11.1Dialectical movement from the sensuous givenness of world to the identity of ego and world – The dialectic of recognition – “Ego that is we and we that is ego” (Hegel’s Phenomenology)

The individualization of truth in myriad individual perspectives (Chapter 10.6) poses a problem for how individual humans are to share the world in social living. The historical emergence and institution of a polity can be regarded as a response to this splintering of truth by institutionalizing how individual truths are to be ‘aufgehoben’ or raised to a higher, pre-eminent plane of shared, social, lived truth. A study of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes is one way of approaching this question of how individual selfhood in its individual truth is to be socially integrated or mediated (vermittelt), i.e. how individual self-consciousnesses can come together and share the “truth of the certainty of one’s self” (PhdG. B Selbstbewußtsein IV Die Wahrheit der Gewißheit seiner selbst).

Doubtless the phenomenology of self-consciousness and especially the “process of recognition” (Prozeß des Anerkennens EnzIII § 425 Add., § 430) constitute a crucial, pivotal point in the phenomenology of spirited mind (Geist),211 not only in Hegel’s famous 1807 publication, but also in the section on the phenomenology of mind in the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia §§ 413– 438. Even on a merely formal level, this can be seen by perusing the table of contents of the Phänomenologie des Geistes and the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. In the latter, the phenomenology of mind is broken down into three sections, “a. Consciousness as such”, “b. Self-consciousness” and “c. Reason”, and section b. in turn is broken down into “α. Desire”, “β. The recognizing self-consciousness” and “γ. Universal self-consciousness”. Finally, proceeding back up the scale of the table of contents, the phenomenology of mind in the Encyclopaedia is itself the second section of three making up “Subjective mind”.

The formal structure is similar in the Phänomenologie des Geistes: “B. Self-consciousness” is sandwiched between “A. Consciousness” and “C. Reason”, and the middle section of “B. Self-consciousness” is the famous “dialectic of master and servant” or the “process of recognition”. But why should the process of recognition between self-consciousnesses constitute such a pivotal point in the movement of consciousness through to reason and absolute knowledge? The 1807 Phänomenologie des Geistes was first titled “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” (Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewußtseins, cf. editors’ note to Hegel’s Werke Band 3). The German word ‘Erfahrung’ should be rendered by something like ‘an experience gone through’ because ‘er-fahren’ is literally ‘to travel through’. The phenomenology is what consciousness or knowing awareness goes through step by step in knowing the world from its first, abstract beginnings through to absolute knowledge. It is consciousness itself as self-consciousness that carries on a dialectic with consciousness in which it step-by-step uncovers the inadequacy of how it conceives the world, moving on progressively to higher ‘truths’ of its conceptions, while we as readers, who already have the τέλος of absolute knowing in view, look on this dialectical movement. The possibility of this dialectical dialogue between consciousness and self-consciousness is given already by the structure of consciousness itself as con-science, i.e a co-knowing of its self being conscious of the world represented in itself; its perception of the world is always also an apperception of its self perceiving. Every ego cogito is an ego cogito me cogitare.212 And we are the onlookers of this dialogue between consciousness and self-consciousness in the course of consciousness’ going through its experiences.

The dialectical movement of thought in the Phenomenology is the movement of knowing awareness loosening, dissolving itself from (ab-solvere) any dependence on the givenness of the world in its objectivity so that ultimately, after it has travelled through all the stages of merely relative knowing and finally unfolded itself in absolute knowledge, knowing awareness knows itself to be knowingly one with the world in the “unentzweiteste Identität”, the “most undirempted identity”213. Absolute knowing is not relative, i.e. it is not dependent upon any outer givenness of what is to be known and is thus infinite, unbounded, independent, unconditional, in short, absolute. The movement of thinking takes place in the medium of the λόγος and is a movement through the various forms in which knowing consciousness gets to know, i.e. becomes knowingly aware, of the world. The movement is therefore dialectical in the original sense of the word in Plato as διαλέγεσθαι, i.e. as a talking-through in the course of which the contradictions in what is said are overcome step by step. This going-through as a talking-through is at the same time ‘absolvent’, a ‘loosening-from’ in the sense of consciousness knowingly penetrating the world and becoming one with it, integrating it, so that ultimately it knows that in the objective world it experiences only itself, namely, as reason in the unity of the Idea.

Knowing awareness or consciousness starts at the beginning of the Phenomenology with the immediate sensuous givenness of the world which it takes in as “sensuous certainty” (sinnliche Gewißheit). What it takes in are the colours, sounds, odours of the world in their singularity, but in insisting that it is knowingly experiencing the world in its sensuous singularity, this sensuous certainty is driven beyond itself and has to admit that, even though it intends the unique singularity of ‘this’ in its sensuous givenness, ‘this’ is itself a universal category, and it is forced to say something universal, namely, that it knows a thing (Ding) with its many properties (Eigenschaften), and is thus compelled to move beyond itself. This new knowledge is taken from the thing in its sensuous givenness as perception (Wahrnehmung). Wahrnehmung means etymologically a ‘taking-true’, i.e. taking something in its truth. But in taking things in their truth through the senses, consciousness is merely exposed to and dependent on how things are given to it in a bewildering variety of endless properties. Confronted with this multiplicity, it cannot even keep the thing together as a unity, but is forced to move from one property to the next, one thing to the next, taking in each in its truth in perceiving it sensuously, and forced to connect these sensuous truths with a mere ‘and’.

The knowing awareness represented by sensuous perception is thus, in turn, driven beyond itself to embrace the supersensuous world of simple laws in order to be able to explain, in a simple, unified way, the sensuous world of things in their endless variety and movement. It resorts to a “calm realm of laws” (ruhiges Reich von Gesetzen, PhdG:120) from which it can account for the continually shifting sensuous phenomenality and thus becomes understanding (Verstand). The laws form the basis for knowing the world as a “play of forces” (Spiel der Kräfte, PhdG:116). But such a split between a supersensuous “calm realm of laws” (such as the Newtonian laws of motion) and the movement of sensuous appearances means that movement is not understood as movement in itself, which requires that the many laws have to be unified in a single law, and that this law has to differentiate itself as a law of movement into its various moments residing in the interior of the moving object itself. In knowing the law, knowing consciousness thus finds itself in the interior of the object and their difference is aufgehoben, i.e. waived and simultaneously raised to a higher plane, namely, to that of self-consciousness. The object becomes something living, with its own principle of movement, i.e. its own soul (ψυχή), and thus identical with living consciousness, which now knows itself in the object. Just as the differences in the object become moments in the self-unfolding of the law and are thus, in truth, not differences at all, so too does consciousness differentiate itself from itself as ego but, since the ego is identical with itself in always already co-knowing itself (I = I), this difference is also no difference at all (cf. Enz. § 423 Add.). In being compelled to regard this self-movement of something living, understanding is on its way to becoming reason.

Am Bewußtsein dieser dialektischen, dieser lebendigen Einheit des Unterschiedenen entzündet sich daher das Selbstbewußtsein, das Bewußtsein von dem sich selber gegenständlichen, als in sich selbst unterschiedenen einfachen Ideellen, das Wissen von der Wahrheit des Natürlichen, vom Ich. (EnzIII § 423 Add.)

Self-consciousness, consciousness of the simple ideal that is objective to itself, that is, differentiated within itself, the knowledge of the truth of what is natural, of the ego, is therefore ignited in the consciousness of this dialectical, this living unity of what is differentiated.

Knowing awareness thus comes to know itself as a self; consciousness becomes self-consciousness, a knowing awareness of itself in its selfhood, and in knowing myself I know the world.

