Hegelian recognition

Introduction

The centrality of the problem of recognition for the understanding and evaluation of Hegel’s system: not only as a fact accepted by many contemporary interpretations (certainly most of the English ones), but on general grounds, is widely acknowledged. Hegel is an exceptionally ‘frustrating’ philosopher. On the one hand, even if one significantly (and perhaps questionably) ‘weakens’ the meaning of the claim to Absolute Knowledge (non-metaphysical interpretations), to accept the system in its basic constructive outline (and all that it implies) seems to be rather crazy. On the other hand, however, while it is relatively easy to find particular ‘faults’, lacunae in the argumentative construction of both the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology (often obscured by the enormous power of Hegel’s philosophical language), they mostly seem to amount just to that: particular inadequacies of exposition. What one usually succeeds in doing with the classics of our tradition: finding a definite problem-complex as the neuralgic point upon which the validity of the whole system primarily depends (be it the elaboration of the Cogito-argument or the ‘circle’ in Descartes, the substance-modes relation in Spinoza, the transcendental deduction in Kant, etc.), this often fails, or perhaps more correctly: is frequently not even attempted in respect of Hegel’s philosophy. The only serious attempt to do just that was and remains Heidegger’s characterization of the system as the consummation of philosophies of subjectivity (with all its critical implications) – this is the basic point of principled criticisms which are not only often repeated, but also elaborated and concretized (partly in quite different directions) for instance by Fink, Theunissen or Habermas. Against such a critique, however, the (quite legitimate) retort refers to the intersubjective constitution of subjectivity, i.e. to the problem of ‘recognition’ – it can and has been argued that criticisms of the above type either neglect it (Heidegger) or underplay its systematic significance, its constitutive, though sometimes only implicit, presence as decisive presupposition in all ‘parts’ of the system as a whole. At least given our hermeneutic situation, ‘recognition’ is the decisive issue in the critical understanding of Hegel’s philosophy. Since its most elaborate, mature exposition is in the famous fragment in the chapter on Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology, this text deserves genuine scrutiny.

Attempting such a scrutiny here, however, operates with a (certainly naive) hermeneutic presupposition: what Hegel wrote, how he has argued, his texts in their details – be they true or false – in general make sense. This is, of course, an assumption which we usually grant the oeuvre of any ‘great’ philosopher. This is, however, not necessarily the case in the actual practice of many Hegel interpretations. His texts are often in fact dealt with as the source of some exceptionally significant philosophical insights which have to be mined out from what is – wittingly or unwittingly – treated as heavy and obscure idealist verbiage: the sultanas to be picked from a rather stale cake. In the following I treat Hegel as I (and ‘we’) would any significant philosopher: taking what he actually wrote as it stands seriously. And this also means: when there are quite obvious difficulties with the argumentative construction that impact upon its very meaning and validity, difficulties which cannot be glossed over as slips or inadvertent inadequacies of exposition, I shall look not only at their broader consequences, but shall also ask about the (putative) reasons for them.

The Hegelian discussion of recognition in the Phenomenology (Hegel, 1976: §166–196; all further references are to the paragraph division in this edition) presents two such basic difficulties for interpretation. The first concerns the (phenomenological) status of the characterization of the general notion of recognition in the ‘introductory’ part of the relevant text. The second concerns the relation between this notion of recognition and its first phenomenological realization: the ‘unequal recognition’ in the form of the relation of Lordship and Bondage. Only after discussing these textual/interpretative difficulties and some potential ways of resolving them in some detail, shall I raise the question of their possibly deeper causes and their broader significance for Hegel’s philosophical project in general.

A. Most interpretations implicitly assume – as something rather self-evident – that the text-fragment in question is conceptually divided into two clearly distinguishable parts. The first encompasses the introduction to the whole chapter (‘The Truth of Self-Certainty’, §166–177) together with the opening paragraphs (§178–184) of the next section (‘Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’). This is understood as the presentation of self-consciousness from the standpoint of the ‘we’, i.e. of the phenomenological observers. It is then followed by the presentation of ‘how the process of this pure Notion of recognition … appears to self-consciousness’ (§185): the evocative description of its first Gestalt, or more correctly of its twin formations, the Lord and the Slave (§185–196). It is, however, quite evident that such a comprehension of the structure of the text does not correspond to its actual Hegelian articulation which suggests a quite different division and putative meaning.

1. Hegel himself quite clearly divided this text into two parts – the Introduction to the whole chapter and then its first section: Lordship and Bondage, and this division has for him, at least prima facie, a very definite phenomenological sense. For the Introduction is not presented as a description ‘for us’. It directly begins at the point (negatively) reached at the very end of Understanding (§165): Self-Consciousness as infinite (in the sense of the formula: ‘I am I’), and what follows is explicitly characterized as the description of its experience, consequently as a particular Gestalt of Self-Consciousness. This is what Hegel unambiguously states at this point: ‘We have now to see how the shape of self-consciousness first makes its appearance’ (§167), and the presentation of desiring self-consciousness is again explicitly and repeatedly characterized as the description of its own experience (cf. §168, 173 and 175), the failure of which first gives rise to the awareness of the necessity of ‘recognition’. Thus the comprehension of the three aspects of self-consciousness summarily described in §176 emerges as the result of its own experience, the process of which has the same three-step structure that also regularly characterized the respective experiences of the various forms of Consciousness. ‘We’ merely ‘observe’ this movement.

The next section (‘Independence and Dependence’) then introduces, as it were, a new Gestalt of self-consciousness and its experience. It opens (§178–184), as it is usually the case, with the characterization of its structure ‘for us’: the movement of recognition in its Concept, and it is then followed with the invocation of its own experience: the struggle of Self-Consciousnesses, Lordship and Bondage, and the separate experiences of these opposed forms that exist only in their mutuality.

There can be, I think, little doubt that this is the way Hegel himself articulates and presents his exposition. It seems to be, however, also rather clear that this presentation cannot be justified within the framework of the Phenomenology, or even more strongly: it does not really make sense.

2. First, the exposition conceived in such a way is characterized by a number of striking anomalies in comparison with any other part/section of the work. In the first, introductory part, the phenomenological description of desiring self-consciousness is interrupted right in the middle – in a way unprecedented elsewhere – by the analysis of ‘life’ (§168–173), interpolated between the auto-characterization of desire (§167) and its experience (§174–175). This analysis is emphatically characterized as one ‘for us, or in itself’ (§168), with reference to the alleged fact that we have seen the emergence of the concept of Life in Understanding, a statement not born actually out by the text. And this interpolation is not some additional excursus, which could have been omitted: its result – self-consciousness is, and is possible only as, self-consciousness of life – is absolutely essential for the understanding of the dialectic of Lordship and Bondage. To make it even stranger, at the end of this analysis of Life (§173–174) Hegel seems to offer a new, independent ‘deduction’ of self-consciousness in the form of the simple, abstract unity of the ‘I’ from Life, to then continue from it directly to desire and the evocation of its experience broken off in §167 – as if nothing happened.

