honneth interview - recognition and critical theory today

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DOI: 10.1177/0191453712470361 published online 16 January 2013Philosophy Social Criticism

Gonalo MarceloRecognition and Critical Theory today: An interview with Axel Honneth

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Interview

Recognition and CriticalTheory today: An interviewwith Axel Honneth

Goncalo MarceloUniversidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

AbstractIn dialogue with his interlocutor, Axel Honneth summarizes the way his work on recognition hasunfolded over the past two decades. While he has retained his principal insights, some importantparts of his theory have changed. He comments that if he were to rewrite The Struggle forRecognition today, he would focus more on institutions and the historicization of recognitionpatterns. He clarifies his stance on some contemporary controversial issues, including the crisisof capitalism, gay marriage, and his quarrel with Peter Sloterdijk. Finally, he sheds some light ontopics much discussed within Critical Theory, such as the relation between theory and praxisand the possibility of politicizing recognition, and on lesser-known aspects of his theory, namely,the relationship between his work and literature.

KeywordsCrisis, Critical Theory, Axel Honneth, institutions, praxis, recognition, Paul Ricoeur

This interview took place in Lisbon on 9 July 2010. Axel Honneth was in Lisbon to

deliver the closing keynote speech on 10 July at the International Symposium Reading

Ricoeur Once Again: Hermeneutics and Practical Philosophy. The interview lasted an

hour and was conducted by Goncalo Marcelo, who co-organized the symposium.

Reactualizing recognition

[GoncaloMarcelo] Professor Honneth, it is a great pleasure and honor to have you here

at our school. I have been studying your work and writing about it for some years now, so

I long have been waiting for a chance to speak with you.

Corresponding author:

Goncalo Marcelo, Centro de Historia da Cultura, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Avenida de Berna 26,

1069-061, Lisboa, Portugal.

Email: [email protected]

Philosophy and Social Criticism113

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You are one of these rare thinkers whom people around the world have read and dis-

cussed. You are, I dare say, the keeper of the flame of the Critical Theory tradition.

You recently had your Festschrift,1 a great honor, which reminds us that your work

has attained classical status. However, your work has also undergone intellectual devel-

opment. I would like you now to look back at your work over the past decades. You

started, in The Critique of Power2 analysing the possible connections between Foucault

and Critical Theory, and you later developed, in your seminal book The Struggle for

Recognition,3 a renewal of Hegels notion of recognition. Your most recent books turned

to new, different directions, such as the concept of reification4 and the pathologies of

reason,5 to quote your titles. You have also been debating theories of justice, Rawlsian

or otherwise, as we will be hearing tomorrow in your talk on the limits of proceduralism.

My question is, if you were to re-write The Struggle for Recognition today, what

would you change? How has your research on recognition changed in the last few years?

[Axel Honneth] This is a very good but complicated question. I think I have never

thought about it in that way. You are right that there have been many developments since

I finished The Struggle for Recognition, and I would make some relatively technical cor-

rections. I would try to keep the spirit of the book, which means to take inspiration from

the early Hegel in order to develop a kind of social theory. I would keep the idea that we

should look at societies as being somewhat organized around certain patterns of recog-

nition. But I would try to avoid an anthropological misunderstanding. In the book I have

a certain tendency to say that there are three stable forms of recognition which are uni-

versal. The book has a certain ambivalence about this. I could be much clearer in saying

that the spheres of recognition are historically developed. That would be, I think, the

main correction. Briefly put, I would try to historicize the forms and spheres of recog-

nition. Another thing I have learned is to use the concept of recognition more clearly for

the purposes of building a social theory. I would be clearer about the interdependence

between recognition and institutions, which is not in the book. These would be the two

main corrections.

So, on the one hand, there would be no anthropological, never-changing core. On the

other hand and you also wrote a book on the reactualization of Hegels philosophy of

right6 you would pay closer attention to institutions and perhaps to the way liberty can

unfold in institutions. Is that correct?

Yes.

Can you tell us more about these changes?

I would keep a certain anthropological idea, which is, lets say, a constitutive formal con-

cept of recognition, namely, that human beings depend on social forms of recognition in

order to develop an identity and to gain a certain understanding and a sufficient form of

self-relation. I would keep that. We cannot think of human beings as not being dependent

on some form of recognition. If they let go of all forms of social recognition, in whatever

form it can come about, they have some difficulty in their own self-development. This is

the anthropological intuition.