In dem Ausdruck Ich = Ich ist das Prinzip der absoluten Vernunft und Freiheit ausgesprochen. Die Vernunft und die Freiheit besteht [...] kurz darin, daß ich in einem und demselben Bewußtsein Ich und die Welt habe, in der Welt mich selber wiederfinde und umgekehrt in meinem Bewußtsein das habe, was ist, was Objektivität hat. Diese das Prinzip des Geistes ausmachende Einheit des Ich und des Objektes ist jedoch nur erst auf abstrakte Weise im unmittelbaren Selbstbewußtsein vorhanden und wird nur von uns, den Betrachtenden, noch nicht vom Selbstbewußtsein selber erkannt. (EnzIII § 424 Add.)

In the expression I = I, the principle of absolute reason and freedom is expressed. Reason and freedom consist [...] concisely in the fact that in one and the same consciousness, I have ego and the world, that I find myself again in the world and conversely that I have in my consciousness that which is, that which has objectivity. This unity of ego and object constituting the principle of spirit, however, is present at first only in an abstract way in immediate self-consciousness and is only recognized by us, the onlookers, and not yet by self-consciousness itself.

At first, self-consciousness, i.e. the knowing awareness of self, is achieved only abstractly, and the unity of this knowing awareness of self with the objectivity of the world is apparent only to us who, from the start, have already assumed the standpoint of absolute knowledge and are the onlookers looking on how consciousness itself goes through the experience of working its way, in its own thinking, toward this standpoint of absolute, totally free unity of itself with the world. Self-consciousness is thus at first immediate, unmediated and insofar still captive to the standpoint of consciousness confronted with a given world in its objectivity which it strives to overcome in its instinctual drive (Trieb) of desire (Begierde). The unity of myself and world is at first immediate or “an sich or according to its concept” (Enz. § 425, an sich oder ihrem Begriffe nach, Enz. § 431 Add.), i.e. potential or δυνάμει, and not yet für sich or actually present, ‘energized’, ἐνεργείᾳ, maintaining itself in presence as a substance.214 Dialectical, speculative thinking, the movement of theorizing (looking) that goes through the experience of the world, still has to move from what is only potentially identical with it and still only given to the senses as a “given objectivity” (gegebene Objektivität, Enz. § 425) to gain what is actually present for its knowledge in which it knows itself in its truth as identical with being, with “that which is”. The first steps in this movement of self-consciousness toward its identity with the world in spirited mind are a three-step of the stages of “desire”, the “process of recognition” and “universal self-consciousness”, which make up the three sections on self-consciousness in the Encyclopaedia.

Desire is still the situation of “unmediated, [...] individual self-consciousness” (das unmittelbare [...] einzelne Selbstbewußtsein, Enz. § 425 Add.) in its relation to “an external object” (ein äußerliches Objekt, § 425 Add.). Through individual, desiring self-consciousness “egoistically, selfishly” (selbstsüchtig, Enz. § 428) consuming and annihilating the object, its unity with the object in the satisfaction of desire is only short-lived, transient, passing (Vorübergehendes, Enz. § 428 Add.) and it is drawn into an endless process of desire and held fast “in the boring alternation of desire and its satisfaction that continues endlessly” (in dem ins Unendliche sich fortsetzenden langweiligen Wechsel der Begierde und der Befriedigung derselben, Enz.§ 429 Add.). It can only escape the tedious endlessness of desire by raising itself beyond the standpoint of immediate desire, in which its subjectivity confronts an external object, to a confrontation with an other that is likewise a self, i.e. another free ego.

Indem ein Selbstbewußtsein der Gegenstand ist, ist er ebensowohl Ich wie Gegenstand. — Hiermit ist schon der Begriff des Geistes für uns vorhanden. Was für das Bewußtsein weiter wird, ist die Erfahrung, was der Geist ist, diese absolute Substanz, welche in der vollkommenen Freiheit und Selbständigkeit ihres Gegensatzes, nämlich verschiedener für sich seiender Selbstbewußtseine, die Einheit derselben ist; Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist. (PhdG:145)

Through self-consciousness being the object, the object is both ego and object. — With this, the concept of spirited mind is already present for us. What happens further for consciousness is to go through the experience of what spirited mind is, this absolute substance which, in the complete freedom and independence of its opposition, namely different self-consciousnesses existing for themselves, is the unity of these self-consciousnesses; ego that is we and we that is ego.

Not only does self-consciousness have to attain its unity with the world considered as a world of objects, but also its unity with other self-consciousnesses in a sharing of spirited mind (an ontological cast of world). The individual, self-conscious ego is thus destined to become unified with others into a We by going through the experience of dialectical thinking. I, we and the world will thus become one in the absolute independence and freedom of spirited mind that becomes objective in ethical life, its mores and institutions. The unity with the objective world in a We is to be an identity in the sense of a knowing belonging-together or Zusammengehörigkeit. But first of all, self-consciousness has to raise itself beyond its “singular individuality” (Einzelheit, Enz. § 430) through the “process of recognition” (Prozeß des Anerkennens, Enz. § 430).

“At first there is a self-consciousness unmediatedly for a self-consciousness as an other for an other” (Es ist ein Selbstbewußtsein für ein Selbstbewußtsein zunächst unmittelbar als ein Anderes für ein Anderes, Enz. § 430). I “look at myself as ego in the other but also see in the other an immediately existing other object, absolutely independent [and standing over ME] against me as an ego” (Ich schaue in ihm als Ich mich selbst an, aber auch darin ein unmittelbar daseiendes, als Ich absolut gegen mich selbständiges anderes Objekt, Enz. § 430). The other is a mirror for myself as ego, but a mirror that is also completely independent of me, which gives me “the drive to show myself as a free self and to be present as such a free self for the other” (“den Trieb, sich als freies Selbst zu zeigen and für den Anderen als solches da zu sein, Enz. § 430). I cannot be a self without showing my self as such to others, without presenting my self to the other and being present for the other as a self, as somewho. What drives the “process of recognition” is

...der ungeheure Widerspruch, daß — da Ich das ganz Allgemeine, absolute Durchgängige, durch keine Grenze Unterbrochene, das allen Menschen gemeinsame Wesen ist — die beiden sich hier aufeinander beziehenden Selbste eine Identität, sozusagen ein Licht ausmachen und dennoch zugleich zweie sind, die, in vollkommener Starrheit und Sprödigkeit gegeneinander, jedes als ein in sich Reflektiertes, von dem Anderen absolut Unterschiedenes und Undurchbrechbares bestehen. (EnzIII § 430 Add.)

...the monstrous contradiction that, since the ego is the wholly universal, absolutely uniform essence common to all human beings that is not interrupted by any borders, the two selves here relating to each other constitute a single identity, a single light, so to speak, and nevertheless at the same time are two which, in complete rigidity and aloofness toward and against each other, each exists reflected into itself, absolutely different from and impenetrable by the other.

Each of the two individual self-consciousnesses as selves is “absolutely aloof”, “impenetrable” and “rigid” in their independence from each other, but at the same time, in their essence, both are immersed in and share the same “light” of ἀλήθεια (disclosive truth) and therefore belong together in the same “identity” of essence. I see in the other myself and at the same time the absolute other. From this “monstrous contradiction” ensues a “struggle” (Kampf, Enz. § 431) that aims at overcoming the other self in its otherness. This struggle aims at the other’s independence at first by attempting to overcome the other self in its immediate presence and independent “bodiliness” (Leiblichkeit, Enz. § 431), with the ego risking its own life, for it can appear at first glance that the other’s independent individuality resides in its separate, sensuous, ontic bodiliness as a natural thing. But this first appearance is only an illusion because risking one’s own life in struggle with the other does not aim at physically destroying the other, but only in showing and demonstrating that one is not merely a natural being tied to its physical bodiliness, but rather a free being, and this freedom is mutually demonstrated and recognized through a struggle over life and death in which the natural, ontic, living bodiliness of both selves is put at risk.

