From Hegel to Marx and Back – Two Sketches of a Normative Ontology of the Human Life-Form

Heikki IkäheimoUNSW Australia, Sydneyh.ikaheimo@unsw.edu.au

One of the strands of the most recent debates on Marx concerns his relationship, and possible philosophical debt, to Hegel, and the recently intensively discussed Hegelian theme of recognition is one of the angles from which Marx has been interpreted.1 My aims in this paper are twofold. First, I wish to lay out what I think are the main elements of Hegel’s concept of recognition, and spell out how it relates to another, even more fundamental concept in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, namely the concept of ‘concrete freedom’. Secondly, I aim to provide a clear picture of how exactly the concept, or concepts of recognition, as well as the Hegelian concept of concrete freedom figure in what is probably the most prominent text for a reading of Marx from this point of view, namely the Comments on James Mill written in Paris in 1844 (Comments from here on). Here I wish to clarify what exactly of Hegel’s conception is present and what remains absent in Marx’s Comments. Eventually, my aim is not merely scholarly, but also systematic since I believe an idea that both the old Hegel and the young Marx shared, namely that of a normative ontology of the human life-form—in which the concepts of recognition and concrete freedom are central—is something worth a serious philosophical scrutiny and perhaps even rehabilitation. In this

1 See also Brudney, Chitty, Quante, Schmidt am Busch et al. …

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presentation however, rather than trying to defend or develop this idea further, I will concentrate merely on reconstructing the two articulations of it by Hegel and Marx.

1. The Hegelian foundationsThe starting point for uncovering the Hegelian background of Marx’s Comments is Hegel’s idea of “spirit” (Geist) and its “essence” (Wesen). Part of what Marx provides in his text is a reformulation of Hegel’s normative essentialism on spirit in apparently more naturalist terms that should avoid what Marx sees as the rejectable metaphysical ballast of Hegel’s thought. The best short translation for what the term ‘spirit’ stands for in Hegel is, I believe, ‘the human life-form’, or to use a more exact expression, ‘the life-form of human persons’.2

In the introduction to Philosophy of Spirit Hegel talks of spirit as the “essence of man/the human” (Mensch), and “freedom” as the “essence of spirit”.3 In both cases Hegel means ‘essence’ in the normative Aristotelian sense in which something can realize its essence to different degrees, and the more it realizes it the better and “truer” it is. A good friend (an example Hegel uses elsewhere) is a “true” friend in the sense of realizing the essence or “concept” of friendship, or acting in ways that are consistent with whatever it is that being a friend essentially 2 My talk of normative essentialism, spirit and personhood is strongly influenced by Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer on the one hand, and by Michael Quante on the other hand. Though my conceptualization of recognition differs from that of Axel Honneth, and though I pursue a universalist anthropological line of argument on recognition that Honneth has distanced himself from (see Ikäheimo 2014, chapter 6), my debt to Honneth’s work on recognition should be clear.3 See ENZ3, §382, EW, 3-5, and Ikäheimo 2014, chapter 4.1.

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consists of. In saying that “spirit” has an essence Hegel is of course saying something much more ambitious than this everyday normative essentialism to which we all are at least implicitly committed; what he is saying is that all of the essential structures or relations distinctive of the spiritual realm, in contrast to the merely natural realm, have, when looked at from a high enough level of abstraction, the same essence. By saying that this essence of all distinctively spiritual structures or relations is freedom, Hegel is saying that for these phenomena to realize their essence is for them to realize or instantiate freedom. By saying the essence of man/the human is spirit, Hegel is simply saying that it is these phenomena, structures and relations that distinguish humans as not-merely-natural beings from ‘mere animals’. Translated in contemporary philosophical terms, Hegel is speaking of personhood, and saying that humans are distinguished from the rest of what there is by being—potentially or actually—persons. Being ‘spiritual’, or in other words being persons, is a potentiality in humans that they can actualize to various degrees, and the degree that they actualize or realize spirituality or personhood is essentially the degree of their freedom.

But what exactly does Hegel mean by ‘freedom’ here? He makes clear that he is not talking about freedom in the “abstract” sense of freedom from determination, but rather in the “concrete” sense of freedom in relation to what necessarily determines one.4 The idea of freedom from determination by something whose determination is essential to what one is is simply nonsense, and thus the 4 EW, 14.

