PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

Introduction

In part one of this three-post series (go here) I presented Agnes Heller’s account of the modern and postmodern worldviews and how she thinks postmodernism leaves us with “life on the railway station” or the state of being radically contingent beings confronted with the task of choosing ourselves. I then explored her closely related ideas of world and home in order to show how postmodernists are threatened with existential homelessness. In the second post (go here) I presented some of Heller’s diverse insights about home and world making that enable us to respond to this threat and be homemakers where ever we find ourselves. In this final post I take a look at two forms of world closure which Heller thinks threaten these hopeful insights. The many manifestations of world closure, which include fundamentalism, racism, sexism, and totalitarianism, threaten to undermine world and home making efforts and especially democracy. Before offering a concluding overview I close with something Agnes would no doubt welcome: some questions to generate inquiry. In what follows I use many of her texts which will be cited according to the abbreviation key at the end of the post.

The Challenges of World Closure 

World and homemaking is a manifestation of our freedom. But this means that some may freely choose to thwart such relationships and facilitate what Heller refers to as world closure. Since this closure threatens world and home making, sometimes on a horrific scale, we must take a close look at it and see what Heller suggests we can do about it. 

In her book Immortal Comedy, Heller draws upon Kierkegaard’s account of the demonic in chapter four of his eccentric work The Concept of Anxiety (1844). One central aspect of the demonic people according to Kierkegaard is their “shutupness” or free decision to close off communication with others to avoid the burdens of freedom (go here for my essay on Kierkegaard’s account of demonic evil). Heller builds on this insight and suggests this shutupness can be construed as an effort to achieve “total world closure.” One type of closure is ideological or fundamentalist and looks like this:  

“Although he can talk without ceasing, he will never establish a relation, or even a contact, between himself and others. Only thoughts and convictions that can be comfortably fitted into their closed universe exist for daemonic figures; everything else is criminal or nonsensical. To employ modern terms, the daemonic man is “ideological” and “fundamentalist” in a very private sense. No one can call his world or anything belonging to it into question; he never pays attention to anyone who contradicts him or interprets something differently that  he does” (IC, 67).

Obviously such demonic people will thwart the efforts of others interested in making moral, beautiful, and democratic connections with them. Anyone not of their world is a criminal or nonsensical person not worth relating to at all. World and home expansion in relation to such people becomes difficult and perhaps impossible. This has serious consequences for democracy. Rather than having more and more world and home growth through the shared values of freedom and equality, we have those who resist such growth and shun integration with those who they simply do not value. As John Rundell nicely puts it, “This other exists in a closed world – a world made of only one point of view in which the other barely exists” (AM, 13).

Figure Crouching by Francis Bacon (1949)

However, Heller stresses that this first form of closure is “not necessarily evil or wicked” (IC, 67). Unfortunately, the second type of world closure is demonically evil insofar as it chooses “isolation from the human race” (SPP, 276) and seeks to pursue this radical closure through the destruction of others: “The evil daemon does not just dwell in his closed world, rejecting communication and reviling everything which enters from outside of it; but he also hates those he rejects, and he desires to destroy them. He indeed plans their destruction. The daemons who cannot reach out from a closed universe are irrational; the daemons who do their utmost to destroy those they exclude are both irrational and wicked. To put it simply, daemonic evil is “totalitarian” and treats others as would any totalitarian despot” (IC, 67). This active form of world closure, which Kierkegaard referred to as “the contentless,” seeks to both maintain and expand the range of its closure by destroying others and, in doing so, is evil. According to Heller, the destruction of demonic evil has two interrelated dimensions. 

Nazi Nuremberg Rally

First, there is the evil of the underworld which denotes those hubristic drives of humans to “rebel against the sacred order (or the good life) at any time” (GE, 167). Civilizations do their best to make the “evil of darkness utterly repulsive, yet this is precisely what attracts, why it becomes demonic” (GE, 169). The dark drives of the underworld of the human soul are always a threat. 

Faust and Mephistopheles by Eugène Siberdt (ca. 1900)

However, without the second dimension of demonic evil, the evil of sophistication, they would only be able to cause limited harm. The evils of sophistication are not lurking behind civilization; rather, they are “created by that very civilization” (GE, 169). These evils are essentially the ways people form guiding principles, or evil maxims, that allow them to engage in the “destruction of morality as such” in order to directly or indirectly “overrule all moral normation” thus allowing for the unimpeded growth of power and knowledge. Heller notes that Plato’s character Callicles formulates a direct challenge to morality with his claim that it is natural justice for the strong to rule over and have more than the weak. These maxims are extremely dangerous because they offer the cultural rationalizations for the darkness of the underworld to take a real foothold and do extensive damage. The evil underworld in common people can be unleashed with sophisticated, institutionalized, and technologically implemented maxims that allow their actions to have real and devastating effects as was the case with Eichmann (GE, 172). 

