2004-2005 Lecture Series

[00:00:01] CHANCELLOR BIRGENEAU:
The– I’m pleased to welcome all of you to the Berkeley campus this afternoon for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. This distinguished lecture series is presented annually at each of nine universities, and we’re delighted that Berkeley is one of the sites. In fact, since I’m relatively new here myself, this will be my f-my first Tanner Lecture, which I’m really looking forward to, uh, a lot.

And, uh, I learned just in the discussions about the Tanner Lectures that, uh, the, the UC part used to be UC as a whole and only recently has become UC Berkeley. So we’re obviously particularly pleased to host, uh, these lectures at UC Berkeley. Of course, it also seems appropriate somehow or other.

Uh, the Tanner Lectures were founded in nineteen seventy-eight by American scholar and philanthropist Ober-obert Clark Tanner to advance scholarly and scientific learning related to human values. Uh, human values here include all values pertinent to the human condition, our interests, behaviors, and aspirations. This week, we hear from the renowned Axel Honneth, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Social Research at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt slash Main.

Uh, he speaks to us this afternoon on the priority of recognition over cognition, and again Tuesday on reification as loss of recognitional attitudes. Uh, more commentary will follow on Wednesday. I hope you can join us for all three events, which are sure to prove most enlightening.

Uh, before we get underway today, uh, let me introduce our three commentators. Uh, this afternoon we have Raymond Geuss, Reader in Philosophy and Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Uh, Raymond.

Uh, t-tomorrow we have our own, uh, Judith Butler, uh, who’s our Maxine Elliott professor of the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature. Judith. And, uh, and then finally, uh, Jonathan Lear, who’s the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought and Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Uh, I want to thank our speaker, commentators, and the Tanner Committee for making this wonderful lecture series possible. Uh, and now let me introduce our moderator, Professor Martin Jay, Berkeley’s Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and a member of the Tanner Lectures Committee. Martin.

(applause)

[00:03:13] MARTIN JAY:
Thanks very much, Chancellor Birgeneau. Uh, first let me, on behalf of the committee, uh, Janet Broughton, Sam Scheffler, and, uh, Robert Post, uh, who is still a member of the committee, although in absentia. Uh, on behalf, let me thank, uh, the chancellor for joining us.

Uh, we had enormous, um, uh, help and, uh, encouragement from his predecessor, and it’s really very important to us to see that he’s continued that tradition. This is, uh, as I’m sure many of you know, the fifth of the Berkeley Tanner Lectures. The first two have actually produced, uh, books already.

Uh, the first, Joseph Raz’s “The Practice of Value,” edited by Jay Wallace. Uh, the second, uh, the Frank Kermode lectures on “Pleasure and Change,” uh, edited by Robert Alter. And two others are in the works.

Uh, the, uh, uh, the second, uh, uh, or rather third, um, uh, by Derek Parfit, which is being edited by Sam Scheffler, and last year’s by Seyla Benhabib, which Robert Post, uh, is editing. Uh, these are brought out by Oxford Press, and I just want to emphasize that, uh, they’re available ultimately, uh, for those of you who want to see the, uh, the final printed version, uh, of the, uh, the lectures. Um, it’s an enormous pleasure to be able to introduce for a second year in a row a leading member of the Frankfurt School’s third generation.

Both Seyla Benhabib, last year’s speaker, and Axel Honneth, the speaker this year, Both are worthy inheritors of the lively and still evolving tradition of critical theory that began with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Berkeley’s own Leo Lowenthal in the interwar era, and then continued in new and fruitful directions in the post-war work of Jürgen Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, and Claus Offe. Both have demonstrated that the only way to keep a tradition of critical thought alive and relevant is to change it according to the demands of the day and the challenges of new theoretical impulses. In both cases, it’s, I think, especially clear that no loss of creative energy and intellectual acumen has followed from the rethinking of some of the fundamental premises of the tradition, both normative and methodological, along new and very promising lines.

Born in 1949, Axel Honneth studied philosophy, sociology, and German literature at the universities of Bochum, Bonn, and Berlin, uh, where he got his doctorate in sociology in 1982 with a dissertation that later appeared in German as Kritik der Macht, uh, or to give it its English title from the translation published in nineteen ninety-one by MIT Press, Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Here, he reconstructed the history of Frankfurt School critical theory from Horkheimer to Habermas, focusing on what he called its sociological deficit, and compared it with the work of Michel Foucault, whose own microphysics of power also lacked a full appreciation of the intersubjective constitution of society. The Critique of Power was preceded by a work that he co-authored in 1980 with Hans Joas on philosophical anthropology, a work entitled Social Action and Human Nature, also in English now, published by Cambridge in 1988.

And then it was followed in 1990 by a collection of essays on social and political philosophy entitled, once again in the English translation which appeared in ’95, The Fragmented World of the Social. Here, Honneth, uh, expanded his range to include a consideration of other French theorists, including, uh, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu, and Castoriadis into– in addition to the Central European tradition from Lukács to Habermas. Two years later, his Habilitationsschrift, basically the second German doctorate, written under Habermas’s guidance at the University of Frankfurt, came out as the s- the Struggle for Recognition.

Some would see this as Honneth’s, uh, perhaps, uh, masterwork, at least so far. A work which drew on insights from Hegel, from the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead, and from British object relations psychology to produce a richly nuanced theory of recognition as the basis of social interaction, which went beyond the methodological individualism and fetish of autonomy associated with the dominant tradition of Western thought derived from Machiavelli and Hobbes. Exploring patterns of intersubjective recognition in personal love, in human rights, and in communal solidarity, Honneth advanced a formal conception of ethical life that carefully preserved the best aspects of Kant’s theory of Moralität, morality, and Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, or ethical life.

Honneth’s Spinoza lectures, delivered in Amsterdam in 1999 and published in English a year later, as Suffering from Indeterminacy, imaginatively sought to recover dimensions of Hegel’s often neglected late work, the Philosophy of Right, for a theory of recognition that would go beyond the thin proceduralism of Habermas’s communicative rationality. And then in 2003, he defended that theory in a spirited debate with Nancy Fraser, herself, incidentally, a nineteen ninety-six Tanner lecturer, uh, a book published by Verso as Redistribution or Recognition: A Political- Philosophical Exchange. And in this work, uh, they, uh, sought in dialogue to come up with the proper relationship, uh, between, uh, egalitarian demands, uh, of, uh, for distributive justice on the one hand, uh, and, uh, other demands for recognition, a recognition of cultural difference, uh, that, uh, uh, were, uh, ones that Honneth himself had particularly, uh, defended.

Now, as might be ex-expected of someone with so powerful a vision of how to revive, uh, critical theory, Axel Honneth has himself achieved extraordinary recognition, uh, and, uh, indeed on the international scene. A fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, a member of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Subjectivity Research, uh, and the University of Bern’s Institute for Cultural Studies, uh, Sciences rather. He was also the recipient of the Palacký Honorary Medal for Merit in Social Sciences bestowed by the Czech Academy of Sciences.

He’s taught in Japan and in Canada, and also at the New School in New York, uh, as well as the universities of Konstanz and Berlin, uh, back in Germany before call– being called to fill Jürgen Habermas’s vacated chair in philosophy in Frankfurt. Three years ago, he, uh, then assumed a position that I suppose he was always destined, uh, to hold, that being the directorship of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, where he is now engaged in bringing its research program into the twenty-first century. It has been my great pleasure to know Axel Honneth for more than two decades.

I think we met first in, uh, Starnberg in 1980, uh, and to watch with admiration his emergence as an internationally acclaimed social and political theorist of the very first rank. It is an even greater pleasure to introduce him to you as the two thousand and four, two thousand and five Tanner Lecturer on Human Values, who will speak, as Chancellor Bergen-, Birgeneau told us, uh, on the theme Reification: A Recognition Theoretical View. Today’s lecture is entitled The Priority of Recognition and will be followed by a commentary by Raymond Geuss, who I’ll introduce, uh, when he’s about to speak.

Tomorrow’s will be dedicated to reification, uh, as loss of recognitional attitudes and be answered by Judith Butler and Jonathan Lear. And then the panel as a whole will get to, uh, struggle over the meaning of it all on Wednesday afternoon, and this will be followed, uh, by a reception. Uh, it is enormous pleasure to introduce to you Axel Honneth.

(applause)

[00:10:33] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah. Thank you very much. Uh, I mean, thank you very much for the invitation.

I wanted to be more precise in whom to thank, uh, than simply saying thank you very much. Uh, first of all, I would like to thank, uh, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for having, uh, making this whole event possible, the Tanner Lectures two thousand and four, two thousand five. I wasn’t aware of the fact that these Tanner Lectures at the University of Berkeley are very young.

I thought it has already here a longer tradition, so I’m extremely proud to be here with you and, uh, to have the chance to deliver the Tanner Lectures. Secondly, I would, uh, like to thank the Tanner committee. Uh, I have to say also for the…

I don’t know whether it’s, uh, courage, but for the decision to invite in a row two, representatives of, uh, critical theory, Seyla Benhabib last year and this year myself. Uh, the lectures, as you know, have also very high reputation in Germany, and therefore I, uh, I’m quite aware of, uh, the kind of honor which is coming together with it, and I’m very grateful for being recognized, uh, by being invited to present these lectures. Eh, I want to mention three persons, uh, uh, especially which have helped to prepare my visit and made it all very easy for me to come.

That is Professor Sam Scheffler, who had the not easy task to force me to be quick enough with my, with my writing, uh, so that it will be finished before I’m coming here. Uh, secondly, Martin Jay, an old friend, uh, of mine who, uh, helped me a lot in, let’s say, making me, m-m-ma– uh, in reducing my nervosity before coming here to present the lectures. And last but not least, Ellen Gobler, who helped, uh, to make my visit technically and, uh, in all respects an easy enterprise.

Finally, I would like to thank the three respondents, Judith Butler, Jonathan Lear, and Raymond Geuss, for having accepted to deal with my lectures and to comment on them. I apologize very much for being so late with my paper. It arrived, I have to confess, on Friday.

I mean, uh, Friday morning, I guess, the last page. Yeah, this is how things are. You can’t control how fast you are in writing, and I’m always a very slow writer finishing in the last minute, so I apologize for that.

Yeah, uh, I don’t want to explain too long, the, the object of my lectures. I hope that becomes clear, and I probably give certain justifications for what I’m doing here in the last, uh, round of our discussion. It would take too much time if I start with that now to explain why I, uh, for the hell I’m dealing with this very classical notion of reification in our days.

Uh, as I said, I hope it becomes clear, and I will tell you a little bit more of, uh, of the background motives for that probably in the last round of our lectures. So let me simply start. The lecture is, uh, anyway quite long, and I hope, uh, it’s interesting enough that you don’t, don’t lose interest and motivation to listen.

In the German-speaking world of the nineteen hundred and twenties and thirties, the concept of reification constituted a leitmotif of social and cultural critique. As if refracted through a concave mirror, the historical experiences that imprinted the Weimar Republic under the pressure of rising unemployment and economic crisis seemed to become concentrated in this concept and its related notions. Social relationships increasingly reflected a climate of cold, calculating purposefulness.

The handworker’s loving care for his instruments and creations, and creations looked as having given way to an attitude of mere instrumental command over the same. And even the subject’s innermost experiences seemed to be infused with the icy breath of calculating compliance. An intellectually committed philosopher’s presence of mind was needed, however, before such diffuse modes could be distilled into the concept of reification.

And it was Georg Lukács who, by boldly combining motifs from the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, succeeded in coining this key concept in a collection of essays published in n– uh, twenty-five and entitled History and Class Consciousness. In the center of this volume, so fueled by the hope of an impending revolution, is a three-part treatise on, I quote the title, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”” This work motivated an entire generation of philosophers and sociologists, at least in the West, to analyze the forms of life under the then prevailing circumstances as being the result of social reification. After World War II, however, the primacy of the category of reification as a diagnosis of the then prevailing circumstances had been lost, as if this horror of the Holocaust had crippled any speculative tendency towards hyperbolic social diagnostics, social theorists and philosophers were instead content to analyze deficits of democracy and justice without making use of concepts for social pathologies such as reification or commercialization.

Although these concepts lived on in the writings of the Frankfurt School, especially in the work of Adorno, and despite the fact that the memory of Lukács’ work flared up once again in the student movements of the late ’60s, the project of an analysis of reification seemed to have ultimately become part of a long-gone era. Merely mentioning the term reification might have appeared to be a symptom of obstinately desiring to belong to a cultural epoch that had long s– long since lost its legitimacy in the wake of the post-war era, its cultural reforms and theore-theoretical renewals. And only now does there appear to be an increasing number of signs that this situation could be changing once again.

Like a philosophically unprocessed nugget, the category of reification has re-emerged from the immense depth of the Weimar Republic and retaken the stage of intellectual discourse. There are three, if not four, indicators that lend support to the speculation of a climate change in the world of contemporary social diagnostics. First of all, and quite banally, banally, one can point to a number of recent novels and narratives that emanate an aesthetic aura of the creeping commercialization of our everyday life.

By using particular kinds of stylistic devices or drawing upon certain specific lexica, these literary exhibits suggest that the social world should be viewed as if its inhabitants interacted with themselves and others as they would with lifeless objects, without a trace of inner sentiment or effort towards understanding the other’s point of view. The list of authors to be mentioned in this context extends from American writers such as Raymond Carver, by the enfant terrible of French literature, Michel Houellebecq, all the way to a German-speaking literary figure such as Elfriede Jelinek. Whereas the concept of reification is present in these narrative works solely as an atmosphere mood, in recent sociological analysis, it has become to be studied as a modified form of human behavior.

Sorry. There are innumerable investigations in the domain of cultural sociology or social p-psychology which have discerned an increasingly, increasingly strong tendency on the part of human subjects to feign certain feelings or desires for opportunistic reasons until they eventually experience these very same feelings and desires as genuine elements of their own personality. This is a form of emotional self-manipulation that Lukács already had in mind when he described journalism at a very famous place in his essay as being a prostitution, I quote, “of experiences and beliefs,” regarding it as the consummate form of social reification.

Of course, in these diagnosises of the tendency of to manage one’s feelings, the concept of reification appears as inexplicitly as it does in most of those pieces of literature that emanate an atmosphere of cold rationality and manipulation. But this is now no way true of a third category of texts that has been arousing suspicion of the return of the the thematic of reification. Within this sphere of ethics and moral philosophy, there have been a number of reasoned endeavors to get a theoretical grasp on the kind of social phenomena that clearly confronted Lukács in the course of his analysis.

In these endeavors, the concept of reification is often explicitly used without reference to the text from which the term originates. For instance, Martha Nussbaum explicitly uses the term reification to characterize, to characterize particularly extreme forms of the instrumentalization of others. And although Elizabeth Anderson abstains from using the concept, her description of the economic alienation of contemporary life certainly deals with comparable phenomena.

In these ethical contexts, reification is used in a decidedly normative sense. It signifies a type of human behavior that violates moral or ethical principles by not treating other subjects in accordance with their characteristics as human beings, but instead as numb and lifeless objects, as things or commodities. And the empirical phenomena thereby referred to encompass tendencies as disparate as the increasing demand for surrogate mothers, the commodification of romantic and familial relationships, or the boom in the sex industry.

Finally, a fourth context can be discerned in which the category of reification is once again being used to conceptually characterize certain striking developments in contemporary social life. Surrounding the current discussions concerning the results and social implications of brain research, it has often been remarked, at least in Germany, that the strictly physiobiological approach employed in this sphere betrays a reifying perspective. The argument goes by that, by presuming to explain human feelings and actions through the mere analysis of neuron fir-firings in the brain, this approach abstracts from all our self-experience in the life world, thereby treating humans as senseless automations and thus ultimately as mere things.

Just as in the ethical approaches described, this critique draws upon the concept of reification in order to characterize a violation of moral principles. The fact that the neurophysiological perspective apparently doesn’t take human personal perspectives into account has thus been determined to be a case of reification. In both contexts, therefore, the ontological connotations borne by this concept’s allusion to mere things play a secondary marginal role.

It is thus not because a certain form of reifying behavior violates ontological presuppositions of our everyday activity that it is regarded as being questionable or mistaken, but because it violates moral principles. By contrast, Lukács still presumed to be able to carry out his analysis without any reference to ethical tenets. He took the concept of reification literally in the sense that he presumed it possible to characterize a certain kind of social behavior as being mistaken solely because it doesn’t correspond with certain ontological facts.

Despite the fact that Lukács abstains entirely from the use of moral terms, his analysis of reification is obviously not without normative content. After all, his mere use of the concept of reification betrays the assumption that the phenomena he describes are in fact deviations from a genuine or proper manner of being disposed towards the world. And it appears self-evident to Lukács that his readers will agree with him when he presents the historical necessity of revolutionizing the given social circumstances.

Yet he deploys these implicit judgments at a theoretical level that is one step below the argumentative, and it is upon this level that he formulates and justifies his corresponding evaluations. This is because Lukács doesn’t regard reification as a violation of moral principles, but as a deviation from a kind of human praxis or worldview, essentially characteristics characteristic of the rationality of our form of life. The argument he directs at the capitalist reification of social life only possess an indirectly normative character as they result from the descriptive, descriptive elements of a social ontology or philosophical anthropology that endeavors to comprehend the foundations of our social existence.

In this sense, it can be said of Lukács’ analysis that it offers a social ontological explanation of a pathology to be found in our life practices. But it is no way certain whether we today may talk in this way, whether we can justify objections to a certain form of life with reference to socio-ontological insights. Indeed, it isn’t even clear whether we, in the light of the high demands that present societies place– that present societies place on strategic and cold calculating activity, can at all use the concept of re- of reification to express an internally coherent thought.

And the aim of my lecture is to give an answer to this question, namely to try to defend a certain concept of reification which hopefully doesn’t share the weaknesses of Lukács’ concept, but instead, uh, can reformulate his insights on a new platform. So the lecture today has three parts. The lecture tomorrow has two longer parts, and they both are equally long.

(laughter)

In order to settle the question of whether the concept of reification still retains any value today, we should, we should orient ourselves first of all on Lukács’ classical analysis. However, we will quickly realize that his own categorial means are not sufficient for the task of appropriately conceptualizing the occurrences which he grabs in a phenomenologically half accurate way. Lukács keeps very close to the ontologizing everyday understanding of the concept of reification in asserting with Marx on the very first page of his treatise that reification signifies nothing but the fact, I quote, “that a relation between people has taken on the character of a thing.”

” End of quote. In this elementary form, the concept clearly designates a cognitive occurrence in which something that doesn’t possess any thing-like characteristics in itself, for example, something human, comes to be regarded as a thing. At first, however, it isn’t clear whether Lukács holds reification to be a mere epistemic category mistake, a morally objectionable act, or an entirely distorted form of praxis.

Uh, after only a few sentences, however, it becomes clear that he must have more than a category mistake in mind, since the occurrences of reification takes on a multi-layered quality and stability that cannot be put down to a mere cognitive error. The social cost to which Lukács attributes the increasing dissemination and constancy of reification is the, the expansion of commodity exchange, which, with the establishment of capitalist society, has become the prevailing mode of intersubjective agency. As soon as social agents begin to carry out their relations primarily via the exchange of equivalent commodities, they will be compelled to place themselves in a reifying relationship to their environment, for they can then no longer avoid preserving– perceiving the elements of a given situation solely from the perspective of the utility that these elements might yield for the, for their egocentric calculations.

The thereby compelled shift of perspective leads in many different directions, which for Luk-Lukács constitute just as many forms of reification. Subjects in commodity exchange are mutually bound, first, to perceive given objects solely as things which one can potentially make a profit on. Secondly, to regard each other solely as objects of, of a beneficial transaction, and finally, to regard their own abilities solely as nothing but supplemental resources in the calculation of profit opportunities.

Lukács subsumes all these changes regarding the person’s stance towards the objective world, society, and him or herself under the concept of reification without taking the many nuance, uh, nuances and diversities between these attitudes into account. He designates the quantitative appraisal for objects, the instrumental treatment of other persons, and the perception of one’s own bundle of talents and needs from the perspective of profitability, profitability as all being thing-like. Furthermore, diverse manners of behavior extending from stout egoism via detachment to primarily economic interests all come together in the attitude defined by Lukács as being reifying.

But Lukács intends to do much more in his analysis than merely provide a phenomenology of the changes of consciousness demanded of people involved in commodity exchange. Although Lukács at first directs his gaze almost exclusively at the phenomena described by Marx as being indicative of commodity fetishism, he begins after a few pages to emancipate himself from the tight bonds of the economic sphere by extending the concept of reification and its coercions to cover the entirety of capitalist social life. It isn’t clear from the text how this social generalization theoretically occurs, as Lukács seems to os-oscillate between alternative strategies of explanation.

On the one hand, he presents the functionalist argument that the purpose of capitalist expansion requires the assimilation of all patterns of activity to commodity exchange. Yet, on the other hand, he simultaneously asserts with Max Weber that the process of rationalization autonomously leads to an expansion of instrumental rational behavior into social spheres in which traditional modes of behavior previously prevailed. But however problematic his rationale for his generalization– generalizing process may be, it ultimately aids Lukács in arriving at the central p-proposition of his study, according to which in capitalism, reification has become human beings, I quote, “second nature.”

He then- He thereby asserts that every subject involved in the capitalist form of life will necessarily as, as acquire the habit of perceiving itself and the surrounding world as mere things and objects. Before I can further pursue the question of what type of mistake is in fact characterized by reification, it is necessary to depict the next step in Lukács’ analysis.

As we have seen, he has until now quite carelessly applied the concept of things or thingness to every sort of phenomenon that the subject could possibly perceive in its surroundings or in its own person as an economically utilizable factor. Regardless of whether objects, other persons, or personal talents and feelings are at issue, Lukács maintains that they all are experienced as thing-like objects as soon as they come to be viewed according to their potential usefulness in economic transactions. But of course, this conceptual strategy is insufficient for the task of justifying the idea of reification as a second nature.

For when we speak of a second nature, we are not dealing only with economic occurrences, but with all dimensions of a, of activity in a society. How can one explain what reification means outside of the sphere of commodity exchange if this concept solely denotes a redid redefinition of all situational co– circumstances as economically calculable factors? In-interestingly enough, Lukács himself seems to have seen this problem, for he shifts the direction of his conceptual approach already early in the course of his analysis.

Instead of primarily attending to the changes brought about by the process of reification in the objects that the subject perceives, he now peers at the transformation that happens with the style of acting by the subjects themselves. He asserts that it is also in the behavior of the subject itself that commodity exchange causes certain changes which ultimately affect that subject’s entire relation to the surrounding world. For as soon as an agent permanently takes up the role of an ex– of an exchange partner, it becomes, I quote, “a contemplative, detached observer,” and I quote, “while its own existence, it is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system.”

End of quote. With this conceptual shift of perspective, the concepts of contemplation and detachment become essential to the explanation of what takes place in the modus of reification at the level of social agency. Here, the sub-subject is no longer actively involved in the activities and occurrences of the surrounding world, but is instead placed in the perspective of a neutral observer, psychically and existentially untouched by these occurrences.

The concept of contemplation thus indicates not so much an attitude of theoretical immersion or concentration as it does a stance of indulgent passive observation. While detachment signifies that an agent is no longer emotionally affected by the events in its surroundings, instead letting them go by without any inner involvement, merely observing their passing. It is quite clear that this conceptual strategy provides a more appropriate basis for explaining what might be meant by the notion that for human beings, reification has come to constitute a second nature.

Although a few theoretical steps still seem to be lacking for a complete explication, the fundamental idea can certainly be summarized in the following fashion. In the constantly expanding sphere of commodity exchange, subjects are compelled to behave as detached observers rather than as active participants in social life, because their reciprocal calculation of the benefits that one person might yield for the other’s profit interests demands a purely rational and emotional– emotionless stance. At the time, this shift of perspective is accompanied by refined perception of all relevant situational elements, since the objects to be exchanged, the exchanging partners, and finally, one’s own personal talents may only be appraised in accordance with how their quantitative characteristics might make them useful for the pursuit of profit.

This kind of attitude becomes second nature when, through corresponding processes of socialization, it develops into such a steady habit that it comes to determine individual behavior across the entire spectrum of everyday life. Under such conditions as these, subjects also start to perceive their surroundings as mere thing-like givens, even when they are not immediately involved in the exchange process. Lukács consequently understands reification to be a habit of mere observation in which one’s natural surroundings, social environment, and personal characteristics come to be solely apprehended in a detached and emotionless manner.

In short, as he says, as things. By having given this short reconstruction of Lukács’s analysis, we have at least indirectly defined what kind of mistake or failure can not be denoted by reification. As we have al– have already seen, such a falsifying perspective does not designate a mere epistemic category mistake.

This is not only due to the fact that reification constitutes a multilayered and stable syndrome of distorted consciousness, but also because this shift in attitude reaches far too deep into our habits and modes of behavior for it to be able to be simply reversed by making this corresponding cognitive correction. Reification constitutes a distorting stance or mode of behavior that is so widespread in capitalist societies after Lukács that it can be spoken of as a second nature. As a result, reification for Lukács can neither be conceived as a kind of moral misconduct nor as a violation of moral principles, for it lacks the element of subjective, subjective intent necessary to bring moral ter-terminology into play.

Unlike Martha Nussbaum, Lukács isn’t interested in the question concerning the point of which the reification of other persons attains a degree that would make it morally despis-des-despicable act. Instead, he sees all members of capitalist society as being socialized in the same manner into a reifying system of behavior, so that the instrumental treatment of others initially represents a mere social fact and not a moral wrong. By discussing what Lukács cannot mean by reification, it is starting to become clearer how he intends for the key concept of his analysis to be understood.

If reification constitutes neither a mere epistemic category mistake nor a form of moral misconduct, the only remaining possibility is that it be conceived as a form of praxis that is structurally false. The detached, neutrally observing mode of behavior as, uh, as which Lukács attempts to conceive reification must form an ensemble of habits and attitudes that deviates from the conception of a more genuine or better form of human praxis. This way of formulating the issue however makes clear that this conception of reification is in no way free of all normative implications.

Also we– although we are not dealing with a simple violation of moral principles, we are indeed confronted with the much more difficult task of demonstrating the existence of a true or genuine praxis over and against its distorted form. The normative precepts reinforcing Lukács’s analysis do not consist in a sum of morally legitimate principles, but in a notion of proper human praxis. And this kind of notion draws its justification much more strongly from the assertions of social ontology or philosophical anthropology than from the sphere customarily termed moral philosophy or ethics.

Now, it wouldn’t be correct to say that Lukács wasn’t aware of this normative challenge. Although he possesses a strong tendency to polemicize with Hegel against the idea of abstract moral duties, he knows very well that his talk of a reifying praxis or stance must be justified by a notion of true human praxis. It is for this reason that he inter-intersperses indications throughout the text of what a practical human relation to the world not affected by the coercion of reification might consist in.

For instance, an active subject must be conceived as experiencing the world directly, I quote now, or in an unmediated manner as an organic unity and as cooperative, while objects can be experienced by the active subject as being, again I quote, “qualitatively unique, essential, and particular in content.” Yet these anthropologically thoroughly plausible passages stand in an odd contrast to the statement in which Lukács, drawing on Hegel and Fichte, attempts to summarize his vision of true human praxis. Here he maintains that we can only speak of undistorted human agency in cases where an object can be thought of as the product of a subject, and where mind and world therefore ultimately coincide with one another.

As these passages demonstrate, the concept of agency employed in Lukács’ critique of reification is decisively influenced by an identity philosophy similar to the one offered by Fichte, with his notion of the mind’s spontaneous activity. And there can be no doubt nowadays that by grounding his critique of reification in this way, he has robbed it of any chance of social theoretical justification. Yet beneath these official idealistic statements, there are also places in the text where Lukács expresses himself much more moderately.

For example, he asserts that genuine true praxis possesses precisely the same characteristics of active involvement and interestedness that have been destroyed by the expansion of commodity exchange. Here, it is not the generation of the object by a collectivized subject that the dem– definition of reified

(clears throat)

praxis is set off against, but another intersubjective attitude on the part of the subject. And it is with this trace found in Lukács’ text that my following considerations will deal with. I will now turn to the question of whether it makes sense to reactualize the concept of reification in such a way that it can be understood as an atrophied or distorted form of a more primordial and genuine form of praxis in which humans take up an active and involved relationship toward themselves and their surroundings.

However, a set of obstacles still stands in the way of such an act of rehabilitation. And these obstacles are connected with some problems in Lukács’ treatises that we have not yet dealt with. What makes the manner in which Lukács proceeds so questionable is not only his official strategy of using as his normative point of orientation a concept of praxis in which all objectivity is quite idealistically regarded as emerging from the subjective activity of the species.

Just as problematic is his social theoretical assertion that commodity exchange is the sole cause of this behavioral transformation that gradually penetrates into all spheres of modern social life. The Marxist premise remains unsettled, according to which involvement in economic exchange processes as such a resounding significance for individuals that it engenders a permanent change or even a total disruption of their entire set of relations towards themselves and the world. Furthermore, the question also arises at this point whether Lukács gravely underestimates the extent to which highly developed societies require, for reasons of effici- effectivity, that their members learn to strategically deal with themselves and others.

If that is indeed true, then a critique of reification should not be as totalizing as Lukács conceives it, but would instead have to exclude spheres of social life in which this kind of observing detached behavior has a perfectly legitimate place. In what follows, it is not my intention to deal with all these ambiguities and problems systematically and one by one. Instead, I hope that by reformulating Lukács’ concepts of reification in an action-theoretical manner, I can prepare the ground for a perspective from which these unsettled questions lose their dramatic character, and instead it prompts some illuminating speculations.

So I come to the next step in this first lecture. Oops. We have already seen in the developing his critical reification, Lukács implicitly offers two opposed alternatives for explaining his resource to a true recourse, to a true undistorted form of human praxis.

On the one hand, in the official version, it seems as if he intends to criticize these reifying practices that have become second nature, but judging them against the ideal of a comprehensive form of practice– praxis, in which all of reality is ultimately engendered by the productive activity of the species. Apart from the fact that it is based on idealist premises, this first model must fail because it asserts the exi– eh, that the existence of every kind of object and nonproduced entity constitute– constitutes a case of reification. It is only in his second alternative that Lukács seems to take more seriously what he himself says about the derivative, merely observing mode of practices and attitudes he classifies as cases of reification.

For in this unofficial approach, which is substantiated in many places in the text, he judges the defect of reifying agency against an ideal of praxis characterized by empathetic and existential involvement. In this version, all idealist overtones are missing, since here he is dealing more with a particular form of interaction than be the kind of world-generating activity. If we follow the indications contained in considerations such as these, we encounter an astounding affinity which I– with ideas developed by John Dewey and Martin Heidegger shortly after the emergence of Lukács’ text.

And if we go a little further along in time, Stanley Cavell could also be said to belong to the ranks of authors whose theories display an affinity with the second version of Lukács’ critique. I would first of all like to concentrate on one pint– point of convergence between Lukács and Heidegger in order to further illuminate the concept of involved or engaged praxis. It has often been said in the past that there is more than one point of contact that can be found between Lukács’ treatises and Heidegger’s Being and Time.

And this theoretical kinship becomes even more apparent if one consults Heidegger’s nineteen hundred twenty-four lectures on Aristotle. But in order to be able to properly recognize the first point of agreement between these two authors, it needs to be pointed out that Lukács seeks to do more than give a critique of the reifying effects of the capitalist economic system. He also intends to demonstrate that modern philosophy is doomed to constantly run into unresolvable antinomies, as it too is rooted in reified everyday culture and thus remains entrapped within the subject-object opposition.