I also think I would be much more historical about the different forms in which this

recognition can be established, in the different forms of relationship in which it can be

instantiated. In the book I have a certain tendency to say that there are three forms of

recognition: love, respect and social esteem. And sometimes I mention that these are the

2 Philosophy and Social Criticism


forms in which recognition appears in the modern world. But I would be much more

explicit in stating this, as we dont have good reasons to say that in pre-modern societies

we had these three forms of recognition. I make this point much clearer in my debate

with Nancy Fraser.7 This would be the first correction.

The other correction has to do with institutions. I dont believe that in The Struggle for

Recognition we can find the idea of the institutions of recognition. But I do think that the

forms of recognition are institutionalized as forms of social practices in a society, and I devel-

oped this idea only subsequently, by reading the later Hegel where you see a much clearer

connection between these two aspects. I also undertookmany other readings in social theory,

and at somepoint it became clearer tome that even authors likeTalcott Parsons havea certain

intuition about the existence of institutions of recognition, such as the family. Already for

Parsons the family is an institution of recognition. This means that this institution can only

survive when the people who are its members are enacting forms of recognition.

This is quite interesting, because from what youre saying it seems that the sphere of

recognition that would be more thoroughly revised would be the most fundamental one,

that is, the sphere of love.

Yes, exactly.

In The Struggle for Recognition, the sphere of recognition that would be the more

anthropological one, that is, the one less subject to change, was the sphere of love. Later,

in your debate with Nancy Fraser, you said that there could be some interaction between

love and legal relations. So we can also have progress in the inter-subjective relations of

love.

Yes, this is part of my new book.8 What became clear to me is that we have at least

two different ways in which the patterns of recognition change. The first, and probably

the most interesting one, is internal, which means that institutions or practices of recog-

nition are dependent on some principle, such as love. People who are in these relation-

ships are binding themselves, in their relation to each other, through the principle of love.

They have to incorporate the normative implications, which are inbuilt in the principle of

recognition. But this entails what I sometimes call a certain surplus value, which means

recognition gives people who are in these relationships the opportunity to make other

claims with reference to the same principle.

By this means, the internal praxis of love can change and can even make progress.

The changes in these institutions are the result of struggles in how to understand the nor-

mative implications of the principle. This, for example, is the way love relationships

have developed over the last 200 years. The whole idea that love is a special form of

mutual recognition was not institutionalized before the end of the 18th century. It was

in the Romantic Movement that this idea came up. Before then there were other concepts

of love and of personal, intimate relationships, but with the institutionalization of the

idea of love this specific form of recognition arose. This development has since gener-

ated a number of struggles for recognition, in the sense of struggles over and about how

to understand the implications of what it means to love someone. These kinds of devel-

opments give a certain dynamic to the different fields of recognition. This is one of the

ways the institution of recognition may change.

The other way is that it can be influenced by other institutions of recognition, as, for

example, by legal respect. This is a development that is very clearly described in certain

Marcelo 3


sociological theories. Consider that the law intervenes in love relationships by establish-

ing new criteria, by introducing certain necessities of legal respect, as, for example, when

the law recognizes and penalizes the act of rape in marriage.

Or domestic violence.

Yes, or domestic violence. These are very good examples. One pattern of recognition

can invade another.

Theory and praxis

We are today faced, in many countries, with a social situation that is very hard to

address, partly because of economic and financial causes inherent in our capitalist soci-

eties. I will not say that our situation today is the same as it was in the 30s, when the

Institut fur Sozialforschung was created, but I think there are some similarities, too.

What is the role for the philosopher or the social theorist amidst all of this? What are

we supposed to do?

