By placing struggle at the heart of social interaction (even though he believes it can be overcome), Kojève in my view paves the way (perhaps along with Nietzsche) for Sartre’s bleak claim that “the essence of the relations between consciousnesses is . . . conflict.” It is on the basis of this claim that Sartre then accuses Hegel of “optimism” for believing that genuinely mutual recognition is possible. Hegel is praised for his “brilliant intuition” that I “depend on the Other in my being”; but he is castigated for thinking “that an objective agreement can be realized between consciousnesses – by authority of the Other’s recognition of me and of my recognition of the Other.”
Sartre’s emphasis in Being and Nothingness on the inevitability of social conflict is notoriously uncompromising, but he is not alone in challenging what Jay Bernstein calls Hegel’s “worrying ‘reconciliations’.”
Many post-Hegelians balk at Hegel’s suggestion that mutual recognition is a real possibility in modern society (or perhaps even already achieved), and prefer to follow Kant in regarding recognition and respect as at most moral ideals in an essentially imperfect world.
Some have even argued that the very idea of successful mutual recognition is unsustainable. Recently, for example, Alexander García Düttmann has claimed that “recognition is always embedded in a destabilizing tension . . . [and] is always an improper, dissimilar, one-sided recognition.” Indeed, if one follows Hegel, Düttmann maintains, “recognition can become what is meant by its concept only in a struggle for life and death.” As we have seen, Kojève would not endorse such a definitive judgment. There is little doubt, however, that he opens the door to such judgments by claiming that the life and death struggle arises directly from the very nature of social interaction between self-consciousnesses.
In contrast to Kojève, Hegel argues that what is made necessary by the interaction between self-consciousnesses is mutual recognition rather than conflict.
This does not mean that social and historical existence will in fact always be characterized by respect and love for one’s fellow human beings; Hegel is not that naïve. It means that logically, when all that it entails has been rendered fully explicit,
genuine social interaction turns out to require mutual recognition. Hegel does not deny that social conflict constantly arises. His claim, however, is that it arises not because we are social beings as such, but because we fail to understand properly what social interaction demands.
For Hegel, self-consciousness must be desire; but we achieve a fully objective sense of ourselves only by relating to something irreducibly independent in which we find our own identity reflected. Such a thing can only be another self-consciousness that recognizes us. Logically, therefore, concrete self-consciousness must be social and intersubjective. But why should the fact that I require recognition from another mean that our relation must be one of mutual recognition? Hegel’s answer is to be found in §§178–84 of the Phenomenology.
Genuine self-consciousness, Hegel writes, is faced by another self-consciousness by which it finds itself recognized. It has thus “come out of itself”: it is not just enclosed within its own interiority, but sees its identity located, as it were, “over there.” In such a relation, self-consciousness certainly gains a sense of self through being recognized. Yet at the same time, Hegel maintains, it feels that it has “lost itself,” precisely because it finds its own identity over there in the eyes of the other.
Equally, however, self-consciousness lacks any real sense that the other is genuinely other than it, since it sees in the other nothing but its own self. Insofar as self-consciousness does no more than find itself recognized by another, therefore, its consciousness of both itself and the other actually remains deficient.
To remedy this situation, Hegel argues, self-consciousness must “proceed to supersede (aufheben) the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being.” Self-consciousness does so by withdrawing itself from the other, locating its true identity within itself (as it were, “over here”), and thereby overcoming its previous sense of being what it is only in and through the other. In making this move, however, self-consciousness loses what has been shown to be a crucial ingredient of any concrete sense of self, and thus, as Hegel puts it, “proceeds to supersede its own self”: for by insisting that its own identity resides wholly within itself, it abandons the idea that its identity is to be found reflected in another and so is something objective. Yet all is not lost: for, as Hegel immediately points out, this withdrawal of self-consciousness out of the other into itself is in fact ambiguous. In withdrawing into itself, consciousness does indeed recover the certainty that it is what it is in itself. In Hegel’s own words, “it receives back its own self . . . [and] again becomes equal to itself.” At the same time, however, self-consciousness restores the other self-consciousness to its own proper otherness.
It no longer sees the other merely as a mirror reflecting it, but “equally gives the other self-consciousness back again to itself . . . and thus lets the other again go free (entläßt also das Andere wieder frei).” That is to say, self-consciousness recognizes the other as another free and independent self-consciousness.
The action of self-consciousness is ambiguous for this reason: by withdrawing out of the other wholly into itself, self-consciousness lets the other go free, and thereby unwittingly affords itself for the first time the opportunity to be recognized by, and to find itself in, another that it knows to be genuinely other than it.
To begin with, self-consciousness did not “see the other as an essential being,” because in the other it saw only itself. Yet it did not enjoy an unalloyed sense of self either, since it found itself “over there” in another (that it did not properly recognize). Now, by contrast, self-consciousness has a clear sense of its own identity and recognizes that the other is something wholly other than and independent of itself. Consequently, it can at last fulfill the condition required for concrete self-consciousness: for it can find itself recognized by and reflected in another that is known to be truly other.