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Inquiry: An
Interdisciplinary Journal
of Philosophy
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Grounding Recognition:
A Rejoinder to Critical
Questions
Axel Honneth
Published online: 06 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Axel Honneth (2002) Grounding Recognition: A

Rejoinder to Critical Questions, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Philosophy, 45:4, 499-519, DOI: 10.1080/002017402320947577
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Inquiry, 45, 499520

Symposium on Axel Honneth and Recognition

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Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to

Critical Questions*
Axel Honneth
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit at, Frankfurt am Main

It is always great good fortune for an author to have his writings meet with a
receptive circle of readers who take them up in their own work and clarify
them further. Indeed, it may even be the secret of all theoretical productivity
that one reaches an opportune point in ones own creative process when
others queries, suggestions, and criticisms give one no peace, until one has
been forced to come up with new answers and solutions. The four essays
collected here, in any event, jointly represent an ideal form of such a
challenge: I am now compelled to make further theoretical developments and
clari cations that lead me to a whole new stage of my own endeavours, well
beyond what I initially had in mind in The Struggle for Recognition. For this
reason, I will not concentrate here on interpretative issues regarding my
earlier work but will instead take up the problems and challenges that have
occasioned several revisions on my part. For this reason, it makes sense to
begin (in section I) with the points that Carl-Goran Heidegren makes, in terms
of a history of social theory, regarding my proposed theory of recognition.
The issues that still motivate me today can best be expressed via an
engagement with the conscientious interpretations he offers. The core of this
rejoinder is based on Heikki Ikaheimos and Arto Laitinens suggestions and
corrections, which they have used to develop my initial approach further, to
the point where the theoretical outlines of a precise and general concept of
recognition come into view. It is primarily these two contributions that helped
me develop a productive elaboration of my originally vague intuitions
(section II). By way of conclusion (in section III), I take up the penetrating
questions raised by Antti Kauppinen regarding the use of the concept of
recognition in the broader context of social criticism; he has compelled me to
take on several extremely helpful clari cations, and they give me the
opportunity, in conclusion, to summarize my overarching intentions.

* Translated by Joel Anderson.

# 2002 Taylor & Francis

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I
In his attempt to reconstruct the emergence of my model of recognition out of
the interplay of philosophical anthropology, social theory, and politics,
Carl-Goran Heidegren is right to attribute a certain priority to philosophical
anthropology. My thinking was indeed shaped from the outset by the
methodological attitude of the tradition founded in the rst third of the
twentieth century by Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen;
despite all the conservative tendencies that could be identi ed in the content
of this tradition, I still consider it to be an enormous contribution that, in their
re exive analysis of the structures of our lifeworld, they (unlike Heidegger)
took an empirical approach and thereby systematically integrated results from
various disciplines within the human sciences.1 The special insight to which
such a philosophical anthropology leads can, I believe, now sensibly be
reformulated in John McDowells terminology: in the ongoing course of
history, which itself must not be conceived in purely scientistic terms, the
human lifeworld can be understood as the result of the emergence of a
second nature, in which we habitually orient ourselves in a changing space
of reasons. I am convinced that philosophical anthropology could be brought
even further up to date if one were to consider the additional convergences of
these two approaches regarding their concept of value, their admission of
biological constraints, and their concept of perception;2 but these initial
suggestions are enough, for present purposes, to make clear that, in the wake
of the excesses of linguistic analysis and historicism, philosophical
anthropology is still exceedingly relevant. When we also take into account
the work of Charles Taylor and Harry Frankfurt over the past few decades, we
can perhaps say that the existential structures of human beings second nature
are now being studied from the perspective of a linguistically informed
phenomenology for which scienti c results are not without systematic
signi cance.
The above attempt to update my theoretical work should not mislead
anyone about the fact that initially, without really having thought through the
methodology, I had set out to employ the young Hegels model of recognition
as the key to specifying the universal conditions under which human beings
can form an identity; the underlying intention was basically to conceptualize
the structures of mutual recognition analysed by Hegel not merely as
preconditions for self-consciousness but as practical conditions for the
development of a positive relation-to-self. This led me, in the form of an
empirically informed phenomenology, to differentiate the three forms of
recognition to which Heidegrens essay refers, in their original characterization; in the second part of this rejoinder, I shall address the question of how I
now view this differentiation, in light of the aforementioned methodology. In
any case, Heidegren is right that, already at that time, my core idea was to

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501

distinguish these modes of mutual recognition according to the constitutive

contribution that each makes to enabling a distinct form of relation-to-self; in
this connection, I was aided by the fact that it was rather easy to see how Ernst
Tugendhats related discussion3 could be developed in a way that
supplemented the familiar aspect of self-respect with a consideration of the
other two dimensions of basic self-con dence and self-esteem. Thus
emerged, out of a somewhat forced reinterpretation of the young Hegel
(in uenced, in particular, by the results of my work on the concept of the
person), the distinction between the three modes of recognition love, rights,
and solidarity with which I am still working today, albeit in a modi ed form.
In The Struggle for Recognition, I had not really worked out whether these
three modes were to be conceived of as constants of human nature or as the
result of historical processes. The whole tone and argumentation did clearly
suggest that the various forms of recognition could only have been intended
as universal conditions for positive human relation-to-self; at the same time, I
had given the distinction between legal respect and social esteem a historical
foundation, at least in so far as I had interpreted it as the result of the
traditional concept of honour splitting into a universalistic moral element and
a meritocratic element.4 I now distinguish much more sharply than in my
original approach between anthropological starting conditions and historical contingency: although the human form of life as a whole is marked by the
fact that individuals can gain social membership and thus a positive relationto-self only via mutual recognition, its form and content change during the
differentiation of normatively regulated spheres of action.5 In this way, it also
becomes clearer how to view the internal link to the second theoretical
domain mentioned in Heidegrens title. I currently see the connection
between philosophical anthropology and social theory as lying in the
normative conditions for social integration: individuals can become members
of society only by developing, via the experience of mutual recognition, an
awareness of how rights and duties are reciprocally distributed in the context
of particular tasks. In this way, the use of the concept of recognition allows
the normative implications that are necessarily inherent in every social theory
to emerge from both directions: from one direction, individual opportunities
for a positive relation-to-self depend on conditions that are social in character,
since they comprise normatively regulated forms of mutual recognition; from
the other direction, a given societys chance of meeting with the uncoerced
support of its members depends on its ability to organize the relations of
recognition in a way that enables the individual development of those positive
forms of relation-to-self. I am thus more strongly convinced than ever before
that an account of society will end up on the wrong theoretical track unless it
is developed, from the outset, in terms of normative concepts.
Of course, none of these points touches the two issues that Heidegren
places in the centre of his reconstruction. He is quite right that I am not

