Recognition and the Human Life-Form

Beyond Identity and Difference

Heikki Ikäheimo

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000605808
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Philosophie
• Categoria: Kritische Theorie

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts.

The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Taylor, Fraser, and Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences.

Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research.

Chapter 5 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Preliminary questions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003272120-2

Contents

1. 1 Preliminary questions
   • 1.1 The semantics of ‘Anerkennung’ and ‘recognition’ – two or three families of meaning
   • 1.2 Recognition of persons – one or many forms?
   • 1.3 Attitudes, attitude-complexes, concrete interpersonal relations, and social and institutional spheres
   • 1.4 Attitudes, acts, and expressions
   • 1.5 Is recognition of persons responsive to or constitutive of its objects?
     • 1.5.1 Recognition and personhood
     • 1.5.2 Recognition and personal identity
2. Notes
3. References

1 Preliminary questions

So what is recognition? In this first chapter, I will provide preliminary clarifications of a number of important conceptual issues around the notion. The aims here are to give the reader a differentiated initial grasp of the theme independently of the texts that the subsequent chapters will discuss as well as to introduce a number of conceptual tools that will be utilized in those chapters.

I will start (1.1) with observations on the semantics of the title word of our theme in two languages central for the history of the theme and for current discussions on it: the German ‘Anerkennung’ and the English ‘recognition’.¹ Second (1.2), I will introduce the idea that there is more than one form or recognition; third (1.3), I will distinguish between several issues that are easily confused but important not to be confused if one wants to think and talk about the theme in a lucid and coherent manner. These are (a) attitude, (b) complexes of attitudes and other psychological states, (c) concrete interpersonal relations, and (d) social and institutional contexts or spheres. Fourth (1.4), starting with the idea that attitudes are in many ways the basic unit in terms of which recognition is best analyzed, I will discuss the connection of attitudes of recognition to ‘acts of recognition’ and ‘expressions or recognition’. Fifth (1.5), as the concept of personhood and its internal connection to recognition will be central to this book, I will take up a question discussed in recent literature on the exact nature of this relationship: is recognition of persons responsive to, or constitutive of, persons, or something in them? I will show that this question needs to be thought of in terms of a differentiated conception of what it is to be a person as well as a differentiated conception of the many ways in which recognition can be responsive to or constitutive of personhood, or of what I call ‘full-fledged personhood’. As will be seen, the different authors discussed in the subsequent chapters have grasped different elements of the recognition–personhood connection and thus of the importance of recognition for what I call the life-form of human persons. The task, taken up in this book, is to form a comprehensive conception that includes them all.

Though the clarifications and distinctions made in this first chapter will be utilized in clarifying the positions of the authors discussed in the subsequent chapters, the chapter should be useful for anyone interested in thinking clearly about the phenomena at issue in the discourses on recognition, independently of the views of this or that author or of the particular goals of this book.

1.1 The semantics of ‘Anerkennung’ and ‘recognition’ – two or three families of meaning

A somewhat confusing fact about the theoretical debates on ‘recognition’ is that the meaning of the central term tends to be understood quite differently by different authors and this at least partly reflects the multiplicity of its extra-academic uses. As has been noted by some (Margalit 2001), the plurality of meanings of the term can be a source of a fruitful fusion of insights, but it can equally well lead to confusion that is not really helpful for scientific and philosophical progress or for collective self-understanding or political debate. It is thus important to make a number of clarifications on the various meanings of the term in its everyday as well as theoretical uses. Though English is today the lingua franca of philosophy, the pioneers of the theme, Fichte and Hegel, wrote in German and much important work on recognition has more recently been done by authors writing in German. Hence, it is important to have an adequate sense of the semantic peculiarities of both the German ‘Anerkennung’ and the English ‘recognition’, words that in the literature are used to translate each other. Importantly, the English ‘recognition’ has a somewhat broader explicit range of meanings than the German ‘Anerkennung’ and this relative multiplicity of meanings of ‘recognition’ can easily lead to ambiguity and uncontrolled slippage between the different meanings.

The meanings or uses of the English word ‘recognition’ can initially be organized in three broad families. One of these families of meaning of ‘recognition’ is not shared by the German ‘Anerkennung’, yet there are two other families which the two words share.

There is, first, a sense of the English ‘recognition’ in which it can be used more or less synonymously with ‘identification’. In this sense, one can recognize, that is identify, something or someone numerically as the individual that it or (s)he is (such as the river Rhein or Michael), qualitatively as having a certain quality or qualities (such as being long or friendly), or generically or essentially as belonging to a certain class or genus of things (such as rivers or humans). In these senses of numerical, qualitative, and generic identification, ‘recognition’ can, in principle, take anything as its objects—persons, material things, as well as abstract entities.

The second family of uses of the English ‘recognition’ is one in which the word is more or less synonymous with ‘accepting’ or ‘admitting’ or with ‘acknowledging’. Whereas anything can be an object of identification, this second family concerns only what we may call evaluative and normative entities. One can only ‘recognize’, in the sense of acknowledge, accept, or admit things like values, norms, principles, rules, reasons, responsibilities, commitments, sins, guilt, and so on.