With respect to this question I probably follow, at least in a broad way, some of

Habermas ideas. I would say that the division of labor establishes the difference

between the role of the theoretician and the role of the citizen. The role of theory

should be to provide as good explanations as possible for these developments and espe-

cially explanations for their unintended consequences so that we can understand the

specific pattern of the crisis and the way it unfolds, as well as its effects at different

levels. This is the task of theory. A good Critical Theory, I would say, should be able

to try to provide these explanations. This was the case, I believe, with early Frankfurt

theory. I dont think they succeeded in all aspects, but at least they tried. They tried to

understand what was happening within Germany and within the western capitalist

countries in the 30s. They had one main question, which organized their whole per-

spective, namely, why didnt the proletariat become a revolutionary class? I think that

in order to conduct such an analysis, you need organizing questions. Because when you

are doing Critical Theory youre not doing ordinary social theory. There has to be a

constitutive question in which you are interested. Foucault would say you need a pro-

blematic, that is, you need an issue around which to organize your research. For the

early Frankfurt theorists it was the question Ive named. Today one leading question

would be: why is the crisis were having today in western capitalist societies not lead-

ing to higher forms or higher degrees of social protest? It is surprising. If you take the

case of Germany which probably stands out since we have had in the past 10 or 20

years permanent cuts in our social welfare program the gap between poor and rich is

growing, but we have at the same time an increased de-politicization. This is an orga-

nizing question. It is very difficult to understand. If we compare this situation to the

one we had 40 years ago, where the degree of politicization was very high, we are sim-

ply surprised by the degree of de-politicization we have now. So the question would be:

how is social integration possible today? The answer would have to be sought after in

what Luc Boltanski calls the new spirit of capitalism.9 Obviously, this new kind of neo-

liberal capitalism is able to generate ethical ideals by which it motivates people to

cooperate. That is the problematic, I think, which would have to be explained and to

be solved by Critical Theory today.



Im pleased that you spoke about politics and politicization because I wanted to pose

some questions on that topic. Your work is sometimes depicted as an ethics of recogni-

tion that draws on recognition at a somewhat anthropological level, even though we

already saw here today how your perspective here has changed. I recall the end of The

Struggle for Recognition, where you decline to assume which specific kind of society will

attain the telos of granting due recognition to all its members. However, some commen-

tators, such as Jean Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault,10 propose that we poli-

ticize your ethics of recognition. This leads us to think that your theory can actually be

used to fight oppression. What do you think about a possible use of your theory in this

way?

I would find it misleading to say that my theory is an ethics of recognition. That

would be too one-sided. The whole idea I have is not a moral intuition, which some

people have, that what is wrong today is that people do not recognize each other suffi-

ciently. For me, that would be like an empty moralism, and it would not be something I

would defend. In that respect, I see myself coming much more from the Hegelian

Marxist tradition, where you take up already existing accepted norms, so there are

no empty norms that appear to you and that you feel should be realized. Instead, we

are interested in why certain already accepted and institutionalized norms do not mobi-

lize people, are misunderstood, are very vague, are struggled for in different directions,

and so on. I would say that the core of my approach would be more a social theory with

a certain moral-practical intention. The question of how to politicize it is very difficult.

I would say it is not directly the task of the theoretician. I am very optimistic, and it was

one of the bases of all my intuitions that people in their ordinary struggles are already

always taking up the principles of recognition, which are institutionalized in certain

spheres. So they are already speaking the language of recognition. We do not have

to come, as theoreticians, and tell them that they should take it up. They normally have

it. Probably what the theoretician can do is to make the issue more explicit, make it

clearer to them. This approach would be more indirect, I would say. But I wouldnt mix

up the role of the theoretician with the role of the political organizer. The political

fighter or organizer, the political person, is always an enormously important figure

in our present societies. And I think this person should be an even more prominent fig-

ure. But, in contrast to the communist tradition, in which the party leader was meant to

be the theoretician, lets say, the Lukacsian communist tradition, I would defend the

separation of the two roles.

My question was on the grounds of principle, even if just as a hypothesis: namely,

what would you think of a politicization of your theory in some sort, whichever way that

might be? Ill mention a more direct example. Lets imagine a society where a certain

minority isnt recognized according to one of its claims, and lets say that this claim has

a certain universal validity, as it is tied up with notions of equality and social rights. The

people who are struggling for that right are, in some way, fighting for recognition. Weve

seen the example recently here in Portugal of the struggle for the legalization of gay

marriage. If people in this sort of situation social actors having a valid claim and

struggling for it end up defending their cause by the mediation of a theory such as

yours, even if youre not directly responsible for it, what would you think of that use?

Wouldnt that be good, in terms of moral progress?

