And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance. . . . The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.
-G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind
Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History, says that Hegel provided us a non-materialist mechanism to understand the historical process, not at the expense of our economic account of history, but as a supplement to it. “Recognition” allows us to understand human motivation in a richer way, as a historical dialectic, than Marx’s version.
As inhabitants of liberal democratic countries, we are used to the reduction of human motivation to economic causes. But most political life is non-economic. We have not invented a vocabulary for talking about the prideful side of human nature responsible for wars and conflict. The “struggle for recognition” is an ancient idea. It is strange today because of the economization of our thinking. Yet we see the struggle for recognition underlying all modern movements for liberal rights.
What is the “struggle for recognition”? Simple, man has a fundamental desire to be acknowledged by other individuals as a man, endowed with free will and the ability act against his biological instincts.
But there must be something about the nature of man that causes him to have this desire. Before Hegel, human nature was understood through the image of the First Man, the man in the “state of nature.” But the liberal thinkers, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau did not intend for the state of nature to be understood as a historical account of primitive man, but as a useful thought experiment that could strip away social conditioning from the human personality, and uncover the characteristics that were common to man as a man, regardless of whether man was European, Buddhist, or aristocratic
Hegel did not think that such a state of nature existed, since he believed that human nature was undetermined, free, and constantly changing. But this process of historical self-creation had a starting point which resembled the discussion of man existing in a state of nature. In the Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel described a primitive “first man” whose philosophical function was the same as “man in the state of nature.”
The first man has basic animalistic desires: desire for food, sleep, shelter, and survival. But Hegel’s first man is different from animals because he desires not only real objects (a steak, a jacket, shelter) but objects that are totally different and non-material. Most of all, he desires the desire of other men, that is, to be wanted by others or to be recognized.
It is interesting how close this account is to Girard’s. The distinction being that for Girard, the desire of the desire of other men is not recognition, but of the actual desires of other men. I do not desire that you desire to acknowledge me, I desire what you desire. It is in this crucial way, that Hegel and Girard disagree.
For Hegel, a person cannot become self-conscious without being recognized by other human beings. Man was, from the start a social being. His sense of self-worth and identity is intricately connected with the value that other people assign to him. While animals are social, their behavior is out of instinct and based on the mutual satisfaction of natural needs. A monkey desires a banana, not the desire of another monkey. Kojeve explains that only a man can desire “an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (a gold medal, an enemy’s flag).
Man desires these objects not for himself but because they are desired by other human beings.
Yet this is only one way that Hegel’s first man differs from animals. The second, more fundamental way, is that this man wants to not only be recognized by other men, but to be recognized as a man.
This additional sentence is what separates Hegel from Girard. Recognition, then, consists of two parts. The first part is mimesis, and the second part is the recognition of man as a man.
And Hegel adds that the most fundamental and uniquely human characteristic is man’s ability to risk his own life. Thus, the first man’s encounter with other men leads to a violent struggle in which each man makes the other “recognize” him by risking his own life. When a man risks his own life, he is essentially freely choosing to forego his own selfish impulses for something grander than himself. Not only is he foregoing his selfish impulses, but his basic biological instinct for self-preservation. That is what, according to Hegel, is the fundamental difference between a human being (who is free) and animals (who are unfree and totally ruled by instinct).
Thus, Girard would maintain that mimesis is what leads to conflict, while Hegel would emphasize that it is both mimesis and recognition that leads to conflict.