The Struggle for Recognition by Axel Honneth

Author:Axel Honneth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

II

If love can be said to represent a symbiosis refracted by mutual individuation, then, in loving, what one recognizes in the other is evidently only the other’s individual independence. Thus, it might be thought that the love relationship is characterized solely by a type of recognition involving the cognitive acceptance of the other’s independence. That this is not the case can already be seen in the fact that this release into independence has to be supported by an affective confidence in the continuity of shared concern. Without the felt assurance that the loved one will continue to care even after he or she has become independent, it would be impossible for the loving subject to recognize that independence. Because this experience must be mutual in love relationships, recognition is here characterized by a double process, in which the other is released and, at the same time, emotionally tied to the loving subject. Thus, in speaking of recognition as a constitutive element of love, what is meant is an affirmation of independence that is guided – indeed, supported – by care. Every love relationship, whether between friends, lovers, or parent and child, thus presupposes liking and attraction, which are out of individuals’ control. And since positive feelings about other people are not matters of choice, the love relationship cannot be extended at will, beyond the social circle of primary relationships, to cover a larger number of partners to interaction. Although this means that love will always have an element of moral particularism to it, Hegel was nonetheless right to discern within it the structural core of all ethical life. For it is only this symbiotically nourished bond, which emerges through mutually desired demarcation, that produces the degree of basic individual self-confidence indispensable for autonomous participation in public life.

Compared to the form of recognition found in love – as it is presented here with the help of object-relations theory – legal relations differ in just about every essential respect. The only reason why both spheres of interaction are to be understood as two types of one and the same pattern of socialization is that the logic of each cannot be adequately explained without appeal to the same mechanism of reciprocal recognition. In the case of law, Hegel and Mead drew this connection on the basis of the fact that we can only come to understand ourselves as the bearers of rights when we know, in turn, what various normative obligations we must keep vis-à-vis others: only once we have taken the perspective of the ‘generalized other’, which teaches us to recognize the other members of the community as the bearers of rights, can we also understand ourselves to be legal persons, in the sense that we can be sure that certain of our claims will be met.

In his later years, Hegel once again presented, with the desired clarity, this necessary interconnection, which allowed both him and Mead to conceive legal relations as a form of mutual recognition. In the summary of the

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