How can there be an original recognition of a self if selfhood originally supposes recognition? How can there be self-consciousness if there is not already a self of which to be conscious? These questions are not identical, to be sure, but they point to a common source of puzzlement for readers of Hegel's analysis of self-consciousness and recognition. Ordinarily, when we speak of being conscious or recognizing some object or other, we presuppose the foregoing presence or constitution of the object. Yet, on Hegel's analysis, there are two levels or strata of performances constituting selfhood that seem to defy the ordinary dynamics of consciousness and recognition. On the one hand, there is a sense in which the self is not constituted or, at least, not fully constituted in advance of self-consciousness, and, on the other hand, self-consciousness only obtains by virtue of mutual recognition, i.e. by virtue of a process of recognizing and being recognized by another. Here we are confronted with two, interrelated puzzles: ‘the puzzles of self-consciousness,’ i.e., puzzles about the self's relationship to self-consciousness and ‘the puzzles of recognition,’ i.e., puzzles regarding the relation of this relationship (including self and self-consciousness) to another self-consciousness.
There is a further puzzle, arguably more central and more momentous, that coincides with the fact that, in Hegel's view, recognition takes the form of a struggle. The struggle for recognition is a battle for mastery, where a central motive is the consciousness of one's superiority over the other. Indeed, on Hegel's account of this struggle, this consciousness can survive and even be corroborated in defeat. In any case, the struggle itself introduces a further puzzle, ‘the puzzle of ethical life.’ How can a self-consciousness, bent on its independence at the cost of the other's independence, ever recognize itself in someone else and/or come to some rapprochement, let alone the unity and equality of ‘ethical actualities’ (a kind of volonté génerale), the spiritual actuality of being recognized universally, as Hegel contends it does?Footnote 1
These three puzzles are among the overriding puzzles of selfhood.Footnote 2 Indeed, while Hegel's writings provide a particularly apt place to address them, they have purchase beyond exegesis of Hegel's writings. After all, regarding the first puzzle, there is no doubt an important sense in which human selves are constituted by their states of mind. Hence, the puzzle of self-consciousness: how can there be self-consciousness if there is not already a self of which to be conscious? Similarly, the second puzzle is by no means peculiar to Hegel's analysis. Just as a person's consciousness of herself is integral to her self in the sense of her personal identity, so, too, her identity emerges in no small measure from her interactions with others, typically beginning in the family (or its facsimile). The fact of this typically familial emergence of selfhood presents us with the puzzle of recognition: how can there be recognition of a self if constitution of the self supposes recognition?
The third puzzle mentioned above is, to be sure, tied more directly to Hegel's distinctive account of the dynamic of recognition in terms of the struggle between master and slave. What is puzzling, given this Hegelian framework, is how self-consciousness can recognize itself in another (as it needs to) if it is independent of others, indeed, in the sense of actively denying them or at least denying their independence? Talk of recognition would seem to be a self-serving ruse, indeed, one that comes at the cost of genuine differences. But here, too, the puzzle is by no means restricted to the framework of Hegel's analyses. Even if one does not accept all the trappings and the universal sweep of his account, there can be little doubt of the historical and empirical evidence of human beings’ desire to master others, often through homogenizing processes. Given this evidence, a version of the puzzle of ethical life remains: how can a struggle, rooted in a desire for mastery of one another, grow or be transformed into a desire for mutual recognition?Footnote 3
The following paper examines the extent to which we can find resources in Hegel to address some of these puzzles. My aim is not to provide a systematic exegesis of Hegel's treatment of these issues, but rather to indicate overlooked aspects of his treatment that offer promising leads to grappling with them. Hegel's treatment is promising, moreover, precisely because it springs in no small way from his attention to developmental phenomena that are based upon certain natural purposes, at least in the case of the first two puzzles. I am less confident about the prospects of resolving the third puzzle along Hegelian or other developmental lines, though the third puzzle, as noted, is by no means restricted to Hegel's philosophy. Indeed, the elusive and enigmatic character of the third puzzle remains perhaps the most stubborn yet pressing problem for philosophy and, more importantly, for humanity.
The first two puzzles form a pair, both in terms of their structure and their content. We already noted how the two puzzles arise structurally from the constitutive roles that consciousness and recognition respectively play in the emergence of the self, and, for this reason, we might be tempted to call them jointly cognitive puzzles. But we should probably resist this temptation since the issues here are by no means confined to self-knowledge and a strictly cognitive or epistemic character of self-consciousness. For, in the first place, there are rudimentary and embryonic forms of self-awareness, including prominently, as noted below, the feeling-of-self that has yet to emerge into full-blown self-consciousness but still clearly serves a natural, biological purpose. In the second place, recognition itself is by no means purely cognitive, particularly if we grant that recognition is tantamount to respect, i.e., an acknowledgement of the worth and independence of whoever is recognized. In the third place, the very content of a full-blown self-consciousness for Hegel demands recognition; that is to say, self-consciousness is not thinkable without it and vice versa. Indeed, this aspect of Hegel's account is arguably among its most significant innovations. He contends, with good reason, that there is allegedly no self without self-consciousness and no self-consciousness without recognition of-and-by other(s). Hence, personal identity as the identity of the self is intimately tied up with one's identity relative to others, more specifically, with the kinds and levels of mutual recognition. (The puzzle of ethical life arises from the fact that, in some contexts but not all, mutual recognition is indistinguishable from mutual esteem and respect.)