This same task of criticizing modern philosophy for its fixation on the dualism of subject and object also constitutes the part, pa– starting point of Heidegger’s philosophical project. Just like Lukács, the author of Being and Time is also convinced that the primacy enjoyed by the conception that we can mutually comprehend reality is responsible for the ontological blindness that has prevented an appropriate response to the question concerning the structures of human existence. Of course, Heidegger does not share Lukács’ furthers– further intention of tracing the philosophical privileging of the subject-object schema itself back to the reified form of life in capitalist society.

Social-theoretical considerations remained so foreign to Heidegger that he never even made the slightest attempt to question the social roots of the ontological tradition he so thoroughly criticized. However, in the sense that they both share the intention of subverting or destroying the prevailing conception of an epistemic subject that neutrally encounters an external world, Heidegger and Lukács are in such fundamental agreement that they are both compelled to submit an alternative view. Heidegger disposes of his– this task, of course, by offering an existential phenomenological analysis intended to demonstrate that in human beings’ everyday activity, the world is already disclosed to them.

According to Heidegger, we do not encounter reality in the stance of a cognitive subject, but rather we always already practically cope with the world in such a way that it is given to us as a field of practical significance. The concept that Heidegger employs in order to characterize the structure of this kind of practical relation to the world is that of care. And this concept provides a link to Lukács’s own attempts to extract a broader concept of praxis by contrasting it to behavior that is merely detached and observing.

In the same way that Heidegger views the concept of care, Lukács seems to regard the idea of empathetically engaged praxis as providing the key to fundamentally refuting the prevailing fixation upon the subject-object scheme.

(cough)

For if we suppose this sort of activity on the part of the subject, then it would no longer neutrally encounter a reality that still remains to be understood, but it would be existentially interested in reality in such a way that reality would always already be disclosed in qualitative significance. However, in explaining this second point of contact between these two philosophers, one should bear in mind that Lukács proceeds quite differently than Heidegger. Whereas the author of Being and Time intends to demonstrate that the mentalist language employed by traditional ontology only abstracts our view of the f-factical character of care in everyday existence, Lukács proceeds from this, from the entirely different premise that capitalism, capitalism’s progressive reification eliminates any possibility of involved, engaged praxis.

Lukács thus cannot conceive of this, his project as unveiling an already existent possibility of human existence, but instead as a sketch of a future possibility. With regard to the problem of traditional ontology, this methodological distinction results in the fact that, unlike Lukács, unlike Heidegger, Lukács could not refute traditional ontologists’ dom-dominance by mere reference to factical reality. He would instead be compelled to find in reality an appropriate expression of reified circumstances, which should only be eliminated by first overcoming capitalist society.

This complication brings up, brings one– brings up one of the most difficult problems posed by Lukács’ text. Upon closer investigation, it isn’t at all clear whether his argumentation really amounts to the conclusion that the process of reification has already eliminated all amen– uh, all elements of true empathetically engaged praxis. For there are many places in the text, above all in the final chapter dealing with the awakening of the proletariat, which gives the opposite impression.

In these moments, Lukács, drawing upon Fichte, attempts to show that the abolishment of reified social relations can only be conceived as an act in which the working class becomes aware of the works it has always already been performing. According to this conception, it is, it is precisely because the proletariat leads such a deeply demeaning and reified existence that the real realization that, I quote, “Social objects are not things but relations between human beings,” end of quote, must necessarily arise within this class like a spontaneous volte-face. If we strip these historical philosophical speculations of all idealist glorifications and distill them down to their essence, then we are left with the realization that reification has not eliminated the other non-reified form of praxis, but solely concealed it from our awareness.

Like Heidegger, Lukács would also assume that reified social relations merely represent a false framework for interpretations and an, an, an ontological veil concealing the facticity of genuine human existence. If we follow this interpretation to which Lukács’ text hardly offers an alternative, both thinkers agree to agree great extent on the placement of their respective notions of praxis. Both Lukács’ allusions to involved praxis as well as Heidegger’s notions of– notion of care designate the form of practical orientation that is characteristic of the structure of the human mode of existence.

For in opposition to the prevailing conception that has become second nature, and according to which humans primarily and constantly strive to cognize and mutually apprehend reality, humans, in fact, carry out their existence in a modus of existential evolvement, of caring, through which they disclose a meaningful world. Lukács assumes that even in social circumstances which, due to the expansion of commodity exchange, have been befallen by reification, this elementary characteristic of human activity must be present in at least rudimentary form. Otherwise, Lukács would not be able to assert that only an act of awakening is required, and not, for instance, of anticipation or recollection, in order to bring the facticity of practical involvement to light in spite of prevailing reified social relations.

In this sense, both thinkers are convinced that even in the midst of the false, ontologically blinded present circumstances, the elementary structures of the human form of life characterized by care and existential in-interestedness are always already there. This commonality yields a further consequence, namely that Lukács and Heidegger must concur on a decisive third point. Up until now, I have maintained that for Lukács, reification indicates neither a mere category mistake nor a moral transgression, but rather a false stance or habit-habit-habitual form of praxis.

But that can’t be wholly correct if both authors indeed agree that the conception of objectified and reified relations is merely a kind of interpretative veil which conceals the fact of factical care and involvement. Given this premise, Lukács must assume that reification doesn’t represent a false form of habitualized praxis, but a false interpretative habit with concern to a correct form of praxis that is always given in at least rudiment-rudimentary fashion. To speak of reified soc-social circumstances would consequently be to alle-allege that agents living under such conditions have a misguided understanding of the practices they have, in fact, always been carrying out in their everyday lives.

At the same time, these false interpretations cannot be conceived as having no influence on the actual actions of these subjects. For Lukács would assert just as vigorously as Heidegger that the reign of the subject-object division and the hegemony of the ontological scheme of presence-at-hand exercises a negative, if not a destructive, influence in our everyday dealings with the world. As a consequence of this extra complication, both thinkers are compelled to advocate a proposition, proposition with something like the following content: The habit, which has become second nature, of conceiving one’s relationship to oneself and to one’s surroundings as an activity of neutral cognition of objective circumstances bestows over time a reified form on human activity without ever being able to completely eri-eradi-eradicate this activity’s original caring character.

These preliminary characteristics must, in the form of pre-reflexive knowledge or marginal practices, remain present in such a way that critical analysis could make us aware of it at any time. In end– in order to complete this sketch of a theory, Lukács would only have to add that reified habits of thought like these originate not so much from the predominance of a false ontology as they do from the social generalization of commodity exchange, that the increasing transformation of social practices into indifferent observing activity is due to the constraints imposed upon subjects’ interpretative habits by involvement in merely calculating processes of exchange. With that, we have reached a point at which we can now make a go at the question of whether Heidegger’s notion of care can in fact contribute to illuminating the concept of praxis upon which Lukács bases his critique of reification.

We had presumed this possibility upon considering the second unofficial alternative for interpreting his theory, and we could– in which Lukács characterizes the structure of genuine human praxis by attempting to determine those elements that reified merely contemplative behavior seems to lack. This now leads us to the realization that human beings must, in fact, constantly deal with the world in the same engaged and interested manner as Heidegger aimed to show with the notion of care. At first glance, this seems to indicate little more than what is described today as the perspective of the participant, in contrast to the perspective of a mere observer.

In other words, human subjects normally participate in social life by placing themselves in the position of their counterparts, whose desires, dispositions, and thoughts they have learned to understand as the reasons for the latter’s actions. If, conversely, a subject fails to take over the perspective, perspective of another and thereby behaves in a merely detached, observing manner towards the other, then the bond of human interaction will become torn, for it will then no longer be conveyed by their reciprocal understanding of each other’s reasons. The element– the elements characterizing the so-called participant’s perspective thus consist of the act of taking over the perspective of another person and the resulting understanding of the other’s reasons for acting.

The question which, of course, now arises is whether this indeed designates the same aspects that Heidegger and Lukács primarily intended to describe with their respective notions of care and engaged praxis. The question is, can the intuitions connecting both these authors and their criti-critiques of the predominance of the subject-object scheme be appropriately and completely translated into the assertion that the perspective of the participant enjoys a permanent and necessary priorvit priority over that of the mere observer? The fact that both Heidegger and Lukács intend their notions of praxis to encompass both a person’s dealing with other persons as well as with his surroundings casts doubt on this hypothesis.

They don’t conceive of the stance embodied by care or by empathetically involved– empathetic involvement as applying solely to the other subject involved in human interaction, but in principle to any and every object involved in the context of human praxis. And even the use of the term object in this context, context is something that Heidegger would reject, since it remains far too entrapped within the subject-object opposition. But it is not only with concern to the extent of application of their respective concepts that Heidegger and Lukács appear to be getting at something more and different from what is indicated in the– in today’s conception of the observer, but also with concern to these notions’ meaning.

Care and involvement and engagement are expressions which, although they designate the act of taking over the perspective of another, also add an element of affective disposition, even of positive predisposition, which isn’t appropriately expressed by the notion that subjects seek to understand each other’s reasons for acting. This marks a r-razor thin, yet all the more definite line dividing the intuitions of both our authors from the fundament con– fundamental considerations formulated today with the aid of the concepts of communicative or intentional stances. While these latter notions aim to point out that human beings generally communicate with one another by reciprocally taking up the role of a second person, Lukács and Heidegger assert that this kind of intersubjective stance is always already connected with an element of positive affirmation and emotional inclination, which is not sufficiently expressed in the attribution of rat– rational motivation to these subjects.

To better understand this assertion, it would be a good idea to take another look at all of its fundamental elements. We assert nothing less than that, that, uh, than that the human relationship to the self and the world is in the first instance, not only genetically or chronologically, but also categorically bound up with an affirmative attitude before other more neutralized orientations can subsequently arise. In other words, the stance of affirmative involvement enjoys a chronological and logical priority.

It comes before detached observation in both senses of the term. In establishing such a premise, the reference back to our guiding topic results from the fact that the abandonment of the originally given affirmative stance must result in a stance in which the elements of our surroundings are only experienced as objective entities, as objects which are present at hand. Reification correspondingly signifies a habit of thought, a habitually ossified perspective, which when taken up by the subject not only leads to the loss of its capacity for empathetic involvement, but also to the world’s loss of its qualitatively disclosed character.

Before I can further pursue this question, the question of whether this clarifying definition permits a still useful employment of the concept of reification today, I must first attempt to justify its founda-foundational premise. That is, that the assertion that the attitude of care enjoys not only a genetic, but also conceptual priority over the neutral comprehension of reality. In the next and last, uh, step of my first lecture, I intend to reformulate this assertion by cautiously replacing the Heideggerian notion of care with the originally Hegelian category of recognition.

In this way, I believe it is possible to justify the hypothesis that in recognitional stance enjoys a genetic and categorial priority over all other attitudes towards the self and the world. Not until I have shown this fact will I be able to come back to my guiding question of whether we can today once again sensibly take up Lukács’ concept of reification. So I come t-to the last step, which is the shortest in today’s lecture, and tomorrow I will follow, uh, and probably at the end, I’ll tell you how I will, uh, proceed tomorrow.

In two fascinating essays appearing shortly after the publication of History and Class Consciousness, John Dewey sketched in the terms of his own theory, a conception of human beings’ primordial– primordial relation to the world that displays parallels to those of Lukács and Heidegger in a surprising amount of points. Dewey’s reflection boiled down to the assertion that every rational understanding of the world is always already bound up with a holistic form of experience in which all elemen-elements of a given situation are qualitatively disclosed from a perspective of engaged involvement. And if you follow this train of thought far enough, then it not only becomes possible to make a transition from the notion of care to that of recognition, but also to demonstrate the primacy of this kind of recognition over all merely cognitive attitudes towards the world.

Just like Lukács and Heidegger, Dewey is also skeptical, skeptical of the traditional view according to which our primary relationship to the world is constituted by a neutral confrontation with an object to be understood. It is true that he neither uses the concept of reification to characterize this doctrine, nor shares the pathos of Heidegger’s worldview. Yet, as far as the phenomenon that he is describing is concerned, Dewey agrees with these two thinkers that the predominance of the subject of object model cannot help but leave its impression on society’s conception of itself.

He asserts with Heidegger and Lukács that the longer the prevailing mode of thought holds on the traditional on to the traditional opposition of subject and object, the more our life practices will suffer damage as cognition and feelings, theory and practice, sci-science and art will thereby be more and more torn apart. The rationale that Dewey offers for his critique of the spectator model, that’s his version of what is called reification by Lukács or, uh, the term epistemic stance sometimes in Heidegger. So the rationale, the rationale that Dewey offers for his critique of the spectator model of knowledge, however, turns out to be considerably more direct and simple than that of Lukács and Heidegger.

Without any cultural critical dis-dis digressions, he intends to demonstrate with the help of language, theoretical and, and epistemological arguments that our emotionally filled practical dealings with the world provides the basis for all rational knowledge. Dewey begins his explanation with the assertion that all existential propositions have their cognitive roots in situations which, I quote, \”Despite their internal complexity for the acting subject, are thoroughly dominated and characterized by a single quality.\” End of quote. Regardless of whether we interact with other people or deal with material objects, the characteristics of a given situation will al-always be dyed in a certain quality of experience that does not permit distinctions between emotional, cognitive, and volitional elements.

That which we experience in such moments, and which constitutes the moods or attunements of these kinds of situations, dominates the understanding of ourselves and our world in such a comprehensive way that it is impossible for us to pick out one particular aspect of a given situation. According to Dewey, it is in this underlying quality of all our experience that the existential immediacy and practical involvement of our dealings with the world are brought to bear. In order to make clear that our everyday activity is not characterized by a self-centered, egocentric stance, but by the effort to involve ourselves with given circumstances in the most frictionless, harmonious manner possible, Dewey also employed the term interaction, but interaction now in the very broad sense of interaction with nature and with other human beings.

Just as it is, uh, just as is true of the mode of care, in interaction, the world is not centered around us, but rather we experience situations in such a manner that we take care to maintain a fluent interaction with our surroundings. In what follows, I will refer to this primordial form of relating to the world as recognition in its most elementary form. For the moment, I merely want to emphasize the fact that our actions do not primarily have the character of an effectively neutral cognitive stance towards the world, but rather that of an affirmative, existentially colored manner of caring comportment.

We constantly concede the situational circumstances of the world surrounding us a value of their own that brings us to be concerned with our relationship to these circumstances. On this elementary level, the concept of recognition thus shares a fundamental notion, not only with Dewey’s concept of practical involvement, but also with Heidegger’s care and Lukács’s empathetic involvement. Namely, the notion that the attitude of existential interested involvement with the world arising from the experience of the world’s significance or value is prior to our acts of detached cognition.

A recognitional stance is therefore an expression of the evaluation of the value persons or things have in themselves in the cause of our actions. Dewey intends to demonstrate that we can only succeed in rationally breaking down and analyzing an, an experienced situation by detaching ourselves from the qualitative unity of these situations, by distancing ourselves from this experience. The analytical components which we require in order to intellectually deal with the problem of action result from the reflexive attempt to retroactively separate the components that we have experienced in their unity as part of a single qualitative experience.

Only at this point in which we secondarily process a situation by dissecting it into emotional and cognitive elements, can we distill an object of cognition which the acting individual can then encounter it as an effectively neutral subject. This subject can now employ the whole of its intention, which had previously been fully lost in the act of immediate experience, as cognitive energy towards the intellectual handling of a problem, which, as the entity that is being focused upon, banishes all other situational elements to be to the background. However, Dewey never fails to emphasize that the primordial quality, qualitative content of experience cannot be allowed to vanish in this cognitive process of abstraction.

For otherwise, the harmful fiction of a merely existing object, of a mere given, as he is saying, may emerge. For as soon as we have forgotten the kind of qualitative experience that obtained at the beginning of our reflexive endeavors, we lose sight of the reason for which we undertook the reflection in the first place. In order not to lose sight of the goal of our entire mental operation, we must constantly and consciously keep this operation’s origin in qualitative experiences in the background.

Hence, with the apparently independent entity. This riddle can be solved until we subsequently realize that the predicative statement is due to the attempt to abstract from an original qualitative experience. For it then becomes clear that subject and object correlat-

correlatively, that’s Dewey’s notion, complement one another, for they originally indicated the direction of movement contained in a qualitatively experienced involvement with the world. In a manner clearly reminiscent of Heidegger’s distinction between readiness at hand and presence at hand, Dewey elucidates his argument once again with the, with the predication that man is mortal. This statement doesn’t lose the character of mere attribution until we translate it into the original transitive form of “men die,” which articulates, I quote, “The care for human destiny that should– that stood at the origin of the linguistic process of abstraction.”

Dewey is evidently convinced that all statements in which humans are defined by a predicate can be deciphered according to this pattern. He says he sees these kinds of predications as being merely the result of an analytical reformulation of the fears, concerns, and hopes that we feel toward other persons when encountering them in our customary stance of recognition. At this point, both elements of the latter– of the later declarative sense are still correlative to each other as they form underlying qualitative of experience that only reveals the direction of our care in their interplay.

Consequently, there is no already clearly outlined and fixed entity with the name man existing independent of the qualitative effect that we anticipate in our existential involvement. Not until this experience has been transformed into a general declarative statement is the context torn apart that previously connected the experienced person and the felt effect. And it is at this point that the ontological fiction can arise that there exist humans lacking all characteristics, as we only ascribe these attributes to these humans In the act of predication.

It is for this reason that Dewey speaks just like Winfried Sellars later does, and in a formulation whose substance, if not its wording, is once against, again reminiscent of Heidegger’s, of Heidegger, of the deceptive idea of the given. And I quote, “The only thing that is un-unqualified given is the total perverse, perversive quality, quality.” And the object, objection to calling it given is that the word suggests something to which it is given, mind or thought or consciousness or whatever, as very possibly as something that gives.

In truth, ‘given’ in this connection signifies only that the quality immediately exists or is brutally there. In this capacity, it forms that to which all objects of thoughts refer.” End of quote.

Taking these considerations as my starting point, I would like to demonstrate in the second part of my lecture, which means tomorrow, that recognition enjoys both a chronological and conceptual priority over cognition. In the second part, I will come back to the notion of reification tomorrow and will try to make my own proposal for its understanding. So my proposal will try to reformulate what we could understand under reification if we take the priority of recognition over cognition seriously.

Uh, thank you very much.

(applause)

[01:24:16] MARTIN JAY:
Thanks very much, Axel. We now have our first commentator, Raymond Geuss. Uh, Raymond Geuss is a reader in philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, uh, philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Um, he has, uh, uh, published a number of extraordinarily influential works, beginning with one in 1981 that I recall quite well, one of the most powerful critiques of the early Frankfurt School theory, uh, all the way up to Habermas’s book called The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. It was followed by Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy, essays which included, uh, some remarkable, uh, discussions of Nietzsche, uh, Hegel, uh, Tugendhat, uh, and Adorno.

More recently, and he’s had a kind of flurry of activity, uh, since the turning of the new millennium. Uh, History and, uh, uh, Illusion in Politics, two thousand one. Public Goods, Private Goods, also two thousand one.

Glück und Politik, uh, the Potsdamer Vorlesungen, uh, later lectures he gave in Potsdam, two thousand four. And then Outside Ethics, which will be, uh, uh, published, uh, this, uh, year. After receiving his undergraduate degree, uh, and his PhD in, uh, uh, the United States at Columbia, and teaching in Heidelberg and Columbia and Chicago, as well as Princeton, uh, he then joined Cambridge, uh, in 1993.

He’s also the series editor of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, and a former editor of the Cambridge University Modern, uh, European Philosophy series. It’s a great pleasure to welcome him back to Berkeley, Raymond Geuss.

[01:25:47] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Begin by describing some of the historical, some of the historical background to Professor Honneth’s very rich account of the relation between cognition, recognition, and reification, in the hope that by describing this background, I’ll be able to clarify some of the central points he wants to make. The historical narrative, uh, I want to present is one that consists of two internested subplots. The first subplot is a story about the characteristic philosophical anthropology of the West, and the second is a story about the development of social criticism.

To start with the first of these two stories, the one about anthropology, John Dewey used to claim that there was what he called an intellectualist bias in Western philosophy. One way in which this bias expressed itself, he thought, was in the traditional attempts to analyze the essential properties of human beings. These properties were supposed to be basic to the human form of life.

They were supposed to be things that were characteristic of human beings as opposed to other species, and they were supposed to be very important, of great importance to the members of our species. Intellectualism is, was his name for the thesis that humans are defined by our ability to engage in a certain kind of activity, and that’s the activity of the formation and evaluation of beliefs. So human beings are belief machines.

We acquire beliefs, we form them, we evaluate them. That’s the central thing about us, the most important thing to know. If you add to this the further assumption that humans are also endowed with a distinct faculty of reason which ought to be allowed free rein to follow its own inclinations in regulating the acceptance of belief, then you get a version of the traditional doctrine, which is sometimes called rationalism, which is the default position for most philosophers since Plato.

If my reason has evaluated the beliefs I’ve formed, those that have survived that evaluation can count as correct cognition of the world. They are the ones, so this account runs, that ought to guide my action.

(sigh)

In order for this conception not to become completely unrealistic as a full account of human life, and in particular of human action, some place had to be made for something other than mere doxogenesis, the mere formation of belief. So we might be belief machines, but we can’t be just belief machines. There has to be some motor that moves us out of the realm of belief into the world of action.

Usually philosophers have said that this second sect– Usually philosophers have thought there’s then a second sector in the human psyche, distinct from the realm in which reason and the cognitive apparatus are located. And this second realm was inhabited by desires, wants, emotions, impulses. They were the things that provided the push, as reason was the thing that provided the guidance for human action.

So action required a conjunction of belief and desire. The realm of desire was motivationally important, but on the traditional view, it had to be kept very firmly under control, lest it distort the process of cognition. The real self was a freestanding, self-regulating, cognitive subject.

It was the starting point for and the teleological goal of human life and of philosophy. This main Western tradition was never completely uncontested, but in retrospect, one can see the importance of a shift that took place at the end of the eighteenth century. Fichte, and following him, an important strand of German idealism, set out systematically to reject the primacy of the cognitive, or at least the absolute primacy and self-sufficiency of the cognitive.

Fichte argued that one cannot simply start with the human subject, which is the center of our cognitive apparatus, as if it had dropped from heaven complete and full and perfect in all of its parts, but rather, he claimed, the subject itself has a genesis. And the first task of philosophy must be to understand exactly how it came into existence. Fichte then makes two claims.

He claims, first, that the human subject brings itself into existence through performing a particular kind of metaphysical action, which is the action of positing itself. And only when the subject has performed this highly, highly paradoxical action can cognition or any other kind of engagement with the world take place. And second, Fichte holds that I can be sure of the very existence of the external world only because I know immediately that I stand under certain moral obligations to other people, and therefore, that since I stand under moral obligations to other people, those other people must be real.

So if those other people are real, the world they inhabit is real, too. So a certain kind of aboriginal metaphysical activity and a commitment to moral principles are both, in some sense, prior to cognition. You can’t have cognition unless you have some kind of action beforehand, and you can’t have cognition unless you have some commitment to moral principles.

Now, the particular kind of action Fichte had in mind was this metaphysical form of action that most of us won’t find very plausible, but as it were historically, that’s not very important. What’s important is that it’s a form of action that’s prior to a form of cognition. This project of demoting cognition had a checkered history in the nineteenth century, but around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, it seems to gain a certain kind of momentum.

And the old Western idea that it was enough to understand a human being as a self-contained belief-producing and belief-evaluating machine comes increasingly to be questioned. Professor Honneth mentions Dewey, Lukács, and Heidegger as crucial figures in this development. Each of them represents a significant attempt to locate the formation and evaluation of beliefs in a wider context, and in particular, in a context that is claimed to be prior to, uh, doxogenesis.

So, for Dewey, belief formation takes place in a pre-doxastic, immediate, qualitative encounter that a li-living animal has with a concrete experiential situation. For Lukács, doxogenesis has to be understood as being embedded in the social activity of a historically specific socioeconomic formation. And for Heidegger, the final framework for conceptualization and for the formation of beliefs is what he calls being in the world, which is essentially constituted by concernful engagement in existing human projects.

So for all three of them, there is something prior to and more important than, and somehow grounding of cognition. That’s the first part of the– that’s the first subplot of the story I want to tell, the anthropological part. The second tells of the dissatisfaction with the social, political, and aesthetic conditions of post-Enlightenment societies, which begins to be expressed at the end of the eighteenth century and grows more common during the nineteenth.

Schiller in the 1790s describes modern society as fragmented. Marx analyzes the alienation of pro– the proletariat in a capitalist society. Durkheim introduces the concept of anomie into sociology.

And Nietzsche tries to find a way out of the nihilism, which he takes to be the specific modern danger. One thing these forms of social criticism have in common is that they are not intended to be moralizing. That is, they, they differ in a number of ways, but they do not differ in that they agree that they, uh, discuss defects in society not relative to subjective failings of individual agents and not relative to notions like responsibility, guilt, regret, or any of the rest of the Christian apparatus.

But if social criticism is not moralizing, then to what can it appeal? What is the– what, what, what structure can be given to it if it doesn’t appeal to any of these, uh, moralizing concepts? Professor Honneth, I take it, is interested in a particular way in which these two historical strands come together, namely the an– the anthropological strand about there being something which is prior to cognition, and the social critical strand, namely there being something deeply wrong with contemporary societies that can’t be understood in moral terms.

And he’s particularly interested in the way in which these two come together in the work, uh, in the early work of, uh, Georg Lukács, and particularly in his account of reification. Reification, as we’ve heard from Professor Honneth, is Lukács’ term for a state of society in which humans treat themselves and others as if they were things, not people, and in which they experience social relations as if they were relations between, uh, non-human entities Reification is a systematic non-moral defect or a pathological feature of contemporary society, and Lukács holds that part of the reason for it is that in our society, agents are encouraged to think of themselves in abstraction from full affective participation in active work processes and to see themselves as mere contemplative agents trying to attain correct cognitive beliefs about a society over which they know they have no final control. I must say, I’ve always found that particular aspect of Lukács’ discussion extremely puzzling.

Why does he think that what’s characteristic of, say, industrial labor in the modern world is that it turns people into contemplative sorts of people? That’s always seemed to me to be very, very peculiar phenomenologically. I hope we’ll talk about that in the discussion.

But, but that is certainly a central part of the view. A central part of the view is what’s wrong with capitalist society is, and to some extent, that it gives too much priority to cognition and causes us therefore to misunderstand these things which are prior to cognition. Phenomenologically extremely peculiar, I still think, but anyway, um, I’m probably wrong about that.

I’ve probably not understood it correctly. Thus, people in a capitalist society, Lukács thinks, have false anthropological beliefs about themselves and the world in which they live, and he argues that the capitalist economic organiza– form of organization is responsible for this, and also for reification. But also, he argues that a reified self-conception i-is, makes social change more difficult.

Professor Honneth proposes to give Lukács’ theory of reification a new foundation in a theory of recognition, which will allow the theory of reification

(cough)

to maintain its edge as a critical theory of modern society. So I take Professor Honneth’s argument to be an argument in three steps. First, recognition is a precondition of cognition.

Second, reification is a failure of recognition. Third, therefore, we have grounds to criticize society if the society shows itself to be reified. Now, since in this lecture Professor Honneth has spoken only about the first of these theses, I’m going to focus on that, and I’d like to begin by, uh, discussing a couple of different ways in which the term recognition or recognize is used, because it’s a very ambiguous term.

And I, I’m sorry, I know many of you will know this, b-b-but I, I think I should mention it anyway. There are a number of different senses in which we can speak of some… of recognition. Um, in the first sense, to recognize something means to identify or re-identify it.

So I can say I recognize something when I see it, see it again, and know that it’s the same thing. I recognize the Colosseum means I saw it on a previous trip, and I see it again now, And I know it’s the same thing, and that I’ve applied the correct name correctly.

However, in a second sense, I can say I recognize something to mean something like I grant it or I admit it. Not I re-identify it, but I grant it. So if I say, “I recognize the truth of what you say,” what that means is I grant that what you say is true or I recognize your claim for compensation means I admit that claim for compensation.

Or in King Lear when, uh, Gloucester recognizes his bastard son, Edmund, he, uh, doesn’t, doesn’t identify him again as the same person, but he gives him the legal status of, uh, actually, uh, being granted, uh, admitting publicly the nature of the relation that exists between them. So this use, the second term use of recognition seems to construe recognition as a kind of performative. It’s something which takes place in a public context.

It’s an action that I perform. Thirdly, of course, there’s a specifically Hegelian sense in which recognition is used. I recognize you if I treat you as a locus of human desires.

That is, I treat you not merely as a, as a, a, an object I encounter, but I treat you as an, an entity who is an entity like me, in that you have desires that are like mine. And to say that you have desires that are like mine is to say that you have desires which as desires are construed by me as things which I ought in some way to take account of. Uh, I, I ought to take account of them as the kinds of things that I recognize as my own desire.

Uh, I can do whatever I want to a rock because it has no desires. I can’t do whatever I want to my milkman who comes three times a week and delivers the milk. Um, that I recognize you in this sense does not mean, of course, that I give you a veto right.

Merely that I act in such a way as to take account of your desires, and that the way I take account of your desires is by construing them as something more than merely obstacles o– to my action or opportunities that present themselves to me in a world that’s structured exclusi-exclusively around my self-realization. Uh, needless to say, the interest of a theory of recognition will depend on what it asserts about what kind of account I must give of your desires. That is simply to say, I recognize your desires means I take account of your desires, doesn’t tell me anything unless I– unless we can say something more about what’s the particular way of taking account of your desires which counts as recognizing you as human.

Because of course, one way I can take care– take account of your desires is just by getting out of your way, treating the, your desires as an obstacle or treating your desires as something which I can use instrumentally for my own purposes. So the real kernel of a theory of recognition will be saying, what is the specifically human way of, uh, of counting something else as a desire that I need to take account of? What, what, what does it mean to say I must take account of it?

And likely, and claims about this are, of course, unlikely to be uncontroversial. All of these above are relatively established ways in which the term, uh, recognition is used. But Professor Honneth uses recognition in a fourth sense, uh, to refer to a primordial form of being open to or concernfully engaged with the world, or being affectively interested in the nature of our interaction with it.

Now, there seems to me little doubt that Professor Honneth has appointed and and pointed out here an important feature of human life. But I think it’s slightly forced to call that phenomenon recognition, uh, in English, or for that matter, Anerkennung in German. That is, there’s a real difference between my recognizing you as a subject, meaning taking your desires seriously, and my being generally open and interested in the nature of the experience I’m I’m engaged in.

They seem to me to be two rather different, uh, notions. Um, and, uh, I just want to point out that there, at at the moment, I just want to point out that there are two slightly different notions there. Um, so the third is the Hegelian, and the force is, fourth is this quasi-Heideggerian notion of being engaged in some, uh, with the world in some way.

It would, of course, be very easy to argue for the existence of a deep-seated connection between recognition and cognition if one meant by recognition, simply the first recognition in the first sense. That is, it isn’t much of a— it’s no Kunststück. It’s not a, not much of a trick to show that I couldn’t know things about the world if I couldn’t recognize individual things out there as the same thing.

So that’s a very important fact about us, but you can’t bake much bread with that fact, and you can’t do much social theory with that fact, I think. At least that’s my suspicion.