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only real freedom with regard to such essential determinants—such as internal and external nature, social institutions, and other humans—is freedom ‘in relation to’ or ‘with regard to’ them.5

Hegel conceives of the structure of concrete freedom with the concept of “absolute negativity”, “negation of negation”6 or “double negation”7, where the first ‘negation’ means differentiation or distinction from something that determines one as one’s opposite, and the second negation the overcoming of its alienness or hostility to one. Another formula for concrete freedom is “unity of unity and difference”,8 and metaphorically Hegel characterizes it as “being with oneself in otherness”, and more exactly as “being conscious of oneself in otherness”.9 In consciousness objects are distinguished from, and determine the subject, and overcoming the alienness or hostility of the objects is the coming about of concrete freedom with regard to them, or “consciousness of oneself” in them.

Hegel uses the term ‘recognition’ (Anerkennung) in a philosophical sense about relations that humans have to each other on the one hand, and to social institutions on the other hand. Let us call the first sense of recognition (borrowing Ludwig Siep) the ‘horizontal’ sense or direction 5 If something does not determine one essentially or necessarily, and if its quality of determination is harmful, then a possible solution is liberation from it or in other words “abstract freedom” from it.6 E3, §382.7 Hegel 2010, 531.8 The second order unity (or Identität) referred by the first term in this formulation is not simply co-existence but a relation that determines both the exact nature of the first order unity and of the difference.9 On the difference between the two latter formulations, see Ikäheimo 2011. In short: “consciousness” or intentionality is essential to the way in which humans can be concretely free to a much greater degree than mere animals.

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of recognition and the second the ‘vertical’ sense or direction. The most famous passage in Hegel’s ouvre where he discusses recognition, or uses the term in a systematical sense, is the chapter ‘Self-consciousness’ in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. But the true role and full significance of recognition is only revealed in Hegel’s mature Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in which he similarly discusses recognition in a chapter titled ‘Self-consciousness’, only this time not constrained by the aim and method of an introduction to philosophy but simply as part of a philosophy of the human person. To clarify what ‘recognition’ means in this text, we need to make the following conceptual distinctions, in addition to the just mentioned distinction between the horizontal and vertical senses or directions of recognition,.

(A) First, as to horizontal recognition between persons, we need to distinguish between ‘institutionally mediated’ and ‘purely intersubjective’ senses of recognition.10 A natural way to read the recognition-relationship between the illustrative figures of the master and bondsman that Hegel uses in the Self-consciousness-chapter is to read it in the purely intersubjective register, which means, not mediated by social institutions. After all, Hegel is describing, at least at the beginning of the story, extremely primitive forms of intersubjectivity between desire-driven animals and the development of their intentionalities through a collision between them.11 What he is basically discussing is the birth of human sociality or social forms, and hence presupposing social institutions as 10 For a closer reading of Hegel’s text from the point of view of these and a few other central distinctions, see Ikäheimo 2014, chapter 4.11 See E3, §429-431.

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given that would mediate the relation seems out of the question. Nevertheless, some interpreters have in fact read the story also in the institutional register,12 and of course talking of masters and bondsmen or slaves does suggest such a reading, as slavery in the real world is an institution.13 To read the recognition-relation of the master and slave or bondsman as an institutionally mediated one means reading the master and slave as recognizing each other as bearers of institutionally defined positions or roles, and thus as bearers of ‘deontic powers’ (to borrow John Searle) of which the positions of a master and a slave thought so consist of. It seems to me that Hegel was content to leave room for both readings (however awkward as this may be in terms of the architectonic of the Philosophy of Spirit as a whole).

