Heikki Ikäheimo

This article is the introduction to a special issue on critical naturalism. “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto” was published in 2022. It was envisaged as a common platform put forward as an invitation for open-minded discussions about the state of critical theory today and the challenges it is facing. It sought to make space for varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientific social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face in their relation with inner and outer nature. It has since inspired much discussion. This special issue of Critical Horizons contains four highly original contributions to critical thought on the challenges presented in the Manifesto that situate themselves beyond the theoretical blockages diagnosed therein. This introduction briefly summarizes the discussion around the Manifesto and introduces the four contributions by Sabina Lovibond, Sakari Säynäjoki and Tere Vadén, Corrado Piroddi, and Agnès Grivaux.

My claim in this article is that addressing the challenges of the present calls for a critical rehabilitation of philosophical anthropology, or of the idea of human essence. Several habitual blockages of thought need to be overcome to enable this rehabilitation. I argue for a Hegelian relational essentialism and show that the essentialism of the young Karl Marx is a variation of it. Hegel’s and Marx’s relational essentialism provides a framework for articulating the parameters of good human life in all the constitutive relations in which it is lived and on which it depends, including relations with nature.

Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of recognition deprives individuals and communities of something essential for their flourishing. Yet critics including Judith Butler have questioned whether recognition is implicated in structures of domination, arguing that the desire to be recognized can motivative individuals to accept their assigned place in the social order by conforming to oppressive norms or obeying repressive institutions. Is there a way to break this impasse? Recognition and Ambivalence brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Honneth and Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject. Contributions from both proponents and critics of theories of recognition further reflect upon and clarify the problems and challenges involved in theorizing the concept and its normative desirability. Together, they explore different routes toward a critical theory of recognition, departing from wholly positive or negative views to ask whether it is an essentially ambivalent phenomenon. Featuring original, systematic work in the philosophy of recognition, this book also provides a useful orientation to the key debates on this important topic.

This chapter examines first two broadly Hegelian variations of the freedom-justice connection by Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst, and then critically contrasts them with Hegel’s own concept of “concrete freedom” as the immanent ideal of social life and Hegel’s state as its “actuality.” I argue that this concept is capacious enough to do justice both to the human capacity in principle for context-transcending reflection on the justness of the social order central for Forst and to the limitations in practice of individuals and groups for transcending the embeddedness and particularity of their perspectives emphasized by Honneth. The question of what makes a theory of a good society also a theory of justice is raised at the beginning with regard to Honneth’s account, and a reason stemming from the ontology of objective spirit is suggested at the end with regard to Hegel’s.

In this paper, we comment and discuss the fifteen replies that interpret, solicit, problematize, and further develop our Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto (Krisis 42(1)), that have been published in Krisis 43(1). In the paper, we address four overarching topics that we see emerging from the replies: Histories and traditions of criticial naturalism; the relation between theory and praxis; the question of what is critical about critical naturalism; and finally the question of utopia. Additionally, we discuss three general types of attitudes that our critics take to the Manifesto.

Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life represents a welcome new development in critical social thought. It aims to overcome the ‘liberal abstinence’, which forbids criticizing the ethical fabric of social life, and proposes to connect normative evaluation with a serious social-ontological model of ‘forms of life’. In this article we argue, however, that Jaeggi’s ontological characterization of the concept of form of life is problematic in ways that introduce a number of adverse consequences for social critique. In section 1, we lay out the main components of Jaeggi’s account. In section 2, we present four interconnected problems that beset Jaeggi’s substantializing conception of forms of life. In section 3, we present an alternative construal of the idea of forms of life, one which does not utilize the concept for grasping substantial unities, but rather focuses on the ‘forms’ that specifically human life takes, and which grasps social practices as concrete collaborative activities involving expectations of recognition. We thereby bring together the recognition-theoretical strand of critical social thought with Jaeggi’s welcome new gambit. In section 4 we briefly put forth three mutually complementary ways to conceive of recognitive expectations immanent in social life understood as a collaborative endeavor.

The Critical Naturalism Manifesto is a common platform put forward as a basis for broad discussions around the problems faced by critical theory today. We are living in a time, e.g. a pandemic time, when present-day challenges exert immense pressure on social critique. This means that models of social critique should not be discussed from the point of view of their normative justification or political effects alone, but also with reference to their ability to tackle contemporary problematic issues (like the dismantlement of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the sanitary crisis). With this manifesto, we invite varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientific social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face with regard to inner and outer nature. We first identity eleven theses of critical naturalism which contemporary critical theory should take into consideration. We then identify the historical crises and catastrophes that critical naturalism seeks to respond to, dispelling the prejudices against naturalism in contemporary critical thought, and considering alternative answers to these questions such as social constructivism, accelerationism, xenofeminism, flat ontologism, and monist world ecology. By sketching the notions of nature and naturalism, we anchor critical naturalism in the history of materialism and critical theory, understood initially as that of the Frankfurt School, but expanded and enriched by other approaches to social critique. Finally, we sketch models and projects of critical naturalism, which are exemplary fragments of varying ways to practice naturalist social critique.

Australia experienced the most devastating bush-fire season in recorded history, and right after that the world economy stalled due to a global virus outbreak the severity of which has no modern precedent. Crises tend up speed paradigm shifts, and the one begun in 2020 certainly will. In this paper I will contribute to a shift that has been gathering momentum for some time now, the need for which the current crisis has made all too obvious. This is a shift in Kant and Hegel influenced philosophy from thinking of ‘spirit’ (Geist) as an abstract realm or dimension insulated from nature—frictionlessly spinning without touching it, or at least with a tendency to do this as essential to it—to thinking of spirit as a life-form, situated in nature at large, just as all life is. I will work on this theme by elaborating on three broadly Hegelian ideas. Firstly, that the subjective and objective aspects of ‘spirit’, that is to say the psychological and social structures distinctive of persons and their life, are co-constitutive elements of a whole. This whole is the human life-form, or as I call it more technically ‘the life-form of persons’. Secondly, that recognition (Anerkennung) as self-transcendence and inclusion of otherness is ontologically constitutive of both, and key to their internal interrelations. Thirdly, that though freedom as collective autonomy is distinctive of this life-form, thought on the model of abstraction from necessarily determining otherness it is theoretically mistaken and put in practice pathological of the life-form in a literal sense of ‘pathology’.

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts. The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences. Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research.