This outlines how I attempt to show the mutual interdependence of a theory of recognition and tolerance. Basically, I want to show how demands for respect and recognition cannot do without tolerance. From an interactive perspective, tolerance and respect/recognition are seen to be mutually exclusive. However, respect and recognition is not simply accorded or granted, but achieved. There are many constraints to their achievement that are felt as disrespect. Rather than replying in kind, tolerance should be understood as creating an invitation to disputing parties to overcome problematic differences. It is through Honneth’s more mature and sophisticated theory of recognition that the problem can be defined and a solution achieved.

There are only a few key texts that I will be using for this first draft. Here they are:

Darwall, S.L. (1977) ‘Two kinds of respect’, Ethics 88(1): 36-49.

To shift from unitary concept of respect to differentiated concept of recognition.

Deranty, J.-P. and E. Renault (2007) ‘Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition’, Thesis Eleven 88(1): 92-111.

To help understand the struggle as a political project.

Featherstone, M. and S. Lash (2002) Recognition and difference. London: SAGE.

Additional/optional source for material regarding recognition and difference.

Galeotti, A.E. (2002) Toleration as recognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

One form of recognition theory that explicitly identifies tolerance.

Gutmann, A. (ed.) (1994) Multiculturalism : examining the politics of recognition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Includes Taylor’s essay that presents on form of recognition theory.

Honneth, A. (1996) The struggle for recognition : the moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Primary text for recognition theory to be adopted by my thesis.

Pharo, P. (2001) La logique du respect. Paris: Cerf.

Sociological discussion of respect that may add bits and pieces.

Sennett, R. (2004) Respect : the formation of character in a world of inequality. London: Penguin.

Primary text for sociological analysis respect.

van Leeuwen, B. (2007) ‘A Formal Recognition of Social Attachments: Expanding Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition’, Inquiry 50(2): 180-205.

Primary text that explores shortcoming of Honneth’s theory with respect to difference.

Below I have included in point form the beginnings of this chapter. This is followed by a very brief discussion of how the mutual dependence between tolerance and recognition.

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This post will be continually updated with a collection of interesting quotes from TCA as I read it. Basically, the notes are quite raw, if I do decide to add any.

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This post contains a slightly edited version of an email I had originally composed for MP. He had given a lecture in SOC379 discussing the characteristics of the Australian public sphere and its effects on political communication. I have also included my more succinct thoughts on this matter at the end of the post. I ended up sending these to MP and he wants to chat more about it.

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A very interesting lunch was had with MP. He was very interested in the direction I was trying to take my work on toleration, but he thought I really needed an empirical component, like a focus group, to help me ground and crystallise the sociological assumptions and insights. I will probably work on some sort of proposal for focus groups because I think it is an interesting idea and worthwhile, even if I don’t think it to be as necessary as MP suggested.

Anyway, after lunch, MP sent me an email with a normative scale from David Held’s book, Models of Democracy, that he thought would be useful for me to think about how to connect the modalities of toleration with different action contexts/value spheres. I’m also thinking of it in terms of a way to connect the different modalities of toleration with different political cultures. I’ve included my reply to MP after the click-through. (more…)

This was something I had started to include in a reply to MP, which I have pulled out and left for further reflection.

I’ve been thinking a lot about trust lately and whether it is a pre-existing resource for toleration or a product (or even both). I was watching a TV show called Scrubs – it’s a comedy based in a hospital – that made me think about this a bit further. Two male patients required kidney transplants and both wives were not a match for their respective husbands, but were a match for the other’s husband. The idea was to do a wife switch for the kidney transplants. However, one couple opted out after agreeing. It became clear they could not trust the other couple because their transplant was going to happen a week later and they had no guarantees that the other wife would still agree. So, one of the doctors organised for both transplants to happen at the same time in order to, and I quote, “take trust out of the equation”. My reading of it was not so much that people wanted to take trust out of the equation, but to get rid of the contingency that requires trust in the first place. Many critics of tolerance use the exact same logic to suggest why we need stronger commitments like respect, acceptance, recognition, etc. rather than toleration. But this struck me intuitively as problematic: I felt like we were losing something in our attempts to create certainty rather than relying on trust or to simply demand respect without relying on or even needing toleration. There certainly are narrowly formulated and, I would argue, impoverished notions of utopia or social order and progress or social change at play.