(b) Secondly, we need to be more exact on what exactly recognition in the purely intersubjective, i.e. not-institutionally mediated sense is in the text. Here we need to distinguish between two senses, or if you want two dimensions of recognition, and somewhat less explicitly a third one. The first dimension is a ‘deontological’ one of the bondsman recognizing the master as his master in the sense of authority on the rules or norms of co-existence and thus of the bondsman’s actions.14 On the other hand, the simple fact that to be put in practice any rule needs to be

12 See Honneth xxxx, and Redding xxxx.13 There are of course many different kinds of slavery, or slavery-like institutions or institutionalized norm-systems, such as the indenture of America in … which was basically temporally limited contractual slavery … Hegel’s discussion is intentionally abstract enough to leave room for a variety of such details. Also, his way of using sometimes ‘slave’ (Sklav), sometimes ‘bondsman’ (Knecht) serves the same purpose of avoiding misplaced concreteness.14 E3, §435.

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applied in the concrete case and circumstance at hand, and that this requires interpretation, means that also the slave in fact has some minimal ‘technical’ authority in the relationship. In executing the master’s commands the slave determines their exact content in the given case. And as Hegel puts it, the master must “command reasonably”15 to a degree that enables executing his commands in reality, and though Hegel does not say this explicitly, part of what this clearly means is that the master must recognize the slave as having technical authority to interpret them and thus give them exact content.

The second dimension of purely intersubjective recognition operative in Hegel’s text is an ‘axiological’ one of both the bondsman and the master caring for the other’s well-being. As Hegel writes, the master must “keep the bondsman alive”, and thus be at least minimally concerned for his life and well-being, for otherwise he has no slave and is no master.16 On the other hand, the whole point of slavery is of course that the slave or bondsman provides through his work for the master’s needs. Would the slave fail to do so, he would suffer himself, and thus he has very good reason to be concerned for the master’s well-being.

The third dimension of recognition operative in the story is, though in a rational reconstruction fairly obvious, somewhat less explicit in the text. This is the ‘contributive’ dimension of the master valuing the slave or bondsman as contributing to his ends or well-being. Using something as means to an end that one values of course implies valuing the means, in this case the slave or bondsman, 15 GK, 343: “Whoever wants to command must do so reasonably, for only he who commands reasonably will be obeyed.”16 E3, §434.

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instrumentally. And in fact the presence of the second dimension of purely intersubjective recognition, concern for the other’s well-being, follows logically from the presence of this third dimension: the master is only concerned for the slave’s well-being insofar as he regards the slave as instrumentally valuable for his own well-being.

(C) This takes us to the next distinction, one which is essential for understanding exactly how relations of recognition realize or actualize concrete freedom and thus the human essence according to Hegel. This is the distinction between ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ forms or modes of purely intersubjective recognition, and it applies on all of the three dimensions just presented.

On the deontological dimension there is, on the one hand, the conditional mode of taking the other as an authority on one out of prudential reasons, that is, in so far as this is necessary for survival (as in the slave’s case whom the master can kill at will), or insofar as this is otherwise useful for one (as in the master’s case who wants to see his commands executed skilfully by the slave). On the other hand, there is the unconditional mode of taking someone as having authority on one without such conditioning through self-interest, which is what we might call ‘respect’.

In the axiological dimension the distinction is between, on the one hand, conditional or instrumental concern for the other’s well-being that both the master and the slave have for each other, and, on the other hand, the unconditional or intrinsic mode in which both care about their own lives and well-being, or in other words ‘love’ (and thus in the self-directed case ‘self-love’).

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Finally, on the contributive dimension there is an analogical distinction between the master’s instrumental valuing of the slave as a contributor to his ends or well-being, and a non-instrumental or non-instrumentalizing mode of valuing someone as a contributor. The latter is what we call ‘gratitude’.17

How is all of this then related to the concept of concrete freedom which is the more general conceptual background of Hegel’s thinking on recognition? Hegel describes in the final sub-chapter of ‘Self-consciousness’, titled ‘General self-consciousness’ (Allgemeine Selbstbewusstsein), the structure of fulfilled mutual recognition as a structure in which each subject knows “one’s self in the other”, or, which means here the same, in which each subject is “absolutely independent”, and yet “does not differentiate itself from the other”.18 What he is talking about is concrete freedom as the unity of difference and unity of persons, or mutual consciousness of oneself in the independent other person or persons. Hegel gives scant detail on how exactly this relates to recognition in general, or to the directions, dimensions and modes of recognition at work in his text in particular. He also says nothing explicit about vertical recognition in ‘General self-consciousness’, though it clearly must be seen as implicitly present there since what he is describing is the recognitive

17 This distinction is hinted at in the following passage from Hegel’s lectures: “The instrument [i.e. the slave or servant] also serves the master willingly however, being implicitly free self-consciousness, and the servant's will therefore has to be made favourably inclined toward the master, who has to care for him as a living being, take care of him as an implicitly free will. By this means, the servant is brought into the community of providing, so that he also has a purpose, counts, is to be honoured, is a member of the family.” (GK, 343)18 #436.

