Autonomy and Agonism in the Phenomenology of Spirit

1

Autonomy and Agonism in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

J.J. McFadden

G. W. F. Hegel is a surprising resource for theorists of agonistic democracy:

Hegel’s political philosophy, and his philosophical approach more generally, are

crucially oriented around reconciliation, while agonistic accounts of democracy

refuse the aspirations to reconciliation and unity, highlighting conflict and

contestation as defining characteristics of democratic life. Against this apparent

opposition, this paper uses an unorthodox interpretation of two key moments in

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to show that his account of autonomy is

fundamentally an agonistic one. The paper argues, first, that Hegel’s famous

parable of mastery and slavery in the Phenomenology shows autonomy to require

acknowledging others’ authority as interpreters of our acts, claims, and

commitments; and, second, that Hegel concludes that such acknowledgment entails

responding to others’ interpretations and reactions in a spirit of agonistic

contestation—a contestation depicted in Hegel’s treatment of confession and

forgiveness at the close of the Phenomenology’s ‘Spirit chapter, which involves

affirming oneself and one’s commitments through the other’s authority rather than

seeking to escape that authority. The paper concludes that Hegel’s embrace of

acknowledgment and agonistic responsiveness renders his conception of autonomy

fully compatible with a non-sovereign conception of human agency, and thereby

amenable to an agonistic understanding of politics.

Democracy, at its conceptual core, is a system in which the people rule themselves. For

this reason, autonomy is an idea with broad appeal in democratic theory. Whatever their other

differences, Rawlsian liberals, Habermasian deliberative democrats, and theorists of neo-Roman

Republicanism such as Philip Pettit all present democratic institutions as mechanisms that make

collective self-determination possible by ensuring that laws can be rationally understood as self-

imposed.1 Autonomy’s wide appeal is easy to understand; it provides an account of democratic

freedom consistent with the constraints that late-modern democratic states place on their citizens

1 See, paradigmatically, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts

and Norms; and Philip Pettit, Republicanism and A Theory of Freedom.

2

by identifying freedom with a particular kind of rule-following, subjection to one’s own authority

rather than the authority of someone else.

Another strand within contemporary democratic theory rejects autonomy’s reconciliation

of freedom with subjection, however, advocating instead a democratic freedom opposed to rule

itself. Pointing to the excesses and differences separating the demos subject to the law from that

which authors it, theorists of democratic agonism concerned with difference, novelty, and

contingency highlight the tendency of autonomy’s self-subjection to collapse into mere subjection.

Against such subjection, they figure democratic freedom as specifically an-archic, an escape from

rule.2 On this account, freedom lies not in the sovereign self-command of autonomy but rather in

forms of contestation that depend on plurality and engender novelty and self-surprise. Locating

free action beyond or outside any norm by which it might be evaluated, agonistic democrats thus

make a virtue of non-sovereignty, but also sever the link between freedom and responsibility that

autonomy would provide.

These two conceptions of freedom are closely identified with deliberative and agonistic

accounts of democracy, respectively. At the same time, however, they manifest a tension between

the democratic ideal of autonomy and the inescapable democratic fact of non-sovereignty. And

where the entrenched opposition between deliberative democracy and agonistic democracy often

seems to leave contemporary democratic theory at an impasse, characterizing that opposition in

terms of the tension between autonomy and non-sovereignty suggests that these two camps can be

understood as representing divergent responses to an assumption shared by deliberative democrats

and agonists alike—the assumption that autonomy depends on sovereignty: If autonomy depends

on sovereignty, then democratic theorists must choose between the aspiration to autonomy and a

2 For influential accounts of freedom along these lines, see e.g. Arendt, The Human Condition, esp. ch. 5; Jacques

Rancière, Disagreement and ‘Ten Theses on Politics’; Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’.

3

non-sovereign understanding of human agents. Deliberative and agonistic accounts of democracy

embrace opposite horns of this dilemma, deliberativists choosing autonomy and then seeking to

explain and defend the sovereignty that it requires while agonists opt for non-sovereignty and

abandon the aspiration to autonomy along with a sovereignty they recognize as a dangerous

fantasy.

Is the choice between autonomy and non-sovereignty inescapable, though? In what

follows, I argue that it is not, using an extended engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

to articulate and defend a conception of autonomy that is compatible with non-sovereignty.3 And

If, as I’ve just tried to suggest, the impasse between deliberative and agonistic accounts of

democracy has been shaped by a choice between autonomy and non-sovereignty that has seemed

inescapable, then such a non-sovereign conception of autonomy may also offer contemporary

democratic theory a way out of its current impasse. In arguing for non-sovereign autonomy, I make

two key theoretic claims: The first is that non-sovereignty is a necessary condition for autonomy,

and the second is that autonomy can be compatible with non-sovereignty only if it is also

compatible with responsiveness, the ongoing practical acknowledgment of the ways that the

content of one’s commitments depends on others’ interpretations of and responses to those

commitments. Further, each of these theoretic claims is tied to an interpretive claim about Hegel:

I first interpret Hegel’s famous accounts of the ‘struggle for recognition’ and the dialectic of master

and slave in the Phenomenology as constituting an argument that non-sovereignty is a necessary

condition for autonomous self-determination. Hegel’s attachment to non-sovereignty leads him to

understand an agent’s actions and commitments as social artifacts, dependent for their content on

3 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hereafter cited in the text as PG, by page number, along with

corresponding citations to Miller’s English translation, abbreviated PS and cited by paragraph number. Translations

are my own, though I have frequently referred both to Miller’s translation and to an unpublished translation by Terry

Pinkard.

4

the ways that others interpret and take up what she does and says and so importantly out of the

agent’s control. I then interpret Hegel’s account of confession and forgiveness at the close of the

Phenomenology’s ‘Spirit’ chapter as depicting a practice of responsiveness that reconciles this lack

of control with autonomy. These passages bookend an argument in which Hegel shows that

autonomy depends on a practice of responding to commitments’ instability in the course of living

them out, attending both to others’ claims about their content and to the ways that such content is

inflected and altered by other commitments one holds. Self-determination thus appears not as

sovereign self-mastery but as integrity, an ongoing, present-tense enactment of one’s commitments

flexible enough to suffer the shifts and reversals that we, as non-sovereign agents, are heir to.

The Reversals of Recognition

Hegel takes over from Rousseau and Kant a commitment to autonomy, that is, to the thesis

that any norm’s authority for a person depends on her authorization of that norm.4 A central

contention of Kant’s critical project had been that knowledge and action alike are intelligible at all

only as normative categories—things we do freely and so may be held responsible for—and that

they could be such categories just in case it was up to us whether any given consideration counted

as a reason for belief or action, so that anything’s being a reason for an agent depended on her

making it one. This normative conception of knowledge and agency had conditioned Kant’s

understanding authority as well as his conception of subjectivity itself: he took subjectivity or

personhood to require the capacity to constitute reasons or norms for oneself, a capacity he called

spontaneity; and he took authority to consist in normative self-constraint made possible by such

4 Compare Robert Brandom’s formulation of the ‘autonomy thesis’ he attributes to Kant and Hegel in Brandom, “Some

Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism,” 170.: “The distinction between force, coercion, or mere constraint on me,

on the one hand, and legitimate authority over me, on the other, consists in the latter’s dependence on my endorsement

or acknowledgment of the authority as binding on me.”

5

spontaneity. Kant thus saw all relations to authority as ultimately self-relations, leaving us, as he

famously put it in the Groundwork, subject to only those laws of which we could regard ourselves

as the authors (AK 4:431; G 39).

One characteristic way that Hegel expresses his enthusiasm for Kant’s conception of

autonomy, and for the identification of subjectivity with self-determination it entails, is through

his definition of freedom as a matter of “being with oneself in another.”5 But the idea that autonomy

is constitutive of subjectivity also informs the structure and strategy of the Phenomenology,

allowing Hegel to understand a narrative of consciousness’ experience of its relation to itself as

simultaneously providing an account of the necessary conditions for autonomy or genuine self-

determination. Thus, in the passage from the preface in which he first announces the project of the

book, Hegel characterizes truth or epistemic authority in terms of a self-relation: “everything

depends on grasping and expressing the True, not as Substance but just as much as

Subject….[o]nly this self-restoring sameness or the reflection in otherness within itself—not an

original unity as such, or an immediate [unity] as such—is the True.” (PG 14; PS §§17-18, last

emphasis added). Likewise, consciousness’ experience culminates in an understanding of Spirit as

essentially involving a relation to itself: “As its fulfillment consists in knowing completely what it

is, its substance, this knowing is also its going into itself” (PG 530; PS §808).

If autonomy is the topic of the Phenomenology as a whole, the more specific question

Hegel addresses in the ‘Self-Consciousness’ chapter is what form of authority autonomy

requires—that is, how to understand authority as consistent with self-consciousness’

independence. Hegel’s answer to this question comes in two steps: the first step is a critique of

5 See, among other places, PG 127, 129 (PS §§177, 184); GPR §§7, 21-3, 112, and, with reference to Kant’s

understanding of duty, §133A) (Phenomenology of Spirit §177), 129 (§184), GPR §§7, 21-3, 112, and, with reference

to Kant’s understanding of duty, §133A.

6

sovereignty as an incoherent conception of independence,6 one that miscasts independence as self-

sufficiency and thereby figures authority as a property inherent in self-consciousness itself rather

than a relation to the world.7 The key claim in this critique is that sovereignty denies self-

consciousness any way to get sufficiently ‘outside itself’ to establish the self-relation that self-

determination requires. Versions of this key claim appear at two points in Hegel’s narrative of the

experience of ‘self-certainty’ (PG 120; PS 166), a self-consciousness that understands its

independence as sovereignty and attempts to adopt a sovereign posture toward the world. And both

versions of the claim constitute moments when this attempt fails, throwing self-consciousness back

on itself.

