Crime and Ethical Life: Hegel's Intersubjectivist Innovation

[mohammad]

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Source: Chapter 2 of The Struggle for Recognition;
Published: Polity Press, 1995;
Translated: by Joel Anderson.
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By Axel Honneth (1992)

By the time Hegel took up the model of social struggle that Machiavelli
and Hobbes had each independently implemented, the theoretical context
was entirely changed. In his 1802 essay on 'The Scientific Way of
Treating Natural Law', in which he outlined a plan for his future
works on practical and political philosophy, the hundred years of
intellectual development that separate him from Hobbes are already
expressed in a shift to a completely different set of questions. Under
the influence of Hölderlin's philosophy of unification
[Vereinigungsphilosophie], he had come to question the individualistic
presuppositions of Kant's moral theory, a theory which had determined
the horizon of his thinking until well into his years in Frankfurt. At
the same time, his reading of Plato and Aristotle had familiarized him
with a current within political philosophy that ascribed a much greater
role to the intersubjectivity of public life than did comparable
approaches of his time. And finally, as a result of his study of
British political economy, he had also already come to the sobering
insight that any future organization of society would inevitably have
to rely on a sphere of market-mediated production and distribution, in
which subjects could only be included in society on the basis of the
negative freedom guaranteed by formal rights.

By the start of the century, these newly acquired impressions and
orientations had gradually matured within Hegel's thought into the
conviction that, for the foundation of a philosophical science of
society, it would first be necessary to break the grip that atomistic
misconceptions had on the whole tradition of modem natural law. This
raised, in a fundamental way, a number of theoretical problems for
which the long essay on natural law suggests a first approach to a
solution.

Despite all the differences between the two conceptions of modem
natural law that he distinguishes in his text, Hegel sees them as
marked by the same fundamental error. Both the 'empirical' and
'formal' treatments of natural law categorically presuppose the
'being of the individual' to be 'the primary and the supreme
thing'. In this context, Hegel labels all those approaches to natural
law 'empirical' that start out from a fictitious or anthropological
characterization of human nature and then, on the basis of this and
with the help of further assumptions, propose a rational organization
of collective life within society. The atomistic premises of theories
of this type are reflected in the fact that they always conceive of the
purportedly 'natural' form of human behaviour exclusively as the
isolated acts of solitary individuals, to which forms of
community-formation must then be added as a further thought, as if
externally. The approaches within the natural law tradition that Hegel
terms 'formal' proceed in principle no differently since, instead
of starting from a characterization of human nature, they start from a
transcendental concept of practical reason. In such theories,
represented above all by Kant and Fichte, the atomistic premises are
evident in the fact that ethical acts cannot be thought of except as
resulting from the exercise of reason, purified of all of the empirical
inclinations and needs of human nature. Here, too, human nature is
understood as an aggregate of egocentric (or, as Hegel puts it,
'unethical') drives, which subjects must first learn to suppress
before they can attain ethical attitudes, that is, attitudes conducive
to community. Thus, both approaches remain trapped within the basic
concepts of an atomism that presupposes, as something like a natural
basis for human socialization, the existence of subjects who are
isolated from each other. A condition of ethical unification among
people can, however, no longer be seen as developing organically out of
this fact of nature, but has to be added externally, as 'something
other and alien'. The consequence of this, according to Hegel, is
that within modem natural law, a 'community of human beings' can
only be conceptualized on the abstract model of a 'unified many',
that is, as a cluster of single subjects, and thus not on the model of
an ethical unity.

But what concerned Hegel in his political philosophy was the
possibility of theoretically explicating just such an ethical totality.
As far back as the period in which, together with Schelling and
Höderlin, he drew up the programmatic text that has gone down in
intellectual history as 'The Earliest Systematic Programme of German
Idealism', one can find in Hegel's thought the idea that a
reconciled society could be properly understood only as an ethically
integrated community of free citizens. In the meantime, of course, this
intuition of his youth had outgrown the aesthetic framework within
which it had originated and, as a result of his confrontation with the
Classical doctrine of the state, had found in the polis a political and
institutional model. In the essay on natural law, whenever Hegel
speaks, in a normative sense, of the ethical totality of a society, he
has in mind the relations within the city-states of antiquity. What he
admires about them is the romantically transfigured circumstance that,
in publicly practised customs, members of the community could also
witness the intersubjective expression of their own particularity. And
down to the details of the account of the Estates, his text reproduces
the theory in which Plato and Aristotle had presented the institutional
constitution of those city-states.