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basic structure of concretely free social life which for him of involves institutions (the topic of his Philosophy of Objective Spirit), and thus vertical relations between individuals and institutions.19 The normative or evaluative principle of concrete freedom clearly applies both in horizontal and vertical relations, both of which can realize concrete freedom to various degrees.

Importantly, realizations of concrete freedom can be less than perfect in two opposite ways, corresponding to the two moments of concrete freedom, unity and difference. This is to say that there can be either not enough difference or independence, or alternatively not enough unity between the relata. Hegel’s ‘master’ exemplifies an almost complete lack of independence of norms from the subject, or in other words a unity without appropriate difference (which is therefore also an inappropriate unity): the norms governing the master-bondsman-relationship are almost completely dependent on the master (except for the bondsman’s ‘technical’ authority to interpret them) and to the extent that they are, the master is actually not a norm-governed being. The bondsman on the contrary exemplifies a radical alienness or hostility of the norms whereby one’s life is governed or determined, or in other words inappropriate difference without appropriate unity (which is therefore also an inappropriate difference). Both of these figures exemplify thus deficiencies of concrete freedom in relation to norms and thus deficient realizations of spirituality or personhood, and the opposite qualities of their respective deficiencies are mutually complementary.19 Ref. …

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What does concrete freedom in the vertical relation to social norms and institutions (consisting of social norms)20 then consist of? In answering this question it is important to see the connection of the vertical direction of recognition to the horizontal. Concrete freedom in vertical relations consist, first, of being governed by norms that one takes to have independence from oneself, and this implies recognizing other persons horizontally as having authority on the norms and thus on oneself. This is the moment of difference, or of being determined by something other to oneself, namely (vertically) norms or institutions, and (horizontally) other persons. Secondly, concrete freedom in vertical relations involves finding the norms to be in correspondence with what one finds rational, and/or conducive to one’s well-being, and/or embodying also one’s own authority. This, again, is internally connected to horizontal relations to the others who have or share authority on the norms, in the sense of confidence that they have concern also for one’s life or well-being and/or that they recognize one as sharing authority with them. This is the moment of unity, or of being conscious of oneself in the otherness that determines one, which is to say (vertically) in the norms and institutions, and (horizontally) in the other persons as co-authorities of those norms and institutions.

20 Hegel hints at the vertical direction in his discussion of the tyrant Pisistratus (xx) as standing ‘above’ and thus vertically related to the Athenians who we related to each other horizontally. I am talking of institutions here as constellations of social norms which determine institutional roles consisting of deontic powers (rights, duties etc.) and which hence only exist insofar as there are persons in these roles. Since even language and thus language-based thinking are activities governed by social norms, it should be clear that the relationship of persons to social norms and institutions is not external.

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But note now something important. Based on what I have said so far, concrete freedom in social life is still compatible with merely conditional recognition between individuals in the sense of mutual attribution of authority merely out of fear or prudential considerations, with mutual merely instrumental or prudential concern for the well-being of others, and with mutual merely instrumental valuing of the other as useful for oneself, or in other words mutual ‘instrumentalization’. Such a picture of social life and acceptance or recognition of social norms and institutions, based solely on mutual fear, mutual self-interest and mutual instrumentalization seems like an ugly (Hobbesian) caricature of the ‘ethical’ unity or Sittlichkeit whose structure Hegel is describing in ‘General self-consciousness’, one which is supposed to be the fulfilment of concrete freedom and thus the normative essence of human being. Surely this cannot be what Hegel meant, or not at least all of it. (Note that ‘symmetry’ of recognition does not solve this problem.) We can now see why it is so important to distinguish between the conditional and the unconditional modes of purely intersubjective horizontal recognition. It is purely intersubjective recognition in the unconditional mode—respect, love and gratitude21—that actualize(s) concrete freedom in horizontal relations to the fullest extent.

