Recognition from First to Second Nature, and Back Again

Abstract

In this paper I will first argue, with reference to Hegel's Jena writings, that the notion of recognition, and the constitution of practical self-consciousness, emerge from the process of first nature and presuppose the capacities of a pre-reflexive self. Then I will show that both the notions of habit and second nature, which Hegel in the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Right places at the basis of his understanding of the social and historical world, and his conception of embedded freedom as liberation, are themselves not intelligible except in their dialectical relation to the first nature of which they are reconfigurations. I will then show how the dialectical relation to first nature accounts for processes of social reification, understood as deadening forms of forgetting the living root of sociality, and thus how it can account in a social diagnostic sense for some aspects of the contingency, plurality and fragmentation of contemporary social processes.