Jamie Aroosi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. His first book, “The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject,” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), is the first comprehensive analysis and synthesis of G. W. F. Hegel’s two most important disciples and critics, Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx. It argues, contrary to conventional accounts that see them as opposed, that the two thinkers are actually deeply complementary halves of a larger whole. He can be reached through his website at www.jamiearoosi.com.

I sat down to speak with him about Hegelian recognition theory and his critique of it in light of Kierkegaard’s thought.

Isaac Fried: Thank you for joining me. Your research is about intersubjectivity and recognition theory, which deals with a particular, more truthful way that two people can apprehend one another. I know that much of your work also deals with community. This is interesting, because recognition doesn’t seem to play much of a role in the constitution of community. If anything — at least on the surface — it seems a threat to community’s constituent fabric. The things that come up in an individual interaction can disturb accepted ideas of how we should interact.

Jamie Aroosi: Theories of recognition are not only interested in understanding how more honest or truthful forms of intersubjective disclosure might come about. They’re also concerned with how our recognition of one another is often mediated by way of social constructs. For instance, theorists of recognition see community itself as a social form maintained through recognition. That is, it exists in how we, as members of a community, see ourselves. And these social selves are themselves the product of recognition, because our sense of self develops within the context of how others see us, just as we serve as the context in which other people form their sense of self.

So, you can talk about intersubjectivity in the ideal sense, as the truthful or honest encounter between one subject and another, but it’s also a theoretical framework for understanding human development more broadly, including how we develop our social selves, and how we often struggle against these social selves in our search for a truer account of who we are.

Isaac Fried: If I remember correctly, your research differentiates between Hegel’s idea of recognition, and an analogous idea from Kierkegaard.

Jamie Aroosi: That’s correct. Contemporary theories of recognition largely derive from Hegel. For example, Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition looks to Hegel for his theory of recognition, and then adapts and employs it to offer a contemporary analysis of society. Charles Taylor is another important neo-Hegelian, who works on questions of identity and recognition. Their work has shaped how many contemporary theorists think about identity and recognition.

This neo-Hegelian discourse has been a dominant approach for a number of years, but having my background in Kierkegaard, I always approached Hegel’s theory of recognition through the lens of Kierkegaard’s critique, which I think is particularly penetrating. In fact, there happens to be a few contemporary political theorists who are also trying to point out the limits of Hegelian recognition, and are unintentionally using elements of Kierkegaard’s critique to do so. However, because contemporary political theorists typically don’t read Kierkegaard, they’re often accessing his critique in a sort of second-hand way, by grabbing elements of it from other thinkers who were themselves inspired by Kierkegaard, such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. It’s almost as if they’re reconstructing Kierkegaard’s critique without realizing that this is what they’re doing. But if they were to turn to Kierkegaard directly, they’d find the post-Hegelian theory of recognition for which they’re looking.

Isaac Fried: So what is Hegel’s idea of recognition? And what is Kierkegaard’s critique?

Jamie Aroosi: That’s a complex question. First, recognition is ultimately interested in what it means to apprehend our true selves, so we need to understand what actually constitutes our true selves. For Hegel, our most fundamental nature lies in self-consciousness : in our ability to look at ourselves, or to be self-aware.

Isaac Fried: Is “self-consciousness” a state that we have all the time, or a state that we can have? Because normally, when I exist, I don’t really look at myself. I just exist — one could say, naively.

Jamie Aroosi: Hegel would say that you’re always self-conscious; that it’s an innate and inalienable part of what it means to be human. However, he doesn’t mean that you’re constantly ruminating about yourself, but that we each have a sense of who we are, and that this sense of ourselves shapes how we act in the world.

For instance, as I mentioned earlier, this is how communities are formed. Our sense of self develops within the context of our society, so that social beliefs about who we are come to constitute how we see ourselves. This sense of self then circumscribes our sense of possibility — it forms the horizon of how we imagine possible actions for ourselves — and we then live within that horizon of possibilities. Consequently, we can notice all the types of similarities, such as in beliefs, customs, and behaviours, that we typically associate with any particular community. But we couldn’t create this social cohesion unless we were at some level aware of ourselves, because it is by shaping how we see ourselves that we then learn about the range of possibilities for our action.

