Satisfying self-consciousness
2. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
As we have seen, the central problem of the PhG is the problem of knowledge, Wissen, ultimately the justification of the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge. As any reader of the PhG knows, however, this topic covers a very wide variety of what, for other philosophers, would be quite different issues.
For one thing, Hegel obviously treats ethical issues as in some way cognitive and teleological, and so as decisively linked to the Wissen problematic.18 The "self-relation in relation to an other" formula appears throughout Hegel's idealism and is certainly relevant to the way in which Hegel poses the problem of a right or justifiable recognition of another human being, or the general problem of an objective grounding of ethical life itself.
This fact - that Hegel clearly thinks his general idealist position is the foundation of ethical and social-philosophical issues (in the latter half of "Reason" and in all of "Spirit" and
"Religion") - together with the obvious social dimensions of this section of the PhG, has led many commentators to view it as the beginning and ultimately the core of that social theory, as the place in the PhG where Hegel simply turns his attention to a novel, powerful way of assessing the legitimacy of various forms of social relations.19 That assessment is supposedly based on a criterion of completely reciprocal "recognition," a criterion that Hegel appropriated from Fichte in the Jena years,20 but that he argued for on the basis of a "social ontology" presented in a Hobbes-like parable of an original
"struggle to the death."21 In such views of the "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness" section, Hegel supposedly tried to establish the claim that the very possibility of practical self-determination, the possibility of being a person or a moral agent at all (what one commentator calls the possibility of "ego identity," Ich Identität),22 requires reciprocal recognition, or is possible only within a social community.
Since such a claim is at the center of many traditional Hegelian attacks on the "individualist" moral and political tradition, these passages, presumably justifying the basis of such attacks, have drawn far more attention in the PhG than any other.
Moreover, and more famously, the way in which Hegel makes such a case, how he presents his argument for the implicit
features of the community that can achieve such recognition, with his reliance on the notions of class (as some interpret
"Master" and "Slave"), violence, the Master's impasse, and the historical labor of the Slave, clearly set much of the agenda for Marx's program and again help account for the attention this section has received.23
In short, for many readers, this section presents a kind of archetypal modern parable of social life, an account of what is implicit in modern
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institutions - their potential violence, their actual domination, and (contrary to Hobbes) their historical character, their development - and an account of why such institutions have such features and in what sense such features are legitimate.
Now, very little of what I have said so far about the devel-opment of the problem of self-consciousness in the PhG prepares us for such a major beginning in social theory. I am thus committed to arguing that a correct reading of this section does not view it as a wholesale shift to the concerns of social and ethical theory, that it is much more a continuous development of the idealism/objectivity issues posed in
"Consciousness," and that it thus ought to be kept separate from Hegel's explicit extension of his idealism into ethical or social-ontological or ego-identity areas.
Textually, there is ample support for the claim that it would be extremely premature to look here toward Hegel's social concerns and away from the specific problems developed in the first three chapters. Most obviously, if there is an identifiable continuous argument running throughout the chapter, it in no way concludes in any account of the specific institutions that would provide the reciprocal recognition that arises as such a dramatic issue in this section.
Straightforwardly, at this point in the book, Hegel thinks that the argument in this chapter properly concludes with the
"Certainty and Truth of Reason." In this version of the problem of recognition, as we shall see, Hegel's primary interest is in the problem of universality, the way in which the purposive activity introduced in the preceding section, although mediated through forms of social interaction can be successfully purposive only if what Hegel calls the "particular
will" becomes the "universal and essential will." Thereby, Hegel asserts at the end of this chapter,
there has arisen for consciousness the idea of Reason, of the certainty that, in its particular individuality, it has being absolutely in itself, or is all reality.
(PhG, 131; PS, 138) Clearly, Hegel intends some connection between the issue of the "universality" of some kind of developing like-mindedness (which he ultimately calls "Absolute Spirit") and this fundamental, even if preliminary, statement of his own idealist position. This direction in his argument is already clearly signaled at a decisive juncture in Chapter 4, the initial stages of what he calls "The Freedom of Self-Consciousness," where in a preliminary and still unsatisfactory way, subjects begin to realize that the only foundation of genuine recognition, and so the only realization of freedom itself, is the "pure universality of thought" (PhG 118; PS, 121).24 This means that the basic question that should govern any attempt to interpret the chapter is simply: What is the significance of the problems of recognition and independence/dependence with respect to the
"deductive" intentions of the PhG, with respect to the general problematic of "Absolute Knowledge"?
