Heller’s Either/Or

Abstract

The question ‘How does a person make an ethical decision?’ becomes all the more compelling and problematic when trying to behave ethically during, as Ágnes Heller puts it, ‘the total breakdown of “normal” ethical worlds’. In her philosophical work Heller pieces together a moral compass internal to individual subjectivity to employ during such times. Kierkegaard’s model of existential choice has played a formative role in Heller’s solution to the problem. In my article I describe Heller’s Kierkegaardian framework of choosing oneself as an ethical being and consider a recent critique of Heller’s Kierkegaardian ethics of personality by Richard J. Bernstein, continuing the substantively productive tension between the irrational and rational forces that determine our ethical actions. In the process, I show common ground between Bernstein and Heller through an appropriation of Arendtian judgment. I turn to Heller’s most recent work in The Concept of the Beautiful in order to make this common ground tangible.