2
Individuals' Struggle for Recognition

2.1    The Intersubjectivist Turn

This chapter presents the first building block of Honneth's critical theory: an intersubjectivist theory of how individuals develop a practical identity, a sense of themselves as interacting, moral beings with unique characteristics and distinctive places in the social world.1 The aim is an account of how individuals come to have an understanding of themselves as individuals in a milieu of social interaction, that is, as persons oriented both by general norms, values, principles and goals, and by their own particular beliefs, ambitions, and needs. Honneth's guiding intuition is that one can find in the concept of intersubjective recognition an underlying normative structure that explains the practical growth and development of individuals. Not only that but the very same infrastructure of intersubjective recognition is connected to the practical growth and development of societies. So the division between this chapter and the next is somewhat artificial, even as it may aid clarity. For the point of studying the intersubjective constitution of individual practical identity is to put it to systematic use in a critical social theory.

Honneth's moral and social theories are founded upon the thesis that personhood is essentially constituted intersubjectively. The key claim is that we only become who we are through our interactions with others. This thesis has received many different interpretations over the past two centuries of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, and Honneth puts his distinctive stamp on it with his theory of recognition. Struggle for Recognition develops that theory through detailed inter­rogations of the work of German philosopher Hegel, American pragmatist social-psychologist George Herbert Mead, and British object relations psychologist Donald Winnicott. For Honneth, what ties all of these theorists together is the idea that when individuals struggle to gain various forms of positive recognition of their different charac­teristics, abilities, and achievements from their interaction partners, they are at the same time becoming who they are as moral, ethical, socially interacting agents. Through intersubjective recognition, they are engaged in the process of self-realization with respect to their practical relation-to-self.

Habermas's communicative theory of individual development is also quite influential, in the background, for Honneth. Habermas's theory is that persons become who they are through the intersubjective acquisition of communicative competence - that is, the ability to be a responsible actor in the social world through linguistic communication. He formulates the intersubjectivist thesis as the claim that individuation - the processes of becoming an individual person with a distinct identity - occurs only in and through socialization - the pro­cesses of learning how to navigate the diverse aspects of the social world and becoming an agent capable of competently interacting with others. As he puts it: "Individuation is pictured not as the self-realization of an independently acting subject carried out in isolation and freedom but as a linguistically mediated process of socialization and the simultaneous constitution of a life-history that is conscious of itself..Individuality forms itself in relations of intersubjective acknowledgement and of intersubjectively mediated self-understanding" (Habermas 1992: 152-3). If we were to change the words "linguistically mediated" in this Habermas quote to "recognition mediated," I believe it would accurately represent the central intersubjectivist intuition fueling Honneth's theory. In other words, Honneth shifts the central medium of intersubjective life from language to practical attitudes of acknowledgment.

Honneth traces the specific recognitional interpretation of the intersubjectivist thesis back to the earliest "Jena period" writings (1801-1806) of the young Hegel, though similar ideas can be found in the earlier work of Fichte.2 Hegel's basic paradigm is the struggle for recognition, within which individuals gain a sense of what and who they are only through comprehending and internalizing their interaction partner's recognition of their own autonomous subjectivity. For Hegel, there are decisive differences between an intersubjectivist starting point and one focused around a fully formed subject capable of independent thought and action, a starting point characteristic of modern philosophy beginning with Descartes and carrying through the rationalists and the empiricists and on to Kant's transcendental project. While the philosophical perspective of the former starting point is essentially dialogical - the focal phenomena are persons communicating and meaningfully reacting to one another's meaningful communications - the latter's perspective is essentially monological - one single mind focused upon its own inner world and the phenomena to be observed there. Consider Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy: there the subject's solipsistic self-reassurance as an independent, thinking being is the first and foundational certainty; any further certainties - including the independent existence of other people - must be grounded upon the existence of the cogitating ego. According to the Cartesian picture, one is an independent subject first and only subsequently a potential member of a community of other subjects. In contrast, Hegel's intersubjectivist conception of personhood suggests that one only becomes a thinking, self-aware subject by being one amongst others, by being able to take up the perspective of one's alter toward oneself, and by engaging with others in an ongoing process of self-reassurance through one's internalization of the recognition of others. Thus, for Hegel, the essential features and capacities of human individuals cannot be understood through a solitary subject's introspection, but can only be comprehended and articulated by attending to the intersubjective processes of mutual recognition through which socialization and individuation occur.

In the practical domains of moral, political, and social philosophy that Honneth is particularly interested in, the shift to the standpoint of intersubjectively constituted subjectivity represents an important change from the model dominant in modern western moral and political theory: the subjectivity model of a fully formed rational and egoistic individual agent calculating the best means to self-preservation. Honneth points to Machiavelli as inaugurating the modern subjectivist tradition in social thought, and to Hobbes as carrying it forward in its most pure form through the development of modern social contract theory. In Hobbes's account, the individual is pictured as having a given set of beliefs about the natural and social world, a given set of more or less idiosyncratic desires, and the ability to rationally calculate which course of action will be most effective in realizing the individuals' desires, given the state of the world and the likely dispositions and actions of other persons. Moral obligations and social order are then supposed to arise from the fact that each individual realizes that it will be in his or her own rational self-interest to contract away some discretion and power in return for the benefits of a rule-governed set of obligations and a social order backed by the coercive threats of a centralized state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of power. In short, both the rightness of the moral order and the legitimacy of the state are supposed to arise from the identical instrumental and solipsistic reasoning of mutually antagonistic individuals, each of whom are vulnerable to the violence of others in a perpetual war of each against all. Morality and justice are thereby derived as dictates of strategic reasoning arrived at in identical fashion by isolated, anonymous, antagonistic, adult individuals.

In contrast, on the Hegelian intersubjectivist model, morality organically grows out of the very infrastructure of social relations since one can only become an individuated and competent individual through socialization into different forms of interpersonal regard, acknowledgment, and recognition. Only by taking up the perspective of others on oneself can one begin to develop a sense of who one is, of one's beliefs, desires, needs, inclinations, values, and ideals. The perspectives of others, further, are themselves shaped in culturally specific ways through a society's institutions, practices and customs. Thus individuals develop by internalizing and understanding a socially specific and morally saturated set of perceptions, expectations, and attitudes. Only from the standpoint of a mature, fully socialized individual, capable of autonomous thought and action, can one then take up a reflective stance toward the specific institutions, practices, and customs of one's society, evaluating them to see whether and to what extent they are justified and considering how to change them if they are not. The fully formed practical self that Hobbes presupposes as the origin of morality is, on the Hegelian model, always already a product of substantial socialization into a morally and ethically meaningful set of social relations. It is from the point of view of intersubjectivity and not of the isolated subject, then, that we are to understand and evaluate the...