Italo Testa Recognition, Skepticism and Self-Consciousness in the Young Hegel (draft, published in: „Fenomenologia e Società", 32, 2 (2009), pp. 117-132) To clarify the problem that I intend to deal with I first have to illustrate the connection between the three concepts indicated in the title of this essay, i.e., skepticism, self-consciousness and recognition. I shall begin with the key concept of recognition - indicated by Hegel for the most part with the term Anerkennung, derived from Fichte‟s Grundlage des Naturrechts. My principal thesis is that the theory of recognition arises within Hegel's confrontation with epistemological skepticism and aims at responding to the questions raised by modern skepticism concerning the accessibility of the external world, of other minds, and of one's own mind. It is opportune in this regard to begin with the last of the three terms, i.e. recognition. Recognition is a complex phenomenon, comprising a number of distinct modes: one may speak of a recognition of subjects, intersubjectivity (identifying someone as a self-conscious subject, attributing intentionality); and one may recognize the validity of a proposition, recognizing something as true. As such the phenomenon of recognition regards issues such as perceptive identification, memory, identification of one's self and of others, the question of truth. There can also be a moral level of recognition - which, in any case, appears to presuppose recognition as a cognitive act - where „recognizing‟ generally means approving, accepting: more specifically, someone may be „recognized‟ as an autonomous subject and as a unique, genuine individuality. In the literature on Hegel great importance has been placed upon the celebrated struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman in the Phenomenology, seeing in the theory of Anerkennung an answer to the question regarding the conditions of conflictual formation of the practical identity of self-consciousness - an answer of pertinence in the field of morals, ethics, and righti. This point of view takes into consideration for the most part the moral level of the phenomenon. In more recent literature we find cues for another line of reading, which goes more in an epistemological direction, in the works of Terry Pinkard, Paul Redding, in 2 a essay of Jürgen Habermasii, in the last book of Paul Ricoeur and in the work of Robert Brandom, who utilizes recognition as the guiding concept of an inferentialistic and pragmatic semantic theoryiii. In my view however, also in order to comprehend the real meaning of practical recognition and the possible semantic importance of such a notion, it is opportune to comprehend that the Hegelian theory of recognition [Anerkennung] is, first of all, a response to questions of the theory of cognition [Erkennung] (normally referred to, in modern philosophy, as „theory of knowledge,‟ but in the context of this essay I shall speak throughout of cognition). The point here is to understand in what sense Hegel formulated a general theory of recognition that, taking intersubjective recognition as its leading phenomenon, develops as an evolutionary theory of cognition which employs this principle to systematize the various levels of the phenomenon of recognition. This will help us clarify several traits of the Hegelian theory of cognition, in an attempt to account for Hegel's largely unexploited statement that „cognition is recognition.‟ What does this statement really mean? What are its consequences for Hegel's epistemology? What, then, is the relation between the theory of recognition, skepticism and self-consciousness? First of all, we have to comprehend the primary phenomenon of recognition. Anerkennung is the genetic mechanism through which the individual self-consciousness constitutes itself in its capacity of self-reference - of reference to itself - and, at the same time, of reference to others. The capacity of self-reference is not an originary, spontaneous property of the subject; instead, to be able to make reference to myself, to be able to recognize myself, I have to be able to recognize myself in the other and to be recognized by the other; that is, I have to learn, in a mutual process, to mirror myself in the other with whom I interact - to know myself and intuit myself in him. As such, recognition mediates the constitution of individual self-consciousness and intersubjectivity: cognition of self is not logically independent of the awareness of other minds. At the same time, recognition institutes the possibility of objective reference to the world: in fact, according to the argumentation we find in the first three sections of the Phenomenology, I can refer myself to the objects I causally interact with - be conscious of them - only insofar as I am capable of self-reference - only as a self-conscious subject; but I can be self-conscious only through the recognitive mediation of other selfconsciousnesses. 