1922-2022 E-Book

Carolina Esser

• Herausgeber: Editora Dialética
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 256

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

In 2022, the 100th anniversary of the so-called "Critical Theory," the antithesis of "Traditional Theory", was celebrated. 100 years ago, the first founding memorandum of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt was written. In 2022, the world and legal theory are surprised by numerous new challenges, such as a war as not been seen for a long time, which requires an uprising to resignify the Critical Theory and its relevance within theories of justice and freedom, as well as a celebration of truly critical dialogues. The present collection brings together experienced legal theory researchers, who revive the critical theory from the current demands of law. Critical thinkers have been developing reflections on capitalism in a way that considers not just economic perspectives, but also individual's social and cultural spheres of life.

Leseprobe

SUMÁRIO

Capa

Folha de Rosto

Créditos

A STRUGGLE AGAINST INDIFFERENCE

Carolina Esser

ON ENJOYMENT AND THE TWO-WAY NARCISSISM OF HOMO ACADEMICUS

Prof. Dr. Domingos Sávio Calixto

(Translation from Portuguese to English by Vanessa Kaut)

IS STATE LAW TRUE LAW?

Isabel Trujillo

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE WORKER THROUGH ART

Mhardoqueu G. Lima França

Danielle de Jesus Dinali

(Translation from Portuguese to English by Vanessa Kaut)

INSTRUMENTAL REASON IN SCHOPENHAUER AND HORKHEIMER’S “COURT OF REASON”

Waldir Severiano de Medeiros Júnior

(Translation from Portuguese to English by Vanessa Kaut)

RECOGNITION, LOVE, AND LAW: STRUGGLING FOR THE RESPECT OF WOMEN

Carolina Esser

Landmarks

Capa

Folha de Rosto

Página de Créditos

Sumário

A STRUGGLE AGAINST INDIFFERENCE

Carolina Esser1

ABSTRACT: Axel Honneth defines recognition from three different perspectives: love, law, and solidarity. Any of these dimensions are able to suffer different forms of disrespect. As the human being builds her own identity from the respect of relationships of love, law, and solidarity, in the case of a offense of a pattern of recognition, it is necessary for the human beings to struggle for recognition. Nevertheless, Honneth does not sufficiently proposes how are the struggles and who is responsible for engaging in the struggles. We advocate that the main struggle for the recovery of recognition relates to the confrontation of the indifference: a negative and intentional emotion and behavior.

Keywords: recognition; struggle for recognition; indifference; solidarity.

1. INTRODUCTION

Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the greatest tragedy of his era was the “appalling silence of the good people.”2

According to Honneth, the recognition of a person as a self- confident, self-respected, and self-esteemed individual happens through three dimensions of personality: needs and emotions (primary relationships of recognition), moral responsibility (legal relations of recognition), and traits and abilities (community of value)3. In other words, it occurs within three perspectives: a private sphere of life including family and friendships – pattern of love, where the person is recognized as a family member and as part of private relationships of love and care; and two public spheres of life – pattern of law, where the person is recognized as a legal person, being the addressee and author of rights; and pattern of solidarity, where a person is recognized as a member of a community of value through empathy and solidarity within the group4. Each pattern of recognition must follow certain conditions to allow an individual to reach self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect.

During the process of identity formation of an individual, she may experience offenses to the patterns of recognition, and then struggles should begin to recover her recognition.

Taking the theory of recognition of Axel Honneth in consideration, we defend that it does not sufficiently explore the elements of struggles, especially for societies that do not have all the democratic elements supposedly necessary for the achievement of recognition. The theory of recognition is based on a minimum of political democratic institutions and democratic attitudes to make possible the engagement in struggles for recognition. Nevertheless, we understand that it is crucial to create forms of struggles for recognition detached from it.

It is necessary to conceive different forms of struggling for recognition. We understand that the struggle against indifference is appropriate for all dimensions of recognition: love, law, and solidarity.

2. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST INDIFFERENCE

Indifference is a term with different connotations in philosophy and psychology. This work interprets indifference from three different perspectives: as a negative emotion, intentional behavior, and social pathology. Our approach to indifference is justified by several reasons.

