Axel
Honneth and the Phenomenological Deficit of Critical Theory
Nythamar de Oliveira, PUCRS
(*) A preliminary draft of this paper was presented at the international colloquium on "Inequalities in the World System: Political Science, Philosophy, Law," held at Cebrap, São Paulo, on September 3-6, 2009. I am grateful to Marcos Nobre, Klaus-Gerd Giesen, Derrick Darby, Fouad Kalouche, and Yohan Ariffin for their critical remarks. The published version is forthcoming in the social sciences journal Civitas, available online.
Abstract:
While
liberal, redistributive views seek to correct and compensate for past
injustices, by resorting to compensatory, procedural arguments for corrective
justice, the recognition-based, communitarian arguments tend to promote by means
of social movements and struggles for recognition a society free from prejudice
and disrespect. In developing democratic societies such as Brazil, Axel Honneth’s
contribution to the ongoing debates on Affirmative Action has been evoked, confirming that the dialectics of recognition does not merely seek a
theoretical solution to the structural and economic inequalities that constitute
some of their worst social pathologies, but allows for practices of self-respect
and subjectivation that defy all technologies of social control, as pointed out
in Foucault's critique of power. The phenomenological deficit of critical
theory consists thus in recasting the critique of power with a view to
unveiling lifeworldly practices that resist systemic domination.
Keywords: affirmative action, critical theory, lifeworld, recognition, self-respect, social technologies.
Resumo:
Enquanto concepções liberais redistributivas buscam corrigir e compensar as injustiças do passado, recorrendo a argumentos procedimentais reparativos em favor da justiça corretiva, os argumentos comunitaristas embasados no reconhecimento tendem a promover por meio de movimentos e lutas sociais pelo reconhecimento uma sociedade livre de preconceitos e desrespeito. Em sociedades democráticas em desenvolvimento, como o Brasil, a contribuição de Axel Honneth para os debates em curso sobre a Ação Afirmativa tem sido evocada, confirmando que a dialética do reconhecimento não se limita a procurar uma solução teórica para as desigualdades estruturais e econômicas que constituem algumas das suas mais graves patologias sociais, mas permite que as práticas de auto-respeito e de subjetivação desafiem todas as tecnologias de controle social, como apontado na crítica do poder de Foucault. O déficit fenomenológico da teoria crítica consiste, portanto, em reformular a crítica do poder com o intuito de desvelar as práticas do mundo da vida que resistem à dominação sistêmica.
Palavras-chave: ação afirmativa, auto-respeito, mundo da vida, reconhecimento, tecnologias sociais, teoria crítica.
1. From the standpoint of what Foucault called
"biopolitics" (1991, 1997; Honneth, 1991, p. 169), affirmative action
(AA) may be fairly defined as an institutional technology of social control
that seeks to rectify past injustice and to obtain a situation closer to an
ideal of equal opportunity by policies aimed at a historically,
socio-politically non-dominant group (typically, minority groups and women of
all races), especially intended to promote fair access to education or
employment. For the sake of elucidating the normative claims of this paper, I
shall confine myself to the usage of AA as it seeks to rectify racial
inequalities in Brazil, particularly in educational policies, even though I
believe that similar arguments might be offered to make a case against gender
and other social, economic inequalities as well. I am thus confined to a social
philosophical approach to the problem of normativity in liberal, egalitarian
policymaking, as I assume from the outset that public policies refer to
decision-making processes that involve not only governmental power (esp.
legislators and judicial decisions) but also civil society institutions broadly
conceived, so as to comprise the public sphere, public opinion, social
movements, trade unions, voluntary associations, NGOs, and numerous activities
of individuals and interest groups. Since I am particularly interested in the
social ethos and lifeworldly relationships in a given democratic political
culture, I am assuming that the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) stands overall for the
horizon of socially, culturally sedimented linguistic meanings that make up the
background environment of competences, practices, and attitudes shared by
social actors (Habermas 1989, p. 119ff.) A phenomenological sociology of the lifeworld, in light of Alfred Schutz’s analysis of everyday practices, has proved indeed relevant to the Brazilian sociocultural context as shown by Hermilio Santos's highly original study, "Interpretations of everyday life: Approximations to the analysis of lifeworld" (Santos, 2009). The problematic relationship between
systems and lifeworld lies, therefore, at the bottom of the normative grounds
of social criticism, just as the basic ideas of cooperation and competition
have determined social philosophical approaches to political theory. Following
Habermas and Honneth's criticisms of systemic power, I propose to recast AA as
a systemic technique of intersubjective recognition and redistributive justice
which cannot ultimately be separated from its correlated lifeworldly techniques
of self-esteem, self-care, and self-understanding. My contention here is that
Honneth's theory of recognition successfully revisits Habermas's critique of
Foucault's genealogy of power so as to address what I have dubbed "the
phenomenological deficit of critical theory" (das phänomenologische Defizit der Kritischen Theorie), inherent in
the Frankfurt School's attempt at a dialectic of enlightenment that breaks away
from the demonization of the technological, instrumental domination of nature.
