Abstract “The role of social interaction in truth finding.”
According to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the consolidation of any truth content
is impossible without ‘social interaction’. Hegel conceptualises the recognition of the
Spirit, which is a manifold of self-consciousnesses that reciprocally recognise one
another. This is not only a condition for human interaction but also one for knowledge
of objective nature. The first part of my paper consists of a systematic introduction to
the structure of the phenomenology of Hegel. In the second part I reconstruct the role
the pure Self plays here. In the third part, I more closely examine the stage of the
lordship/bondsman-relation, which is the first stage in the PhoS in which recognition
is realised. I propose a systematic interpretation of the fear of death, the labour of the
bondsman and the savoury of the lord. I want to show that recognition is not just a
formal condition but is also realised as a societal body, and that the
lordship/bondsman-relation in this sense anticipates on the complete relation between
objective and absolute spirit. Recognition is both reflective and immediate practice.
This exposes the phenomenology of Hegel to be a philosophy that explicitly connects
the particular acts of knowing with the concrete practice of human life.