Recognition

Two people meet and each wants to be acknowledged by the other as a person rather than a thing. That sounds like a description of good manners. Hegel’s claim is that it is the condition for being a self at all, and once you accept that, a surprising amount follows about labour, capitalism, and what happens when a stranger looks at you.

This is the concept PHL217 runs on. The course description says so: it explores continental traditions “primarily through the concept of recognition,” across Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Sartre, Beauvoir and Fanon, considering recognition’s ties to various goods and “the problems posed by misrecognition.”

So when a paper sets two of these thinkers against each other, recognition is usually the axis it turns on. What follows is each position stated at the altitude where they can be compared, then the places they actually conflict.

1. Hegel: recognition has to be mutual

Two self-consciousnesses meet. Each needs the other to acknowledge it as a self-consciousness, because a self-consciousness that nobody recognizes has no way to be certain it is one. Recognition is not a reward for being a self. It is how you become one.

They fight. Each stakes its life, because being willing to die for recognition is what proves you are more than a living body. One backs down, preferring life to recognition, and becomes the bondsman. The other becomes the lord.

The lord now has what he fought for. He is recognized.

And the arrangement fails, for a reason internal to it. The lord is recognized by someone he has reduced to a thing, and recognition from a thing is worth nothing. He needed acknowledgement from an equal, and he has made his acknowledger unequal, which destroys exactly what he was trying to obtain.

The bondsman meanwhile does the work. And through work he gets something the lord does not: in shaping the object he sees his own activity standing there in front of him in durable form. He acquires a self through labour, having failed to acquire one through combat.

Two things carry forward. Recognition must be mutual or it is void, and work is where a self gets externalized and becomes visible to itself.

2. Marx: recognition happens in labour, and the wage relation breaks it

Marx takes the second point and asks what happens when the work is done under capitalism.

If labour is where you externalize yourself and see yourself in what you have made, then labour under a wage does the opposite. The product belongs to someone else and confronts you as an alien thing. The activity is not yours, since it is directed by another and undertaken only for the wage. You are estranged from the object, from the activity, from your own species-being, and from other people.

Recognition moves from combat into production. Where Hegel had two people staring at each other, Marx has a relation mediated by work and by things, and the alienation of labour is a failure of recognition occurring at the point where a self was supposed to get made.

The failure is still legible as a failure. A worker under a wage can experience the relation as one of domination, and the person doing the dominating is identifiable.

3. Lukács: the relation stops looking like a relation

Lukács extends Marx and makes the situation worse in a specific way.

Reification is his term: “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”

The key clause is the last one. Under a fully developed commodity system, what confronts you is not a boss but a wage, a price, a market, a set of laws that behave like natural laws. Every one of those is made of relations between people, and the form conceals that completely.

He is explicit that this needs the commodity to be universal rather than occasional: the commodity is understood in its undistorted essence “when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole,” and the difference from earlier societies is one of quality rather than quantity. He grants that pre-capitalist exploitation was often more brutal. His point is that in a slave society the domination is visible as domination, and under capitalism it appears as impersonal law.

The consequence for the subject is the contemplative stance: as work is rationalized, activity becomes “less and less active and more and more contemplative.” You can learn the laws, you can use them to your advantage, and you cannot “modify the process by your own activity.”

So the difference from Marx is not degree, it is visibility. Marx describes a broken relation. Lukács describes a broken relation that has stopped presenting itself as a relation, which means there is nothing there for you to identify as needing repair.

And he adds that seeing through it does not fix it. Atomization is “only the reflex in consciousness” of laws that genuinely have been extended over all of life, so “if this atomization is only an illusion it is a necessary one.”

4. Sartre: recognition happens without consent, and it is a threat

Sartre inverts the value of the whole thing.

You are at a keyhole, absorbed. Footsteps in the hall. Someone is watching you. In that instant you become an object: a person crouching at a keyhole, with a nature you did not give yourself and cannot see from inside.

His name for the experience is shame, and his definition is the one to quote: shame is recognition. “I recognize that I am as the Other sees me.”

Three features distinguish this from Hegel’s account.

1. No mutuality is required. The Other’s look works on me whether or not I look back, whether or not I acknowledge him, whether or not I consent. Hegel’s structure needs both parties. Sartre’s needs only one.
2. It is immediate rather than achieved. There is no struggle, no process, no arrangement to be arrived at. It happens the moment someone sees you.
3. It is a loss rather than a gain. Hegel’s subject wants recognition and fails to get it properly. Sartre’s subject receives it constantly and experiences it as theft: the Other confers an outside on me and takes a portion of the world with him, arranged around a centre I cannot occupy.

