I

How are we to understand the sociality of the human life-form? To answer this question, it is helpful to reconsider the general form of life-form judgements Michael Thompson has expounded in The Representation of Life. Thompson takes up Hegel’s thesis that life is a logical category in its own right to specify a certain characteristic type of judgement through which we conceive of living beings. He leans on a certain mode of talking familiar from wildlife documentaries: ‘When springtime comes and the snow begins to melt, the female bobcat gives birth to two to four cubs. The mother nurses them for several weeks’ (1995: 280). Thompson characterizes the general form of the relevant type of judgement as follows: ‘The S is (or has or does) F’ (1995: 281). Although the surface grammar of the statement suggests that it refers to an individual, it is evident that it does not refer to a specific bobcat, but to the bobcat in general: we are characterizing the species of the bobcat, not this or that individual bobcat that runs through the picture as an exemplification in that documentary. If that is right, then perhaps, one might think, it would be more precise to say: ‘all female bobcats or most female bobcats or some female bobcats give birth to two to four cubs when the snow begins to melt’. But such statements would refer to the class or a subclass of individuals of a species. However, the speaker of the wildlife documentary neither refers to a single individual which has the trait in question, nor to a group of individuals that in fact all share that trait, but rather to the general life-form or species that is shared by all individuals of the species, whether or not they themselves exhibit that trait in an individual case (Thompson Reference Thompson, Hursthouse, Lawrence and Quinn1995: 288). The statement can therefore remain correct even if, due to certain circumstances, not a single bobcat gives birth to two or three or four cubs in a given year.

Natural-historical judgements of this kind are remarkable because they express a peculiar form of generality which Thompson calls non-Fregean and which has a special normative force.Footnote ¹ The norm by means of which we can evaluate individual exemplars takes the form of an ideal in Kant’s sense: the ‘representation of an individual as adequate to an idea’ (CJ 5: 232).Footnote ² The norm here is articulated through the representation of a single being, the bobcat as such. I can therefore measure a particular bobcat against the bobcat as such of which the wildlife documentary speaks. This norm does not have a statistical character: it does not simply express the average of the various appearances displayed by the class of all individual bobcats.

The analysis raises numerous problems discussed at length by Thompson and his critics, which I cannot go into here. I recall it only to draw attention to two very general points: (1) First, natural-historical judgements seem to suggest that we take everything we understand to be alive as an exemplar of a life-form and hence to refer intrinsically to a specific kind of generality. To understand something as alive is to relate it to its form of life, which it shares with others and through which alone it can be interpreted, explained in its acts and evaluated in normative terms. This means, however, that to understand something as alive implies a very basic form of ‘sociality’. What emerges here is the general character of the living thing, which essentially links it to other living things of the same sort. This sociality is independent of any concrete forms of social behaviour the specific species we are dealing with might display. Even a species of pure loners, which do not even have direct contact with conspecifics for reproduction, would be social in the sense that we can understand what one of its specimens is only by understanding this specimen as an instance of a species which it shares with other exemplars of that same species. This sociality could be called the logical sociality of living beings,Footnote ³ and would need to be distinguished from the material sociality of those living beings, whose behaviours are determined by intraspecific cooperation.

(2) Second, it is noteworthy that the life-form judgements Thompson bases his analysis on are articulated in the third person. In natural-historical judgements, human beings talk about other species of animals that they seek to classify and determine. It is from this observational point of view that they measure a specimen against its assumed species. Thompson claims that the logical form of these natural-historical judgements and their special generality and normativity can in principle be applied to human beings as well (see, e.g., Thompson Reference Thompson and O’Hear2004: 59), thus opening up a route to various kinds of ethical naturalism (cf. Foot Reference Foot2001 and Hursthouse Reference Hursthouse2002). It seems remarkable, however, that in the case of judgements about the human form of life the stating subject and the object of the statement are non-accidentally one and the same. In these, humans are not judging other species, but self-predicating. In his paper, ‘Apprehending Human Form’, Thompson himself emphasizes this first-personal character of specifications of the human life-form. However, his interest in this feature of natural-historical judgements about the human is very narrow: Thompson is interested in the first-personal character of this knowledge primarily because, on his account, it can show that life-form statements are not necessarily based on observational knowledge and do not have to be understood in empiricist terms. Rather, we humans possess knowledge of our own life-form that is at least partially based on self-knowledge and does not require observation. What Thompson does not explicitly consider in this context, however, is the more far-reaching notion that the first-personal character of human natural-historical judgements might point to a distinct, differently constituted type of life-form altogether.

However, this is exactly what we should explore: the possibility that human beings differ from other species not only in the material content of the respective natural-historical judgements, but in terms of the first-personal form which the natural-historical judgements assume in the human case. The human being’s life-form is precisely that form of life which judges itself in the first person. Footnote ⁴ This means that this form of life is understood to be self-consciously available to every being belonging to that form of life, in however imperfect a sense, and that this form of life is essentially realized through the self-consciousness of its members. This is of central importance to understand the anthropological difference because it does not just concern a piece of the content of our life-form, however distinctive or central it may be, but modifies its very form and the way in which individual bearers partake in their form of life. I take it that this self-conscious relation to our life-form is not only present in the admittedly rare cases in which human beings in fact make explicit first-person-plural statements about the human life-form. Rather, it is a pervasive fact that permeates human acting and thinking throughout to the extent that it generally operates in a self-conscious manner and manifests a self-understanding of the subject in light of its life-form.Footnote ⁵

In this sense, we are not simply living beings, but self-conscious living beings; we are not simply animals that are social in a material sense, but self-consciously social animals. What is crucial here is the fact that our life-form knowledge is not only first-personal, but in this first-personality itself socially articulated. The knowledge of our form of life is not articulated in the first-person singular—I do not simply say who I am or how I live—but in the first-person plural—I say what we do and how we live. In claiming this ‘we’, I make a ‘claim to community’ (Cavell Reference Cavell1979: 20) and thus address myself to others who are doing the same. Thus, the self-conscious character of the human life-form involves a third register of sociality: the human being’s form of life is not only social in a logical and a material way, but is, moreover, social in a political way. Most characterizations of the distinctive character of human sociality will focus on the specific character and extent of the material sociality of human life: the way in which human beings for their individual and collective reproduction need to rely on cooperation with others and have established especially complex and cognitively demanding ways of doing so. Without denying or diminishing the specificity or importance of this material sociality, I want to suggest that it is not simply cooperation, but collective self-conscious self-determination that is the defining sea-change that transforms the whole form of life.Footnote ⁶ The human being is not merely a ‘social animal’ that cooperates to satisfy its own needs, but a ‘political animal’, a zoon politikon (Aristotle Reference Aristotle and Rackham1932) that determines its own form of shared life in social contestation. This does not mean that what constitutes our form of life and its material sociality is simply left to our arbitrary positing; but it does mean that the realization of our form of life depends on its self-conscious articulation by us, and that the material sociality of our cooperation is overdetermined in a particular way by our political sociality. All participants in the material cooperation, no matter how different their roles in cooperation, have first-person access to our shared form of life and participate as such in it. Regardless of the different material social roles, the social relation is thus determined by a fundamental equality of all in their entitlement to articulate the shared life-form, the forms of material cooperation and to identify and complain about what violates those forms.Footnote ⁷ Given this fundamental equality, every exemplar articulating its own life-form must acknowledge the possible conflict that may arise between us in this regard. Saying what we do is a claim to community that necessarily can always be contested.

Different observers of another species will also have disagreements about how to characterize that life-form, about what is essential to it and what should be considered an accidental variation. They, too, may be engaged in a struggle to describe the life-form correctly. In the case of the human life-form, however, we thereby wrestle with our very own life-form and its normative characterization. The conflict that arises here is therefore existential. It determines how we understand ourselves and it determines to what extent one may or may not be considered as one of us. We are not here characterizing the laws of another species from an apparently neutral external standpoint, but are determining ourselves in these judgements. Especially if one takes seriously that life-form statements, as Thompson has shown, are not statistical statements about what is the average case, it becomes clear that there is no easy way to settle a possible disagreement that arises between us about what characterizes our life-form or whether we share the same life-form at all.

II

In order to understand the fundamental difference regarding the relatedness of living being and life-form in the animal and the human case, it is helpful to return to Hegel. This is true in two respects: first, (1) Hegel has explicitly developed the contrast between the animal and the human in terms of the distinctive self-conscious relation the human being has to its own form of life, suggesting that this yields a fundamentally different kind of life-form. Second, (2) in articulating the very structure of self-consciousness, Hegel has explicitly elaborated the way in which self-consciousness is inherently social in the political sense I have briefly indicated above.

(1) As Hegel develops in his Philosophy of Nature, living beings are essentially related to their general form of life and hence ‘social’ in the logical sense indicated above. However, this is not simply a fact of them being classified or interpreted by some external observers in this way, but a function of their internally purposive character: their taking shape as a purposive realization of their own concept. Living beings can be described as the process of attaining, sustaining and reproducing their very form.Footnote ⁸ Thus, their general form guides their whole life process, which Hegel analyses in terms of a threefold process of shape, of assimilation, and of reproduction. The mode of realization of this general form is, however, limited in two essential ways if we compare it to a spiritual form of life like that of the human being: The merely living being only manifests the general form it falls under but it does not do so self-consciously. Second, the merely living being relates to this general form primarily in terms of its particular species, but it does not explicitly realize and grasp this general form as genus.Footnote ⁹ The human being on the other hand, does exactly that: it self-consciously relates to its own life and thereby uncovers a universality of its existence that points beyond its own species. While animal beings are in this sense ‘species-beings,’ or Artwesen, human beings are ‘genus-beings’, or Gattungswesen to use Marx’s famous expression.

The point at which the character of the generality that the animal being realizes becomes most explicit is in the process of reproduction. In this ‘genus-process’ a living subject enters into a relationship with another subject of the same species and reproduces itself in a new living subject.Footnote ¹⁰ Even though there is, in this case, indeed ‘an affirmative relation of the individual to itself in [the genus]’ (ENC II: §369), individual and genus remain ultimately separated in this process: individuals do not maintain themselves in the reproduction of their genus, but as individuals become dispensable by fulfilling their reproductive biological function. The genus, on the other hand, does not gain an independent existence as genus, but only in the shape of another living individual that has the same destiny as the individuals that have given rise to it: it is ‘destined to develop into the same natural individuality, into the same difference and perishable existence’ (ENC II: §369). With the help of natural-historical judgements, we are certainly able to pinpoint the species, an abstract generality that is realized by means of this process; but this species or kind does not exist as such, but only as an ideal abstraction in our judgement. As Hegel famously puts it: in nature, ‘the Lion in general [der Löwe überhaupt] does not exist’ (ENC II: §245A). Thus, the genus-process articulates itself in terms of a badly infinite progress: the genus does not gain existence in and for itself, but realizes itself only in an endless chain of individuals that must each be transcended to point to a genus, which then, however, in each case has to ‘fall down again’ (ENC II: §376A) to realize itself on the level of new individuals. The bobcat as such does not exist in nature, but only in our judgement. The living being is not yet the genus for itself, but only for us.

Now, the self-conscious beings that we are, on the other hand, are characterized by the fact that we fully grasp the genus character of other living beings as such and, at the same time, become genus for ourselves. In this sense, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes how self-consciousness emerges from a consciousness of animal life: Where I thus understand the bobcat as a living being—something that I can determine as an individual only through natural-historical judgements about the bobcat in general—there I understand an individual being as producing and reproducing its species, and there I understand at the same time that the object of my cognition is like myself in a certain respect. Where I understand the reproductive process of a living being and comprehend how the process of life realizes itself as a genus process, I recognize life as ‘simple genus’, which, however, is not yet for itself. We can say that the living is genus only from the third-person perspective, not yet in the first-person perspective from which a self-conscious living being is genus for itself. The unity of the living is

In this sense, the living possesses a genus character, but does not yet unfold a self-conscious relation to this genus character. In its genus character it points beyond itself—to ‘this other life’, that is: to self-consciousness. This self-conscious life or living self-consciousness—the life of the human being—is characterized by the fact that (i) in it the genus character of the living in general comes to consciousness and that (ii) this being becomes conscious of itself as genus at the same time. To characterize a being that has this double grasp, Marx proposes the term Gattungswesen. To be a Gattungswesen, a genus-being, means to be not simply a living being that is internally related to its genus-character, but a self-conscious living being that has a self-conscious theoretical and practical relation to its genus: It knows and determines itself in its own genus-character. Marx writes:

In this sense, the human being is that being in which the basic sociality of the living comes to itself. Marx makes clear that the ‘genus-being’ is precisely not a ‘species-being’, as the English translation of the term Gattungswesen suggests, that is to say: not a being that is locked into its given biological species, but a ‘genus-being’ in the sense that it recognizes the genus character of all species and through a distinct relation to its very own species constitutes a life-form of another sort. As a genus-being, the human being can only realize itself by relating to its social others in a special way. The other functions as a ‘mediator’ between me and my genus (CW 3: 227); only in an other, to whom I am related in a very peculiar way, is my genus objectified and only through this relatedness to another am I a genus-being.

Let me address two worries concerning this notion of genus-being: the objection that it is speciesist, often directed at Marx’s version of the idea, and the notion that it is ultimately solipsist, invited by some elements of Hegel’s presentation. Insisting on the unique character of the human being as a genus-being may first seem suspect because it starts from a fundamental rift between the animal and the human. Does this not involve the notion that human beings are infinitely elevated above all other living beings such that they only have obligations to other genus-beings? Marx’s idea that the human being is a Gattungswesen has indeed often been criticized for being anthropocentric and for giving rise to such a speciesist outlook. But this objection rests upon a misunderstanding of his position.Footnote ¹¹ What distinguishes the very form of human life on both Hegel’s and Marx’s account is nothing other than the self-conscious grasp of a genus-character human beings actually share with other living beings. What distinguishes us from other living beings in this respect is our ability to recognize what connects us to them. Precisely to the extent that we are genus-beings, it becomes unacceptable for us to treat others simply on the basis of their species and to disrespect the interests of members of other species. Rather, being genus-beings requires acknowledging our deep connection to and dependence upon beings of other species. Marx expresses this by saying that we have to treat all of nature as our ‘inorganic body’ (CW 3: 275). And he argues that it is precisely by virtue of the sociality of our human life-form that we can relate to other creatures beyond our own species in this way.Footnote ¹²

(2) Let me come to the second objection. When Hegel characterizes the ‘other life’ of the genus-being as the life of ‘self-consciousness’, we might be tempted to think that the human being must paradoxically be less social than other social animals. In order to prove its genus-character and reproduce its genus, the animal is dependent on others of its kind; it is never for itself the genus, but the various individuals are so only for one another in the characteristic genus-process of species-specific reproduction. Self-consciousness, on the other hand, is, according to Hegel, the genus in and for itself and, one could therefore assume, does not need any other in order to be its genus.

However, this is the opposite of what Hegel is trying to show. Instead of leaving behind our dependence on other individuals in the step towards becoming a spiritual being, Hegel aims to show that a spiritual being is dependent on its social relatedness to others for its very existence. That self-consciousness is the genus for itself, then, does not mean that a solipsistic ego dissolves the genus into itself, but on the contrary that self-consciousness can only exist through another self-consciousness: ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself because and by way of its existing in and for itself for an other; i.e., it exists only as a recognized being [es ist nur als ein Anerkanntes]’ (PhG: ¶178).Footnote ¹³ In his Jenaer Systementwürfe, Hegel formulates the same thought by describing the human being as consisting of nothing else than the very movement of recognition: ‘he is recognition’.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, the individual human being is not the genus for itself because it is self-sufficient and complete in itself. It is rather the genus for itself because it comes to exist only in its relation to other human beings, that is, in the movement of recognition. To know oneself thus means to know oneself as an actualization of one’s genus co-constituted with other such genus-beings. Self-consciousness is genus-consciousness. But this also means: none of us is a human being considered solely by herself. We are human beings only as recognition and in and through the recognition of others. Fichte expressed the same thought by saying: ‘if there are to be human beings at all, there must be more than one’ (Fichte Reference Fichte, Baur and Neuhouser2000: 37).

In Hegel, this is made clear by the way in which he explicates the first-personal character of the human life-form. As I already pointed out, a being that can lay claim to being a genus-being has to articulate its self-consciousness in the first-person plural. Such a being is social in its very first-personal character. We cannot therefore understand this first-person plural as a mere enlargement of the I, as a pluralis majestatis, but must realize that there is this We only if there is a You that is distinguished from the I and at the same time united with it. The first-person plural therefore necessarily requires that the I is related to a second person.Footnote ¹⁵

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, this is made clear by the fact that Hegel presents two theses as directly connected to each other: on the one hand, that living self-consciousness exposes the structure of an ‘I that is we and the we that is I’ (PhG: ¶177); on the other hand, the thesis that self-consciousness is only for another self-consciousness. First-person singular, first-person plural and second person are understood as reciprocally conditioning one another, such that the sociality Hegel aims to bring into view is irreducibly both an I-thou and I-We sociality.Footnote ¹⁶ None of the elements can be dispensed with or else the whole constellation collapses: If the genuine ‘We’ falls away, there is no encounter of I and Thou, but a mere juxtaposition of isolated individuals. If the kind of You which is capable of offering a competing version of what constitutes us falls away, the We becomes a mere pluralis majestatis. If the I, which understands itself as a singular articulation of a shared We that confronts other singular articulations, is missing, the We becomes an Everyman that looks at us indiscriminately out of the eyes of each of its individual instantiations. The structure of an ‘I that is we and the we that is I’ (PhG: ¶177) only exists when I and We remain distinct from one another, irreducible to one another. The I points beyond itself, offers itself as an exemplification of a We, whereas the We takes singular shape in the form of an I. The way in which I and We can maintain this internal connection without collapsing into another is precisely through the relation of I and Thou. I and Thou are constituted as part of a shared We, which is, however, articulated differently from its two sides. They constitute this We, on Hegel’s account, not by sharing certain characteristics that allow us to conceive of them as instances of the same class, but only by relating to each other in a certain way: they are parts of this We by recognizing each other as recognizing each other. Footnote ¹⁷ I and Thou are not constituted as part of a We by externally being subsumed under a certain concept, not even the concept ‘subjects that are second-personally related to other subjects’, but by relating to each other.Footnote ¹⁸ This We is thus a community of recognition, a community of which one can only be a part by entering into social relations of the described kind. The life-form of the genus-being is composed of those practices through which we can constitute, maintain, differentiate such a type of community.

Hegel approaches this form of life in a first attempt by describing its emergence from a struggle of recognition that finds a provisional and failed resolution in the asymmetry of master and servant—a resolution that does not do justice to the sociality of the human being and in which neither master nor servant becomes genus for themselves and the other. We are here confronted with an asymmetric relationship that seems to promise recognition to the I, but only from a Thou from which the I withholds recognition, thereby itself undermining the value of the recognition shown by the Thou. By maintaining the asymmetric relation, the I undermines the We shared with the Thou, the We on which the I itself depends and in whose name it claims to speak. The overcoming of this asymmetry and the constitution of an actual We is not characterized by the disappearance of the difference between I and Thou. On the contrary, the relationship between master and servant is characterized by the fact that the actual difference between the two cannot come to bear any significance and is buried under the one-sidedness of the constellation. The constitution of the shared ‘We’ thus first constitutes the space in which these differences can emerge and the struggle for the appropriate characterization of the We that we share becomes possible—a We that can only ever be articulated by an I that presumes to speak for us and that therefore, if this ‘I’ is not to succumb to its arrogation, must expose itself to the judgement of a Thou. The We of our shared humanity is present for each of us first-personally, but its content and shape is necessarily open to negotiation between an I and a Thou, each of which can claim to say what it is that we do. This We is not delineated by making a wildlife documentary about the lives of human beings, but by struggling for the recognition of others with regard to the understanding we have of ourselves—that is, of the forms of recognition that we are.

III

Thus, according to Hegel, we are characterized by a fundamental sociality that goes beyond the fact that we are ultra-cooperative animals. We are self-conscious ultra-cooperative animals, and this means that the very participation in our life-form is itself socially mediated through forms of recognition. If the foregoing considerations are right, then the human form of life is of a special kind: the human being is a genus-being. It is a member of its form of life only through a self-conscious relation to this form of life. If self-consciousness is, as Hegel seeks to show, only through and for other self-consciousnesses, then this means that the human being exists only as recognition of and through the recognition by other human beings. The human being is, as it were, nothing other than a certain relation of recognition. The human being lives by and lives off recognition: It is alive as the peculiar kind of being that it is only by being recognized as such.Footnote ¹⁹

Stanley Cavell expresses the extraordinary reliance of the human form of life on recognition by articulating its two sides: ‘Being human is aspiring to being seen as human’ (Reference Cavell1979: 399). And: ‘Being human is the power to grant being human’ (Reference Cavell1979: 397). If this is true, then human life is characterized by a social need and a social power that is exceptional: a need for recognition and a corresponding power to grant or withhold recognition that affects our ability to belong to that form of life itself. This makes the human form of life at once more open and more precarious. Whoever or whatever is able to participate in this game of recognition can be considered as one of us. On the other hand, this makes our existence—literally our very existence as human beings—dependent on the recognition of others who might withhold it and, thus, undermine the possibility that we can constitute ourselves as part of a We.

That the belonging to our own life-form is inherently precarious is not just based on the necessary freedom of recognition, on the way in which recognition is fundamentally only conditioned by itself, i.e. by other recognition, and unable to simply derive itself from any given fact existing before any recognition (for example, membership in the same biological species). The fragility of the life-form is also based on the inner ambiguity of the result of recognition: To experience recognition is as empowering and liberating as it is defining and fixing; recognition gives me status and right, but in this it makes me dependent on the recognition of the other. As much as recognition enables me to stand out and gain visibility, it also exposes me to the gaze of the other and prevents me from retreating into the inexpressibility of my existence. Recognition, for inner reasons, produces the temptation to have it both ways: to seek empowerment without determination, entitlement without dependence, visibility without limitations on my ability to withdraw. This can give rise to wanting to experience recognition without granting it myself. Experiencing the impossibility or fruitlessness of this intent can lead to the opposite attempt to overcome one’s own dependence on recognition altogether or to return to an unrecognized state in order to regain another form of negative freedom and entitlement. These two temptations—on the one hand, the attempt to assert my humanity at the expense of and to the exclusion of others and, on the other hand, the attempt to deny or leave behind my own humanity—do not overtake human life externally and accidentally: they are internal to its very form. As Cavell puts it: ‘Nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s humanity or to assert it at the expense of others’ (1979: 109).

In order to understand more precisely the internal openness and vulnerability of the human form of life, it is helpful to specify the kind of recognition on which it depends. The contemporary, post-Hegelian discussion of recognition moves between two poles, neither of which fully gets at the sense of recognition and misrecognition intended here. On the one hand, the debate refers to the basic recognitive status of being a person, which is understood as a condition of possibility of our participation in the space of reasons, and which in this sense, it seems, can no longer be in question at all when we speak and act upon others and, conversely, are affected by their utterances and actions as utterances and actions.Footnote ²⁰ If the recognitive status of the person is the condition of possibility of speaking and acting, and if there is undoubtedly incessant speaking and acting among us, then this recognitive status is apparently always already established and secured by a basic and minimal relation of recognition. On the other hand, the debate refers to a more differentiated typology of specific forms of recognition—love, respect, esteem—that can be reconstructed as ‘preconditions’ of a successful ‘development of personal identity’ (Honneth Reference Honneth and Anderson1996: 37). The instituting and securing of such forms of recognition is more demanding, and the outcome possible through these forms of recognition is richer: not mere, abstract personhood, but free, self-determined ‘true individuality’ (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 115). Establishing appropriate forms and institutions for such forms of recognition is itself already the object of action and speech, in which it is struggled for, and thus presupposes a minimal recognitive status. In both described conceptualizations of recognition, non-recognition as exclusion from our form of life does not seem to be a relevant possibility.Footnote ²¹ In the first case, recognition is always already given as a transcendental condition of acting and speaking; in the other case, a lack of recognition and a form of disregard, which limits personal self-development, is possible, but as such does not imply exclusion from one’s form of life. In the understanding of recognition unfolded in the foregoing, on the other hand, there emerges the possibility of acts of disregard, denial and misrecognition that exclude the other by not recognizing him or her as an authoritative member of this human form of life, that is, by not acknowledging the other as an I that participates in our We, not as a way in which our We takes shape in the form of an I: I grant the other no epistemic or normative authority over what we do; she is of no concern to me, when I explicate my self-conscious understanding of what I and we are up to.Footnote ²² This exclusion does not necessarily require that the other be denied membership in the same biological species and it does not even require we deny they are persons in the minimal sense that they act and speak.Footnote ²³ But it does claim an indefinite difference, infinite in its indefiniteness, on the basis of which others are excluded ‘from existence in our realm of justice’ (Cavell Reference Cavell1979: 378), that is: from the realm of our fellow agents and knowers, whose members are entitled to co-determine with us the normative forms of our cooperation, to challenge us and point out where we fall short, and to articulate our self-understanding of who we are and what we do. The form of (mis)recognition outlined in the foregoing, which concerns our belonging to the human form of life, therefore points at something that lies beyond the two alternatives mentioned. It is as fundamental as the transcendental recognition of personhood, but as rich, concrete, and differentiated as the forms of intra-societal recognition. It concerns the fundamental status of being a participant in the same form of life, but understands this status as one that does not lose its precariousness even in the constituted acts of socially established actors. Thus, the fundamental, society-constituting struggle of recognition remains awake in the inner-societal struggle for recognition that permeates our everyday struggles of what’s right and what’s deserved. The point of this proposal is thus not to suggest that the inner-societal struggles for love, respect and esteem are irrelevant or simply downstream from the primordial problem of recognition thematized here, but rather that we should redescribe what is at issue in the inner-societal struggles in light of this problem of recognition. The struggles about love, respect and esteem are never only struggles about the right amount of certain social goods (as if love, respect and esteem were ‘social goods’ to be maximized (Pippin Reference Pippin2008: 183), and as if disrespect were just a lack or shortage in such social goods). Rather, they are always also struggles about the very form of love, respect and esteem through which our sociality can take its proper shape.

The problem of misrecognition and denial that this theory of recognition seeks to bring into view concerns our belonging to the same human form of life, and in this sense is radical. This does not mean, however, that this problem arises only in exceptional borderline situations, for example, where radically heterogeneous societies meet at their outer border or where we explicitly declare what falls within and outside of the realm of the human and draw a line. Rather, the problem of this misrecognition and denial pervades constituted societies internally and is implicitly present in all kinds of local struggles about concrete social practices, norms and situations. It inscribes itself in forms of exclusion, denial and disparagement in which an indefinite difference is marked, a difference that separates the human form of life from itself. Racism, classism and sexism are figures of this divide. The forms of violence and exclusion that are thereby brought into view can be blatant and structural, but they can also manifest themselves in subtle and idiosyncratic forms. In this sense, the human form of life is characterized by its capacity for a particular form of violence that has no direct counterpart in other species.Footnote ²⁴

IV

Let me conclude with a brief exploration of some social theoretical implications that arise against the background of this conception of the human life-form. This conception implies a shift from other recognition-theoretical approaches in social theory: social institutions do not come into view solely as forms of instituting and realizing recognition, but more specifically as ways of dealing with the inner fragility of recognition and as attempts at securing the openness of the form of life made possible by recognition.

If it is true that self-consciousness does not just expand the horizon of the respective form of life, but also makes it vulnerable to new ways in which it can undermine itself, then self-conscious forms of life seem dependent on specific forms of their stabilization. If self-conscious life is to become a form of life, then, in view of its fragility, it cannot depend on individual and contingent acts of recognition alone, which could happen or fail to happen each time. Rather, it depends on the stabilization of recognition through reciprocity, community, and the institutionalization of recognition. Thus, unlike the existence of other animals, the guarantee of human existence, the existence of a genus-being, requires not only an environment (Umwelt) in which the resources for the process of assimilation can be found, but a lifeworld (Lebenswelt)Footnote ²⁵—an objectification of our genus-being in the shared objects, institutions, and practices of our world: ‘the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature’ (RPh: §4). If the human spirit is social in the way I have tried to describe, then it does not only require the constant participation of individual others, but at the same time requires the support of sociality by forms of objective spirit.

In these forms, recognition is not granted in such a way that it depends in each case on the arbitrary recognition by a contingent You. Through the lifeworld, my membership in this self-conscious form of life is not confirmed by individual acts of recognition alone, but is rather confirmed in a generalized form of ‘being recognized’ (Anerkanntsein) (RPh: §217): in a mode of recognition that has become world. The openness and fragility of the constellation of the first-person singular, the first-person plural, and the second person requires the constitution of figures of the third that guarantee a form of generalized being recognized that is not dependent on a contingent relationship to an individual. It is a peculiar form of the third, however, that we are here dealing with—not a third the individual is separated from, not the dead object of my observation or the external standpoint from which I become observable as a dead object, but rather a medium in which to move affirms my being: a world in which I live.

To the extent that this world objectifies recognition by establishing fixed forms in which we are generally recognized, it simultaneously withdraws the terms of recognition from free negotiation between you and me. It guarantees general forms of recognition, but at the same time limits the possibilities of what can be recognized. Against this background, it is no accident that the concept of lifeworld faces the worry that it is connected to a certain narrowness of human existence: By ‘lifeworlds’ we usually mean familiar environments in which particular ways of life find confirmation and are supported by unquestionable background certainties. In a sceptical text about the notion, Niklas Luhmann (Reference Luhmann1986) once noted that the concept of lifeworld responds to a presumed need for security and seems to be angling for feelings of home.

The Hegelian concept of lifeworld that I have indicated here, however, has a different ambition: It does not recommend a homely version of the world in which we can settle into the familiar and find confirmation of our prejudices. Rather, it aims to bring into view a world that is alive and is able to embrace its own unpredictability. It is therefore not about feelings of home, but about expanding the breadth of the horizon and opening up the world.Footnote ²⁶

In Hegel’s theory of modern society, civil society is of crucial importance for the opening of the lifeworld against its possible narrowing to predetermined ways of life. Hegel conceives of it as a socially instituted sphere that at the same time suspends the normative hold of shared forms of living and apparently reduces the sociality of our existence to a mere means in the pursuit of our individual interests. After family life had initiated children into a substantive form of ethical life and turned them into fully integrated social members, they are finally released from this organic sociality into the hands of civil society in which they apparently move as socially unbound individuals, free to associate themselves in new ways. In this sphere we encounter certain social institutions that can be understood as aiming at ensuring the openness of human sociality, while disowning and disavowing this sociality in a peculiar way. I am thinking here in particular of the institution of human rights and the subjective rights of members of civil society. If one starts from the characterization of the sociality of the human form of life that I have outlined here, then these institutions appear paradoxical.

According to the modern understanding, the securing of self-conscious life cannot be understood in such a way that it is secured solely within the limits of a given way of life. Modernity rather understands the task of securing this form of life in such a way that, on the one hand, it is about ensuring us against the possible exclusion from a shared social life; on the other hand, it is about the safeguarding of the openness of our form of life against its hegemonic determination by a few. On the one hand, it is part of the modern lifeworld that all, regardless of the concrete recognition they receive in the medium of social participation from individual second-personal others, are regarded as deserving a minimal recognition, at least the recognition of their entitlement to participate. The general recognition of this ‘right to have rights’ (as Hannah Arendt called it) is meant to secure us against a complete withdrawal of recognition that might rob us of our humanity. To accomplish this, the idea of human rights resorts to a remarkable naturalization that seeks to grant us a status qua nature, that is, qua member of a biological species, prior to and independent of any lived social participation.

On the other hand, it is part of modern society that it attributes individual rights to each individual as a member of civil society, freeing this individual action from the burden of pursuing ethical purposes and to entertain a shared conception of the human form of life. These subjective rights rather authorize the individual to live however she pleases as long as she does not unduly infringe upon others. Thus, in order to ensure this openness of the human life-form and lifeworld, the idea of subjective rights proceeds in an individualizing manner: I grant each individual rights to determine their own way of life, abstracting from the individual’s social genesis and existence, and bracketing the normative force of given social modes of life.

We are thus confronted with a paradox: In order to secure the sociality of human life, which precisely goes beyond a mere biological affiliation, this sociality is naturalized and tied to the boundaries of our biological species. In order to secure the openness of our social forms of life, the entitlement of people to participate in it is de-socialized. Human rights are put forth as innate rights as if these rights were based in our biological species membership; subjective rights address the individual as if they were about an essentially asocial being. I said at the outset that the most common way of understanding our sociality can be characterized in the following manner: sociality pertains to us qua individuals and by virtue of the fact that we belong to a particular species. The form of human rights and the form of individual rights of civil society thus defines us in a way that harks back to the usual, but, in my diagnosis, mistaken way of understanding ourselves as social animals.

According to the interpretation I have proposed here, these forms, which seem to obscure, even to disown, our sociality, can at the same time be understood as a paradoxical response to the inherent problems of the true sociality of the human form of life. Precisely because we are social in ways that make our belonging to our form of life precarious and that give our form of life an openness that pushes it beyond unitary ways of living, these forms of their insurance may seem necessary. They respond to historical experiences of exclusion and oppression, the possibility of which is inherent in the specifically vulnerable and open sociality of human beings. The question arises, however, as to how well this insurance works when it protects the sociality of the human form of life only at the expense of also obscuring it.

Thus, by understanding the form of this sociality, we can, on the one hand, understand the extent to which this feature of modern society has its deeper justification, and, at the same time, explore the question of the extent to which its concrete present shape actually protects or, rather, undermines that form of sociality. This also enables us to ask how these shapes can be transformed so that these paradoxical institutions better serve their purpose. Starting from a deeper understanding of this sociality, it seems imperative to understand the nature and individuality claimed here differently than political liberalism tends to do. The actual content of human rights does not lie in a set of pre-political, natural rights detached from our political sociality, but on the contrary concern the very claim of the human being’s political nature.Footnote ²⁷ The real content of the individual rights of civil society should not be conceived in terms of property rights—rights of sovereign dispositional power over things against others; the true content of individual rights is the possibility of the free association of wills.Footnote ²⁸ The nature and individuality claimed here should thus not be understood as antecedent to our shared human life, but as figures of reflection through which the sociality of human life protects itself against its inherent cruelty and vulnerability.

If Cavell is right that nothing is more human ‘than the wish to deny one’s humanity or to assert it at the expense of others’ (1979: 109), it seems a crucial task to understand more precisely why it is part of the sociality of the human form of life to turn against itself in this way. It is to be feared that the strategies of insuring human life against its inherent vulnerability and cruelty still partake in the tendency of the human life-form to disown itself.Footnote ²⁹