(music playing)

The claim Professor Honneth is making is, however, not this relatively trivial one, but the much more substantial one that if I did not stand in relations to other people in which I treated them as loci of desire, then I could not know anything about the world. That is, the interesting form of the thesis is I couldn’t have any cognition if I didn’t have recognition of other people in the Hegelian sense, if I didn’t recognize you as a social agent. That is, he’s making a, so he’s making a claim about recognition in the, in the third of the Hegelian sense.

It’s difficult to see how a claim about the priority of recognition to cognition could serve as a framework for social theory, unless the recognition in question was inherently something that had to do with my relations to other human beings, and not just, f-for example, with my openness to experience. So this leads me with two questions. I’m almost finished.

First, suppose that I grant that doxogenesis repla– uh, uh, formation of beliefs requires a prior context within which it must be located in order to take place at all. What reason do I have to think that what is prior is recognition in the specifically Hegelian sense rather than, than in, for example, the Deweyite sense or the Heideggerian sense? That is, the, there, the, Professor Honneth has a slight, but I think very striking tendency to underplay the extremely strong differences between Dewey, who thinks of human beings essentially as animals engaged in interaction with an environment, Heidegger, who notoriously has great difficulty in, in encountering, uh, in, in dealing with social relations between people and focuses on the dimension, a certain dimension of existential openness that’s very important.

But it isn’t clear whether his conception of Mitsein really has much substance. And Lukács, who has a social theory of, of knowledge. Uh, so there are three very different ways of construing the world, and although there are similarities in that all three of them say there’s something that’s prior to cognition, what it is they’re saying that’s prior to cognition is a very different kettle of fish indeed.

And I would just encourage Professor Honneth, as it were, to give us the other half of the story. We’ve heard the half of the story which says they’re all similar, but the, the other half is they’re also different in important ways, and I think that nee- would need to be taken account of too.

[01:47:40] MODERATOR:
Almost done.

[01:47:41] RAYMOND GEUSS:
It’s important to realize that for Professor Honneth’s project to be successful, the form of praxis he discovers, which is eventually to serve as a standard against which our society is to be measured. It must not only be in some sense prior to cognition, but it must be also of enduring and continuing and substant-substantial social relevance. It isn’t enough to find a structure that’s prior to cognition.

We also want to know that that structure that we’ve found that’s prior to cognition can be used in some substantive way to criticize the particular society we have. And I hope that in the next lecture, we’ll hear more from Professor Honneth about how he thinks that will be possible. John Dewey, to return to the place from which I began, thought that moral philosophy as a discipline was inherently reactionary.

It was an attempt to invent an illusory discourse about imaginary metaphysical entities so as to defend highly inegalitarian social structures. Plato invents the theory of ideas to defeat claims of democracy, essentially. He thinks that’s what–

That’s the origin of Western ethics, and he s– as he says, Western ethics has never really got away from that origin. Ethics was– is the protection of existing privilege against novelty and against the pressing needs of the many. For Dewey, then, politically progressive social theory has to be non-moralizing.

One of the great strengths of Professor Honneth’s work is that he shows that there’s still much life in this project of a non-moralizing form of social criticism.

(applause)

[01:49:28] MARTIN JAY:
Thank you, Raymond Geuss. We now have, oh, I would say fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Um, we will, of course, have an opportunity to have a-an extended response on Wednesday.

But if Axel wants to at least make one or two points, maybe just simply sitting with that microphone. We can do it that way. And then I do wanna have some questions from the audience before we adjourn today.

So, uh, th-this will be a kind of preliminary response.

[01:49:49] AXEL HONNETH:
Yes. Um, I-I-I must say, I would be in a happy, happy position to be able to say that all that will be resolved tomorrow in the second lecture, but, uh, I’m not in that position. So some of the, uh, questions, uh, will not be answered tomorrow, so I try to at least, uh, give some short indications in which I believe an answer should, uh, uh, go.

Um, I mean, first, I, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m not going in the chronological order in which Professor Geuss argued. Uh, first, let me say something to his idea of non-moralizing social criticism.

[01:50:31] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
We can’t hear you, Axel. Will you speak louder?

[01:50:35] AXEL HONNETH:
Maybe I go to the-

[01:50:35] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
The microphone is not on, I think.

[01:50:37] MODERATOR:
It is on.

[01:50:38] AXEL HONNETH:
Is it? Yeah. Yeah, but it takes not a lot of volume.

[01:50:40] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Gotcha.

[01:50:47] AXEL HONNETH:
as… I mean, I’m not so skeptical about this other form of social criticism, which, uh, Professor Geuss is describing as moralizing. I have a much more relaxed attitude to it. I’m making simply a strong distinction between two types of social criticism.

The one is a strictly, call it moral type of social critici-criticism. There, you are presupposing certain standards, like standards of justice, and you criticize an existing society for not being, Uh, let’s say, in, uh, agreement with these principles. And I don’t mind to do this.

I think it’s a very worthwhile enterprise at certain moments, and it deserves respect as a specific form of social criticism. The problem is it doesn’t get in view certain preconditions of an existing society, uh, because it excludes too much from its optic or from its perspective, namely, for example, how desires are formed in a certain kind of society, how actions are structured. So that all is not an object of that type of social criticism.

But I would say like, uh, like, uh, certain versions of the Rawlsian, uh, enterprise are, I think, there we differ, are important endeavors. Uh, the other, for me, more important type of social criticism, I, uh, like to call the criticism of social pathologies. This is something different, and as you mentioned, that starts with, in the German context, with Schiller, in the French context, with Rousseau in the Second Discourse.

And that is an, another type of, uh, endeavor of social criticism because what you criticize is not, uh, uh, some-

(cough)

something which can be called an, uh, a violation of moral principles. What you criticize is a way of life, is a patholo- pathological way of life, so you need certain standards to, to be able to describe a way of life as being a pathological way of life. And this is a difficulty in this, uh, tradition of social criticism that obviously the standards which, uh, we have to use there have to be of another type than the standards we are using in a kind of moral criticism of a society.

For example, criticizing a certain society for being not just, uh, and for being not morally, uh, organized enough. The standards, as I explained, have more to do with social, with philosophical anthropology, with certain intuitions of social ontology. It takes there its standards from intuitions about what a correct form of life should be, a form of life which allows us to, uh, to, to, to, to lead a good life, let’s say, an Aristotelian viewpoint almost.

Uh, and therefore, in need of certain standards of a more complex, uh, substance. And, uh, the way I’m arguing here is definitely in that tradition, and I take Lukács as being an interesting but almost forgotten, uh, uh, type of that type of social criticism. The strategy I have, I mean, I think you, uh, described it wonderfully, is in fact to say that, uh, reification is, uh, we can in, in, in Lukács’s perspective, we can identify reification by, uh, uh, by describing that cognition takes over the priority o-over recognition.

Whereas in fact, human praxis is based in a certain, um, priority of recognition over cognition. That’s the whole strategy. Then the question comes up, and I, I try to be short because a lot of these questions will come up, uh, again and again.

Why call these different approaches, which I try to present today, namely Lukács, Heidegger, and Dewey, why to summarize all them under the notion of recognition, where what they are really interested in is always something very different? I mean, the, the, the, uh, combining definition I used in the beginning was that they all want to show that involvement, engagement, and so on is prior to cognition. I mean, one justification for calling that type of existential involvement recognition could be simply an historical one, And I think it’s not a sufficient answer.

But if you look to a certain tradition of philosophy in the twentieth century, you find exactly the same type of opposition. I mean, the same type means with the same type of notions. One, uh, very important example for that is, uh, Sartre in Being and Nothingness is exactly arguing that the, the, the opposite of a cognitive stance to the world, and he is very Heideggerian, is an recognitional stance to the world, which means to be affected in such a way by others that we immediately have to recognize them.

So being involved in the world means to be affected by others in such a way that we have to recognize him. We have to ta-take account of the fact that there are desiring subjects, and therefore, he calls it recognition. The same, and that will be, uh, uh, play a very important role tomorrow, is true for Stanley Cavell, who also opposes, um, cognition to acknowledgment, not recognition, but acknowledgment.

And so there are certain, um, theoretical, uh, historical evidences which, let’s say, justify probably to call all this reification. I have one, uh, argument which is more substantial. I, I would say, I mean– a-and you made it, uh, totally– you, you explained it totally correct, I think.

I used here to a certain degree a fourth notion of recognition. The, the real notion of recognition is the Hegelian one. I would say it’s a little bit stronger than what you reconstructed.

I think it’s not only taking account of, of the desires of the others, but to recognize somebody else means to take account of the desires of others in such a way that these put limits to my own action. Only that means acknowledgement or recognition. Whereas simply to take account of wouldn’t be sufficient to call something, uh, a recognitional stance or recognitional attitude.

Uh, but you were right in saying that the way I, uh, argue today, I’m was u- I was using a more elementary or fourth notion of recognition where it means something different, uh, because it’s, as you could see, not related only to intersubjective relationships between subjects, but also it was a notion for our relation to the world as such to subjects and objects and all what is going on in the world. And what I try to say is that, uh, what is similar for Lukács, Heidegger, and Dewey is I think that to, to care or to be engaged means to realize that there are things or objects which require, which require something of me. The realization that– I mean, to care for means to realize that I’m dealing with things, objects, persons which require something from me.

And that is, I think, constitutive for what, uh, Heidegger calls care, what I think Lukács, uh, calls, uh, uh, praxis in this non-Fichtean sense, but in the sense of involved activity and what John Dewey calls interaction. You see, I mean, Dewey’s notion for that is interaction. It’s not qualitative experience.

But he has the idea we interact as human animals with nature. And to interact means, I think, to realize that we are in our action, uh, depending on things which require something from us. And this, I think, is a very elementary notion of recognition, even basic, or even fundamental or more elementary to what then, uh, recognition in the Hegelian sense means, where it refers to the interaction between subjects.

Yeah. So maybe that are two first, uh, very, uh, rough answers to- Two…

Two very interesting questions.

[02:00:39] MARTIN JAY:
Yeah. We, we have time, I think, probably for just one question. There is a microphone, and if the questioner would be kind enough, please.

[02:00:46] AXEL HONNETH:
I need to- Yeah. You need to go to the microphone.

[02:00:51] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
But it’s my experience, uh, particularly in East Bay, that, um, there is plenty of involvement and engagement and kind of recognition, but there isn’t caring. In fact, it seems to have, um… People seem to be divorced from experience and have mind cognitive splits.

Um, by a simple example, manifested, they’re very much engaged with machinery now in, say, fitness centers. Um, so they’re actively engaged and split from the human beings around them and from their own hu-humanity. And it is so striking that I notice it.

I’m not a philosopher, I don’t… Or a sociologist, I just move in the world. And so, I wonder what it is, what you call this, uh, pre… Some pre-ontological, pre– a fancy word because cognition, uh, how, how early this takes hold.

And I– don’t know if it has something to do with the elimination of parenting or parents, uh, who have been converted into machines so that children are being raised by machines as machines or something. I, I don’t know. So I don’t know how this affects things philosophically, uh, where to go with it for a correct quick action.

[02:02:56] AXEL HONNETH:
I think I would be, uh, happier to answer your question if I would have laid out, say laid out, offered my concept of reification, which I didn’t do, uh, which I didn’t do until now, uh, because, um, I think I would give a certain description of, uh, what you were, uh, demonstrating. I mean, if I understood it correctly, what you wanted to say, uh, that kind of behavior you were, uh, trying to, uh, demonstrate to us as a probably a, a typical incarnation of what one could call reification today. I mean, the elements you stressed were not so much, uh, perceiving others as things, but as I understood you, as being so self-centered in your activities that the others not even appear, obviously.

Yeah.

(laughter)

Uh, I mean, probably the– Maybe that’s not, not a v-very, uh, d– a very polite answer, but, uh, I hope to be able to demonstrate tomorrow that we should speak of reification in such a sense that exactly what you are describing is a type of reification. But that means a separation from Lukács in a stronger sense and is, is– in a, in a more radical sense than I propose today.

There, there I come close to certain intuitions that, uh, Professor Geuss explained when he said that even phenomenologically there’s something unclear in, in, in Lukács, and I agree to that. The, the– it’s not al-always clear what he really means when he’s speaking of this, uh, observing behavior or the, uh, uh, the, the kind of, uh, behavior he has in mind. And I think therefore one has even to be more radical by overcoming Lukács in order to be able to describe phenomenons, phenomenons like you have in mind as cases probably of reification.

But he needs another language to do that.

[02:05:14] MARTIN JAY:
I’m afraid that we have to stop there. We really have a cliffhanger. Can a theory of recognition save, uh, the, uh, theory of reification? We’ll find out tomorrow.

(laughter)

I encourage you to come back.

(laughter)

Thank you.

(applause)

Uh, we have, uh, Judith and Jonathan Lear. Thanks very much for organizing the activities. And, uh, thanks for a difficult conversation.

[00:00:00] INTRODUCER:
It’s a great pleasure to welcome you back to the second of our three lectures, uh, on, uh, human values, the Tanner Lectures of two thousand four-five. Um, it’s a great tribute to our speaker, Axel Honneth, that we have such a large turnout for the second, uh, of the three lectures. The, I guess, antithesis to yesterday’s thesis.

We will hear, I guess, on Wednesday, the final synthesis that’ll bring it all together. Uh, I gave a quite elaborate introduction yesterday, and I don’t wanna repeat that. We have a very full program today.

I wanna simply add, uh, those of you who don’t know Axel Honneth, he is, uh, the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and Professor of Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University there, and has had a very long and distinguished career teaching many places around the globe, writing many, many books which I listed yesterday, almost all of them in translation. One I did not list, which is not yet in English, uh, a book called Unsichtbarkeit or Invisibility, uh, which among other things deals with figures like Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, and carries his discussion of, uh, the, uh, issue of recognition, uh, into identity politics and, uh, issues that much concern us today. Uh, this is the second lecture.

The title, uh, is, uh, Reification as Loss of Recognitional, uh, Attitudes. Uh, and it’ll be pa– followed by two responses, one by Judith Butler, the other by Jonathan Lear, and I will introduce them before their responses. Uh, and then we’ll have, I hope, uh, a bit of time for questions, uh, before we have to close at around six thirty.

And then, of course, tomorrow we’ll have a panel discussion, and then we would more than, uh, be more than happy to invite, uh, all types of questions and responses from the audience. So without further ado, it’s my great, great pleasure indeed to welcome once again Axel Honneth.

(applause)

[00:01:48] AXEL HONNETH:
Thank you very much. I, uh, don’t want to repeat what I said yesterday. That would, uh, take too much time, and I hope that, uh, it will become clear in the first part of my lecture today what I’m aiming at.

Eh, but I don’t want to start without, uh, thanking one other person which I forgot yesterday, uh, namely the translator of the whole thing. Uh, and, uh, as you can imagine, that’s an extremely important person, and I’m mentioning him also because he is a former student of the University of Berkeley, who is now studying with me at the University of Frankfurt. Uh, he studied with Hans Sluga and, uh, Hubert Dreyfus.

His name is Joseph Ganahl, and he did a wonderful job in the last two weeks to translate the whole thing. You can imagine what kind of work that was– that was under that pressure. I’m permanently too late.

He had to rush. I send him, uh, the pages on the evening. He was here–

He had finished them on the next morning. So he, he was a wonderful person to help me. Uh, today’s lecture will have two parts, and in the first part, uh, I will try to do what I promised yesterday, namely, to give some independent indications of why we should believe that recognition comes before cognition.

And only after that, uh, I will then try in the next step, in the second chapter of today’s lecture, to clarify what reification could mean under those premises. So I probably start immediately. In order to elucidate my assertion that involved behavior precedes a neutral grasping of reality, that recognition comes before cognition, I must go beyond the theoretical historical framework within which I have been moving up to this point.

Independent evidence and arguments are required in order to demonstrate, without merely invoking philosophical authorities, that a layer of existential involvement indeed provides the basis for our entire objectifying relation to the world. Not until, until we have taken this step can we sketch how the concept of reification must be constituted if it is to preserve Lukács’ intuitions in a recognition theoretical form. As a contrast against which I intend to set off my own assertions, I will employ again the idea according to which human behavior is distinguished by the communicative stance achieved through taking over a second person’s perspective.

I contend by contrast that this ability to take over the perspective of another person is itself rooted in a kind of antecedent interaction which bears features of existential care or, as I said, recognition. I intend to substantiate this hypothesis, first of all, from a genetic, or probably the right word in English would be from a chronological or temporal point of view, by taking a look at the preconditions contained in the way that children acquire the ability to take over the perspective of another. And then I will turn to the much more difficult task of a systematic or categorial proof of this hypothesis.

So these are the two steps in my– in the first part of this day’s lecture.

(clears throat)

So coming to the first, the, uh, temporal or chronological priority of recognition over cognition. In the fields of developmental psychology and socialization research, it has long been agreed that the emergence of children’s ability to think and interact must be conceived as a process that occurs in the act of taking over another person’s perspective. According to this conception, which owes its existence to a synthesis of either Piaget and George Herbert Mead or of Donald Davidson and Freud, the acquisition of cognitive abilities in the child’s developmental process is peculiarly bound up with the formation of primary relations of communication.

A child thus learns to relate to an objective world of stable and constant objects by taking up the perspective of a second person and thereby gradually decentering its own primarily egocentric perspective. The fact that an infant begins very early on to come into contact with its figures of attachment, its psychological parent. Taking up this person’s view and steering it towards certain significant objects is interpreted by these theories to be an indication of a phase of experimentation in which a child tests out the independence of another perspective on this sur-surrounding world.

And to the extent that it succeeds in placing itself in the perspective of the second person and then in perceiving the surrounding world from this perspective, an infant acquires a corrective authority, allowing it for the first time to perceive objects in an impersonalized, objective manner. The age at which children acquire the ability to carry out this kind of triangulation is generally considered to be nine months. And it is for this reason that recent research speaks of the nine-month revolution, since it, it, it is at this age that children acquire the ability to perceive their attachment figures as an in-intentional agent whose stance towards the surrounding world is likewise goal-oriented and therefore at the– of the same significance as one’s own relation to the world.

What is notable about all these developmental… development psychological theories, which either with George Herbert Mead or with Donald Davidson emphasize the necessity of taking over another’s perspective for the emergence of symbolic thought is the extent to which they ignore the emotional side of the relationship between a child and its figure of attachment. Mead had a certain– George Herbert Mead had a certain tendency to describe a child’s early step of taking over the perspective of a concrete second person as if it, its affective connection to this second person didn’t play any significant role. And indeed, a tendency towards cognitivism can certainly be said to prevail among the dominant majority of attempts to explain the origin of mental activity in the child’s communicative relationship to a figure of attachment.

The triangular relationship in which a child places itself as soon as it has suspected the independence of a second person’s perspective after phases of proto-conversation is described by these theories as a largely emotionless space. Only very recently have there been some attempts to reverse these cognitivist abstractions by making comparative investigations of children with autism. These investigations have demonstrated with astounding regularity that a small child must first have em-emotionally identified with an attachment figure before it can accept this person’s stance towards the world as a corrective authority.

It is on these kinds of findings that I would like to build in order to be able to prove the ontogenetic priority of recognition over cognition. It is most likely, uh, the empirical comparison with autistic children that allowed these investigations to develop a greater sensibility for the affective components of the infant’s interaction with people and objects in its surroundings. These theories generally regard the cause of autism to be the fact that diverse and usually constitutional barriers prevent the affected child from developing feelings of attachment to its primary parent figure.

By contrast, both Peter Hobson and Michael Tomasello, to name only two, uh, here, point out that in the case of children not affected by autism, this kind of emotional identification with others is absolutely necessary in order to enable the taking over of another person’s perspective, which in turn leads to the development of the capacity for symbolic thought. The starting point of these investigations consists in the same transition from primary to secondary intersubjectivity that the cognitivist approach al-also have in mind. These theories demonstrate that at the age of nine months, a child makes several notable advances in its interactive behavior.

It acquires, it acquires the ability to point out objects to its attachment figure by means of proto-declarative gestures, and then view these objects with this person. It can further make its attitude towards meaningful objects dependent upon the expressive behavior with which the other person reacts to these objects. And finally, the child appears in doing what George Herbert Mead calls playing to gradually grasp the fact that familiar meanings can be uncoupled from their objects and transferred to other objects whose new borrowed function can then be creatively dealt with.

The theoretical approaches I have been distinguishing between concur with each other to a great extent with regard to the proper description of these or similar advances in the child’s learning process. They both emphasize the developments in communicative interaction by which a child learns step by step and through the perspective of a second person to perceive objects as entities in an objective world existing independently of our thoughts and feelings about it. Unlike the cognitivist approaches, however, Hobson and Tomasello contend that the child could not make all these advantids– advances if it did not already develop a feeling of emotional attachment to its psychological parent, for it is only by way of this antecedent identification that the child is able to let itself be moved, motivated, and swept along by the presence of a concrete second person in such a way that it can comprehend this person’s changes of attitude in an interested, affected manner.

The specific nature of this theory can best be illuminated by turning once again to the differences between this approach and the cognitivist approach in explaining the causes of autism. Whereas the customary cognitivist approaches are compelled to trace the origin of autistic behavior back to cognitive deficits related to disturbances in the child’s ability to think and speak, Tomasello and Hobson both attribute the decisive cause to the child’s lacking receptiveness to the emotional presence of attachment figures. This psychological detachment may itself be genetically conditioned.

But what is decisive is the fact that an autistic child is hereby structurally prevented from emotionally identifying with a concrete second person. Martin Dornes, a German devel-developmental psychologist, summarizes the results of this explanation’s awareness of the role of affectivity in autism in a way that links up well with my original topic. Because autistic children are, and I quote, “emotionally unreceptive,” they remain entrapped with their own perspective on the world and don’t become familiar with any other perspective.

They don’t see, or rather, they don’t feel the fact that facial expressions, movements, and communicative gestures give expression to attitudes. They are blind to the expressive mental conte- content of such expressions, or rather, to their meaning. An autistic infant, thus, isn’t mentally blind, uh, blind due to a cognitive deficit, but rather because it is in the first instance emotionally blind.

End of quote. He would also just like– I would also just like to point out that Theodor W. Adorno made same– some similar reflections in certain places in his works, above all in Minima Moralia and in Negative Dialectic. Formulations can be found again and again in these texts which indicate that Adorno, similar to Hobson or Tomasello, attached the origin of the human mind to the necessity of an early imitation of a loved figure of attachment.

As he states in a well-known aphorism from Minima Moralia, and I quote, \”A person doesn’t become a person until it imitates other persons.\” End of quote. Immediately afterwards, he writes that this kind of imitation constitue– constitutes the, I quote, “archetype of love.” End of quote.

At issue here is the same act of decentering that the other two authors regard as the starting point of the child’s mental learning processes. That is a kind of existential, even affective sympathy toward other persons that allow the child to experience their perspectives on the world for the first time as having significance. The act of placing oneself in the perspective of a second person requires an antecedent form of recognition that cannot be grasped in cognitive or episteme– epistemic concept, as it always necessarily contains an element of involuntary openness, devotedness, or love, or love.

This devotion to, or as Adorno states in psychoanalytic terms, this libidinal cathexis of objects is what allows children to place themselves in the perspective of another in such a way that it can acquire a broader and ultimately depersonalized conception of reality. Of course, this developmental psychological notion cannot be equated with the ideas that I have distilled out of the works of Lukács, Heidegger, and Dewey by way of demonstrating the convergence of the various notions they respectively employ. At that point in the lecture, I was concerned with arguing for the general priority enjoyed by a particular stance of involvement or recognition, recognition,

(clears throat)

over all other forms of relating to the world. But now I am concerned with showing that emotional res-receptivity in a strictly, in a strictly temporal sense, comes before the transition to cognition of intersubjectively given objects. In neither case is the type of priority nor the specific character of that which is said to have priority the same.

Emotional attachment or ident-identification with another concrete person is indeed distinct from the fundamental existential care or concern that Heidegger or Dewey had in mind. However, I do believe that this ontogenetic finding, finding offers a first indication of the plausibility of my general assertion. For it appears to be true that it is first of all from the perspective of a loved one that small children first gain an inkling of the abundance of existential significance that given situational circumstances can have for human beings.

Therefore, it is through this emotional attachment to concrete others that the world is disclosed to a child in which it itself must be practically involved for the sake of these meaningful qualities. Genesis and validity, or in Marxist terms, history and logic, should not be torn apart to such an extent that the conditions under which a child’s thinking originates lose their relevance for the categorical significance of our knowledge of the world. This is precisely how Adorno intended for his statements on the effective basis of our cognitive acts to be understood.

The fact that it is from the perspective of a loved figure of attachment that children arrive at, at an objective understanding of reality indicates at the same time that the more perspective on a single object, object of perception we can gather, the more appropriate and precise our knowledge of objects will be. But just as it is true of small children, this act of taking over the other perspectives, which every time will reveal to us a new aspect of an object, is attached to the hardly accessible prerequisite of emotional receptivity or identification. In this sense, Adorno holds that the preciseness of our knowledge depends on the extent of emotional recognition, on the effective acceptance of as many perspectives as possible.

With that, I have already left the sphere of deve-development psychological argumentation and have subtly slipped into the arraign-arena of rather categorial substantiation. So I come to the second part of this first part of my second lecture. Yeah, it’s difficult, but, uh, what I have hopefully been able to show up until now is that in ontogenesis, that is, in a chronologically understood process, recognition must precede cognition.

If the investigations previously mentioned are indeed correct, then the individual learning process functions in such a way that a small child, first of all, identifies with its figures of attachment and must have emotionally recognized them before it can arrive at knowledge of objectively reality– of, of objective reality by means of these other perspectives. Now, my last comments on Adorno may have been intended as a hint that these intersubjective emotional conditions surrounding the origin of our thinking processes most likely also revealed something about the conditions of validity of our thought. However, these kinds of speculations cannot, of course, substitute for the arguments that would be necessary to be able to assert the priority of recognition over cognition in a conceptual sense.

Both Heidegger and Dewey, and presumably Lukács as well, had this kind of priority in mind when they asserted that our epistemic relation to the world must be preceded by a stance of care, existential involvement, or recognition. These authors intended to demonstrate that our efforts to acquire knowledge of the world must either fail or lose their meaning if we lose sight of this antecedent act of recognition. One can see this assertion in Heidegger’s work in the fact that he even regards the most objectfi-objectified scientific knowledge of behavior as a derivative of the these antecedent stands that he describes with the term care.

John Dewey writes that all research must remain aware of its origin in the diffuse problematic of everyday uncertainty in order that it does not lose sight of its, I quote, ‘regulative principle.’ I would now like to take up a third approach, one that is closer to my own topic, in order to demonstrate that our cognitive relation to the world is also attached in a conceptual sense to a stance of recognition. I think it to be advisable for us to take a look at the consi-considerations that Stanley Cavell has made concerning the relation between cognition and recognition.

Cavell arrives at his concept of acknowledgment, and acknowledgment is his term for what I call recognition, through his critique of the notion that we could ever have direct, unmediated knowledge of other persons’ mental states of so-called other minds. He is convinced that the proponents of such an assumption are much too accepting of a premise that actually stems from their opponents, the skeptics, who cast doubt on the possibility of certainty about other minds. The skeptics always regarded the question concerning possible access to other people’s mental states as an epistemic challenge, and demanded an answer in categories of certain, certain knowledge.

Yet Cavell contends that as long as anti-skeptics attempt to refute skeptics head-on on these terms, they will be condemned to failure, for they ultimately cannot dispute the fact that our knowledge of others’ mental states can never have the kind of qualitative certainty that can be had from the first-person perspective. The attempt to describe our access to another subject’s mental states according to the pattern of a cognitive relation does not do, do justice to the fact that mental states simply aren’t objects of knowledge. Even the more– the mere assertion that the subject knows of her pain or of her envy

(cough)

belies the fact that this subject is far too caught up in, or as Cavell is saying, transfixed by these mental states to be able to gain detached cognition or knowledge of these states. In a subject relation to others, it is not itself an object about which it imparts information in the form of informative facts, but rather, as Cavell says with Wittgenstein, it discloses its mental states to another person by bringing these states to the other person’s attention. Up to this point, Cavell’s line of reasoning proceeds very similarly to that of Sartre in the third part of Being and Nothingness, where Sartre presents his own critique of skepticism.

He is also convinced that skepticism concerning other minds cannot be refuted as long as one retains the premise that our access to other persons is primarily cognitive. To assume this kind of relation to others is to construct an ideal of epistemic certainty that is not attainable, simply because a person’s own mental states can in no way be for himself objects of knowledge or cognition. According to Sartre, this asymmetry can only be over-overcome by conceiving of a subject’s relation to another person in the same manner in which we conceive of the relation between the second subject and its own mental states.

Just as we do not, in this case, speak of knowledge, but of affectedness or involvement, neither should we conceive of a communicative agent as an epistemic subject, but rather than ex– as an existentially involved subject that doesn’t merely neutrally take notice of another person’s emotional states, but it’s rather affected by them in its own self-conception. And Sartre goes on to call this kind of affective relationship recognition in his own book. As far as this finding goes, and despite all their methodological differences, Cavell agrees with Sartre to a great extent.

After he has demonstrated that assertions about one’s own emotional states cannot be understood as statements of knowledge, Cavell draws consequences for our understanding of elementary relations of interaction that come very close to those found in Sartre’s phenomenological analysis. Just as a speaker normally discloses his emotions to a second person by bringing attention to them and without recourse to knowledge, the linguistic reaction of the listener can, for its part, neither be interpreted as an act of cognition. Rather, it is only through the listener’s sympathy, that’s Cavell’s word, with the emotions the The speaker has brought to his intention that he gives his response.

Cavell remarks, and I quote, “I might say here that the reason I know you are in pain is not an expression of certainty, is that it is a response to this exhibiting, exhibiting. It is an expression of sympathy.” End of quote.

In describing this notion of sympathy, we have come very close to the issue in Cavell’s line of argumentation that is most relevant for my concern. What he intends to say with Wittgenstein is that a certain stance, in which I feel existentially involved in the emotional world of another subject, must precede all possible cognitive knowledge of that subject’s mental states. Once I have completed this act and thereby established a certain form of connection to another person, I then perceive his expressions of emotion as that which they really are.

That is, as statements that make a claim on me that demand a corresponding reaction from me. For Cavell, to acknowledge is thus to take up a stance in which the behavioral expressions of a second person can be understood as demands to react in some specific way. If I do not react in way– any way, not even in a negative way, I only thereby express the fact that I have not properly understood the emotional expression of the other person.

In this sense, Cavell connects the understanding of statements of emotions very closely with the requirement of a recognitional stance. And conversely, he regards the inability to take up such a stance as ultimately signifying an inability to maintain social relationships. It is at this point that Cavell and Sartre parts ways, part ways.

It is true that both, both authors replace the cognitivist model of social interaction, which they hold to be a burden inherited from the tradition of skepticism, with a model of reciprocal affectedness, which they both call recognition or acknowledgment. Indeed, subjects are generally certain of having another subject with mental properties before them, since they are touched by this second subject’s emotional states in such a way that they see themselves compelled to react in a certain way. However, whereas Sartre concludes negatively from this fact that subjects reciprocally limit each other’s freedom for boundless transcendence, Cavell is content to make a therapeutic reference to the necessary priority of acknowledgment.

Cavell sees the danger implied by the everyday seduction by the cognitivist model to be so great as to demand a constant reminder of the fact of mutual sympathy. The only thing that Cavell intends to accomplish by his language theoretical intervention is a defense against a false image of interpersonal communication. He maintains that the fabric of social interaction is not, as philosophers often as often assume, spun out of the material of cognitive acts, but instead of that of recognitional stances.

