David Espinet and Matthias Flatscher
Recognition and freedom function not only most prominently as a key concept in current social and political theory, notably in critical theory (Honneth, Habermas, Fraser) and in (post-)structuralist debates (Althusser, Butler) as well as in pragmatic-skeptical conceptions (Wittgenstein, Cavell), but the concept also receives considerable treatment within the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition. In particular, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricœur, and Jean-Paul Sartre have visibly elaborated the concept of recognition in a significant way; however, one can also find seminal indications for a nuanced understanding of the intrinsic relation of recognition and (un)freedom in the thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. Schematically, in all conceptions, there can be discerned a “positive” and a “negative” understanding of recognition—and hence of freedom, as recognition is in many ways linked intimately to the concept of freedom. Both concepts are, indeed, correlative.
A positive understanding of recognition takes its departure from the assumption that the subject can only achieve a practical self-relation if she experiences affirmation and acceptance from Others. Those from whom, however, recognition is withheld—for example, in racist, sexist, or colonial contexts—have difficulty affirming their own overall life projects. The intrinsic relation of recognition to freedom is obvious: the autonomous subject recognizes both the limits of her own freedom and that of other autonomous persons (cf. Honneth 1996).
In contrast, the negative understanding of recognition starts with the observation that existing orders of recognition force the subject to adopt given identity attributions in conformity with the system and with an effective apparatus of power. Recognition then no longer is what enables freedom, but is in fact what makes freedom impossible (cf. Althusser 1971).
Obviously, the positive and the negative forms of recognition cannot be developed in isolation from one another. In phenomenological hermeneutics, a noteworthy standpoint has been developed by tracing the ambivalent character of the intrinsic relation of recognition and (un)freedom; this approach basically undermines the dichotomous opposition of a positive and a negative conception of recognition and thus of freedom.
As Honneth highlights, Heidegger’s understanding of care includes more than a neutral “perspective of the participant”: it “is always connected with an element of positive affirmation and emotional inclination,” constituting thus a “human relationship to the self and the world” (Honneth 2008, 35). Conceptually Honneth hence does not see anything in the way of an attempt to “reformulate … the Heideggerian notion of care” “by cautiously replacing it with the originally Hegelian category of ‘recognition’” (Honneth 2008, 36).
A closer look at the Heideggerian workshop of the 1920s prior to the analytics of being-there (Dasein) of Being and Time confirms Honneth’s assumption: in Heidegger’s lecture course on the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (1924), he develops a specific figure of existential recognition effective in practical life. At this stage of his thought, Heidegger interprets the Aristotelian “zoon logon echon”—the animal provided with logos, that is with language and reason—as “human being” characterized by “letting-something-be-said-by-others” and “letting-something-be-said-by-himself” (Heidegger 2009, 76). For Heidegger, both ways of “letting-something-be-said” are structurally intertwined, which becomes even more obvious in the term of “listening” (“Hören”), by which Heidegger designates precisely the hermeneutical capacity to recognize others and oneself in a specific practical and ethical relevance (cf. Espinet 2009, 55–66, 161–207). It is clear that this kind of listening to logos becomes a major influence for Gadamer’s hermeneutics, as we shall pursue in the following.
Thus, Heidegger states that the human being “lets something be said insofar as she listens. She does not listen in the sense of learning something, but rather in the sense of having a directive for concrete practical concern” (Heidegger 2009, 76; trans. mod.). By the term “listening,” Heidegger hence primarily means the practical attitude of accepting a “directive.” Doubtless this kind of listening to the others and to oneself is a figure of practical recognition. Through listening, I recognize the relevance of what is said prima facie and without the need for rational analysis. Listening seems then to be an asymmetrical and alienating relation. Already here, in Heidegger’s early hermeneutical phenomenology of listening, a crucial ambivalence becomes tangible: the freedom of the logos is only achieved if the linguistically open part of the soul listens to logos. Is recognition hence an asymmetrical relation in which the listening element is dominated by a finally alienating mandatory authority? Or can recognition be thought of in Heidegger as a fruitful, non-alienating relation in spite of its asymmetry? Is Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology of listening in fact the expression of a violent voluntarism, or is it a way of twisting free from an alienating asymmetrical dichotomy?