This is, however, not the sole eccentricity of this part. Its very structure seems to deviate in a fundamental way from what is expected in a phenomenological exposition. For in this three-stage description (the abstract, undifferentiated I; desiring self-consciousness; recognizing self-consciousnesses [or what is usually taken for this – see B/e]) the earlier, inadequate ‘stages’ are not really ‘sublated’ by the higher ones: they are directly and fully preserved in their original meaning as one-sided (and if fixed in this onesidedness, no doubt, distorted and distorting) aspects, necessary ‘moments’ of self-consciousness in its truth (cf. §176).

This leads to the gravest, most significant difficulty: in its content the Introduction cannot at all be conceived as the presentation of a particular Gestalt and its experience as it is understood in general by Hegel. In the Phenomenology the experience of a particular Gestalt means the disclosure of the inadequacy of its own self-understanding, the ‘falsity’ of which (i.e. what falsifies it) constitutes the ‘truth’ of the new Gestalt. But the Introduction ends not with the falsity, but with the truth of Self-Consciousness: it exists necessarily for another self-consciousness. And from this truth no new particular ‘shape’ of truth can or does emerge in the sense of phenomenological deduction. The struggle of self-consciousnesses may well exemplify one of the (inadequate) ways they exist for each other, but it does not follow in its particularity from the general truth of self-consciousness as ‘recognition’. What truly follows from this latter insight is clearly stated by Hegel: ‘With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is’ (§177). One would, of course, be inclined to say: don’t be in such haste. But this is, on the other hand, quite true. This reference cannot be understood as merely a (questionable) anticipation, like the reference to Reason in the discussion of Understanding (§144): the ‘deduction’ of Spirit from the ‘truth’ of recognition seems to be, even if underdeveloped, as good a ‘deduction’ as any in the Phenomenology.

These last remarks already indicate that there are deep problems with the second part of our text as well: the analysis of the movement of recognition in its opening paragraphs does not describes even ‘for us’ the underlying structure of the next Gestalt, the ‘unequal recognition’ of the Lord and Slave. This is, however, the second great problem-complex – I shall deal with it separately, under B.

3. Thus one has to ‘rehabilitate’ the usual interpretations of Hegel. There is no way to accept – so it seems – his own articulation and characterization of the exposition here; one must assume, as is so strongly suggested by the content, that the whole Introduction together with the opening paragraphs of the next section constitutes a single unit which provides an analysis of self-consciousness in itself (in its truth) from our standpoint as phenomenological observers. But this lands us perhaps in even greater difficulties.

The point here undoubtedly depends on the highly disputed and disputable interpretation of the meaning of the phenomenological ‘We’. If the ‘We’ is understood, as it is very often the case, as being just the royal plural for the authorial I, i.e. if the standpoint of the ‘phenomenological observers’ is that of the philosopher in the possession of Absolute Knowledge, then the project of the Phenomenology collapses before it begins, and any detailed investigation of whatever difficulties its accomplishment encounters is superfluous and pointless. For the ‘We’ standpoint is constitutive to this whole project and is necessarily employed at every stage of its realization, because it is from this standpoint that every Gestalt of consciousness is initially characterized – necessarily so, since its own self-understanding is false, illusory. Only such a characterization allows the reader to correctly identify the phenomenological ‘shape’ in question, thereby becoming able to ‘enter’ into its own experience. If, however, all such descriptions and the conceptual language in which they are articulated assume the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge, the very ‘result’ and end-point to which the pathway of Phenomenology is supposed to lead ‘natural consciousness’, to which it is initially both ununderstandable and fundamentally alien, then, of course, this whole enterprise moves in a vicious circle of the most primitive kind.

I have therefore argued that the Phenomenology makes elementary sense only if we accept that Hegel’s ‘We’ refers to the socially-culturally situated reader, the actual addressee (the post-Enlightenment cultivated German of the time) of the text. The initial characterizations of the particular Gestalten from the standpoint of the phenomenological observer conceptually mobilize and presuppose no more than what reasonably may be assumed to be familiar and legitimate for this reader. The most decisive methodological feature of the Phenomenology consists precisely in the fact it integrates the imputed reader into the text as a particular phenomenological figure whose standpoint itself undergoes change/development in the course of the exposition: it is thus the most radical realization of the conception of philosophy as Selbstbesinnung (self-reflection).

I think that such an interpretation can reasonably be justified, perhaps is even enlightening, in respect of most of the text. It, however, radically fails precisely in our case. There is no way to conceive the analysis of self-consciousness offered in this part of the Phenomenology as merely making explicit what is otherwise – at least in principle – already familiar to such a reader. This is one of Hegel’s most radical and (even accepting the role of Fichte as ‘precursor’) most radically new ideas that introduces a turning point in the development of German idealism and, one well could argue, in the whole history of modern philosophy. No reader of the time, however cultivated, could have regarded it as an accepted/acceptable philosophical commonplace. In terms of the method of the Phenomenology there is no immanent justification for this analysis in its totality, even though part of its exposition (Desire) is presented as the description of a phenomenological experience. ¹

This is, no doubt, a rather devastating result. The presentation of the decisive turning point in the phenomenological path, just where ‘we have entered the native realm of truth’ (§167), does not satisfy what seems to be the requirement of the phenomenological method in general; it appears to presuppose the already achieved standpoint of Absolute Knowing. One needs to ask why, for what reasons did Hegel insert here such an analysis of the concept of self-consciousness in general? This is a completely meaningful question since one can well argue that he could have proceeded from the (phenomenologically presented) failure of the experience of Desire directly to the struggle of the putative self-consciousnesses and to its outcome: unequal recognition. (And he did in fact proceed precisely in this way in Part Three of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, cf. Hegel, 1971: §426–433.) It can even be maintained (see B/b) that in fact this would have been the compelling train of thought dictated by the immanent logic of exposition.

There is also another consideration which seems to indicate that we are not dealing here with a case of unmotivated, unintended inconsistency. For there is a strange parallel to the problem encountered here in Hegel’s Science of Logic (Hegel, 1969).

Hegel’s argumentative strategy in the opening parts of the ‘Doctrine of Being’ (Hegel, 1969: Vol. 1, Bk 1) can be (very crudely) characterized in the following way: in the case of each relevant category he demonstrates that its initially introduced, assumed meaning is irreconcilable with its actual use and that this contradiction or inadequacy can only be removed through the introduction of another, ‘higher’ category which appropriately modifies or concretizes the originally accepted meaning. (Thus ‘Being’ in its attempted use immediately collapses into ‘Nothing’ – to distinguish these two categories, it is necessary to introduce ‘Becoming’, and so on.) Thus each step of the constructive exposition has simultaneously and inseparably both a critical and positive character (in general: critical in respect of some metaphysical standpoint, which one-sidedly isolates and absolutizes the relevant category, and positive in the sense that the category in question is necessary for, and integral to, that system of thought-determinations, objective meanings, which in their totality constitute the Idea). These two moments – the negative and the positive – cannot be separated, since it is only the system as a whole which discloses the truth (the function in the system) of any particular category.