First of all, coming from the Honnethian theory of recognition, any situation of disrespect damages recognition; every person who witnesses a situation of disrespect is an agent responsible for struggling for recognition; and the achievement of recognition is possible only if people struggle for it. On these grounds, the presence of indifference - either as an emotion, behavior, or social pathology – results in the absence of struggles. Any interpretation of indifference as a neutral or a positive institute is erroneous, because in the context of recognition, it is fundamental that people not behave neutrally, people should struggle.

Secondly, indifference as a behavior spreads in different cultural contexts and societies. As a result, it damages the achievement of recognition from a macro perspective, as people generally do not engage in struggles.

More than an emotion, indifference is inserted in a shared ethics, from the moment when human beings adopt it as a principle of their actions. Indifference comes from an individual psychological perspective and turns out to be socially shared – it is not just individually practiced anymore. We will see that, in the end, indifference may be a social pathology.

For us, indifference damages the patterns of love, law, and solidarity. As a consequence, struggles against indifference should happen in all of them.

Although we reject the interpretations of indifference as a neutral or a positive feeling, for the sake of accuracy, we will briefly assess these perspectives.

2.1. Neutral indifference

For the stoics, someone “indifferent” is neither virtuous nor vicious, the one indifferent is neutral.5

If a neutral life is exercised in a vicious or in a virtuous way, then this life is not indifferent anymore6. We do not agree with the stoic definition of indifference because, in the context of the theory of recognition, a neutral life may be vicious when it damages recognition and the moral obligation to struggle. If the individual finds situations of disrespect during her life, then it is necessary for her to engage in struggles. If she stays neutral in a situation of disrespect, the indifference as a neutral feeling results in a neutral and apathetic behavior, damaging the achievement of recognition through struggles.

2.2. Positive indifference

Some authors understand indifference as an expression of free will. Indifference would mean the freedom not to act, not to do anything, a kind of negative freedom7. To be indifferent, according to these authors, is guaranteed by the human right to freedom.

We reject such an interpretation of indifference, because an ethics of recognition presupposes people’s engagement in struggles. In a situation of disrespect, it is fundamental to struggle.

Michael Walzer, for instance, proposes a benign indifference. For him, the institute of toleration is an absence of actions, willing to respect different cultures or minorities:

Understood as an attitude or state of mind, toleration describes a number of possibilities. The first of these, which reflects the origins of religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is simply a resigned acceptance of difference for the sake of peace. People kill one another for years and years, and then, mercifully, exhaustion sets in, and we call this toleration. But we can trace a continuum of more substantive acceptances. A second possible attitude is passive, relaxed, benignly indifferent to difference: “It takes all kinds to make a world.” A third follows from a kind of moral stoicism: a principled recognition that the “others” have rights even if they exercise those rights in unattractive ways. A fourth expresses openness to the others; curiosity; perhaps even respect, a willingness to listen and learn. And, furthest along the continuum, there is the enthusiastic endorsement of difference: an aesthetic endorsement, if difference is taken to represent in cultural form the largeness and diversity of God’s creation or of the natural world; or a functional endorsement, if difference is viewed, as in the liberal multiculturalist argument, as a necessary condition of human flourishing, one that offers to individual men and women the choices that make their autonomy meaningful.8

For Walzer, toleration is not enough to appreciate an individual or a community. He affirms that mutual respect is also necessary: “To tolerate someone else is an act of power; to be tolerated is an acceptance of weakness. We should aim at something better than this combination, something beyond toleration, something like mutual respect”.9

According to him, difference should be twice tolerated, on a personal and a political level. It holds different feelings such as resignation, indifference, stoicism, curiosity, and enthusiasm.10

Nevertheless, we understand that toleration should have limits. We do not agree with the blind toleration of cultural practices of disrespect. We agree with the respect of cultural differences if the cultures adhere to the ethics of recognition. In the case of Honnethian disrespect in a cultural manifestation, then individuals should not tolerate it anymore. On the contrary, individuals are responsible for struggling for the recognition of this community.

Paul Dumouchel also has a positive interpretation of indifference. For him, in the context of capitalism, there is a change of perspective from solidarity to scarcity. Scarcity means a contract of mutual indifference11.

Dumouchel explains that, on the one hand, formalists understand that the market, by definition, is fair, and the agents are rational and do not prejudice each other at all12. On the other hand, substantivists claim that the market economy is destructive and the bonds of solidarity have been damaged13. The substantivists, then, consider the institute of indifference as a negative result of this process.