Respect is a term freely used in relation to issues of diversity. But there is much ambiguity to what it means: “Is it respect of personhood, of citizenship, of specific differences? And who exactly should respect whom” (35)? “This paper aims to clarify the possible respect relationships in diverse societies, and to explore both their normative basis and practical possibility” (35). The combination of two basic types of respect – of sameness, of difference – and two respecting agents – state and citizen – suggest four basic types of respect relationships: respect of sameness between state and citizens, respect of sameness between citizens, respect of difference between state and citizens and respect of difference between citizens (36). Using this set of relationships, Balint wants to argue that “respect of sameness…remains entirely justifiable and normatively preferable to respect of difference in either of its forms” (36).

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The stranger has typically been conceived as embodying the more celebrated aspects of modernity. Tabboni explores the what types of meaning are attached to the stranger in post-industrial societies marked by “the globalisation of politics and the economy, of culture and the need for collective identity” (17). Tabonni’s aim is to “develop the theoretical implications of the figure of the stranger by historicizing it, by reflecting on the various changes that have been brought about by its appearance now that the values which the stranger represented have changed as have the characteristics of the society that s/he joins” (17). (more…)

What is the role of dialogue in the morally reflective person’s life (5)? Socrates’ fixation upon the role of dialogue in the question of the good life is problematic because it neglects to indicate at what point that life is actually lived (5). Obviously so, there is a tightrope balance between reflection and practice in this regard (5). Therefore, if this question does not dominate my whole life it becomes necessary to be more selective of conversation partners (e.g. trusted persons) (5). But this may raise certain anxieties about the value of dialogues I undertake because of the doubts that may arise about the quality of conversation partners (5). One response is to rely upon the external authority of faith (6). The other is to appeal to myself (a sort of internal dialogue) (6). While remaining guarded against individualism, the point is that “key decisions are made in silence”: “The moral value of my life does not merely depend on how I rationalize it in conversation, but upon the intrinsic value of my moral beliefs, and my success in living up to them” (6). Ackerman, suggests that there may be more to moral life than “mere talk” (6). The reverse, however, holds true for public life:

Here I want to…proclaim dialogue as the first obligation of citizenship. Although a morally reflective person can permissibly cut herself off from real-world dialogue, a responsible citizen cannot with similar propriety cut herself off from political dialogue (6).

Ackerman’s task is not merely to suggest why this is so but to explain the asymmetry (6). (more…)

So, I had my Annual Progress Review presentation on Wednesday. A number of staff and students attended which was good to see. I had prepared a set of point for discussion that I shared with PJ and HB so that they would be aware of what I intended to say. They thought it was a good idea and it helped them to see where my thoughts of late were going. In the end, the presentation went well and I had only one question about possible empirical projects – something I did not leave enough time to talk about in the presentation itself. However, I thought my presentation should have made clear the significance of my thesis. PJ agreed, but HB thought it was all good. The day after, PJ sent me an email with some more comments and questions. I’ve included this email plus my responses.

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Van Leeuwen’s concern is that Honneth’s theory of recognition says very little about cultural differences that underpin the politics of recognition that dominates the literature on multiculturalism (180-1). The paper is concerned with elaborating the shortcomings of Honneth’s thesis in this area by developing a fourth principle of recognition in order to make the theory more relevant to multiculturalism (181). (more…)

This is what I’m currently working on: my thesis in summary form. Basically, I’m writing a very unplanned, unstructured and under-elaborated version of my thesis as it stands right now. I’m focusing more on what I want to say rather than what others have said in a bid to find some way of organising my own thoughts. This amounts to a very meandering line of argumentation that reads more like a set of loosely related points. But, again, it’s mainly about me trying to figure out what I want to say.

2009-10-20

• Have added PJ’s comments as footnotes.
• Have added my preliminary responses to PJ’s remarks.
• A few things stand out:
  • The idea of the ‘logics of toleration’ is not clearly elaborated and I need to think this through properly.
  • The organisation of the ideas in this paper are not always coherent, although at certain points PJ is able to put together the pieces. I need to look at her specific comments and see how the provision chapter outline attends to these issues.
  • PJ has identified various cases of toleration that I have not adequately considered – these need to be attended to.
  • The distinction between morals and ethics is not properly elaborated. For one, I need to make sure my interpretation of how others conceieve of the distinction is accurate. I also, need to make clear the sense in which a different conception of the distinction is made apparent in toleration – a conception that is underappreicated and often undermined by the application of toleration itself.

