AXEL HONNETH REIFICACIN PDF

Axel Honneth will study the long-run social consequences of the ongoing dissolution of the integrative force of contract-based work. His project will be partly. In Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (), Axel Honneth, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and at Columbia. Axel Honneth: Against Sloterdijk (Die Zeit, 24 September, ) An English translation of Peter Sloterdijk’s.

It seems rather futile to point out at this stage of the argument that theoreticians as different as George Sorel and Barrington Moore drew attention to the key role of honour as a motive force of political movements at a much earlier date.

His first main work The Critique of Power: Things dont look any better for Sloterdijks thesis that the moral indignation of the socially disadvantaged masses can only be explained by motives of resentment towards the privileged. First, every society is governed by a set of moral principles that reifucacin it together. Since then a string of essays, books and speeches have issued form his fertile mind year by year; if they arent all read by that rificacin of his devotees, hoonneth theyre surely leafed through.

You might recall that it was a Social Democrat, not a Liberal local council that recently sought to adorn itself with the help of a lecture by this very author. I see no reason whatsoever to assume that this claim is true; but, as Honneth himself recognizes, his argument cannot get off the ground without it. Sincehe is also Jack C. That value is freedom: Rather, diversity requires society to have values that binds it together: As The Critique of Cynical Reason seemed to signal, a true free spirit had here stepped on to the intellectual stage again at last, someone who, with the lonely resolve and radicalism of a Nietzsche, took issue with all the habits of thought that had long ago given our era an almost unbearable sloppiness.

Social freedom goes beyond this: Surely its rare for products of the intellectual past that in their own time betrayed little more than defensiveness and dull fears to be freshened up so deftly and presented as the latest word on the spiritual and political condition of the contemporary world.

At the very outset of his intellectual development, Peter Sloterdijk may still have been undecided whether he should set off down the path of philosophically inspired social criticism, or that of a mystical or speculative interpretation of history and the world.

It had fearlessly wised us up to the hidden meaning of all our genetic experimentation and it had investigated the timeless reificxcin of politics. A small historical reminder suffices to see that the claims Sloterdijk develops here are plain nonsense; what we have to thank for them is a mixture of historical ignorance and theoretical chutzpah.

The liberating chuckle that you might react to such war sloganeering with on account of its breath-taking flippancy and sheer nuttiness has to be counterbalanced with the thought that were talking about the pronouncements of an intellectual much loved by the media, much respected politically within the public domain and richly rewarded within academe.

It was that equating an intra-national moral code structured around the values of national honour and reificafin with the moral universalism of internationalism is to overlook the very different intentions behind their respective calls for equality.

Axel Honneth Against Sloterdijk

On the psychological picture of the ancient Greeks Sloterdijk wants to inform us without so much as a passing reference to modern research or scientific literature human beings are gripped by a striving for success, prestige and self-respect at least as strongly as they are by sexual desire; these thymotic powers, which in modernity have been ignored with the exception of a few great thinkers and which were finally banished from the realm of self-knowledge by psychoanalysis, supposedly supply the actual material of all political conflict, since in the end its the collective reconquest of pride and honour that political conflict is about.

The political slogan for this programme? If the social democratic rrificacin is going to operate purely as the lower classes instrument of envy and demand axrl more by way of tax, if, as in recent decades, it has indeed developed into a money-grubbing, money-blowing monster, then, according to Sloterdijk, its time to rouse honnteh members of the exploited elite to overcome the self-contempt they have been condemned to feel.

To do it he draws on an idea or two he had already made use of in Spleen and Time to tease out the implications of his teachings about the energy of pride and self-respect that ground our civilisation and give us a picture of a different sort of capitalist economy; referring darkly to Georges Bataille, the talk there was of the rich shaking off the self-contempt they had been culturally burdened with once they distributed their fortunes down below among the needy in a series of benevolent beaux gestes as part of an economy of pride.

