Introduction

1In this paper, I will focus on the fruitful theoretical relationship existing between the philosophical anthropology developed by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas in Social Action and Human Nature (1988 [1980]) and John Dewey’s naturalistic humanism. The key aim of this essay will be to consider their similar attempts to rely social criticism upon a naturalistic redefinition of the human being, emphasizing the strong critical potential that derives from such a theoretical strategy. On the other hand, I will point out the essential contribution that Dewey’s metaphysics of experience can bring to a naturalistic critical approach to the social world, as it overcomes some of the theoretical gaps in Honneth and Joas’ philosophical anthropology.

1. Human Action as the “Humanization of Nature”

Anthropology must not be understood as the theory of constants of human cultures persisting through history, or of an inalienable substance of human nature, but rather as an enquiry into the unchanging preconditions of human changeableness. […] Anthropology is a reflective step in the scrutiny of the suitableness of social-scientific theoretical frameworks that has become autonomous. (Honneth & Joas 1988: 7-8)

This is to be understood in three ways. First, the human being humanises nature; that is, he transforms it into what is life-serving for himself and thereby creates, in an interknitting of the transformation of nature and the development of the human personality which requires more exact clarification, the cultural shapings of his nature. Second, the human being humanises nature within himself in the course of the long civilising progress that has been engaged in by the human species. Lastly, the human being himself is a humanisation of nature, being an upstart out of the animal kingdom; in the human being, nature becomes humane. (Ibid.: 9-10)

1.1. “Sensuous Openness to the World” and “Intersubjectivity”

7The first philosopher to whom Honneth and Joas confer a central role for rethinking human activity is Ludwig Feuerbach, whose anthropological materialism, in sharp opposition with Hegelian Idealism, reassesses the fundamental ontological and epistemic primacy of the human being as a natural individual. Indeed, Feuerbach grounds his philosophical project on an anthropology whose primary subject matter is the human subject in its primary and more natural dimension: its being a sensuous and needy body. Honneth and Joas acknowledge the importance of Feuerbach’s theoretical shift within the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1986 [1843]):

The thinking ego […] is not just a thinking being, that indeed it could not even exist as such, if it were not first of all a corporeal ego endowed with needs. […] He [Feuerbach] primarily conceives of the relation of subject to object not as one effected through thought, but as one funded on and determined by need. […] Natural objects possess their own proper structures, which become experienceable as the resistance of objects in relation to the subject’s neediness. […] He rehabilitates sensuous pre-philosophical experience of the world not only as the foundation, but also as the medium and end of thought. (Honneth & Joas 1988: 14-5)

8According to Feuerbach, human individuals, like other animal organisms, are sensuous bodies with needs that are functional to their survival and directed toward the qualitative properties of the external environment that are necessary for their bodily reproduction and valuable for their well-being. The human being is part of nature, “as [the] being, by its essential nature, ‘open the world’” (ibid.: 15). However, for Feuerbach, human action distinguishes itself from other animals’ activity by the significant and meaningful quality that the human sensuous and bodily relation to the external world acquires. Human action is significant because of the subject’s correlation of the outer qualitative objects of need into meaningful, symbolic unities. The subject experiences the external sensuous object in its singular quality, but to idealize and universalize it in an object of knowledge, thus grasping the outer world’s qualitativeness in its underlying general structures. Therefore, in Feuerbach’s framework, the human processes of signification and cognition manifest in their functional dependence upon human sensuous neediness within nature. Indeed, the sensuous dimension of need represents both the material condition of human knowledge, as well as its medium and constitutive aim. Bodily experience appears as the real subject-matter and justification-ground of human knowledge, which aims at penetrating, explaining, and enriching the human qualitative exchange with the world.

9The second element of Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism Honneth and Joas agree with is the theoretical effort to explain the human being’s meaningful activity in its structural possibility. The development of rationality as a self-conscious activity, performed by subjects who perceive themselves as self-conscious beings that can extract intelligible objective properties from the external environment, needs a further explicative principle. As the human capability of reciprocally partaking in the experience of the other subject, intersubjectivity or recognition can adequately justify the process of self-individualization, the subjects’ sharing of objective meanings, and the development of knowledge as reached common agreement. Accordingly, Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism outlines a naturalistic conception of human intersubjectivity since the latter is returned in its emergence and functionality respectively to nature and the natural interaction between the subject and the external world.

