The previous article concluded with the quest for recognition that individuals embark on, a quest that can come into conflict with a desire for intellectual emancipation. In this one, we will specify what the concept of recognition entails and in what way the desire for recognition interferes with the freedom of thought. Along the way, we will discuss how recognition articulates oppositions and idealizations.
In the first part, we will delve into the history of the notion of recognition, which was primarily approached from the perspectives of honour and public esteem before the 20th century. With the assistance of the German philosopher Axel Honneth, we will break down this notion into three forms, and drawing on Rousseau’s ideas, we will distinguish between the need and the desire for recognition.
In the second part, we will discuss the biological foundations of desire through the reward system, and then we will connect idealizations to the desire for recognition. Finally, we will briefly ponder the possibility of distancing oneself from it.
Conceptualizations of Recognition
A Historical Philosophical Distrust
The question of recognition reveals itself in Greek philosophy under the guise of honour (timê), which is the esteem enjoyed by a deity, a hero, or a human being. According to Plato, if honour is a divine good,1 “the love of honours and wealth is considered a reprehensible attitude, and […] it is indeed reprehensible.”2 The philosopher willingly sacrifices the recognition granted by humans and, more generally, the signs of an attachment to earthly life for divine wisdom.3 This does not mean that honours are not important in the city, especially on the political level: the legislator has the task of “bestowing honours on those who respect the laws and inflicting fixed penalties on wrongdoers.”4 However, it is important not to be intoxicated by esteem, risking falling into excess.5
As Aristotle writes, honour is the reward of virtue.6 It is worth keeping in mind that Socrates and his followers have questioned several traditional values, especially those related to the Homeric narratives that praise the warriors of the Trojan expedition. The virtues they advocated were more intellectual, substituting concepts for the memory of acts of bravery. To experience the satisfaction of contemplating ideas, there is no need for others, unlike honour. The latter “appears to be something too light [compared to happiness] because it seems to depend on those who grant it, rather than on the one who receives it.”7 The pursuit of honours and that of wisdom are difficult to reconcile because the former not only depends on others but also inflames passions and antagonisms: “The lure of gain and the taste for honours, indeed, set people against each other, not because they want to acquire something for themselves, […] but because they see others possessing more than them, some justly, others unjustly.”8
In Christian spirituality, the pursuit of earthly glory becomes the object of a more pronounced mistrust. However, as noted by Albert Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests, Saint Augustine is lenient regarding the sin of power when it is associated with a “powerful desire for praise and glory: The Angelic Doctor “refers to the ‘civic virtue’ of the early Romans, ‘who showed a Babylonian love for their earthly homeland’ and who ‘repressed the desire for wealth and many other vices in favour of their unique vice, namely the love of praise.’”9 The thirst for power and the thirst for glory are two vices whose conjunction mitigates the negativity of each. A. Hirschman sees Augustine as the precursor of a paradigm that will develop from the Renaissance: instead of striving to repress passions, to dominate them through reason, the idea is to exploit them so that a form of harmony emerges from their flow and oppositions. Thus, according to Francis Bacon, one has “to set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we used to hunt beast with beast, and fly bird with bird [. . .]. For as in the government of states it is sometimes necessary to bridle one faction with another, so it is in the government within.”10 Bacon transposes to the mind what Machiavelli had conceived on the political plane.
Later, Spinoza and Hume go so far as to partially base their philosophy on the passions and their oppositions, to the extent that only one passion can thwart another. They not only rehabilitate the passions but subordinate reason to them. The transformation of the view on the passions is particularly evident in what Hume calls ‘the love of fame’: he theoretically grounds it on sympathy, which allows perceiving the inclinations and feelings of others, and on reasoning that involves comparing oneself to others.11 From the observation that contempt or downgrading is easier to bear for a person living abroad, he infers a correlation between sympathy and the degree of proximity (family, neighbours, compatriots, etc.) of those who pass judgment on us. These elements contribute to a deeper psychological analysis of recognition.
