Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

2017 ◽  
pp. 231-264
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Rational Justification

Hegel's Value

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Living System ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Voluntary Consent ◽  
Philosophy Of Right ◽  
Theory Of Value

It has long been recognized that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offers the only systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in modern political philosophy. The difficulty has been to characterize Hegel’s view of justice as having the same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory, with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges, such an attractive model. Hegel’s Value argues that Hegelian justice depends on a proper understanding of Hegel’s theory of value and on the model of life through which the overall conception of value, the Good, is operationalized. Through an examination of key episodes in Phenomenology of Spirit and a detailed reading of the entire Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s Value shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into increasingly thick normative structures. The theory of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of pure thinking and the natural drives. The book argues that Hegel’s expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value in social contexts of mutual recognition. Hegel’s account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an understanding of the law as developing through practices of public reason.

Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’sPhenomenology of Spirit

Dialogue ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Westphal
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Pragmatic Account

ABSTRACT: Individual rational judgment, of the kind required for justification in cognition or morals, is fundamentally socially and historically conditioned. I argue for this by defending key themes from Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts of rational judgment and justification, including the “autonomy” of rational judgment and one key point of Hegel’s account of “mutual recognition.” These themes are rooted in Kant’s and Hegel’s transformation of the modern natural law tradition, which originates the properly pragmatic account of rationality, which affords genuine rational justification, and which provides for realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity about moral norms.

scholarly journals Hegel’s justification of the human right to non-domination

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Westphal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Reflective Equilibrium ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Philip Pettit ◽  
The Social ◽  
Republican Liberty

?Hegel? and ?human rights? are rarely conjoined, and the designation ?human rights? appears rarely in his works. Indeed, Hegel has been criticised for omitting civil and political rights all together. My surmise is that readers have looked for a modern Decalogue, and have neglected how Hegel justifies his views, and hence just what views he does justify. Philip Pettit (1997) has refocused attention on republican liberty. Hegel and I agree with Pettit that republican liberty is a supremely important value, but appealing to its value, or justifying it by appeal to reflective equilibrium, are insufficient both in theory and in practice. By reconstructing Kant?s Critical methodology and explicating the social character of rational justification in non-formal domains, Hegel shows that the republican right to non-domination is constitutive of the equally republican right to justification (Forst 2007) - both of which are necessary requirements for sufficient rational justification in all non-formal domains, including both claims to rights or imputations of duties or responsibilities. That is the direct moral, political and juridical implication of Hegel?s analysis of mutual recognition, and its fundamental, constitutive role in rational justification. Specific corollaries to the fundamental republican right to non-domination must be determined by considering what forms of illicit domination are possible or probable within any specific society, in view of its social, political and economic structures and functioning.

Rational Justification and Mutual Recognition in Substantive Domains

Dialogue ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
KENNETH R. WESTPHAL
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
Pragmatic Account

This paper argues that individual rational judgment, of the kind required for rational justification in empirical knowledge or morals, is in fundamental part socially and historically based, although this is consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with strict objectivity about basic moral principles. To judge fully rationally that one judges, and thus to justify one’s judgment rationally, requires recognizing one’s inherent fallibility and hence our mutual interdependence for assessing our own and each others’ judgments and their justification. This provides a pragmatic account of rational justification which dispatches the distinction between “rational” and “historical” knowledge.

scholarly journals Hegel’s Antigone: The Birth of the Constitution from the Spirit of Tragedy

ICL Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Gragl
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
The Law ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
Tragic Conflict