3 In this way, 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. The reference to a common world of public objects is thus possible only thanks to the mediation of recognitive capacities that are naturally possessed and socially articulated, which make possible - as Davidson puts itiv - the triangulation between self, world and others: the content of my thoughts is not idiosyncratic but is determined by the communicative interaction with others and, for that very reason, is publicly accessible. This is possible to the extent that the theory of recognition is, as we shall see, 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. The epistemological importance of this solution, which in my view is systematically set out in the first three sections of the Phenomenology, 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 skepticism: that is, from 1797 - the beginning of his Frankfurt period - when he began to occupy himself with epistemological 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 the cards are, so to speak, still on the table and the systematic exposition of Hegelian doctrines does not cover the ground of origin of the questions Hegel intends to respond to with his system. My aim is to combat, on two fronts, the widespread opinion that sees Hegel as epistemologically delinquent: on the one hand by reconnecting Hegel to questions of modern epistemology, and on the other by showing how the Hegelian solutions can be of importance also for post-empiristic philosophy of cognition. Having thus illustrated the problem to be dealt with and the method of investigation, I now intend to dwell on six stages of the evolution of Hegel's thought prior to the Phenomenology, stages that, in my view, shed great light on the direction taken by his argumentative strategy. Synthetically, the stages are as follows: 4 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 practicalinteractional - of the rise of self-conscious knowing; 6. finally, Hegel synthesizes these epistemological views in a theory of cognition qua recognition. Following this guiding thread we shall come to an understanding of the relation between Hegel's philosophy of mind and his philosophy of cognition. I. Naturalization of Epistemology. Hegel in Frankfurt. It is already clear from my opening remarks how Hegel's strategy consists, on the one hand, at least with respect to the Cartesian tradition, in a sort of Aristotelian naturalization of the questions of epistemology and philosophy of the mind, to the extent that the question regarding subjectivity and the problem of the external world is posed - with a recovery of the value of Aristotle's position in the Physics - on the basis of the evolutionary-natural level of life and of the primary relations that come about first of all in an affectivecorporeal dimension and that develops itself as a kind of second nature through the historical institutions of Bildung. On the other hand, this pragmatic-vitalistic approach is connoted in a strictly relationalinteractional sense, in the sense that the world of objects and of other subjects is given primarily as the term of an interaction/mediation, rather than as an immediate given of consciousness. Self-consciousness, as is already clear in the fragment Die Liebe (1797), is not an originary structure but is grounded in life - as is also the case in the Phenomenology: life is the first object of self-consciousness, insofar as selfconsciousness is nothing other than life that becomes conscious of itself, whose first level of self-relation is corporeal and institutes itself through the affective interaction proper to the primary relations of care. To that effect, it is in the Die Liebe fragment (1797)v that the question of the external world and of other minds appears for the first time in Hegel's work: Hegel - against the backdrop of a confrontation with Jacobi - attacks the absolutization of that subjectivity which, in modernity, was theoretically formulated by 5 Descartes: such subjectivity withdraws from the ensemble of „life‟ relations (absolutizes an opposite), constituting itself as a totality with respect to which all otherness is „external world‟ [Aussenwelt], res extensa devoid of life, whose existence for the subject can be guaranteed only by the intervention of God. Thus Hegel sketches a genealogy of the question of skepticism, which he imputes to a precise epistemological approach. But his response to the skeptics' puzzle does not follow the Jacobian road of a recourse to the intuitive immediacy of the world and other subjects; rather, it takes the form of an intersubjective theory of the constitution of self-consciousness, in which we find the first nucleus of his theory of recognition, not yet indicated with the Fichtian term of Anerkennung. Hegel shows that, in the cycle of development of „life‟ [Leben], self-consciousness - which comes to light in the affective experiences of care that have sustained the development of human identity ever since infancy - becomes such only as life's „duplication of itself‟ [Verdoppelung seiner selbst]. The self-reference of self-consciousness is not the originary viewpoint with respect to which the world and