Verkörperte Freiheit. Erste Natur, zweite Natur und Fragmentierung

If spirit is constituted through recognition, then the fact that recognition somehow depends on (first) nature – as I will argue in the first part of this paper – will have deep consequences on how we are to conceive the genesis and the structure of the social and historical world, and the very notion of social freedom that participating in this world makes possible. Secondly, I will argue that even at the spiritual level recognition cannot be conceived on its own terms, but must rather be thought by means of the notions of second nature and habit. The move from recognition to second nature implies a dialectical embodied notion of freedom. Finally, in the third part of the paper I will argue that, once we understand recognition in terms of embodied second nature, then we have to take into account how much the contingency, the fragility and the plurality of second nature affect our notion of freedom.