On the one hand, already in Being and Time (1927) and particularly after it, until around 1934, there are voluntaristic tendencies in Heidegger’s concept of freedom that force him to eliminate any recognitional reconciliation in favor of a purely willful mode of being. Although Being and Time gives an account of the fundamental thrownness (Geworfenheit) of existence into the world, nevertheless authentic being-in-the-world cannot be achieved by the affirmation of the pre-given world and self. That would lead only to an inauthentic existence in the mode of the “they” (das Man), in which I let others decide over my Dasein (cf. Heidegger 2010a, §27). On the contrary, authentic existence can only be achieved through a fundamental decision by which a “human being” decides to “‘choose’ for herself her life-project” as a whole (Davis 2010, 170). It is this general life-project (Entwurf) and its correlative “world-forming decision” (Davis 2010, 171) that organizes the multiple activities of care around the Dasein of human existence. In one line of thought, Heidegger subordinates thrownness of human existence to “its disclosedness” (Heidegger 2010a, 129) in and shortly after Being and Time, and this move narrows the recognitional perspective of care attested by Honneth. The self, the world, and the others are then only there for the sake of my own life-project: “World … is primarily defined by the for-the-sake-of-which” orientated by my own chosen fundamental project, as Heidegger states in 1928. Here he emphasizes the voluntaristic character of this assumption: “But a for-the-sake-of-which, a purposiveness, is only possible where there is a will” (Heidegger 1984, 185). Taking into account that, for Heidegger, the most intense form of making decisions, “resoluteness, is an eminent form of the disclosedness of Dasein” (Heidegger 2010a, 284), one can easily distinguish the figure of an heroics of the self that becomes most visible in Heidegger’s determination of resolute anticipation of individual death as the “ownmost possibility of Dasein” (Heidegger 2010a, 252). Heidegger’s further developments of this version of a transcendental will by which I chose my own existence in a fundamental way (cf. Heidegger 2002, 193) read like prefigurations of what Heidegger later was to criticize as voluntaristic excesses in Nietzsche’s will to power.
On the other hand, however, there are themes that obviously counterbalance Heidegger’s voluntaristic tendencies. Also, in Being and Time, Heidegger reactivates the Aristotelian option of successful recognition by reassembling the elements of listening as letting-something-be-said by others as well as by oneself: “Listening to [hören auf] … is the existential being-open of Dasein as being-with for the other. Listening even constitutes the primary and authentic openness of Dasein for its ownmost possibility of being, as in hearing [hören] the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it” (Heidegger 2010a, 158). The named “voice” is Dasein’s capacity to listen to herself and to others, that is, to recognize both herself and the others as fundamentally relevant for her existence. This general theme of listening and openness becomes increasingly stronger in Heidegger’s thinking from the mid-1930s on. In Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938), there becomes tangible to a certain extent what will later be Heidegger’s mature thinking of freedom as letting-be or “releasement” (Gelassenheit). Here, in Contributions, freedom still means to “cast oneself loose [Sichloswerfen], to venture into the open” (Heidegger 2012, 357). Such a risky movement toward the open is, however, not meant anymore as an act of pure will aiming at a mere self-assertion of willful subjectivity. “Casting oneself free” means “to belong neither to something over and against nor to oneself” (Heidegger 2012, 357). “To venture into the open” means, then, to oscillate between oneself and a sort of vis-à-vis, belonging to each side and to neither of them at the same time. It is significant that Heidegger formulates this movement of “casting oneself free” in Country Path Conversations as “releasement,” more precisely, “as the releasing of oneself [Sichloslassen] from transcendental … willing” (Heidegger 2010b, 92). By such a terminological shift from the distinctly active voice of “Sichloswerfen”—and its somehow voluntaristic undertone—to the undecidable active and passive voice of “releasing of oneself,” Heidegger grasps in the most accurate way the meaning of freedom “as the self-opening for the open” (Heidegger 2010b, 93). What Heidegger describes here, then, is the movement by which a self would let itself go—release itself—precisely by recognizing that itself is of the same being as the being vis-à-vis her or him. This form of recognition of oneself in the otherness of being thus leads to an “encounter in the open” (Heidegger 2012, 358). In other words, one sense of freedom is the venture of an intersubjective openness.
