The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth by Petherbridge Danielle;

Author:Petherbridge, Danielle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this respect, Honneth suggests that it is only by means of social conflict that subjects come to fully understand their dependence on one another. Rather than acting as isolated individuals, Honneth therefore suggests that “in their own action-orientation” subjects must “have already positively taken the other into account, before they become engaged in hostilities.”[55] The above passages clearly indicate the extent of Honneth’s anthropological claim and attempt to establish positive affectivity as the primary form of intersubjective relation. As discussed above, this further suggests that negative feelings are always understood in moral terms as a lack of recognition, and are separated out from other modes of interaction that might be motivated by strategic concerns, resentment, or power. In this way it might be argued that Honneth ‘purifies’ intersubjectivity as recognition as a primary form of intersubjectivity, and conceptualizes it in a manner that immunizes it from other forms and modalities of relation.[56]

However, Honneth goes even further in cementing the primacy of recognition and makes a strong social-ontological claim, arguing not only that subjects must have accepted one another in advance as partners “to interaction upon whom they are willing to allow their own activity to be dependent” but that both parties must have “already mutually recognized each other even if this social accord may not be thematically present to them.”[57] In other words, Honneth argues that mutual recognition occurs ‘behind the backs’ of social actors, so to speak, whereby a primary affective form of recognition forms the very underlying ontological fabric of social life. These passages are fundamental in defining Honneth’s concept of recognition as an ontology of ‘affective attunement,’ and the secondary relation between struggle and recognition that is carried through to his later work where conflict and struggle become even further de-emphasized.

Secondly, in analyzing Hegel’s depiction of the ‘life-and-death’ struggle in terms of the primacy of recognition, Honneth extends Hegel’s basic sketch in a manner that offers a significant reconceptualization compared to previous interpretations. If taken at its most basic, Honneth argues that all that can be inferred from Hegel’s account of the ‘life-and-death’ struggle in the Realphilosophie is that there is “a constitutive link between the intersubjective emergence of legal relations and the experience of death.” The most prominent existential interpretation of this presupposition was popularized by Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. According to this view, the notion of the ‘life-and-death’ struggle is understood to elucidate the inevitability of death as the driving factor behind intersubjectively secured freedom and the possibility of shared social life, based on the reciprocal acknowledgement of individuals in their finitude as vulnerable beings.[58]

However, Honneth wants to extend the interpretation of the ‘life-and-death’ struggle much further in order to reconstruct the full implications of Hegel’s idea in a recognition-theoretic direction.[59] Honneth’s alternative reading emphasizes the morally motivated nature of social conflict and the normative expectations that subjects bring to all interaction, rather than the mutual acknowledgement of human finitude as the factor compelling subjects to acknowledge the fragility of partners to interaction.

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