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Boundedness beyond reification: cosmopolitan teacher education as critique

Certain strands of cosmopolitanism have been criticized on various occasions for merely mirroring the mental framework of a global elite that stresses positive attitudes to mobility, flexibility, and disinterested objective detachment to the detriment of ‘rooted’, local and national values.1 In this way, it is argued, it presents a one-sided opportunistic or naively affirmative picture of processes of globalization rather than taking seriously the challenges posed by the inherently normative dimension of cosmopolitan thought and practice.2 The present paper will argue for a return to the critical core of the cosmopolitan idea and proposes that the critique of reification, which recently received renewed interest by philosophers of the so-called third generation Frankfurt School, can serve as a vital tool for re-imagining cosmopolitan teacher education as critique. In particular, the discussion around the recent turn towards a standards and competencies oriented teacher education in Germany will be critically examined in this regard. Rather than presenting a mere factual description of our thinking, judgments and actions, a cosmopolitan orientation should be concerned with reminding us of the importance of a continuous critical challenge of their validity. Firstly, the concept of reification will be shown to provide the conceptual resources to describe and select relevant characteristics of contemporary social pathologies that cannot be adequately captured within liberal social philosophies. A closer analysis of reification as a deficient relation to oneself, to others, or to the world will then lead to the second question of how to conceive of non-reifying forms of relatedness, commitment and boundedness as enabling new forms of expressive freedom. Instead of one-sided, narrow and hasty reactions towards a perceived ‘global challenge’—either fetishizing borders or their transgression, an critical educational cosmopolitanism should bring into focus how educational institutions such as teacher education can provide, strengthen, and enhance the conditions for binding ourselves as citizens of the world in non-reifying ways.


INTRODUCTION: COSMOPOLITANISM AS CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION
Since the 'cosmopolitan turn' 3 reached the discipline of education, several battle lines have been opened in the discourse. One of the major controversies, which emerged in this process, spins around the dichotomy between 'an abstract cosmopolitanism from above and a rooted cosmopolitanism from below'. 4 The charge often implicit against the cosmopolitanism in the 'abstract' reading is that it has an implicit, or hidden agenda that emphasizes the economic challenges and opportunities that progressive globalization presents us with and promotes positive attitudes to mobility, flexibility, and a disinterested objective detachment to the detriment of 'rooted' ethical attachments to local and national cultural values. Cosmopolitanism understood in this sense then seems to be all about breaking away from traditional affiliations and detaching oneself from norms in order to enjoy more freely 'a style of life' which allows one to 'incorporate the manners, habits, languages, and social customs of cities throughout the world' like a 'parasite, who depends upon the quotidian lives of others to create the various local flavors and identities in which he dabbles'. 5 Even if this somewhat antiquated conservative criticism of the cosmopolitan attitude might seem hyperbolic from today's perspective, some of the worry still remains. However, if authors worry that cosmopolitanism has 'more in common with partners in Manhattan, London, Singapore or Hong Kong than with locals or nationals that are not plugged into a network of global connectedness', 6 this does not mean that we should give up on the cosmopolitan ideal in my view. Rather, I believe it requires the new cosmopolitanism to take serious enough the challenges posed by the inherently normative dimension of cosmopolitan thought. 7 With regard to teacher education, the mentioned charges require a critical re-assessment of why a cosmopolitan orientation is not exhausted by a merely economically inspired reaction to the new global connectedness and its perceived demands on education. A more fully-fledged moral and political cosmopolitanism in teacher education entails not only to elaborate an ideal with convincing normative arguments, but it should also provide the descriptive and explanatory means to pick out, sustain and enhance those forms of inter-subjective relations, self-relations, and relations to the world without which educational practices succumb to severe pathological tendencies in times of an ever faster globalizing world.
The present paper will argue that the critical dimension of cosmopolitan thought should be brought to the fore, and it is suggested that the critique of reification, which recently received renewed interest by philosophers of the so-called third generation Frankfurt School, 8 can serve as a vital tool for finding a solution to the rootedness vs. rootlessness debate in cosmopolitan theory which lies square to the established dichotomy and allows to articulate a critical approach to cosmopolitan teacher education. The argument proceeds in three steps. In order to explore the possibilities of approaching an updated understanding of Lukács' reification theorem and its potential for clarifying the structural outlook of the educational discourse on cosmopolitanism, I will first recall Lukács' development of the notion of reification as C. Schumann a generalizing transformation of Marx' analysis of 'commodity fetishism' with a particular focus on possible deficits and its applicability for societal circumstances of today. After this short historical excursus, I will look more specifically at the two recent approaches to reification by Demmerling and Honneth, who try to revive the notion for contemporary philosophical discussion. Reification will be explained as a second-order process of forgetting a primary recognition or meaning-constitutive context, which leads to severe pathologies on a socio-ontological level, beyond being a merely moral failure or epistemic mistake. Understood in terms of an appropriated critique of reification, cosmopolitanism is then critically directed towards problematic reifications of universals as well as particulars and promotes non-reifying forms of responsive and responsible boundedness. Such a conceptualization, it will be argued in the final part of the paper, can contribute to an explanation for many of the specific normative failures characteristic of today's educational institutions and practices as they are trying to meet global challenges. It can also provide the conceptual tools for a normative re-orientation of what cosmopolitan teacher education should imply in terms of taking the normative and critical dimension of cosmopolitanism seriously within the ongoing reforms of teacher education in Germany.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION IN MARX AND LUKÁ CS
Extending his analyses of the alienating character of labor in early industrial liberalism, Marx introduces 'commodity fetishism' and objectification in his later work as categories which are both critical of certain forms of epistemology as well as ideology. The capitalist mode of production, according to Marx, leads to a re-interpretation of social conditions as natural qualities of things. In particular, the commodity*insofar as it is not only the material product of the labor process, but also has an exchange value*transforms into a 'sinnlich ü bersinnliches Ding'. 9 The strong advantage of Marx' narrow focus on the economic conception of labor lies in the precision of the definition of his critique of alienation and reification, although only for the price of reducing human practice to instrumental action. By uniting Marx' criticism of capitalism with central motifs of the theories of Max Weber and Georg Simmel in a comprehensive theory of reification in the core part of the essay collection Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1925), Georg Lukács extends Marx' perspective significantly in a way that is essential for its adaptability to today's discussion as it allows for a multidimensional and thus a more adequate description of modern societies. On the one hand, it is due to the functional logic of expanding capitalism itself that not only the economic sphere, but also other societal spheres are penetrated by the commodity logic. On the other hand, the process of rationalization itself contributes to the spreading of instrumental thought and action into the social realm.
