reveals the crux of Heller's defence of the idea of modern subjectivity against its post-modern critique. Against a vision of a palimpsest identity where the emphasis is on forgetting, rewriting, experimenting and disassembling shapes, she opts for a model where gradual or life altering learning constitutes an authentic personal continuity.
3. The notion of authenticity comes to the centre of discussion in the twentieth century with the demise of traditional virtue and increasing consciousness of contingency. Beyond moral virtue, authenticity is a personality term. The authentic person is characterised by the unity of existence and essence. How is this unity achieved if the existential choice involves choosing all previous determinations? Heller relies on the metaphors of "dying" and "resurrection." The existential choice itself is a timeless moment of isolation after which everything is both the same and. different. Paradoxically, the choice of all determinations is supposed to be a release from the past insofar as from this point on the individual assumes full responsibility for all her actions. However, this does not mean that everything in the personality and past is taken as a value. Everything is different because she now evaluates and acts from the perspective of the chosen attributes and their affiliated values. Confronted by infinite possibilities, the authentic person raises herself by "her own hair." By contrast, the inauthentic person avoids the choice, remaining "fake" and not "real." Heller wants to avoid the aristocratic connotations associated with the notion of authenticity. Her commitment to the modern universal value idea of freedom means that the existential choice is open to all. Yet democratisation of the notion of the existential choice raises some key problems that we will return to.
4. Heller's idea of existential choice entails a self-chosen destiny that has to be realised in a series of challenges and subsequent choices put to the character of the individual. But this self-choice is multi-faceted. In one dimension it concerns developing personal endowments into talents. This is the existential choice according to difference. Of course, moral goodness is one aspect of the good life but not the good life itself. In large measure moral capacity is a negative element that resists the transgression of moral norms. But in the choice of difference, the chooser distinguishes herself from, rather than uniting with, others. For Heller, positive virtuosity and accomplishment plays a significant part in any understanding of the "good life." All humans have a variety of endowments. If the "good life" connotes human flourishing, it is essential to explore the full range of potentialities. Only this pole of existential choice fully elevates the distinctive capacities of the individual from the domain of contingency and nature into the realm of a distinctive ipseity and reflective developmental project.
5. Just like Tocqueville who speaks of individual existence as a momentary spark between two abysses, Heller has fashioned her conception of existential ethics between another two abysses: that of marxist Dialectical Materialism, which would reduce the individual to prisoner of laws both historical and natural, and the abyss of recent post-modern critiques of the subject, which declared the rational subject illusory, repressive and a denial of the autonomy of text, of the slippage and play of its cultural meanings beyond intention in the infinite multitude of other texts or singular historical constellations of power. Heller, who took over the concept of the human condition from Hannah Arendt with its stress on the embeddedness of all individual action in webs, certainly does not deny the importance of conditionality. Nor does she dismiss the role played by repression in the constitution of subjectivity. However, she maintains that neither of these genuine insights into subjectivity diminishes the meaningfulness and moral responsibility of individual initiative and action as crucial ingredients of social action. Yet, however worthy these strategic intentions, her conception of existential ethics is provocative and open to fairly obvious critical objections.
6. Heller's focus on strategic moments and key decisions lends to the concept of existential choice a certain non-naturalistic flavour. The insistence on viewing life as a whole with its moments integrated into a unified project with a self-chosen, singular meaning adds to a stilted and quasi-romantic aura of the privileged and elite individual tied to the idea of a personal destiny. Heller's insistence on choosing all the individual's previous determinations as a confirmation of individual autonomy seem extreme. It suggests that no contingency of a past life should stand in the way of the existential model of self-creation. Yet such almost grandiose gestures to individual autonomy tend to invite the common-sense rhetorical objection that few of us would change nothing in their lives. Surely regret is a natural ingredient of any life, successful or not: there are always roads not taken, miscalculated or hasty actions that in retrospect invite the judgement that there were better alternatives, other ways of saying and doing that now seem far preferable.