Marcelo 5


Its complicated. It is a very thin line between what I take as being adequate for Crit-

ical Theory and what I take to be the too direct political involvement of theory. I would

put it this way: I agree that in spelling out the normative implications of already institu-

tionalized spheres of recognition we, as theoreticians, have to try to give the best possible

interpretations of them in terms of moral progress. This means that we have to take up, in

our own theory, the perspective of moral progress. And this belongs to theory. Its not

coming from outside. This is probably hard to defend, but I would say that theory, if

it can defend a certain concept of moral progress, it is not only allowed but even asked

to defend, in its own language, the higher standards of recognition and therefore the best

practices of recognition. In that sense, I would say that even in theory one could defend

the whole idea of gay marriage, because one could explain why the whole concept of

love does not allow the legal exclusion of certain sexual minorities. Thats theory. It

is something else to invoke that theory in a political manner. Then we are changing the

role from the theoretician to the citizen. Therefore, the line is quite thin between these

two forms. The first is still Critical Theory, the second one is a kind of politics, which

you are always allowed to do, but always in the role of the citizen, no longer in the role

of the theoretician.

Speaking about politics, what is the genesis of your political conscience? Could you

tell us a little bit how you became interested at an early age in politics?

Yes. It took me a long time, Ill have to say. I come from an area in Germany that was

its industrial center. I grew up as the son of a medical doctor, in an area where 60 to 70

per cent of manual workers were employed in the coal-mining industry. Looking back

now, I think that it was in high school when I first became aware of what I would later

try to explain with the help of the concept of the struggle for recognition. There was a

certain upward mobility, as a whole generation was coming to high school for the first

time. Those members of the working class, who for the first time came to the high school,

felt a certain shame, due to their own class position, which was extremely interesting to

notice. But I noticed that pre-theoretically, lets say. It didnt mobilize me directly.

Shortly before the student movement, when I was still in high school, I was strongly

opposed to such movements because I thought they were too radical, too empty in their

goals. I never believed in the proletarian revolution. After I left high school I became a

member of the youth organization of the Social Democrats in that area. This came all of a

sudden, as I wasnt very politicized before. But it was clearly the opening up of a kind of

cultural struggle against my own class background. Not that I didnt love my parents, but

I disliked very strongly the empty bourgeois culture in which I grew up. So it was cul-

turally that I came into politics. I was also mobilized by rock music.

Bob Dylan?

Yes, Bob Dylan and reading novels. So I came to politics through cultural experi-

ences. From that time on I tried not to lose contact with political organizations, but that

contact became harder as time went by. I left the Social Democratic Party when I went to

Berlin in 1972, because it was extremely bureaucratized at that time in Berlin. I left it and

became a member of a small socialist group. Much later I became interested in the Green

Party, and when they invited me to give a speech I tried to influence them on the concept

of justice. I never became a member of a party again, though, so I have no political

affiliations.



The exemplary role of literature

You were speaking about novels, and I have a small confession to make. I discovered a

very good novel from a citation in your work that perhaps I should have known previ-

ously. Im talking about Night Train to Lisbon,11 by the Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri

turned author Pascal Mercier. I discovered it from a footnote in Reification.12 I also

discovered Ralph Ellisons The Invisible Man13 when reading your remarkable article

on invisibility.14 This leads me to ask: what is the connection between literature and your

own works? Do you find inspiration in literature?

Yes, this is an interesting question. I think I have never talked about that. I have a long

tradition of reading a lot of novels. But this reading was almost always completely dis-

connected from what I was doing in philosophy and sociology. In The Struggle for Rec-

ognition, I do not quote a single novel by which I was inspired. I dont know why that

changed in later work. It might have had to do with, I have to confess, the influence of

analytical philosophy, because analytical philosophy is often much more open to this

possibility. There are certain philosophers from the analytical tradition like Bernard

Williams, whom I really admired who took novels as being phenomenologically the

best description of everyday life. When I became courageous enough to take that per-

spective seriously, I started to read novels or art works in the broad sense, as phenom-

enological testimonies of certain structures of everyday life.

Like Pascal Mercier (Peter Bieri), on the Night Train to Lisbon.

Yes. Peter Bieri, by the way, played a role there. Because hes a Swiss analytical

philosopher who wrote a book (as a philosopher) on the concept of freedom15 at about

the same time he wrote the novel. There he proposes that we should accept novels to be

the material that a philosopher can take seriously. So, since then, I have done that. I think

that this gives my own writing a certain empirical basis, which I cant get from empirical

research in sociology because that research is very often too quantitative and not sensi-

tive enough to the nuances in everyday life.

