Although it is difficult to sum up the philosophical, psychological, phenomenological, literary, and political achievement of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, one of its central themes concerns the problem of a distinctive form of racial alienation. In this text from 1952, Fanon offers an unparalleled analysis of the experience of being black in a world structured by anti-black racism and colonial domination, providing a psychological and structural account of racial alienation and possible paths toward disalienation. Lewis Gordon suggests that Fanon guides his readers, like Virgil guides Dante, through the circles of hell: ‘layers of mediation offered to the black’, which include the racially alienated experiences of language, love, sex, labour, social relations and consciousness (2015: 23, 24). In forging the path to restructuring the hell that is our world, Fanon is, however, guided by what appears to be a relatively straightforward normative orientation. He writes, by way of conclusion: ‘I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize for myself one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other [Je me découvre un jour dans le monde et je me reconnais un seul droit: celui d'exiger de l'autre un comportement humain]’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 229; translation slightly altered).
We can unpack this important claim in three parts. The first is an existentialist point of departure: I find myself suddenly in the world, in a situation that I did not create or choose, but one that nonetheless defines the context of action within which my freedom comes to be exercised. The paradigm here is the condition of childhood, where we are faced with an established world whose structures we do not understand but to which we must submit, and the task is to take up our situation not as an absolute fact but as a project shaped through free action.Footnote 1 The world in which Fanon finds himself is a Manichean world, one defined by the opposition between black and white, where the latter serves as a universal standard. Second, within this situation, Fanon recognizes that he has one single right (un seul droit). This right is recognized immediately as he finds himself in the world, and although this right is a demand directed toward another, he also recognizes this right for himself and recognizes himself in this right (je me reconnais): self-recognition and the recognition of this right go hand in hand. Third, the right in question concerns the demand for human behaviour from the other. Although the idea of human behaviour (comportement humain) is perhaps the most ambiguous part of Fanon's claim, we have ample examples from the text of what constitutes inhuman and dehumanizing behaviour within racist and colonial contexts.Footnote 2 Minimally, human behaviour toward another would entail the recognition of and respect for their existential freedom to choose and act within a given situation. More substantively, it would involve creating and sustaining the conditions under which existential freedom could be enacted in meaningful ways toward the goals of both individual and collective self-actualization—in short, the creation of what Fanon called a ‘human reality’.Footnote 3
With this three-part understanding in view, my aim in this paper is to consider Fanon's claim as the basis of a distinctive theory of recognition. Although some scholars have enlisted Fanon as a critic of Hegelian recognition theory in particular, I will argue that he is better read as developing Hegel's theory of recognition in a novel direction. Specifically, Fanon argues for the normative significance of a concept of concretely universal humanity within a theory of recognition aimed at the psychological and material liberation of oppressed individuals and groups living in racist and colonial contexts.Footnote 4 In denouncing the practices of colonialism as inhuman and dehumanizing, Fanon argues for three interrelated tracks of disalienation, which all involve the creation of new and genuinely human forms of recognition. The first is broadly psychological, involving the creation of new intimate, interpersonal and cultural forms of recognition that affirm black life, identity and history.Footnote 5 The second is political, involving revolutionary praxis that ‘sets out to change the order of the world’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox1961/2004: 2). For Fanon, revolutionary praxis aimed at decolonization controversially involves violence, but perhaps more paradigmatically, it involves formative work and ‘irreversible act[s]’ that restructure both consciousness and the world (1961/2004: 44).Footnote 6 The third provides the unifying, normative orientation for the first two and involves the creation of a ‘new humanity’ and ‘humanized’ forms of mutual recognition (1961/2004: 2, 178, 238). This third, normative track of Fanon's theory of recognition revolves around the demand for human behaviour from the other. In addition to providing the normative orientation for grasping what I called the psychological and political forms of recognition, the concept of humanity also functions to qualify these first two forms, since neither for Fanon are unconditioned goods in themselves. In what follows, I will focus primarily on the third, normative account of recognition and present some of its key features and potential problems.Footnote 7
Section I provides a close reading of the Hegel section from Black Skin, taking up the three passages from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit quoted by Fanon. Although these passages are well-known, I argue that they warrant a close reading as each passage develops a key feature of Fanon's humanist theory of recognition. With these three key features in view, section II takes up three different senses of universal humanity that are operative in Fanon's work: humanity as a false universal, humanity as an abstract universal, and humanity as a concrete universal. I argue that whereas the first two are critical, pejorative uses, the third provides the normative anchor for his recognition theory. This third, normative sense of humanity has two key features: first, it draws on features of Hegel's understanding of concrete universality; second, it draws on certain features of existential humanism. Fanon's distinctive approach is to combine these features—which might at first glance appear to be in tension with one another—into a theory of recognition aimed at universal human emancipation. Section III takes up two features of Sartre's existential humanism that need to be incorporated into the idea of a concrete universal: self-transcendence, and the a priori limitations that make up our universal human condition. Incorporating these existentialist features into Fanon's account allows us to understand what I take to be his key contributions to a normative theory of recognition: our one human right to demand human behaviour from the other, and our one human duty not to renounce our freedom.
