Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

Freedom as Correlation

Freedom as Correlation Recognition and Self-Actualization in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit Robert R. Williams In a recent essay, Robert Pippin asks, “What is the question for which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition is the answer?”1 His answer to this question is that recognition is bound up with the issue of the nature and possibility of freedom and that Hegel’s later writings are extensions, not repudiations, of his earlier Jena view. Pippin’s claims about the systematic connection between recognition and freedom, as well as the continuity between Hegel’s early and mature position are I believe correct. However, understanding the systematic connection between recognition and freedom does not, in Pippin’s estimation, require understanding recognition as a theory of selfconsciousness or of intersubjectivity. Instead Pippin claims that the “question for which recognition is the answer” narrows to the question, why does Hegel think that a subject cannot be free alone? In answering this question, Pippin presents an account of Hegel that is historicist and constructivist. According to Pippin, it is his radical historicism and constructivism that leads Hegel to recognition.2 The question is, how can Pippin’s antisubstantialist, constructivist, left-Hegelian interpretation of recognition ground the normative aspects present in Hegel’s mature account of ethical life? Pippin concedes that his reconstruction is too constructivist and relativist to do justice to the 155 156 / Robert R. Williams historical Hegel or to the normative issue.3 It is not clear how one moves from a formal constructivist reading of reciprocal recognition to Hegel’s mature, nonformal theory of ethical life.4 Pippin observes, Once Hegel’s anti-dualism about Geist, and a radical anti-realism or constructivism about norms is conceded, and some version of Hegel’s critique of formalism is accepted, then there is just nothing left to ‘counting as a norm’ other than being taken to be one . . . Without a possible Aristotelian appeal to the realization of natural capacities in order to establish when one is really acting in a practically rational way (realizing one’s natural potential) . . . this turns out to be the only criterion left: one is an agent in being recognized as, responded to as, an agent; one can be so recognized if the justifying norms appealed to in the practice of treating each other as agents can actually function within that community as justifying.5 This is circular and inadequate as Pippin concedes. This circularity betokens a formal, nonteleological, and nonholistic view of mutual recognition. Pippin treats normative questions by appeal to preestablished community practices that are broader than and external to recognition. Instead of grounding community and norms, recognition presupposes these. In his Die Logik des Absoluten, Stefan Majetschak claims that recognition is connected not so much with the nature and possibility of freedom as with self-actualization.6 Majetschak observes that for Hegel, the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of being-for-self (Fürsichsein) consists in “being recognized by the other, of counting absolutely for the other.”7 The self becomes objective, that is, actual, in the recognition of others. Thus, finding oneself in another’s recognition is part of what self-actualization means. As Hegel frequently asserts, freedom means being at home with oneself in another (bei sich im anderen zu sein). Here is a straightforward answer to Pippin’s question, Why does Hegel think that a human being cannot be free alone? Moreover, if mutual recognition is a condition of self-actualization, then mutual recognition cannot be void of normative significance, for a cognitively and socially isolated subject could not be free or actual in any significant sense. Given his programmatic thesis concerning self-actualization in recognition , it comes as a disappointment that Majetschak fails to make explicit the connection between recognition, freedom, and self-actualization. I want to explore that connection. Freedom for Hegel is being at home with one- Freedom as Correlation / 157 self in an other. Freedom is actual only in relation, not apart from relation.8 But a relational freedom is not absolute. It is a mediated autonomy. A mediated autonomy is a vulnerable, fragile autonomy. Its self-actualization can be prevented, and if it does become actual, its self-actualization is a mediated one. The normative significance of mutual recognition—what is at stake— becomes clear principally in the negations and distortions of recognition that undermine, prevent, or harm the self in its mediated actualization. Misrecognition not only prevents the I...