7. In response to such criticism Heller did try to clarify and moderate the essential meaning of this idea of the existential choice as "transforming contingency into destiny." In a late dialogue she invites one of her characters-- a wise and worldly grandmother-- to clarify the notion of existential choice and to raise some objections not canvassed in her earlier purely theoretical presentation of this idea. For the grandmother, the notion of the existential choice is a beautiful metaphor. However, she is wary of it becoming a standard against which to measure all unique personal histories. The idea of a single, life-transforming commitment falsifies the experiential continuum between essential and conventional living. The grandmother is convinced that we do choose ourselves, but not entirely. The stark opposition between authentic choice and inauthentic indecision fails to recognise a gradient that includes indecision and partial choice. The notion of existential choice really signifies an ideal that can only be approximated, not fully realised. The notion of existential choice under the category of difference seems to allow for only sharp differentiations of success and failure but such clarity is often missing in judgements of decency. The existence of the "good person" cannot disguise the fact that most people live between good and evil. Nor would we want to think that anybody was beyond the possibility of rehabilitation. Can any human destiny annul all contingencies? A rich life is one full of involvements with others and things. This implies that contingency and the possibility of our own loss of self is an ineradicable feature of the modern moral universe. However, Heller is still quick to defend key aspects of the existential model. She thinks it perfectly legitimate to focus on key strategic moments and decisions. In her view, it makes sense to focus on life-shaping crises and junctures where possibilities are narrowed down, where situations are not simply given but dynamic, offering real choices and new options. The idea of transforming contingency into destiny means not the embrace of every detail but the realisation of the best possibilities. This choice is a leap into authenticity neither determined nor directed by any external rule or norm. Authenticity signifies bringing the self’s empirical existence into accord with these chosen best possibilities.
8. These clarifications, refinements and concessions aside, it is worthwhile to focus on the core idea that animates Heller's notion of the existential choice. In 2005 I was present at a series of lecture in Spain where Heller outlined the key aspects of her philosophy. After one lecture on her ethics she was questioned from the audience about the autonomy that she attributed to the existential leap. The questioner seemed sceptical about-the degree of autonomy that Heller ascribes to the everyday subject. Heller replied to this question by citing a news story that concerned a potential murder in a hospital ward. She alleged that in this crisis moment, one very disabled patient, who had previously appeared comatose, managed to alert staff and save the day. For Heller, this narrative exemplified the moral potential of even very disabled human beings to act even in crisis situations when it might seem that conditions and fate had robbed them of their capacity to act autonomously. For others in the audience, including myself, this example raised more questions than it answered, not least about the balance between contingency and autonomy in Heller's understanding of the existential leap. While Heller was not condemning the disabled patients who were unable to raise themselves from their beds to provide assistance in this crisis, her celebration of the miraculous revival of the comatose individual left me wondering about the purported universal potential of the existential leap. There seems to be many instances when contingency invades the very core of the capacity for autonomy in human beings. I'm not here just referring to physical incapacity as in the case of bedridden patients. There would appear to be a whole spectrum of instances from addiction to psychological trauma of various sorts where life history and contingency either robs or significantly impairs an individual's capacity for autonomous action.
9. To my mind the idea of a singular quest, of drawing the various dimensions and possibilities of a life into a unified whole, still smacks of a romantic sensibility that privileges one aspect (usually creation) and downgrades all the other values that lie in the ordinary performance of life. The idea of an existential leap, even in the wise grandmother's attenuated form, has the tendency to homogenise the myriad sources of meaning and possibility in everyday life by imposing the idea of a singular, coherent narrative. In most lives, particularly whose of the disabled and disadvantaged, the weight of contingency is heavy, and the prospects for meaning must often be won from moments, from fragmentary episodes and actions, and also from enduring care that co-exists with the rhythms of practical necessities and their contingencies. If this is true, then the idea of an existential leap need not even be a regulative idea for all. What is required is a further concession to modern pluralism that acknowledges that the ordinary performance of life has its own meaning and values. These do not require validation by a higher purpose or a singular narrative. In fact, the idea of radical choice that seems so essential to Heller's idea of existential choice might often lose more than it gains by sacrificing the rich diversity of the everyday web of life for a singular, holistic meaning. We know that the post-modern spirit has abandoned the grand narratives of history in the interests of emancipation and pluralism. Maybe it is time to do the same for the individual life and abandon the idea of an existential leap into singularity in the interests of inclusiveness, true diversity, and the intrinsic richness of the web of contingency.
