Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity

So far, none of the efforts philosophers have made to remedy this situation by means of conceptual distinctions between different forms of freedom has met their self-avowed goal. This is especially true of Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, which succeeded at generating some philosophical excitement but has been unable to supply us—insofar as we aim at self-understanding—with a sufficiently fine-grained clarification, if only because the phenomenology of positive liberty remained too vague and given to misunderstanding.¹ I am going to argue that even today Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life represents a superior and more persuasive alternative. It is a philosophical source that can still elucidate the concept of freedom for us as it is practiced and valued by us. He assigned this conception the theoretical function of teaching the members of modern societies about the need to differentiate between distinct exercises of liberty (I will set aside the numerous other purposes that Hegel’s conception of modern ethical life was meant to serve, which I will return to). Indeed, the theory of the free will that he offers in his Philosophy of Right can be seen as an explanation of how to distinguish different forms of individual liberty in such a way that they can then be respectively assigned their proper place in the institutional framework of functionally complex modern societies. My procedure will be as follows: First, I will explain to what extent the doctrine of ethical life that Hegel develops in his Philosophy of Right is meant to lay out distinctions between different forms of freedom. That in itself is no easy task, since the primary purpose of Hegel’s idea of ethical life seems to be to identify a sphere of institutional reliability that is immune to the continuous questioning and reflection in which modern, “free” subjects are engaged. The connection between the idea of ethical life and human freedom is therefore not an obvious one. In a second step, I will show how Hegel proceeds from his theory of the will to identifying a variety of distinct forms of individual freedom within the sphere of modern ethical life. Here we need to ask ourselves whether we are in fact justified in supposing that Hegel’s theory of ethical life still retains the power, for us today, to bring some order into the conceptions of freedom that we practice and aspire to, and to assign each of them a distinct institutional place. Finally, we should recognize that Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life suffers from certain deficits, largely resulting from the fact that he does not always follow through with his own fundamental intentions. In a third step, I will turn to these limitations of his doctrine of ethical life, and I will raise the question once more of his contemporary relevance.

Just as he does throughout his Realphilosophie—that is to say, that part of his mature system devoted to an explanation of “actuality”—so too in his theory of right and of the state, in his theory of “objective spirit,” Hegel introduces his operative concepts in two registers: first, in a register of logical determinations, and second, in a register that is closer to a descriptive grasp of the phenomena. This twofold conceptual apparatus remains one of the most attractive features of Hegel’s project. As Dieter Henrich has remarked,² one of Hegel’s greatest talents lay in his ability to counterbalance his efforts at delivering a formal-ontological analysis of reality by identifying closely corresponding features of our natural and social environment in a way that allows even a reader unacquainted with Hegel’s Logic to follow the course of the argument. His ability to think in a way that is at once highly abstract and diagnostically concrete renders Hegel a sociologist avant la lettre. Before this discipline even existed, Hegel showed himself to be a great and nearly unsurpassed social theorist of modernity.

When we aim to understand the intention and purpose of the idea of “ethical life,” we can make use of this double meaning of all the terms employed by Hegel in his Realphilosophie. In its logical guise, Hegel’s philosophy of right and of the state is an attempt to describe the process of the realization or self-actualization of the determinations of reason insofar as those determinations have resulted in a certain objective social reality.³ In its phenomenological or empirical guise, Hegel’s aim is to bring to our awareness those phenomena of our social existence that show us to be the sons and daughters of modernity insofar as we actively participate, through our practices, in generating the rational determinations that characterize our society. If one wanted to invoke an influential contemporary view in social theory to bolster Hegel’s intentions, one might say that Hegel wants to emphasize those among our “collective” ascriptions of status functions that correspond to general, quasi-organic properties of reason.⁴ Now as we know, Hegel’s two-sided analysis of modern society presupposes that a long process of historical development has already taken place—a process that has first made it the case that at this point in time, that is to say, around 1800, we can take for granted the existence of institutional arrangements that reflect the determinations of reason. If we wish to understand the intention behind Hegel’s philosophy of right and of the state, we should therefore bear in mind that the social reality of which it offers an account is one that has already attained a degree of rationality such that its social practices and institutions can be considered embodiments of the logical determinations of spirit.⁵

