Monday, November 06, 2006

Home To?

Agnes Heller and the Ethics of "The World We Shall Come Home To"

[Interview with Simon Tormey]

A final question, you recently wrote a paper called ‘where are we at home?’ in which you reflect on the character of modern consciousness, but I’m just wondering as someone who has by force of necessity lived all around the world if you feel a special kind of affinity with that question. Do you know where ‘home’ is?

I wrote this paper on the basis of two meetings, one with a man who is still living in Italy and the other with a lady on the plane. These were real experiences. I really started to think about this matter and to think over this problem of home for the modern man through these two stories. In a way, this was also a little bit about me, but not at the time when I wrote this. When I wrote this it was after the changes in 1989-90 and I knew I would definitely be here at home, and I had not the slightest doubt in my mind where home was; but looking back to previous experiences, when I left Hungary, I believed I left it for good and I wanted to find a home somewhere else where I was not ‘at home’. Then I really felt these issues on my own skin, but when I wrote this paper I was thinking about it as an existential issue, about existential experience, about modern man and time experience, space experience. It’s part and parcel of the philosophy of modernity because whether we are at home anywhere is one of the crucial issues of the experience of modern man and woman.

Should we worry about the phenomenon of existential homelessness?

There is positive and negative homelessness. There is a kind of homelessness that is really chosen. There is a kind of person who doesn’t want to be at home because to have a home is basically a case of being bound to something and modern man sometimes wants to be entirely ‘free from’, and not to have a home is a kind of negative freedom, just like not having a wife or not having a family can be a kind of freedom. You can choose not to have family. You can choose not to have a home, but if you happen not to have a home without having chosen it, this is one of the great burdens of modern man. This is really a very difficult psychological state, and extremely difficult to cope with. That’s like you want to have a family but you can’t have one; you want to have someone with whom you can share your life, but somehow you never succeeded in finding someone. So with modern man very frequently they do not succeed at feeling at home anywhere and then they want to escape this place and want to have a family somewhere else and then try to have something else. This is a source of greatest unhappiness. It is totally different from freely chosen homelessness.

So is loneliness the modern condition because it corresponds with our notion of what it means to be free?

Arendt was right when she discussed the difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is what you freely choose. Loneliness is superimposed upon you by accident or fate. Modernity allows both possibilities.
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I shall not undertake to start this reflections from a philosophical world-picture for various reasons, philosophical discourse aims to the building of theoretical systems different to those in biology and sociology in that these systems cannot be falsified; they can at most be vexed, used, misused, destroyed but in fact they can never be falsified, only discussed. I also hold a personal distrust for philosophical speculation. Somehow else my view is rather misleading because in escaping philosophy at "the end of philosophy" I am returning to it in a Kantian-most rigidity; this is the only language that born at the feet of age-old traditions has provided me with a space for reflection itself. Without verifying or denying the above stated claims I also house in my thoughts the hope that my reflection upon the ethical world that they shall be based on real experiences to which the books have been only the second layer within a series of conversations that have involved real people that have turned away from the questions of the systems to address human questions in their innermost idiosyncrasy and arbitrariness.

I would like to start with Heller's basic assumption from her system of Ethics, such being the musing of Wittgenstein that Ethics must be a condition of the world to the same degree Logic is. It means as it did in Levinas' critique of Heidegger that the ethical being is implicit automatically and by proxy in the definition of being in the world and accordingly in the definition of being so far. No sources from the pre-rational world exist that can confirm these assumptions and as early as we can travel back in history we face the walls of religious traditions that make the obvious assumption that these sources for morality in the public and the private stem from a divinely-ordained commandment; in this context we shall nonetheless eliminate the Greek tradition of morality which in fact is in itself the sole theoretical basis of our contemporary political life, yet in the limited context of its theoretical assumptions. Moreover according to Jaspers we need not seek the mythical image of the ethical man because this has become already impossible with Socrates; the pre-rational world with all its mesmerizing darkness and clarity remains shut off forever from our world-pictures. The practical assumptions of political life have come with a very different label; they are painted with the colorful paradoxes of the human condition; no matter the tradition we're making use of for our analysis this is a concept common to all forms of thought, and as Aristotle put it human nature is something common to all cities. We cannot dissect the human condition with the same degree of accuracy we use to dissect a human heart from a sickly body and replace it with its artificial yet functional counterpart. This means ultimately that the human condition belongs to an onset of theoretical assumptions partly empirical and partly spiritual that become concretized only in their abstractness.

For Heller the world cannot exist without ethics, even of the negative kind; this leads me to consider an argument that the void of ethical constructions - which is indeed a construction not unlike anything else that "exists" in the world, a paradox set against the background of Biblical accounts, could in fact create a meta-paradox in which the world disappears. For Hannah Arendt the idea of the world is second in importance to none and she goes on to claim that animals have soul but do not have a world; this in particular connected to her reflections on education, that animals are so thoroughly specialized in their labor that they have obliterated all possibility of having a world; there is obviously a moral call in this statement for a more generic kind of education which is not available in the modern world in general, and in the modern condition of labor-division (a sociological tenet) in particular.

This generic and publicly-available knowledge is no longer sustainable in the social compartmentalization typical of Modernity (once more set against the background of sociological theory, in tension-constraints with my hermeneutic model that aims to bridge the gap between theory and life by means of an interpretive model that addresses human questions not by answering them but by pushing them to the limit of philosophy and therefore of rationality; not unlike Arendt's model of Kantian political philosophy, the aim is not philosophical verification but the enabling of one among many possible modes of discourse), therefore the only liable alternative to solve this problem is the limited possibility of human culture. It is worthwhile mentioning Heller's thought on the cultural sphere: Culture is not in the production process but rather in the interaction and discussion, for example in everyday discussions about movies, theater plays and books; this exercise comes closely tied with all of the thinking traditions the western world has produced and it is indeed how philology since the ancient times has opened the hermeneutic space to create as in the model of Steiner, present presences from old sentences; because it is indeed part of this being human the unfinished (therefore constantly renewed but never improved upon) world-picture narrative. Steiner also presents an incredibly useful metaphor of art and criticism in the development of a "cultural" culture or a human culture. For him all possible is already different and dissenting from the world, it is in fact a critique of the world and by sheer necessity enabled simultaneously the visible spaces that make the world itself visible creating spaces for sociability and immediately thereafter for politics. By stating this I'm obviously distancing myself from Kantian models of political life and rather adopting Lessing and Plato. I shall leave temporarily the question of cultural philosophy as it stands beyond the scope of my reflections, so that I can timely return to the world of ethics and the ethics of the world.

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