There is, however, one single exception to this procedure of construction, and it concerns – lo and behold – the category of infinity. In this case Hegel himself strictly distinguishes its false understanding (‘bad’ infinity) from its truth (‘positive’, qualitative infinity). And he does so, though for the next logical step of construction he needs and employs only the category of ‘bad’ infinity and not that of the true one. Since ‘infinity’ articulates the most general, minimal relational-categorical structure of self-consciousness itself, and this latter is actually introduced in the Phenomenology through this very concept, a methodological anomaly occurs in the two foundational works of Hegel in the case of two, no doubt, distinct subject-matters, but in fact in respect of one and the same problem-complex. This coincidence hardly can be regarded as something accidental.

B. Before attempting, however, to answer this question of ‘why’, one needs to deal with the second difficulty that our text presents: the apparent incompatibility of the general notion of recognition with the characterization of its first phenomenological form. According to the analysis of the ‘double movement’ of recognition in general, in it ‘[e]ach sees the other do the same as it does, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both’ (§182; emphasis added). But then only three paragraphs later, introducing the way recognition first appears to self-consciousness, Hegel presents us with a form in which one self-consciousness is ‘being only recognized, the other only recognizing’ (§185). This is the relation of Lordship and Bondage: ‘for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal’ (§191). But according to the whole preceding analysis of the very notion of recognition such an (inter)action is ‘useless’ precisely in regard to a relationship constituting recognition; the ‘improper’, ‘unequal’ relation between the Lord and the Slave not only does not satisfy it, prima facie it directly contradicts the constitutive conditions of the possibility of recognition. ²

The strain in Hegel’s exposition here is a rather obvious one, and there are a number of interpretations (or proposals of revision) which try to resolve this difficulty. In most cases they assume that the ‘unequal recognition’ determining the relationship of domination/dependence in fact presupposes in Hegel an underlying, perhaps more ‘primitive’ or abstract relation of full reciprocity which alone makes it possible. Which solution one chooses in this regard at least partly depends on the answer one implicitly gives to a question rarely raised explicitly, but which is prompted by what seems to be another ambiguity of the text: ‘who’ are – of course, in the sense of their categorial determinations – the Gestalten who enter into the life-and-death struggle with each other?

a. In the relevant text-fragment (§186–187) Hegel repeatedly refers to the subjects entering the struggle as self-consciousnesses, each of which is ‘certain of its own self, but not of the other’ (§186). If this is taken seriously, then – in view of the preceding general analysis – one would have to assume that they have already been so constituted through some prior recognition-relationship (of reciprocal character) which for some reason, however, remains unmentioned and unspecified. One could support such a presumption by reference to the Jena manuscripts of Philosophy of Spirit. For there, within the framework not of a phenomenological, but socio-genetical (rather Hobbesian) construction, Hegel does in fact arrive at the ‘struggle’ after he introduced the intersubjective constitution of self-consciousnesses through mutual, strictly reciprocal recognition. The exposition in the Jena manuscripts departs from love (creation of shared, common consciousness), proceeds to family (perpetuation of this consciousness through education) and only then concludes (through the introduction of the notion of property) in the struggle (through which ‘difference’, full individuation emerges).

This is, however, an exceptionally unconvincing interpretation. It is hardly imaginable that Hegel would fail even to hint at such a fundamental presupposition, and, of course, the methods of genetic and phenomenological construction are fundamentally different, nay irreconcilable. In any case such an interpretation would hardly ‘save’ the consistency of the text. Because if the protagonists of this encounter are already self-consciousnesses, then there is no reason why their encounter should necessarily take the form of struggle (if one does not invoke here considerations concerning conflict over family property, certainly absolutely alien to a phenomenological inquiry). How a self-consciousness relates to an (alien, unfamiliar) other one seems to be an ‘empirical’ question; to treat the other merely as an ‘ordinary object’ (§186) is at best only one of the possibilities.

b. It much better accords with the logic of argumentation to presuppose (as it is assumed by most interpreters) that the protagonists of the struggle are only potential (or proto-)self-consciousnesses: ‘their self-certainty still has no truth’ (§186). That is, their awareness of the self has only the form of ‘unalloyed feeling of self’ (unvermischte Selbstgefühl, §195): before the struggle they are merely subjects of desire. This renders their conflict truly necessary, since for desiring consciousnesses all elements of objectivity appear only as inessential objects ‘submerged in the immediacy of Life’ (§186). The recognition relation (in the proper sense) emerges in the struggle itself (being at the same time the condition of its possibility) in which the subjects are first constituted as self-consciousnesses. This seems to be also what Hegel implies, stating: ‘they prove themselves and each other through life-and-death struggle’ (§187). The struggle is based upon each protagonist consciously staking his life on the intention to destroy the other by proving his independence, but such an intention can only be formed if each recognizes that the other intends to do the same. The two intentions are simultaneously opposed to and identical with (i.e. mirror) each other and they can be consciously made only simultaneously. And, of course, only the comprehension that the other is ready to risk his whole life for his independence (i.e. that he is a self-conscious being) can motivate the future slave to submit consciously to the other (by repressing his desire and recognizing the desire of the other as valid).

To argue that this reciprocal recognition does not simply disappear without any residue in the inequality of Lordship and Bondage, one could perhaps supplement this analysis with the following train of thought: even in servitude there remains a residual element of mutuality as the trace of its origin. The slave has chosen life in face of death attesting to his dependence on thinghood, but he did so only after he staked his life in the struggle. The reclaiming of independence by the revolting slave must therefore be a constant possibility that the Lord cannot fail to recognize. Even for him the slave is a consciousness, though only an unessential one in the form of thinghood, and not simply a thing without the possibility of any intentional resistance – otherwise the Lord could not receive the (unequal) recognition from the Slave. There must be some residual element of reciprocity.

This is, in my opinion, the most consistent and convincing interpretation solving our problem, in so far as one accepts and intends to preserve the general framework of Hegel’s conceptualization. It faces, however, difficulties. First, recognition as an integral element of the struggle is also a transient aspect of it. Recognition in and through the struggle is momentary/ephemeral, it does not amount to a constant and well-grounded relationship, which is needed for the formation of a stable Ego-identity, and it was precisely the lack of this latter that constituted the basic ‘inadequacy’ of Desire. And my ‘supplement’ that may seem partly to remedy this deficiency will not really do: it is not reconcilable with the text. For Hegel’s slave is not even potentially a ‘revolting’ one, ³ his is the ‘good slave’ who completely interiorized his submission, for whom essential reality and true consciousness exist outside of him, in the Lord (cf. §194). And the very possibility of emancipation through labor in Hegel’s argumentation necessarily presupposes this full interiorization of service (and of existential fear), without which formative activity would remain merely an exercise of some particular skill of merely pragmatic significance (cf. §196).

c. An interesting interpretative solution has been offered by Robert Williams in his book Recognition (Williams, 1992). He argues that while the relationship of Lordship/Bondage initially appears to be an unequal one, its truth, however, is disclosed as recognition proper in the sense of genuine reciprocity. For the Lord cannot avoid doing to himself precisely what he does to the Slave, namely ‘rendering himself a dependent being’ (1992: 187, fn 26).