I. Reading the section on Hegel and recognition from Black Skin, White Masks
Fanon takes up the problem of recognition most explicitly in the penultimate chapter of Black Skin, and the second section of that chapter engages directly with Hegel's account of the struggle for recognition from chapter four of the Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote 8 This section has been extensively debated by scholars, but situating Fanon in relation to Hegel is a complicated interpretive endeavour for at least three reasons. First, Fanon's discussion of Hegel in this section is very short and somewhat critical, leading many scholars to contend that Fanon's argument is plainly to show that Hegel's famous account of the relation between the lord and the bondsman simply does not apply to the context of the enslavement of blacks or to the colonial problem.Footnote 9 More scathingly, the claim is that Hegel's account of recognition upon which his broader philosophy of self-consciousness and Geist relies assumes a fundamental reciprocity between human beings that, at best, renders it unfit for understanding racial domination, and at worst, operates to obscure its dynamics and relationships.Footnote 10 Second, even if Hegelian ideas do figure in Fanon's arguments, it is important for his project that decolonial thought and praxis are not modelled upon, do not imitate, or simply draw inspiration from European ideas about humanity and progress.Footnote 11 Tethering Fanon's thought to Hegel's risks doing just this. Third, there is the complication of Fanon's French Hegel, where his engagement with Hegel is arguably as much an engagement with the readings of Hegel present in his intellectual context, with Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre and Beauvoir being of particular importance.Footnote 12
Given this complex interpretive terrain, I will not aim to settle the question of Fanon's relationship to Hegel here. Nor will I suggest that Fanon ought to be understood as a Hegelian thinker above all else. I will follow Brandon Hogan's suggestion that Fanon's broader normative project, which involves a critical assessment of the colonial subjugation alongside a call to action to fight against it in various ways, implicitly relies upon a Hegelian conception of freedom (Hogan Reference Hogan2018: 17). Hogan argues that we can view Fanon's project as ‘unified’ by this concept of freedom, which serves to justify many of his key claims (2018: 17).Footnote 13 Following Hogan's general strategy, I will focus instead on the closely related Hegelian concept of recognition, showing how it unifies Fanon's project, as well as how Fanon develops this concept in directions unexplored by Hegel. Fanon's most important contribution to the theory of recognition is to articulate the demand for reciprocal recognition in terms of a right to demand human behaviour from the other. To begin to understand this claim, I turn now to the key passages from Hegel's Phenomenology discussed by Fanon.
In the famous section, ‘The Negro and Hegel’, Fanon discusses three passages from Hegel's account of the struggle for recognition, each of which develops a key argument that he will adopt for his own project. Although there has been a lot of debate concerning Fanon's footnote claiming that the master/slave dialectic is fundamentally different from the historical enslavement of blacks (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 220, n.8), the main focus of Fanon's discussion concerns Hegel's general, philosophical account of recognition in the opening of that section, prior to the introduction of the figures of the lord and bondsman. The first passage is employed by Fanon as an epigraph:
(1) ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged or recognized’.Footnote 14
Beginning with an account of self-consciousness as desire, Hegel argues that what desire ultimately seeks is recognition from another self-consciousness, where recognition is what allows self-consciousness to attain a certainty of its own self. Fully affirming Hegel's account of the fundamentally social nature of the self, Fanon immediately translates the relation of recognition into humanist terms, writing that one is ‘human’ on account of recognition from the other and that ‘human worth [valeur] and reality’ depend upon recognition (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 216, 217). For Fanon, then, the reality of being human, where that reality is not mere existence but an existence with a distinctive kind of value, is constituted and created through relations of recognition. Recognition here, for Fanon and for Hegel, is not simply an act of cognitive identification, but concerns forms of practical treatment, engagement and action that are creative of ‘a human world’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 218). Whereas Hegel's account of recognition employs the more abstract language of self-consciousness and spirit, Fanon is clear that at stake in relations of recognition are questions of humanity and its value, where the quality of the latter fundamentally depend on the quality of the former.
