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Honneth’s “Truncated Project” and the Recovery of John Dewey: A Proposal Proposal

Nel documento UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI PARMA (pagine 47-63)

In the two previous paragraphs, we have attempted, first, to summarize the theoretical reasons which led contemporary practical philosophy to reconstruct the Hegelian category of recognition, thus allowing critical social theory to progressively outline a critical project built upon this notion. Second, we have posited Axel Honneth’s account, mainly relying upon the theoretical framework of The Struggle for Recognition, as momentarily the more systematic paradigm of recognition and the higher attempt to provide a critical theory of recognition. The acknowledgment of Honneth’s theory as the turning point of the contemporary critical paradigm of recognition is due to his attempt to clarify the constitutive mechanism of recognition for human subject’s self-realization. Accordingly, recognition manifests as the relationship wherein subjects positively confirm and affirm their subjective practical dimensions, thus reciprocally allowing each other to develop the positive practical self-relation that is necessary for freely self-realizing within existing societies. Then, we have briefly enumerated the theoretical bases of Honneth’s account, namely, his systematic identification of three different species of recognition (love, respect, and social esteem) and understanding of recognition’s moral meaning. Consequently, the central role he attributes to social sufferance as the emotional basis to undertake moral struggles for social recognition. And finally, his formulation of the criterion of the “good life” to criticize social contexts that structurally implement forms of social misrecognition, which harm the psychological integrity of social members through continuous experiences of disrespect and contempt.

Third, we have presented the two levels of criticism, emerging within critical theory and social philosophy’s debate, that the contemporary critical theory of recognition, mainly relying on Honneth’s paradigm, is compelled to address in order to maintain as feasible to use recognition as a critical category of human societies. What such criticisms have pointed out is the insufficient attention Honneth paid respectively to the role that recognition plays in sustaining and silencing situations of social dominations, at the expenses of oppressed groups,

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and to its inevitable constitutive dimension in partly determining and structuring the subject’s practical identity, in its emotions, capacities, ends, and qualities through pre-existing and regulating social categories and practices. We have seen how these two levels of criticism affect an ethical or normative paradigm of recognition more or less structurally, stressing the urgency to provide further conceptual tools to distinguish among adequate and inadequate relations of recognition. Against the background of such criticisms, the theoretical framework Honneth outlined from The Struggle for Recognition appears necessary but not sufficient to maintain recognition as a critical category of the social contexts.

Having made such considerations, in an attempt to contribute to this debate on recognition, the main objective of our reflections will be the following. To inquire, in light of the criticisms previously exposed, on how it could be possible to strengthen the theoretical framework of a critical theory of recognition, as highly based on Honneth’s mature paradigm of recognition, in order to maintain the project to provide a normative category of recognition for criticizing human societies. This aim implies three theoretical steps.

The first step, that we attempted to undertake partly in this chapter, is to clarify from the criticisms raised to Honneth’s theory what sort of theoretical questions it is unable to address.

We conceptualize the first compelling issue his theory is incapable of dealing with in terms of the ontological conditions of normative recognition, related to the urgency to find conceptual tools to distinguish more clearly among adequate and ideological relationships of recognition, due to his assumptions that any occurrence of social relations of affirmation and confirmation towards social members’ practical identities is already a case of ethical recognition, apt to allow their free self-realization in the social context. This problem, thus, calls for an enlargement of his normative grammar of recognition. Indeed, its normative framework seems to be capable of critically detecting cases of personal injury, which manifestly obstruct the possibility for human subjects to develop a positive practical self-relation. Notwithstanding, it turns out to be lacking sensitive conceptual tools for criticizing ideological relations of recognition among social members, namely, normatively weak recognitive relations, which acknowledge positive values to social members while maintaining them within relations of domination and oppression. The second compelling issue Honneth’s theory is struggling to address is the one we have defined as the ontological status of normative recognition, and refers to the problem of the constitutive dimension of recognition and the necessity to discriminate among the inevitable social determination of recognition and the pathological cases wherein it turns into a standardizing,

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alienating, and lifeless relation. Honneth’s overlooking of this ontological dimension of social recognition, which in its pathological regressions relies upon a notion of power different to that one of domination, implies the lack within his conceptual framework of theoretical elements apt to specify the ontological status of normative recognition, namely, the kind of constitutive relation that it is or should be in contrast to its pathological forms.