The one-sentence contrast to have ready: Hegel’s problem is that recognition fails when it is one-sided; Sartre’s problem is that recognition succeeds whether or not I consent to it.

5. Where Lukács and Sartre actually conflict

These are the two thinkers on Paper 2, so this is the comparison most likely to matter.

They agree on a surprising amount. Both think something has gone wrong with how people appear to each other. Both think the wrongness is structural rather than a matter of individual bad behaviour. Both use a vocabulary of objectification: things that should be free are appearing as things.

The disagreement is about where the problem is located and what would count as fixing it.

On what the Other is. For Sartre the Other is a consciousness, immediately and unavoidably present, whose look objectifies me. For Lukács the Other under capitalism is precisely what does not show up. What shows up is a price. One says the Other is unbearably present; the other says the Other has been made invisible.

On whether the condition is historical. Lukács’s reification is a product of a specific mode of production at a specific stage, and it could in principle end. Sartre’s Look is a permanent feature of there being more than one consciousness. No change in economic arrangement removes the fact that another person can see you. One is a historical condition, the other is ontological.

On where the remedy lies, if anywhere. Lukács’s answer is collective and political: the proletariat is the position from which the totality becomes visible, because it is the one place where the object of knowledge is also the subject. Sartre’s freedom is exercised individually, and the Look is not a thing to be overcome. One points at class consciousness, the other at individual responsibility under conditions that will not change.

On the diagnosis of alienation. For Lukács I am alienated because I have been absorbed into a system that runs by laws I cannot touch, and I have become contemplative in the face of it. For Sartre I am always free, including inside any system, and the temptation is to pretend otherwise. Sartre’s bad faith is a candidate description of exactly the stance Lukács calls contemplative — and where Lukács says the structure produces it, Sartre would say the person is choosing it and calling it necessity.

That last one is the sharpest point of contact and the most useful in an argument paragraph. A Sartrean reading of the reified worker says: the contemplative stance is bad faith, an affirmation of facticity where transcendence was called for, and the worker who says the system leaves him no choice is fleeing his own freedom. A Lukácsian reply says: calling that a free choice is possible only if you ignore that the atomization is a necessary illusion, produced by real laws genuinely extended over all of life, and Sartre has mistaken a structural condition for a personal failing.

Notice that each accuses the other of the same thing, at different levels: Sartre says Lukács lets people off, and Lukács says Sartre blames them for what the system does.

6. Positions in one line each

For the summary paragraphs, since the paper asks for one per thinker.

The Beauvoir and Fanon rows are sketched from the syllabus and the standard reading of those texts. Both are marked here as unverified against lecture, since neither has been taught yet.

7. Building a comparison under time pressure

A method, for when the passage sets two thinkers against each other and you have to write.

Find which of the four questions the passage turns on. Almost every disagreement between these thinkers lands on one of: what the Other is, whether the condition is historical or permanent, where a remedy would come from, and whether the subject is responsible for their own position in it.

State each thinker’s answer to that one question, rather than summarizing everything they think. A paragraph that says what Lukács holds about reification in general is weaker than one that says what he holds about the specific point at issue.

Then find the strongest version of each side. The argument paragraph asks you to take a side, and a side taken against a weak opponent is worth less. If you argue for Sartre, the Lukácsian objection you have to answer is the necessary-illusion line, because it is the one that says your position is naive. If you argue for Lukács, the Sartrean objection is that determinism about consciousness is itself a form of bad faith.

Say what would change your mind. Not required, and it demonstrates that the position is held for reasons.

Vocabulary to deploy

• Recognition — acknowledgement by another consciousness as a consciousness. For Hegel the condition of self-consciousness; for Sartre the imposition of an outside.
• Mutuality — Hegel’s requirement, and the thing whose absence makes lordship self-defeating.
• Misrecognition — the course’s own term for the failure cases, named in the course description.
• Alienation — Marx: estrangement from product, activity, species-being, and others, occurring in labour.
• Reification — Lukács: “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing” and acquires “phantom objectivity.”
• Contemplative stance — activity becoming “less and less active and more and more contemplative”; you can know the laws and cannot modify the process.
• Necessary illusion — atomization is “only the reflex in consciousness” of real laws, so seeing through it does not dissolve it.
• The Look — Sartre: the Other’s gaze confers a nature without consent. Shame is recognition.
• Being-for-others — the mode of being I have for another consciousness: genuinely mine, not constituted by me, not accessible to me.
• The ontological against the historical — Sartre’s Look is a permanent feature of plural consciousness; Lukács’s reification belongs to a specific mode of production.