5.3.5. Honneth, Lukács, Tomasello
Axel Honneth (2008) does – in contrast to other contemporary social theorists – not drop, but (in the book Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea) re-interpret Lukács’ concepts of alienation and reification for a contemporary critical theory of society. He bases his approach on Michael Tomasello (2008)’s development psychology. Tomasello presents research based on development psychology and socialisation findings that recognition precedes cognition: children learn to take over the perspective of another, which enables thinking and communication. In the ‘9 month revolution’, the child starts perceiving an attachment figure whose perspective s/he takes over. S/he develops an emotional relation to this person and starts relating to the world and objects by observing how the attachment figure relates to objects. The child imitates the attachment figure’s behaviour. Children thereby depersonalise themselves and become social.
At around 9 months of age, infants begin displaying a whole new suite of social behaviors, based both on their ability to understand others as intentional and rational agents like the self and on their ability to participate with others in interactions involving joint goals, intentions, and attention (shared intentionality) (Tomasello 2008, 139).
Developmental psychology confirms for Honneth that recognition by and of others and empathetic engagement precedes cognition: ‘the acknowledgement of the other constitutes a non-epistemic prerequisite for linguistic understanding’ (Honneth 2008, 50). Honneth says that Georg Lukács, Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, and Stanley Cavell made this point philosophically. Related to it would also be Georg Herbert Mead’s concept of seeing ourselves through the eyes of the other and Adorno’s notion of the libindial cathexis of a concrete other through which children develop by imitating others.
5.3.6. Three Forms of Critique
Honneth (2007b, 57–69) distinguishes between a constructive, transcendental critique; a reconstructive, immanent critique; and a Foucauldian genealogical critique. Critical theory would combine all three forms. In the debate with Fraser, he characterises this combination as immanent transcendence. Transcendence
must be attached to a form of practice or experience which is on the one hand indispensable for social reproduction, and on the other hand – owing to its normative surplus – points beyond all given form of social organization. […] “transcendence” should be a property of “immanence” itself, so that the facticity of social relations always contains a dimension of transcending claims (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 244).
162
Critical Theory of Communication