Beyond Recognition? Critical Reflections on Honneth’s Reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09672559.2012.760171
ISSN1466-4542
Autores Tópico(s)Political Philosophy and Ethics
ResumoAbstractThis article challenges Honneth’s reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Theory (2001/2010). Focusing on Hegel’s method, I argue that this text hardly offers support for the theory of mutual recognition that Honneth purports to derive from it. After critically considering Honneth’s interpretation of Hegel’s account of the family and civil society, I argue that Hegel’s text does not warrant Honneth’s tacit identification of mutual recognition with symmetrical instances of mutual recognition, let alone his subsequent projection of symmetrical forms of mutual recognition onto the various spheres of the Philosophy of Right as a whole. I conclude by indicating an alternative way in which Hegel’s text might be used to understand contemporary society.Keywords: HegelHonnethrecognitionphilosophy of rightpolitical theory Notes1 Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel’s Social Thought, trans. Ladislaus Löb, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. The history of this work is somewhat confusing. It is a translation of Leiden an Unbestimmtheit: eine Reaktualisierung der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001. I refer to these texts as PIF, followed by the page numbers of the German and English editions. Moreover, a substantial part of the German version (pp. 7–71) corresponds to an earlier English edition titled Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Jack Ben-Levi, Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000. This book does not include the last part of the German edition (pp. 78–127).2 Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011, hereafter abbreviated as RF. The work can be said to be Hegelian in spirit insofar as two of the three main parts of the work follow the structure of the Philosophy of Right and insofar as Honneth regularly refers to sections of the Philosophy of Right to support his account of aspects of contemporary societies. However, most of these references are brief and correspond to sections of The Pathologies of Individual Freedom. Moreover, Hegel is now only one among many philosophers, sociologists, novelists and historians to be cited in the footnotes. The part devoted to the sphere of politics (pp. 470–624) does not refer to Hegel at all. Since, according to Honneth, Hegel is ultimately not interested in the implementation of democracy, his ‘normative reconstruction of this third sphere’ has ‘to distance itself from the example of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (RF: p. 471). I hold, by contrast, that Hegel’s account of the state is much more relevant to contemporary political philosophy than Honneth takes it to be.3 Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), translated by Joel Anderson as The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, hereafter abbreviated as KA. Although Honneth’s reading of Hegel in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom is deeply informed by The Struggle for Recognition, my discussion will be largely confined to the former. See for a critical discussion of Honneth’s interpretation of Hegel’s Jena conception of mutual recognition Dirk Quadflieg, ‘Vom Zwang, Person zu sein: Hegel als Theoretiker einer nicht-reziproken Anerkennung’, in Axel Honneth (ed.) Gerechtigkeit und Gesellschaft: Potsdamer Seminar, Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2008: 68–75. Quadflieg rightly maintains, it seems to me, that Hegel’s conception of recognition is not exhausted by mutual, symmetrical or intersubjective forms of recognition.4 PIF: pp. 12–13/4–5, cf. KA: pp. 107–108/65–66. Apart from ignoring the fact that Hegel’s Science of Logic hardly deals with the concept of spirit, Honneth here repeats the standard criticisms of Hegel’s alleged metaphysics without asking what Hegel could mean with his concept of spirit or, for that matter, logic. Commentators who adopt a similar approach to the Philosophy of Right include Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, and Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. See Kenneth Westphal, ‘The Basic Context and Structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Frederick C. Beiser (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 234–69, for an account that stresses the progressive strands of the Philosophy of Right.5 English translations of Honneth’s works use the term ‘reactualization’ to render Reaktualisierung, which means the act of modifying something so as bring out its contemporary relevance.6 See for a defense of a detailed correlation between the Logic and the Philosophy of Right: Henry S. Richardson, ‘Logical Structure of “Sittlichkeit”: A Reading of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”’, Idealistic Studies: An International Philosophical Journal, 19 (1989), pp. 62–76.7 PIF: p. 13/5, cf. pp. 78/48, 92/57, 94/58.8 See on this. my On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010.9 ‘The state in and for itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom, and it is the absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual’ (PR: § 258 add.). ‘Morality, ethics, and the interests of the state – each of these constitutes a distinct variety of right, because each of them gives determinate shape and existence to freedom’ (PR: § 30 rem., cf. § 4, § 258, § 260).10 The second chapter of The Pathologies of Individual Freedom is devoted to Hegel’s analysis of abstract right and morality. The second part of Das Recht der Freiheit is concerned with these issues as well, but only cursorily refers to the corresponding sections of the Philosophy of Right (cf. RF: p. 132–6, 202–03). Although I hold that Hegel in this part of the Philosophy of Right examines one-sided theories rather than pathological attitudes attributable to individual citizens or groups, as Honneth claims (cf. PIF: pp. 57/34, 59/35, 67/40–41, 74/45–6), I consider this part of The Pathologies of Individual Freedom to be less problematic than the chapter devoted to ethical life.11 Within the sphere of the state, Hegel writes, rationality ‘consists in the unity of objective freedom (i.e., of the universal substantial will) and subjective freedom (as the freedom of individual knowledge and of the will in its pursuit of particular ends)’ (PR: § 258 rem.). The moments of universality and particularity are as yet ‘bound together in the unity of the family’, which is the ‘ethical idea’ insofar as it has not yet opposed and united its contrary moments (§ 181, cf. § 255).12 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, § 182, addition, hereafter abbreviated as PR. I will refer to the additions in this work by 'add.' and to the remarks by ‘rem.’