Spiritualising Recognition: Addressing Religious Inequalities through Axel Honneth's Theory of Recognition

As one of the most influential schools in recent political theory, the ‘politics of recognition’ may be more open to accommodating religious diversity than competing perspectives. This Paper examines this potential in recognition theory through a focus on Axel Honneth’s writings. Honneth’s materialist theory of recognition at first seems ambiguous in relation to the other-worldly and transcendent. His focus on legal rights as a central mode of recognition risks recreating the problems with religious accommodation in mainstream liberal theories, with their focus on collective religious rights. While these rights are obviously not unimportant to religious believers, religious claims often take a more ‘individualised’ form, in the sense of being concerned more fundamentally with a person’s particular spiritual beliefs. The Paper suggests that the accommodation of religion through group rights may not acknowledge the ‘ultimate and compelling’ nature of some religious beliefs. To overcome this ‘spiritual impasse’, the paper turns to examine a comparatively under-discussed dimension of Honneth’s three modes of recognition, namely the idea of ‘care’. A close reading of the object-relations theorists from whom Honneth draws yields a certain respect for the non-temporal, spiritual dimensions of human existence. In other words, these theorists offer an understanding of the relevance of non-material, perhaps ‘otherworldly’, goods that contribute to a person’s wellbeing alongside legal rights and material resources. This acknowledgement enables Honneth to encompass care for an individual’s spiritual life, whilst balancing it against the legitimate rights of others. By considering relevant cases from recent US and UK jurisprudence, the paper will contend that, against more usual readings of Honneth’s materialist theory, his account of recognition is partially ‘spiritualised’. Whilst spiritual and material goods are not fully commensurable, Honneth's theory may recognise the valid claims of citizens of faith, without subsuming them within a homogenous public sphere.