1 © Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research Oct-Dec 2011, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, 1-18 Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit J OHN R USSON While Hegel’s name is well - known, the ideas that are associated with that name are often highly misrepresentative caricatures of his position. It is these caricatures that tend to be passed around, probably because Hegel’s actual texts are uncommonly difficult to read, and so non-specialists tend to rely upon the reports of others, with the result that misrepresentations circulate more and more widely and become deeply entrenched. In fact, professional research on Hegel’s philosophy has become very sophisticated over the last few decades, with the result that it has been possible to show the falsity of some familiar “Hegel myths and legends”, and to develop in their place an authoritative interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. 1 When Hegel’s texts are studied carefully, it becomes clear that Hegel is a philosopher able to offer cutting-edge insights into all the most contemporary problems of philosophy. One of the most important contributions of Continental Philosophy throughout the 20 th Century was its emphasis on the nature of “the other”, whether it be in terms of the interpersonal “other” that defines and exceeds moral experience; the political “other” that defines and exceeds cross-cultural experience; the divine “other” that defines and exceeds religious experience; or the non-sensical “other” that defines and exceeds all sense as such. In fact, 20 th Century Continental philosophy 2 J OHN R USSON in general has its roots in Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” and its subsequent developments in Hegel and German Idealism, and later Continental philosophy’s characteristic themes of self and other are indeed already very much alive in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a phenomenological description of experience that aims especially to capture the dynamism of experience. Hegel’s study demonstrates the way in which experience in its very nature is driven by its own immanent norm to develop through changing forms. It is the constitutive norm of experience to apprehend immediately what is there—to witness to “what is happening”—and the varied forms our experience takes are more or less adequate in living up to this defining norm. Hegel’s study is rich and complex, ranging over the whole expanse of possible experience, but in order to bring out his important insights into the theme of “self and other”, I will focus solely on his description of the nature of self-consciousness, and its role of “witnessing to what is happening”. 2 In Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit , “SelfConsciousness”, Hegel describes three different ways in which our experience of self-consciousness—our sense that we are experiencing ourselves—is crucially “mediated by” (i.e., constitutively defined by) a distinct experience of the “other”. “The other”, that is, is irremovably at the heart of “the self ” and in a multiplicity of ways. We will investigate this through three short sketches of the domains that Hegel names “desire”, “recognition”, and “thinking”. Desire When we imagine fulfilling our desires, we imagine the world giving us what we want, the world answering to us: in desire, the self appears to get its way in the world. This sense that fulfilling desire is being the one in charge is reflected in Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 3 the long history of talking about powerful people as the ones who can have all their desires fulfilled—indeed, this is what we often fear about powerful people, namely, that they will use their power to make the world answer to themselves. When we act on our desires, we have an experience of this sense of power and control: we feel something like “I won” on those occasions in which the desires that are harboured within our souls—those desires that define our perspective—are allowed to be satisfied. In these ways, then, when we imagine ourselves living from desire, we imagine ourselves in charge. The fulfilling of desire can have a satisfying sense that “I won.” but it can also have a dissatisfying sense that “I lost.” If I am trying to lose weight, I may struggle everyday with my desire to eat sweets and, if at some point I gratify that desire and indulge in eating sweets, I will likely feel that “I lost and my desires won.” Even in less extreme situations than forcibly restricting our diet, we can feel in general that acting on our desires is a matter precisely of being out of control, a matter of being directed by an alien master. It is this sense that Kant emphasizes when he describes desire as a state of “heteronomy” of the will, i.e., a state in which the will is subject to “the law of the other,” and that Freud emphasizes when he describes the desire as the “It” ( das Es , the “Id” ) that presses upon the “I” ( das Ich, the “Ego”) within experience. 3 The experience of desire typically has these two sides to it, these two valences. On the one hand, the satisfaction of desire is the affirmation of oneself by the world, a sense that one’s self is running the show; on the other hand, it has the sense that one is being run by an alien power. Hegel describes this phenomenon—this ambivalent experience—in his phenomenology—his description of experience—of desire. 