It [the subject] becomes an ego only by means of its relation to others, that the very talk of an “I” is meaningless if it is not accompanied by the thought of a “you.” Hence, empirical, corporeal communities are prerequisite for all cognition. (Ibid.: 14)

11Furthermore, Honneth and Joas emphasize that for Feuerbach, this natural and embodied form of intersubjectivity has another essential function, not merely ontological but epistemological as well: it is “the precondition for sensuous certainty about the existence of objects but is also the criterion for the validity of all cognitive judgments whatsoever” (ibid.: 16). Indeed, human subjects’ reciprocal sensuous partaking in the experience of the other is the condition to gain a shared certainty about the existence of external objects and to reach a commonly agreed cognition and knowledge of the outer world, thus representing a function of the subjects’ sensuous and needy experience.

12Within Feuerbach’s anthropological project and critique of religious alienation in The Essence of Christianity (1957 [1841]) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1986 [1843]), Honneth and Joas detect a compelling guiding line for the critique of the social world.

The cognitive intent of this materialism is defetishisation: the attempt to explain all pseudo-nature, all forms of action and consciousness that have slipped away from human control and become autonomous, by tracing them back to need-guided structures of action. […] Thus, [Feuerbach] criticises religion less as a false or deficient form of human cognition, than as an illusory form of the satisfaction of human needs. (Honneth & Joas 1988: 18)

13By means of this anthropological materialism, Feuerbach can consider religion, specifically Christianity, as an object of critique since it represents a social and cultural institution that, once it had exhausted its functional role for the human being, developed an autonomous and reified stance for human societies. Religion advocates for the suppression and negation of the primary dimension of human beings, namely, their open-to-the-world sensuous dimension, turning into an “illusory form of the satisfaction of human needs.” As well as suppressing the dynamic creativity of human bodily sensuousness, religion also entails the dismission of the functional role of human thought and intersubjectivity, thus leading to a general pathological distortion of human action’s quality within nature.

14Continuing their analysis, Honneth and Joas then recover George H. Mead’s social psychology as the contemporary version of an empirical conception of human intersubjectivity. In Mind, Self and Society (2015 [1934]) and Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), Mead relates the emergence of human self-consciousness to the subject’s capacity of taking the perspective of the other, as the human being’s pre-verbal and verbal communication manifestly demonstrates. To act by shared symbolic gestures or linguistic meanings implies the assumption by the subject of the perspective of the other because by using meanings, the individual is one:

who affects himself as he affects another; who takes the attitude of another in so far as he affects the other, in so far as he is using what we term “intelligible speech”; who knows what he himself is saying, in so far as he is directing his indications by these significant symbols to others with the recognition that they have the same meaning for them as for him. (Mead 1936: 383)

16Lastly, Karl Marx is the third author that Honneth and Joas cover in the first section of Social Action and Human Nature. Although they stress the absence in the Marxian production of a theoretical clarification of the role of intersubjectivity for human activity, the two authors highlight Marx’s acknowledgment of the transformative and critical dimension of human praxis for the fulfillment of natural needs. Marx’s critique of Feuerbach in the Theses on Feuerbach (1976 [1845]) provides two fundamental contributions. First, Marx recognizes the historical and social dimension of human needs, in contrast to the abstract and a-historical analysis that Feuerbach outlines. In fact, human subjects are born within a pre-given social world, within specific historical and social conditions, and for this reason, “objects are practically constituted prior to their cognition. […] The things which the human being sensuously encounters, while indeed natural, are objects that have nevertheless always been ‘fashioned’ in some way and to some extent by human activity” (Honneth & Joas 1988: 19).

Marx understands the human being’s sensuous-cognitive capabilities as achievements that are integral to the process of the very activity which transforms nature. The human species, therefore, gains access to nature for itself only though praxis, by means of which it also emancipates itself from the dominion of nature, in socially organised work. (Honneth & Joas 1988: 20)

18Therefore, Marx brings to the fore the transformative significance of human activity, as practically changing the outer world for the intelligent satisfaction of human neediness. Nonetheless, the two authors also emphasize how, in his urgency to distance himself from Feuerbach’s aesthetic conception of human action, Marx ends up narrowing the transformative meaning of human activity to work, i.e., the material production of objects, and to the social re-appropriation by subjects of such an essential activity.