.13 This also holds true of the order in which Hegel treats family, civil society, and the state (cf. PR: § 256 rem., § 33). By contrast, Honneth considers these three spheres to refer to three successive stages of the subject’s individualization (PIF: p. 98–100/60–62). This is stated more explicitly in Axel Honneth, ‘Das Reich der verwirklichten Freiheit. Hegels Idee einer Rechtsphilosophie’, in Das Ich im Wir. Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010, pp. 33–48. Citing PR: § 30, Honneth here confuses the stages of the development of the idea of freedom (with which Hegel is concerned) with what he calls the stages of the realization of individual freedom (40–41, cf. 44, 47).14 PIF: pp. 12–13/4–5, cf. KA: pp. 107–108/65–66.15 PR: § 158, add., translation modified. This phrase, only partly cited by Honneth (PIF: pp. 103/64, 106/66, cf. RF: pp. 86–7, 255), does not exactly amount to a description of mutual recognition. Hegel here rather seems to regard love as a relationship that allows both partners to achieve a particular form of self-knowledge. This is also the case in the last of his Jena writings, Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes [1805/1806], ed. R.-P. Horstmann, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987, p. 193. At one point, he here suggests that love involves the recognition of a person qua character or natural individual (p. 193, cf. KA: pp. 63–64/37). A few pages later, Hegel refers to the family insofar as it conceives of itself as an independent unity. As such, he adds, the family is ‘spiritual recognition itself, which knows itself’ (p. 196). However, this passage, not quoted by Honneth, seems to refer not so much to the relationship between husband and wife as to the child in which their love is objectified (cf. PR: § 173). By themselves, these passages do not seem to warrant the conclusion that Hegel either in his early works or in the Philosophy of Right conceives of love in terms of mutual recognition.16 PR: § 7, add., translation modified.17 Cf. PIF: pp. 36/19, 44–45/25, 108–109/67.18 Cf. PIF: pp. 97–98/60–61, 121/76.19 PIF: p. 118, cf. PR: § 71.20 Within civil society, ‘the moments of subjective particularity and objective universality’ are initially ‘divided into the internally reflected particularity of need and satisfaction and abstract legal universality’, but they become internally united in the corporation (PR: § 255). Hegel explicitly conceives of the ‘particular person’ and ‘the form of universality’ as the two complementary principles of civil society (§ 182).21 ‘[I]n providing for himself, the individual in civil society is also acting for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough; only in the corporation does this necessity become a knowing and thinking part of ethical life’ (PR: § 255, add.)22 ‘The fact that I have to fit in with other people brings the form of universality into play at this point. I acquire my means of satisfaction from others and must accordingly accept their opinions. But at the same time, I am compelled to produce means whereby others can be satisfied … To this extent, everything particular takes on a social character’ (PR: § 192, add., cf. § 181 add.). It goes without saying that individual citizens who comply with conventions such as opening hours, diner time, or fashion, transcend their immediate impulses without in most cases being aware of the universality they thus produce.23 ‘One the one hand, as the association of human beings through their needs is universalized, and with it the ways in which means of satisfying these needs are devised and made available, the accumulation of wealth increases … But on the other hand, the specification and limitation of particular work also increase, as do the dependence and want of the class which is tied to such work; this in turn leads to an inability to feel and enjoy the wider forms of freedom, and particularly the spiritual advantages, of civil society’ (PR: § 243, cf. 185, 241–5).24 In agreement with The Struggle for Recognition, but without reference to passages from the Philosophy of Right, Honneth considers Hegel’s account of ethical life in this work to be concerned with ‘forms of social interactions in which a subject can achieve self-realization only by expressing, in a certain way, recognition of another’ (PIF: p. 84/52, cf. pp. 83/51, 121/76). In his view, this also obtains of the sphere of the family (pp. 105–106/65).25 ‘The point of view of the free will, with which right and the science of right begins, is already beyond that false point of view according to which the human being exists as a natural being and … is therefore capable of enslavement … [T]he dialectic of the concept and of the as yet only immediate consciousness of freedom gives rise at this stage to the struggle for recognition and the relationship of lordship and servitude … But the insight that … the human being in and for itself is not meant to be enslaved … is achieved only by the form of knowledge that considers the idea of freedom to be truly present only as the state’ (PR: § 57 rem., translation modified). See Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, for a clear account of the conception of recognition Hegel elaborated in his Jena writings. However, it seems to me that Williams no less than Honneth unduly projects Hegel’s early view onto the Philosophy of Right.26 In friendship, ‘one is not one-sidedly within oneself, but willingly limits oneself in relation to an other, while knowing oneself in this limitation as oneself’ (PR: § 7, add., translation modified).27 ‘Contract presupposes that the contracting parties recognize each other as persons and owners of property; and since it is a relationship of objective spirit, the moment of recognition is already contained within it and presupposed’ (PR: § 71 rem.).28 PR: § 72 rem. Within the