However, the foregoing considerations immediately give rise to an objection, one that calls into question the differentiation of these first two puzzles. ‘Given the inseparability of consciousness of oneself from mutual recognition,’ one might object, ‘there is something tendentious about the first puzzle. How can there be a puzzle regarding self and self-consciousness alone since their structure and content, it turns out, suppose something more?’ There is something to this objection, looking ahead, as it does, to the role of recognition. Nevertheless, as I argue below, part of the resolution of this elementary puzzle lies in consideration of naturally purposive levels of reflexivity and self-hood, beginning with what Hegel calls ‘self-feeling’, that are not the product, but a precondition of recognition. In other words, instead of rejecting the more elementary stage as an abstraction from a more developed stage, there is a more straightforward and substantial part of the solution to the first puzzle (the puzzle of self-consciousness), more straightforward because it is mirrored in Hegel's account of the purposeful, natural stages of selfhood that form the backdrop to the dynamics of recognition. This part of the solution consists in rejecting the premise of the puzzle that there is no sort of self in advance of full-blown self-consciousness.Footnote 4
As we shall see, a similar way of addressing the second puzzle (the puzzle of recognition) affords itself. A self may be supposed by recognition albeit not the self that is constituted and re-constituted by it. Hegel's analysis entails (quite reasonably, I argue) that there are multiple stages and levels of this process. Moreover, here, too, Hegel gives us good reasons to look to developmental, intersubjective phenomena that naturally serve purposes for those involved. While amounting to something less than recognition in a more robust sense, these phenomena foreshadow and even serve as necessary conditions for it.Footnote 5 To the extent that the self of self-consciousness depends upon this recognition, these phenomena are indications of the self before self-consciousness.
I The puzzle of self-consciousness
Part of the solution to the last-mentioned puzzle corresponds to a venerable approach to self-consciousness, stretching from antiquity to modernity. By way of introduction to this approach to self-consciousness and how it forms part of the solution to our puzzle, I would like to make note of a curious historical aspect of Hegel's own development of these issues. This historical curiosity can be perhaps best appreciated by considering the following comment that Hegel makes in the introduction to the Philosophy of Spirit in the second and third editions of the Encyclopedia (§378). Hegel writes:
Aristotle's books on the soul, along with his treatments of particular sides and conditions of it, are still the very best or only work of speculative interest on the subject. The essential purpose of a philosophy of spirit can only be to reintroduce the concept into the knowledge of the spirit and with this open up again the sense of those Aristotelian books.
We know, too, that in each of Hegel's nine lecture courses on the history of philosophy, he examined De anima at great length. But what is curious is the lack of any commentary by Hegel on a passage in De anima where Aristotle argues for the reflexiveness of perception and does so in a way that arguably becomes paradigmatic for questions of selfhood in modernity.
Aristotle famously argues for this reflexiveness in De anima III, 2 (425b11-17). There he offers two reasons why the senses are reflexive, that is to say, why they must perceive themselves or, to put it perhaps less paradoxically, why they must include an awareness of themselves. First, if it were not by sight that we are aware of seeing colour, then there would have to be two senses that see colour, i.e., sight and the sense that sees sight and colour. Presumably, the missing premise of this modus tollens argument is that each sense alone senses its proper sensible (colour, sound, etc.). Second, if the sense which perceives sight were different from sight, we must either fall into an infinite regress or ‘we must somewhere assume a sense which is aware of itself. If so, we ought to do this in the first case.’Footnote 6 With these remarks, Aristotle may be said to have introduced a traditionally bottom-up, internalist approach to self-consciousness, based upon what seems to be the phenomenologically evident reflexivity of sensation and perception. Aquinas comments that, as in ordinary discourse, the terms for sensing and perceiving do double duty in this argument. But for our purposes the crucial point is that, in simply having a sensation or at least some sensations and perceptions, I am conscious of the sensation or perception as mine in the following sense. I don't just see red or hear the music; I am aware—at least in some measure—that I am seeing red, that I hear the music, and at least the potential for this reflexivity is integral to my sensations or perceptions.
