Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (The Berkeley Tanner Lectures)
Axel Honneth
Language: English
Pages: 182
ISBN: 0199898057
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable "second nature." For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. In these original and imaginative essays, delivered as the Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, the distinguished third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition he has been developing over the past two decades. Three distinguished political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of his argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanted. Honneth listens carefully to their criticism and provides a powerful defense of his position.
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That our everyday activity is not characterized by a self-centered, egocentric stance, but by the effort to involve ourselves with given circumstances in the most frictionless, harmonious way possible. Just as is true of the mode of care, in interaction the world is not centered around us; instead, we experience situations in such a way that we “take care” to maintain a fluent interaction with our surroundings. In what follows, I will refer to this primordial form of relating to the world as.
Of the term. When our relation to other persons is at issue, “reification” means that we 64 . Axel Honneth have lost sight of our antecedent recognition of these same persons; whereas when we speak of our relation to the objective world, the term signifies our having lost sight of the multiplicity of ways in which the world has significance for those we have antecedently recognized. The asymmetry found in the use of this concept results from the fact that the ways in which recognition constitutes.
Predisposition that go beyond its instrumental significance for the Heideggerian concept of care. See Dreyfus, Being in the World, chap. 14. 42. Dewey, “Affective Thought,” pp. 104–110; “Qualitative Thought,” pp. 243–262. 43. See Dewey’s introduction to his essay “Affective Thought,” p. 104. 44. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960). 45. Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” pp. 245–246. 46. See John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), chap. 5. 47.
Honneth: as we have all heard, these lectures are at once serious and imaginative. There is so much in these lectures that is thought-provoking, that I am genuinely grateful to be here. Whatever reifying tendencies may be hidden in my practices, I am not the commentator who mistook his invitation for a hat. Still, it seems to me that the job of a commentator is to face up to a tough question: Am I actually persuaded by Honneth’s argument? If so, why? If not, why not? Ultimately, I am not.
As Recognition. A Response to Nancy Fraser,” in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange (London: Verso Press, 2003). 5. John Searle’s attempt to trace individual intentionality back to collective intentionality, which is in turn anchored in a “sense” of coexistence or cooperation, is interesting in this connection. See his The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 23–26. What I have to say about the institutional.