The second passage discussed by Fanon concerns the reciprocity of recognition: ‘Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both. […] They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another’ (PhS: ¶¶182–84). There are two senses of reciprocity that ought to be distinguished here. First, the relationship expressed in recognition is reciprocal in so far is it concerns a double action where each not only recognizes the other but recognizes that the other is engaged in the same act. Reciprocity in this first sense is a structural feature of recognition, but it does not mean that recognition cannot be, as Hegel later suggests, ‘one-sided and unequal’, as it is in the relation between the lord and the bondsman (PhS: ¶191). Second, there is a more robust, normative sense of reciprocity that is expressed by the idea of mutual recognition, where the relationship is equal or symmetrical in the sense that neither subjugates the other, neither treats the other as inferior, but each treats the other in a way that promotes their aims through their actions. For Hegel, whereas the lord/bondsman relation is a paradigmatic case of one-sided and unequal recognition (recognition that subjugates), love and friendship are paradigmatic cases of mutual recognition in which we are most free and at home with ourselves in relation to another.Footnote 15
The issue of reciprocity and its possibility is a point of contention in understanding the relation between Hegel and Fanon. Gordon argues that Fanon rejects Hegel's analysis of the relation between lord and bondsman as applicable to structurally racist contexts at all, given that Hegel assumes a certain degree of reciprocity between the lord and bondsman that is not given in racist and colonial contexts. For Gordon, Fanon is suggesting that the very model of self-other recognition relations—even radically unequal ones such as might be the case in patriarchal gender relations—fails to grasp that blacks fall below this schema altogether, dwelling in what he calls ‘the zone of nonbeing’ (Gordon Reference Gordon2015: 69).Footnote 16 In a much-discussed footnote often cited as evidence of Fanon's rejection of Hegel, Fanon writes:
I hope I have shown that here the master [the white man in the capacity of master] differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation. The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.Footnote 17 (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 220, n.8)
The first thing to note is that Fanon's footnote is inserted in the midst of a discussion concerning the abolition of slavery in France, where Fanon is reflecting on the difference between being granted one's political freedom and actively struggling for one's freedom and creating one's own values in open conflict.Footnote 18 Second, in pointing out the differences between Hegel's account of the lord/bondsman dialectic and the historical situation of enslavement, Fanon in no way rejects Hegel's general account of recognition as constitutive of the self, nor does he reject the requirement of reciprocity both as a structural and normative feature of genuinely human forms of recognition.Footnote 19 Indeed, he equates the ‘creation of a human world’ with ‘a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 218). Taking these two points together, then, Fanon is in no way rejecting the possibility of reciprocity between whites and blacks, or colonizers and colonized, on account of a so-called ontological difference between them where the latter fall outside the schema of recognition altogether.Footnote 20 Rather, he is commenting on the significance of struggle and conflict in establishing relations of normative reciprocity, especially in situations where the world is organized such that this reciprocity is systematically denied to certain individuals and groups. In Hegel's account of the lord/bondsman relationship, there is a certain reciprocity because these figures had previously engaged in a life and death struggle in which the slave refused to be treated as a mere thing, surviving the struggle and resulting in the relation of subjugation.Footnote 21 On Fanon's account, the political freedom brought forth by the abolition of slavery was not the result of this kind of struggle, which affects the quality of reciprocity even in the aftermath of slavery. This brings us to the third Hegel passage cited by Fanon, which brings the relation between reciprocity and struggle into relief:
It is only through staking one's life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not just being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life. […] The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.Footnote 22 (PhS: ¶187)
In this passage, Hegel is providing an explanation for the life and death struggle that ensues in the encounter between two self-consciousnesses, each seeking the recognition of the other. At this stage in the text, two living, desiring self-consciousnesses are dissatisfied with their activity of negating merely living, non-self-conscious objects, and have moved toward finding satisfaction in relation to another self-conscious subject. In order to differentiate itself from mere life, however, each shows that it is willing to risk its life in pursuing the death of the other, resulting in a life and death struggle for recognition that, ultimately, has limited success. In Hegel's account, risking life and seeking the death of the other is a process that does not lead to genuine freedom, but remains at the level of a purely ‘natural setting’ (PhS: ¶188). Rather than establishing a relation to another self-conscious subject, the other continues to be treated as a mere thing, with Hegel claiming that seeking the death of the other is merely an act of ‘abstract negation’. Thus, although Fanon cites this passage affirmatively, the key is to understand what he takes to be essential for establishing a ‘human world’ of reciprocal recognition without romanticizing or valorising conflict for its own sake.
Fanon clarifies the significance of risk and its role in creating relations of reciprocity as follows:
Thus human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through struggle and through the risk that struggle implies. This risk means that I go beyond life toward a supreme good that is the transformation of subjective certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth. As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. […] I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I struggle for the creation of a human world, that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions. (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 218)
Fanon begins by suggesting that struggle and risk are essential for establishing a human reality in and for itself. Struggle appears to be a consequence of desire, where having a desire is already a demand to be considered because it is also a claim that my desires matter, a claim that they ought to be satisfied. In so far as desires are not immediately satisfied, struggle of some kind follows (a struggle with the world, with others, with myself, which may all be obstacles to the satisfaction of my desires). Risk is necessarily involved in struggle, since there is no guarantee that obstacles will be overcome, I am often unaware of the full context of the obstacles I face, and the obstacles may end up overpowering me. But the specific risk in question concerns the risk of life, which demonstrates that my desires and my negating activity aim at something more than mere survival. Although the willingness to risk life is the limit case of what is involved in significant, free action, it is important not to take an overly literal approach where all such action requires the risk of life. For both Hegel and Fanon, the more important point is that significant action involves engaging in ‘irreversible act[s]’ for which one claims responsibility, actions that may involve violence and the risk of one's life (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox1961/2004: 44).Footnote 23 Regarding the risk of life, however, two qualifications are important to keep in mind.