An upshot of such a self-understanding of our modern condition is that the
globalized, transnational phenomenon of juridification (Verrechtlichung) turns out to be an interesting instance of
systemic-lifeworldly technologies that resist demonization as they contribute
to accounting for the normative grounds of a critical theory of society at the
same time that they function as efficient procedures of "reflective
equilibrium" (in Rawlsian terminology) or as dispositifs, in the Foucaultian sense of technologies of power, at
once reifying and breaking through a "linguistically generated
intersubjectivity." (Habermas 1997, p. 297) Axel Honneth's critique of the
sociological and normative deficits of critical theory has been decisive for a
more engaged, down-to-earth commitment towards the implementation of the very
egalitarian, liberal, and communitarian ideals of self-respect, freedom,
justice, and solidarity that such different authors as Rawls, Habermas, Foucault,
and Fraser have stood for, even though stemming from somewhat opposing
standpoints. Honneth's recasting of Foucault's power struggles for
self-recognition (variously formulated as techniques of self-control, social
and moral technologies) makes furthermore
self-identity possible through the three forms of self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem in an intersubjective
account of recognition.(Honneth, 1995, chapter 5)
2. Much of
what has been published and discussed about affirmative action is based upon
personal opinions, feelings, and myths relating to ethnicity, gender, class,
and other social constructs. When dealing with the social policies of AA we are
often thinking of overcoming different forms of social prejudice, mostly
unconscious or subtly embedded in our lifeworld. In itself, the act of
discriminating is an epistemic category meant to differentiate, to discern, to
judge how one thing differs from another on the basis of some rational
criterion. Now, prejudice may be defined as a discrimination based on
irrelevant grounds (social, racial or sexual). In conceptual terms, identity
and difference are to be articulated in social ontological categories such as
egalitarianism and diversity. As it will be argued towards the end of this paper,
I think that ontological commitments in social philosophy cannot be ultimately
separated from the correlated conceptions of subjectivity and language.
According to Mosley, AA arguments must thus focus on the attempt to render the
semantic fields of "race" or "gender" relevant to basic
opportunities. Such arguments tend to be utilitarian, as they refer to
distributive justice, minimizing subordination and maximizing social
utility.(Mosley and Capaldi, 1997, p. 53) For Pojman, we must attend to the
difference between Weak Affirmative Action and Strong Affirmative Action: the
latter is defined as preferential treatment, discriminating in favor of members
of underrepresented groups (often treated unjustly or marginalized in the
past), while the former simply seeks to promote equal opportunity to the goods
and offices of a society. According to Pojman, since two wrongs don't make a
right, he concludes that Strong Affirmative Action is both racist and sexist,
and defends Weak Affirmative Action to encourage minorities to strive for
excellence in all areas of life (esp. education, public offices, employment),
so as to avoid reverse discrimination.(Shaw, 1998) Some of the most known AA
policies are: preferential hiring, nontraditional casting, quotas, minority
scholarships, equal opportunities for underrepresented groups, and even
"reverse discrimination," depending on the semantic, social context.
This is certainly a rather simplified account of a complex issue, which I only
evoke here in order to explore the social philosophical implications of
policymaking procedures, as they were initially implemented in the US,
especially against the background of the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971. We may
think of seminal papers by Thomas Nagel and Judith Jarvis Thomson in 1973, as
the ongoing debates in the United States supporting and opposing affirmative
action have shown the highly complex problem of social integration in a
pluralist democracy that takes diversity seriously. According to recent
research at Yale University, the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action to
date in the US are Caucasian women, although white males may as well be said to
have benefitted through bailouts, draft deferments, legacy admission into top
universities, etc. At any rate, both backward-looking and forward-looking
justifications of affirmative action, whether they tend to be more or less
deontological or utilitarian, seem to require some substantive approach to
racial and cultural identity, as shown by different arguments developed by
moral thinkers such as Albert Mosley, Louis Pojman, and Robert
Fullinwider.(Cohen et al., 1977) The classical opposition of US conservative
and "liberal" positions respectively against and for AA eventually
gave way to a liberal-communitarian debate, following different receptions of
Rawls, Habermas, and Honneth's works on justice, inclusion, and recognition.
