Critical Theories of the Budapest School: Politics, Culture, Modernity, Eds. Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell, Routledge, Forthcoming 2017-8.

Existential Choice as Existential Comedy: Ágnes Heller’s Wager

I want to dig a subterranean passage.Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too high.

We are digging the pit of Babel. —Franz Kafka, Nachlass

In the cultural tower of Babel, one changes languages all the time. Language itself loses its power; the power remains

with the speaker. The question will be: who is the one who speaks?

— Ágnes Heller, “Omnivorous Modernity” 1

I. I will argue that Ágnes Heller offers a distinctive notion of existential

choice, which both relates her to and distinguishes her from major thinkers of the existentialist tradition. I will also make the case that Heller appreciates, in a genre she calls existential comedy, the most humane and some of the most accurate considerations of existential choice. Existential comedy’s dramatization of existential choice offers a constructive focal point for taking in Heller’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Even so, existential comedy rarely stages the successful act of existential choice, but on the contrary, it tends to revolve around frustrated attempts to follow through on such a choice, or around equally hopeless attempts to confirm that any reasonable, action-guiding principles can be derived from an existential choice. Existential comedy’s subject is more often the spectacular illusion that the option of choosing exists at all. In Kafka’s works, which for Heller are paragons of existential comedy, the potential action of making a choice, and the active reflection which may precede and follow from choosing, are usually forestalled or detoured with descriptive scrutiny of the inaction and uncertainty that supplant them. For both Heller and Kafka, existential choice appears as necessary and unfounded; unteachable and unamenable to analysis. For both, decent and productive people appear not to develop,

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decently and productively, without making existential choices upon which they continue to reflect.

Both Heller and Kafka cultivate their intuitions about choice and reflection as faithful, if profane, readers of Kierkegaard. Heller’s recognition of Kafka as the ultimate existential comic entails the judgment that Kafka’s writings do the work that she delegates to the later modern philosophies, including her own, even while digging beneath that work for the humour and empathy to sustain it. This is the work that comes after the consummate accounts of reflection in the philosophical tradition and Kierkegaard’s rejoinder to them; the work of mining regulative ideals from our intellectual and artistic canons and proposing them as they are needed.2 Kafka’s wit dwells on that mining and proposing as the stuff of “infinite absolute absurdity”; he seems to acknowledge the severity of the mission as much as our inability to make do without it.3 His ape, delivering “A Report to the Academy,” has successfully made do; he has found a way out of abjection: he has become a person. Unlike most of Kafka’s characters, the ape chose himself, as one who overcomes incarceration, who finds a way through captivity, and who deals on his own terms with the unfreedom he still shares with former captors and fellow “educated Europeans.” Having become a person and achieved the impossible, he counsels the Academicians, “if one achieves the impossible, the promises appear later retrospectively precisely where one had looked in vain for them before.”4 What if his audience asked about these promises? What if, unlike so many appeals made and messages sent in Kafka’s stories, we received the ape’s report? What if, so to speak at dusk, we were to attend to the histories wherein the ape suggests promises collect? This is what Heller asks of us. It is what she bets for, with her wager on our ability to hold off abjection and to move toward an impossible personhood.

Before explicitly turning to Heller’s discussion of wagering, existential comedy, or Kafka, let me describe her portrayal of existential choice and specify how it is the point of convergence for her enterprise. With Heller and her Budapest School colleagues, I dissociate the existential choice of the extant individual from the notion of collective self-choice, a notion with which Lukács and Heidegger flirt, and one which remains susceptible to misappropriation by champions of the consciousness of a revolutionary class

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as much as promoters of a nationalistic or ethnocentric ideology. As well, I will comment on the concept of reflection as Heller, Kafka, and Kierkegaard receive it, namely from Kant and the German Idealist tradition. Reflection, and with it, the possibility of legitimately accounting for oneself and adapting regulative ideals to the situation at hand, are crucial in Heller’s philosophy - yet Heller’s position, she tells us, is a philosophy of existence, and her application of reflection and regulative ideals passes through a Kierkegaardian sieve, as do Kafka’s depictions of the inhibition of reflection. II. Existential Choice of Oneself

In A Philosophy of Morals, Heller appropriates from Kierkegaard the notion of a metaphorical leap; a founding decision without its own verifiable cause, to be a particular kind of person.5 Generally, one might choose an overall orientation, such as to be honest, honourable, or noble, and leap into it. More specifically, one might leap into the particular life of a scholar, a physician, or an artist (etcetera). Less imagistically, Heller calls this leaping the existential choice of oneself. One chooses oneself as a philosopher and decent person; one cannot choose to be the abstractly perfect philosopher or the model of decency. She argues that the existential choice of self follows no discernable norms or principles; it appears to be outside of or prerequisite for justification, yet only this choice grounds and justifies ensuing moral choices. Heller insists that there is never a direct, enforceable or teachable reason for the leap. Once one has chosen oneself as a certain kind of person, all subsequent acts of taking responsibility can be traced to the founding moment of existential choice. But as for the choice itself: the image of a leap is hardly any more metaphorical than that of the term existential choice, which Heller uses interchangeably with it, because both merely indicate a readiness for moral autonomy that resists substantive explanation or further analysis. Heller later compares the existential choice of self to the Kantian notion of freedom as the self-given rule; I’ll return to this comparison shortly. First, I wish to emphasize that whether one utilizes the more familiar term freedom, the openly analogical leap, or the concept of existential choice, the claim is that no further ground for human willing and action can be found. Heller does not claim that

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leaping is a rigorous philosophical term; she claims that it is as rigorous as any description of the initial act undergirding moral action can be.6 Heller also describes the mechanism of self-choice, namely as a matter of “dueling aprioris.” The two dueling givens in question for each individual are genetic and socio-cultural. Genetically, each of us manifests our own exceptional hereditary coincidences. Even while elements of our genetic inheritance are predictable in broad terms, our individual genetic codes are in effect accidents with fixed consequences. So our first a priori is our hereditary makeup. The second, the socio-cultural world into which we are born, is likewise a result of uncountably diverse interactions and outgrowths, but the fact that a certain kind of socio-cultural world awaits us and that we will have to deal with it is undeniable.7 Borrowing from Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, Heller calls each person a throw - each of us is thrown into the tension between these two constraining absolutes, which will often enough create difficulties for us (as for example, when one is born female in a world where women cannot openly hold positions of political power, or born without hearing in world unwilling to adopt non-auditory languages).

Self-choice, then, or existential choice, is always made in the friction between potentially opposing or uncoordinated aprioris. As our existential choices can be re-affirmed each time we take responsibility for something, the dynamic between who we are as physically sited and how we are as members (or excluded or oppressed outsiders) of social groups is always the circumstance of our choosing. On this model, not thinking about existential choices and not intentionally making them are also choices; they are decisions against further endeavoring self-determination and self-awareness. As “Kierkegaard says,” Heller writes in A Theory of Modernity, “if one does not choose oneself, others will choose on one’s behalf” (Heller, 1999, 227).

