Anerkennung: Hegel's refutation of Walker Percy

Rene Girard's scapegoat and Michel Foucault's "other" point to a peculiar and perverse human need to identify an object of scorn. Lest one relegate such perversity to the school yard, it should be noted that the esteemed novelist Walker Percy specified his n'er-do-well as Hegel, a brilliant thinker whose waves of influence continue to hit the beaches of our minds to this day. The following is an apologia of Hegel against this specific attack, employing Percy's The Moviegoer as an intellectual receptacle for such exercise. I contend that Hegel's concept of Anerkennung , culled from the master/slave dialectic of his Phenomenology of Spirit, more insightfully and paradigmatically "explains" Percy's characterizations in his works of fiction than do other thinkers that Percy so readily subsumes. My methodology begins with an exploration of Percy and his beloved Kierkegaard, who functions as an informal, "associate" hermeneutic and whose anti-Hegel diatribes are legendary; progresses to a dissection of Hegel's logic, my primary hermeneutic, to further magnify the Hegel/Kierkegaard schism; then specifies a failure of intersubjectivity in both Hegel and Kierkegaard that evolves into a resolution through Hegel's concept of Anerkennung as impacted by the sole of the symbol in the self-determination of Geist. The culmination of my argument is situated in the plot of The Moviegoer, wherein individual redemption is instantiated through interpersonal recognition and objective Spirit in community that emerge out of Hegel's portrayal of the praxis of confession and forgiveness. My conclusion is that Percy dismisses Hegel at his own intellectual peril, and that had he attended more carefully to Hegel's corpus, his own Weltanschauung would have been immeasurably enriched.