My first point of Contact with Continental Social Philosophy this Semester has been thougt two articles by the current director of the Institut für Sozialforschung Frankfurt, Axel Honneth. Both papers place the origins of social /critical theory in a historical context, tracing its evolution from Rousseau through to ‘modern’ commenators like Arendt and Adorno. Now while the historical side is interesting I was struck by two things. First, the distinction between Anglo-saxon and German approaches. I can’t really comment on contemporary German philosophy, but I do agree with Honneth that social philosophy in the Anglo/America vein really is a kind of applied political philosophy. This goes to the heart of my early comment post on the Continental-Anglo division. Yes, by all means, a pragmatic, purposive approach to solving normative questions is very satisfying. If one sees a problem with a particular aspect of society, it is natural to try and come up with a solution. However, as Honneth points out, all this takes part in the context of a wider debate- the philosophical anthropology of humanity.
I agree with Honneth’s call for a ‘weak’ formal, philosophical anthropology- a method inherited from Marx (or even Aristotle), and here I can see some points of comparison between John Rawls’ Theory of justice, but more on that later. Perhaps more to the point, I found the idea of social pathology interesting, the notion that society can be compared to a living organism and, and that the quality of freedom that an individual enjoys is dependant on ‘health’ of that organism, tying in with my understanding of Hegel’s dialectical approach. Now the point there was a point of comparison made in a lecture, between a sick mind and a sick society- both try to heal themselves, with their own resources. A society should not attempt to heal itself by striving for some fabulous, external utopia, but by looking for the seeds of change within itself- by allowing individuals to realise freedom, not only in the negative (but non-pejorative ‘liberal)’ sense, but through real human flourishing- the weak, purposive anthropology. In this light, in later posts I’d like to explore the relationship between liberalism and social philosophy, particularly the concept of pluralism; who determines what human flourishing is? What if my idea of flourishing interferes with your own?