The claim that sovereignty is incompatible with self-determination first appears in the

midst of self-consciousness’ attempt to confirm its sovereignty by assimilating the objects of

desire: the self-consciousness of desire confronts objects as things whose independent authority,

and so their challenge to its own sovereignty, lies in their existence; self-consciousness therefore

demonstrates that objects lack authority for it by ‘negating’ their existence, destroying them:

“Certain of the nothingness of this other, it posits for itself this nothingness as the truth of the other;

it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty.”

(PG 125-6; PS §174). Since the object’s authority is tied to its existence, however, self-

consciousness’ demonstration of its independence from the object requires it to destroy the very

thing that might have reflected that independence back to it. The price of sovereignty is thus the

6 Both this characterization of sovereignty and the account of self-consciousness’ pursuit of sovereignty in the

following two paragraphs are indebted to Markell, Bound by Recognition; and Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology.

Pinkard’s account of this section focuses on self-consciousness’ pursuit of ‘self-sufficient agency.’ Markell identifies

the independence that self-consciousness pursues as sovereignty. See Markell, Bound by Recognition, chap. 4, esp.

104–8; Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, chap. 3, esp. 46–53. 7 The conception of authority as sovereignty that Hegel attributes to self-consciousness can thus be described, if avant-

la-lettre, as a reification of authority in the sense of reification Marx associated with commodity fetishism— mistaking

as a thing or ‘making thing-like’ [Verdinglichung] what is actually a social relation. See e.g. Marx, Capital, 163–77.

7

loss of the objective world whose determination had constituted self-consciousness’ independence

in the first place.

In this satisfaction, however, it experiences the independence of the object. Desire and the self-

certainty obtained in its gratification, are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from

sublating this other….It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence of

desire; and through this experience self-consciousness has itself realized this truth. (PG 126; PS

§175)

The claim that sovereignty is incompatible with self-determination appears again within

the master-slave relation, as a result of self-consciousness’ turn to recognition for confirmation of

its sovereignty. Recognition—acknowledgment of self-consciousness’ sovereignty by another

self-conscious subject, manifested in that other’s treatment of its claims as authoritative—seems

to promise a confirmation of self-consciousness’ sovereignty in which the object (the other) is

preserved: since the other’s independence consists in its distinct subjective take on the world, it

can forfeit the independence of this subjective take while maintaining its independent existence,

so that it makes itself dependent on self-consciousness. As Hegel puts this point, the other “effects

the negation within itself” (PG 126; PS §175).8 Since the independent point of view that makes the

other a possible source of recognition also allows it to challenge self-consciousness’ sovereignty

and demand that self-consciousness recognize it, however, self-consciousness can secure the

recognition it seeks only through a “life-and-death struggle” in which it ‘stakes its life’ and

8 The other can affirm self-consciousness’ authority in a way that self-consciousness itself cannot because the other

can relate self-consciousness’ authority to a different desire—its own. In satisfying its own desires, self-consciousness

cannot avoid begging the question whether those desires are freely self-determined or merely given to it; the other,

however, can contrast self-consciousness’ claims on it with its own desires such that self-consciousness’ claims and

the other’s own desires (self-consciousness’ subjective take and the other’s own take) appear from its perspective as

two distinct possible sources of authority, and the authority of self-consciousness as opposed to itself becomes

something the other can acknowledge in practice. Put differently, it is from the perspective of the other that the

possibility that she could have done or thought otherwise than she did do or think first becomes intelligible, and thus

it is the other for whom an intelligible account of the notion that her doing and thinking as she does is ‘up to her,’

something she can be responsible for, first becomes available. I return to this issue below. See also Brandom, “The

Structure of Desire and Recognition,” 140–43; Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 55–9.

8

compels the other to surrender (PG 131; PS §187).9 That act of surrender gives rise to the master-

slave relationship, situating the victorious self-consciousness and the defeated other as “two

opposed shapes of consciousness, one the independent, for which being-in-itself is the essence, the

other the dependent, for which life or being-for-another is the essence” (PG 132; PS §189). And

that relationship provides the self-consciousness who has become master with the recognition he

had sought: “For the master…his recognition comes about through another consciousness….the

other consciousness sets aside its own being-for-itself [sich als für-sich-sein aufhebt], and thereby

itself does what the first does to it.” (PG 133; PS §191). But the slave’s recognition can no more

confirm self-consciousness’ sovereign self-sufficiency than assimilation of the objects of desire

could, and for the same reason: in order to count for self-consciousness as confirmation of its

sovereignty, the slave’s recognition would have to represent an authority outside self-

consciousness itself, an independent point of view; but to be sovereign is precisely to exercise a

sole or complete authority isolated from any such outside authority. The master’s aspiration to

sovereignty thus requires him to destroy the independent authority of the slave just as it required

him to destroy the independent existence of the object; it requires, as Judith Butler puts it, “a way

of forcing the other to die within the context of life” by denying to the other the status of a self-

conscious, judging subject.10 And this again amounts to destroying the very authority that might

have reflected self-consciousness’ independence back to it:

In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the master the object, which constitutes the

truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear that this object does not correspond to its concept,

9 Hegel’s account of the ‘struggle for recognition’ suggests that he takes the struggle to require self-consciousness to

overcome an immediate or pre-reflective attachment to life in addition to overcoming the challenge to its sovereignty

presented by the other. I say more about self-consciousness’ overcoming of its attachment to life below. Hegel also

notes that one way for this struggle to end is in the death of (at least) one of the two combatant self-consciousnesses,

but that this result “does away with the truth that was supposed to issue from it,” repeating the unsatisfying destruction

of desire and failing to provide the surviving self-consciousness with recognitive confirmation of its sovereignty. See

PG 129-131; PS §186-188. 10Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 41; On the notion of slavery as a "substitute for death," see also Patterson, Slavery

and Social Death, 5–14 & 35–76;.the quotation is from p. 5.

9

but rather that the object in which the master has achieved his mastery has turned out to be for him

something quite different from an independent consciousness. Not an independent consciousness

exists for him but rather much more a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-

itself as the truth of himself. (PG 133-4; PS §192)

What prevents self-consciousness from securing confirmation of its sovereignty is not, as

it had thought, some problem with the object, but rather a problem with the notion of sovereignty

itself: the only thing that could confirm self-consciousness’ sovereignty for it—some authority

independent of itself—is ruled out by the idea of sovereignty, so nothing could confirm or

demonstrate that self-consciousness is sovereign without at the same time challenging its

sovereignty and requiring self-consciousness to destroy it. Nothing ‘other’ than self-consciousness

can reflect its sovereignty back to it because sovereignty turns out to be a denial of the reality of

everything ‘other’ than self-consciousness, a denial that there is any world for it to relate itself to

or exercise sovereignty over. Thus sovereignty cannot be the independence self-consciousness was

after, because it turns out to be not self-determination but the refusal of self-determination, a

refusal to commit to any determinate account of the world that vitiates the original promise of

consciousness’ independence.

The second step in Hegel’s answer to the question of how authority can be made consistent

with consciousness’ independence is an account of autonomy that incorporates two fundamental

forms of dependence he takes to be constitutive of self-determination. The first of these forms of

dependence is provisionality, a dependence on the future characteristic of agents for whom

commitments are constraints on future belief and action; the second is plurality, a dependence on

others—and, more specifically, on the independent authority of others—characteristic of agents

whose commitments, both as undertaken and as manifested in action, are artifacts of interpretation.

10

Provisionality and plurality are necessary conditions for self-determination, Hegel argues, because

they make it possible for self-consciousness to get sufficiently ‘outside itself’ to serve as an

authority (a source of genuine constraints) for itself. Hegel’s account of the ‘master-slave dialectic’

shows provisionality and plurality to account for a form of external authority, and while this

external authority initially appears, within the master-slave relation, as the slave’s bare subjection

to the master, it has a social structure that allows it to be rendered consistent with self-

consciousness’ independence when administered within reciprocal relations of recognition, as the

much longer story of the Phenomenology goes on to show. The master-slave episode thereby

makes the key claim in Hegel’s defense of autonomy as a conception of self-consciousness’

independence, the claim that freedom—independence itself—consists in a particular form of social

dependence. Getting this account of autonomy off the ground, however, requires a shift in

perspective for self-consciousness and for Hegel alike, since the only alternatives the self-

consciousness bent on sovereignty can acknowledge are death and the emptiness of self-sufficient

mastery. For self-consciousness, this shift comes at the moment of surrender that gives rise to the

master-slave relation—the moment when, as Hegel puts it, “self-consciousness learns that life is

as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” (PG 132; PS §189).11 In its surrender, the self-

consciousness who learns this lesson recognizes the other as an authority outside itself, escaping

from the incoherent aspiration to sovereignty in constituting the other as the master. For Hegel,

the narrative of self-consciousness’ experience of its independence correspondingly shifts to the

perspective of the slave, who quickly supplants the master as the self-consciousness the chapter

tracks. (PG 133-4; PS §§193-5).

11 For my appreciation of the importance of this sentence I am indebted to Patchen Markell; See Markell, Bound by

Recognition, 106–8; Also helpful on this point is Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 52–3, 59–60.