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satis ed simply to present the connection between social integration and

mutual recognition, and that, drawing on Hegel, I speak instead of an
agonistic relationship that requires a permanent struggle for recognition;
and, in an instructive comparison with the Gehlens anthropological ethics,6
he outlines the extent to which I move beyond the monistic framework of a
pure morality of respect, in that I speak, in parallel with the three forms of
recognition, also of three distinct sources of morality. I shall not discuss this
second point further here, since it will play a larger role in connection with a
further clari cation of the concept of recognition; the rst point, however,
will be taken up in what follows here, for it has to do with how the concept of
recognition relates to the third theoretical domain that Heidegren mentions in
his title, namely, politics.
The problem Heidegren addresses stems in part from the Hegelian
inheritance, at least in the sense that what Hegel was getting at in his early
writings was the idea that every elementary form of mutual recognition is
continually transcended via a struggle that leads to a higher stage in the
process of recognition. There has always seemed to me to be something
particularly attractive about the idea of an ongoing struggle for recognition,
though I did not quite see how it could still be justi ed today without the
idealistic presupposition of a forward-driven process of Spirits complete
realization. But drawing on G. H. Meads social psychology which I then
thought I could use to develop the concept of recognition further, in
naturalistic terms did seem to provide me with the key to solving the
problem just posed: if we follow Mead in understanding the experience of
mutual recognition as the individual evolution of a me that consists in the
consciousness of legitimate social expectations, then the I could perhaps be
conceptualized as the source of continual rebellion against established forms
of recognition the source that Hegel had wanted to explain in terms of the
structure of consciousness. I have since backed away from Meads social
psychology, however, for I have come to doubt whether his views can
actually be understood as contributions to a theory of recognition: in essence,
what Mead calls recognition reduces to the act of reciprocal perspectivetaking, without the character of the others action being of any crucial
signi cance; the psychological mechanism by which shared meanings and
norms emerge seems to Mead generally to develop independently of the
reactive behaviour of the two participants, so that it also becomes impossible
to distinguish actions according to their respective normative character. This
explains why Mead never addresses the question as to what sort of behaviour
might be especially bene cial, during the maturation process, for developing
a positive relation-to-self; he simply thought that perspective-taking
represented a psychological process that comes about regardless of the
particular manner of the reciprocal interaction. As a result, Meads social
psychology turned out to be much less suitable than I originally thought for

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purposes of using the concept of recognition to characterize a speci c kind

of attitude or action; in a certain sense, the naturalism of his approach is too
strong for it to be possible to view recognition as habituated behaviour that
takes place in a historically emergent space of moral reasons.
In departing from Mead in this way, I also closed off the possibility of
simply locating the cause of the con icts that are intrinsic to relations of
mutual recognition in the same source that Mead did. The I which, for
Mead, was the prere ective locus of all spontaneous impulses can no longer
be seen as the origin of the rebellion against established patterns of
recognition, given that these are to be viewed no longer as internalized
behavioural expectations but rather as intersubjectively binding forms of
action; it is still particularly tempting to attribute to persons an unconscious
will to distinguish themselves [Besonderungswillen], but for Mead, it works
by means, again, of the inner negation of internalized norms, rather than by
means of judgments regarding objectively given standards of action.
Regarding the question of whether there could be a uni ed source of all
impulsive rebellion against established forms of recognition, we nd ourselves
in the domain of wild speculation; this can easily be made clear in the case of
the dif culties that Judith Butler gets into when she re ects on the
psychological causes of the rejection of regimes of recognition and
notoriously vacillates between a theory of drives and a theory of
consciousness. 7 At this point, the solution that suggests itself rst would be
to refrain altogether from generalizations about human nature and thus,
instead of attributing to human beings any deep-seated tendency to negate
intersubjectivity, merely postulate a sensibility to injustice that is mediated, in
each case, by experience and thus merely possible. Relativizing matters
historically in this way would, however, come at the cost of giving up the
Hegelian claim that every relation of recognition should include an inner
progressive dynamic: as soon as the experience of not being recognized fully
in ones distinctive identity no longer brings with it a virtually anthropological
force but rather becomes dependent on historical and cultural circumstances,
one can no longer speak of the necessity of a struggle for recognition.
In order to avoid losing entirely the suggestive power of this last thesis
and, indeed, to leave a bit of room to sharpen the point somewhat
speculatively I have recently taken to substituting the recourse to Meads
I with another hypothesis about human nature. In speaking, in a felicitous
phrase, of an anthropology of transcendence, Heidegren has in mind the part
of my more recent work just outlined, even though his presentation is not
entirely accurate regarding the extent to which that account differs from the
original notion of individuals unconscious will to distinguish themselves. In
a rejoinder to the psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook,8 as well as in other essays on
object-relations theory,9 I have attempted to extend the view that I had
developed, drawing on Donald Winnicott, in The Struggle for Recognition.