This intersubjective turn of recognitional freedom becomes explicit in Heidegger’s various involvements with Hölderlin, especially in two lectures from 1941 and 1942, where Heidegger struggles to develop a genuine understanding of what is “own.” The “own” is not limited to single persons, but reaches out to a self-understanding of a community still to come, which Heidegger calls “the Germans.” According to his remarks, the “own” would not be something in which one would already find someone or something that one would already possess in advance. Instead, Heidegger leaves no doubt that it is impossible to start at and with oneself. A successful self-relation hence presupposes “a coming from the distance of the foreign” (Heidegger 1992, 182, our trans.). Settling down, feeling homely—as an open process—is carried out as “struggle and encounter with the alien” (Heidegger 1996, 54).
The German’s genuine alien character is located by Heidegger in Greek culture, mainly in its philosophy and literature. Only in an historical reflection on this Greek alterity can the richness of the essential being of the own develop. This kind of relation between the foreign and the own is determined by Heidegger terminologically as “recognition” (“Anerkennung”) and in etymologically akin words (such as “Anerkennen” or “Anerkenntnis”). Heidegger’s central aim is to show “that in the foreign the own begins to shine” (Heidegger 1992, 175, our trans.). By insisting on the ineluctability of the recognition of the foreign for the constitution of the own, Heidegger stresses the necessity of a detour by this very foreignness in order to dismiss all attempts at an unhistorical, self-referred, and only inward-looking foundation of what is own (cf. Heidegger 1992, 86). The determination of the own hence does not only not subsist without the foreign, but even more so stands in a fundamental relation to it. What is foreign is taken into account as a specific foreignness—this, however, as one has to note critically, “not for the sake of the foreign, but of the own” (Heidegger 1992, 190, our trans.). In any case, for such a “readiness to acknowledge the foreigner and his foreignness” (Heidegger 1996, 141) Heidegger consistently regards it as imperative to “recognize” what is foreign “out of the recognition of its ownness” (Heidegger 1992, 140, our translation) without, however, leveling the difference between the own and the foreign. From this historical relatedness to the Greek past originates also a genuine understanding of the Occident and its history.
Out of this interpretation, Heidegger’s specific adaptation of the concept of recognition becomes visible. The concept does not, however, receive an explicit treatment, for example, through a delimitation of his understanding of recognition from Hegel’s. For Heidegger, it is by the very historical constellation that the relation manifests itself as neither reciprocal nor symmetrical; rather, the foreign precedes the own in a constitutive way. Heidegger stresses that the difference between the foreign and the own cannot be overcome by means of a higher synthesis. Freedom would not consist in detaching the will from its historical orbits in order to exit history through a history of spirit; it must rather be understood as a permanent dialogue with the first beginning of the Occident in order to constitute a new historical community to come. At least with regard to ancient Greek literature, art, and philosophy, Heidegger sees the possibility “[b]ecoming homely” by “going away into the foreign.” Such “becoming homely … must come from the foreign into its own” in order to “learn to use freely what is its own” (Heidegger 1996, 142, italics added).
Heidegger, however, has to be questioned critically about whether he regards the foreign only as a condition of possibility for the ultimately more relevant constitution of the own. Led by such a constricting logic of identity of the own (understood collectively), Heidegger loses sight far too quickly of the foreignness of the foreign—after having withdrawn every kind of alterity from the very foreign by identifying it all too quickly with the Greeks, and the Greeks, in turn, with a specific form of idealized German alterity.