Heller, like Kierkegaard, claims the world closure efforts of radical evil are ultimately self-destructive (SPP, 157). But they can nonetheless have far more problematic consequences for democracy than the first form of world closure because of their destructive aspirations. Heller mentions examples with which we can all too readily identify, namely, how “small camps, communities, and pressure groups” become “anti-universalistic” and “push their interests,” “grow big on ressentiment,” mobilize action by “suppressing individual taste and opinion,” and “produce deviants, enemies” by declaring that other people’s “behaviour, gesture, speech” is “repulsive.” Thus democracy “easily goes with racism” and can’t exclude “totalitarian mental attitudes” and “physical violence used as the weapon in the exercise of force” (AM, 216-17). 

Liberal Democracy as a Response to World Closure

This twofold analysis of world closure shows us that democracy suffers as those in their closed worlds see others as immoral and ugly beings who deserve no attention or, in the case of demonic evil, deserve to be destroyed. What does Heller prescribe we do about it?

Her response is twofold. The first part we have already briefly covered: establish and support democratic institutions. This support can be directly political (e.g., voting, activism, educating oneself on the issues, etc.) but it can also indirectly foster democratic values like equality and freedom (e.g., by establishing the relations we have explored). The second part is to prevent some of the dangerous potentials of democracy by embracing Heller’s version of liberalism: “If one seeks remedy against intolerance, narrow-mindedness, prejudices, and blind hatred, one should turn to liberalism. But liberalism does not offer a home; it is not a home; it is just a principle, a conviction, and an attitude. One can be a liberal in all homes” (AM, 217). This is because liberal principles allow everyone to give their own answer to the question: where are we at home? And, more importantly, they help prevent world closure by allowing us to see ourselves “from the standpoint of the other also, and thus we have a world of our own and still know the world that is broader than the one that we have” (PHF, 234).

Intolerance by Willem De Rooij (2010)

An illiberal or tyrannical order, by contrast, includes an overt demand that one “dissimilate himself or herself from all other homes” (AM, 221). If one adopts a liberal attitude one has “the conviction that we have no reason, authority, or right to disapprove of others simply because of their preference for other goals or values” (PM, 186). Liberalism promotes “radical tolerance” (the “citizen virtue par excellence”) but not necessarily acceptance of citizens who value treating others as a means to an end only and thus deny the values of justice, autonomy, and reciprocity. It doesn’t follow from this that such citizens should be excluded from the “public realm.” But it does imply that “they can be excluded from participation in a rational discourse” about morality since such discourse presupposes freedom for all and their beliefs incoherently rule this universal freedom out (PM, 160-1). And “it goes without saying that liberalism must not be extended to actions which are morally wrong” (PM, 186). Given these parameters, Heller believes a liberal democracy “could become the home of all moderns.” She does suspect that the battle between various “powers of tolerance and intolerance” are fighting a “no win battle on both sides.” Nonetheless, liberal democratic institutions allow us to “hope that hatred, resentment and enmity will not get the upper hand in our home” (AM, 217). They also allow us to be cautiously optimistic about reducing the effects of evil since “if all institutions were as good as humanly possible, the opportunity for spreading evil would be minimal, and consequently the effects of evil actions would be curtailed” (GE, 174).

Questions for Inquiry

Like all philosophical frameworks, there are points that call out for critique – something Agnes would no doubt expect given that she concludes her book A Theory of Modernity with the following two sentences: “Postscript: perhaps I have answered too many questions – more than I should have. If this is so, please re-translate my answers into so many new questions” (TM, 235). Many questions can be raised about specific concepts covered in her suggestions for homemaking, her account of liberalism, her account of evil, and so on. Naturally I can’t address them all (for more critical insights see the volume Engaging Agnes Heller, edited by Katie Terezakis).

But given that her network of ideas rests on her vision of contingency and the shock it causes postmodernists, I have decided to take a critical look at this foundational concept. In his book Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History (Pluto Press, 2005) John Grumley rightly observes that Heller’s philosophy is marked by a tension insofar as it must “reflect on its own conditionedness without pressing this process of demythologisation to the point of self-destruction” (AH, 87). Let me explore four interrelated points that might help us negotiate this tension by offering ways in which we can, on the one hand, recognize contingency and, on the other hand, remove potentially self-destructive factors that threaten arbitrariness and generate unnecessary homelessness.