Rousseau also attributes significant importance to the passions while preserving autonomy for the understanding because, according to him, man distinguishes himself from the animal by his quality as a free agent.12 We “seek to know only because we desire to enjoy, and it is not possible to conceive why one who has neither desires nor fears would bother to reason. The passions, in turn, have their origin in our needs, and their progress in our knowledge.”13 While needs are natural, desires arise from society, especially the desire for public esteem that emerges concurrently with it: “Everyone began to look at others and to want to be looked at themselves, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best; the most beautiful, the strongest, the most skilful, or the most eloquent became the most considered, and that was the first step toward inequality and vice at the same time.”14
Three Forms of Recognition
The valorisation of passions paves the way for the philosophical legitimization of recognition. Axel Honneth brought to light in The Struggle for Recognition that one should turn to Hegel’s early writings to grasp this evolution. In The System of Ethical Life, Hegel postulates a kind of state of nature involving forms of recognition between individuals. Human beings leave this state when various types of struggles undermine primitive forms of recognition. Unlike Hobbes, who sees the contract as a means to end the war of all against all, Hegel considers the struggle as “a moral means to transition from a primitive stage to a more advanced stage of ethical relationships. With this reinterpretation of the Hobbesian model, Hegel inaugurates a new understanding of the concept of social struggle and truly marks a date in the history of political thought: the practical conflict between subjects can now be understood as an ethical factor in the overall movement of social life.”15
Axel Honneth relies primarily on Hegel’s early philosophy and the works of the social psychologist George Herbert Mead to establish his own theory of recognition, which he breaks down into three forms: love, rights, and social esteem. Love encompasses “all primary relationships that, following the model of erotic, friendly, or familial relationships, involve strong emotional bonds between a limited number of people.”16 Regarding childhood psychology, A. Honneth refers to research on the importance of maternal care for infants (Spitz, Eagle, Bowlby, Stern), as well as Donald W. Winnicott’s approach that “bases the success of affective relationships on the capacity acquired in early childhood to establish a balance between symbiosis [with the mother] and self-affirmation.”17 Love recognition ensues: it includes an element of individuality or independence of the person and a component of “emotional trust in the permanence of the reciprocal attachment between the two partners.”18
The modern legal framework extends recognition beyond familial and friendly circles. By freely accepting the laws of a country, “legal subjects mutually recognize each other as individuals capable of making rational and independent judgments about moral norms.”19 This form of recognition contributes to autonomy and self-respect, which is equivalent to self-confidence in romantic relationships. Social esteem, on the other hand, arises from an evaluation of individuals ability to actualize culturally defined values upheld by the community. “As ethical ends open up to different values and hierarchical structure gives way to horizontal competition, social esteem becomes individualized and introduces greater symmetry into relationships.”20
Axel Honneth largely aligns with Pierre Bourdieu21 when he asserts that “social esteem relationships are, in modern societies, the subject of a permanent struggle, in which different groups strive symbolically to valorise the abilities associated with their particular way of life and demonstrate their importance for common purposes.”22 Social confrontation contributes to the creation of solidarity in a manner akin to a war, where we witness the development of “spontaneous bonds of solidarity beyond social barriers.”23
Distinguishing Between the Need for Recognition and the Desire for Recognition
Historically and philosophically, recognition is linked to the oppositions and values of a society (such as love, freedom, equality, work, solidarity, etc.) that constitute idealizations or are intertwined with them. Pierre Bourdieu and then Axel Honneth have highlighted that recognition can be considered a major explanatory element in the dynamics that lead from ideals to conflicts. In doing so, they go beyond Max Weber, who confined himself to observing the war between divergent moral convictions. Nevertheless, do they not associate recognition too intimately with conflicts and domination?