Heller knows that the concept of self-choice has been extended to social groups or classes, as much by a young Heidegger as by a young Lukács. In Can Modernity Survive? She writes:

Lukács and Heidegger, as young radicals, had several features in common. … The idea of a collective existential choice thus emerged almost naturally in their closely similar vision and theoretical interest.

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The political appeared to them as the identity of the essence and existence of a community. When a collective entity chooses itself and thus its own destiny, the political act par excellence has already been accomplished. In Lukács it is the empirical proletariat, this merely economic class, that is bound to choose itself and thus its own destiny. … In Heidegger it is the nation, the empirical German nation, that is bound to become fully political in the gesture of self-choice (Heller, 1999, 117).

This extension represents the flaw in both thinkers. Both Lukács and Heidegger, in their political attempts, lost sight of what the existential is about, for the extant individual. Heller continues:

The concept of a collective existential choice is mythological, because it conceives of a modern collectivity, for example a class or nation, in terms of an individual, a single person of gigantic dimensions, formidable powers and unitary will. … If carried out completely, this conceptual operation results in the total loss of the perception of reality. … The theoretical flaw of the philosophy of collective existential choice is inseparable from its political implications. The self-choice of a collectivity, if possible at all, cannot be existential. The entity is not an ‘exister’ to use Kierkegaard’s term; thus it cannot choose its existence. … The philosophy of collective existential choice cannot help but legitimize the oppression of individuals. … Although Lukács and Heidegger quickly abandoned their self-created mythological devises, the existential concept of the political had its comeback in Sartre’s thesis of the ‘project’ and in his theory of the radicalization of Evil (Heller, 1999, 117-8).

The distinction between authentic existential choice and the myth or ideology of collective existential choice is key for understanding Heller’s concept and its axial placement in her system. Her prominent turning away from a certain expression of “Marxism” and toward something she sometimes calls “postmodernism” is explained in the nutshell of this distinction. For the only political framework that avoids oppression, along with its ideological legitimation, is one that supports irreducibly whole, self-determining individuals, and that operates by following just procedures which exhibit its means of support transparently.8 The “best possible socio-political world” supports “internal relations of symmetric reciprocity” between individuals who themselves define and uphold “the regulative idea of the best possible socio-political world entailing equal life chances for all,

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equal freedom for all,” as well as the equally regulative idea of an altogether self-determining individual (Heller, 1987, 326). Heller’s political philosophy and theory of justice are aligned by the primary idea of the individual who chooses herself, setting off an internal teleology (aimed at becoming and maintaining herself in the particular and general ways she has chosen), and who must find the tangible possibility and support to pursue her ends in the socio-political world. Heller well knows that an individual “cannot make choices continuously on the basis of reflection … or exclusively rational choices” (Heller, 1993, 24-5). She knows that “self-making” is often a “delusion” we experience even as we abandon ourselves to the “capricious lottery of good or bad luck” (Heller, 1993, 24-5). Nonetheless, modern societies can encourage individuals to embrace contingency as well as self-choice. We can experience ourselves as the potential to become what we choose to be (particularly and generally) under ever-indeterminate conditions which may yet undermine our most sincere efforts. The just society, by definition, facilitates the opportunity to pursue the internal teleology set off by self-choice, equally for all of its inhabitants. Qua modern, it will do so as an openly-affirmed regulative ideal, following evident and fair procedures. As Heller indicates, shared concentration on a civic ideal also reinforces shared appreciation of the ways that reflective self-consciousness and context-awareness are historical achievements requiring active maintenance.

This cardinal emphasis on existential self-choice might seem to oppose the twentieth century movements with which Heller has been aligned. The very configuration of postmodernist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive movements stems, in part, from skepticism about metaphysical or epistemological systems based upon self-consciousness or the notion of a unified human selfhood. Heller has been among the leading diagnosticians of each of these (broadly construed and overlapping) approaches; the charge of eccentricity or nostalgia would not broadside her. Instead, Heller works to show that self-choice is a requirement, not a luxury, for all non-foundationalist positions; she asks that postmodernity become the best of late-modernity by paying as much attention to the struggle to “dovetail” internal opposition as it does to the divided and distributed appearance of our inner lives. Her Budapest School colleagues

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join her in this regard, and like Heller, they see the question of the self-choice of the “problematic individual” as a turning-point in György Lukács’s intellectual development, paralleled in the development of modernity.

Ferenc Fehér, for example, argues that as Lukács formulates his multifaceted criticism of Heidegger, he “unwittingly” formulates a self-criticism as well, sublimating his earlier theory of realism into a “genuinely democratic conception of the education of personality” (Fehér, 1983, 104). Fehér contends that while:

The programme of elevating the particular person to the level of the species retains certain vestiges of essentialism in its terminology … the Manichaean dichotomy of the 1930s and 1940s increasingly gives way to ethical alternatives … These have a solid basis in everyday activity … and with that basis a springboard for the fixation of the particularist structure and a material basis from which to rise to the level of the species. … The Specificity of the Aesthetic is indeed … the transformation of an essentialist ontology of fetishism into a cosmology of the self-creation of the individual (Fehér, 1983, 104-5).

Fehér’s judgment that not just Lukács but modernity itself makes this shift (or that modernity is pulled along its course by Lukács) comes across most clearly in his occasional essays on modernity and postmodernity. For example in “The Status of Postmodernity” (1988), he asserts, in the opening lines:

[Postmodernity] is neither a historical period nor a trend with well-defined characteristics. Postmodernity is the private, collective time and space, within the wider time and space of modernity, delineated by those who have problems with or queries addressed to modernity (and artistic modernism), by those who want to take it to task (Fehér, 1991, 537).9

Fehér writes as if the definition and status of the postmodern are not still being debated (in the late 1980s); as if - not despite but because of its denial of homogeneity and affirmation of plurality - a general classification of postmodernity is already widely accepted, such that one can utilize this delineation to harness attention back toward the unfinished questions of modernity. He writes as if these essential questions were postmodernism’s true inheritance as a matter of course. And this is the virtuosity of Fehér’s technique: he is working to make an is from an unacknowledged ought; he is offering postmodernity its regulative ideal; an ideal derived from

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reflection on its own conditions. As such, Fehér associates postmodernity with the rediscovery of contingency. He writes:

The experience of contingency has by now been a two-centuries-long datum of modernity. Stirner’s Ego, Marx’s “accidental” and Lukács’s “problematic” individual are so many names for the same entity: the human condition aware of its contingency. The first symptoms of a new attitude toward contingency are only gathering on a fragmented horizon. Those capable … will proceed from here toward shaping contingency into destiny. … this pluralism is the only basis on which ethics can be erected without pedantry or tyranny (Fehér, 1991, 538).