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Taken together, these more recent essays lead to the thesis that the early
childhood experiences of symbiosis have lifelong in uences, in that they
compel the subject to rebel again and again against the experience of not
having the other at our disposal. Accordingly, I now assume that the impulse
to rebel against established forms of recognition can be traced to a deepseated need to deny the independence of those with whom one interacts and to
have them, omnipotently, at ones disposal. We would then have to say that
the permanence of the struggle for recognition stems not from an
unsocializable egos drive for realization but rather from the anti-social
striving for independence that leads each subject to deny, again and again, the
others difference. Although I am convinced that I can put forward more
evidence for this speculative thesis than for the Meadean alternative, it too
raises an enormous problem regarding the connection with a theory of
recognition; for it is entirely unclear how these antisocial impulses are to be
connected to the moral experiences we have in mind when speaking of feeling
a lack of or a withholding of recognition.
At the moment, I am not sure where to go from here. On the one hand lies
the speculative insight (in uenced by object-relations theory) that one might
be able to trace the fact that relations of recognition are permanently marked
by the possibility of con ict, ultimately, back to the need to rebel against all
forms of recognized independence of the other, in order to recreate the
original situation of guaranteed, secure symbiosis; this type of approach could
help explain not only the tendency to compulsively deny the distinctiveness
of ones romantic partners10 but also the historically recurring willingness, in
the face of social threats, to seek refuge in a homogeneous community that is
free from all the dissonances intrinsic to relations of mutual recognition.11
This insight stands in contrast, however, with the decidedly more robust basic
conviction that the struggle for recognition is provoked by a particular kind
of moral experience: the tendency to challenge established forms of mutual
recognition stems from the historically fuelled feeling that others unjustly fail
to recognize certain aspects of who one is. Whereas the rst thesis
presupposes a need, anchored in human nature, that generates the agonistic
character of relations of recognition, the second thesis appeals, by contrast, to
the moral vulnerability of humans, who turn to protest and rebellion only
when faced with certain experiences. It seems that the only way to bridge
these mutually exclusive ideas would be to explain the emergence of this
moral vulnerability in terms of the early childhood loss of the symbiotic
experience of security; on that assumption, the individual tendency to deny
that others are not at ones disposal would be merely the ip-side of the
human interest in having essential components of who one is be socially
recognized. Before taking up that line of thought in the nal section, I would
like to address the question of what exactly it makes sense to understand
under the concept of an act of recognition.

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II
Although it was enough, in replying to Heidegren, to look back to various
initial motives for my project, the essays by Heikki Ikaheimo and Arto
Laitinen confront me with substantial systematic challenges. For however
much recent shifts in political ethics have expanded the research literature on
questions of social recognition, the core conceptual content of what we today
call recognition has hardly been addressed further; instead, the concept is
employed vaguely, usually with passing reference to Hegel, for attitudes and
practices by which individuals or social groups are af rmed in certain of their
qualities. What remains unclear is not merely the relation to the Kantian
concept of respect; more than ever before, it has also become clear that the
concept of recognition incorporates various semantic components that differ
in English, French, and German usage, and that the relationship between them
is not really transparent. Thus, in German, the concept appears to denote
essentially only that normative situation associated with awarding a social
status, whereas in English and French it encompasses the additional epistemic
sense of identifying or knowing again [Wiedererkennung ]; adding to this
dif culty is the fact that, in all three languages, the concept can be used in
speech acts in which one admits something or acknowledges a point, in which
case recognition acquires a primarily self-referential sense.12 Finally, in
competition with the Hegelian usage, there is also now a Wittgensteinian
interpretative perspective, according to which recognition stands for a
performative reaction to how people express themselves; especially owing to
the writings of Stanley Cavell,13 who makes do without any recourse to
Hegel, the category of acknowledgment has made its way to the inner circle
of analytic philosophy.
Ikaheimos and Laitinens contributions to this symposium have cleared
some very helpful paths into this thicket of conceptual confusions and
unanswered questions. Both authors address my original proposals with
analytic rigour, in attempts to reformulate them with suf cient independence
of Hegel for the tripartite distinction of love, rights, and esteem to acquire
systematic meaning; at the same time, the two proposed interpretative
strategies depart from one another enough to force me to make a choice
between them, a choice with signi cant implications. As far as I can see, there
are four premises that both authors share and that form the underpinnings for
their differing attempts at reconstruction. First, they are of the belief that the
original mode of recognition consists in what the German meaning of the
word foregrounds: in the rst instance, it should be understood as a matter of
af rming the positive qualities of human individuals or groups, although
neither author rules out the possibility of establishing a systematic link to
other senses of the term. Second, Ikaheimo and Laitinen agree in
underscoring recognitions character as an action: an act of recognition is

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never exhausted by mere words or symbolic expressions, since it is only the

corresponding behaviour that establishes the credibility that matters
normatively to the recognized subject. This is why both authors speak
explicitly of recognition as a certain attitude. In addition, they share a third
belief, that acts of recognition represent a distinctive phenomenon in the
social world that is accordingly not to be understood as a side-effect of an
other-directed action but rather as the expression of a free-standing intention;
whether we are talking of gestures, speech acts, or institutional measures,
these expressions and procedures are cases of recognition only if their
primary purpose is directed in some positive manner towards the existence of
another person or group. This conceptual precommitment rules out, for
example, counting as recognition those positive attitudes that unavoidably
accompany the pursuit of a series of cooperative interests: if I have a strong
desire, for instance, to play chess regularly with someone, I am probably
thereby expressing a special esteem for her intellectual capacities, but the
primary aim of my intentional action is directed at playing chess together. A
fourth premise shared by Ikaheimo and Laitinen is the above-mentioned
belief that recognition represents a conceptual species comprising three subspecies. What comes into view in the attitudes of love, legal respect, and
esteem is the one basic attitude (albeit with differing emphases) that can be
conceptualized generically as recognition. This agreement with my own
proposal is not particularly surprising, since despite their preoccupation with
analytical clarity, they too are ultimately guided by Hegel; but their
reconstructions make clear that there is more theoretical plausibility to
Hegels tripartite distinction than we would ever guess from mere
hermeneutic appeals to heritage.
The four premises discussed up to now express, with all the clarity one
could hope for, what I too currently take as my point of departure: recognition
is to be conceived of as the genus comprised of three forms of practical
attitudes, each re ecting the primary aim of a certain af rmation of the other.
The real challenge from these two contributions thus begins at the point where
the agreement ends and the markedly differing emphases come to the fore;
this point is indicated by the question as to whether we should understand
recognition more as a matter of attribution or of receptivity. Since I have
never before considered my conceptual approach from the vantage point of
this pair of alternatives, I shall begin by presenting the two possibilities in
abstraction, before then turning to the solutions proposed by Ikaheimo and
Laitinen. With regard to the question of how to characterize appropriately the
generic case of recognition, we do indeed appear to face two options as to
the cognitive relation to those with whom we interact: the af rmation effected
by such an action can be understood either on the model of attributions as a
result of which the other subject acquires a new, positive property, or on the
model of perception, according to which an already-present property of a

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person is, as a secondary matter, merely strengthened or publicly manifested.