Yes, we should pay attention to the nuances of everyday life. You, for example, are

very attentive to the situations of suffering. In your books, we always find incarnated sub-

jects, some of them who suffer. We are consequently inclined to diagnose our societies

against the backdrop of a somewhat normative standpoint that is showing us the situa-

tion and telling us: You cannot tolerate this! We should strive for a society whose mem-bers are duly recognized!

My question is, why do you think you are so sensitive to suffering? I know these are

matters of justice, but you seem to have a certain solicitude, to use one of Ricoeurs

notions. If I could ask you to make a small Selbstdarstellung, do you think you can

explain how your attentiveness to suffering situations came to the fore?

Its hard to say. Its always hard to diagnose oneself. It might have to do with the sit-

uation I was talking about before. I think I became interested in suffering already in high

school. Partly because I was myself suffering from school! I was an extremely bad stu-dent. I had to repeat a class, and I just made it to the Abitur [graduation from high

school]. So I was suffering from the institution. But what was much more important

to me were the nuances of suffering in those friends of mine who came from the poor,

proletarian environment. There are many faces suffering can take. They were suffering

Marcelo 7


simply from the fact of not being able to invite me to their homes because they were

ashamed of the poverty there and the absence of culture. Also, my first readings of Amer-

ican novels or plays for instance, the Death of a Salesman16 have to do with those

experiences. You might remember that play, because there was a cinematic version of

it, a fantastic movie. It depicts the suffering of a father who has lost his job and is

ashamed to tell this to his family. So he is hiding this all the time. He comes back home

as if he still had the job, and he wants to hide the disaster of being without a job. He is

completely ashamed of it but, on the other hand, still tries to escape from the shame. I

became very interested in these forms of suffering. They played an enormous role in the

formation of my interests in the kind of academic training I would undertake.

I also think that there are three key theoretical situations which led me to the whole

idea of the struggle for recognition. One was reading certain historical investigations into

the role of respect in social protests in the proletarian movements of the 1800s.

Like the works of E. P. Thompson?

Yes, E. P. Thompson, Barrington Moore. I was reading these works, and I was very

impressed by them. I thought, this is great, this is what I always thought, that respect

plays a constitutive role. The social actors want to be respected, and that is what its all

about. The second key was a small book I read by Richard Sennett,17 the sociologist, on

the injuries of class, which is a fantastic book about Italian immigrants in the USA who

suffered from not being respected to the same degree as ordinary Protestant Americans

were. And then the third key was Hegel. These three influences came together, and led

me to the idea of the struggle for recognition.

Critique and recognition

We now turn to some questions dealing specifically with philosophy. The notion of cri-

tique is fundamental in all post-Kantian philosophy. However, this notion assumes many

different shapes in the works of Hegel, Marx and Adorno. How would you define cri-

tique? Which definition of critique seems to you the better, at both the core theoretical

and practical levels?

There are many discussions revolving around this topic. Lets just talk about social

critique. I will probably make a distinction between three forms of social critique,

depending on where you want to go. First, we have the idea of normative, external cri-

tique which is, approximately, the Rawlsian understanding of it. You think that you can

develop certain universal norms, universal concepts of justice, and then apply them to the

present, existent society. Then you have the notion of immanent critique, which means

you take up already existing normative beliefs; you believe that these are not realized,

and this is sometimes the Marxian way of critique you criticize the existent society

with reference to these somewhat already existing normative beliefs. I am defending a

third model. It would be necessary to show that certain normative ideas and principles

are already institutionalized, which means that they are not only accepted but that they

are somewhat already informing our practices. But at the same time, we are not fully

explaining the normative content of what we are doing. I would call this internal critique.

I am sometimes using the word normative-reconstructive for it because all I am doing

there is to reconstruct normatively the principles which we have already accepted.



So there are three forms of social critique. But critique, you see, is changing its role and

its meaning in the different fields, depending on how you use it. And there are other uses.

Art critique, for instance, is something completely different. As for me, I am only talking

about social critique.