Marx, together with Engels, passes beyond Feuerbach’s conception of a contemplative anthropology that is limited to interhuman relations, for the benefit of a social theory that is systematically grounded in the co-operative reshaping of nature; in this radicalisation of Feuerbachian philosophy for the purpose of a theory of society, however, Marx robs it of part of its emancipatory power. Thus, the question can be asked regarding Marx’s transformation of Feuerbach’s notion of sensuousness into a concept of sensuous, objectual activity, whether in this transformation the aesthetic and contemplative dignity of “emancipatory sensuousness” is preserved […]. (Ibid.: 23)

19According to Honneth and Joas, an anthropological redefinition of human subjectivity’s exchange with the external world, with a retrieving of its transformative meaning, is needed, but without restricting this latter to work and productive activity. Thus, they conclude that a theory of human action should consider the human being’s capacity for transformation as occurring both through work and for the satisfaction of more material needs, as well as through a more general transformative action to fulfill more “spiritual” or “contemplative” needs.

1.2. The Structure of Human Action as a Criterion for Critically Analyzing the Social World

20By bringing together Feuerbach’s, Marx’s, and Mead’s reflections, Honneth and Joas consider human capability for sensuously directed meaningful activity in terms of a double process of humanization of nature and humanization of human nature itself. It is a process of humanization of nature because, thanks to human intersubjectivity, cognition and knowledge emerge as functions of natural experience, disclosing nature’s intrinsic intelligibility, cognitively unveiling its qualitative values, and practically ensuring them. Human cognition aims at idealizing nature, thus revealing the human being as a specific manifestation of nature, which reflexively and practically enriches it from within. Conversely, human action is a process of humanization of human nature itself because human experiential needs, thanks to intersubjective relations, can be cognitively processed, organized, implemented, and fulfilled through cooperative knowledge and coordinated activities.

21Hence, I want to draw four considerations with regards to Honneth and Joas’ attempt to identify the distinguishing quality of human action. Firstly, they conceive of the process of meaningful shaping of external and internal nature in transformative and dynamic terms. They retrieve, on the one hand, Marx’s notion of praxis, even if this should not be reduced only to work. On the other hand, they recover Feuerbach’s concept of “emancipatory bodily sensuousness,” namely, his insight on the human being’s passive, pre-reflexive, and affective relation to nature. The re-acknowledgment of the subject’s “powerful inner, drive-fraught nature, which is not fully determined by social history” (Honneth & Joas 1988: 23) permits to depict the social world as a fragile cognitive and practical organization of human contents, as being open to revision under discarding and dynamic human sensuousness. The relation between first nature – both external and internal nature – and second nature – the meaningful and cultural organization of it – is to be conceived as an ongoing and adjustive one, according to the emergence of new sensuous situations.

22Secondly, in Social Action and Human Nature, Honneth and Joas do not provide a conclusive theoretical account of human action that describes and integrates its transformative and deviational character more profoundly. Such descriptive and normative aspects are merely sketched. The two authors do not further supply the necessary ontological or metaphysical considerations that are needed to provide a conception of human action wherein, in the first place, “transformation” is not univocally reduced to work while being ulteriorly defined in its occurrence. And, wherein, moreover, the “discarding dynamism of human sensuousness” can receive a less abstract explanation by giving theoretical reason to the ongoing emergence of new situations.

24Finally, once the anthropological content of Honneth and Joas’ reflections has been grasped, it is possible to clarify their critical aim. To inquire about human beings’ capacity for action means to find a criterion for criticizing the descriptive and normative framework of social sciences and their content, e.g., social practices and institutions. Human societies are to become objects of criticism, in their categories, collective practices, and scientific-theoretical frameworks, as the meaningful process of transformation and re-definition of the social context for the fulfillment of human needs is obstructed, revealing a block within the intersubjective relations of recognition between social members. Following the social movements and struggles of the second half of the 20th century in Europe, such as the ecological struggle and the women’s movement, Honneth and Joas attempt to respond to the urgency to find a critical criterion apt to conceptually grasp the extensiveness of such social phenomena. In fact, these latter are not restricted merely to issues of social, economic, and political equality. Rather, they mostly point out the necessity of redefining qualitatively and intelligently the natural needs and values of European societies, in their complex objective conditionings, both natural and social.

