ABSTRACT
Agnes Heller was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929. A student and close associate of Georg Lukacs, she was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Budapest from 1955 to 1958. The ‘whole human being’ can be distinguished from the ‘specialised human being’. The specialist operates neither in everyday life nor in the sphere of culture, but rather in the sphere of objectivation ‘for and in itself’-or, more simply, in institutional settings. In the everyday life-world, a condition of survival is learning to appropriate ready-made group norms. A person in the everyday life-world reasons-discriminates between good, bad-unreflectively, according to norms which are taken for granted. The communist parties sought to ‘totalise’ society, eliminating social and political pluralism. In pursuit of this, the Party’s aim was virtually to eliminate any ‘conscience culture’ in favour of a ‘shame culture’. The calculative conscience grows out of the ‘bad conscience’ of the Protestant ethic, yet at the time radically transforms the Protestant conscience.