10. Now I want to begin to discuss another aspect of Heller's theory of modernity. I should, have pointed out that this was a joint theory conceived with her husband Ferenc Fehér who died in 1994. Unlike the pioneers of modernity thinking who thought they had captured the secret of modernity in a single logic or process, Fehér and Heller abandoned such monolithic visions to capture complexity and opacity of modernity. Despite Heller's slogan of the "dissatisfied society", they refuse to equate modernity with a single dominant logic, given constellation of characteristics and processes. Political refugees from the recently demolished "real socialism" who chose to theorise it as unique version of modernity dominated by state power and the logic of industrialisation, they want to raise the profile of civil society and democracy as basic ingredients of a radical discourse on the future shape of the modernity. This perspective and reflection on the errors of the past made them acutely aware of the tensions and complexity of modernity. Their method is to focus on and extract those multiple elements and tendencies which appear to be the source of contemporary tensions. They nominate three fundamental and distinct logics--capitalism, industrialisation and democracy--which reinforce, complement, countervail and check each other in a constellation that is dynamic and self-expanding. They underline that it is the invariant complexity and conflicting character of this historical symbiosis, which explains the lack of transparency in modernity. This is why it is so difficult for the modern subject to locate problems, sheet home responsibilities and know what needs to be done. Modernity is a decentred society without a single centre. Talk of complexity and antagonistic elements reinforces the multi-dimensionality of modernity stressing the volatility of these dynamic and interwoven logics. Heller dismisses the myth of the closed totality in the sense of a homogeneous system of institutions bent on manipulative uniformity or normalisation diagnosed by the famous Frankfurt School image of the "totally administered society" or Foucault's "Carceral". It is the multi-dimensionality and tensions of modernity that Heller wants to explore. This means roundly facing the grave difficulties and uncertainties underlined by totalising critics, without neglecting the real but always fragile achievements and contemporary opportunities. In the main, it is these opportunities/dangers that forms the focus of their own theorising.
11. However, before detailing the main elements of their diagnosis we must clarify the Fehér/ Heller conceptualisation of modernity and its linkage with the notion of multiple dynamic logics. This no easy task as in their considerable body of writings on this topic they provide no systematic conceptual clarification. These authors do not equate "modernity" with this constellation of multiple logics. "Modernity" is both a historical region and site of the simultaneous appearance of these "logics" and more strongly a creation of the European social imaginary ultimately exported with its technology, wealth and statecraft. Without discounting the structural and institutional aspects of modernity, they want to move beyond the sterile debates over causal determination. They give no causal primacy to any logic. They lay equal emphasis on modernity as imaginary project whose spirit can be encapsulated in various ways: sometimes as "a cumulative fantasy of infinite progress", sometimes as "dynamic justice", sometimes as "philosophy actualised" but always born along these three dimensions or logics.
12. How is a logic of modernity to be understood? If "modernity" is a symbiosis does it make any sense to speak of distinct, multiple, separable logics? Does capitalism, industrialisation and democracy all exhibit a "logic" in the same sense? These are important questions. The idea of the logics in this sense is more than metaphor and takes its meaning from the bourgeois market: this has an immanent tendency to expand as an increasingly self-enclosed, self-¬unfolding system based on the accumulation of private capital, class inequality and domination. In this sense, capitalism as a logic involves both institutional structural and imaginary components taking the form of a developmental tendency or dynamic. In each case the dynamic is born through institutions and institutional networks involving learning processes and more or less formalised modes of behaviour as well as strong social imaginary aspects. The logic of industrialisation is similar to that of capitalism: it involves an unequivocal dynamic of technological development similarly future-orientated and motored by the revolutionary practice of science. In both these cases the fundamental idea inscribed in' the notion of an internal logic is that of an immanent cumulative dynamic with a universalising developmental tendency. Heller points out that the expansion of the market during the European Renaissance and the monetarisation of the economy disrupted the smooth functioning of particularistic life-worlds. Monetarisation announced the passing of the isolated and parochial community standards and the reign of universal equivalence. Such universalisation has both economic and socio-cultural dimensions. Around the same time we witness the shift of cultural objectifications towards universality. Both universal values like freedom and autonomous culture like Art in the singular are both products of universalisation. Universalisation permeates these objectivations. Science is characterised by a universal language. All scientists accept the pursuit of true knowledge as the universal value guiding their endeavours. This commitment to scientific rationalism must subordinate all else in the practice of science. Science also institutes 'a symbolic language which is the common medium of communication between all scientists, irrespective of religious beliefs, race or nationality.' The universalisation of science is not confined to language. Heller underlines that both the logic of capital and that of science involve moral indifference. Each follows its own independent value--profit and truth--according to a logic of universalisation, of dynamic self expansion increasingly emancipated from alien fetters. The dynamism of each logic is also expansive: new territory is constantly appropriated and subordinated to its own internal standards be they economic efficiency or rationality. It is this universalising logic exemplified by voracious appetites of the market and scientific rationalism that Habermas associates with the colonisation of the life-world.
