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Chapter Two. The Need for a “Praxis Philosophy”: The Theoretical Genesis of Axel Honneth’s Mature Theory of Recognition
The theory of recognition that Honneth elaborated in his Habilitationsschrift, then published in 1992 as The Struggle for Recognition, represents the pars construens of his previous critical dialogue, in The Critique of Power (1985), with the main theorists of the earlier generations of the Frankfurt School, specifically Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Although Honneth has not dedicated any of its nine chapters to the analysis of his theoretical reviewing of and distancing from their social theories, it is essential to place his mature theory of recognition in the correct philosophical context of origin. Indeed, if
“separated from this rich genealogy […], the theses presented in The Struggle for Recognition might appear vague or insufficiently developed.”72 In fact, The Struggle for Recognition is to be interpreted in terms of a programmatic reaction to the critical impasse of Horkheimer and Adorno’s social theories through the development of Habermas’ truncated analysis on the everyday sphere, normatively regulated, of the intersubjective relationships among social members. Why can recognition stand for a critical category of the social? How is it to be understood in its intrinsic normative mechanism? How is it possible to systematically grasp its extensive critical potential within the different spheres of the social world? And how should critical theory be interpreted accordingly in its role and task? Honneth has defined all these inquiring questions, which represent the backbone issues of The Struggle for Recognition, in relation to the theoretical problems and limitations he previously singled out in the accounts of social critique of the Frankfurt School’s previous generations.
In the preface to The Critique of Power, Honneth explains the main aim of the work as follows:
I examine the approaches developed by Adorno, Foucault, and Habermas in order to criticize the conception of contemporary societies as relations of domination. The purpose of such a comparison is to work out in the represented positions the conceptions of action that lie at the basis of social integration and thus, too, at the basis of the exercise of power. […] The form that a ‘critique of power’ should assume today follows implicitly from a critical analysis of the difficulties encountered, at different levels of reflection, within both of these approaches. To that
72 Deranty, 2009, p. 2.
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extent it provides […] reflective stages in which the conceptual premises of a critical social theory are gradually clarified.73
In The Critique of Power, Honneth is interested, on the one hand, in analyzing the philosophical anthropologies to which the previous critical theorists referred in order to outline a theory of human action through which providing an analysis of the mechanisms of social domination and an account of social critique. On the other hand, he aims at understanding such accounts as progressive stages in the analysis of social domination, as parts of a “learning process” wherein the theoretical shortcomings of the previous stages had been overcome partially by the following ones, and through which Honneth clarifies to himself the fundamental directives of his future critical program. In fact, the origins of Honneth’s mature theory of recognition can be retrieved in the theoretical need he points out in The Critique of Power for
“a praxis philosophy,” namely, for a philosophical-anthropological analysis suitable to address as systematically as possible the many facettes of social domination, to revalue the capacity of the human subject for critical and transformative activity, and to redefine the role and function of critical social theory.
According to Honneth, previous critical theorists, having failed to provide a differentiated enough philosophical anthropology, overlooked the differentiated normativity intrinsic to the intersubjective relationships among subjects. By ignoring or not investigating in depth the normativity that springs from the intersubjective relations among social subjects, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas ended up outlining system-theoretic accounts of the social world, with three main theoretical shortcomings. First, they prevent an essential dimension of social domination from being considered autonomously or sufficiently. Second, they severely downplay the capacity of social subjects for critical activity, and, finally, critical social theory loses its defining function to sustain oppressed social groups’ social struggles.
In the first two chapters of The Critique of Power, Honneth undertakes a reconstructive and critical analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s social theories, focusing, among other writings, on the four-handed work in which their theoretical points of convergence are presented, namely the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).74 Indeed, in this collection of essays,
73 Honneth, 1993, pp. xi-xii (Italics mine).
74 The main topics contained in the Dialectic of Enlightenment follow the inquiry path Horkheimer already disclosed in the essays Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era (1936), Traditional and Critical Theory (1937), and Art and Mass Culture (1941). Adorno then furthered the critique of
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Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to reconstruct the development from pre-modern to modern societies in terms of a history of the progressive and totalizing affirmation of instrumental reason. With “instrumental reason” they refer to the scientific paradigm of rationality that prevailed during the Enlightenment, namely, that form of abstracting and generalized thinking by which the human being began to be able to dominate nature for self-preservation, but at the expense of an increasing abandoning of the constitutive relation between subjectivity and objectivity. In fact, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the aim of the human being to dominate nature for overcoming its constitutive dependence and vulnerability to it progressively implemented a form of thinking that relates to the natural world only through a categorizing, generalizing, exploitative, and quality-blind attitude.
