!Negligence
---
agk's diary
29 November 2023 @ 14:59 UTC
---
written on ThinkPad X61/HP Pavilion vf15/Model M
in quiet kitchen while Evy's away modeling
and daughter sleeps at Ruwen's house
---
Agnes Heller (1929-2019) wrote philosophy for 70
years. In 2010 she wrote A Short History of My
Philosophy, critically reviewing her major books,
papers, and lectures of the previous 60 years.
It's refreshingly unsentimental and clear. It was
how I decided where to enter her vast ouvre of pol-
itical, moral, ethical, aesthetic, and philosophy
of history thought.
I liked the idea of how, thrown into the world, a
person cannot perfectly fit the space she ought to
fill. Through meeting a decent person or persons in
everyday life, she's faced with the existential
choice of whtether to also be decent. Should she
make the choice, she's then faced with the task of
climbing the ladder, becoming who she is. So I
started with An Ethics of Personality (1996).
Heller's known for grounding her thought in every-
day life, her work on needs, justice, feelings,
and the responsibilities of individuals in modern-
ity.
In her short history of her philosophy, Heller
discussed the impact of her blacklist after the
1956 Hungarian Revolution. She wrote for her desk
drawer, determined to think in a world that denied
her colleagues or students, without expectation
her thought would ever be encountered by another
person.
She did not write that at the time she had a 4
year-old daughter and a marriage 5 or 6 years from
ending in divorce.
I can't imagine her thought without the experience
of motherhood any more than without the experience
of being banned from teaching, writing, traveling
early in her career.
Despite her dogged focus on everyday life and
attentiveness to relations with parents, children,
teachers, students, colleagues, friends, law, etc.,
I think she had nothing public to say about the
impact of having and raising two children, of being
wife and mother, on her thought.
My friend Ruwen is smarter than me, and also mother
to a 2-year-old. She hasn't read Heller, but I
asked her thoughts. Maybe, Ruwen hazarded, Heller
was ashamed of being a body that bleeds, conceives,
lactates, shrivels.
It could be. Like Plato and Aristotle, Heller
wrote deep masculine love for her teacher Lukacs,
her students, friends, and second philosopher-
husband. Maybe she resisted feminized embodiment.
Unlike Plato and Aristotle Heller didn't act as if
she had no family but her philosophical family. It
was either her father or grandfather, who by his
decency presented her with the existential choice
to also be decent. She was clear that very few
people need ethical philosophy's books, teachers,
students, colleagues as she did. They need only
encounter a decent person.
Her father was killed in Auschwitz but she insisted
ethics aren't formed, clarified, or realized in
moments of crisis or impossible choice. Decency is
realized in everyday life. My everyday life is
almost entirely structured around my child, my
spouse, a household that demands constant mainten-
ance: tidying, cleaning, washing, shopping,
cooking, and the child, wife, linoleum flooring,
plumbing, major appliances, cars, and bicycles
that demand care. Is anyone skilled at this work?
It's a life mostly devoid of disciplined, system-
atic thinking. In everyday life, I work one day a
week, a nurse in a hospital to stabilize children
and adolescents in crisis. The rest of the time
I'm thrown into concerns that animated Heller's
work, even as she was silent on the fact of our
feminized life.
My child's loud. I'm lonely for conversation.
While Evy works in the economy for a wage tending
hospital patients I do my task and neglect it. I'm
deeply fulfilled and radically estranged from
teachers, students, and colleagues. I don't even
write for my desk drawer like Heller did in the
late '50s and early '60s. I unconvincingly pretend
I don't need to think any more. Didn't Heller
share my difficult way?
My negligence was invisible to me til open mic
last night when I read from an unfinished novel I
forgot about for 5 years. I found it digging
in notebooks for something "new" to read. In the
two notebooks filled with the partial novel is my
sharpest, funniest, most acutely observant and
embodied writing.
Freed from motherhood's duties by Evy, I was for
the first time able to socialize after open mic.
Listeners found the invisible violence, comedy, and
tragedy of their everyday lives in my writing. They
*saw themselves.* Reflected, they picked up and
told me details lost by their daily consciousness
re-found in the mirror of my characters and
dialogue.
One listener challenged me like Heller's decent
person. If I can write like that, why did I stop?
How could I forget how much I loved those charact-
ers, the world that shaped their possibilities,
how dearly I loved giving them narrative life? I
was climbing a ladder, attentive to this world's
richness as I wrote. Then I got distracted and
largely forgot myself beyond my utility and daily
complaints.
Heller was only 23 when her Zsuzsanna was born. I
was almost 40. Maybe less life observing and
thinking socially when she became a mother meant
less to lose. Maybe her parents were more help in
everyday life. Maybe communist Hungary in those
years, for all its strictures on her ability to
think socially, still freed her through childcare
or other social benefits unavailable to me. Maybe
it snatched away Zsuzsa to be raised by the state,
something Heller could have experienced as a loss
not a freedom. I don't think I can know. I don't
think she told.
Today, talking to Ruwen, I didn't want to go home.
I asked her favorite book and wrote it down. I
talked too much about Heller. When Ruwen said she
was reading about Chinese Medicine I interrupted
her to talk too much about that too, stealing her
interests to remember mine. Specifically to remem-
ber my teachers who once were as Lukacs to Heller.
They left me tasks I once did, then forgot.
This is my everyday life I have to be attentive to
now. This womanhood gifts me with responsibility
for a bold, strong, stubborn, needy toddler who
loudly narrates every thought to cross her mind.
This motherhood needs me to not lose treasures
entrusted me before daughter's birth to the total
attention she demands by the klaxon-horn of her
extravagant existance.
I want Agnes Heller to be my role model, but she
won't. She says on the authority of Heidegger,
Kant, and beloved Kierkegaard that my choice to
become what I am, and my labor in service of that
choice, is mine and mine alone. My flourishing, my
ethical life, is not her job.