Dumouchel classifies himself from the perspective of mimetic theory, believing that neither formalists nor substantivists are right. He advocates for a positive meaning of indifference, as it frees the human beings of obligations of solidarity, which will result in violence14.

The author sees obligations of solidarity as negative, because they will always result in violence and duties of revenge. When people create strong bonds of solidarity between each other, they cannot accept any threats to their peers, and they will incur violent acts for the benefit of the members to whom they are solidary. In the end, solidarity will result in a conflict for protection, in a dispute for space, and acts of violence.

Dumouchel affirms that solidarity was replaced by scarcity, which has resulted in practices of indifference. Nowadays, there is no obligation of solidarity and bondedness anymore.15 In his words:

Traditional bonds of solidarity impose obligations of violence and duties of revenge. […] Scarcity isolates conflicts. Just as it allows us not to help those whose basic needs are not satisfied, it allows us, “not to get involved” in other people’s conflicts. Scarcity generates, to borrow an apt phrase from Norman Geras, a “contract of mutual indifference”.16

The interpretation of Dumouchel is the opposite of the ethics of recognition. Solidary acts are necessary for the recovery of recognition of people and the formation of struggles for recognition. Struggling for recognition is a moral obligation and the human being’s relationships are based on feelings such as compassion, care, and affection.

2.3. Negative indifference

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory – but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive. (1953: 635)17

The theory of Honneth had addressed elements of indifference when he discussed invisibility, individualization, reification, the freezing of society, and autonomization. We will analyze all these institutes and contend that their characteristics can be summed up in the institute of indifference as a negative emotion and intentional behavior. We will prove that indifference is the opposite of Honnethian solidarity.

Honneth’s first approach to this topic occurred in 2001 when he discussed “invisibility.”

In “Invisibility: on the epistemology of ‘recognition’,” Honneth quotes the book “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. In this story, invisibility means non-existence in a social sense. It is not related to a physical non-presence, but, more than that, with someone being made invisible18. People who suffer acts of invisibility eventually have social meaninglessness, “as a result ‘invisibility’ here cannot designate a cognitive fact but rather must mean a kind of social state of affairs”19. Honneth affirms that social invisibility is a form of moral disrespect because the subject makes the other invisible and with no worth20.

To make someone invisible is to “look through” this person, without even seeing her as a human being. There is no perception of this person at all21.

Invisibility is different from prejudice, because in prejudice someone is seen, and then “seen as” inferior. There is a difference between “looking through” someone and “seeing someone as”22.

Making someone invisible also has a performative aspect because it is represented by human behaviors and gestures. There is an intentionality “in looking through” someone. Honneth affirms that invisibility has an intention of the one who acts; it is not accidental behavior23.

If the conditions of visibility are not accomplished, then “their absence is normally considered an indicator of a social pathology that can end in a condition of ‘invisibility’ for the person affected”24.

To clarify the invisibility, Honneth, then, analyses what visibility means, in such a way that, for us, it eventually represents recognition.

First of all, visibility is related, by Honneth, to the Kantian concept of “respect.” Acts of giving worth to someone are part of human beings’ intelligibility. It represents the renouncing of egocentric inclinations25:

Once again, with Kant, we must keep hold of the idea that all these assessments of worth can only be the evaluative aspects of a property that he designates the “intelligibility” of the person: whether we consider another human being to be loveable, worthy of respect, or worthy of solidarity, what is displayed in each case in the experienced ‘worth’ is merely a further aspect of what it means for humans beings to lead their lives in rational self-determination.26

In this context, Honneth affirms that morality coincides with recognition, because when a person assumes that the other person has worth, it represents a moral attitude.

It is possible to identify visibility in observing people’s actions, behavior, gestures, expressions. As Honneth affirms, there are specific ways of reacting that represent a positive attitude with the other person, being open to her and seeing her properly – emphatic forms of expression27. More than representing the rationality of a human being’s act, visibility comes from two different orders: cognizing (Erkennen) and recognizing (Anerkennen)28.

The first order, cognizing, is related to perception. It involves a spatiotemporal framework, where the visible individual has situationally relevant properties29. It is an elementary form of individual identifiability30.