13. For our authors, this interpretation of the logics of modernity in terms of universalising developmental tendencies is also applicable to democracy. Yet they are nowhere able to provide it with the same degree of conceptual definition. Interesting in the light of their assertion of separable logics, Heller sees a common ancestry between science and democracy. It was philosophy with its attack on conventional views and traditional authorities, which not only elevated truth as a universal value and thus initiated the logic of scientific rationalism but also raised the other values of freedom, humankind, personality. Exemplifying this philosophical spirit, anti-authoritarian struggles breached pre-modern social arrangements by challenging the authoritative interpretation of virtues and privileges and their natural linkage with specific social estates and raised questions concerning the validity of certain norms. The authoritative interpretation of social norms by small groups according to a social hierarchy was undercut and norms rendered more abstract and universalising in their application and appeal. The outcome was the universalisation of a few abstract values like freedom and equality and they ceased being the exclusive province of specific social estates. Thus the logic of democracy is also bound to a process of universalisation. The logic of democracy resides in the unfolding of freedom, human rights, equalization and decentralisation of power; it universalise these abstract universal values to realise them as empirical universal values.
14. 0n the question of the separability and relative independence of these logics, Fehér offers the following clarification. Despite the intricate independence of these logics in the western constellation of modernity, they both existed separately both in history and the recent past. The Soviet system functioned, according to Fehér, without the logics of democracy or capitalism, ancient democracy survived for long periods without capitalism or industrialisation and capitalism has appeared unaccompanied by industrialisation (Fehér I the W56-57).
15. 1n emphasising the unstable character of the constellation of modernity, Fehér and Heller underline not only the common features of these logics but also their potential and real antagonism, not only their complementarity but also their mutual checking and delimiting. Ultimately this is only the other side of their universalising tendency: one universalising tendency finally collides with the others. The logic of capitalism in the form of the modern market tends to enforce the values of freedom and equality behind the back of individuals by universalising its own mechanisms and relations. Yet, the capitalist utopia of the entirely self-regulating market meets resistance from the other countervailing logics stemming from industrialisation and democracy. Democratic struggles impede expansion and resist the universalisation of market mechanisms whereas the logic of industrialisation counteracts the market through processes of rationalisation, which centralise the allocation of resources and institutes various forms of regulation and planning. This phenomenon of mutual checking and limiting appears pervasive. The incursions of science into modern democracy in the form of bureaucracy as well as the increasing problem of the degree of expertise required in decision making are well known. Although it is equally clear democracy increasingly tends to question and limit the imperium of scientific rationality, Heller maintains that democracy has clearly not had the same impact on everyday life as science. Science is the dominant worldview of modernity in as much as it has taken over the mantle of religion. While acknowledging this, Heller wants to suppress the cannibalising tendencies of the logics of capitalism and industrialisation. She wants to redress the situation where democracy is retreating before the combined thrusts of capital, science and technology. However, Heller's advocacy of the logic of democracy is tempered by an appreciation of the vital contribution of the other logics to the vitality of modernity. Not only is it impossible to envisage a modernity without industrial technology and science: more specifically because she recognises that the logic of democracy is not the only bearer of an emancipatory potential. She points to the early historical contributions made by the market to social emancipation: its corrosive impact on the traditional rigidly hierarchical community and its systematic and unconscious propagation of the values of freedom and equality. The modern domination of the scientific worldview, despite its costs, is also truly emancipatory. The explicit avoidance of a normative vision imposed by science has lowered the former pressures to internalise conventional norms and provided the psychological space for subjects to assume real autonomy in relation to their social environment and its values. However, our authors clearly associate the projects involved with such universalising dynamics as both potentially destructive and ultimately illusory. Not only do they run up against each other but Capitalism and industrialisation run up against the question of limits both ecological and economic. Even democracy until now has faced fierce cultural resistance beyond its Western home.
