Read this essay on ‘The Politics of Recognition’. Answer the study guide questions below in your campus cruiser journal, then respond to this week’s guest blog.
You should know that this will be a challenging but, I think, rewarding exercise.
From the ‘Introduction’
1. What are the ‘identity politics of assimilation’?
2. By contrast, what does the author mean by the ‘identity politics of recognition’?
From ‘Hegel’s Dialectic of Master and Slave’
3. What is gained and what is lost in the experience of modernism and modernist identity?
4. What was Hegel’s reaction to the invasion of Napoleon into (what we now call) Germany?
5. What is ‘Romanticism’?
6. How did Hegel incorporate the Romantic critique of modern individualism?
7. From the quote taken from Hegel’s Phenomenology, what’s the ‘paradox’ of self-consciousness? In other words, how is it pulled in two different directions?
OK, we’re now going to look at the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave. It’s a sort of story or narrative about stages in the path toward what Hegel thinks is the most meaningful life. Generally with Hegel everything comes in 3s, and the dialectic of mastery and slavery, too, involves three stages. it’s important to keep in mind, as the author notes, that these stages never end, once you get to the third stage it sort of starts all over again, but always moving forward, so that history is sort of in a progressive spiral. Like a slinky, moving us through the ages.
8. Hegel describes the first stage of the dialectic as ‘pure self-consciousness’. What does that mean? Why does Hegel says this stage is unsustainable and marked by insecurity?
9. In the second stage, the pure self tries to overcome insecurity by seeking some sort of assurance of itself. How does it do this? What is ‘negativity’, in this context?
10. Going back to the first stage, Hegel’s narrative begins with two self-consciousnesses certain of themselves but not of one another. How do they see one another and what threat to they pose to one another?
Again, in the second stage, the self seeks security and an assurance of itself. Keep in mind that in the first stage, the stage of pure self-consciousness, the self’s identity is above all abstract, because it knows only itself, nothing else, no otherness can be involved in its self-understanding at this initial stage of the dialectic. And this abstraction is the source of the paradox. On one hand it (abstraction) seemingly allows the self to be free, completely uninhibited, ‘unencumbered’ (Bellah’s language). But on the other hand it raises a sort of nagging question: Am I real? There’s nothing to me, I’m like an idea, with no determinate qualities. How can I be sure of my own existence? So the self engages in a project, which Hegel called negation. It means that the self, in an attempt to define itself, goes around and makes distinctions. That is that, this is this, you are there, I am here, and so on. It’s a kind of ‘negation’ because the self is sort of desperately figuring out what it is NOT (through a process of negation) in order to clarify for itself what it IS. Like racist nationalism, you might say, this is a stage in the formation of identity when I need to say what I am not (THOSE races) in an effort to define for myself who and what ‘the nation’ is. The upshot, though, is that the self in this immature, preliminary stage of the dialectic, has the following problem: it really needs others to help it know who it is (ironically, even the racist nationalist needs thos he or she despises to help him or her define the true identity of the nation). So while at this stage the self imagines itself as pure and independent, it is also, in fact, very dependent and needs otherness to help gain a more secure sense of self.
11. What, according to Hegel, is the solution to this problem? And, why, according to Hegel, is it elusive?
12. What is a dialectic?
13. What does it mean to say that the formation of selfhood is dialectical?
14. How does the institution of slavery correspond to the first stage of Hegel’s dialectic?
15. Is Hegel saying that slavery, conflict and domination are natural expressions of a human need for recognition? Why or why not?
16. In the second stage of the dialectic of master and slave, some discoveries are made. What does the master discover (to her dismay) about herself, and what does the slave discover? Why is the master’s identity less secure, and why is the slaves existence, strangely enough, ‘better off’?
17. What does the experience of determinate labor (concrete interaction with the real world that produce, sustain and enable life) give the slave that the master lacks?
18. Why and how is labor essential to selfhood? (by the way, do you recall John Stewart’s plea for Americans to remember that wealth comes from work, not freely through abstract processes? He was, in a way, appealing to a very Hegelian thesis: meaningful existence, and a more just, equitable existence, is one that is obtained through determinate interactions with the world and with one another, not through abstract mechanisms that secretly exploit others for one’s own gain)
19. What’s the third moment of the dialectic about? What does it mean for the slave to not simply realize his or her better off-ness, but to gain ‘true recognition’? What would that entail?
From ‘Recognition and the Politics of Identity’
Skip the first paragraph.
20. The author identifies four insights from Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. The first is that ‘politics hurts’. What does he mean by that?
21. The second insight is that there is always a way, in the dialectical formation of identities, for oppressed selves and identities to refashion themselves in more positive ways (just as the slave could discover that out of the experience of forced labor came a way of being in the world – concrete, self-sustaining, productive, capable, etc – that is actually far more meaningful than the master’s – inessential, needs everyone else to do stuff for them, doesn’t know how to do anything for themselves, etc.). Can you think of an example of this?
I don’t want you to get lost looking for the third insight. it is, in short, that identity is the product of a) history and b) social relations. The author shows how modernism produced two contradictory claims about identity. One was that it is the product of individualism, self-made, unencumbered by anything but itself, and so on. And the other strand of modernit thought about idenitity is that it is derived from nature, from biology, from genes and so forth. this second strand is closely related to modern conceptions of race, and in this section of the essay you’ll see a reference ot Cornall West. The irony is that those two strands conflict. I’m free, unencumbered, but I’m determined by nature and natural forces? Which is it? So, how does hegel solve the problem? he argues that identity is the product of history and social relations, not nature and not some sort of pure, radically independent selfhood.
22. What’s the fourth and final insight according to the author?
23. Again, what would ‘true recognition’ involve?
24. How is it that the slave’s new identity still involves and incorporates that of the master? Can you think of an example of this?
25. The author uses the word ‘reconciliation’ to describe the result of the third stage of the dialectic. What does this mean?
26. When the author describes reconciliation as a situation in which the old oppressors realize how they were dependent on the oppressed and mus play a part in reconstructing and restructuring the existence of the oppressed, do you see any parallels to contemporary situations?
27. Finally, why does recognition require a struggle? Compare this claim, in Hegel, to Martin Luther King, Jr.s arguments in the letter from prison.