Enlightenment is totalitarian. […] For Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed by unity has the status of an existence or an event; its ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows. […] Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. […] The single distinction between man’s own existence and reality swallows all up others. Without regard for differences, the world is made subject to man.75
Through instrumental reason, indeed, both subjectivity and objectivity “are nullified”
since the subject’s extensive incorporation and subjection of the external world for the sake of control entails the total suppression ofboth the autonomy of nature and the awareness that the human being has about the living bond existing between the richness of its personal identity and the qualitative uniqueness and multiplicity of outer objects. From the false promises of the Enlightenment, concerning the possibility for the human being to overcome its self-incurred immaturity through scientific reason, to the affirmation of Capitalism, with its scientific division of labour and its system of mechanized and waged work, to the consolidation of the modern State’s bureaucratic and administrative rationality, the logic of violence, control, and suppression becomes the only relational structure of all interactions of the human being, with nature, itself, and other subjects. Horkheimer and Adorno, thus, attempt to show how the dominating logic of instrumental reason has been progressively extended to all layers of human
instrumental rationality and mass culture in Minima Moralia (1951), Negative Dialectics (1966), and Aesthetic Theory (1970). For an introduction to Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophical background in writing the Dialectic of Enlightenment, see Galli, 1966.
75 Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, pp. 4-5.
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relationality, and systematically secured through industrialism, state apparatus, and mass culture, in the face of which the subject is but a passive victim, as being completely exposed to their attitudes of control and standardizing activity. “Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationships of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched […].”76 The individual psyche, repressed in its natural impulses and socialized through the system of rationalizing social forces,
shrinks to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected from them. […] The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardizing behaviour on the individual, as the only natural, decent, and rational one.
Individuals define themselves not only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function or schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to criminality, is expose to the force of the collective, which keeps watch from the classroom to the trade union.
Yet, even the threatening collective is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence.77
From this passage it is clear how the system of instrumental reason distorts both the human being’s self-conception and self-relation as a unique and qualitative individuality, for it abandons its enriching and projective relation to objectivity to become a mere standardized function of the system, and human social relationships. By entirely transposing the logic of exploitation and suppression of external and internal nature to the subject-subject relations, the two authors attempt to explain social domination as the respective inter-humane attitude to materially dominate the other, to exploit its bodily existence for profit and security, regardless of its unique and irreplaceable qualities. Famously, Horkheimer and Adorno reinterpret the story of the Sirens in the Odyssey as an indirect depiction of such a nexus between repression of nature through work and social domination. Accordingly, to escape the perilous lure of the Sirens, which metaphorically recall the subject to its original aesthetic unity with nature, Odysseus relies on a rational system of division of labor. Such a strategy of control, on the one hand, leads Odysseus to a form of self-suppression, and, on the other hand, implies the institution of a class of dominated workers that deal with nature and materiality for Odysseus’
own sake. Indeed, Odysseus decides to plug the ears of his comrades and orders them to row while he avails himself of the right to enjoy the pleasure of the Sirens’ lure but bound to the
76 Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, p. 21.
77 Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, pp. 21-22.
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ship’s mast. Thus, retrieving Hegel’s master-slave dialectics, Horkheimer and Adorno conceive the logic of social domination as the suppression of the slave’s free and autonomous unity with nature. The latter is indeed reduced to blind corporeity and, as a working tool, his/her function is exploiting nature for the other’s survival. Instead, the master is the one who delegates to others the violent and material manipulation of nature while ensuring his/her control on instrumental theory and the access to the archaic pleasure deriving from the original unity with nature, but without indulging in any real abandonment and retrieval of it.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s final consideration is entirely pessimistic. The reconstruction of the increasing degeneration of human societies into closed systems of domination leaves no openings for a renewal of the human species. Rather, human history is conclusively conceived of as embedding a ‘dialectical’ movement, for its logic of suppression of nature, which is progressively transposed to all aspects of human relations (with objects, the inner self, and other subjects), leads to the very opposite outcome: human societies and human beings succumb
“more deeply to that compulsion.”78 Individuals’ atomization, war, racism, antisemitism, totalitarian societies, industrialized and standardizing mass art, and bureaucratization, are all simultaneous products and elements of the progressive totalization of instrumental reason, which, by attempting to repress all natural dimensions, leads to the opposite result of unleashing nature in its more blind and de-humanizing form.
