Abstract

Agnes Heller’s philosophy of history is divided between A Theory of History (1982) and A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993). The one is a reflection on the stages of historical consciousness, the other is a manifestation of postmodern historical consciousness, situated between the crisis of European philosophy of history and a dawning world-historical consciousness. The crisis of European philosophy of history is defined by the irresolvable contradiction between the absolute present of Hegel’s self-knowing subject of History and the consciousness of the sheer contingency of the historical present. From Hegel to Benjamin philosophy of history sought the absolute redemption of the contingent moment. It is against this philosophical legacy that Heller sets out in A Philosophy of History in Fragments to rethink the meaning of the present as absolute, not in itself but in relationship to the past and future of our present. Our absolute present is thereby revealed as inescapably paradoxical. Just as we live from the afterlife of a departed absolute spirit so the self-consciousness of our post-modernity resides in the self-consciousness with which we endow the past. Beyond this limit we must return to A Theory of History. Its reconstruction of the evolution of historical consciousness points to the emergence of a truly planetary consciousness and hence to the possibility of the end of history in a philosophy of World History.