Research in biology and psychology, since the 1950s, has supported the importance of maternal care – as noted by Axel Honneth – and, more generally, of attachment: “in highly social mammals, oxytocin is released in the brain in positive social situations, such as grooming, cuddling, sex, and food sharing. At least in highly social animals, this release, supported by the cannabinoids, tends to intensify social attachment. It results in reduced vigilance and anxiety, and an increased sense of trust and well-being. This outcome is rewarding, and indeed, the reward system responds to reinforce the behavioral routine.”24
Attachment not only contributes to well-being but also proves to be partly vital, as an absence of care in infants can lead to abnormal development, particularly brain atrophy, when it does not result in death25. In adults, the feeling of social isolation is correlated with a degradation of health that can even lead to death.26
These findings highlight a minimal psychological need for recognition to avoid feeling socially isolated or excluded, a need that was not part of philosophical reflections before the 20th century, which focused on public esteem. Therefore, drawing inspiration from Rousseau, one can distinguish between the need and the desire for recognition.
The legal component of recognition, conceptualized by Hegel and then Axel Honneth, can be perceived as a need. This need is partly the focus of philosophies grouped under the term communitarianism,27 which address the question of multiculturalism. However, the need for recognition does not remains, it seems to me, in the legal sphere; it extends to the realm of work, which still constitutes a pillar of social integration today and which Axel Honneth associates with social esteem. The question of work seems appropriate to attempt to grasp a distinction between the need for recognition and then desire for recognition: satisfying a need for recognition in relation to work is to develop a sense of minimal professional security, contributing to security in terms of housing and food; desire goes beyond security, aiming for the recognition of performances or qualities, especially through a position within a hierarchy, either with the goal of professional ‘success’ or for extraprofessional projects.
The need for recognition, as outlined, pertains to elements associated with survival, which can likely be related to the evolution of the human species, while desire is more but not exclusively awakened by social idealizations. Such a distinction depends on a definition of security, relative to a social context and varying from one interpretation to another. Its primary purpose is to shed light on the question of recognition.
A Blinding Desire
Limit one’s desires?
Biologically, the need for recognition and the desire for recognition seem to involve the same neural networks, those of the reward system where dopamine plays a central role. As mentioned in the previous article, romantic love can be likened to a positive form of addiction. However, it seems evident that not all desires for recognition can be considered positively, especially if they lead to addictive behaviors resulting in excess (of work, social media consumption, sport, food, etc.) or if they lead to forms of alienation when obtaining recognition depends on concurring with certain political, moral, or religious ideas.
Addictions that do not depend on drugs demonstrate a natural tendency toward excess as long as sources of pleasure are accessible without restriction. The reward system functioning appears particularly suited to an environment where an animal, a human being in particular, must exert significant efforts to survive and obtain pleasures, which is no longer the case for a growing part of the human species since the Neolithic era. A now-famous experiment conducted in the 1950s by James Olds and Peter Milner, which contributed to identifying the reward system, illustrates this point.
The two researchers implanted electrodes directly into the brains of rats that could move freely inside a cage. Whenever the rats “passed through one of the corners of the cage, they received electrical stimulation. Olds and Milner then observed that when the electrode was positioned in a very specific region of the brain, the animals spent much more time in the area of the cage associated with brain stimulation, and soon the animals hardly left that part of the cage.”28 The rats were then placed in a second cage where they could press a lever to trigger intracerebral stimulation. Once they understood how it worked, they began to press the lever frantically. In some cases, they became so dependent that they no longer took the time to eat, stopping only from exhaustion.