Objectively, the process of rationalization merely leads to a subdivision of the total production process into continuously smaller production steps for each worker.

Boundedness beyond reification
However, from the subjective perspective of the wageworker, this leads to the own work process becoming less and less transparent for the worker while 'the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system'. 10 This attitude not only affects the realm of labor, but spreads to all other realms of life. As Lukács critic Dannemann describes, the basic structure of reification is given a concrete shape in the description of the wageworker, but Lukács is furthermore trying to show in which ways exactly rational production succeeds in shaping all societal institutions through and through. 11 Once the commodity has become the 'universal category of society as a whole', 12 the dominant, reifying 'modes of thought' 13 will also appear outside the realm of the exchange of goods because the commodity and with it the processes of rationalization and calculability will permeate all spheres of life. Interestingly, Lukács' analyses not only include a discussion of concrete examples of the spread of reifying structures in the media, in modern bureaucracy, and modern law, but he also employs the notion of reification for a critique of science and philosophy if they misunderstand their own conceptualizations and differentiations in substantialist ways and as fixed in unalterable dualisms. 14 Lukács, however, remains true to Marx insofar as he presupposes the social determination of thought and does not conceptualize a dialectic interaction between the conceptual and the practical level. His model of non-reifying human practice is still informed by the revolutionary optimism of the twenties and tightly connected with his theory of class-consciousness, locating the primary potential for non-reifying forms of life in a Utopian revolutionary practice. 15 On a theoretical level, this ties in with a problematic idealism, which follows Fichte's primacy of the practical in overdetermining the role of the subjective action of the species in generating the objective world. Furthermore, he adheres to the Marxist premise of the social determination of the form of thought, which is problematic insofar as it cannot capture the dialectic relationship of language and language external practice. 16 In this way, his theory remains unable to bring into focus phenomena of reification which can develop under the influence of ideologies. In this context, it has to be further clarified to which extent economy can indeed be assigned such an influential role for the whole of social practices as it appears in Lukács' work. Particularly with regard to presentday challenges, we can ask with Habermas whether Lukács' model of reification can really do justice to the complexity of modern societies and to which extent reifying, objectifying or instrumental approaches might have a legitimate place within some societal spheres. 17 The two theories discussed in the following undertake to revive Lukács' theory of reification while avoiding these problematic aspects and rejuvenating it for contemporary critical social philosophy. Yet, Honneth's and Demmerling's theories both share with Lukács that their appropriated conceptions of reification neither demarcate a mere cognitive error on an epistemological level, nor merely pick out a certain moral failure, but are situated at a prior, socio-ontological level. If reification constituted a mere epistemic mistake, it could easily be corrected by just demonstrating the misperception. In the sense of moral failure, the notion of C. Schumann reification has recently gained renewed interest in the work of Martha Nussbaum 18 and also in the critical debates following the emergence of neuro-physiological explanations of human action, thought and emotion. However, when Lukács examines the reifying modes of thought that have become second nature, the phenomenon of reification poses a more complex challenge and concerns processes that occur on a deeper, more fundamental level. They can be described on a socialÁontological or philosophicalÁanthropological level as distorted forms of the whole of human practice. Only after analyzing the problematic reifications and its consequences on this level, can we derive normative implications in a second step.
