Grounding social criticism: from understanding to suffering and back

Abstract

This paper critically examines John Dewey’s and Axel Honneth’s critical social philosophies in order to highlight two different normative sources of social struggle: scientific understanding and social suffering. The paper discusses the relations of these sources with each other and aims to show to what extent the normative sources of Dewey’s and Honneth’s critical social theories are compatible. The comparison between Dewey and Honneth is used in order to argue for a desiderata for critical social ontology. The argument is that we want to consistently include both elements – suffering and understanding – in a critical theory as only by having both will critical theory grant a clear enough direction and good enough motivational normative core for a social struggle.