4 Desire is, on the one hand, a relation of the self to an other, in the sense that my desire is intentional: it is about something 4 J OHN R USSON other than itself. Desire has an object and, is immediately experienced as control over that object: having the object as “for me.” This is what Hegel means when he writes of desire that, certain of the nothingness of this other, it explicitly affirms that this nothingness is for it the truth of the other; it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself. 5 Though desire is explicitly an affirmation of self—an experience of “self-certainty”—and a domination of its object, desire implicitly depends upon that object to afford it the opportunities for fulfillment. Desire, though dominating the other, in fact needs the other: it needs the other to be other, and it needs it, in its otherness, to make itself available: Desire and the self-certainty obtained in its gratification are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding this other: in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this other. 6 Desire of an object makes one answerable to that object and the terms that it sets, and because of this I must expend effort to conform to its objective character if I am to be satisfied. When I desire an object, I become answerable to it. Further, that desire itself is something I find myself experiencing: desire is precisely not a chosen attitude, but is the immediacy of attraction between myself and an object. 7 In this sense, then, desire is my immediate sense of being bound to the object, and, because desire binds me to an object, I can experience my desire itself as a chain: Hegel thus writes, ‘It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of desire.’ 8 Thus, not only am I answerable to the object when I desire, even though I experience myself as the one in charge: further, I am answerable to desire itself, inasmuch as it “comes over” me, Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 5 and, effectively, makes me “its” servant. I must expend physical effort to fulfil my desires, and, more, I must expend psychological effort if I want to do something other than what my immediate desires dictate: the attitude of desire is itself an “other,” with its own “objective” features, with which I must negotiate. Desire, then, opens up the field of the “other” to us, and this in two senses. Through our desire we are immediately brought into a meaningful relationship—a relationship where “how things go” matters to us—with the physical world, the “outer” world of bodily effort; through desire we are also meaningfully introduced into a meaningful relationship with our “souls,” with the “inner” world of psychological struggle. Without and within, we are inherently exposed, through desire, to an other with which we must negotiate, an other that makes our meaningful experience possible while itself exceeding that experience. Recognition Our desire reveals to us the “inner” life: it reveals to us that the “outer” world of nature exists for a desiring subjectivity. This is true both of a worldly object—the food I eat, for example—and for my immediate organ—the hand I use, for example, to grab that food. The truth of the living body, as much as the truth of the object, is experienced by desire as not substantial in itself, but as “for” the desire that animates it. This characteristic experience of the body in desire has further implications for the nature of the object of desire. The immediately present living body is not what is “really there,” but is, rather, the way a desire is made present, 9 and it is just as true that the living bodies that desire encounters as the objects of its desire are also not simply bodies, but are the presentations of desire—but other desires. Just as “what is happening” when the living body of the desiring self is present is that desire is having its way, so is it true that when another 6 J OHN R USSON living body is present, “what is happening” is that another desire is having its way: the “outer” bodies that desire encounters in the world are so many ways in which “inner” lives are made manifest, inner lives that are themselves “self-certainties” superseding the independence of the their bodies and objects: Consciousness has for its object one which, of its own self, posits its otherness or difference as a nothingness, and in so doing is independent. . . The object of self-consciousness... is for itself a genus, a universal fluid element in the peculiarity of its own separate being; it is a living selfconsciousness. 10 To live from the sense that the immediately present body is not the truth requires recognition of the “interiority”, the desire, of other bodies as much as it allows a recognition of our own interiority, and this is a recognition that we do in fact make. Our recognition of the other’s desire, furthermore, in not an indifferent recognition: one of the most profound features of our experience of desire is that we desire the other’s desire , that is, our desire is a desire for other selves, and the desire for another self is the desire to be desired . The description of this encounter with the desire of the other is perhaps the most distinctive and definitive component of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit . 11 This recognition of the desire of others is itself not simply a heightened recognition of the character of the object; it is also a heightened recognition of the character of ourselves. When desire encounters another such desire, it experiences itself as the other’s object: Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. . . [I]t has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being. 