11

If self-consciousness’ surrender amounts to a recognition of something about the other,

however, its discovery of the value of life that precedes and motivates that surrender amounts to a

recognition of a crucial fact about itself—the fact that its knowledge of its commitments may be

incomplete or mistaken, so that it can ‘learn’ what is essential to it. In his account of its initial

conflict with the other, Hegel had identified self-consciousness’ freedom with its capacity to

determine for itself what is essential to it. There, Hegel contrasted self-consciousness’ commitment

to its status as ‘pure self-consciousness’ with its implicit attachment to life:12 That life was valuable

to this self-consciousness in some sense can be inferred from the fact that life was the form of its

external existence or being-in-itself,13 as well as from Hegel’s characterizations of life as a thing

that it could ‘stake’ or ‘risk,’ but life’s value was not something self-consciousness had determined

for itself, so its attachment to life couldn’t count as a genuine commitment. By contrast, having

the status of ‘pure self-consciousness’ was valuable to this self-consciousness solely because it

took that status to have value—its value was an artifact of self-consciousness’ own self-

determining activity. This contrast between its given or latent attachments and its self-determined

commitments made self-consciousness’ freedom legible as the capacity to take only its self-

determined commitments as essential to it, and to deny that its mere attachments were so. “It is

only through staking one’s life that freedom is won,” as Hegel claims in his account of the struggle

for recognition, because an agent must deny that the form of life naturally delivered to her is

essential if she is to take as essential to her only what she herself determines to be so (PG 130; PS

12 This sentence and the account of commitment and self-determination in this paragraph are indebted to Brandom,

“The Structure of Desire and Recognition,” see esp. 129–132. 13 “they are for one another….consciousness immersed in the being of life, which for each other have not completed

the movement of absolute abstraction, of destroying all immediate being and being only the pure negative being of

self-identical consciousness.” (PG 130; PS §186). And since what they are in themselves depends on what they are

for one another, being ‘mere life’ for one another means that they cannot be in themselves the pure [negative] self-

consciousness they are for themselves.

12

§187). And putting that denial into practice requires “being willing to risk and if need be sacrifice

something one actually is (in oneself) for something one is merely for oneself.”14

What, then, could it mean for self-consciousness to learn that it was wrong about what was

essential to it? We can begin to answer this question by attending to what Hegel claims self-

consciousness gets wrong about its commitment to being ‘pure self-consciousness’: it is not that

this commitment turns out to be false, but rather that it turns out not to extend as far as self-

consciousness had taken it to; in particular, it turns out not to rule out also having a commitment

to life—self-consciousness doesn’t exchange one commitment for another equally singular

commitment, but rather discovers a second commitment it must add to the first. And the fact that

self-consciousness mistook the shape and extent of its commitment in this particular case implies

that it can in general be wrong about what exactly it commits itself to in undertaking a commitment,

about what inferences and obligations, acts and forbearances will be involved in living out this

commitment. Thus one important lesson of self-consciousness’ discovery that life is essential to it

is that its understanding of the commitments it undertakes is provisional: though self-

consciousness undertakes commitments with some sense of their content, this sense will

necessarily be indefinite or incomplete until manifested in a particular, concrete course of action

that settles, within the circumstances that are its context, the acts and forbearances the commitment

requires and the incompatible commitments it rules out. The key idea here is that commitments

14 Brandom, ‘The Structure of Desire and Recognition,’ 130-31. Though Brandom’s phrasing effectively captures the

contrast between a commitment to freedom and an attachment to life as Hegel suggests that contrast appears to the

consciousness immersed in the struggle, I think his identification of ‘what one actually is’ with what one is ‘in oneself’

misses an important distinction between two ways one can be something ‘in oneself’ that Hegel introduces in the

course of his account in Chapter IV. Consciousness is ‘in itself’ life in the sense that life is the form of its natural,

given being or ‘existence’ [dasein]; by contrast, in being recognized—taken by the other to be the essentially self-

determining self-consciousness it takes itself to be—it becomes ‘in itself’ self-consciousness in the sense that self-

consciousness is the form of its actual normative status, its desire to be which has been satisfied. (Hegel often calls

this specifically normative mode of being-in-itself a thing’s ‘actuality’ [wirklichkeit], though he doesn’t use this

language within the master-slave parable.)

13

must be dependent on the agent’s future actions for their content if they are to be fully self-

determined: Imputing some content to an agent’s commitment immediately, without waiting to see

what she goes on to do, infringes on her capacity to determine its content for herself; by the same

token, taking an agent to be thoroughly self-determining suggests that what she does go on to do,

her future activity, counts at least prima facie as good evidence for what she takes her

commitment’s content to be. Put differently, if one’s commitments are to be self-determined then

their content must depend on the future, because action can have the status of a manifestation of

those commitments only after the commitments have been instituted.15 And since constituting

oneself as an independent or self-determining agent in general just requires determining the content

of one’s commitments for oneself in particular instances, commitments’ dependence on the future

implies that agency itself involves an essential dependence on the future. As Robert Pippin

reconstructs Hegel’s point: “if…taking oneself to be or being committed to anything is not

introspective or observational, then it must always be provisional. Such a self-regard requires some

confirmation or realization out in the world and for others if it is to count as what it is taken to

be.”16

15 A crucial qualification here: activity manifesting a commitment must take place after one undertakes the

commitment, but this undertaking is not identical with and need not be simultaneous with an avowal of the

commitment. One may undertake a commitment without avowing it, or discover that one already has a commitment

one has not acknowledged by observing that commitment manifested in one’s present activity. 16 Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, 19. See more generally Pippin’s ch. 1 for a helpful discussion of the

provisional character both of particular commitments and of self-consciousness in general. Although my account of

provisionality here is in broad agreement with Pippin, he identifies Hegel’s characterization of Consciousness as

“desire itself [Begierde überhaupt]” as the key moment introducing provisionality (PG 121; PS §167). This leads him

to consider the provisionality characteristic of single commitments as intentional orientations toward the alterable

external world, rather than what I take to be the more important provisionality commitments bear in virtue of their

relations to one another. Focusing on the latter sort of provisionality both helps to show the potentially radical

consequences of commitments’ provisional character and discourages a tendency to think of some commitments as

categorically prior to or transcendental with respect to others, as Pippin at least sometimes seems to. See e.g. his

account of rational self-determination in Pippin, ‘Hegel’s Ethical Rationalism,’ Idealism as Modernism, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 417-450.

14

Of course, what drives self-consciousness to confront the provisional character of its

commitment to being ‘pure self-consciousness’ is its discovery that the attachment to life it had

taken to be a merely given fact about it, a problematic dependence to be overcome, is in fact a

commitment, something ‘essential’ to it. This too—that self-consciousness’ discovery is a

discovery of a commitment to life—follows from the idea that self-consciousness’ commitments

are self-determined: if the new constraints and limits imposed on self-consciousness’ prior

commitment to being ‘pure self-consciousness’ are to count as self-determined, as constraints and

limits self-consciousness imposes on itself, then the newly revalued claim of life out of respect for

which they are imposed must itself be a freely undertaken commitment. Through its struggle with

the other, self-consciousness discovers that it was committed to life without realizing it. This

discovery subjects self-consciousness to a profound reversal, however, showing how deeply the

provisional character of commitments can cut. In the struggle, self-consciousness had sought to

show that it was “not attached to life” (PG 130; PS §187), and Hegel casts its staking of its life not

as an unfortunate consequence of its attempt to compel the other to recognize its sovereignty but

rather as an attempt to manifest its commitment to being an independent agent: the denial of its

commitment to life thus is its commitment to being ‘pure self-consciousness’. Reading the

experience of the struggle as one in which self-consciousness learns that it has a hitherto

unacknowledged commitment to life therefore amounts to granting to commitment-manifesting

activity a strikingly broad authority: not only can activity specify the shape and limits of

commitments an agent knows herself to have in potentially surprising ways, it can also reveal to

her that her commitments are more or other than she knows, or that she is self-deceived in the

specific sense that the commitments she in fact holds are not those she takes herself to hold.

15

As this contrast between an agent’s take on her commitments and her actual commitments

indicates, provisionality positions an agent’s activity as an authority ‘external’ to her by separating

her manifest commitments (those she enacts) from her acknowledged commitments (those she

takes herself to have). But this separation can’t rely solely on a distinction between prior

conception and subsequent act, ‘inner’ essence and ‘outer’ appearance, because the relation

between an agent’s conception of her commitment and the activity that manifests it is a conceptual

relation dependent on an act of judgment: the concepts that articulate a commitment as a norm and

the activity that manifests it are related to one another as universal rule and particular instance, and

subsuming a particular act under a universal norm as an instance of following that norm, or as

manifesting the commitment the norm articulates, requires making an evaluative claim about the

scope of the norm and the salient features of the act. Thus activity can count as enacting

commitments at all—whether commitments an agent knows herself to hold or commitments

revealed to her only through her actions—only in being taken as enacting commitments by some

interpretive authority, some judge. Now, the idea that self-consciousness is essentially independent

might suggest that it alone must be the authoritative judge of whether its activity counts as

manifesting the commitments it takes itself to have, but this would collapse the external authority

of activity back into self-consciousness’ conception of itself, allowing it to interpret any activity

whatsoever as manifesting the commitments it takes itself to have and thereby leaving self-

consciousness trapped in the “frictionless spinning” of sovereign isolation.17 Maintaining action’s

character as an external authority therefore requires the further step of tying the significance of

self-consciousness’ activity to an independent interpretive authority. And since the only sort of

thing that can make the evaluative judgments that constitute activity as meaningful is another self

17 The phrase is due to John McDowell; see especially McDowell, Mind and World, 11 & passim.

16

with an independent take on the world, activity’s authority turns out to require a dependence on

the other as well.