First, for both Hegel and Fanon, risk of life for its own sake is ultimately a dead end, and neither are suggesting that freedom requires blind heroism. Risking one's life for certain ends is surely foolhardy, and an overemphasis on risking life is a one-sided and incomplete picture of freedom: as Hegel suggests at the conclusion of the life and death struggle, ‘self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness’ (PhS: ¶189). Following Hegel's suggestion of the equal importance of life and self-consciousness, Fanon claims that in going beyond my own immediate being to give and receive recognition, what I recognize in the existence of the other is both ‘a natural and more than natural reality’, and it is this double existence of life and self-consciousness that makes it a ‘human reality’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 217).Footnote 24 Second, under oppressive, inhuman conditions, the risk of life is more palpable and urgent for engaging in free action, which is why Fanon emphasizes this point in his reading of Hegel. However, life-risking, violent action is justified and meaningful only to the extent that it aims toward a ‘supreme good’, one that transforms the subjective certainty of one's own worth into a ‘universally valid objective truth’. The only aim that ultimately justifies life-risking, violent action in the context of struggle is the aim of creating a human world of universal, reciprocal recognition.
To sum up: in the section on Hegel, Fanon discusses three central passages from Hegel's account of the struggle for recognition, each of which develops a key claim for his own theory of recognition. First, recognition is constitutive of the self, and human worth, value and reality are dependent upon relations of recognition. Second, reciprocity is both a structural and normative feature of recognition. Where recognition is one-sided or unequal, as it is in contexts of enslavement, colonialism and structural racism, the goal is to create a human world of reciprocal recognition. Third, establishing relations of reciprocal recognition involves risk and struggle. Under oppressive or inhuman conditions, risk of life and violence are likely involved in actions that aim at affirming the value of human existence and the creation of a human reality. In the next section, I will discuss three different senses of humanity that are operative in Fanon's work in order to clarify its role as a normative concept in his theory of recognition.
II. Three senses of universal humanity: false, abstract, concrete
Although Fanon consistently frames his normative project in humanist terms, calling explicitly for a ‘new humanism’, ‘human’ forms of recognition and the creation of a ‘human reality’, the idea of humanity is equivocal, contested and in need of clarification. As a first step to understanding how the demand for human behaviour functions in Fanon's theory of recognition, I will suggest that we can identify three senses of universal humanity operative in his work. Whereas the first two are negative, pejorative uses, the third provides the normative anchor for his recognition theory and justifies his calls for psychological and cultural self-affirmation for black and colonized peoples, as well as his calls for acts of revolutionary violence in colonial contexts. This third, normative sense of humanity has two key dimensions: first, it draws on features of Hegel's understanding of concrete universality; second, it draws on certain features of existential humanism. Fanon's distinctive approach is to combine these features—which might at first glance appear to be in tension with one another—into a theory of recognition aimed at universal human emancipation.
The first, and likely most heavily criticized, sense of humanity is the European, bourgeois sense of ‘man’, which Fanon and many others have argued to be a pernicious and false universal. Fanon criticizes this false universal most scathingly in the conclusion of Wretched of the Earth, where he writes: ‘This Europe, which never stopped talking of man, which never stopped proclaiming its sole concern was man, we now know the price suffering humanity has paid for every one of its spiritual victories’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox1961/2004: 236). Sartre, in his preface to the same text, is also highly critical of European humanism, writing: ‘the striptease of our humanism[—][n]ot a pretty sight in its nakedness: nothing but a dishonest ideology, an exquisite justification for plundering; its tokens of sympathy and affectation, alibis for our acts of aggression’ (Sartre Reference Sartre and Fanon1961/2004: lvii–iii).Footnote 25 In effect, Fanon is claiming that European humanism is false in at least three ways. First, it presents a false understanding of humanity, one that is highly restrictive in its rationalism, overly individualistic in its understanding of human freedom and motivation, and takes the white, able-bodied, bourgeois male as its operating ideal. Second, it is a false universal, since what is being presented as universally human is in fact highly particular and exclusionary, with certain characteristics, relationships, genders, races, religions, and social and economic statuses excluded by definition. Third, it is false in so far as its ideological character has served to justify, motivate and guide dehumanizing practices of various kinds, especially racism and colonialism. Although critiques of the false universal of European humanism are widespread, Fanon's philosophical and political approach is distinctive in not abandoning claims to humanity and universality, but argues for reconstructing them anew.Footnote 26
The second sense of humanity concerns what Fanon takes to be empty or impotent calls for human dignity or equality, which he criticizes on account of its abstract universality. Early in Black Skin, he contrasts his phenomenological and psychological approach to combatting the internalized effects of colonialism with the more obvious path of ‘calling on humanity, on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity […] to prove, or to win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 30). In focusing on lived experience and psychological complexes, Fanon demonstrates that the effects of living in a colonial environment cannot be easily corrected by appeals to equality or dignity, but involves complex acts of struggle towards self-affirmation—psychic, cultural and political—that transform our understanding of those very terms. In the conclusion, he returns to the problem of an abstract sense of universal humanity, writing: ‘I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 224).Footnote 27 The charge of abstraction is Hegelian in spirit, and in suggesting that this sense of humanity is abstract, Fanon is implicitly distinguishing between what he takes to be an abstract universal of humanity and the concrete sense of universal humanity that orients his theory of recognition. But what makes a universal abstract as opposed to concrete?Footnote 28 Although this is a highly complicated issue that I can only address here in a cursory way, let me point out two features of abstract universality that are important for understanding Fanon's critique.
