Axel Honneth Quotes

Child’s creativity – indeed, the human faculty of imagination – presupposes a capacity to be alone, which itself can arise only out of basic confidence in the care of a loved one.

Only if all members of society can satisfy the needs they share with all others – physical and emotional intimacy, economic independence, and political self-determination – by relying on the sympathy and support of their partners in interaction will our society have become social in the full sense of the term.

If the mother managed to pass the child’s unconscious test by enduring the aggressive attacks without withdrawing her love in revenge, the child has to accept that she belongs to an external world. If the mother’s love is lasting, the child can develop a sense of confidence in the provision of his or her needs and a capacity to be alone. The child can go on pursue his or her own personal life without the fear of being abandoned because the child possesses the confidence that his or her needs will be met because he or she is of unique value to the mother. The same pattern then applies to adult life where an individual is able to trust himself or herself because he or she believes they are of unique value to other individuals. In becoming sure of the mother’s love, young children come to trust themselves, which makes it possible for them to be alone without anxiety.

It is all those moral deviations that constitute the developmental process of society and its relations of recognition. In every historical epoch, individual, particular anticipations of expanded recognition relations accumulate into a system of normative demands, and this, consequently, forces societal development as a whole to adapt to the process of progressive individuation. The process of development goes in the direction of ever-greater liberation of individuality, increasing personal autonomy.

Just as, in the case of love, children acquire, via the continuous experience of 'maternal' care, the basic self-confidence to assert their needs in an unforced manner, adult subjects acquire, via the experience of legal recognition, the possibility of seeing their actions as the universally respected expression of their own autonomy. The idea that self-respect is for legal relations what basic self-confidence was for the love relationship is already suggested by the conceptual appropriateness of viewing rights as depersonalized symbols of social respect in just the way that love can be conceived as the affectional expression of care retained over distance. [...] What is required are conditions in which individual rights are no longer granted disparately to members of social status groups but are granted equally to all people as free beings; only then will the individual legal person be able to see in them an objectivated point of reference for the idea that he or she is recognized for having the capacity for autonomously forming judgments.

So the real task is to equip the ‘generalized other’ with a ‘common good’ that puts everyone in the same position to understand his or her value for the community without restricting the autonomous realization of his or her self. In this kind of society, subjects with equal rights could mutually recognize their individual particularity by contributing in their own ways to the reproduction of the community’s identity.

Axel Honneth comienza con la gran paradoja de la situación presente: existe una creciente insatisfacción con el capitalismo global que a menudo estalla en episodios de furia, pero resulta cada vez menos posible articular esta furia en un nuevo proyecto político de izquierdas.