The ecological, the counter-cultural and the women’s movements – despite all the differences among the various shades in the variegated spectrum of these oppositional strirrings – have in common at least a concern with themes having to do with nature: with external nature and a humane relationship to it, as well as with the inner nature of the human being and its humane development. (Honneth & Joas 1988: 1)

25In light of the redefinition of the human being’s relation to the external world and its recognitive structure, the critical capacity of such a criterion does not merely consist in diagnosing manifest cases of economic inequality, social exclusion, and lack of integration. Instead, it seeks to detect within historical social worlds when social practices and institutions get static, fixed, and dysfunctional, namely, resistant to transformation, turning into presumed natural phenomena that are ideologically eradicated from the need-structure of human subjectivity. The ontological structure of human action represents a critical criterion for enhancing the meaningful fulfillment of human needs and the re-definition on the social level of social meanings, categories, social practices, and institutions through the pre-reflexive and sensuous experience of social members.

26In conclusion, in Social Action and Human Nature, there are original insights on social criticism. Nevertheless, Honneth and Joas leave their analysis deprived of a deeper systematization suitable to explore, from a naturalistic point of view, the transformative meaning and intrinsic dynamism of human action for the aim of social criticism. In the next section, I want to argue that John Dewey’s naturalistic humanism can be a useful starting point to further ground a critical path relying on a naturalistic redefinition of human subjectivity.

2. Dewey’s Naturalistic Humanism, Its Metaphysical Premises, and Its Critical Aim

2.1. The Place of the Human Organism in Nature

[The human being] domesticates the exercise of intelligence within nature. […] But the possibility is realized not by a mind thinking about it from without but by operations conducted from within, operations which give it new relations summed up in production of a new individual object. […] We return […] to experience of them [objects] with added meaning and with increased power to regulate our relations to them. (LW.4.171-5; emphasis mine)

29Like in Honneth and Joas’ account, according to Dewey, human action is capacity for meaningful and transformative activity within nature, and the justification of such a naturalistic conception follows a quite similar logic. The human being is, first of all, an animal organism, which Dewey defines in Experience and Nature (1981 [1925]) in terms of “the conjunctive presence in activity of need-demand-satisfaction […], [whose] selective bias in interactions with environing things is exercised so as to maintain itself” (LW.1.196). As an animal organism, the human being is involved in a sensuous and transformative intercourse with the valuable objective properties of the external environment to fulfill the needs for its self-reproduction. Thus, the human being is “sensuously open to the world,” to use Honneth and Joas’ expression. It is elicited and directed towards objects or situations having some sensuous value for its well-being, representing something of itself, of which it is objectively deficient, entailing a disruption of energies, an absence of adequate adjustment with the external world, a situation of lack and unsatisfaction.

Every need, say hunger for fresh air or food, is a lack that denotes at least a temporary absence of adequate adjustment with surroundings. But it is also a demand, a reaching out into the environment to make good the lack and to restore adjustment by building at least a temporary equilibrium. (LW.10.19)

30According to Dewey, any organism, for the fulfillment of its needs, behaves and transforms the external environment. “In the interests of the maintenance of life there is transformation of some elements in the surrounding medium. The higher the form of life, the more important is the active reconstruction of the medium” (MW.12.128). Behavior and transformation, therefore, are uniform and continuous aspects or traits of organic life as such.

31However, for Dewey, what distinguishes the sensuous human intercourse with nature lies in the subject’s greater capability to let life grow. “If [the organism’s] activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives” (LW.10.20). According to Dewey, thanks to its cognitive capacities, i.e., signification and knowledge, the subject can perceive the objective qualities that are valuable for its well-being not only as something to be contingently enjoyed, but rather as “something to be accomplished, to be brought about” (LW.1.33). That is, the subject’s perception of outer objective qualities does not merely entail the impulsive enactment of instinctive transformative reactions. On the contrary, the human being can know and value the qualities of which it is deficient in their underlying relations, namely, in the objective conditions that regulate and stabilize their occurrence.