This presupposition, which is central to his Philosophy of Right as a whole, follows from the fact—which Hegel presents as nearly obvious—that it was only the transition to modernity that placed social institutions under the demand to realize individual freedom. In modernity it is no longer just the individual with his or her particular aspirations and beliefs who can be thought of as free. Rather, the functionally necessary social institutions themselves are now considered as making possible the realization of freedom in the external domain of social action.⁶ In his Philosophy of History especially, Hegel explains why only such transition in the meaning and scope of freedom, from the merely internal sphere to the objective world of social institutions, allows the logical determinations of spirit to find full application. Hegel shows how each successive stage in the world-historical process extends the scope of social reality. This process can be thought of as the realization of the self-referring subjectivity of spirit, since each further step eliminates a piece of that opaque, still spiritless objectivity that evades all attempts at grasping it in terms of logical determinations. Not until the “new epoch” of modernity when freedom has become the organizing principle of all the central social institutions is it possible to fully express social reality in terms of logical concepts. For only then is it the case that in relating to their social institutions, individuals at the same time relate to themselves in just the way that is required by Hegel’s conception of spirit as a self-relating type of organism.⁷ Thus Hegel’s philosophy of history delivers the premises on whose basis Hegel can then build his Philosophy of Right as a formal-ontological account of social reality: all the aspects of modern societies that need to be considered inasmuch as they are displaying the “actuality” of freedom must conform to the concepts of a “logic” that seeks to describe spirit in the process of its undiminished self-actualization.⁸

With regard to the point of departure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, these presuppositions entail that right from the beginning the canonical modern concept of freedom needs to be explicated in a way that allows us to recognize in it the features of spirit in its process of self-relation. If the kind of freedom that is supposed to have attained actuality in modern societies did not lend itself to being understood along these lines, it would be unintelligible how one could develop a theory of these modern societies according to the determinations of logic. Hegel meets this challenge in his introduction, which constitutes a fascinating attempt to wrest the concept of freedom from the hands of the prevailing doctrines of his day, at the same time considerably expanding the range of the tasks faced by any “philosophy of right.”⁹ Hegel’s line of argument is highly complex and traverses several stages of determination. I will provide only a very basic description of it, since my goal here is mainly to explain the point of departure of the idea of “ethical life.” Hegel sets out from a conception of freedom that is rather simplistic but very influential in modern society. According to this conception, an individual subject is “free” to the extent that there is a certain external space within which his activity can unfold without any interventions by other subjects. It is inconsequential, from this perspective, whether the goals that the subject is able to realize within this space can in turn be described as “free”—that is to say, whether those purposes arise from what are regarded as good reasons, rather than simply from natural causes. All that the conception is interested in is the possibility of realizing arbitrary goals without outside interference.¹⁰ This formulation already indicates that what Hegel has in mind here is roughly what Isaiah Berlin much later was to call “negative liberty”: that is to say, a type of individual freedom that an individual is supposed to enjoy simply by virtue of being granted a circumscribed space for the unhindered pursuit of his goals. It is not difficult to see why in Hegel’s view this conception must be rejected as insufficient. It does not even approximate Hegel’s master concept of “spirit,” since nothing guarantees that the individual purposes whose unhindered realization is being enabled are themselves something “spiritual,” rather than simply part of the causal order.¹¹ For Hegel it is impossible to speak of “freedom” in any demanding or meaningful sense as long as we do not know whether an individual’s intentions themselves qualify as free. Yet as we will see, he incorporates this still primitive conception into his own theory of social modernity and assigns it a place within the subsystem of “abstract right,” since he is convinced that without it we cannot make sense of our own institutionalized practices as ones in which freedom is in fact actualized.