A life-and-death struggle is a struggle at the extremes which reveals how the selves can come to recognize each other as free selves and thus as ontological beings. Freedom cannot be located in ontic, natural bodiliness but only ontologically in human being itself in its free selfhood. “This freedom of the one in the other unites humans in an inward way, in contrast to which need and distress bring them together only outwardly” (Diese Freiheit des einen im anderen vereinigt die Menschen auf innerliche Weise, wogegen das Bedürfnis und die Not dieselben nur äußerlich zusammenbringt, Enz. § 431 Add.). Instead of an interaction of forces according to some inner law, as on the level of understanding, here, on the level of knowing selves in interplay with each other in a process of recognition as free human beings, we observe an extreme game of life and death in which both selves demonstrate their freedom to each other in each other as mirror. Only free human beings who are selves can play this game of putting themselves physically at risk for the sake of showing off and demonstrating their freedom.

Hegel is quick to avoid the misunderstanding that he is propagating the advisability of his students engaging in life-and-death duels to prove their status as free beings, pointing out that the struggle of life and death is applicable only in the “state of nature where human beings are only individuals” (Natur-zustande, wo die Menschen nur als Einzelne sind, Enz.§ 432 Add.) and not in “civil society and the state” (der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und dem Staate, Enz. § 432 Add.) because in society they are always-already recognized as free persons, i.e. in civil society the spirited-mindful We of the abstract-universal person has already been constituted and realized. In a social, sociated state, the singular, individual self is already mediated with its universal status as a free person, and is no longer only immediately free and independent in its own individual, singular self-consciousness. The social objectivity in which it is embedded is then a law-governed realm of social intercourse that is an objectivation of freedom in concrete institutions. Freedom is no longer only an sich, potential, but also für sich or actually present and ‘energized’ (ἐνεργείᾳ) for itself in the state’s laws that guarantee the freedom of the individual as person. Not only formally as person (especially before the law), but also substantially, the individual member of civil society and state, i.e. the citizen, is recognized in being accorded “honour through the office that it holds, through the business it operates and through its other working activity. Its honour thus has a substantial, universal, objective content no longer dependent on empty subjectivity” (Ehre durch das Amt, das er bekleidet, durch das von ihm betriebene Gewerbe und durch seine sonstige arbeitende Tätigkeit. Seine Ehre hat dadurch einen substantiellen, allgemeinen, objektiven, nicht mehr von der leeren Subjektivität abhängigen Inhalt, Enz. § 432 Add.).

The life-and-death struggle is obviated in a state of society because the “process of recognition” already has attained the objectified form of honour that derives from the individual self’s standing as somewho in the ensemble of objective, ethical, social relations in which it is embedded. Individual selfhood of free self-consciousness has to be mirrored and affirmed in the honour which derives from an individual self’s social standing. The corollary to this is that the individual self is ‘socially dead’ if it is not acknowledged by being honoured in some way as a somewho with social standing and an assured place in the overall ensemble of ethical social life. The mirror of social honour and esteem is necessary for the individual to be a self; its self must be reflected in the world as a shared, social world. If this recognition is only formal, i.e. acknowledgement of the individual citizen’s status as person, this socially guaranteed status remains abstracted from the individual’s concrete life and place within the social whole, and the individual is confronted with an indifferent, blank, abstract mirror in the other.215

But on the prior level of the struggle over life and death between two self-consciousnesses, any kind of social recognition in “the ethically holding-relation” (dem sittlichen Verhältnis, Enz. § 432 Add.) of honour has not yet been gone through by knowing self-awareness. Instead, the life-and-death struggle has at first the outcome of the relationship between master and servant (Enz. § 433) in which the servant, for the sake of saving his life, subjugates himself to the master. Instead of insisting on his independent, free individuality, the servant now serves the master.

This could be regarded as the first lasting (i.e. habitual and thus ethical) social relation that arises in the phenomenology of spirited mind, a “communality of needs and the care for their satisfaction” (Gemeinsamkeit des Bedürfnisses und der Sorge für dessen Befriedigung, Enz. § 434). The self-consciousnesses are thus on their way from a confrontation of self-seeking, singular individualities to the constitution of a universal connection in which it is no longer a matter of the immediate satisfaction of desire (to prove the independence of self-consciousness from objectivity) but rather of mediated “caring- and providing-for” (Vorsorge, Enz. § 434) in social relations of labour in which “the two extremes of independence and dependency close together” (die beiden Extreme der Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit sich zusammenschließen, Enz. § 434) in a “conclusion” (Schluß, cf. the third and final part of Hegel’s Logik). Whereas the master can look upon the prevailing of his own individual, selfish being-for-itself in the servant and his service to the master (hat in dem Knecht und dessen Dienst die Anschauung des Geltens seines einzelnen Fürsichseins, Enz. § 435), the servant is raised above the standpoint of the merely immediate, selfish singularity of the satisfaction of desire to a more mediated, shared, communal, universal standpoint.

Moreover, there is a further twist in this dialectic of a power interplay between master and servant, viz. that through the work which the servant performs at his master’s behest, he develops also his own potentials into powers put to work that ultimately can be turned against the master. Hegel does not see this twist which could be regarded as the historical possibility of changing the rules of power interplay to those of a power play between and among formal equals which would accord better with Hegel’s dialectical move to “real universality as mutuality” among self-consciousnesses as we shall now consider.

11.2Universal self-consciousness and irrepressible, questioning, singular individuality – The ever-broken mediation between singularity and universality concretely realized in ethical life

The upshot and culmination of the dialectical process of recognition among independent, self-knowing selves is the attainment of “universal self-consciousness” (das allgemeine Selbstbewußtsein, EnzIII § 436) which knows its free self as affirmed in the other self-consciousness and as a “real universality as mutuality” (reelle Allgemeinheit als Gegenseitigkeit, Enz. § 436) which forms the “substance” (Substanz, Enz. § 436 Note) that is objectified in ethical social relations, i.e. in “every essential spirituality, of family, fatherland, state as well as all virtues, of love, friendship, bravery, of honour and fame” (jeder wesentlichen Geistigkeit, der Familie, des Vaterlandes, des Staats, sowie aller Tugenden, der Liebe, Freundschaft, Tapferkeit, der Ehre, des Ruhms, Enz. § 436 Note).

Wir haben daher hier die gewaltige Diremtion des Geistes in verschiedene Selbste, die an und für sich und füreinander vollkommen frei, selbständig, absolut spröde, widerstandleistend — und doch zugleich miteinander identisch, somit nicht selbständig, nicht undurchdringlich, sondern gleichsam zusammengeflossen sind. Dies Verhältnis ist durchaus spekulativer Art; [...] Das Spekulative oder Vernünftige und Wahre besteht in der Einheit des Begriffs oder des Subjektiven und der Objektivität. Diese Einheit ist auf dem fraglichen Standpunkt offenbar vorhanden. Sie bildet die Substanz der Sittlichkeit, ... (Enz. § 436 Add.)