After cognizing, the person is, then, recognized, if she acquires visibility in a non-visual sense, as a positive meaning of an affirmation, making the subject gain social ‘validity.’ Recognizing is related to public expression: “In contrast to cognizing, which is a non-public, cognitive act, recognizing is dependent on media that express the fact that the other person is supposed to possess social ‘validity’”31. For us, both can also have private aspects; for instance, when experiencing domestic violence, a woman is neither cognized nor recognized, even in her intimacy.

Gestures and expressions, then, turn out to be very important in human beings’ interactions, because they symbolically show to the addressee if he can expect a benevolent attitude from the person who performs the act. Expressive gestures are meta-actions, “by making a gesture of recognition towards another person, we performatively make her aware that we see ourselves obligated to behave towards her in a certain kind of benevolent way”32.

Honneth exemplifies the “recognizing” through the relationship experienced by a child with her caregivers. Smiling and other facial expressions are reciprocal forms of love, devotion, sympathy, and care:

These expressive responses do not articulate a cognition of just any type, but rather express in abbreviated form the totality of the actions that are supposed to be accorded to the small child on the grounds of his situation. To this extent, recognition possesses a performative character because the expressive responses that accompany it symbolize the practical ways of reacting that are necessary in order to ‘do justice’ to the person recognized. In the felicitous formulation of Helmut Plessner, one could say that the expression of recognition represents the ‘alegory’ of a moral action.33

Honneth affirms that the child-caregiver relationship can be extended to relationships in adulthood:

By way of a differentiation of the perception by which he originally sees in the facial expression of his caregiver a reflection of his own potential as an intelligible being, the growing child learns to infer from his partners in interaction different assessments of worth that are always perceptions of his intelligible nature.34

It is relevant to highlight the fact that the public expressions which imply the feeling of being visible and, then, recognized, depend on each culture. The range of gestures, expressions, and behaviors, which represent people receiving worth and positive empathy, varies according to context35. For instance, the public expression required for Chinese to be recognized in China is not the same as the public expression in Morocco. Individuals expect to be treated according to their culture. If they are not, then they can become invisible.36

For us, Honneth’s study of “invisibility” should be reviewed under two aspects. First of all, it seems that the first order cognizing presupposes a real physical contact between the two individuals, the one who cognizes and the other to be cognized:

The subject can only claim of another person that she looks through, ignores, or overlooks him if he has already ascribed to that person the achievement of a primary identification of him. To this extent, invisibility in the figurative sense presupposes visibility in the literal sense.37

Nevertheless, nowadays, there are several situations of cognizing, which occur, for instance, in virtual spaces – such as social media. We understand that cognizing and recognizing can occur without physical contact or physical presence. More than that, we have seen that struggles do not presuppose a necessary connection between the agent and the addressee of recognition. If Honneth affirms that to recognize we first need to cognize the one receiving the worth, then it would not be possible to practice it with human beings outside our social contact. Nowadays, we need precisely the opposite: people fighting for the recognition of others, even without knowing them.

Nowadays, the phase of cognition does not have the same role as in the past. The digital revolution and the prominence of social media, as well as the plurality of forms of life, make it necessary to conceive recognition independently of a spatiotemporal perception. People should be able to struggle for each other without presupposing any prior contact.

Secondly, after building a complete explanation regarding the process of recognition, coming from cognizing and arriving at recognition, at the end of his text, Honneth seems to change the order, affirming that the emphatic forms of expression performed in a spatiotemporal dimension represent, for the addressee, recognition itself. Nevertheless, he does not clarify sufficiently how the pattern of cognizing keeps existing, what is the importance of this pattern in the process of recognition:

At least genetically, recognizing precedes cognizing insofar as the infant infers from facial expressions the “worthy” properties of persons before he is in a position to grasp his environment in a disinterested way. […] Corresponding to the priority of recognition in our social form of life is the prominent status of gestures and facial expressions with which we demonstrate to one another in general a motivational readiness to be guided in our actions by the moral authority of the other person.38

For us, Honneth’s “invisibility” relates to our concept of “indifference,” especially regarding the element of intentionality.

Nevertheless, we understand that the term “invisibility” is not the proper one to define the nature of the institute. “Invisibility” concerns just the perspective of the victim: the one being made invisible. The term “indifference” concerns the two sides of the same institute: the perspective of the one practicing indifference, “to be indifferent” – the agent –, and the victim, the one suffering it - “the one disrespected.”