This capacity for self-consciousness is a fundamental element of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology, as is the freedom that self-consciousness allows. Without being able to reflect on ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to imagine different possibilities for action, and we subsequently wouldn’t be able to exercise our freedom. So, we might not always be aware that we are self-conscious creatures, but we always are, because acting in the world depends on it.

Isaac Fried: It seems that another way to describe Hegel’s idea of self-consciousness is to say that any act of will presupposes self-consciousness.

Jamie Aroosi: Definitely, but this isn’t a claim that’s exclusive to Hegel. For instance, Nietzsche is quite insightful on this point. At the end of On the Genealogy of Morals, he says that we would rather will nothingness than not will. And he’s demonstrating the same point — that our will depends on self-consciousness — because we need to be able to reflect on ourselves in order to give our will a direction.

So, when he distinguishes between not willing and willing nothingness he’s distinguishing between a world that is truly meaningless, one in which our will lacks a prerequisite for its activity, and a world that we simply determine is meaningless, in which case we’re imposing the meaning of meaninglessness on the world. And in this latter case, meaninglessness is actually a meaning that allows us to exercise our will. And as Nietzsche notes, this latter world is a world we prefer, because within it, at the very least, we’re free.

Isaac Fried: For Hegel, what would it look like if man was exclusively aware of his self-awareness? This Hegelian picture of freedom reminds me of a line from Sartre in Existentialism: “There is no determinism, Man is free, Man is freedom.” But for Sartre, you then have to choose an identity.

Jamie Aroosi: For Hegel, freedom isn’t a state where we haven’t chosen an identity. It’s a state where we’ve chosen our true self. I think we have a tendency to view freedom as a sort of absence, as the ability to do anything we want. But freedom is actually a substantive component of who we are; we might call it our will, for instance, but this “will” is actually a quality that we possess, and not merely an absence of obstacles. Therefore, becoming free is not only a process of overcoming limitations that impede our freedom, but it also entails the process of discovering the freedom that exists within us. Consequently, true freedom means that we are taking actions consistent with our freedom, and a free society is not an anarchic free for all, but a society organized in a way that is similarly consistent with our freedom.

Amanda Blunden — “Before The Storm” — (2018)

This is also where, to my mind, we begin to run up against the primary theoretical limitation in Hegel’s work. Hegel imagines human development within a social context, because he believes that our sense of self is primary formed within this context. What follows is that he imagines that the difference between a free society, and the more limited societies that precede it, resides in the fact that a free society offers its members a social identity consistent with our true identity as free selves.

But herein lies the problem. If a true society is socializing us into its image, albeit an image that happens to be true, it seems to me that we wouldn’t be truly free. Rather than having authentically appropriated our individual freedom, we would be living according to an idea of freedom that happened to be true, but without necessarily recognizing that we are free in a deeper sense. In other words, we might come to believe that we are free in the same way that we tend to believe whatever identity our society offers us, but unless we have existentially appropriated our freedom more directly, unless we have a deeper and immediate experience of our freedom, we might merely be conforming to an idea of freedom without truly become free.

Isaac Fried: We’re getting back to Kierkegaard’s critique. Whether a society that socializes us into freedom produces freedom, seems a problem of means and ends. In other words, does there have to be a particular path of development, what you called an “appropriation,” for freedom to be meaningful?

Jamie Aroosi: I would agree that we wouldn’t want to be too rigid in describing the path to freedom, as different people have to struggle with different obstacles in order to achieve it. That said, for Hegel, the process of emancipation is always a social process, while for Kierkegaard it’s a religious or spiritual one. That term, religious, tends to scare people away. But I think that, in part, what Kierkegaard is trying to say is that freedom cannot be encapsulated within any social context, no matter how expansive the social identity is, so that we have to imagine emancipation in transcendental, or religious, language. This isn’t merely a matter of means and ends, but about what freedom itself is, and about what the process of emancipation entails.

Isaac Fried: When you talk about social identities being expansive, you mean more than just “allow us to do more things.” You mean that we recognize that we have more capabilities, or aspects to ourselves.