In the rst case, what we call recognition would award or supplement the
affected subject with something she had not had before; in the second case, by
contrast, it would be a matter of a certain kind of perception of an already
independently existing status.
This choice of alternatives marks the point at which the authors
argumentative paths diverge. If I understand them correctly, Ikaheimo
recommends that I follow the attributive model, whereas Laitinen advises me
to adopt the perceptual model. Of course, perception is not quite the right
word here, since Laitinen prefers to speak, drawing on Joseph Raz, of a
responsive attitude, in order to emphasize the practical features of
recognition: in recognition we react correctly or appropriately to evaluative
properties that human beings already possess in various ways. The model
preferred by Ikaheimo, by contrast, is free of any tinge of such value realism;
he leans unambiguously towards the notion of attribution when he says that
what is distinctive of all forms of recognitional attitudes is that one accepts
another person or group as having particular capacities; indeed, at several
points in the text, Ikaheimo himself even uses the phrase attribute, as if to
underscore the contrast with Laitinen. The disadvantage I see with this way of
viewing things lies in the same point that Laitinen considers the central defect
of the attributive model: if the recognitional attitude were merely to attribute
positive qualities to the other subject, we would no longer have an internal
criterion for judging the rightness or appropriateness of such ascriptions;
instead, the variability of recognition would then have no boundaries, since
anything could end up having to count as a capacity or status, as long as it
comes about through an act of attribution. One way out here could be found in
the thesis that the legitimacy of recognition depends on the normative quality
of the process by which it emerges; but then the concept of recognition would
lose all the moral implications that distinguish it in the rst place from a
sociological labeling approach.
At rst sight, matters look no better for the opposing approach, the
receptivity or response model proposed by Laitinen. In order to be able to
claim that someone is responding correctly to the evaluative qualities of a
person or group of persons, the objective existence of values must be
presupposed in a way that is incompatible with what we know about the
constitution of values. Laitinen will be aware of the dif culties that
accompany this kind of value realism, but he makes no effort in his essay
to point the way towards a solution. I think he is right to claim that we should
locate recognition in the space of reasons, so that it is not deprived of its
character as a moral action; for only if our recognition of other persons is
motivated by reasons, which we can also try to articulate as necessary, can we
understand it as a matter of acting on the basis of insight and thus, in a broad
sense, expand the domain of the moral. Laitinens further suggestion that we

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categorize these reasons as evaluative also seems plausible, to the extent

that in recognizing persons (or groups) we always seem to be making their
value manifest; the moral constraints to which we know ourselves to be
subject in recognizing others result from the valuable qualities to which, in a
certain sense, we give public expression in recognizing them. The problem
starts at the point where we have to specify further the status of these
evaluative reasons. Here there seems to be no way out except to take recourse
to a form of value realism that is incompatible with the rest of our background
ontological beliefs. This unfortunate situation changes, however, once we
admit the possibility that these values represent lifeworld certitudes whose
character can undergo historical change; then the evaluative qualities that we
would have to be able to perceive in order to respond correctly to them in
recognizing a person or group would no longer be immutable and objective
but rather historically alterable. To be halfway plausible, however, the picture
just outlined would have to be supplemented with a further element: the social
lifeworld would have to be conceived of as a kind of second nature into
which subjects are socialized by gradually learning to experience the
evaluative qualities of persons;14 this learning process would have to be
conceptualized as a complex one, since in it we would be acquiring, along
with the perception of evaluative qualities, also the corresponding ways of
behaving whose distinctiveness would have to consist in the obvious restraint
of our natural egocentrism; as a result, we could then view relations of
recognition as a bundle of customs that, in the process of socialization, are
linked to revisable grounds for the value or worth of other persons.
Of course, this line of argument does not yet solve the problem that
generates the actual dif culties with this type of moderate value realism. The
idea was that the valuable qualities for which we can appropriately recognize
someone have reality only within the experiential horizon of a particular
lifeworld; those who have been successfully socialized into the culture of that
lifeworld take these values to be objective givens of the social world, in just
the way they initially experience other cultural particularities as selfevidently given facts. This gives rise, within this conception, to the danger of
a form of relativism that is fundamentally incompatible with the normative
aims of the concept of recognition; for the values in terms of which the
appropriateness of acts of recognition would be assessed appear to have
normative validity only for a single culture. Consequently, the relativism that
accompanies the response or receptivity model would be indistinguishabl e
from the attribution model; in both cases the validity of the recognitional
attitude, whether it is described as an attribution or as an appropriate response,
would depend exclusively on the normative givens of the form of life in
question. With regard to the receptivity model defended by Laitinen, I believe
that this dif culty can be overcome only be equipping this moderate value
realism with a more robust conception of progress. That would basically