There is a second conception of freedom that Hegel discusses in his introduction because of its powerful presence in our modern self-understanding. In contrast with the first conception, the focus is here shifted entirely to the goals or intentions whose external realization is at issue. On this second model, which Isaiah Berlin would have classified as a “positive” concept of liberty, human actions can properly be called free only if they proceed from purposes that transcend mere natural causality and are instead anchored in self-posited or subjectively endorsed reasons.¹² In Hegel’s view there can be no doubt that this constitutes a major advance over the merely external concept of negative liberty. The idea that freedom requires rational self-determination brings the whole concept closer to that of spirit, which after all consists in a reflexive self-relation. But a comparison with the structure of spirit also shows why this second concept of positive or reflexive freedom, which is largely derived from Kant, must still appear deficient to Hegel. To put the point in terms of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, this concept remains deficient because it lacks the moment of objectivity that spirit must possess insofar as it conceives even of its own other—that is to say, nonspirit or the realm of the object—as a product of its own reflexive relation to itself.¹³ Translating this into the more concrete, phenomenological vocabulary that Hegel employs throughout to bring out the correspondences between his logical determinations and the familiar features of our environment, his critique of the idea of freedom as rational self-determination is that it conceives of individual freedom as though it was enough for us to have rational intentions, ones supported by good reasons, whereas in fact everything depends on whether we can think of the reality with which we are confronted as already being itself an emanation or embodiment of a process of self-determination.

Thus Hegel’s introduction yields the difficult task of delineating a third concept of freedom, one that mirrors the structure of spirit by allowing us to think of the objectivity of social reality as a product of the activity of rational, self-relating subjects.¹⁴ At this point, it comes as no surprise that Hegel’s concept of “ethical life” is meant to meet exactly this challenge.¹⁵ In explaining this notion, it is advisable to start by attending to the more intuitive formulations that Hegel offers to show that his logical concepts can be translated into the language of everyday phenomena. Thus when Hegel tries to explain what it could mean to say that freedom should be thought of as a subjectivity that knows itself to be spontaneous and active in its very object, he immediately points to the concrete examples of “friendship” and “love.” “Here,” writes Hegel, “we are not one-sidedly within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reference to another, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves. In this determinacy, the human being should not feel determined; on the contrary, he attains his self-awareness only by regarding the other as other. Thus, freedom lies neither in indeterminacy nor in determinacy, but is both at once.”¹⁶ What Hegel here calls “self-limitation” may be thought of, at the level of human psychology, as a predecessor of the kind of rational self-determination that the second, Kantian model took to be the decisive mark of individual freedom. When I decide to enter into a friendship or a loving relationship, I am not blindly following my inclinations but am guided by certain considerations and reasons; and to the extent that those reasons persuade me of the rightness of my action, they amount to a source of rational self-determination, which here consists in a limitation of my motives to what the relationship permits. But Hegel’s concern is to point out that this idea of a self-limitation resulting from autonomy is one-sided and misleading, since in friendship and love my experience is precisely that the other person is a condition of my realizing my own, self-chosen ends. In cases like this, where what the other person desires from me is what I desire from him, it is more appropriate to speak of self-release than to speak of self-limitation, since that to which I relate is here something that first completes my freedom.

When we now try to translate these concrete clues provided by Hegel back into the formal terminology of his theory of spirit, we already have the key to a rough understanding of his third concept of freedom, which he characterizes as “objective.” In relations of friendship and love, a subject is reflexively related to himself in such a way that he recognizes the objectivity of the other person as a reflection of his own intentions and in that sense as his own other. Thus when we abstract from the special cases of friendship and love, we can say with Hegel that objective freedom is found wherever social routines and institutionalized practices allow subjects to view the intentions of those with whom they interact as objective embodiments of their own, reflexively constituted ends.¹⁷ Only in this way does the subjectivity of individual agents attain a shape that is analogous to the more encompassing form of spirit, in that they can recognize the objectivity of those institutionalized practices as the product of their own reflexive self-determination. All those practices that reliably offer subjects the opportunity to make this kind of experience are classified by Hegel as belonging to the part of social reality he calls “ethical life.” Ethical life is superior to other institutional structures of social reality not simply because it relieves individuals of the burden of choice or reflection, but because it allows them a kind of freedom that far surpasses the other freedoms cherished by modernity, in that it affords a much more profound and saturated experience of the absence of constraint. By now I need hardly add that in Hegel’s eyes, one indication of this superiority of ethical life vis-à-vis other conceptions of freedom is the fact that it alone can be expressed in terms of the logical concepts of spirit. For while the forms of activity associated with the two other types of freedom retain a residue of inscrutable, utterly alien objectivity, which makes it impossible to fully explicate them in terms of the structure of spirit, no such obstacles remain at the stage of objective, ethically mediated freedom, since subjects are here in a position to view the object as their own other, which is to say, as a product of their own self-relation.