This is an ingenious argumentation, but it again fails, and rather badly. On the one hand, even if one accepts it, the fourth aspect needed for full recognition, i.e. the requirement that ‘what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other’ (§191), is still missing. In fact Williams himself seems at the end to concede this point, ultimately characterizing the relation as one of complementarity rather than that of reciprocity (192: 180). The complementary character of this relation is, however, utterly trivial and it was never in question.

More importantly, this argumentation misconceives what is implied in the Hegelian concept of recognition. It refers to a complex practical relation consciously/intentionally enacted by the subjects concerned themselves, and not to what emerges as an ultimate outcome of the whole course of their experience – a result which (at the given stage of the phenomenological progress) is comprehensible only by ‘us’, the phenomenological observers.

d. Since all the strict interpretative attempts aiming at the solution to this difficulty seem to fail, one may decide to ‘improve’ Hegel by supplementing his text in a rather obvious way, making a point which he himself could have silently presupposed or at least easily accepted. The most obvious way to do this is to foist upon him a ‘Habermas’. That is, to point out that even if the Slave is considered as a ‘speaking instrument’, it is still a speaking instrument. As we have seen, for the Lord the Slave is ‘a consciousness in the form of thinghood’ (§189), but still, of course, a consciousness and not a simple manipulable object, otherwise the Slave would not be recognizing him. And following Habermas, one can argue that linguistic communication necessarily presupposes a basic level of full reciprocity: that of shared perspectives without which mutual understanding would be impossible.

It seems, however, that Hegel explicitly rejected such a supplementation. The textual evidence for it, no doubt, is exceptionally flimsy: a single sentence from a longer, deleted fragment in the Jena Philosophy of Spirit manuscript of 1803/4. In any case, one reads there: ‘Language, explanations, promises, these are not recognitions, for language is only an ideal medium, it disappears as soon as it appears; it is not a persisting, real recognition. [Die Sprache, Erklärungen, Versprechen sind nicht dieses Anerkennen, denn die Sprache is nur eine ideale Mitte, sie verschwindet so wie sie erscheint; es ist nicht ein bleibendes reales Anerkennen]’ (Hegel: 1974, fn 322). The view expressed here, however, seems to follow from Hegel’s general conception of recognition. Recognition with him involves consciously enacted and at the same time institutionally fixed practical relations between social actors in general ⁴ that confer upon them stable and intersubjectively valid/accepted social roles. Neither fleeting acts of actual communication, nor the permanent but merely normative/counterfactual, ideal preconditions of communication can fulfil such a role.

e. The most radical and in the philological sense perhaps most definitive solution declares this difficulty to be a mere pseudo-problem based upon the misreading of the text. For the discussion in the Introduction proper which discloses the three necessary aspects (and thus the conditions of possibility) of self-consciousness does not in fact mention recognition at all. It seems to formulate a broader and more general condition: self-consciousness necessarily presupposes a ‘double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness’ (§176). ‘Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’ (§175), it exists ‘for a self-consciousness’ (§177). That is: to be self-conscious, the subject must make another self-consciousness as self-consciousness its object, to become in a such a way able to transpose itself ideally into the position/perspective of this other and perceive itself – though with his own eyes – from this perspective (as subject-object). This must be of course equally true of the other self-consciousness as well – the relations implied are mutual in the sense of necessary complementarity. But while this certainly assumes the mutual ability to cognize – clearly on the basis of its actions – the Other as equally a self, it tells us nothing more specific about the character of the enacted relations beyond their complementarity. That they must satisfy the conditions of strict reciprocity/symmetry (recognition proper in its Notion) does not follow from this analysis.

But if this is the case then, first, the text itself is deeply misleading. For the very first sentence, immediately following this Introduction, unambiguously suggests the identity of this (allegedly broader) relation with recognition in its proper sense. ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being recognized’ (§178 – transl. modified). And, much more importantly, if the analysis of recognition in §178–184 represents merely one case (be it the most perfect, desirable, etc. one) which satisfies the necessary condition of possibility of self-consciousness (satisfied as well by possibly various forms of ‘unequal recognition’), then its insertion into the discussion here, the reason for its insertion, becomes truly incomprehensible. If this is not the very Concept of recognition, then why is it here at all?

C.1. But of course recognition proper with its strict reciprocity, as it is analyzed in these paragraphs, represents for Hegel the Concept of recognition as such – only one needs to understand ‘Concept’ in its Hegelian sense. Hegel’s deep critique of the whole metaphysical traditions meant at the same time a return to the idea with which systematic metaphysical thought originated and which conferred upon this enterprise (as onto-theo-logic) a genuine unity: a return to the Aristotelian idea of paronymicity, the foundational role of pros hen relations. According to it the case that is the most perfect, exemplary and paradigmatic is at the same time also the truly universal case, for it constitutes the general essence, i.e. the Concept of all the non-perfect cases as well, since it is the telos of their functioning and – in so far as they are inherently related to time – of their development. To this one needs only to add that for Hegel, of course, most of the finite things and phenomena we encounter do not have a ‘Concept’, since they are – even in their kind – accidental (‘elements of contingent particularization’, §304) and do not belong to the ontic furniture of the world; they can and should be cognized through representations (Vorstellungen), the usual ‘general concepts’ of everyday thought.

Hegel’s system represents the consummation of the metaphysics of subjectivity – this Heideggerian characterization, I have no doubt, coincides with how Hegel himself conceived and intended to present his own philosophy. ‘[S]ubstance is essentially subject’ (§25) is for him the most sublime idea of the modern age, the conception which distinguishes it from the philosophies of antiquity (cf. §33). But the ‘truth’ of this (correct) Heideggerian characterization fundamentally differs from how Heidegger himself interprets it.

In Heidegger’s understanding Hegel completes the process inaugurated by Descartes, the fatal process of Seinsvergessenheit. The very distinction made between substance and subject (the two terms originally being the equivalent translations of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon) signals the irrevocable loss of genuinely ontological questioning. The preeminence attributed to the ontic entity man as subject, i.e. as the ‘I’ certain of itself and thus freed to self-legislation, simultaneously reduces all inner-worldly entities to the status of mere objects of representation and manipulation. This transformation of metaphysics into an anthropology goes all the way to ‘the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man’.

It does not demand very searching reflection to realize that Hegel’s philosophy does not fit comfortably into a historical process of thought so conceived. At the most elemental level: because the substance which is essentially subject for Hegel is not the thinking/willing Ego certain of itself but Spirit. Indeed the very task of modernity, which is to realize this principle, is characterized by him precisely as the endeavor to free the determinations of thought from ‘the fixity of the pure concrete, which the “I” itself is’ (§33).

