Verifying the historical dialectic in our current reality (and the importance of being aware of it) does not mean allegiance to everything Hegel said about it during the Empire, nor does it mean adopting a conception of the mind that is no longer tenable in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Similarly, adopting Aristotelian logic cannot mean adopting his metaphysics or his justification of a patriarchal slave system. More generally, we must abandon the illusion that a philosopher has understood everything and that all we have to do is embrace his philosophy. Great philosophers are admired for the truths they discover or the questions they ask, which makes them indispensable to know, but the paradox is that these truths are always mobilized for a final denial (of death or suffering) and an idealization of reality, so that in (almost) all philosophies, the true is only a moment of the false. Philosophical demonstrations should not be taken seriously, with their implacable syllogisms that “bound the minds and did not reach things” (as Bacon insisted). Indeed, reality does not resist thought (fiction), only action. It is therefore more than legitimate to take up Plato's truths, like Aristotle, without accepting his theory of ideas or the immortality of the soul. Similarly, if it is no longer possible to be a Marxist-Leninist communist, this does not mean that one can no longer be a Marxist in the sense of being determined by the system of production and social relations, that is, by a materialist and dialectical conception of history determined by technical evolution. For Heidegger, it is even more caricatural because, of course, being touched by Being and Time or some of the themes it addresses cannot make one accept his Nazism and his pangermanist mysticism. Each time, powerful revelations that advance the argument are supposed to ultimately make us mistake bladders for lanterns and, in the name of their logical deductions, make us believe in our absolute freedom, in a God, in life after death, in a utopian end of history, or in an illusory bliss.
So, let us repeat that what should make us adopt Hegelian dialectics is its verification in concrete terms and in the particularity of phenomena, both in logic and in history (political, moral, aesthetic), a dialectic that we undergo and cannot ignore. However, this should not blind us to the totality of the system—and in particular to the Phenomenology—and cause us to lose all critical spirit. It is even essential to deconstruct the system based on the confusion between individual consciousness and the historical spirit. As has been pointed out, it was precisely the decision to begin with consciousness that gave impetus and coherence to the writing of the Phenomenology, approaching truth and spirit as subjects rather than from an external point of view. This confusion between individual consciousness and the history of the Spirit is, however, untenable, even though the role of the individual is minimized, particularly in view of the “tricks of reason.” The dialectic of consciousness that unfolds there could be attributed at most to a kind of transcendental consciousness, to the spirit of the times (too quickly identified by Kojève as Man) or, better, to logical constraints but not to the activity of the individual, as the last paragraph of the preface makes clear. It is all the more surprising that the Introduction claims to be a science of the experience of consciousness. In his lecture on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1931), Heidegger has no trouble criticizing, in the name of phenomenological intentionality and its noesis, the reconstruction of consciousness from its perceptions, when in fact there is always a prior understanding of the totality, of the meaning of the situation. Consciousness never begins from the immediate; it is always already there, in a situation, embedded in a history, social relations, discourses, always already consciousness for the Other and language, from the beginning and not only at the end of the journey. As Lev Vygotsky showed, child development does not proceed from the individual to the social, but rather from social discourse to the individual.
In the Philosophy of Mind of his Realphilosophie, just preceding Phenomenology, Hegel admitted this and that there is no realization of self-consciousness except in the people (the collective), yet what is appealing in his Phenomenology is that he turns it into a novel in which consciousness is supposed to be constructed in its own experience. This is again what he presents in Chapter IV, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” where consciousness achieves socialization through “self-consciousness in and for itself when and because it is in and for itself for another self-consciousness” (p. 155), that is, “an I that is a We, and a We that is an I.” (p. 154). The first part, entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness,” introduces the dialectic of Master and Slave, which is the best-known part of the work but the subject of much misunderstanding. Kojève makes it the pivot of his questionable Hegelian-Marxist-Heideggerian interpretation, combining struggle and labor with the anxiety of death, but this dialectic, which has nothing historical about it, must be reduced to its fictional and parabolic nature.
