The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts

TLDR: In this paper, the authors consider a situation where a subject's only appropriate response to an injury to its own person is to defend itself actively against its assailant, which they call a "struggle".

Abstract: ness 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 nflict-generating claim to the unrestricted development of that subjcct's subjectivity; on the other hand, the reactive claim to social respect for property rights. Hegel considers the outcome of the struggle un1('OHlwd by the collision of these two claims to be a foregone conclulon, In Ihlll only one of the two divided parties can refer the threat 22 Hegel's Original Idea 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'r\" 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 [Entzweiungj. 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 I take towards myself when I 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 relationto-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 thol hi flll'll('ll/rally tied to the presupposition that each individunl jlllI'lklllililly l'I'I'!·!vt'/\"l Crime and Ethical Life 23 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 I 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' .36 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' .37 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 corne 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 -ompetent agents, whereas the term 'whole person', by contrast, refers io individuals who gain their identity above all from the intersubjective I'\\'l'ognit:ion of their 'particularity'. On the other hand, however, the 1'11111(' hy which subjects gain greater autonomy is also supposed to 111'11\\\\· jlllih 10 1;I'1'111t·1' knowledge of their mutual dependence. This is 24 Hegel's Original Idea 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' .39 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 pl'Obll'\"1H 1'11111 flegel's reconstructive analysis had already failed 10 ndd\"I'1I11 III 1111'IlI'('vioUfl slages rornain open nt Ih(, ('1