While liberal, redistributive views seek to correct and compensate for past
injustice, by resorting to compensatory procedural, arguments for corrective
justice, the recognition-based, communitarian arguments tend to promote by
means of social movements and struggles for recognition a society free from
prejudice and disrespect.(Fraser and Honneth, 2003) In developing democratic
societies such as Brazil, Axel Honneth's contribution to this debate has been
evoked, as over against Nancy Fraser's redistributive account, just to confirm
that the dialectics of recognition is far from accounting for the structural
and economic inequalities that constitute some of the worst social pathologies,
as shown in recent articles by Sérgio Costa, Paulo Neves, Celi Pinto, and
Ricardo Mendonça. In order to go beyond the Fraser-Honneth debate, I have
sought to revisit Honneth's critique of Foucault's genealogical account of
power and of Habermas's communicative action, by recasting a lifeworldly,
nonreifying conception of juridification that meets social movements and
identity claims stemming from grassroots practices of recognition from below.
In effect, Honneth's dialectics of recognition could offer us a much more
defensible diagnosis of the Brazilian symbiosis between a slave-societal ethos,
an ideology of racial democracy, and a lifeworldly praxis of racial disrespect
as his "critique of power" reexamines the Foucaultian, Habermasian
accounts of systemic power relations. Precisely because racial inequalities and
ongoing discussions on AA social policies cannot be reduced to racialized,
ideological discourses, the complex problem of intersubjective and hybrid accounts
of self-identity, cultural identity, miscegenation, and social constructs such
as race and gender must not be dismissed as too eclectic or too subjective, as
critics of postmodernist and postcolonial studies seem to purport.
3. Like most representatives of
"liberal" and conservative standpoints, Mosley and Pojman had clearly
different ideas about how to make things more equal for all. The main difference seems to consist in that
Mosley doesn't think equality means simply treating everyone equally, whereas
Pojman takes equal treatment for an end result that would eliminate unjust
discrimination. The term "reverse discrimination" has been used
throughout most texts. The purpose of affirmative action is to open a door that
was once closed. It allows people who are qualified to walk through. It
increases competition from a world of work that was once white, male,
heterosexual, abled bodied etc. to one that includes all people. In the US, we
are often reminded that affirmative action even works for veterans! In Brazil,
AA policies mainly refer to systems of preferred admissions (quotas) for racial
minorities (blacks and native Brazilians), the poor and people with
disabilities, and they have also been regarded as supplementing other programs
of social inclusion such as conditional cash transfer and similar welfare
programs. One must not overlook that there are already quotas of up to 20% of
vacancies reserved for the disabled in the civil public services. In the United
States, access to the American Dream is often framed as a fair race in which
the swiftest runners win. Critics say we should eliminate affirmative action
because it gives some runners an unfair
head start in an otherwise fair race. At the same time, many supporters of
affirmative action say it is essential because some competitors are disabled
and need a head start in order to compete in the race. But what if both of
these perspectives miss the point about affirmative action? From this
perspective, we can see that policies that promote inclusion, like affirmative
action, are designed to equalize the conditions of a previously unfair race.
Hence the emphasis on the Rawlsian principle of "fair equality of
opportunities," combined with the basic principle of "equal
liberty": just as one cannot promote universalizable ideals of justice and
freedom without egalitarianism, one cannot celebrate diversity and the
principle of difference (in its various social, egalitarian versions) without
presupposing the fair equality of opportunities for all parties. The intuitive
idea here is that all primary goods (liberty and opportunity, income and
wealth, the bases of self-respect) are to be distributed equally unless an
unequal distribution of any of these goods is to the advantage of the less
favored. (Rawls, 1971) We all know that there are
numerous obstacles that litter the lanes of disadvantaged runners:
historically, nonwhites have found their path blocked by racial discrimination;
poverty creates broken lanes filled with potholes and other dangers; women find
their lanes filled with impenetrable barriers; and urban youth are derailed far
from the finish line by the school-to-prison pipeline. Meanwhile, those runners
who aren't kept back by race, class, or gender discrimination are privileged to
run a race in which their ability to compete is not impeded by unwarranted
arbitrary barriers. Some runners are luckier still. They are benefited by a
host of privileges such as family connections, wealth, and an array of other
factors that deliver them to the finish line ahead of all the other runners
without even to have to break a sweat. Their lane is, in effect, a
people-mover, an electrically powered lane that moves them along even when they
simply assume the position of a runner while never having to actually lift a
foot to propel themselves forward. To be sure, it is difficult for anyone to know
what it feels like to be discriminated against unless it has happened to them.