From this intermediate conclusion, Hegel needs to take only a small further step to be able to present the full program of his Philosophy of Right and thus his own particular idea of “right”; and only at that point can we properly understand what Hegel is aiming at with his distinction between different conceptions of freedom as I have just sketched it. Hegel here proceeds in a strictly immanent fashion. First, he shows how the philosophy of right as practiced by his contemporaries routinely starts out from a concept of individual freedom and reasons from it to conclusions about the individual rights that should be protected by the state. By this methodology, the extent and content of subjective rights that the state should safeguard will depend on whether a “negative” or a “positive” conception of free will is being presupposed. Hegel’s ingenious next step is to demonstrate that if we derive our conception of rights in this way, we end up being forced to give up our starting idea of merely subjective rights as soon as we decide to rely on the objective conception of freedom, rather than on one of the two deficient conceptions. Once we think of a subject’s freedom, properly speaking, as consisting neither in a defined space of arbitrary choice nor (following Kant) in reflexive self-determination, but rather as a matter of participating and collaborating in ethical institutions, the idea of right itself needs to be expanded, since those institutions themselves are now accorded a normatively grounded right to existence.¹⁸ We might say that Hegel seizes from the traditional philosophy of right its own concept of right by demonstrating that this concept has to contain not just subjective claims but also social facts and, more specifically, certain kinds of institutions, once the guiding principle of individual freedom is conceived in an adequate way—which is to say, along the lines of objective freedom. The generally accepted definition of right, says Hegel, “embodies the view, especially prevalent since Rousseau, according to which the substantial basis and primary factor is supposed to be not the will [of the individual] as a rational will that has being in and for itself, or the spirit as true spirit, but will and spirit as the particular individual, as the will of the single person in his distinctive arbitrariness.”¹⁹ We can continue the thought as follows: when the free will of the individual is instead modeled on spirit, as a self-relating will that recognizes itself in the objectivity of specific practices, the definition of right must change too, since it now has to incorporate the institutionalized practices that make this kind of self-relation possible.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right executes the program just outlined. It relies on an extended, social-ontological concept of right in order to show that all those institutional practices in which modern subjects can experience an objectively mediated self-relation exist rightfully, in that they are spheres of action justified by the requirements of individual freedom. My next step will be to show that Hegel’s approach pushes him to further distinguish between different shapes of objective freedom itself, each associated with one particular set of institutions. My goal is to argue for the continuing relevance of Hegel’s theory of ethical life by showing that it supplies us with a normative vocabulary that we can use to assess the respective value of the various freedoms we practice.