We have here therefore the mighty diremption (sundering) of spirited mind into distinct selves who are completely free, independent, absolutely aloof, resistant in-and-for-themselves and for each other — and nevertheless at the same time identical with one another and thus not independent, not impenetrable, but, as it were, confluenced, flowed-together. This relation is of a thoroughly speculative kind; [...] What is speculative or reasonable and true consists in the unity of the concept or the subjective element with objectivity. This unity obviously exists at the standpoint in question [namely, the final subsection of self-consciousness at the transition to reason, ME]. It forms the substance of ethical life,...

The dialectic of recognition among self-consciousnesses is the way in which, the path on which, according to Hegel, consciousness finally attains the standpoint of Geist, of spirited mind, where it knows itself to be identical with, i.e. as belonging to, the world, namely, a shared social, ethical world in its substantive objectivity. Reason is nothing other than the speculative, i.e. ontological, insight into the beingness of being, and such reason attains truth for Hegel as an adequation of the ontological concept to objective reality. Such is the consolation and reconciliation offered by speculative thinking to human being as a self-aware self that it find its place in the world by merging with other self-consciousnesses and becoming integrated into society’s habitual-ethical practices, customs and institutions, thus becoming substantial. Only speculative thinking, i.e. thinking that reflects on and has insight into being, can see the unity of many different, independent self-consciousnesses in a shared ethical world that has gained substance, οὐσία, standing presence.

The merging with other self-consciousnesses is the experience that self-consciousness goes through in its dialectic with itself; for us, however, looking on from an absolute standpoint, there is no merging but rather the opposite: a sundering diremption of the always already unified spirited mind (Geist) into “distinct selves who are completely free, independent”. Hegel’s speculative-dialectical thinking is therefore the very opposite of subjectivist metaphysics, including in today’s Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, for which consciousness is located somehow individualized ‘inside’. For analytic philosophy as the hand-maiden of today’s neuroscience, this ‘inside’ location is the brain.

Is Hegel’s resolution of the question of the identity of self-consciousness with the world satisfactory? To be a self, singular, individual self-consciousness requires the recognition-mirror of the world to confirm its place in the world, which can only be a social world (cf. Chapter 3.3.1). The “certainty of one’s self” is achieved only through the self’s being reflected in the other and the others who acknowledge it affirmatively as self. Hegel himself points out in passing the problematic nature of the recognition and acknowledgement of self-consciousness in the other. The problem resides in the “substance of every essential spirituality” (Substanz jeder wesentlichen Geistigkeit, Enz. § 436 Note) and its discrepancy from its “universal reflected appearance” (allgemeines Widererscheinen, Enz. § 436 Note) or “universal shining-back” from social objectivity for, “this appearance/shining of what is substantial can also be separated from what is substantial and be held onto for itself in honour void of substance, vain fame, etc.” (dies Erscheinen des Substantiellen kann auch vom Substantiellen getrennt und für sich in gehaltleerer Ehre, eitlem Ruhm usf. festgehalten werden, Enz.§ 436 Note). The reflected standing that a self-consciousness enjoys in the recognition shone back by others and in ethical objectivity as esteem and honour can be mere appearance, a tinselly, tawdry fake, an illusion and a delusion of prestige (from L. præstigium a delusion, illusion, usually in pl. præstigiæ, illusions, juggler’s tricks).

The individual’s genuine “substance”, its substantial, intrinsic (hence singular) powers in the sense of abilities, excellences, can blatantly diverge from the individual’s socially mirrored standing by virtue of its merely derived, extraneous powers (wealth, social position and connections, official position in a hierarchy, etc.). But if this “substance” consists in an individual’s powers and abilities, these are precisely potentials that refer of themselves to their exercise, i.e. their being put to work in active movement to bring forth some sort of work. In the context of a society, this work must be estimated in some way or other, and this movement of estimation is itself a power play between self and society, and therefore relational rather than intrinsic, substantial. Coming to stand as somewho in society is therefore fraught with the contradication that, on the one hand, the ‘shining-back’ from the others may be tawdry celebrity, fame, etc. but, on the other hand, some kind of affirmatively estimating reflection is necessary to be somewho at all.

The “form of awareness” (Form des Bewußtseins, Enz. § 436 Note) of this “substance”, Hegel says, is “universal self-consciousness” itself, “i.e. that free self-consciousness for which the other self-consciousness standing over against it [...] is an equally independent self-consciousness” (d.h. dasjenige freie Selbstbewußtsein, für welches das ihm gegenständliche andere Selbstbewußtsein [...] ein gleichfalls selbständiges ist, Enz.§ 436 Add.) thus constituting a unity “of subjectivity and objectivity” (des Subjektiven und der Objektivität, Enz. § 436 Add.) that is “the substance of ethical life” (die Substanz der Sittlichkeit, Enz. § 436 Add.). Only in recognizing each other in a mirror interplay as free, independent self-consciousnesses is any form of social being such as “family, love between the sexes (here this unity has the form of particularity), patriotism, this willing of the universal aims and interests of the state, the love of God...” (Familie, der geschlechtlichen Liebe (da hat jene Einheit die Form der Besonderheit), Vaterlandsliebe, dieses Wollens der allgemeinen Zwecke und Interessen des Staats, der Liebe zu Gott..., Enz. § 436 Add.) at all possible.

The substance, according to Hegel, is thus the universal that overcomes and elevates singular individuality and the self-interest of particularity to enable an ethical We composed of free self-consciousnesses in a customary way of life. But the substance can also be corrupted in fake forms of “affirmative knowing of one’s self in the other self” (das affirmative Wissen seiner selbst im anderen Selbst, Enz. § 436) such as “in honour void of substance, vain fame” (in gehaltleerer Ehre, eitlem Ruhm, Enz. § 436 Note). Honour and fame as forms, ‘looks’ in which self-consciousness mirrors, and thus consolidates, itself in other selves accordingly can only be genuine if the honoured or famous, celebrated individual concerned genuinely embodies the universal and stands above its own singularity and selfish particularity, i.e. if singularity is genuinely mediated with the universal (assuming that such a mediation is at all possible). The individual who insists on its peculiar, singular idiosyncrasy only conceitedly delectates itself in the mirror of the honour accorded to it by others, whereas the selfish individual only exploits the honour of public office to covertly further its own particular interests. Such a universal standpoint for self-consciousness is possible through self-aware human being — which is always already reasonable an sich, i.e. potentially in itself — raising itself above itself to become “reason” (Vernunft, Enz. § 437) conceived as a thinking correspondence to the beingness of beings as Idea, and through this, reason’s constituting a true or genuine communality. Reason itself as an ontological casting of the beingness of beings is then objectified in ethical life, especially in the institutions of state, in such a way that the universal standpoint attains a solidity that no longer has to rely on the fickleness of individual self-consciousness with its proneness to self-interest or capricious idiosyncrasy.

Nevertheless, can reason itself, especially in its objectified forms of ethical life, be unreasonably, i.e. against the thoughtful hermeneutic recasting of the beingness of beings, repressive of individual singularity that does not conform to, is not identical with reason’s solidified universality (cf. Heidegger’s Mansein, i.e. the mediocre averageness of ‘people’, in Being and Time) and itself questions the validity of an all-too-consolidated historical mode of ethical life in given, unquestioned mores of an age? That is, can singularity and universality dirempt, i.e. fall apart, and switch roles and valencies in such a way that singular individuality — “the principle of individuality and personhood” (das Prinzip der Individualität und Persönlichkeit, LII W6:297) — that is non-identical with, i.e. does not belong to, realized reason, stands higher than universality as precipitated in an ostensibly ‘reasonable’, ‘substantial’, ethical social objectivity that has attained all-too-standing presence? Can reason itself become overbearing, repressing individual singularity’s struggle to cast a facet of an other historical vista of how being could shape up as a world? Does Hegel’s attempted dialectical mediation of singular individuality with the universality of reason gloss over the irremediable contradictoriness and fracturedness of such a mediation?