I cant resist asking you this question, as some of my work revolves around it. Paul

Ricoeur made a good contribution to the widening of recognition theory with his book, The

Course of Recognition.18 While Ricoeur recognized your tripartite recognition model as

the major contribution to recognition, making you the leading figure of recognition the-

ory in our times, he nevertheless criticized your model as perhaps being too demanding.

He asked: when will each of us feel he or she has been fully recognized? Dont we risk

arriving at a situation of bad infinity, where an all-demanding subject would insist on

being recognized in all aspects whatsoever of his or her life? Cant we have a truce in all

this struggle and perhaps recognize the other before demanding recognition for our-

selves? To be honest, Im not sure this critique is entirely fair. I think Ricoeur must have

only read The Struggle for Recognition and not your later works, but I must still ask: Do

you think that we could arrive by any other means than struggle at a society where all

members receive due recognition, where there isnt the attitude of disrespect?

I would say no. But I have a much more positive conception of struggle. When I was

reading Ricoeur I was surprised that he seemed to take struggle as being something very

close to war. The opposition hes working with is war and peace. This is not how I am

thinking. You see, I take struggle as being an enormously productive force in our human

life-world. And it takes thousands of forms. It starts with the young baby, who is strug-

gling against his or her parents. Its whats happening in classrooms in different forms. It

slowly changes the way we understand the principles of recognition, the way we under-

stand ourselves, and it slowly helps to make our societies normatively better. So the first

difference is that I have a productive, positive understanding of struggle. Im more inter-

ested in the small, everyday forms of struggle and not in the big struggles which are, I

think, what Ricoeur has in mind. The second aspect to which I am opposed is that what

he describes as bad infinity I would describe as productive infinity. And in this in

what concerns the productivity of infinity I think I must be closer to Derrida than I

am to Ricur, because I contend that these norms of recognition be it equality, be it

love have a normative surplus, an inbuilt normative demand, that we will never really

be able to fully institutionalize. But this means that we as human beings have a perma-

nent demand imposed on ourselves, a demand to make things better. And I dont see why

that should be considered bad. In that sense, I have another constitutive intuition. I think

that an infinite demand is a productive requirement for us to live our everyday lives in

interaction. The systematic point is that Ricoeur believes that we should think of recog-

nition first as a one-sided act of grace something like the gift whereas I think that this

is what comes second. I would always put reciprocal forms of recognition first. This

means that we should understand recognition as something that is happening between

subjects, not strictly from one subject to the other. So recognition is in itself a mutual,

reciprocal interaction.

But I guess the real question here would be: can recognition really be an entirely vol-

untary act, can it stem solely from the subject, or can it come from outside him or her, in

a certain sense?

Marcelo 9


It is neither voluntary, nor does it come from without. I would say that our nor-

mal attitude towards other human beings is that we recognize somebody in the

expectation that he or she is recognizing us. And that is so because we belong to

the same species.

That might come from the intuition stemming from the direct, face-to-face contact . . . ?Yes. This is how the young Heidegger as well as Fichte and Hegel saw it. They have

the intuition that recognition is a mutual process, because both sides are presupposing

that they belong to the same species as rational beings. And therefore, I think that the

voluntary, one-sided gift is another case. It is definitely an enormously important event

of life. But it is not how we should understand recognition.

But perhaps that process of voluntary recognition plays a role, too. For example, in

the cases of invisibility, when we realize that by not attending to the other what we are

doing is something wrong from a normative standpoint, then we start to seek actively to

recognize the other. Theres a voluntary aspect of recognition in that process, isnt

there?

Yes, sure. I dont want to deny that. But even in that case of the voluntary act of rec-

ognition, the question would be whether it is done only under the presumption of a

mutual recognition.

Intersubjectivity, pathologies of reason, reification andtechnology

I think we agree. I want to come back to the aspects of normal, everyday behavior now

because I find your critiques here very sharp and interesting. You focus a lot on the daily

behavior of people, in order to show how apparently small gestures of normal behavior

can in fact contain deviations from the somewhat normative standpoint and can have

grave consequences. This is the case, for instance, as we have just said, of not attending

to the other, in the case of invisibility. You also speak, at the end of your book on

Reification, about possible reifying behavior (in this case, the constructivist kind of

behavior) by people who seem to be constantly acting, apparently changing their identity

according to what they think other persons expectations are at some given point. You

give two examples: job interviews and social networking. Do you think intersubjective

relationships are impaired by technology? If intersubjective relationships are fundamen-

tal, what are the mutations they are forced to undergo when they are mediated by tech-

nologies like social networking?