The reason that we don’t normally have any difficulties understanding the emo-emotional propositions of other subjects is therefore due to the fact that we have already taken up a stance in which the invitation to act contained in these propositions appears to us as self-evident given. This concluding summary should now have made clear why I feel that Cavell’s analysis systematically reinforces the issue I have until now been treating in a merely historical manner. According to my interpretation, Lukács, Heidegger, and Dewey were all already convinced that recog-recognition must generally precede cognition in the sphere of social activity.

And the findings I presented from the realm of developmental psychology have reinforced this conceptual sketch in a temporal or chronological sense. But only now with recourse to Cavell has it become possible to go beyond the temporal sense of this assertion and defend its categorical meaning. For according to his analysis, we are only able to understand the meaning of a particular class of linguistic propositions if we are in that stance or attitude which he describes as acknowledgment.

To put it briefly, the acknowledgment of the other constitutes the non-epistemic prerequisite for linguistic understanding. Cavell also appears to agree with the intentions of our other three authors in holding that this form of recognition signifies something more or something else than is customarily understood by the notion of a communicative stance or of the taking over of another person’s perspec-perspective. Just as, as is the case with Heidegger’s concept of care, Cavell’s concept of acknowledgement contains an e-element of affective involvement or sympathy of an antece-antecedent act of identification, which is ignored in the proposition that we thereby merely understand one an-another’s reasons for acting.

Nevertheless, there remains a difference between Cavell and our other authors that makes it difficult to simply add Cavell’s analysis into the context of the philosophical tradition I have been describing. Unlike Heidegger, Dewey, or Lukács, Cavell appears to limit the validity of that which he calls a stance of acknowledgment solely to the sphere of interpersonal communication. Any notion suggesting that we also necessarily find ourselves already in a recognitional stance towards non-human objects is apparently wholly alien to Cavell’s theory.

I will have to come back to this contrast in turning now once again to the issue of reification, the explanation of which I’m above all concerned with in these lectures. So I come to my second part of this day’s lecture. In the preceding section, I presented several pieces of evidence which, although they may vara– vary with concern to their respective emphasis, all ultimately point in the same direction.

Both the theories of developmental psychology I have referred to, as well as Cavell’s analysis reinforces the assertion that in human social behavior, recognition and existential involvement necessarily enjoy a simultaneously chronological and categorical priority over cognition, and the detached understanding of social facts. Without these antecedent acts of recognition, infants could not take over the perspective of their figures of attachment, and adults would be incapable of properly understanding the linguistic propositions of those with whom they interact. To be sure, none of these reinforcing theories asserts that we must also necessarily take up this kind of involved recognitional stance when encountering non-human objects.

For developmental psychology, emotional identification with a concrete second person is regarded as a prerequisite of all thought without it being necessary, however, that we take up a specific stance towards objects. And due to the particular interests of his philosophical project, Stanley Cavell doesn’t address the issue of our relation to nature at all. For the moment, I would like to leave this difficulty be, in order to once again pick up the thread of my argument where I had last left it before dividing into the elucidation of the primacy of recognition, of diving into the elucidation of the primacy of recognition.

My original question was: How can the concept of reification be formulated once again for us today in a manner which takes as much account as possible of Lukács’s original intentions? As he’s– as has been shown, the concept of reification can neither be understood as an epistemic category mistake, nor as a transgression against moral principles. Unlike a cast– category mistake, reification refers to something that is not simply epistemic, a habit or form of behavior.

It can also be distinguished from a moral wrong by the fact that it cannot be traced to an ascribable instance of liability or guilt. As was made especially clear in our comparison with Heidegger, Lukács intended reification to be understood as a kind of mental habit or habitually ossified perspective, which when taken up by human subjects, causes them to lose their ability for interested involvement in other persons and occurrences. And he was convinced that to the same degree to which this loss occurs, subjects would become transformed into neutral spectators, to whom not only their social and physical surroundings necessa-necessarily appear as an ensemble of merely think-like thing-like entities, but also their own mental life.

We can now assert with hindsight that for Lukács, reification must be a name for both a process and a result. It indicates both the occurrence of a loss, the substitution of a secondary and false human stance for a genuine and correct one, as well as the result of a reifying manner of perception. In the meantime, we have come to see that there are many good reasons for the assumption that taking up a stance of recognition or involvement comes prior to all cognitional attitudes, especially with regard to the world of social relations.

But how can Lukács justify the assertion that a loss of this genuine form of behavior is possible if it is indeed so deeply anchored in the human way of life. This question contains the greatest difficulty for an attempt to revive the concept of reification. For unlike Lukács, who can here point out the deforming effect of ontological world pictures, Lukács is compelled to explain this loss by means of circu– social circumstances.

In other words, by means of a network of social practices and institutions in which these recognitional stances must be brought to bear. How they– how then can the process of reification be explicated as a social occurrence if that what– which is supposedly lost is of such major sig-significance for human soci-sociality that it must somewhat be expressed in all social occurrences? There’s really only one answer to this question that can be found in history and class consciousness, which is, however, so unconvincing that Lukács himself later rejected it.

We must consequently conceive of the process of reification as precisely that occurrence through which the genuine involved human perspective is neutralized to such a degree that it ultimately transforms into objectifying thought. One could say with Dewey that in this case, reification consists in nothing but this reflexive act of detachment through which we, for the purpose of attaining objective knowledge, extract ourselves from the experience of qualitative interaction in which all of our knowledge is always already anchored. If this view is correct, if reification is indeed identical with the objectivation of our thought, then every social occurrence demanding such objectiva-objectivation would be an embodiment of the process of reification.

And indeed, there are many passages in History and Class Consciousness which suggest that Lukács intends to assert that the occurrence of reification consists solely in a socially compelled neutralization of our necessarily antecedent stance of involvement. We can already see that this assumption must be inaccurate due to its overly totalizing ramifications, since until now, we have understood the antecedent act of recognition as being not the contrary of such objectified thought, but as its condition of possibility. In the same way that Heidegger conceived of scientific knowledge as a possible and legitimate continuation of care, Dewey was also convinced that all objective thought is rooted in the reflective neutralization of our original qualitative experiences.

Both of these thinkers, just like Stanley Cavell, or the development psychological theories I have cited, conceived the recog-recognitional stance as a practical, non-epistemic attitude that must be taken up if one is to attain knowledge of the world or other persons. It thus appears highly implausible to assume with Lukács that this kind of recognitional perspective must stand in any kind of tension with cognition, or that they might even be ir-irreconcilable, irreconcilable. In fact, the objective understanding of persons, objects, or issues is a possible product of an antecedent act of recognition and not its polar opposite.

The way in which Lukács equates reification and objectivation leads further to a highly questionable conception of social processes of development. Essentially, Lukács must hold every social innovation requiring both that we neutralize our original act of recognition and make this neutralization institutionally permanent to be a case of reification. Thus, he ultimately cannot avoid regarding everything Max Weber has described as a process of social rationalization in the European modern age to be on the whole a social totalization of the occurrence of reification.

But because Lukács is compelled to assert at the, at the same time that this original stance of involvement, due to its function in constituting social relations, can never be lost, his conception of society here comes up against its limits. If all occurrences within a society are reified just because they compel an objectifying attitude, then human sociality must have ultimately vanished. All these regrettable consequences result from Lukács’ conceptual strategy of reducing objectivation to reification.

We can confrude– conclude from his analysis that the occurrence of reification must be understood differently than Lukács understands it in his own work, an issue which I would like to turn to now. Lukács’ conception of reification is to a certain extent not sufficiently complex, not sufficiently abstract. By equating the occurrence of reification with the replacement of recognition by an objectifying stance of cognition towards objects and persons, he implicitly

(cough)

repudiates the, repudiates the significance of the increase of objectivity in social processes of development. One possibility of avoiding Lukács’ mistake could be to draw upon external criteria in order to decide in which spheres of recognitional– in which spheres, social spheres, a recognitional stance is required, and in which social spheres an objectifying stance is more functionally called for. Jürgen Habermas, for instance, took this functionalist path in his theory of communicative action when he attempted to conceive reification as precisely the process through which strategic observing modes of behavior penetrate into social spheres in which communicative orientations are with functional necessity, his term, required.

The disadvantage of this kind of conceptual strategy, however, quite clearly consists in the fact that it implicitly charges these functionalist distinctions with a normative burden of proof they cannot possibly be shouldered. The question concerning the point at which objectifying attitudes unfold their reifying effects cannot be answered by speaking of functional requirements in an apparently non-normative manner. For this reason, I suspect that the question concerning the criteria for the process of reification must be posed in a different way altogether.

As long as we retain the simplis– the simplistic conception that every form of detached observation is opposed to antecedent recognition, we do not take sufficient account of the fact that the neutralization of this stance of recognition and involvement normally serves the purpose of intelligent problem solving. So instead of allowing the danger of reification to arise wherever the recognitional stance has been abandoned, as Lukács does, we should orient ourselves in our search upon the superior criteria concerning what kind of relation these two distinct attitudes have to one another. At this higher level, where we are concerned with the modus of this relationship, we can discern two poles capable of replacing the opposition with which Lukács had been operating.

On the one hand, or on the one side, we find, uh, then forms of knowledge sensitive to recognition, and on the opposite side, forms of knowledge in which every trace of their origin in an antecedent act of recognition has been lost. These somewhat complicated formulations are intended to articulate the fact that it is prima facie most advisable for us to distinguish between two modes in which these two kinds of stances relate to one another. Either they are transparent to each other or obscu-obscure, accessible or inaccessible.

In the first case, the act of cognition or detached observation occurs in a manner conscious of its dependence on an antecedent act of recognition. In the second case, it has freed itself of this dependency and deludes itself that it has become autonomous of all non-epistemic prerequisites. By further pursuing Lukács’ intention at a higher level, this kind of forgetfulness of recognition, to make a play on Heidegger, can now be termed reification.

I thereby mean the process by which we, in our knowledge and cognition of other persons, lose the consciousness of the degree to which this knowledge and cognition owe their existence to an antecedent stance of involvement and recognition. Before I proceed to make this assertion more plausible, I would first like to briefly demonstrate that this assertion greatly har-harmonizes with the intentions of some of the authors I have already dealt with here.

(coughs)

John Dewey, to whom the continental notion of reification was, of course, wholly alien, repeatedly hints in the essays I have quoted here at the fact that our reflexive thought becomes endangered of becoming pathological as soon as it loses sight of its roots in a qualitative experience of interaction. By shutting out the origin of these thoughts, an increasing tendency emerges in all our scientific efforts to forget those elements of existential affectedness for the sake of which we undertook these efforts in the first place. Stanley Cavell doesn’t argue much diff– doesn’t argue much differently when he asserts that his– that this antecedent act of acknowledgment must be conceived as, and I quote, “presenting an object of knowledge.”

For this conversely means that if we are not conscious of this original experience of direct involvement, we don’t even really know what we are dealing with when we deal with other persons. Theodor W. Adorno emphasized more than any other the fact that the appropriateness and quality of our conceptual thought is dependent upon the degree to which this thought is capable of remaining conscious of its original concept connection to an object of desire, a beloved person or thing. He even regarded the memory of this antecedent act of recognition as providing a kind of guarantee that an act of cognition has not, uh, has not instrumental, instrumentally reworked its object, but has grasped it with all the aspects of its concrete particularity.

None of these three authors set the non-epistemic requirements of involvement in a polar opposition to conceptual thought. Rather, they were all convinced that it is the moment– is at the moment in which our reflef-reflexive efforts lose consciousness of their origin in an act of antecedent recognition that we cross the threshold to pathology, in Dewey’s case, skepticism, in Stanley Cavell’s case, or as Adorno would have called it, identity thought. It is this element of forgetting, of amnesia, am, amnesia, am-

Amnesia, amnesia, sorry, that I would like to establish as the cornerstone of a redefinition of the concept of reification. To the degree that we, in our acts of cognition, lose sight of the fact that these acts owe their existence to our having taken up an antecedent recognitional stance, we do– we develop a tendency to perceive other persons as mere insensate objects. By speaking here of mere objects or things, I mean that in this kind of am-amnes- I’m just trying to be right.

[00:54:00] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Run your run.

(laughter)

[00:54:02] AXEL HONNETH:
Thank you. I ca– I, I, I, I stay, I stick to John. Amnesia.

We lose the ability to immediately understand the behavioral expressions of other persons as expressing a claim on us, a demand to react in an appropriate way. We may be indeed capably, in a cognitive sense, of perceiving the full spectrum of human expressions, but we lack, so to say, the feeling of connection that would be necessary in order for us to be affected by the expressions we perceive. In this respect, this occurrence of forgetting our antecedent recognition, which I understand at the core of all occurrences of reification, indeed corresponds to the result of a perceptive reification of the world.

In other words, our social surroundings appear in this situation quite similar to the autistic’s child’s world of perception as a totality of merely observable objects lacking all psychic impulse or emotion. By shifting the concept of reification from the simple level, at which it merely signifies the opposite of involvement or recognition, to a complex level, at which it describes a particular relation between recognition and cognition, we of course raise a series of problems that are not exactly easy to solve. First of all, we require at least a rough idea of how it might be possible that the cognitive process can cause the effect of our antecedent recognition to be forgotten.

At the comparable point in Lukács’ line of argumentation, at the place in his overly simple model where he describes the way in which merely observing behavior displaces active involvement, he inserts the social factor of the market. He is convinced that it is the anonymous behavioral compulsions of the capitalist free market system which cause subjects to take up a merely cognitive stance towards their surroundings. But when we replace this simple concept of reification with our high-level concept, then we cannot shift so directly and immediately to the sociological level of explanation as did Lukács.

Instead, we must explain beforehand in what way it is at all possible for us to subsequently lose sight of the recognitional prerequisites of social practices in the process of carrying out these very practices. Normally, it is said that the parca- pa- that the particular rules which we learn more through practice than through explicit instructions cannot be later unlearned. So how could it be possible that the both chronologically and categorically antecedent act of recognition could be forgotten in the course of our everyday acts of cognition.

I feel that it becomes easier to answer this question once it has been made clear that to forget does not possess that’s the strong meaning here that is generally employed in the term to unlearn. It cannot be true that our consciousness can simply dis-dispossessed of this fact of recognition, and that this fact thereby vanishes. Rather, a kind of reduced attentiveness must be at issue, which causes this fact to shift into the background and thus to slip out of our sight.

Reification in the sense of forgetfulness of recognition therefore means that in the course of our acts of cognition, we lose our attentiveness for the fact that this cognition owes its existence to an antecedent, antecedent act of recognition. Now, there are at least two exemplary cases of this form of reduced attentiveness, which are quite helpful for the task of distinguishing between different types of reification. The first case is when, in the course of our practices, we pursue a goal in such an energetic and one-sided manner that we lose our attentiveness for all other, possibly more original motives and purposes.

An example for this phenomenon might be the tennis player who in his ambitious focus on winning forgets that his opponent is in fact his best friend, for the sake of whom he took up the game in the first place. The way in which this go– h-his goal becomes independent of the context in which it originated is, in my opinion, one of the two patterns according to which we can make sense of the occurrence of reification. Our attentiveness for the fact of antecedent recognition becomes lost because in the course of our practices, the purpose of observing and cognizing our surroundings asserts its independence to such a degree that it banishes all other situational circumstances into the background.

The other case of reduced attentiveness that can be used here to explain the process of reification results not from internal, but from external factors influencing our actions. A series of thought schemata that influence our practices is by leading to a selective interpretation of social facts can signifi-significantly reduce our attentiveness for meaningful circumstances in a given situation. I prefer to abstain from an example here, since the case is so well known that it doesn’t require a trivial illustration In the course of our practices, our attentiveness for the fact of antecedent recognition can also be lost if we allow ourselves to be influenced by thoughts, schemata and prejudices that are ir-irreconcilable, irreconcilable with this fact.

In this sense, it would make much more sense to speak here not of forgetting, but of denial or defensiveness. So we have the two cases of forgetting the priority of re-recognition and of denial of the priority of recognition. By distinguishing between these two cases, we have become familiar with two patterns according to which the process of reification can be explained.

Within the framework of our more complex model, I could summarize by saying that either we are dealing with a process by which our cognitive stance becomes solidified or overemphasized due to the fact that its goal has become independent of its original context, or in the second case, with a retroactive denial of recognition for the sake of preserving a prejudice or stereotype. With this explanation, we have now acquired the means which could en-en-en-enable us to switch over to a sociological level of explanation, for we now possess sufficiently differentiated and sophisticated notions concerning which courses the process of reification can take. This in turn would enable us to investigate the social reality at the pr– of the present day with regard to the causes of these processes.

And it is clear that we are dealing here either with institutional practices which cause the purpose of observation to become independent of its roots in recognition, or socially effective thought schemata which compel a deni-denial of antecedent recognition. But I do not wish to take this step towards sociological analysis at this point, for that would open up a whole other issue and would give you another hour, uh, here to listen to me. Instead, I would like to conclude by turning to a problem I have left on the sidelines until now, And that would be the question of whether we could draw conclusions from our previous arguments for the primacy of recognition about humans’ relation to their natural surroundings and themselves.

The three philosophers I dealt with in the first lecture were all convinced that involvement, care, and recognition all enjoy a priority with regard to our relationship to nature. That just as we must be affected by other people before we can take up a more neutral stance, our physical surroundings must be disclosed to us in their qualitative value prior to our more objective dealings with them. Unlike this more comprehensive assertion, the theories I cited at the beginning of today’s lecture as independent exhibits are limited to assertions about the interpersonal world.

It is solely with relation to other persons that Tomasello, Peter Hobson, and Stanley Cavell all speak of the primacy of identification or acknowledgement, not at all in relation to non-human living entities, plants, or even things. Yet the concept of reification that I have here attempted to rescue in connection with the work of Lukács demands that we account for the possibility of a reifying perception, not only of our social world, but at least also of our physical world. The things we deal with in our everyday dealings with the world must also be regarded as entities to which we relate in an in– inappropriate manner by apprehending them in a merely neutral manner and according to external criteria.

It is therefore not difficult to see that this intuition confronts me with a problem that is partly due to the narrow basis of my talk of recognition. After all, how can the idea of reification of nature be justified if until now I have only demonstrated that we must preserve the priority of recognition in our relations towards other persons? Transitions.

Here as well, I don’t simply want to resort to the solution that Lukács had in mind. Rather, I prefer to take a wholly different path. If we wish to stick with Lukács, then we would not only have to demonstrate that we must always necessarily take up a stance of involvement towards nature as well.

And as we have seen, this would not be dif– uh, be a difficult task with the help of Heidegger and Dewey, since both in their diverse ways insisted on the fact that we must always already have disclosed our physical surroundings in their qualitative significance before we can relate to it in a the– in an, in a theoretical fashion. Beyond this, Lukács would also have to show that abandoning this kind of perspective is ultimately irreconcilable with the goal of apprehending nature as objectively as possible.

Only when it could be claimed here as well that recognition enjoys a categoric– categorial priority over cognition, could he prove in the end that in treating nature in an instrumental manner, we would violate a necessary precondition of our social practices? I don’t see how one could carry off such a proof today. Even in the works of Heidegger or Dewey, I hardly see any indications for the strong hypothesis that an objectivation of nature could in any way harm the primacy of care or qualitative experience.

Thus, the direct path taken by Lukács for justifying his idea of a possible reification of nature has been closed off to us. We may regard the possibility of interactive, recognitional dealings with animals, plants, and even things to be ethically desirable, but this normative preference cannot provide any sound arguments for proving that these kinds of dealings are socially irreplaceable. Instead, the attempt to pursue Lukács’ intuition along the detour of the priority of intersubjective recognition seems to be more promising.

And for this assertion, I can lean on a thought I have already mentioned briefly in referring to Adorno’s idea of a primordial act of imitation. Adorno also took over the notion, as we have seen, that our cognitive access to the objective world can only be opened through our identifi-identification with an important figure of attachment through the libidinal cathexes of a concrete other. But from this temporal argument, he also drew, drew an additional conclusion that throws some light on the question with which we are concerned here.

He believed that the precondition constituted by this act of identification not only means that the child learns to separate attitudes towards objects from the objects themselves, thereby gradually forming a concept of an external and independent world. He also asserts that a child will continue to preserve the perspective of the loved person to which it feels attached, regarding this perspective as a further aspect of the new– of the now objectively fixated object. This act of imitating a concrete second person, which dwells upon libidinal energy energies, becomes transmitted, so to say, onto the object by endowing it with additional components of meaning that the loved figure of attachment perce-perceives in the object.

And the more second person’s attitudes a subject can fuse to this same object in the course of its libidinal cathexis is, the more rich in aspects the object will ultimately appear to him in its objective reality. In this sense, Adorno was certainly convinced that it is possible to speak of recognition with relation to non, non-human objects. But for him, this manner of speaking only had the borrowed meaning that we show respect for all the particular aspects and meanings of those objects that owe their existence of their meanings to the attitudes of other persons towards these objects.

Perhaps one should formulate Adorno’s conclusion more decisively and reproduce it in an internal context between morality and knowledge. That this would produce the following: Our recognition of the individuality of other persons demands from us that we perceive objects in the part-particularity of all those expe– aspects that these are the persons at-attached to those objects in their respective attitudes toward them. But this normative escalation goes far beyond what is necessary in order to reformulate, with Adorno’s aid, the idea of a possible reification of nature.

By pursuing his line of reasoning, we come upon an opportunity to justify this concomitant idea without having to resort to speculations about interactive dealings with nature. As I argued before, the reification of human beings signifies the occurrence of losing sight of our den– of our deny– of, of, or denying the fact of antecedent recognition. With Adorno, we could add that this antecedent recognition also means respecting those aspects of meaning in an object that human beings accord that object.

If it is indeed the case that in recognizing other persons, we must at the same time recognize their subjective conceptions and feelings about non-human objects, then we could also speak without hesitation of a potential reification of nature. It would consist in losing our attentiveness in the course of our cognition of objects for all the additional aspects of meaning accorded to them by other persons. Just as in the case with the reification of other persons, a certain blindness in human beings to call, uh, to quote William James, is here at hand.

We then perceive animals, plants, or things in a merely objectively identifying manner without being aware of the fact that these objects possess a multiplicity of existential meanings for the persons around us. With these speculative considerations, I would like to bring my deliberations to a close. I had wanted to make an attempt of reviving Lukács’ concept of reification and making it fruitful once again for the present day.

To this end, I ins-insinuated that he had also asserted the primacy of recognition over cognition. But in looking back at the results of my efforts at the reconstruction, I’m highly unsure of whether he would have in fact seen himself acknowledged by such an attempt to co-opt his intuition. Thank you very much.

(applause)

[01:12:46] INTRODUCER:
Of, uh, rhetoric, comparative literature, and gender and women’s studies, the Maxine Elliot Professor of those fields, uh, and will be known to you, uh, across many disciplines as, uh, an internationally acclaimed expert, uh, in philosophy, European, uh, philosophy, continental philosophy in particular, as well as, uh, feminist, gender and queer theory. Uh, among her publications are Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, which came out in 2000. Excitable Speech came out three years earlier in 1997.

The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, also 97. Gender Trouble: Uh, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990. Uh, Bodies That Matter, which came out a bit after that.

I don’t have that on my sheet, but it’s a book I know quite well. And most recently, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, uh, and then Undoing Gender, both of which appeared last year. And finally, a book that, uh, is a rare tribute indeed.

It’s simply called The Judith Butler Reader, edited by, uh, Judith and Sara Salih. Uh, she’s, um, a, uh, student of, uh, all the fields that Axel has mastered, and in fact, gave the Adorno lectures in Frankfurt a couple of years ago. And it’s a great pleasure indeed, uh, to ask her to deliver the second comment, uh, of the, uh, three-day, uh, Tanner Lectures.

(applause)

[01:14:12] JUDITH BUTLER:
Um, well, thank you very much. Um, I, I just wanna begin by saying how pleased I am to be responding to, um, Axel Honneth, um, to his work, and to engage with some of the, um, extremely interesting issues he raises for us here today and yesterday. I think it’s important to note that we have heard what we have heard constitutes probably the most extended and thoughtful engagement with Lukács on the issue of reification that has been done in recent years, and for that, I’m enormously grateful.

Honneth’s efforts to rethink what reification might still mean for us is, of course, based on a specific reading of Lukács’ work, but it also seeks to bring forward, um, many of those themes into a productive engagement with more contemporary concerns in philosophy, psychology, and social criticism. It’s probably fair to say that Honneth has done more than any other contemporary philosopher to bring our attention back to the problem of recognition, not only in Hegel, but in contemporary social theory and philosophical anthropology. He now seems to be doing the same for reification, and this means that we will have many questions to ask him in the course of this exchange and its aftermath.

Yesterday, Axel brought our attention to one aspect of reification that seems especially important. He notes that it’s not only that the re– that reification entails treating humans as objects, where objects are understood on the model of the commodity, but that subjects come to regard themselves in reifying ways as well. He remarked that for Lukács, it is in the behavior of the subject itself that commodity exchange affects changes which ultimately affect that subject’s entire relation To the surrounding world.

Accordingly, Lukács makes way for an account of reification as a habit of detached observation, in which even one’s perceptual field is treated as a field of objects from which one remains strangely distanciated. Over and against this reification of the subject’s relation to its own perceptual field, can Lukács demonstrate a true or genuine praxis? In the second lecture we heard today, Honneth finds that Lukács cannot alone supply this true or genuine praxis, but that he– but indeed, he offers us some clues for understanding what it might mean.

Along the way, Honneth recruits Cavell, Dewey, and Heidegger to try and work out what that praxis that he calls recognition might come to mean. The most fruitful of Lukács’s paths is taken up by Honneth and is described as an approach to reification that focuses on, uh, those observing modes of practice which are understood as a kind of reifying agency, and then to contrast those observational modes reified, uh, with those of an ideal of praxis. These habits of observation form over time.

They constitute our lives in part, sometimes even appear to overwhelm our lives and our world. But according to Honneth, they are never fully successful in eradicating the originally involved and caring engagement with the world. When we ask more narrowly in what this involvement and care consists, we receive several formulations that are worth considering in some detail.

It’s not enough simply to be participatory rather than observational, since there are all kinds of modes of involvement and participation that clearly would not satisfy the ideal of a genuine praxis that Honneth is outlining for us here. In fact, what seems to define the ideal of genuine praxis is the norm of reciprocity, one that he understands to be articulated in its nascent form in the relationship between the child and the caregiver. One that he explicitly calls the defining structure of the social bond.

So I think it’s fair to say that not any sort of participation or involvement will do if genuine praxis is what we’re after. It will have to be a kind of participation and involvement that affirms the primary emotional attachments through which we enter into sociality. And it will have to be a kind of participation and involvement that carries reciprocity as its implicit and articulate structure.

Honneth tries to elaborate on this view when he claims that human subjects normally participate in social life by placing themselves in the position of their counterparts, whose desires, dispositions, and thoughts they have learned to understand as the motives for the latter’s actions. To participate then means to take up the position of the other, and if we fail to take up the position of the other, we can’t really be said to be participating. Indeed, if we fail to take up the position of the other, then we maintain instead a set of reifying relations to that other.

It would seem that, according to this scheme, our choices are either to be merely observational, and hence reifying, and fail to take up the position of the other, or to be participatory, by which we mean, among other things, taking up or adopting the position of the other. Many questions abound. Can we fail to take up the position of other– the other, but still engage in a participatory relation to them?

Perhaps we can, and that we can still call those forms of engagement participatory, even though they do not rise to the level of a genuine praxis. How do we understand hateful or sadistic impulses toward the other? It would seem that these kinds of emotional dispositions and expressions are neither quite observational nor involved and engaged in ways that subscribe to principles of reciprocity.

Are such modes of– and such modes of dispositions seem to be neither. And if that’s the case, what does it tell us about the framework we are asked to accept at this point? It would be one thing to claim that taking up the position of the other defines the very meaning of participation, in which case to participate, to participate means precisely to adopt that position and nothing more.

It would, however, be another thing to claim that one form of participation is adopting the point of view of the other, and that that’s a better form of participation than some others. I’d like tentatively to suggest that this second view seems a bit more plausible. If we consider hateful and aggressive modes of relating, we could, according to this model, conclude that hateful and aggressive modes of relating are a consequence of the observational mode characteristic of reification.

The observational mode implies that others are objects, and so accordingly, we treat them as objects. And violence is an expression, if not the ultimate expression, of that sort of reifying treatment. But what if violence is considered precisely as a way of being involved?

At that point, involvement itself loses its presumptively normative character, and we’re left with modes of involvement that bear different moral meanings for us, and among which we have to negotiate. Of course, many social psychological theories after the Shoah debate this issue, questioning whether the obliteration of moral sensibility among the Nazis was a result of the hegemony of instrumental reason, asking whether, for instance, the systematic torture and death of humans was conditioned by a kind of dissociated disconnection, and whether this dissociation was itself conditioned by a triumph of instrumental reason, or indeed reification. The fact that human bodies were quite literally reduced to ash or transformed into soap and lampshades gives us the most vivid and horrid, horrid concretization of this view that reification works as a way of characterizing human violence in its extreme form.

The problem, of course, is that instrumental reason and modes of reification can themselves become forms of passion, modes of attachment, sites of emotional investment and excitation. They are not by definition detached and dry and scientific. And even if they sometimes take this form, there can be an erotics that sustains that detachment and dryness, even what we might call an excitation about being cold.

Um, in this way, understanding sadism and torture then, um, it’s not so much that the other is treated as a thing, but rather precisely as someone who is sensate and alive, and so capable of suffering and exhibiting suffering. Um, and indeed inducing the exhibition of the suffering of the other may well be, uh, a, a specific aim of that kind of sadistic torture. It seems to me that at this point, it would be hard to say that neutrality is the problem.

What seems to me to be the problem, interestingly enough, is a certain kind of passion or involvement, uh, that has, um, that has extraordinarily, um, uh, violent and unethical, uh, consequences. Um, so I’m going to assume that Honneth agrees with me, at least on this point, um, that there we cannot assume that if only we are passionate and emotionally involved, we will do the right thing or implicitly index a norm of reciprocity. In my view, there’s no innate moral trajectory in involvement, participation, and emotionality, since we are beings who, from the start, both love and resist our dependency, and whose psychic reality is, by definition, ambivalent.

As much as attachment is a precondition for development, a thesis with which I wholeheartedly concur, so differentiation is probably an equally necessary precondition for development, and differentiation is a task that engages us throughout life and which makes for the persistent structure of ethical quandary. How do I remain attached and yet remain boundaried as a self? How do I live this boundary that encloses me from others and opens me to them?

Indeed, I don’t think we can say, as Honneth has argued elsewhere, that attachment precedes differentiation, since to attach to something is already to have to cross the divide between that thing, that person, and myself. And so differentiation is as much a condition of attachment, maybe even sometimes its curse, as it is its consequence. So we have to ask, I think, whether Lukács’ diagnosis of what ails us is really correct.

Is it our powers of detachment and observation that put us at risk of destroying what Honneth calls the human or the social bond? Or is it also part of our emotional constitution, something constitutively with us and our relationship to what it means to form a bond within conditions of dependency that produces the permanent problem of aggression, a permanent struggle between love and aggression, we might say, and so the structure of one of the more permanent ethical quandaries in human life. So I’d like to return for a moment to what it means then to take up the position of a second person, because clearly this operates in a very fundamental way, um, for Honneth’s view.

He makes clear that this capacity to take up, take over, or to adopt, um, another’s point of view, um, uh, constitutes a capacity for reciprocal understanding, uh, and that this idea of reciprocal understanding in turn defines recognition As we are to understand it. It’s in this sense as well that recognition precedes and conditions cognition and establishes what he calls the ontogenetic priority of recognition over cog-cognition. As such, it is prior to all forms of observation, which would include then observational methods.