Before I turn to the appropriated conceptions by Honneth and Demmerling, it remains to discuss what could motivate a discussion of Lukács' theory of reification in connection with a contemporary design of a cosmopolitan teacher education. In some ways, employing a Marxist concept in order to work out an approach to cosmopolitanism as suggested here might seem counter-intuitive. The term 'cosmopolitan' was frequently used by Marx and Engels in close connection with the devastating consequences of globalizing capitalism and the bourgeois ideology of 'free trade', 19 and it infamously became a powerful and dangerous term for political denunciation under Stalin, even being directed against Lukács himself. On the other hand, however, the focus on the common experiences and interests of the workers*independent of their nationality, as well as 'the ideal of the class-less society and the expected withering away of the state after the revolution' 20 might be interpreted as in itself suggesting a different form of cosmopolitanism. As Michael Löwy shows in his careful study of the early writings of Marx and Engels (1845Á1848), it is not true that 'Marxism has nothing in common with cosmopolitanism'. 21 Marx is indeed highly critical of the sort of pseudo-cosmopolitanism which serves to declare the ideals and hegemonic interests of one nation, one social class, or one cultural group as universal and absorb all others into it. Nevertheless, Löwy emphasizes, 'the idea of a cosmopolis, a universal city going beyond national frontiers, is to be found at the heart of the reflections of Marx and Engels on the national question in this period'. 22 But in this form, cosmopolitanism should not serve the hegemonic interests of one national or societal group; rather it implies a 'projection of a world city, a universal Gemeinschaft, in which not only national antagonisms and conflicts will disappear but also the economic, social and political (but not cultural) differences between nations'. 23 While the idea of cosmopolitanism as a realization of a 'class-less and stateless society' 24 based on the hope for an international revolutionary upheaval by united proletarians is not a timely and feasible theoretical option any longer, I still want to defend that understanding cosmopolitanism in terms of a critique of reification can help to capture the important difference Löwy finds in Marx' and Engels' writings between a 'pseudo-cosmopolitanism', 25 which promotes nothing but the universal hegemonic rule of one privileged group of people or nations, and a 'genuine cosmopolitanism' 26 which is closer to what I believe Diogenes originally meant to say with his famous response: 'I am a citizen of the world'. 27 In the view I wish to put forth, Diogenes did not wish to affirm another substantive, cosmopolitan identity Boundedness beyond reification instead of the then customary way of determining one's own identity in close connection to one's native polis. Rather, the declaration should be read as resisting an acknowledgment of conventional identifications with a critical and emancipatory intent. 28 In this way, Diogenes accomplishes with his statement something which Emerson would have called an aversion to conformity. 29 This aversion aims at a critique of certain norms or standards, which he perceived as inadequate because they had become reified*thus stifling rather than enabling creative human activity. Cosmopolitanism in terms of a critique of reification is not about preaching the abandonment of all bonds and boundaries, merely trying to conceal the universal imposition of the special interests of some to the detriment of others, but about criticizing bonds and boundaries which lead to reifying distortions of the whole of human practice, and about the enhancement of non-reifying forms of boundedness. For an orientation of teacher education in times of ever intensifying global connectedness to become cosmopolitan in the genuine sense, one has to be aware of the dangers of falling into a pseudo-cosmopolitanism in the sense outlined by Löwy. I will argue in the following that this difference can be rendered meaningful by connecting the ideal of cosmopolitanism with an appropriated critique of reification.

REIFICATION AS FORGETFULNESS OF RECOGNITION
Already in his earlier work, in place of Habermas' focus on undistorted structures of human communication the well-known representative of the so-called third generation of the Frankfurt School Axel Honneth looked at the impediments to full interpersonal recognition and at the real-life subjective experiences of humiliation for the standard and normative criteria on which to ground his social critique. In contrast to justice and democracy oriented approaches dominating social philosophy, Honneth stresses that there can be normative failures of societies which cannot be adequately captured in the majority of liberal social philosophies since certain societal developments can lead to social pathologies which might be undesirable beyond questions of justice. In order to make these pathologies visible, theory has to turn to the particular, the contextual, and substantive instead of merely proceduralist principles. Of course, this approach was met with criticism from other thirdgeneration theorists, who remain closer to Habermas. Nancy Fraser, for example, criticized that 'To stress the victim's subjective feelings of injury is to endanger the possibility of a democratic adjudication of justice claims'. 30 However, I think that it can be argued that Honneth's analyses are more comprehensive than justice oriented approaches in that they allow for an articulation of those pathologies of contemporary capitalism that affect people beyond the unjust distribution of goods that it causes. Furthermore, I believe that his theories are particularly beneficial for philosophy of education insofar as his notion of recognition as well as his theory of reification differ significantly from more widely spread merely moralistic notions of recognition or respect as criticized by Papastephanou. 31 Even if Honneth's analyses C. Schumann start with very subjective experiences and struggles for recognition, his social criticism does not end there, but instead puts equal emphasis on recognition in the legal realm in his earlier theories already.
In his 2005 Tanner Lectures on reification, 32 Honneth put forth an interpretation of Lukács' theory of reification, which tries to revive key ideas and show their productivity for analyzing contemporary society. Honneth suggests a recognition theoretic interpretation, which understands reification as a second order process, as a specific forgetfulness of a primary form of recognition. Honneth's interpretation of the notion of reification takes Lukács' analysis of the contemplative, disinterested attitude of the wageworker towards himself and his own work as a starting point. Instead of the 'official' idealistic line, Honneth points to some more moderate passages that he finds interesting in Lukács where the praxis that is destroyed through commodity exchange is described in terms of 'empathetic engagement' or 'interestedness'. 33 The way in which commodity exchange affects human relations is not just by reifying situational elements, but also by compelling 'subjects [ . . .] to behave as detached observers, rather than as active participants in social life'. 34 He argues that it is in this contemplative attitude, which spreads from the realm of work to all other societal realms, as Lukács shows, that we forget the primacy of recognition over cognition, i.e. the genetic and categorical primacy of a compassionate and interested involvement with the world over the neutral observation of objective reality. The form of recognition Honneth appeals to in this context must not be confounded with the forms of recognition he outlines in his Struggle for Recognition. 35 The form of recognition that is being forgotten in modes of reifying thought is situated at a more fundamental level as becomes obvious with the authors who Honneth draws on in order to elucidate his notion. Building on Heidegger's notion of 'care', Dewey's notion of 'involvement', and Cavell's notion of 'acknowledgment', Honneth's conception of recognition aims at 'a wholly elementary form of intersubjective activity, but one that does not yet imply the perception of the specific value of another person'. 36 This form of recognition 'lies below the threshold at which that particular form of mutual recognition takes place in which the other person's specific characteristics are affirmed'. 37 However, in contrast to Lukács, Honneth is very careful not to classify all forms of objectification of our thought as reification. Rather, it is only 'at the moment in which our reflexive efforts lose consciousness of their origin in an act of antecedent recognition that we cross the threshold to pathology, skepticism, or*as Adorno would have called it*identity thought'. 38 Reification as the forgetfulness of recognition thus specifically means that 'we lose the ability to understand immediately the behavioral expressions of other persons as making claims on us.
