Ágnes Heller

Everyday Life - Preface to the English Edition (1984)

This book was written in 1967-68 and first published in Hungarian in 1970. Italian and Spanish editions followed suit, I soon became aware of certain redundancies in the original version, somewhat aggravated by the overabundance of examples. This is why I consented to an abbreviated version in German, published in 1978 (second edition 1981) by Suhrkamp. In spite of my respect for the work of the editor, my ideas about a properly abridged version were different from his. As a result, when the idea of an English publication presented itself, I decided to abbreviate the Hungarian original myself.

To prepare a shorter version of a book written almost twenty years ago is almost always an unwholesome enterprise; there are several pitfalls involved in it. First and foremost, one must resist the temptation of rewriting certain parts, of bringing certain analyses into harmony with one’s present views and works. To give in to such temptations would have been tantamount to the destruction of the coherence of the book which had to be avoided at all costs. I have therefore not changed any ideas or any solutions. Even the categorical vocabulary of the original has been left intact. I have not added any knowledge to it gained from books written on the same or similar topics which I have appropriated since. The work presented in English is not only true to the message of the original, it is indeed the translated shorter version of the original work itself.

Everyday Life was written in the midst of a period when the slogan of the ‘renaissance of Marxism’ was coined. The first objective of the book was exactly what the title suggested: outlining a theory of everyday life. However, the enterprise was even more ambitious. I decided to embark on new paths by working out a philosophical method, on the one hand, and the outlines of a new philosophical framework, on the other hand, while remaining faithful to the spirit of Marx and, at the same time, breaking with certain dominant traditions of ‘historical materialism’. It is in this book that I established the very framework of my philosophy which I have never changed since, short of elaboration or occasional modification.

The method of the book can be described as a combination of a phenomenological approach and an analytical procedure. By the latter I mean the Aristotelian procedure. Since I had written a book on Aristotle (1958-9), I was intimately familiar with, and sympathetic to, his analytical procedure. But I was also aware of the fact that in modern times, where norms and rules are no longer taken for granted, where traditional values have been dismantled, the analytical method of Aristotle cannot be implemented, unless the ‘phenomena’ themselves are constructed. Husserl, and a critically modified Heidegger, had to provide the method with which to construe the phenomena themselves.

The philosophical framework of the book cannot be summarized with similar brevity, and I shall therefore confine these prefatory remarks to basics. It was in this book that I worked out a specific version of the paradigm of objectivation: the paradigm of the sphere of objectivation ‘in itself’. Since this sphere of objectivation is an empirical universal, all social categories can be understood by having recourse to this objectivation, and thus the procedure of transcendental deduction could be avoided. Since it is this sphere of objectivation which in the main-even if not exclusively - regulates everyday life in our age as well, the centrality of the theory of everyday life has been theoretically established. The anti-historicist character of such a conception is obvious. However, it is equally obvious that ‘anti-historicist’ is here not synonymous with ‘anti-historical’. I have sought rather, to emphasize the historical variability of social structures and, simultaneously, the historical variability of the content of the norms and rules presented by the sphere of objectivation ‘in itself’. Moreover, I then shared the evolutionism of Marxism in full, and subscribed to a philosophy of history, characteristics which I have since abandoned. All the same, I have insisted that the sphere of objectivation ‘in itself’ and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life, include historical constants, and these historical constants have to be reflected upon in conjunction with the historical variables. I argued that everyday life can be changed, humanized and democratized, in spite of the constancy of some of its patterns. The emphasis put on the possibility of such a change was intended as a challenge to the Heideggerian position. As far as the practical intent of the theory is concerned, the anti-Heideggerian message cannot possibly be mistaken.

How everyday life can be changed in a humanistic, democratic, socialist direction is the practical issue the book addresses. The answers provided in it express the conviction that social change cannot be implemented on the macro-scale alone, and furthermore, that the change in human attitudes is co-constitutive of every change, be it for the worse or for the better, I have argued for the possibility of a change in attitudes on the grounds that the attitude essential for the change for the better does exist, and that it only needs to be generalized. I coined the term ‘individual personality’ (in contrast to ‘particularistic person’) when referring to this attitude. True to the phenomenological approach, I commence my discussion -ydth the distinction of these two kinds of attitude. I never had ‘perfectibility’ in mind; the ‘individual personality’ is anything but perfect, yet it is good enough to be the subjective bearer of a humane everyday life (which I called non-alienated, using a then voguish but fairly vague term.) Despite dismissing perfectibility, I did raise the most ancient problem of philosophical speculation, the problem no one can solve, but which no philosophy envisaging a change for the better can fail to address, namely 'Is suffering injustice better than committing it?' If this is ‘moralizing’, then so be it.