Im Staate sind der Geist des Volkes, die Sitte, das Gesetz das Herrschende. Da wird der Mensch als vernünftiges Wesen, als frei, als Person anerkannt und behandelt; und der Einzelne seinerseits macht sich dieser Anerkennung dadurch würdig, daß er, mit Überwindung der Natürlichkeit seines Selbstbewußtseins, einem Allgemeinen, dem an und für sich seienden Willen, dem Gesetze gehorcht, also gegen andere sich auf eine allgemeingültige Weise benimmt, sie als das anerkennt, wofür er selber gelten will, — als frei, als Person. (Enz. § 432 Add.)

In the state, the spirited mind of the people, ethical custom, law rule. Here, a human being is recognized and treated as a reasonable being, as free, as a person; and the singular individual for its part makes itself worthy of this recognition by overcoming the naturalness of its self-consciousness and obeying something universal, the will that exists both in and for itself, the law, and thus conducts itself toward others in a universally valid way and recognizes them as that which it itself wants to be regarded — as free, as a person.

Can a universal We constituted in conformity with reason (thinking insight into being), despite all recognition of and respect for the individual as a person, be stifling and repressive? Is the universal form of human being represented by personhood merely abstractly universal and therefore also potentially repressive of concretely individual singularity? Or is it rather the concretization of personhood in ethical life and state rule by law that is tendentially repressive, whereas precisely the abstractness of personhood, guaranteeing as it does mutual indifference, leaves room for play of the freedom of an individual singularity with an other perspective on being? Does the triad of universality, particularity and singularity remain always unreconciled, broken, beset by inner turmoil, a Zerrissenheit, not only through the distorting incursions of particular self-interests, but also through singular individuality that freely questions realized reason’s self-sufficient concrete solidity, the final closedness and complacency of its mores, the oppressiveness of a purported ‘closing-together’ of singularity and universality in which the individual has to choose its self from among the masks of identity offered by the world? Does freedom itself depend upon singularity and universality remaining precisely not closed together in a consolidated, reasonable con-clusion? Does human being itself in its whoness, despite all pacification and reconciliation of its contradictions among singularity, particularity and universality through reason that has shaped a social world as objective, ethical spirit, remain nevertheless ultimately torn and turbulent, a turbulence that is embodied above all in singular individualities that break out of all conformity and identity, and engage in questioning, keeping the very question of human being historically open toward the future so that the present time can always be either a point of historical continuity or of historical rupture?

Such an openness would imply that the three moments of the Hegelian concept do not form an absolute closure, i.e. that, perennially exposed to the finiteness of human being-in-the-world, they invariably never quite fit together, rubbing against each other in a friction of discontent, alienation and strife. If, according to Hegel, “the singular, individual being is the same thing as what is real and actual, only that the former has gone forth from the concept, thus as universal” (das Einzelne ist dasselbe, was das Wirkliche ist, nur daß jenes aus dem Begriffe hervorgegangen, somit als Allgemeines, EnzI § 163 Note), we now have to contemplate — pace Hegel — the possibility that “the singular, individual” human being ‘goes forth’ from the concept, the universal, in such a way that breaks with historically realized and accepted forms of We that, as finitely human, have always already been corrupted by becoming solidified into a conventional, unfree conformism.

If the question of human being in its belonging to being (for Hegel: the Idea, but for us the open 3D-temporal clearing) always remains open, doesn’t this mean that the shapes of objective, spirited mind, namely, the institutions of ethical life, themselves remain always unsettled in a double sense, questionable and revocable? The always unsettled and unsettling questions to be posed can only be posed by singular individuals who do not and cannot accept that reason has consummated itself and come to rest in offering singularity its identity as self only in the reflection of a people’s given ethical mores and institutions, especially the political institutions of state. In a globalized world in incessant, intermingling movement is the ethical life of a unified people still at all appropriate for thinking through historically cast human being? Within Hegel’s system it is possible, at least according to Hegel’s intentions, for singular self-consciousness, by going through the experience of dialectical-speculative, phenomenological thinking, to ultimately attain undirempted, substantial, standing presence in the identity with a final, consolidated, social whole that is this singular self-consciousness’s speculative mirror of (a people’s) identity.

But does there not always remain an unmediated contradiction between singularity and universality and, in the case of the singularity and universality of human being, an unsettledness and uneasiness, especially about ways of political and social thinking, i.e. widespread preontological preconceptions, that have become all too complacently objectified in accepted institutions of political life and conformity to established mores? Doesn’t precisely the abstract freedom of personhood allow the singular individual the recognized and guaranteed freedom of movement, albeit in a niche, to question concrete ethical practices and thus shift them even from within the guaranteed abstract ethical institutions of personhood, above all freedom of speech, that enable traditional understanding and practices that have been handed down to be prevented from being passed on all too unquestioningly and ungainsaid into the future? Can it not always be questioned by singular individuals whether the mores of a people and the laws of its state are truly in conformity with freedom, which could be open to ever new historical castings? The very question of freedom hence remains always open and unsettled.

For as long as there remains a kind of questioning thinking beyond or outside or beside reason consummated in a purportedly final, settled, absolute knowledge and ethical life, a kind of thinking in the lacuna outside reason’s ambit hitherto more or less in conformity with an historically given cast of the beingness of being, the recognition accorded to individual self-consciousness as citizen by the “honour through the office that it holds, through the business it operates and through its other working activity” (Ehre durch das Amt, das er bekleidet, durch das von ihm betriebene Gewerbe und durch seine sonstige arbeitende Tätigkeit, Enz. § 432 Add.) itself becomes vain and empty and cannot satisfy vital, singular, thinking, questioning individuality. An uncanny hiatus, be it at first ever so slight and inconspicuous, opens up, or rather, singularity and universality were never truly closed together in a final historical conclusion.

Even in being acknowledged abstractly in its individual human rights and enjoying the freedom of movement of particularity (which are the great historical achievements of the West that have disseminated worldwide), singular individuality therefore remains always eerily unhoused, ‘unbelonging’ and isolated (vereinzelt, singularized, individualized) in the midst of historically realized, ethically cemented reason, for it is left ill at ease with the claim of infinite, absolute reason to have attained final historical consummation in the social institutions of substantive, consolidated, objective spirit that purportedly constitute self-consciousness’s highest identity, its ostensibly unsurpassable, sublime belongingness to the world. In such an ever-broken mediation between singularity and universality concretely realized in ethical life, the open clearing of historical time sprouts single eruptions of free singularity.

If this is so then, in particular, universal human rights cannot be declared as the ideal toward which history is or ought to be moving as its final destination, its τελός. The present phenomenology of whoness as a genuine social ontology can remedy this delusion by introducing ontology of sociating through mutually estimating power interplay.