In other words, one must choose oneself, with an awareness of one’s own contingency, and any decent ethical and political frameworks that may arise to support the growing, heterogeneous population will have to reflect the practical individuality that galvanizes pluralism.

Likewise, György Márkus reads the young Lukács’s struggle for a working notion of culture as an attempt to preclude the apparent contradictions at play in existential self-choice, and to replace them with culture as the “unifying of all life’s phenomena with a single force” (Márkus, 1983, 4).10 Márkus shows that belief in a “new world” typifies Lukács’s early work - it is only a possible world, and perhaps a world only possible for a few - but in it, human nature, needs, and desires are mapped perfectly onto a social existence that satisfies them. Lukács envisions this “shaping of life through culture” as early as his 1909 essay on Kierkegaard; his Philosophy of Art manuscripts of 1912-14, in which he reflects on that same Kierkegaard essay; and in his treatment of Dostoevsky in the 1920 Theory of the Novel.11 Márkus traces this vision of cultural unity as individuals become, for Lukács, ever more “conscious and problematic” and as the individual comes to exist, “more and more only in relation to the things outside him, as the sum total of his relationships to them” (Márkus, 1983, 17).12 Lukács’s vision of culture does not recede, according to Márkus, but the mature conception of reification for which Lukács is most celebrated stems from his problem reconciling inward subjectivity and the demands of the world into any kind of cultural whole, especially under the order of bourgeois institutions. The tension between the inwardness of personality and the requirements of society are productive for Lukács, but only in his

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personal reflections. Maintaining his lifelong concern with culture even as his hope for reconciliation between inward subjectivity and society erodes, he produces the notion of reification, which effectively identifies and organizes a range of psychological and social phenomena not completely treated by the more traditional Marxist notions alienation and fetishism. The notion of reification allows Lukács to diagnose a kind of failed redemption.

For Heller, on the contrary, opposition between the dueling aprioris of our embodiment and our social being is not geared toward redemption in the first place, so the loss of a redemptive ideal can be no loss at all. Along with Fehér and Márkus, her understanding of contingency is far too radical, and the seriousness of self-choice too fundamental, to permit any overcoming of the individual exister in culture, species-being, class, or ideological movement. We do not overcome the one (every one) who is a problem for herself. In this regard, Heller is guided not only by Kierkegaard, but by Kant. Kant maps the terrain of reflective self-consciousness. Above all, Kant makes clear what is requisite and what is at stake in being a self who can reflect upon self and world, and who can make free choices about both. Although her notion of contingency is more ubiquitous in her approach than in Kant’s system, and although she will reject certain demands of Kantian metaphysics and morality, this is why Heller always returns to Kant: the Kantian procedure shows how personality maintains its “pricelessness” and “dignity” in a non-foundationalist paradigm, in effect by choosing and granting freedom to itself.13

III. Reflective Judgment in KantFollowing Leibniz, Kantian self-consciousness is apperceptive; it may

be but the awareness of receptive perception. Or apperception may be the awareness of a more spontaneous, self-directed conception. Kant calls the apperception or awareness of inner, empirical sense apprehension; he reserves the word reflection (as both the Latinate Reflexion and the German Überlegung) for mental acts that focus on the understanding itself.14 In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents both a logical and a transcendental account of reflection. The understanding can generate concepts logically, by comparing things with the “concepts of reflection” (identity-difference;

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agreement-opposition; inner-outer; matter-form). Kant argues that judgment also requires transcendental reflection on those same concepts; he argues that we have not reflectively grasped any thing until we distinguish whether the concepts of reflection on which we rely relate to intuition or to the understanding (CPR A262/B318). In other words, even before we know any thing in judgment, we make an even deeper judgment about how we know by judging how things relate to each other and to our means of conceiving that relation. We can compare thing as they appear (logically), but in order to know how that logical comparison is possible, we must also look to how we formally classify (via reflexio) our mental representations (according to the four concept-pairs of reflection listed parenthetically above). As such, for example, “the concept of a cubic foot of space, wherever and however often I think it, is in itself always completely the same. Yet two cubic feet are nevertheless distinguished in space merely through their locations; these are conditions of the intuition in which the object of this concept is given, which do not belong to the concept but to the entire sensibility” (A282/B339). Kant reveals two different ways of knowing and we learn how they yield information about appearances when we reflect upon their structure. Transcendental categorization is requisite for judgment, then, but we do not attend to it first or insofar as we must first make the decision so to categorize. On the contrary, the point of a transcendental deduction of its apriori status is to show that it must necessarily have conditioned subsequent judgments even before we were aware of it; or again, that it shows up via reflection.

Kant’s amplification of reflective judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is consistent with the portrayal of reflection in the first Critique. Whereas every judgment covered in each of Kant’s Critiques involves fitting a particular under a universal, in the third Critique Kant clarifies how the requirement of reflective judgment operates, when the universal that might properly apply to some particular thing is unknown. Had judgment a viable universal category on the ready, reflection would be unnecessary; we reflect when we are at a loss and know neither what kind of thing something is, nor yet the right principle to help us figure it out (CJ First Introduction §IV-V, 20:209-20:216). Kant’s transcendental, reflective innovation is to show that at this otherwise disadvantaged juncture,

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thinking proposes one of its own principles: it proposes to itself either the reflective principle of teleological nature or the freeplay of the cognitive faculties.15 That is, either the unknown thing in question is compared and assessed as if nature is ordered purposively, and this thing must be a part that makes sense within the systematic whole (with this principle, one can make a reflective teleological judgment). Or, one compares and assesses the unknown thing vis-à-vis the imagistic principle of the harmonious freeplay of all the cognitive faculties (with this principle, one can make a reflective aesthetic judgment).

In both cases, reflective judgment produces and follows its own rule. The procedure works: sound judgments become practicable; thinking reaps successfully from its own resources by reflecting on the structure that it must have in order to proceed at all, and it tests the footholds it will need to carry on thinking. The purposiveness of nature and the freeplay of cognitive faculties are not empirical facts; they are reflective principles that allow for orientation in thinking where nothing else suffices. As every student of Kant knows, however, their aprioricity means that we require them for whatever comprehension we achieve. Kant shows that a priori principles are on the scene whenever we know some thing as a something. Once more, what makes this account transcendental - what renders it a radically critical metaphysics - is the way that its mechanisms are discovered via self-reflection. Transcendental reflection isolates the cognitive capacities behind our unified experience, pivoting inward, to show how we experience and know objects via separate cognitive spheres. All we know, we know through inner sense and reflection upon it.

