Philosophy

As much as I agree with Honneth’s philosophy of mutual recognition, I cannot help but feel something is missing in his application of the concept of autonomy. It seems to me that there is a chicken-and-egg problem in his conception of autonomy and its relation to an individual’s struggle for recognition. I believe that resolving this weakness in Honneth’s theory would strengthen its usefulness. In this paper, I will first describe the importance of autonomy in Honneth’s philosophy and then discuss Honneth’s view of the relationship between recognition and autonomy, revealing a dilemma his formulation creates when he applies it to struggles for recognition. I will attempt to resolve this dilemma by suggesting an alternative formulation of Honneth’s own ideas on the relationship between autonomy and the struggle for recognition that I believe will benefit Honneth’s critical theory.

My M.A. dissertation/thesis written 2013. My thinking on this topic has evolved a little since but not contrary to the basic argument presented here.

This paper asks whether we can craft from Heidegger’s Being and Time an account of how Dasein is individuated in the midst of social contexts. Its answer is yes, if we take a different direction than Heidegger did. The ingredients are present in the early sections of Being and Time, but Heidegger decides to develop other ideas both later in Being and Time and later in his career. This paper offers an analysis of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world in the context of Being and Time by asking what individuates Dasein. The crux of its argument combines two of Heidegger’s insights: that Dasein’s knowing is a mode of Being and that Dasein brings entities close into significance and places them into regions. The insight of this paper is that bringing close into significance extends to Dasein’s knowing, which reveals the concept of Being-sphere—the mode of Being that individuates each Dasein in its involvements and possibilities in its everyday Being-in-the-world. I have no eagerness for neologisms and make no pretense of a bold discovery, but I want to craft a new combination of several of Heidegger’s points that I think will yield a clearer and deeper view of Dasein. This paper describes the ontological structure of Being-sphere through a phenomenological analysis of how Dasein appropriates experiences and social norms into its individuated experience of the world. Being-sphere enables a fuller explanation than Heidegger supplied of how individual Dasein responds in the face of das Man and other Daseins and how Dasein is individuated in the social lifeworld, thereby providing a foundation for answering questions of interpersonal relations and social and political theory.

Presented at the 9th International Critical Theory Conference in Rome, 5 May 2016. In this paper, I identify a dilemma within Honneth’s account and argue that, in addition to his account of hurt feelings from misrecognition, there must also be some form of agency in the individual who, lacking the recognition necessary to be autonomous, and being damaged by misrecognition, nevertheless has some capacity to seek recognition actively. I discuss the ideas of Lois McNay and Christine Korsgaard as theoretical tools that could move us toward a more robust and fine-grained picture of struggles for recognition.

This paper argues for two points. The first is that the persistence of misogyny is partly due to its basis in cultural norms that are pathological forms of recognition. The second is that we need an expanded view of recognition and misrecognition that discloses that the practical remedy for misogyny lies in a form of recognition that is distinct from the cultural norms of pathological recognition. This formulation attempts to satisfy two aims of critical theory: a diagnosis of injustice and a path for emancipation from injustice through progressive change.

Axel Honneth has called for a change of focus in Critical Theory "from the self-generated independence of systems to the damage and distortion of social relations of recognition."I argue that Honneth does not shift his methodological focus sufficiently to succeed in his goal of illuminating the social relations of recognition.Despite Honneth's shift to relations of recognition, he considers these relations in terms of the macrosocial Hegelian triad of social spheres of recognition. A deeper analysis of recognition behaviors shows they cannot be mapped exactly to these spheres.I conclude  that the Hegelian triad of social  spheres  is  an insufficient basis for an exploration of misrecognition behaviors. To
understand misrecognition, we need to seek a picture of misrecognition
that reflects the complex diversity of individuals' lived experiences and
practices, gives sufficient attention to interpersonal recognition and
misrecognition, and offers potential reasons for why individuals might
engage in misrecognition behaviors.

The conception of progress has been debated within critical theory, including questioning its usefulness and whether it is tainted by colonialist assumptions. I believe that we need a view of progress to establish criteria for critiquing current injustices, but our view of progress needs to avoid hegemonic, teleological, and utopian thinking. A decentered view of progress helps us achieve these goals. By decentered, I mean detaching the conception of progress from patterns of cultural dominance and being open to the dynamic of socially embedded intersubjective forms of life. What this means in practice is twofold. First, it means that our normative considerations of progress are detached from a backward-looking story of historical process leading to us, which helps us decolonize critical theory and understand dynamic processes of social change. Second, it means accepting that there are other beliefs than those of the dominant culture and its social institutions about the definition of progress and what social developments constitute progress, which allows us more clarity in analysis of social change, how individuals struggle for social progress, and how both progress and regression can manifest in social institutions and practices.

Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth advanced theories of recognition; however, neither developed a robust account of misrecognition but saw it simply as the inversion or the contrary of recognition. I argue that misrecognition is a complex constellation of behaviors that can be described along two dimensions: one’s engagement with social norms and one’s engagement with another individual. This multidimensional view reveals that misrecognition and recognition are intertwined behaviors, and it allows for a more robust and fine-grained account of what goes wrong in recognition relations leading to misrecognition and injustice. Conceiving of recognition and misrecognition in this way helps explain the persistence of oppression and how to overcome injustice.
Disengagement from both social norms and individuals leads to misrecognition, but I identify forms of engagement with social norms or with individuals that also lead to misrecognition. Structural power influences individuals through two types of recognition norms: Pathological recognition norms purport to recognize a social group positively but in practice oppress them, and negative tracking norms attribute to social groups traits that should be recognized negatively. Domination and oppression are perpetrated through individuals engaging with these recognition norms that are devoid of engagement with other individuals. However, within institutional oppression, such as racism and misogyny, are varieties of individual behaviors that are revealed by applying a multidimensional view. Individuals face dilemmas in their relations with others of whether to affirm the pathological recognition norms of the power structure or to affirm the needs and desires of other individuals that may be in conflict with pathological recognition norms. Struggles to overcome oppression stem from individuals acting on their connections with each other over and against prevailing social norms.
Not all misrecognition can be blamed on pathological recognition norms because some forms of misrecognition stem from individuals’ disengagement from others. Whether quotidian forgetfulness or deliberate disengagement, when care about others and how our behaviors affect them is lacking, misrecognition and injustice are inevitable, and we cannot evade our responsibility. Nevertheless, engagement with others is no guarantee of just behavior. Recognition and justice mean recognizing individuals as individuals who have personal attributes and desires. Engagement requires listening to the testimony of others and valuing them and their experiences—seeing them as active agents, not objects to us as subject.
This multidimensional view of misrecognition opens up the complexities of social behaviors by appreciating the conflicts between recognition demands that individuals face and the ways social norms and individual involvements lead to behaviors of injustice. This view shows that misrecognition is not only a structure of social institutions but also an expression of individuals.

This thesis critically analyzes Axel Honneth’s theories of misrecognition and struggles for recognition and argues for two main conceptualizations to address shortcomings in his theories. The first conceptualization is that recognition and misrecognition behaviors are better understood along three dimensions of engagement—norms, individuals, and actions. We can use this multidimensional view to identify misrecognitions in which the problems are in vertical recognition, either disengagement from norms or engagement with problematic norms, and misrecognitions in which the problems are in horizontal recognition, during which there is insufficient or improper engagement with other individuals. The multidimensional view of misrecognition overcomes Honneth’s overly positive picture of recognition and lack of a robust account of misrecognition and shows how negative recognition fits into the normative structure of social life while acknowledging the positive value of recognition. The second conceptualization is an expanded view of struggles for recognition that takes such struggles beyond group political conflicts into everyday social experiences. I identify two problems in Honneth’s formulation of struggles for recognition: his premise that emotional experiences of disrespect motivate struggles for recognition is contradictory without an account of individual agency, and his theoretical reliance on political resistance movements neglects other paths responses to injustice can take. To address these problems, I argue that there are two types of struggles for recognition, affirmational (related to practical identity) and rectificatory (related to efforts to change social circumstances), and that individuals’ familiarity with affirmational struggles enables them to engage in rectificatory struggles against injustice. Individuals respond to injustice in varied ways other than organized political action, and this is significant for critical theory. The common thread in these two conceptualizations is the importance of individuals’ normative experiences in ethical life and social change. Power structures shape social relations, but individuals actively instigate many instances of injustice.

Since ancient times, philosophers have pondered what it means to be human. David Hume observed that we cannot say much definitively about our world because we do not have other worlds with which to compare it. This is especially true about intelligent life because we know of only one intelligent species—us. Science fiction, because it can step outside our ordinary world, has the capacity to show us who we as humans are, especially when it shows humans interacting with aliens. Science fiction can at least speculate on what alien worlds and alien intelligences are like and give us ways to contemplate our own humanity and broaden our limited definition of persons. The 1999-2004 television series Farscape is excellent at portraying what personhood means because its speculations about alien beings defy the expectations of science fiction. Farscape challenges and plays with science fiction's clichés and thereby challenges our own preconceptions. Star Wars is the classic hero myth identified by Joseph Campbell. Star Trek is a classic morality play extolling the virtues of discipline, loyalty, and faith in humanity. With all due respect to these influential franchises, their philosophical reach is limited by their faithfulness to classic fictional forms. Postmodernist science fiction such as Blade Runner and Neuromancer departs from the mythic structures but tends to sink into deep pessimism if not outright nihilism about humanity in the face of technology and the pace of change. The critique of how technological change threatens our humanity is important, but part of what makes Farscape interesting as entertainment and useful for philosophy is that it successfully sails between the Scylla and Charybdis of excessive optimism and excessive pessimism about our human nature and our possibilities and can thus more realistically explore the notion of personhood and its implications for identity and morality.

My focus is on personal resistance to social change in order to reveal how social agents fare amidst social change, which helps describe the ontological character of social change. The inescapable reality of social change for individuals is that change alters the semantic and normative structure of the social world and interrupts social habits thereby generating instability. Understanding individuals’ contingent experiences of stability and instability in their lifeworlds can shed light on social change.