At the most general level, Hegel's aim in distinguishing between abstract and concrete universals is to come to the right understanding of the relationship between the categories of universality, particularity and individuality. Ultimately, he thinks that these categories are intrinsically interrelated, and that determining the truth or ‘concept’ (der Begriff) of any subject matter requires understanding the necessary interconnections of these three moments.Footnote 29 Stated baldly, abstract universals are abstract on account of being grasped as separate and independent from the individuals that exemplify them. In this case under discussion, Fanon is arguing that universals like equality and dignity are understood in terms that render them entirely independent of the individual human beings they are meant to identify, namely, the human beings living under conditions in which their dignity is denied or unrealized. When we make a universal claim that human beings are equal in their dignity, we are generally treating ‘equality’ or ‘dignity’ as universals in one of two senses. First, we might be claiming that dignity is a property of human beings. As a property universal, dignity can be understood independently of the individual human beings of which it is a property. Afterall, dignity is a property that can be appropriately attributed to many other things, such as horses, professions or traditions. Human beings also have many other properties, and something more needs to be said before we can determine whether dignity is an essential or merely accidental property of human beings.
Second, and in light of this, we might instead claim more explicitly that all human beings are equal in dignity in order to clarify that dignity is an essential property. Since ‘all’ is a quantitative determination, Hegel says what we have now is an ‘empirical’ universal, a universality that ‘remains a task’ in so far as we need to count and check if every human being has this property to ensure that it is in fact essential (SL: 573). Universality in the sense of ‘allness’ is always provisional, which suggests that we have not determined the intrinsic and necessary connection between human beings and their supposed universal dignity. In both cases, universality is abstract because dignity is not shown to be necessarily connected to the individuals that supposedly possess or instantiate this property. This is why Fanon charges that appeals to the equality of human dignity are generally ineffectual and empty, since the actual treatment of colonized peoples reveals that they are not regarded as equal in dignity at all. He writes:
any number of speeches on human equality cannot mask the absurdity whereby seven Frenchmen killed or wounded in an ambush at the Sakamody pass sparks the indignation of civilized consciences, whereas the sacking of the Guergour douars, the Djerah dechra, and the massacre of the population behind the ambush count for nothing.Footnote 30 (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox1961/2004: 47)
With Fanon's critique of the false and abstract senses of universal humanity in view, we can now turn to the third sense of universal humanity which provides the normative orientation for his theory of recognition. As I suggested above, Fanon's positive account of humanity and the human world as one of reciprocal recognition has two key features, bringing together Hegel's account of concrete universality with aspects of existential humanism. Although Fanon does not make explicit reference to the Hegelian idea of a concrete universal, there is strong evidence that his teacher, the poet, politician, and one of the founders of the Négritude movement, Aimé Césaire, was deeply influenced by this idea. Jamila Mascat argues that Césaire's approach to Négritude can be understood through his engagement with Hegel's dialectical approach to the relationship between particularity and universality (Mascat Reference Mascat and Dhawan2014: 96–101).Footnote 31 Césaire recalls his own excitement upon the translation of Hegel's Phenomenology into French whereupon he said to Léopold Senghor: ‘Listen to what Hegel says, Léopold: To arrive at the Universal one must immerse oneself in the Particular!’ (Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt2003: xiv; cited in Mascat Reference Mascat and Dhawan2014: 96). As further evidence of his deep engagement with Hegel's idea of the concrete universal, Mascat also quotes the following from a 1997 interview with Césaire:
Hegel explains that we should not oppose the singular to the universal; and that the universal is not the negation of the singular, rather it is by enhancing the singular that we reach the universal […] We had been told in the West that in order to be universal, we should have started by denying that we are black. To the contrary, I told myself: the more we are black the more we will be universal. (Nesbitt Reference Nesbitt2003: xiv; cited in Mascat Reference Mascat and Dhawan2014: 96)Footnote 32
I will suggest that Fanon's approach to humanism follows Césaire's understanding of Hegel on the concrete universal in key respects.Footnote 33
