ABSTRACT
Ágnes Heller’s theory of action refers to four conditions that are often viewed as separate but –as we shall see – are, for her, intimately interconnected: needs, feelings, values, and rationalities. More accurately, Heller’s notion of action builds in tension, incompleteness, and gaps or interstices between different action types or attitudes, each with their interconnections of needs, feelings, values, and rationalities. It is perhaps more accurate to view Heller’s theory of action as working along two simultaneous axes or planes – the vertical and the horizontal. These two axes can also be conceptualised in terms of the subjective inner (the vertical) and the social outer (the horizontal). I am going to deploy this – to be sure – unusual terminology here to emphasise the change in perspective that is required when discussing one axis rather than the other. The terminology highlights an intersection between the two axes and one that is fraught with tension.