To face these problems and keep the idea of a normative concept of recognition for criticizing human societies, we aim to inquire whether it is possible to enrich Honneth’s theoretical framework, as standing for the current reference framework of the contemporary critical theory of recognition, for clarifying the ontological conditions and the ontological status of normative recognition. This would make feasible, for a critical theory of recognition, to distinguish among adequate and inadequate recognitive relations, namely, among normatively strong and normatively weak relationships of recognition, i.e., ideological and lifeless.

The second step, thus, will endeavor to identify within Honneth’s framework, with a particular focus on The Struggle for Recognition and other following writings which develop its theoretical and methodological strategy, the theoretical reason for which the possibility for a clarification of the ontological conditions and ontological status of normative recognition is structurally impeded.

The final step, once this problematic theoretical reason is understood, will be to enlarge the reference framework of contemporary recognition through a philosophical perspective which can be of help in overcoming the structural shortcoming of Honneth’s paradigm and, thus, in clarifying the two issues mentioned. As previously said, we want to try to go beyond Honneth, through a philosophical perspective that can strengthen the normative grammar and critical task of a contemporary critical theory of recognition. The philosophical perspective we think can give a stimulus to the progressive development of the contemporary paradigm of recognition by being flanked with Honneth’s theory, is that of the American pragmatist John Dewey.

I. 3. 1. The Unidimensional Analysis of the Subject-Subject Relation: The Subject-Object Relation, Its Critical Potential and Honneth’s Truncated Project

The first and the second part of this work will be devoted respectively to a reconstruction of Honneth’s theory of recognition and the identification of its structural element which

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prevents the possibility of clarifying the ontological conditions and ontological status of normative recognition.

In Chapter Two and Chapter Three, we will thus outline the theoretical structure of Honneth’s mature project for a critical theory of recognition, by focusing mainly on The Critique of Power (1985), The Struggle for Recognition (1992), his exchange with Nancy Fraser Redistribution or Recognition (2003), and the articles of the 2000s, Pathologies of the Social:

The Past and Present of Social Philosophy, The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: on The Location of Critical Theory Today, Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the Analysis of Hidden Morality, and Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of Critique in the Frankfurt School. In the extensive production of Honneth,67 these writing can be considered exemplificative of both the theoretical exigencies and the main conceptual bases on which he has built his human anthropology of recognition and account of critical theory. By analysing in more detailed the exigencies that led Honneth to undertake a similar project against the background of the previous generations of Frankfurt Critical Theory, we aim to delineate the theoretical core of his paradigm of normative

67 We will primarily focus on these writings since, herein, we can find the theoretical backbone that sustains Honneth’s entire philosophical production, even his most important following work, Freedom’s Right (2011). On the one hand, this theoretical backbone provides a clear description of how Honneth conceives the constitutive mechanism of recognition for the human subject’s self-realization. On the other hand, it unveils the problem we think structurally affects his category of ethical recognition’s critical capacity: the lack of analysis of the constitutive practical interaction that the human being undertakes with the external environment. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth maintains The Struggle for Recognition’s theoretical backbone in its main conceptual elements and structural problem, focusing on the objective embodiment of the social conditions of human subjects’ self-realization within three main institutions of the modern world, i.e., personal relationships, the market, and the public sphere. Honneth shifts the interest from the intersubjective relationships of recognition among social members to the normative principles that govern the genesis, the reproduction, and development of the social institutions of social life, conceiving the critique of the social world in terms of an analysis of the possible

“distortions” of social life from the rational principles embedded within the social world. In Freedom’s Right, therefore, with respect to the first mature systematic work on recognition, The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth undertakes an institutional analysis of the social world, wherein the recognitive conditions of the subject’s freedom are analyzed through the historical and normative reconstruction of the main social institutions of the modern world, whose ethical principles govern their progressive and teleological evolution towards increasingly ethical contexts of freedom. Hence, Honneth keeps maintaining his understanding of the constitutive mechanism of recognition and the teleological interpretation of human societies’ moral progress, reconsidering the former on the level of social institutions and grounding the latter on a historical reconstruction of the modern world. Therefore, the final result is that the problematic aspects already present in The Struggle for Recognition are not solved, but, on the contrary, maintained and implemented. Firstly, his institutional shift maintains the lack of a broader anthropological analysis of the human being, and consequently, of recognition. Secondly, it implies his less attention to the hidden sufferance and emancipatory reactions occurring at the social world’s intra-group and inter-group level. Thirdly, it entails his furthering assumption of a teleological and cumulative path for social freedom and ethical life, overlooking the “imbrications of power,” as Danielle Petherbridge calls them, that can accompany relationships of recognition. Therefore, for our reflections, we want to focus directly on “the origin of everything,”

namely, the first mature works of Honneth, identifying the theoretical reason that we think has weakened all the Honnethian program for a critical theory of recognition.