Already at this point, however, Hegel distils from the concrete ideal
that he enthusiastically believed he had found in the idea of the polis
the general features of an ideal community. Indeed, he does this so
clearly that one gains at least a rough sense of the conception of
ethical totality that he employs in the text. First, the singularity of
such a society could be seen, by analogy with an organism, in the
'lively unity' of 'universal and individual freedom'. What this
means is that public life would have to be regarded not as the result
of the mutual restriction of private spheres of liberty, but rather the
other way around, namely, as the opportunity for the fulfilment of
every single individual's freedom. Second, Hegel views the mores and
customs that come to be employed communicatively within a social
community as the social medium through which the integration of
universal and individual freedom is to occur. He chose the concept
'Sitte' ['mores' or 'customs'] quite intentionally, in order to
be able to make clear that neither laws prescribed by the state nor the
moral convictions of isolated subjects but only attitudes that are
actually acted out intersubjectively can provide a sound basis for the
exercise of that extended freedom. For this reason, the public
'system of legislation' is always intended to express only the
'living customs' actually 'present in the nation', as the text
has it." Third and lastly, Hegel takes a decisive step beyond Plato
and Aristotle by including, within the institutional organization of
absolute ethical life, a sphere that he provisionally labels 'the
system of property and law'. This is linked to the intent to show
that individuals' market-mediated activities and interests - Which
later come to be gathered under the title 'civil society' -
comprise a 'negative' though still constitutive 'zone' of the
'ethical' [sittlich] whole. A further example in the text of
Hegel's attempt to render his societal ideal realistic can be found
in his departure from the Classical doctrine of the state, through the
initial introduction of the unfree Estate as a class of producing and
trading citizens.

Insofar as the foregoing discussion adequately describes the framework
within which Hegel attempted, in Jena, to reappropriate the societal
ideal of his youth, it also outlined the main problem that will
confront him from now on. If indeed it turned out that modem social
philosophy is not in a position to account for such a higher-level form
of social community owing to the fact that it remains trapped within
atomistic premises, then the first implication of this for political
theory is that a new and different system of basic concepts must be
developed. Hegel thus faces the question of what these categorial tools
must be like, if they are to make it possible to explain
philosophically the development of an organization of society whose
ethical cohesion would lie in a form of solidarity based on the
recognition of the individual freedom of all citizens. During the Jena
years, Hegel's work in political philosophy was directed towards
finding a solution to the systematic problems that this question
generates. The various proposals that he developed within the context
of the emerging system of the logic of the human spirit have their
common roots in this enterprise, and they all refer back to it.

In his essay on the different theories of natural law, however, Hegel
has not yet developed a solution to this problem, but he has already
marked out the rough contours of the route by which he will reach it.
His first step in attempting to give the philosophical science of
society a new foundation is to replace atomistic basic concepts with
categories that are geared to the social nexus between subjects. In a
now famous passage, Hegel quotes Aristotle as follows: 'The nation
[Volk] comes by nature before the individual. If the individual in
isolation is not anything self-sufficient, he must be related to the
whole nation in one unity, just as other parts are to their whole'.
In the context in which this quotation occurs, Hegel merely wants to
say that every philosophical theory of society must proceed not from
the acts of isolated subjects but rather from the framework of ethical
bonds, within which subjects always already move. Thus, contrary to
atomistic theories of society, one is to assume, as a kind of natural
basis for human socialization, a situation in which elementary forms of
intersubjective coexistence are always present. In so doing, Hegel is
quite clearly taking his lead from the Aristotelian notion that there
is, inherent in human nature, a substratum of links to community, links
that fully unfold only in the context of the polis.

What is crucial for everything that follows, however, is the second
step, in which Hegel has to show how he can explain the transition from
such a state of 'natural ethical life' to the form of societal
organization that he previously defined as a relationship of ethical
totality. in the theories of natural law criticized by Hegel, the
theoretical position thus delineated is occupied either by the model of
an original social contract or by various assumptions about the
civilizing effects of practical reason. They are each supposed to
explain how the overcoming of human 'nature' can bring about an
orderly condition of collective social life. But for Hegel there is no
need to appeal to such external hypotheses, for the simple reason that
he has already presupposed the existence of intersubjective obligations
as a quasi-natural precondition for every process of human
socialization. What he has to explain, then, is not the genesis of
mechanisms of community-formation in general, but rather the
reorganization and expansion of embryonic forms of community into more
encompassing relations of social interaction. In order to address the
issue this raises, Hegel begins by appealing once again to Aristotelian
ontology, from which he borrows the. idea that this transition must
have the form of a teleological process in which an original substance
gradually reaches its full development. At the same time, however, he
emphasizes so decisively the negative, agonistic character of this
teleological process that one can easily detect in his reflections the
basic thought that he works out, with the help of the concept of
recognition, in repeated proposals in the subsequent years. Hegel sets
out to conceptualize the path by which 'ethical nature attains its
true right' as a process of recurring negations, by which the ethical
relations of society are to be successively freed from their remaining
one-sidedness and particularities. As he puts it, the 'existence of
difference' is what allows ethical life to move beyond its natural
initial stage and, in a series of rectifications of destroyed
equilibria, ultimately leads to a unity of the universal and the
particular. Put positively, this means that the history of human spirit
is to be understood as a conflictual process in which the 'moral'
potential inherent in natural ethical life (as something 'enclosed
and not yet unfolded') is gradually generalized. In the same passage,
Hegel speaks of the 'budding of ethical life' as 'the emerging
progressive supersession of the negative or subjective'.

What remains completely unclear with regard to this basic conception,
however, is what these undeveloped potentials of ethical life must be
like, if they are to be already inherent, as an existing difference, in
the initial structures of social ways of life. And left equally open in
the text is the question of the proposed shape of this process of
recurring negations by which these same ethical potentials could
develop in the direction of universal validity.