If there are bloody duels in struggles for pure prestige, it is always between masters of the same social class, whereas it is obviously not in an individual fight to the death that the status of master or slave is decided, even if we can find this fight to the death in identity and racist wars, but then at the collective level. Even if death can sometimes be involved in the desire for recognition, this does not justify reducing recognition to a fight to the death when it is much better expressed in love, and everyone knows that relationships of domination (in couples, in groups, at work) rarely involve real threats of death and that it is rather the dominated who sometimes commit suicide (as we have seen at France-Telecom, among others). This is consistent with the version given in 1805 in his Realphilosophie, where this struggle for recognition was more between the offender and the offended. However, in this context, it is the offended party who, by contrasting the knowledge they have of themselves with the knowledge the other has of them, could put their life at risk by threatening to commit suicide—not the glorious dominant party who risks their life. Death here is introduced by Stoic suicide but prefigures Heidegger's being-for-death, self-awareness as awareness of one's death and revealing the totality of one's singular existence (“which can only show itself to the extent that it commits its entire existence to its preservation, where it is absolutely undivided. And the demonstration ends only with death”) p72.
In the previous version, from 1803, closer to Schelling, although he already spoke of an opposition between the Master and the Slave, it was then only a fact of nature, a given prior to any real dialectic and not the result of a confrontation, but rather linked to work:
In this recognition, the living individual stands face to face with the living individual, but with an unequal power to live... This relationship—namely, that the indifferent and free individual is the powerful individual, as opposed to the different [assigned to his difference]—is the relationship of domination and servitude... We must not think here of a necessary equality. p139 Domination and servitude belong to nature. p140
We can see how Hegel groped his way forward, trying out different combinations and embarking on convoluted lines of reasoning in order to give a dialectical form to the question of recognition, which he already considered fundamental[1], even before the Phenomenology, in the three modes of love (emotional relationship), rivalry (social esteem) and law (universal recognition), i.e., interpersonal, social, and state recognition (taken up by Axel Honneth). To understand the invention of the dialectic of master and slave, an unlikely staging of domination, we must take into account the reason he gives for it, namely that recognition cannot remain at the level of love as immediate mutual recognition, which is supposed to be egalitarian. Dialectics requires, in fact, that we separate ourselves into two sides (the recognized and the recognizing) in order to engage in historical dialectics and become conscious of it, the truth being only the contradiction that has been overcome. - It must be said that Hegel has a rather naive and undialectical conception of reciprocal love, whereas in our view love is rather a desire for desire, and love or desire do not need domination to embody the essential asymmetry between loving and being loved, which no right can erase - Here we have a prime example of a purely dogmatic (or pedagogical) illustration of dialectics, rather than a concrete description as he will provide in the following chapters.
As a subject, it is pure and simple negativity; which is why it is the division of the simple into two parts, or the opposing duplication, which in turn is the negation of this indifferent diversity and its opposition; it is only this equality reconstituting itself or reflection in itself in the other that is true—and not an original unity as such, or an immediate unity as such. Phenomenology of Spirit, vol. I, pp. 17–18
We must now examine this pure concept of recognition, of redoubling in its unity of self-consciousness, and consider how its process manifests itself for self-consciousness itself. This process will first present the inequality of the two self-consciousnesses, it will present the rupture of equality and the passage to extremes, which, as extremes, are opposed to each other, one of the extremes being only that which is recognized, and the other that which only recognizes. p157-158
Thus, the dialectic of Master and Slave, which starts from the recognition of oneself in another self-consciousness and moves on to its negation, must not be taken as a real experience of consciousness but as a typical figure illustrating the failure of recognition and the division between a self-consciousness as spirit, superior to biological life, and the taking charge of material life by the slave, whose submission, self-control, and control of his work prove more decisive than domination and bloody struggle, initiating a liberating historical dialectic. Otherwise, such a personal confrontation may well have occurred here and there, but it is not a historical event, since membership of the aristocracy was most often hereditary and slavery resulted from the enslavement of defeated populations (but there was also debt slavery).
The subject here, too, is not the individual as described, but rather a more vague collective and historical spirit, part of a general cognitive evolution (which the spirit of a people cannot contain). Even interpersonal recognition is a social fact, and the credit given to this rather limited episode in the Phenomenology is surprising, no doubt because we admire a philosopher above all for his deceptive inventions. It is true that he is supposed to initiate the historical dialectic of consciousness for the other, first in morality, where the ego must identify with itself in the other in order to return to itself, then in politics, chapters that are often remarkable for their accuracy and which are the real novelties here, but they cannot be reduced to individual consciousness (which may experience some of its torments), since what is at stake is a historical learning process and contradictions that are not contingent but must be gone through. As envisaged, the three modes of recognition present themselves as moments in a dialectic passing from love to conflict and then to Law, except that conflict is not so much an individual struggle as a social competition in which the division between the recognized and the recognizing, testing each individual's autonomy, which has become mediated self-awareness, is supposed to ultimately lead to the universal recognition of Law, which is even more impersonal — except that the law itself is never entirely universal, being linked to an identity, a sense of belonging, a state, and that there is no right to love or fame.
