ABSTRACT
Given the importance of ethics in Ágnes Heller’s oeuvre, the centrality of the image of the good person is evident. This paper argues for the relevance of another attitude in her work: that of the good friend. Modern friendship, which is the object of not a few attempts at definition by a number of philosophers, seems to overflow any conceptual determination. Heller’s work, in all its breadth, which is so conscious of our historical contingency and the paradoxes in which we live, opens to an understanding of friendship that needs not lean on specific criteria. Instead, it lets us see friendship as a relationship constituted as a field of tensions between subjects: First, modern friendship expresses a tension between, on the one hand, an ethics that in the most orthodox Kantian interpretation becomes formalistic, and, on the other hand, a more Hellerian reading of Kant that sees an aesthetic dimension in Kantian universalism. A second tension is that between the unpredictability of feelings to which friendship opens and the ways such feelings come to be judged and perhaps communicated. Yet another tension is that between the everyday aspects of friendship and the experience of transcendence to which it might open up. Finally, there is a tension between our condition as contingent denizens of modernity who always remain strangers to each other and the possibility of surrender to our friends in certain moments of unity. This paper attempts to explore such tensions through the work of Heller in order to show how helpful it is for understanding modern friendship and also how, aside from the good person and the good citizen, the image of the good friend is central to Heller’s work.