For Hegel, the solution to these two problems is further complicated by
the need to describe the normative content of the first stage of
socialization in such a way that a process can arise involving both a
growth of community ties and, at the same time, an increase in
individual freedom. For only if the world-historical course of the
'budding of ethical life' can be conceived as an interpenetration
of socialization and individuation can one assume that the organic
coherence of the resulting form of society lies in the intersubjective
recognition of the particularity of all individuals. In the early Jena
years, however, Hegel does not yet have the suitable means for solving
the problems generated by this difficult task. He is able to find a
satisfactory answer only after, in the course of reinterpreting
Fichte's theory of recognition, he has also given the Hobbesian
concept of struggle a new meaning.

In the beginning of his Jena period, just as previously in Frankfurt,
Hegel always referred to Fichte only critically. As we have seen, Hegel
considered him to be the central representative of the 'formal'
approach within the natural law tradition, which was unable to provide
a theoretical account of a 'genuinely free community of living
relations'. But in the System of Ethical Life - written in 1802,
immediately after the completion of the natural law essay - Hegel
treats Fichte's theory positively, drawing on it in order better to
describe the internal structure of those forms of ethical relations
that he wished to presuppose as a fundamental 'first' of human
socialization. In his essay, 'The Foundations of Natural Law',
Fichte had conceived of recognition as the 'reciprocal effect'
[Wechselwirkung] between individuals that underlies legal relations: by
both mutually requiring one another to act freely and limiting their
own sphere of action to the other's advantage, subjects form a common
consciousness which then attains objective validity in legal relations.
Hegel first removes the transcendental implications from Fichte's
model and then applies it directly to various different forms of
reciprocal action among individuals. He thus projects onto the
intersubjective process of mutual recognition communicative forms of
life, which he had heretofore described, following Aristotle, merely as
various forms of ethical life. He now sees a society's ethical
relations as representing forms of practical intersubjectivity in which
the movement of recognition guarantees the complementary agreement and
thus the necessary mutuality of opposed subjects. The structure of any
of these relationships of mutual recognition is always the same for
Hegel: to the degree that a subject knows itself to be recognized by
another subject with regard to certain of its [the subject's]
abilities and qualities and is thereby reconciled with the other, a
subject always also comes to know its own distinctive identity and
thereby comes to be opposed once again to the other as something
particular. But in this logic of the recognition relationship, Hegel
also detects an implicit inner dynamic, which allows him to take a
second step beyond Fichte's initial model. Since, within the
framework of an ethically established relationship of mutual
recognition, subjects are always learning something more about their
particular identity, and since, in each case, it is a new dimension of
their selves that they see confirmed thereby, they must once again
leave, by means of conflict, the stage of ethical life they have
reached, in order to achieve the recognition of a more demanding form
of their individuality. In this sense, the movement of recognition that
forms the basis of an ethical relationship between subjects consists in
a process of alternating stages of both reconciliation and conflict.
It, is not hard to see that Hegel thereby infuses the Aristotelian
concept of an ethical form of life with a moral potential that no
longer arises merely out of the fundamental nature of human beings but
rather out of a particular kind of relationship between them. Thus, the
coordinates of his political philosophy shift from a teleological
concept of nature to a concept of the social, in which an internal
tension is contained constitutively.

By thus using a theory of conflict to make Fichte's model of
recognition more dynamic, Hegel gains not only the possibility of
providing a first determination of the inner potential of human ethical
life but also the opportunity to make its 'negative' course of
development more concrete. The path that takes him there consists in a
reinterpretation of the model of an original struggle of all against
all, with which Thomas Hobbes (drawing on Machiavelli) had opened the
history of modern social philosophy. If the reason why subjects have to
move out of ethical relationships in which they find themselves is that
they believe their particular identity to be insufficiently recognized,
then the resulting struggle cannot be a confrontation purely over
self-preservation. Rather, the conflict that breaks out between
subjects represents, from the outset, something ethical, insofar as it
is directed towards the intersubjective recognition of dimensions of
human individuality. It is not the case, therefore, that a contract
among individuals puts an end to the precarious state of a struggle for
survival of all against all. Rather, inversely, this struggle leads, as
a moral medium, from an underdeveloped state of ethical life to a more
mature level of ethical relations. With this reinterpretation of the
Hobbesian model, Hegel introduces a virtually epoch-making ?few version
of the conception of social struggle, according to which practical
conflict between subjects can be understood as an ethical moment in a
movement occurring within a collective social life. This newly created
conception of the social thereby includes, from the start, not only a
field of moral tensions but also the social medium by which they are
settled through conflict.

It is only in the Jena writings, however, that the basic theoretical
idea resulting from this innovative coupling of Hobbesian and Fichtean
themes gradually takes shape. In the System of Ethical Life, the first
in this series of writings, this newly acquired model first becomes
evident in the construction of the argument, which represents, as it
were, a mirror image of the model of the state in Leviathan. Instead of
starting from a struggle of all against all, Hegel begins his
philosophical account with elementary forms of interpersonal
recognition, which he presents collectively under the heading
'natural ethical life'. And it is not until these initial relations
of recognition are injured by various kinds of struggle - grouped
together as an intermediate stage of 'crime' - that a state of
social integration emerges that can be conceptualized formally as an
organic relationship of pure ethical life. For methodological reasons,
Hegel attempted (following Schelling) to give his text a very schematic
form of presentation. But if, subsequently, one peels this form away
from the substance of the argument, the individual steps of a
social-theoretical model become clearly visible.