This is not to minimize deadly conflicts and the omnipresent role of the awareness of death, with the haunting possibility of suicide accompanying our existence—an awareness that we are quick to repress with some magical mantra—but simply that this does not justify the morbid glorification of death favored by military powers and romantic dreamers. Above all, the important point is that it is not death that makes history or the triumph of will, but the development and confrontation of material forces that can only be measured by confronting each other. It is the Hegelian idealism that must be overturned in favor of dialectical materialism. There is no autonomy of the mind; it is not ideas that make history, nor is it the conflict of identities or civilizations, but the progress of material forces and their contradictions or inequalities. The system of production is more decisive than the relations of production it establishes, validating after the fact the progress of rationality (of techno-science and law). This is not to say that ideas do not play a part, particularly through rationalization and technical progress, but that external reality decides after the fact according to the principle of natural selection, with death and destruction allowing evolution to take place by clearing the way for adaptation to the reality encountered, which alone gives content to history. Even for Hegel, it is not ideas that rule the world, but the mad passions that stir it and ultimately yield to reason, that is, to the reality of the effective idea.
It is not the idea that exposes itself to conflict, combat, and danger; it stands back, out of harm's way, and sends passion into battle to be consumed. (Reason in History, p. 129)
It is essential to distinguish between two different dialectical moments that should not be confused: that of external opposition and internal division, and that of a dialectic that is regulated by effective reality, its feedback, or that evolves through its internal contradictions. Thus, morality seems to advance on the basis of its internal contradictions, but these contradictions lead to the recognition of the impotence of morality and the need for its political realization, which this time comes up against external opposition and material powers (military, economic, and even ecological). It must be reaffirmed that negation (conflict, reaction) is indeed the effective driving force of dialectics (war is the father of all things), the test of reality that is not given in advance to knowledge that has no direct access to reality and must constantly correct its errors. The Mind is not immediate intuition but the separation of consciousness from its object (separation of the word, information or perception from the thing), step-by-step learning (cognitive progress resulting from the evolution of life and societies in their struggle against entropy, which is always local and limited).
Finally, despite the interpretation of myths and religions as a form of collective self-awareness in symbolic representations, the image that a society has of itself, we can see them rather as the manifestation of the narrative language's capacity to delude, by having an answer for everything, at the same time as their identity function (myths serving each tribe to differentiate itself from neighboring tribes through its beliefs). If we can see this as progress of reason throughout history, including for religions, it is in terms of moving away from primitive obscurantism and the superstitions of collective narratives that have nothing to do with original truth. Clearly, this is not something that happens at the individual level either. The mind can be identified with nature becoming aware of itself, but starting from complete ignorance and fanciful fictions that certainly give meaning to communal life but clash with reality, gradually revealing their illusions.
We could go on, and we would certainly have to subject all philosophical statements to a meticulous critique separating the true from the false, an infinite task that is beyond us and is the work of time, which is why criticism must focus primarily on current issues, or those that seem to us to be such, such as the ongoing historical dialectic to which we must not dogmatically apply supposed principles (and even less to justify reactionary ideologies), but whose issues and effective dynamics we must try to understand—even if it is always with a time lag and we must admit that we will inevitably be overtaken and contradicted by a future that does not belong to us.
Note : The theme of recognition can be traced back to Aristotle's philia, between friends or citizens, or the more universal one of the Stoics, later perverted by the vanity of self-love (Pascal), in which Rousseau sees the origin of inequality and inauthenticity. Hegel, however, was mainly influenced by Fichte, for whom the self must assert itself by opposing another self, but can only recognize itself by being recognized by that other self. This active interpersonal recognition, which overcomes conflict, is necessary and fundamental to freedom and law. In Hegel, however, it takes on a historical dimension, where domination (non-recognition) and its overcoming become an essential stage in dialectics.
While modern sociology also attaches paramount importance to recognition and reputation, it does so for more prosaic reasons of integration and validation, not as the foundation of the social, which, on the contrary, always pre-exists but gives rise to identity claims. In real society, recognition does not have the absolute metaphysical character attributed to it by philosophy; it is more diverse, relative, social, hierarchical, and changeable.