In knowing that one is the object of any of the unconditional attitudes of recognition one experiences

21 Hegel explicitly mentions in ‘General Self-consciousness’ only “love” of these. But he does also mention “friendship” which typically contains respect and gratitude as well. See E3, §436: “This form of consciousness constitutes not only the substance of all the essential spirituality of the family, the native country, the state, but also of all virtues, - of love, friendship, valour, honour, fame.”

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oneself as related to independent other subjects whose intentionality however “affirms”22 one so that one can be “fully” “conscious of oneself”23 in them and thus reconciled with them. Why is it the unconditional attitudes that realize or actualize concrete freedom and thus ‘spirit’ “fully”, or to the fullest extent, and in what ways does it make sense to say that this amounts to actualization of personhood, as I have suggested? The reason is that unlike conditional attitudes of recognition, the unconditional attitudes mirror the attitudes of self-recognition that full-fledged psychological persons have towards themselves: it is constitutive of flourishing or full-fledged psychological personhood to be concerned of one’s own well-being not merely instrumentally but intrinsically, to take one’s judgments and will to have an unconditional claim to authoritativeness, and to conceive of oneself, not as a mere instrument, but a free contributor to shared life with others. In knowing that one is the object of such attitudes of unconditional recognition by another subject one can experience oneself as “fully” “affirmed” by his intentionality, and in this sense be “fully” “conscious of oneself” in an independent other. Formulated more generally, unconditional attitudes of recognition maximally realize the specifically human capacity for collective autonomy, including the norm-governed activities of linguistic discourse and language-based thinking, and they enable humans maximally to grasp each other as fully independent other persons that are irreducible to one’s

22 E3, §436: “Universal self-consciousness is the affirmative knowing [affirmative Wissen] of one's self in the other self.”23 §436: “master who confronted the bondsman was not yet fully free, for he was not fully conscious of himself in the other”.

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own practical perspective, and thus themselves in a motivationally effective way as singular persons among many, and yet so that they experience themselves and the others as united in reason, interests and motivation. One can therefore call the unconditional purely intersubjective attitudes of recognition also “fully personifying” attitudes in that they maximally realize personhood, or in Hegel’s terminology “(subjective) spirit”.

It is also such fully free ethical “unity of unity and difference” in horizontal relations, defined by full mutual personification that forms the intersubjective foundation of a freely and rationally authorized institutional order that maximally reflects the authority, interests and well-being of those whose life it governs. In other words, there is a close connection between concrete freedom in horizontal relations on the one hand, and concrete freedom in vertical relations to the social institutions or the society as a whole on the other hand. Knowing that my fellow members of society do not accept the institutional structures of our shared life merely out of fear for others (including me), or otherwise for merely prudential reasons (perhaps because they believe the institutions are a useful tool for exploiting others), but that they obey them also, at least to some degree, out of genuine respect for others (including me) and/or genuine non-instrumental concern for the well-being of others and/or grateful appreciation for their contributions, is essential for my capacity to have trust and to feel at home in the shared social world, and thus to be concretely free in it.

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2. Recognition and concrete freedom in Marx’s Comments on James MillIn his critical discussion of Hegel in (the third manuscript of the) Paris Manuscripts Marx shows no acknowledgement of these themes in Hegel, yet they are present (as an ‘unconscious Hegelianism’, partly received through Feuerbach who himself was astonishingly unconscious of what he got from Hegel) in the Comments on James Mill. In what follows, I will explicate which of the senses of recognition distinguished above are present in Marx’s discussion of capitalism and communism in the Comments, and say a few words on how recognition-relations distinctive of communism, as Marx conceives of them, relate to the concept of concrete freedom.

Recognition in capitalismLet us first take a look at how, or in which senses recognition is present in the alienated conditions of capitalism according to Marx in the Comment. At least five interrelated senses can be discerned.