the subjects that inhabit it have to be recovered as external beings: if that were so, the world and the subjects that inhabit it would be lost for ever. On the contrary, self-consciousness can begin to refer itself to itself and to the world only through the interaction, situated in a „life‟ dimension, with another self-consciousness that specularly performs the same movement (theory of the recognition of „opposites‟). In the other, as its „opposite,‟ the individual self-consciousness, which as such is nothing other than life that refers itself to itself, sees its own image as reflected in a mirror, and it is precisely by recovering this image of itself which it finds in the other that the individual selfconsciousness can take itself for an object. II. Critique of Epistemological Foundationalism. First Critical Writings in Jena The change of paradigm announced in the Frankfurt writings is justified in the first writings from Jena - 1801-1802 - through an immanent critique of the epistemology of Cartesian origin that gave rise to modern epistemological skepticism. As emerges from the attack on Reinhold in the Differenzschrift of 1801, Hegel takes a stand against the „foundationalist‟ approach - in Quine, Sellars and Davidson's sense of the term - that claims to rest all empirical cognition on a Grund, an ultimate self-justifying foundation. In his 6 Skeptizismus-Aufsatz of 1802 Hegel identifies the qualifying traits of that approach, which in the final analysis are the basis also of that modern skepticism whose ultimate and exhausted form is represented by the writings of Aenesidemus-Schulzevi. In the Skeptizismus-Aufsatz - as will emerge subsequently, also in the „Sense-certainty‟ chapter of the Phenomenology - Hegel sees this foundationalist approach as a result of the „subjective dogmatism of the facts of consciousness,‟ that is, of the assumption of an absolute dualism between subject and object combined with the myth - to recall that which J. Austin, W. Sellars, D. Davidson and J. McDowellvii have analogously called the „myth of the given,‟viii or „myth of the subjective‟ - that there is a form of immediate and unquestionable givenness which would concern private states of the subject, namely, the so-called „facts of consciousness.‟ The claim to found empirical cognition on a mythicized givenness to which the subject would have privileged access provokes the backlash of modern skepticism, since at this point access to the external object that gives rise to a subject's internal givens - whether it be the world or other subjects - can be gained only directly and hypothetically. III. Epistemic Justification, Coherentism and Holism The attack on foundationalism also regards its specific conception of epistemic justification. Foundationalism is bound up with a linear model of justification which holds that empirical cognition has the structure of a pyramid where the justification is linearly and unidirectionally transmitted, starting from a first principle which, self-justifying, itself has no need of justification and which therefore functions as the foundation of all cognition - that which Hegel calls „foundational demonstrative procedure‟ [Forderung eines Grundes].ix To combat any attempt at grounding on the basis of a principle, Hegel explicitly makes use of the second series of tropes of ancient skepticism, the so-called Aggripan tropes, which claim to show that no foundational attempt can escape the inevitable trilemma of infinite regress in its justification, of the arbitrary assumption of a first principle that arrests the chain of regress, or of circularity. In this way Hegel dissolves the assumptions of modern skepticism through the recourse to ancient skepticism: modern skepticism is in reality a form of foundationalist dogmatism; the real skeptical question that philosophy has to deal with is the one posed by the tropes of Agrippa, namely, the problem of epistemic justification. In this 7 regard Hegel - in the Differenzschrift, and again, later, in the Phenomenology - gives a positive sense to the trope of the circlex and proposes a coherentistic and holistic solution to the problem of justification.xi In philosophy it is not the beginning that transmits justification to what follows; no, there can be justification only within the totality of the system of cognitive propositions that mutually sustain one another dialecticallyantinomically, triggering a circularity in which it is the result that justifies the beginning. This solution, which in the final analysis exploits, positively, the skeptical trope of the circle, is understood by Hegel as a full and proper rational integration of true - i.e. ancient - skepticism: holistic coherentism confutes modern but not ancient skepticism, insofar as the process of development of the holistic system is nothing other than „skepticism that comes to maturation,‟ according to the formula that will be employed in the Phenomenology; i.e., a form of metaepistemological skepticism that shows how every epistemic justification is fallible and destined to