Hegel initially describes the process by which the first social
relations are established in terms of the release of subjects from
their natural determinations. This growth of 'individuality' occurs
in two stages of mutual recognition, which differ from each other in
the dimensions of personal identity that receive practical
confirmation. In the relationship between 'parents and children',
which represents 'the universal reciprocal action and formative
education of human beings', subjects recognize each other
reciprocally as living, emotionally needy beings. Here, the component
of individual personality recognized by others is 'practical
feeling', that is, the dependence of individuals on vitally essential
care and goods. The 'labour' of raising children, which for Hegel
constitutes the inner determination of the family, is directed towards
the formation of the child's 'inner negativity' and independence,
so that, as a result, 'the unification of feeling' must be
'superseded'. Hegel then follows this (now superseded) form of
recognition with a second stage, still under the heading 'natural
ethical life', of contractually regulated relations of exchange among
property owners. The path leading to this new social relationship is
described as a process of legal universalization. The practical
relations to the world that subjects had in the first stage are then
wrenched from their merely particular conditions of validity and
transformed into universal, contractually established legal claims.
>From now on, subjects mutually recognize each other as bearers of
legitimate claims to possession, thereby constituting each other as
property owners. In the act of exchange, they relate to each other as
'persons' who are accorded the 'formal' right to respond to all
offered transactions with 'yes' or 'no'. To this extent, the
recognition that single individuals receive here in the form of a legal
title represents the negatively determined freedom 'to be the
opposite of oneself with respect to some specific characteristic'.

The formulations with which Hegel chooses to portray this second stage
suffice to make clear why he considered this still to be a
'natural' form of ethical life as well. The establishment of legal
relations actually creates a social situation that is itself still
marked by the 'principle of singularity', from which only relations
of absolute ethical life are completely free. For, in a type of
societal organization characterized by legal forms of recognition,
subjects are constitutively integrated only via negative liberties,
that is, merely on the basis of their ability to negate social offers.
By this point, of course, the socializing movement of recognition has
already broken through the particularistic constraints placed on it in
the first stage by affective family ties. But initially, progress in
social universalization is paid for with an emptying and formalizing of
the aspects of the individual subject that receive intersubjective
confirmation. Within society, the individual is not yet, as Hegel says,
posited as a 'totality' and thus not yet as a 'whole that
reconstructs itself out of difference'.

What sets the System of Ethical Life apart is the fact that Hegel
counterposes the two 'natural' forms of recognition (as a whole) to
various kinds of struggle, which he summarizes in a separate chapter.
Whereas the social-philosophical proposals of the following years are
constructed in such a way that the struggle for recognition leads from
one stage of ethical life to the next, here there is only one single
stage of various different struggles between the two stages of
elementary and absolute ethical life. It is difficult to see what
theoretical reasons may have moved Hegel to this unconventional model,
a model that is not particularly plausible either in terms of social
history or of developmental logic. In part, of course, these reasons
are generated by the methodological restrictions that accompany the
schematic application of Schelling's epistemology. But they are also,
in part, the result of the direct opposition to Hobbes, which may have
provoked him to depict the 'natural' state of conflict-free ethical
life in a unified manner. In any case, Hegel does not yet use his model
of struggle here to theorize the transition between the individual
stages already distinguished within the movement of recognition.
Rather, he follows them with a single stage of different struggles,
whose collective effect consists in continually interrupting already
established processes of mutual recognition with new conflicts. What
primarily interests Hegel is the internal course of the struggle
resulting from these disruptions of social life, and his analysis of
this is based on interpretating acts of destruction as expressions of
'crime'.

For Hegel, the various acts of destruction that he distinguishes, in
his intermediate chapter, represent different forms of crime. He
connects criminal acts with the previous stage of ethical life by
characterizing each type as a form of the negative exercise of abstract
freedom, specifically, the abstract freedom that subjects had already
been granted in juridified relations of recognition. The claim that the
form of law, on the one hand, and criminal acts, on the other, are
dependent on each other becomes theoretically comprehensible once one
also takes into account the conception of 'crime' already contained
in Hegel's early theological writings. There, he had conceived of
criminal acts as actions that are tied to the social precondition of
legal relations, in the sense that they stem directly from the
indeterminacy of a form of individual freedom that is merely legal. In
a criminal act, subjects make destructive use of the fact that, as the
bearer of rights to liberty, they are integrated only negatively into
the collective life of society. In the context of the new text,
however, Hegel made no further use of the other side of the theoretical
determinations that he had developed in his earlier writings for
characterizing crime. Excluded here is the motivational consideration
that the act of a criminal represents something like a
reaction-formation vis-A-vis the abstractness and one-sidedness
structurally inherent in legal relations as such. Owing to the lack of
this affirmative component, the System of Ethical Life leaves
unanswered the question as to which motives provide the impulse for
criminal acts. There are only a few places in the argument where one
can find comments suggesting an answer along the original lines.
'Natural annihilation', for instance, is said to be directed
against the 'abstraction of the cultured', and Hegel speaks
elsewhere of crime in general as an 'opposition to opposition'. If
one pulls such formulations together and connects them with the older
conception, one ,begins to suspect that Hegel traces the emergence of
crime to conditions of incomplete recognition. The criminal's inner
motive then consists in the experience of not being recognized, at the
established stage of mutual recognition, in a satisfactory way.