Whereas ‘recognition’ as identification can thus, in principle, concern anything and whereas ‘recognition’ as acknowledging or accepting concerns evaluative and normative entities, there is a third family of uses of ‘recognition’ in which it concerns only persons, individually or collectively. In this exclusively person-related sense, one can, say, ‘recognize Ludwig for his pioneering work or contributions’ or think one should ‘recognize the bravery of the suffragettes in the early years of the feminist movement’.

The semantics of the German ‘Anerkennung’ is somewhat different. On an explicit level, its meanings seem to cover roughly the two last mentioned senses of the English ‘recognition’. As in English, in German one can recognize or have recognition both for persons (the third family) and for evaluative and normative entities (the second family).² The main difference is that the surface meanings of the German ‘Anerkennung’ do not include the first mentioned family of meanings where the English ‘recognition’ is synonymous with ‘identification’.

Yet, when one looks below the surface, one in fact notices that the German ‘Anerkennung’ functions in ways similar to the English ‘identification’. This is due to there being only a thin line between cognizing or identifying something as something on the one hand and acknowledging (anerkennen) that something is something (or that something is the case) on the other. One only needs to think of cases where someone is at first in denial of some relevant fact of practical or perhaps moral relevance—but then finally acknowledges it (erkennt es an). This is to say that the apparently non-normative phenomenon of identifying or cognizing something is naturally described as a normativity-involving case of ‘Anerkennung’ as soon as there is a suggestion that one should or ought to identify it as what it is.³ What is at stake is not merely an epistemic sense of normativity in which one can identify or cognize objects, events, and so on correctly or fail to do so (normativity in this epistemic sense is of course by necessity involved in identification). Rather, what is at stake is some kind of practical ‘should’ or ‘ought’ (Sollen). When someone is advised to “acknowledge the facts”, the point is usually not so much (or at least not only) that she should not commit an epistemic mistake of not believing what is the case. The point is rather that she should face or acknowledge the demands or claims that the facts in question make on her.

1.2 Recognition of persons – one or many forms?

Eventually the various issues called ‘Anerkennung’ or ‘recognition’ are in many ways interconnected, and once one starts probing deeper into them, the neat distinction between the two (or three) families of meaning begins to lose its obviousness. Despite this, this distinction is a useful tool for thinking of the complex of phenomena at issue, and it will be utilized throughout the book. Thought of in terms of the distinction, the explicit focus in the great majority of the recent debates in social and political philosophy has been on recognition of persons, and the same is true of most of the older literature on our theme. ⁴ Yet, already for Fichte and Hegel, discussed in the next two chapters, recognition of persons is also closely connected to something like recognition (or acknowledgement) of institutions, and, as we will see, this is related to an ambivalence of the notion of personhood between its ‘institutional’ and ‘non-institutional’ uses.

As to recognition of, or for, persons, perhaps the first conceptual question to ask is whether there is only one or more than one form of it. To put this another way, the question is whether ‘recognition for persons’ names a family with many members, or more traditionally a genus for several species, or whether there is perhaps only one way to recognize a person or persons. As we shall see in Chapter 3, not even Hegel, the central classical author on the theme, was wholly clear about this question, and until quite recently the theme of recognition was typically discussed without an explicit acknowledgement that there even is a question.

In principle, the answer to the question, whether explicit or implicit, distinguishes one-dimensional from multi-dimensional conceptions of recognition. Whereas on multi-dimensional conceptions there are two, three, or more forms or species of recognition, on one-dimensional conceptions there is just one. It is of course possible and often the case that an author operates on the explicit level on a one-dimensional concept yet is implicitly committed to a multi-dimensional one or, in other words, that he or she does not explicitly acknowledge that the ways in which she talks about recognition in fact commit her to there being more than one form of recognition. In principle, this does not have to be a problem since it must be possible to speak on the level of the genus, concentrating on what all the species or forms share and abstracting from where they differ. Yet lack of adequate awareness of this problematic may also lead one to believe something to be true of recognition in general, when it is in fact true of only some of its species, assuming there is more than one.

The best known and most influential explicitly multi-dimensional conception of recognition of persons is by Axel Honneth (the topic of Chapter 5), who, drawing partly on a rational reconstruction of Hegel’s early work on recognition and partly on more contemporary theorists, distinguishes between three forms or species. He calls these ‘love’, ‘respect’, and ‘esteem’ (Honneth 1995) (see 5.2). I will be working in terms of a distinction that is partly analogical to Honneth’s but that allows for a more fine-grained differentiation between various forms of recognition and between the ways in which these are important for the various elements of what it is to be a person. What I mean is a distinction between the ‘axiological’, ‘deontological’, and ‘contributive’ dimensions of recognition, which relate to what I will call the axiological, deontological, and contributive dimensions of personhood. In short, the axiological dimension has to do with persons as concerned for their own well-being and possibly that of others and seeing the world in terms of good and bad; the deontological dimension has to do with persons as collectively organizing their life in terms of norms and thus (formal or informal) rights and duties and seeing the world in terms of rights and wrongs; finally, the contributive dimension has to do with cooperation and contributions to shared goals or to something that others value.

This modified Honnethian distinction between the ‘dimensions’ of recognition will be discussed in more detail in the final chapter of the book, but it is already at work in my discussion of the other authors in the following chapters: Fichte (see Chapter 2) was solely focused on the deontological dimension of personhood and recognition; in Hegel’s text (see Chapter 3), we find the axiological dimension present side by side with the deontological; with Taylor (see Chapter 4), we enter a somewhat different territory having more to do with personal i...