[ . . .] Indeed, we may be capable in a cognitive sense of perceiving the full spectrum of human expressions, but we lack, so to speak, the feeling of connection that would be necessary for us to be affected by the expressions we perceive'. 39 In the course of his analysis, Honneth then extends his thesis of reification as forgetfulness of recognition from inter-subjective reification processes to the reification of our natural surroundings and of ourselves. In order to characterize the Boundedness beyond reification structure of the reification of our natural surroundings, he draws on Adorno's analyses again. The primary inter-subjective recognition includes, as he tries to show, a respect of the subjective meaning aspects that fellow humans attach to specific natural objects so that reifying these objects consists in a forgetfulness of these existential aspects of meaning, which others associate with them. As for the third form of reifying self-relations, these can take two basic shapes. The primary expressivist character of our own emotions, attitudes and desires can be distorted in a cognitivist way if we understand them as things that merely have to be 'detected' and then put to use in a socially useful way. But they can also be distorted in a constitutivist way if we understand them as something to be created at will in order to fit societal functions. In these self-reifying modes, we forget the primary recognition of our own desires, emotions, and intentions in the sense of forgetfulness about their being worthy of an explorative appropriation and expression, which allows for the development of a self-relation to begin with.
With regard to developing a cosmopolitan orientation in teacher education, Honneth's recognitionÁtheoretic delineation of inter-subjective reifications, reifications of the natural world, and of self-reifications could be put to work in the following way. By impeding our 'ability to immediately understand the behavioral expressions of other persons as making claims on us', 40 processes of reification lead to a forgetfulness about the primary, fundamental form of recognition, which could provide the basis for a cosmopolitan orientation. This primary form of recognition is not aimed at the recognition of particular characteristics of other persons, but it operates on a more fundamental level and is accorded to everybody under omission of specific individual characteristics. In this sense it can be described as constituting a precondition for any moral and political cosmopolitanism. A cosmopolitan teacher education should, therefore, first and foremost be concerned with a critique of those structural conditions which lead to inter-subjective reifications, self-reifications, as well as the reifications of the natural world.
After looking at the different forms that reification can take, I would like to turn to the origin and social causes of reification that Honneth names. The first and most general origin Honneth mentions is that the processes, which allow for and facilitate the purpose of observing and cognizing our surroundings, can become independent of the context in which they originated. 41 Secondly, however, Honneth importantly sees that also 'series of thought schemata' may lead to 'a selective interpretation of social facts' and 'significantly reduce our attentiveness for meaningful circumstances in a given situation'. 42 In this way, his approach is capable of incorporating ideological causes of reification which*by way of a more or less radical*de-contextualization and fixating of thought schemata give rise to reification in the sense of a total forgetfulness of prior, and meaningÁconstitutive recognitional structures. In response to the criticisms by Butler, Geuss and Lear, Honneth further specifies 'a certain kind of lasting, routine praxis' 43 as the social cause of reification: 'Subjects can forget or learn later to deny the elementary recognition that they generally grant to every other human being, if they continuously contribute to a highly one-sided form of praxis that necessitates abstraction from the 'qualitative' C. Schumann characteristics of human beings'. 44 This specification of the origin of reifying attitudes and processes is particularly illuminating with regard to the criticisms raised against the introduction of a standards and competencies oriented approach in teacher education because it allows to specify more clearly the dangers pointed out by the critics while at the same time being able to outline in which form standards might be used as possibly helpful starting points for the improvement of pedagogical practice. For this, however, standards must be re-assessed from a comprehensive pedagogical perspective and guarded against reifying tendencies. We will return to this point in more detail after looking at the other approach to a renewed interpretation of reification put forth by Christoph Demmerling.
I see two particular strengths in Honneth's interpretation of Lukács. Firstly, he introduces a helpful distinction between innocuous cases of objectification (instrumentalization, or de-peronalization) and dangerous, harmful, destructive pathological processes of reification. Secondly, we need to stress that his discussion of social sources for reification does not reduce to commodity exchange only, but is able to include other sources, such as ideologies. I believe that this is of utmost importance in times in which educational sciences themselves seem to be utterly unaware of the ideological nature of the research paradigms, slogans, and key words they uncritically import from the fields of economy and politics without paying attention to whether these are compatible with intrinsically pedagogical goals, aims and self-understandings. Lastly, I believe that Honneth's theory allows us to describe with great precision the reifying understandings of the cosmopolitan idea which lead to the problematic attitude of a mere observer of human life who reifies other people, objects, nature, and ultimately his or her own emotions and abilities. It is this attitude, I believe, which has been criticized by cosmopolitanism's critics (and the criticism can in this way be shown to be understandable if not justified in some sense). At the same time Honneth's theory of reification might help to clarify that the core of the cosmopolitan idea is directly opposed to these reifying mechanisms. But before I return to the benefits I see in this recognitionÁtheoretic understanding of reification, I would like to present one other approach to reification which focuses more closely on the way in which language as well as certain understandings of language might set reifying processes in motion.