The principles and posits we utilize to achieve orientation on thinking might be fictitious or artificial, but Kant is willing to call transcendental illusions “natural and unavoidable” (CPR A298/B354). Critical idealism never strays from the idea that we need the world to have a unity and a cause in order to think at all, even while it proves that if unity and cause exist, we cannot know them as such. So we posit, according to working principles, and we shoulder the responsibility of remembering that our posits are necessary illusions; they are regulative principles without transcendent validation or empirical verification. Kantian critical idealism is a reflective philosophy; its analytical as well as its dialectical wings are

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about the conditions of possibility for having experiences and making judgments, and they are presented via consideration of a thinking that is always underway, in the grips of appearances. The responsibility we shoulder when we accept the limitations of the critical system becomes its own reward: it bespeaks an ability we cannot know we have until we test for it.

Kant secures human freedom via the same mechanism that he discovers in reflective judgments on the constitution of cognition. The derivation of human freedom receives more careful treatment than we need to recount here; it is enough to mark how free activity already runs through the whole of Kant’s system, as reflection. We endorse universality and necessity freely, and this reflective endorsement is both self-constituting (we know ourselves as so-endorsing) and world-constituting (it allows us altogether to know whatever we know of the world). Reflective endorsement is theoretically fruitful, in that it produces standards or criteria for ongoing acts of judgment. Reflective endorsement is likewise practical; it is how agents come to be - in the choice, identification, and recollection of our activities. In Kant’s critical philosophy, we begin with what is apparently given; we pivot back and utilize that, in reflection on its conditions of possibility; and we thereby produce standards that allow us to endorse or reject judgments explicitly.

This is, in part, why Heller embraces Kant as the formulator of the social theory of radical philosophy. In disallowing that empirical, accidental conditions for the application of principles or laws can be binding on the laws themselves, Kant clears the way for a praxis unbeholden to ideology or previous experience (Heller, 1984, 144). In taking the view of the reflective, self-constituting agent, Kant “structures the empirical and therefore accidental conditions from the point of view of the law of radical utopia, since it searches for the possibilities of a radical utopia and the conditions in which it can be realised” (Heller, 1984, 144-5). Nor does the Kantian innovation recede with the developments of later modernity, for “radical philosophy must not forget its rational utopia for a single moment, it has to remain philosophy, for when it does not, it will no longer be capable of subsuming the accidental facts under the theory constituted by universal values” (Heller, 1984, 145). The mental apparatus by which we arrive at

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universal values for political philosophy is the one by which we arrive at all other regulative ideas and standards, for universal values are regulative ideas and standards. Heller continues, “radical philosophy must never fail at this task, for it has to put forward recommendations for help and relief everywhere and in every situation” (Heller, 1984, 145).

These values and recommendations are the stuff, too, of existential comedy, yet the best existential comedies do not merely exemplify deeper, more imperative philosophical arguments. On the contrary, by the very Kantian standard of communicability, many existential comedies would rank as more efficacious than their argumentative counterparts, insofar as they speak across intellectual and social divisions to a greater range of people. People recognize in the dark humour of an existential comedy our own struggle and the struggles around us, and an acknowledgment of their severity. Blazing freely into a “rational utopia” is more easily said than done, and probably also more easily argued than evocatively illustrated, since the argumentative position tends to remain in its vantage-point above the fray. Instead of subsuming accidental conditions into an overarching theory or diagnosis, existential comedies more often acknowledge the effort to deal with our conditions, and especially with the resolution to posit anything more than the accidental in a world that remains contingent. Along with the self-constituting agent who is supposed to subsume the accidental into a universalizing theoretical vision, in existential comedy, values and normative oughts play out more like delusions, ridiculous and reasonable at the same time. To be sure, where prefabricated norms threaten to replace the thinking of free agents, everything rides on the ability of individuals to reflect inwardly, on how they know and what they should do. Yet where the ideals we utilize in judgment fail even to cohere with apparently accidental facts, let alone to subsume them, then our sense of agency is under threat. Kafka’s stories (about a message from a distant Emperor that may be sent but absolutely cannot be delivered; about the five-year evolution of an ape into an erudite “European”; about a reasonable, successful son condemned to suicide by some higher law manifest in the ravings of his decrepit, demented father) stage the same divide taken up in Heller’s dueling aprioris and in Kant’s reflective pivoting back toward the given. Kantian judging, with which we constitute our

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agency, and the act of self-choice by which we leap into our own model of good life in Heller, still “happen” in Kafka, but most of Kafka’s characters experience its breakdown rather than its triumph. Kafka’s existential comedies present individuals at the impasse of grand decisions, ordinary everyday efforts, and the want of warranted codes of belief and conduct, but their reflections are as good as worthless; they do not yield bearable thoughts or actions. So far, this does not seem very funny! We must yet return to contend with how, for Heller, Kafka’s illustrations of reflection and inaction constitute the height of existential comedy.

IV. Kierkegaard and the Reflective Rejection of Reflection Heller has either casually referred to or carefully accounted for her

reliance on Kierkegaard in most of the works she had written over the last forty years. She upholds not only Kierkegaard’s literary response to the plurality and paradoxes of human reasoning, but his pluralistic and paradoxical rejoinder to any modern philosophy still laboring to maintain a teleological orientation. I will mention again A Theory of Modernity (1999), where she openly affirms that her own philosophical system is a philosophy of existence, modeled on Kierkegaard’s conception of existential choice (Heller, 1999, 226). In that work and as usual, Heller presents her position via a set of historical comparisons. She sees as “postmodern” her ability to pick and choose from the best of classical and early modern forms. Yet her presentation is historically minded: not only does she depict the evolution of the principal concepts she treats (concepts such as contingency, authenticity, culture, and space-place), but she reads the animating ideas of modernity as made possible and still conditioned by their evolution. Heller seizes the Aristotelian archē and telos, for example, or the need for an originary principle to launch all rational inquiry and for a purposive projection to lend it organization. Yet she strips archē and telos from their traditional moorings by following their historical deconstruction. She not only recounts, but qua “modern,” she affirms the critique of traditional metaphysics’ reliance on knowledge of Substance (or God, or Nature, or God-as-Nature) for its picture of the teleologically constituted being. The “new model,” and her model, do “justice to the experience of contingency” by jettisoning the claim on Substance or transcendent insight (Heller, 1999,

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226). Where contingency holds, Substance and the rest are just so many metaphors and mythic placeholders. Either the teleological reality of the world is guaranteed or it is not; either we can know this (via traditional metaphysics) or we cannot. Contingency, like culture, is one among many historically appearing characters or organizing ideas, but it upends the grand stage. Only people aware of themselves as contingent can make authentically existential choices, and Kierkegaard, Heller finds, best portrays the new teleology, built upon and attuned to contingency.

