Paolo Costa

Axel Honneth is internationally renowned for being one of the leading political and social philosophers of our time, and is highly regarded for his work on recognition and the struggles for recognition. In this interview, he discusses his work over the past four decades, starting from the rise of his intellectual vocation to his most recent book on the sovereignty of work. The text is a transcript, revised by the author, of the dialogue Honneth had with his interviewers and the audience at the masterclass held on 24 May 2023 at the University of Trento, as part of the first series of lectures “Voices from Contemporary Philosophy”.

Like all great thinkers, Charles Taylor was able with his oeuvre to challenge and often change the vocabulary, habits and theoretical imaginary of his readers. In this sense, he deserves to be celebrated as a teacher in the broadest sense of the word. Especially remarkable is his mastery in making the complexity of our experience as modern men and women accessible. Now, the first thing that can be learned from his sane attitude towards modern epistemology is the resolve to embrace what he once called "a hazy picture of history" , in which order and chaos coexist in the same picture as a warning for the purity seekers. Our view of history must remain somewhat hazy because, if we want to understand long-term change without resorting to an old-style philosophy of history, we have to do justice both to historical discontinuity and to historical continuity. Thus, understanding deep historical change means being able to combine a fair dose of theoretical recklessness and a good eye for the details.

In my paper, I set The Language Animal against a broader picture of Taylor’s intellectual trajectory. Sources of the Self (1989) left three major questions open in its wake: (a) the viability of religious moral sources in a ‘secular’ age; (b) the compatibility between a robust moral realism and a genealogical account of modern identity; (c) the meaning and destiny of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. This is the framing topic of his last book. Although Taylor’s variety of hermeneutics is unquestionably a product of the linguistic turn, he has operated with a broad notion of the linguistic capacity from the start. Language is, for him, a shared activity and the acknowledgment of its animal embeddedness functions in his work as an antidote against any too idealized a view of the kind of creatures that humans are. In his earlier writings, however, a structural tension lurked below the surface between a Gadamerian notion of Sprache and a more phenomenological, Merleau-Pontyan, embodied outlook that was less modeled on articulate speech. My claim is that his new book marks a shift from a more speech-oriented to a more body-oriented understanding of language.

Da un punto di vista temporale la felicità rappresenta un’esperienza intensa del presente. Non a caso la tradizione metafisica e cristiana ha rappresentato la beatitudine come una fuoriuscita dal tempo in un attimo che permane . Ma, accogliendo alcuni suggerimenti di Hannah Arendt, la felicità umana può essere intesa altresì come l’esperienza di un presente dilatato in cui il tempo non è trasceso, bensì esaltato in uno “spazio” della presenza in cui il trascorrere degli attimi non costituisce una perdita. Ma questo dono della felicità non è senza costi: esso spetta solo a chi si oppone alla deriva del tempo, a chi parteggia per un “presente che lotta”.From a temporal point of view, happiness consists in an intense experience of the present. It is not a chance that the metaphysical and christian tradition has understood beatitude as a getting out of time in a lasting moment . Drawing on some suggestions by Hannah Arendt, however, human happiness can be seen also as an experience of an extended present where the time is not transcended, but exalted in a “space” of presence where the elapsing of the “nows” does not represent a loss. In any case, the gift of happiness is not without costs: it belongs to those who oppose the drift of time, those who stand for a “fighting present”

What is it like to be an earthly, worldly, “secular” creature? Is it a blessing or is it a curse? During the last two centuries, this question has generally been answered with an appeal to disengagedness and objectivity, that is, to an indisputable “scientific” representation of the whole of “reality.” The world then seems to serve as a justification, through the “facts of the matter,” of the superiority of optimism or pessimism. On the contrary, I want in this essay to show that, in order to argue convincingly about our basic attitudes towards the world and the reasons pro or con for them (if we have any reasons at all), we do not have to insist on disinterest; we need, rather, to move toward primary and apparently objectless emotions, of the kind that are called Stimmungen in German. In other words, we need an epistemology of basic existential moods. In particular, I examine, out of many possible, one basic attitude toward world – the readiness to be surprised or amazed by things or events – on the hypothesis that one of the preconditions for feeling at home in the world has to be sought exactly here.