16. If this brief exposition aids our comprehension of what Fehér/Heller mean with the idea of modernity as a constellation of multiple logics, it also raises some doubts. The apparent historical interlocking of these "logics" and their dynamics raises questions regarding whether even in modernity we are dealing with separable logics at all. As well there are other difficulties with which it might be easier to begin. Let's begin with our authors' derivation of their "logics" of modernity. They find the origins of the modernity project in the European legacy of wealth, technology and statecraft. These historical elements duly undergo theoretical metamorphosis as the principal logics of modernity. While it is fairly straight forward to translate the former two into the project of modernity as capitalism and industrialisation, the translation of statecraft as democracy is clearly one-sided and tells only part of the story. Fehér and Heller make no attempt to conceal this. They openly acknowledge that the totalitarian systems of the 20th century were just as much a product of the western cultural tradition as were their liberal-democratic opponents. Yet, this admission demonstrates the potential political ambiguity of European statecraft and what appears to be the fragile position of democracy within the constellation of modernity. Certainly, it is not the case that a logic of democracy arises out of statecraft with anything like the "automaticity" that a logic of capitalism emerges from the accumulation of European wealth or a logic of industrialisation from the dynamic of technological development. The Janus-face of European statecraft is registered in the chequered fate of democracy within the project of modernity. This corroborates Heller's observation in The Power of Shame:
democracy has not penetrated everyday life to the same depth as capitalism and industrialisation in the forms of the market, science and technology respectively.
17. Heller elaborates this remark referring to the depth to which both the logic of capitalism and of industrialisation intrudes into everyday life in virtue of their transformative imperialism. This penetrative potential is tied to their institutional systematicity and resulting behavioural formalism and automaticity. While Fehér and Heller argue convincingly for the existence of democratic consciousness as a vital historical condition of the birth of the constellation of modernity, its capacity to colonise everyday life is not so clear, never mind to do so automatically and systematically. While the power of democracy as a social imaginary is real, its potential to permeate social relations and institutions is fragile and never inexorable. If further evidence of this is required, then the historical failure so far to export modernity with capitalism and industrialisation against cultural resistance of traditional hierarchical society is proof enough. Democracy seems especially reliant on specific historical customs; it is a habitus requiring constant maintenance and renewal. Like capitalism and industrialisation, it is embodied in institutions yet it, unlike them, appears weaker in terms of internal dynamism and systematicity. Trying to characterise its specificity, our authors speak of the logic of statecraft as a process of learning and experiment. Democracy's survival and prosperity depends less on automatic structural dynamics and more on conscious cultural adoption, invention, active renewal and propagation.
18. Furthermore, the patchiness of the European historical record with respect to democracy surely casts doubt on the idea of a logic of democracy in the sense of an internal logic similarly dynamical, self-enclosed and unequivocal. Afterall, experiments more often go wrong than right. It reinforces the suspicion that the idea of a democratic "logic" is at least precarious and certainly in need of more conceptual clarification. Heller clearly does not believe that democracy's lack of transformative power disqualifies it as an indispensible component within modernity. On the contrary, she underlines that democratic consciousness is a vital condition of the birth of this constellation. Historically it is not merely a case of capitalist economic organisation and industrial technology providing a substructure, which created democracy as its appropriate superstructure. The existence of conflicting social classes and their political manifestation in struggles for democracy was the pre-condition for industrial development and the capitalisation of the world. While this historical argument proves that democracy was not an afterthought but integral to the original project of modernity, it does not really clarify the sense in which democracy can be asserted an independent logic within the constellation of modernity.