In 2004, in the article “Organized Self-Realization: Some Paradoxes of Individualization,” Honneth directly mentioned the institute “indifference.” In that instance, he uses Georg Simmel’s approach to the term, when indifference represents an impoverishment of social contact:

On the one hand, for Simmel the processes whereby a pluralization of individuals’ possibilities of choice was brought about, processes which sociology first had to describe, were always also bound up with the danger of an impoverishment of social contact and of the deepening of people’s mutual indifference, as the analyses of The Philosophyof Money make clear; hence one always has to distinguish a third dimension of meaning in the concept of individualization, one related to the tendency of individuals to become ever more lonely as the network of anonymous social contacts expands. This particular development, too, Simmel at first thought could be described only from the viewpoint of an observer; he did not have in mind a process of increasing loneliness, of isolation felt or suffered, but rather the objective fact of a stronger and stronger concentration on one’s own interests alone, independently of other people.39

In this work, Honneth relates the various aspects of individualization. Whereas it represents an opportunity for human beings to exercise their autonomy, at the same time, societies experience an excess of selfish behaviors coming from individualization. Simmel calls it “mutual indifference”:

The result of this paradoxical reversal, where the processes which once promised an increase of qualitative freedom are henceforth altered into an ideology of de-institutionalization, is the emergence in individuals of a number of symptoms of inner emptiness, of feeling oneself to be superfluous, and of absence of purpose.40

The process of mutual indifference is experienced in the metropolis, because, there, the principle of money41 is active and endorsed. People develop a blasé metropolitan attitude:

This incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy constitutes in fact that blasé attitude which every child of a large city evinces when compared with the products of the more peaceful and more stable milieu. […] The essence of the blasé attitude is an indifference toward the distinctions between things. Not in the sense that they are not perceived, as is the case of mental dullness, but rather that the meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless.42

People also begin to act with excessive discretion and in isolation - mutual reserve:

The mental attitude of the people of the metropolis to one another may be designated formally as one of reserve. […] Indeed, if I am not mistaken, the inner side of this external reserve is not only indifference but more frequently than we believe, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion which, in a close contact which has arisen any way whatever, can break out into hatred and conflict. The entire inner organization of such a type of extended commercial life rests on an extremely varied structure of sympathies, indifferences and aversions of the briefest as well as of the most enduring sort. This sphere of indifference is, for this reason, not as great as it seems superficially. Our minds respond, with some definite feeling, to almost every impression emanating from another person. The unconsciousness, the transitoriness and the shift of these feelings seem to raise them only into indifference.43

Such social problems are a result of the politics of money. All emotional relationships between persons – which used to rest on their individuality – become intellectual relationships, transforming people into numbers, endowing them with an indifferent significance. They will have worth as soon as they offer something objectively perceivable.44

The intellectualistic person is indifferent to personal things, which are not purely rationally perceptible. It is the result of a society submitted to the principle of money45.

For Simmel, then, individualization has the effects of mutual reserve and mutual indifference, a result of the principle of money dominating an individual’s life46.

The definition of indifference coming from Simmel does not present the element of intentionality. The intellectualistic person is not interested in emotions because he is alienated by capitalism and the principle of money.

The process of alienation was developed some years later by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. The alienation, the blasé attitude, and the mutual indifference all describe an absence of attitude from the individuals. Nevertheless, such an absence of actions is not necessarily intentional. The agent does not act indifferently necessarily because he wants to. On the contrary, he is influenced by the principle of money, and his rational capacity to choose his actions is lost. He can recognize the other subjects and things, only if they represent some rational result or some interest.

2.4. Unintentional indifference

According to Lillehammer, there are two kinds of indifference. The first occurs when the individual agent does not know about some situation, practicing, then, an involuntary and unintentional indifference. It results from the ignorance of the facts; the individual does not have knowledge and awareness of the case47. Reification and autonomization are also results of involuntary actions of people.

On the other hand, there is the voluntary indifference: a voluntary feeling, when the person is aware of the situation, she knows what is happening and then voluntarily chooses not to give importance to it, to ignore it48. For us, voluntary and intentional indifference damages recognition.

Heidegger also has an interpretation of indifference, as negative and unintentional. He talks about indifference as boredom49, i.e., as a situation in which things are covered by a veil of indifference when the individual experiences a lack of interest in things and a presence of anguish.