12 When I desire to be desired, I experience myself as the other’s “other.” While my desire is initially the experience that Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 7 what matters to me is “what’s really happening” my desiring recognition of the other’s desire is the sense that her or his inner life is “what’s really happening” and I desire to have a place there. While our experience of desire initially gives us the sense that I am “where it’s at”, that where I am is where “here” is, when we desire the desire of others, we experience “where it’s at” as elsewhere, ourselves as the “there” to the other’s “here”. The desire to have a place in the other’s world is the desire to be recognized. It is one of the most powerful insights of Hegel (and of Fichte and Schelling before him) that our desire—the desire of selfconscious beings—is crucially shaped by the desire to be recognized by others. 13 We saw above that in any situation of desire the otherness of the object is essential to desire, even if the essentiality of that otherness is denied in the very practice of desiring. In the desire for recognition, the necessity of this otherness becomes thematic, for it is precisely the otherness of the other that captivates our desire. To desire to be desired by another is to experience another body (and, indeed, the whole world) as a present reality that bespeaks a non-present reality—the subjectivity of another—that one finds compelling. Your desire—your perspective—is what matters to me, and that reality is a reality definitively outside of my control: it is the domain of your will. In desiring to be desired, I desire to be subject to an alien reality that eludes my grasp, and it is its alienness—its otherness—that makes it desirable to me. Of course, subjecting oneself to an alien will is a challenging matter, for it is precisely a matter of making oneself vulnerable. Consequently, we often compromise our desire for recognition by defensively evading the vulnerability to which our desire naturally disposes us. We encounter this structure in everyday life in the various familiar ways in which we are manipulative 8 J OHN R USSON or defensive in our everyday dealings with others, trying to secure approbation without truly opening ourselves up to open, intimate interaction.14 Hegel describes these same compromised approaches to the other in their most extreme forms, namely, the use of physical force—killing or forceful subjection—to control the will of the other. We can try to rid ourselves of the vulnerability to the other by killing the other, as if thereby to demonstrate our independence of that other; however, it was in fact, the other’s perspective, not her life, to which we found ourselves subject, and killing the other merely evades that challenge without answering it. 15 Again, one can try to establish one’s superiority and invulnerability to the other by using force to win from the other a recognition of her inferiority and subordination; to seek such a recognition of subordination, however, is in fact to demonstrate one’s own dependence upon the perspective of that other and to reveal thereby that what claims to be a relationship of simple domination is in fact a collaboration (though an unequal and unfair one, to be sure). 16 The general point of Hegel’s discussions of these compromised approaches to another is that it is inherently contradictory to try to control the will of the other through force. This is true, first, because physical force is ex hypothesi ineffective inasmuch as the recognition of the will begins with the recognition of its detachment from the domain of bodily causality. It is true, second, because trying to force or control the desire of the other precisely contradicts the basic premise that one desires that the other’s desire give itself. Of the failure of the struggle to the death, Hegel writes: [ J]ust as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required significance of recognition. . . The two do not reciprocally Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 9 give and receive one another back from each other consciously. 17 Of the failure of the relationship of master and slave, he writes: But 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 also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal.18 Examining the failure of these compromised projects of intersubjective negotiation underlines the fundamental point: we cannot satisfy our desire to be desired without embracing the interpersonal vulnerability to which that desire subjects us. If we are to be vulnerable to the other, and not compromise that desire by trying to control one another, then each of us must be preserved in our subjectivity while giving up our presumption of exclusive self-possession. Each of us must recognize our sharedness of self-identity: Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, 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. 19 Our desire to be recognized, then, can only be fulfilled in a situation of the equality of mutual recognition. Self-conscious beings like ourselves who are constituted by a desire for recognition by others can thus only be fulfilled on condition that ‘[t]hey recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.’20 Within our desire, then, we discover another field of otherness to which we are exposed, in addition to the otherness of the object and the otherness of desire itself that we discovered above. Our desire for recognition reveals a profound “other” 10 J OHN R USSON to which the self is exposed, namely, the other person. Through the otherness of the bodily object to which my desire naturally exposes me, I encounter a deeper otherness, which is the other’s subjectivity, the other’s will and desire. The otherness that is the physical body demands of me that I develop the attitude of objectivity and the bodily competencies that enables me to negotiate with it effectively. The otherness that is my desire demands of me that I develop the psychological resources of self-interpretation and self-control to negotiate with it fulfillingly. This third otherness—the otherness that is another will—demands of me that I develop the communicative