dissolve. Ancient skepticism, whose principle of equipollence/antinomy - for which every proposition has an equipollent one that opposes it - had already been taken up by Hegel in his Frankfurt period as the principle of philosophy, is declared to be united with true philosophy, as its negative moment. For Hegel, however, the antinomy is essentially the recognition/Anerkennung of the relatedness of opposites:xii thus in philosophy, as the self-knowledge/selfcognition of reason, reason knows - cognizes - itself as having an essentially recognitive structure. At this level ancient skepticism plays a constructive role in the definition of the Hegelian theory of rationality: thus Hegel systematically develops his youthful intuition, going back to his years in Tübingen, that reason, like love, essentially consists in recognizing oneself in every rational being.xiii IV. Theory of Perception. Jena's Philosophie des Geistes. On this occasion I shall limit myself to just a brief remark on the Naturrecht-Aufsatz and the System der Sittlichkeit, in which the question of recognition is dealt with for the most part on the level of practical philosophy. I do wish to note, however, that the clearly Aristotelian reference to the notion of natural Sittlichkeit, which many interpreters have seen as a regressive element, is in fact consistent with that 8 strategy of naturalization which Hegel also adopts on the epistemological level, through the recovery of the value of the position of life and through the critique of the foundationalist program. Instead, I shall focus my attention here upon the Jena Philosophie des Geistes of 1803-04 and 1805-06 in which Hegel, among other things, develops a complete philosophy of cognition and of the mind, of which I intend to illustrate some characteristics. The attack upon the dogmatism of the „facts of consciousness‟ that Hegel had brought into focus in his Skeptizismus-Aufsatz is now aimed at the specular phenomena of epistemological idealism and empiricism. In the Jena texts of 1803-04 and 1805-06 he develops an alternative to that representationalistic conception of perception that is proper to „foundationalism‟ - to use a term of contemporary debate, utilized for example by Rorty and Brandomxiv. This theory views perception as merely receptive, consisting in the passive reception of inner perceptive facts that present themselves as immediate and unquestionable, while the veridicality of their objective reference can only be established indirectly - which accounts for the skepticism of the external world and of other minds. Hegel, on the contrary, formulates a pragmatic and interactional conception of perception - further developed in the „Perception‟ and „Understanding‟ chapters of the Phenomenology - showing, for example in relation to seeing, that perception is always linked to action and motory activity, i.e., that it has an active character, which implies an active discriminating, distinguishing, recognizing; the content of perception is, as J. McDowell puts it, always already conceptual, a synthesis of content and the „I‟ (cf. Potenz der Sprache, 1803-04,xv and the „Intelligence‟ chapter of the Philosophie des Geistes of 1805-06xvi). In this way the infallibility of the immediate facts of consciousness is lost, but at the same time the relation to the world is assured, since that distinction between direct access (to internal facts) and indirect access (to the external world), which caused the skeptics' problem, is dissolved. V. The Critique of Monological Self-Consciousness The next step in the attack upon modern skepticism goes beyond the critique of the immediatistic theory of perception and cognition and calls into question also the theory of subjectivity that is linked to it. Here we find that theoretical connection which links the question of skepticism to that of self-consciousness and 9 intersubjectivity in Hegel's texts, and which should permit us to comprehend Hegel's position against the backdrop of the historical-argumentative context we referred to earlier. Moreover, also in the Phenomenology the refutation of foundationalism and of the passivistic theory of perception in the „Consciousness‟ section will be followed by the critique of the self-centric theory of self-consciousness. The Jena Philosophie des Geistes, in fact, contains - starting with „Fragment 18‟ of 1803-04xvii - a radical critique of the self-reflective conception of the identity of self-consciousness, understood as a result of the objectivizing self-reference of an isolated „I‟: in this way Hegel attacks Kantian apperception in the element that links it to the Cartesian cogito and, at the same time, confronts the Fichtian problem of a noncircular explanation of self-consciousness. We have seen how the immediatistic theory of perception is linked in modernity to a proprioceptive conception of the subject as having an epistemologically privileged relation with its own inner contents. This approach persists even when, most notably in post-Kantian philosophy, the notion of subject is desubstantialized