Hegel claims, in introducing the notion of recognition into the Phenomenology, that self-

consciousness “achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” and “exists only as

recognized.” (PG 126-7; PS §§175 & 178) These claims have sufficed to convince many readers

that he sees some form of dependence on others as constitutive of self-consciousness. To contribute

to the project of constituting an authority compatible with consciousness’ independence, however,

this dependence on others must be a dependence of a quite specific sort—the dependence on others

I call plurality.18 Plurality consists, first, in dependence on others as interpreters, beings capable

of evaluating relations between norms and acts, and so of assessing one’s acts and claims as

commitments; this implies a further dependence on others as interpretive authorities, that is, as

interpreters whose evaluations of one’s commitments are integral to giving content to those

commitments; third and finally, plurality involves dependence on others as independent

interpreters, and so demands a recognition or acknowledgement of others as judges whose

interpretations of one’s commitments manifest their own judgments and are not under one’s

control. Just as the availability of an agent’s activity for interpretation by others was crucial to its

‘external’ character, the independence of those others is crucial to their interpretations’ external

character, since it provides the freedom to conflict with the agent’s own point of view that makes

those interpretations’ agreement with her point of view meaningful where it occurs. As

18 On this issue, compare Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, chap. 7, and especially the remarks at 185-6; Brandom,

“Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism.” For the terms of my reconstruction here I am indebted to Brandom’s

account.

17

independent interpreters or interlocutors, others can endorse an agent’s take on her commitments

for their own reasons, rather than merely echoing back to her a point of view she’s imposed on

them. Acknowledging plurality, recognizing the independence and authority of the other, thus

amounts to abandoning the aspiration to sovereignty in favor of the real but risky relation to the

other that sovereignty foreclosed.19

This dependence on the other first appears to self-consciousness in the experience of

slavery, in the form of the slave’s subjection to the will of the master. The slave works on the thing

for the master, preparing it so that the master may “achieve satisfaction in the enjoyment of it”

(PG 133; PS §190), and in doing so he must acknowledge the master as an external authority: since

the desires that the artifacts of his labor are to satisfy are the master’s, whether those artifacts are

in fact what the slave takes them to be—the things demanded by the master—depends on what the

master, as an external authority, takes them to be. If the slave takes his labor to have rendered

something satisfying to the master’s desire, that thing is actually desire-satisfying just in case the

master takes it to be so, that is, just in case the master is satisfied by it. Indeed, the slave is

constituted as a slave, and his activity is constituted as labor, by his practical acknowledgment of

the authority of the master’s projects as normative for him.20 The slave’s dependence on the master

thus secures with a vengeance what sovereignty precluded—the independence of the norms that

guide his laboring activity. Norms are imposed on the slave by the master, indifferent to his point

of view (or, rather, in denial of the existence of that point of view), and backed by coercion. But

19 On this sentence, compare Markell, Bound by Recognition, 108. 20 Although much has been made of Hegel’s claim that the slave “has experienced the fear of death, the absolute

Master” (PG 134; PS §194), and of the idea that it is the experience of fear that allows the slave to achieve genuine

self-consciousness, Hegel explicitly notes that fear alone cannot do this: “although indeed the fear of the master is the

beginning of wisdom, consciousness therein is a self, but is not being-for-itself [so ist das Bewusstsein darin für es

selbst, nicht das Fürsichsein]. Through labor, however, it comes to itself.” (PG 135; PS §195). Hegel also does not

claim, pace readers such as Kojève and Dallmayr, that the slave’s labor is motivated by a fear that the master will kill

him if he does not work; see Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 48; Dallmayr, G.W.F. Hegel, 67. I discuss

the role of fear in Hegel’s account in more detail below.

18

labor also presupposes and preserves a form of the slave’s own authority, incorporating this

authority into his dependence on the master: in order for his labor to be guided by the master’s

demands, the slave must be able to interpret for himself the content of those demands, judging

when a particular artifact of his labor will satisfy the master’s desire and so counts as the thing

demanded.

…the slave, as self-consciousness in general, also relates himself negatively to the thing and

sublates it; but the thing is at the same time independent for him, and therefore he cannot, through

his negating activity, be done with it to the point of annihilation; or, he only works on it. (PG 133;

PS §190)

If the master demands a house and the slave, taking this demand as a norm, labors at

building a house that will satisfy the master, the house the slave produces—made from a certain

material, with a certain number of rooms, arranged so as to take a certain advantage of the light,

etc.—amounts to an interpretation of the master’s demand, a claim about what counts as a

(satisfactory) house. In making such a claim, the slave necessarily manifests the interpretive

independence of his own point of view, exercising a capacity for assessing the content of the

master’s claim to want a house, and thereby offering his own take on the world. Further, because

he is compelled to embody this independent point of view in artifacts of labor guided by the

master’s demands and subject to the master’s judgment, the slave discovers that his own

interpretive authority is compatible with the master’s authority rather than precluded by it. The

master’s authority thus becomes both a limit on the slave’s point of view and a confirmation of

it—indeed, the master confirms the slave’s point of view in limiting it, providing the conditions

for genuinely determinate, external manifestations of the slave’s agency.: “the formative

activity…now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way,

therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being its own

independence.” (PG 135; PS §195). The subjection central to the master-slave relation ensures that

19

any endorsement the master gives to the slave’s interpretive take on the commitments manifested

in his labor is precisely the sort of independent endorsement that the master-slave relation

precludes the master from receiving from the slave: what the slave takes to be a satisfactory house

is in fact a satisfactory house if the master accepts it as satisfactory, in part because nothing

compels the master to accept it as such. Thus, in a reversal that carefully mirrors the dissatisfaction

of the master’s sovereign self-isolation, the slave’s recognition of the master as an independent

interpretive authority—his acknowledgement of the other as a genuine other—allows him to come

to see the artifacts of his labor as ‘actual,’ that is, as external manifestations of his own interpretive

authority and agency:

The shape, through being made external, does not become for him something other than himself;

for just that shape is his pure being-for-itself, which thereby becomes for him the truth. Through

this rediscovery of himself, the slave develops a mind of his own [eigner Sinn], precisely in the

work wherein there had seemed to be only an alien mind [fremder Sinn] (PG 136; PS §196).

At this point, one might object that reading Hegel’s meditation on slavery, subjection, and

labor as an account of a structure of interpretive authority ignores the affective and existential

concerns that are central to his narrative. After all, isn’t labor, in which the slave “destroys” the

“alien being before which he had trembled,” the experience through which he overcomes his fear

of death and emerges out of his attachment to immediate bodily existence into independence,

adopting a reflective, ‘negative’ relation to the things he works on and to his own desires alike?21

(PG 135; PS §196) Hegel does link labor to the slave’s overcoming of immediacy, but this can’t

be its whole significance, because understanding labor solely in these terms would make it a route

back to mastery, rather than a way out of the dead end mastery represents in Hegel’s narrative.

Now, what differentiates the negation of labor from the negation involved in the master’s “pure

enjoyment” of objects, allowing the slave to achieve the genuine self-relation that the master fails

21 Here see Hegel’s characterization of labor as “desire held in check [gehemmte Begierde].” (PG 135; PS §195)

20

to achieve, is just the slave’s relation to the authority of the master. And that authority makes a

difference, Hegel argues, because it denies to the slave the self-deceptive allocation of authority

and responsibility that mastery requires. The master arrogates the slave’s action to himself, relying

on a hierarchical understanding of the relation between thought and action in order to see his own

‘negating’ of existing conditions in thought as ‘essential,’ and the slave’s laboring activity as the

‘inessential’ mere application to the material world of the rule given by the master’s command:

…this action of the second is the first’s own action: for what the slave does is really the action of

the master; the latter is purely being-for-itself, the essence; he is the pure negative power, for whom

the thing is nothing, and thus the pure essential action in this relationship; but the slave is not a

pure but rather an inessential action. (PG 133; PS §191)

What’s deceptive about dividing action up into ‘essential’ and ‘inessential’ parts this way, finally,

is that it denies the interpretive authority of the slave even as it relies on it; the master identifies

the world that the activity of negation produces as a manifestation solely of his own point of view,

while also depending on the slave to understand and interpret his commands in the course of giving

those commands actual content through his labor—the master, that is, denies the dependence of

the concept on its actuality. And Hegel quickly upends this deceptive schema by asserting just this

dependence: In the reversal that reveals his dependence on the slave, Hegel says, the master sees

that “his truth” lies not in the negation of objects in thought he had understood as ‘essential action,’

but rather “much more [in] the unessential consciousness and its unessential action”—the labor of

the slave that he had taken to be the ‘mere’ carrying out of his intention. (PG 133-4; PS §192)

Thus, it is fundamentally as interpretive activity that the slave’s activity, the “negative middle term

or the formative activity” of labor, gives the products of labor their actual shape and the demands

of the master their actual content (PG 135; PS §195).

The slave’s relation to an external authority is the key to the difference between labor and

the abstract negation of mastery, then, because it adds to the idea of self-consciousness’

21

interpretive independence a conception of interpretive dependence; the slave must reconcile his

own point of view with the point of view of the master, and in doing so he comes to understand

his own authority in terms that are compatible with a shared perspective jointly authorized by both

parties. This shared perspective is what allows the slave to achieve the successful self-relation that

had eluded the master, but it is also a perspective born out of the slave’s fear of the master. Hegel

returns to the importance of this fear, and of the conception of self-determination it allows the

slave to develop, several paragraphs later, in the account of the slave’s development of a ‘mind of

his own’ quoted above.