Axel Honneth has also mentioned a kind of unintentional indifference in his work “Reification.” In this instance, he mentions the ossified behavior of human beings:

“Reification” correspondingly signifies a habit of thought, a habitually ossified perspective, which, when taken up by the subject, leads not only to the loss of its capacity for empathetic engagement but also to the world’s loss of its qualitatively disclosed character. Before I can further pursue the question of whether this clarification could allow us to continue to employ the concept of “reification” today, I must first attempt to justify its foundational premise—that is, the assertion that the attitude of care enjoys not only a genetic but also a conceptual priority over a neutral cognition of reality. I intend subsequently to reformulate this assertion by cautiously replacing the Heideggerian notion of “care” with the originally Hegelian category of “recognition.” In this way I believe it is possible to justify the hypothesis that a recognitional stance enjoys a genetic and categorical priority over all other attitudes toward the self and the world.50

Reification does not have intentionality. A human being loses his capacity to act, to engage, to perform empathetic behavior, but he does not choose to behave indifferently. Human beings do not objectify their lives and those of others from an instance of liability and guilt.

Honneth bases his analysis on the work of Georg Lukács. According to Honneth, Lukács intended to interpret reification as a mental habit, which makes persons lose their empathetic engagement. People transform themselves into neutral spectators. For Lukács, reification is a process and a result.51

Honneth affirms, further, that the process of reification occurs not just between persons, but also regarding all elements which surround the individual:

Yet the concept of “reification” that I have attempted to resuscitate here in connection with the work of Lukács demands that we account for the possibility of a reifying perception not only of our social world but also of our physical world. The things we encounter in our everyday dealings with the world must also be regarded as entities to which we relate in an inappropriate way when we apprehend them merely neutrally and according to external criteria.52

This process, from our point of view, is also encouraged by alienation.

In 2012, in the article “Brutalization of the social conflict: struggles for recognition in the early 21st century”, Honneth analyzes Parsons’ theory and affirms that, unfortunately, the solidary and active human behaviors expected by Parsons’ theory had not happened at all. Nowadays, struggles for recognition seem to be frozen, as human beings are not in the mood to do something:

Yet, despite all these profound changes, as a result of which the established spheres of reciprocal recognition have become highly permeable at the edges and exclude ever more people from the benefits of socially justified self-respect, what Parsons’ analyses suggested would then happen has not. There has not been moral indignation in the face of mass denial of social recognition, there are no signs to be seen of an increase in public outcries; instead, the struggle for recognition seems essentially frozen on the outside and to have essentially been interiorized, be it in the form of greater fears of failure or in the form of cold, impotent rage. So, what has happened to the conflicts over social self-respect in the midst of all this oppressive silence, interrupted as it is only on occasion superficially by journalistic coverage? What shapes has the struggle for recognition since assumed?53

According to Honneth, then, instead of people being morally indignant and able to increase public outcries, there is an oppressive silence, in a way that makes human beings impotent.

Two years after the article mentioned above, Honneth introduces another concept related to indifference: the autonomization of the human being. Autonomization signifies that people’s actions are fixed and rigid, making them socially isolated and implying a loss of communication. Lifeworld interaction is damaged:

When it comes to moral freedom, just as in the case of legal freedom, the pathological logic consists in the fact that subjects do not grasp its internal boundaries and thus make its practice the entirety of their life praxis. The habitual consequence of such an autonomization is that individual action becomes rigid and fixed, reflected in symptoms of social isolation and a loss of communication. Because subjects cannot see that the freedom granted to them only offers the limited possibility of reflexively repairing shattered or disrupted intersubjectivity, they perceive this freedom as the source of their entire self-understanding and thus deprive themselves of the chance to reconnect to lifeworld interaction.54

In this time, Honneth affirms that there is a personal lack of interest in the private spheres of life, as well as in the public spaces. They are not just disinterested in public affairs, but also they do not consider the infringements of the private life of other members of the community. It seems to us that autonomization is also a consequence of alienation, in the same way as reification and freezing. There is no intentionality in autonomization.

2.5. Intentional indifference

Until now, we have seen that Honneth mentions the freeze of struggles, reification, and invisibility, as attitudes, which interfere in the achievement of recognition. From our point of view, they are all examples of behaviors with some elements of indifference.