And yet, as Rawls himself suggested, one doesn't have to be black, a woman,
Jewish or gay to take a radical stand against racism, phallocentrism,
anti-semitism or homophobia. The point here is that this is exactly why nobody
should ever have to be the victim of unjust and immoral discrimination. All
people should be treated equally with respect and given fair opportunity to
flourish as human beings. People can thus respect each other's differences and
mutually recognize themselves as individuals and as members of distinct social,
interest groups. Honneth's conception of intersubjective recognition seeks
precisely to move beyond the individualist, atomistic foundation for sociality
and recast Habermas's conception of individual self-formation through
socialization by correcting some of the problems in the latter's
lifeworld-system divide.
4. Freyre's 1933 seminal book Casa-Grande e Senzala (ET: The Masters and the Slaves) has been
hailed as the most representative work on Brazilian identity ever, opening up
endless debates on collective self-esteem, self-understanding, and race
relations in Brazil, esp. racial mixture, the quasi-romantic idealization of
the mulatto (pardo, moreno), and the so-called myth of
racial democracy –even though there is no occurrence of the term in this book.
Beyond its immediate context of the contemporaneous discussion on regionalism
versus universalism following the Modern Art Week in 1922, Freyre's analyses
contributed to new, comparative readings of slavery systems and racism in the
Americas. One particular upshot of the racial democracy myth is the ideology of
whitening and the concomitant practice of miscegenation or race mixture,
described by many scholars as the primary pillar of white supremacy in Latin
America, particularly in Brazil (Twine, 1997, p. 87). According to Twine, the
whitening ideology "was originally coined by the Brazilian elite to
reconcile theories of scientific racism with the reality of the predominantly
nonwhite population of their country" toward the turn of the 19th century.
Thus Afro-Brazilian children are systematically disempowered as they learn not
to talk about racism, regarded as a taboo subject for discussion with their
parents and peers.(Twine, 1997, p. 153) It was such a perverse circle that
racial democracy has been fueling for decades throughout generations and it was
only recently, especially after the end of military dictatorship in Brazil, that
middle-class and the average citizen began talking about these social
pathologies. Brazilian citizens have certainly been socialized into a racist,
paternalist political culture, so full of contradictions and shortcomings when
compared to the normative, regulative ideals of the democratic, egalitarian
yardstick. And yet, this making of a political culture is only sustained to the
extent that Brazilians also produce and reproduce such a culture. The shift
from a hypocritical racial democracy towards a truly pluralist democracy has in
effect been the only way out of the elitist pseudoliberalism of both military
and civilian calls to "modernize" Brazil. Just as the aestheticist
regionalism and nationalism of the modernist movement of the 1920s gave way to
a technocratic, nationalist modernization in the 1950s and 1960s only to
highlight the oligarchic, hierarchical relations of power that made Brazil one
of the most socially unequal nations of the planet, a moral revolution from
below alone can secure the rule of law for all and call for a public,
democratic distribution of primary goods. If Brazil remains too far from a well
ordered society and public participation in the bargain processes is still
remote from vast, excluded segments of the population, the political thrust of
social movements meets a fortiori the normative criteria of a concept
of democracy that defies and transgresses any corrupted, systemic "power
that be" for the sake of the people. The egalitarian premises in AA
procedures can do precisely that, whenever one has to be reminded that the
outcast in Brazil discover their own identity as citizens, rights-bearers or as
end-in-themselves only when they become visible in the public sphere and get
talked about in the media. Hence a radical critique of state and society is not
necessarily opposed to the regulative ideals of a procedural theory of justice.
In his highly original account of racial problems in Brazil, Costa has taken a
critical stand against modernist, teleological accounts of racism such as those
inspired by Habermas, Beck and Giddens's analyses of social pathologies, to a
great extent because of the limitations of importing European patterns of
modernity and identity to the Brazilian context. On the other hand, however,
even though he praises postcolonial studies for being particularly useful for
his own refusal to import US, binary categories of anti-racism, Costa remains
skeptical about the normative deficit of Brazilian sociological contributions
to this ongoing debate.(Costa, 2006) In
another assessment of the same problem, Costa argues that the category of race,
once transformed into a tool for social analysis and normative desideratum, leads to an incomplete,
biased understanding of the Brazilian makeup, an objectifying view of social
relations and eventually to a reduction of social identities to their
political, instrumental dimension.(Costa, 2002) In order to tackle the problem
of racial identity in Brazil, Mendonça recasts Habermas's discourse,
communicative theory to arbitrate between Honneth's self-realization and
Fraser's parity of participation guiding ideas: if it is only through
interactive participation that self-realization can be ultimately thought in
moral terms, one must inevitably resort to a sound socialization so that
individuals are empowered to affirm themselves as social actors and take part
in the effective construction of a just society, by means of free exchanges and
interplays of revisable validity claims.(Mendonça, 2007) A similar argument of
complementarity is offered by Pinto, albeit from a different programmatic
platform. According to Pinto, distribution cannot be reduced to recognition, as
this would render the question of justice void. Recognition is, moreover, a highly
polysemous word and its reduction to an exclusive definition evacuates both its
heuristic value for social theory and its potential for struggles for justice.
