Transcript of Interview with Axel Honneth on Recognition Theory

An interview with Axel Honneth on Recognition Theory

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: This is a very special interview for me. My guest, Axel Honneth, is not just one of the greatest philosophers alive, but one of my first teachers who made me fall in love with philosophy. Back in college, my biggest struggle was dealing with my own craving for external validation. I found myself racking up achievements I didn’t need, to pursue careers I didn’t want, all in order to impress people I didn’t particularly like. And when I realized this as a 19, 20 year old, I decided that I needed to be free from external validation altogether in order to build a healthy self esteem. So I went the opposite extreme. I deleted all of my social media. I moved to Nepal to practice in a Tibetan monastery. I was genuinely considering renouncing the world. But then I encountered, among others, Axel’s work on Hegel. And it showed me that I’d set up a false dichotomy. The way to build a healthy self esteem, it turns out, is not by rejecting validation altogether, it is by gaining the right kind of external validation. The key question then is not how do I stop caring, it’s how, from whom and when should I care?

Johnathan Bi: This is the most important lesson that Axel taught me and will also teach you today. But what really moved me back then, even more than Axel’s ideas into philosophy, is who he is as a person, as one of the most important and busy scholars, he spent hours every month taking me some random undergrad at the time, one-on-one, carefully through his works. His generosity showed me what a philosophical life was all about. This interview is special then, because it gave me the opportunity, almost a decade later, to revisit the works that started my journey into philosophy. In this interview, we’re going to tease out the relevance of Axel’s ideas by examining a common tension within the modern left between class conflict and identity politics, before providing you with a systematic roadmap for how to live a life not just for others, but authentically your own. Without further ado, my teacher, Axel Honneth.

1. Class Conflict Vs. Identity Politics

Johnathan Bi: I wanna begin by critiquing examining one of your most interesting and controversial opinions. In classical leftist progressive movements, it has been politics of sameness, class conflict. Workers of the world unite to fight against what many people see is the major injustice and inequality, namely the material one. In the recent decades, there’s been a rise of identity politics, and that has been interpreted as a politics of difference. Not only do we need to care for African Americans, but African American women, but disabled African American women. And so it becomes intersectionality. It’s a kind of a force of difference. Most scholars seem to think that recognition and redistribution are opposed, or at least distinct. But your opinion is that all forms of moral struggle are actually at the bottom, struggles of recognition.

Axel Honneth: Yes.

Johnathan Bi: Why is that?