Moreover there is also ample textual evidence that Hegel himself understood quite well the difference between the relevance of "the struggle to the death for recognition" for social philosophy and as a component of the PhG's deduction of idealism. In one early version of the recognition theory
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(the 1803-4 PS), his claim about the struggle for recognition is made in explicitly social terms that are absent from the PhG account; it concerns heads of families, is based on a notion of such an individual as a "totality" (a notion that does not appear in the PhG), is presented in terms of a complex theory about language and labor as social activities, and concludes in claims about the "spirit of a people," an "absolute"
Volkgeist he explicitly calls "the absolutely universal element," in marked contrast to the PhG's claims about reason. 5 Likewise, in the 1804-5 account of PS, Hegel presents the problem of recognition and its resolution in explicitly political and legal terms, concentrating on presenting the theory in terms of crime, law, and constitution.26 None of these distinctly social and political elements play any role in the PhG's account. However, to be sure, the earlier social-theoretical account of recognition, and the general Hegelian claim that the realization of my own freedom depends on a successful recognition of the freedom of others, do indeed play important roles in a different way, later in the PhG. The theme dominates one of the most important sections of "Spirit," "Conscience," until, after the account of "forgiveness,"
Hegel can introduce the theme of "Absolute Spirit" simply be calling it "reciprocal recognition" (PhG, 361; PS, 408).27
So then, if the account in this chapter is not intended as an introduction to a philosophic anthropology or a theory of moral identity, what exactly is it an account of? If the key problem is the universality of self-consciousness's "will," what is that problem and why does it involve such strange claims about a showdown of opposed self-consciousnesses, a necessary risk of life, and the opposition of Master and Slave?
Put another way, the issue is simply: What is an ideal reconstruction of the collectively "self-determined" subjective conditions of experience? If objects are being considered now as "determinate" only for consciousness, as dependent for any fundamental determinacy on the way in which a subject takes itself to be in relation to that object, and if we begin to consider how that determination occurs "immediately,"
with such self-relation understood simply as desire, a sentiment of life, and objects as mere objects of desire (or obstacles to desire), in what way does Hegel propose to reconstruct a "transition" from such a wholly, even crudely subjective determination to a universal, genuinely objective determination? As Hegel himself implies, his original position "solves" the PhG's realism problem all too easily: Objects are only provisionally "other" than a desiring being takes them to be; soon they are simply
"devoured," destroyed or ignored, and so not other. End of problem.
As already noted, Hegel begins simply by pointing out that in such a scenario, no relation to objects has been established for consciousness; objects are simply obliterated, and consciousness, as a merely living being, pursues whatever desires it has or whichever is strongest, and so cannot be said to determine itself self-consciously. He states such a claim this way:
7. SATISFYING SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Appearing thus immediately on the scene, they [self-consciousnesses] are for one another like ordinary objects, independent shapes, individuals submerged [versenkte]
in the being of life.... They are for each other shapes of consciousness which have not yet accomplished the movement of absolute abstraction, of rooting out all im mediate being, and of being merely the purely negative being of self-identical con sciousness; in other words they have not as yet exposed themselves to each other in the form of pure being-for-self, or a self-consciousness. (PhG, 111; PS, 113)
Accordingly, on this view of a living subject, we have not begun to explain the
"self-relation in relation to an other" required by the account given in the PhG thus far.
There is no real self-relation (however implicit or "hori-zonal" we construe it); and there is no real, mediated relation to objects. This all changes when we consider, again ideally and quite abstractly at this point, such a radically and immediately "idealizing subject" (e.g., objects are objects for it only in terms of its immediate self-sentiment, desire) in the presence of another such desiring subject. In Hegel's reconstruction at this point, two things can be said to happen: We introduce, by considering this new element, the possibility of conflict, of opposed desires; and, even more importantly, that conflict alters the experience of desire itself for a subject. For a self-conscious subject,28 the threat posed by another self-conscious subject is not merely a threat to this or that satisfaction of desire; it is a threat, potentially, to any future satisfaction of desire. If this is so, such a pervasive threat requires not just a resolution of this or that conflict but eventually a fundamental resolution, a securing of some practice of mutual satisfaction of desire or mutual, and so finally rational, universal recognition.
The general picture emerging from this scenario, and its relevance to the PhG's general deductive problematic, also comes more into focus with the introduction of this struggle/recognition issue. Having argued against what we can call both realist and empiricist accounts of ground, and having also shown, he believes, the necessity of forms of self-consciousness for any determinate experience, criteria constraining what fundamentally can count as a determinate object, Hegel retreats in a sense to a kind of
"ground zero" position, a consideration of what experience would look like if such sub-jectively determined constraints were simply and exclusively a living being's contingent desires, the most immediate form of its self-sentiment. He first concludes, in effect, that this alone would not be what we were looking for; construed so radically, it would not count as an experience, a genuine relating to and distinguishing from objects.
Hegel is thus accepting as a premise, justified by the earlier establishment of a necessary "self-relation in relation to any other," that even the most immediate form of this self-relation or self-sentiment must be a genuine self-relation, that the desire for an object must be a desire for-me, self-consciously pursued. He argues that this condition cannot be fulfilled on the model of a solitary subject responding impulsively to its strongest contingent desire. In his terms, it would be "sunk" in life, not leading its life.
If we provisionally
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II. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF IDEALISM 7. SATISFYING SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS consider such a subject as a solitary, self-conscious subject,
taking itself to be pursuing these desires, construed in this way and so on, we then open up the possibility Hegel is interested in: another self-conscious, desiring subject negating that pursuit and even that construal. Only in the presence of this other, it will turn out, can there be a determinate, grounded self-relation and relation-to-other.