context of his discussion of civil society Hegel comes back to the abstract, formal mode of recognition that he takes to be characteristic of the juridical relation between independent persons (PR: § 217, add., § 238). He likewise maintains that the relations between states, which do not form part of an overarching unity, can only consist in such an abstract form of mutual recognition: ‘The state has a primary and absolute entitlement to be a sovereign and independent power in the eyes of others, i.e., to be recognized by them. At the same time, however, this entitlement is purely formal, and the requirement that the state should be recognized simply because it is a state is abstract’ (PR: § 331).29 Cf. PR: § 166.30 Whereas Hegel considers civil society to be constituted by a wide range of social structures, Honneth attributes to Hegel the view that within the sphere of civil society subjects can only actualize their particular interests by recognizing others as contractual partners (PIF: p. 118/74).31 ‘Just as the stipulation of a contract by itself contains already the genuine transfer of property … so do the solemn declaration of consent to the ethical bond of marriage and its recognition and confirmation by the family and community constitute the formal conclusion and actuality of marriage’ (PR: § 164, my emphasis).32 ‘Insofar as their actual existence is concerned, needs and means … become a being for others, such that satisfaction is mutually conditioned by the needs and work of others … This universality, as the quality of being recognized, is the moment which makes isolated and abstract needs, means, and modes of satisfaction into … social ones’ (PR: § 192, translation modified). Evidently, this recognition of values by the community does not exclude the possibility that citizens respect their fellow citizens for their behavior or achievements. However, Hegel suggests that this form of recognition is provided by marriage and membership of a corporation rather than by individual achievements (cf. § 164, § 253 rem.).33 PR: § 218, cf. ‘This collision, in which a legal claim is made to a thing (Sache), and which constitutes the sphere of civil actions, involves the recognition of right as the universal and deciding factor, so that the thing may belong to the person who has a right to it’ (PR: § 85, cf. 86). Likewise, civil society acknowledges the members of a family as independent persons, thus annulling their unity (§ 238). See for the distinction between Anerkennung as recognition of other persons and as acknowledgement of values Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen, ‘Analyzing Recognition: Identification, Acknowledgement, and Recognitive Attitudes Towards Persons’, in Bert van den Brink and David Owen (eds) Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 33–56.34 Concrete freedom, Hegel notes, ‘entails that personal individuality and its particular interests … gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and of civil society), and also that these interests partly (teils) pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal’. This is to say that the baker who pursues his particular interests also contributes to the well-being of the society as a whole. On the other hand, however, the well-being of the society also requires that a part of the population deliberately ‘acknowledges (anerkennen) the general interest as their own substantial spirit and adopt this interest as the final end of their activities’ (PR: § 260, translation modified, cf. § 324). Honneth ignores the distinction between these two ways of identifying with the interests of the state. In line with traditional criticisms of Hegel, he seems to confuse Hegel’s view that the universal interests represented by the state should prevail over particular interests with his rejection of democracy (cf. PIF: pp. 126–127/79).35 Neither do I wish to deny that it makes sense to interpret the struggles of cultural minorities and other groups seeking respect from the majority or the government in terms of recognition. See on this Sybol Cook Anderson, Hegel’s Theory of Recognition: From Oppression to Ethical Liberal Modernity, London: Continuum, 2009. Whereas her reading of the Philosophy of Right is largely in agreement with the framework set up by Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition, she emphasizes what she considers to be Hegel’s view on the right of individuals and groups to posit themselves as different from others and to be recognized as such.36 See Nancy Fraser, ‘Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, and Participation’, in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 7–109, esp. 19, 25, 48. Fraser does not give priority to either recognition or redistribution, but affirms their irreducibility as well as the fact that in many cases a lack of the one is entwined with a lack of the other. See also Nancy Fraser, ‘Recognition without Ethics’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18(2-3) (2001), pp. 21–42. In ‘Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser’, in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, pp. 113–97, Honneth admits that claims for redistribution should not be ignored. He maintains, however, that ‘even distributional injustices must be understood as the institutional expression of … unjustified relations of recognition’ (p. 114, cf. 134). Similarly, he suggests in ‘Recognition or Redistribution? Changing Perspectives on the Moral Order of Society’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18/2-3 (2001), pp. 43–56, that today groups of unemployed people are likely to engage in struggles for recognition ‘directed at the institutionalized definitions and measures of social esteem that govern which activities and abilities may achieve symbolic or material recognition’ (pp. 54–5). But isn’t it much more likely that they will ask for jobs? For similar criticisms of Honneth see Christopher F. Zurn, ‘Recognition, Redistribution, and Democracy: Dilemmas of Honneth’s Critical Social Theory’, European Journal of Philosophy, 13(1) (2005), pp. 89–126, and Veit Bader, ‘Misrecognition, Power, and Democracy’, in van den Brink and Owen, Recognition and Power, pp. 238–69.37 Cf. PR: §§ 303 add., 308 add.38 See.39 See on this issue Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, London: Continuum, 2011.
Referência(s)