ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the sense of a School’s experience of migration and disintegration. It explores the open realisation of the insuperable antinomies of philosophy: antinomies that, for them, are matched by the antinomic nature of (post)modernity. The Budapest School presents a promising direction for developing a critical theory of human needs and their social production, stultification, and alienation. The book argues that existential choice denotes Heller’s model of a constitutive tension between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions that keeps subjectivity ontologically open to and contingent upon one’s own freedom and the alterity and freedom of others. The Budapest School – even if it only exists in the imagination or as a metaphor for the gathering of a group of friends – encourages our participation in a critical cultural discourse that concerns our contemporary modern condition.