Hegel then shows how conflict with another desiring subject does introduce this issue of its desire for consciousness, forces on such a subject the issue of its desire in light of such a threat (and thus, within such a conflict, the general problem of the objectivity of a subject's self-determined, negative relation to the world is introduced). What he goes on to consider is what, within the methodological constraints of his approach, we must conclude as a consequence of such a struggle. That is, given the assumption that, at this point, subjects can rely on no common or "universal" point of view to resolve any conflict, with the collapse of the options represented by consciousness in the PhG, all we can assume as a result of any conflict is war, a struggle to mastery. A self-grounding subjectivity looks, first of all, simply like a plurality of opposed subjects, each acting to secure its purposive projects, and to secure them by forcefully securing recognition of them from others. Just as consciousness had begun with the simplest possible sense of knowledge being
"determined by the object," so this initial consideration of self-consciousness introduces the simplest, even crudest, sense of the subject's "determining the possibility of objects" in knowledge. In Hegel's extraordinary reconstruction, he will consider first the possibility of a radical independence for such an essential subjectivity; as if subjects simply do directly determine, qua subjects, the character of their experience. The story of the chapter is the story of the "self-negation" of such a view of independent determination. It is negated immediately by the mere presence of other subjects, and the attempt to reestablish such independence by simple Mastery, or by spiritual independence, or spiritual negation (in Stoicism and Skepticism) are likewise "sublated."29
So, to sum up, I am suggesting that we view the problem Hegel is pursuing this way. The question is: How should we regard an ideal community (at this stage, a community considered with minimal theoretical presuppositions, or considered "immediately") as coming to establish the constitutive principles of its various practices, activities, and institutions, particularly, given the interest of the PhG as a whole, the claims to knowledge constitutive of all its basic institutions. We have reached this question because Hegel has argued that the self-relation (apperception, self-consciousness) necessary for there to be a determinate, cognitive relation to an
object cannot be understood as determined on empirical or rational grounds, and is an empty or wholly indeterminate self-relation if considered apart from intersubjective mutual determination or outside such a historically self-determining community. Having reached this way of looking at the question, what Hegel wants to do in this section as a whole is thus basic to nis whole enterprise: to show why, in this reconstruction of such fundamental practices, opposed
self-consciousnesses would reach a kind of impasse, a barrier to any successful objective resolution of their own violent struggles, one that can be resolved only by reconceiving the very terms of recognition, by understanding the centrality of
"thought itself," to use his terminology, in the possibility of such a struggle and its resolution. And, although such a realization of the need to understand the nature of thought itself in our reconstruction of such institutions and practices can only be quite obscure at this point, it is at least clear that once this link between the possibility of self-consciousness ("in relation to" any object or other subject) and pure thought is established (and explained and refined, but not substantively extended, in
"Reason"), the deduction of the Absolute Standpoint, and so the proper introduction to the Logic, will have been achieved.30
Looking at this issue this way allows us to focus attention on the two crucial elements of the project. The first considers Hegel's reasons for introducing the problem of "other self-consciousnesses" in the way he does. The second concerns the initial resolution of the problem of self-consciousness "in thought," most obviously in that statement of idealism in
"Reason," and most generally in the move to an "idealist logic"
as the final resolution of the PhG's task.
The first problem contains a number of distinct issues. I have already tried to indicate why Hegel introduces the problem of subjectivity first in terms of desire and then by considering the significance of another desiring being in the satisfaction of such desire. But we clearly also need to understand why Hegel thinks that such a relation of "opposed self-consciousnesses"
should be understood to issue in a "struggle" for recognition, why the risk of life is so important in such a struggle, why it results in the opposition of Master and Slave, why this relation represents a kind of impasse for both (no successful
"realization" of self-consciousness), why the labor of the Slave is important to Hegel in resolving this impasse (at least for the slave), and finally, to come to the second large topic, what the connection is between this interpretation of the significance or meaning of human work and the introduction of "the absolute universality of thought."
Hegel begins his discussion of all these themes by restating clearly the central claim of the chapter:
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it is in and for itself for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.
{PhG, 109; PS, 111) I have interpreted this claim about recognition as a component of the PhG's version of the problem of a "possible knowledge of objects." Such knowledge is conditioned by some form of self-consciousness, a self-relating Hegel originally considers in its immediacy, as purposive and practical, a "desiring" self-understanding. But on such an immediate view of a subject's determination of its own experience, objects are simply abstractly negated by a subject, and so subjects remain "sunk"
in "life," and cannot be said to establish a "self-relation in relation to an other." This can occur only when
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the subject's self-sentiment is itself negated by an other, when its pursuit of satisfaction is challenged by another subject. Its desires are in that situation "for
the subject's self-sentiment is itself negated by an other, when its pursuit of satisfaction is challenged by another subject. Its desires are in that situation "for