and rethought in terms of „self-consciousness‟ [Selbstbewusstsein], i.e., in terms of a subject that is such not insofar as it consists in some type of substance, but rather insofar as it refers to itself with an act of self-reflection. Also in the case of the post-Kantian theory of reflective self-consciousness it is assumed that there is a form of privileged relation of the subject with an immediate content of its internal perception, where this cognitive content is now the subject itself qua immediate object of its own cognition: this relation to self as object is private and originary with respect to any type of relation to other objects (external world, other self-consciousnesses). Hence the Fichtian puzzle of circularity to which D. Henrich has paid such close attentionxviii: if self-consciousness consists in the act with which it turns back to itself as to the object of its cognition, how can such self-consciousness recognize itself in the object it has before it without presupposing a cognition of itself? The Hegelian critique of the modern epistemology of the subject had thus to be extended - due to an intimate argumentative connection - also to this self-centric and ultimately solipsistic conception of selfconsciousness. The critique of the immediatistic theory of perception had to find its necessary complement in a critique of the theory of the subject and of monological self-consciousness, which shows how also the 10 reflective self-relation of the conscious subject is nothing immediate, but rather is itself something mediated. The theory of intersubjective recognition between self-consciousnesses will be the instrument through which Hegel intends to critique and to overcome such formulations. For Hegel, in fact, epistemic selfconsciousness not only cannot preexist itself without falling into a vicious circle (Fichte's solution, selfposition), but it cannot preexist its relation with other self-consciousnesses either: while an isolated selfconsciousness has no criterion by which it can identify with itself as with the object it has before it, a relational self-consciousness constitutes itself precisely through the mediation of a public criterion that makes its self-identification, hence its self-cognition, possible. This is the solution of the paradox, a solution that functions with the same logic we find in Wittgenstein's arguments on private languagexix: for Hegel an isolated self-consciousness would have no criterion by which it could identify with itself as with the object it has before it; a self-consciousness has a criterion of self-recognition only if it is relational and constitutes itself through the mediation of a public criterion. Thus the epistemic accessibility of other minds is not to be considered derived with respect to the accessibility of the first person, as the formulation of the skeptics' problem presupposed. And thus the theory of recognition is in agreement with the critique of foundationalism, to the extent that it itself consists in a critique of the claim to posit subjectivity - in the diverse forms of the cogito, of Kantian apperception, of Reinhold's consciousness, or Fichte's self-positing „I‟ - as the ultimate ground of knowing: a claim that is at the origin of that peculiar form of skepticism presented by epistemological idealism and modern solipsism. VI. Hegel's Theory of Knowledge/Cognition Thus it was the confrontation with skepticism that drove Hegel to reconstruct reason on all levels - i.e., in its logical, epistemological and practico-moral structures - in terms of pragmatic relatedness grounded in recognition. In the Jena Philosophie des Geistes Hegel does not limit himself to delineating the genesis of self-consciousness by developing a genetic theory of the mind; no, he goes further, attempting to redefine the very notions of „knowing‟ and „cognition‟ in terms of recognition. This means attributing „cognition‟ [Erkennen] with the structure of „recognition‟ [Anerkennen]. And it is here that Hegel graphically affirms, 11 „man is recognition‟xx: this is the fundamental structure both of his relation to the object (knowing what is objective in its objectivity as the self) and of his relation to other subjects and to himself.xxi In fact, epistemic recognition plays a central role in the theory of cognition that Hegel develops in these writings. This role granted to epistemic recognition is part of a design that aims to bring to light the vitalistic and pragmatic roots of cognition, in accordance with the revision of the theory of perception in activistic terms that we saw earlier. To this end, in the Philosophie des Geistes of 1805-06 Hegel places the concept of „knowing‟ [Wissen] within the practical sphere of the „will‟ [Willen],xxii which dialectically follows the theoretical sphere of „intelligence‟ that we have seen. The „drive to knowing‟ is brought to light by the dialectic of the cunning consciousness, i.e., by the dialectic of labor.xxiii The notion of „cognition‟ [Erkennen] is defined as a knowing one another as one in love; that is, as a reciprocal knowledge on the part of the two extremes in which the will has divided itself, namely, the natural drive and the dr ive to knowing (which correspond to the male and the female).xxiv Thus „cognition‟ [Erkennen] is attributed with the structure of „recognition‟ [Anerkennen], in a process that passes through the „struggle for recognition‟ [Kampf um Anerkennung] to ultimately give rise to the unification of the opposites of intelligence and will (the first two spheres, theoretical and practical, of spirit) in a „knowing of the will‟ [Wissen des Willens] that is at the same time a „will [...] to know.