(1) Heller claims that “contingency is the opposite of teleology; men and women become contingent beings by being stripped of their telos” (PHF, 3). It seems clear that by “telos” here Heller means the teleology of modernist grand narratives which offer objective and necessary progressions toward fixed and utopian futures. Once we are stripped of teleology in this sense then we are stripped of all objective goals: whatever goals we then have must be made by us. But is this a false dilemma? Isn’t there at least another option available, namely, a form of telos which is a function of objective dispositions that may or may not actualize themselves? Here we can think of the many biological potentials we have as well as potentials that are a function of our interaction with various environmental factors. In many cases these dispositions – say to become a rational and social animal that can sympathize, use language, love, and be creative –  objectively exist and so wouldn’t be just a creation of our choices. And yet they would not necessarily guide our destiny either. Teleology is, of course, a controversial subject and many seek to dispense with teleological explanations altogether. But if we are open to such explanations in some form, then we can ask: can’t we both embrace contingency on many levels and see how dispositional analyses might prevent us from being “stripped” of all objective teleological aspects of our experience?

(2) We can then take up a related issue, namely, how Heller tends to include the loss of God, a transcendent soul, an afterlife, and objective foundations for reason and morality with the loss of grand narratives. Naturally, in many cases such things are inseparable from grand narratives many of us wish to avoid. But perhaps such things can be explored independently of such narratives. Again, we may be facing a false dilemma: either modernist grand narratives that insure various forms of transcendental things or a radically contingent world where all these things are removed. Heller, as we have seen, admits to the experience of homesickness that reveals a longing many of us for transcendence. Could it be that this longing does indeed point to things that exist and can be sought after with the help of arguments? Perhaps Heller is right that postmodernists have “shut themselves up in the prisonhouse of historicity and they have lost the key to this prisonhouse.” Perhaps she is right that “we are no longer in Plato’s cave, because we now know (or rather, this is what we know) that every epoch is a prison, and everyone a prisoner” (PHF, 194). But if she knows for certain that there is no longer any escape to the Sun then she seems to have escaped the fallibility of historicity. And if she doesn’t know for certain there is no escape then, well, perhaps an escape is possible after all. 

Richard J. Bernstein

(3) Let’s assume the freedom of the leap exists. Then we should think about the scope Heller attaches to this freedom. Recall that the “choice of the self means the choice of everything that one is: when I choose myself I choose all my determinations – I choose my drives, my infirmities, my mental abilities, my neuroses, just as I also choose myself as my self, with all of the predeterminations that define it: my age, my birthplace, my family, my religion, and so on” (TM, 227). But can we really translate all our conditions into a freely chosen destiny? In Engaging Agnes Heller the late Richard J. Bernstein, Heller’s close friend and colleague at the New school, points out that “long before a person makes an existential choice (if she does make such a choice) she is always already being shaped consciously and unconsciously by family, community, traditions, institutions, personal history. This thick, rich, complex character development shapes what we are to become long before we are even born.” And he goes on to argue that this shaping need not imply that others choose for us: “The moral education that one receives (or that one doesn’t receive) before making an existential decision is not be confused, reduced, or identified with allowing others to choose my destiny” (EAH, 98). If this is the case, then we can ask: aren’t there aspects of ourselves that are neither a function of an existential choice nor a function of other people choosing for us?

(4) Finally, we can ask: why should we make a leap and choose ourselves as decent human beings committed to universal morality in the first place? If an ethics of personality reveals that there are no objective factors external to us as we decide moral issues, then doesn’t this reduce morality to something arbitrary? Heller states that the fundamental leap into morality, the leap that allows the questions of morality to have meaning in the first place, “has no ‘reason’ and no traceable cause. For such a fundamental choice no norms can be provided, no advice given, no orientative principles presented” (EP, 6). This is an extreme position for sure and one which, if we do accept that certain objective dispositions exist both in us and in the things around us, can be avoided. Can’t there be objective conditions which don’t determine the leap but guide it in ways that make it non-arbitrary? 