Indeed, this communicative stance through which a reciprocal understanding of motives is achieved defines human behavior essentially. Honneth writes, “Human behavior is– behavior is distinguished by the communicative stance through the adoption of a second person’s perspective.” We see the beginnings of this capacity in the infant, he claims, since the infant contains this principle of reciprocal understanding in his or her ability to take up the perspective of the other.

Now, I’m not sure which parts of developmental psychology and socialization research support the views that Honneth then elaborates. And I have a little suspicion that infants are being figured as baby Kantians, but we’ll have to discuss that. Um, but what remains somewhat surprising to me here is that he turns to these fields in order to, to justify or at least to reinforce his claim about the primordial character of recognition.

Developmental psychology is a large and contested field. One would have to decide among competing methodologies and justify the choice of one methodology rather than another. That doesn’t quite happen here, but perhaps it will in successive publications.

Socialization research suggests that there’s empirical work on the, on the phenomenon of socialization that would provide the basis for his claims about the priority of recognition to cognition. What seems confusing here is that this work relies all of it on observational methods that by and large are criticized within the very framework upon which Honneth relies. Indeed, he spent the first several pages of his lectures making the argument that existential involvement, forms of caring, and the primordial occurrence of recognition is not only prior to and more fundamental than detached observation, but that it constitutes or can constitute something of its opposite.

Why rely suddenly on an observational method, then, in order to supply empirical grounding for this very claim? Indeed, why the turn to the empirical here at all? After all, if recognition is primordial, and if it is coextensive with basic acts of perception that precede and condition cognition, and if recognition constitutes a form of interaction that precedes and conditions forms of observation, then it would seem that we need to reverse the order here, contextualizing the study of empirical phenomenon such as socialization within the more fundamental framework of recognition.

To his credit, I think he moves in this direction toward the end of his paper. After all, if our perceptions and then our cognition emerge from within the framework of recognition, it would be within this framework that any– that, that it would be this framework that is presupposed by any particular empirical inquiry. I’m assuming that Axel would agree with me here again.

If we were then to pursue the empirical inquiry in order to supply empirical proof or reinforcement for a framework that itself conditions empirical observation, we would be effectively reversing and nullifying the argument for which we are seeking proof. So let’s not do that. The better strategy, I think, is to ask, how would developmental psychology itself be redefined if it were to ground its own observational methods in a more primordial recognitional attitude?

See, I’m more Honnetian than he is in this sense. How would its methodology change, and what would its relation to social theory and philosophical analysis look like? How then are we to understand this recognitional attitude if it is supposed to entail adopting the point of view of the other?

Now, I’ve been thinking about this, was up last night thinking about this. It seems to me we have these options. We are recognitional if we are able to adopt the other’s point of view.

I gather that this is not the same as making the other’s point of view the same as my own. It seems to mean only, as Axel Honneth suggested, understanding another’s reasons for acting. Yesterday, Raymond Geuss suggested that it means that I am compelled to take into account the other person’s desire.

Now, both of these seem to be the kinds of reflections that adults engage in when they consider possible modes of conduct. I gather the infant is not in the business of understanding another’s reasons for acting when it makes its most initial emphatic attachments and identifications. It may be, in fact, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has suggested, that identification precedes the formation of the subject.

And so the mimetic echo of the other, we might say, instigates the “I” who maintains, quite unconsciously, the trace of the other as the basis of itself. These are complex matters that I cannot fully interrogate here, but I think we can see that the kind of moral deliberations that adults conduct are not quite phenomenologically apt as descriptions for what happens at the early stages of attachment identification, identification, and responsiveness. Indeed, it seems not quite right to ask an infant to be moral, nor does it seem quite right to find the incipient structure of morality in an infant’s efforts to secure its basic needs.

It worries me that the version of attachment and taking over the point of view of the other to which Honneth turns is one in which the other is understood as a corrective authority. He cites some proponents of developmental theory to the effect that, and I quote, “A child must first have emotionally identified with an attachment figure before it can accept this person’s stance toward the world as a corrective authority.” End quote.

In this case, to adopt the second person point of view means to grant the authority of that second person point of view and to internalize that authority as truth. This seems very different from the model of reciprocity that seemed to guide the earlier formulations of what it means to adopt the point of view of the second person. It’s one thing to grant that another has reasons for acting as she or he does, and another thing to obligate myself to asking, um, to obligate myself to take into account the desires of the other.

But it’s a fully different matter to grant authority to the other and to internalize that authority as truth and as the condition of my access to an objective world. I think that these various senses of what it means to adopt the second person’s point of view need to be distinguished if we are to understand the bearing that these theories of early childhood have on the norm of reciprocit-reciprocity that is said to define recognition as the primordial and abiding structure of the human, uh, bond. In fact, the infant’s internalization of the other as a corrective authority assumes an asymmetrical relationship, right?

So that the infant’s love and attachment involves accepting this, the, the caregiver’s or the parental point of view, um, as an authoritative one. And I believe it is precisely this mode of attachment and love that Freud, uh, asks us to guard against in his writings on mass psychology, right? Because what it does is it, is it, is it, is it calls up the infatuated and uncritical relationship to the authoritative other, rather than, uh, invoking a, a, a norm of, of, of reciprocity.

I found it interesting to note, um, the kind of presumptions at work in this developmental theory. The relation to a world of objects is facilitated by a primary relation to the other, so the child only learns to relate to an objective world through first learning how to take up the perspective of the second person. Thus, a child takes up a relation to the external world through de-centering its own primarily egocentric position.

But if an egocentric position is there prior to any relation to the external world and prior to taking up the second person perspective, this is an interesting psychology, one that is more clearly focused on the primacy of the ego than on the primacy of relationality. Crudely put, the infant is attached to itself prior to its attachment to others. But is this actually true?

And what do we make of those psychological positions that would seem to be much more closely allied with Honneth that work out of the object relations thesis that relationality is actually prior to and conditioning of the formation of the ego? It would seem to me to be closer, I think, to the kind of position, um, he wants to take. Okay, so I’m going to, um, um, I’m just going to say some final remarks here, and then I’m looking forward to hearing what Jonathan has to say.

If we must first attach to a second person, and as part of that attachment come to adopt that second person’s perspective, it would seem that we must first regard that second person as a second person. That is, we have to come to regard that second person as not me, separate from me. Only on the occasion of this differentiation do I come to encounter that second person as a separate one and so to adopt their point of view.

Let’s hold off for the moment about thinking about what it means to adopt a point of view and just stay with the logical presuppositions of this encounter that is so importantly a part of the normative dimension of human praxis for Honneth. If the child must first take on the second person point of view and even perceive through this second person’s perspective in order to perceive objects as entities of an objective world that exists independently of our stance toward it, then it seems clear that the child must undergo a loss of its egocentrism, its narcissism, if you will, and not only form an attachment, but take on the perspective of the one to whom it is attached in order then to understand an objective world that exists with some degree of significant indifference toward the child. This loss of egocentrism is accomplished then in at least two steps.

The first is through the recognition of the second person as second, and the taking on of the second person’s perspective. And then through that displacement in the second person perspective or appropriation of the second person perspective, opening up perceptually to a world that exists in its objectivity and also emphatically in its in-independence from us. If this is a mode of development that we understand to be appropriate, if not healthy, then it would seem that it’s precisely by denying our involvement with that world that we come to understand it in its objectivity and independence.

Now, of course, toward the end of his remarks, it seems to me, um, that, um, that Axel, uh, tries to suggest that, um, there are forms of objectivity that are not the same as reification. And then it seems to me that there are certain implications for the philosophy of science, for instance, in your latter remarks. Um, is it the case that through identifying with another and taking a second person’s point of view, I then can know the objectivity of the world?

Is it only through considering other people’s perspectives on that objectivity that an intersubjectively given world becomes available to me, both intersubjective and objective at the same time? And it seems to me that, that, it seems to me that, that, um, Axel is moving in that direction, trying to redefine, um, uh, the objective world as an intersubjectively given one that would be very different from, um, a kind of objectivity that would be, um, uh, understood as, as, as a, a reification. Um, and, um, uh, it seems that adopting the perspective of the second person not only introduces us to a new as-aspect of the object, an object of nature, but it’s the means through which that objectivity is itself constituted.

I– it seems to me that Honneth wishes to introduce a new notion of objectivity here, and it would be interesting, I think, uh, to hear more about it. The task clearly, um, as he puts it in his final remarks, is to distinguish between those forms of objectivity that continue to maintain the trace of their origin in recognitional attitudes and that affirm in some way, um, uh, that trace. Um, what does it mean to affirm that trace?

How would we be able to pick out or, uh, distinguish among forms of objectivity that avow the trace of that origin in recognitional attitudes and those forms of objectivity that, uh, are amnesiac in relationship to that trace. How would we, how would we be able to read that or know that in some way? Um, um, it’s left to be understood how precisely that takes place, but I think the direction of his thought is interesting in line, say, with feminist philosophies of science, with the new, new approaches to objectivity, for instance, that we see in the work of Evelyn Fox Keller, one in which objectivity cannot be fully extricated from primary forms of relationality without risking a destructive relation to the lifeworld.

Would we have to distinguish here between objective and objectifying thought? Would the objective be built through intersubjective means? Would the objective– would the objectifying effectively destroy the intersubjective basis of the objective?

These are open questions, and I look forward to discussing them.

(applause)

[01:38:56] INTRODUCER:
Thanks very much, Judith. If, as we have seen, the issues of recognition and reification are at the nodal point of philosophy and psychology, there is no more appropriate third commentator for this, uh, panel than, uh, our next speaker, Jonathan Lear, who is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Uh, he is, uh, trained as an analyst, as a psycho, uh, analyst who has written extensively, uh, in psychoanalytic theory.

In fact, winning several awards for the National Association for Psychoanalysis for writing the best book, uh, uh, of the year in that field. In addition to that, he has published widely in philosophy, most, uh, uh, most often in ancient philosophy. Among his publications are Aristotle and Logical Theory of 1980; uh, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand in 1988; Love and Its Place in Nature: a Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis, which came out in 1990; Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul in 1998; Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, 2001; Therapeutic Action: an Earnest Plea for Irony, which came out in 2003.

Uh, and, uh, this spring we will see the appearance of a book simply entitled Freud, to be brought out as the latest title in the Routledge Philosophers serie– uh, series of Freud as a Philosopher. Uh, it is indeed a great pleasure to welcome Jonathan Lear to give the third response to Axel Honneth’s Tanner Lectures.

(applause)

[01:40:35] JONATHAN LEAR:
Thank you. Um, firstly, I’d like to thank the Tanner Foundation, the members of the Tanner Committee, Berkeley, for bringing us all together and inviting me to comment on Professor Honneth’s fascinating lectures. And I would like to thank, uh, Professor Honneth.

Um, we’ve all heard, uh, these lectures are at once serious and imaginative. And I think Professor Honneth, uh, is a thinker of astonishing breadth. Uh, his insights have run, uh, in the past couple of days from Lukács to Heidegger through contemporary developments in literature, ethics, neuropsychiatry, to Dewey, developmental psychology, and the philosophy of language.

And he has disciplined all of this to the, um, big questions that animate the Tanner lectures. Uh, who are we? What are we like?

Uh, do we distort our understanding of ourselves, of others, of the world in ways that interfere with our flourishing? There is so much in these lectures that is thought-provoking that I am genuinely grateful to be here, so thank you. And whatever reifying tendencies may be hidden in my practices, I am not the commentator who mistook his invitation for a hat.

(laughter)

Still, it seems to me that the job of a commentator is to face up to a tough question. Uh, am I actually persuaded by pers- Professor Honneth’s argument? And if so, why?

And if not, why not? And ultimately, at least let’s put it this way, this far in the discussion, I’m not persuaded, and I’m going to explain why not. But there is so much in Professor Honneth’s, uh, work that I find intriguing, that I offer these comments as a friendly but skeptical interlocutor.

The central problem, as I see it, and in a nutshell, one might call the problem of the slippery middle. Um, there are three crucial terms for Honneth: uh, recognition, care, and reification. And I think all of these terms are polyvalent.

They each pick out a host of phenomena that have in common, I think, at best, a family resemblance. And in crudest outline, I’m going to explain this, but in crudest outline, if one has a syllogistic argument of the form all A’s are B, and all B’s are C, therefore all A’s are C, one had better be sure that the middle term B picks out the very same thing in both premises. Otherwise, there’s going to only be an appearance of validity.

I suspect that recognition, reification, and care are ambiguous, and that they allow for a kind of slippage in the middle term that I’m going to explain. And as a result, though, one gets to conclusions that are stronger than the evidence or argument allows. Now, Professor Honneth is an astonishingly fertile thinker, and he covers a wide variety of theories.

But each of the salient theories has in common that it has the structure of a secularized version of the fall. That is, there is some prior condition, and the priority is different. The priority may be historical, or it may be in terms of individual psychological development, or it may be an atemporal conceptual priority, or it may be an atemporal ontological priority.

But in each case, there is a prior condition which is in some sense good, and we might call this prior condition recognition or care, whatever. Um, then there is either some disruption of that prior condition or some distortion of it. And now these will obviously be different accounts of what this, this– there will be different accounts of what the sources of disruption or distortion, um, is or are, depending on what the, what the narrative, um, is or are.

Say, um, you know, wheth- You know, if the narrative is social critique or developmental psychology or fundamental ontology, it will be a different account of what the distortion is. For Lukács, for example, and as we’ve seen, the distorting force was capitalism or the means of production.

And now we are in a less good condition. And let us call this con- less good condition, uh, it and its processes reification. Now, in this less good condition, we systematically misinterpret ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit.

And this misinterpretation isn’t simply cognitive, it is, as we’ve been told, emotive and encompassing. It affects all aspects of life. However, precisely because our current condition is a fall, nad– uh, that is a turning away from or being turned away from or a distortion of a prior good condition, we can recognize glimpses of that prior good condition even it’s in, in the distortions.

And thus, there is a kind of redemptive hope that we can recover a sense of that prior condition, that prior good condition, recognition, and take it forward into a better future. Now, when Honneth gives us his own account of reification, he characterizes it as a kind of forgetting, and that gives us the hope of remembering something that we have forgotten. And this, by definition, would get, would get us past this sort of bad condition of reification.

Now, by saying that the various narratives all have the structure of the fall, I do not thereby mean to impugn them. I mean, perhaps our condition does fit this structure, and perhaps a narrative of the, the structure will help us. But I do think that seeing the narratives this way ought to awaken us to an occupational hazard.

For there will be a tendency in any theory that has this structure to build in too much goodness into the prior condition. For it is that prior goodness that is not only supposed to help us recognize and criticize our present bad condition, it is meant to validate some image of how we might go forward. But if we have a narrative that basically goes: prior condition recognition good, to present condition reification bad, to posterior condition recognition good, to what extent is the posterior condition’s claim to legitimacy or to our allegiance based on its claim to be the inheritor of this original goodness of the prior condition?

And if it is, might we unwittingly be building too much goodness into that prior condition? Now, obviously, as you, as you won’t be surprised to hear, I think the answer to that question is basically yes. Uh, since Professor Honneth has in today’s lecture been talking about developmental psychology, I’m going to use that as an example, but I think a version of my problem is going to arise for every version of Honneth’s narrative.

Now, let me at once wholeheartedly endorse Professor Honneth’s claim that infantile capacities for recognition are crucial for development. Indeed, I think the child development literature, uh, supports Professor Honneth’s claims even more than he thinks. Uh, he says at one point, and this is a quote from his lecture, “Indeed, a tendency towards cognitivism can certainly be said to prevail among the dominant majority of attempts to explain the origin of mental activity in the child’s communicat-communicative relationship to a figure of attachment.”

Unquote. I don’t want to argue about what’s dominant or whatever, but I do want to point out that there’s a huge literature on child development. And to give just one example, the attachment theorists in Britain and the United States who developed John Bowlby’s work going back to the 1950s, the work of child psychoanalysts going back to Anna Freud and Melanie Klein as early as the 1920s, and the mother-infant work of D.W. Winnicott, all of which stress the emotional aspects of recognition in the relations of infant and her emerging world.

And in terms of this wealth of contemporary work, I’d just like to mention, uh, Peter Fonagy a-and his various collaborators’ work. One particular book that is– I, I found really excellent on this is called Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. This is a fine piece of empirical research which makes out Honneth’s basic claim.

So let us agree with Professor Honneth that an emotively laden capacity for recognition is a crucial part of infant development. But even here, there is a problem, I think, which social theorists and philosophers tend to overlook. I’m only going to mention it now.

I’ll return to it in a few minutes at the end. As the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott argued in a series of marvelous papers in the 1950s and 1960s, part of what it is for me to develop my capacity for recognition is to develop my capacity to hate. As I increasingly come to recognize that mommy is indeed herself an agent with her own desires and projects, I have an ever-increasing basis for being angry at her, for thinking of ways to manipulate her, punish her, and otherwise bring her under my control.

And I may use sophisticated cognitive and emotional understandings of mommy’s psychological makeup to achieve my ends. In short, even if we accept that the capacity for recognition is there in infancy and that it involves an emotionally laden, uh, processes, it does not thereby follow that there need be any respect for the autonomy of the recognized other. Or put it a different way, I may recognize mommy’s independence by figuring out ever more psychologically sophisticated ways to manipulate her.

As I said, I’m going to return to the problem of the place of aggression and recognition in a few moments. But for now, in this way, I, I very much agree with things that, uh, that Judith Butler was saying earlier. But for now, for the purposes of the argument, I’d like to make a distinction between two species of recognition.

And I hope that– I hope I don’t go too quickly here, so you gotta get it in mind. First, there’s one I– what I’m gonna call recognition as sine qua non.

It’s recognition as sine qua non for any real development at all. That is, what is the minimum of emotive, cognitive recognizing of another’s point of view that is required for the development of a capacity for symbolic thought, language, and ability to relate to others? Bare minimum.

Okay, that’s re– that’s re– that’s the first kind of recognition of sine qua non. But secondly, there is recognition as a paradigm of healthy human development. And that is, what are the capacities of sympathy, empathy, acknowledgement of others that are required for human flourishing?

Now, these two forms of recognition, sine qua non and a paradigm of some kind of flourishing, are importantly different. And here, I think the challenging contrast case is not with autism, which is the case that Honneth discusses, but with certain forms of narcissism. Now, there are certain kinds of types of narcissists who are extremely good at recognizing that other people have their own point of view, along with their own motivations, desires, and projects.

And these people can be extraordinarily charming and emotionally engaged, and they can be remarkably attuned to the needs of others. Now, certain successful politicians come to mind, so do certain kinds of seducers and other con artists. And these people can use emotionally laden language of recognition, and they can, you know, feel your pain, encourage you to respect the diversity of others, and indeed encourage you to recognize others’ points of view.

The psychoanalyst Helena Deutsch talked of the as-if personality, and this is an example of the as-if apostle of recognition. Now, for this kind of narcissist, it can be all in the service of gratifying his or her desires. Now, these people do have remarkable social and recognitional skills, but it’s all being deployed in the service of treating people as means to their ends.

Now, as a turn of phrase, we might want to say that these people treat others as objects. Certainly, their behavior is not pretty, and it is open to criticism, but it is not clear that h-there has been any kind of ontological mistake. It is not as though they are treating other people simply, say, as a car that has run out of gas.

Now, if I wanna get the car going again, I don’t have to consider its feelings or its motivations or its projects. I don’t have to think about what it thinks about me. I don’t have to mislead it into thinking that its projects are my projects.

I recognize the problem’s mechanical. If I wanna get the car going, I’ve gotta get some gas. But if I’m a talented narcissist and I really want to do get this other person up and running in my direction, I will take her humanity into account.

I will realize that I’m dealing with a different ontological realm than I’m dealing with when I’m dealing with my car. Now, I may pay close attention to this other person’s desires, hopes, and projects. I may have become very good at recognizing the distinctive humanity of others because I want to use them.

Now, this may be awful, but it doesn’t seem like an ontological mistake, and nor need it involve any kind of forgetting of some prior recognitional capacity. That will only seem so if we can play– if we conflate recognition as sine qua non with recognition as developmental paradigm. Now, obviously, there is some kind of recognitional capacity these people lack, a certain kind of capacity for empathy and sympathy with others.

There is some kind of developmental deficit here, and we may call this deficit a deficit in the capacity for recognition. But this is a recognitional capacity which is a developmental paradigm. This is the recognitional capacity we equate with the capacity to flourish.

Surely, the narcissists I’m describing do lack that recognitional capacity, but that recognitional capacity wasn’t necessary for them to develop into the kinds of narcissists they are. On this sense of recognition, this need not have been a capacity they once had and then lost. There is just no evidence for that.

These are people who are using and developing the recognitional skills they’ve had all along. It’s just not what we think of as a paradigm of human flourishing. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that there are all sorts of distinctively human relations which go back long before modernity, which involve dominating others, humiliating them, exerting mastery over them, and otherwise subjugating them.

These are distinctively human forms of being with. So is cannibalism. Warriors of a certain Native American tribe I’m studying would, on occasion, eat the hearts of their defeated enemy.

This was in some sense vengeance, and in some sense, it was intended as a deterrent. Um, and these are– vengeance and deterrents are distinctively human forms of recognition. But it was also a recognition of the bravery of their opponent.

By eating the heart, the hope was that the warrior would also consume the other’s bravery, and he would now have that bravery inside of him. Now, these forms of behavior may be vulnerable to various forms of critique, but one form of criticism I think is not justified by the evidence, that all of these forms require covering over or forgetting forms of recognition that had to have been there in childhood, nor is there evidence that an ontological mistake has been made. Now, Honneth argues that, quote, “The attitude of care enjoys not only a genetic, but also a conceptual priority over the neutral comprehension of reality,” unquote.

And I agree with him about that. And he continues, quote, “I believe it is possible to justify the hypothesis that an affirmative recognitional stance enjoys a genetic and categorical priority over all other attitudes towards the self and the world.” Unquote.

And again, in some meaning of those words, I think he’s right. But I don’t think it’s the meaning he needs. And to use a Nietzschean analogy, the hungry lion cares about the little lamb he has just recognized.

Uh, he certainly doesn’t have a detached or neutral stance towards it, and his recognitional stance is marvelously affirmative. Um, indeed, the lion is about to respect the lamb as a lamb. Um, now, the, the talented, the talented narcissist that I’ve been describing is a kind of predator slightly higher up the food chain.

He cares about human beings all right, and he just certainly does not take a detached or neutral stance with respect to them. And he has an affirmative recognitional stance towards others in that the desires, intentions, motives, and projects of others really do matter to him. Indeed, they really do matter in an emotional and cognitive way.

It’s just that they don’t matter to him in the way we feel they ought to matter. If we are appalled by his appalling behavior, and I do think there’s a lot to be appalled by, we may well wanna say that he’s treating other people like objects, and under the influence of a social– some social theory, we m-may wanna say he’s reifying them. But there’s no evidence that he had a recognitional capacity in childhood that has somehow been lost.

And perhaps certain so, you know, perhaps certain societal formations do encourage the production of such pathological character types. I, you know, I don’t know that. But if we are looking for a general social account of what we have all become, this doesn’t seem to be it.

Um, now it’s– I think it’s important that social theorists and philosophers consult the research of developmental psychology. I think it’s marvelous that, um, Professor Honneth has done so in these lectures. But I think it’s also important to recognize a danger for anyone who wants to make the kind of argument that Professor Honneth wants to make.

For developmental psychologists, this may sound truistic, they’re concerned with development. Now, this is a truism, but it has very significant consequences. To recognize anything as development, one needs a conception of a goal or a telos that the development is developing toward.

One needs this even if one is tracking failures of development. Implicitly or explicitly, there will be some conception of human flourishing as a developmental paradigm, and there will be a conception of psychological and social well-being in terms of which the development is being evaluated. So for instance, in terms of the mature adult capacities for recognition of others, developmental sugges– psychologists will not in general be asking what are the bare minimum conditions for developing the capacity to recognize other people’s desires, projects, and concerns in order to become better at manipulating them as means to your ends?

No, they will be asking a more general question, which is what are the conditions of recognizing others as independent agents? And having isolated this richer sense of developmental paradigm, they will look for the antecedents in infancy and stress their importance for development. As far as I’m concerned, that’s fine.

But we need to keep in mind that what we are discovering are, are the antecedents in the development of this paradigm of recognition. It is not then that we are starting out with an independently identifiable infantile good, recognition as a basis for remembering it, recovering it, or legitimating it later in life. Just the reverse.

We’re starting out with a later conception of health and finding its antecedents in childhood. And it doesn’t follow that we are discovering the nece-necessary conditions for the possibility of recognition of humans as such. There may be emotionally laden cognitive abilities for recogni-recognizing others as agents who have desires, beliefs, intentions, and projects of their own, which are nevertheless split off from this developmental paradigm.

And I take it that certain forms of narcissism do fit this profile. So in conclusion, I want to put everything back in the nutshell I began with. Um, there might be some form of reasoning that on the surface looks very plausible.

It sounds something like this: childhood development requires recognition. Recognition is required throughout development, therefore recognition ought to be present in adult life. Therefore, if some aspect of recognition is missing in adult life, it must somehow have been erased or distorted along the way.

Now, in this argument, as I’ve just put it, is as I see it, the– all the premises are true, the conclusion doesn’t follow. For everything depends on how we are trading between what I’m going to call recognition sub one. This will make philosophers happy and everybody else unhappy.

Um,

(laughter)

uh, everything depends on how we are trading between recognition sub one, which is the bare capacity needed for development of language as a basic social skill and the basic social skills, and recognition two, which is the capacities for recognition that are part of flourishing. The mere fact that recognition one does have to be there in childhood in order for us to develop at all, I mean, to sort of not be autistic, does not give us any basis for thinking that recognition two two ought to be there in adulthood. We may indeed correctly think that recognition two ought to be there in adulthood, and when it isn’t there, we may look for reasons why it failed to develop out of earlier capacities for recognition.

But– And we may even find that this failure is significantly tied to certain social conditions. That is, we may track the failure to develop the capacity for recognition two, that is par– uh, flourishing or paradigm.

But it doesn’t follow that a person must already have been exercising those ca-capacities, or he never would have acquired language, knowledge, or objects, of ob– knowledge of objects, or the capacity to recognize others in the recognition, one type of sense. Okay, so let me close with a brief remark that I’ve been promising about human r-aggression and our capacity to recognize it. There seems to me to be something wishful about the social critiques that like Lukács’s that Professor Honneth discusses, which covers over salient facts about human beings, and that’s what I want to bring to our attention in closing.

For if any social theory posits some prior condition which is good, let’s call it recognition or care, and then some condition of the fall, call it capitalism or the means of production or commodification or reification, then there is at least a hope that if only we could overcome this intervening condition, then we could return to or restore or perhaps transform in new ways some Um, descendant of of that original good condition. But what if the original condition was actually what I’ll call a mixed bag? Um, what if we started out not only ready to empathize and sympathize with others, but also as greedy, competitive, aggressive, envious, jealous, murderous little animals?

Um, and what if our developmental capacities of recognition of others were in the service of all of those needs? The society may have shaped those aggressive impulses in various ways. When it comes to the bare fact of aggression, its existence in human life, to use Bob Dylan’s memorable phrase, we keep on keeping on.

Um, now ironically, Freud, writing at this very same time as Lukács, made this point about communism. He called it, quote, “An untenable illusion,” because– that’s unquote. Uh, because it made the wishful assumption that humans are basically good and well-disposed towards others, and that the only probl-problem was that private property was getting in the way.

This is a quote from Freud. Quote, “Aggression was not created by property.” It reigned almost without limit in primitive times when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery.

It forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people. Unquote. What would people do after the cra- class struggle had been overcome?

Find something else to fight about. At least that’s what Freud thought. Now, my point is not to defend Freud’s view, but it is to use Freud’s view to show that there’s something that these types of social critiques tend to leave out of consideration.

For as a social critique, they tend to locate the problem in some formation or deformation of society, let’s say reification, and by encouraging us to think that that’s where the problem lies, we are thereby absolved from looking at some of the less attractive aspects of ourselves. Now, the idea that the organization of society and culture can shape the human psyche, can shape the most intimate capacities for recognition of others indeed, give us a second nature, as Professor Honneth discussed, goes back at least to Plato and to Aristotle. But as valuable and as true as this insight is, it can also be used in the service of misleading us about ourselves.

Because if we are motivated to look away from our own aggressive tendencies and conflicts, then theory, whether it be philosophy or social critique or psychology, can unwittingly be complicit by encouraging us to think that the real problem lies not with us, but with the current social formation. Obviously, this is not at all a reason to avoid social criticism and social critique. God knows social injustice cries out for recognition and cure.

But it is a reason, I think, to be wary of certain uses to which large-scale social critique can be put. Thank you.

(applause)

[02:05:08] INTRODUCER:
Thank you very much indeed, Jonathan. Uh, Jonathan’s references to the, uh, the lion eating, uh, the lamb and cannibalism, I think remind us all that the dinner hour is coming rather close. Uh, and I don’t think we’ll have time for questions today.

We will, uh, hold those off for tomorrow. We have a, a good long session tomorrow. But I certainly do want to give, uh, Axel a crack at replying to those two very spirited, uh, comments and, uh, see, uh, where he’s going to, uh, lead us now as, uh, this, uh, discussion gets even more complicated and interesting.

(coughs)

[02:05:39] AXEL HONNETH:
Don’t expect from me now an answer. I simply want to thank, uh, both, uh, respondents for two wonderful papers, uh, which I believe even converge, yeah, in the main argument or the main objection. And I think the best is not to try and not even to start to try to answer this objection, but, uh, probably, uh, demark how I think I should answer tomorrow.

(laughter)

Um, I think both papers, uh, let me look a little bit like a very naive, uh, Rousseau. Uh, and I think, uh, that has, uh, roots in some conceptual problems which were already raised by Raymond Geuss in his first respondent, and I think I should go back to this conceptual problems. It all has to do with the question, uh, how to understand recognition here, and whether the way in which I’m introducing recognition makes out of recognition already a moral act in the different meanings we’ve heard in these respondents.

For example, in the meaning of reciprocity or in the meaning, uh, in which Jonathan Lear used the idea of flourishing. I mean, this second notion of recognition. And, um, I think, uh, but this is more a promise for tomorrow than really an answer today.

I think that, uh, the way I would like to speak of recognition, at least in this paper, is not in its for– uh, in its full Hegelian meaning. It’s more what, uh, that what I have in mind is a very elementary form of recognition which not yet has the format of reciprocity, which therefore not yet is a kind of morally good act or morally wishful act, but which is the precondition for all that which we mean when we speak of morality. It’s the first, uh, opening towards, uh, the demands of others without being already, uh, the full-fledged recognition we have in mind when we come from Hegel.

So what, what I really mean here is something less, uh, demanding, something, uh, which, Yeah, I would say is the overcoming… I would say it’s the overcoming of narcissism, and I’m not sure how that relates to your definition of narcissism. But, uh, it is the overcoming of narcissism in the sense that the child, I mean, speaking in terms of developmental, uh, theories, the child, uh, develops,

(cough)

uh, an idea of the authority force of another person.

(cough)

And there, there I’m, I’m not afraid of speaking of authority force. I think the, the elementary notion of a recognition includes to become aware that others have an uh authority force, uh, towards us. They can limit us, or they can limit our desires.

