Honneth’s Decentered Autonomy: A middle that cannot hold.

Honneth (1995) constructs a constrained model of autonomy, based upon strong claims regarding linguistic determinism and also the nature of the unconscious. His claims about the unconscious are presented as empirical facts. Research which precedes Honneth’s “Decentered Autonomy” held that these were not uncontested facts. Should Honneth’s claims regarding the unconscious not be as robust as he claims, this has strong effects on his model of autonomy, and may provide for routes for exploration that lead to forms of autonomy that Honneth has deemed unreachable.

Finding autonomy through the immediate unity with others in Honneth

For Honneth, our aim in establishing a conception of autonomy is in its definition such that it serves as the as the normative objective of the process of individualisation.

Honneth constructs three boundaries that confine the personality of the human. Two are highlighted explicitly “the uncontrollable forces of the unconscious and of the linguistic meaning event [Bedeutungsgeschehen] are grasped as those two poles in the subject from whose charged opposition the compulsion to individualize emerges” the third is less well engaged with as a boundary, the society of others.

The linguistic boundary is a result of the contention that the things that we are conscious of are linguistically determined thoughts. These thoughts are constructed within the confines of an “intersubjectively shared language system”. This view contests that only those thoughts which can fit within the conceptual framework defined by the system of words that is a person’s interpersonal environment are available to the subject. As this structure confines us, and since it is not something we can overturn without the co-operation of others, it acts as a limitation on ourselves, and thus our freedom of action, and so our autonomy.

The second boundary to the person, within Honneth (1995), is the unconscious. The unconscious is for him entirely opaque. For every person, her drives, hungers, and needs “always remain concealed from her conscious experiencing” intrude constantly and irresistibly into her consciousness.  

The third boundary to the person is that of socially induced affect which takes effect through the fear of the loss of social recognition and by the mechanisms of a “rudimentary… superego… which must lead to moral feelings of guilt and thereby to secondary compulsive mechanisms” (Honneth 1995). This requires that the human subject is “cognized as the product of processes of social interaction”, wherein everyone internalises the social environment she dwells within.

These three boundaries create three foci of conflicts for the person. The linguistic boundary merges with the social boundary where it limits the person’s capacity to express her self in terms not facilitated by the pre-existing linguistic relations of her social environment. The social boundary merges with the unconscious boundary when our social relations provoke emotional reactions that moderate our behaviours. Then there exists the tension between the alinguistic unconscious and the pre-existing linguistic framework that is the primary focus of Honneth’s (1995) argument.

Within this narrow domain, defined by Honneth’s three poles, we must establish our capacity for autonomy. Overcoming these three conflicts requires, Honneth contests, three important abilities, “[1] it is only that person who is in a position to disclose needs creatively, [2] to present her entire life in an ethically reflected way, and [3] to apply universalist norms in a context-sensitive manner, who can be regarded as an autonomous persons”.

For Honneth, the social milieu is a necessary element realising the self. In earlier models of psychoanalysis the normative goal was one of rational control. Our goal as an autonomous person was to “be able to cope with reality in an appropriate manner, [therefore] the subject must have enough ego-strength to strike a balance between unconscious demands of the drive and social norms in order to be capable of work and interpersonal bonding” (Honneth 1999, p229). Central to this idea is that the rational actor can, and normatively should, survey her drives and select those which are to be acted upon. Where the person’s ego is weak she fails to resist these impulses and takes on the role of Kant’s wanton. Consequently she fails to become a moral actor because she is incapable of rationality. In Honneth’s “Postmodern Identity and Object-Relations Theory” (1999) the ego-strength of the person is defined by what it does for the subject; ego strength allows the person to balance her unconscious demands of the drive with the necessary social norms which facilitate work and social bonding. Consequently ego-strength is socially constructed.

