Reification Book

Axel Honneth's creative elaboration of his critical theoretical understanding of recognition combining Luckacs, Dewey, Heidegger, Cavell, and developmental psychology is impressive. Honneth's argument is rooted in a claim that recognition is prior to cognition. Honneth enlists Dewey and Heidegger alongside recent claims of infant psychology to support his claims. Essentially Honneth tries to establish that emotional or affective identification with a caregiver-'recognition'- must take place and serve as the platform for a more differentiated relationship with reality and its objects-'cognition'- is to take place.
With this in hand he then goes on to engage in 'social philosophy' as he understands it: diagnosing social pathologies. To this end he marshals a rehabilitated notion from Georg Lukacs, 'reification'. Reification is a pathology in human relationships because it turns people and one's self into things to be controlled according to the dicta of social norms that are heavily saturated with utilitarian imperatives. That is, to re-ify is to thing-ify. But humans aren't mere things, so when we turn others and ourselves into mere objects of our cognition that in turn are understood through our private preferences for personal gain, we forget our original accomplishments as infants that made affective and emotional identification the condition for wider cognitive capacities and accomplishments. By turning people into things, we forget ourselves. This forgetfulness is not just an individual phenomenon, it is a social pathology of our late-capitalist environment.
We thing-ify others and we thing-ify ourselves. Honneth offers an example of online dating services as an example of how we 'thing-ify' ourselves for others to then browse according to their schedule of preferences. Fairly brilliant example by my lights.
Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear offer criticisms as is the standard practice for the Tanner Lecture series from which this book is published. Butler offers relevant analysis of the structure of Honneth's appropriation of the infant psychology and finds it a bit one-dimensional. Humans for Butler just cannot be easily enlisted in a narrative of having lost what was good through some damning social pathology. Humans are nastier than this, by nature, and so the emotional and affective bond that precedes cognition could lead to terrible things, and while she doesn't make this point, with her analysis it becomes possible that a re-ifying stance could hypothetically prevent some types of grotesque and unethical behavior resulting from recognition.
Raymond Guess offers reflections on the philosophical anthropology that Honneth develops with his use of Dewey and Heidegger. Specifically with Honneth's appropriation of Heidegger's concept of sorge, care, does Guess find fault. Heidegger explicitly warns that his theory of authentic dasein is not to be understood either as an endorsement for a particular ethics or as a position on practical reasoning.
Finally, Jonathan Lear offers his own psychoanalytically generated take questioning some of Honneth's use of the child psychology literature and questions the redemptive character of Honneth's position.
Honneth responds briefly at the end to these criticisms, quite well in my opinion.
A creative extension of Honneth's theory of recognition and a relevant diagnosis of our condition.