The Norm, the Normal and the Pathological: Articulating Honneth's Account of Normativity with a French Philosophy of the Norm (Foucault and Canguilhem)

ABSTRACT

Axel Honneth deploys the categories of normal and pathological to explain contemporary society in organic terms. This article concerns itself with how these medical references function in Honneth's work to explain the social world, and what their political implications are. For Honneth, social normality is a normative resource, even if it is only accessible through the study of pathology. Socially accepted norms are taken to reflect legitimate principles, with the early Honneth taking pathology as an individual psychic suffering that results from injustice, and the later Honneth taking pathology as an overextension of the logic of one social sphere (e.g. law) into the terrain of another (e.g. ethics). The implications of Honneth's organic account of society are explored through the lens of a competing “French” account of the norm offered by Canguilhem and Foucault. These French thinkers view socially accepted norms not as reflecting legitimate principles, but as standardizing processes of normalization that stifle normativities that do not conform. It is suggested that Honneth's account of normativity must be articulated with Canguilhem's and Foucault's account of normalization. That said, through the course of the analysis, several unexpected continuities are discovered between these two different traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• norm
• normality
• normativity
• pathology
• power
• organism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Miriam Bankovsky and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks. This work was made possible by a research stay at the Marc Bloch Zentrum in Berlin.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Canguilhem, “Mort de l’homme ou épuisement du cogito?” 612.

2 Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,” 3–48.

3 Cf. Honneth, Freedom's Right, 2014. See also Honneth, “The Diseases of Society,” 683–703.

4 Canguilhem, Écrits sur la médecine, 108.

5 Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,” in Disrespect.

6 Ibid., 5.

7 Ibid., 35.

8 Honneth, “The Diseases of Society,”698.

9 Ibid., 698.

10 Note that in What is Politics? Arendt uncovers how certain political conditions favor the production of an individual's lack of sensibility: totalitarianism produces a “desert” that undermines the human capacity to even suffer.

11 Honneth, “The Diseases of Society,” 687.

12 In Freedom's Right, Honneth distinguishes pathologies from misdevelopments: pathologies only occur in the legal and moral spheres, spheres that are conditions of possibility for freedom. That is, pathologies do not occur in the ethical sphere, the reality of freedom. Pathologies are misinterpretations of the underlying normative regulations. But misdevelopments are exclusive to the ethical sphere: they jeopardize the level of realization of the promises of freedom. The idea is that the spheres of law and morality are capable of generating illusions, whereas the ethical domain does not, because individuals are not tempted to think about the realization of their freedom in individualistic terms alone. Honneth returns to this distinction in order to qualify it, by considering a “systematic misinterpretation” of social freedom (thus a form of pathology) in what he refers to as “negative freedom”

it seems important to consider whether the spheres of social freedom might not be vulnerable to systematic misinterpretation, as they cannot eliminate the possibility of having their principles understood merely in terms of negative freedom. In particular, there is the constant possibility of such fundamental misinterpretation in the ethical sphere of the economic market. (Rejoinder, p. 215)

13 See Renault, L’expérience de l’injustice; Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.

14 Honneth, “The Diseases of Society,” art. cit., 693.

15 Honneth, The Critique of Power.

16 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 275–6.

17 Ibid., xvii.

18 Ibid., xxviii.

19 Honneth, The Critique of Power, 166–7.

20 Honneth and Roberts, “Foucault and Adorno,” 58.

21 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 93.

22 Macherey, “Toward a Natural History of Norms,”187.

23 Ibid., 186.

24 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 239.

25 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 239.

26 Ibid., 239.

27 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 85.

28 Ibid., 65.

29 See notably Mc Nay, “The Politics of Suffering and Recognition.”

30 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 186.

31 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 285.

32 Ibid., 286.

33 Honneth and Hartmann, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,”41–58.

34 Honneth, “Recognition as Ideology,”325.

35 Ibid., 324.

36 Cf. the subtitle of Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.

37 See for example his reply to Rancière, on the use of the term “pathology”

I’m using this vocabulary, I’m not nervous when somebody is using it, and I’m also using it with reference to all states of society, not only to state of individual affairs: but in the case I’ve just reconstructed, I referred to an inter-subjective relationship. (Honneth and Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement, 122)

38 Honneth, “The Diseases of Society,” especially 701–2. This conception of society as functionally differentiated is featured in The Idea of socialism. Towards a Renewal.