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mean hypothesizing, with regard to the cultural transformations of valuable

human qualities, a developmental path that would allow for justi ed
judgments regarding the transhistorical validity of a speci c culture of
recognition. I am fully aware of the burden of proof this hypothesis places on
me in the present culture, which is so sceptical of claims to progress; but I do
not see Laitinen having any alternative to a conception of progress, either, if
he wants to avoid, for good reasons, the unfortunate choice between
completely ahistorical value realism and cultural value relativism.
The picture of moderate value realism that I have presented thus far plays
into notions of progress in so far as I take as my point of departure the
expanding differentiation of evaluative qualities: the thesis would have to be
that, in the course of historical development, there is a growing number of
values that, owing to our socialization, we can perceive people as having and
for which we can, accordingly, recognize them. This development can be
understood as progress in the normative sense, however, only if it can be
shown that, taken as a whole, this development contributes to whatever it is
about relations of recognition that merits so much attention in the rst place;
there has to be an internal connection between the expansion of values and the
purpose behind relations of recognition, for it would otherwise be entirely
unclear what we ought to view as the intended endpoint for a purported
direction of historical change. This theoretical demand raises the issue that
occupies Ikaheimo and Laitinen extensively in their essays, namely, the
question regarding the extent to which recognition represents a practice that
ought to have normative signi cance for human practical life. The answer
already suggested by Hegel (and subsequently proposed in ever-changing
versions) reintroduces human autonomy as the goal of recognition: only the
person who knows that she is recognized by others can relate to herself
rationally in a way that can, in the full sense of the word, be called free. In
the last section of his article, Laitinen makes clear that we must distinguish
here between two different strong readings of this thesis: we can speak of the
constitutive role of recognition for human personhood in a direct or an
indirect sense, depending on whether recognition generates the relevant
qualities for the rst time or rather merely actualizes them. In both cases,
recognition is a necessary condition for becoming a person capable of
autonomous self-determination; but only in the rst case is recognition also a
suf cient condition, since the subject does not acquire the capacities in
question prior to the act of recognition, whereas in the second case these
capacities have to be already present as potentialities in order to then be
realized, in a certain sense, as the result of recognition.
In light of this useful distinction, it is clear that only the attribution model
will allow one to speak of recognition being constitutive in a direct sense: if
recognitional attitudes are understood as attributions, then they represent the
necessary and suf cient conditions for human beings becoming autonomous

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persons with the relevant properties. By contrast, the response model that I
would defend (with Laitinen), allows at most for the possibility of speaking of
a constitutive meaning in an indirect sense: the evaluative qualities that
subjects already have to possess, according to this model, would then be
conceived of as potentialities that recognitional responses transform into
actual capacities. This rather ingenious thesis does, however, need an
additional assumption if it is to explain how, with the help of the concept of
recognition, we are to imagine this transformation of potentiality into
actuality. It seems to me that an exceptionally apt explanation emerges from
an understanding that combines the insight into the constitutive role of
recognition with the response model: in our recognitional attitudes, we
respond appropriately to evaluative qualities that, by the standards of our
lifeworld, human subjects already possess but are actually available to them
only once they can identify with them as a result of experiencing the
recognition of these qualities. Although Laitinen himself gives no indication
of his theoretical sources, the in uence behind the concept of identi cation
here seems to be Harry Frankfurts concept of the person: according to his
account, a person counts as autonomous in the strong sense only if she is able
to identify wholeheartedly with her own desires and capabilities.15 Going
beyond Frankfurt, however, we would have to say that this identi cation
presupposes recognition by others: with regard to the capabilities to which, in
virtue of my cultures normative presuppositions, I am entitled as a subject, I
can really af rm only those capabilities that are reinforced as valuable through
the recognitional behaviour of those with whom I interact. To this extent, an
explanatory model of this sort actually represents a middle position between
pure constructivism and mere representationalism: although we make
manifest, in our acts of recognition, only those evaluative qualities that are
already present in the relevant individual, it is only as a result of our reactions
that he comes to be in a position to be truly autonomous, because he is then
able to identify with his capabilities.
Having thus explained the purpose in terms of which acts of recognition get
their normative signi cance in human life, I can now return to the idea of
progress that I saw myself having to defend in connection with moderate
value realism. I do not think we can do without a conception of progress if we
are to avoid the relativism that would ordinarily accompany claims to the
alterability of evaluative human qualities; if we are to elude the implication
that every evaluative predicate ever to have emerged in history has the same
normative validity, we must be able to derive, from the desired direction of
such changes, transhistorical standards for judging them. With regard to the
directional index that is, progress that we are permitted to presuppose
historically, we can get some insight from the foregoing discussion into the
underlying purpose of mutual recognition in human life: every new evaluative
quality whose con rmation through recognition increases a human subjects

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capacity for autonomy must be viewed as a progressive step in the historical

process of cultural transformation. This is not to say that a vague formulation
of this sort already clears up the numerous problems connected with claims
regarding progress in evaluative perception; but the line of thought just
sketched does still provide us with a criterion that we must attend to in trying
to ascertain a direction within cultural change. In my exchange with Nancy
Fraser,16 I have actually tried to make these standards more precise, arguing
that it is the increases in individuality and social inclusion that jointly indicate
progress in social acts of recognition; with the help of these preliminary
re ections, I have attempted to show that we ought to view the differentiation
of various kinds of recognition not as an ahistorical given but rather as the
result of a directional process. This raises the further issue with which
Ikaheimo and Laitinen confront me; for despite their differences, they both
claim that the tripartite distinction of love, rights, and esteem represents an
ontological or anthropological (and, in any case, ahistorical) distinction.
Of course, the justi cations each offers for this thesis are quite different,
since they do, after all, defend different models of recognition. In the
analytical schema that Ikaheimo offers in the context of his attribution model,
the distinctions between types of recognition appear to be made in terms of
the logical possibilities formally available in the dimensions of human
personality; though he speaks of a useful practice, he is actually oriented
towards Hegel when he speaks of the three dimensions of singularity,
autonomy, and particularity. By drawing a parallel between these aspects and
the three distinct qualities to which we can in principle again, on logical
grounds attribute as a value to human subjects, Ikaheimo arrives at the
ambitious table with which he wants to elucidate the eld of possible types of
recognition: in love, the singularity of ones partner to interaction is
recognized by having attributed to him the status of a person whose wellbeing as such is valuable; in rights, the autonomy of the other is
recognized by being granted the status of a person who is entitled to perform
certain actions; and nally, in esteem, the other is recognized in his
particularity by being equipped with the status of a person who has value for
a third party. I nd especially helpful the ideas that Ikaheimo puts forward, on
the basis of his schema, when he crosses these different variables with one
another. In this way, it becomes clear that the various categorical assignments
are much looser that I envisioned in my original proposal: for example, we
can often demonstrate to children that we care by con rming their autonomy
through the attribution of non-juridical rights, or we can grant persons formal
rights that protect them exclusively with regard to their singularity. But even
if we consider such extensions to be sensible, the question remains as to
whether to view the central categorizations as socio-ontological givens or as
matters of historical circumstance; the fact that love was not uncoupled from
expectations of utility until the modern period and that legal rights were fused