Values are values, things immediately having certain intrinsic qualities. […] When thought and discussion enter, when theorizing sets in, when there is anything beyond bare immediate enjoyment and suffering, it is the means-consequence relationship that is considered. Thought goes beyond immediate existence to its relationships, the conditions which mediate it and the things to which it is in turn mediatory. (LW.1.297)

Even in etymology [interest] indicates something in which both a person and surrounding conditions participate in intimate connection with one another. In naming this something that occurs between them it names a transaction. It points to an activity which takes effect through the mediation of external conditions. (LW.13.205-6)

33Therefore, we can see that, like Honneth and Joas, Dewey also conceives of human activity as including two complementary processes. Firstly, it is an idealization or humanization of the external world, which is unveiled and discovered in the constitutive intelligibility running through its natural and social phenomena. Secondly, it is a humanization of human nature itself, since the subject can fulfill its immediate and pressing needs significantly and stably. Nonetheless, in Dewey, we can find a more systematic explanation of the transformative and creative meaning of human activity than in Social Action and Human Nature, at least under three main aspects.

35Secondly, as evident in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1982 [1920]), Dewey clearly overcomes any dualistic distinction between material and spiritual values, considering both as depending on objective conditions to be realized. For Dewey, it is necessary to “do away once for all with the traditional distinction between moral goods, like the virtues, and natural goods like health, economic security, art, science and the like” (MW.12.178), since they both deserve idealization (valuation) and transformation (change of objective and material conditions). All the objective qualities or values, also the more aesthetic or spiritual ones, perceived and publicly needed by subjects, are amenable to intelligent valuation of the transformative means suitable to enhance them. They are “capable of idealization, and […] they must acquire ideal and intrinsic value. Esthetic, religious and other ‘ideal’ ends are now thin and meagre or else idle and luxurious because of the separation from ‘instrumental’ or economic ends” (ibid.). As all values – from happiness, communication, religion, and investigation, to security, health, and reproduction – are always “subjective” and “objective,” i.e., perceived by the subject and mediated in their content and conditions of occurrence by the outer world, human activity, in its distinguishing quality, cannot be essentially equated with work. Rather, it should be identified with all the organizational activities embedding an intelligent valuation of the means-ends-consequences for the liberation of needy human experience and the expansion of the ontological unity between the outer world and the human being.

We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of sufficiencies, tight completeness, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally […]. The striving to make stability of meaning prevail over instability of events is the main task of intelligent human effort. (LW.1.47-9)

37Following the new processual metaphysics rising from modern science and evolutionism, according to Dewey, the world in which we live is a mixture of contingencies and order since life is a process resulting from ongoing interacting parts, which entail reciprocal transactions and transformations and, thus, new interactions and changes. Consequently, the human being’s sensuous experience of objective qualities is, on the one hand, always specific and unique, according to the objective conditions that, in a particular situation, mediates the occurrence of the demanded quality. It follows that the interests, i.e., the ends-in-view and their consequent chain of means and transformations, to be realized for the significant fulfillment of the subject’s needs are never the same. Rather, they should be valued immanently and always imply a specific organized activity seeking intelligent transformations.

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. And consequently, judgments as to acts to be performed must be similarly specific. To say that a man seeks health or justice is only to say that he seeks to live healthily or justly. These things […] are adverbial. They are modifiers of action in special cases. (MW.12.175)

38On the other hand, human experience is projective. Due to the process of life and changing situations, needy experience always entails some emotional, cognitive, and practical deviation from previous experiences, namely, a degree of creativity and change. “The end is no longer a terminus or a limit to be reached. It is the active process of transforming the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim in living” (MW.12.181). In this sense, according to Dewey, sensuousness is truly emancipatory and creative. Finally, due to the specificity and projectivity of human experience, Dewey also concludes that any attempt to provide a hierarchy of human needs, values, and interests is but a negation of the creativity of nature and life. Every need can be equally pressing in particular situations, and, respectively, it can turn into an instrument to fulfill other needs. Any classificatory enterprise forgets that “to think of objects as more or less ends is nonsense” for “they either have immediate and terminal quality, or do they not: quality as such is absolute not comparative” (LW.1.89).