The British reader, educated in a quite different philosophical tradition, will perhaps find the continental categorial system of the book puzzling, sometimes even artificially over-complicated. The Hegelian distinction between ‘in itself, ‘for itself’, ‘in and for itself’ and ‘for us’ is applied to the three spheres of objectivation and, respectively, to their appropriation. But given that these categories are properly defined (or redefined) in the book, their use should not cause undue difficulties for the reader. Another central category of the book, ‘species-essence’ or ‘species-essentiality’, was borrowed from Marx, in particular from the Paris Manuscripts. All spheres of objectivation are termed ‘species-essential’. They are divided into objectivations which are ‘species-essential in itself, ‘species-essential for itself’ and, finally, ‘species-essential in and for itself’. ‘Species-essential in itself’ stands for the empirical human universal which is appropriated as ‘taken for granted’, whereas ‘species-essential for itself’ stands for a sphere of objectivation which is appropriated of free volition, and reflection for it embodies the crystallization of previously willed and reflected acts. It would have been sufficient to define these spheres as ‘species-essential’ on introducing the categories. The repetition of the qualification at every point where the term is used, seems to me now to be entirely superfluous and redundant. But I did not want to delete it, for the notion of ‘species-essentiality’ indicates my indebtedness to the Marxian legacy in general, and to that of Lukács in particular. It was Lukács, in the first chapter of his Aesthetics (on everyday thinking), a work to which I make frequent references, who placed the category of species essentiality at the forefront of discussion. Even though I have modified the Lukácsian interpretation of ‘species-essentiality’ in the present work, the continuity is to be taken into consideration as much as the discontinuity.

After the first, rough, German translation of Everyday Life, I sent the manuscript to several friends abroad, among others to Professor Kurt Wolff. In his most complimentary reply, Professor Wolff pointed out the similarities of my conception with that of Schütz. It was for the first time then that I heard the name of this famous author, for which I have no excuse other than the insularity of East-European cultural life in that period. After having read The Phenomenology of the Social World, I too was struck by the coincidental similarities, even if, on second thoughts, it was not particularly astonishing. Since Husserl, and to a lesser extent Weber, inspired me to an extent no less than they influenced Schütz, the similarities are easy to explain. At any rate, certain ideas are always ‘in the air’, more precisely, in the historical consciousness of a given age, and coincidence must occur whenever the same problems are addressed. Certain similarities notwithstanding, my conception was, in the main, basically different from that of Schütz. First and foremost, in my book ‘everyday life’ is not identical with the ‘life world’. The notion of ‘life world’ refers to an attitude (the natural attitude) in action and thinking, which is to be contrasted with institutionalized (rationalized) action and scientific thinking. Everyday life, however, is not an attitude, rather it encompasses (or at least it can encompass) different attitudes, including reflective-theoretical attitudes. It is the objective fundament of every social action, institution, of human social life in general. Although the sphere of objectivation ‘in itself’, as the backbone of everyday life is to be contrasted with all objectivations ‘for itself’ (not only with science, but also with art, religion, abstract moral norms and ideas), everyday life itself is not necessarily conducted under the guidance of the sphere of objectivation ‘in itself’ alone. In our everyday lives, we can have recourse to higher objectivations, and as well we can test and query norms and rules which are ‘taken for granted’. The practical intent of my book on everyday life then, is at cross-purposes with Schutz’s solution which ended up in the vicinity of a positivistic systems-theory. In spite of its phenomenological approach, the present work is far closer to the so-called ‘critical theory’ than to Schütz. And the impetus to argue for the possibility of changing everyday life (and thereby social life altogether) has undoubtedly come from the legacy of Marx and Lukács.

Agnes Heller