Recognition qua self-recognition (self-esteem, in Honneth) and qua status (in
Fraser) are not mutually exclusive, but are different moments of the same
process of theoretical elaboration and political struggle, and might be
regarded in many circumstances as complementary notions. Recognition as public
policy and as state policy are not contingent upon the self-recognition of
individual subjects, but are limited to a specific range of
"remedies," to employ Fraser's terminology. On the other hand,
according to Pinto, recognition as self-recognition is essential to the
construction of the subject of action in social struggles. There are only
"dominated" insofar as they recognize themselves as such in their
struggles against "domination." There is no such a thing as feminism
before the emergence of the feminist, just as there is no parity of
participation prior to the self-recognized subject as an equal. Finally, both in Fraser and in
Honneth, the moments of construction of situations of disrespect are absent,
just as the shift from nonrecognition and misrecognition to recognition, which
renders the scope of both theories quite narrow.(Pinto, 2008) In the last
analysis, the problem is whether recognition can actually function as some form
of moral principle, as Honneth claims, even if he does not assume it to be
taken for a foundational or unifying principle (systematically conceived, not
necessarily as in a metaphysical system, since Honneth's critical reading of
Hegel is clearly postmetaphysical). Honneth has in effect set up an
interdisciplinary research program that accounts both for a theory of justice
and for a theory of democracy: recognition is what sets democracy in motion,
making it both possible and desirable, as we are always caught up in ongoing
struggles for recognition. We are thus led from a dialectical appropriation of
Freyre's problematic account of racial relations and the social patterns of
disrespect, misrecognition, and recognition towards social policies meant to
promote self-realization through the self-assertion and self-understanding of
Afro-Brazilians' social struggles and their normative claims raised in these
struggles. It seems that Honneth's theory of recognition becomes even more
relevant for AA social policies when it is recast in light of its point of
departure vis à vis Habermas's critique of Foucault's systemic techniques of
power.
5. In his Critique of Power, Honneth sets out to show "that Adorno must
have failed in the task of an analysis of society, since throughout his life he
remained imprisoned to a totalized model of the domination of nature and was
thus unable to comprehend the 'social' in societies" (1991, p. xii).
Honneth regarded the Dialektik der
Aufklärung as one of the most representative works for a critical
self-understanding of the 20th-century Zeitgeist,
its lifeworldly disenchantments, and social pathologies. But it is only by
alluding to both Foucault and Habermas, that Honneth seeks to move beyond this
modern predicament, as they propose post-Hegelian, alternative accounts in
their respective opposing views of power. While Foucault rehabilitates an
"action-theoretic paradigm of struggle," Habermas calls for a
paradigm of "mutual understanding." Both models can be thus regarded
as alternative accounts to the sociological deficits of critical theory and
earlier phenomenology. My working hypothesis here is that Honneth's
indebtedness to Habermas and Foucault betrays, furthermore, the other two Hs –
Husserl and Heidegger—which, together with Hegel, were so decisive for the
phenomenological emergence of intersubjective themes such as recognition,
liberation, and alterity in postwar France. According to Honneth (1995, p.