Hellerian existential choice, following Kierkegaardian existential choice, is a choice made by a contingent and free personality. In A Theory of Modernity, Heller continues to associate with Kierkegaard her distinction between the category of particularity and that of universality. It is true, she adds, that “there can be men and women (there are) who choose themselves as being good at something and also as decent persons. If they are lucky, the two choices will not collide; if they are unlucky, they might.” What remains essentially Kierkegaardian in the choice is its “groundless ground”; its “freedom which does not found” (Heller, 1999, 228-9). Like Kierkegaard, Heller relies on Socrates as the paradigmatic example. When Socrates “proves” that it is better to suffer than commit an injustice (for example, in arguing with Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic), he unalterably deduces nothing of the kind. Equally good arguments can be marshalled in favor of committing injustice. “Socrates ‘solves’ the paradox,” Heller writes,

by antinomy, by choosing death instead of committing wrong. Decency proves decency … so why does someone choose to be good? The question is unanswerable. The sources of goodness are transcendent. Kant came to the same conclusion… (Heller, 1999, 229). Now referencing Kierkegaard, Heller sees Plato’s Socrates as

exhibiting the “paradoxes of reason.” Whereas Platonic and Kantian idealism suggest a freedom which does not found except via its transcendental mooring in reason, Kierkegaard is persuaded, by looking at the same attempts at self-constitution, of the interminable vulnerability and dependency of human reasoning. For her part, Heller seems to remain somewhere between Kant and Kierkegaard on the matter of the pretenses, vulnerabilities, and ultimate justification of reason. The paradoxes of reason that she interprets from the Platonic staging are: first, the traditionally

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skeptical insight that equally sound and valid arguments can be fashioned for and against the same thing, such that reason alone gives us no ultimate reason to prefer one over the other. The second kind of paradox follows from the cynical mode in which the first might be received. It is the idea that that reason leads to unreason; that reason, kicking its can down the road as best it can, begets the unreasonable. Heller clarifies: reason cannot produce an absolute ground; it can only produce principles, and people become relatively good or bad by following principles. But principles not only can become outdated or unsuitable, they can also be misunderstood or exceedingly difficult to distinguish when we would reach for them. In fact Plato gives of scores of examples of this scenario, too.

In Beyond Justice, Heller utilizes Kantian concepts to explain the Platonic view that evil is a maxim for acting in an evil way.16 This is the notion of evil as reason perverted against itself, making Plato’s position, in Heller’s words, “breathtakingly modern.” But knowing this much, Plato also inoculates the primary moral assertion that “it is better to suffer than do injustice” with the outbreak of injustice toward Socrates, and with Socrates’s enthralling response to it. Plato makes a “gesture of the future”; he “tips the balance” in Socrates’s favor. Plato gives us a Socrates who exhibits not only an erotic inexplicability but a “moral glamor”; this is Socrates as the “clownish knight of righteousness” (Heller, 1987, 69ff).

With The Concept of Irony With Constant Reference to Socrates (1841), Kierkegaard labors in part to reconstruct a historical Socrates who might stand against the Platonic portrayal, but as regards Plato’s authorial gesture of “tipping of the balance” toward Socrates, Kierkegaard agrees with Heller, and therefore would agree that another, third face of the paradox of reason arises via Plato’s depiction of Socrates. It appears in the way that Socrates, even in failing to produce a foundation for moral goodness, becomes himself the representation of goodness. Plato all but ensures that readers will wish to model Socrates, not Thrasymachus or Callicles, each of whom actually present defensible positions on society and politics. Thanks to Plato, the story and personality of Socrates compel us to envision more than accidental values, social domination, and Realpolitik. Socrates, qua character or personality, personifies the narrative intelligibility that the Good is supposed to furnish (or so he supposes). But

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Socrates’s difficult, compelling personality achieves this standard, and decidedly not the ideal Goodness for which he can only strive. The third face of the paradox of reason is the human face of a Socrates, fixated on a Goodness that cannot be presented, but that he comes to represent.17

Again, although Plato erects the first great system of idealism with Socrates at its gates, Heller finds that he also admits something of the human hope and projection that go into envisaging the Good, and of knitting its filaments back into everyday life. Plato’s Socrates does not stumble into paradoxes in spite of Plato, on Heller’s reading, but because Plato is willing to show his hand in dialogical exchanges that reveal the weaknesses in Socrates’s arguments and in the endowment of Socrates with a personality that exceeds them. Therefore “Socrates,” she writes, giving Kierkegaard credit for the same insight, “was the first existential ironist” (Heller, 2005, 100). Yet Kierkegaard, who also studies Socrates’s irony and lauds his brash humility, ultimately finds that Socrates the teacher is not, cannot be, and himself requires a savior. Not Kierkegaard’s but Heller’s Socrates undergoes the paradoxes of reason and provides a model on which to set our sights as we face up to the paradoxes, with no savior in sight before or after this common era.

In Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard says that we can relate to ourselves only if we relate to the Good; he goes on to claim that God and the Good are “one and the same.”18 Doubt and the so-called self slip and tumble without end, until we form a relationship with that which establishes the very possibility of relating. Kierkegaard attempts to replace reflection on the idealist model with a relationism that goes beyond the self and its ideas. He allows that we become selves only by authentically relating to ourselves; and, with Hegel, he admits that we can only authentically relate to ourselves insofar as we relate to others. But Kierkegaard asserts that we can only relate to others if we relate, unconditionally to the Good, or God, as that which launches relatability in the absolute-first place. On the one hand, then, Kierkegaard gives us a relational, interdependent self; a self who could never be self-contained and who never sheds his or her contingency. Yet the theoretical price of this modern self is the loss of theory and its exchange for a religious leap of faith into God as the unconditioned condition. The Kierkegaardian self is not

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only relational and reliant, and not just twisted into a paradox between worldliness and transcendence; he is on that count living “in sin.”

The Kafkian subject, embodied in characters such as Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis and Joseph K. of The Trial, likewise attempts to relate to or know himself, even as his reflections become all the more unmoored and absurd. He sets goals, but the goal-post turns out never to have existed except perhaps in myth or a distant administrative chamber. He makes decisions, in fact ad nauseam, but vitiating decrees outdistance them before they affect his life. Foremost, he tells us things about himself, he attempts the reflective relation, but his vehicles combust; both his body and his language ironize him. In mastering some preliminary movement under a piece of furniture or through a bit of paperwork, what this mastery teaches is that he controls nothing. The Kafkian subject is not necessarily a faithless subject: he may trust in a God, in laws, in family, and above all, in the reign of normalcy and reason - but as the readers of his story, we see this as misplaced, even suicidal faith.19

