Lebenswelt and Reflexive Democracy

in Habermas and Honneth

Humboldt Kolleg São Paulo, 2009Nythamar de Oliveira

Research Projects (1999-2009)

Comparative study of theories of justice in Kant, Rawls, Habermas, and HonnethContributions of Rawls, Habermas, and Honneth’s

social philosophy to a normative theory of democracyThe normative grounds of a critical theory of justiceReflective Equilibrium & the System-Lifeworld NexusThe phenomenological deficit of critical theory

Supported by: Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung,CNPq , Capes, PUCRS

What is democracy?• “the government of the people, by the people,

for the people” (A. Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863)

• J. Habermas,"Three Normative Models of Democracy" (in Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, Princeton Univ. Press, 1996)

• Habermas’s proceduralist democracy • liberal (J. Locke, J. Rawls) and republican

models (J.-J. Rousseau, H. Arendt)• Axel Honneth’s reflexive democracy

Rawls, Habermas, Honneth: Communitarian Critique of Liberalism:

Normative Self & Critique of Power

Deliberative Democracy and “The Other of Justice”

J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

• Principles of Constitutional, Liberal Democracy• Equal Liberty Principle• Fair Equality of Opportunity• Difference Principle (Maximin Rule)• Procedural device of reflective equilibrium• Kant’s procedural test of universalizability:

categorical imperative as universal Verfahren• Justice as Fairness : Political Liberalism

Student und Politik (1961)

• Social movements, struggles for liberation

• Axel Honneth, Struggle for recognition (1992)

Habermas’s Dual Conception• Political culture arises out of delicate networks

of mentalities and convictions which cannot be generated by or simply steered through administrative measures (juridical, political, economic, policy-making, technical systems)

• System Lebenswelt (pre-reflective horizon of meaning, intersubjective aspects oriented toward socially, linguistically shared understanding of everyday practices – Kultur, Gesellschaft, Persönlichkeit)

Habermas on democracy: technology, science, and the lifeworld

“I should like to reformulate this problem with reference to political decision-making... we shall understand 'technology' to mean scientifically rationalized control of objectified processes. It refers to the system in which research and technology are coupled with feedback from the economy and administration. We shall understand 'democracy' to mean the institutionally secured forms of general and public communication that deal with the practical question of how [humans] can and want to live under the objective conditions of their ever-expanding power of control...”

From Ideologiekritik To Diskursethik:Communicative Action

• “Our problem can then be stated as one of the relation between technology and democracy: how can the power of technical control be brought within the range of the consensus of acting and transacting citizens?” (Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie, 1968)

• Systemic world of institutions (capacity of responding to the functional demands imposed by the environment / context)

Lebenswelt (lifeworld)• Forms of cultural, societal and personal

reproduction that are integrated through the norms consensually accepted by all participants in the social world.

• The rationalization of the Lebenswelt renders possible the differentiation of autonomous subsystems, opening up the utopian horizon of a civil society in which the spheres of action formally organized of the bourgeoisie constitute the foundations of the post-traditional social world of human beings (private sphere) and citizens (public sphere)

A Phenomenology of Justice

• Social Ontology, Intersubjectivity, Moral Grammar• A. Honneth, Kritik der Macht (1985):• Critical Theory must go beyond Adorno’s totalizing

domination of nature, in order to understand social intersubjective relations and concrete societies;

• Both Foucault and Habermas help us move beyond this modern predicament, as they propose post-Hegelian, alternative accounts to fix the sociological deficit:an action-theoretic paradigm of struggle and a paradigm of mutual understanding of critical theory

A Phenomenology of Justice:Ontology, Intersubjectivity, Language

www.nythamar.com

Honneth: The impossibility of immune communicative reason

• The Lebenswelt stands overall for the horizon of socially, culturally sedimented linguistic meanings that make up the background environment of competences, practices, and attitudes shared by social actors.

