Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
Fichte says that Kant’s theory presupposes a wider inter-subjective human community
According to Fichte, the self cannot give itself the consciousness of freedom; rather the consciousness of freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Schelling qualifies the latent solipsism of transcendental idealism when maintains that the ground of free self-determination must lie partly “within” the subject and partly “outside” of the subject. Schelling’s point in affirming that the ground of freedom is divided is that freedom is social and intersubjective. Hence the ground of freedom cannot be identified with subjectivity alone; the grounds of freedom must be both “in” the subject and yet transcend the subject. Freedom and consciousness of freedom must obviously be the subject’s own doing, yet the subject is incapable of making itself and its freedom into an object and so it cannot be autonomously self-conscious in the crucial sense. Something irreducibly other is required to make the subject available to itself and to arouse the subject to freedom and responsibility.
For this reason self-consciousness and freedom require reciprocal interaction between self and other. Neither self nor other is, by itself, sufficient; consequently, the ground of freedom must be twofold, and yet correlative.
Yet the correlation of the internal and external grounds of freedom, or self and other, is not simply a positive empirical one. Schelling shares Fichte’s tendency to conceive the other in terms of negation. The other is not-I, and I am not-other. Both the other and the self mutually condition each other, but such conditioning is negative. There is no direct presence of the other to the self, or vice versa. The important concept of a doubled ground of freedom makes central the issue of coordinating and ordering the dual grounds of freedom: each self, in its independence, depends on an other that it is not. In spite of its claims to freedom and independence, each seeks security and legitimation from an other whose recognition is contingent and not guaranteed.
Since the parochial self, as self-repulsive negativity, is hidden from itself, it depends on the other for its own critical self-consciousness. that is why self-knowledge for Hegel take the form of Self-recognition in other. The road to interiority passes through the other. The self is for itself only by being for an other, and the self is for an other only by being for itself. The ‘for itself’ formulates not the beginning but the result and telos of the process of recognition.
The natural “solipsism” of desire is a condition that must be transformed and sublimated if the self is to become capable of enduring relationships with others. Hegel’s account of the process of recognition is at the same time an account of the sublimation of desire. In this process desire is fundamentally a desire for the other.
The point to be underscored here is that the other, or the confrontation with the other, both shatters the natural solipsism of the self, and “pulls” it out of its natural solipsism. The analysis of recognition therefore is also and at the same time a story of self-overcoming, through which a enlarged ethical-social mentality or Geist, is attained. (50)
Hegel conceives the individual self in its desires not as a simple, stable, quiescent self-identity but as a complex, restless, self-repulsive, negative identity. This self-repulsing negativity means that the self is not initially present to itself, much less transparent to itself. The immediate self does not yet know what it is. What it is, is still implicit and must become explicit to it.
It can become explicit to itself, that is, discover what it is, only through the mediation of an other. Self-consciousness requires an other to confirm and transform its own self-understanding. The self’s presence to itself is mediated by an other that is likewise a self-repulsing negative identity. But this does not mean tha the relation to the other is inherently or essentially negative.
Rather only the other is capable of satisfying the desire for recognition, which is at the same time a desire for an other. “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” … Believing at first that it has no need of the other, the self makes the discovery that it needs and depends on the very other that it originally deemed “unessential.”
As immediate, each self operates with the presumption of being absolute. According to Hegel, desire signifies a condition of natural egoism in which the self’s satisfaction is the end to which everything else is regarded as merely instrumental and subordinate. Natural egoism is immediate, parochial, and abstract; it excludes the other, difference, and relation. For this reason, the confrontation with the other is experienced as an abrupt self-transcendence, that is, a plunge into a relation that “others” or alters the self. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness is confronted by an other self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double [equivocal] significance: first it has lost itself, because it finds itself as an other being. Second, it has thereby canceled [aufgehoben] the other, because it does not look upon the other as essential, but rather sees only itself in other.
The presence of the other precipitates a crisis in abstract parochial self-identity. The “shock” or upsurge of the other is immediate and underivable. The encounter with an other calls into question the immediate natural solipsism or naive self-identity. the encounter with the other reveals that naive or parochial self-identity is exclusive. The self achieves its identity by excluding the other. the other constitutes a shock to this naive parochial identity, which works an immediate change. The self now finds itself as other, or as “othered.” The presence of the other signifies a loss of the original naive certitude, and this may be experienced as a loss of self.
The starting point of the process of recognition is the apparent loss of self before the other, or conversely, an apparent loss of the other owing to the inability to see anything but oneself in the other. The second phase is the attempt to cancel the self-othering, which can take two forms: elimination and/or domination of the other, or finding some accommodation with the other. The former involves eliminating the other, or compelling the other to recognize. Either form of violence is self-subverting in Hegel’s view. Hegel believes that the concept of recognition must take the second path. This means that the self may “return” to itself out of its “othered” state, but it can do so only if it abandons mastery and domination. the recognition that is needed cannot be coerced or controlled.
Mutual-reciprocal recognition is possible only if coercion is renounced. The authentic “cancellation” of other-being means that the other is not eliminated but allowed to go free and affirmed. But if the other is allowed to go free, this means that is affirmed, not simply in its identity, but also in its difference. Without the release and allowing of the other to be as other, in its difference, the ‘We’ would be merely an abstract, parochial identity. The release and affirmation of the other is constitutive of the determinately universal identity of the ‘We’. The ‘We’ is not a return to abstract, parochial self-identity of the original self-certain I. It is a determinate universal that reflects both the common identity and individual differences. Releasement of the other is the condition for the other’s release of the self and the self’s “return to itself” from “being-other,” both of which constitute the We qua determinate universal.
The self’s return to itself out of self-othering is not simply a restoration of the original parochial and abstract self-identity. It is not a simple satisfaction of desire, a filling of the lack by consumption of the object. Rather the original absolute self-identity of desire is decentered and relativeized by relation to other, while being enlarged and legitimated by the other’s recognition. This return to self in freedom is intersubjectively mediated. The condition under which the self can pass through the other and the other’s freedom and return to itself affirmatively is that coercion and mastery must be given up.