Kierkegaard and Kafka do not differ so much in their thinking of inwardness, relationism, or even faith in an unknown God or great mystery. But whereas Kierkegaard recommends relation to self, other, and God, admitting that reason cannot guarantee his recommendation, Kafka records the attempted relation and the reasoning that presses onward, practical but itinerant. In “The Judgment,” a dutiful son attempts to relate to his distant friend, his fiancée, and foremost to his father, but the lucidity necessary to relate to anything is darkened by his father’s dementia and the deeper, disproportional law it calls forth. In “An Imperial Message,” the subject would relate to his emperor and the emperor to his subject, but a morass of bodies and perpetuity separate them. The message has been sent but no messenger is durable enough to contain it, and the emperor is already dead; he can repeat or confirm nothing. Kierkegaard recommends faith in the Good beyond the door of the law, but the Kafkian subject dies “Before the Law” as his author sounds out the elements of the doorway that precedes it, describing instead his character’s life in wait. Further on in the narrative surrounding the parable, K. and his interlocutor, the priest, plumb the “unalterable scriptures” for the truth within the parable, which presumes a world beyond the door insofar as it first conjures a door worth waiting

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before. The priest asserts the necessity of all of the doorkeeper’s words, but, K. wonders, does this not “turn lying into a universal principle?” Necessity and universality make for internally unified minds that understand a unitary world, a world not only before the threshold, but stretching out after it, too. As Kant has said, a critical limit does not allow us to see beyond the limit, but it allows us to think that there is something beyond it. Following Kafka’s parable and the midrashic conversation into which he writes it, we are asked to consider, pace K., if an idealistic necessity and universality are not the greater lies. Would this mean that contingent and singular truths are incommunicable via the channels of necessity and universality? And if so, how will we deal with the contingency and individuality we experience in everyday life?

V. Kafka’s Infinite Absolute Absurdity and Heller’s Wager In A Philosophy of History in Fragments, Heller calls “Before the Law”

a beautiful story, holding it up as a negative model. Unlike the dying, submissive character who perplexes us, the “philosopher in the age of universal hermeneutics” can do more; she can “keep banging at the door.” “One can try the impossible,” Heller writes, “because one does not know whether it is impossible in an absolute sense.”20 Heller appreciates Kafka as a comic writer because she does not suppose that he asks us to identify completely with his characters. When they are portrayed as passive, they tend to stop us in our tracks, qua comic, by allowing us to laugh at the possibility of inaction.

Thomas Mann calls Kafka a “religious humourist.”21 “And what,” asks Heller a half century later, “is the existential essence of the humourist?”22 She cites Kierkegaard for the definition, then glosses:

“Briefly, the humourist treats every earthy striving as comic, measured against something he believes to be higher, yet to which or whom (God) he does not stand in relation. … I think that Plato was a humourist in the Kierkegaardian understanding of that notion. He lingered in the sphere between the religious and the poetical. He was not a metaphysician, but a man related to transcendence, and this relation could not manifest itself in direct communication (Heller, 2005, 101).

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I mentioned above that Heller credits Kierkegaard for naming Socrates the first existential ironist. Yet it is Plato, she shows, who renders Socrates’s irony also humourous. In Kafka’s existential comedy, she goes on to say, we also find this constitutive irony and constitutive humour, but it is reversed, because here contingency and immanence hold sway; here there is no “other world” except as a fantastic dream or castle in the air, and this is not at all comic for the dreamer or aspirant but only becomes comic with “the reader’s or spectator’s eye” (Heller, 2005, 103-4).

In a diary entry of August 21, 1913, Kafka records receiving Kierkegaard’s Buch des Richters: “As I suspected,” Kafka records, “his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, as least he is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.”23 Kafka then includes a draft of the letter he has just penned to the father of Felice, in which he warns of what an awful husband he would make for Felice. Max Brod’s annotations of the diaries confirm the consistent if protracted environment of both activities, marking by September 15, 1917, in addition to the first medical confirmation of Kafka’s tuberculosis and his rekindled interest in Judaism, Kafka’s close reading of Kierkegaard and his renewed decision to end his engagement to Felice.24

Kafka’s affiliation with Kierkegaard cannot be identified merely with reference to absurdity; it lies in the way that, for both, the abyss of reflection is only passable via reflection, by going even more inward. Not for their pseudonyms or characters, but for Kierkegaard and Kafka, the record of reflection is a new entity. In it, writing through reflection becomes dissent, even revolutionary upheaval - and even if there is no immediate, outward sign marking the “unrecognizables” who make the attempt. For Kierkegaard, reflective inwardness becomes the leap of faith into religiosity, but in Kafka, the other side of the revolution remains unnamed, unpictured, and still hovers between doubt and hope. It also becomes the record of a failure to name and picture; reflection revolves into the text, or into literature. Kierkegaard and Kafka exhibit interrelated expressions of the way that, at modernity’s defining crossroads, Scripture recaptures its authority, but only as secular literature, at the same time that literature, and the inspired beings who apparently must sacrifice themselves to write it, are attributed the radiance of spiritual vision.25

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“Before the Law,” again, is exemplary, and Heller’s reference to it instructive. The citation of the parable and the conversation after it raise doubts about authority and its basis. K.’s melancholy questioning does not batter down the door of interpretative understanding any more than the dying protagonist makes it through his personal door, but if there is an injustice in the latter’s treatment, it is recorded with the former’s questioning. In the face of suffering and death this seems to be very little but it is not nothing, because disbelief, noncompliance, or even confused non-participation matters if “the law” (necessity, universality) is held in place by tradition, force, or an allegedly otherworldly sanction. Not one of those can compel absolutely, even where the external forces accompanying authoritarian claims can crush an individual dissenter. If the justice of the law is random, then by definition it is not justice. If it is universal or reasonably proportional, then questions about its basis must be answerable; they must appear to reason. And if the human or institutional enforcer of the law denies that these two alternatives are exhaustive, in particular by refusing to discourse about them at all, then the record of the struggle for answers is a testament justifying revolt. It may be comic, insofar as it incorporates the ironies of an impossible choice (believe or disbelieve; accept or act) with a humour that mocks submissiveness, but it is also an exhortation, paraphrasing Heller, to bang down any door that imposes on us a claim without reason.

Kafka gives us individuals on the cusp of an action or in the moment before a decision, but unable to act or decide (“Abraham,” “Before the Law,” “Up in the Gallery”) or characters whose decisions and action can only come too late, or never come (“The Coming of the Messiah,” “An Imperial Message”) or characters to whom it never occurs that they might contest a life-altering situation (The Metamorphosis, “The Judgment”) or for whom such contesting or appealing is futile (The Trial, The Castle). These works play out in ways that allow us to imagine the world shifting to accommodate them, but it never does. Sometimes, as with the ape who offers “A Report to the Academy” or the murderer of “A Fratricide,” or the brother in “A Knock at the Manor Gate,” individuals may undertake significant action, but nothing that prevails over the isolation or brutalization that accompanies their endeavor.