Abstract Sophocles’ Antigone has been studied intensely for more than two thousand years, but it was especially Hegel’s allegorical use of this tragedy in several of his works (first and foremost the Phenomenology of Spirit) that added yet another fascinating facet to its possible reading: the birth of the legal order and therewith a constitutional system from the conflict between two normative orders. In this contribution, I interpret the dialectic structure of Antigone in a manner in which each normative position – both Antigone’s and Creon’s – are equally justified and thereby antithetic in the ethical world of the Greek polis. It is therefore only by transcending this tragic conflict between the human and the divine orders that we can transform necessary externalities (‘fate’) into a process of a legal status which eventually allows individuals to become the authors of the law itself and thus to guarantee their freedom. I denote this reading of Hegel’s Antigone as ‘symmetrical’, since it accepts both positions – Antigone’s divine law and Creon’s human law – as equal and makes freedom and justice only possible through the law. This means that an ‘asymmetrical’ reading, giving prevalence to either position (for instance, found in Goethe or Habermas) and localizing freedom and justice beyond the law, can never effectively result in a legal status that would allow individual persons to become legal persons.My principal argument consequently is that only a symmetrical view of this normative conflict can justifiably be regarded as making a constitutional order possible in the first place. It is feasible only in a dynamic-genealogical fashion (ie, by constantly generating this order through conflict and the transcending of this conflict through mutual recognition) that concurrently also respects individuals as particular individuals, not just as formal equals among equals, by allowing them to realize their personalities and to find themselves through the arts, science, and philosophy. This is more than a merely formal or negative constitution which recognizes every person as equal and free, but disregards their particularities; this is a material and positive constitution that can guarantee both equality and self-actualization. Such a constitutional order guarantees an identity of universal laws and individuality, and accordingly offers individuals a solution to the conflicting ethical orders of the ancient polis in which they would otherwise remain trapped.

scholarly journals A new Reading of “The Phenomenology of Spirit”:Brandom on Hegel

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-112
Author(s):  
Igor D. Dzhokhadze ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Negative Side ◽  
Robert Brandom ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

Robert Brandom in his recently published commentaries to “The Phenomenology of Spirit” tries to re-actualize Hegel’s legacy, linking his speculative dialectics to the twenti­eth-century linguistic philosophy and pragmatism, with the ideas of G. Frege, L. Wittgen­stein, and W. Sellars. His principal focus is on the issue of “the struggle for recognition”. In terms of “mutual” and “symmetric” recognition as a terminus ad quem of social com­munication, Brandom interprets the reciprocal confirmation of the normative statuses of individual subjects acting as equal participants in a collective “game of giving and asking for reasons”. This state of mutual recognition, Brandom maintains, can be achieved through overcoming the subjectivist alienation and egotism characteristic of the moder­nity. The author argues that in his discussion of this issue the American philosopher con­fuses two key concepts used by Hegel in “The Phenomenology of Spirit”: Entfremdung (“alienation”) and Entäußerung (“externalization”). The author claims that by emphasiz­ing the negative side of Entfremdung, Brandom overlooks the meaning of Entäußerung (objectification), which, according to E. Ilyenkov, “is essential to the very definition of ‘Spirit’”.

Impossible Divisions: Fanon, Hegel and Psychoanalysis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham
Keyword(s):  
Racial Difference ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Black Skin

This chapter concentrates on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where the Hegelian theme of mutual recognition as the origin of man’s self-consciousness and potential freedom is tested against the complex circumstances of colonialism. Fanon’s idea that the ‘Negro slave’ is recognized by the ‘White Master’ in a situation that is ‘without conflict’ suggests a possibly double, or self-resistant, meaning: the colonial situation after slavery ushers in something like a phony war; but also colonialism’s historical interpretation is not exhausted by the Hegelian master-slave logic. Through this double possibility of the colonial, one wonders whether after Hegel it is historical interpretation or the historical process itself that has gone awry. Such dynamic tensions suggest an impossibly divided dialectics at work throughout Fanon’s corpus. The section of Fanon’s ‘The Negro and Recognition’ devoted to a critique of Adler points to an earlier footnote in Black Skin, White Masks which offers a lengthy engagement with Lacan, allowing us to reread the politics of racial difference into the scene of the Lacanian mirror-stage. Here, the resistant ‘other’ of psychoanalysis unlocks the possibility of another ‘politics’ capable of addressing, by better recognising, some of its most significant impasses.

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