The I in We E-Book

Axel Honneth

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 469

Beschreibung

In this volume Axel Honneth deepens and develops his highly influential theory of recognition, showing how it enables us both to rethink the concept of justice and to offer a compelling account of the relationship between social reproduction and individual identity formation. Drawing on his reassessment of Hegel's practical philosophy, Honneth argues that our conception of social justice should be redirected from a preoccupation with the principles of distributing goods to a focus on the measures for creating symmetrical relations of recognition. This theoretical reorientation has far-reaching implications for the theory of justice, as it obliges this theory to engage directly with problems concerning the organization of work and with the ideologies that stabilize relations of domination. In the final part of this volume Honneth shows how the theory of recognition provides a fruitful and illuminating way of exploring the relation between social reproduction and identity formation. Rather than seeing groups as regressive social forms that threaten the autonomy of the individual, Honneth argues that the 'I' is dependent on forms of social recognition embodied in groups, since neither self-respect nor self-esteem can be maintained without the supportive experience of practising shared values in the group. This important new book by one of the leading social philosophers of our time will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, sociology, politics and the humanities and social sciences generally.

Leseprobe

First published in German as Das Ich im Wir © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin, 2010

This English edition © Polity Press, 2012

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5232-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5233-7 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9479-5 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9386-6 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Preface

This volume brings together a number of contributions to discussions over recent years on how to build upon the basic assumptions of a Hegelian theory of recognition. After initially outlining my interpretation of Hegel's approach in The Struggle for Recognition, I had my hands full correcting or further elucidating my position in response to various objections. In particular, a debate with Nancy Fraser and the Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, offered welcome opportunities to give a more precise account of what were still vague considerations.1 But in going down this path and attempting to deal with various impulses from alternative theories of intersubjectivity,2 many questions still remained unsolved. After all, the reason I had sought to reconstruct Hegel's theory of recognition was to garner insights that would not only allow a rethinking of the concept of justice, but also lead to a better account of the relationship between socialization and individuation, between social reproduction and individual identity formation. My diverse efforts to clarify this relationship over recent years are gathered in this volume. Apart from a few exceptions, the essays move along the margins of social philosophy, where normative questions can only be answered by taking into account the empirical undertakings of other, neighbouring disciplines.

Part I, however, contains two essays in which I return to essential elements of Hegel's practical philosophy. Whereas in The Struggle for Recognition I had still assumed that only Hegel's Jena lectures contained coherent elements of a theory of recognition, after more intensive study of his mature writings I came to realize how wrong I had been. I no longer believe that Hegel sacrificed his initial intersubjectivism in the course of developing a monological concept of spirit; rather, Hegel sought throughout his life to interpret objective spirit, i.e. social reality, as a set of layered relations of recognition. On the basis of this reassessment I sought to make Hegel's Philosophy of Right fruitful for the development of a theory of recognition. Expressed much more strongly than in his early writings is the groundbreaking notion that social justice is to be defined in terms of the requirements of mutual recognition, and that we must take our point of departure in historically developed and already institutionalized relations of recognition.3 In the essay on Hegel's concept of self-consciousness (Chapter 1), which deals with a key chapter from Phenomenology of Spirit, I attempt to clarify the systematic meaning of recognition in this context; for the mature Hegel, recognition refers to an act of moral self-restriction, which we must be able to perform on ourselves in the face of others if we are to arrive at a consciousness of our self. By contrast, the essay on Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Chapter 2) attempts to answer the difficult question of how we are to conceive of the internal connection between recognition and human freedom. According to my interpretation, Hegel creates this link by attempting to demonstrate to contemporary proponents of liberalism that it is only by taking part in institutionalized practices of individual self-restriction that we can experience our own will as being completely free.

In the essays that make up Part II, I attempt to further develop these Hegelian ideas in order to solve some central problems of contemporary theories of justice. The systematic framework for these approaches can be found in the first essay (Chapter 3), which is meant to correct our customary conception of social justice by redirecting it from a fixation on the principles of distributing goods towards measures for creating symmetrical relations of recognition. However, and as I attempt to show in the subsequent chapters, such a theoretical reversal must not shy away from problematizing the current organization of labour (Chapter 4), or from the difficult question of which forms of social recognition currently contribute indirectly to reinforcing social domination (Chapter 5). Theoretical predeterminations can exclude neither the sphere of societal labour nor ideologies that serve to stabilize domination from the corpus of a theory of justice. In a discussion of the highly instructive study On Justification by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (Chapter 6), I combine some of the already developed ideas by arguing against the authors' tendency to de-structure social morality, instead emphasizing the normative weight of already institutionalized spheres of recognition. I undertake a similar endeavour in the chapter on David Miller's theory of justice (Chapter 7), which was originally published as a preface to the German edition of his now classic monograph, The Principles of Social Justice. Here as well, I argue that if a theory of justice is to establish stronger ties to social reality, a Hegelian ‘reconstruction’ of already established principles of recognition is crucial.

