Suffering from Indeterminacy

Axel Honneth is Professor of Philosophy at the Goethc University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The present volume contains the Spinoza Lectures he delivered under the auspices of the Departinctit of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in May and June 1999. In these two lectures, Honneth provides an interpretation of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Righ't: what interests him above all is Hegel's attempt to define a normative principle for modern societies in such a way that the social conditions necessary for personal self-realization will be established as conditions for fullfledged communicative freedom as well. In doing so, he wants to show that Hegel, in a "unique synthesis of a theory of justice and a diagnosis of the age", undertakes the task, on the one hand, of pointing out in a normative manner what pathologies will result from various false conceptions of freedom, which, being truncated conceptions, will of necessity end in distorted interactions among individuals, and hence themselves produce unjust conditions in social life. On the other hand, at the same time Hegel seeks to give the rational reasons for both the failures and the successes in individuals' lives in the social reality of modern society: for in a procedure of normative reconstruction, this reality itself can and has to provide the standard by which those pathologics are diagnosed. And it is precisely this genuine combination of an empirically informed diagnosis of the age with a normative social theory that both draws Honneth to Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' and brings his own project of a theory of society to expression.