That is too big a question! It has different sides. In the cases I wanted to mention at theend of Reification, I was interested in the following question: Do the developments, the

structural changes in our present society, invite us to take on a constructivist view of our-

selves? I think there is a certain tendency here, especially with certain patterns that come

along with neo-liberal capitalism, which invite us to take that constructivist stance with

respect to ourselves. I dont know whether I would say that technology is responsible for

this altogether. But I guess that certain developments in the media are playing here a sim-

ilar role, even if they dont intend these consequences, because probably nobody wants

them. By having certain technological forms and certain interactive media like the inter-

net or some televised reality shows, which are the results of the medias increased



publicity of people, there are certain unwanted effects namely, to encourage attitudes

of self-constructivism. For example, if you take internet dating, there is a certain ten-

dency that goes along with that new medium which almost provokes us to force our-

selves to construct something out of ourselves. I want to be that specific person in the

eye of the other. But, because the other is not present, he or she cannot control that pro-

cess. This is not the normal face-to-face interaction, which normally prevents this con-

structivist attitude. But here, when Im alone and using the internet for dating, I am

somewhat almost invited to take this position. I try to form myself, and I try to form

my inner experiences in such a way that I think the receiver wants to perceive it. In that

sense, yes, I would say there is a certain danger that goes along with new forms of media

that increase that kind of attitude.

So the problem is not of technology in and of itself but of certain uses of it. Do you

have any other examples of reifying behavior besides the ones you mentioned in your

book?

The strength of the book resides in the fact that if you take reification literally, and I

think you should, there are very few cases of it. Normally, people do not reify other peo-

ple. If you think that the biggest institution of reification was slavery, and that it assumed

that people who are treated solely as means dont have a soul, this happens very sel-

domly. Even if you take another person as a mean for your ends, you want to be dealing

with a human being, not a human object. So there are relatively few cases of real inter-

subjective reification. I think the danger of reification is much bigger in what concerns

the self-relationship. There are probably a lot of developments going on in that area

today. This has to do with certain structural changes in the ideology of present-day capit-

alism. It is a capitalism of recognition, in the ideological sense. This capitalism is work-

ing through an affirmative, albeit artificial, promise of recognition. It promises

recognition for people in different forms. It is promised by the capitalist market, namely

by certain capitalist enterprises, that if you become a staff member or something of that

sort, youll be recognized as part of the company. So, recognition plays an enormous role

in this ideology! This is new, and it has a relation with self-reifying behavior. I thinkthere is a connection between this ideological development of capitalism today and the

tendency of self-reification.

You have this interesting notion of the pathologies of reason. Could you tell us what

they are, and which ones affect us the most in our time and age?

I think that this is a fundamental, constitutive concept for Critical Theory. Its insight is

that by means of the structural organization of societies, some of our rational capacities

are restricted and others are invited to grow. This is the whole idea behind the notion of

instrumental reason. It is a pathology of reason because a certain structure of our society

privileges only one dimension of our rationality. I think that it is enormously important

for someone in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory to defend that

concept, which means to always be interested in how the present structure of our soci-

eties privileges and disprivileges certain dimensions of our rationality. Of course a lot

of this assessment depends on how you understand rationality. But it is enormously

important to have that intuition. This means to try to understand in what sense the

neo-liberal forms of capitalism are encouraging or blocking certain dimensions of

our rationality. What I said before about the increase in the attitudes of

Marcelo 11


self-constructivism could mean that what is really privileged is a certain artificial ration-

ality, namely, that we can create our own inner experiences, that we can create our own

relations to others.

Critical Theory today and its influence on society

I have two final questions for you. I must say I truly appreciate your work and surely

believe that the Critical Theory tradition is alive, well and productive. There have been

some provocative debates about it, though. First, then, what motivated your recent

polemical debate with Sloterdijk on the topic of taxes and tax-spending in Germany? And

finally, would you please also say a bit more about what you are doing in Frankfurt now:

what are the main activities you are undertaking, and how can we, given that we are situ-

ated on the periphery of Critical Theory, learn more about these activities?