In modernity, versions of this Aristotelian observation are ubiquitous. Descartes arguably takes over Aristotle's observation, suitably expanding it to every mental state or, better, every conscious mental state, when he contends that the I is a thing that thinks, doubts, imagines, has sensory perceptions, and so on.Footnote 7 In section 4 of Principles of Nature and Grace Leibniz helpfully dubs the phenomenon ‘apperception’ and defines it as “the consciousness or the reflexive knowledge of the interior state” (la conscience ou la connaissance réflexive de cet état intérieur, laquelle n'est point donnée à tout les ames, ni toujours à la mème ame.)Footnote 8 But Locke comes closest to paraphrasing Aristotle's observation when, in the course of elaborating what a person is, Locke remarks that it is ‘impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive.’Footnote 9 While Hume cannot find a self (probably because he looks for it in the wrong place, namely, in a content or object of perception), Kant appropriates Leibniz's rendition, building the entire argument for the objective validity of knowledge on ‘the originally-synthetic unity of apperception.’Footnote 10
After Hegel, Brentano explicitly revives the Aristotelian notion, though the fact that he labels this sort of consciousness of the self ‘the secondary object of consciousness’ has bothered phenomenologists who want the consciousness of consciousness to be intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the respective mental state. Indeed, a significant debate has emerged as to whether self-consciousness in the sense of this apperceptive consciousness is somehow intuitive or whether it is a matter of a higher-order reflection.Footnote 11 Appreciation of the apparently reflexive character of consciousness is also evident in what is dubbed, in some contemporary discussions of consciousness, the ‘intransitive’ character of consciousness or the ‘self-representational’ character of mental states. The common thread here is Aristotle's insight that a kind of reflexiveness distinguishes consciousness generally, despite ongoing contemporary controversy over the appropriate characterization of that reflexiveness. Or, in the terminology of the modern tradition before Hegel, self-consciousness is ap-perceptive consciousness.
Given this tradition and what an avid reader Hegel was of Aristotle's De anima, it would be particularly surprising if he failed to find this internal, reflexive approach compelling and central for any discussion of self-consciousness. Yet there is no evidence of Hegel explicitly discussing the crucial passage from De anima III, 2 in his lectures and this fact is curious (the historical curiosity mentioned earlier). Nevertheless, he clearly integrates this approach into his account. Moreover, far from doing so only under the rubric of self-consciousness, he prefers to integrate much of it into the sphere of anthropology or, more specifically, his accounts of the feeling and actual soul. Herein lies part of the solution to our first puzzle. There is, indeed, a self prior to self-consciousness, but it is the self that is merely felt or feels itself in desire. Far from being anything inert, this self develops via levels of reflexivity.
Before turning to Hegel's account of these phenomena, a word is in order about my use of the term ‘reflexivity’ to characterize them. In logical and grammatical contexts, ‘reflexivity’ refers to the way a name or the subject of a sentence refers to itself where, for example, Raa is meant to give formal expression to ‘she hurts herself’. Reflexivity and its structure are by no means confined to logic and grammar.Footnote 12 To the contrary, there are plainly observable reflexivities in nature, built—probably teleonomically—into the nature of various entities.Footnote 13 Such reflexivity can be interpreted as a means to the end or at least one of the ends of the entity in question and/or as its very end (or at least a constitutive aspect of its end). For example, an animal's sensation of thirst is arguably a kind of reflexivity that serves as a means to an end. The thirst is its alone and, hence, reflexive, but this reflexivity is a means, indeed, a motivational means to quenching its thirst and maintaining a certain homeostatic condition on this side of dehydration. Moreover, the satisfaction of quenching the thirst is, in an analogous sense, reflexive and co-incident, arguably even constitutive of an end of the animal, namely, its health. The reflexive character of thirst or satisfying thirst in the senses described clearly entails no robust sense of ‘self.’ In fact, a more or less abiding sense of self in a human being seems to suppose or, better, develop out of such ongoing and repeated episodes of reflexivity. We are not born with ready-made selves, for example, the personal identities supposed by promises and contracts, but we are surely born with the patent potential to come to be conscious of ourselves as having these robust identities. In some natural entities, this reflexiveness manifests itself as a kind of self-feeling.
If we turn to Hegel's texts we find him emphasizing reflexivity in just these ways. Thus, in the Encyclopedia version of the philosophy of spirit, he identifies the immediate yet holistic self-perception of an embodied individual as a ‘self-feeling’ (Selbstgefühl), that ranges from pre-reflective sensations (Empfindungen) through sovereign feelings of oneself (i.e., feelings at one's disposal) to habitual modes of self-understanding that, as the result of reflection, put the individual in control of her body. Indeed, for animal organisms generally, Hegel conceives a ‘simple immediate self-feeling’ as the aim and result of its key processes, necessarily involving various forms of feedback and interaction with external nature, through which ‘the animal gives truth, objectivity, as a unique individual to its certainty of itself.’Footnote 14
Against this backdrop, Hegel turns in the Anthropology to distinctively human self-perception. While in an Empfindung as such there is no distance from our bodies, i.e., the animal organisms that we are, the content of the human sensation is nonetheless a ‘determinacy of my entire, albeit in this form dull or vague, being-for-itself [dumpfes Fürsichsein]; it is thus posited as my ownmost’ (Enz., § 400). The dullness or vagueness of this sense of being-for-oneself is first but incompletely trumped by what Hegel calls the ‘the feeling soul’ as a ‘simple interiority.’ In contrast to those sensations that come and go, the feeling soul takes possession and becomes ‘the power of its substantial reality for itself,’ even though it is nothing separate from the body, and ‘its determinations do not develop into conscious and understood contents’ (Enz., §§ 403-4).