In Being and Nothingness, a direct response to Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology, Sartre explicates his understanding of recognition, which is most notably orientated by the phenomenon of shame. With such an unusual approach, Sartre wants, first, to provide a new access to the problem of the experience of the other. The situation of shame presupposes that a given subject feels itself being observed by an alter ego whose existence need not have been made epistemologically accessible. Sartre’s explicit linking of recognition with shame means, second, that to be ashamed in front of an Other’s gaze is basically to recognize “that I am as the Other sees me” (Sartre 1956, 222). Recognition turns out not to involve a reciprocal act between two subjects, but rather to contain a radically asymmetrical self-attribution imposed by the Other. This asymmetry leads to a problematic reification and self-alienation of consciousness. In the analysis of the phenomenon of shame, it thus becomes obvious, third, that an uncontrollable openness toward the Others traverses the consciousness of each single ego. Herein the vulnerability of the single subject, who can be haunted by the Other, also becomes palpable. Recognition does not, in Sartre’s view, render possible a free relation to oneself and to others, but proves rather to be an intra-subjective experience of the deprivation of freedom provoked by the appearance of the Other.
Sartre depicts this negative understanding of recognition by means of an example: as a subject observes a scene through a keyhole, she is caught red-handed by a third party. Sartre does not interpret this scene in a moral respect, for instance as a concession of moral failure, but he calls attention to the way in which the observed subject becomes all of a sudden aware of being conscious of herself as a mere object, a self-attribution that differs fundamentally from the status of the autonomous I: “Now, shame … is shame of self; it is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object” (Sartre 1956, 261). Deprived of her unlimited possibilities, the subject becomes the Other’s object of observation without being able to get rid of this kind of alien ascription. This conflict of reification cannot be solved by a “second negation” (Sartre 1956, 287), by which the reified subject would simply re-obtain the lost state of subjectivity (cf. Sartre 1956, 288–289). It follows that for Sartre a state of mutual satisfaction in which incarnate subjects would recognize each other reciprocally is not conceivable, not even in relations characterized by love. Love is understood by Sartre as the “conflict” (Sartre 1956, 364) between the freedom of the lover and the freedom of the loved. The relation between lovers is characterized as the reciprocal attempt at “appropriation” (Sartre 1956, 367). Furthermore, an adequate understanding of the Other in her alterity cannot be obtained in Sartre’s conception; the intersubjective tension remains an insoluble conflict based on the primacy of one’s own freedom, so cherished by Sartre.
Although Sartre does not put it this way, it is as though the violently reifying character of subjectivity and thus intersubjectivity Sartre takes for granted would demand a likewise radical form of individual freedom. This is confirmed at least on three levels: First, the fact that Sartre cleaves firmly to a first-person perspective—while, however, rejecting Cartesianism (cf. Sartre 1947)—displays this inverse proportion of negative conception of recognition and a voluntaristic conception of freedom. One of Sartre’s basic assumptions is, indeed, that freedom cannot be instantiated on the grounds of an intersubjective “we” (cf. Sartre 1956, 413–431), which would partly or totally take over individual decisions and assume personal responsibilities (cf. Sartre 1956, 553–556). Second, and consequently, recognition as the core of intersubjective relationships cannot, for Sartre, be a foundation of freedom. Even love, in Sartre’s analysis of recognition, proves most obviously to be trapped in the negative reverse of voluntaristic freedom. Third, and more broadly, Sartre conceives all intentionality or active relation to the world as a free act, which basically negates existing facticity outside me: “Freedom is conceived only as the nihilation of a given” (Sartre 1956, 481). Intentionality, the idea of the basic structure of intentional consciousness (as being consciousness of something) that Sartre takes from Husserl, opens now, in the Sartrean perspective, a “hole of being” (Sartre 1956, 79). Unlike Husserl’s conception of originary givenness (Husserl 1960, §24, 57–58), intentionality in Sartre’s view is animated by radical freedom and hence does not primarily constitute givenness but, on the contrary, negates what is given (Sartre 1956, 435). In other words, freedom is only the recognition of a lack within positive givenness insofar as freedom projects something different from what is given, “an ideal state of affairs” that at least opens the “actual situation” toward that which is projected. In short, freedom can never rely on something given, but rather must realize itself in a perpetual conflict both with the world and with a determined self. Hence, at the heart of the subject as human existence, there is a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself” (Sartre 1954, 439). What Sartre misses then in his account of the intrinsic relation between freedom and recognition is that pre-given dispositions and determinations are not merely the raw material on which a radical indeterminate constituting force would act independently and solely through negation. Freedom does not simply show up the world as pure “coefficient of adversity” (Sartre 1956, 324, 328) as Sartre, however, states.