The long last paragraph of the ‘Lordship and Bondage’ section narrates the slave’s

discovery of his ‘being-for-self’ in labor, and this paragraph has long been understood, under the

influence first of Marx and then of Kojeve,22 as an account of self-consciousness’ return to

sovereign self-mastery, a return in which labor liberates the slave from the “fear of death, the

absolute master” that had catalyzed his surrender into slavery (PG 134; PS §194). But there are

two importantly different aspects to Hegel’s invocation of fear here: one aspect of that story, picked

up and greatly extended in 20th Century existentialism, concerns the way that a confrontation with

one’s own mortality may dislodge one from the realm of the natural; but focusing solely on the

fear of death misses the significance of the slave’s fear of the master; and it does so, in part, by

missing a shift in Hegel’s language. Hegel describes the slave as developing ‘a mind of his own’

precisely in the activity that had seemed to be governed by the master’s “alien mind’—that is, the

activity of labor; ‘a mind of his own’ here is a translation of eigner Sinn, contrasting with the

fremder Sinn of the master’s perspective, and he goes on to note that the slave develops this

contrasting perspective not by overcoming his fear of the master but through the “discipline of

22 See Kojéve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; Marx, e.g. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,

Manifesto of the Communist Party.

22

service and obedience” imposed on his activity by the master’s fremder Sinn (PG 136; PS §196).

Hegel then contrasts the successful self-assertion through which the slave manifests his eigner

Sinn with an unsuccessful form of self-assertion that fails to make the self manifest precisely

because it is not constrained by fear of another—the unlimited self-assertion he calls Eigensinn:

If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-

centered attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative

activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as an essential being…. ‘[H]aving a mind of one’s

own’ is self-will [Der eigne sinn ist Eigensinn], a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude.

(PG 136; PS §196)

The slave’s fear of the master allows him to acquire an eigner Sinn because it constitutes a

form (though an admittedly crude form) of acknowledgment of external authority that can reflect

the slave’s self-assertive labor back to him as an objective reality; and, as we’ve seen, the master

is able to confirm the actuality of the slave’s labor precisely because he limits the slave’s capacity

for self-assertion. The limitless self-assertion of Eigensinn, by contrast, refuses outside authority

and the determination it would provide—it is ‘an empty, self-centered attitude’; thus it remains

within the horizon of sovereignty, ‘a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude.’ Read this way,

“the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” not because it forces self-consciousness to

overcome (somehow) its fear of death, but rather because that fear is the initial form that

acknowledgment of the authority of the other takes—the only form it can take within the limited

conceptual register of Hegel’s parable.

None of this should indicate that the slave’s labor renders him self-determining, of course.

The norms that guide his laboring activity, imposed on him by the master and backed by coercion,

are not self-given. But the discovery that ‘a mind of his own’ persists within the subjection of

slavery introduces the notion of a shared authority into the pursuit of independence, shifting the

terms of that pursuit so that the problem becomes how to reconcile his own authority with the

23

external authority of the other, rather than how avoid or escape it. Hegel develops this problem, as

his narrative proceeds, in terms of an incompatibility between self-consciousness freedom in

thought and its dependence on an essence outside it. And he locates an initial solution in religious

self-consciousness’ relation to the ‘minister,’ both an other in which it can see a capacity to relate

norms and acts analogous to its own and an external authority capable, like the master, of assessing

its commitments from an independent perspective, but one whose authority is grounded in self-

consciousness’ own faith rather than in coercion. The minister confirms for self-consciousness that

“its doing and being as this particular consciousness are being and doing in themselves” (PG 156;

PS §230). This moment, in which self-consciousness’ relation to the essential depends on the

minister’s reading of its sacrificial activity, involves both provisionality and plurality; but it also

points to self-consciousness’ own authority as a limit on its dependence by embodying the external

authority to which self-consciousness is subject in the minister, whose authority stems from self-

consciousness’ faith and so is in some sense conferred by self-consciousness itself.

With this final return to the notion of self-authorization, Hegel completes a structural

account of independence as an autonomy understood along agonistic social pragmatist lines.23 To

say that Hegel’s account is a pragmatist one is to note the dependence in that account of

commitments’ meanings on the acts that manifest them highlighted by provisionality; to say that

the pragmatism involved is a social one is to note that it is one in which, as plurality insists, actions’

meanings depend in turn on their interpretation by participants in discursive practice broadly

understood; and to say that this social pragmatism is agonistic is to note that it conceives of

23 I take the term ‘agonistic social pragmatism’ from Thomas Fossen, who uses it to characterize Brandom’s account

of meaning. See the discussion in Fossen, “Politicizing Brandom’s Pragmatism,” especially sec. 3.

24

discursive practice as constituted in part by the possibility of contestation. I mean by this that Hegel

takes a participant’s interpretation to be capable of conferring meaning on actions and

commitments just in case it is open to the participant to offer alternate interpretations. To say that

Hegel’s agonistic social pragmatism provides an account of autonomy, finally, is to claim that an

agent whose commitments acquire determinate meaning through interpretive contestation over the

significance of her actions is a self-determining agent, able to genuinely constrain her will while

remaining, in a mediated way, subject only to herself. Provisionality and plurality make this self-

determination possible by constituting the interpretations of an agent’s social interlocutors as a

source of external authority capable of giving her commitments the form of genuine constraints,

while the requirement that only those others recognized as authoritative by the agent count as her

interlocutors—a requirement built into the necessary reciprocity of relations of authority—ensures

that that interpretive authority remains one that she gives to herself.

While recognition thus plays an important role in Hegel’s account of autonomy, the

recognition Hegel endorses as central to autonomy is not the recognition that the self-

consciousness had originally pursued in its struggle with the other: Self-consciousness initially

sought recognition of its sovereignty—just the recognition it received, and found unsatisfying,

within the master-slave relationship. By contrast, the recognition precipitated by self-

consciousness’ surrender is a recognition of the authority of the other over it, or a recognition of

its own dependence on the other. This dependence is made manifest for the slave through the

experience of work, I’ve tried to show, because what gives his activity the character of work is the

condition of subjection to the master's will under which it is performed. Thus, while Hegel's

account of the struggle for recognition and the master-slave relationship serve as a powerful

critique of sovereignty and provide us good reason to be suspicious of projects that turn to

25

recognition in order to secure sovereign independence, that account also serves to differentiate

between the recognition of one's own sovereignty by another that Hegel unmasks as self-

undermining and the recognition of others’ independent authority that he takes autonomy to

require.

Though these two forms of recognition have starkly different valences, the difference

between them can be hard to see at the level of the text because Hegel uses the term recognition

[Anerkennung] for both the acknowledgment of sovereignty that the master seeks and the

acknowledgment of finitude and dependence that renders autonomy possible for the slave:

Paragraphs 182-84 emphasize the mutual or reciprocal nature of the recognition constitutive of

self-consciousness, culminating in the claim that two self-consciousnesses “recognize themselves

as mutually recognizing one another” (PG 129; PS §184); but Hegel goes on, beginning in

paragraph 185, to refer to the recognition that self-consciousness seeks in the struggle and achieves

in mastery simply as ‘recognition’ (PG 131-33; PS §§188-191), and avoids using forms of

Anerkennung throughout the paragraphs elaborating the slave’s point of view. This has led many

interpreters to identify recognition tout court as the recognition of sovereignty, and thereby to read

Hegel’s larger project as a defense of an autonomy dependent on sovereignty.24

Most commonly, interpreters who take Hegel to align autonomy, sovereignty, and

recognition in this way locate the principle problem of the master-slave relation in the fact that the

master fails to extend equal recognition to the slave, leaving the slave’s sovereignty

unrecognized.25 Thus the solution to the problem seems to be a more equally distributed

24 Readers happy to accept this gloss nonetheless disagree widely about how best to characterize the sovereignty they

take Hegel to defend and the autonomy it would provide. 25 Interpreters who share this view have disagreed about whether the asymmetry of recognition characteristic of the

master-slave relation can be successfully overcome; some, such as Kojeve and Sartre, argue that the domination and

subordination characteristic of the master-slave relation is inherent in all human relations, while readers such as

Honneth, Taylor, Williams, and other advocates of a ‘politics of recognition’ think that recognition allows us to

overcome these dynamics and achieve relations of genuine mutuality.

26

recognition of sovereignty, understood as a capacity for independent self-determination that

persons have, but that becomes fully active or available to them only when it is recognized by

others.26 And understanding recognition this way allows it to fit neatly into an otherwise awkward

space in Hegel’s project—the gap between his enthusiasm for individual autonomy and his

insistence that its achievement somehow depends on the individual’s place in a larger social,

historical, or spiritual whole. The fit is too neat, however: by figuring self-determination as self-

sufficiency or sole authority in determining one’s commitments, it leaves unexplained both how

that authority gets its grip and why an agent’s having it depends on her being recognized as having

it by another—that is, it leaves unexplained how a genuinely sovereign agent’s relation to external

authority could matter to it, or, more specifically, how the unrecognized status of the slave

precipitates the crisis for the master that Hegel says it does. These explanatory remainders are

symptomatic of the fact that understanding recognition as the recognition of sovereignty overlooks

sovereignty’s incompatibility with what I above called the relational character of authority, and

thereby both preserves the fantasy that sovereignty is possible and leaves undisturbed the notion

that autonomy depends on it.

By contrast, for readers who see the pursuit of sovereignty itself as the problem in the

struggle for recognition and the relation of domination that emerges from it, this alignment of

recognition with sovereignty and autonomy points toward the opposite lesson: If, as Patchen

Markell argues, “the pursuit of recognition is the failure of acknowledgment” of one’s own

dependence on the other, and recognition allows the master to sustain his fantasy of sovereign

independence in part by forcing the slave to prop up that fantasy,27 then Hegel’s parable suggests

26 For discussions of the reasons for characterizing recognition this way, and the issues raised by doing so, see Honneth,

“Grounding Recognition,” sec. II; Laitinen, “Interpersonal Recognition,” sec. V; Markell, Bound by Recognition,

chap. 1; “The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth, and the ‘I’.” 27 Markell, Bound by Recognition, 108-113. The quotation is from 112–13.

