Reifcation and the Real: The “Fact of Existence” in Intersubjective Recognition

DOI

10.19079/metodo.9.2.273

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-1-2021

Publication Title

Metodo

Volume

9

Issue

2

First Page

273

Last Page

290

Keywords

Existence, Honneth, Marx, Reifcation; Recognition

Abstract

The concept or category of reifcation has taken several forms since its early evolution in Marx’s nineteenth-century political-economic denunciation of the harms of commodity exchange. Moreover, with commodifcation continuing in the twentieth century, Lukács asserted that reifcation had also gained a foothold in the social and political domains of capitalism, which further reduced the power of individuals to reverse it. But Axel Honneth asserts that Lukács’s account, though well intentioned, lacks a theoretical justifcation for the way in which agents need to interact to develop intellectually and emotionally within capitalism’s strictures. Honneth thus attempts to develop an account of the structure of intersubjective recognition that can protect individuals from the dehumanizing harms of reifcation. His object relations approach to recognition, however, leaves out a critical component of shared agency: namely, such an intersubjective dynamic necessitates that the agents in an interaction have a mutually accepted and non-reifed but real third, an existential element that inaugurates and sustains the formation of non-reifed and contingent relations for the agents of interaction. Autonomous yet coordinated actions, and mutatis mutandis those of society as a whole, are possible only when this shared third is acknowledged by the agents of said actions.

Open Access

Gold

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