39Thus, we can see how Dewey, thanks to his naturalistic metaphysics of existence and human experience, describes and justifies systematically and in more depth the transformative and creative dimension of human action than the framework of Honneth and Joas. In fact, he is able to theoretically ground and integrate the objective uniformity, situationalism, projectivity, and non-hierarchy of human needs, values, and interests, with the final aim of criticizing the social world.

2.2. Recognition and the Critique of the Social World

40Dewey’s naturalistic theorization of the human being’s capacity for action has a clear critical function. In light of this anthropological analysis, philosophy is eminently critical since:

Its primary concern is to clarify, liberate and extend goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of experience. It has no call to create a world of “reality” de novo […]. Its business is to accept and to utilize for a purpose the best available knowledge of its own time and place. And this purpose is criticism of beliefs, institutions, customs, policies with respect to their bearing upon good. (LW.1.305)

41The redefinition of the human being’s capacity for action represents, for Dewey, a “ground-map of the province of criticism” (LW.1.309), a chart for everyday reflection on social practices and social institutions and a reflexive tool for any descriptive or normative theory about the social and natural world, from economics to physical sciences, to ethics, aesthetics, and political and social theories. Social reality must be analyzed and, if necessary, criticized and intelligently transformed according to the quality of the human being’s activity. It must be considered in its aptness to improve it, by assuring in its structure and organization the fulfillment of shared interests.

42Dewey’s employment of his naturalistic anthropology for social criticism does not refer to the social world in terms of a secondary and exterior element, namely, as an additional dimension with respect to natural individuality. On the contrary, the social world can become an object of critique because it is a constitutive or structural element for the true realization of the human being’s capacity for action. In fact, human action relies upon a specific kind of association or social relationship, that of recognition.

• 19 Although Psychology has been contested (see Westbrook 1991: 14-28) for its strong Hegelian metaphys (...)

He [the subject] can truly develop himself only in self-conscious activity, in personality, and this is impossible without relations to other persons. […] It is hardly conceivable that he should ever become a being capable of knowing objects, and of enjoying beauty, without the aid and stimulus given by others. (EW.2.281)19

43Within Dewey’s framework, human action turns out to be dependent on the recognition of other subjects in at least two senses, which resemblance the minimal naturalistic conception of recognition that Honneth and Joas pointed out. The first function of intersubjective relations is eminently genetic, for they mediate the reciprocal self-individualization of subjects as embodied rational individuals. In one of his first works, Dewey considers the feeling of other subjects as the necessary condition for the individual’s self-individualization:

There can be no egoistic feelings except as the self is distinguished from others and set over against them; there can be no altruistic feelings, except as others are recognized in their relations to self, and compared with it. Our first feelings are not personal, in the sense of egoistic. […] They become personal only as they are referred to persons; and they cannot be referred to the ego, except as the ego is compared, consciously or unconsciously, with others, and preferred before them; they cannot become altruistic except as others are compared with the immediate claims of the ego. (EW.2.281-2)

44The emergence of the subject’s practical self-identity is based on a mechanism of reciprocal decentralization with the other, which consists both in a projective and distinguishing process.

45Secondly, Dewey identifies a second and normative level of intersubjectivity, to which he refers through the concepts of “sympathy,” “participation” or “recognition.” This level of intersubjectivity does not merely permit, from a genetic point of view, the reciprocal self-individualization of subjects. Instead, it stands for the reciprocal normative participation or engagement in the experience of the other subject as “significant,” as worthy of interest in its qualitative and potentially creative sensuousness, as valuable to be understood through shared practical meanings and cooperative knowledge, and relevant to be enhanced practically through shared and concerted action. The experience of the subject is “significant” because it expresses evaluative claims towards objective properties of the external world that are valuable for its well-being and because it is always the “sign for something else” (LW.1: ch. 5), to be discovered and analyzed. Only within this normative intersubjective level can the human processes of signification and cognition be truly performed and realized in their naturalistic meaning, since they are intrinsically social processes. Knowledge and signification of the world’s qualities and values can be effectively reached through the cooperative investigation and common agreement among subjects, and the transformation of the external environment can functionally occur only through social conjoint actions.