Jamie Aroosi: Exactly. Those are two sides of the same coin. If you give people more autonomy and freedom in social life, that generally reflects a more expansive view of who we are. Identity and action are correlated for Hegel. The way we see ourselves circumscribes our range of action, just as our range of action reflects how we see ourselves.

Isaac Fried: Is it fair to say that if you allow a broader range of action, you not only accept the existence of more aspects of the self, but you also grant them legitimacy? For example, a repressive, Christian society might believe that man is inherently sinful. Sin is then a human characteristic, but not one that society is willing to translate into permitted action. Or take a traditional valuation of promiscuity. It would acknowledge that man is inclined to be promiscuous, but won’t translate that into something positive.

Jamie Aroosi: I think that there’s a couple of things happening in your question, and that we should be careful to distinguish between them. In the first case, there’s the issue of human identity, which pertains to how we see ourselves in the broadest possible sense. At some level, the religiously repressive individual and the sexually liberal individual might actually have a similar understanding of who we are, insofar as they both recognize sexuality as constitutive of human identity. And sometimes, you even find that the proponents of repression, such as sexual repression, have a more expansive understanding of that which they’re attempting to repress. In other words, you can’t repress that which you don’t acknowledge as existing in the first place. But this point aside, the underlying question of human identity pertains to the expansiveness by which we recognize what it means to be human. That is, it pertains to that which we include in our definition of human beings, regardless of how we judge those qualities.

But then the second, and primary, part of your question had to do with morality. Rather than the question of who we are, you’re asking about the question of what we should permit. And these questions are often answered within the context of that underlying question of human identity. As you pointed out, we might accept that human beings have a sexual aspect to their nature, but we might disagree about what should follow from that. Should we repress our sexual instincts or act on them? And if so, to what degree and in what way? But I think that generally these latter types of questions are less interesting to Hegel and Kierkegaard, because in some ways they come off as petty moralisms, and both Hegel and Kierkegaard have a more expansive understanding of morality that related to the underlying question of philosophical anthropology.

For instance, while Hegel saw our struggle for truer recognition as the driving force propelling history, it was less against the repression that acknowledges but attempts to control an aspect of our personality, and more a matter of the very frameworks through which we see ourselves. So, we might adopt a social identity that fails to account for human sexuality, thereby failing to give it expression, but this is different from a social identity that recognizes the diversity of human sexuality, and that then attempts to repress part of it.

But this aside, it seems like you’re alluding to the idea that freedom is a state of license in which we each get to do whatever we please, and which then necessitates a certain level of repression, lest we all kill one another. But I think that however common this idea is, it actually reflects an impoverished understanding of what freedom and morality are. Freedom isn’t merely an absence of external (or internal) obstacles, but as I tried to allude to earlier, for both Hegel and Kierkegaard, freedom is actually a substantive and constitutive element of the self. In other words, to be free isn’t a matter of eliminating all obstacles to action, but it instead entails the appropriation of the quality of freedom that we each hold within us. And because it’s substantive, because to be free means to be something very specific, freedom actually entails acting in a way that is consistent with our freedom.

Granted, some might argue that our actual freedom nonetheless remains a sort of unbridled willfulness, but this isn’t what freedom is for either Hegel or Kierkegaard. And this is also where theories of recognition can help, because they would generally argue that the process by which we recognize freedom in ourselves also entails the reciprocal recognition of freedom in others too, so that freedom and mutual respect are one and the same. It is therefore here, rather than in some particularist attempt to control our behaviour, that true morality resides.

Isaac Fried: How does one overcome instinctual life without repressing it?

Jamie Aroosi: I think the answer, and this isn’t only Hegel’s answer but dates back to Plato, is that having our will governed by our instincts is a form of servitude itself. And, for Hegel, I think the story is similar, in that the essential narrative is about freeing the will, and not explicitly about freeing the instincts to express themselves. That said, while recognition is not about recognition for sexual identity per se, it does require recognition of the whole person, which means accepting sexuality as part of who we are. For instance, given that sexuality is clearly a part of human life, if we failed to afford this part of ourselves a proper role, we find ourselves in the territory of psychoanalysis, because this is going to have all types of unhealthy consequences. So, the instincts do clearly have to play a role in our lives, but they also have to be sublated, so that we’re not being governed by them.