27

that we should abandon the pursuit of recognition, and autonomy along with it. I’ve tried to show

that such a reading is more attentive to the details of Hegel’s account, but it also places him at odds

with himself: though he constantly casts recognition, in the Phenomenology and throughout his

corpus, as the key to modern freedom, his most influential treatment of the idea links it to self-

deception and domination.

We need not choose between these problematic options, however, because Hegel explicitly

distinguishes the recognition of sovereignty pursued in the struggle and secured for the master

through his relation to the slave from ‘genuine’ recognition, suggesting that we need not choose

between these options. Following the account of reciprocal recognition offered, in the mode of

philosophical analysis, in paragraph 184, he begins to shift toward phenomenological narrative in

paragraph 185, saying that the “pure concept of recognition” will now be observed “as its process

appears to self-consciousness” (PG 129). He then introduces his narrative of self-consciousness’

attempt to secure recognition of its sovereignty in the struggle and its achievement of that

recognition in the subjection of the other with a warning: “At first, [the notion of recognition] will

exhibit the aspect of the inequality of the two [self-consciousnesses], or the breaking apart of the

middle term into the extremes…of which one is only recognized, the other only recognizing.” (PG

129; PS §185). The accounts of the struggle and the standpoint of mastery follow immediately,

and Hegel closes the account of mastery with a distinction between the recognition that the master

achieves and ‘genuine’ recognition: “…for genuine recognition the moment is lacking, that what

the master does to other he also does to himself, and what the slave does to himself, he also does

to the other. Thereby a one-sided and unequal recognition arises” (PG 133; PS §191). These two

references to inequality neatly bracket Hegel’s account of the pursuit of sovereignty through

recognition, explicitly marking it as involving a deficient conception of recognition. And Hegel’s

28

specification of the deficiency identifies just those conditions that would make a recognitively

shared normative authority possible: an adequate conception of recognition would require the

master to subject himself to the external authority of another, just as he subjects the other to such

an external authority—himself—and it would require the slave to acknowledge the other’s

dependence on him just as he acknowledges his own dependence on that other. Hegel thus ties a

reversal in the concept of recognition to a much more fundamental reversal in the concept of

independence, replacing the fantasy of independence as sovereign self-sufficiency with a

conception of independence as socially mediated self-determination—replacing sovereignty, that

is, with autonomy.

Integrity and the Artifice of Action

Hegel’s analysis of recognition suggests that self-determination is a circuit that runs

through the future. Our commitments are open to the future, as provisionality indicates, because

the content of any commitment I undertake depends on what I go on to do and say in manifesting

that commitment—its meaning, Hegel would say, depends on its actuality. And this dependence

on actuality entails, further, that the circuit of self-determination runs through the other, since the

actuality on which commitments depend for their content is constituted in large part by the

interpretations and responses of others. A full understanding of our actions and commitments is

available only in retrospect, both because we cannot know what others will make of the words and

deeds in which we actualize our commitments and because we live out our commitments as

unpredictable, always-changing selves in similarly unpredictable, always-changing circumstances,

lacking a clear view of our own commitments as well as of the future in which we will have to try

to live them out.

29

In the ‘Reason’ chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel begins to articulate a conception of

actions as social and normative artifacts by emphasizing the retrospectivity of our knowledge of

action that is the flip-side of provisionality.28 He argues, against the separation of intention and

action characteristic of modern understandings of agency, that “[t]he true being of a person is

rather his deed; in it individuality is actual.” (PG 215; PS §322) Explicating this claim, Hegel then

goes on to emphasize the uncertainty and self-opacity about our intentions that their provisionality

implies:

insofar as…his work and his inner possibility, capacity or intention are opposed, the former alone

is to be regarded as his true actuality, even if he deceives himself about it and, having turned away

from his action into himself, means in this inside to be something different than [he is] in the deed.

Individuality, which entrusts itself to the objective element when it becomes a work, thereby makes

itself vulnerable to being altered and perverted. But what constitutes the character of the deed is

just this: whether it is an actual being that holds its own ground [sich hält], or whether it is merely

an intended work…(PG 215-16; PS §322)

The dependence of intentions on the deed that gives retrospective determination its salience leads

Hegel to present action as a process of self-actualization; he calls it “the very coming to be of Spirit

as consciousness,” and describes it as a “pure translation” of what is not yet explicit into the form

of “explicit being” [dargestellten Seins]. (PG 264, 263; PS §401) Consciousness’ intention and

its deed thus figure as the beginning and end, respectively, of this process. And the latter—the

actuality of the deed—is dispositive: “What [consciousness] is in itself, it knows therefore from its

actuality.” (PG 264; PS §401)

Hegel, true to the logic tying provisionality and plurality together, goes on to identify this

actuality as socially constituted, analyzing the ways in which self-consciousness’ deeds are open

to the interpretations of others. Discussing the relation between consciousness, in the shape of

28 See Robert Pippin’s helpful discussion in Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, ch. 7. Pippin formulates Hegel’s

basic claim regarding the dependence of intentions on the deed at p. 156, as the claim that “[o]nly as manifested or

expressed can one (even the subject herself) retrospectively determine what must have been intended.”

30

‘individuality,’ and a ‘matter in hand’ it aims to accomplish through its activity, Hegel notes that

individuality’s dependence on an independent ‘universal’ perspective constituted through the

interpretations of others is internal to its action as the process of actualizing its intentions:

“Actualization is…a display of what is one’s own in the element of universality, whereby it

becomes, and ought to become, the matter in hand of everyone.” (PG 275; PS §417) For the

consciousness of ‘individuality’ as for the slave, action’s objectivity or actuality just is others’

authority over it.

Open to the future and to the authority of others, actions and commitments are social

artifacts in Hegel’s account. As products of a shared process of interpretation, their meanings

always exceed the perspective of any one interpreter, including the agent herself. This is simply to

say that actions and commitments are recognitively constituted, that they have normative

significance, and so objectivity or actuality, only insofar as they are recognized as having such

significance by others whom the agent has authorized to adjudicate her acts and commitments: In

the understanding of action that Hegel finally attributes to ‘conscience,’ the moral consciousness

that he considers at the end of the ‘Spirit’ chapter, “it is just the fact that it is recognized that makes

the deed into an actuality.” (PG 420; PS §640) And a later Hegel makes the same point in the

‘morality’ section of the Philosophy of Right,29 formulating the concept of objectivity appropriate

to self-determining agents in terms of an “external subjectivity” [äuβerliche Subjectivität]:

While I preserve my subjectivity in implementing my ends….the external subjectivity which is

thus identical with me is the will of others – The ground of the existence of the will is now

subjectivity, and the will of others is the external existence that I give to my end. – The

29 G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Theorie Werkausgabe bd. 7, 246. Hereafter cited in the

text as GPR, by section number, with Hegel’s Anmerkungen denoted by ‘A’ and the additional, now-standard

Zusätze denoted by ‘Z.’ (The Zusätze are based on students’ lecture notes and were added to the text in the 1833

edition edited by Eduard Ganz.) Translations are my own, though I have largely followed H.B. Nisbett’s translation,

see Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Nisbett’s Translator’s Preface includes some helpful basic

information on the structure and history of the text. See Elements of the Philosophy of Right xxxv-xxxvii.

31

implementation of my end therefore has this identity of my own and others wills within it—it has

a positive relation to the will of others. (GPR §112)

An agent’s subjectivity can be ‘actual’ only through the recognition of others because being a

subject involves willing particular deeds in a conceptually mediated way—as manifestations of an

intention (GPR §118), as means to an end (GPR §§119, 125-6), and “as right or wrong, good or

evil, legal or illegal” (GPR §132). This mediation of the particular (the deed) by the universal (the

agent’s conception of it) is what makes a deed an action, an (external or objective) existence of

the subject’s capacity for ‘inwardness’ and reflection.

In understanding action as a social artifact, Hegel gives it the structure of a self-relation

appropriate to agents for whom all norms must be self-given. As Hegel emphasizes in both the

discussion of ‘morality’ in the Phenomenology and the section of the Philosophy of Right that

bears the same name, however, the normative purchase of actions and commitments understood in

this way requires that agents be genuinely bound by the interpretations and judgments of others.

As a result, this artifactuality leaves agents vulnerable to the impropriety of action—the tendency

of actions and commitments to expose us to unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences.30

Action’s impropriety emerges most dramatically in Hegel’s appropriation of Sophocles’

Antigone:31 Hegel describes Antigone and Creon as locked in an interpretive conflict over the

meaning of Antigone’s attempt to bury her brother Polynieces, and while he identifies that conflict

as symptomatic of the problematic structure of Greek Sittlichkeit as a unique form of Spirit,32 Hegel

traces its tragic consequences to the fact that neither Antigone or Creon can learn the lesson of

30 See Markell, Bound by Recognition, 63-4 & passim, and compare Rebecca Comay’s formulation at Rebecca

Comay, Mourning Sickness, 134. 31 See Markell’s helpful discussion of the Antigone episode in the Phenomenology; Markell, Bound by Recognition,

95-103, and compare Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, 144-6. 32 Hegel diagnoses a problematic immediacy in Greek Sittlichkeit, suggesting both that it places human and divine

law in too immediate an opposition, and that it identifies different social roles (and, especially, gender roles) so

closely with the exclusive authority of one type of law or the other that individuals’ attempts to live out those roles

seem bound to generate conflicts. See especially PG 305-9; PS §465-69.