This does not mean that Hegel somehow stands apart and outside the main tendencies of modern philosophical thought. He ‘completes’, however, a tendency of it which is completely missed or neglected by Heidegger.

The emergence of the notion of ‘subject’ in its particularly modern sense can and ought to be seen not only in the context of privileging a particular kind of entity, thus restricting true and full substantiality to the conscious I and thereby foreclosing the question of its way of Being. It equally can and has to be seen from an opposed aspect: as the consistent radicalization of the notion of ‘substance’ re-opening the original problematic of metaphysics. The idea of the ‘subject’ comes about when the traditional idea of the ontological independence of the substance (as hypokeimenon which ‘underlies’ all properties and relations: ‘of which other things are predicated while it is itself not predicated of anything else’ [Aristotle: Metaphysics, VII1028b36]) is conjoined with the idea of its causal independence (that which is not dependent on any external cause, is self-determining both in its being and character, causa sui). This problem, of course, emerges under the conceptual pressure of the Jewish-Christian idea of God-Creator. But once the fixed theological solution of the problem: restricting the ‘strong’ idea of Substance-Subject to a single entity, i.e. God (still present – at least prima facie – in the strict Cartesian distinction between the two different meanings of ‘substance’ as it applies to the infinite versus the finite) itself become problematized, the question becomes – in the form of a Blumenbergian Umbesetzung – that of the relation between what truly and ultimately is, Being as substance-subject, to finite existents. Beginning with Spinoza’s struggle with the problem of the relation between the substance and its modes, this question recurs in varying forms in all the great systems of 17th and 18th century philosophy. And it always centers around one particular issue: the relation of the finite human I to the Infinite, the realm of the noumena, the Absolute: the substance-subject. Once the idea of man created in the image of God lost its status as unquestioned truth, human finitude becomes a pressing and open problem. (This is, of course, a point which Heidegger – at least before his Kehre – clearly recognized, but only in the case of Kant.)

It is this trend of thought which Hegel’s philosophy brings to its ‘consummation’ in the sense of being both its end result and the opening of a new beginning. Spirit is precisely the substance that relates itself only to itself, because all its determinations are only its own externalizations that it sublates and reflects back into itself, becoming in this way an object both created and known by itself. Spirit exists only as its own product. That is, Spirit is subject strictly in the above metaphysical-ontological meaning of this latter term.

Spirit is, of course, not a separate, independent entity – in this respect the non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel are certainly right. But the conclusion drawn from this completely legitimate observation (rightfully raised against many of the rather vulgar interpretations and criticisms of Hegel) is rather strange. It presupposes that metaphysics in general is possible only as a metaphysics of inner-worldly entities – an assumption which Hegel attempted to demolish in the whole of his Science of Logic, first of all in the ‘Doctrine of Being’, which is primarily a critique of reificatory entity-ontologies. Spirit is actual as a system of relations, objectified on the one hand in the institutions of historical communities and on the other in those ideal objectivations of ideational contents, meanings (‘forms of Absolute Spirit’) which constitute the framework of their self-interpretation. These objectified relations do not exist, of course, without and outside their relata, which ultimately are always ‘subjective spirits’, human individuals. But the individuals are, as Hegel again and again formulates, only evanescent accidents of this spiritual substance, which has an ontological priority in respect of them. This does not mean that the system of embodied relations as a pre-given facticity externally determines the individuals ⁵ – it means, however, that these relations have an objective, teleological logic of functioning and development, of which the individuals (at least while history has not ‘ended’) have no adequate knowledge and which determines the objective meaning of their life and activities. They are, as spiritual, also free, self-transcending beings, who not only interiorize these substantial relations but also transform them in their activity – but the ultimate, solely humanly/philosophically significant outcome of their doings is submitted to this logic, of which they are unaware and in respect of which, as Hegel brutally formulates it, they are mere ‘instruments’. ⁶ It is on the basis of these considerations that Hegel elaborates an all-encompassing metaphysical system as a metaphysics of relations.

It is this metaphysics which allows Hegel to develop a new theory of finitude in general, and most importantly of human finitude. Being finite is no longer defined by a comparison with an Infinite, Absolute Being as a relation of external deprivation – it is the immanent characteristic of the existent in question: the non-correspondence to its own concept. And in particular, the human individual as a self-conscious being is finite, because self-consciousness is constituted (as to its very possibility) through a relation to its Other, with whom (within the framework of pre-existent communal relations) the individual can in some practical respects identify itself, in this way first acquiring the possibility to relate reflexively to itself and to individuate itself. The recognition relation in its metaphysical-ontological sense means that the individual is a self-forming, self-determining and self-transcending being, i.e. subject, only in so far as it interiorizes its dependence upon the others and the Other (der Andere as You, the other I, and das Andere, the world we inhabit, our world which You and I share), i.e. only in so far as it is at the same time a finite and accidental being. It is through this notion of an inherently finite subjectivity, a conception of human finitude appropriate to a world-epoch after the death of God, that Hegel initiates a new beginning for philosophical thought, opening the way not only for the various theories of the intersubjective constitution of subjectivity, but also for those radical philosophies of finitude that challenge and reject his legacy.

2. Hegel’s philosophy is the consummation of the metaphysics of subjectivity. This statement never intended merely to indicate Hegel’s place in the development of Western philosophical thought – it served always as the foundation of its critique. I share this tradition. But as far as I am concerned the problematic feature which this laconic formulation brings into relief consists not in the fact that this philosophy is still a metaphysics of subjectivity (because it is precisely this conception of the inherent finitude of humans who are nevertheless subjects which constitutes for me his lasting legacy), but that it is a metaphysics of subjectivity. For the price to be paid for founding and articulating the theory of finite subjectivity upon and within a metaphysics, even if a metaphysics of new type, is also very significant.

To make this point clearer, let me ask now the question posed earlier: what could have been the putative reasons for that strictly parallel anomaly of construction which we have seen both in the Logic and in the Phenomenology? What did Hegel in fact achieve by the argumentatively ‘unmotivated’ introduction of the concepts of ‘true infinity’ and ‘proper recognition’ respectively?

In regard to the Science of Logic, the answer seems to be rather clear. The concept of true infinity provides, as it were, a preliminary metaphysical guarantee for the complete closure of the system of objective thought determinations (one could say: independent of whether Hegel himself succeeds in realizing it convincingly in his actual construction). Whatever makes determinate thought (of anything by anyone) possible – and all determinate thought is based on negation/exclusion – if this thought is consistent, then it must and will be contained as an immanent moment/aspect in this coherent system, since this latter has the character of true infinity, i.e. it posits and reabsorbs all that it seemingly excludes, distinguishes from itself.

