Abstract

Hegel’s concept of Recognition is of continuing interest on several accounts. In the Hegelian system Recognition plays a key role in the development of the natural consciousness to Spirit in the Phenomenology of 1807 and in the development from Subjective to Absolute Spirit in the later Encyclopedia. But apart from its role in the system itself, Hegel’s dialectic of Recognition has seminally infused thinking on intersubjectivity and social theory in Marx, Sartre, Habermas, and others. Siep would apply it in yet another way. He proposes to view Recognition as a principle of practical philosophy, indeed as making possible a renewal of practical philosophizing in the tradition of Aristotle. Through Recognition, which is Spirit as self-consciousness in the interaction of individuals and between individuals and institutions, Hegel overcomes the cleft in Kantian and Fichtean a priori philosophizing between autonomous individuality and community. Utilizing Recognition theory to derive the community and its institutions from a notion of the free self-consciousness, Hegel reconciles the Aristotelian tradition of the polis with the principle of transcendental subjectivity. Siep, in a scholarly and at the same time stimulating work, inquires whether Recognition theory can provide the principle for a contemporary practical philosophy not wedded to the Hegelian teleology of Spirit.