Intersubjetividade e ontologia social nas revisões da teoria do reconhecimento de Axel Honneth

Abstract

The article synthesizes the revisions Axel Honneth imposed to his work after the critical reception of The Struggle for Recognition (1992) and proposes to unterstand them as intermediate steps towards the new critical model stabilized in Freedom's Right (2011), which Honneth calls normative reconstruction. The purpose is not to examine the methodical determinations of normative reconstruction, but to go through the intellectual path taken by Honneth between his two main books, making explicit the revisions and the new presuppositions of his “mature” work. These revisions, focused in an unterstanding of intersubjectivity and social ontology considered by Honneth as more adequate, sustain and justify the decisions of method of that latter book. Since the beginning of his theoretical work, Honneth had to deal with the objection of systematically commiting a kind of naturalistic fallacy as he sought the basis for a critical theory of society in the concrete experience of suffering. Even The Struggle for Recognition was still justifiably subjected to that same criticism, as Honneth himself admitted. I argue that the aim of the revisions carried out in the decade of 2000 was to solve that gap finding, on the one hand, an index of rationality internal to the very act of recognition and, on the other hand, an index of rationality present in the social norms and practices historically sedimented through relations of recognition