Continental philosophyFrankfurt School. They enthusiastically read every article demonising the politics ofthey noted with deep satisfaction that the leading disciplines of the declining post 68 era, sociology and psychoanalysis, were finally getting their comeuppance.

During the development of industrial capitalism, in their collective efforts to carry through a policy of economic redistribution and thus secure social rights, the economically worse-off were able to support their claims from the outset using two sources of moral legitimation.

In their academic youth, which fell in the years after the fall of the Reiflcacin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the representatives of this new elite had read the words of Michel Foucault; because of their unfixed, elastic intellectual attitude, their readiness for bold intuitive leaps, they had quickly ascended all the conceivable heights of power, where they now found themselves awaiting inspiration a transcendent word of clarity that could provide our epoch with an intellectual signature.

Again, the skeptic will see little reason to grant Honneth his starting point, yet without it everything that comes afterwards will remain unconvincing.

Somehow you feel youve already heard all reificscin you might well think youre being presented with an amalgam of Gehlen and Ernst Nolte, except that the equation of fascism and socialism and their common derivation from motives of ressentiment and thirst for power comes across here as showier and more slapdash.

Axel Honneth | Department of Philosophy

In other projects Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote. On Sloterdijks picture, philosophical reflection has to begin at a deeper level if it is to succeed in extracting from the dark haze of historical conflict the values that might actually have served the resentment movements of the Nineteenth axek Twentieth Centuries as instruments of artful revenge you already sense that now the reficacin formula that Sloterdijks meaning-hungry followers have been awaiting for axep long is not too far off.

From the lonely heights, Sloterdijk had at last pronounced the long-awaited formula that will shape the political future, the formula that will finally put paid to the sentimental dream of the social democratic state. But in practice, in modern society, he contends, there is only one. As if Foucaults objection to anthropological essentialising had never been made, as though all the warnings against the postulation of culture universals or the supposed invariables of the human condition could be thrown to the wind, Sloterdijks assumption was simply that closer inspection revealed a series of inescapable drives at work in civilised life.

Axel Honneth, Patologas de la razn fragmento Documents. reificscin

Axel Honneth

Views Read Edit View history. For example, Honneth assumes, without argument, that there are moral principles underlying modern Western society that are simply waiting to be found. So for Hegel, to understand history is to understand the process by which reason instantiates itself more and more in the moral and political systems governing the societies of the world.

EssenWest Germany. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Axel Honneth. Honneth’s are impassioned arguments of intellectual substance.

Axel Honneth Against Sloterdijk

That his own resentment now shows its face in so petty-minded a way must simply have dumbfounded them though. Reicicacin again, the methodological flippancy he proceeds with in the book is breath-taking; a mere backwards glance at classical Greek and Roman psychology is supposed to suffice to fit us out with the necessary equipment for a complete diagnosis of the contemporary world.

The title of the short piece should already make it clear that we have someone here who is contemplating nothing less honbeth the overthrow all our customary values and habits. While in the first case the equality of all members of the nation striven for within the state was was merely the moral flipside of a battle fought against a common foe in the outside world, in the second case, at least in theory, all polemical reference to outside groups falls away, since all members of the human honnfth are to enjoy the same rights.

By continuing to browse the site with cookies enabled in your browser, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy. These half-baked reflections at no point does he make clear why fortunes acquired by inheritance or financial speculation are justly jonneth in the sense of involving any sort of notable achievement provide Sloterdijk with the basis for a political programme of revolutionary proportions.

At the heart of the Philosophy of Right was a story about society and history. To repeat, no ressentiment, no envy honbeth no lust for power was needed to motivate the members of the lower classes to fight for an economic redistribution from the upper to the lower social reaches. This page was last edited on 27 Octoberat Peter Stone is an assistant professor of political science at Trinity College Dublin.

As far as Sloterdijks use of Gehlen goes, obviously every author is free to recur to the thought patterns of the past as they wish.