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recognition as relying upon the conceptual triad previously mentioned: positive affirmation – individualization as undistorted self-relation – self-realization. Consequently, we will expose his account for a critical social theory, namely, his conception of the specific function and analytic criterion of social critique, respectively, the discovery of the hidden morality of misrecognized social groups, and the “good-life” criterion.

In Chapter Four and Chapter Five, we will seek to identify the theoretical reason for which his account of recognition, with its conceptual framework and consequent normative grammar of recognition, cannot deal appropriately with the two levels of criticism previously exposed, and thus offer conceptual tools to point out less formally the ontological conditions and status of normative recognition. We want to argue that this reason lies in Honneth’s unilateral analysis of the subject-subject relation as regards the process of individualization and free self-realization of human subjects. The structural shortcoming of Honneth’s framework consists of his consideration of the development of subjects’ practical identity as primarily dependent upon the positive affirmation and confirmation of other social members. He does not frame social recognition alongside other interactions through which the contents of subjective practical identities develop and are related to, and on which recognition is functionally dependent. Instead, he understands recognition as the unique relation of subjectivity, whose affirming and confirming quality is sufficient for subjects to gain a “positive self-experience”

and, thus, undertaking unimpeded the processes of “social self-realization.” By considering the development of subjective identities only in relation to social recognition, Honneth ends up assuming by default a private and psychologist conception of practical identity’s contents, as interiorly present, pre-reflexively or reflexively, in human subjectivity, something they possess and just attend to receive a kind of social confirmation to be realized, fulfilled, and developed.

Honneth’s subjectivist or psychologist understanding of subjective contents, which individuals dynamically develop or own through the historical development of human societies, is evident from his abstract and formal definition of recognition in terms of affirmation (Bestätigung), participation (Anteilnahme), improvement (Steigerung). Such a description, nevertheless, has a high degree of formality. It is formal because it reduces recognition to a matter of amorphous affirmation. Honneth assumes that the mere sustainment received from the social context is a sufficient condition for allowing subjects to realize their contents effectively and objectively.

Therefore, Honneth, focusing only on intersubjectivity concerning the development of subjective practical identities, and consequently relying upon a psychologist idea of their

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contents, ends up taking for granted the immediate continuity among the abstract, evaluating, social affirmation of subjective features, which is necessary for the subject to positively self-identify with itself, and the effective, objective, and dynamic realization and fulfilment by subjects of their personal contents. Notwithstanding, such a theoretical structure has proved to be inadequate, namely, necessary but not sufficient for approaching social contexts critically.

Whereas it permits the criticism of social situations wherein subjects undergo manifest cases of social misrecognition through experiences of radical contempt and disrespect, thus being impeded in developing a positive self-relation to act within societies, it is insufficient for critically approaching the inadequate forms of social recognition. It is insufficient, on the one hand, to critically identify those recognitive relations wherein the development for the subjects of a positive self-relation is instrumentally supported for silently hindering the effective and objective realization of their personal contents and social requests, and thus, their real self-realization. On the other hand, it is inadequate to detect those recognitive relations which become lifeless, tending to standardize, strictly determine, and curb the dynamic process of development of subjective identity’s contents.

The theoretical reason that we think hinders the Honnethian framework to be able to overcome the formality of his recognition paradigm, thus offering a more explicit analysis of the ontological conditions and ontological status of normative recognition, is his unilateral analysis of the subject-subject relations. Indeed, his formal anthropology of the human being unilaterally considers the reliance of human subjectivity upon recognitive relations without contemplating another central pole of subjective activity, on which recognition should be considered as functionally dependent: the subject-object relation.68 Without a reflection on the qualitative relationship of the human being with its external environment, both natural and social, and an analysis of its interdependence and influence with recognition, a further clarification of the constitutive mechanism of normative recognition is compromised. In fact, how can we consider a relation of recognition as ethical or normatively “effective,” i.e., as

68 The critique to Honneth as regards his unilateral analysis of subject-subject relation has been already pointed out by Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nancy Fraser, and Danielle Petherbridge, but in different ways. We will see in the following chapters how Deranty (2005, 2009, 2015a) and Fraser (2003) especially stress the “missing materiality”

within Honneth’s mature theory of recognition, namely, the absence of a Marxist analysis of the subject’s interactions with materiality, work, and nature, and the consequent role they should play within recognitive relations. Petherbridge (2013) emphasizes especially Honneth’s missing consideration of the relations among subjects and social institutions. Our analysis aims at stressing more forcefully the absence in Honneth’s mature theory of recognition of an anthropological project conceiving ethical recognition as functionally dependent upon the general co-constitutive relation existing between the human subject and the external environment.