156), the kernel of Sartre's social philosophy is that "social conflicts
are to be understood, above all, as disruptions in the relatioships of
recognition between collective actors." Sartre saw thus anti-semitism as a
form of social disrespect as he shifts away from the reciprocal reification of
the ontological dualism between the en-soi
and the pour-soi of his earlier
phenomenological account of otherness in L'être
et le néant. Granted, Sartre's indebtedness to the Hegelian conception of
intersubjectivity took him farther beyond Husserl's solipsistic account of
consciousness and Heidegger's self-deceptive conception of Dasein, so that his recasting of the three Hs (Hegel, Husserl,
Heidegger) paved the way for his later critique of colonialism and his Marxist,
liberationist theory of recognition inherent in his praise of négritude. As early as 1956, Sartre
denounced "colonialism [as] a system that infects us with its
racism." (Sartre, 1956) Honneth follows Habermas when the latter argues that
Sartre's moral decisionism, like Heidegger's and Foucault's, cannot account for
the normative thrust needed to carry out emancipatory struggles for
recognition, even though his unmasking of imperialism and colonial power
pointed to the crisis of Cold War capitalism. (Honneth, 1995, p. 159) Habermas's
own theory of communicative action sought to overcome the late capitalist
crisis of legitimation, without falling back in the aporias of a critique of
ideology and philosophies of consciousness, on the one hand, and avoiding the
pitfalls of relativism, skepticism and historicism, on the other, resulting
from postmodern criticisms of modernity. Habermas reclaims thus the Kantian
legacy of a normative foundation for the political sphere, at the same time
that he maintains the separation of morality and legality, and the primacy of a
communicative normativity regulated by rational discourse, shared by all and
capable of guiding human action in democratic, pluralist societies. Political
questions are to be debated, therefore, within the context of a discourse
ethics, founded in the form of an argumentative, moral logic, hence both
normative and universalizable. The Habermasian theory succeeds in articulating
the question of normativity with the political, social question of
institutionalization, in the very conception of an integrated model which
differentiates the systemic world of institutions (defined by their capacity of
responding to the functional demands imposed by the environment /context) from
the lifeworld (Lebenswelt, i.e. forms
of cultural, societal, and interpersonal reproduction that are integrated
through the norms consensually accepted by all participants in the social
world). And yet, insofar as it is conceived both
as the precondition and starting point for a process of systemic
differentiation and as the threatened
pole of systemic imperatives leading to the colonization of the lifeworld,
modern rationalization seems to fall prey to an inevitable paradox, as Habermas
himself pointed out in his meticulous analyses of lifeworld and system (1989).
While the rationalization of the Lebenswelt
renders possible the differentiation of autonomous subsystems, opening thus the
utopian horizon of a civil society in which the spheres of action formally
organized constitute the foundations of the post-traditional social world of
human beings (private sphere) and citizens (public sphere), it seems to dig,
however, its own grave in a technological society dominated by monetarization
and bureaucratization. Habermas's own solution out of this impasse consists
precisely in resorting to communicative reason, as opposed to instrumental,
purpose-oriented rationality (Zweckrationalität),
so as to avoid the reifying mechanisms of the coordination of actions, social
integration, and symbolic reproduction. As Albrecht Wellmer remarked, Habermas
in fact reformulated the same paradox of rationalization already at work in
Weber, Adorno, and Horkheimer's critical analyses of capitalism, with the
important proviso that the emergence of a post-traditional rationality in
modern Europe allows for "different possible constellations concerning the
relationship between system and lifeworld."(Bernstein, 1985, p. 57) Nevertheless,
it seems that we can hardly move beyond this paradoxical, vicious circle every
time we revisit the problem of normativity at stake. If on the one hand, we
cannot simply square normativity with the lifeworld, as opposed to the
technization of cognitive and practical relationships and the instrumental
dealings of differentiated institutional systems, the paradox will simply
persist, on the other hand, within any attempt at coordinating a supposedly
democratic "consensual action." Hence, just as Habermas saw the same
problem inherent in Rawls's contractarian "original position,"
Wellmer spots here the impossibility of deafeating a self-vindicating
rationality, whose practical intent is anchored in lifeworldly, tacit
assumptions, posited with the avoidance of performative contradictions every
time one has to come across in everyday talks and dealings. The ideal speech
situation functions thus like the "grammaticalness we have for the
sentences of our native language" (Rawls, 1999, p. 41) –we do not even
care to think about it, but it has been always already presupposed by all
speakers. To be sure, as Wellmer remarked, idealized lifeworlds might strike us
as nonsense or undesirable chimeras but, like Rawls's procedural devices of the
well-ordered society and reflective equilibrium, they might help us in thought
experiments that call into question our intuitive, taken-for-granted notions of
equality and freedom. In effect, both Rawls and Habermas follow Kant's
procedural wager that no rational means-ends system can defy the irreducibility
of human means to their ultimate, universalizable ends, since human dignity or
humanity is to be regarded as an ultimate end in itself (Endzweck).