It is the same function of metaphysical closure that the analysis of recognition proper fulfils in the Phenomenology, except that here the Phenomenology is the path of natural consciousness to ‘science’ and this is a meta-historical path. What it thus ensures is the closure of history, or more exactly of its telos as immanent meaning (independent of whether this end is in fact realized). Owing to what self-consciousness in its Concept is, what by its very constitution it is teleologically directed at, history is moved – independent of the particular motives and ends of its actors – by its internal logic toward the actualization of a system of ‘true’, i.e. reciprocal, recognition: the realization of a system of essential social/institutional relations between the individuals within the framework of which they are equal and equally free. ⁷

This conception, no doubt, constitutes the fundamental, essential link of Hegelian philosophy with the project and the values of Enlightenment, a linkage which I personally value deeply. A critique of it must – as far as I am concerned – proceed therefore ‘with care’. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that this metaphysical construction has disturbing consequences, both theoretical and practical. They can, of course, be indicated here only in the most schematic way.

a. In the Hegelian construction of self-consciousness ‘in its truth’ (§176) ⁸ recognition represents the aspect of individuality in its Concept. In more concrete terms this means that self-consciousness as the awareness of my personal identity not as a mere fact but as something valuable – an awareness made possible only by my identification with the Other within the framework and compass of a ‘We’-consciousness ⁹ – constitutes the full resolution and reconciliation of the basic contradiction between the empty abstract universality and the merely factitious/accidental particularity of the I. This implies, however, an exceptionally strong and therefore problematical conception of personal identity (in the normative sense of human integrity). According to it the conscious identity/integrity of myself as individual, at least in its Concept, presupposes that everything I have done, thought, that has happened to me I can affirm as mine, i.e. as something I could have consciously willed and willed just as it is (in opposition to Nietzsche) on grounds of rational insight. Personally I am not much into schizo-philosophy. This Hegelian conception, however, seems to me irreconcilable with the very idea of human finitude (and is, no doubt, contradicted by a number of considerations that Hegel himself elsewhere clearly articulates). A great many things can happen to an individual that even in retrospect one would not will to have occurred and one has done a great many things in response to them that one would also will not to have been forced or challenged to do. I have been changed and transformed myself in ways that I can accept, but not affirm. I still retain a personal identity and integrity if in all this change there is a reasonable, ‘reconstruable’ continuity: if the ways I changed and change in the face of the undesired and the unforeseeable can be at least stylized (with all the possibilities of self-deception) as based on rational decisions in view of what I was and intended to be. Personal identity, even in its ideal, cannot be construed in terms of a logical, but only that of a ‘narrative’ coherence.

It is worthwhile to follow up how this conception becomes concretized and plays itself out in Hegel’s further exposition – to see its consequences and to comprehend better its presuppositions. The problem raised here first returns in the Hegelian critique of ‘expressivist’ theories of self-consciousness, in the ‘Physiognomy’ sub-sub-section of ‘Reason’ (§309–322). According to its standpoint the actions of the individual are the expressions of its ‘inner being’, the self. Against this view Hegel objects that speech and action are both more and less than expressions. More, ‘because the inner itself breaks out in them and there remains no antithesis between them and it; they give not merely an expression of the inner, but [are] directly the inner itself’ (§312). But Hegel then goes on and immediately adds: they are also less than expressions, ‘because in speech and action the inner turns itself into something else, thus putting itself at the mercy of the element of change, which twists the spoken word and the accomplished act into meaning something else than they are in and for themselves, as actions of this particular individual’ (§312). This point – certainly a basic aspect of human finitude – is opposed not only to the first observation made, but surely seems to invalidate everything I have stated – on the basis of logical considerations alone – about the Hegelian conception of personal identity. And at this point of the analysis Hegel merely re-affirms the contradiction as an ‘ambiguity’: ‘The action, then, as completed work, has the double and opposite meaning of being either the inner individuality and not its expression, or, qua external, a reality free from the inner, a reality which is something quite different from the inner’ (§312).

This ambiguity is, however, radically resolved by Hegel in the subsequent discussion of the relation between action and intention. Only an inadequate understanding of action (Handlung) does not comprehend it as deed (Tun), i.e. as ‘something simply determined, universal, to be grasped in an abstraction’ (§322), it is only in this misconception that action can appear as something external to the self, understood now as pure intentionality. The truth is unambiguously on the side of the first aspect of the antithesis: ‘The true being of a man is rather his deed; in this the individual is actual, and it is the deed that does away with both aspects of what is [merely] “meant” to be’ (§312). Because ‘[i]ndividuality, when it commits itself to the objective element in putting itself into a deed, does of course risk being altered and perverted. But what settles the character of the deed is just this: whether the deed is an actual being that endures, or whether it is merely a fancied performance, that in itself is nothing at all, and passes away’ (§312).

What this discussion certainly demonstrates is the fact that Hegel’s ‘strong’ conception of personal identity (as characterized above) is not based upon the ignorance of the consequences of human finitude as they appear in the ‘externality’ of objectifying action and its consequences for the actor. (This is what Hegel at various points designates as Entfremdung, ‘alienation’.) If he overrides these considerations, he does so for excellent reasons. For it is not Hegel who is thoughtless – I was the one who earlier, without explication and qualification, spoke about the concept of ‘finite subject’. Given the metaphysical idea of the ‘subject’ in Hegel, this combination of predicates is prima facie meaningless. It represents an unmediated logical contradiction (having nothing to do with ‘dialectic’). ‘Subject’ means being radically self-determining, while finitude implies dependence upon and determination by the Other, with the ensuing accidentality (as non-correspondence to its own concept). The concept of a finite subjectivity makes sense therefore only if this being – in its Concept – is endowed with the capacity to sublate its alienation, which is – as a fact – untranscendable, that is, only if it can ideally recuperate and reabsorb in thought everything which determined it externally, if it can affirm the other-determined as its own.

Hegel therefore had excellent philosophical reasons for accepting a ‘strong’ theory of personal identity. But how could he? What are the conditions and presuppositions which allow even the possibility of such an ideal sublation of ‘alienation’? In the text-fragment just discussed it appeared as a dogmatically posited fiat. The meaning of the basic distinction, upon which it rests, the distinction between Handlung and Tun, is not really disclosed. Hegel, however, returns to the same problem to elucidate the conditions of this possibility at the end of the chapter on ‘Reason’, in the discussion of the individual of the ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’ and its experience.

This sub-chapter manifests a strong correspondence with the earlier part, ‘Physiognomy’. This analogy is well-founded. For the latter presented (variants of) an expressivist theory of the self, and it is this view which now becomes the practical self-understanding of the subject of this Gestalt, ‘the intrinsically real individuality’. ‘Action is in its own self its truth and reality, and individuality in its setting-forth or expression is, in relation to action, the End in and for itself’ (§394). This individual not only acts rationally, from reasons, led by the ‘instinct of reason’, but is also conscious of the principle of reason itself as the unity of reality and self-consciousness, i.e. it is a self-consciousness which does not oppose itself, its ends, to the world, governed by the unreflexive belief in their realizability, but conceives the world as the mere condition and material of its activity of self-affirmation and self-disclosure, and conceives itself as a being in the world, whose ends stem from an interest in the world as its own.