39 Honneth, Freedom's Right, 6.

40 Ibid., 6.

41 Ibid., 6.

42 Honneth, Freedom's Right, 86.

43 Honneth, Freedom's Right, 88.

44 Ibid., 86.

45 Ibid., 86.

46 Honneth writes:

From the very beginning I have vacillated on just how to justify the concept and diagnosis of social pathologies ; at times I have followed a more anthropological approach, seeing pathologies as deviations from our ‘naturally’ given life form ; at others, I have followed the advice of Christopher Zurn to only include ‘second order’ disorders under the concept, that consist in socially caused obstacles to the full realization of the available rational potential, 212–213 (Rejoinder, Critical Horizons, Vol. 16 No. 2, May 2015, 204–226)

See Zurn, “Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders,” 345–70. See the criticism of Freyenhagen on this latter definition, which he claims has “contributed to a misframing of social pathology as being primarily ‘in the head’”, Freyenhagen, 136. Honneth's rebuttal is on 216.

47 Honneth, Freedom's Right, 86.

48 Ibid., 86.

49 Honneth, “Diseases of Society,” 689.

50 Honneth, “Diseases of Society,” art. cit., 699.

51 It is also a liberal perspective: Honneth praises the liberal predecessors of socialism's founding fathers, who considered the socio-political consequences of the differentiation of society into various social spheres around their respective functions.

Liberalism recognized that – along with the differentiation of ‘morality’ and ‘legality’ – the two subsystems of ‘society’ and the ‘state’ needed to be distinguished, as each of these spheres seemed to function according to their own respective laws – either private and personal or public and neutral. (Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 78–9).

52 Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 80.

53 Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 92.

54 On Freedom's Right, see Critical Horizon's Vol. 16, no.2, May 2015. According to F. Freyenhagen, the change in the account of social pathologies implies a reduction of these pathologies to the prevention of reflexive access to norms and actions, which requires no social change. For his part, J. Schaub deplores the disappearance of the possibility of revolution. Honneth has conceded that he should have given more prominence to institutional revolution, but he reaffirms that a normative revolution is impossible under modern conditions. Our values of freedom remain an insuperable horizon that permit reinterpretation and reapplication (“in the course of the struggle of some groups, it may be made apparent that a more comprehensive application of those norms could only be achieved if the institutional forms of the relevant spheres were fundamentally changed”, 208).

55 Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 90–1.

56 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 235 sqq.

57 Canguilhem, Ecrits sur la médecine, Paris, Seuil, 2002, 112.

58 Ibid., 108.

59 Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body.

60 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 250.

61

We shall say otherwise – certainly not better, probably less well – namely that a society is both machine and organism. It would be only a machine if the collective's ends could not only be strictly planned but also executed in conformity with a program. (Normal and Pathological, 252)

62

So that what is denounced, under the name of rationalization – the bogey complacently waved by the champions of liberalism, the economic variety of the cult of nature – as a mechanization of social life, perhaps expresses, on the contrary, the need, obscurely felt by society, to become the organic subject of needs recognized as such. (248)

63 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 255.

64 Canguilhem, Ecrits sur la médecine.

65 Canguilhem, “Le problème des régulations dans l’organisme et de la société,” 101–25.

66 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 255.

67 Ibid., 253.

68 Ibid., 253.

69 Cf. Muhle, “Biopolitical Life and Its Milieu,” 9–26.

70 Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 97, emphasis mine.

71 Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,”35.

72 Ibid., 35.

73 Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 92.

74 Honneth and Koch, “The Normativity of Ethical Life,” 817–26.

75 Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 106.

76 Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 277.

77 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject.

78 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 164–5.

79 Le Blanc, “L’invention du sujet entre normes sociales et normes vitales,” 78–106. The author's translation.

80

But it is enough that one individual in any society question the needs and norms of this society and challenge them – a sign that these needs and norms are not those of the whole society – in order for us to understand to what extent social need is not immanent, to what extent the social norm is not internal, and finally, to what extent the society, seat of restrained dissent or latent antagonisms, is far from setting itself up as a whole. If the individual poses a question about the finality of the society, is this not the sign that the society is a poorly unified set of means, precisely lacking an end with which the collective activity permitted by the structure would identify? (Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 256)

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Katia Genel

Katia Genel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France). Her research interests lie in German social and political philosophy, with a focus on the Frankfurt School, along with its comparison with French critical philosophy. She is the author of Autorité et emancipation. Horkheimer et la Théorie critique (Payot, 2013), Hannah Arendt. L’expérience de la liberté (Belin, 2016), and the co-editor with Jean-Philippe Deranty of Axel Honneth & Jacques Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016).