Volume 62, Issue 2

This paper interprets Fichte’s transformation of the Enlightenment’s idea of self-consciousness into the concept of the ego as a transformation of transcendental logic into a philosophical theory of action. This transformation was of central importance for his critique of Kant as well as his rejection of both Schelling’s and Hegel’s ontologies of spirit, whose post-revolutionary determinism Fichte repudiated. Fichte developed his theory of action under the social premise of preindustrial labor, accentuating that social symmetry should be maintained against the tendency of property concentration amongst private property owners. His transformation of the concept of rationality (attained through transcendental logic) into a relational differentiation of the subject (1), its objectification (2), and the synthesis of both as an alteration between acting and suffering (3) open the path from an as yet - in terms of its presuppositions - monological concept of self-consciousness to a structural concept of action.

The paper starts with the intuition that morality basically consists in a caring respect for human beings: Moral subjects have to respect human beings in their individual human potential, and they have to do whatever is necessary for this potential to be realized. The main aim of the paper is to defend the claim that this understanding of morality is connected with objectivity as a formal feature of morality. I begin by considering constructivist and cooperation-based accounts of morality. Their explanation of moral objectivity is not compatible with caring respect as fundamental content of morality. (1) Thus, in order to argue for my claim I have to put this explanation of moral objectivity into question. To do so, I turn to its action theoretic background. Since this background consists in a dualistic understanding of action I sketch and argue for a non-dualistic alternative based on the notion of practical conceptual capacities. (2 & 3) This understanding of human agency leads to the conception of objectively good actions in which the subject is determined by the reality of bodily substances. (4) In the final section, I propose to conceive of human beings as a certain kind of bodily substances, namely as bearers of conceptual capacities. Consequently, moral actions can be seen as a certain type of objectively good actions. These actions correspond to what has to be done out of caring respect because this is exactly what bodily substances with conceptual capacities oblige moral subjects to do. (5)

The Hegelian insight that subjectivity depends on recognition has been taken up by two competing traditions: Post-Hegelian theories (Honneth, Brandom) take recognition to be a precondition for a critical stance of subjects towards society. In contrast, theories of subjection (Althusser, Butler) take the dependency of subjects on subordinating relations of recognition as undermining their capacity for critique. I argue that this worry has not been taken seriously enough by the post-Hegelian tradition, especially by its model of immanent critique. However, theories of subjection ignore that the very structure of recognitive relations supports critical capacities that can never be fully effaced by ideology.

Axel Honneth frames his contribution to the tradition of critical theory as an attempt to do justice to both the structures of social domination in contemporary Western societies and the practical resources for their overcoming. This paper assesses how well Honneth’s critical theory, which centers on the notion of the struggle for recognition, accomplishes the first of these two tasks. I argue that Honneth has yet to offer a fully satisfactory analysis of domination because his recognition model is unable to make sense of modes of subordination that function without producing any struggle.

Recently, a number of critical social theorists have argued that the analysis of social relations of unfreedom should take into account the phenomenon of self-subordination. In my article, I draw on Hegel’s theory of recognition to elucidate this phenomenon and show that recognition can be not only a means of self-realization, but also of subjugation. I develop my argument in three steps: As a first step, I reconstruct the idea of social pathologies in the tradition of Critical Theory. In the course of this reconstruction, it becomes clear that the analysis of social pathologies should focus on the binding force of recognition. As a second step, I reinterpret Hegel and show that a close reading of the relationship of lordship and bondage can help us to understand how a subject can become bound by recognition. As a third step, I make an attempt at reactualizing Hegel’s idea. Following Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism, I outline three stages of how subjects can gradually come to subordinate themselves and become entrapped in social relations of unfreedom such as race, class or gender.

The social-philosophical discourse of the last 20 years pictured recognition mainly as medium of human autonomy. In recent years however, concerns have been raised over whether recognition might not occasionally work in the opposite direction, as means of subjection. This article contends that these concerns rely on a misconstruction of the relationship between recognition and subjection as merely contingent. Developing themes from Foucault’s work, it argues that recognition rather always necessarily involves a moment of subjection. In the first part, I show that Foucault, especially in his power-analytic writings, can plausibly be read as theorist of recognition insofar as every relation of power presupposes the recognition of the other as free. In the second part, I elaborate that every concrete relation of power depends on conditions - knowledge and norms - that precede it and that are formed and transformed in complex historical processes, in which the authority of individual subjects is always only a limited one. Against this background, it will become visible that recognition indeed allows us to conduct ourselves autonomously as certain kinds of subjects according to certain norms but as such also always subjects us as it ties our freedom to conditions that we remain largely exposed to.

This personal letter describes the history and current situation of philosophy in Estonia. We sketch the development of academic philosophy since the foundation of Tartu University in 1632, and describe the current philosophical landscape. We discuss the challenges we are facing in trying to find a balance between the responsibility that a discipline in the humanties in a small country has with respect to local culture and society on the one hand, and our ambitions to build up an internationally collaborating department with an international graduate programme on the other. We close with a description of the relation between academic philosophy and Estonian society and the role that the Center for Ethics in Tartu plays in supporting that relation.