19. The illusive character of the "logic" of democracy is reflected in the fact that earlier Heller situated its origins not in "statecraft" but in "civil society". In this formulation, the independence and autonomy of "civil society" allows it to be the home of two logics. It is the embodiment of both the logic of the universalisation of the market and that of democratisation. With this formulation Heller confirms the inextricable interlocking of logics that ultimately further problematises their potential separability and meaning as independent logics. Growing suspicions of this interlocking are strengthened when elsewhere Fehér and Heller argue that the leading value ideas of modernity "freedom" and "equality" are advanced by both logics. In any case, it may be that a derivation of a logic of democracy from civil society is compatible with one from statecraft. However, this conceptual ambiguity clouds Fehér and Heller's understanding of the multi-dimensionality of modernity. Unfortunately this fuzziness is not confined to the more problematic "logic" of democracy. A similar conceptual slippage is evident with the other proposed "logics" of modernity. In the same formulation from which Heller derives the twin logics of democracy and of capitalism from civil society, she goes on explain the logic of industrialisation as "the limitation of the market through the centralisation of allocation of resources by the state". This is very much in keeping with the Fehér/Heller analysis of the Soviet system. Early in their work, they were not prepared to consider the Soviet Union a version of modernity at all. Afterall, here we have a societal constellation without the logics of capitalism or democracy. However they soon came to see this system as a unique form of modernity under the domination of the logic of industrialisation. In any case, sometimes the logic of industrialisation is understood purely in terms of the developmental tendencies of technology. Clearly these two understandings are not identical. The link between rationality and planning is clear but why this should involve an immanent tendency to the domination of state requires conceptual clarification? Similarly, even the logic of capitalism, which they typically define in terms of the universalisation of the market, is occasionally presented as a logic of the increasing pervasiveness of the functional division of labour. Again commodification and functionalisation are clearly related. However, more conceptual clarification is required as to what each logic specifically entails and excludes, to what extent we can speak of a separable "logic" of capitalism distinct from the rationality of industry and vice versa.
20. Again we come up against the apparent inextricable historical interlocking (one might even say fusion) between these three "logics". This returns us to the initial question of their conceptual separability as logics of modernity. The recent historical failure of the Soviet attempt to introduce industrialisation without democracy only underscores the fact that in Europe these three aspects of modernity arose as an interactive constellation of complementary and antagonistic forces. Heller and Fehér initially theorised the Soviet Union as a system without a democratic logic. Yet, despite official repression, democratic forces existed, developed and were remarkably resistant albeit often required to remain a subterranean force. From a methodological standpoint it is entirely unclear whether the Fehér/Heller interpretation of modernity based on the abstraction of these three logics as separable developmental tendencies can be sustained.
21. This conceptual problem has further implications that collectively amount to an objection against the arbitrary basis of this conceptualisation and a question regarding its comprehensiveness. We already know that Feher and Heller recognise that totalitarianism is equally the offshoot of the western cultural tradition. Nevertheless, they are reluctant to theorise it as deeply entrenched in the modernity. The crimes of the Nazis bear the mark of "modern fantasy" and carried the logics of capitalism and industrialisation "to the most barbarous extreme" but excluded the logic of democracy on principle (Fehér I the W 63). This version of totalitarianism is, in their terms, a "failed" experiment: a version of modernity that lacked the inner cohesion to survive. Here Heller and Fehér resist the temptation to locate barbarism at the very core of modernity like those who have taken the path of a totalising critique of modern rationality. While this strategy has some theoretical and practical merit, it leaves several unanswered questions. How does this model respond when required to explain some of the more complex historical phenomena of modernity like totalitarianism? Is it plausible to conceive totalitarianism as a distortion arising from the logics of capitalism and industrialisation? Even Fehér mentions the myth of racism as crucial to the Nazis (Fehér I the W 63), yet, if this is so, it would seem that any attempt to explain this regime in terms of the logics of industrialisation and capitalism requires supplementation.
22. Are the major problems of modernity sufficiently explicated in terms of the negative consequences of capitalism and industrialisation or do we have seek more complex answers including other important ingredients of modernity like nationalism, internationalism or other ingredients? The former course would appear reductive and incompatible with the large body of historical analysis. Totalitarianism seems hardly explicable in terms of capitalism and industrialisation only. Despite their intentions to grasp the complexity of modernity, could it be that the Fehér/Heller model is still simply too abstract? While Fehér and Heller reject mono-causal accounts of modernity, their model still works at a high level of abstraction with only three component "logics". In this instance the model appears deficient. If its defenders were to reply that the model is construed as a contemporary perspectivism, similar criticism is hardly blunted. The great historical events that overturned the former Soviet block demonstrate that nationalism and ethnicity are still weighty factors in modernity. If Fehér and Heller were to retort that nationalism is a weighty factor but not one of the "logics" of modernity, they still must show what makes democracy one of these "logics" while nationalism is not.
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