Not surprisingly, this form of self-consciousness runs into the very same antinomy practically, which we encountered as a theoretical contradiction in ‘Physiognomy’. What had appeared there as the immanent contradiction of action as expression here appears now as the inevitably self-contradictory attitude of the acting subject to his ‘work’, in the sense of pragma, i.e. any objectified accomplishment of the action. For this latter is for it both its direct self-disclosure in the sphere of communal objectivity, which alone provides it with enduring reality, ¹⁰ and at the same time something accidental for the acting subject itself and also something immediately disappearing in and due to the activity of other individuals, for whom it is a mere element of objectivity and thus serves only as further material of their own self-realization (§405). Hegel now explicitly relates this antinomy of the ‘work’ back to the very structure of self-consciousness. For the ‘fundamental contradiction inherent in work’ (§407) is now disclosed as that between ‘pure deed’ (reines Tun – in logical terms: absolute negativity) and ‘particular action’ (determinate negation), which is actually the concretization of the universality and particularity of self-consciousness.

Understandably the solution of this antinomy must be the ‘individuality’ of self-consciousness (negation of negation) in the sense posited by recognition. Only now, for the individuality that is real also for itself recognition itself must be recognized: its genuine meaning has to become disclosed in its own experience. It is disclosed as die Sache selbst. It is again a misconception of what ‘work’ really is (just as it was earlier a misconception of the nature of action) that makes it appear as accidental (which can be disowned by the acting individual) and vanishing, without a hold in reality: ‘[T]he experience of the contingency of the deed (Tun) is itself only a contingent experience’ (§408). The ‘true work’ as die Sache selbst is the ‘unity of doing and being’, ‘that which endures, independently of what is merely the contingent result of an individual action, the result of contingent circumstances, means, and reality’ (§409).

This enduring being – recognition recognized in its truth – is nothing but ‘the deed of each and everyone’ (§418): the shared world of the ‘we’ as the substance and result of their self-disclosing actions. But self-consciousness at first still misapprehends its nature: it conceives die Sache selbst as an abstract universal, the ‘common cause’ or general interest – a predicate of itself as real subject (§411), something which it may intend to produce in its own deed, and certainly ought to do so if it is ‘honest’. For this honest consciousness ‘die Sache selbst is not yet a subject’ (§411). It is this ultimate misunderstanding, which is dissolved in its experience. In it honest and dishonest consciousnesses learn equally that it is not they but the ‘spiritual substance’ that is the real subject, of whom they are only particular, accidental predicates:

Thus die Sache selbst no longer has the character of a predicate, and loses the characteristic of lifeless, abstract universality. It is rather substance permeated by individuality, subject in which there is individuality just as much qua individual, or qua this particular individual, as qua all individuals … The pure Sache selbst itself is what was defined above as ‘the category’, being that is the ‘I’ or the ‘I’ that is being. (§418) ¹¹

Only by identifying itself with the particular community (as the time-bounded realization of Spirit), in the life of which it cannot but participate, and consciously accepting all that results from this participation for its own life as its own, does the individual become real not only in, but also for itself. For these communities as ‘real Spirits’ are ‘actualities in the strict meaning of the word, and instead of being merely shapes of consciousness, are shapes of a world’ (§441).

b. Hegel’s solution to the antinomy of finite subjectivity is truly radical. Only by recognizing and affirming their ‘non-subjectivity’, their being as merely the predicates of a supra-individual subject, do the individuals become subjects in the full and true sense of this word. The state-organized community is thus hypostatized as a ‘universal individual’ in the full sense; it is presented as possessing a will and self-consciousness of its own that the empirical individuals ought to interiorize as the embodiment of a higher rationality and insight. ¹² No doubt, there are very definite historical and institutional conditions which for Hegel makes such a relationship rational (and therefore in principle historically sustainable). But the consequences of this conception are not only ‘practically’ suspect (a point which, hopefully, needs no elaboration), they also create deep and not easily resolvable theoretical strains in the Hegelian project of modernity.

Modernity is recognition realized and recognized, and with it history is brought to its end (both as Vollendung and Ende). It ends because its end – conscious freedom – is made actual through the everyday functioning of the institutional mechanisms of this society. Hegel writes in the Philosophy of Right:

The principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfilment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself. (Hegel, 1991: §260)

But this is still the characterization of the ‘principle’, that is, the idea of the modern state. And at this point Hegel’s construction seems to become inherently ambivalent. Because the relation between this idea and the multiplicity of the empirically existing national states of modernity as its positive forms appears in a double light. On the one hand, these latter are the exemplifications of the former under specific conditions, each quite ‘accidental’, in the context of relations ‘governed by natural necessity’ (Hegel, 1991: §3), i.e. the particular national character of the people, the historically inherited forms of their institutions, the actual configurations of social forces within and external relations with other states, etc. On the other hand, however, every existing state is something finite and therefore cannot correspond to its own Concept, i.e. to the idea of the state; its accidentality means here the contradiction between the two, a contradiction, whose possibility must be grounded in the very idea of the modern state as finite actuality. And Hegel, with his unflinching realism, in fact discloses a whole series of potentially destabilizing contradictions pertaining to the idea of modernity. His whole effort is directed only at demonstrating that modernity is in principle able to solve these contradictions in the sense of constraining them, bringing them under control and keeping them – and thereby also itself – ‘on the move’ through rational reform. This is, in fact, the very meaning of the ‘end of history’ – that history is now consciously (and prosaically) made and thereby ceases to be history. ‘History’ is the drama that befalls its actors, something that happens to us owing to memorable epoch-making deeds, whose consequences far transcend and thwart the intentions of the doers and the consequence of which they themselves undergo.

The Hegelian project of legitimation of modernity in its (even broadly conceived) particularities has no doubt lost its convincing power today primarily because of the now clearly perceivable inadequacy of those institutional ways and means, which for him seemed to ensure the capacity of modern society to sublate and absorb its own contradictions. ¹³ But the project fails – and this is the point I want to make here – also on purely internal and perhaps less conspicuous grounds. For there is a fundamental contradiction in the Hegelian characterization of modernity, which organically and essentially belongs to its constitution but is not recognized by Hegel as such, or at least not ‘sublated’ by him even in principle.

Modern society represents an institutional structure which allows the realization of conscious freedom, the reconciliation of the demands of self-conscious and reflexive subjectivity with its private interests, on the one hand, and the functional requirements of an extended and highly complex social organism, on the other hand – a reconciliation which is not only actual, but is also known to be so. This society, in which the individuals – in opposition to the ‘substantive Sittlichkeit’ of the classical polis – no longer directly identify themselves with their social role, demands rational legitimation. The individual of modernity as moral subject has, as its highest right, to recognize nothing but what it perceives as rational (cf. Hegel, 1991: §132). Accordingly, ‘[w]hatever is to achieve recognition today no longer achieves it by force, and only to a small extent through habit and custom, but mainly through insight and reasoned argument’ (§316A). ¹⁴ For ‘the adequate cognition of this identity [i.e. between the universal and particular] belongs to conceptual thought’ (§147A).