This is the objection that Merleau-Ponty’s somehow “happy existentialism” brought against Sartre’s conception. In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty holds that freedom is never only acting against existing reifications out of a radical point of indeterminateness. It is altogether the opposite: “My freedom is … never without an accomplice, and its power of perpetually tearing itself away finds its fulcrum in my universal commitment in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 525–526; cf. also Merleau-Ponty 2014, 479). Freedom does not primarily negate what is, but relies on my given “commitment in the world,” as the metaphor of the “fulcrum” is apt to show. Freedom is a lever developing its genuine force only in contact with a given adversity. Merleau-Ponty finds yet another helpful metaphor to depict this intrinsic connection between freedom and the pre-given and perhaps determinate nature. Human freedom is compared to the throw of an object. What is thrown and thus in movement is always subject both to a “centrifugal” and a “centripetal” force at the same time (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 510), that is one force driving the object away from its center of rotation—its situation—and another, but correlative force pulling it back to the ground forcing the object thus to follow a curved path. The tortured prisoner, an example Sartre uses frequently, resists the temptation to betray her fellows not by a pure act of free will (as Sartre interprets it), but by a net of motives giving strength to her will and thereby liberating it. She “What withstands pain” in her “is not … a bare consciousness,” but the commitment “with” her “comrades or with those she loves and under whose gaze she lives” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 527, trans. mod., italics added). Far from losing freedom by negating intersubjectivity (“Mit-Sein,” that is: being-with), Merleau-Ponty preserves it by stressing that the subject can only act free—resist the temptation of giving in—by taking an intersubjectively motivated decision.
Ricœur’s existential phenomenology of freedom presented in Freedom and Nature (1950) must be read as a direct response to both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Ricœur shares with Merleau-Ponty the refusal of Sartre’s voluntaristic excess (cf. Marsh 2008) and the affirmation of a fundamental need to re-equilibrate the relation between the facticity of nature and the freedom of the subject. Like Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur replaces the rationalist dualism consciousness and facticity with a two-dimensional unity in which the voluntary and the involuntary are strictly complementary. The reconfiguration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology operates, however, on three further levels: first, Ricœur affirms the Husserlian perspective of eidetic phenomenology, criticized by Merleau-Ponty; second, Ricœur, unlike Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, places the problem of freedom at the very heart of phenomenology of the body. Retrospectively Ricœur affirms, indeed, that in Freedom and Nature he had “hoped … to provide a counterpart in the practical sphere to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception” (Ricœur 1995, 11). For Ricœur, the description of embodied existence cannot be detached from the account of the “practical sphere,” that is, its ethical and even theological implications. Third, the lived body as part of human freedom is interpreted in terms of an “incarnate freedom” (Ricœur 1966, 33), relying on Gabriel Marcel’s Christian existentialism and making thus explicit a Christological undertone already audible in Merleau-Ponty’s terminology (cf., e.g., Merleau-Ponty 2002, 246). Each of Ricœur’s shifts is meant to engage in a “broader project, which would be the pacification of a paradoxical ontology within a reconciled ontology” (Ricœur 1966, 19, translation altered), in which ultimately “the conciliation of the voluntary and the involuntary” (Ricœur 1966, 34) becomes philosophically conceivable.