This far-reaching theory is further supported by the fact that it
enables one to decipher the logic upon which Hegel based his account of
the different species of crime. The order in which he presents the
individual types of destructive behaviour makes sense when one keeps in
mind that the point of the enterprise lies in tracing crime back to
incomplete forms of recognition. Hegel introduces into his account the
idea of a still fully pointless act of destruction. In acts of
'natural devastation' or 'annihilation', as he calls them,
individuals react aimlessly to the experience of the 'abstraction'
of already established ethical life. It is unclear whether this is to
be taken as meaning that elementary forms of disrespect here constitute
the occasion for destructive acts. Moreover, such acts of blind
destruction are, in Hegel's sense, not really crimes at all, since
they lack the social precondition of legally recognized freedom.

In the stricter sense, crime only emerges with the kind of negative
action that Hegel introduces in the second stage. In robbing another
person, a subject wilfully violates the universal form of recognition
that had already developed with the establishment of legal relations.
Although Hegel refuses to say anything about the motives for this type
of destructive act, the context of his argument suggests that they may
lie in the experience of abstract legal recognition itself. This is
supported not only by the activist character of formulations in which
Hegel speaks of the 'injury to the law' as well as of the 'goal
of robbing'," but also by his portrayal of the progression of the
conflict situation that emerges with the act of predatory crime. The
crime of robbery initially only restricts a subject in its right to its
own property. But at the same time, the subject is also attacked in
such a way that it is injured, in its entirety, as a 'person', as
Hegel puts it. Since we are still operating here at the stage of
natural ethical life - where the abstractness of law 'does not yet
have its reality and support in something itself universal', and thus
lacks the executive power found in state authority - every subject
must defend its rights by itself and, hence, each subject's entire
identity is threatened by theft.

The affected subject's only appropriate response to this injury to
its own person is to defend itself actively against its assailant. This
'repercussion' of the crime for its perpetrator - in the form of
the injured person's resistance - is the first sequence of actions
that Hegel explicitly calls a 'struggle'. What emerges is a
struggle of 'person' against ,person', that is, between two
rights-bearing subjects, a struggle for the recognition of each
party's different claim: on the one hand, the conflict-generating
claim to the unrestricted development of that subject's subjectivity;
on the other hand, the reactive claim to, social respect for property
rights. Hegel considers the outcome of the struggle unleashed by the
collision of these two claims to be a foregone conclusion, in that only
one of the two divided parties can refer the threat unconditionally
back to itself as a personality, because only the injured subject
struggles, in resisting, for the integrity of its whole person, whereas
the criminal is actually merely trying to accomplish something in his
or her own particular interest. Therefore, as Hegel quickly concludes,
it is the first, attacked subject that 'must gain the upper hand'
in the struggle, because it 'makes this personal injury a matter of
its entire personality'.

Hegel follows this social conflict, which starts with a theft and ends
with the 'coercion' of the criminal, with a third and final stage
of negation, namely, the struggle for honour. With regard to its
starting conditions alone, this case of conflict represents the most
demanding form of intersubjective diremption [Entzweiung]. This
conflict is based not on a violation of an individual assertion of
rights, but rather on a violation of the integrity of the person as a
whole. Admittedly, Hegel once again leaves the particular motives
behind this conflict-generating crime indeterminate here. The reasons,
in each case, why a person sets about destroying the framework of an
existing relationship of recognition by injuring or insulting the
integrity of another subject remain unclear. At this point, however,
the reference to a totality is presupposed for both participants in the
conflict, in the sense that each is fighting for the 'entirety' of
his or her individual existence. This can be understood to mean that
the intention behind the criminal's insulting act is to demonstrate
one's own integrity publicly and thereby make an appeal for the
recognition of that integrity, but then the criminal's insulting act
would, for its part, have its roots in a prior experience of being
insufficiently recognized as an individuated personality.

In any case, the two opposing parties in the emerging conflict both
have the same goal, namely, to provide evidence for the 'integrity'
of his or her own person. Following the usage of his day, Hegel traces
this mutually pursued intention back to a need for 'honour'. This
is initially to be understood as a type of attitude towards oneself, as
it is phrased in the text, through which 'the singular detail becomes
something personal and whole'.' 'Honour', then, is the stance 1
take towards myself when 1 identify positively with all my traits and
peculiarities. Apparently, then, the only reason that a struggle for
'honour' would occur is because the possibility of such an
affirmative relation-to-self is dependent, for its part, on the
confirming recognition of other subjects. Individuals can only identify
completely with themselves to the degree to which their peculiarities
and traits meet with the approval and support of their partners to
interaction. 'Honour' is thus used to characterize an affirmative
relation-to-self that is structurally tied to the presupposition that
each individual particularity receives intersubjective recognition. For
this reason, both subjects in the struggle are pursuing the same goal,
namely, the re-establishment of their honour ~ which has been injured
for different reasons in each case by attempting to convince the other
that their own personality deserves recognition. But they are only able
to do this, Hegel further asserts, by demonstrating to each other that
they are prepared to risk their lives. Only by being prepared to die do
1 publicly show that my individual goals and characteristics are more
significant to me than my physical survival. In this way, Hegel lets
the social conflict resulting from insult turn into a life-and-death
struggle, a struggle which always occurs outside the sphere of legally
backed claims, since 'the whole [of a person] is at stake'.