• The instrumentalization of social action in the very attempt to tackle the paradox of the rationalization of lifeworldly relations lead to social pathologies within our democracies

“Von Rawls bis Honneth”

• J. Rawls, TJ § 40: “noumenal selves”• PL: “political culture” / “overlapping consensus”

/ global theory of democracy• A. Honneth: intersubjective self-identity &

mutual recognition: in hermeneutic terms, moral, legal, and political contexts of signification; normative conception of the person yields to challenge of perspectivism inherent in cultural relativism:fact of pluralism

Reflexive Intersubjectivity of Democratic Ethos

• Reflexive/Reflective Equilibrium inherent in a Dialetic of Recognition and Alterity

• The horizons of signification of the lifeworld refer us back to endless dialogues, interlocutions and learning processes

• The social ethos of radical democracy unveils itself thru self-understanding(Selbstverstehen) as emancipatory, deliberative & participatory only and only if mutual recognition is achieved thru social public policies

Axel Honneth

• The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Kampf um Anerkennung, 1992)

• Ethical Lifeworld (Sittlichkeit) ↔ Intersubjectivity

• Patterns of Intersubjective Recognition:• Love/Friendship – Rights – Solidarity• Forms of Disrespect:• Abuse / Rape – Social Exclusion – Insult / Denigration

The Phenomenological Deficit of Critical Theory

• One cannot account for the social pathologies of the Lebenswelt (esp. racism, sexism, classism) without a self-understanding (Selbstverstehen) correlated to the processes of reification and subsystemic colonization

• The juridification of systemic-institutional and normative relations requires a correlated reflexivity, both active and passive, between these & the self individuated thru socialization

A Pragmatist Perspectivism

• Honneth’s intersubjective recognition in a social phenomenology of the Lebenswelt

• Habermas’s tripartite, intersubjective aspects of the lifeworld oriented toward socially, linguistically shared understanding of everyday practices (verständigungs-orientiert handelnden Aspekte: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Persönlichkeit)

• Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium

Pragmatic-Formal Perspectivism

• Semantic-pragmatic correlation between Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and Systems• Moral normativity (discourse ethics) is correlated to

the social, political question of institucionalization of life forms, in the very conception of an integrated model, differentiating the systemic technologies of institutions from lifeworld technologies, keeping the tension between instrumental and communicative actions

• Reflexive Democracy from below in the making

Formal-Pragmatic Correlation

Globalization

System of Rights Deliberative Politics

Democratization Juridification Economic Systems

Technologies of the Self

• Our problem can then be stated as one of the relation between technology and democracy: how can the power of technical control be brought within the range of the consensus of acting and transacting citizens? (Habermas)

• Governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by [her]himself (Foucault)

Perspektivismus der Lebenswelt:Anerkennung

Social Ontology

Phenomenology Hermeneutics

Intersubjetivity Language

Deconstruction

Nancy Fraser vs. Axel Honneth

• Justice & Democracy: distribution-recognition• Sérgio Costa, The Sociological Construction of Race

in Brazil (2002)• Paulo Neves, Anti-Racist Struggle (2005)• Ricardo Mendonça, Recognition at stake: Habermas,

Honneth, Fraser (2006)• Celi Pinto, Note on the Fraser-Honneth Controversy

in light of the Brazilian scenario (2008)

Affirmative Action

• An institutional effort to rectify past injustice and to obtain a situation closer to the ideal of equal opportunity by policies aimed at a historically socio-politically non-dominant group (typically, ethnic minority groups and women of all races), esp. intended to promote fair access to education or employment.

• Social policies, educational policies to rectify racial, economic inequalities in Brazil.

Costa’s critique of tropical reason

• A critical stand against modernist, teleological accounts of racism;

• The limitations of importing European patterns of modernity and identity to the Brazilian context;

• Race transformed into a tool for social analysis and normative desideratum, an incomplete, biased understanding of the Brazilian makeup, an objectifying view of social relations.

Pinto’s complementarity thesis

• Distribution cannot be reduced to recognition;• Recognition is a highly polysemous word and its

reduction to an exclusive definition misses both its heuristic value for social theory and its potential for struggles for justice;

• Recognition qua self-recognition (self-esteem, in Honneth) and qua status (in Fraser) are not mutually exclusive, but are different moments of the same process of theoretical elaboration and political struggle.