Crucial to this Encyclopedia account of the soul's development is the Selbstgefühl, the feeling of oneself, in which ‘the subject as such posits [its determinations] in itself as its feelings.’ Immersed in the particularity of the sensations on the one hand, the subject nonetheless ‘at the same time joins together with itself as subjectively one in those feelings’ (Enz., § 407). Indeed, for Hegel the mark of mental illness is precisely a fixation on a particular feeling and thus embodiment of oneself, illness that can only be overcome by a subject who has not only a feeling but a consciousness of herself (Enz., § 408).
Hegel accordingly describes self-feeling as a state in sharp conflict or tension with itself, caught up in the respective, fleeting feelings and bodily states, yet also with itself throughout them. This tension gives new meaning to the duality of the reflexiveness noted by Aristotle with respect to perception. The self is immersed in each particular feeling but senses that immersion, thereby betraying the fact that it is not confined to any particular feeling but instead ranges over all of them precisely by feeling itself feeling in each case.
This dimension becomes actual, that is to say, the self-feeling actually breaks free of its immersion in particular feelings and its embodiment through the force of habit (‘the mechanism of self-feeling’). Through the repetition and exercise that produces habits, the soul neither differentiates itself from nor is lost in particular feelings, but instead moves about among them ‘without sensing them, unconsciously’ (Enz., § 410). Again, Hegel is quick to interject that this habit-formed break from the immediate identification with particular feelings and one's body is not yet self-consciousness or consciousness of the I. Yet it is the foundation of consciousness precisely ‘because it has superseded [aufgehoben] the bodiliness in itself and thus posited it as subject for itself’ (Enz., § 409). Indeed, Hegel apparently even maintains that ‘the soul, insofar as it is subjectivity or something like a self, is already in itself an I’ (Enz., §412 Zusatz). As a result of habituation, in the actual soul (the last stage of the development depicted in the Anthropology), the body becomes the sign of the soul, the externality in which it ‘feels itself,’ relating only to itself and setting the stage for ‘the higher awakening of the soul to the I.’Footnote 15
It should not be overlooked that this self-feeling and its development are motivated by purposes natural to the organic nature of human beings. Hegel's account of these phenomena in his Anthropology provides at least the outline of an answer to the initial puzzle of self-consciousness. Although the self of self-consciousness is ultimately constituted by its consciousness, there is a developmental story to this process, one that ranges over phenomena of the soul and self-feeling that are presupposed by self-consciousness proper (as conditions for it). Thanks to this development, there is, indeed, a self before self-consciousness, a self that is presupposed by consciousness, even if (a) the consciousness of that self transforms it and (b) that self-consciousness ultimately supposes recognition of and by another.Footnote 16 With this last observation, of course, we enter into the realm of the second puzzle. However, as a prelude to considering that puzzle, it is helpful first to consider Hegel's treatment of the relation between self-consciousness and consciousness of an object, as that relation initially takes shape in desire.
II Between puzzles: self-consciousness and desire
In the opening paragraph of Hegel's treatment of self-consciousness in the Encyclopedia, we find the observation that ‘self-consciousness is in the existence of every consciousness of another object’ (Enz., §424). He continues in a similar vein in the very next section, as he construes self-consciousness generally as the initial negation of consciousness and the ‘contradiction of itself as self-consciousness and as consciousness’ (Enz., §425). Both observations echo the bottom-up account of apperceptive consciousness that we traced above, both from Aristotle through the moderns and from the account of sensations and feelings to that of the actual soul in Hegel's Anthropology. But here Hegel introduces an innovation into the account, at least relative to many of his modern predecessors, by construing apperceptive consciousness as a contradiction, an unresolved relation of consciousness and self-consciousness, and, in addition, by identifying that tension as desire.