They can, uh, uh, they, they can, they can have authority force in a cognitive or in a moral sense. And I think, uh, this is all what I need to speak of recognition in this very elementary sense. And probably tomorrow I’m more successful in developing it in such a way that the, uh, possibility that I’m simply reproducing certain Rousseauistic illusions, uh, can be falsified.

As I said, that’s a promise. Uh, and then probably I could come to all the other extremely interesting, uh, questions which were raised, uh, again, I mean, here is the, the most provoking example which was brought up is the example of, uh, of the Holocaust, namely the question how to understand, uh, the criminal acts of, uh, of what happened in the camps. And h-h- is it possible to describe it with the notion of reification, or do we need some other more complex, uh, kinds of notions to describe that type of comportment, uh, of behavior?

And, uh, again, it’s a promise. I think, uh, we should, we should try to de– to describe it as reified behavior or reifying behavior. But, um, probably I can, I can do it tomorrow.

It’s… Again, it’s a promise for something I want to explain tomorrow. So, great.

Thank you very much.

(applause)

[02:11:45] INTRODUCER:
Thank you, Axel. Thank our panelists. Uh, Sam Scheffler will be in the chair tomorrow. We’ll be gathering at four ten, and, uh, we now have many promises on the table. Uh, and I hope you’ll all come back to see if they are cashed out. Thanks very much

[00:00:01] MODERATOR:
Uh, those of you who were here yesterday, uh, uh, will remember that, uh, Axel Honneth promised to do many things today. Uh, and we’re all here to hold him to his promises. But first, we’re going to give the three commentators the opportunity to, uh, elaborate, uh, uh, or, um, ex– Uh, refresh your memories about, uh, what they said, uh, in the last two days.

So we’ll begin with some remarks from each of the three commentators, and then Axel will have the chance to respond, and then we’ll have some discussion. So we’re gonna go in the same order in which people delivered their comments over the past, uh, two days. That–

Which means that we will begin with, uh, Raymond Geuss, and then Judith Butler, and Jonathan Lear. Raymond?

[00:00:54] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Um, I’d like to make four points. Uh, one of them is just to remind you of, uh, what’s been the topic of the conversation for the last, uh, two sessions, and Then the, uh, the next two, uh, refer to things that came up in the discussion yesterday, and the final one is a new perspective that I wanted to introduce into the discussion.

Uh, so to start with the first one, just to refresh your memory about where we are. Uh, you remember that the basic structure, at least I was claiming, of Professor Honneth’s, uh, presentation, is that recognition is prior to cognition, and that recognition is to be understood as a positive affective engagement with the world. So prior to any kind of formation of beliefs or knowledge, we have to be connected to the world through desires, through projects, through a variety of different ways of being open to that which is out there in the world, and you can’t understand cognition except if you understand it in the context of this wider and deeper background engagement with the world.

So it’s a positive affective engagement of the– with the world that’s prior to cognition. Then from this, Professor Honneth tries in a way that I ca– I will allow him to explain later, to, uh, say that therefore any institution or form of social interaction which marginalizes or covers over or represses the awareness of that positive recognitional relation in which we stand to the world is to be criticized. So, uh, if you have a social institution which makes it impossible for you or difficult for you to, to see that all of your cognition is located in an antecedent engagement with the world, that’s a defect in that institution in some way.

Now, I want to make two comments on this, or two comments have been made in the past two days on this structure. The first is that it’s very important to see that when I say that, uh, for Professor Honneth, uh, recognition means a positive affective engagement with the world, the notion of positive does not mean positive in the normal sense in which we would use the term positive. The term positive in the, in the sense of, uh, in the sense in which it’s used here, is opposed to the notion of being neutral or to being detached.

So I have a positive relation of engagement to the world if I’m not detached from the world. Now, that neither means that I have a relation to the world and a, a, a relation of practical engagement to the world that is positive as opposed to negative. It doesn’t mean that.

So, uh, in particular, I hate this and will do everything in my power to crush and destroy it, is just as much an expression of a positive engagement with, uh, the world as I cherish this and love it and will do everything in my power to make it continue in, in existence. So it’s this Heideggerian notion of an ontological structure, which is the precondition of either being positive or negative. So when Honneth speaks of a positive engagement, he means not a detachment, but an engagement, whether that engagement is positive in some other sense or negative.

And of course, in– yesterday, we heard in great and vivid and eloquent, um, detail, both from, uh, Judith Butler and from Jonathan Lear, discussions of ways in which rather negative, aggressive, destructive, and distancing relations to other people might be very important, both as parts of human development and as parts of, uh, an adult and mature engagement with the world. So this is not a Pollyanna view that says that in the beginning, it’s all light. It’s a posi– you know, we all embrace the world in love and kindness, and out of that, cognition arises.

It’s, uh, this more, uh, austere view that, uh, there is, uh, a kind of engagement which is prior to positivity and negativity, which is a precondition. Second thing is to say that that engagement is positive is not to say that it has, that, that it is anything which any of us would find morally, uh, a thing we ought to approve of. Uh, it’s rather something which is morally neutral, too, and is a precondition for morality.

So that’s the first comment or set of comments that we’ve had on this concept. The second has been a series of comments about the ambigu– about what the three commentators, I think, have found to be an ambiguity in Professor Honneth’s concept of recognition. And now, the form in which I would put this, although I kn-

I I don’t know whether Professor Lear or Professor Butler would agree with me exactly on it, but the form in which I would put this is that recognition, uh, vacillates between a roughly Heideggerian sense and a roughly Hegelian sense. That is, it vacillates betweening, between meaning a minimal openness and engagement with the world of the kind that I’ve just described. That’s the Heideggerian sense, being engaged with the world at all, whether reciprocally or non-reciprocally, what– for good or for ill.

That’s the Heideggerian sense of it. That’s what Jonathan Lear yesterday called the minimal sense of a recognition. And then the second sense is the Hegelian sense, which is the idea that recognition consists in a relation of mutual, uh, a, a relation of mutual recognition between two subjects, each of whom recognizes the other as a subject of human desires, where those desires are are understood by each party as the kind of thing that ought, in some sense, to limit the desires of the other.

So that’s a much more complicated Hegelian structure, which does not just mean a minimal engagement with the world, but means a complicated structure of intersubjective recognition. And now, this isn’t exactly the same as, but I think it’s slightly related to what Professor Lear in the last session called recognition in the sense of human flourishing. Some notion of a human flourishing, which would be a model of how recognition in this sense, namely recognition as a relation in which people stabilize their desires toward one another, uh, in, in a particular way, uh, that, that is, uh, as a, as a, as a basic concept of human, of a notion of human flourishing.

Now, I think there’s a basic Heideggerian point to be made here, which is that I think that the basic idea of Being and Time is that from the Heideggerian sense of recognition, you cannot get to an ethics from this minimal notion of it being a necessary condition for being a human being that you be engaged in the world. From that notion alone, you cannot derive any kind of moral, uh, imperatives, and you cannot der-derive any form of social criticism. Uh, that’s, I think, a central thought in Being and Time.

Um, and of course, Sartre devoted his whole life to trying to refute this, to re-, to try to re– trying to refute Heidegger in this, that is, to thinking that from this structure, you could draw some kind of ethical conclusions, or you could use this for social criticism, but I think he failed. So I, I think that’s, that’s the first– So that’s the first point I wanted to make about this, uh, difficulty that a lot of the commentators have had with the notion of recognition, and particularly the claim that recognition is a, a sufficiently well-defined concept so that it can actually play the kind of role that it will have to play if it’s going to be a central part of a form of social criticism.

Now, the second point I’d like to talk about is one about Lukács’ concept of reification. Um, and I want to claim that Lukács, uh, in his theory of reification, actually collapses three very different distinctions. He collapses the distinction between actively taking part in something as opposed to observing it.

So I’m playing football on the field, or I’m sitting back and observing people playing football. I’m conducting a conversation in French, or I’m sitting up in the translator’s booth and observing the conversation that goes on in French. That’s a perfectly good distinction, but that’s one kind of distinction.

Second distinction is the distinction between being emotionally involved in what’s going on, being existentially touched by it, and being neutral or detached. The third dis– that’s also a perfectly good distinction, but it seems to me it’s a very different distinction from the first distinction.

The third distinction is the distinction between spontaneity and calculation. I act in a spontaneous way. I act in a way that is the result of a certain calculation.

And now that I think of it, there’s actually a fourth one, which is, uh, the notion of doing something for its own sake and doing something as a result of some calculation of its instrumental value. Now, uh, I think a lot of the commentators, in particular p-uh, Professor Butler, uh, have indicated that, uh, Luk\u00e1cs’s conception of reification assumes that those four distinctions line up more or less par– in parallel, so that everything that can be described as a form of observation will also be correctly described as a form of being neutral or being detached, will also be described as connected with calculating rather than a spontaneous relation to the world, et cetera. And it was her claim, and I think she’s just right about that, that one will in fact lose sight of a tremendously important part of human existence if one doesn’t see that in a lot of cases, those distinctions do not overlap.

It’s not the case that if I am calculating, I am emotionally detached. It’s not the case that spontaneity necessarily goes together with, uh, being emotionally involved. These distinctions are different distinctions.

They don’t overlap. And so the Lukácsian attempt– I’m of course interpreting now what Professor Butler said the last time, but I, I, I take it that she will correct me wh-when, when, when her turn comes. So that these four distinctions don’t overlap.

That’s terribly important. And that means that Lukács’ concept of reification as a central concept for for pulling together a lot of things is much less useful than, uh, one might think. And this poses, I think, a prima facie, a, a certain problem for continuing to use this.

I think Professor Honneth has, uh, acknowledged this in some parts of the, of the essay, but I think, uh, of his talks, but I think it, it is important to face this very clearly and ask ourselves, what, what is the point of retaining this notion of reification if it in fact has the property that it puts together in a relatively naive way things that are so very different, and if it violates these important cases that, um, Professor, um, uh, Butler, uh, brought to our attention the last time. The third thing I want to say is, um, as I said, I take Professor Honneth to be engaged in the task of giving a non-moralizing form of social, uh, criticism. But, uh, and you can ask yourself, uh, what– how you can understand a form of social cri-criticism that’s non-moralizing.

And what I want to suggest is that there’s a certain metaphor that immediately suggests itself to you if you want to do non-moralizing social criticism, and that’s the metaphor of medicine. And if you look at, uh, the way Professor Honneth describes some of the things he’s describing, he describes them in terms of pathologies, diagnosis, therapy. There’s a medical metaphor there about what it’s like to do social criticism.

It– social criticism it is not about correcting just cognitive mistakes. It’s not about moralizing. It’s about doing a kind of quasi-medical, uh, uh, uh, engaging in a quasi-medical enterprise.

And I merely want to point out that this is a metaphor, and it would be very good to hear from Professor Honneth how far he thinks that metaphor can be taken and what he thinks the implications are of thinking of social criticism as a kind of medicine. And now, you all know, I mean, I won’t be condescending to you, but I mean, y-you all know that there are some obvious differences between the practice of medicine and social criticism, one of which is that in medicine, uh, there is a relatively clearly presupposed notion of what human health is. Not in psychoanalysis, but in non-psychoanalytic forms of medicine.

We presuppose that we know what human health is, and it’s a question of bringing that about. And of course, it is an open question what human flourishing is, uh, and an open question what counts as a pathological or a non-pathological form of society. And so who decides what is pathological and what’s not pathological?

On what basis does this theory allow us to say this form of s-social praxis is pathological, this form is not? And I, I put it that that’s a much more complicated, uh, thing to decide than it is in the case of a, a broken arm, whether the arm is broken or not, and it functions or it doesn’t. The, the goal, the goal of, uh, the, the enterprise is in question in a way that perhaps makes the medical metaphor not completely appropriate.

Uh, the third thing I’d like to mention is, um, suppose I were to accept the whole of Professor Honneth’s theory of recognition. Um, what would follow from that for social criticism and for politics? Now, um, it’s very important that this is presented in the context of a discussion of Lukács, and so I think a comparison with Lukács might be a, a lot enlightening here.

Now Lukács, as you know, was obs– or the, the early Lukács was obsessed with a certain idea, and that was the idea that a human society could become completely self-transparent. That is, that we as a society could get together and we could decide how to structure our lives, and we could decide how to structure our lives and do that successfully in such a way that everything that happened in the society could be seen as the results of a conscious collective decision on the part of the people who made that decision. That was Lukács’ conception, uh, and, uh, uh, he called– He has a technical term for that, which is, as you know, the identical subject-object of history.

The identical subject-object of history is the idea of a society that has brought itself into existence, where there is no invisible hand. Uh, things don’t happen that have not been predicted by anyone. One, everything that happens is the result of a collective Gosplan.

You know, Gosplan, uh, operates, and, uh, we, uh… Okay. So he has this, this view.

And connected with that, of course, he has a view about politics, which is the view that politics should consist in bringing this state about. And he has also the view that the only way to bring this state about is by, as you know, the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the victory of the proletariat. You know that story.

But he further thinks that the victory of the proletariat can only be brought about by a vanguard party, that is a party of professional revolutionaries who are full-time, who have the correct insight into the operation of the economy, and who can, by virtue of their, uh, correct insight into the real needs and interests of the proletariat, destroy the capitalist system, and bring about the preconditions for this realm in which the identical subject-object of history is realized. Now, the traditional Frankfurt view, I take it, Professor Honneth will correct me if I’m wrong, is to reject this conception completely. That is, the traditional Frankfurt conception is to reject this Lukácsian view of politics on two grounds, for two reasons.

First, because, uh, traditionally, the Frankfurt philosophers have thought that the very conception of an identical subject-object of history was incoherent. There was no such thing, and it was impossible for there to be a human society which was democratically organized and organized in such a way that the invisible hand was completely done away with, that everything in the society was transparent, and everything could aro– could be seen as arising from the actions of a democratically constituted population who had decided on this. They thought that conception was completely wrong, and it it was a secularization of certain theological beliefs.

The belief that God created the world, and in creating the world, he would then create a thing which he could completely know, and in the knowledge of God, God’s knowledge of the world, the, the object and the subject were unified. So they thought that this Lukácsian conception, secular as it was, as it seemed to be, actually had deep theological, uh, uh, uh, um, roots, and that it was for that reason unacceptable, and that it also had horrible, um, political consequences. So they rejected this completely.

Now, I, I mentioned this because of course, uh, yesterday, uh, a Professor Lear told us in very vivid detail, uh, a story about, uh, which was a very important story, I think we’d all agree with, about the illusions in which one can find oneself when one’s doing social criticism. One can have the illusion that by getting rid of certain forms of false consciousness, one can solve all human problems. Uh, and that is a, of course, a serious danger, and, uh, we’re very grateful, I’m sure, to always to have that, uh, uh, kept in mind for us.

But I, I’m, I merely say that I think Professor Lear presented that point as if it was, uh, a criticism of Professor Honneth’s position, but I don’t actually think it is a criticism of Professor Honneth’s position. I think that actually Lear and Honneth agree on this, that these theologically based views which, which have this utopian, uh, uh, claim that the world can be transformed somehow into a place where there’s no opacity, there’s no conflict. I think it’s a, it, it’s something that the members of the Frankfurt School have traditionally shared.

They’ve given it a slightly different theological etiology. They think it comes from, uh, the notion of God creating the world and seeing himself in the world. Uh, Professor Lear the last time talked about the, the myth of the fall.

One’s in the Garden of Paradise and falls from paradise and wants to get back to it. So there’s slightly different theological… They have slightly different views about the theological roots of this or perhaps the, the appropriate theological an-analogy.

Perhaps not roots, but just the, the, the, the analogy that’s most enlightening. But the actual content I think is not different. Uh, so that’s the first criticism that the Frankfurt School’s had of Lukács.

There is no such thing as an identical subject-object of n– of history, so Lukács can’t be right about that. The second, of course, is the very, very important, uh, criticism of the view that the theory of the party, according to Lukács, would have to be the theory of a political agent who was manipulative vis-à-vis the proletariat, that the Bolshevik party, the vanguard party, who based its claim to hegemony on correct insight into what the real interests of the proletariat was, that that construction meant that the Bolshevik Party would have to have an inappropriately manipulative attitude toward the people in society, and that there was some incompatibility between having that kind of manipulative attitude and claiming to foster human, uh, emancipation. So there were these two kinds of criticisms of Lukács that have been central to the, uh, to the theory, and as I said, one of them, uh, connects with something that Professor Lear said yesterday, and indeed also with various things that Professor Butler said.

Now, uh, contrary, contrary to Lukács, the– I think the traditional Frankfurt view has been one that one could express by saying that, um, one shouldn’t think of politics in terms of, uh, vanguard parties

(coughs)

and their action, but in terms of Bildungsprozesse. Now, uh, well, I mean, uh, you know, we could talk forever about what Bildung is and what a Bildungsprozess is. That’s roughly speaking the central concept in this whole stream of Central European, um, theorizing for two hundred years.

We’re not going to get any kind of agreement on it, I think. But I do think it is, uh, an alternative model to what politics could look like. One model is politics as therapy.

Another model is politics as the action of the vanguard party. And the, and the third model is the model of a Bildungsprozess, a party that’s engaged in training and educating people, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, a party wh-whose cognitive, uh, role is particularly important, the role of making people aware of themselves. Um, now I, I must say that, uh, al-although there, of course, is, are, are very important cognitive elements in politics, and it’s a very important fact that European societies, for example, have learned certain things during the past fifty years about the use of force in history, and Perhaps other societies might well study some of the lessons that those European societies, um, learned, uh, about the use of force and, um, militarism and, um, imperialism.

But so there are cognitive, you can say that, you know, Central Europe has learned something there. Um, that’s not a, that’s not a, a, a, a

(clears throat)

ridiculous thing to say. Um, but I think as a, um, as an all-encompassing model of what politics is like, um, that’s not really, uh, a starter either. Uh, it’s as, as implausible as the idea that politics is just therapy or the idea that politics is some kind of action of a vanguard party who has knowledge of true interests.

So, um, in the end, uh, I’d just like to ask, uh, in-invite Professor Honneth to say a little more. Obviously, there won’t be any answers to these questions because there are deep human questions in addition to being, um, important philosophical questions about what– how we should think about politics and social criticism from the point of view of this new theory of recognition that he presented. So thank you.

Okay, uh, Judith Butler.

[00:24:47] JUDITH BUTLER:
Thank you. Um, Well, I spoke more recently, so my, um, my need to summarize my remarks is probably, uh, less urgent than it would be if I’d waited two days. Um, Um, and, uh, maybe I’ll just, um, make a, a couple of, uh, remarks.

Yesterday, I, um, um, I, uh, tried to ask Axel whether, um, we’re to understand, um, that, um, his notion of recognition as requiring that we be participatory, and if we’re to further understand that to be participatory, um, is precisely the op-opposite of being observational. Um, and, um, I sought to understand whether his notion of involvement or participation, uh, carried within it an implicit norm, and whether, um, and whether that norm, uh, had to do with, uh, reciprocal recognition. That is to say, um, recognition would be constitutive of a genuine praxis if it, uh, implied reciprocal recognition of some kind.

Um, I, I worry a bit, and I think I made that clear that, um, um, I’m not sure one can live with the opposition between participation and observation, assuming that participation is involved and observation is detached. Um, and, um, and I asked him to think about that since there are obviously ways of being obser- obs- observational and emotionally involved, say, um, that would seem to, um, undercut that, and clearly also ways of being participatory that might not, um, uh, live up to the, uh, the idea of genuine praxis that he seems to be working out at least in the, um, uh, in, in, in part of the paper. Um, at one point he, he suggests to us that the kind of participation that’s implied by recognition involves taking up a position of another, um, and, um, and it would seem that if we are were unable to take up the position of a, of another, we can’t really be said to be participating in the sense that’s proper to recognition.

So then a lot seems to hang on, uh, what it means then to take up the position of the other. And, and, I have some, some questions about that, that I’ll turn to, um, uh, in a moment. Um, uh, I also wondered about his effort to establish not only an ontological priority of recognition over cognition, but a chronological or genetic one.

And it seemed that that part of his argument, that recognition is prior to cognition genetically or chronologically, depended on his recourse to developmental psychology. And there, it seemed to me that he was, um, relying on, um, uh, on a, uh, a science that involved observational methods when he had just given us a way to criticize, uh, observational methods. And I wondered whether he might not more, uh, fruitfully, uh, turn it around and ask how developmental psychology would be redefined if it were to take, uh, his claim seriously.

Namely, that recognition is prior to, uh, uh, cognition and hence prior to the very observational methods that seem to operate as its uncontested methodological grounds. Um, I also have some questions about his theory of primary attachment,

(clears throat)

and those are questions that I think, um, were perhaps even more, uh, eloquently, uh, stated by Professor Lear.

(clears throat)

It’s unclear to me that one can have attachment without differentiation. I would be opposed to saying, well, there’s a school of thought that puts attachment first, and then there’s a school of thought that puts differentiation first. I think that they logically entail one another quite fundamentally.

I even think it was Hegel who taught me that. Um, and that I’m not sure we can attach to a second object without there being a differentiation at work. Um, and it seems important both to Hegelianism and to psychoanalysis, um, which at least in part seems to be, to form some of the, the basis of, um, Axel’s thinking on this, since, um, what it means is that one attaches to, uh, at least psychoanalytically, one attaches to someone who is bound to leave the room.

Um, and so one attaches to someone who presents the possibility of loss all the time, absence, um, who cannot be had in a full presence in any sense. And there is, at least in Winnicott’s view, a necessary anger that must, um, uh, that must be, uh, part of the process of differentiation and coming to grips with the second– coming to grips with the idea of the second person as second. In other words, we would not be able to apprehend that second person as other than us, as second rather than first, unless we accomplish that differentiation, and there is a certain kind of anger that is necessary for that.

Um, Professor Lear talked about, uh, the n-necessity to mutilate the mother, and there’s one also wonderful point where Winnicott talks about, um, um, uh, a kind of anger in the child that actually leads to what he calls greedy appetite and that actually forces the child to eat. He said we wouldn’t even be able to eat if we didn’t have some manner of aggression, which I find very interesting. Um, um, uh, in Hegel, of course, um, and this would be a much longer discussion, but it’s, it’s worth saying first of all that, um, I actually agree that the Hegelian concept of recognition has enormous, uh, resources to offer us at this time.

And so I’m very much in affinity with, um, with Axel Honneth’s project in this respect. I am of course, um, different from him, or I share a different view because, uh, for me the, uh, uh, the principle of negativity that is so important to Hegel’s notion of recognition seems to be, um, uh, dropped out of the picture in, um, in Axel’s view. So although I appreciated very much what, um, Professor Geuss just said, I want to say that it’s not a question of, of choosing between a Hegelian model of recognition and a Heideggerian notion of care or, or ontology, because we have to ask which, which of the Hegelian positions we’re talking about.

And even here, I mean, if you remember, um, and these are passages that I think are actually quite important, but I think in Axel’s vi– uh, effort to establish a kind of primarily affirmative,

(breathing)

um, uh, attitude on the part of the infant and even a kind of primary affirmation ontologically. It’s almost a Spinozistic move. I don’t know where your affirmative primary affirmation stuff comes from, but I hope to find out.

Um, that, uh, that something, uh, that, that, that his Hegel is one that actually downplays the, um, um, the struggle for recognition as a, uh, as, as one that in in which in which death is risked, in which the desire for annihilation is undergone, in, in which something like, uh, existence is put into, into question. Um, and I’ll just, I’ll just read you the first line of, of the, um, um, uh, um, um, of the, the section of lordship and, and bondage. Um, let’s see if it is actually in the first line.

Um, there’s a, a great, uh, a great moment where, um, Hegel says that, um, the first consciousness sees another consciousness, and in German it says, um, “Es ist außer sich, es ist außer sich gekommen.” And what does this mean? It, it, it has come outside of itself, but also außer sich in German means it’s beside itself in rage.

It’s like, who is this other person who’s identical to me? Now how can there be another person who’s structurally identical to me? What an outrage.

Um, uh, and it’s, it is in a s– And we might say in psychoanalytic terms, it’s a kind of assau-assault on, on primary egoic omnipotence, but a necessary one. A necessary one, uh, in order to apprehend the other as other.

And part of the very dislocation of egocentrism that I think Axel is in favor of, and I think we agree here totally, is accomplished in part by that initial puncturing of an egocentric omnipotence that is necessary, I would say, uh, for the apprehension of the other as a second person, as other, uh, than myself. Um, I guess I would, um, I, I, I agreed with so much of, um, what, um, Professor Lear did yesterday. There was just one point at the end where I felt he separated, uh, the question of dealing with ourselves versus engaging in social criticism.

And I do understand what he meant, that sometimes we look for the origin of our ailments in social conditions when perhaps we would be better off looking to ourselves. But these selves that we are are formed within the crucible of social life, and it seems to me that self-reflection involves reflection on the conditions of our own formation and the conditions that sustain us or fail to sustain us, and that we are invariably social beings. So for me, it seems to me that the effort to put together a certain kind of psychological reflection with a social theory is absolutely inevitable.

And I, and I think, um, whatever quarrels I might have with Axel on that point, um, I am in agreement with the, with the larger project. Um, then there’s finally then to go back to this problematic concept that I deferred, or what does it mean to take on the– to take over or adopt, um, the perspective of another? Well, it might be that in this discussion, we need to distinguish between what it is to identify with another as a psychological process, and what it is to recognize another, uh, as a normative practice.

Um, and I’m not sure that they’re the same. And in this sense, I think that, um, uh, that some of the comments that, that both Raymond Geuss and Jonathan Lear made suggested that these notions need to be, um, um, uh, distinguished more, more carefully. Um, to take on or adopt the position of a second person could be to consider reasons for what they do, to appreciate their motives for what they do.

It could mean something more robust, like accepting as valid their reasons and motives for conducting themselves as they do. Um, it could be in the Hegelian sense to find oneself to be structurally identical to the other. It could be in the Fichtean sense to countenance the other, to grant standing to the other, which I think is part of what Axel also, uh, at least in other work, wants to preserve of the notion of, of recognition.

But let me just, um, add a couple of others. To acknowledge a difference, to acknowledge a difference, a, a way in which the other is different from me, that difference being the condition of recognition itself. Um, where is difference in, in Axel’s account?

Um, and of course this is crucial when we think about gender difference, cultural difference, and the like. Um, um, and, um, and that said, I guess I wanna maybe just end by thinking a little bit more about this provocative question that, um, Raymond Geuss asks us to consider about engaging in social criticism and whether there is something useful, um, here in the notion of recognition that Axel offers us that we can use for the purposes of social criticism. And I, I just wanna make two points.

First of all, it seems to me that, um, um, that the notion of recognition is crucial to any notion of participatory politics. Uh, what does it mean when we participate together, when we act together, or when we recognize another as someone with whom we engage in political decision-making? So understanding better what is involved in recognition, and not just, um, recognition as a decisionist act, something I give to you after some calculation, but rather recognition as something that binds us prior to any action and that we call upon as we, in fact, um, recognize one another.

That strikes me as a very important way of trying to rethink a kind of social basis for the participatory sphere. And then lastly, what I think is perhaps most important and what we haven’t maybe dwelt on enough here, is that in so much of Axel’s recent works, um, he’s been concerned with the question of suffering, with the question of humiliation, um, and with recovering resources of emotional responsiveness to the suffering of others. Um, so to the degree that part of what he is looking for in this concept of recognition is a resource, uh, that might help us to reanimate forms of, uh, emotional responsiveness to the, the suffering, the sensate qualities of another, the life of another as another.

Um, he is working against the political climate in which we are asked, uh, to turn the page of The New York Times when another torture article comes b- comes our way. Um, and, uh, and, and in that sense, uh, I think that there is a, a, a terribly important critical potential in, in, in, in what we’ve read here. It may, may be us- up to us to further elaborate that, but I think it’s, it’s certainly there in implicitly if not ex-explicitly.

[00:38:41] MODERATOR:
Okay, before, uh, Jonathan begins, I just wanted to, m- Uh, invite anyone who would like to, to come sit on this side of the room. The room was set up in the expectation that the speakers would use the lectern, but they-their preference has been to use the table here.

And so those of you who are at the far end may have a hard time seeing the faces associated with the voices that you’re hearing. There are plenty of seats on this side of the room. If you’d like to just take a moment and come on over, please feel free.

Um, Jonathan Lear.

[00:39:14] JONATHAN LEAR:
Well, um, my remarks, I think, are gonna be the briefest, uh, of the commentators because I find myself in large-scale agreement with what’s been said by the others, and I think, um, Raymond has, I think, in a way summarized the views of the three of us. I mean, one of the things that has really struck me, uh, in being here these past few days is firstly, I think, how engaged and interested the three of us are in what, um, Professor Honneth has been– the ideas that he’s been putting forward, but also the problems that we found, um, uh, we experienced in the argument seem to me to be very similar and have a, a large degree of overlap. They’re not the same, but they’re a large degree of overlap.

But I’m basically very much in, in, um, uh, agreement, uh, with, um, the, the, the views that both, um, both, um, Raymond and, and Judith have, um, put forward. And I don’t wanna spend a lot of time rehearsing what I said yesterday, but I will say a couple of things. Firstly, I just wanna say I’ll go last things first in a way.

I wanna say in response to something Judith just said about asking me a question. I just– before I lose, uh, uh, forget about it, I wanna just say, look, I certainly didn’t mean to say any, uh, I certainly didn’t mean to say anything that implied that, um, social criticism… Uh, s– firstly, that social influences were crucial on the formation of the psyche, um, and thus that social critique is, is crucially important.

I mean, I didn’t mean… I, in fact, I tried to say explicitly, I think this is a crucial idea going back to Plato. Um, and it’s true in that, and I…

So I, I basically very much agree with what Judith said. The point I was trying to make yesterday was about a certain defensive use to which that insight could be put, and that defensive use, and by the way, I don’t mean to be criticizing, uh, Professor Honneth about this at all, uh, but I do mean to be criticizing people in the, uh, in the, in the tradition he was taking up and discussing that, um, you know, if only this condition of society were, uh, were ameliorated, there’d be no further problem. That’s a…

That I take to be a defensive use of a very important, um, um, uh, uh, fact about human beings, an insight about human beings, which is the, the fact that, um, psyches are shaped by cultural, social influences. Um,

(cough)

Now, let, let me just also say in relationship, uh, to, to what, um, what, what, what Raymond has just said, uh, a couple of things. I’ll just try and su-sum up the, what I take to be one or two of the key points I wanna make in relationship to, to what, um, Axel has said. Um, and there really are…

I mean, they’re, they’re skeptical all right, but they really are questions, uh, that I’ve got. Um, it– I thought that, um, the, the, the problem with the argument as I saw it was that there was a, um, crucial set of am, the, the, the, the, that the terms like recognition, care, and reification are, they, they name a lot of things. And so I, I, I, I became concerned about which things were getting named at which points and what work they were doing.

And in particular, I mean, I tend to be skeptical of arguments, uh, you know, just sort of, uh, what, what can I say? I feel like I’m getting old. But, you know, in, in terms of like getting old, one of the things I’ve found is that when anybody presents to me an argument that the conditions for the possibility of experience or the condition of the possibility of language or the conditions of the possibility of, um, symbolic thought or, you know, some requires that, you know, that there be having been some antecedent condition, chances are it, the, the, you know, my experience is chances are the claim is true, but you don’t then get to the conclusion that you wanna get to because the, the The sense in which it’s true is a very thin sense of whatever that thing that’s needed, and what you need on the other side is a very rich sense, and you just can’t bridge it.