(1) First of all, in capitalism individuals relate to each other, and recognize each other as “property-owners”,24 which is to say bearers of property and thus the right to property—or in other words as “persons”.25 As I have already used the term ‘personhood’ in discussing Hegel, and done so in senses of the term other than Marx’s, this requires some clarification. In short, we need to distinguish between three different senses of ‘personhood’— the institutional, the psychological, and the intersubjective.26 24 ÖpM, 196; CW3, 217.25 ÖpM, 201; CW3, 221.26 See Ikäheimo 2014, chapters 2 and 7.

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Marx uses the term in what I call the institutional sense in which to be a person is to be a bearer of some basic rights and other deontic powers in an institutional system, paradigmatically the right to life and property. (‘Legal personhood’ is the more often used term for this.) Recognition between individuals as property-owners—the capitalist owning the means of production, the worker only his own labour force—is, following the distinctions that I made in the previous section, institutionally mediated recognition of the other as a bearer of rights and other institutionally defined deontic powers defining of personhood in this institutional sense. The institutional sense in which Marx exclusively speaks of personhood in the Comments, and which is also what Hegel means by “personhood” in the section ‘Abstract Right’ of his Philosophy of Right, is not to be confused with personhood in the psychological sense which consists of psychological capacities distinguishing human persons from simpler animals, and which on Hegel’s account is genetically and constitutively dependent on intersubjective recognition. It is also not to be confused with personhood in the intersubjective sense which consists of the status or significances in light of which individuals see each other when they have attitudes of (unconditional) purely intersubjective recognition towards each other.

(2) The second, closely related, sense of recognition present in Marx’s description of capitalism is what he calls “economic recognition”:27 it is recognition of the other as a contract-partner in giving and taking money as credit, and in particular as having the capacity to pay back (which in 27 ÖPM, 450; CW3, 215-6: ”economic appreciation...” in the translation.

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capitalism is in Marx’s view perversely elevated into a moral virtue).28

(3) Though Marx does not discuss this explicitly, it is clear that both of the just mentioned forms of horizontal, institutionally mediated recognition also imply vertical (upwards) recognition, by the individuals, of the institutional system that upholds the rights, duties and other deontic powers at stake, or in other words of the state. (More metaphorically speaking the ‘downwards’ ‘recognition’ of individuals as persons in this sense by the state is of course also involved here.)

(4) Fourthly, the institutional order of private ownership and contractual relations is accompanied in capitalism by the conditional mode of the axiological dimension of the purely intersubjective horizontal recognition, or in other words by instrumental concern for the well-being of others. For the worker to be able to satisfy his own needs which are an unconditional concern for him, he needs to offer the capitalist something the capitalist wants or needs, which is to say his own labour force. The capitalist, on his part, is concerned of delivering something to the market that consumers need for satisfying their needs. Each is thus unconditionally or intrinsically concerned for his or her own needs and well-being, and conditionally or instrumentally concerned for the needs of other members of the society, since responding to them is instrumental for satisfying those of oneself. As Marx puts it, “what gives your need of my article it’s value, worth and effect for me is solely your object, the equivalent of my

28 Ref…

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object.”29 In other words, your needs have an “effect” on me, or ‘move’ me only insofar as I can by utilizing them (by satisfying them with my work or “object”, or by paying a price for your “object” that you do not want to or cannot refuse) satisfy my own needs.

(5) Fifthly and finally, the just mentioned instrumental concern for the satisfaction of the needs or well-being of others is clearly a consequence of the fact that individuals value each other as useful or necessary for their own life or well-being, just as Hegel’s master values the slave. Hence, also the instrumental mode of the contributive dimension of purely intersubjective conditional recognition is a necessary element of human relations in capitalism.

Recognition in communismMarx’s description of the non-alienated conditions of communism which realize the “species-essence” (Gattungswesen) of humanity is extremely short and sketchy, but he says enough for us to be able to reconstruct the recognitive basic elements. According to Marx, human relations in communism are characterized by two, and only two, forms of recognition.

(1) Firstly, in contrast to conditions of ownership, production and consumption organized in capitalist terms where individuals as workers, capitalists and consumers only (afford to) care about each other’s well-being instrumentally and thus conditionally, in communism human life is reproduced by work done in order to satisfy the needs of others, and motivated, at least in part, by non-

29 ÖpM, 205; CW3, 226.