‟xxv The human cognitive powers, which Hegel previously investigated, are thus actual [wirklich] only in the synthesis of understanding and will, whose actuality is in „actual spirit‟ [wirklicher Geist]. And it is here that Hegel graphically affirms, „man is recognition‟xxvi; this is the fundamental structure both of his relation to the object (objective knowing in its objectivity as self-knowing) and of his relation to other subjects and to himself. The first aspect thus regards the theory of recognition as a theory of cognition, the second the theory of recognition as a theory of the mind and of personal identity. The theory of spirit as an ensemble of „middles‟ (recognition, labor, language)xxvii that Hegel brings into focus in these pages is thus not only a theory of the interactive constitution of the self-reflective capacity of subjects a genetic-evolutionary theory of mind that develops his ideas from Frankfurt - but also a theory of cognition expressed in terms of pragmatic interaction. In this picture, epistemic recognition is the cognitive mechanism that makes it possible to coordinate the interactions on the natural -corporeal level of 12 the natural relation between genders. The interiorization of this mechanism of affective-cognitive coordination establishes an intrinsic connection between perception and memory, which is expressed in the capacity of perceptive reidentification of objects and which constitutes the cognitive infrastructure on the basis of which self-conscious human mind interactively structures itself. In my view, Hegel takes up the definition of cognition in terms of Anerkennung that had been given by E. Platner: as in Platner, Anerkennung acts as a bridge between perception and consciousness, mediating the lower cognitive capacities (perception, memory, consciousness) and the higher (concept, judgment, syllogism) xxviii. Hegel's innovation consists, however, in interpreting Anerkennung in interactional terms also on the cognitive level - unlike Fichte. Only if we ascertain the epistemological role of recognition can we at the same time understand why - for a philosopher like Hegel, who aimed to overcome any artificial opposition between the theoretical and the practical sphere, while still maintaining the specificity of their structure - the theory of recognition plays an important role also in his practical-political philosophy. In fact, it is precisely in his pragmatic-vitalistic theory of cognition based on recognition that Hegel sets down the theoretical premise for overcoming the artificial opposition between the theoretical and the practical sphere. VII. Intersubjectivity between first and second nature At this point we still have at least one open question. if recognition is the guiding thread of an evolutionary theory of cognition, which describes the structuring of the human cognitive faculties on the basis of the dimension of animal interaction, then the cognitive phenomenon of recognition already has to be present at the level of Naturphilosophie, and as such does not coincide with the notion of linguistically structured human intersubjectivity. To the extent that recognition is the guiding thread of a theory of cognition, which describes the structuring of man's cognitive faculties on the basis of the animal dimension and his pragmatic interaction with the world and other men, it is already clear that the notion of recognition does not coincide with that of linguistically structured human „intersubjectivity‟ - a term, moreover, that is not used by Hegel. 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 power which is necessarily presupposed by 13 a self-conscious subjectivity that expresses itself linguistically: linguistic intersubjectivity expresses various modes of recognition, but not every form of recognition is linguistic. Hegel advances two types of argumentation on this scorexxix. On the one hand he maintains that no stable recognition is possible in languagexxx. On the other, if we look at the construction of his argumentation we have to admit that, for Hegel, recognition is a phenomenon that is already present on the level of nature and even in the prehuman animal world: this may be gathered both from the System der Sittlichkeit, where recognition is seen as the highest result of the natural-animal processxxxi, and from the Differenzschrift, where recognition - Anerkennung - is introduced with explicit reference to the relation between members of the same species in the animal world. For that matter, as early as his Frankfurt period Hegel placed recognition firmly within the sphere of life and of its antinomic duplication, in that which was his first draft of Naturphilosophie. Recognition, as power, is thus what links the first-nature level of life to the second-nature level of social and historical processesxxxii. 