11.3The question of who: Selfhood, my self, you-and-I (Heidegger’s 1934 lectures and Being and Time)

If, within German Idealism, Hegel thinks the Absolute as infinite and philosophy as the possibility of absolute knowing, a century later Heidegger takes human being back to the finitude of Dasein whose truth is also finite, limited by the horizon of the historical 3D-time-clearing (Zeitlichkeit) within which the beingness of beings is hermeneutically cast and, furthermore, by the individual and particular situation within this temporal clearing. Whereas Hegel proceeds from the subject, from self-consciousness, seeking reconciliation and consummate identity in the Idea as subject-object, Heidegger is presumably the first thinker in the Western tradition to pose explicitly the question of who, the Werfrage as an ontological question. He does this in Sein und Zeit as a prelude to undertaking an ontological analysis of human being itself, which he calls Dasein.216 In contrast to metaphysical ontology, which has always asked the question of what a being is as such, investigating τὸ ὂν ᾗ Heidegger pursues the question of who the human being is and analyzes this mode of being as the 3D-temporal structure of existence that enables selfhood. Existence is thus redefined and comes to designate, as an ontological concept, the specific way human being stands out (ek-sists) in the three temporal ecstatic dimensions of future, ‘past’ (Gewesenheit, beenness, yesterness) and present. This has crucial implications for how the socio-ontological constitution of ‘we ourselves’ is to be conceived as part of the problematic of the question concerning whoness. The We can no longer be thought through a process of recognition between self-cousciousnesses, as we shall see below. Another task is to assess how far Heidegger gets in delving into the question of whoness.

Heidegger takes up the question, “Who is the human?” at some length in his lectures in Summer Semester 1934,217 immediately after his resignation from the rectorate at Freiburg University:

Die echte und angemessene Vorfrage ist nicht die Wasfrage, sondern die Werfrage. Wir fragen nicht ‘Was ist der Mensch?’, sondern ‘Wer ist der Mensch?’. [...] Auf diese Frage antwortet der Angefragte ‘ich’ oder, wenn es mehrere sind, ‘wir’. Oder es wird mit einem Eigennamen geantwortet. Die Vorfrage lautet daher immer: ‘Wer bist du?’ — ‘Wer seid ihr?‘— ‘Wer sind wir?’. (GA38:34)

The genuine and appropriate preliminary question is not the what-question, but the who-question. We do not ask, ‘What is the human?’, but, ‘Who is the human?’. [...] The one asked answers this question with ‘I’ or, if there are several of them, ‘we’. Or it is answered with a proper name. The preliminary question is therefore always: ‘Who are you?’ — ‘Who are you all?’ — ‘Who are we?’.

If confronted with the question ‘Who am I?’, I answer in colloquial English, ‘It’s me’ or ‘I’m Michael Eldred’, or, more philosophically, ‘I am I myself’, an unsatisfying, tautological answer of the sort I = I suitable perhaps for a god. The natural, colloquial answer, ‘I’m Michael Eldred’, reveals that I am a singular individual and bear a proper name to denote that singularity. The proper name goes no further than a denotation of this individual singularity as a difference addressing somewho as somewho, since there can be no identity without difference. Michael Eldred, Socrates, Louis Firestream are simply proper names for singular individuals, even though, to pass the time, one could still ask about the etymology of such proper names, or the family lineage, or what they signify in themselves. I myself bear a singular proper name that is supposed to point to nothing and no one other than me.

That different singular individuals coincidently bear the same proper name is a cause of confusion, for proper names are intended to hold singularities apart. Despite any traditions of naming within families, such a singular proper name is not merely a particularization of a universal, but aims at naming me in my unique singluarity. My selfhood is thus marked by a proper-namedness, a general or universal ontological-existential category that encompasses denotation of a singular self.218 I am not a singular thing, a τόδε τι, but a singular self, a τόδε τις, and in order to capture this singularity in the medium of language, I must have and bear my own, singular, proper name. And the same goes for you whom I encounter in the world.219 Thus, even to say that I am a ‘singular self’ is to employ a general term that is already at one remove from my unmistakable, unique singularity as Michael Eldred, my proper name as a senseless sound that differentiates (or is supposed to differentiate) me as singular.

Heidegger at least implicitly recognizes this problem of singularity when he follows up the question, “How is the we and you all and I and you to be determined?” (wie das Wir und Ihr und Ich und Du zu bestimmen sei, GA38:35) and first answers with, “they are said to be persons and associations of persons” (sie seien Personen und Personenverbände, GA38:35). “But what is to be understood by the term ‘person’?” (Aber was sollen wir unter dem Titel ‘Person’ verstehen? GA38:35) Heidegger does not pursue the question further, but we will provide at least an indication. ‘Person’ is related to Greek πρόσωπον, ‘face’, ‘visage’, ‘mask’, ‘outward appearance’, ‘beauty’, ‘a person’. To be a person, I show my face, I present a mask to the world as a persona on stage; I show myself off in the world in an outward appearance. This self-presentation as a showing-off (Sichzeigen) of my face is the mirror reflection, the mirror image of the ἰδέα or εἶδος that metaphysics thinks as the look or face or sight which whats show of themselves in presenting themselves as whats in their whatness.

When Heidegger writes, “that the what-question hits back at us” (...daß die Wasfrage auf uns zurückschlägt, GA38:45), this can be interpreted as meaning that the metaphysical question concerning the whatness or the essence of beings hits back at us in the question of whoness, for now it is we ourselves who bear masks, show off a face, present a look to the world and are mirrored by the world to be ourselves. I am myself only in showing myself as someone, as somewho, just as a thing is a thing only in showing itself as something in its look of the εἶδος and in having this εἶδος understood as such by human being. But more than that: I can only show myself off as who I am in the mirror of the others who estimate and either affirm or deny my self-standing. The others must see and understand who I am for me to be anywho. Such self-disclosure occurs in the 3D-temporal clearing.

Traditional ontology is now reflected back onto me myself and us ourselves when we take up and take on the question of who we are in our whoness. As has been shown already in Chapters 2 and 3 — and this is the all-important, pivotal point — the self-showing-off of who, i.e. the Sichzeigen of the phenomenon of whoness, must not be confused and coalesced with the self-showing of what, i.e. the Sichzeigen of the phenomenon of whatness. Whereas modern metaphysics, starting with Descartes, turned back and reflected back onto the ego cogito as ego cogito me cogitare, thereby positing as the fundamentum inconcussum and ultimate, substantial subject of self-certain truth, thus becoming self-consciousness, i.e. a co-knowing of self, as the starting-point for all certain knowing of the world, today we have to gain the insight that this self-reflection that essentially characterizes modern metaphysics missed its proper target because, in allowing the metaphysical what-question to “hit back” at us, Descartes and his successors, through to Hegel and beyond, all failed to translate the what-question in its hitting back into the appropriate who-question, thus missing the phenomenality of encounter and intimacy.

The question of the whoness of human being was therefore given a what answer: the anonymous ego, res cogitans, the cogitating thing, the conscious subject, self-consciousness, and the dimension of whoness in its ultimate singularity, of first-and-second person-being that comes about only in an ongoing, mirroring interplay among proper-named singularities, remained sealed off. All these what-answers to the question of the whoness of human being remain within the bounds of the Western metaphysics of substance, of that-which-underlies, of ὑποκείμενον, of standing presence, whereas genuine access to the phenomenon of whoness shows that human being is a site of temporal groundless, mutually estimating interplay that only strives to come to stand in a singular, proper-named showing-off of who it is in a mirror interplay of powers.

Both Hegel and Heidegger fail to properly enter the dimension of whoness in their thinking. The deficiency with Hegel lies in the circumstance that self-consciousness is thought in the third person, even though, to his credit, he underscores that “self-consciousness [...] is only as recognized self-consciousness” (Das Selbstbewußtsein [...] ist nur als ein Anerkanntes, PhdG. S. 145). The dialectic of recognition remains ‘impersonal’, however. Nevertheless, Hegel has the great merit that he shows that “the concept of this its [self-consciousness’s] unity in its doubling [...] is a multilateral and polysemic inter-meshing” (Der Begriff dieser seiner Einheit in seiner Verdopplung [...] ist eine vielseitige und vieldeutige Verschränkung, PhdG:145), without however drawing the conclusion that self-consciousness therefore cannot be a subject, a substance, a self-standing presence at all.