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instrumental or unconditional concern for their well-being.30 What is at stake is hence the unconditional mode of the axiological dimension of purely intersubjective recognition, or in other words love.

(2) Secondly, working freely and, at least partly, out of altruistic motives to satisfy the needs of others, or in other words contributing to their well-being freely and at least partly motivated by love triggers in the beneficiaries a moral response, an attitude of a particular kind that Marx somewhat misleadingly calls in the last page of the manuscript “love”.31 Marx’s conceptual mistake is easy to correct by noting that love, as I have suggested, is in his picture actually the motive for producing, and thus reproducing human life, and that the response to free and loving contributions is, more exactly, gratitude.

A general way in which Marx refers to the difference between recognition in capitalism and recognition in communism is by saying that whereas in capitalism humans recognize each other as “persons”, in communism they recognize each other as “humans”. 32 What does this mean? It is closely related to Marx’s talk of “mediation” (Vermittlung), and more exactly of two ‘bad’ forms of mediation in human relations characteristic of capitalism, and one ‘good’ form characteristic of communism. The bad forms of mediations are, firstly, mediation by the “alien mediator” of money33 and more generally the market as an institution with its rules or norms of exchange between

30 CW3, 228 (etsi kohtia muualta). Unconditional concern for others as motive is not the only important subjective feature of non-alienated work. Realizing the workers’ individual capacities is another: “the specific nature of my individuality […] would be affirmed in my labour […]” (idem).31 ÖpM, 207; CW3 228: “I […] would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love.”32 Idem. See also CW3, 213: “[…]not human relationship[…]”; “Since men engaged in exchange do not relate to each other as men […]”. The German word is “Mensch”, which the English translators translate either as “human” or “man”, depending on the context.33 CW3, 212.

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individuals as “persons”.34 The second bad form of mediation is mediation by self-interest. Marx expresses the latter mediation by talking of the “object” or in other words of the property or “products” of the other as my primary aim mediating or conditioning my concern for the other’s need for my property or products. 35

The good form of mediation characteristic of communism is one in which where “man himself’ – and more exactly “as man”36 – is “the mediator of man”?37 First of all, he means by it the absence of the two bad forms of mediation through money and more generally norms and institutions on the one hand, and through self-interest on the other hand. But secondly, and more positively, he is operating with the idea found already in Hegel (but one which Marx probably got from Feuerbach, who in his part probably got it from Hegel, though he never acknowledging the source38), namely the idea of consciousness or knowledge of oneself in the other. On the one hand, as Marx puts it, an individual as producer “knows” himself “confirmed (bestätigt) in

34 "To the economist, production, consumption and, as the mediator of both, exchange or distribution, are separate activities." (221)35 "exchange is necessarily mediated by the object which each side produces and possesses"; "[o]ur respective products, therefore, are the means, the mediator, the instrument, the acknowledged power of our mutual needs." (CW3, 226). The two bad mediations are united in the following formulation: "In credit, the man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as a man, but as the mode of existence of capital and interest." (CW3, 215)36 "In credit, the man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as a man, but as the mode of existence of capital and interest." (CW3, 215, emphasis H.I.)37 See the previous footnote.38 See §36 of his Philosophy of the Future (published in 1843), where Feuerbach criticizes the “old philosophy” and thus Hegel of holding that “I am abstract, a merely thinking being to which the body does not belong”. Assuming that Feuerbach read and understood Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, including the Anthropology where hegel extensively discusses the essential embodiment of the human mind, and the Self-consciousness-chapter where he discusses the intersubjective mediation of the structure of consciousness or intentionality defining human persons, Feuerbach could not have made such claims in good faith. (There is evidence that Feuerbach at least attended Hegel’s lecture on “Philosophy of Spirit – Or Anthropology and Psychology” in 1825 [ks. JP:n lahettama pdf, kysy lahde]. A friendlier hypothesis is that Feuerbach did not fully comprehend what he read (and heard) from Hegel, yet it left impressions on him which he later developed on his own, forgetting their origin.