However unclear this account may be on the whole, it offers, for the
first time, a more precise overview of Hegel's theoretical aims in
the intermediate chapter on 'crime'. The fact that, in the
progression of the three stages of social conflict, the identity claims
of the subjects involved gradually expand rules out the possibility of
granting a merely negative significance to the acts of destruction that
Hegel describes. Taken together, the various different conflicts seem
rather to comprise precisely the process that prepares the way for the
transition from natural to absolute ethical life by equipping
individuals with the necessary characteristics and insights. Hegel not
only wants to describe how social structures of elementary recognition
are destroyed by the negative manifestation of freedom; he also wants
to show, beyond this, that it is only via such acts of destruction that
ethically more mature relations of recognition can be formed at all,
relations that represent a precondition for the actual development of a
'community of free citizens'." Here, one can analytically
distinguish two aspects of intersubjective action as the dimensions
along which Hegel ascribes to social conflicts something like a
moral-practical potential for learning. On the one hand, it is
apparently via each new provocation thrust upon them by various crimes
that subjects come to know more about their own, distinctive identity.
This is the developmental dimension that Hegel seeks to mark
linguistically with the transition from 'person' to 'whole
person'. As in the earlier section on 'natural ethical life', the
term 'person' here designates individuals who draw their identity
primarily from the intersubjective recognition of their status as
legally competent agents, whereas the term 'whole person', by
contrast, refers to individuals who gain their identity above all from
the inter-rsubjective recognition of their 'particularity'. On the
other hand, however, the route by which subjects gain greater autonomy
is also supposed to be the path to greater knowledge of their mutual
dependence. This is the developmental dimension that Hegel seeks to
make clear by letting the struggle for honour, in the end, change
imperceptibly from a conflict between single subjects into a
confrontation between social communities. Ultimately, after they have
taken on the challenges posed by different crimes, individuals no
longer oppose each other as egocentric actors, but as 'members of a
whole'.

When these two dimensions are considered together and as a unity, then
one begins to see the formative process with which Hegel aims to
explain the transition from natural to absolute ethical life. His model
is guided by the conviction that it is only with the destruction of
legal forms of recognition that a consciousness emerges of the moment
within intersubjective relationships that can serve as the foundation
for an ethical community. For, by violating first the rights and then
the honour of persons, the criminal makes the dependence of individuals
on the community a matter of common knowledge. To this extent, the
social conflicts that shattered natural ethical life prepare subjects
to mutually recognize one another as persons who are dependent on each
other and yet also completely individuated.

In the course of his argument, however, Hegel continues to treat this
third stage of social interaction, which is supposed to lead to
relations of qualitative recognition among the members of a society,
merely as an implicit presupposition. In his account of 'absolute
ethical life', which follows the crime chapter, the intersubjective
foundation of a future community is said to be a specific relationship
among subjects, for which the category of 'mutual intuition'
emerges here. The individual 'intuits himself as himself in every
other individual'. As the appropriation of Schelling's term
'intuition' [Anschauung] suggests, Hegel surely intends this
formulation to designate a form of reciprocal relations between
subjects that goes beyond merely cognitive recognition. Such patterns
of recognition, extending even into the sphere of the affective (for
which the category of 'solidarity' would seem to be the most likely
label),' are apparently supposed to provide the communicative basis
upon which individuals, who have been isolated from each other by legal
relations, can be reunited within the context of an ethical community.
In the remaining parts of the System of Ethical Life, however, Hegel
does not pursue the fruitful line of thought thus outlined. At this
point, in fact, the thread of the argument drawing specifically on a
theory of recognition breaks off entirely, and the text limits itself,
from here on, to an account of the organizational elements that are
supposed to characterize political relations in 'absolute ethical
life'. As a result, however, the difficulties and problems that
Hegel's reconstructive analysis had already failed to address at the
previous stages remain open at the end of the text.

Among the unclarities that characterize the System of Ethical Life as a
whole, the first question to be asked is to what degree the history of
ethical life is, in fact, to be reconstructed here in terms of the
guiding idea of the development of relationships of recognition.
Admittedly, one might object to this reading on the grounds that the
text's Aristotelian frame of reference is not at all sufficiently
differentiated conceptually to be able to adequately distinguish
various forms of intersubjective recognition. In many places, however,
the argumentation does suggest a distinction between three forms of
recognition, differing from each other with regard to the 'how' as
well as the 'what' of practical confirmation: in the affective
relationship of recognition found in the family, human individuals are
recognized as concrete creatures of need; in the cognitive-formal
relationship of recognition found in law, they are recognized as
abstract legal persons; and finally, in the emotionally enlightened
relationship of recognition found in the State, they are recognized as
concrete universals, that is, as subjects who are socialized in their
particularity. If, furthermore, in each of the relations of
recognition, the institution is more clearly distinguished from the
mode, the stage theory that Hegel had in mind can be summarized in the
schema shown in figure 1.