Ricœur’s “reconciled ontology” thus aims at a possible recognition of nature through freedom, the concordance of the continuity and discontinuity of experience, of action and passion, and of oppositions of similar kind. The crucial point is that what is involuntary in me (body-skills, emotions, and habits) and my voluntary capacities (deciding, acting, and consenting) develop only in constant contact with one another. Decision, action, and consent as modes of the voluntary are the strict other side of the involuntary. They are like two sides of a medal.
Ricœur’s method of reconciliation, operative in Freedom and Nature as well as in Fallible Man (1960), consists in a meticulous description of this originary paradox of freedom and nature. The overall strategy Ricœur employs consists in retracing apparent paradoxes to a point where one side culminates in its opposite, which becomes most visible in Ricœur’s understanding of consent. As in Heidegger’s account of the releasement of the will (Gelassenheit), to consent here means to accept necessity, without, however, falling into indifference. Letting somebody, something, or a situation be the way she or it is, is to recognize their being, individuality, and difference in their own right and is thus an eminent “act” of freedom. Like Heidegger, Ricœur also hereby leaves behind the dichotomy of activity and passivity and develops a remarkable version of the turn from freedom as choice or action to freedom as releasement.
The Symbolism of Evil (1960), in which Ricoeur shows that human self-reflexion on freedom moves in symbols and myths, already announces a decidedly hermeneutical turn in Ricœur’s thinking (cf. Kearney 2004, 13–33). In the following works, Ricœur gives up the methodical standpoint of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology because he becomes aware that such a static and introspective description of the voluntary and the involuntary was based on the erroneous assumption of an immediate access to the self (cf. Ricœur 1970, 3–59). Now, from the 1960s on, Ricœur detects a wide range of mediating structures of the self, which is this very unity of the voluntary and involuntary: it is only through signs, symbols, metaphors, texts, and, in general, narratives that the self interprets itself: “To understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self” (Ricoeur 2008, 84). It does not follow, however, that the voluntary disappears by this kind of self-configuration through the text (as an established net of significations). On the contrary, it is only within the text that the voluntary “as contextual action creates a new meaning” (Ricœur 2003, 115; cf., e.g., Wall 2005, 137–170). It is true, however, that from the 1970s on, Ricœur focuses less explicitly on freedom.
So Ricœur, in his last book, The Course of Recognition (2004), keeps track of the manifold meanings of the French “reconnaissance,” pointing out the multiple semantic oscillations of the word “recognition” between “cognition” and “acknowledgment.” By means of a broad interpretation of the history of philosophy, Ricœur elucidates the polyphone semantics of recognition as an objective-theoretical recognition of objects and a subjective-practical recognition of oneself, as well as an intersubjective social dimension of mutual recognition.
Recognition in the narrow sense, as acknowledgment, represents for Ricœur only one, albeit important, facet of recognition. In this way, Ricœur distances his understanding from conventional stances on recognition that unduly emphasize its conflictual character. In these accounts, recognition itself threatens to be lost in an “unhappy consciousness” and in “the indefatigable postulation of unattainable ideals” (Ricœur 2005, 218). To this abysmal “struggle of recognition,” which ultimately clings to the Hobbesian paradigm of a generalized state of war, Ricœur opposes an “actual experience of … states of peace” (Ricœur, 2005, 218), thus taking a position inspired by the biblical agape. Selfless mutuality as a relation free from the logic of coercion and obligation thus substitutes for the basic figure of calculating reciprocity (cf. Ricœur 2005, 232f.). Ricœur locates this kind of peaceful experience of mutual recognition, which is only possible for individuals within their mutual relations, in the generous practice of gift-giving radically void of expectations and any logic of exchange: “The generosity of the gift does not call for restitution, which would, properly speaking, mean annulling the first gift, but for something like a response to the offer” (Ricœur, 2005, 242). In this bond of gratitude and recognition as acknowledgement, the recipient is led to a different state of recognition that is incompatible with any calculation of a quid pro quo; indeed, one is now open to a positive form of recognition in which the gift’s ungraspable character and, finally, its alterity are recognized as such.