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Spoke to HB late last week about how I’m struggling to organise my ideas into key themes and how they relate in terms of an argument, his suggestion was to simply write my thesis as it stands and to ignore for the moment the technical conventions and academic strictures in order to actually focus on what I want to say. This work in progress thesis has helped me to think more about what I want to say rather than what others have said – the main source of frustration to date. For the most part it has simply flowed without much pause for reflection. I reached a point where I wasn’t so clear about the next few steps and so I merely summarised the points made so far and that is where it stands.

I met with PJ today after writing a summary of what I have done so far for this WIP thesis and included what I eventually thought of what I was going to say immediately following what had been done so far. This does not contain the whole thesis to date. This is what I gave to her: (more…)

This post just contains a list of questions from PJ that I have highlighted as being important to the thesis and worthy of further reflection. I’ll typically add a brief explanatory note as to the context of the question. I’ll just be listing brief notes and/or links to other thoughts. The responses are not going to be elaborate for the moment.

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Rössler’s main thesis revolves around how the value of privacy is articulated in terms of personal autonomy.

In this thesis she develops a unified concept of privacy across three distinctive, but overlapping normative dimensions: decisional privacy, informational privacy and spatial privacy.

Of particular interest to me is the realm of decisional privacy. Decisional privacy refers to the capacity to design and plan life projects without the scrutiny of others. To put it simply, it is about having the capacity to make my own decisions about how I choose to live my life. The mutual recognition of such a right to privacy requires a certain obligation to others that Rössler describes, in general, as reserve and tact. Not only does it mean not interfering in the decisions of others, but to refrain from over-burdening others with the decisions in my own life. Because this type of restraint applies to both positive and negative engagements, toleration is not quite enough because it refers specifically to that which we object to.

Nevertheless, toleration is important. This is not something discussed in any depth by Rössler. But, my own position is that tact and reserve are culturally and historically specified. This is a rather uncontroversial proposition in many ways when the bounds of privacy are shared and clearly understood. More often than not such bounds and obligations to restraint are learned through socialisation. But, such socialisation will not allows equip us to deal with changes and the unfamiliar.

Reserve and tact are attached to my concept of pre-reflexive toleration as part of our repertoire of taken-for-granted orientations that lubricate social coexistence and cooperation. But, invariably, we butt up against differences with which we are unfamiliar and which are beyond our tolerances and, therefore, which our existing repertoire of relating to each other is unable to accommodate. It is under these particular circumstances that reflexive toleration may be called upon, since such situations may lead to disputes or conflicts.

Insofar as this relates to privacy, we have to understand that toleration is often called upon when something that was previously ‘invisible’ becomes ‘visible’. ((I use the visual metaphors as a rough indication of how indirectly changes may be experienced without losing a sense of how our experiences may be very confronting and immediate.)) What this may actually mean is that something which had previously been considered private is now public. A topical example being headscarves worn by Muslim women in secular countries, countries where religion and religious expression is putatively considered a private matter. As much as this may cause some types of concerns (whose validity and legitimacy is yet to be determined), toleration is at least owed to Muslim women on the grounds that their decision to wear the hijab needs to be respected. Thus, any deliberation emerging over these concerns ought not a priori reject the wearing of the hijab, but to instead position one’s concerns as an ethical objection whose moral status needs to be considered as contingent. In the end, toleration requires a contingent attitude to the moral status of that which one objects to in order to respect the decisional privacy of others so that deliberation may be sustained in a democratic manner (i.e. following the pricinple of political egalitarianism, cf. Bohman on reflexive toleration in a deliberative democracy).

Similarly, from the point of view of Muslim women, there is a need for toleration. In a secular society where Muslim religious expression is unfamiliar and lacking in symbolic support, wearing a headscarf can no longer be undertaken as a taken-for-granted practice. There is also a need for Muslim women to understand exactly how acceptability has been defined (as ‘visiblity’) in order to explain their own practices. The mutual undermining of taken-for-granted lifeworlds requires mutual justification. Such justification, for Muslims, can be particularly burdensome insofar as the justificatory request requires them to divulge private matters. In this sense, it is important that Muslims exercise toleration vis-a-vis such requests in order to explain the public significance of their private cultural practices. Again, insofar, as others are exercising toleration in such requests, it can become less burdensome for Muslims who may be feeling as though they are under the pressure of the ‘tyranny of public opinion’.

Basically, it is important to note the pre-existing historical and cultural distinctions between private and public that social and cultural pluralisation undermines. Mutual reflexive toleration involves treating such things as contingent given a universal democratic obligation to both restraint and openness in public dialogue aimed at reaching a shared understanding or consensus. There is much more to this thin account of the relationship between toleration and privacy that I will attend to later.