In one of Habermas's earliest reflections on the relationship between
technology, science, and the lifeworld in the 60s we read:
"I should like to
reformulate this problem with reference to political decision-making. In what
follows we shall understand 'technology' to mean scientifically rationalized
control of objectified processes. It refers to the system in which research and
technology are coupled with feedback from the economy and administration. We
shall understand 'democracy' to mean the institutionally secured forms of
general and public communication that deal with the practical question of how
[humans] can and want to live under the objective conditions of their
ever-expanding power of control. Our problem can then be stated as one of the
relation between technology and democracy: how can the power of technical
control be brought within the range of the consensus of acting and transacting
citizens?" (Habermas, 1970, p. 57)
Like Rawls and Honneth, Habermas refuses
to reduce the social construction of rule-following procedures to a rational
choice theory or utilitarian calculus, just as they all resist a decisionist
condemnation of the technological society and its self-regulating institutions
as one finds, say, in Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul. Like revisited
versions of the Pascalian wager, Habermas's modernist creed constantly seeks to render
its premises reasonably credible, as his ethical universalism engages in
endless battles with infidels and believers from every hill. As one of his most
sympathetic interlocutors remarked,
"Can we still, in our time, provide a rational
justification for universal normative standards? Or are we faced with
relativism, decisionism, or emotivism which hold that ultimate norms are
arbitrary and beyond rational warrantability? These became primary questions
for Habermas. The fate –indeed, the very possibility— of human emancipation
depends on giving an affirmative answer to the first question and a negative
answer to the second." (Bernstein, 1985, p. xv)
It
seems to be fair enough to gather that Habermas has sought to rescue the
normative grounds of modern liberal democracies, against the diversity of
communicative, lifeworldly backgrounds, without falling back into some form of
absolutism (as one finds in religious and metaphysical models) or succumbing to
relativism, nihilism or historicism (as Heidegger, Foucault, and postmodernists
do, according to Habermas). Hence, the technological modern predicament is not
so much how to make a good use of natural and social resources (as if we could
simply use those things like tools) but rather how to deal responsibly and
democratically with the uncoupling of systems and lifeworlds, as the latter
cannot be reduced to the former. Habermas's own proposal out of the pickle is to
recast the normative thrust of democracy in critical-theoretical terms, so that
the satisfaction of functional needs of action systematically integrated must
find its limits in the integrity of the lifeworld, i.e. in the very demands of
the spheres of action which are socially, communicatively integrated.
(Habermas, 1984, p. 307). Although I cannot elaborate on this question here, it
is my contention that Sandel's criticisms addressed to Rawls's liberalism may
as well be applied to the Habermasian attempt to articulate a Kantian
proceduralism with a Hegelian-inspired view of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Honneth's critique of
Habermas's dualistic conception of society aims precisely at this, which might
be perceived as a systemic flaw: one must go back to substantive conceptions of
the good in order to account for the best procedures, even with a view to
repairing injustice.(Honneth, 1991, p. 221) Honneth addresses Habermas's
immanent critique as still indebted to a "philosophy of history influenced
by Heideggerian Marxism," so as to unmask the anthropological blindspots
of his confusing accounts of systemic and lifeworldly fictions. Indeed, a
similar problem lies at Habermas's procedural formulation of the ideal speech
situation, which can be solved with the support of an analysis of civil society's
voluntary associations that secure democratic values against the state and
economic colonizations of the lifeworld. In his later formulation of his
procedural model of deliberative, participatory democracy in Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), Habermas
contends that his theory of communicative action stands as a third way between
a systemic-theoretical sociology of law (such as the one advocated by Niklas
Luhmann) and a liberal, universalist theory of justice (such as John Rawls's).
After having developed a theory of justice in
vacuo, says Habermas, Rawls recasts the "old problem of how the
rational project of a just society, in abstract contrast to an obtuse reality,
can be realized after confidence in the dialectic of reason and revolution,
played out by Hegel and Marx as a philosophy of history, has been exhausted—and
only the reformist path of trial and error remains both practically available
and morally reasonable."(Habermas, 1998, p. 57) For Habermas, Rawls's
problem appears as "the return of a repressed problem," insofar as it
recasts the modern model of natural law (social contract) in procedural terms
(original position). Nevertheless, as Dick Bernstein put it so well, we end up
with an epistemic justification paradox of self-referentiality at the very
uncoupling of systems and lifeworld:
"[Habermas] wants to do justice to the integrity of the
lifeworld and social systems, and to show how each presupposes the other. We
cannot understand the character of the lifeworld unless we understand the
social systems that shape it, and we cannot understand social systems unless we
see how they arise out of activities of social agents. The synthesis of system
and lifeworld orientations is integrated with Habermas's delineation of
different forms of rationality and rationalization: systems rationality is a
type of purposive-rational rationality, lifeworld rationality is communicative
rationality." (Bernstein, 1985, p. 20)
Along the same lines and reminiscent of Honneth's
own assessment, James Bohman has remarked that "Habermas's criticism of
modern societies turns on the explanation of the relationship between two very
different theoretical terms: a micro-theory of rationality based on
