Recognition: Hegel, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon

On the social dynamics of selfhood and identity

This video lecture is part of the Identity and Selfhood course on Substack. You can find the reading list here. Links to readings and access to the full lectures as video and audio are provided to subscribers, with low-income and student learner discounts available on my homepage.

G.W.F. Hegel had twentieth-century French philosophy in a chokehold. Particularly influential on this period was the so-called master-servant dialectic, which comes from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and asserts that self-consciousness is truly itself only in being for another consciousness. Encountering another is a dizzying and even shocking experience, resulting in what Hegel describes as a fight to the death. Luckily, through a series of twists and turns, this fight has a happy ending of sorts when each consciousness recognizes the other and each can actualize their freedom in the world.

Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and phenomenologically-influenced psychiatrist Frantz Fanon all consider identity to be a matter of recognition in a sense, but are less optimistic than Hegel about the reciprocal recognition of freedoms. After all, social oppression, as Beauvoir and Fanon point out, often block recognition. Sartre’s famous account of “The Look” is a direct response to Hegel, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. He basically agrees with Hegel that recognition is necessary for selfhood, but thinks that Hegel’s account is overly cognitive (Sartre emphasizes the affective dimension).

This video draws together these four thinkers’ views of recognition and how it relates to our identities. You’ll see that there are some shared themes with the earlier video on the Existential Self, but here the focus is more on our social relations with others, including in situations of oppression. As you read and watch the video (or listen - audio version below!), consider:

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