REIFICATION AND LANGUAGE CRITICISM
Christoph Demmerling's 1994 study Sprache und Verdinglichung*Wittgenstein, Adorno und das Projekt einer kritischen Theorie, while far less known than Honneth's study, shares with him the general approach of stressing the necessity of locating the analysis and criticism put forth in the theory of reification on a fundamental socioontological level, and not conceiving of it as a merely moral or epistemic issue. In contrast to Honneth's social philosophical approach to reification his focus is not primarily on the social origins and causes of reification, but he approaches the problem of reifying processes from the perspective of philosophy of language.

Boundedness beyond reification
Honneth already tries to incorporate the idea of ideological sources for processes of reification in his theory, but Demmerling succeeds to a much bigger extent at revealing those reifying structures, which derive from our conceptual and linguistic practices. In this regard, his study is especially interesting for thinking about cosmopolitanism in teacher education since it allows for a more detailed critique of one-sided and ideological tendencies informing processes of reification in educational practice as well as in the educational sciences themselves.
Demmerling's approach connects Wittgenstein's and Adorno's philosophy in order to develop an alternative to Habermas' linguistic transformation of social philosophy. According to Demmerling, the philosophy of praxis can be defended against Habermas' renowned criticisms and provides prolific resources for philosophy of language as well as for social philosophy, which can be demonstrated particularly with regard to the theory of reification. Building on Wittgenstein and Adorno he wants to show how an inter-subjective transformation of the philosophy of practice could be conceptualized which neither falls back on a problematic individualist subjectivism nor on collective subjects of one sort or another. In this way he attempts to destabilize Habermas' criticism of the constitution theoretic approach as well as to retain the normative premises of the theory of reification, which Habermas feels pressed to tone down or give up. The praxis philosophical approach is considered indispensable for keeping alive the genuinely critical impetus of a normatively oriented social philosophy. Especially the theory of reification is worthy of preserving according to Demmerling since many pathologies of postindustrial society can only be described adequately as reifications. 45 But he suggests a reformulation of the problem of reification, which starts from the analysis of processes of hypostasis of the products of our conceptual practices. The linguistic analysis, however, is not intended as a replacement for the economic and social analyses of the phenomena of reification as they are examined in Marx and Lukács but merely as complementing the latter analyses. His aim is to work out those pathological and obsessive distortions of our cognitive and behavioral structures, which derive from the various self-misunderstandings of what we are doing within the realm of our linguistic and conceptual practices; especially the logic underlying the substantialist misinterpretations of the formations of our concepts and differentiations.
Some of the aspects of the criticism of reification which Demmerling develops on the basis of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language can be nicely illustrated with the following passage from the Blue Book. Wittgenstein writes: The questions ''What is length?'', ''What is meaning?'', ''What is the number one?'', etc., produce in us a mental cramp. [. . .] (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.) 46 According to Wittgenstein, our concepts usually gain their meaning through the way in which we use them. For example, our practices of counting are constitutive for the meaning of the numeral 'one'. Wittgenstein's conception of language is thus C. Schumann diametrically opposed to any referential semantics. Words do not have a certain meaning because they refer to a certain extra-linguistic object, but because they are used in specific practical contexts in specific ways. If we take these concepts out of this practical context and look at them as abstract, discrete units, they often still seem to mean something to us, for example, if we point at something with a finger. This can be revealed as a mere illusion, as a particular way in which language deludes us. Even an ostensive definition presupposes already that we (or in case of a child still learning the language other participants of the linguistic practice) already speak and master a language: Without knowing the practical and conceptual differences between a leaf, a tree, and a trunk of a tree, I cannot merely by pointing at a leaf, a tree, or a trunk determine a meaningful content of that which I denote.
In the strict sense, I denote nothing at all in this case of a pure, practice-and language-free ostensive definition.
The private language argument furthermore underlines the primacy of the open, social character of our language: language is always*at least potentially*shared language. In my opinion the critics who up to today charge Wittgenstein with a linguistic relativism can be refuted with this argument. Even if language is assigned a strong constitutive role for our experience of the world, it is still always in principle possible for Wittgenstein to get acquainted with foreign languages and forms of practice. Also within our own language we are not trapped on fixed rails, but Wittgenstein continuously emphasizes the open and incomplete character of our linguistic practice and attaches*like Adorno*greater importance to the individual phenomenon than to schematic subsumptions under general categories. It is also in this perspective that Wittgenstein's conceptualization can make vital contributions to the criticism of reification.