32

surrender and accept plurality as a condition of action. Each, he says, “sees right only on its own

side and wrong on the other,” claiming an exclusive authority to define Antigone’s act, and this

brings both equally into conflict with the fact that action’s meaning is always constituted from

more than one perspective. (PG 306; PS §466) Antigone and Creon provoke the tragic reversals

that engulf them by adopting postures of sovereignty incompatible with action’s status as a social

artifact, and thus, Hegel concludes, “each is responsible for the guilt which devours it.” (PG 311;

PS §472) Part of Hegel’s point here is that Antigone and Creon, as participants in a Greek

Sittlichkeit that credits divine law and human law alike, fail to take account of the full range of

relevant norms in evaluating Antigone’s act, in symmetrical ways. But this claim also points both

back to the master-slave episode and beyond Greek Sittlichkeit, to the fact that any attempt to act

from a position of sovereignty necessarily involves a contradiction, since acting just is inserting

oneself into the shared realm of the actual.

Together, Hegel’s master-slave parable and his discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone argue

powerfully that sovereignty is an impossible and dangerous aspiration, if also a seductive one; at

the same time, they demonstrate Hegel’s keen insight into the non-sovereign conditions of human

agency. Neither, however, provides Hegel with an account of the form of independence-in-mutual-

dependence that autonomy would require: The slave’s aspiration to sovereignty gives way to the

starkly one-sided dependence of subjection to the master, while Antigone remains committed to

sovereign independence, insisting on her own interpretation of her act to the exclusion of Creon’s

until the Greek Sittlichkeit they both inhabit is engulfed by a “dreadful fate” (PG 304; PS §464)

What Hegel still needs is some way for independence and dependence to meet half-way, some way

to reconcile genuine self-determination with the fact that “in their actions, human beings

33

necessarily involve themselves in externality….which accordingly has a right over me and is an

existence of my own volition.” (GPR §119Z) Having shown non-sovereignty to be a necessary

condition for autonomy, Hegel needs to show that something recognizable as autonomy can be

made compatible with that non-sovereignty. To do so, he emphasizes responsiveness—human

agents’ ability to practically acknowledge the role that others’ interpretations play in determining

the content of their commitments by responding to those interpretations and to the shifts and

destabilizations in their commitments that those unpredictable judgments create. Such

responsiveness makes it possible for us to practice political integrity, a form of integrity that makes

a virtue of the dependence on others’ judgment that gives our commitments their instability.

In introducing the concept of integrity above, I noted both that it identifies a self-relation

in the sense of a relation among the parts that make up a whole and that it allows for the possibility

that the unity among those parts is something composed out of an initial difference—the outcome

of a process of integration—as well as for the possibility of an initial unity preserved over time.

Taking these features together, I suggest that we can understand the quality of integrity as a unity-

in-difference that is achieved rather than assumed, and the practice of integrity, relatedly, as the

pursuit and maintenance of such an achieved unity through the unification or reconciliation of

differences. Integrity so understood is centrally at stake in Hegel’s social account of action, since

action’s impropriety essentially concerns the fact that our subjective understandings of our actions,

our commitments, and ourselves may come apart from their objective actuality. And integrity

remains an acute problem in Hegel’s discussion of conscience, the form of moral consciousness

whose attempt to resolve the “antinomy of the moral worldview” is bedeviled by differences both

temporal and perspectival (PG 415; PS §632). By the time conscience comes on the scene near the

close of the Phenomenology’s treatment of morality, action’s artifactuality has already troubled

34

earlier forms of moral consciousness’ by creating a series of gaps between consciousness’ own

subjective view of things and the objective actuality of duty, and conscience takes itself to

reconcile these two perspectives through a turn to self-certainty. Thus, while it remains the case

that for conscience recognition “makes the deed an actuality,” this deed “is recognized and thereby

actual because the existing reality is immediately linked to [conscience’s] conviction;” for

conscience, “the essence of action, duty, consists in the conviction of conscience about it.” (PG

420-1; PS §640, first emphasis added) But conscience’s resort to self-certainty fails to solve the

problem, giving rise instead to a stand-off between two opposed conscientious perspectives—the

perspectives Hegel calls ‘acting consciousness’ and ‘judging consciousness’ (PG 433-7; PS §§659-

60, 665)—that mirrors the struggle for recognition from the ‘Self-Consciousness’ chapter in a

number of ways.

The conflict between acting consciousness and judging consciousness, like the earlier

struggle for recognition, unfolds as a conflict between two opposed individuals each of whom

claims universal authority for its perspective. Further, the stakes of the conflict are similar to those

of the struggle for recognition, the core question being whether (and how) acting consciousness

and judging consciousness can come to share a single authoritative perspective. And as he did for

the earlier struggle, Hegel argues that the conflict between these two conscientious perspectives

may end in two crucially different ways: Just as he had first acknowledged that the struggle for

recognition might end, fruitlessly, in death, Hegel argues that the conflict between acting

consciousness and judging consciousness may end with a similarly fruitless one-sided surrender,

one party recognizing that the two occupy equally finite, particular perspectives33 and inviting the

33 Hegel indicates that the identity acting consciousness perceives between judging consciousness and itself

concerns the equal-if-opposed finitude of their two perspectives by noting that acting consciousness recognizes in

judging consciousness the same evil [Böse] and hypocrisy [Heuchelei] that the latter had seen as entailed by acting

35

other into a relation of mutual dependence by “confess[ing] this to the other,” only for the other to

refuse this invitation in favor of its self-certainty and thereby condemn itself to the spiritual death

of life as a “beautiful soul lacking actuality.” (PG 438,440; PS §§666,668) Similarly, as he had

argued that the struggle for recognition might instead end in the slave’s surrender and thereby play

a crucial role in the development of spirit, Hegel argues that the conflict between acting and

judging consciousness may end in a mutual surrender that completes that development, an

exchange of confession and forgiveness in which the two consciousnesses achieve “a reciprocal

recognition which is absolute spirit.” (PG 441; PS §670)

The first thing to notice about Hegel’s account of these two alternatives is that it positions

confession and forgiveness, together, as constitutive of an autonomy that does not depend on

sovereignty. The reciprocal surrender that he presents as the ‘successful’ resolution of the conflict

places acting consciousness and judging consciousness in a relation within which each allows the

other to experience its own actuality—reciprocally recognizing one another, each becomes for the

other an ‘other’ in which it is ‘with itself,’ an independent interpretive authority affirming

consciousness’ own perspective and thereby serving as the condition of its successful self-relation.

As Hegel says, their recognition of one another’s authority renders them “existing spirit, which

sees the pure knowledge of itself as a universal essence in its opposite.” (PG 441; PS §670) Each

is the condition of the other’s actuality, further, not as a sovereign representative of pure

universality who certifies her perspective ‘from above,’ but as an equal interlocutor, an interpreter

whose finite perspective shares in the authority constitutive of actuality alongside the agent’s own

perspective. Here it is crucial that both confession and forgiveness are acknowledgments of

finitude: Acting consciousness initially confesses to its adversary because it recognizes the other

consciousness’s own attempt to give duty a particular content in its action. See PG 438; PS §666, and compare PG

434; PS §660. I return to this issue below.

36

as “identical with itself,” and it recognizes their identity only because judging consciousness

“makes itself the same as” acting consciousness by “clinging to” its own particular account of the

latter’s deed, just as acting consciousness had clung to its own particular interpretation of duty.

(PG 438; PS §666) Acting consciousness’ confession, then, accepts the finitude and partiality of

its own particular perspective and the other’s perspective alike, and it acknowledges the

“hypocrisy” involved in either consciousness identifying its perspective immediately with the

universal. (PG 438; PS §666). Similarly, the forgiveness with which acting consciousness (having

by now assumed the position of judgment over the other) replies to the beautiful soul’s eventual

confession of its hard-heartedness “is the renunciation of itself, of its non-actual essence,” a

renunciation of its claim to judge from the perspective of pure universality.34 (PG 441; PS §670)

Thus, together, confession and forgiveness transform the opposition between universal and

particular that is dramatized in the encounter between acting and judging consciousness into an

opposition between two self-consciously particular perspectives, each of which has been shorn of

its ‘one-sided’ character: “as [acting consciousness] must surrender its one-sided, unrecognized

existence of particular being-for-itself, so must [judging consciousness] surrender its one-sided,

unrecognized judgment” (PG 440; PS §669)

The second thing to notice about Hegel’s stuttering account of confession and forgiveness

is that the difference between the first, failed resolution and the second, successful reconciliation

is simply that the consciousness to whom confession is offered chooses to respond differently.35

The beautiful soul’s confession of its hard-heartedness “is the same movement” as acting

consciousness’s initial confession, and Hegel claims that this confession is met with forgiveness

34 Here contrast Hegel’s characterization of the beautiful soul’s determination “to keep itself to itself, and not throw

itself away for another” (PG 439; PS §667) 35 The discussion in this paragraph is indebted to Rebecca Comay, who rightly notes Hegel’s emphasis on the

irrational or groundless character of forgiveness; see Comay, Mourning Sickness, 123-5.

37

rather than another hard-hearted refusal only because acting consciousness, now judging its

adversary, “in fact sees itself in” the other. If forgiveness is an act of recognition of one’s identity

with the other, however, then this claim amounts to a tautology: consciousness recognizes the

authority of the other because it recognizes the authority of the other; and one might say, equally

tautologously, that judging consciousness hard-heartedly refuses to recognize the other because it

refuses to do so. One chooses non-sovereignty and mutual dependence, the other sovereignty and

self-certainty, and in one sense this choice is utterly arbitrary, because the consciousness that

chooses sovereignty would first have to recognize the authority of the other in order for anything

that other might say or do to count as a reason for recognizing her.36 In another sense, however,

choosing to recognize the other follows directly from choosing autonomy, since the choice of non-

sovereignty and recognitively structured dependence just is the choice of autonomy rather than

sovereign isolation. And Hegel’s account indicates these stakes by describing acting

consciousness’ initial confession as offered with the expectation that the other will reciprocate and

“contribute his part” to “the existence of spirit.” (PG 438; PS §666)

Finally, to return to action and the idea of integrity, note that the shift from a ‘vertical’

relation between abstract universal and concrete particular to a ‘horizontal’ relation between two

particular interpretations of a single universal that confession and forgiveness perform repeats the

shift to a social-pragmatic conception of action already familiar from the experiences of self-

consciousness and the ethical consciousness of Greek Sittlichkeit, while adding a crucial

innovation: Forgiveness, which forgives the agent for the finitude and imperfection of her forays

into actuality, allows the universal to meet agents halfway. Confession, to which forgiveness

36 Another way to put Hegel’s claim here is to say that sovereignty, consistently understood, is incompatible with

language. I take Hegel’s emphasis on speech and language in the confession and forgiveness episode as an attempt

to indicate this incompatibility. See especially the contrast between confession’s character as “speech” [Rede] or

“expression” [Aussprache] and the “silence” [Stummheit] of the beautiful soul (PG 438-39; PS §§666-67).