skills and practices of fair play to negotiate with it appropriately. Thinking If we have not reconciled ourselves with the demands of nature, desire, and other subjects, then we live with the world against us in a perpetual ontological conflict that forecloses the establishing of any healthy sense of self. 21 It is when we live in a way that accepts this “co-arising” of self and other, when we accept to cooperate with our world, that we are able to establish a coherent and settled sense of self identity. When we establish such a coherent sense of a self well integrated with the world, however, we discover that these worldly terms are not the last word on self-identity. Negotiating with another body in order to act effectively or with another person to establish a situation of equality is a practical matter, and the terms to which such coherent and fair practice need answer are specified by the individuals involved in the negotiation. Our experience, however, reveals to us a further set of terms to which this whole negotiation is beholden, but which are not defined by it. These are the terms of the world of what Hegel calls “thinking” the subject of the final section of his chapter on self-consciousness, “The Freedom of Self-Consciousness.” 22 Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 11 I can carefully cultivate my relationship with the persons and things of my surrounding world, and I can learn how to manage my own desires. Yet when I have successfully thus established myself as a self-possessed individual, cooperatively reconciled with all these dimensions of my world, I can nonetheless discover that my experience offers me a meaning that is not definable in these terms. My psyche, the things of the natural world, and the other people I encounter are so many particular individuals. Through my experience of all these particularities, however, I can discover universal meanings, meanings that provide the essential context of meaning for these many particularities. Neither nature nor soul, object nor subject, yet pervasive and formative of both, this non-worldly universality is simultaneously most other and most intimate both to the self and its others. “The Unhappy Consciousness” is the name that Hegel gives to the experience of recognizing this ultimate other. 23 The “unhappy consciousness” is a form of self-consciousness, and it is specifically that form of self-consciousness in which the self is conscious of the fact that its own most intimate nature is found in another—an ultimate other to which it is beholden: This unhappy, inwardly divided [entzweite] consciousness... must for ever have present in the one consciousness the other also... The Unhappy Consciousness itself is the gazing of one self-consciousness into another, and itself is both, and the unity of both is also its essential nature. 24 The individual self-consciousness finds itself in the position of being a changing, contingent, empirical consciousness, internally answerable to an ultimate judge, eternal source of all significance: [The unhappy consciousness] is, to begin with, only the immediate unity of the two and . . . one of the them, namely the simple unchangeable, it takes to be the essence; but the 12 J OHN R USSON other, the manifold changeable, it takes to be the unessential. 25 The unhappy consciousness is the form of experience in which we find ourselves compelled to recognize and submit to an ultimate authority, the essential and universal truth that governs both self and world—to bear witness to the fact that “what is happening” is a gift of significance, not sufficiently explicable in the terms of the world that it illuminates. Mostly commonly, we associate this description of experience with a religious consciousness. 26 This association is quite correct, but in describing this “religious” form of experience, Hegel is in fact revealing the ultimate form of all sense. We discover this other that is universality when we find ourselves subject to a commanding authority within our experience that comes neither from the world nor from our own will. Logic and mathematics are the most familiar instances of such a compelling sense—a sense to which we are inherently attuned that imposes its form on all things and all psychic functioning. When we ask of some things “how many?” we enumerate them according to the rules of quantity to which those things must conform, even though those things do not themselves have any formative impact upon those rules, and we, similarly, experience this quantitative significance as a sense to which we must necessarily assent regardless of our desires. Again, morality, as Kant showed in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals , similarly presents itself to us as such an immanently compelling significance 27 : a commandment internal to ourselves but to which must answer, simultaneously intimate and alien. In mathematics and morality we experience the way in which our whole living situation—the entire world of self–other relations—itself answers to an ultimate Other, a ordering sense not reducible to the terms of the world it orders.28 “What is happening” is that we are commanded to conform our Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 13 relationship to world of our experience to these non-worldly terms. As we can respond inappropriately to our experience of exposure to personal others (as we saw in the experiences of the “struggle to the death” and “lordship and bondage”) so can we respond inappropriately to our experience of exposure to the imperatives of the ultimate “Other”. Indeed, it is important to notice in the lines quoted earlier that Hegel emphasizes that, in identifying the experience of self-consciousness as inessential in the face of the essential Other, he