Good, Evil and Successful Recognition. A Processualist View on Recognitive Attitudes, Relations and Norms

Abstract

In this paper I am proposing a “processual” account of struggles for recognition. I read Hegel in the section of “Evil and Its Forgiveness,” in his Phenomenology of Spirit, as arguing for a transition from basically action-theoretic, relational or institutional conceptions of recognition to a processual conception. Furthermore, I will be claiming that John Dewey’s experimentalist social philosophy can be understood as an attempt at working out the implications of this move in Hegel’s thought. Finally, I will try to indicate how to integrate central concepts of the recognition-theoretical vocabulary into such a processual account

Keywords

• idealism
• pragmatism
• process
• recognition