In such a stage theory of social recognition, different modes of
recognition correspond to different concepts of the person in such a
way that a sequence emerges of ever more demanding media of
recognition. In the System of Ethical Life, however, the corresponding
distinctions are too evidently lacking for the certain presence of such
a theory

to be unambiguously assumed. Even if it were possible to extract a
sufficiently clear distinction of three modes of recognition from
Hegel's application of Schelling's model of knowledge, the text
would still be obviously missing the complementary concepts of a theory
of subjectivity, with which one could also effect such a
differentiation with regard to what it is about a person that gets
recognized.

The second difficulty that the System of Ethical Life fails to consider
arises from the question as to the status of 'crime' within the
history of ethical life. There is good reason to believe that Hegel
granted criminal acts a constructive role in the formative process of
ethical life because they were able to unleash the conflicts that, for
the first time, would make subjects aware of underlying relations of
recognition. If this were the case, however, then the moment of
'struggle' within the movement of recognition would be granted not
only a negative, transitional function but also a positive (that is,
consciousness-forming) function. Along the diagonal axis (in figure 1)
that points in the direction of increasing 'universalization', this
moment of 'struggle' would then represent, in each case, the
practical conditions of possibility for the transition to the next
stage in social relations of recognition. Against this reading,
however, it must be pointed out that Hegel's theory leaves the
various crimes too unmotivated for them to be able to assume this sort
of systematic position in his argumentation. If within this theoretical
construct social conflicts were, in fact, supposed to take on the
central role of clarifying the reciprocity of specific recognition
rules, then it would have been necessary to explicate its internal
structure more precisely, both in theoretical and in categorial terms.
Thus, in the System of Ethical Life, the social-philosophical model
that Hegel develops in Jena in order to explain the history of human
ethical life is evident only in outline. He is still lacking the
crucial means that would put him in a position to provide a more
determinate version of his mediation of Fichte and Hobbes.

It becomes possible for Hegel to take such a step towards greater
precision once he begins to replace the Aristotelian framework guiding
his political philosophy with a new frame of reference. Up to this
point, he has drawn his conception of 'ethical life' from a
philosophical world of ideas for which the ontological reference to a
natural order - however it was conceived - was central. For this
reason, he could describe ethical relations among people only as
gradations of an underlying natural essence, so that their cognitive
and moral qualities had to remain peculiarly indeterminate. In the
'First Philosophy of Spirit', written in 1803 / 4, however, which
stems from the proposal for a system of speculative philosophy once
labelled 'Realphilosophie, I', the concept of 'nature' has
already lost its overarching, ontological meaning. Hegel no longer uses
it to designate the constitution of reality as a whole, but only of the
realm of reality that is opposed to spirit as its other - that is,
prehuman, physical nature. Of course, at the same time that the concept
of nature was thus restricted, the category of /spirit' or that of
'consciousness' increasingly took over the task of characterizing
exactly that structural principle according to which the social
lifeworld is demarcated from natural reality. Here, for the first time,
the sphere of ethical life is thus freed up for the categorial
definitions and distinctions that are taken from the process of
Spirit's reflection. The place occupied by Aristotelian natural
teleology, which still had a complete hold on the System of Ethical
Life, gradually comes to be taken by a philosophical theory of
consciousness.

Admittedly, in this process of conceptual transformation, which already
points in the direction of the final system, the fragments from 1803/4
have only the status of an intermediate stage. Here, Hegel still clings
to the formal structure of his original approach, both in the sense
that the ethical relations associated with the State continue to form
the central point of reference for the reconstructive analysis and in
the sense that the category of consciousness merely serves the
explication of forms of ethical life. But even by itself, the turn to
categories of the philosophy of consciousness is enough to give the
model of a 'struggle for recognition' a markedly altered
formulation. Hegel can no longer conceive of the emergence of a State
community as the agonistic development of elementary structures of an
original, 'natural' form of ethical life, but must instead consider
it directly to be the process by which Spirit is formed. This process
occurs via the sequence of the mediating instances of language, tool,
and family goods, through the use of which consciousness gradually
learns to comprehend itself as an 'immediate unity of singularity and
universality',' and accordingly reaches an understanding of itself
as 'totality'. In this new context, 'recognition' refers to the
cognitive step taken by a consciousness that has already developed
'ideally' into a totality, at the moment in which it 'perceives
itself - in another such totality, consciousness - to be the
totality it is'. And the reason why this experience of perceiving
oneself in others has to lead to a conflict or struggle is that it is
only by mutually violating each other's subjective claims that
individuals can come to know whether or not, in them, the respective
others also re-identify themselves as a 'totality':

But this, that my totality as the totality of a single consciousness is
precisely this totality subsisting, on its own account, in the other
consciousness, whether it is recognized and respected, this 1 cannot
know except through the appearance of the actions of the other against
my totality; and likewise the other must equally appear to me as a
totality, as 1 do to him.

