Philosophy & Social Criticism

The aim of this article is to combine Pettit’s account(s) of freedom, both his work on discursive control and on non-domination, with Pippin’s and Brandom’s reinterpretation of Hegelian rational agency and the role of recognition theory within it. The benefits of combining these two theories lie, as the article hopes to show, in three findings: first, re-examining Hegelian agency in the spirit of Brandom and Pippin in combination with Pettit’s views on freedom shows clearly why and in which way a Hegelian account of rational agency can ground an attractive socio-political account of freedom; second, the reconciling of discursive control and non-domination with Hegelian agency shows how the force and scope of recognition become finally tangible, without either falling into the trap of overburdening the concept, or merely reducing it to the idea of simple respect; third, the arguments from this article also highlight the importance of freedom as non-domination and how this notion is, indeed, as Pettit himself claims, an agency-freedom which aims at successfully securing the social, political, economic and even (some) psychological conditions for free and autonomous agency.

This article explores the ways in which Nietzsche’s conception of subjectivity, as rehearsed in The Birth of Tragedy, draws close to other modern models of split subjectivity as described by Hegel, Freud, or Althusser. Although the subjectivity depicted by Nietzsche is constituted in the tension between reaffirming and dissolving its boundaries, and this tension may seem to put the possibility of identity at risk, in effect individuation and dissolution function as symmetrical contraries. Rather than disrupting the boundaries of reason, the Dionysian contributes to Apollonian equilibrium by temporarily destroying Apollonian rigidity, so that the polis can periodically overcome limitations, assimilate its others and gather new strength. Identity is thus seemingly reinforced through the controlled illusion of its shattering: it is protected from the irruption of real otherness. Unlike Nietzsche’s dialectical dramaturgy, Greek tragedy depicts an incipient rationality wounded by contradictions, institutionalizing conflict. Because of the ambiguity of the Greek tragic world, the fissures of its organizing powers and the ambivalent agency of tragic subjects, a parallel between Attic tragedy and modern subjectivity may illuminate the latter.

This is a critical theoretical investigation of Hubert Dreyfus’ ‘phenomenology of everyday expertise’ (PEE). Operating mainly through the critical perspective of the ‘emancipatory interest’ the article takes issue with the contention that when engaged in expert action human beings are in non-deliberative, reason-free absorption. The claim of PEE that absorbed actions are not amenable to reconstruction places those actions outside the space of reasons. The question of acting under the wrong reasons – the question upon which the emancipatory interest rests – is thereby rendered groundless. A further difficulty for the emancipatory interest is the elimination by PEE of reflective agency. Framing expert action as perception- and affordance-driven, PEE diminishes practical reasoning. Furthermore, it understands freedom – consistently with its notion of action as affordance – as primarily the capacity of human beings to submit themselves to processes rather than to step back reflectively from them. Several criticisms of the philosophical delimitations created by methodology of PEE – phenomenology – are also developed.

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. Some defenders of human rights accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, but opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in human rights terms because of their limitations as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this article, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of ‘humanity’ as a political identity and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics.