Abstract
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man offers a magnificent literary reworking of the dialectics of recognition that has fascinated philosophers since Hegel. Ellison’s novel transforms the tradition of the slave narrative by drawing on writers and artists in European traditions — Dostoevsky, Dante, Marx, Malraux — as well as in African-American traditions — Wright, Armstrong to ask for more than Frederick Douglass’ demand for formal equality. The recognition Ellison asks for cannot be granted by formal procedures or by individual goodwill, but only by reexamining the cultural and historical inheritance that makes up the medium of public debate in democracy, an inheritance full of achievement and damage. Moreover, such recognition will involve not only changing our understanding of historical facts, but also learning to reason historically through culture. The purpose of my paper will be to explore how Ellison helps us reason through culture, history, and difference rather than against them, as do Kantian proceduralists, such as Habermas, and postmodernist celebrators of difference per se.
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Steele, M. (2002). Recognizing Invisibility, Revising Memory. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. Analecta Husserliana, vol 75. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0485-5_15
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