Restoring Dignity: Social Recognition in Practical Identity Formation

As human beings, we are ‘obligatorily gregarious’ (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008: 52), implying that we cannot evade our physical, social, and emotional inter-dependences, from which we derive many of our most important relationships, projects, and sources of meaning. To be inescapably social means that, although we are separate individuals, we are not sovereign. We do not pick and choose our life plans from social materials which exist apart from us — instead, we are already constituted by our relations to others with whom we co-produce and co-sustain the meanings, norms, and values of our intersubjective existence. This means that to experience our lives as meaningful, we require positive self-relation s of self-respect and self-esteem, which are intersubjectively shaped by our relations to others. But realising positive self-relations becomes problematic when our relations to others are such that our valued identifications are misrecognised, or when institutional norms and values make it difficult to achieve a sense of being a valued person, in the contemporary work of social cooperation, stable positive self- relations are increasingly difficult to experience, making the task of forming a practical self-identity a demanding project. I evaluate the limitations of the concept of self-respect in Rawlsian justice, and of the concept of self-esteem in Honneth’ theory of social recognition, both of which mediate recognition through individual achievement.