Normative Conception of the Person

• articulated within its own co-constitutive lifeworld in reflective equilibrium, conceived as a procedural device between a nonideal theory of human nature (“we ourselves” and our considered judgments or common sense intuitions of right and good) and an ideal theory of a public conception of justice that refers to free and equal persons with 2 moral powers sense of justice & conception of good

Recasting Global JusticeGlobal Justice ↔ Global Ethics (Kant, Rawls,

Habermas)The Global-Local problematic is to be dealt with

from the perspective of a Phenomenology of JusticeTranscendental-Semantic Perspectivism:

Ontology, Subjectivity, LanguageGlobalization not only economic, but also in

cultural, political, religious, and social systemsInternational Relations & Law: Human RightsJuridification of Freedom / Equality / Sociality(Hobbesian) Political Realism vs. (Kantian)

Cosmopolitanism : Pluralistic Universalism ↔ Reflexive Cooperation within Global Community

Political Realism: might makes rightThrasymachus: "what is good for the stronger"Thucydides, Machiavelli, HobbesModern Realpolitik / Moral RelativismNietzsche’s will to power / critique of modernityHeidegger’s critique of subjectivity / technologyFoucault’s critique of disciplinary powerRawls & Habermas: in order to keep our freedoms and

rights we must rehabilitate the normative grounds of social criticism (Baynes)

Normative – sociological – phenomenological deficits

AA and Social Movements

• African-American Civil Rights (1955-1968)• Martin Luther King & Feminism• Struggles against colonialism• Liberation Movements in the Third World

• Cold War (1945-1989)• Globalization and Democratization• Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies

The Myth of Racial Democracy• Gilberto Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, 1933

(Masters and Slaves)• Recasting Brazil’s authoritarian lifeworld colonial

slaveholding past• Countering racist analyses (Oliveira Vianna)• In praise of miscigenation:mulato, pardo, moreno• Frank Tannenbaum, Slave & Citizen (1946)• Carl Degler, Neither Black Nor White (1971)• Cultural Relativism (Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict)

Affirmative Action After Rawls

• Equal Liberty + Fair Equality of Opportunities• Thomas Nagel & Judith Jarvis Thomson (1973)• Ongoing debates in the United States

supporting and opposing affirmative action have shown the highly complex problem of social integration in a pluralist democracy that takes diversity seriously.

• Albert Mosley, Louis Pojman, and Robert Fullinwider: pros and cons

Affirmative Action• Backward-looking and forward-looking justifications

of affirmative action, whether they tend to be more or less deontological or utilitarian, seem to require some substantive approach to racial and cultural identity

• AA policies: preferential hiring, nontraditional casting, quotas, minority scholarships, equal opportunities for underrepresented groups, reverse discrimination.

• Discrimination: the act of discriminating, to differentiate, to discern, to judge how one thing differs from another on the basis of some rational criterion.

• Prejudice: a discrimination based on irrelevant grounds (social, racial or sexual).

Transcendental-Semantic Correlation

a priori

Idea of Freedom Formal Intuition

Transcendental Self Experience Technology

Transcendental-Recognition Correlation

Gott / Universal

Torah / Rechte Lebenswelt/Solidarität

Mensch/pluralism Welt/communitySalus / Liebe

John Rawls“Justice as Fairness”

• A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. [ TJ ]

• Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 (Dewey Lectures) [ PL ]

• The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1999. (Oxford Amnesty Lectures) [ LP ]

Liberalismo Político - Igualitarismo Socioliberal

Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

• “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”

• “A conception of justice which generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.”

• “Distributive justice ...the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties.”

• An ethical-political, comprehensive conception (TJ) paves the way for PL and LP (political realism)

TJ: Principles of Justice

• First: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. (Equal Liberty Principle)

• Second: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that : a) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; b) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (Difference Principle).

Maximin = maximum minimorum

• Rational choice theories & utilitarianism: choice produces highest payoff for the worst outcome

• Property-owning democracy vs. Welfare State• Society: fair system of social cooperation among

free, equal citizens from one generation to other • All primary goods (liberty & opportunity, income and

wealth, the bases of self-respect) are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any of these goods is to the advantage of the less favored.

Reconhecimento & Movimento Social

• O movimento negro teria cumprido um papel importante ao fazer as denúncias contra o racismo, obrigando assim a sociedade brasileira a olhar para si própria com menos condescendência em relação à questão racial. Isso, de certa forma, havia sido alcançado; agora teria chegado a vez de a sociedade civil intervir, incorporando as demandas anti-racistas na agenda pública do País.

Habermas, Rawls, Honneth• Habermas como árbitro entre Honneth (teoria da

justiça calcada na noção de auto-realização) e Fraser (princípio da paridade de participação):

• Se é por meio da participação interativa que a auto-realização pode ser pensada de maneira moral, é apenas através de uma socialização minimamente saudável que os indivíduos podem afirmar-se como sujeitos e participar da construção de uma sociedade mais justa, por meio da troca livre e permanente de pretensões de validade criticáveis.

Juridificação de Políticas Públicas• “Apenas uma concepção política pode levar à

constituição de um novo status cujo elemento principal precisa ser o reconhecimento pela totalidade da comunidade política de uma falha na sua concepção de justiça. A correção desta falha que pode surgir ou do diálogo ou da luta social deve corresponder a novos direitos cuja institucionalização política é condição sine qua non para a sua vigência ... é fundamental que o reconhecimento abandone o campo do self e se implante definitivamente na arena política legal” (Leonardo Avritzer, 2007)

Paradoxo do Auto-Reconhecimento

• “Por exemplo, nos EUA, programas como affirmative action e outros benefícios proporcionam incentivos àqueles que se identificam como minorias. Contudo, ao se identificar publicamente dessa maneira, a pessoa está explicitamente assumindo o caráter subalterno de sua posição. Isto leva a uma contradição prática na qual, para se tornar igual, a pessoa deve apresentar-se como inferior. Resta-nos saber se esse tipo de programa é capaz de superar essa contradição”

• (João Feres, 2002).

Complementariedade• 1. A distribuição não pode ser reduzida ao reconhecimento,

sob pena de anulá-la como questão de justiça.

• 2. Reconhecimento é um conceito polissêmico e sua redução a uma definição exclusiva retira tanto seu valor heurístico para a teoria social, como sua potencialidade na luta por justiça.

• 3. O reconhecimento como auto-reconhecimento (estima) encontrado na tese de Honneth e o reconhecimento como status, encontrada na tese de Fraser, não se excluem, mas fazem parte de momentos distintos de elaboração teórica e da luta política, que em algumas circunstâncias podem aparecer como complementares.

Desrespeito e Dialética do Reconhecimento

• 4. O reconhecimento como política pública e como política de Estado independe do auto-reconhecimento dos sujeitos individuais, mas está limitado a uma gama específica de remédios, para usar a terminologia de Fraser.

• 5. O reconhecimento como auto-reconhecimento é essencial para a construção do sujeito da ação na luta social. Só existe o dominado contra a dominação se este se reconhecer como tal. Não há feminismo antes da feminista, assim como não há paridade participativa antes do sujeito auto-reconhecido como igual.

• 6. Tanto em Fraser como em Honneth há uma ausência de momentos de construção de situações de desrespeito, de não-reconhecimento e de reconhecimento, o que limita o alcance de teorias.

Honneth et les 3 Hs (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger)

• A filosofia social de Sartre compreendeu que conflitos sociais são disruptivos em relações de reconhecimento entre atores coletivos.

• O anti-semitismo é visto como uma forma de desrespeito social, evitando a reificação recíproca do dualismo ontológico entre o en-soi e o pour-soi de L'être et le néant.

• Sartre evita o auto-engano do Dasein mas sua filosofia da história é marxista-heideggeriana

Intersubjetividade ↔ Sittlichkeit

• Honneth recorre à concepção hegeliana de eticidade ao criticar o dualismo de Habermas como uma falha sistêmica: temos de retornar a concepções substantivas do bem a fim de almejarmos os melhores procedimentos, até quando buscamos reparar injustiças e danos

• Habermas escamoteia falhas antropológicas em sua confusão entre procedimentos &meios sistêmicos e a normatividade da Lebenswelt

Uma Fenomenologia da Justiça

• Perspectivismo pragmático-formal corrige e reconstrói uma semântica transcendental, reformulada nos seguintes termos:

• As relações possíveis entre a ontologia social e a intersubjetividade inerentes a uma fenomenologia do mundo da vida nos remetem a três perspectivas epistêmicas ou paradigmas correlatos (Correlação Semântica)

• Ontologia, Subjetividade e Linguagem

Mundo da Vida & Equilíbrio Reflexivo

• Perspectivas intersubjetivas do mundo da vida orientadas ao entendimento compartilhado de práticas cotidianas social e linguisticamente co-constitutivas do self e identidade étnica, nacional (cultura, sociedade, personalidade)

• Transformação semântico-hermenêutica do equilíbrio reflexivo (Rawls): contextos de significação moral, legal e política (Forst); perspectivismo do “fato do pluralismo”