Ricostruzione normativa e relazionalità etica nel pensiero di Axel Honneth

Normative reconstruction and ethical relationality in Axel Honneth’s thought · Axel Honneth’s political philosophy is an attempt at grounding subjectivity in a type of relationality whose correct unfolding is dictated by the principles derived from the ethical order of a society. Authentic liberty, that is social liberty, can only be attained in theory and practice if moral subjectivity turns into adherence to the given ethical codes. If this merging fails, one is condemned to suffer from indeterminacy, crossing the threshold of the pathological. The passage to ethics must therefore be experienced as true liberation by the means of mutual recognition. Only adherence to socially sanctioned rights and duties can display the therapeutic power to which everyone in contemporary Western societies yearns. This essay, through the examination of the method of normative reconstruction and its relationship with the evolutionary character of ethics, suggests that Honneth’s Anerkennungsphilosophie is a critical theory that in fact does not harmonize the needs of individuation and those of socialization. Then the rationalization of ethics constitutes a philosophy of history which,avoiding the negative implications of the power relations inherent in ethics itself, is conducive of further homogenization in thought and further drying up of inter-subjectivity.