Faced with the argumentative structure of the Dialectic of Enlightenment that we have tried here to summarize, Honneth, in The Critique of Power, provides a critical perspective on the fundamental purpose of this work, the anthropology and theory of ego formation it accounts for, the type of social theory it develops, the theoretical tools to analyze social domination it provides and the effective possibility for social criticism and transformation that derives from it.
Indeed, he points out how the pessimistic attitude of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is undeniably radical, providing a philosophy of history that interprets human historical process as a systemically progressive course of domination, assured by structures of control and manipulation destined to totally shape human individuality.
The progress of civilization is exposed as the concealed process of human regression. Socio-cultural evolution, which on the testimony of a cumulative growth in productive forces gives the
78 Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, p. 9.
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impression of continuous progress, turns out to be the extended act of regression in the history of the species.79
The radicality of such an interpretation of human history and the focus on a single source of its regressive matrix, namely, the pathological relation of the human being with the natural world, according to Honneth, unveil Horkheimer and Adorno’s unilateral anthropology and theory of ego-formation. Indeed, there are few passages in the Dialectic of Enlightenment wherein the negative judgment on instrumental thinking and abstract individuality is shown as related to a positive anthropology and theory of identity formation. Such an anthropology, following Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Theses on Feuerbach, grounds the criticism of existing societies upon a conception of an undistorted practice of the subject with and within the objective world, i.e., with the natural and the social world.
Indeed, Marx’s initial critique of Capitalism unmasks its base-mechanisms of private property and wage labour as de-humanizing for they imply the loss for the human being of its
‘humane’ practical relation with the external world, itself, and other subjects. Marx conceives of human activity in terms of ‘praxis’ since its primary ontological and epistemological dimension consists of its sensuous and transformative exchange with the external world through labour.80 The exploitative and estranging logic to which human praxis is subjected within
79 Honneth, 1993, p. 37.
80 Here, it is essential to stress that Marx’s anthropology, despite having been developed with the background of Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism, outlines a distinguishing category of human activity. As Emmanuel Renault points out, “following Hegel, Marx tried to think of men as defined mainly by their concrete activities, activities that are always conditioned by external and internal constraints, but are also able to transform their conditions, either through work or through revolutionarily activity. The notion of ‘practice’ denotes precisely the human activity conceived of in its subjective and objective conditionings as well as in its subjective and objective transformative potentials. […] It is surely not contingent that Marx’s version of the idea of the primacy of the practical is articulated with reference to ‘Praxis’, rather than to ‘praktische Vernunft’, ‘das Praktische’, ‘die Tätigkeiten’, ‘die Handlung’, or ‘die Tat’. Indeed, in German Idealism and in Young Hegelianism, the German term ‘Praxis’ was already in use, but it was in another context and with another function. It was not in the context of discussion about the primacy of the practical, but about the relations between theory and practical applications.
Its function was not to enunciate an ontological or epistemological principle but to think of the status of applied science or the political application of philosophical theories of natural rights. […] Marx speaks of ‘Praxis’ in the Theses on Feuerbach in order to contrast an idealist conception of practice as ‘subjective activity’ (subjective Tätigkeit) or as actualisation of the freedom of the spirit or practical reason, with a materialist conception of practice as ‘objective’ and ‘actual’ (wirklich), that is, as always conditioned by circumstances.[…] Hence, the task of the ‘new materialism’ Marx wants to promote is to think of the primacy of the practical with reference to practice conceived of not only as a ‘subjective activity’ but also as an activity conditioned subjectively (as ‘sensuous human activity’) and objectively (as conditioned by circumstances). […] It means that new materialism thinks of practice in its ‘worldiness’. […] It means that this new materialism criticizes the idealist conception of practice with an argument that is typical of old materialism: human activities are always conditioned by ‘circumstances’. But conversely, against the old version of materialism, Marx stresses that the circumstances can also be changed by human practices, and it in only such a potential of human practices that enables one to understand the possibility and significance of ‘revolutionary’, or ‘practical-critical’ activity.” (Renault, 2018, pp. 21-23).
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Capitalism, as depriving the human being of its own activity, of the object of its labor and of its sympathetic attitude towards other subjects, well warrants for Marx the radical criticism of bourgeois societies and the imperative of social struggle to give rise to a communist society.