Cognate with Althausser’s interpellation, our social norms are internalised with sufficient force that the inner-policeman guards us from the drives and impulses through the fear of losing the recognition of society, it is not inner agency but appropriately socialised maturity that facilitates the person’s capacity to live a moral life. As there is no longer a necessity for the ego to moderate the unconscious drives, then there is no longer the capacity for the ego to do this. The ego under this model is not realised through conflict and dialogue with her drives and unconscious motivations but is realised in the reflection of her self in the society that she inhabits. It is necessary that our person speaks of her inner life, her self, and her drives to others in her society, and through this process of ‘communicative liquefaction’ she strengthens her ‘ego-identity’. Thus she develops a coherent image of herself through “her relation to self, by ensuring that as many of the various interactors as possible obtain a hearing in the individual’s own inner life” (Honneth 1999, p239).

The interpersonal does not simply intrude into the person in Honneth’s paradigm. In juxtaposing the self-aware linguistically mediated experience and the driven unconscious processes Honneth creates a tension between these two forces which is akin to master/bondsman story of Hegel. Honneth talks of the incessant prodding of the unconscious action impulses as being “comparable to the one between two unequal partners in dialogue”. The unconscious under this model constantly judges “the current modes of behaviour”, impinging affectively upon every conscious action. For the subject of this conflict, this tension “drives her to into a process of individualisation” through which she presents “herself intersubjectively as a unique personality.” It is the act of revealing herself, as she thinks herself to be, that gives meaning to herself, and gives herself meaning to the subjects that she reveals herself to.

Some opposition to Honneth’s assertions

Honneth makes strong claims regarding the both the opacity and the impenetrability of the unconscious and presents them as ‘empirical’. It is a fact for Honneth (1995) that “the human subject is no longer to be grasped as one completely transparent to herself”, similarly it is a fact “that the unconscious is in principle uncontrollable”, consequently no person is fully in command of herself. There is a second, more subtle, issue with how Honneth views the activity of the mind. Implicit in his position is that what we are conscious of, those thoughts which are readily available to us for inspection are in themselves rational.

When we look at the person who is autonomous according to the criteria that are the necessary consequence of Honneth’s theory of the person we find a person who has developed three critical skills. The first is the capacity to explain with words the drives and needs which her unconscious desires to have fulfilled. The second is the capacity to describe herself autobiographically in a way that shows her to be consistent with an ethical framework, thirdly she must be capable of explaining her reasons for deviating from this universalist ethical framework on a case by case basis, with recourse to the context of the event in question.

With such a strong emphasis placed upon the discursive, interpersonal aspect of the act of self-reflection there is a risk that being eloquent, or even being plausible, is sufficient to be, or at least appear to be, an autonomous person. The defence against such an argument is that a person engages in deception is not an honest participant in the discursive endeavour; this deception of the other is merely oppositional, therefore she merely eats this other and does not recognise them as a person in their own right. A person who acts in such a way does not return to her self with an understanding of restored unity of herself and the world because she treats this other as an object that facilitates the satiating of her desires. So she remains alienated from her self, and is not an autonomous person. But that defence necessitates a bad faith deception, where the deceiver knows that she is deceiving.

Honneth’s implicit assumption that we are honest in our reasoning has many failings. It ignores the literature available that pertains to such complicating factors as motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990, Houston & Fazio 1989), implicit biases (Taylor 1982), the failures in biographical memory (Sanitioso Kunda & Fong 1990) – failings which extend beyond forgetting incidents, but also misremembering true events (Schum 1981), and remembering events that never happened (Neisser & Fivush 1994). These processes undermine the version of autonomy that is constructed by Honneth. Not only has more evidence accrued since the publication of Honneth (1995) for these motivating processes, many more have since been established. Collectively these seem to fatally wound the kind of autonomy that Honneth envisages. If we cannot know that we are being dishonest with ourselves then we cannot self realise, and autonomy becomes an impossible fantasy.

What remains, when we allow for these empirical observations within Honneth, is a form of being which scarcely deserves the name of autonomy. All that’s necessary, for a person who seeks to portray herself as autonomous, is that she presents her entire life in an ethically reflected way, while allowing herself the contextualisation benefits that she affords others. While such a person might experience a sense of self which will not be different to an ideal Kantian, it allows her to live within a coherent fiction and offers us a sense of autonomy so broad that only those who are phenomenally conscious of their irrational compulsions may miss it. Therefore it does away with much that is useful in Honneth’s model.