A similar move can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Apperceptive consciousness is, it bears recalling, dual or double. Every conscious perception is also at once apperceptive, i.e., a consciousness of that perception. Flagging this same doubling in the introduction to the chapter on self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes:
As self-consciousness, consciousness has a double object, the one, the immediate, the object of sense-certainty and perceiving, … and the second, namely, itself that is the true essence and is initially at hand only in contrast to the first. (PhG, 121f)
Hegel proceeds to depict self-consciousness as the movement of canceling this contrast. Self-consciousness here is something living and takes the form of desire; though Hegel gives far too little justification of this observation in the Phenomenology, we know from the Jena drafts and later from the Encyclopedia that he conceives the self as initially the self of the actual soul that, by permeating the body and myriad feelings, is also distinguishable from the body. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel thus stresses that the movement of self-consciousness is the process of satisfying its desires and, in the process, experiencing the self-sufficiency of the objects of desire (PhG, 122). He also characterizes this process as the paradox that, inasmuch as self-consciousness becomes certain of itself through striving to destroy the other as a self-sufficient object of its desire, it dare not destroy it or, at least, all of it (PhG, 123).Footnote 17
But while there is apperceptive consciousness in desire and its satisfaction, as long as the object of desire is not like it, i.e., is not another self-consciousness, there is no genuine self-consciousness. If the object is something alive but not itself another self-consciousness, i.e., not someone desiring as I do, I cannot recognize myself genuinely in my desire. As a result, the desire that defines self-consciousness can only be satisfied by superseding the desire or, more precisely, by negating it and by the object of the desire negating itself, i.e., the independence that self-consciousness experiences in negating it. Soulful, self-centered desire for another must give way to self-conscious recognition of and by another self-consciousness.
Returning to the Encyclopedia, we find a similar account, thinner on some details but even clearer on the transformation of apperceptive consciousness to full-blown self-consciousness. Hegel characterizes self-consciousness in its immediacy as the process of the selfish individual satisfying its desires. In the final section before he introduces the account of ‘the recognizing self-consciousness,’ he writes:
But the self-feeling [Selbstgefühl] it procures in the satisfaction does not remain in the inner side or in itself, in abstractly being-for-itself or in its individuality. Instead, as the negation of the immediacy and the individuality, the result contains the determination of universality and the identity of self-consciousness with its object. The judgment or diremption of this self-consciousness is the consciousness of a free object, in which the ego has knowledge of itself as ego, but that is also still outside him. (Enz., §429)
This awakening requires an identification of the soul with a universality and this identification requires an other self-consciousness, albeit in a quite distinctive sense. What is required for the transition from soul to consciousness and self-consciousness is their mutual recognition, not simply of each other as souls, subjects of bodies, but as identical, as sharing in some universal. In effect, despite Hegel's respect for the time-honoured bottom-up or internalist, apperceptive approach to self-consciousness, he makes a clear break from it by making self-consciousness dependent upon intersubjectivity. Elaboration of self-consciousness solely or even primarily along internalist lines fails to give the intersubjective constitution of self-consciousness its due and, in the process, lays the groundwork for a solipsism that flies in the face of how we are conscious of our conscious states and, thereby, conscious of ourselves.
III The puzzle of recognition
The puzzle of recognition, as noted at the outset, is motivated by the fact that recognition typically supposes the foregoing on-handness of who or what is recognized. Thus, when we speak of someone deserving recognition for acts of courage or charity, the recognition clearly comes after the fact and by no means confers existence, selfhood, or even self-consciousness on the person responsible for those acts. Similarly, after seeing an old acquaintance, particularly as years of aging have set in, we might say: ‘I hardly recognized him’ or even ‘I wouldn't have recognized him if he did not say he was John, my old acquaintance.’ Given this ordinary mechanism of recognition, it is puzzling how recognition can be necessary for the self or self-consciousness.
As with the previous puzzle, texts other than the Phenomenology of Spirit provide important clues to answering this puzzle. As Ludwig Siep observes, ‘the most important texts of Hegel's for the theory of recognition stem from his Jena period.’Footnote 18 Accordingly, the following observations on Hegel's conception of the struggle for recognition draw on his earlier Jena treatments of recognition.
Three aspects of Hegel's conception of that struggle become patent in his 1805/06 Jena draft of a philosophy of spirit. The first aspect is Hegel's explicit identification of the struggle with the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. Hegel is bent on integrating the natural law theory of the battle of individuals in the pre-contractual status naturae into his conception of the formation of spirit. Thus, the struggle for recognition emerges as the product of a practical solipsism or mutual alienation on the part of contending parties vying with one another for supremacy.
This relationship is usually called the ‘state of nature’ [Naturzustand]; the free, indifferent being of individuals opposite one another and the natural right is supposed to answer what sort of rights and duties, given this relationship, the individuals have opposite one another…. Their sole relationship, however, is precisely to cancel this relationship, exeundum e statu naturae [they should leave the state of nature]. In this relationship they have no rights and no duties opposite one another, but they first acquire them by abandoning that relationship. (JS III, 196f)
To abandon that relationship is precisely to produce the reality of right in general (Erzeugen des Rechtes überhaupt), i.e., to enter into a relationship of mutual recognition (anerkennende Beziehung). ‘In recognizing,’ Hegel writes, ‘the self ceases to be this singular self; in recognizing, it is by right [lawfully: rechtlich], that is to say, no longer in its immediate existence’ (JS III, 197). But this process of mutual recognition is a struggle since the parties begin in mutual alienation. Each party initially refuses to accept the independence of the other, is unable to see that the other accepts mine, and demands that the other do so.
