La natura del riconoscimento. Riconoscimento naturale e ontologia sociale in Hegel

My research takes as its guiding thread the statement from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1805-06, that «cognition is recognition[Erkennen ist Anerkennen]». Whereas, generally, the field of reference of the Hegelian theory of «Anerkennung» is taken to be the practical-moral sphere, in my view Hegel's theory of recognition is, first of all, a response to problems of the theory of cognition ["theory of knowledge", but in the present context I shall speak throughout of "cognition"]. In this perspective I delineate, first, the consequences of this position for Hegel's epistemology, in particular with reference to the question of skepticism. Then, I show in what sense the recognitive conception of cognition makes it possible for Hegel to comprehend unitarily, on one hand, cognition as exercise of natural capacities and cognition as exercise of normative capacities socially articulated, and, on the other hand, theoretical self-consciousness and practical self-consciousness. The gnoseological importance of this solution can be comprehended only if we reconstruct the evolution of Hegel's thought in that span of time in which he most directly tackles the issue of skepsis: that is, from 1797 - the beginning of his Frankfurt period - when he began to occupy himself with gnoseological questions, until the end of his stay in Jena, which begins in 1801 and concludes in 1807 with the writing of the Phenomenology. In this period, in Hegel the theory of recognition furnishes a unitary response to the threefold skeptical issue of the accessibility of the external world, of other minds, and of one's own mind: the evolution of the capacity of recognition institutes unitarily the possibility of self-reference, reference to others and objective reference. This is possible to the extent that the theory of recognition is the guiding thread of a critique of the modern theory of cognition and, at the same time, the point of departure for an alternative approach. From this point, cognition does not proceed from the subjective to the objective, as in the Cartesian formulation that gave rise to modern skepticism: cognition of self, of other minds and of the external world are holistically connected and intersubjectively structured by means of the cognitive capacities of recognition. In the Jena period Hegel developed an epistemological strategy that can be summarized in the following theses: 1. Hegel naturalizes the epistemological questions; 2. to do so he critiques foundationalism qua theory of empirical cognition; 3. and qua theory of epistemic justification; 4. the critique of foundationalism is linked to a critique of the corresponding representationalistic theory of perception, with respect to which Hegel delineates an alternative - pragmatic-interactional - model; 5. this, in turn, is linked to a critique of the monological theories of self-consciousness and to the development of a model - itself practical-interactional - of the rise of self-conscious knowing; 6. Hegel makes use of the tropes of ancient skepticism on one hand to critique the epistemological position responsible for modern skepsis, and on the other to define, in a positive sense, the holistic and recognitive structure of cognition and of rationality, through the tropes of the circle and of the relation; 7. Hegel synthesizes these epistemological views in a theory of cognition qua recognition; 8. Hegel roots this theory in his Naturphilosophie, thus formulating a conception that accounts for the relation between natural recognition and spiritual recognition of a normative-conceptual type. The analysis of the development of the Hegelian theory of cognition - worked out in the first part of my study - is dealt with in the context of a reconstruction of the historico-argumentative constellation within which it matured. The constellation of importance for our analysis is represented by the skeptical crisis - triggered by authors such as Schulze, Maimon and Platner - that invested the post-Kantian galaxy, within which the idealist solutions to the problem of cognition matured. Through the analysis of journals and authors with whom Hegel came directly or indirectly into contact - from Platner to Reinhold, Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling, to Hölderlin and Sinclair, concluding with Zeender, Krug, Bouterwek and Werneburg, and among the journals Fülleborn's Beiträge and Niethammer's Journal in particular - it is possible to map the various solutions proposed for the skeptical problem and see how it is in relation to this problem that the conceptions of self-consciousness evolve and the very concept of "interpersonality" - "intersubjectivity" - emerges for the first time. At the same time, pursuing my objective of broadening the investigation of the phenomenon of recognition, which in my view is not reducible to the field of practical philosophy, I propose a fresh reconstruction of the lexical and conceptual evolution of the various terms - Erkennen, Wiedererkennen, Recognition, Anerkennen - through which the various modalities of the phenomenon of recognition were indicated in the philosophical tradition to which Hegel refers: recognition of objects as perceptive reidentification; reminiscence on the level of theory of memory; recognition of subjects as self-recognition (apperception) and attribution to others of intentionality; logical recognition as recognition of the validity of a proposition; moral recognition, where "recognizing" generally means approving, accepting (more specifically, someone may be "recognized" as an autonomous subject and as a unique, genuine individuality). I focus in particular on the theory of memory as «recognitio» in Wolff and in his school, on the conception of «reconnaissance» in Bonnet, on Kantian «Recognition» and on the theory of «Anerkennen» in Ernst Platner. This investigation serves, on the one hand, to show how the phenomenon of recognition is central for a comprehension of the structure both of the lower and of the higher cognitive faculties. This ought to allow us to understand in what sense Hegel, taking intersubjective recognition as his leading phenomenon, attempts to reunite the various meanings of recognition within a theory of cognition on the basis of which «cognition is recognition». On the other hand, my conceptual and lexicographic investigation also serves to bring to light - in a new way with respect to the studies on Anerkennung - a hitherto unknown problematic constellation and the input of certain authors, such as Werneburg and Platner, whose conceptions may have influenced Hegel's approach. The second part and the third of my study - a reconstruction of the pre-phenomenological Jena writings dealing with «Anerkennung» - dwells on the theme of the notion of natural recognition, whose centrality for the Hegelian conception of recognition has not yet been adequately grasped. This reconstruction of the theory of natural recognition gives due weight to the influence of Schelling on Hegel's understanding of «Anerkennung» - while the critical literature has generally concentrated on Fichte. Analyzing the conception of the animal organism developed in particular in the lectures on the philosophy of nature of 1803-04 brings to light how Hegel already individuates the recognitive phenomenon at the level of sexual reproduction: it is from here that he posits the natural prerequisites for the development of consciousness of self. The category of natural recognition will present itself anew in Hegel's analysis of the social ontology of the human world in the philosophy of spirit, where it concerns sexual love, reproduction and child raising: natural recognition is, then, that on the basis of which Hegel develops his theory that cognition is recognition. Recognition, as a «middle» of spirit, is a cognitive phenomenon that is primitive with respect to linguistically structured human intersubjectivity; it is, properly, that cognitive structure which is necessarily presupposed by a self-conscious subjectivity that expresses itself linguistically: linguistic intersubjectivity expresses various modes of recognition, but not every form of recognition is linguistic. The evolutional theory of cognition as recognition is in fact designed to show how increasingly complex recognitive relations emerge from a basic level of natural interactions to take on a linguistically mediated and universal structure. With the notion of spiritual recognition Hegel indicates just that ensemble of normative relations that constitute the infrastructure of action and thus mediate the formation of socially articulated self-conscious knowing of self. In the lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1803-04 and of 1805-06 Hegel thus reconstructs the recognitive structure of the social institutions of right, of labor, and of exchange, showing that, within a politically structured community, dyadic (I-you) interactions are mediated by the universal viewpoint of the "we" incarnated in institutions that can be recognized by citizens as their own and by which citizens can be recognized.