Would humans behave differently from rats if subjected to a similar type of experimentation? The behaviour of addicts or alcoholics suggests that the gap might not be massive. While these are extreme cases, and there are likely neural differences between social and non-social rewards,29 these examples illustrate that limiting desires is necessary to avoid falling into dependence due to the abundance of sources of pleasure. This idea was emphasized by ancient philosophies such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno of Citium, and Epicurus, which highlighted the importance of reason or, more broadly, reflection to restrain passions. These philosophies are echoed to some extent in contemporary theories of the mind that distinguish between two systems, notably Daniel Kahneman’s.30 ‘System 1’ produces impressions, feelings, and inclinations, acting quickly and automatically; ‘System 2’ is slow, requires attention, and analyses and judges suggestions from System 1. This distinction no longer revolves around the separation of soul and body but rather between cerebral processes. French psychologist Olivier Houdé adds a third system,31 located in the prefrontal cortex, which allows overcoming conflicts that may arise between the first two systems by inhibiting intuitions from System 1. According to him, “thinking is inhibiting, that is, learning to resist cognitive automatisms (heuristics).”32
The philosophical and scientific approaches mentioned earlier contrast with the unrestrained desires for accumulating wealth or experiences of all kinds, the perpetual quest for surpassing oneself or achieving perfection linked to various competitions, and the staging of achievements on social media or in traditional media. Contemporary societies largely overlook these philosophies and scientific theories, probably in part because unlimited desires generate economic growth, which has been historically embedded in the struggle between states since the 16th century through the theories of mercantilists, physiocrats, and Adam Smith. While this struggle has fortunately decreased on the military front, it continues on the economic front in the competition between countries and multinational corporations. In this context, limitations are advocated primarily after recognizing the lethal consequences of excess (speed, pollution, work, consumption, etc.).
Attachment to Idealizations
We have seen that, according to Axel Honneth, social esteem corresponds to the esteem of more or less individualized cultural values, and therefore of idealizations. Values can either be directly an idealization (e.g., freedom, equality) or associated with idealizations (e.g., love, family, work, individual). By definition, the values a person wishes to have recognized are important to them, notably because these values are linked to shared experiences with loved ones, emotions, and feelings. In these conditions, the desire to have them recognized appears more difficult to contain. I consider this containment to be one of the most challenging things for a human being to achieve, as behaviors are oriented, more or less consciously, by idealizations. Let’s illustrate this point with the ideal of freedom.
In Four Essays on Liberty (1969), philosopher Isaiah Berlin argues that the lack of freedom, about which human beings complain, amounts to a lack of recognition.33 According to him, an individual is not seeking to protect themselves from tyranny, create a space where their movements are unhindered, formulate a rational life plan in society, or develop philosophical wisdom. They simply strive not to be ignored, treated condescendingly, or scorned, but rather to be recognized as a unique person. Isaiah Berlin contrasts his conception of freedom with a desire for reciprocal recognition. Elsewhere in the same essay, he acknowledges that the negative freedom he advocates,34 combined with a pluralism of values, constitutes an ideal. He does so in a book that, by design, is meant to be recognized (the essay has become a philosophical reference). The desire for recognition does not easily relegate itself.
Attachment to idealizations, interpretations of which can diametrically oppose each other, and the desire to have them recognized fuel oppositions, as we have noted with Weber, Bourdieu, and Honneth. One could use the term ‘will’ instead of ‘desire,’ a term that is more philosophically linked to reason than to passions. The will for recognition would pertain more to values, the deepest and most enduring motivations of human behavior, those that require the deployment of strategies over the very long term. Nevertheless, the distinction between desire and will seems too vague to me, considering that idealizations are intertwined with strong emotions and feelings.
How to Distance Oneself from the Desire for Recognition?
The effort required to limit desires and attachment to idealizations participates in explaining why the desire for recognition is so vigorous in our societies. Another element can be put forward: the social division of labour that induces recognition by peers for the practice of any professional activity, especially for the production of knowledge. Under these conditions, how can one distance oneself from the desire for recognition?
The time when it was enough to invoke reason or rationality and oppose it to passions seems to me to be over for two reasons:35 1) there is not a single reason insofar as the content of ethics evolves historically and geographically; 2) reason, as soon as it is based on morality, is intertwined with passions. If we revisit the theorizations of the mind mentioned earlier, which break down into at least two systems, System 2 does not judge independently of System 1; it evaluates based on propositions elaborated necessarily in part by System 1. No one lives in a world disconnected from perceptions, emotions, and intuitions, where a decision would be made independently of these, especially when it comes to ethics.