In the Jena drafts the movement of recognition is framed over the difference between possession (Besitz) and property (Eigentum). In the state of nature, I can take possession of something, but I thereby exercise a right only opposite things, not others. But it is my property only by virtue of being recognized as mine by others. Here recognition contributes to the constitution of the self and self-consciousness not simply in the abstract, but also as an embodied and extended self, identified with property. Consciousness of oneself as the owner of property supposes recognition of oneself in this capacity by others and, it does not go without saying, one's own recognition of others’ recognition. We might call this a practical version of Davidson's doctrine of triangulation.Footnote 19
But the second aspect of Hegel's Jena discussion of the struggle for recognition breaks with the Hobbesian account when it comes to the question of the motivation for this state of mutual alienation. On Hegel's account, an individual finds herself in this state because of an underlying desire to be honoured rather than merely to be preserved or empowered.Footnote 20 I take ‘honour’ here in a broad sense to designate a range of attitudes, from mere toleration, acknowledgment, and acceptance to respect, appreciation, and revering. The appeal to desire for honour in this broad sense hardly leaves the realm of natural purposes. To be sure, cultural differences regarding the types and degree of manifestations of this desire and its fulfillment abound. Nevertheless, the universality of these phenomena provides impressive empirical evidence of the naturalness of this desire as a purpose, an aim of human striving.
The third aspect of Hegel's Jena discussion also departs from a Hobbesian but also a Rousseauian framework. To be sure, for Hegel as for Hobbes, what is at stake is an absolute self-affirmation of the individual. But in Hegel's account the individual is not of her own making. She does not enter the struggle unarmed, as it were, with no history of her own and nothing but natural powers. At the same time, this self-affirmation does not dissolve some foregoing harmony among individuals.Footnote 21 In the 1805/06 draft of a philosophy of spirit, Hegel has love and family precede and thereby inform the struggle for recognition. Moreover, in this draft the struggle for individual self-affirmation is not aimed at the family nor is the family (in contrast to a draft a few years earlier) construed as the summation of ethical life prior to the state. Instead—and much more naturally it would seem—Hegel conceives being recognized in the family's love as the presupposition for the consciousness of independence and individual freedom that aims to validate itself in the battle against other ‘free individualities’ (GW 8, 214f). At times, Hegel even couches the struggle as one between families. He observes, for example, that ‘the family, as a whole, confronts another whole closed in on itself’ (JS III, 196) and that ‘the other – the family – is calmly and innocently for itself’ (JS III, 201).Footnote 22
Hegel's thinking is very much underway in these Jena writings, and my aim here is not to provide an exegesis of them that sorts out discrepancies and offers an explanation of that development. But even in the foregoing gloss on his thinking about the family, we find important clues to resolving if not dispelling the puzzle of recognition. For in the context of the family and the natural purposes it fulfills, there is genuine self-consciousness only where the self possesses a distinctive, gendered identity and role (e.g., mother, sister, uncle, cousin) thanks to his or her recognized place in the family. To the extent that the family is necessary for its members’ sustenance and well-being, familial recognition fulfills natural purposes, indeed, purposes that arguably supersede (cancel yet reconstitute) aims and pursuits attributed to the soul as the unity of the organism. In turn, a family's recognition by other families (through, specifically, recognized claims to property, honour, and the like) is a natural extension of the self-consciousness achieved through familial recognition.Footnote 23 For example, the access to property, secured by this mutual recognition among families, enables the family to provide sustenance to its own members and, in that fundamental sense, to recognize them. I argued above that the existence of the soul with its self-feeling prepares the way for the self of self-consciousness and thereby mitigates the puzzle of self-consciousness. So, too, the role played by the family in the formation of the self and self-consciousness makes perfectly plain why recognition is necessary for self-consciousness and, in the process, dispatches the puzzle of recognition.
To be sure, familial recognition and the level of self-consciousness afforded by it, even when ideal, are not identical to the robust mutual recognition that characterizes ethical life (Sittlichkeit). To this extent, the reference earlier to ‘right’ and ‘mutual recognition’ in the Jena writings may be premature. It is all too conceivable that a family pays respect to claims of justice but only for the sake of itself, for the sake of its security, property, and honour. But with these considerations, we have already moved from the puzzle of recognition to the puzzle of ethical life.
