Heikki Ikäheimo

A Vital Human Need Recognition as Inclusion in Personhood

Why is recognition of such an importance for humans? Why should lack of recognition motivate people to fight or work for recognition? In this article, I first discuss shortly Axel Honneths somewhat psychologizing strategy for answering these questions, and suggest that the psychological harms of lack of recognition pointed out by Honneth are neither sufficient nor necessary for motivation to fight or work for recognition to arise. According to the alternative that I then spell out, recognition and lack of it are so intimately intertwined with some of the most fundamental and intuitively appealing facts about what it is to be a person in a full-fledged sense — arguably in any culture — that there are reasons to be optimistic about a more or less universal existence of latent motivation to fight or work for more or more equal recognition.

Analysing recognition : identification, acknowledgement, and recognitive attitudes towards persons

There is a wide consensus today that ‘recognition’ is something that we need a clear grasp of in order to understand the dynamics of political struggles and, perhaps, the constitution and dynamics of social reality more generally. Yet the discussions on recognition have so far often been conceptually rather inexplicit, in the sense that the key concepts have remained largely unexplicated or undefined. Since the English word ‘recognition’ is far from unambiguous, it is possible, and to our mind also actually the case, that different authors have meant different things with this word. In what follows, we will make a number of conceptual distinctions and clarificatory proposals that are intended to bring to more sharply focus the field of phenomena that are being discussed under the catchword ‘recognition.’ This is meant to serve a dual purpose: to suggest a number of distinctions that are of help in formulating rival views, and to propose what strikes us as the best overall position formulated in terms of those distinctions. Our proposals are meant to be, by and large, compatible with Axel Honneths work on recognition, which to us is the most ambitious and differentiated account of recognition available. Where we propose something that seems to us to be in compatible with Honneths explicit formulations, we indicate it in the footnotes.

Esteem for Contributions to the Common Good: The Role of Personifying Attitudes and Instrumental Value

Social esteem based on contributions to the common good, or to the good of others, is an important phenomenon, and, following Axel Honneth, it can be seen as an important subspecies of interpersonal recognition, side by side with respect and love. In this chapter we will contrast two accounts of this phenomenon, hoping that this kind of cross-illumination will prove useful by clarifying a number of conceptual questions and options that one needs to be conscious of in discussions about esteem as a form of recognition.

Is 'recognition' in the sense of intrinsic motivational altruism necessary for pre-linguistic communicative pointing?

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung in German) has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegelscholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the ‘recognitive attitudes’ of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the prelinguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground (at least among the most intelligent animals currently known to exist), then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest nonhuman relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth.

Recognition, Identity and Subjectivity

The term “recognition” has in the last two or three decades become the centre point of an extraordinary amount of theoretical activity among critical theorists and social and political philosophers. It is also at the centre of a great deal of conceptual ambivalence and often theoretical confusion as not all authors mean the same thing with the term and as there is often inadequate attention to the different concepts at stake. In this chapter, the author maps central parts of the conceptual and theoretical landscape around the term “recognition”, which is relevant for critical theory, and discuss some of the main contemporary authors on the theme: Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler.

The Times of Desire, Hope and Fear

Abstract The aim of this article is to show that the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in Hegel’s mature Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences contains the outlines of a philosophically rich notion of the constitutive temporality of subjectivity. The temporality of the being of Hegel’s concrete subject is intimately connected with embodiment and sociality, and is thus an essential element of its fully detranscendentalized inner-worldly nature.