The close relationship between recognition and idealizations implies that any distance from recognition arises by stepping back from idealizations and the individuals who have transmitted them to us. Stepping back from those close to us is certainly the most delicate and personal. Let’s limit ourselves here to idealizations. Historical and scientific knowledge related to idealizations facilitates this step back; it allows us to question them and contributes to their desacralization. Therefore, it is not a matter of collecting and organizing any knowledge, but primarily those that pertain to idealizations and are likely to shed new light on them. However, such an approach is not self-evident because it does not spontaneously come to mind to inquire into things that could challenge what matters most to us. And even if such an idea were to arise and appeal, one would still need time to engage in extensive reflections.
Notes
1.↑ Platon, Les Lois. Livres I à VI, Flammarion, 2006, 727a.
2.↑ Platon, La République, Flammarion, 2004, 347b.
3.↑ Platon, Phédon, Les Belles Lettres, 1983, 68b-c.
4.↑ Platon, Les Lois, op. cit., 632b.
5.↑ Ibid., 716a.
6.↑ Aristote, Éthique à Nicomaque, 1123b in Œuvres complètes, Flammarion, 2014.
7.↑ Ibid., 1095b.
8.↑ Aristote, Les Politiques, 1302a-b in Œuvres complètes, Flammarion, 2014.
9.↑ Albert O. Hirschman, Les passions et les intérêts, PUF, 2020, p. 14.
10.↑ The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Advancement of Learning, by Francis Bacon. Under Bacon’s pen, we find the analogy between the city and the mind formulated by Plato in The Republic.
11.↑ David Hume, Traité de la nature humaine II, Flammarion, 1991, p. 160.
12.↑ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. URL : Les Classiques des sciences sociales: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1754) (uqac.ca)
13.↑ Ibid.
14.↑ Ibid.
15.↑ Axel Honneth, La lutte pour la reconnaissance, Gallimard, 2015, p. 34.
16.↑ Ibid., p. 161.
17.↑ Ibid., p. 166.
18.↑ Ibid., p. 182.
19.↑ Ibid., p. 186.
20.↑ Ibid., p. 208.
21.↑ Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, Seuil, 1997 : “Symbolic power relations are power relations that are established and perpetuated through knowledge and recognition. For « symbolic domination to be instituted, the dominated must share with the dominants the patterns of perception and evaluation according to which they are perceived by them and according to which they perceive them.”
.
22.↑ Ibid., p. 216.
23.↑ Ibid., p. 219.
24.↑ Patricia Churchland, Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
25.↑ Riane Esler and Douglas P. Fry, Nurturing our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape our Brains, Lives and Future, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 53.
26.↑ Stephanie Cacioppo, “Neuroimaging of Love in the Twenty-first Century” in Robert J. Sternberg and Karen Sternberg (ed.), The New Psychology of Love, Cambridge University Press, 2019. Voir aussi Danilo Bzdok , Robin I.M. Dunbar, “The Neurobiology of Social Distance” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 24, Issue 9, p. 717-733, September 2020. URL : The Neurobiology of Social Distance: Trends in Cognitive Sciences (cell.com)
27.↑ Communitarianism – Wikipedia
28.↑André Nieoullon, Mark F. Bear, Michael A. Paradiso, Neurosciences, Pradel, 2016.
29.↑ Magdalena Matyjek, Stefanie Meliss, Isabel Dziobek, Kou Murayama, “A Multidimensional View on Social and Non-Social Rewards”, Front. Psychiatry, vol 11, 2020. URL : Frontiers | A Multidimensional View on Social and Non-Social Rewards (frontiersin.org)
30.↑ Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
31.↑ Olivier Houdé, L’intelligence humaine n’est pas un algorithme, Odile Jacob, 2019.
32.↑ Ibid.
33.↑ Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 201.
34.↑ That is, the existence of a sphere free from social obstacles and constraints.
35.↑ Même si ce type de justification perdurera probablement pour une durée indéterminée.