It speaks to the greatness of Hegel’s gifts as a sociologist that he solves this problem in a way whose detailed execution may no longer be fully tenable, but whose general theoretical structure remains sound even today. If we consider similarly ambitious proposals in social theory that were developed much later, for example, those of Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, we can see that they make no fundamental advances over the distinctions that Hegel laid out in his Philosophy of Right.²¹ In his younger years, Hegel enthusiastically pursued the idea that even complex societies could achieve the required degree of integration through an extension of relations of love and friendship. Once he gave up on this thought, he developed the much more realistic view—not least thanks to his study of the contemporary theories of political economy—that the reproduction of modern societies depends on the joint operation of three general, motivationally formative sets of institutions. The first of these, personal relations based on love and friendship, retains elements of his earlier conception; but on his revised view, it is now supplemented by the capitalist market economy and by the political institutions of a constitutional monarchy.²² Yet Hegel’s path toward his mature philosophy did not leave him so disenchanted as to abandon the project of modeling all three of these spheres of institutionalized action on the structure of reciprocity that had originally been restricted to relations of love alone. And this project, in turn, set him the task that we already saw elaborated in the introduction with respect to the case of love and friendship, namely, to identify in the other two institutional spheres, the market and the state, the substance of “objective freedom,” which is to say, the peculiar mechanism whereby individuals mutually encounter their own self-determined purposes as objectively given in the other’s activity. By following down this path, Hegel was eventually led to the conviction, which is central to his Philosophy of Right as a whole, that the three modern institutions of love (now conceived as romantic love), of a socially embedded market, and of a monarchic yet civic state constituted spheres of ethical life. By being molded by the moral language of these three sets of institutions, he thought, and by exercising their capacity for self-determination, individuals would adopt ends and intentions reasonably directed at those institutions, and they would then be able to view the satisfaction of those intentions in the corresponding practices as amounting to an unconstrained objective realization of their own individual freedom.

Now it is of course not sufficient for Hegel simply to list these three forms of objective freedom side by side. In order to be able to properly individuate and describe them, he needs to show how they fit together in a normatively structured ordering that allows us to compare them and assess their respective value. In ordering or ranking them in such a way, Hegel draws again on his quasi-organic concept of spirit. He now applies it to the three institutionalized spheres of freedom, just as he had earlier relied on it in surveying and evaluating current conceptions of individual freedom, and we should therefore expect that the different shapes of objective freedom are more complete and hence more valuable the less they involve any residual elements of natural causality. In its most complete realization, objective freedom should then fully conform to the model of spirit, which recognizes itself as reflected in its objectivity and therefore knows no external constraints. Here again one is impressed by how masterfully Hegel manages to bring his purely logical determinations to bear on an account of social reality that is both illuminating and empirically plausible. Thus the practices of reciprocal caring and affection found in relations of love and friendship and within the family represent a subordinate stage of objective freedom since what is satisfied in them is merely our socially interpreted but in the end still natural needs.²³ The money-mediated practices of exchanging goods and services that are institutionalized in the capitalist market embody a higher degree of objective freedom, since the individual interests operative in them are already informed by prudential reflection.²⁴ And the practices of caring for the common good and of standing up for one another for which the monarchic-civic state makes room constitute the highest form of objective freedom, because the intentions that attain their objective existence in them have shed the last remnants of natural determination and express purely spiritual, rationally formed attitudes.²⁵ I am not claiming that these specific ways of characterizing the different sets of practices are flawless, or were so at least in Hegel’s own time. As we know, Hegel’s depiction of romantic love and of the familial relations based on it was guided by the patriarchal prejudices of his own day;²⁶ and his description of the state completely loses sight of the fact that by the terms of his own project this should be a matter of symmetrical relations among citizens, who are able to reciprocally recognize their honorable actions as objective realizations of their own respective efforts.²⁷ But the basic idea of this tripartite conception of ethical life was in his time, and remains today, an imposing challenge to the modern conception of freedom. It forces us to give serious thought to the question whether we might not be more free if we come to think of institutions and practices not as restrictions on or presuppositions of a merely subjective freedom, but rather as themselves embodying a type of communicative freedom. In its design and its basic conceptual structure, Hegel’s theory of ethical life already contains all the necessary resources for extending our understanding of freedom. Hegel distinguished between needs (including bodily needs), instrumentally rational interests, and individual self-valuation as the three sources of those intentions that can be freely satisfied only through institutionalized reciprocity and that thereby afford a sense of enhanced freedom. He sought to explain that this kind of intersubjective reciprocity is possible in principle only among equals. And finally, he already described in outline the specific types of institutions that would make room for these shapes of ethical, social, or communicative freedom. But nowhere in the Philosophy of Right do we find any hints of whether or how the institutions he envisaged might one day undergo further developments that would make them more amenable to the basic demand for relations of reciprocity among equals. Instead, he treated as sacrosanct those particular arrangements of family, market, and state that a very charitable interpretation might have found to be in existence in his day, and he failed to so much as consider the possibility that they might exhibit an inner dynamic, a conflict-fueled, immanent progressive tendency. This conservatism of Hegel’s social analysis reflects a quite serious flaw in the construction of his theory of ethical life, to which I will now briefly turn.