The situation with Heidegger is more complex because, on the one hand, he clearly sees and emphasizes that all Dasein is Mitsein (e.g. “this being qua Dasein is always already with others”; dieses Seiende qua Dasein ist immer schon mit Anderen, GA26:245), i.e. that all human being is shared, sociating human being with one another, so that it makes no sense to talk of a self without others. But on the other hand, in his engagement with dialogical philosophy he asserts repeatedly that “selfhood, however, is never related to you, but rather — because it enables all this — is neutral vis-à-vis I-ness and you-ness...” (Nie aber ist die Selbstheit auf Du bezogen, sondern — weil all das ermöglichend — gegen das Ichsein und Dusein [...] neutral. 220). The neutrality of human being in a self-standing selfhood is thus given ontological priority over being you-and-me, i.e. the self is assertedly thinkable prior to its engagement and “intermeshing” with the other,221 rather than you and me coming about as selves only in the mirroring interplay of our “multilateral and polysemic inter-meshing” (Hegel).222 The very selfhood of Dasein, according to Heidegger, consists in its Seinkönnen, i.e. in its ability to cast itself into its future in choosing and moulding possibilities of its existence, an ability first enabled by Dasein’s moodedly understanding and thus belonging (anonymously) to being.

But this possibility of self-casting, of realizing one’s abilities, of bringing them to presence and into play in the world as acquired abilities that belong to one’s self and therefore make up the core of one’s identity, is in truth only given through the estimatively mirroring power interplays with others, especially intimately between me and you, in which each of us comes to stand, through estimation both affirmative and detractive, as our own, singular, proper-named selves. In ourselves, without this enabling interplay of mutual estimation, each of us is nothing, a blank, non-existent in the sense of not standing out into the shared world. This means that selfhood on its very deepest socio-ontological level is a reciprocal interplay of each of us casting each other affirmatively or disparagingly into our very own individual possibilities. This must be kept in mind when following further Heidegger’s treatment of the question of who in 1934.

Wer bist du? Wer bist du selbst? Wer bin ich selbst? Wer sind wir selbst? Die Werfrage zielt in den Bereich von solchem Seienden, das jeweils ein Selbst ist. Wir können jetzt die Antwort auf die Vorfrage so fassen: Der Mensch ist ein Selbst. Wenn wir jetzt nur wüßten, was ein Selbst ist. Hier fehlt uns völlig der Begriff. (GA38:35)

Who are you? Who are you yourself? Who am I myself? Who are we ourselves? The who-question aims at the domain of such beings that are in each singular case a self. We can now formulate the answer to the preliminary question in the following way: The human is a self. If we now only knew what a self is. Here we are completely lacking a concept.

Heidegger sees clearly that the question asking in the first person, ‘Who am I myself?’ or ‘Who are we ourselves?’, has a tendency to drift off into a question asked in the third person, ‘What is the self?’. The question concerning who seems to naturally transform itself into a question concerning what. We seem to naturally push the question away from us into the third person. Hence it could be said that the phenomenon of whoness loves to hide even more than the phenomenon of whatness, thus presenting even more a challenge to ontological thinking by hiding behind whatness. The direction in which the who-question asks is therefore constantly in danger of being brought off course into a question concerning what, the classical question of metaphysics, τί ἐστιν; or ‘What is...?’. This tendency to drift off course is inherent in language itself — at least in language hitherto, whose grammatical structure is thoroughly metaphysical —, for the use of words itself transports each singular thing or singular individual into a universal or general realm.

This was seen clearly by Hegel at the beginning of the Phänomenologie des Geistes in the section on “sensuous certainty” (sinnliche Gewißheit), for sensuous certainty wants to hold onto its singular sensuous experience of this singular, sensuous thing here, e.g. this singular keyboard here at this very moment, and thus simply points at this singular, sensuous thing. Even by naming it as ‘this thing’ or ‘this’, a universality is said that is not intended, for ‘this’ can be everything that is, i.e. a universal. ‘This’ always misses its singular mark. Similarly with me, Michael Eldred. As soon as I say, ‘I, Michael Eldred, am a self’, I have already been deflected from my singularity and have used a general, universal term, namely, ‘self’. It is therefore not easy to approach the question of who, the question of ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who are we?’. I would have to say tautologically, “I, Michael Eldred, am as self I myself.” The reflexive pronoun, ‘myself’, refers back to me, not as a self, but as I myself; thus even I myself requires a mediation that breaks with brute tautology.

Nevertheless, apart from the self-reflexive proposition in which I as self bend back upon myself, each of us is a ‘self’, so that the singularity of my being myself and you being yourself and we being ourselves cannot escape, in some sense, subsumption under the universal of selfhood. How is our respective singularity to be preserved when you and I encounter each other? This subsumption may be not at all pernicious so long as we are aware of and think through carefully the translation of unique singularity into a universal category of self-hood through language itself and are not seduced by this translation into a comfortable, unquestioning subsumption under massive, substantivized concepts. There is even a peculiar doubling of singularity when I come to consider certain singular things that belong to myself. This singular fountain pen, for instance, is my very own. As something singular it could not even be named a ‘fountain pen’ (a universal denotation), but could only be pointed to; it is doubly singular, however, for it is not only a singular thing as ‘this’, but it is my very own and entertains a singular relationship (πρός τι) to my singular self, my Jemeinigkeit, expressed by saying, for instance, it has ‘sentimental value’ or that it is ‘priceless’.

It is no coincidence, but inherent to the nature of (our Western) language, considering the work of the first grammarians in Alexandria, that the grammatical term ‘substantive’, meaning ‘noun’, is essentially related to Greek οὐσία, i.e. substance, standing presence, and that the concepts of our thinking are solid substantives in standing presence designed from the outset to grasp the what-ness of whats. With regard to the phenomenality of whoness and the singularity of my self and our selves, a good measure of circumspection must prevail regarding the validity of substantive concepts that lay a claim on defining the phenomena of being ‘who’ by confining them in an ὁρισμός, a conceptual horizon of standing presence. The exertion and toil of the concept — Hegel’s Anstrengung des Begriffs — must gain a new, more delicate, evanescent meaning in the realm of the question regarding who I am and who you are and who you-and-I are. Indeed, we must be prepared to use entirely unusual language to gently bring these light-shunning phenomena out into the open.

Wir verstehen, was Wir selbst, Du selbst, Ich selbst heißt. Aber die Wesensbestimmung verlangt immer den Begriff. (GA38:35)

We understand what we ourselves, you yourself, I myself means. But the determination of essence always demands a concept.

Are we looking for an “essence” of who? When posing the question of who, is it still possible, in the train of the philosophical tradition, to demand the concept? Does the concept always transform the who into a what? And singularity into universality? The two questions must be distinguished from one another, for it may be possible, after all, to situate singularity within a universal concept, namely selfhood, without thereby sliding unthinkingly and unawares from who (first and second person in mutually estimating interplay) into what (third person). It should be noted that Heidegger asks — and we, too, ask — the question regarding who not in the third person, ‘Who is he?’, ‘Who is she?’, ‘Who are they?’ because the third person already has the proclivity to drift into a what. People in the third person can be thought just like anything else (which is why today’s social science also talks invariably in the third person, because such talk is ‘scientific’, ‘objective’). People are already easily assimilable to being thought of and treated as things, as ‘facts’. The phenomenal immediacy of self-hood is preserved only by asking in the first or second person. As yet we do not quite fathom why this is so.

