Among the most compelling features of Axel Honneth's work is his commitment to the integration of ethical and political philosophy with the study of actually existing forms of experience, motivation, and social struggle. The idea of recognition serves as his bridge between these levels of analysis: for Honneth, recognition is what we owe to each other, yet it is also that toward which our social interactions are already oriented, however imperfectly. One aim of this chapter is to identify a serious difficulty in this effort to anchor normative analysis in social reality. To bring this problem into view, I consider an elegant answer that Honneth and Arto Laitinen have recently proposed to a puzzling question about the nature of recognition: is recognition a response to something that already exists, or does it bring something new into being? Their answer, which turns on a distinction between “potentiality” and “actuality,” does not escape the problem it is meant to solve; instead, I shall suggest, this particular use of the concepts of potentiality and actuality drives a wedge between the levels of analysis Honneth aims to hold together, securing recognition's grounding as a normative concept only by making it unnecessarily difficult to grasp certain powerful modes of response and opposition to injustice.

This chapter also has a second, interpretive purpose.