Reviews for Schools of recognition

The average rating for Schools of recognition based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-11 00:00:00 Grant White This is an exceptionally lousy book, by an author who - in my opinion - marks the downfall of the Frankfurt school and/or the critical theoretical tradition. With such a damning statement, I want to emphasize why I even gave this book two stars, instead of 0 or 1. First, the title is accurate, this is a new look at an old idea, and I think reification is an idea that needs to not only stay within the philosophical, political, and psychological discourse, but needs to take on a more prominent and well-known position. Just by writing about it, Honneth has contributed to this desire of mine. Second, Honneth points out a fundamental problem with rights and justice based ethical approaches to present social/ethical problems. Even if we have all our eggs in the justice basket, and we fulfill the requirement of a particular just solution, we may still have an underlining pathology at work, which is equally, if not more so, reprehensible. Just to give an example - one that Honneth does not give, because he's too scared to be this radical - even if we had a completely just distribution in capitalism, we would still have alienation. Which is more profound of a pathology than any equal distribution could ever make up for. So far so good? Not really. Honneth makes these two points within the first two pages of the book, and from that point forward the book is a disaster. First off, if you're going to take a new look at an old idea, at least get the new idea right; otherwise you're generating a new idea, into an old category, while fighting off a straw-man. This is essentially what Honneth does throughout the entire book. While he pretends to be ameliorating Lukács, he in fact never understood him. Lukács' theory of reification, as he himself states on the first page of his essay, is contingent upon an understanding of Marx's capital, and his structural analysis of capitalism. Yet Honneth develops Lukács' entire theory, without mentioning structure until the final three or four pages. Thus, everything up until that point has the cart before the horse, and everything after that point, reveals his complete misunderstanding of anything Marx or Lukács ever wrote. We hear the same banal platitudes about base and superstructure being a one-sided causal relationship. Yawn. And we hear the same old canard that everyone in the marketplace is a legally free subject, and thus on respectable playing grounds. This is important for Honneth, because his theory requires inter-subjective relations; of course as anyone whose read Marx's Capital knows (as Lukács did), humans are mediated by alien capital forces, and almost never interact in an inter-subjective way, but always toward alien processes they fail to comprehend. Moreover, the employer labor relation is itself never inter-subjective, as we see through Marx's analysis of money, abstract labor, relative surplus value etc. I don't need to go into the nuances of each analysis here, just be aware that Honneth doesn't even bring these analyses up to being with. If Honneth were to actually understand Marx, then his theory would have no footing whatsoever, because he would then have to explain reification, as a socio-structural phenomena as Lukacs himself did. I might as well mention that Honneth's theory is that for humans, recognition precedes cognition. This is proven by the study of 9 month year olds and their relations to a loved one. Somewhere along the line the child 'forgets' to recognize the other emotionally and thus reifies the other. That's his theory in a nutshell, and it's sort of interesting, but maybe he should avoid using the term reification, since he never understood it to being with. And when you don't understand the structural relations of reification, you obviously can't build off an old idea…you can only build next to it. When viewed side-by-side, Marx and Lukács had it right, don't bother with Honneth.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-30 00:00:00 Michikazu Yoshioka 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.