IV The Puzzle of Ethical Life
The last puzzle of our trio, as noted at the outset, is generated by the assumption that self-consciousness requires what it must negate. Consider the following three sentences from the Phenomenology of Spirit:
S1: ‘Es ist ein Selbstbewußtsein für ein Selbstbewußtsein. Erst hierdurch ist es in der Tat….’ (PhG, 127)
S2: ‘Es muß dies sein Anderssein aufheben.’ (PhG, 128)
S3: ‘Das Selbstbewußtsein ist zunächst einfaches Fürsichsein, sich selbst gleich durch das Ausschließen alles andern aus sich;…’ (PhG, 129).Footnote 24
Both S2 and S3 contradict S1, by stating that self-consciousness necessarily cancels or excludes the other that, according to S1, is a necessary condition for self-consciousness. To be sure, in S3 Hegel alludes to the preliminary character of this stage (‘at first’: zunächst). But the puzzle of ethical life is how, from this beginning, it can move towards the sort of mutual respect constitutive of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). S3 and, to a lesser extent, S2 express a kind of self-conscious, practical solipsism, at least in the sense that it exists self-same and simply for itself, and, indeed, does so by necessarily excluding everything else from it.
In Hegel's defense, it bears noting that he insists that characterizations such as S3 are abstract, incomplete, and merely starting points. The struggle for recognition is part of a cultivation or education (Bildung) of consciousness that is not resolved when individuals accept each other as equals or as exchangeable with one another simply for prudential reasons. The struggle is supposed to lead to the insight into each party's identity with the other as a free subject or, in other, more Hegelian terms, the insight into the identity of the individual with the universal, that is to say, as the manifestation of that universal, the Volksgeist, the spirit of the people.Footnote 25
But the puzzle still remains; indeed, it is exacerbated by the presumption of some sort of universal identity. The question is not only why it must come to this but, given Hegel's account of the struggle and its motivation, how it possibly can, and, perhaps even more importantly, whether pursuit of such a mutually recognized identity founds ethical life. On the one hand, Hegel starts out from the supposition of self-consciousness’ independence from everything not part of its apperception, an independence that takes the form of actively negating otherness, i.e., actively pursuing its own self-interest at the cost of the other. On the other hand, he supposes that self-consciousness can only become objective in an other and, indeed, in an inter-subjective relation, a relation of mutual recognition, based upon the identity of their true self-interests.Footnote 26 But, then, how do we get from a struggle for mastery to robust, truly mutual recognition, from an inter-subjectivity motivated by the pursuit of power and honour to one motivated by civic virtue?Footnote 27 Why is mutual recognition necessary? Why are individuals or individual families or groups not content with the self-consciousness of the struggle or, if you will, a mere self-perception motivated by desire for power and honour? Furthermore, if there is such a thing as civic virtue, an inter-subjectivity not motivated by enhancing or even merely preserving one's power and position, it is hard to see how the struggle for mutual recognition can enjoy the sweeping and fundamental status assigned to it in Hegel's account of ethical life.Footnote 28
Fichte introduced an account of recognition as a means of solving the puzzle of ethical life. The account begins with a summons by others to responsible, inter-subjective freedom. I accept the summons and recognize the freedom of others by negating my arbitrary will but thereby gain freedom of action in the public domain, and the others do so as well. On this Fichtean account, recognition is mutual and liberating, but its essential component consists in restricting oneself, imposing constraints on oneself. (In the moral sphere, this component takes the form of an ought, an obligation that can only be endlessly pursued, since it requires overcoming the boundary between the absolute freedom of self-identity and the empirical ego.)
Hegel was a constant critic of Fichte's theory because he saw it as one-sided and insufficiently radical. For Hegel it is not enough for me to see in the other my own self-negation and the possibility of self-determination it yields; I must also see in the other my own negation of her. But I cannot make this happen alone; like any genuine relationship, it takes two. The other has to negate herself or, more precisely and moving beyond Fichte's account, she has to be forced to take my negation of her and make it her own. And the same has to happen on my part. The entire process takes the form of a struggle since each sets out from a self-consciousness that is more a self-feeling, ensconced in its own body and consciousness, defined or, better, defining itself by exclusion of the other. Given this starting point, only a struggle and, indeed, an ultimately self-defeating, life and death struggle can ensue.Footnote 29 And the struggle ensues, as Hegel puts it, ‘because each is focused on the preservation of its life as the existence of its freedom’ (Enz., § 432). As noted earlier, death resolves the conflict but creates a new and higher-level contradiction. But this contradiction gives way to the master-slave relation. As Hegel puts it, ‘because life is as essential as freedom, the struggle ends initially as a one-sided negation,’ namely, the inequality of master and slave and a series of the ensuing dialectical moves.Footnote 30
This last quotation leads me to a reprise of the puzzle stated earlier. On the one hand, the motivations that presumably underlie the emergence of a master-slave relation (and its countless permutations) leave little room to think that inter-subjectivity, at least in the public domain, can ever be something other than reciprocally one-sided negations of others. The self-negation that leads to servitude is forced, prudential, and (it is hoped) provisory. Why should the self-negation inherent in social, legal, or political contexts calling for mutual respect be any different? On the other hand, it is hard to see how a progressively reciprocal, two-sided negation (as full, mutual recognition presumably demands) can do justice to the other as other—and, indeed, oneself as other. Discounting differences seems to be a necessary consequence of the presumption of a teleological development towards universality in the form of mutual recognition, as a condition of ethical life.