communicative coordination and a macro-theory of the systemic integration of
modern societies in such mechanisms as the market" (Habermas 1987). To be
sure, there is no clear-cut separation of lifeworld and systems rationalities,
since it is precisely because of the systemic colonization of the lifeworld
that social actors can have more and more access to its general structures and
are urged to seek integration amid all complex differentiations, with a view to
attaining emancipation and understanding. Hence, to the structural
differentiation of the lifeworld in its social integration, cultural
reproduction and personal socialization, there must be an interactive
differentiation of the systemic institutions steered by money and power
(economy and bureaucratic administration). What is at stake, after all, is the
institutionalization of the social world, beyond traditional accounts of
society and state. Honneth has convincingly shown, however, the impossibility
of maintaining communicative reason immune from the instrumentalization of
social action in the very attempt to tackle the paradox of the rationalization
of lifeworldly relations, as anticipated by Habermas's own account of
socialization. In this sense, it seems that one is condemned to the Foucaultian
predicament of social technologies, at once systemic and lifeworldly, as the
reification implicit in the very interplay of recognition and disrespect seems
to provide us with a good phenomenological clue to the correlation between a
social ontology, moral grammar, and accounts of intersubjectivity. By effecting
a rapprochement between the procedural conceptions of a reflective equilibrium
(Rawls) and the lifeworld (Habermas) we can thus reenact, as it were, a
hermeneutics of normativity correlated to the facticity of a democratic ethos
inherent in a pluralist, political culture, capable of integrating systemic and
pragmatic aspects of a diversity of practices and codifications (modus vivendi) that subscribe to an
overlapping consensus, especially when dealing with universalizable claims and
local action practices, such as human rights and public policies, among which
AA procedures stand out as reifying and demythologizing remedies. Social
philosophy can be thus recast as a correlate of a philosophy of nature that
allows for sustainable technologies that effect the return of ecological themes
such as home, earth, and global dwelling without romanticism or the nostalgia
for a primordial reconciliation of technique and nature. Even though I won't be
able to elaborate on these developments in this paper, it is my contention that
Foucault's critique of a neoliberal "technological society" (to
paraphrase Ellul) cannot be dismissed as a nihilistic, postmodernist threat to
the unfinished project of emancipatory democratization –as Habermas insinuated
in his Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity—but may as well be integrated into a sustainable critique of the
modern pathologies of 21st-century capitalism. As Nancy Fraser rightly
observed, we must draw an important distiction between Foucault's empirical
insights and the normative problems inherent in his writings, as we distinguish,
say, Foucault's genealogical analyses of the state qua "technology of
government" from the normative thrust of "new modes of
governmentality" in postnational
configurations of "neoliberal globalization."(Fraser, 2008) Social
technologies such as AA procedures are, therefore, revealing for the
"ontological history of ourselves," bringing together interplays of
knowledge and power, intersubjective and reflective accounts of
self-understanding. Following Honneth's recasting of the critique of power,
the phenomenological deficit of critical theory ultimately unveils
communicative networks and lifeworldly practices that resist systemic
domination. Thus technologies of power and techniques
of the self are brought together so as to make sense of the correlation between
discursive and nondiscursive practices, epistemai
and dispositifs, knowledge and power
relations in the intricate networks of socialization, individualization, and
normalization that make up subjectivation.(Foucault, 2001) As Foucault himself
remarked,
"I think that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the
subject in Western civilization, [s]he has to take into account not only
techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. Let's say: [s]he has
to take into account the interaction between those two types of techniques –
techniques of domination and techniques of the self. [S]he has to take into
account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one
another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon
[her]himself. And conversely, [s]he has to take into account the points where
the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion and
domination. The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is
tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think
government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing
people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always
a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques
which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or
modified by [her]himself" (Foucault 1991, p. 203f.).
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Brazilian Centre for Research in Democracy
Book Review of The Critique of Power
Professor Honneth's Research Program at the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt
Deranty, Axel Honneth's ethics of recognition
Número da Revista "Civitas" 8/1 (2008) sobre Axel Honneth
O. Koslarek, La actualización de la teoría crítica de A. Honneth
A Democracia Deliberativa segundo Habermas
"Habermas, o Mundo da Vida e a Terceira Via dos Modernos"
Lebenswelt: Husserl, Heidegger, Habermas
Axel Honneth Seminar at Porto Alegre
A. Honneth, "Gerechtigkeit und kommunikative Freiheit. Überlegungen
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Resenha do livro de A. Honneth (em port.)
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2007 Talks by A. Honneth (audio)
Wikipedia entry on Axel Honneth
Wikipédia (français) Axel Honneth
Wikipedia (Deutsch) Axel Honneth
A. Honneth's Tanner Lecture on Reification
A. Honneth's Research Program at Frankfurt: "Paradoxes of Capitalist Modernization" (2006)
Interview avec Axel Honneth Le Monde
Entrevista com Axel Honneth Folha de São Paulo
