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  • The Course of Recognition
  • David Carr
The Course of Recognition. Paul Ricoeur. Translated by David Pellauer. Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 320. $29.95 pbk. 978-0674025646.

Parcours de la reconnaissance: Trois études may have been the last work published before Paul Ricoeur’s death in 2005, and this translation appears posthumously. Ricoeur begins with an apt question: The term recognition (reconnaissance) is obviously an important one in philosophy, so why has no one attempted a general theory of recognition? The immediate suspicion is that the term means several things that cannot be brought under a single concept. Ricoeur struggles with this question, beginning (the first time he has done this, he says [247]) by perusing some dictionaries, notably the classic Dictionnaire by Emile Littré (published 1859–72) and the modern Grand Robert (2nd ed.) of 1985. This is a fascinating inquiry but may be problematic for English-language readers, for the array of meanings under reconnaissance (Littré lists twenty-three) does not overlap with that normally found under recognition. (One of the common meanings of reconnaissance, for example, is “gratitude.”) Ricoeur’s conclusion is that although there is no single concept to be found, and hence no general theory, one can isolate three philosophically interesting ones. More important, he believes that they form a meaningful succession—hence the term parcours in his title, which could be rendered as “running through recognition.” This is the interesting thesis of his book and a difficult one to demonstrate.

The three concepts he lays out are “recognition as identification,” “recognizing oneself,” and “mutual recognition.” The first of the three, to which the shortest chapter is devoted, is relatively straightforward: to recognize, in this primarily cognitive sense, is to identify something in general, and to identify is to take it to be the same as it was before or on other occasions and to distinguish it from other things. Here the central concept is Kant’s “synthesis of recognition,” but Ricoeur traces its background in Descartes and its repercussions through Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

The second chapter, more than a third longer than the first, seems to me to raise the problem of translation. Its epigraph is a statement by Arthur Rimbaud: “Je me sui reconnu poète” (69). It is hard to translate, but saying “I recognized myself as a poet” or “to be a poet” or “that I was a poet” would be among the least satisfactory. This is in some ways the most interesting and wide-ranging chapter, encompassing self-knowledge, self-consciousness, self-awareness, self-esteem, self-attestation, and even self-assertion, but self-recognition is just not a term that would come to the mind of an English speaker. Coming to know oneself and be oneself is the phenomenon that Ricoeur primarily has in mind. At any rate, the object in this case is of course not something in general but oneself, and for Ricoeur coming to know oneself is primarily not a cognitive but a practical [End Page 324] matter, an emergence of capacities, abilities, and know-how. His vast erudition is on display as he invokes literary examples from Greek tragedy to Proust and philosophers from Aristotle to Bernard Williams to Amartya Sen.

The third study, on mutual recognition, is the longest and most important. Here Ricoeur begins with the opposing forms of “dissymmetry” between self and other that he finds in Husserl and Levinas and moves to recognition in the form of Hegelian Anerkennung. Here one expects the emphasis to be on Hegel’s well-known account in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Instead, his focus is on the pre-Phenomenology Jena period (primarily as interpreted by Honneth and Taminiaux), considered as Hegel’s response to Hobbes, Kant, and Fichte. The reason, it turns out, is that Ricoeur objects to the idea, so prominent in the Phenomenology, that reciprocal recognition must be the outcome of a struggle. Preferring to speak of mutual rather than reciprocal recognition, Ricoeur seeks more irenic models in the context of family and a notion of society that does not rest on the fight for survival. This is the occasion for...

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