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Nonetheless, whether it is called injustice or is but the absence of reasonable order, a record is made. Where Kierkegaard is willing to testify that we must relate to God as the Good, Kafka’s record includes the ambiguity of the anchoring term. Should a naturalist attempt to interject an instinctual compulsion toward the Good, Kafka’s record looks the same. Nature is the sleek panther who paces awesomely, in captivity alongside the free hunger-artist; it is the enjoyment in food eluding the hunger-artist; it is the insect body of Gregor and the inexplicable chirping of Josephine. In other words, nature is another metaphor, another illusion made universal. Josephine’s story, Heller tells us, is a beautiful example of constitutive humour and probably the first case in literature of the comic presentation of the religion of art, and maybe also of the authority of religion as such. In its presentation, Kafkian existential comedy halts the march of the reflective subject of idealist philosophy, dwelling on the herculean effort to posit finality in nature or harmony in cognitive freeplay. Likewise, Kafka’s work breaks down the empirically minded naturalist with images of the disinterested impersonality of an ever-present nature, checking the religionist with a matching image of a superabundantly disinterested God. Yet as a record, Kafka’s writing is also a kind of wager. Facing up to mutually opposed, impossible choices - at bottom: our contingent existence makes sense or it does not; we can affect the world significantly or we cannot; there is ultimate design to the world or there is not - Kafka places what Heller would call a new bet, now against the wager.26 And with it, he raises a question: on what grounds are we shocked by or laughing at his narratives?

On Heller’s reading of The Metamorphosis as existential comedy, Gregor has not really been transformed because he has not exchanged his more essential function as either useless or instrumental in his family. “Life itself, Gregor’s life in his family, the silent acceptance of being used as a mere means, is itself absurd” (Heller, 2005, 106). Gregor’s situation is portrayed as if he has been cursed. But “the trick is that there is no curse,” one becomes who one is and Gregor is treated as, and becomes, an insect. The naturalistic descriptions of Gregor’s new body and techniques of using it are extremely funny, Heller finds, for the close scrutiny of something so fantastical, as if it was ordinary and routine, is incongruous. We laugh at

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the way the strangest of scenarios, things that should make us shout and resist, become acceptably humdrum as soon as we accept and describe them as such. Kafka presents the stark alternatives; his presentation itself can be read, comically, as the wager that we will deny that they constitute a plenum.

I return one final time to the Hellerian notion of pervasive contingency. Contingency means that 1: for human agents, our ability to know the world is fundamentally mutable and the occasion to determine our innermost selves is unending. And yet that 2: we require rules, standards, and models of action in order to think and to act. The rules we utilize are not derived from the fundamental order of Being nor are they merely imaginary. Rather, they are practical utterances that describe our place and our goals within relational matrices. Heller further finds that 3: principles and regulative ideals exist aplenty in our philosophical and literary canons, and her normative counsel is that those who can should bring them to light and advocate for their application as they are needed.

Heller acknowledges the inalterability of contingency by beginning with the leap of self-choice which must undergird moral agency. She remains clear that even as self-choice is necessary, it is inexplicable. Not only is the founding action of self-choice unamenable to logical analysis, but human reason altogether, on which we will not cease to depend, is often too fragile to fend off its transformation into unreason. So, Heller counsels, we place a bet: we bet on human reasoning in a contingent world and existential self-choice in world without an ultimate foundation. Heller is not suggesting a Pascalian bet, namely that there either is or is not God/Universality/Necessity. She is suggesting a “second order wager.”

Heller identifies her second order wager with Kantian regulative positing and the postulates of practical reason (Heller, 1993, 12-16). On her telling, this is Kant’s way of betting on the prospect of refusing to bet. In effect, she adds, this is also a bet on oneself; it is a reflection on the founding act of self-choice, despite the odds against it, which affirms that the self can choose and can get on with formulating decent principles even as it remains agnostic about how the initial self-choice is made. Self-choice is a puzzle, Heller suggests, that cannot be solved, because really, it is not a

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puzzle at all. Our puzzlement is our problem and it gives us a task, and that task is absurd. Like the ape before his capture, the panther who supplants the hunger artist, and the blossoming of Grete Samsa after her brother’s death, it is possible not to think about it as a task at all; it is possible not to be a problem for oneself. But insofar as we are reading existential comedies, smiling because we recognize the struggles they record, it is already too late, and we can also accept their consolation. We can “enjoy the fun that sprouts from below the equilibrium between hope and despair,” Heller writes. 27 Called forth by literature, it spreads like a mood, sufficient and fit to find its own reason.

Notes

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1 Kafka (1993), 2:484. See too (1953), p.387. Heller (2002), p. 110. 2 For a representative example of reference to this task see An Ethics of Personality (1996) p. 5.3 Kierkegaard (1965) takes over the phrase “infinite absolute negativity” from Hegel, but Kierkegaard uses it to describe his own concept of irony. In order to apply the phrase to Kafka, while still emphasizing this heritage, I have changed the last word of the description to absurdity. Kafkian humour and irony, as I will describe (with Heller) in what follows, follow a pattern similar to Kierkegaard’s. But unlike Kierkegaard the religious humourist, for Kafka the possibility of another, transcendent world to which we can yet relate, is obviated. Our yearning for and projection of that world is incongruous; our hope and our despair are infinite, absolute, and absurd. 4 Kafka (1979), p.251. 5 Heller uses the image of a leap (and of a throw) throughout her works. For representative examples see not only A Philosophy of Morals (1990), but also A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993); An Ethics of Personality (1996); and A Theory of Modernity (1999). 6 This section of the argument I take directly from Terezakis (2014). 7 Terezakis (2014) and see An Ethics of Personality (1996), p. 204. 8 Beyond Justice (1987), 270ff.9 Fehér (1988) and (1991), p.537. 10 Márkus (1983). 11 Márkus (1983). 12 Márkus (1983). 13 “The romantic and the anti-romantic stories can also be synthesized. Kant performed such a synthesis. He distinguished between the person and personality (the moral individual). The person has a market price, but the personality does not; he is priceless, he has dignity.” A Theory of Modernity (1999), p. 87.14 For the “synthesis of apprehension” see Kant (1998) CPR A100; for Kant’s account of reflection proper, see Kant (1998) CPR A260/B316, or the whole of the “Appendix on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection Through the Confusion of the Empirical Use of the Understanding with the Transcendental.” Kierkegaard’s target is solely reflection, though the Hegelian account of reflection provokes his criticism more than the Kantian. Kierkegaard identifies reflection with an “excess” that overwhelms and dissolves effective action. Kierkegaard stands his own notion of inwardness, and of the potentially revolutionary turn into a form of religious belief, against what he takes to be the standard, enervated notion of reflection in the German idealist tradition. For his elaboration, see Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (from Kritik der Gegenwart - wherein the potential reference to Kant is more manifest), (1962) and (2009). 15 For the reflective principle of teleological nature see Kant (2000) CJ §11; see too purposiveness as internal to organized beings at Kant (2000) CJ §66, and “nature in general as a system of ends” at Kant (2000) CJ §67. For freeplay of the cognitive faculties see Kant (2000) CJ §9, §12, §15, §35. 16 I make this point in (2006). 17 A Theory of Modernity (1999), p.18 and Beyond Justice (1987), p. .18 Kierkegaard (2009). For closer examination of this point, see Anthony Rudd (2015) p.56. 19 Cythia Ozick drives home the argument that Kafka’s characters expect normalcy and reason (1998). 20 A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993), pp. 214-5. 21 Mann calls Kafka a “religious humourist” “Homage to Kafka,” which serves as the introduction The Castle (1954). 22 Immortal Comedy, (2005), p.101.23 Kafka (1979), p.258. For more closely developed analysis of Kafka as an ideal reader of Kierkegaard, see Clark S. Muenzer (1990). I owe to Muenzer also the reminder of Kafka’s “Schacht von Babel,” which opens this essay and with which Muenzer closes his excellent essay.24 Also in Corngold (1988) p.109 fn7. 25 For the best interpretation of this crossroads that I know of, see Prickett (1986) and (2010). 26 A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993), pp.12-16. 27 Immortal Comedy (2005), 124.