In Part III, which bears the relatively vague title ‘Social and Theoretical Applications’, I take the ideas described in the first two parts of the book and attempt to make them useful for explanatory purposes. Therefore, problems of sociological explanation, rather than normative questions, stand at the centre of these individual essays. It will soon become apparent, however, that when it comes to ‘applying’ these ideas, there is no way of cleanly separating social facts from normative claims to validity. As soon as we follow Hegel and interpret relations of recognition as being constitutive for all of social reality, we must recognize that any explanation of social processes necessarily invokes prevailing norms and principles. Claims and demands, obligations and beliefs are just as much a part of reality as supposedly purely ‘objective’ matters. The first chapter in this part (Chapter 8) represents what is still a very tentative response to recent attempts within political science to employ the concept of recognition to explain tensions and dynamics within the field of international relations. My sole aim in this chapter is to clarify the extent to which it makes sense to conceive of relations between states as being regulated by expectations of recognition. The other two chapters in this part are dedicated to theoretical explorations undertaken at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (Chapters 9 and 10). Together with Martin Hartmann, I attempt to give a more detailed explanation of our interdisciplinary research on ‘paradoxes’ in the development of contemporary capitalism. I do so by empirically illustrating the extent to which structural economic changes have transformed historically developed recognitional expectations into disciplinary demands on subjects. In the context of this book, however, both of these more sociological essays can only give some initial indications of what a recognition-theoretical diagnosis of the present would have to look like.

Part IV picks up a theoretical issue that I have left almost entirely untouched since the publication of The Struggle for Recognition.4 I have always been convinced that social relations of recognition can only develop under the precondition of corresponding structural developments within the human psyche, such as have been investigated in exemplary fashion by object relations theory. Although my recourse to psychoanalysis has occasionally provoked the accusation that I make the theory of recognition altogether ‘too psychological’, even today I see no reason to abandon my plan to draw a connection between external social recognition and structural psychological formation. Of course, one could draw a false genetic conclusion and justify claims to recognition with reference to the danger of psychological injury, but apart from that, dovetailing the theory of recognition with psychoanalysis seems to me to be an entirely advantageous endeavour. I have sought to further develop some of these insights in two essays in which I address the significance of social groups (Chapter 12) and the role of psychological ‘dedifferentiations’ (Entgrenzungen) (Chapter 14). The other two chapters in the final part of the volume (Chapters 11 and 13), especially the discussion of the work of my friend Joel Whitebook, represent attempts to defend my own, recognition-theoretical interpretation of psychoanalysis against the obvious objection that I have neglected destructive, antisocial drives.

I wish to thank Stephan Altemeier and Frauke Köhler for technical assistance in completing the book. Their calm and care ensured that the scattered essays could be put into a unified and systematic form. Eva Gilmer at Suhrkamp once again provided excellent advice in compiling the various chapters. Finally, I wish to thank the translator, Joseph Ganahl, for his loyal service over the years and for ensuring that this volume could appear in English that is both readable and true to the content.

Notes

1

    Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth,

Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–Philosophical Exchange

(London and New York: Verso, 2003).

2

    Axel Honneth,

Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003).

3

    Axel Honneth,

Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

, trans. Jack Ben-Levi (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum Ltd, 2000).

4

    The following essays represent the few exceptions: Axel Honneth, ‘Objektbeziehungstheorie und postmoderne Identität: Über das vermeintliche Veralten der Psychoanalyse’, in

Unsichtbarkeit

, pp. 138–61; Honneth, ‘Appropriating Freedom: Freud's Conception of Individual Self-Relation’, in

Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory

, trans. James Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 126–45.

Part IHegelian Roots

1From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Grounding of Self-Consciousness

Hardly any of Hegel's works have attracted as much attention as the chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. As difficult and inaccessible as the book may be on the whole, this chapter, in which consciousness exits ‘the nightlike void of the super-sensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present’1 (111), finally offers something that we can understand. All of a sudden, his account of the mind's experience of itself takes on more striking colours, the lonely self-consciousness unsuspectingly encounters other subjects, and what was previously a merely cognitive matter is transformed into a social drama consisting of a ‘struggle for life and death’. In short, this chapter brings together all the elements capable of supplying post-idealistic philosophy's hunger for reality with material for concretion and elaboration. Hegel's first students seized the opportunity offered by this chapter and took his speculative philosophy out of the ethereal sphere of ideas and notions, pulling it back down to the earth of social reality. And ever since, authors from Lukács and Brecht to Kojève have sought unceasingly to uncover in the succession of desire, recognition and struggle the outlines of a historically situatable, political course of events.

However, by sharpening Hegel's considerations into concrete and tangible concepts, we risk losing sight of this chapter's argumentative core in the face of all this conflictual interaction. After all, Hegel intended to do much more than merely prove that subjects must necessarily enter into a struggle once they have realized their mutual dependence. By employing his phenomenological method, he sought to demonstrate that a subject can only arrive at a ‘consciousness’ of its own ‘self’ if it enters into a relationship of ‘recognition’ with another subject. Hegel's aims were much more fundamental than historicizing or sociological interpretations cared to realize; he was primarily interested in elucidating not an historical event or instance of conflict, but a transcendental fact that should prove to be a prerequisite of all human sociality. If any description of an historical event is to be found at all in the chapter on ‘Self-Consciousness’, then it is only after the event that Hegel is truly interested in has already occurred: that is, after the subject has emerged from the self-referentiality of mere desire and become aware of its dependence on its fellow human subjects. Hegel thus seeks to do nothing less than explain the transition from natural to conscious (geistig) being, from the human animal to the rational subject. The social conflicts that follow in this chapter are merely intended as a processual articulation of the implications this consciousness () has for human beings.