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for a long time with social esteem seems to me to speak more in favour of the
second answer. Like Ikaheimo, Laitinen also favours an ahistorical
introduction of the basic types of recognition; in his case, however, this
strategy is linked to his value realism, which unlike me, he apparently wants
to understand in ontological terms.
Although Laitinen leaves open at the start of his essay whether we should
understand the evaluative qualities of persons in ontological terms, it
becomes clear in the course of his argument that this is precisely his view. My
suggested way out, which involves speaking merely of these evaluative
qualities social and experiential [lebensweltlich] reality, is not the route he
seems to want to take; that is why he answers the question as to which types of
recognition are to be distinguished, by referring to the various values that can
be seen as be tting human essence. It is not surprising that Laitinen thereby
comes to the tripartite distinction, since his conceptual orientation, like
Ikaheimos, is Hegelian: human subjects can be recognized for good reasons
because they possess either the same dignity as all others or exceptional
capacities or speci c signi cance for others. From what I said earlier
regarding Laitinens distinction between potentiality and actuality, it is clear
that we are to understand these three values as objective, timeless potentials
of human essence: as a result of the corresponding recognitional responses of
legal respect, of love, and of esteem, subjects come to be able to identify with
the three evaluative qualities to which they always already potentially have
access, independently of all historical transformations. For the reasons
mentioned, I do not agree with such a strong value realism, which
presupposes a nite number of realizable human values; this type of view
ignores, as a matter of principle, not only the social constitution of all
evaluative qualities but also the possibility that new values could emerge.17 In
my view, the space of reasons is also a historically changing domain; the
evaluative human qualities to which we can respond rationally in recognizing
others form ethical certitudes whose character changes unnoticeably with the
cultural transformations of our lifeworld. If we assume, in addition, that these
changes in our ethical knowledge have occurred in the direction of increasing
individuality and inclusion, then the three forms of recognition that Ikaheimo
and Laitinen both presuppose can be understood as the result of a historical
learning process: in our lifeworld, we, the children of modernity, have learned
to perceive in other human subjects three potential evaluative qualities to
which we can respond appropriately with the relevant recognitional
behaviour, according to the kind of relationship in question; what we then
do, in such acts of recognition, involves publicly making explicit the
knowledge that we have acquired in the process of socialization.

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III
In my response to the systematic proposals of Ikaheimo and Laitinen, the
central issue was the appropriate understanding of the concept of recognition.
Faced with the choice between the attribution model and the response model,
I took the path of a moderate value realism: we are to understand
recognition as a behavioural reaction in which we respond rationally to
evaluative qualities that we have learned to perceive, to the extent to which
we are integrated into the second nature of our lifeworld. This formulation
does not, however, make adequately clear why the concept of recognition,
thus understood, refers to a moral action; we are, of course, dealing with an
action that is mediated by evaluative reasons, but that is far from enough to
show that this must also be a matter of acting morally. The intended
connection rst arises with Kants claim that [r]espect is properly the
representation of a worth [or value: Wert] that infringes upon my selflove,18 that is, somethings (or someones) value can require us to constrain
our actions in a non-egoistical manner. Joseph Raz seems to have something
similar in mind when he writes that the value of what is of value determines
what action, if any, it is a reason to perform.19 The implication of this line of
thinking is that the reason why acts of recognition must be moral acts is that
they are determined by the value or worth of other persons; acts of recognition
are oriented not towards ones own aims but rather towards the evaluative
qualities of others. If this is so, then we would have to be able to distinguish as
many forms of moral action as there are values of human beings to be
recognized; I have thus concluded, in several recent essays, that we should
distinguish three sources of morality, which are meant to correspond to the
differentiated forms of recognition found in our lifeworld.20 My proposal thus
overlaps only super cially with that of Arnold Gehlen, who also distinguishes
three sources of morality; contrary to Heidegrens assertions, I take my
starting-point not from functional demands of human nature but rather from
aspects of the value of human persons, aspects that have become
differentiated as the result of a historical learning process.
With these remarks, I am already approaching the theme that is at the core
of Antti Kauppinens essay. In mentioning the implications that I wish to
draw for moral philosophy from the historically justi ed distinction between
three forms of recognition, I am once again underscoring the point of all my
efforts here: basically, what I am concerned with is the attempt to use the
concept of recognition to develop the normative foundations on the basis of
which social criticism can be justi ed. The astute comments that Kauppinen
directs at this goal of my work are extremely well suited to helping me clarify
matters further. Even just the few pages he devotes to the opaque eld of
social criticism make it possible to specify precisely my theoretical point of
departure: in contrast to approaches that try to criticize social relations

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externally, with reference to universalistic principles, I favour an internal