Gadamer underscores in Truth and Method that understanding never starts at a neutral point, but rather inevitably brings into play its own origin and history. History and even the present situation are not at the disposal of the solitary subject. Rather, history constitutes an ultimately uncatchable and mostly opaque horizon of understanding: “In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live” (Gadamer 2004, 78). It is essential for Gadamer that one cannot cast off or encompass this forestructure of understanding, but has to consider its constitutive dimension; no unhistorical standpoint free of prejudices can be attained. It is in this regard that Gadamer considers one’s own basic historical finitude. To distinguish this position from that of Enlightenment or Historicism, which, according to Gadamer, misrecognize in an elemental way reason’s finite mode of being and hence the historical situatedness of humans, Gadamer underscores the “recognition that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice” (Gadamer 2004, 272). Accordingly, Gadamer stresses “that we should learn to understand ourselves better and recognize that in all understanding, whether we are expressly aware of it or not, the efficacy of history is at work” (Gadamer 2004, 300).
The act of taking explicit account of tradition in the form of established authorities and legitimate prejudices Gadamer calls “an act of acknowledgment [Anerkennung] and knowledge [Erkenntnis]” (Gadamer 2004, 281). By that he does not mean, however, any blind obedience, but rather a resultant responsiveness to the tradition that entails a highly articulated involvement, or even a conflict, with that tradition. This kind of openness, in which I might find myself “recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me” (Gadamer 2004, 355), implies a different approach to history, even with the Other in general: “I must allow tradition's claim to validity … in such a way that it has something to say to me” (Gadamer 2004, 355). This other approach to history grounds Gadamer’s revision of the concept of recognition. Recognition would no longer only be directed toward the mere detection and identification of the alien character of the past, but would now have to be expanded to the dimension of “being able to listen to one another [Auf-ein-ander-Hören-können]” (Gadamer 2004, 355), that is, decisively letting oneself be engaged and put into question by the Other.
Understanding, hence, is conceived as a dialogue, which has always already begun before us, and to which we have to respond relentlessly. This dialogue, however, is not enclosed within itself, but rather each voice, each project of understanding, has to be “borne out by the things themselves” (Gadamer 2004, 270). The crucial point in the processes of understanding does not therefore consist in taking the place of the other by an act of empathy. Instead, orientated by the same thing and the adequateness of the different approaches to it, those involved in understanding must achieve a commonly shared understanding of the thing itself. This kind of sharing of meaning Gadamer designates as a “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer 2004, 305). “[U]nderstanding,” then “is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves” (Gadamer 2004, 305). Such a process of fusion stands under the general directive of the “history of effect” (cf. Gadamer 2004, 298–305) that, for Gadamer, has the character of a “principle.”
If understanding is ultimately not a subjective act but the effect of an historical process led by existing horizons prefigured through tradition, how, then, are we able to “continually … test all our prejudices” so that the present judgment is not merely a result of the past? Can there be individual freedom? Gadamer’s response remains ambivalent. On the one hand, he asserts: “Hermeneutical experience … does not have prior freedom to select and reject” (Gadamer 2004, 459). In fact, Gadamer vividly refuses the concept of individual subjectivity understood by him “only as a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life” (Gadamer 2004, 278). On the other hand, Gadamer detects a form of linguistic freedom closely linked to the Heideggerian listening to language. It is through language, and the human capacity to be “able to listen to the logos” (Gadamer 2004, 458), that the subject acquires a relative negative freedom, the “freedom from environment [Umwelt]” (Gadamer 2004, 441). Human freedom as it unfolds through language “does not mean that” the human being “leaves her habitat but that she has another posture toward it—a free, distanced orientation” (Gadamer 2004, 442; translation modified). One can easily conceive that it must be through this capacity of taking distance that we can “continually … test all our prejudices.” Linguistic activity is, in Gadamerian terminology, thus also the title for positive freedom—“for language is a human possibility that is free and variable in its use” (Gadamer 2004, 442). By such linguistic liberation from instinctive behavior a “rising to ‘world’ [Welt]” (Gadamer 2004, 442) becomes possible. World for Gadamer is, as for Heidegger, the universal linguistic openness of understanding (cf. Gadamer 2004, 458). Listening, as a metaphor for the general belonging to the horizon of the word, is therefore the “avenue to the whole” (Gadamer 2004, 458). One should not misinterpret this universality as being hostile to plurality; on the contrary, it is by the liberation from the animal environment to the human world that we become “free for variety in exercising” our “capacity for language” (Gadamer 2004, 442). This liberation finds confirmation in the plurality of historical languages affirmed by Gadamer, that is, in the “multiplicity of human speech” (Gadamer 2004, 441).
