Philosophy and Ethics in Germany

Axel Honneth’s book “Das Recht der Freiheit” (The Right to Freedom) is something of a masterpiece. The German feature pages have celebrated the 600 page study as a “tremendous achievement” (taz), a “great contribution” (Frankfurter Rundschau), a “monumental plan” (SZ), and even as an “event in the history of theoretical reflection” (Die Welt). It seeks to reanimate an almost forgotten author, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for the purposes of a critical social philosophy.

Contributions to moral philosophy and the theory of justice seldom lead to completely new insights! New, as a rule, are not the moral norms and principles, but rather the ways of reasoning. Often enough the argumentative labor on the one hand and the yield for moral and political theory on the other stand in a peculiar disproportion; moreover, there dominates the impression of a certain distance to social and political reality. At any rate, those of these texts that may be reckoned to political theory in the strict, and so “classical”, sense are the exceptions. It is therefore all the more welcome when philosophers expressly place themselves in a tradition of social theory, base political theory on social analysis, and seek to combine theoretical discourse with social empiricism.

Philosophy as social critique

Axel Honneth is one such author. He puts Kant, Rawls and Habermas – the latter, after all, his intellectual mentor – to one side in order to concentrate fully on one author who, among contemporary philosophers, has long been consigned to the scrape heap. This change of port is not an accident; it is systematically motivated by a specific conceptual interest: Honneth’s subject is not morality but rather, as in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ethical order or ethical life. Honneth sketches, as the subtitle of his book has it, the “Outline of a Democratic Ethics”.

Ethical life, in Hegel’s sense, means not personal morality but the morality of social institutions and relations; not individually posited norms, but those inherent in social conditions. Society, according to Hegel’s and Honneth’s a priori assumption, is always already constituted normatively. Therefore, they reason, instead of applying elaborately justified norms to society from, as it were, the outside; it is more reasonable and theoretically fruitful to reconstruct the structural normativity of social institutions and practices and to confront social reality with this measure. The exponents of Critical Theory once called this the method of “immanent critique”; Honneth speaks of “reconstructive critique”.

The idea of freedom

For Honneth, societies reproduce and integrate themselves not only by economic processes, but also through values. In agreement with the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, he assumes that all social arrangements are legitimized by ethical values. Social relations and practices can therefore be measured by the norms that underlie them or on which they rely. In democratic societies, the first and foremost such norm is the “idea of freedom”. In freedom Honneth sees the central value of modernity, with which all other values must be bound up.

Unlike, for example, Rawls, Honneth seeks not to justify the “priority of freedom”, but rather to describe and grasp conceptually the various social forms in which it manifests itself. By uncovering the “freedom-related spheres of action in contemporary societies”, he means to bring into view not only social defects and pathologies, but also missed opportunities and possibilities. If it can be shown that promises of freedom have been kept to only an incomplete degree, that potentials for freedom have been left unexploited, then this opens a scope not only for criticism but also for emancipatory political action.

The practice of freedom

Honneth distinguishes three basic forms of freedom: negative, reflective and social freedom. Each is assigned to a different sphere of action: the first to law, the second to morality, and the third to society, economics and politics. By “negative freedom”, Honneth means the constitutionally guaranteed protection from government interference. “Reflective freedom” in turn is the freedom or the right of each individual to form his own judgment about moral norms. Both, in Honneth’s interpretation at any rate, are variants of individual freedom, which just for this reason lack the dimension about which he is especially concerned, namely the social. If law or morality are posited as absolute, in the form, for example, of obsessive legalization or a stringent ethic of duty, then they lead to social pathologies.

The focus of the study is not individual but rather “social freedom”, which for Honneth is the real sphere of “democratic ethics”. By this expression he means all the practices and processes in which freely interacting subjects reciprocally “recognize” one another as free and equal. Social freedom thus means not the freedom of self-determination and self-design, not “freedom in the sense of the autonomy of the individual”, but rather the freedom that is can be and has been realized together with others. It manifests itself in close personal relationships, in market economy actions, and in the process of democratic decision-making.

Surrenders

The balance drawn by Honneth is quite mixed: while the consciousness of the significance and the degree of reciprocal recognition has steadily grown within close personal relationships (love, family, friendship), the same cannot be said of the economic and political spheres. Here, on the contrary, he sees breaks in development that have even led to partial surrenders of the original achievements. For example, hardly anything today recalls to us that the market once contained a promise of freedom, namely that of complementarity and mutual support, which is why the market, properly understood, constitutes a form of ethical life. In actuality, however, it is dominated by an egotism of interests that labels itself “neo-liberal” and operates with ruthlessness towards other participants in the market.

And the democratic state’s promise of political participation is also no longer being kept. The blame, argues Honneth, falls on the modern mass media, which have failed in their responsibility to provide information, on political parties, which have long decoupled themselves from democratic decision-making, and on a state that has increasingly become the tool of the economy. Gloomy prospects, all in all, which, according to Honneth, can be countered only contrafactually by insisting on the idea of social freedom.