As this shows, Hegel has improved the theoretical clarity of his
derivation of the struggle for recognition quite a bit, in comparison
with the earlier text from the Jena period. The turn to philosophy of
consciousness now allows him unambiguously to locate the motives for
initiating a conflict in the interior of the human spirit, which is
supposed to be constructed in such a way that for its complete
realization it presupposes knowledge of its recognition by others,
which can only be acquired through conflict. Individuals can feel sure
that they are recognized by their partners to interaction only by
experiencing the practical reaction with which the others respond to a
targeted, even provocative challenge. On the other hand, it is clear
that the social function that the struggle thus initiated is to have in
the context of the process of ethical formation remains basically
unchanged in the new theoretical context. Indeed, as in the System of
Ethical Life, conflict represents a sort of mechanism of social
integration into community, which forces subjects to cognize each other
mutually in such a way that their individual consciousness of totality
has ultimately become interwoven, together with that of everyone else,
into a 'universal' consciousness. As in the earlier text, this now
'absolute' consciousness finally provides Hegel with the
intellectual basis for a future, ideal community: produced by mutual
recognition as a medium of social universalization, 'the spirit of a
people' is formed, and to that extent the 'living substance' of
its ethics is formed as well.

Despite these rough points of agreement in outcome, however, there can
be no mistake as to the serious difference between the two fragmentary
texts at the level of fundamentals. Both texts do, of course, conceive
of the struggle for recognition as a social process that leads to
increasing integration into community, in the sense of a
decentralization of individual forms of consciousness. But only the
earlier text that is to say, only the System of Ethical Life -
attaches to this struggle the further significance of being, at the
same time, a medium of individualization, of increasing ego-competence.
This surprising contrast becomes comprehensible in systematic terms
when one considers more closely the points of conceptual divergence to
which the different approaches must necessarily give rise. As has been
shown, the change in human interactive relations described in the
System of Ethical Life is a change with a direction. From the start,
owing to the text's Aristotelian frame of reference, the foregoing
reconstructive analysis has centred on the normatively substantive
relationships of communication out of which individuals must be
differentiated before they can understand each other to be individuated
subjects. Taken together, however, both the emancipation of individual
subjects and their growing communalization among each other should be
initiated and driven on by the struggle for recognition, which, to the
degree to which it gradually makes them aware of their subjective
claims, simultaneously allows a rational feeling for their
intersubjective similarities to emerge. But Hegel must distance himself
from the complex task thus formulated as soon as he replaces the
Aristotelian frame of reference with a theory of consciousness as the
basis for his political philosophy. Because the object domain of his
reconstructive analysis is now no longer composed primarily out of
forms of social interaction that is, of 'ethical relations' - but
consists rather in stages of the self-mediation of individual
consciousness, communicative relations between subjects can no longer
be conceived as something that in principle precedes individuals.

Whereas Hegel's philosophical investigations had, until this point,
proceeded from the elementary system of relationships associated with
communicative action, here (in the fragments of 1803/4) the analysis
begins with the theoretical and practical confrontation of individuals
with their environment. The intellectual formative process resulting
from this confrontation - the further development of which takes the
form of Spirit's reflection on the mediations that it has already
intuitively accomplished - allows, first, a consciousness of totality
to emerge in the individual subject, which leads, second, to the stage
of universalization or decentralization of ego-perspectives that
accompanies the struggle for recognition. To this extent, the conflict
between subjects have lost the second dimension of significance that it
had in the System of Ethical Life. For it no longer represents a medium
for consciousnessformation of individuals as well but is left instead
only with the function of being a medium of social universalization,
that is, of integration into community. Because Hegel gives up, along
with the Aristotehanism of his early Jena writings, the notion of an
original intersubjectivity of human life, he can no longer conceive the
process of individualization in terms of the agonistic release of
individuals from already existing communicative relations. In fact, his
political theory of ethical life completely loses the character of a
'history of society', of an analysis of directional changes in
social relations, and gradually takes on the form of an analysis of the
education [Bildung] of the individual for society.

If these considerations are correct, Hegel paid for the theoretical
gains of his turn to the philosophy of consciousness by sacrificing his
strong intersubjectivism. By making the conceptual modification first
introduced in the proposed system of 1803/4, Hegel does create, for the
first time, the theoretical possibility for conceptually distinguishing
more precisely between the individual stages of individual
consciousness-formation. At the same time, this generates the
opportunity for differentiating various concepts of the person that his
approach had been lacking. But the benefit thus obtained, in terms of a
theory of subjectivity, comes at the expense of a
communication-theoretical alternative, which was in fact also implicit
in the reference to Aristotle. The turn to the philosophy of
consciousness allows Hegel to completely lose sight of the idea of an
original intersubjectivity of humankind and blocks the way to the
completely different solution that would have consisted in making the
necessary distinctions between various degrees of personal autonomy
within the framework of a theory of intersubjectivity. But the
categorial advantages and the theoretical losses that this cognitive
step generates for Hegel's idea of a 'struggle for recognition'
can only be adequately assessed in connection with the text in which
this conceptual reorientation comes to a provisional conclusion.
Already in the 1803/4 draft of his Realphilosophie - the last text
before the Phenomenology of Spirit - Hegel analysed the formative
process of Spirit entirely within the framework of the newly acquired
paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness. Despite the fact that
virtually all echoes of the System of Ethical Life have disappeared
from this text, never again in the later political philosophy is the
'struggle for recognition' given such a strong, systematic position
as here.

URL:http://marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/honneth.htm