38

responds, acknowledges provisionality and plurality as conditions of action, and thereby concedes

that an agent’s interpretation of her commitments bears the “blemish of determinateness,” the

ineliminable contingency of a particular perspective on those commitments; forgiveness, in turn,

responds by acknowledging provisionality and plurality and evaluating the agent’s contingent,

particular act in light of that acknowledgment. In doing so, forgiveness allows that an agent’s

manifestation of a given commitment will be constrained in the same way that any actuality is

limited, by other commitments as well as by the uncertainties of the future. Acknowledging that

the actuality of any commitment is nothing other than what agent and judge, as interpreters with

equally contingent particular perspectives, take it to be, forgiveness counts the agent’s acts and

claims as her commitment made manifest, reflecting the actuality of that commitment back to her.

Given that others’ judgments confer actuality on an agent’s actions and commitments, forgiveness

provides those others a way to take her non-sovereignty into account. Together, confession and

forgiveness thus allow actor and judge to close the gaps between their two perspectives, providing

a way for agents to cope, together, with the instabilities characteristic of human commitments:

[T]he deed is not imperishable, rather it is taken back by spirit into itself, and the aspect of

individuality, present in it either as intention or as existing negativity and limit, is what

immediately vanishes. The actualizing self, the form of its action, is only one moment of the whole,

and just as much is the knowledge that, through judgment, determines and establishes the

distinction between the individual and the universal aspects of the action. (PG 440; PS §669)

Confession and forgiveness, like the acting and judging Hegel attributes to consciousness in his

discussion of conscience, mark out the beginning and ending characteristic of actions and

commitments in his social account. As reciprocal forms of acknowledgment, however, they also

explain how these two moments can be reconciled as parts of a coherent whole—the actuality over

which the act of the ‘actualizing self’ and the ‘knowledge’ of judging consciousness share

authority.

39

In his account of confession and forgiveness, Hegel articulates a logic of responsiveness

tailored to fit non-sovereign agents whose commitments are liable to shift in the course of their

attempts to fulfill them. Both confession and forgiveness respond to the thought that the other’s

endorsement of one’s own contingent perspective is the condition of that perspective’s actuality,

and, by extension, of one’s autonomy. Confession responds to that thought by submitting to the

interpretive authority of the other;37 the confessing agent may thus be understood as someone who,

granting the other partial authority over her commitments, aspires to sustain those commitments

by responding to the other’s claims about them. Forgiveness, in turn, responds to confession’s

grant of authority by raising the confessing agent to the status of an equal interpreter; the forgiving

agent may thus be understood as someone who, acknowledging the partiality of the authority

granted to her by the agent as well as the finite nature of all determinate commitments, aspires to

see the agent’s actions as manifestations of her commitments (and this means, in part, as responses

to the forgiving agent’s own claims about those commitments). Confession and forgiveness can

then be understood as modelling an interpretive give-and-take in which interlocutors may critique

one another’s claims about their commitments, put forward conflicting claims about what a given

commitment requires, offer excuses, compensate for errors or excesses, justify the limited scope

of some commitments by reference to others, ‘double down’ on some commitments and back away

from others with a new, clearer understanding of their content.

Within such a give-and-take, whether a deed counts as an agent’s action and what action it

counts as thus come to depend on whether (and to what degree) she can give others an account of

37 Importantly, Hegel depicts confession as a partial submission to the other: confession, he says, “is not an

abasement, a humiliation, throwing himself away in relation to the other; for this declaration is not something one-

sided, through which he would establish his disparity with the other. Rather, only due to his insight into the identity

of the other with him does he make this declaration.” (PG 438; PS §666)

40

her unfolding course of activity that allows them to recognize that activity as continuing a

commitment, even as it may also inflect or revise the commitment. Both the agent’s own and her

interlocutors’ understandings of the relation between her activity and the commitment, intention,

or norm it manifests will therefore have to be sensitive to changes in her relation to the deed during

its performance and throughout its reception and interpretation by those interlocutors, because

what the action turns out to be—what she and they eventually attribute to her—will depend

essentially on where she stops being willing or able to respond to others’ objections to and alternate

understandings of her activity and its consequences. Further, while the interlocutors an agent

encounters in such a give-and-take continue to count for her as independent authorities (sources of

genuinely external constraints), the interpretive character of the authority they exercise over her

allows them to offer assessments sensitive to the non-sovereign character of her agency rather than

indictments based on the fantasy of sovereignty. This remains a demanding form of authority,

however, since the agent who takes seriously the acknowledgment of non-sovereignty involved in

confession must actually respond to the instability of her commitments, taking action to meet

others’ criteria where appropriate and seeking to explain and atone for conflicts between her

commitments when these arise. The logic of reciprocal responsiveness articulated by confession

and forgiveness thus links autonomy to a practice of integrity that is inherently political, asking us

to sustain our commitments by following through in practice on the dependence of their

significance on others.

Immediately after articulating this politically charged understanding of normative

authority, Hegel reifies the reconciliation between acting consciousness and judging consciousness

in the singular, substantive perspective of “absolute spirit,” This reconciliation, he says, “is the

41

existence of the I expanded into a duality which therein remains identical with itself;” or: “it is

God.” PG 440;PS §671) And Hegel will reiterate this depoliticizing move in the Philosophy of

Right, where he identifies forgiveness as one of the marks of the “majesty of the monarch,” denying

the power to forgive to ordinary citizens and restricting it to the sovereign who represents the

state38—that “self-sufficient power of which single individuals are only moments” which Hegel

famously calls “the march of God in the world.” (GPR §258Z). Hegel’s own trepidations about a

politics of radically ungrounded forgiveness notwithstanding, however, his account of confession

and forgiveness suggests that such a politics allows non-sovereign agents to practice normative

self-determination together, each person’s self-given laws achieving universality (and thereby

serving as genuine laws or norms) in a perspective she shares with others who remain irreducibly

distinct from her. Further, when paired with Hegel’s critique of the incoherence of sovereign

independence, his account of forgiveness might be seen as showing that, non-sovereign agents

being the only sorts of agents there are, self-determination mediated through the forgiveness of

others in this way is all autonomy can ever be.

38 Hegel denies moral subjects’ power to forgive in order to separate the sphere of forgiveness from the sphere of

right in which commitments are ordinarily undertaken and assessed; see GPR §132. He characterizes the sovereign’s

exclusive right to forgive under the power of “clemency” (Gnade); see GPR §282.

42

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. University Of Chicago Press, 1998.

Brandom, Robert B. “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and

Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms.”

European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (August 1, 1999): 164–189.

Brandom, Robert B. “The Structure of Desire and Recognition.” Philosophy & Social Criticism

33, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 127 –150.

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, Calif: Stanford

University Press, 1997.

Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. (Stanford, Calif:

Stanford University Press, 2011).

Dallmayr, Fred R. G.W.F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics. Modernity and Political Thought 3.

Newbury Park, Calif: Sage, 1993.

Fossen, Thomas. “Politicizing Brandom’s Pragmatism: Normativity and the Agonal Character of

Social Practice.” European Journal of Philosophy (n.d.).

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1468-

0378.2011.00504.x/abstract. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and

Democracy. Studies in contemporary German social thought. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich. Phenomenologie des Geistes: Philosophische Bibliothek ed.

Hrsg. von Hans Friedrich Wessels und Heinrich Clairmont. Hamburg: Felix Meiner

Verlag, 2006.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. London:

Oxford University Press, 1977.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Available online at http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page.html. Accessed Jan. 3 2007.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: Theorie Werkausgabe

Band 7. Hrsg. von Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp

Verlag, 1970.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Ed. Allan Wood, Trans.

H.B. Nisbett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts. trans. Joel

Anderson. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Markell, Patchen. “The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth, and the ‘I’.” In Recognition

and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge

[England]: cambridge University Press, 2007.

Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. Princeton University Press, 2003.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. V. 1: Penguin Classics. London ; New

York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981.

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Foreign Language

Publishing House, 1964.

Marx, Karl. "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. ed.

Tucker. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978, pp. 469-500.

43

McDowell, John Henry. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Harvard

University Press, 2009.

McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press, 1982. Pettit, Philip. A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency. Oxford University

Press, 2001. Pinkard, Terry P. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge ; New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Pippin, Robert B. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. 1st ed.

Cambridge University Press, 2008. Rancière, Jacques., Davide Panagia, and Rachel Bowlby. “Ten Theses on Politics.” Theory & Event 5 (3),

2001. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. John Dewey essays in philosophy no. 4. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1996. Taylor, Charles. 'The Politics of Recognition,' in Multiculturalism: examining the politics of

recognition. ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: an essay in phenomenological ontology. trans. Hazel

Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984.

Williams, Robert. Hegel's Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

1997. Wolin, Sheldon. Fugitive Democracy. In Democracy and Difference: contesting boundaries of the

political. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.