However, it remains unclear in Gadamer’s conception how single acts of judgment, in which we test our prejudices—that is, judgments by which we establish a certain distance from the existing discourses on the micro-level of linguistic experience—connect with the macro-structure of a general and universal historicity of language and tradition. If these are always already at work on the very same micro-level of linguistic practice in which we are supposed to take distance, then such a critical practice seems ultimately impossible (cf. Figal 2010, 8–24).
In contrast to Gadamer, Charles Taylor attributes a definite political undertone to the concept of recognition. In his book Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” Taylor not only traces the systematic points of insertion of the concept of recognition within modernity, but also proposes a solution to the extremes of Eurocentrism and multiculturalism within the political debate. He does so by drawing on Gadamer’s concept of the fusion of horizons. A “‘difference-blind’ liberalism” (Taylor 1994, 62), which Taylor finds in wide sections of Anglo-American philosophy, is in particular submitted to a critical interrogation.
His starting point is the hermeneutical insight that the “crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character” (Taylor 1994, 32). It is only within the multiple, linguistically understood exchange with others that human beings acquire their identity; every subject remains constantly dependent on “recognition given or withheld by significant others” (Taylor 1994, 36). Such a process of formation of self-understanding cannot be confined to an individual dimension or a small sphere of intimacy, but must also be analyzed at a political and public level.
Here, however, Taylor detects a fundamental tension within the concept of recognition. On the one hand, we take for granted, at least since Kant, the dignity and equality of all humans and thus find ourselves in a “politics of universalism” (Taylor 1994, 37). On the other hand, groups and communities insist on their unique identity, which leads to a “politics of difference” (Taylor 1994, 38) that seeks to protect these differences. What is at stake then, for Taylor, is to rethink the libertarian concept of equality by way of the demand for recognition of alterity without, however, sliding into relativism. Governmental regulations such as, for example, the Canadian language policy that protects the French-speaking Québécois minority, which contradict classical liberal principles of public neutrality, can promote the willingness “to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival” (Taylor 1994, 61) in order to give diverse cultures both autonomy and the chance for development within equal conditions.
Without falling into an ideologically informed multiculturalism, Taylor stresses the importance of a certain “stance” (Taylor 1994, 72) in which openness toward other cultures would attribute to them an intrinsic value. Such a stance would not only prohibit the colonization of other cultures, but invite them to a “fusion of horizons” within a transcultural dialogue orientated by the foreign. Thus, we “learn to move in a broader horizon” of recognition, “within which what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the different background of the formerly unfamiliar culture. The ‘fusion of horizons’ operates through our developing new vocabularies of comparison, by means of which we can articulate these contrasts” (Taylor 1994, 67). Our own patterns of existence are indeed questionable, but only in a free response to the alien cultures. Hence, Taylor’s liberalism does not claim to incorporate other cultures into the supposedly universal horizon of one’s own (Western) culture, but neither is it a “demand for equal” and symmetrical “recognition” (Taylor 1994, 71) consistent with an all too much homogenizing multiculturalism. Rather, he pleads for a movement in which we “displace our horizons in the resulting fusions” (Taylor 1994, 73).