To be sure, the dialectical purpose of the chapter on self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit is precisely to demonstrate that a certain desire for mastery of others results in self-negation and, hence, must be given up. Terminating as it does in unhappy consciousness, the chapter ‘signifies a recognition of the insufficiency of mastery,’ i.e., that it is here, as elsewhere, ‘self-subverting.’Footnote 31 So, too, ethical life in general only emerges when that desire is surrendered, and the subsequent accounts of ethical life, both in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia, supposedly fill out the story that needs to be told in this regard.Footnote 32 Our self-understanding, far from being restricted to that of desiring subjects possessing bare self-awareness, entails being ethical (sittlich), namely, being responsive to norms, a responsiveness and responsibility that follows from growing up in and being part of a community and, indeed, a community with its own cultural and linguistic identity. Mutual recognition is a transformative function of acknowledging—and respecting—each other as speakers and actors in (or in terms of) that community, not simply as desiring animals.Footnote 33
I have no problem with these considerations, precisely as readings of Hegel's argument. Still, far from solving or removing the puzzle of ethical life, they underscore its enigmatic character, particularly when they continue to locate the rationale and motivation for ethical life in the prospect of gaining our true selves (i.e., our inter-subjective selves, mediated by forms of mutual recognition). The self-serving motivation of the initial, agonistic encounter with the other survives, it would seem, under the rubric of communal or social identity with the other.
What is substantially diminished, if not forfeited, by centering the development of ethical life in a (conscious or unconscious) pursuit of mutual recognition, is the role of acting for another or for others within a context of asymmetry, one that lies outside the parameters of mutual recognition. Without doubt, one of Hegel's major contributions is to have demonstrated how spirit emerges from a kind of loss and retrieval of selfFootnote 34 and, more particularly, how ethical life is founded in many respects upon acts based upon mutual recognition, ensuing from a self-defeating struggle for mastery. But it is founded no less—indeed, perhaps even more—upon acts of generosity, sacrifice,Footnote 35 and kindness without recompense, actual or expected. Such acts, entailing the real prospect, sometimes even the reality, of loss of oneself, require an other (and thus a difference) that is not—indeed, cannot be—superseded by the kind of shared (let alone universal) identity that is emblematic of mutual recognition.
Conclusion
In our efforts to solve the first two puzzles, we followed the same strategy of looking at texts where Hegel couches the relevant phenomena within the context of a pursuit of natural purposes. The naturally purposive reflexivity of the soul and its developing self-feeling provide rudiments of selfhood and thus a basis for the constitution of the self through self-consciousness. The strategy was to look to Hegel's own accounts of stages of development prior to that constitution in order to put the latter—or, better, read him as putting the latter—on a natural footing. In this way, the puzzle of self-consciousness becomes less puzzling when it is seen as a development of a reflexivity that already constitutes the soul, the animated but not yet self-conscious self. A similar strategy helped us address the puzzle of recognition. The identity constituted by the relation of self and self-consciousness requires more than the reflexivity of the embodied soul; it requires recognition of-and-by others. Yet, prior to the struggle for recognition that is a matter of life and death, there is a kind of proto-recognition involved in one's gendered identity in a family (or the closest thing to a family in the modern, bourgeois sense of the phenomenon). This familial recognition constitutes self and self-consciousness, and vice versa—albeit at a level that, while in some sense natural or fulfilling natural purposes, does not amount to the recognition of sameness and the mutual respect that is required for ethical life. Hegel's glosses on how the family provides the basis for recognition thus leave the puzzle of ethical life fully in force; indeed, they may even be seen to exacerbate it.Footnote 36
One of the aims of this paper has been to argue that, when it comes to the puzzles of selfhood, we would do well to consider them in developmental terms and, indeed, that Hegel's work in this connection is exemplary.Footnote 37 What Hegel has also shown is the need to broaden the developmental focus to history, the history of humankind and its cultures. In that historical development lie perhaps the clues to the seemingly intractable selfhood puzzle of ethical life, the identity and self-identification of an ethical self. But here a stumbling block presents itself and, indeed, a stumbling block that also marks a crucial difference between the puzzle of ethical selfhood and the puzzles of self-consciousness and recognition. Clues to resolving the latter puzzles can be found in what are arguably natural purposes or teleonomies, both the unity that the soul, feeling itself, gives the human body and the unity of that soulful unity with others in the family. If we follow a similar strategy to resolve the puzzle of ethical life, we are faced with the daunting task—from which Hegel does not flinch—of demonstrating that history, too, has a purpose.