Drawing on Steinbock and Costello, we can see that we constitute our own world through participating in the social world. Costello observes that the particular possibilities of social positions that we can take up emerge only through intersubjective involvement with others who are, to varying degrees, alien to us. We must, through the perspectives of alien others, come to understand our own perspective and learn how to anticipate and organize our social experiences in the web of human relations.

In Political Theory, Volume 44, Issue 6, Jonathan Havercroft and David Owen offer an insightful discussion of white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, arguing that the obliviousness is a case of soul blindness.  I think that Havercroft and Owen’s approach holds promise and that they have staked out fertile ground on which we can grow understandings of injustices and how to overcome them. Their linkage of white obliviousness to BLM’s message with soul blindness is a larger topic I will explore in depth elsewhere, but here I wish to respectfully focus on two factual omissions that Havercroft and Owen made in their discussion of direct encounters that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had with BLM protestors in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I do not want to turn this into a debate over the relative merits of Clinton versus Sanders as policy makers; however, correcting Havercroft and Owen’s inaccuracies is not only fair to Clinton and Sanders but also reveals important aspects of soul blindness that are important to advancing Havercroft and Owen’s argument. I am attempting to clear the ground a little, correcting the record to bring out important distinctions that need to be included in further explorations of the implications of Havercroft and Owen’s important argument.

My approach to the topic of social personhood is to ask what it is to be a person. I begin from the position that personhood is inherently social, that being a person entails interacting with other persons. But to say that personhood is social does not indicate what personhood or being a person is. The argument I present is that a person is constituted by means of the dynamic relationship between an individual human and society that constitutes an individual's practical identity or personhood. Individual humans are embedded in a constellation of relations between the society's members and social institutions. Each individual human occupies a particular social situatedness within the constellation of human relations, and, accordingly, individuals' experiences of personhood, and the persons they are, are constituted by their social relations and situatedness. A person is constituted through interacting with other persons; however, individuals, though deeply influenced by society, are more than mere cogs in a social machine. I think that the contribution individuals make to their own social personhood needs greater emphasis and clarification and that we need to base our account of social personhood on individuals as active, thoughtful beings, rather than on abstract cultural processes. What I will outline in this paper is not a firm division between those aspects of personhood produced by society and those aspects produced by the individual but how there is a dynamic of how individuals constitute their personhood through their relations and actions.

Published in: Phenomenological Reviews, 21 February 2018
Title: Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political: Essays in Honor of Jacques Taminiaux 
Series: Contributions To Phenomenology 
Author: Véronique M. Fóti, Pavlos Kontos (Eds.) 
Publisher: Springer 
Release Date: 2017 
Format: Hardback 96,29 € 
Pages: 262 
Reviewed by: Douglas Giles (University of Essex)

I seek to shed light on both religious intolerance and religious tolerance through a two step process. The first step is to discuss attitudes within personal interactions. I do not see religious tolerance and intolerance as an either/or relation but as varied phenomena that emerge from everyday human life. Societies and religions are many-sided, and personal interactions between people of different religions reflect not only religious beliefs and traditions are but the constellation of social forces and personal desires and fears. To understand religious intolerance we need to look at the possible attitudes that motivate and inform prejudice toward people of other religions and the possible attitudes that would mitigate it. My thesis is that hostility between religions is motivated and informed by attitudes of exclusivism. I believe that hostility between religions can be mitigated by understanding the nature and structure of exclusivism and how it manifests in discrimination and violence. A deeper understanding of what is behind exclusivism will help us to understand what new attitudes would mitigate the attitudes that lead to discrimination and prejudice based on religious differences.

Recent right-wing political parties and movements in the United States and Europe have been called “populist” by the media and parts of academia. I argue that this designation is misleading and that it obscures the social and political issues involved. I apply the underused term “reactionary” to describe right-wing social and political movements, and I distinguish reactionary movements from populist movements. Both types of social movements are struggles for recognition, but they significantly differ on what kind of recognition is sought and why. I define “populist” movements as those in which groups seek greater social and political inclusion for themselves, and I define “reactionist” movements as those in which groups seek greater social and political distinction from others. Populist movements seek to be recognized as deserving equal or fair legal rights or social status without giving up their distinct group identities. Examples would be the agrarian social movements and political parties in late 19th century America, which sought greater political involvement and social and economic reforms, or Black Lives Matter, which seeks recognition for African-Americans and the injustice they suffer. Reactionist movements seek recognition for their legal and social status as distinct and privileged from other social groups. Movements to restrict immigration and cultural diversity or to repeal other progressive social reforms are examples of reactionism—literally reactions against diversity and change. Both populist and reactionist movements may have antiestablishment sentiments, but populism seeks an end to hierarchical social structures, whereas reactionism seeks to reaffirm previous hierarchical divisions. The reactionist/populist distinction clarifies the nature and goals of social and political movements and social conflict. Being clear on reactionism gives us tools to critique claims of social aggrievement, truth and falsity in politics, and the exercise and sources of political power.