KENNT DAS KONZEPT DER ANERKENNUNG EIN MASS?
Is the Concept of Recognition Limited?

Summary/Abstract: Hans-Klaus Keul poses the question “Is there a limit of the concept of recognition?” In order to respond he undertakes a genealogical analysis of some crucial conditions of the recognition paradigm in Hegel’s philosophy as it developed from his early Jena period to the theory of self-consciousness and later on, philosophy of law. Keul analyzes Hegel’s critiques towards Kant’s individualist philosophy of freedom as well as the variations of Hegel’s intersubjective concept of individual freedom that treats freedom not as a primary state of reason but as a momentum within the play of mutual recognition. The conceptual overturn fulfi lled by Hegel historicizes the forms of morality toward Sittlichkeit and thus, deprives Kant’s moral law from its unquestionable universality as an a priory fact of pure reason. Sittlichkeit proves to be a relatively “stable common mediator which enables individuals to carry on their life” and which is itself an outcome of the immediate social interaction, a momentary effect in the process of recognition. That conceptual revision however, engenders the following problem (especially if we renounce Hegel’s teleology of the Absolute Spirit as the mainstream of the contemporary social philosophy does): Since any standard is an effect of the struggle for recognition, then no universal moral and legal standard of recognition could be established. Today multiculturalist dilemmas of recognition are a telling example of the latter problem.

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