There was this article by Sloterdijk in a leading German newspaper,19 which pro-

voked me to such an extent that I thought I had to react.20 I was astonished that no one

was reacting because it was an article where someone who has a certain intellectual

capacity and who plays a certain intellectual role in Germanysomeone who is gaining

international respect in certain countrieswas seriously making the proposal that the rich

should stop paying taxes, because to have to pay taxes is shaming for them. And this was,

I must say, the deepest attack on my deepest convictions that I have ever experienced.

Because I always thought, concerning this matter, that the correct understanding was

exactly the opposite of his proposal namely, that those who are really ashamed are not

those who have to pay taxes but those who are living on welfare. Therefore I provoked

the debate by reacting in a very sharp way. That led to a discussion about taxes in

Germany, which I think is important. The result was interesting, namely, that even most

members of the rich class in Germany dont deny that they have an obligation to pay

taxes. Even today, some of them mentioned that they thought taxes should be increased.

So it is interesting to realize that in what concerns the subject of taxes the normative sta-

bility in Germany is very high.

As the director of the Institute for Social Research, I always try to influence the pub-

lic, which means in Frankfurt that those who come first are not only the students but ordi-

nary citizens. So what we are doing is having regular discussions, debates and lectures in

the city, not in the university. We are going out to other places like libraries and theaters

in the city, and we present either debates or studies on several topics, such as aspects of

todays crisis. Thats one way I try to connect theory with the social environment. There

are other activities, too. I try to influence publishers to undertake some translations. I try

to organize series of books. As an editorial member of a few journals,21 I try to encourage

the right topics in those journals, and so on. As intellectuals, we are playing all these

roles at once, and I think we have to play them. We have to take very seriously the fact

that sometimes you are working at your desk, but that many times you are working for

the public, too. You should always try to build bridges toward the public and find the

right ways to inform and to inspire the public and the public debate. These are the instru-

ments I am now using to promote the commitment of Critical Theory to the public.

Professor Honneth, I thank you for this remarkable interview.

Thank you.



Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to the Centro de Historia da Cultura da Universidade Nova de Lis-

boa for having provided the conditions that made this interview possible and to George Taylor

and Todd Mei who helped in the editing process.

1. Sozialphilosophie und Kritik. Axel Honneth zum 60. Geburtstag [Social Philosophy and Cri-

tique: Festschrift for Axel Honneth for his 60th Birthday], ed. Rainer Forst, Martin Hartmann,

Rahel Jaeggi and Martin Saar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009).

2. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K.

Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

3. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J.

Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).

4. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2008).

5. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. J. Ingram

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

6. Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegels Social Theory, trans. L. Lob

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

7. Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical

Exchange, trans. J. Golb, J. Ingram and C. Wilke (London and New York: Verso, 2003).

8. Axel Honneth,Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriss einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit [The Right

to Freedom: Outline of a Democratic Ethics] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011).

9. Luc Boltanski and E`ve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliot (London and

New York: Verso, 2005).

10. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, Politicizing Honneths Ethics of Recogni-

tion, Thesis Eleven 88 (February 2007): 92111.

11. Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon, trans. B. Harshav (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

12. See footnote 4, p. 92.

13. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).

14. Axel Honneth, Invisibility: On the Epistemology of Recognition, The Aristotelian Society

LXXV (supp. vol.) (Bristol: 2001): 11126.

15. Peter Bieri,Das Handwerk der Freiheit. Uber die Entdeckung des eigenen Willens [The Hand-

work of Freedom: On the Discovery of Free Will] (Munich: Hanser, 2001).

16. Arthur Miller, The Death of a Salesman (New York: Viking Press, 1949).

17. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).

18. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 2005).

19. Peter Sloterdijk, Die Revolution der gebenden Hand [The Revolution of the Giving Hand], The

FrankfurterAllgemeineZeitung (13 June 2009), available online@:http://www.faz.net/-00m3x9

20. Axel Honneth, Fataler Tiefssinn aus Karslruhe [Fatal Profundity from Karlsruhe], Die Zeit

40 (25 September 2009), available online @: http://www.zeit.de/2009/40/Sloterdijk-Blasen?

page121. Axel Honneth is an editorial member of the journals Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie,

European Journal of Philosophy, Constellations and WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift fur

Sozialforschung.

Marcelo 13


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honneth interview - recognition and critical theory today

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