I have already indicated that Hegel by no means wanted to banish the deficient forms of individual freedom from his theory of right and state. He was enough of a liberal to recognize that the existence of purely private opportunities to draw personal boundaries and engage in ethical reflection is a constitutive feature of modern societies. After the introduction to the Philosophy of Right laid open the deficiencies of a merely negative conception of freedom and of the idea of individual self-determination, both reappear in the main part of the book under different names, which now designate two spheres of activity that have in fact long been part of social reality. Under the heading “abstract right,” Hegel subsumes the liberal rights that had been established in rudimentary form by the time he was writing and that were meant to ensure that each adult individual’s life, property, and freedom of contract would be protected by the state.²⁸ By “morality,” on the other hand, Hegel meant each individual’s institutionally protected chance to insist for moral reasons on his own conception of what is right.²⁹ Even though these two institutions precede the objective, ethical forms of freedom in Hegel’s order of presentation, this should not lead us to conclude that he thought of them merely as preliminary entry conditions for participation in the social practices of family, market, and state—as though individuals would, as it were, lay aside their individual rights and their moral autonomy once personal reflection on those rights and on the verdicts of their conscience had convinced them to take part in the institutions of intersubjective reciprocity. Rather, Hegel assumes that liberal rights and the chance for moral self-positioning continue to form the backdrop of all interactions in the three ethical spheres, in that they allow individuals in principle to withdraw from practical commitments or to morally object to them. It therefore remains constitutive of the sphere of ethical life as a whole that the members of a society should have permanent access to the two options that Albert Hirschman called “exit” and “voice,” that is to say, the options of voluntary withdrawal and of morally articulated protest.³⁰

This inclusion of “subjective” liberties in the concept of institutionalized ethical life already introduces a dynamic element of openness and transgression into Hegel’s theory, which his presentation is unable to fully keep in check. For nothing in Hegel’s description rules out the possibility that individual objections may at one point add up to a collective protest that could call into question the very constitution of the ethical institutions themselves. It is true that Hegel sometimes mentions the possibility of such a collective “outrage,” especially in his analysis of the capitalist market;³¹ but he does not countenance the fact that this entails a dynamization of the specific kind of ethical life favored by him. Doing so, after all, would have meant leaving the adequacy of his own theory of right and state vulnerable to the conflictual, even revolutionary changes that might in the future result from the frictions that Hegel himself allowed to be a feature of the system of institutionalized freedoms. As we know, Hegel did not take this further step. He did not regard his Philosophy of Right as an intermediate stage in the process whereby modern society accounts for its own potential for freedom. Rather, he took it to have a conclusive character: from the vantage point of an institutionally embodied and, in this very embodiment, self-comprehending spirit, his theory was meant to show how objective freedom had once and for all found a secure foothold in the institutions of the family, the market, and the state. For those of us who look back at Hegel’s theory of ethical life after almost two hundred years, history has taught us otherwise: the forces of individualization and of autonomy and the potential included in negative and reflective freedom have released a dynamic that has affected the system of ethical life itself and that has left none of its institutions in the exact normative position that Hegel had once assigned to them. For this reason, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right can no longer serve today as a theory of social freedom with respect to its concrete execution but only with respect to its outlines and its general plan of construction. We can learn from it how poor our freedoms are if we try to comprehend them purely in terms of subjective rights, moral autonomy, or some combination of the two. Following Hegel would lead us to insist on the fact that individual freedom in social contexts has to mean first and foremost the experience of an absence of constraint and of personal development, resulting from the fact that our own individual but generalizable goals are advanced by the equally general goals of others.