Reflexionen über die sozialen Bedingungen geglückten Lebens: Axel Honneths Sozialphilosophie der Anerkennung und K.P.Moritz' Anerkennungsroman Anton Reiser

In the current academic and intellectual landscape Honneth’s recognition theory is well established and at first glance it seems that on the theoretical level there is not much unexamined. However, in this article I firstly shall point to conceptual problems in Honneth’s theory of recognition and secondly I shall focus on how recognition theory helps us to unfold and therefore understand intersubjective relations and identity building. In this context I take recognition as a practical notion, something that is done, expressed, showed or withhold. In the last part I shall then show how using recognition theory for understanding human relations and identity building gets us to understand that individual’s self-respect can have different sources. I will use the German 18th century novel “Anton Reiser” (1785/1790) by Karl Phillip Moritz, which is a kind of negative ‘Bildungsroman’, to come closer to an understanding of the dimensions that are at stake when ‘doing recognition’.