Fortunately Honneth is also psychologically naïve in his portrayal of the unconscious. Honneth creates a person who can only self-realise through her interpersonal communication with others. This narcissistic vision of the self is reflected back to the subject through her interaction with others. There is an assumed consistency through time, but the source of this consistency can only be the subject herself, and we are all unreliable narrators of our autobiographies. The conflict between the unmovable linguistic turn and the irresistible unconscious urge creates the necessity to define the self through others but it does not offer the subject the means by which the person she says herself to be can remain consistent over time. This position is built upon the assertion by Honneth that the unconscious is both opaque and immutable, this is contested ground.

The self as a creative labour

In contrast to my explicit biases: Those biases I am both consciously aware of and am capable of supporting through argumentation and I also have my implicit biases: Those which are preconscious, or unconscious, which frame the thoughts which subsequently occur to me. If Honneth were correct then I could ameliorate the biases that are the logical progression of my thoughts, the explicit ones, if through argumentation or information I found that I was incorrect in the thinking which led me to that particular position. In contrast, there ought to be nothing that I can do about my irrational biases as I am a passive recipient of the drives of my unconscious. I may be able to prevent myself from acting upon that dislike (if I’m rigorous about introducing an universalist ethical component to my actions) but that dislike is something I’m not only unaware of, it is also something I cannot alleviate as it is a consequence of the efforts of “uncontrollable forces of the unconscious”. Thus at best these unconscious urges may be controlled, though not completely, which suggests an oppositional relationship that is incapable of taking that subject-transcending move.

Thankfully we are not so beholden to the efforts of our unconscious (Devine 1989, Montieth 1993) as that. The unconscious is not an unmoveable object, though “overcoming prejudice is a protracted process that requires considerable effort” (Devine et al. 2012). Unwinding these biases is a skilful activity, and one which the subject must wilfully pursue. Unless the subject actively surveilles herself there will be an opaque feature to herself and her unconsciousness, and should she fall for Honneth’s trap she will ensure that she remains in this patch of sterile selfhood. For with Honneth’s “Decentered Autonomy”, she may observe these unconscious prejudices through her discourse with others, but there is little to support the contention that she will and much to counter it as a productive methodology; we are much too good at explaining ourselves. Worse, even if somehow she becomes aware of her prejudices by chance, according to Honneth this prejudice is a fact of personality rather than a challenge to be addressed.

It is easy to trawl through the psychological literature of the last century and select the perfect study such that the result reinforce whatever argument you want to address, but beyond that cherry picking strategy there have been broad trends that were observed.

In the study of the self, having lost the place of the soul we discovered the unconscious though psychoanalysis. As the utility of psychoanalysis diminished we rational choice theory, and behaviouralism. When behaviouralism reached its limits we developed representationalist cognitive models. Coincident with this, the rational choice model gave way to the two process models of mind. Today, enactivism reinvigors behaviouralism while cognitive behavioural therapy resurrects the spirit of the rational control psychoanalytical model. These cycles have created new, richer, dialectics that present challenges to Honneth’s over-simplifications. For Honneth the only motile agent was the subject in her interactions with others, whereas the richer current view of the self allows us to return to ourselves and shape ourselves, or at least our unconscious impulses, as we choose ourselves to be.

In contrast with Hegel who saw will as a contextualised process where the individual abstracts from feeling into a nonsubjective thought and then back again through universalism to himself (thereby allowing the person agency to determine himself), Honneth sees the person as the consequence of interpersonal activity expressed within the limits of the body and its language. The ‘I’ in Honneth (1999) “assumes the form of an unorganized… residuum without structure.” In holding to limited view of the self and the unconscious, Honneth rejects the possibility of a self-actualising self which would allow us the possibility of a richer form of autonomy than that which satisfies his decenterised model of autonomy.
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