[…] The mental is empirically discernible only where association is manifested in the form of participation and communication. […] the ulterior meaning of the mental as well as of the physical and the vital is revealed in this form of associational interaction. The implication is not that they have not describable existence outside the social, but that in so far as they appear and operate outside of that large interaction which forms the social they do not reveal that full force and import with which it is the traditional business of philosophy to occupy itself. (LW.3.49; italics mine)

46Other subjects’ participation or engagement in the needy experience of the individual, thus, is a constitutive element for the realization of the human being’s capacity for action. This participation should occur, first, on an emotional level. With “sympathy” Dewey refers to the feeling of “having interest” in the other subject, thus resulting from:

• 20 See also Dewey’s use of the concept in EW.3. Herein, the concept of sympathy is used as the key cat (...)

[…] the identification of one’s self with another […] In sympathy we take the feelings of another for our own. […] Sympathy, in short, is the reproduction of the experience of another, accompanied by the recognition of the fact that it is his experience. […]We must not only take their life into ours, but we must put ours into them. Sympathy, as active interest, thus becomes love and a spring to action […]. (EW.2.283-5)20

47Hence, for Dewey, “sympathy” is an affective engagement in the feelings of others and the condition for an active partaking in developing their feelings in objective interests from a cognitive and practical point of view. By recovering the distinction between “feeling” and “interest” previously examined, “having interest” in others means to actively cooperate for transforming social members’ qualitative experience into adequate objective interests. The subject’s immediate experience must be cooperatively transformed into a hypothetical object, it must be grasped in its circumstantial intelligible relations, and, therefore, practically enhanced and mastered. To treat a thing as “the sign for something else,” i.e., as having a meaning, means to treat it as “something literally made common in at least two different centres of behaviour. To understand is to anticipate together, is to make a cross-reference which, when acted upon, brings about a partaking in a common, inclusive undertaking” (LW.1.141). Thus, the sensuous, cognitive, and practical partaking of other subjects in the individual’s qualitative intercourse with objective values is the performative condition for the process of idealization and expression of human experience through shared meanings, cooperative knowledge, and concerted transformative actions.

Conclusions

49The aim of the essay was to unveil the living bond existing between Honneth and Joas’ project of Social Action and Human Nature and Dewey’s naturalistic humanism. Firstly, I have pointed out the similar attempts of the authors to provide a naturalistic analysis of the category of human action for employing it as a criterion for the criticism of the social world and its scientific frameworks. In both cases, the distinctive quality of human action has been defined in terms of the meaningful elaboration and practical enhancement of the values that emerge within the ongoing experiential exchange between the human subject and the external world.

50Secondly, I have underlined the two main theoretical contributions that a naturalistic anthropology can bring to the critique of the social world. On the one hand, I have stressed how, in these two naturalistic frameworks, recognition among subjects is considered as emerging from nature while having a constitutive function for the quality of the human being’s activity. On the other hand, I have argued that a naturalistic analysis of human action’s minimal structure discloses a strong critical potential. In fact, besides manifest cases of political, economic, and social inequality, it permits the diagnoses of a broad range of pathological social situations. For instance, moments wherein social subjects are impeded from meaningfully and transformatively fulfilling their needs, situations of social stagnation, fixity, bareness, and presumed naturalness of social practices and institutions can gain critical attention.

51Thirdly, I have identified some theoretical shortcomings in Honneth and Joas’ theoretical framework. I have argued that the opening of a critical path from a naturalistic redefinition of the human being deserves a systematic analysis and justification of the descriptive and normative aspects of human action, i.e., its creative and transformative meaning, and that Dewey’s naturalistic humanism provides in this sense important theoretical tools. His metaphysics of life and human experience can be of help for considering as pathological social contexts wherein the material or spiritual needs of social members are not significantly fulfilled in their particular occurrences or multiplicity, or are not acknowledged in their living dynamics, while unveiling the inadequate recognitive relationships among social groups. To maintain and develop Honneth and Joas’ insight on the fact that human societies can become pathological when they reveal a weakening of social relations of recognition in adequately processing social members’ dynamic experiences, a revival of Dewey is a fundamental point of departure. Thus, with Dewey, a path for a naturalistic critical project, combining both a reflection on human activity’s natural distinctiveness and its recognitive structure, can be further developed.