And this is where the problem lies. Because precisely what makes such a rational legitimation necessary – the complexity of the system of institutional mediations between the individual and the social whole, excluding the possibility of direct identification – also makes it unavailable to the absolute majority of ordinary citizens. The truly popular forms of communal self-interpretation – art and religion – are no longer adequate to this social task (this is the very meaning of the Hegelian declaration of their ‘end’). It is ‘conceptual thought’ in the strict sense of this word, i.e. philosophy that alone can accomplish it (and Hegel’s philosophy, of course, provides just this legitimation). Philosophy, however, as Hegel always underlined, is practically accessible only to the few, who are able and ready to undertake the ‘hard labor of the concept’ – philosophy’s ‘servants represent an isolated priesthood’.

Therefore Hegel actually has to revoke, directly contradict his original characterization of modernity. When it comes to the actual analysis of the normative attitude of the modern political subject, ¹⁵ it is no longer characterized by ‘insight and reasoned argumentation’: it is described (Hegel, 1991: §268) as the stable disposition of patriotism understood as the sentiment of a habitual trust based on the ‘basic sense of order’, ¹⁶ an attitude of unreflexive, immediate confidence in the rightness of the existing political-institutional arrangements, an acceptance of the will of the state as rational. For, as Hegel now insistently and repeatedly underlines, the ordinary citizens ‘do not know their own will. To know what one wills, and even more, to know what the will which has being in and for itself – i.e. reason – wills, is the fruit of profound cognition and insight, and this is the very thing which ‘the people’ lack’ (Hegel, 1991: §301R).

It could seem therefore that the theory emphatically required by Hegel’s political subject (§270), in the consciousness of whom the ends, principles and laws of the state are not only implicitly, but actually present, is simply absent from his detailed analysis of the modern state. In fact, of course, it is present. It is surreptitiously introduced in the form of the ‘universal estate’ of civil service bureaucracy, which ‘has the universal interests of society as its business’ (§205) and is characterized by dispassionateness, integrity and – above all – an insight into the nature of the institutions of the state and its needs and possesses the skill to deal with these latter (cf. §296 and 301R). ¹⁷

Beside all the (obvious) empirical/sociological objections one can raise against this construction, it actually reintroduces the very dualism, which led to the disintegration of the classical polis, into very heart of the modern state: the dualism of the unreflective, passive and emotive as opposed to the conscious, reflective and active knowing and willing the universal, which in antiquity was distributed between the social roles of women and men. Hegel seems to restrict this (in fact ontologized) gender difference within modernity to the privatized realm of family alone. But the categorial characteristics which this difference exemplifies reappear with unchanged content in the political sphere proper (exclusively male). And one can then ask: where in the construction of the modern state is there anything analogous to that strictly reciprocal relation of love that helps members of the family to constitute a ‘single person’?

The universal interest of the state, the recognition of what is common to each and all therefore is realized without being knowingly recognized as such by each and all: the ‘common interest’ is transformed into a pre-given objectivity, independent of the actual choices and convictions of the citizenry, something that a special group of person (owing to their education, selection, way of life and group ethos) can insightfully ‘discover’. As far as the knowledge available to the political subjects of modernity is concerned, the particular and the universal again fall apart. The deus ex machina of the monarch, along with all the deep ambiguities of its actual characterization, is not (or at least: not only) a symptom of Hegel’s accommodation to Prussian realities: it expresses the formal/logical necessity to introduce the principle of ‘individuality’ as the reconciliation of this dualism.

Hegel, however, knows well how empty this solution is. The monarch is at most the ‘symbol’, not the actuality, of the sought unity. And there are no general principles able to disclose how this latter can be achieved, how modernity can at least in principle sublate and absorb the contradiction implied in this dualism. For while it is clear that the trust of the citizens and the appropriate/insightful functioning of the bureaucracy of the state presuppose each other in a negative sense, since in the long run neither can be sustained without the other, their positive unification remains a matter of accident. Because neither can general trust ensure the rational functioning of the separated apparatus of the state, nor will this latter automatically produce the former: it must be not only impartial, it should also appear as such for the (confused, short-sighted and unreliable) understanding of the majority of citizens. The unification of the particular and the universal or, in another aspect, of what is unreflexively felt and reflexively known is a task for which there is no general solution even in principle, it must be practically accomplished, without any guarantee of success, by modern society in each historical moment, under its novel and accidental conditions, ever anew. Failure, disintegration is a perennial possibility and threat for modernity. Or, as Hegel so plainly formulated it at the end of his first cycle of Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: ‘How does the temporal, empirical present find its way out of its diremption, in what way it forms itself further, this is to be left to it alone. This is not the direct practical affair and not the competence of philosophy’ (Hegel, 1986: 344).

c. Modernity represents the end of history, because history now becomes consciously made. But once history is ‘made’, once collective human actions, in all their mediated complexity, take upon themselves the responsibility to realize the demands of rationality, which in the past were effectuated by the ‘ruse of reason’ through their deeds but behind their backs and beyond their consciousness and will, history becomes radically open. The essentially dynamic modern societies cannot possess that inertial (though transient) stability which characterized the earlier forms/stages of Objective Spirit.

The question, which often seems to trouble the interpreters of Hegel’s philosophy, as to what can history be after its ‘end’, is not really troubling for him. He can point – beyond all possible changes in the centers of power, like the explicitly mentioned emergence of America at the cost of the old civilizations of Western Europe – to the potential ‘quantitative’ progress of rationality, not only in the sense of the spread of modernity (whatever its costs may be) over the whole Earth, but also the resulting steady rise of average well-being and security, the growing possibilities of cultivated leisure, an evolving ‘spiritualization’ of human beings in general, whose labor is made progressively easier or replaced by machines, etc. What is truly and deeply troubling for this philosophy is the question: what can the ending of this end as the ever present possibility of the collapse of modernity as its perennial threat mean at all? Formulated in this way, this seems to be an extremely vague question. Hegel, however, with his frightening feeling for reality, gives it a clear meaning. He indicates a large social stratum that cannot find satisfaction even at the end of history and thus constitutes an element of disintegration (with an appropriately destructive ideology). This is the Pöbel, the rabble: the permanently unemployed/unemployable, regularly produced and reproduced under the conditions of modernity. This, however, would demand a rather extensive elaboration that cannot be dealt with here.

Within a metaphysical construction of the history of subjectivity this question is unthinkable. Hegel’s analysis of modernity makes it, however, also unavoidable. This is the limit question of Hegel’s philosophy: the point where the principle of finitude overrides all the guarantees and certainties that a metaphysics can offer. The greatness and daring of Hegel’s thought consist in its relentless drive to this point: the point where his system fails.