Doug Henwood wrote:
> As I recell "Merely Cultural" - I don't have a copy at hand - Butler
> uses a lot from Nancy Fraser on "mutual recognition."
What interpretation of "mutual recognition" is involved?
There was a Hegel conference at York over the weekend at which one presenter made Hegel consistent with Foucault by interpreting "mutual recognition" to mean "multi-culturalism" based on the idea that there is no rational basis for ethical beliefs so individuals should accept as the rational ethical position "mutual recognition" of all particular beliefs as equally "valid."
When I pointed out to him that this seemed inconsistent with such claims of Hegel as:
“Sophocles in his Antigone, says, ‘The divine commands are not of yesterday, nor of today; no, they have an infinite existence, and no one could say whence they came.’ The laws of morality are not accidental, but are the essentially Rational.” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm
and
"In caprice it is involved that the content is not formed by the nature of my will, but by contingency. I am dependent upon this content. This is the contradiction contained in caprice. Ordinary man believes that he is free, when he is allowed to act capriciously, but precisely in caprice is it inherent that he is not free. When I will the rational, I do not act as a particular individual but according to the conception of ethical life in general. In an ethical act I establish not myself but the thing. A man, who acts perversely, exhibits particularity. The rational is the highway on which every one travels, and no one is specially marked. When a great artist finishes a work we say: 'It must be so.' The particularity of the artist has wholly disappeared and the work shows no mannerism. Phidias has no mannerism; the statue itself lives and moves. But the poorer is the artist, the more easily we discern himself, his particularity all caprice. If we adhere to the consideration that in caprice a man can will what he pleases, we have certainly freedom of a kind; but again, if we hold to the view that the content is given, then man must be determined by it, and in this light is no longer free." Hegel, Pbilosophy of Right, Introduction <http://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/hegel/index.htm>
he suggested these must be mistranslations.
His attempt to bring together Hegel and Foucault in this way is also inconsistent with Foucault himself who explicitly and correctly contrasts Nietzsche's and his own position with Hegel's in the passage I just quoted. Also, and in addition to this interpretive question, it's not clear to me how universally valid grounds for an ethic of toleration can be consistently deduced from (a) the assumption that there are no such grounds and (b) the claim that all ideas of "goodness" are merely masked expressions of "the endlessly repeated play of dominations."
“In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non– place’ [the ‘non-place’ of the ‘emergence’ of ‘the concept of goodness’] the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," p. 150
Ted