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aiming at the realization of the subject’s contents, if we cannot refer it to a conception of human activity within the external world that can give us some directives concerning their mutual constitution and qualitative exchange? Moreover, how can we define the ontological status of normative recognition if we do not refer to a broader ontological analysis of human activity within and through the external world?

Apart from such an analysis, recognition appears “overhead,” eradicated from its reference to an objective world wherein the qualities, capacities, ends, and aims of subjects arise, can be realized, and develop according to the specific ontological relation that the human being has with the external world. As long as we rely upon a formal human anthropology that focuses on the sole intersubjective conditions of practical human identity, without also inquiring about the type of relational exchange with the external environment that characterizes human activity and constitutively defines its contents, normative recognition cannot but be described abstractly in its conditions and be lacking a clear definition of the type of relation that actually is for the human being and human societies. It remains abstractly described in terms of “positive affirmation” because the sole analysis of the subject-subject relation does not lead to the consideration of the co-constitutive relation between the human being and the experienced external world. Accordingly, the human being is considered for its self-realization as dependent merely on the emotional, linguistical, or practical confirmation from the social world of its subjective contents, which are overlooked in their strictly objective mediation and development.

Consequently, the subjects’ contents remain, for both theoretical and pre-theoretical critique, something “private” and “undefined.” This means that they are prevented from being considered in their objective conditions for fulfilment and enhancement, and, thus, are extremely vulnerable to social manipulation and sterile objectification.

Afterwards, once the theoretical reason for which Honneth’s mature framework fails to provide a stringent description of normative recognition in its ontological conditions and ontological status has been identified, we will attempt to overcome its shortcoming by referring to a philosophical anthropology wherein the category of recognition is framed within a broader analysis of human activity within the external world. We will start such an operation, firstly, by considering in Chapter Six that within Honneth’s production there is a work, Soziales Handeln und menschliche Natur (1980), which, although less considered in the philosophical debate and not further developed and officially integrated by Honneth in its reference framework on recognition, contains somehow a theoretical openness to the philosophical anthropology we are

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looking for. Indeed, we will emphasize how Honneth here, with Hans Joas, undertakes an analysis of the constitutive exchange that the human being has with the external world. Honneth and Joas theoretically approach the human being, first, in its more immediate dimension, namely, its being a part of nature, which develops a specific agentive quality within the external environment wherein it lives. Within this framework, recognition still plays a central role in representing a condition of possibility for subjectivity. Nevertheless, it is no more abstractly conceived as independent or “eradicated” from the distinctive occurrence of human activity from nature and within the objective world, natural and social. Instead, it is now presented in its genetic and performative role of mediation in the distinctive exchange that the human being has with the external world. We will see how therein Honneth and Joas conceive human activity in terms of a humanization of nature, as the subject’s capacity to grasp its sensuous and bodily experience within the world meaningfully and transform the external world intelligently and creatively. Recognition, as the genetic and performative condition for this agentive structure of the human being, assumes thus a normative role, as the necessary social mediation through which the human qualitative exchange with the external world can be performed and developed in its dynamism.

This work’s primary reference to the natural, sensuous, bodily, and practical aspect of human activity seems to sketch a theoretical framework different than the leading one of The Struggle for Recognition. Albeit not explicitly stated and subsequently integrated by Honneth in his mature theory, in a similar theoretical framework, the constitutive role of recognition for the human subject’s self-realization is enriched. Consequently, the ontological conditions and ontological status of normative recognition would be more clarified because this should aim at implementing the agentive quality of human beings within nature, in its specific ontological conditions. In addition to the fact that Honneth himself has neither yet expressly pointed out the advantages of such an approach to recognition nor attempted to integrate it with his reference account, the conceptual ground of Social Action and Human Nature does not stand for a systematic theory wherein a deepened naturalistic analysis of human activity, social life, and recognition are gathered together. Therefore, the third part of this work will be dedicated to a pragmatist approach that fundamentally contributes to the outline of a systematic naturalistic anthropology wherein recognition is functionally framed, disclosing an enriched normative grammar on recognition and critical approach to human societies. In conclusion, we will emphasize the theoretical and critical significance of this approach for a contemporary

Nel documento UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI PARMA (pagine 47-63)