Fichte’s Role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter 4

In this paper I return to the familiar territory of the Lord-Bondsman dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in order to raise the question of the relation of Hegel’s use of the theme of recognition there to Fichte’s. Fichte had introduced the notion of recognition in his Foundations of Natural Right, to deduce the social existence of humans within relations of mutual recognition as a necessary condition of their very self-consciousness. However, there it also functioned as part of a solution to a problem within the work on which the theory of rights was meant to be based, the earlier Foundation of the Complete Wissenschaftslehre of 1794-5. In Hegel’s classic account in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology we find recognition offered as a solution to a problem within an account of self-consciousness that has a number of clearly Fichtean features. But I suggest that to the degree that the lord-bondsman episode there expresses any theory of recognition , it is not Hegel’s own theory but rather his interpretation of Fichte’s, a theory of which he is critical. Freed from this misleading assumption that the lord-bondsman dialectic represents something deep about Hegel’s own philosophy, we might then be more able to get clearer about Hegel’s actual views about recognition and the role it plays in his own philosophy.