Journal: Studies in Social and Political Thought

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University of Sussex

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2015 - 20184
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Publications 1 - 4 of 4
  • Ideology as Artificial Respiration: Hegel on Stoicism, Skepticism and Unhappy Consciousness
    Item type: Journal Article
    Särkelä, Arvi-Antti Erik (2015)
    Studies in Social and Political Thought
    This paper draws upon Hegel’s analysis of Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness as intellectual reactions to social pathology. He argues that, in Hegel’s view, the true and the false are held together in ideology by its being recognitively educational: ideology presents both a moment of social pathology and a moment of its overcoming. It gives, so to speak, artificial respiration for a social life fallen ill. The paper argues against two readings of these passages (as distinguished by Robert Stern). For the ‘historical materialist’ interpretation put forward by Alexandre Kojève, Stoicism, Skepticism and Unhappy Consciousness are treated as servile ‘ideologies’ and given a ‘purely socio-political rationale.’ The conceptual realist reading, by contrast, identifies a clear conceptual progress in these shapes as they bring self-consciousness forth from what initially appeared to be a dead-lock in the preceding relation of Lordship and Bondage. The paper argues that both readings are partly right and partly wrong: the conceptual realist gets it right that Stoicism, Skepticism and Unhappy Consciousness are indeed distinctively novel shapes of consciousness; the historical materialist correctly points out that Stoicism, Skepticism and Unhappy Consciousness are ideologies functionally sustaining the dead equilibrium of Lordship and Bondage. Both aspects can be reconciled by regarding ideology as productive and potentially educative. Ideology works not only to maintain the dead equilibrium of Lordship and Bondage, but also revives the organic means of overcoming it. Thereby this paper argues for the necessity of ideology-critique as a component of an inclusive diagnosis that understands social pathologies as systematic disturbances in the reproduction of characteristically social life.
  • Pathologies of Recognition: An Introduction
    Item type: Journal Article
    Laitinen, Arto; Särkelä, Arvi-Antti Erik; Ikäheimo, Heikki (2015)
    Studies in Social and Political Thought
    This paper is an introduction to the special issue on Pathologies of Recognition. The first subsection briefly introduces the notion of recognition and trace its development from Fichte and Hegel to Honneth and his critics, and the second subsection turns to the concept of a social pathology. The third section provides a brief look at the individual papers.
  • Pathologies of Recognition
    Item type: Journal Issue
    (2015)
    Studies in Social and Political Thought
  • Analysing Conceptions of Social Pathology: Eight Questions
    Item type: Journal Article
    Laitinen, Arto; Särkelä, Arvi-Antti Erik (2018)
    Studies in Social and Political Thought
    Axel Honneth has suggested that the task of social philosophy can be defined as the diagnosisand therapy of social pathologies. He has developed that view in various writings (Honneth2007, 2009, 2014a, 2014b; cf. Zurn 2011; Freyenhagen 2015). In these different writings, he has in fact defended different conceptions of social pathology, as we try to show elsewhere(cf. Särkelä & Laitinen, ms). In so doing he has nonetheless brought the notion of social pathology to the centre of interest for researchers interested in Frankfurt School Critical Theory or the philosophy of social criticism more generally. In this short paper, we suggest some central questions for analysing and comparing conceptions of social pathology, which could be thought to be useful for social philosophy, especially for the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Rival conceptions of socialpathology will give rival answers to these questions and the conceptions can be classifiedand compared with the help of these answers. Of course, any two conceptions can be compared in any of the details that either of them have, but our aim here is to map some of the central issues as stake in the philosophical discourse on social pathology. We discuss and compare in more detail four conceptions of social pathology with the help of these questions in Laitinen & Särkelä (2018) and in Honneth’s work in particular in Särkelä and Laitinen (2018). The questions we present in this paper are intended less as an a priori foranalysing conception of social pathology, than a potentially helpful a posteriori reflectionof the kind of questions one is confronted with when inquiring into the debate on social pathology. ’Pathology’ can mean both the science studying diseases and the object of inquiry, the disease itself. Unless otherwise indicated (as in subsection 7), we refer to the diseases themselves with ‘pathology’.
Publications 1 - 4 of 4