Given that the problem with abstract universality concerns its sharp separation from individual instances, concrete universals must minimally be grasped through their intrinsic and necessary connection with their individual instances. In the Logic, Hegel argues that the idea of a concrete universal is already implicit in universal affirmative judgments such as, ‘all humans are mortal’, for what truly unites the subject, ‘all humans’, is not the quantifier, but the universal genus or kind, ‘human being’. This universal is not a property of being human, but is simply ‘what the individual is, in so far as that individual is an instance of that kind of thing; it is therefore a substance universal (e.g., ‘man’ or ‘rose’) and not a property universal (e.g., ‘red’ or ‘tall’)’ (Stern Reference Stern2009: 155–56).Footnote 34 We cannot grasp the universal ‘human being’ except through the individual instantiations of this kind (individual human beings such as Frantz Fanon, G. W. F. Hegel or Simone de Beauvoir), and individuals such as Fanon, Hegel and Beauvoir are the individuals that they are in virtue of being human, while all instantiating that universal in vastly different ways. As a concrete universal, then, ‘human being’ or ‘humanity’ is inseparable from individual humans and their particular ways of being. In fact, it is through attention to these particular modes of being—being black, being Algerian, being a subject of desires—that the universal is concretized in individuals.Footnote 35
In addition to simply being what the individual is, Robert Stern notes two further features of concrete universals that are important for Fanon's understanding of universal humanity.Footnote 36 First, concrete universals support generic statements (‘human beings need reciprocal recognition’) and normative statements (‘because this person has renounced his freedom and retreated into bad faith, he is failing his duty as a human being and a bad instance of its kind’).Footnote 37 As Hegel points out in his Science of Logic, such statements are distinct from universally quantified statements since they are not about the shared properties of a group of individuals (which remains at the level of an empirical universal) but concern the particular characteristics and historical shape of the universal genus or kind itself.Footnote 38 Second, concrete universals can be exemplified in individuals with vastly different properties—differences at the level of particular modes of being—such that individuals need not share additional properties in order to exemplify the same concrete universal. Thus, in subscribing to a concrete universal account of humanity, we need not overlook, downplay, or cover over the undeniably diverse ways of being human, and such diversity poses no in principle problem for a concretely universal notion of humanity.
With this conception of concrete universality in view, we can briefly return to Fanon's identification of the struggle for reciprocal recognition with the creation of a human world or reality. What is the significance of a concept of universal humanity within the context of struggles for recognition? The goal of struggles for recognition is not the false humanity of European, bourgeois humanism, nor the abstract sense of humanity in empty calls for universal dignity and equality. Rather, struggles for recognition aim at articulating a concrete and ever-expanding sense of humanity inseparable from the particular identities and histories at stake in fighting against specific forms of domination and oppression. Struggles for recognition aim at creating what Fanon calls a ‘new humanity’, but these struggles are, in turn, guided by concrete demands for human behaviour and recognition from others based on concrete human needs and desires, which are most sharply in view when inhuman behaviour is present and recognition denied. My suggestion in this section has been that the idea of concrete universality provides the most promising resource for understanding Fanon's commitment to universal humanity in his theory of recognition, despite the common drawbacks associated with this idea. It also reveals that this commitment is philosophically sophisticated and not merely rhetorical. Interpreting Fanon's calls for a new humanism as merely rhetorical underestimates both his critique of the rhetorical gestures of traditional Western humanism, and the importance of the concept of humanity for his account of recognition. In the next section, I will argue that Fanon's concretely universal humanism is fully compatible with key existential commitments concerning the lack of a human essence, which is something that is actualized only through the course of human action. Through psychic, interpersonal and political struggle, the creation of a ‘new humanity’ is guided by what Fanon calls our one human right and our one human duty: the right to demand recognition and human behaviour from the other, and the duty not to renounce our freedom.
III. One human right and one human duty: recognition and freedom
I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize for myself one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other.
One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices. (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 229)
In claiming that Fanon's theory of recognition is oriented by a concrete, normative universal of humanity, we need to avoid an ahistorical essentialism about human nature that clearly stands opposed to core existentialist commitments. Fanon is clear that what he calls human reality, a human world, human relations of recognition—all of these are creative acts of self-transcendence, the results of ‘actional’ beings engaged in struggle (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 222). They are neither pre-given as an eternal essence, nor should they be understood as realizations of pre-determined potential, like a tree growing from a seed. There is thus a further, more mundane, everyday sense of concreteness that should be emphasized in Fanon's concrete universal of humanity: it is concrete because it is the material result of human praxis, produced through human relations, practices and institutions. Decolonization is the process of struggling against a false humanity—one realized through practices and institutions of subjugation, misrecognition, exploitation and dehumanization—and the creation of ‘a new humanity’, which ‘alters being’ and creates ‘new men’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox1961/2004: 2).