Deliberative democracy must face the fact the cultural pluralism raises the possibility of deep and potentially unresolvable conflicts (111). Toleration is important, but within this ideal of deliberative democracy it must go beyond passive silence and towards critical engagement (111). “How can such engagement be critical without being intolerant, and intolerant without being uncritical? That is the task of a deliberative theory of tolerance” (111).

When is toleration needed? Difficult from Rawlsian position where public reason cannot involve criticism of any comprehensive doctrine (112). The exception arises if such a doctrine is incompatible with the essentials of public reason and a democratic polity (112). Bohman questions the extent to which this is tolerant given the fact of pluralism today (113).

From the deliberative point of view this might be insufficient because the use of public reason should exclude all comprehensive doctrines (112). But this is difficult when such doctrines are at the heart of the conflicts (112). This is especially the case when the regime of toleration itself conflicts with comprehensive doctrines (112). In principle, any reason should be accepted as public (113). But in order to discriminate between better and worse reasons, all reasons must be subject to critical scrutiny (113).

But in order to not undermine, but support democracy, toleration must impose some limits on deliberation. This reflexive conception of toleration pulls in two directions: 1) democratic ideal that all have equal voice in an inclusive political community; 2) seeks the best reasons and hence all reasons must be open to revision and rejection in public discussion (112). Bohman argues tension can be resolved in two ways when toleration becomes reflexive: 1) it “opens up standards and regimes of toleration to public deliberation rather than removing them from debate”; 2) “its object is not the content of speech, but the maintenance of a free and open structure of communication in a pluralist society” (112-3). Reflexive toleration serves to support ‘political egalitarianism’, “broadly understood as the ‘equal access for all to influence political deliberation’” (113).

Thus, toleration is not merely openness to others in discourse, but the capacity to treat them as free and equal members of a community of deliberation and judgement. As a regulative ideal, toleration maintains such a community; it deems intolerant those who deny that conflicts can be solved in such a way as to maintain the equal membership of all” (113).

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In the midst of trying to sort out my provisional chapter outlines into something more coherent and precise, I began to dwell on the more substantive issues I need to address in Chapter 1. In many ways, this chapter has to confront the critques of toleration. For the large part, I read such critiques and say to myslef ‘this doesn’t actually apply to my own conceptualisations’. Obviously, this is an inadequate defence, but this chapter aims at elaborating upon these sentiments. Central to this chapter will be the penetrating critiques of Wendy Brown. This chapter, basically, attempts to suggest that Brown’s critiques do not undermine the normative core of toleration – the need to accommodate difference through both openness and restraint. If the concept cannot be rejected in toto on this basis, then the tasks of critical reconstruction becomes more urgent – a task I set myself in the rest of the thesis. Given the centrality of Brown in this chapter, I need to show how each of her critiques makes a reformulation more important. So, the significance of this proposed chapter to my thesis should be quite apparent. Following the jump is a fairly coherent beginning of this chapter.

10/11 Note: I should also incorporate existing responses to critiques of toleration over here.

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At the moment, I am considering the critical perspectives on toleration in order to determine to what ends it can be put and to what extent a reformulation is required. Thus, the idea is to show the limitations of the critiques or how they help to peel away the problematic layers of the concept of toleration so that we can more clearly get to its normative core. I have grouped these perspectives according to whether or not they seek to provide a defence of toleration. Thus, the affirmative critiques are still trying to find justifications for toleration, whereas the negative critiques are, at the very least, not concerned with this aim. Within the negative critiques there are two approaches to this problematic. The first that still seeks to justify toleration directly as virtuous and the second that seeks an indirect route. This note concerns my criticisms of the second approach within the affirmative critiques, exemplified by Rawls and elaborated upon by many in the McKinnon and Castiglione (2003) volume, The culture of toleration in diverse societies. The primary reason for this note is to document my analysis of these critiques without having read all the literature in this area, especially Rawls. As I continue reading I’ll need to come back and test the propositions here. (more…)

This post will be used to collect initial, fairly unstructured thoughts and responses to my reading of the articles in the volume edited by Dario Castiglione and Catriona McKinnon on toleration and reasonableness as a new basis for a contemporary reformulation of toleration from a liberal perspective. I will provide a very brief exposition accompanied by some analysis or at least points of departure for analysis. I will be using this post as a way to test my initial analysis of the reasonableness reformulation of toleration summarised by Castiglione and McKinnon.

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