In Wittgenstein's language theory, language does not appear as an idealized, conceptual superstructure to social practice, but language itself is a central form of human practice. As Demmerling carves out, language thus acquires a similar status that the notion of labor has in Lukács and Marx. Accordingly, Wittgenstein's therapeutic understanding of philosophy does not only aim at the correction of our linguistic aberrations, but equally at a therapy for distorted forms of our practices. In analogy to Marx' analysis of commodity fetishism, Demmerling describes Wittgenstein's critique of reification as revealing 'semantic fetishisms'. He distinguishes between two distinct forms of reification. On the one hand, we find semantic fetishisms, which derive from the structure of our language as in the confusions caused in the following example by the noun 'time'. The grammatical possibilities of using nouns in sentences lead to such questions as, 'What is time?' or 'Where is time?' In these cases time is understood in analogy to physical objects because the surface grammar has a similar structure and bewitches us. 47 On the other hand, we can also speak of semantic fetishism when language as such is reified, i.e. when it is as a whole not understood any longer as a form of human practice (as for example on a high theoretical level in the semantics of reference).
A possible therapy for these semantic fetishisms Demmerling locates with Wittgenstein in philosophy's task to 'clarify the use of existing language' 48 and Boundedness beyond reification in this way fight the 'battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language'. 49 The means by which this can be done is by bringing 'words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use'. 50 By restoring the concrete, situational context of the word, the metaphysical illusion disappears and the distorting reifications become visible. This re-contextualization and temporalization as a counter model to reifying concepts, is quite compatible with Adorno's concept of mimesis. 51 We cannot rely on already fixed conceptual schemata in the mimetic approach to the world; we are forced to immerse ourselves into the respective concrete situational contexts, and we are reminded that our conceptual practice should indeed correspond to the flexibility of being*in principle*revisable.
There is an important benefit we can draw from Demmerling's approach for the present purposes. His theoretic link between practice and language is able to do justice to the way in which language, knowledge, and education in post-industrial societies are not necessarily juxtaposed to or even counter-acting reifying processes brought on by economic activities, as might be suggested in Habermas' farewell to the production paradigm and his idealizing take on communicative practice. Demmerling's theory can help to clarify the way in which language, knowledge, and education can themselves becoming reified and enhance processes of reification by contributing to the formation of new social classes. 52 A cosmopolitan teacher education in the way proposed here has to be wary of this harmful potential of language, knowledge and the educational realm themselves becoming reified if it is meant to expose something else than what Löwy described as 'pseudo-cosmopolitanism'.

BOUNDEDNESS BEYOND REIFICATION? * RE-IMAGINING A COSMOPOLITAN TEACHER EDUCATION
Critical Theory has always advanced a 'dual perspective' 53 in combining empirical social research with normative philosophical argumentations. Accordingly, inquiry into social phenomena should be able to both adequately relate to and explain social realities in an empirical descriptive way, as much as it should be normatively concerned with pointing out possible forms of social transformation toward emancipation from domination and oppressive circumstances. As I have already argued elsewhere, 54 I believe that the critique of reification, if appropriately adapted, can contribute to an understanding and provide an explanation for many of the specific normative failures characteristic of today's educational institutions and practices. While reification theory is grounded in everyday experiences, it does not end with the mere analysis of our thinking, our values, and forms of action; it also questions our attitudes and experiences so as to reveal their inherent critical potential. As I emphasized before, the critique of reification developed by Honneth and Demmerling is situated at a socio-ontological level, i.e. their analyses of possible pathological tendencies, which, as a result of reifying processes, deform human practice as a whole, operate at a level from which normative as well as epistemic questions only arise in a second step. In this way they can serve well to draw out how C. Schumann cosmopolitanism poses itself to us in the form of normative as well as in the form of epistemic challenges.
With regard to the dual perspective that a cosmopolitan theory requires, Fazal Rizvi has argued that while the facts of rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections can no longer be denied, it is not always clear as to how particular communities and people experience and are affected by global interconnectivity.
[ . . .] These questions clearly require detailed empirical research [. . .]. But these are not merely empirical questions they are also normative. They relate to the issues of how we should work with these global transformations. 55 In his advancement of a critical cosmopolitanism, Gerard Delanty charged that many existing forms of theorizing cosmopolitanism reduce the concept to globalization. 56 Against these approaches which determine 'the global context' as 'the primary reality and everything else a reaction to it', thereby neglecting 'cosmopolitan resistances to globalization', 57 he insists in a similar vein as Rizvi that, in contrast to theories of globalization, 'cosmopolitanism cannot be entirely separated from the normative vision of an alternative society'. 58 Even Ulrich Beck, one of the fiercest proponents of an 'analyticalÁempirical cosmopolitanism' 59 in terms of a '''value-free'' approach to everyday experience and to the epistemology of world risk society in the social sciences', 60 concedes that while 'the normative question of what cosmopolitanism should be is put to one side for the moment, that does not mean that it could or should be ignored altogether', 61 and that his approach ultimately aims at opening up 'new paths and perspectives on the dilemmas and the normative and political content of global cosmopolitanism'. 62 In all these very different approaches, the authors agree that, on the one hand, cosmopolitan theory should help us understand better the social conditions of increasing global interconnectedness; on the other hand, the epistemic questions are inseparably intertwined with the normative ideals we connect with cosmopolitanism, if cosmopolitan theorizing is not to reduce to a theory of globalization, or to what we earlier described with Löwy as the cultural imperialism of a mere pseudo-cosmopolitanism. 63 The educational debates on cosmopolitanism have often centered on a 'drastic choice between the old universalism of the grand narrative of ahistorical cosmopolitanism and the new isolationism of small narratives unable to cross divides'. 64 The critique of reification, as renewed by Honneth and Demmerling, provides the means to reveal this dichotomy as false and irrelevant. Neither the reifications of a universal outlook leading to an equalizing, normalizing indifference to the particular context, nor the reifications of a particularist outlook leading to an over-stylization of the difference to the 'other' prove helpful. The distinction which should matter is that between a badly understood cosmopolitanism which means nothing but the economically inspired extension of reification on a global scale, and between a critical cosmopolitanism which provides an analyticalÁdescriptive as well as a normative resource for theorizing the withstanding, untangling and going beyond such reifications on a global scale. 65