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the thought and love”39 of other individuals as beneficiaries of his work. On the other hand, as a beneficiary of the work of another an individual is conscious of the other, a worker or producer as a “completion of [his, the beneficiary’s] own essential nature and as a necessary part” of herself. In other words, as a producer I am conscious of myself in you in the sense of confirmed by your gratitude towards me, and as the beneficiary you are conscious of yourself in me in the sense of confirmed by my love towards you and thus by my loving contributions to your well-being. (And the other way around, to the extent that both of us are both contributors and beneficiaries.) This, knowledge or consciousness of oneself confirmed, or affirmed by the unconditional recognitive intentionality of the other is what Hegel calls in the first sentence of the chapter ‘General self-consciousness’ (mutual) “affirmative knowing (affirmative Wissen) of one’s self in the other self” and that he identifies with universal self-consciousness, or in other words with concrete freedom in interhuman relations.

In brief, Marx’s short description of non-alienated social life, in fact, whether or not Marx was conscious of this (and probably he wasn’t) operates with the (or Hegel’s) concept of concrete freedom as “self-consciousness in otherness”, and it is exactly horizontal relations exemplifying unconditional purely intersubjective recognition and thus concrete freedom that for Marx actualize the “species essence”. –This all looks now very much like a rephrasing of Hegel’s normative essentialism on spirit and humanity.

3. What is missing from Hegel’s model in Marx?

39 “I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognized and felt by yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. (CW3, 228)

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Yet, it is clearly only a partial rephrasing since as we can already see, Marx’s picture of such “truly human relations” lacks important ingredients of Hegel’s conception of relations that actualize the essence. I will end by drawing attention to these conspicuous lacunae in Marx’s model. Firstly, what is completely lacking from Hegel’s three-dimensional conception of intersubjective recognition in Marx, is the deontological dimension. This is a serious deficiency since one of the least controversial distinctive features of the life-form of human persons (in distinction to ‘merely animal’ life-forms) is that it is governed by social norms. And where there are social norms, there are authorities of those norms and thus recognitive attitudes and relations towards or between those having or sharing authority. Hegel has very good reasons to treat this deontological complex of issues as one of the central dimensions of his account of the distinctive constitutive features of the human life-form in the master-slave-story. In failing to give the deontological dimension a positive constitutive role in unalienated social life that actualizes the species essence, Marx in contrast clearly fails to conceptualize that essence adequately.

The second element of Hegel’s ontological model of the life-form of human persons lacking in Marx’s conception of the species essence is a specification of the first one: this is institutionalized norms and thus (if you want) ‘institutions proper’. If one takes seriously an idea that Hegel expresses very clearly in his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, namely that all of the distinctively "spiritual” and thus in our terms ‘person-making’ processes, activities or practices depend on and are

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embedded in a habitualized “second natural” background,40 and if one thinks of institutionalized norms or institutions proper as an essential constituent of this background, freeing interaction from the debilitating burden of constant reflection and negotiation of every norm constitutive of or regulating the interaction, then again Marx has clearly failed to account for an essential element of the human life-form. That already language involves institutionalized norms, and that hence language-based thought and thereby all specifically human action is dependent on institutionalization shows how grave a deficiency this is for an attempt to account for this life-form.

For those such as myself who are in principle in sympathy with the idea of a normative ontology of the human life-form—conceived in terms of the concepts of recognition and concrete freedom—the way to go from here is to return to the fuller Hegelian account. Its clear advantage is that it does not deem institutions and the deontological dimension in general as a realm of alienation by definition, but allows one to think of more or less alienated, or more or less concretely free relations to social norms and institutions, and thus of better and worse ways of being determined by these essential determinants of us. None of this necessarily requires subscribing to the institutional details of Hegel’s state—something which should be attractive for those by default sympathetic to the romantic intersubjectivism of the young Marx and suspicious of the alleged heavy institutionalism of Hegel—but it does mean taking norms and institutions seriously. As to the details, the concept or principle of concrete freedom, 40 See E3, §409-410 and elsewhere, as well as Lumsden…, Testa…

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in terms of which both Hegel and Marx think of the normative essence (or if you don’t like that term, ideal) of humanity, does not by itself tell us whether the institution of private property is ideal for realizing concrete freedom (as Hegel thought), or whether some form of communal property does this better (as Marx thought), or whether, all things considered, some kind of mixture or uneasy compromise of both is what we should aim at.

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