I mean, I, I, I, I look forward to somebody doing it or persuading me, but just sort of having gotten to this age, I just… when I see that, I j- It doesn’t really…

I, I get worried that it ain’t gonna work. And so what I think is right is that the, the sense in which, what, uh, in the various senses in which, um, it’s just true that, um, the very ability to acquire, uh, language, deal with others at all, have symbolic thought requires a pr- sort of prior recognition is not gonna be the sense of recognition we nee- we need on the other side when we say, um, there, there, you know, in adulthood, there either is this recognition or it’s gone missing. We’ve forgotten it.

So that’s that, I… But it’s basically, I mean, I, it, it is obviously said with a, a skepticism, but it’s a skeptical question. I’d love it to be shown, you know, how it would work.

I just don’t yet see it. Um, similarly, I don’t really… And this is an invitation to, uh, to, to Axel to say more about it.

I mean, in what– in reading it, uh, the, the essays, I mean, I was fascinated by the idea of reification, but I don’t know what it means. I mean, I don’t know… I mean, I’m not sure what– which thing it’s pointing out or what things look a lot like it, um, that aren’t it.

Uh, you know, so clearly people have been treating others, I mean. And I know, um, I mean, I, I’m confident that Axel doesn’t mean just treating somebody as a means to an end or treating somebody as what we would normally call an object. That there’s some phenomenon here that, um, that we need to sort of focus in on.

But what that thing is, I don’t know.

[00:44:46] AXEL HONNETH:
No.

[00:44:46] JONATHAN LEAR:
And the question– that’s, that’s one qu- part of the question, and the second part of the question is: is, is, is it always bad to reify? Uh, I mean, I, I’m not sure what it is, so I don’t know whether it’s always good or always bad. I know that when I think of myself just intuitively, there are certain ways I really like being treated like a commodity.

Um, um, you know, as just so long as it’s the right kind of commodity. Um, um, I think it’s, you know, I think there, there are many wonderful things about reification in the modern world. Um, but that might not be, be what he’s talking about.

Um, but I like, I like my students treating me, you know, as a… They don’t… I, that we, we, you know, I like being used, uh, just so, just so long as I’m being used in what I take to be the right sorts of ways.

Um, uh, and I, and I, you know, I, I know that, um, Axel isn’t wanting to talk just about means versus a, a- a thing in itself or whatever, but I actually like being used as a, being used as a means in certain circumstances. And, um, certainly, I also think that, you know, certain, at least as I understand reification or commodification, there are certain aspects of it which are bad and

(coughs)

deserve to be criticized. There are certain aspects of it that seem to me to have opened up markets and, uh, you know, free, free trade and certain things. Uh, f- you know, sometimes, you know, just sort of seeing resumes traded over what we call the meat market, uh, has actually opened up job opportunities for, you know, lots of people who, you know, in destroying older forms of, of, of, of trading and interaction.

So I don’t, you know, this isn’t the… I don’t really know what, what this is, but I, I think it would be really helpful to see examples of what reification counts as and what, what’s bad about that, and then what other things look a lot like it and what might be good about that. The last thing I want to say is, I really didn’t, and this is related to something that, that, um, Raymond said in his comments, but it’s very helpful that he said it because it gives me the occasion to get clearer on what I was trying to say yesterday, and I may well have been just trying to say too much in too little time.

Um, but I certainly didn’t want to, um, um, in talking about narratives having a structure of the fall, I didn’t want to say at all that Professor Honneth was, That he was engaged in the same kind of utopian thinking there. Uh, and I was really trying to make a, a very… A, a, and so insofar as it was seen that I was, uh, uh, uh, criticizing them both that way, I really wasn’t meaning to.

Uh, but what I did want to say is that there’s a structural issue sort of one level up. Forget about the utopianism, uh, here, and I don’t wanna be seen to be or, or interpreted to be. In, insofar as I was, I,

(cough)

I, I apologize. I didn’t mean this at all to be, um, you know, sort of saying that Professor Honneth-Axel’s, uh, you know, uh, uh,

(clears throat)

a-account f-was vulnerable to that criticism. I don’t think it is. But what I do think is right is that in his, um… I, I take it to be a structural point, um, which is… And, and so I’m not accusing him at all of a kind of naiveté

(cough)

about this, but I am saying there’s a structural issue about remembering and forgetting. There’s a very fascinating account that Professor Axel is trying to recover, uh, from, you know, from his own criticisms of Lukács, saying, “Well, what can we now make of the issue, the idea of reification?” And he wants to give an account of that in terms of we’ve forgotten something.

May-maybe because of social processes, maybe because of, you know, various forms of practices. There’s been a kind of forgetting, and we should understand reification in terms of forgetting some prior condition or some condition for the possibility of the, what we’re doing. So, so that the theory is a kind of recollection theory.

It’s a theory of forgetting and remembering, and that’s the last, I guess, question I’ve got for, um, for, for Axel, which is, um, you know, what is the n-n-nature of, of, of, of the, um, uh… What thing are we going to get back when we remember what we’ve forgotten? Uh, I think is what I– it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s basically a question.

I guess I got one last thing to say which related to that, which is very much I thought Raymond did a, a wonderful job about raising this question about what constitutes a positive or affirmative attitude. And he said, “Look,” and you know, uh, uh, in the right sense of this, that includes hating, pushing people away, um, you know, all sorts of things. And, um, you know, all sorts of negative attitudes count as positive, I mean, roughly speaking.

The opposite thing is neutral. It’s not positive versus negative. It’s, it’s positive versus neutral or detached.

And here again, I just have a question about what that is or what that means. I don’t get what the other thing is. I mean, I do know, you know, there’s some understanding of neutrality that I think I under– I get, which is But that is a manifestation of an enormous amount of care and, and actually Axel said this, uh, that, you know, actually deciding to take a neutral stance, uh, t-towards someone is a, is a caring stance of, of, of, of, of, of, of its own type.

There is a mistake that might happen at the level of theory, which is a thing that I think Heidegger and all these people at one level or another, and Axel too, at the level of theory, you know, if you start out theorizing about people, well, we’re just detached atoms, you know, detached from a world, and now the question is, you know, how do we get involved with it? That’s just the wrong way to begin, and it’s just not the right way to understand us. And so in terms of criticizing a certain kind of, um, uh, impulse to philosophy, it’s a brilliant criticism, and it’s correct.

But in terms of like what we do in our living, I’m not sure what the positive attitude is is opposed to, because as I see it, the neutral neutral stance is also a positive attitude in this, in this sense. So th-so those are the questions I’ve got.

(clears throat)

[00:51:12] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Okay. Well, the three commentators have asked many questions, and it’s now time to give Axel Honneth the opportunity to answer as many or as few of them as he would like to. Axel?

[00:51:24] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah. Tha-thank you very much. Thank you again for, uh, all these comments and the objections which were raised.

Uh, I must confess that, uh, yesterday night before going to bed, I thought, uh, probably that the objections were so heavy that it could be better, uh, simply to give the project up. Uh, waking up this morning, I came back to my self-confidence. I thought I can defend, uh, probably not everything, but, uh,

(cough)

a lot of, uh, what I tried to say to say in the, uh, Tanner Lectures. Uh, let me before I start, I have mainly four points, and in these four or five points, which, uh, more or less try to make once again clear what I wanted to say and where I feel a little bit, uh, misunderstood. Um, before I’m developing these four or five points, I want to make, uh, probably three, important, uh, preliminary remarks which, which probably help already to, to see where certain misunderstandings are here, uh, on the table between us.

Um, I never mentioned in this text, uh, uh, n-not only once I mentioned the name, uh, Hegel. This is not a paper on Hegel, and it’s not even a paper on Hegel’s notion of recognition. Uh, I make a huge difference.

between what I call in this paper, uh, a recognitional stance and recognition as what is Hegel describing?

[00:53:14] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Yes. Yeah.

[00:53:14] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah, as a, uh, something which has a normative content because of its reciprocity, and something which is based on a mutual acceptance of certain norms which allow us to recognize each other in the light of those norms.

[00:53:36] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Uh, so I believe that Hegel is extremely important for spelling out how to understand these different forms of mutual recognition. Um, and we can even use Hegel for making certain differentiations between different types of recognition

(cough)

which we find in human societies. But, uh, the thing I’m– I was interested here is on a deeper level, level, I would say. It’s probably on that level, uh, on which Hegel is speaking at this passage, which was, uh, quoted by, uh, by Judith, uh, today when he is introducing, uh, in a book which I never liked, namely The Phenomenology of Spirit

(laughter)

and I never understood completely. But there is this one sentence where he is introducing recognition, and he is saying, “This attitude of recognition is where the subject kommt außer sich.” Yeah, he, he or she, I mean, for him, he, uh, the self-consciousness, uh, is coming out of himself.

I mean, that, that kind of decentering, uh, of the subject,

[00:55:04] AXEL HONNETH:
this is what I try to understand with the notion of recognitional stance. And I will say to it, uh, to, to this or about this, uh, uh, some other things later, but I want to make, uh, clear in the beginning that, uh, I never intended in this, uh, papers or i- during these lectures to defend Hegelian notion of, um, recognition, I intended to show what a prerequisite of all forms of recognition is, namely to take a certain stance towards others, uh, or a certain ta– uh, stance towards the world. And without having taken this stance, we not even can put us in a, in the kind of action which is needed when we speak of mutual recognition.

Uh, so it’s the opener to what Hegel is describing. This is a pro-problem, by the way, which comes up already in Fichte, if I can, can, uh, for a minute only say something about one of, uh, these classics which are behind, uh, all these notions. Um, when Fichte in the Groundworks of, uh, Natural Law, I th– I, I don’t know about that, that that’s the right English title, but, uh, something like that.

When he is for the first time introducing the concept of recognition, uh, which is a wonderful way in which he’s doing it, because he is– he tries to show that the only way in which we can experience our own freedom is when we feel, um, angerufen. I don’t know what the English word for that is.

[00:56:47] JUDITH BUTLER:
When you’ve been called?

(laughter)

[00:56:48] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Called.

[00:56:49] AXEL HONNETH:
Called by another subject, uh, who calls, uh, for our– for making use of our freedom, Yeah? Who addresses me as somebody who, obviously, because I’m addressed in such a way, have the capacity to act freely.

This is the, the, the, the way in which, uh, Fichte is introducing, uh, recognition for the first time in the German tradition. There are other uses of the word before. You can find it in Rousseau, but the specific German use of it in this normative content, you find in, in, uh, in Fichte at this passage.

But then he’s asking himself, “But why should I,” the one who is called by this oth-other subject, be sure that this other, their self-consciousness, is in subject?” I mean, he raises this question, and then he brings something in play, which I think is very close to what I mean with, uh, recognitional stance. And he introduces it via the concept of the face of the other, which, uh, sounds almost, uh, a little bit like Levinas-

Mm-hmm. -uh, another author I have difficulties to understand. But, um, he wants to say that without this kind of awareness and openness, uh, uh, towards this face there, I wouldn’t be sure that, that the voice which is calling me is the voice of a human being.

So there must even something be prior to that kind of recognition, uh, Fichte is describing. And I’m interested in what is prior to those forms of mutual recognition we can describe, uh, with Hegel in the one or the other form. So, uh, this is a preliminary remark.

A second one is, which only– I mean, with these remarks, I only want to make sure what I wasn’t looking for. Uh, the next remark should, uh, be that, um, uh, I think I, I, uh, explicitly, uh, rejected Lukács’ conviction that all observational practices in that sense of, uh, in which he tries to describe this, that, uh, these are forms of reification. I think, I think this is the main mistake Lukács is doing.

Uh, and therefore, he, he is so simplistic in a certain sense, yeah, he is, he is convinced, obviously, that whenever we, uh, let’s say, take an, uh, uh, a rational or an objectivist stance towards other persons or towards the world, this already is reification. Uh, and this brings so many problems with it, uh, which become especially clear when you take, uh, John Dewey or Heidegger, which both showed that that is a totally wrong description of the situation.

Um, that, uh, I, uh, didn’t want to take up this proposal, but another… I, I, I, I then introduced another proposal which I thought is on a higher level, and this is the concept of, uh, the, the, uh, for, the, forget, uh, f- how, how did I call it?

For-forgetfulness of recognition. And I will come to that, uh, in, in some minutes. Uh, what I think one should understand, uh, with this is a parallel construction to Heidegger, um, but it’s on a higher level than, uh, the argument, uh, Lu-Lukács was introducing.

And only one small, uh, last remark. I didn’t, I didn’t even– and not even touched the problem, what could be the social causes for these forms of reification

(cough)

I try to describe or try to identify? Uh, this is because I’m extremely unsure about that.

[01:00:59] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Mm-hmm.

[01:01:00] AXEL HONNETH:
I’m definitely convinced that the idea that the market as such is producing such attitudes is, uh, first totalizing and in that sense wrong, and probably also wrong because it, uh, describes the effects of markets in a problematic way. I think there are other causes for this forgetfulness, but probably not the market. Yeah.

I mean, only, only as a remark. Thank you. I’m, I’m unsure about that.

Uh, probably there is something in the market or in a specific organization of the market which, um, which, uh, let’s say, enforces certain attitudes, which I would then describe as for-forgetfulness, uh, on recognition. But, uh, definitely not in the way in which Lukács introduced that whole picture, namely as if the market as such is an institution which forces us to detach behavior or observational, uh, behavior. Now let’s, uh, uh…

That were only preliminary remarks, and, um, I have, uh, as I said, uh, working through this, uh, during the night and obviously during sleep. I, uh, I have four points which I, uh, would like to make in reformulating some of my ambitions. Here I touch, uh, something which I mentioned already in some other remarks before.

So, uh, let’s start with this idea of two opposite forms of social criticism, which is important because that’s the background of the whole enterprise. Uh, as I said, I believe, and I think, uh, Raymond, uh, pointed that out, uh, I, I share the conviction that there are, to put it very roughly, at least two very distinct forms of social criticism. The first type of social criticism is, uh, what we call the critique of social injustices.

This is the, in– in the moment prevailing model of social criticism. If we find literature about, uh, which comes close to, uh, the enterprise of social criticism, it’s normally about certain forms of injustice, uh, which are, uh, provoking and which are, uh, really, uh, showing that something is totally wrong in the world. Uh, but this is a specific view on the world.

It is a view on the world in which I presuppose a certain standard of justice or several principles of justice. And I try to show that that the present organization, uh, of society or certain pieces in a society do not really fulfill the standards which are required by that, uh, principle. Uh, I mean, the, the, the most famous form of social criticism of that, uh, type is, uh, all what we can find in the field of, let’s say, left Rawlsianism.

I mean, the application of Rawls in certain leftist contexts. Uh, I think it’s very important here. And here I differ from, uh, I know that I differ from, uh, uh, Raymond Geuss, who has the other, uh, convictions.

Uh, I think other, uh, parties who share that kind of social criticism is, uh, are to be found in the late Habermas. Habermas, in the last 10 years, was mainly interested in such a project. Uh, and we can, we can find parts of that are also in Marx.

Also, Marx had a certain idea to criticize the society he was find– he was, uh, living in because or out of reasons of being injust. Uh, the other form of critique is the one I called, uh, uh, the critique of social pathologies. And here you bring in another word, and you bring in a totally different perspective.

The idea is that something is wrong in a society which can’t be measured with the help of a principle of justice. Something else is going wrong. And this something else, what is– w-which is going on, you describe with a medical notion.

There are other notions you can use, but I would propose that the, uh, that the best notion to cover all that is the word pathology. Something has gotten a patholo-pathological format in a society. This is beneath the level on which we, uh, refer to when we speak of injustices, because that refers to the level in a society where desires are formed, where certain forms of actions are constituted, and where all that is, uh, in play, which, uh, which in a criticism of social injustices is taken as a given.

Yeah. In that sense, I think it is working on a deeper level, uh, because, uh, uh, a criticism of social injustice can’t even touch that level of a society because it has to start from certain given preferences, from certain interests, uh, which, uh, let’s say, play a role in that criticism, but as givens. Whereas a criticism of social pathologies can’t accept these givens, but, uh, tries to, uh, to question these givens because there is the suspicion that they have a certain pathological format.

Uh, there is a long tradition in which this kind of criticism was, uh, developed. My guess was always that in, in the modern societies, it started with, with Rousseau in his second treatise. But definitely Schiller, whom you mentioned, uh, was another one.

And since then, there was Hegel, partly Marx, because he was also convinced that it’s not only, uh, injustices which he can find in capitalist societies, but obviously also believed that there are certain social pathologies, which he called alienation. Yeah. The early Marx was totally convinced that, uh, the society is wrong because it has alienating, uh, ef-effects.

(laughter)

So, this line of social criticism– criticism I try to take up, Which means now and reinforces one to, uh, do exactly what Raymond Geuss is looking for, namely to define a criterion, yeah, which allow one, uh, allows one to say that, uh, there are pathologies in a society. Uh, and this is, this is the really demanding and difficult task in that whole, uh, tradition. And I have to say that only very few authors in that tradition, I think, managed to solve those problems, which are connected with the question, how then to introduce and to justify that standard which allows us to speak of social pathologies?

It comes close to the question as you, uh, formulated it. Are there social equivalences to our intu-intuitions about, uh, physical health? I mean, are there equivalences to what we can call social health?

And I think there are more or less two, uh, two ways of answering that question, and both can be found in that tradition. The one is to go via ethical standards. Let’s say ideas of the good life, ideas of the good social life.

Uh, you can find, uh, hints to that in Aristotle, and you can try to, uh, to articulate these visions of a good life, and you can use them as a kind of standard. Then it becomes a kind of ethical critique of a given society, uh, which, uh, uh, for example, Schiller is doing, I think. Yeah.

He, he has a certain vision of the good life. He tries to argue for it, and then he tries to show that our present society is violating, uh, these principles of the good, of the good life. The other idea which came up later, I think, is a socio-ontological one, namely, to refer to certain socio-ontological prerequisites of our type of living and showing that certain practices in a society or certain institutions in, in a society are either destroying or violating those prerequisites.

This is, uh, the strategy I would prefer. Uh, but that means to, to start this enterprise, namely to go into socio-ontological, uh, argumentations. To ask whether we can say something reasonable about those social prerequisites which are constitutive for our form of life in such a way that we don’t believe that they are replaceable.

[01:10:55] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Yeah.

[01:10:56] AXEL HONNETH:
I mean, we have intuitions, uh, uh, uh, of this kind always when we talk. We, for example, believe that our form of socialization, of the socialization of our children, uh, uh, should be distinct from forms of manipulation. So I mean, we have here a clear intuition about something, yeah?

[01:11:17] RAYMOND GEUSS:
Yeah?

[01:11:18] AXEL HONNETH:
But it is really hard to spell this intuition out because it then would mean to really make clear in what sense our socialization practices can be differentiated from those form of ma-manipulation from which we believe that they would violate those prerequisites. I mean, we, we simply believe that there are these prerequisites which shouldn’t be destroyed because then we lose– we would lose our form of life. And on this level, I try to introduce now, uh, those ideas which one can find in Lukács.

So now I come in my second step to this notion of reification. As I said, there were a lot of notions for existing pathologies in these traditions. Alienation was probably the most famous one.

There were others which were brought up by, uh, other sociologists, like depersonalization, like commercialization. And one specific one was always reification, also brought up by Marx in the 19th century, and then taken up in this, uh, masterpiece, I still would say, uh, Lukács wrote, even when there are all these mistakes in this book, it is a kind of masterpiece. There he tries to defend the idea that the main pathology of our modern societies, capitalist societies, is exactly what he calls reification.

So, uh, the idea was to take up this, uh, intention of Lukács. Uh, but why reification? I mean, this is now, uh, probably, uh, something which has to be answered.

Probably other notions would be even more plausible to take up today in, in, um, in trying to make sense of in what society we, uh, we are living. Probably reification is not the most obvious one to take up. Probably other pathologies are much more, uh, demanding and much more important, uh, if we try to, uh, to spell out and to articulate what we believe is going wrong in our, uh, type of society.

I tell you at least, uh, three experiences which are behind my interest in reification. And doing this, I want to say, I don’t believe that all pathologies in our societies can be brought to this one notion of reification. I think it’s only one possible way of this of describing a specific pathology of our societies.

Um, and I start probably by something which comes very close to what Jo- Judith, uh, introduced yesterday. It was my reaction to reading this fascinating book of, uh, Christopher Browning on the, uh, German police forces, which were asked at the end of the Second Wor-World War to, uh, to perform the, uh, murdering of, uh, uh, Jews, uh, day for day, day per day,

[01:14:35] RAYMOND GEUSS:
you say,

[01:14:36] AXEL HONNETH:
day by day. Uh, this is a, uh, I mean, it’s, it’s a fantastic book, but it’s horrible to read because, uh, you have to understand what, what was going on there. There were all these young police forces which were not even in the, uh, in the central, uh, central, um, parts of the National, uh, National Socialist Party, they were simply police forces in big cities like Hamburg, uh, and Frankfurt.

But they were– because they tried to intensify the killing because they believed the war is coming to an end. They tried to intensify, uh, the Holocaust. They tried to get this, uh, police forces to do this job.

And, uh, now Browning is trying to figure out what happened to these police forces. How was it possible that these people which had at home their own families, small children, wives, and so on, took over the job of killing, uh, these Jews, uh, uh, per, uh, day, day, day by day, uh, without any kind of resistance, obviously? I mean, there were certain people which resisted to this task, and they were allowed to resist, by the way.

So they were not even, uh, even forced to do it because, uh, the party was aware that there may be certain humanistic reactions to that. Uh, but more or less ninety percent agreed. Uh, Browning brings it, uh, brings it down to what he calls, uh, the result of the Milgram experiences.

He believed that something like that happened there. But I must say, I always had doubts whether that’s already the explanation. I mean, the, the Milgram experience is only, let’s say, it’s, it’s not the solution.

Uh, we have to understand why the Milgram experience works in such a case. And here, my intuition was always that it must have to do with something like a specific stance towards other person, persons, which is not the one we usually have. And there must be a specific, uh, stance towards others, which allow us to suddenly, overnight, come into the situation to kill not only, uh, all the people, but, uh, children, yeah, which you see in front of you.

So what happens in such a person? This is one background experience or one, uh, one reading, uh, which, uh, which gives you a lot of puzzles and you want to understand. And probably the only way to understand it, I thought, is to introduce something like what we can call a reified perspective towards the world.

The other is, is, uh,

(cough)

quite close to our present time, and, uh, it is to understand certain, uh, racist, uh, forms of violence in Germany. Also, that is hard to understand because there are very often, uh, young boys socialized in a normal, uh, life world, which overnight develop a certain tendency, uh, to, uh, to, to, to develop, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, highly brutal form of violence against, uh, others, mainly Turks in Germany. And also there, when you hear the reports of how that is happening and how they are able to do that, there is a certain dehumanizing, Um, let’s say, perspective in play when you hear these reports.

So it is hard to understand why this should be possibly in such a life world as the one we have, where all the moral standards are obviously, um, somewhat in play. And, uh, so again, you have to understand what’s happening with these, uh, young boys which suddenly become members of skinhead groups and, uh, obviously are not able to see the other they are, uh, attacking as a human being any longer, yeah?

So again, that was another, uh, part of my experience, uh, which, uh, I thought I should try to understand. And the last, uh, piece of experience is, uh, totally different from that. That are all forms of violence, uh, which are hard to understand.

The last piece of experience is to see or to experience, uh, a certain type of, uh, let’s say, self-entrepreneur on these new markets, which are able to model themselves, obviously, after the prerequisites of, uh, the market. So that has to do with market developments. There is a new trend as far as I can see it, and in Germany, it’s called self-entrepreneurship.

Um, Arbeitskraftunternehmer, which is a new word now introduced. Uh, somebody who obviously is able to model himself permanently and new after the demands of, uh, the, the very quick developing market. So the question is, what kind of behavior is that?

What kind of attitude is it this person takes towards him or herself? And again, I thought maybe that, uh, the clue to understand that could be to take up the notion of reification to understand exactly what’s going on there. So these are only s– three of, uh, three pieces of experience which played a certain role in my own interest to take up the notion of reification again, and not in the belief, uh, to take up the whole Lukács program, namely that capitalist– capitalism as such has reifying consequences, but in trying to understand, uh, these pathologies I just tried, uh, to mention.

So, uh, then, uh, let me come to my third point, uh, namely, how to understand reification, and this now comes very close to the main problems we had in our discussion of this. Um, I mean, first I mentioned already, Lukács has this, I think, oversimplicistic view that reification is the, is, uh, to be equated with a rational, detached, uh, with a, with a rational, neutral, observational stance to the world. This already is for him reification.

And I think this is, uh, totally wrong, and it’s the wrong way to understand, to understand what it could mean to speak of a reifying perspective or of occurrences of reification. So I tried, uh, in going through all the literature which I offered here, namely through, uh, Heidegger, through Dewey, through certain pieces of developmental psychology, and especially through Stanley Cavell. I, uh, tried to propose an other understanding of what, uh, uh, reification could mean.

And as I said, I called it

(laughter)

forgetfulness of recognition. What I mean with is, is with this is that the observational or objective stance or perspective on the world or towards the world is as such definitely not a pathology. It is a quite normal way of, uh, relating to the world.

Yeah. And we normally, I guess, behave in that way, that we are observing other persons, that we are calculating, uh, uh, about other persons, uh, that we are following our interests, which again presupposes a certain observational stance, probably, and that we are joining that type of, uh, reflexive distance stance towards the world. So it would be wrong to equate that kind of perspective on the world with, uh, a pathology called reification.

My idea was that it only turns into a social pathology when in doing this you lose sight of an antecedent or prior recognition. And this is, let’s say, the intuition behind the whole project. Uh, it

(clears throat)

means that all our observational stances or perspectives only can be developed under the condition of a prior recognition. I mean, this is the intuition behind that. And, uh, probably I try to, uh, re-articulate this one specific intuition once again now, uh, to, to, make clear what I wanted to say with that.

Uh, first, prior means here mainly, uh, not, uh, genetical or developmental priority, but it means a kind of, you can say ontological or you can say categorical priority. In order to be able to do all that what we call observation or, uh, what we can call, uh, calcul-calculation, what we can call interest following, uh, following, what we, uh, can call this kind of theoretical stance towards the world. In order to develop such a theoretical stance to the world, uh, and especially to other person, we first have to, uh, take over a stance which I call the recognitional stance.

This is, uh, the main idea, and, uh, this is so because without taking over this recognitional stance, we wouldn’t be able to understand others as human beings, to see others as human beings. I think this is a prerequisite even to, to, to act towards others as human beings. And, uh, in that sense, it’s, uh, I would say, uh, maybe that’s, uh, uh- a notion none of you likes because I think you even mentioned it already.

Um, I mean, Habermas once had this notion, quasi-transcendental, mm-hmm, which I always liked, yeah. Uh, so it’s a kind of quasi-transcendental condition of all our, um, intersubjective practices, uh, because we wouldn’t– I mean, uh, We wouldn’t be able to, uh, to un-to, to realize that others are other human beings without this antecedent or prior recognition. So that’s the question now is: what means here recognition?

And this is the other part of all your questions. Yeah, how heavy is the notion? How normatively loaded is this notion?

And, uh, what I, uh, what I’m all– What is it that I bring into this notion? Maybe I make a short break.

(laughter)

It’s too long, yeah. The– Our ability in participating in linguistic practices, in forms of linguistic, uh, understanding.

And I think this is not enough. This is already– This comes, let’s say, too late because something is prior to that also. And this what is prior to that is the ability to, um, to, to, to

(clears throat)

understand the expressions of others as a demand to me. I think this is what allow, what allow us immediately to see other human beings as human beings. And therefore, that kind of recognitional stance, or as Cavell is describing it as that kind of acknowledgement, is prior to all other forms of

(clears throat)

cognition, of observation, and so on and so on. And, uh, this is, as I said, a non-epistemic condition because it’s, uh, it’s not a belief you have about the world,

(clears throat)

it’s not a conviction you have about the world, but it’s a specific stance you have to have towards the world in order to be able, uh, to, uh, see other human beings as human beings. Which, uh, uh, uh, then means, uh, that to see other human beings as human beings means to know that their expressions are something to which we can only react by a certain way of behavior. I mean, you see, you don’t understand an expression of pain correctly when you take it as an information about something in the world.

You understand it correctly in the moment in which you feel required to act. And that’s the right way to understand an expression of that kind. And this kind of attitude towards others, I would, uh, call the recognitional stance.

And this is prior to all other forms of seeing persons, understanding persons, even prior to what, uh, one can call the communicative stance, uh, in, in, in difference to the observational stance. So that kind of recognitional stance I have in mind when I try to say that there is something non-epistemic prior to all forms of social interaction, and, uh, that these non-epistemic condition is something like recognition, care, or sympathy. And now I come to these three notions because these are– this is probably the most complicated, uh, thing in our, uh, in our whole debate, because you have the suspicion that here suddenly I bring in two normative, uh, concepts already, yeah, on this basic level.

And, uh, so let me try to defend my own, uh, my own intuition here. Uh, first, I have to say that, uh, in, in my whole argumentation, there is a certain asymmetry which I produced, and this is probably a real problem of the paper. Namely, when I try to bring as an other evidence for the priority of the recognitional stance towards all other forms of behavior

(coughs)

, the results of certain, uh, developmental research-

[01:30:53] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.

[01:30:54] AXEL HONNETH:
I suddenly had to switch to another language. Namely, here, the language when we speak of, uh, uh, the young children in the age of nine months,

(coughs)

the language is not recognition.

(coughs)

It’s not recognitional stance.

(coughs)

The language here is attachment, binding, identification,

(coughs)

imitation. It’s a totally different vocabulary which, which comes here in. And this produces, let’s say, uh, certain difficulties in understanding what I want to say.

So this is a kind of, um, recognition in the other sense, a recognition of a probable mistake in my argumentation. I mean, at least I invite a certain misunderstanding. You see, the idea was, and I think– I still think it’s a wonderful idea, but it doesn’t really work in this paper, probably.

The idea was, when I am able to show that what Donald Davidson is describing as epistemic triangulation as the condition for getting an objective concept of the world. When this epistemic triangulation is, uh, conditioned by a prior attachment to the second person, then it is easy to show, at least genetically, that attachment or identification, and in that sense, let’s say in this very broad sense, care or relate– relatedness is prior to cognition. Yeah?

Uh, but again, uh, as I said, this is slightly, uh, slightly, uh, uh, a slight problem because here the relationship of the child to the second person, which is obviously necessary to have in order to bring the epistemic triangulation in play, it has nothing to do with what can be called recognitional stance, but is a kind of direct attachment towards the second person or identification, or as I said, imitation. Whereas my main point is that prior to cognition is recognition, the recognitional stance, and this is something else than simple attachment or simple identification. The recognitional stance, um, has the characteristic that I accept a demand on myself, its limit, which limits my own, uh, my own interests or my own self-centeredness.

This I would call the recognitional stance. This is what is prior to cognition. Namely, to be open to a demand which I can only understand correctly when I see that it limits my possibilities.

So there is an internal connection there between limitation, between, between realizing that demand in the sense of acknowledging that demand and making the experience of a certain limitation of myself. This, uh, s– I see as an internal link which has to be spelled out when one speak, when one speaks here of recognition or acknowledgement. It doesn’t make sense to speak of recognition when there is not this internal link between, uh, I mean, understanding a demand and immediately limitation of yourself.

This means recognition. Recognition means to accept that limitation. Uh, and therefore, I think that the example of the narcissistic person is not a good example.

Uh, let, let me, let me try. I don’t know how much… I’m, I’m consuming a lot of time, I see.