BibliographyWorks by Ágnes Heller

Agnes Heller,“Georg Lukács and Irma Seidler,” in Lukács Reappraised, Agnes Heller,

Ed. Oxford and New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Radical Philosophy. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.Beyond Justice. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Can Modernity Survive? Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1990. A Philosophy of Morals. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (with Ferenc Fehér).

New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991.A Philosophy of History in Fragments. Oxford and Cambridge:

Blackwell, 1993.An Ethics of Personality. Oxford and Cambridge. 1996.A Theory of Modernity. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1999. “Omnivorous Modernity” in Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays

in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman. Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe, Eds. London and New York: Routledge 2002, pp. 102-126.

Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life. New York, Lexington Books, 2005.

A Theory of Feelings, 2nd Edition. New York: Lexington Books, 2009. A Short History of My Philosophy, New York: Lexington Books, 2011.

Other WorksFritz Billeter Das Dichterische bei Kafka und Kierkegaard: Ein typologischer Versuch. Winterhur: Keller Verlag, 1965. Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Ferenc Fehér, “Lukács in Weimar,” in Lukács Reappraised, Agnes Heller, Ed. Oxford and New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 75-106.Ferenc Fehér “The Status of Postmodernity,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Boston, no.5 (1988), pp. 17-31. Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka. Introduction by Erich Heller. New York: Washington Square Press, 1979.___ The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913; 1914-1923. Max Brod, Ed. Prague, Berlin, New York: Schocken Books, 1948; 1949.

Tagebücher 1910-1923. Project Gutenberg DE. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/-162/1.

Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I & II, Kritisch Ausgabe. Malcolm Pasley, Ed. Frankfurt am Main Fischer, 1992 & 1993.

Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem NachlaB. Max Brod, Ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1953.

The Castle. Thomas Mann, Homage. 2nd Edition. New York: Alfred Knoph, 1954. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Trans. and Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. Paul Guyer, Ed. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age. Alexander Dru, Trans. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Eds. And Trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony With Constant Reference to Socrates. Lee M. Capel, Trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965. Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Eds. And Trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. György Lukács. Soul and Form, Katie Terezakis and Jack Sanders, Eds., Anna Bostock, Trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.György Lukács. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: Anna Bostock, Trans. The MIT Press, 1971.György Márkus, “Life and the Soul: The Young Lukács and the Problem of Culture,” in Lukács Reappraised, Agnes Heller, Ed. Oxford and New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 1-26. Clark S. Muenzer. “A Kafkan Reflection on Kierkegaard: ‘Auf der Galerie’ and ‘Kritik der Gegenwart’ in Wegbereiter der Moderne: Festschrift für Klaus Jonas. Helmut Koopmann and Clark Muenzer, Eds. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1990, pp. 144-162.Joyce Carol Oates, “Kafka’s Paradise,” The Hudson Review. Vol. 26:4 (Winter 1973-1974), pp.623-646. Cynthia Ozick, “Tall Kafka and his Sisters,” Bomb No.65 (Fall 1998), pp.24-25. Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.Stephen Prickett “The Bible and Literary Interpretation” in The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth- Century Theology, D. David A. Fergusson, Ed. Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010, pp. 395-411. Anthony Rudd, “Kierkegaard’s Platonic Teleology,” in Narrative, Identity, and the Kierkegaardian Self. John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes, Eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 46- 62. Katie Terezakis, Ed. Engaging Agnes Heller: A Critical Companion. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. Katie Terezakis. “Telling the Truth: History and Personality in the Philosophy of Agnes Heller” Thesis Eleven. 125(1), pp.16-31, 2014.Katie Terezakis, “Heller on the Ancients” Ethics and Heritage. Ed, Boros

Janos. Budapest/Pecs: Brambauer, 2006.

KeywordsComedy, Existentialism, Humour, Irony, Leap, Reflection, Reflective judgment , Regulative ideal, Martin Heidegger, Agnes Heller, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant, György Lukács, Plato, Socrates.

AbstractÁgnes Heller offers a distinctive notion of existential choice, which both relates her to and distinguishes her from the major thinkers of the existentialist tradition. Heller appreciates, in a genre she calls existential comedy, the most humane and some of the most accurate considerations of existential choice. Existential comedy’s dramatization of existential choice

offers a constructive focal point for taking in Heller’s wide-ranging oeuvre. Yet as Heller shows, existential comedies usually stage the failure, rather than the success, of existential choice. Especially in its superlative form in the stories of Kafka, existential comedy detours the reflective process that seems inseparable from existential choice. Kafka’s stories often portray the absurdity of reflection in a world too accidental for rational mastery or for any more than a perverted universality. In them, Heller locates how issues of control and dependency cut to the core of both everyday life and of our attempts - reasonable, mystical, doomed, or hopeful - to understand and remake it. Where the Kantian presentation of reflective judgment locates human freedom with the unity of reason, and the Kierkegaardian critique of reflection suggests a leap of faith into the relational condition of reflection, Heller wagers that human possibility can be developed in the regulative sphere between alternatives. She suggests that Kafka’s existential comedies stage an imaginative possibility beneath even the “equilibrium of hope and despair,” granting the opportunity to reflect upon this regulative sphere and the promise it holds.

Author biographyKatie Terezakis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of numerous articles on Heller, on Lukács, and different elements of modern and later modern philosophy. She is the author of The Immanent Word: The Turn to Language in German Philosophy 1759-1801 (Routledge 2007); the editor of Engaging Agnes Heller: A Critical Companion (Lexington: 2009); and the co-editor of Lukács’ Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010). She is currently completing a manuscript on “The Reinvention of Idealism in American philosophy.”

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