{"id":36938,"date":"2020-08-20T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=36938"},"modified":"2020-08-18T13:52:46","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T12:52:46","slug":"mutual-recognition-or-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2020\/08\/20\/mutual-recognition-or-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Mutual recognition or tragedy?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hegel\u2019s philosophy is notoriously difficult, but when I first studied his Phenomenology<\/em> and Philosophy of Right<\/em> in the mid 1970s I was struck by a simple idea that is at the core of both works: you can\u2019t be yourself by yourself<\/em>, but you need others in order to be who you are. This idea\u2014that we are essentially social, interrelated beings\u2014has underpinned my understanding of Hegel, and of life, ever since. Of course, there are many circumstances in which others prevent us from being ourselves (and vice versa), and Hegel is well aware of this. Think of his penetrating analysis of poverty and alienation in civil society\u2014problems that continue to blight the modern world. Yet Hegel\u2019s response to such distortions of social life is not to recommend self-absorbed isolation\u2014moral, economic and political \u201cdistancing\u201d\u2014but to urge us to deepen our shared identities as human beings. Central to this endeavour, for Hegel, is learning to let go <\/em>of oneself and accord recognition\u2014through respect, love or forgiveness\u2014to others; and we see striking examples of such letting-go in the hypocrite\u2019s confession and consequent forgiveness by the hard-hearted judge in the Phenomenology<\/em>. This \u201creciprocal recognition\u201d, Hegel writes, \u201cis absolute spirit<\/em>\u201d (Phenomenology of Spirit<\/a><\/em>, \u00b6670), and it recommends itself, in my view, to the hypocrites and hard-hearted judges of today, too\u2014a group that in one way or another includes all of us.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If, however, we refuse to let go of ourselves and we insist on asserting our unrelenting judgement or unyielding will, Hegel has a stark lesson for us: such self-assertion will lead to tragedy<\/em>. Tragedy was one of the first subjects in Hegel that I worked on, and I still regard his understanding of it as profound. Tragedy, for Hegel, is produced, not (as for Nietzsche) by the interplay of the \u201cDionysian\u201d and \u201cApollinian\u201d, but by taking oneself<\/em> (or ourselves) to be the sole embodiment of the true and the good. In Hegel\u2019s view, we are destroyed, not by the tragic condition of life, but by our own unyielding insistence on satisfying ourselves before all others (as both Sophocles and Shakespeare knew well). We come to be truly ourselves, therefore, by learning to let go of ourselves and thereby to form bonds of mutual recognition with others. It was said once that \u201cwhoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it\u201d (Luke 17: 33), and this seems to me to express in religious language exactly what Hegel understands by tragedy, dialectic and \u201cspirit\u201d. It is not a guide to every situation in life: there are times when one has to stick to one\u2019s judgement and fight. Yet doing so, in Hegel\u2019s view, should always be in the service, ultimately, of letting-go, mutual recognition and the freedom this brings with it. For me, this has been and continues to be one of the most important and inspiring insights in Hegel\u2019s thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hegel\u2019s philosophy is notoriously difficult, but when I first studied his Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right in the mid 1970s I was struck by a simple idea that is at the core of both works: you can\u2019t be yourself by yourself, but you need others in order to be who you are. This idea\u2014that we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":857,"featured_media":36939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2265],"tags":[7714,80],"coauthors":[7818],"class_list":["post-36938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-hegel-250","tag-philosophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/857"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36938"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=36938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}