approach; this means that the standards for critical judgment are to be derived
from the normative convictions that are already shared by the addressees.
Kauppinen rightly sees as the twofold advantage of such internal critique that
it safely avoids the danger of a merely supposed universalism and that it has,
in addition, great motivating force: since the underlying norms in the
criticized society are already accepted in some way, those targeted by the
critique are more likely to be willing to follow them. But already in the
inconspicuous quali cation that the norms must be shared in some way, one
can see an indication that this model of critique must also be divided into
subspecies. Whenever the internal standards are explicit, that is, whenever
they are publicly articulated in the society in question, Kauppinen speaks of
simple internal critique, since all that is needed is a confrontation between
those explicit norms and the practices that depart from them. By contrast,
whenever the internal standards are assumed to be of only implicit
signi cance for the addressees, the situation becomes markedly more
complicated and requires a form of critique that Kauppinen terms
reconstructive: before they can be considered implicit standards, the norms
that are to provide the underpinning for the critique must rst be educed
interpretatively, in a reconstruction, from the semantic eld of the existing
social practices.
For Kauppinen, even this set of distinctions is not enough really to reveal
the whole array of possible forms of social criticism. Not only does the
simple form of social criticism get divided into two further subcategories,
the reconstructive form is also presented in two versions: if the critique
makes weak claims, then it treats the implicitly practised norms as having
only a contingent, particular character, whereas if it appeals to strong
aspirations, then the universal necessity of those implicit norms must be
demonstrated. Only after Kauppinen has introduced this last branching does it
become clear why he had to go so far in drawing these distinctions; his view is
that both Habermas and I are engaged in a form of social criticism that
corresponds to the stronger form of reconstructive critique. Accordingly, he
devotes the main part of his essay to the question of whether my theory of
recognition is actually able to ful l the wide-ranging aspirations of this type
of critique. Since I agree with Kauppinens astute classi cation, I must take
up the challenge posed by his questions; indeed, it is not clear to what extent
the concept of recognition sketched thus far could make possible a
reconstructive form of critique that rests on the universalistic content of a
societys implicit norms.
Kauppinens analysis of the critical intent behind my conception of
recognition is just as wellfounded as his classi catory proposal is convincing.
The starting-point here is to be found in the same premises regarding human
nature that already came up in my rejoinder to Heidegren: with Hegel, I take it

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for granted that human beings need the experience of recognition in order to
relate to their capabilities and potentials in a way that permits a free,
uncoerced realization of their personality. Taking a page from Laitinen, I
should perhaps now say that social recognition represents the necessary
condition for subjects being able to identify with their valuable qualities and,
accordingly, develop genuine autonomy. This premise remains a claim within
philosophical anthropology, even though I now emphasize much more than
previously the historical alterability of forms of recognition; it is still a matter
of the invariant dependence of humans on the experience of recognition, even
though its forms and contours can become differentiated in the course of
historical transformations. For me, the decisive point that Kauppinen makes
in connection with my anthropological starting assumptions is the proposal
that he makes in connection with the implicit character of norms of
recognition: he recommends that these be understood, following Robert
Brandom, as generalized behavioural expectations that we follow, not
explicitly or consciously, but rather implicitly; accordingly, we become
aware of the norms that regulate our behaviour in the form of knowing how
only in those moments when our expectations are disrupted; the interruption
of our action forces us to make explicit the portion of our latent background
beliefs that is ineluctable for making sense of the situation. I see no dif culty
in incorporating this suggestion with the ideas I developed earlier, regarding
the basis for acts of recognition in our socially acquired background
knowledge: if we think of norms of recognition as patterns of response that we
master in the course of acquiring evaluative knowledge, this must be a matter
of knowing how that we can never completely articulate in explicit rules.
This conceptual result actually only explains why the theory of recognition
takes the form of social criticism that Kauppinen terms reconstructive: the
critique relies on norms of recognition that it must make explicit via a form of
reconstruction, because the validity of those norms has the character of
implicit knowledge. This does not yet show that the concept of recognition
can also accomplish the more ambitious tasks that Kauppinen associates with
the strong version of reconstructive critique; that would require demonstrating that the norms of recognition that are reconstructed in each case are not of
a merely contingent character but have, rather, necessarily universalistic
content. This is where we come to the most dif cult questions that Kauppinen
directs at my approach; he is not sure to what extent a societys implicit norms
of recognition can yield a universalistic basis for forms of critique that
attempt to connect up with the self-understanding of their addressees.
In my rebuttal, I will skip over the questions that Kauppinen treats under
the rubric of a Priority Challenge. I currently think it is possible, without too
many dif culties, to use the historical, sociological, and psychological
literature to indicate the priority that normative questions of recognition must
have, from the perspective of those affected, ahead of other moral interests;

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moreover, I have recently attempted to work out, in several recent texts, the
explanatory proof for a prioritization of this sort.21 For me, the real challenge
begins at the point where Kauppinen doubts these norms of recognition can
yield an adequate basis for a universalistic justi cation of my critical
aspirations. The rst problem that arises in this context results once again
from my repeated assertion that recognitional behaviour serves to enable
autonomy or self-realization; this formulation leaves the impression that
recognition is accorded the role of a merely instrumental value, whereas
autonomy or self-realization occupies the truly decisive position as the
highest moral value. I shall rst reply brie y to the charge of instrumentalism just voiced, before I then turn to the charge of cultural particularism.
The suspicion of instrumentalism arises from my starting assumption that
social recognition is a necessary condition for the individual autonomy of
persons. The character of that claim changes markedly, however, as soon as
one notes additionally that these acts of recognition also represent the morally
appropriate response to individuals evaluative qualities; for what was
initially just a condition loses its purely instrumental meaning in coming to
be also a matter of meeting a moral or ethical demand. Just as Kant locates
both a precondition and an obligation in the concept of respect, one must see
the concept of recognition as simultaneously representing both as well: it is
in virtue of being in accordance with individuals potential evaluative
qualities that recognition comes to be a condition for the development of their
autonomy. In this sense, it would be a mistake to follow Kauppinen in
speaking of recognition as merely secondary to a primary goal of selfrealization; on the contrary, the point is that individuals autonomy can reach
its fullest development only via the relevant recognitional responses, and it
would thus be entirely inappropriate to draw a primary/secondary distinction
here.
With these re ections, I am already working within one of the two possible
solutions that Kauppinen distinguishes, namely, the one he labels the
foundationalist possibility. I do indeed assume that we should understand
autonomy or self-realization as the overarching telos of our human form of
life, in terms of which our internal critique can orient itself. In order to
understand how a universalistic approach of this sort can be combined with
the idea of internal critique, however, two things need to be made more
precise. I have spoken throughout of autonomy or self-realization in the
most neutral sense possible, in which we attribute to every human being an
interest in being able to freely determine and realize his own desires and
intentions; that is why, on my view, this way of specifying the goal does not
entail any culturally speci c commitments, or even the designation of
particular conceptions of the good. On the contrary, a formal concept of
autonomy or self-realization should rather let differences come to the fore
regarding the various cultural ways of realizing, within history, the telos of a