Yeah. I come to an end because, I, hopefully, I find it very soon. I wrote it down somewhere because I liked it as an example, and only this morning in waking up, I was sure it’s a wrong design.

Uh, it’s a wrong example. Um, I mean, you are… Let me see.

Um, you are describing the narcissist. Here I have it. Uh, you are describing him as somebody who has to, who has to have a high knowledge of, uh, the emotional, uh, characteristics of the other.

Let, let me simply read it. “I will rea– realize that I’m dealing with a differents– different ontological realm than I am when I’m dealing with my car.” This is a narcissist now, the “I.” I may pay close attention to this other person’s desires, hopes, and projects.

I may have become very good at recognizing the distinctive humanity of others because I want to use them. This may be awful, but it doesn’t seem like an ontological mistake, nor need it involve any kind of forgetting of some prior recognitional capacity. That will only seem so if we conflate recognition as sine qua non and recognition as developmental paradigm.

I think that’s wrong. I think the recognitional stance means that understanding the desires, hopes, and projects of others means to limit myself in respect to these desires, hopes, and, uh, and projects. I mean, I can’t speak of recognition if that is not included.

Because then the difference between recognition and cognition would’ve gone lost. Then there is no difference between that I, uh, that I see and understand your hopes, and I recognize your hopes. To recognize your hopes means I have somewhat to act on them.

I have somewhat to limit myself in, uh, in doing what recognition includes in the German sense. Yeah, in the, in the normative sense, not in the, in the, uh, in the other senses or meanings in which this word can be used. So in that sense, the recognitional stance is, uh, a little bit more than what, uh, uh, what Raymond spelled out when he spoke of positive affective engagement.

I think it is more because it means, uh, it doesn’t mean to be always positive towards the other. It doesn’t mean to love– to always have to love the other. It means that when my wife is crying, and I’m so distant to her because I lost love, and I feel resentment in the moment in which she’s crying, that I know that that is the wrong reaction.

That’s the recognitional stance.

[01:38:18] JONATHAN LEAR:
So, but just feeling the resentment isn’t?

[01:38:20] AXEL HONNETH:
No. Okay. Yeah. The recognitional stance is to have, to have the, the, the criteria for knowing what, what reactions are the appropriate reactions and

(clears throat)

what are the inappropriate reactions, even when I’m not in the situation to, uh, to perform the appropriate reaction. Yeah? So that I would call recognitional stance.

The idea of reification is, uh, that we in, uh, in the consequence of certain practices or in the consequence of certain, uh, thought, uh, schemas, ideologies. We lose this, uh, dependence of our observational attitudes from the, uh, the prerequisite of the recognitional stance out of view. This is the whole idea.

So we, we, we lose the capacity to at least understand that we are doing something wrong and that the, uh, that the reaction is somewhat deficit there. Yeah. Uh, that was the main idea.

Maybe I stop here. I have some other points, uh, and I, I only try to recapitulate what the core of the paper was. Thank you.

[01:39:46] RAYMOND GEUSS:
I wanna give the audience a chance to get involved in discussion, but Judy, did you have… You look like you had something you wanted to say-

[01:39:52] JUDITH BUTLER:
You know, I, I just wanna make sure I’m understanding-

[01:39:53] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah, correctly,

[01:39:54] JUDITH BUTLER:
that the, that the normative criteria that you say we have access to at such a moment in responding to another’s expression of suffering.

[01:40:05] AXEL HONNETH:
Right?

[01:40:07] JUDITH BUTLER:
Is, um, at the, at the normative criteria we have access to when we respond appropriately to another person’s expression of suffering is there as a pre-epistemic condition. Right? And, and, and it is– it’s not e-e-even if we come to cognize it or learn it or talk about it reflectively

(coughs)

Right, we’re cognizing and learning something that is always already there and that constitutes us pre-epistemically, so it’s co-extensive with our being human.

[01:40:36] AXEL HONNETH:
Yes.

[01:40:38] JUDITH BUTLER:
Okay, it’s a tall order, but yeah, okay. Okay. But that’s, but that’s, that… So that is, that is basically to, to establish the normative goodness of humans, no?

[01:40:47] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah, but not in the, in the, in the full sense of morality. You see, it’s-

[01:40:52] JUDITH BUTLER:
No, it-

[01:40:52] AXEL HONNETH:
I think it’s a condition. In, in that sense, it’s, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for, for morality. Okay.

I have to ha– I have to take over this recognitional stance in order even to start to think about morality, because all morality has to do with the demands of others and how to,

(clears throat)

how to satisfy or fulfill the demands of others. Uh, in order to understand the demands of others and to be prepared to act on them.

[01:41:18] JUDITH BUTLER:
Right. But to take over recognitional stance is actually to recover one that I’m already endowed with.

[01:41:23] AXEL HONNETH:
Yes, yes. And the main thing I wanted to say is, you see, and, and that’s the tricky thing, uh, Raymond said, and I think you said, uh, you have to see that somebody who is, uh, who is hating somebody else, uh, is, uh, in an engagement with that other person. This is right.

I mean, this is totally right. The question is, is he or she in, uh, in the recognitional stance? My answer would be yes, he is in the recognitional stance.

as far as he knows that in certain situations, hate may be the inappropriate reaction to the expression of the other. You see, I mean, he can hate her in that situation, and he can’t do other, uh, uh, other- You say otherwise?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. He can’t do otherwise.

But if there is not the knowledge that this is somewhat inappropriate when she is suffering, uh, then he is not in the recognitional stance.

[01:42:28] MODERATOR:
Could you just say one more word about what kind of limitation exactly you have to see? You said in the recognitional stance, you have to see the other’s

[01:42:37] AXEL HONNETH:
right desires as one is limiting you. Right. But in what- but in what limiting means I– It’s very simple. I can’t do what I would do if I would follow only my own desires. Yeah. I mean, uh-

[01:42:51] RAYMOND GEUSS:
But that falls short of full-fledged moral limits. I mean, it’s just something less than what I would do.

[01:42:57] AXEL HONNETH:
Right, right. Therefore, I wouldn’t say this is morality. Yeah. This is a precondition for, for morality, for the moral point of view.

[01:43:05] RAYMOND GEUSS:
But it’s the perception of a reason somehow. Their desires- Yes, yes, yes are reasons for me to limit my- It’s not just a constraint.

[01:43:11] AXEL HONNETH:
No, no, no. I-

[01:43:12] RAYMOND GEUSS:
I believe-

[01:43:12] AXEL HONNETH:
I’m not sure whether I would say reason. Maybe I would say value or something like that. Yeah. That’s, yeah.

[01:43:20] MODERATOR:
Okay. Um… The audience has been very patient.

Um, and, um, I would like to give you all a chance to ask some questions. So, um, who’d like to? Uh, yes.

I think, um, I think… Are we supposed to– Should they use the microphone? If you wouldn’t mind coming over and using the microphone so that your words will be preserved for posterity.

[01:43:51] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I don’t know if I’m ready for posterity.

(laughter)

I have two questions, um, to think about. I loved the talk. I loved the last three days.

I’m really grateful to all of you. Um, one is a question that emerged from the conversation of the last, uh, three days, and the other is one that I guess I came in with before I, I was with you. One is this notion of the social causes of reification.

Um, um, perhaps I started more with the critique that Lukács’s, uh, critique of the social pathology and about capitalism and like, being the root of a kind of objectified commodification of the relations between people as things. And I guess I don’t think that it’s only about capitalism, but that it’s about a certain kind of inequality, but an inequality of power. Um, and so to link it to your idea about developmental theories, That I, I was thinking that in, in some ways, um, the recognition that using the, the, your developmental theory about a, uh, a child.

The recognition of a child with their parent in a way, um, is a recognition of the other, but it includes a certain kind of power. But it’s a, in our, in this case, a benevolent power. And then to use, to use you, I guess you wanted to be used.

But so, yeah. You know, like— you know, like you were talking about— yeah, the hungry lion the other day and like, you know, getting at the, at that, at, at its prey or to use you, Judith, like about, um, Abu Ghraib and people like recognizing an other. I was thinking that there’s– maybe there’s

(coughs)

what’s missing is, like, something about the evolution of recognition to a point at which in the development of a human being where there’s an equality of power. So like if you have a child or if your wife is crying, you’re

(laughter)

or I don’t know what. You know, where if somebody has an equal potential to fight back, then you, y- then your, um, characterization of recognition sounds a little bit like noblesse oblige in the sense of when you come to a point at which you recognize the other’s needs, then you have a self-responsibility to regulate that. And maybe it links up to the Lukács idea about, um, capitalism and about inequality and just and justice and everything.

That there is something that you need to have, that there has to be a development, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be, like, physical power, but it can be emotional power. It can be a, a, a power that, that regulates itself. You know, sort of a yin-yang or something like that to make it very California, you know.

But something, something where you’re not the only one in charge so that those children who were, who were shooting or, or really just hurting, you know, killing Jews, you know, had this th- inequality of power at that time, that they were, they were in an objectified situation. I don’t know that. That, that doesn’t exactly work, that, that part.

So that, that was one point. Um, the other was one that I came in with, which was about the relationship between reification and the concept of belonging. Because I think that in a s-culture of, of, uh, self-objectification and commodity objectification and the relationship among people that somehow loses its interactional humanity, that you still have a longing to belong, and that maybe there’s something about the racial, um, uh, fragmentation and, and the, you know, all the identity politics that are also tearing up the world and that also, you know, had devastating effects in Germany, that maybe that was part of a symptom of that kind of social pathology of looking for a sense of belonging when the– you couldn’t see a belonging to a larger human race or other human beings.

Anyway, just thoughts.

[01:48:44] RAYMOND GEUSS:
You wanna respond to-

[01:48:45] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah.

(laughter)

Uh, I make it short because I guess, uh, there are many other questions. I think belonging, a sense of belonging, Maybe that’s– I mean, one, one could say that’s that’s another word that’s probably not as, um, a differentiated word for what I want to say when I speak of recognitional attitude. Because, uh, to, to, to be in that kind of attitude or to, to have that kind of stance towards others means definitely to, to have it I mean, as Cavell is saying, uh, uh, a kind of sympathy, yeah?

This you can’t– I mean, we can’t imagine to be in that stance without a very elementary form of sympathy in the German sense of Anteilnahme.

[01:49:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:49:45] AXEL HONNETH:
Which is, uh, less than Sympathie– Mm-hmm, uh, in German. So, um, so in that sense, I would, uh, I would agree to that. Maybe I can use this to say one word about the notion of care, because I have a certain tendency to identify care with, with recognition attitude.

And there are also some categorical problems or some, uh, some, uh,

(throat clearing)

some problems of definition. In, in Heidegger, I think, I mean, Professor Dreyfus will know much better, but my rough picture is you have two chances of interpretation of that notion of care. The one is to understand it quite egocentrically.

Uh, that’s a German tendency to have that understanding of care, and Tugendhat, for example, I think proposes such an explanation. There, it simply means to care about the world, uh, following your own interests. Yeah?

I mean, then care is another word for, uh, for a kind of instrumental way of utilizing the world. This is one way of understanding it. And as I said, in Germany, uh, especially Tugendhat tends to, to propose that kind of definition.

The other understanding of care brings in something like the demand of something you are confronted with. Namely, to take into consideration the demand of the things or the persons you are caring for. And then it’s already to– this what Hegel describes when he says, “You have to be out of yourself.”

Then it’s a kind of decentring attitude. And then, uh, then you– then taking care of or caring for has this, uh, meaning which I try to reconstruct with the help of the idea of recognitional stance, yeah? Then– Yeah,

and then you are open for the demand of others, of other things or others. And I reduce this to the intersubjective world out of reasons I mentioned in the paper.

[01:52:03] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Okay. Yes. Well, I don’t think this is naive Rousseauianism, but it strikes me that one of the concepts that, um, that you’re trying to get at is has its origins in Rousseau, and I think the whole, um, history of the, of the concept of recognition begins with Rousseau, and that’s his concept of pity, which in the second discourse, he defines as a feeling of distress at the suffering of a being like ourselves.

And that involves two things: number one, a reaction, which Rousseau speculates is spontaneous and natural, and number two, the ability to recognize when a being is like ourselves. Similarly, Rousseau sees that as a necessary condition for moral judgment, but not a sufficient condition for moral judgment. Virtue is rooted in pity, but pity is not yet, yet virtue.

And that gets t-t-to the, I guess, a question I have b-about the distinction that you make between, um, moral criticism and social pathologies, the critique of social pathologies. I mean, a-again, going back to Rousseau, it’s, it, that confounds me a little bit because it seems to me that the tradition that you’re invoking is, in fact, can be distinguished from a tradition of moral criticism simply by being situated moral criticism. That is the, the critique that, for instance, Kant desituates is inspired by Rousseau.

Hegel puts it back into the historical situation. Marx takes it even more deeply into the historical situation. So it’s not, I, I think you described them as though there’s, there are very separate enterprises, and it seems to me they’re much more confounded with one another, um, than the distinction suggests.

And, uh, uh, finally, um, I just sort of wanted to say I work in the childcare center over on Durant Avenue with, with these types of creatures that you’ve been describing in this empirical literature. And, um, and I think that one of the things that’s, that’s missing sometimes in the accounts themselves of Winnicott, Bowlby, and stuff like that, is the other side of the moment of recognition. Um, there are points in which children recognize, and I’ve– I’ve had this experience where you say something to a child and it gets a look on its face like suddenly it understood you.

It never unders– You were just quacking at it before, and suddenly it understood you. But I think that that moment of discovery, that there’s, there’s something there. It doesn’t know what it is.

It can’t put itself in your place or whatever, but there’s something like it there in that simple Hegelian sense. That’s also mutual too, because I think adults who are engaged with children and pay attention to them are equally startled when their own subjectivity or their own capacity of subjectivity emerges into the world. And I think sometimes the literature itself loses that moment of rest that that the reciprocal nature of the process, that the adult has to be equally startled by what emerges in the child as the child is startled by what it discovers, uh, in the adult.

And practitioners who read too much of that literature and turned it into Foucauldian, uh, discourses and practices often are, are not as susceptible to that kind of discovery. So I just wanted to point out that there’s another way of looking at that process that is more mutual and reciprocal. But my question was about the relationship between moral criticism and, and pathology and the distinction.

[01:55:46] AXEL HONNETH:
I must not be the only one who is always answering, but

(cough)

(laughter)

I, uh, ma-I make it again very short. Um, I think pity for me would be a too substantial notion for describing what I mean with recog-recognitional attitude or stance. Because, um, as I said, you all– you can be in a recognitional stance towards the world, and you normally are when you, for example, don’t, uh, have the moral feeling of pity with somebody who is suffering.

Yeah, this is possible. I think the only, uh,

(coughs)

And this diff– this is a, this is a difference to Cavell, I think, who describes things differently, I think. I think the only precondition for, for being in that stance is to know somewhat that this reaction of pity is missing, is somewhat not appropriate. But, uh, you are in that stance when you don’t feel pity, I think.

Yeah. But p-pity is already a moral concept, too heavy for what I want to describe. I want to, I want to describe something which is, which is, which is beneath, uh, where all the moral concepts are coming in, but which is a necessary condition for letting these concepts coming into play.

Uh, the, the second point is very interesting, but too complicated, I must say. I, I, I think you are right that there is– there must be certain relations, and probably they are very interesting between what I separate very strongly when I’m speaking on the one side of injustices and on the other side of pathologies, Yeah?

That’s an analytical distinction. I, I, I think it worked for– It works when you try to reconstruct the tradition of crit– of, of social criticism because you can identify certain structures in certain thinkers, uh, with the help of this distinction. But already the case of Marx shows how complicated things are because he, he did both things in the same moment,

Yeah. He was interested in specific forms of injustices in the capitalist society, but believed that these injustices are produced by a certain social pathology. So he, he saw a certain internal relationship between these two, and that’s very interesting but complicated.

Um, Um,

[01:58:25] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
simply to, um, follow in the spirit of Jim Stockinger, who was the last questioner, and to slightly complicate, um, the question of pitié in Rousseau’s second discourse. Um, just a couple of very brief points that I’d be interested in hearing what people made of. Um, first, um, it, it’s not a simple category, nor is Rousseau a naïve theorist, it would seem to me, especially not in the second discourse, for the following reasons.

Um, uh, I don’t think, in fact, pitié in Rousseau’s Second Discourse is, in fact, a moral or even a social category at all. It’s, uh, when one sees a fellow creature, uh, let’s get to how we define a fellow creature in a moment, suffering, one thinks something like this: Uh, yeah, there but for the grace of God go I. But that isn’t the reaction, because you’d have to have some notion of what the grace of God means,

[01:59:32] AXEL HONNETH:
and I haven’t even got there yet, and I’m a long way from Rousseau’s, uh, state of nature. It’s more like a flinching and recoil when you see that suffering. Um, it’s not social because it is the suffering you are reacting to.

It is not the creature directly. Uh, also, there is no reason to suppose that the creature doing the recoiling is one that we would recognize as being human. Uh, Rousseau’s very clear about this.

Natural man, quote unquote, and socialized man are completely different creatures. We wouldn’t recognize each other if we met in the street. Uh, so I, I, I don’t think we should play fast and loose with this notion of pity.

I think there’s all sorts of, um, odd complexities to it. Uh, and I would be interested in hearing more how that would work into, uh, what we’re working towards here. Yeah.

It’s, it’s… I, I refer, but when I said, uh, pity is for me already a too substantive moral concept, I was not referring to Rousseau’s use of it in the Second Treatise. There it plays a different role, and I agree that probably you are– you have a right point to say that, uh, Rousseau, the way he is describing it in the discourse is not meaning it as a moral reaction.

Probably that’s right. Yeah. Pr-probably it’s also for him, we need that kind of level, especially because under the conditions of modern societies or when we have become socialized, uh, this pity does not work any longer in the same sense as it worked as long as we were in the state of nature, where we had, uh, a totally different structure.

That’s, that’s right. Yeah, so I th– I, I think I– You see, I don’t li– I, I think it’s a fantastic book, and for me, it’s the starting point of all forms of social criticism in that sense, uh, of a critique of social pathologies.

I– To a certain degree, I believe it is totally wrong, um, even when it’s a fantastic book. And, uh, I think it’s wrong because he believed simply that, uh, regarding the perspective

(cough)

of the other as yet, as we are doing under conditions of highly developed societies is, uh, is, is decentering us in the– in a, in a highly problematic sense. This is his conviction, yeah? And this I think is, it’s wrong, and it’s the result of somebody living in Paris and, uh and, and, uh,

(laughter)

seeing that

(laughter)

the main relation between human beings is envy. Yeah? And therefore, all kind of, uh, of-

(laughter)

[02:02:58] JUDITH BUTLER:
No, that was Geneva was the problem, I think.

[02:03:00] AXEL HONNETH:
No, but the, the, the short time when he was in Paris- Yes, he immediately thought that’s the wrong place to be then. Uh, so this, this, this gave him such a, in my words, negative picture of what recognition is that he really couldn’t, uh, couldn’t get it right.

Yeah? But it’s a long discussion on Rousseau. Mm-hmm.

[02:03:27] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I, I don’t wanna take too long with the question that just quickly, I think there are a lot of, um, arguments that have been made about Lukács which could be contested. Um, and th-th-the early Lukács. We’re not talking about the Lukács after that.

So I, I don’t– the whole idea of the subject-object is a eschatological category, it’s been contested by Parkinson. It’s an epistemological category taking over from capital, the idea that only the working class can understand its real role in the concrete totality, and because of that kind of knowledge it can attain, can play a particular kind of role. Um, this whole idea of the contemplative stance that Lukács was trying to develop b-via the, uh, category of reification, I think has been developed well by Andrew Feenberg.

I, I think it’s something that’s quite obvious. I mean, there are laws of economics. There’s a crisis.

No one knows why there’s a crisis. People feel they have to accommodate themselves as if they’re any other commodity. There’s too much of that, it’s too much of it, they have to reduce their price of their commodity, allow for their wages to be reduced.

Keynes, in a way, represented a de-reification of the economy outside of the Marxist idea. But I think these are– that we’re playthings of alien forces, that people have to, in a way, adapt to those laws and find ways to live within them is what he me-meant by contemplative stance, and I think there’s, there’s, there’s something quite true about that. Um, there are a lot of different arguments, uh, about Lukács, but the point I w-I, I want to ask for Professor Honneth is that I could go on and on about every single thing that’s been said about Lukács, and I think it could be contested.

About the party also, I think, I think that’s unfair. I think many people who read his work saw an appreciation of the worker councils against the party, and that was why the text was suppressed, and it became a very important text for opposition to Stalinist regimes, despite what Stalin himself did. So I think the text itself is, is much more complicated than, um, was suggested.

Um, but I think Lukács would have argued against the recognition paradigm here, that it’s exactly through recognition that exploitation happens. That is, recognition is, is– it’s what we’re forced to recognize each other as in a commodity-producing society. That is, as juridical subjects, free and equal with each other, that exploitation is actually carried out.

Recognition is the problem. That is, we– Because, uh, when Reagan breaks the PATCO strike, those workers were free, and as free juridical subjects, they agreed to a no-strike clause. Because they agreed to it, that contract is binding on them.

Because, you know, because we are, we recognize each other as free and equal juridical subjects, uh, that’s how the contract becomes binding on workers. That is, workers are forced to assume a persona that they are free and equal to each other. That’s the s-co-subjective stance that’s required by the commodity, that we all appear as free and equal proprietors vis-à-vis each other, and it’s exactly through that illusion of, of mutual recognition of each other as juridical subjects that exploitation is carried through.

So I, I think the whole paradigm of recognition re– uh, implies a certain conception of the subject, which is phantasmagoric for Lukács. So I, I think, I think there’s a problem there.

[02:06:40] MODERATOR:
Okay. Axel, you wanna-

[02:06:41] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah. Start? Um, and now we are sp-

Now we are speaking, uh, on recognition on a, on a totally different level. Now we are speaking on recognition as a Specific, uh, form of, uh, affirmation of others, mutual affirmation of others. And the one example you have in mind is, uh, the specific form of legal recognition we find in capitalist societies.

Um, I mean, also here to make it very short, I don’t see and I don’t believe that the problem here is, uh, the fact of mutual legal respect as equal and free persons. I think this is an enormously, uh, important development of modern societies, that it opened up that idea that we should respect each other, uh, in our societies as being free and equal. I th-

I think it’s the, it’s the core of modern societies. As, as such, uh, did Hegel saw it, Yeah?

I think the problem is that the standards, uh, of that idea of rights, of right under which we respect each other in that sense, that there are certain mistakes. I mean, the whole idea of autonomy, which is, uh, connected with the, uh, actual form of legal respect may be a problem. It’s not sufficient.

But not the idea of, uh, equal and, uh, uh, of, of, respecting the, uh, the the equality and the freedom of the other. I don’t see that problem. You see?

And there I differ from… I know that there is this whole tendency and the whole tradition in, in the Marxist, uh, movement to believe that legality as such or legal respect as such or legal recognition as such is a problem, and that I don’t see. Not at all.

I mean, I’m, I’m, I here have a very clear conviction that, uh, uh, that that’s one of the big advantages of modern societies is that the problem is in the, in the, let’s say, uh, Im Umfang des Rechts.

(coughing)

Umfang. In the, uh,

[02:09:11] MODERATOR:
in the extent

[02:09:11] AXEL HONNETH:
in the extent of rights, not in the idea of rights. Yeah.

[02:09:19] MODERATOR:
Judy, did you wanna-

[02:09:20] JUDITH BUTLER:
You know, it, it just occurred to me that some of these questions are, are bringing up the, um, uh, a set, a set of concerns about how the recognitional stance unders– which is explained through the example of the dyadic encounter. Mm-hmm. The first and the second person, um, how that translates into a broader social-

Yeah uh, into a broader social theory and whether it can.

[02:09:42] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah.

[02:09:43] JUDITH BUTLER:
And, um, it seems to me that the encounter with the second person is an ethical encounter, we might say, or one in which certain normative, um, criteria are binding upon us or ought to be. Um, but then, you know, at the moment where you are doing a critique of a social pathology, you seem to be indexing, um, um, a s- a social domain that is, um, that is not just dyadic and that the dyadic wouldn’t be adequate for conceptualizing.

[02:10:10] AXEL HONNETH:
Mm-hmm.

[02:10:11] JUDITH BUTLER:
And, um, and it seems that the normative re– uh, uh, criteria that we’re using is articulated through the dyadic, but how could it translate?

[02:10:20] AXEL HONNETH:
Mm-hmm.

[02:10:21] JUDITH BUTLER:
Um, and, and I’m, I’m just, uh… I guess I’m wondering about that. And then, you know, I’ll just say something polemical, which is, um, I appreciated the lucidity with which you, uh, distinguished the critique of social injustice from the critique of social pathology.

But what about the critique of normalization that makes use of the notion of pathology- Yeah, uh, and extends pathologies, even proliferates them, you know, for market reasons?

[02:10:47] AXEL HONNETH:
Right. Right.

[02:10:48] JUDITH BUTLER:
Um, I remember going to my first Marxism group, um, in Heidelberg where I was, I was disinvited quite quickly since homosexuality was considered a social pathology. And would we, would we agree that internet dating is a social pathology? And would we agree that pornographic consumption is a social pathology?

I’m not sure we would, right? And at what point then does that discourse of pathology actually work, you know, to support a kind of discourse of normalization that we see, say, you know, documented early on by Canguilhem, but, you know, obviously, um— Yeah, you know, a, a cause of great critical concern within contemporary life.

[02:11:27] AXEL HONNETH:
I see that as a warning which is, I think, very appropriate, yeah. I think this warning can’t go so far

(cough)

that we give the idea that there are wrongs in a society which don’t have the structure an injustice has, yeah? I mean-

Yeah, I would agree with that. When I see… I mean, there, there is this problem that we in, in, in describing or in, in, uh, trying to identify pathologies, we are presupposing standards which are the result of certain normalizations.

Yeah. But I think one has to develop here a kind of, uh, reflexive knowledge about this danger. Yeah.

And the da– I see the danger, which is– I mean, speaking of pathologies must bring up, uh, a Foucauldian reaction. It’s clear to me, yeah. And, uh, uh, and, and I must say it, it should be a part of that.

It should be a

(cough)

part, part of the whole enterprise should be the awareness, uh, of this danger, which only means that, uh, that, uh, we have to be so careful in introducing those, uh, socio-ontological premises on which we try to, uh, to, to build such a diagnosis of social pathologies extremely carefully. And, yeah.

[02:13:02] MODERATOR:
we have only a couple of more minutes. I want to ask whether Jonathan or Raymond, you had any additional comments or final word that you would like to add?

[02:13:10] RAYMOND GEUSS:
If I may.

[02:13:11] AXEL HONNETH:
Yes, please.

[02:13:15] JONATHAN LEAR:
Um, I think mainly at first I just wanted to thank you, um, Axel, not just for great lectures, but today I thought answering the, um, comments that have been made, you just presented your position so clearly. I, I think I understand it much better—

[02:13:31] AXEL HONNETH:
Mm-hmm.

(coughing)

[02:13:31] JONATHAN LEAR:
—um, just listening to you, um, than I did earlier. And so I, I really want to thank you for that. It was a beautiful presentation.

But I, you know, when I listen, I– it, it seems to me, and I’m just curious what you think about this, that of all the people you discuss in your lectures, it now seems to me- Mm-hmm having listened to you, that the person who’s really the most influential is Cavell.

[02:13:53] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah.

[02:13:54] JONATHAN LEAR:
Um, and, um, and that’s fine. I mean, I, that, you know,

(laughter)

that’s, uh um, but that, but I, as I listen to what it, how this maps out, I feel that the kinds of things that, um, Cavell thinks can go missing in life, um, are the things that are, you know, worthy of criticism for going missing in a way that, um, now makes a lot of sense to me. I would say, um,

(throat clearing)

given that is the c- the central figure here or these ideas of acknowledgement that, uh, Cavell develops are the central, you know, important ideas, which I do, I do think is a very fruitful thing for you to be pursuing, uh, and thinking about. But that I would say this is a, um, you know, basic…

I mean, uh, we’re always gonna be worried about what we mean by our terms, but basically I would say this is basically an ethical kind of a critique. Mm-hmm. That there’s something, uh, about the human capacity for recognition, um, understood, uh, not as the sort of absolute minimum condition for acquiring language at all or symbolic thought, but there’s something just very important about human behavior and human possibilities that can go missing, and there’s an important story to tell about why that is or how it happens.

But that’s basically within the realm of what, broadly speaking, I would call a, an ethical critique.

[02:15:13] AXEL HONNETH:
Yeah.

[02:15:13] JONATHAN LEAR:
And then, you know, this is related to the question, and this is, I think, where, you know, I, I want, I, and for that reason, you see, I think the, uh, this is the place we may continue to disagree, but I wanna push you. I think the narcissist is an excellent example about– Uh, you think it’s a bad example, I think it’s a wonderful example

(laughter)

because it’s the, the very hedge on what we mean by acknowledging the demand of another is is is is… That’s the ti- that will titrate it. If what we mean by acknowledging the demand of another is a kind of ethically loaded notion, which I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, just so long as one acknowledges that, which I take to be Cavell’s idea or derivatives, then yes, the narcissist doesn’t acknowledge the demands of others.

But if what we’re interested in is a more sort of minimal condition, like I certainly recognize that you’re making a demand on me, uh, but I choose to, uh, manipulate it rather than accede to it. I don’t, I don’t, you know, I don’t, I, I see the demand all right. I just, you know, don’t d- don’t deal with it in the way that I would if I were not a narcissist.

Um, so I think it’s a really good example because I think it titrates out these two different ideas of acknowledgement, and it doesn’t, I think, at all diminish, I think, the, the things you’re interested in. But I think it does locate it in, in the domain of the ethical broadly construed.

[02:16:31] AXEL HONNETH:
Right, right, right. Can I say something?

[02:16:33] JONATHAN LEAR:
Sure.

[02:16:33] AXEL HONNETH:
Sure. Uh, yes. In a certain respect, it’s a fantastic example.

[02:16:37] JONATHAN LEAR:
Yeah. I, I, I, I-

[02:16:38] AXEL HONNETH:
Good. I give that to you.

[02:16:39] JONATHAN LEAR:
Now we can end.

[02:16:40] AXEL HONNETH:
No, no, because it, uh… No, because it allows one to, to, uh– And I use it in, in such a way. It allows one to introduce what I mean with recognitional stance.

Yeah. Let me say something about or, or one word about, uh, Cavell. I think, uh, it’s not only Cavell, it’s, uh, my reading of Heidegger’s concept of, uh, Mitsein is, uh, is exactly that, that, uh, he– What, what he calls Fürsorge is what I describe as the recognitional stance.

So I, I believe that there is the forerunner and, uh, Sartre in his understanding of Mitsein, if he wouldn’t have had this absurd ontology of the, of freedom. Uh, he, he, he would have said the right thing.

(laughter)

But, uh, he, he had the right– I mean, he, he got it right, but then all this strange ontology comes in where he believes that, uh, to be, to be recognized, uh, uh, uh, is to be absolutely alienated and so on and so on. That I don’t believe.

[02:17:54] MODERATOR:
I know that there are many more questions, and I’m sure we could go on for some time, but it is six thirty, so we have to stop. Um, if I– if my information is correct, that door is gonna disappear in a moment, and behind it will be, uh, various forms of food and drink, uh, and which you’re all invited to stay and partake. But first, uh, I’m sure there is a sense of recognition.

I forget whether it’s any of Raymond’s four, uh-

(laughter and applause)

(applause continues)