What is important to underline is that in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx considers the disrupting effects of Capitalism upon practical human activity in its outer and inner dimension as well.81 Marx’s reference to the subject’s self-constitution and self-relation, thus, relies upon a sketched theory of subjectivity, according to which to become a subject means self-constituting as an individual human being through the particular and self-conscious appropriation of the human species’ sensuous, creative, and transformative activity of the natural world’s qualities.82 According to Marx, the “humane” relation to the external world and, therefore, the subject’s positive self-development as an individual human being, do not depend upon the mere “having,” “owing,” or “consuming” of external objects. Instead, it depends on self-consciously pursuing the ontological unity which bounds, respectively, subjectivity to objectivity’s qualities, circumstances, and properties that are suitable to be enjoyed, seen, touched, and perceived in their variety, and objectivity to subjectivity, as suitable to be unveiled, transformed, and enriched by the human being.
Similarly, Horkheimer and Adorno outline a philosophical anthropology according to which the primary agentive dimension of the human being is its relationship with the natural world, which is ‘undistorted’ when it is lived as a sensuous, aesthetically rational, artistic, and transformative relationship. Consequently, they relate the constitution and positive development of the subject’s identity to the relations with natural objectivity.
But even as an autonomously objectified subject it is only what the objective world is for it. The inner depth of the subject consists in nothing other than the delicacy and richness of the outer perceptual world. If this intermeshing is broken, the self petrifies. It is confined, positivistically, to registering the given without itself giving, it shrinks to a point, and if, idealistically, it projects the world out of the bottomless origin or its own self, it exhausts itself in monotonous repetition.
81 See Marx, 1975, 3.
82 Marx, 1975, 3, p. 296. It is fundamental to underline how in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx still relies upon the idea of a historical subject, i.e., the human species-being (Gattungswesen). Although he follows Feuerbach in his critique of Hegel’s absolute idealism, reclaiming the urgency to revaluing from a philosophical point of view the uniqueness of human individuality, Marx maintains the philosophical perspective of the human species’ natural community as the real subject of human history (see, Feuerbach’s Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy [1839], and Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1843]). Despite Marx’s maintenance of a group and species’ perspective, both on a descriptive and critical level, it is possible to find in both Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Notes on James Mill (1844), the presence of a sketched theory of the process of identity constitution of subjects as individual members of the human species through the projective and transformative relation with the external world.
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[…] Only mediation, in which the insignificant sense datum raises thought to the fuller productivity of which it is capable, and in which, conversely, thought gives itself up without reservation to the overwhelming impression – only mediation can overcome the isolation which ails the whole of nature.83
According to Honneth, Horkheimer and Adorno’s human anthropology and theory of ego-formation84 are unilateral and, thus, problematic, both from a descriptive and critical point of view. Firstly, Honneth stresses how through such a theoretical framework the mechanism of social domination, i.e., of the oppression exerted by some social group upon other social groups, lacks an autonomous analysis that, independently from the logic of the domination of nature, focuses on its non-derivate origin and on forms of social oppressions other than the mere material, bodily, and labour exploitation.
Such a theory sees in the identity logic of instrumental reason the subsumption of the particular under the universal – the original model of domination, of which every other form of domination is merely derivative. […] This pointed formulation blatantly reveals the implicit presupposition that creates in the Dialectic of Enlightenment an argumentative bridge between the philosophical-historical construction and a theory of social domination. The knitting together of these component concepts represents an attempt to form the concept of social domination in correspondence with the concept of the domination of nature. Only with the silent presupposition of this analogy is it meaningful to conceive of the techniques of social domination as products of an intra-social utilization of the means of domination acquired by working upon nature.85
Secondly, by following such a unilateral analysis, the emergence and the successful development of the ego formation are understood as dependent merely on the free constitutive relation with external objects, to be conceived non-dualistically, as determined by and determining subjectivity. Horkheimer and Adorno, hence, entirely overlook the constitutive role that intersubjective relations play for the formation and the positive development of subjectivity.
83 Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, pp. 155-156.
84 We should underline how Horkheimer and Adorno’s lexicon for what concerns the topic of identity formation is strictly related to psychoanalysis and its theory of the ego-development through the antagonistic pressure of the Id’s impulses and the Superego’s moral norms introjected from the social context. Horkheimer and Adorno reject Freud’s ultimate idea that civilization or community life and the human original impulsive nature are two opposite and conflicting poles, for they do not perceive human naturalness in terms of an anti-social or blind condition, thus in strict opposition to social life. What’s wrong is not social life per se, but the form of social life to which the model of instrumental reason has led. The positive ego-formation, thus, is not dependent upon the ‘repression’ or
‘sublimation’ of naturalness, but rather on the recovery of such a naturalness through a different form of rationality (negative or aesthetic thought for Adorno).
85 Honneth, 1993, pp. 42-53.