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Rorty and a study guide by R. Brandom, Cambridge, Mass.: Harward University Press Siep, L., (1974), ‚Der Kampf um Anerkennung. Zu Hegels Auseinendersetzung mit Hobbes in den Jaener Schriften‟, Hegel-Studien, vol. 9, p. 155 ff. Siep, L., (1979), Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktische Philosophie , Freiburg: Alber Verlag Stern, R., (1996), ‚Hegel, Scepticism and Transcendentals Arguments‟, in Skeptizismus und Spekulatives Denken in der Philosophie Hegels , ed. by H.F. Fulda and R.-P. Horstmann, Stuttgart: Klett Kotta, pp. 206-225 Testa, I., (2001), ‚Riconoscimento naturalizzato. Una soluzione scettica al dibattito sull‟autocoscienza tra Henrich, Tugendhat e Habermas‟, in P. Costa. M. Rosati, I. 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Welsch (eds.), 200 Jahre der Phänomenologie, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 286387 Thenunissen, M., (1965), Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart , Berlin: De Gruyter Thenunissen, M., (1982), ‚Die Verdrängte Intersubjektivität in Hegels Philosophie des Rechts‟, in: D. Henrich, R.P. Horstmann (eds.), Hegels Philosophie des Rechts, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 317-281 Tugendhat, E., (1979), Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung. Sprachanalitische Interpretationen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Varnier, G., (1990), Ragione, negatività, autocoscienza, Napoli: Guida Vieweg, K., (1999), Philosophie des Remis, München: Fink Westphal, K.R., (1989), Hegels Epistemological Realism, Dordrecht: Kluwer Westphal, K.R., (1998), Hegel, Hume und die Identität wahrnhembarer Dinge, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann Wildt, A., (1982), Autonomie und Anerkennung. Hegels Moralitätsktitik im Lichte seiner Fichte-Rezeption, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Williams, R.R., (1992), Recognition. Fichte and Hegel on the other, Albany: State University of New York Press Williams, R.R., (1997), Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley: University of California Press Wittgenstein, L., (1953), Philosophische Untersuchungen, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Wittgenstein, L., (1969), On Certainty, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 16 i cf. Kojève 1947; Theunissen 1965; Theunissen 1982; Habermas 1967; Harris 1972; Siep 1974; Siep 1979; Tugendhat 1979; Wildt 1982; Kimmerle 1987; Hösle 1987; Honneth 1992; Honneth 2001; Düsing 1986; Williams 1992; Williams 1997; Schmidt 1997; Della Valle 1998; Fischbach 1999; Pippin 1998; Pippin 2000. ii Habermas 1999: 186-229; Pinkard 1994; Redding 1996. iii cf. Brandom 1999. iv cf. Davidson 1982; Davidson 1991a; Davidson 1991b. v Hegel 1907: 378-382. vi cf. Fichte 1966: 313-460. vii Sellars 1956; Austin 1962; Wittgenstein, 1969; Putnam 1994. viii Hegel 1968: 215: „this skepticism [...] is directed against the common sense and common consciousness that hold fast the given, the fact, the finite (whether this finite be called phenomenon or concept)‟. ix Hegel 1968: 65. x cf. Rockmore 1986. xi Hegel 1968: 82: „as objective totality knowing is grounded all the more, the more that it is more formed, and its parts are only grounded simultaneously with this whole of cognitions‟. xii Hegel 1968: 51. On the young Hegel and epistemological skepticism see at least Forster 1989; Varnier 1990; Stern, 1996; Vieweg 1999; Testa 2002a and 2003. xiii Hegel 1989: 101. xiv cf. Rorty 1979; Rorty 1983; Davidson 1987. xv Hegel 1975: 282-300. xvi Hegel 1976: 194: „this seeing, attention, is the first, necessary activity, precise seeing, activity of spirit, fixing, abstracting, drawing out, exertion, overcoming of what is indeterminate in sensation‟. xvii Hegel 1975: 273-279. xviii cf. Henrich 1967; Henrich 1970. xix cf. Wittgenstein 1953: §§ 188, 213, 239, 258, 265, 289. xx Hegel 1976: 215. 17 xxi Hegel 1976: 209: „cognition consists in the very fact that it is itself this knowing, that for [cognition] itself its opposition goes over into identity; or this, that it knows itself as it intuits itself in the other. Cognition means knowing what is objective in its objectivity as self-knowing, conceptualized content, concept that is object.‟ xxii Hegel 1976: 208-222. xxiii Hegel 1976: 207-208. xxiv Hegel 1976: 209-211. xxv Hegel 1976: 221. xxvi Hegel 1976: 215. xxvii On this point see Habermas 1967. xxviii cf. Platner 1784; Platner 1793. See Testa 2002b. xxix On this see Testa 2002b and 2005. xxx Hegel 1975: 308-309. xxxi cf. Hegel 1998: 289-290. xxxii On the relation between fist and second nature in Hegel and Hegelism see Testa 2007 and 2008.