There are two broad features of existential humanism that need to be incorporated into the account of the concrete universal presented thus far: the idea of self-transcendence and the idea of a priori limitations that make up the universal human condition. Incorporating these features will shed light on what Fanon, in the conclusion of Black Skin, refers to as the right of reciprocal recognition to demand human behaviour from the other, and our one human duty to not renounce our freedom.
(1) The first feature concerns what was just mentioned above concerning the importance of praxis and human self-creation, which we can discuss under the existentialist heading of ‘self-transcendence’. Recall the characteristics of the concrete universal outlined in section II: (i) a concrete universal is not a property, but what the individual is as an instantiation of a particular kind of thing; (ii) concrete universals support generic and normative statements; (iii) concrete universals can be exemplified in individuals that have vastly different properties. We can now add to this an existentialist claim: (iv) in the case of human beings whose activity and values are self-consciously realized, humanity as a concrete universal is the historical and material result of human praxis as self-transcendence.
Here is Sartre, discussing the idea of transcendence:
But there is another meaning to the word, ‘humanism’. It is basically this: man is always outside of himself, and it is in projecting and losing himself beyond himself that man is realized; and on the other hand, it is in pursuing transcendent goals that he is able to exist. Since man is this transcendence, and grasps objects only relation to such transcendence, he is himself the core and focus of this transcendence. […] This link between transcendence as constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense that man passes beyond himself) and subjectivity (in the sense that man is not an island unto himself but always present in a human universe) is what we call ‘existentialist humanism’. This is humanism because we remind man that there is no legislator other than himself and that he must, in his abandoned state, make his own choices, and also because we show that it is not by turning inward, but by constantly seeking a goal outside himself in the form of liberation, or of some special achievement, that man will realize himself as truly human. (Sartre Reference Sartre and Macomber1946/2007: 52–53)
And on the ‘construction’ of human universality:
we can claim that human universality exists, but it is not a given; it is in perpetual construction. In choosing myself, I construct universality; I construct it by understanding every other man's project, regardless of the era in which he lives. (Sartre Reference Sartre and Macomber1946/2007: 43)
The idea that human beings are self-transcending beings, beings outside of themselves that relate to the world through their transcendence, is familiar not only through existentialist ideas, but already through Hegel's account of self-consciousness as living desire.Footnote 39 Desire is a movement in which the self reaches out beyond itself, but through this reaching out, is continually reshaped and thrown back upon itself in an ongoing process that ceases only with death. The desire for recognition is a characteristically human mode of desire and self-transcendence through which concrete, human universality is ‘constructed’. In light of the above, we might rewrite the first point concerning concrete universality for the human being as follows: (i)1 a concrete universal is not a property, but what the individual is as an instantiation of a particular kind of desirous, self-transcending activity.Footnote 40 With this modification, (ii) and (iii) continue to hold: this concrete universal supports generic and normative statements (desirous, self-transcending human beings need recognition; a human being who renounces self-transcendence is in bad faith and its activity is defective in some way), and can be realized in individuals with vastly different properties acting in vastly different circumstances.
In appropriating the ideas of self-transcendence and the ‘construction’ of human universality, Fanon takes both a negative and positive approach. Negatively, Fanon argues that self-transcendence aimed at a human world of reciprocal recognition requires that we have a duty to struggle against subjugation and dehumanization, on pain of renouncing our freedom. He writes that we must ‘say no to the attempt to subjugate his fellows’, and ‘fight for all my life and with all my strength so that never again would a people on the earth be subjugated’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 226, 227). Since the full realization of my freedom and powers of self-transcendence require that I am not subjugated or dehumanized, one ought to fight all conditions in which anyone is subjugated or dehumanized.
Positively, Fanon argues that our desirous, self-transcending activity aims to ‘create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 231; my emphasis). More directly, and with the necessary interrelation of concrete universality, particularity and individuality in mind, Fanon focuses on creating conditions of particularization, or particular modes of being that mediate and develop the relationship between individuals and universal humanity. Perhaps with Hegel's three central institutions of modern ethical life in mind—1) intimate interpersonal relations, including family life; 2) meaningful work in civil society; and 3) political participation in a nation-state—Fanon emphasizes that creating the ideal conditions for universal human self-transcendence requires developing rather than abandoning these particular modes of being: 1) developing and affirming black love, sexuality and family life alongside possibilities for anti-racist, interracial intimate relations; 2) developing possibilities for solidaristic, meaningful, non-exploitative work in the aftermath of decolonization that is not beholden to European capital; and 3) developing African national cultures that are not opposed to, but rather, ‘lead to the discovery and advancement of universalizing values’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Philcox1961/2004: 180).Footnote 41 As with Césaire's understanding of Hegel in which it is through ‘enhancing the singular that we reach the universal’, Fanon urges that we create the conditions of individual self-transcendence by developing the particular modes of black mediation that have been denied, suppressed, and pathologized. Part of what it means to construct a ‘new’, concrete universal humanity, then, is to empower oppressed individuals and groups to develop their particular modes of being to enable reciprocal, human recognition.