Boundedness beyond reification
It is in light of the critique of reification that we can understand the difference between a pseudo-cosmopolitanism in terms of an economic or cultural opportunism of a small global elite, and a cosmopolitanism which aims at counter-acting reifying tendencies by taking responsibility for making the situational and historical contexts of our own claims and demands visible. Such a re-contextualization might make it harder to spill blood 'in the name of universality, but for the sake of home and property'. 66 Furthermore, it has to be employed with regard to approaching, exploring and understanding another person's, another culture's, or another nation's moral, political, and economic claims. Rather than reducing the meaning of cosmopolitanism to the pleasurable aspects of globalization that allow for ever more cultural consumption for those who (have the means to) enthusiastically embrace 'the opportunities provided by the diverse societal culture which characterizes the Anglophone society of the United States', 67 as Kymlicka rightly criticizes, the cosmopolitan virtue can then take on a more profound dimension and cut deeper to much more 'bloody truths'. 68 If we conceive of reification as a second-order process of forgetting a primary recognition (Honneth) or of forgetting the primary context first constitutive of meaning (Demmerling), then we can come to see the choice between the culturalist emphasis on the necessity of local contexts for meaning to be established and the cosmopolitan universalist abstraction is wrongly put. Instead of consisting in a selective, reifying attitude of appreciating the new worldwide possibilities of consumption, the cosmopolitan attitude can be reframed in terms of commitment to non-reifying forms of boundedness, as taking responsibility for resisting the reifying attitudes modern capitalism enhances. Cosmopolitanism understood in this sense could mean to remind ourselves of the primary form of recognition inherent in our relations towards every human being, toward nature, and toward ourselves, which is first constitutive of the meaningfulness of human understanding, human action and interaction. The cosmopolitan attitude is then not one of abstract, merely observing detachment from all cultural or normative boundaries, but, on the contrary, a regaining of an interested and engaged involvement with others regardless of whether they share our background or not, with nature as well as with ourselves. In this way cosmopolitanism means to constantly work against and out of the naivety involved in letting our practices as well as our own constructs, or frames of thought which evolve through human interaction become reified entities which take on a life of their own and start to determine human life in turn. Reifications inhibit not only our interested involvement with the world, others and ourselves, but also the flexibility and openness of our thought for re-assessing our values, perceptions and meanings in different contextual circumstances, thus undermining the very foundations of any genuine cosmopolitan orientation. Therefore, in my view, a theory of a cosmopolitan teacher education has to be primarily concerned with providing the epistemic as well as the normative theoretic means for resisting being bound by reified entities, and with finding, founding and finding back to non-reifying ways of boundedness.
I would like to shortly illustrate, by example of the discussion surrounding the recent teacher education reform in Germany, how such a notion of cosmopolitanism C. Schumann in terms of a critique of reification can contribute to a re-conceptualization of what the 'global challenge' 69 for teacher education consists in and how it can be adequately met. Within the last two decades, teacher education in Germany has undergone significant change. This reform, which was instigated by transnational resolutions with the goal to face new global challenges of 'higher social and economic expectations', 70 has been so all-comprising on many levels that some even consider it a 'historical turning point'. 71 Many of the reservations and criticisms raised against the reform are concerned with the new focus on the efficiency of educational institutions as well as with the introduction of standards and competencies for the professional actions of teachers. But while critics and proponents of the reform strongly disagree with regard to the interpretation of the possible benefits and dangers they see in the reform, the discussion on both sides so far has centered mainly on the problem of how and if the demands and recommendations of the international and European institutions and organizations responsible for instigating the reform in Germany can be reconciled with the traditional national design and orientation of the educational system. 72 Since the normative shift towards the implementation of a standards and competencies oriented teacher education was instigated by supra-national developments and promoted by international organizations such as the OECD and transnational educational services such as PISA, the reform is portrayed as some form of demand or attack on the national educational system from the outside. The pressures global developments exert on the national system are presented as unfolding with a certain necessity, forcing politicians to overthrow longstanding national educational traditions in the interest of global economic competitiveness.
How can a more fully developed cosmopolitan outlook on teacher education in terms of a critique of reification help to untangle the various problematic issues raised with regard to the reform? I believe that it can help to render more precisely the criticisms as well as the necessary improvements by shedding light on the shortcomings of the way in which the 'global challenge' for teacher education has been perceived so far. A critical cosmopolitanism should caution against the typical fetishizing of the transgression of borders by the proponents of an internationalization and standardization of education without subscribing to the nationalist nostalgia of some of the reform's critics. As Matthew Hayden highlights, the current unisonous trend towards standardization in education can similarly be interpreted as a reaction to the systematic production of uncertainty in a globalizing world as certain fundamentalist religious or preservationist culturalist movements. 73 If cosmopolitanism is to offer an alternative between the two pathological tendencies 'to reify local identities or construct universal ones', 74 it cannot be understood as being exhausted by guaranteeing global economic competitiveness or by any other substantive specification. Rather, it has to stand as a constant reminder that*in principle*all moral and epistemic issues, all religious and cultural convictions*no matter if they are beliefs of a minority or a majority*can and should always also be objects of critical reflection and judgment, and should be assessed in terms of their ability to resist reifying processes and to allow for non-reifying forms of boundedness.