is describing the most immediate form of the experience of unhappy consciousness. In fact, he argues, there is “a threefold way” in which empirical self-consciousness relates to this experience of the Other.29 What we often think of as the characteristic “religious” attitude is the immediate experience described above of a denigration of the ontological weight of the individual, empirical consciousness. The experiences of mathematics and morality, on the contrary, reflect a richer recognition of the irreducible essentiality of the place of empirical consciousness—the recognition, that is, that sense, though “given” by the Other, is not an “otherworldly” reality but depends upon its realization within the domain of empirical life. In mathematics and morality, the individual recognizes her- or himself as essentially empowered to do the work of “the absolute”: This movement [of unhappy consciousness through its “threefold” form] has resulted in positing the completely developed single individual. . . . In this movement it has become aware of its unity with this universal. 30 Using the imagery of the extreme and the middle terms of a syllogism, Hegel describes the shift from the immediate and inadequate first form of unhappy consciousness to the fully developed form as a shift from the self ’s experience of itself as 14 J OHN R USSON one of two alienated realities to its experience of itself as precisely the relationship of these two: Its truth is that which appears in the syllogism whose extremes appeared as held absolutely asunder, as the middle term which proclaims to the unchangeable consciousness that the single individual has renounced itself, and, to the individual, that the unchangeable is for it no longer an extreme, but is reconciled with it. This middle term is the unity directly aware of both and connecting them, and is the consciousness of their unity. 31 The most developed form of unhappy consciousness—which, Hegel argues, is the ultimate form of self-consciousness, the ultimate truth of the relation of self and other—is the form in which the individual recognizes its need to submit to the commandment of the absolute, while simultaneously recognizing its own essential authority to enact those commandments in the world of empirical life. In our earlier studies of desire and recognition, we discovered that the self is inherently defined by its relation to the “others” that are nature, desire, and persons, and we saw that healthy self-development is accomplished only in a cooperative negotiation with these others that honestly acknowledges their co-reliance. So here do we discover an intrinsic relation between the self and the ultimate Other, and here too this constitutive ontological relationship, this exposure to the Other that defines our reality as selves, is only adequately addressed in the cooperative co-relation in which we simultaneously acknowledge (submit to) the ultimate authority of this Other and equally recognize the irreplaceable essentiality and authority of our own individuality in interpreting and enacting the absolute commandments to which we find ourselves subject. 32 Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 15 Conclusion Through our study of Hegel’s chapter on self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit , we have seen that the variety of ways in which the self is exposed to its others. Indeed, the self is precisely defined by and in relation to its exposures: exposure to desire, exposure to nature, exposure to others, exposure to the Other. The self is this exposure, and the meaningfulness of our experience—”what is happening”—is the way we negotiate with the imperatives of these others. Hegel’s descriptions in the Phenomenology of Spirit generally seek to show (a) that we commonly behave in ways that deny these essential exposures to otherness and (b) that such behaviours ultimately demonstrate their own incoherence and untenability. The intrinsic norm of experience, ultimately, is the demand that we acknowledge the essentiality of these exposures and lend ourselves to them in a cooperative spirit of co-enactment. Notes 1 See, Jon Stewart, The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996) for an introduction to this topic. The most important single text for the interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder (2 volumes) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). See also Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et Structure de la Phénoménologie de l’Esprit de Hegel (2 vols) (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 194 6), translated as Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), and John Russon, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004). For Hegel’s Science of Logic, the single best commentary is Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005). See also John Burbidge , The Logic of Hegel’s ‘Logic’: An Introduction (Broadview Press, 2006). For a strong selection of contemporary studies of the entire range of Hegel’s philosophy, see A Companion to Hegel eds. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (WileyBlackwell, 2011). 2 I have developed my own approach to these topics in Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 3 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Part II), ed. Lara Denis (NY: Broadview Press, 2005); Sigmund Freud, The Ego J OHN R USSON 16 and the Id in The Standard Edition of the Complete Pscyhological Works of Sigmund Freud , Vol. 19 (1923-25), (Hogarth Press, 1971). 4 G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988), hrsg. v. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Friedrich Clairmont, pp 120– 127, translated into English by A.V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit ( O x f o r d : O x f o r d U n i v e r s i t y Pr e s s , 1977 ) , p a r a g r a p h s 167 – 177. Subsequent references to this text will be to paragraph number in the Miller translation (abbreviated M) and to the page of the WesselsClairmont text (abbreviated W/C); hence here, M167-177, W/C 120-127. For an excellent discussion of Hegel’s analysis of desire, see David Ciavatta, “Hegel on Desire’s Knowledge”, The Review of Metaphysics, 61 (2008) pp. 527–554. 5 M174, W/C 125. 6 M175, W/C 126. 7 In this sense, then, the “self ” of desire is not the reflective ego, but the sense of self that emerges precisely as the experience of satisfaction— the self, that is, that one finds oneself to be in and as the experience of enjoyment. This notion that the fulfilling of desire involves a kind of self-consciousness—a consciousness of self that emerges precisely as the sense of satisfaction, of “consummation”—is the idea behind the third synthesis of desire in Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, L’AntiOedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1, Nouvelle Édition Augmentée (Paris: Les Édition de Minuit, 1972/73), translated as Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977) pp 16–22, 84–105. 8 M175, W/C 126. This characteristic feature of desire is what lies behind the prominent theme in Buddhist philosophy of the “addicted” self that arises with and is dependent upon its object. On the theme of the “chain,” see also M190, W/C 132. 9 M187, W/C 130: “The presentation [Darstellung] of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence [Dasein], not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life.” 10 M176, W/C 126-127. 11 This is Chapter IV, Section A, “The Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.” The literature on these half-dozen pages of the Phenomenology is vast. On the primacy of the theme of recognition (Anerkennung) that is developed here for Hegel’s Phenomenology, see Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), and Andreas Wildt, Autonomie und Anerkennung: Hegels Moralitätskritik in Lichte seiner Fichte-Rezeption (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982). I have Self and Other in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 17 offered more specialized discussions of the dialectic of recognition in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology . 12 M179, W/C 128. 13 This notion is powerfully developed in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right , trans. Michael Baur, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and subsequently in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism trans. Peter Heath (University of Virginia Press, 1993). 14 For excellent accounts of these everyday mechanisms of evading vulnerability, see Everett L. Shostrom, Man the Manipulator: The Inner Journey from Manipulation to Actualization (Bantam, 1979) and Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis (Ballantine Books, 1996). 15 This is the “struggle to the death.” See especially M188, W/C 131. 16 This is the relationship of “lordship and bondage”. M189-196, W/C 132136. 17 M188, W/C131. 18 M191, W/C 133. 19 M182, W/C 129. 20 See M184, W/C 129. 21 See especially R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (Penguin, 1972), for an account of how healthy interpersonal relationships of mutual recognition are the precondition for mental health. 22 Chapter IV, “Self- Consciousness,” Part B, “The Freedom of SelfConsciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.” M197-230, W/C 136-156. See especially M197, W/C 137: “We are in the presence of self-consciousness in a new shape, a consciousness which, as the infinitude of consciousness or as its own pure movement, is aware of itself as essential being, a being which thinks or is a free selfconsciousness.” 23 M206-231, W/C 143-157. Note that the final paragraph I have indicated, M231, W/C 157, is actually the first paragraph of Chapter V of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is this paragraph that completes the discussion of the three forms of Unhappy Consciousness, begun in M210, W/C 14 5-14 6. The section called “The Freedom of SelfConsciousness” in fact studies two other forms of experience before studying Unhappy Consciousness, namely, “Stoicism” and “Scepticism.” The specific details of this part of Hegel’s study are not essential to the overall trajectory that I am charting out here, so I have not analyzed them in the text; for discussion of these sections, see Chapters 7 and 9 of John Russon, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004). 18 J OHN R USSON 24 M207, W/C 144. 25 M208, W/C 144. 26 C o m p a r e , m o s t o b v i o u s l y , t h e f u n d a m e n t a l s e n s e o f I s l a m a s “submission”. 27 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Part II) ed. Lara Denis (NY: Broadview Press, 2005). 28 The theme of mathematics and logic is introduced in the section on “Stoicism” and is essential to the experience of “Reason.” See M197, W/C 137-138, and M232-239, W/C 157-163. The experience of morality is introduced in the section on “Law-giving Reason,” and is studied in detail as the final moment of the dialectic of “Spirit.” See M419-428, W/ C 277-281, and M596-671, W/C 394-442. 29 M210, W/C 145-6. 30 M231, W/C 157. 31 M231, W/C 157. 32 The remaining chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit study various forms in which this experience is enacted. It is the stance of “conscience” that is the ultimate “authentic” enactment of our selfconsciousness, for it is the stance of self-interpretation that explicitly recognizes itself in the terms our analysis has here revealed to be the inherent structure of self-consciousness (M632-671, W/C 415-442; see also M792, W/C 518-519).