(2) To further develop the idea of self-transcendence, a second feature of existential humanism needs to be incorporated into Fanon's understanding of concrete universal humanity. Although existentialism emphasizes again and again that there is no universal, unchanging human nature or essence, possibilities for human self-transcendence are not wholly unconstrained, as is most evident in conditions of oppression. Even Sartre, who is sometimes accused of not fully appreciating this obvious fact, claims that our powers of action and self-transcendence are subject to a priori limitations, which he calls ‘a universal human condition’:Footnote 42
[A]lthough it is impossible to find in every man a universal essence that could be said to comprise human nature, there is nonetheless a universal human condition […] today's thinkers are more likely to speak of the condition of man rather than his nature. By ‘condition’ they refer, more or less clearly, to all limitations that a priori define man's fundamental situation in the universe. Historical situations vary: a man may be born a slave in a pagan society or a feudal lord or a member of the proletariat. What never varies is the necessity for him to be in the world, to work in it, to live out his life in it among others, and, eventually, to die in it. These limitations are neither subjective nor objective; rather they have an objective as well as a subjective dimension: objective, because they affect everyone and are evident everywhere; subjective because they are experienced and are meaningless if man does not experience them—that is to say, if man does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them. And as diverse as man's projects may be, at least none of them seem wholly foreign to me since each presents itself as an attempt to surpass such limitations, to postpone, deny, or to come to terms with them. Consequently, every project, however individual, has a universal value. […] There is universality in every project, inasmuch as man is capable of understanding any human project. (Sartre Reference Sartre and Macomber1946/2007: 42–42; original emphases in italics, my emphases in bold)
To conclude our discussion, Sartre makes three key points here that are important for understanding Fanon's humanism. The first is the idea of there being a universal human condition: although there is no universal and unchanging human nature, human freedom and self-transcendence are subject to a priori limitations. Sartre understands these limitations in terms of necessity (necessities of life, work, others, death), and we must freely determine ourselves in relation to such necessities, primarily in the mode of surpassing them. Although Fanon agrees with Sartre that there exist such necessities, Fanon understands our universal human condition not primarily in terms of necessity, but in normative terms where our a priori limitations include what he calls our one human right to demand human behaviour and recognition from the other, and our one human duty not to renounce our freedom. Understood in normative terms, these a priori limitations are not limitations to be surpassed, but are the universal conditions of genuinely free, self-transcending action. Fanon begins where Sartre begins (‘I find myself suddenly in the world’, ‘a world in which things do evil; a world in which I am summoned into battle’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 229, 228)), but builds to a normative rather than necessity-based understanding of our universal human condition by claiming that he recognizes himself in this one human right and one human duty. This is to say that he recognizes himself in the normative, a priori limitations that make up our universal human condition, that he relates to this condition in the manner of self-consciousness.Footnote 43 For Fanon, then, to recognize for myself the right to demand human behaviour from the other and the duty not to renounce my freedom constitute an act of self-consciousness, an act that at once expresses our universal human condition.
With this normative rather than necessity-based understanding of our a priori limitations in view, we can follow Sartre to his second point, which suggests that these limitations have both an objective and subjective dimension. For Fanon, our one human right and one human duty are objective and concrete because they are instantiated in and affect every human being; they are, as Fanon writes in a passage quoted above, ‘universally valid objective truth[s]’ (Fanon Reference Fanon and Markmann1952/1967: 218). Their subjective dimension consists in their being experienced, and our experience consists in freely determining our relation to this right and duty in which we recognize ourselves. We can add that for Fanon, those who live in dehumanizing, oppressive conditions experience these a priori limitations most acutely, in needing to forcefully demand their right to recognition and in feeling the weight of the duty of freedom when facing the risk of losing one's life to engage in everything from everyday actions to organized political struggle.
Third and finally, Sartre contends that our projects, in so far as they are free acts of self-transcendence defined in relation to a priori limitations, are never merely individual, but also have a universal value. This dialectical approach to the relation between individuality and universality, mediated through modes of particularization, is, I have been arguing, the key to understanding Fanon's commitment to a concretely universal humanism in his theory of recognition. By equating the ‘human world’ and ‘human reality’ with ‘a world of reciprocal recognitions’, Fanon presents a unique, normative theory of recognition built around the experiences of racial and colonial subjugation. Most importantly, and despite the well-documented problems with various false and abstract humanist projects, he never abandons the commitment to universal human emancipation that lies at the core of all genuinely progressive social theories and movements.
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