From the perspective of a cosmopolitan teacher education, the question which has to be asked is whether the recent trend towards standardization in teacher education contributes to processes of reification on a global scale, and under which conditions and to which extent standards could allow for resistance against reifying processes. Turning to the discussion in Germany, 75 main points of criticism have been: 1. Essential aspects of the teaching profession are not yet captured within the formulated standards, as for example reflexivity as the link between judging and acting within a situation. 76 2. Standards tend to not adequately take into account future developments by codifying and freezing the current state of affairs. Instead they have to be understood as necessarily revisable. 77 3. Standards are in danger of leveling, normalizing and in this way reducing desirable contents and capacities to those which can be easily agreed upon and which can also be easily tested and assessed. 78 4. The introduction of standards can lead to a fixation and narrowing of teacher education where the efficient and technocratic realization of the standards becomes the only acceptable goal discrediting all other activities and detours the educational processes of future teachers might take. 79 The concern articulated in all of these criticisms indicates that standards in their current form contribute to reifying processes, rather than providing the means for the promotion of non-reifying forms of boundedness. Perceived as a side effect of 'global' processes, standards seem to function as raised bars which future teachers have to strive to reach and which teacher educators have to implement as efficiently as possible.
If we follow Honneth's arguments, this will firstly threaten the way in which teachers can relate to their students. If standards contribute to the reification of the inter-subjective pedagogic relations, they can lead to the forgetfulness of the primary compassionate and interested involvement which shapes the teacherÁstudent relationship before and independent of any outstanding specific characteristic of the student. Creating a merely cognitive, disaffected and test-result oriented relationship between student and teacher, however, is neither desirable from a pedagogical point of view, nor is it in accord with the idea of a cosmopolitan teacher education as outlined above. Secondly, this can lead to a reifying relation to our natural surroundings. In order to be able to respect the multitude of existential meanings associated with natural objects, we certainly require a reflexive sensitivity, which is neither easily tested nor easily assessed. Thirdly, and maybe most pressingly, standards in their present form can lead to teachers' self-reification. Rather than allowing for an explorative, expressivist approach to their own desires, emotions, or intentions, teachers are supposed to either 'detect' the appropriate attitude according to which they will be assessed, or they are led to create the desired attitudes at will, learning to neglect that their own intentions, desires, emotions are worthy of an explorative appropriation.

C. Schumann
While standards and standardized tests might provide a helpful starting point for instigating discussion, re-assessment, and even re-orientation of deficiencies and strengths of current teaching practices, there is a danger of these tests as well as the standards themselves becoming de-contextualized and reified in highly problematic ways. Then they are no longer starting points for the improvement of pedagogical practice, but have become aims in themselves, much in the way as the reifying processes described by Demmerling. Such a de-contextualized, a-historic perspective leads to pathological deformations of pedagogical practice. Cosmopolitan teacher education needs to challenge the reifying tendencies leading to social pathologies, such as the undue overemphasis on the development of efficacious teachers with economically useful skills to the detriment of their responsiveness and critical judgment. The question that needs to be raised is therefore which forms the standards take, whether they enable and protect the teachers' and the students' flourishing, or whether they police and stifle creative human practice and, in the worst case, lead to social pathologies. In this sense, it is wrong to view educating 'cosmopolitan' teachers as a new substantive goal, yet another script for allowing for a deferral of responsibility. 80 A more fully-fledged cosmopolitan outlook on teacher education will have to address economic, political as well as moral concerns, but always in terms of allowing for and enabling critical reflection and the development of the power of judgment of future teachers. I believe that it is on the basis of a critique of reification that the conditions can be created for enabling teacher students 'to use their power of judgment in practice so that they are capable of pursuing the highest good', 81 as Klas Roth, following Kant, specifies the goal of a cosmopolitan teacher education.
Standards in their present non-reflexive, codifying, normalizing, and technocratic form are clearly not in accord with the presented idea of cosmopolitan teacher education as they seem to enhance the forgetfulness of a primary recognitional relation and set off pathological consequences for teachers' relations to students, to themselves, and to the world. A cosmopolitan teacher education needs to destabilize these reifying tendencies. For this, standards need to be re-interpreted as a starting point for a critical discussion and continuing re-evaluation of what good teaching and good education in a globalizing world consists in. In such a perspective, teacher education is never exhausted by the most efficient ways of producing the highest numbers of teachers meeting the standards which are said to ensure global economic competitiveness. A cosmopolitan teacher education has to promote a historically sensitive re-contextualization which can help prevent the defined standards and competencies from becoming entities which control and normalize the individual teacher to the detriment of a developed responsiveness, emotional sensitivity, critical and responsible reflection and judgment. In order to avoid these social pathologies, we have to re-imagine norms to which we could want to bind ourselves willingly because they enable 'a bonanza of positive freedoms', 82 because they enhance our creative and constructive engagement with the complex social realities of a globalizing world, because they are inherently open for critique, and because they enable non-reifying forms of boundedness.