The way we answer these questions has ramifications for how we see the shock of contingency and Heller’s account of world and home that flows from it. For suppose it is true (1) that there are ways to think about objective goal-directed action outside the necessity of grand narratives; (2) that we might be rationally justified in believing in certain things, such as God, the afterlife, the soul, transcendental freedom, objective grounds for truth and morality, and so on in ways outside the necessity of grand narratives; (3) that who we are is in some significant sense a function of conditions that exist before we make the leap; and that (4) that these conditions can offer us non-arbitrary guides for making sense of why we leap in the first place. Then we might see our lives as having far more direction, integration, purpose, guidance, hope, and so on in ways that might reduce, although not completely remove, cosmic and social contingency and the homelessness that can flow from it. Naturally, her prescriptions for world and home making can stand for the most part. But we might have more resources for objectively grounding these prescriptions and avoiding the threat of arbitrariness.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction, the above network of ideas really resonated with me in my late twenties when I found myself overwhelmed in NYC trying to establish a new world and thus a home. They have continued to resonate with me due to various dynamics of contemporary society at large. For example, we have a seemingly endless proliferation of worlds on offer with their many opportunities for openness and closure. The internet, multiple forms of media, and the ease of travel allow us to know and even have more worlds like never before. Many people take up these on and offline opportunities for world expansion in ways that are enriching and facilitate tolerance. And yet we find more and more people sorting themselves, both on and offline, into like minded groups that serve as echo chambers that breed conspiracy theories, group polarization, demonization, and hatred. Indeed, as Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven point out in their book Evil Online (Blackwell, 2018), “Our children are now born into online worlds. Worlds that have brought problems of moral fog, where normalizing and legitimizing influences enable evil to flourish, in ways never seen and otherwise hardly imagined.” Such online worlds allow people to do something that Heller’s account doesn’t seem to allow: have tremendous power to, on the one hand, act in someone’s world without ever stepping a geographical foot in it and, on the other hand, be acted upon by others from unknown worlds. They elaborate: 

“Our teenagers routinely, and often in extreme ways, come under attack from bullies or predators in their own bedrooms. In fact, on our desktop, or the mobile in our hand, we all have access to an abundance of fraud, theft, blackmail, threats, bullying, manifestations of terrorism, acts of pedophilia, sexual violence, pornography, child predation, all sorts of violence, including murder and sadistic harm, self-destructive and “hate” communities, pseudoscience and all kinds of gross indecency” (100).

Moreover, we have, on the one hand, powerful conservative trends that seek to hold onto traditions and, on the other hand, growing numbers of people who feel disconnected from traditions and, in some cases, see them as dangerous and oppressive things from which to escape. This duality often underlies cultural wars about gender, sexuality, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, and the content of education. We also have those whose reactions to contingency lead them to relativism, indifference, and even nihilism. Yet there are those whose experiences of the postmodern world inspire them to dig in and become all the more fanatical in their defense of what they take to absolute truths known with certainty. Unfortunately, some people’s attempts at world closure lead them to commit evil acts that leave us both horrified and perplexed. And the dangers of global warming and pollution remind us that the necropolis of expendable things is growing all around us. As we saw above, “even the song of the nightingale and the shade of the chestnut tree oblige, for we cannot take it for granted that they will be here tomorrow” (AM, 221).

Roses and Bamboo with Nightingale by Teisai Hokuba (19th century)

Heller’s ideas on world and home and the various ways to establish both continue to offer me a helpful conceptual framework for tracking these tensions and developments. And, as mentioned above, they can be combined in ways that continually bring new insights. As we have seen, there are plenty of questions she would want us to ask about her ideas. But for those of us who believe in the general thrust of her vision – that we don’t know the future, that contingency looms large in our lives, that we have the freedom to choose to a large extent, and that through our leaps we can forge moral, beautiful, conversational, comic, and democratic relations that foster worlds and homes – Heller’s insights can inspire and guide us in our efforts to counter the widespread and growing homelessness we have around us. 

And they can do more: they can guide as we try and unite our worlds together into one growing world despite all the forces that seek to prevent it. Not, however, into a world like a “major tapestry” which would integrate everyone in one oppressive totality incompatible with radical freedom. Rather, a world more akin to a “mosaic of difference” in which “the difference between ‘your world’ and ‘my world’ remains, and so does the idiosyncratic character of every single world; difference and singularity are not sublated.” This is “the world of people who choose themselves existentially in a significant world. A world where modern men and women can settle in and dwell is composed of the worlds of significant subjects. Every work stands for itself in the friendly company of other works” (PHF, 242). At the end of A Philosophy of History in Fragments, Heller asks: “Can a world like this create something that endures?” (PHF, 243). A task for all of us would be to contribute to the growth, inclusivity, and endurance of the mosaic of difference in the hopes that, someday, this question will receive an affirmative answer.

© Dwight Goodyear 2025

References

EP: An Ethics of Personality (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996)

GE: General Ethics (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1988)

PM: A Philosophy of Morals (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990)

TM: A Theory of Modernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1999)

BJ: Beyond Justice (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1987)

PHF: A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993)

RP: Radical Philosophy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1978)

IC: Immortal Comedy (Lanham: Lexington, 2005)

AM: Aesthetics and Modernity, edited by John Rundell (Lanham: Lexington, 2011)

TJ: The Time is Out of Joint (Lanham: Lexington, 2002)

CMS: Can Modernity Survive? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)

EAH: Engaging Agnes Heller, edited by Katie Terezakis (Lanham: Lexington, 2009)

RI: Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (New York: Routledge, 1994)

AH: Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005)