In posing the question of selfhood in 1934 and also earlier on, especially in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger focuses on gaining one’s self by casting oneself into one’s ownmost possibility of existing — without any mention of you. This is the authenticity of the self. At first and for the most part, he says, we are not our selves, but lost in the inauthenticity of understanding our possibilities of existing only from the tasks of taking care of things in which we are immersed and absorbed in everyday life and from the opinions of ‘people’ (das Man). Thus we are ourselves, i.e. understand our selves, only from everyday busyness, and this busyness is conceived as an involvement first and foremost with things that have to be taken care of in an average, conventional way under the watchful eye of people’s opinions.

Even though Heidegger has provided an ontological-existential place for others in the world under the headings of Mitsein and Mitdasein, and points out that taking care of things always involves also having to do with others, the phenomenality of what this Mitsein entails with regard to understanding one’s self is spelt out only as adopting the average, conventional opinion of “man selbst” (what ‘people’ ‘think’) in understanding oneself. It is to be noted and underscored here, that the entire discussion of the self, selfhood and das Man in Sein und Zeit takes place in the third person within a landscape of heavily substantified concepts.223 This is not without consequences for the very thinking of Mitsein. In the 1934 lectures, the situation is similar, although now Heidegger situates his inquiry under the question, “Who are we ourselves?”, i.e. genuinely in the first person (plural), noting that

...wir zunächst und zumeist nicht bei uns selbst sind, uns in Selbstverlorenheit und Selbstvergessenheit herumtreiben. (GA38:49)

...at first and for the most part, we are not with our selves but rather gallivant about in self-lostness and self-oblivion.

The meaning of this lostness of and oblivion to the self is seen to lie in not grasping a genuine possibility of one’s own existing through an authentic decision regarding how to cast one’s very own, singular existence and resolutely pursue this possibility once adopted:

Wir sind eigentlich wir nur in der Entscheidung, und zwar, jeder vereinzelt. (GA38:58)

We are authentically, properly we only in the decision, and indeed, each of us individually.

A We comes about authentically solely in a decision? If only it were so easy! Where is the Auseinandersetzung, the having-it-out with one another, the conflict and debate through which we come to a common, shared decision in which the power interplay of mutually estimating who each of us is mediates? Where is the controversial interchange of views and arguments contro-verting, i.e. turning against, each other through which we win each other over, persuade each other and gain each other’s trust and become confident in each other with regard to a proposed course of action, and so come about (zeitigen) in the first place as a unified, resolved We that mediates, as much as humanly possible, the gulf between us as singular individuals? Or does Heidegger, along authoritarian lines, envisage only that each of us individually decides to follow a leader or to commit oneself without altercation to a cause or a (predefined, uncontroversial) shared futural historical possibility of existing? How could such a unisonous commitment to a leader come about if not by miracle? Or seduction by clever demagoguery?

Furthermore, this account of self-lostness disregards an important, indeed crucial, aspect of the phenomenality of how we come adrift from our possible, very own self that is hidden in the word “Eigenname”, “proper name”, that Heidegger introduces but does not explore and develop further. We have already seen above that being who, i.e. being I myself, necessarily involves bearing a proper name that denotes me in my singularity. My proper name is my very own, strictly senseless, name, something almost intimate, belonging only to me myself.

But this name exists nevertheless in language and can thus also be appropriated by everyone else. In the social intercourse I have with others, my proper name is employed by you and them in appellating me, i.e. in calling, invoking me. And I, too, call or appellate you in addressing you with your proper name. We call each other by our very own proper names, and that is the proper domain for our proper names: calling, or appellating each other’s selves in our intercourse with each other, an intercourse that sociates us, perhaps intimately. This proper domain for our proper names, however, is not walled off, and so my proper name and your proper name can be appropriated by others as well in referring to us in the third person. Our proper names thus come into circulation among the others, ‘them’, as mere signs marking individuals used to ‘identify’ them among others. This possibility of (our Western) language is inherent in the universal nature of language itself, in which designating substantives play a primary, leading role. In employing my proper name not to address, to call me, but rather to designate me, I have myself become a sign that can be circulated in the language spoken by others. Who I am is then decided upon in part by what is said about me by others, which reflects or shines back on my self. They, too, play a part in moulding and casting who I am, and who I can be, in my existential possibilities in the world.

As has been shown in Chapter 2, what is said about me by others is my reputation, my Ruf or ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’. In and through my reputation in the eyes of others, I myself have been appropriated by language in the language of others, who may be completely anonymous, and I thus succumb to the eery power of the third person which also contributes to delineating who I am and can be in the exercise of my potential, above all, my abilities. For my reputation is ineluctably also an estimation of my abilities. The calling into my reputation provides me with a stand in the world of others, by virtue of which I can also enjoy a certain supportive Ansehen (standing, repute, face, sight) — or also lose face. How I stand, my standing, depends on how the showing-off of my face is reflected in the estimation of others, even and especially when this estimation does not take place in a face-to-face encounter. Through reputation I am alienated from my own self through others in the third person defining who I am.

This delineation of who I am in my reputation is a co-determinant of my self in the sense that it co-determines as who I can cast my self in the social world. In this sense and to this extent, with language, especially in the mouths of others, I have always already lost my self to the others (although at the same time it is also only within language that I can even cast, define, gain and be my own self). But it is not just in reputation and in the use of my proper name by others that I lose my self; it is in the very casting of possibilities of existing by a third person language that I come to cast my self by mirroring these third-person possibilities (each of which is a universal) into my self. I adopt or reject them and cast my self accordingly. I come under the sway of anonymous, circulating public opinion not only with regard to my own reputation that is circulated in this medium but also with regard to the possibilities of existing that I can see against the horizon for my self in how existential possibilities are cast as desirable or undesirable by public opinion or certain others. And whether I can realize a possibility of existing I have adopted as my own through exercising my potential, my abilities, depends also crucially on whether others estimate and mirror those abilities affirmatively, thus either opening up or closing off possible self-castings for developing my abilities and putting them to work.

To be my self, I must first of all cast my self into my ownmost possibility of existing, but how am I to decide which of these possibilities is my very own? How am I to decide whether I have been alienated from my self from the start by being swayed by the spectrum of existential possibilities that ‘society’ and the ‘spirit and mood of the times’ offers me? How am I even to attain my self-chosen self-casting if not through power interplays with others? Since it is impossible for me to cast myself in a void that is not already precast by public opinion and the thinking of the times in the language of the third person, and since I am always dependent on my social standing as defined by my reputation, how it is possible that I could not be selbstverloren, lost to myself?

Since I am always already exposed to the eery medium and power of third person language circulating about who I am, my abilities, etc., being my self must always be a becoming my very own self through winning my self back from its having been always already articulated, defined, precast by others, by anonymous common sense, by what others ‘think’ about me, how ‘they’ assess my potential, by what the conceptions of the times already pre-conceive, etc. This is the uncanny power of das Man, but now put explicitly and emphatically into relation to the phenomena of proper-namedness and reputation. Becoming my self is thus, in a certain sense, a rite of passage from the medium of the third person, in which I have always already been predefined and precast in my existential possibilities by the others, through a process of extracting myself from conventional, average normality, to the first person in which I myself choose and cast my singular self as my very own possibility of existing in the world, even though this very own possibility as a standing-out in the world is ineluctably and always an exposure of my singularity to universality, a more or less broken mediation of my singular individuality with the world.