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relation-to-self that is free from domination or compulsion; this is the same

move I made vis-a`-vis Laitinen, in claiming that the changing evaluative
properties of human beings specify, in each case, what has to be seen as the
distinctive character of individual autonomy. Granted, this line of thought still
does not justify why social criticism that starts out from a societys implicit
recognition norms must rely on a normative basis that is universal or even
necessary; this is because following those norms fosters only one form of
individual autonomy, whose legitimacy [Geltung] is limited to just one
culture, leaving it without any transcendental validity [Gultigkeit]. As
Kauppinen rightly surmises, at this delicate point in the argument, I have to
rely on a conception of progress; for in order to show that the currently
dominant norms of recognition are not just relatively but rather universally
valid, it must be possible to assert their normative superiority over all
previous recognition regimes. I have already addressed, in the discussion of
Ikaheimo and Laitinen, the conditions under which I consider such a model of
history defensible; here I would only add that, in my view, the hemeneutical
counter-proposal that Kauppinnen defends, following McDowell, itself
cannot be carried out without a weak concept of progress.22
In this debate with Kauppinen, I have now reached the point where one can
start to see how the concept of recognition can serve as the basis for a strong
version of reconstructive internal critique. In describing the process by which
it would come to be used in this way, I could hardly do better than Kauppinen
himself does in the nal section of his essay: social criticism reconstructs the
norms of recognition that are already implicit in the ways in which people in
that society respond to one anothers evaluative qualities, in order to make
clear, in the exchange with its addressees, the extent to which their de facto
practices and social order contradict their implicitly practised ideals. I am
unsure, however, whether Kauppinens formulation takes suf ciently into
account that I presuppose, in the very structure of my approach, that norms of
recognition are characterized by a normative surplus [Geltungsuberhang];
even when there is no apparent gap between de facto practices and implicit
norms, the ideals associated with the distinct forms of recognition always
call for greater degrees of morally appropriate behaviour, than is ever
practised in that particular reality. Otherwise, I could hardly explain how
there could ever be the progress (regarding the historical transformations of
recognitional attitudes) that I must presuppose in defending the strong model
of critique; here, my hunch is that norms of recognition which are to be
understood as patterns of response (acquired through socialization) vis-a`-vis
evaluative properties that are perceived in lifeworld contexts continually
demand, from within themselves, the further perfection of our moral action,
such that the historical process is characterized by a permanent pressure to
learn.
I know full well, of course, that I am getting myself into extremely

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speculative terrain here. As is true of Habermas and his approach, I too need a
plausible concept of progress for the theory of recognition if I am to justify the
universalistic content of my internalist approach to critique; and as in the case
of his writings indeed, in a much more underdeveloped and confusing way
the building blocks for such a conception are lying around in my writings,
without ever really tting together. What is, above all, unclear to me is how to
square the anthropological speculations about anti-social human tendencies
with the suggestions I have made in connection with the structural surplus
regarding the validity of recognition norms. But the authors of the essays
collected here can take comfort in the fact that there may well be no greater
compliment to the signi cance of their criticisms than the admission that I am
confronted here with problems that are dif cult to solve.

NOTES
1 Cf. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. Raymond Meyer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 2.
2 John McDowell, Two Sorts of Naturalism , in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 16797.
3 Self-Consciousnes s and Self-Determinatio n, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1986), Lecture 11.
4 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition : The Moral Grammar of Social Con icts,
trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
5 Honneth, Redistributio n as Recognition, in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition ? A Political-Philosophica l Exchange (London: Verso, forthcoming) .
6 Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral: Eine pluralistisch e Ethik (Frankfurt a/M:
Athenaum, 1969).
7 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjectio n (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997).
8 Axel Honneth, Facetten des vorsoziale n Selbst. Eine Erwiderumg auf Joel Whitebook ,
Psyche 55 (2001), pp. 790802.
9 Axel Honneth, Postmodern Identity and Object-Relation s Theory: On the Supposed
Obsolence of Psychoanalysis , Philosophica l Exploration s 2 (1999), pp. 22542; Axel
Honneth, Das Werk der Negativita t. Eine psychoanalytisch e Revision der Anerkennungstheorie , in Bohleber and Sibylle Drews (eds), Die Gegenwart der Psychoanalys e
Die Psychoanalys e der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), pp. 23845.
10 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis , Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
11 Axel Honneth, Angst und Politik Starken und Schwachen der Pathologiediagnos e von
Franz Neumann, in Mattias Iser and David Strecker (eds), Kritische Theorie der Politik:
Franz Neumann eine Bilanz (Baden-Baden : Nomos Verlag, forthcoming) .
12 Cf. the entry on Recognition , in Michael J. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992).
13 Stanley Cavell, Knowing and Acknowledging , in Must We Mean What We Say?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 23866.
14 John McDowell, Two Sorts of Naturalism, op. cit.; Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 1.
15 Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), chs. 7 and 12; and his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chs. 7, 11, and 14.
16 Axel Honneth, Redistributio n as Recognition , op. cit.

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17 Hans Joas, Die Entstehung der Werte (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1997); English translatio n
forthcomin g from Polity Press.
18 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic s of Morals, in Mary J. Gregor (trans.
and ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 56,
second footnote [Akademie edition 4: 4012].
19 Joseph Raz, Value, Respect, and Attachment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 166.
20 Axel Honneth, Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2000), part II;
English trans. forthcomin g from Polity Press.
21 Axel Honneth, Redistributio n as Recognition , op. cit.
22 Axel Honneth, Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the
Challenge of Moral Realism, in Nicholas H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell (London:
Routledge, 2002), pp. 24666.
Received 21 September 2002
Axel Honneth, Institut fur Sozialforschung , Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit at Frankfurt/M.,
Senckenberganlag e 26, DE-60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. E-mail: honneth@em.uni frankfurt.de