Cooperation depends on the participants recognising one another as free. This recognition is not a state reached once and for all, but a process renewed in every act of working together.
Hegel’s idea
The concept of recognition was introduced into philosophy by Fichte (Foundations of Natural Right, 1796). For him, one becomes aware of one’s own freedom only when another person summons one to act freely, and from mutual recognition he derives the relation of right. Hegel took the concept further and sharpened it. His starting point is simple: I know myself as a free being only when another free being recognises me as such. For that, I must recognise the other as free. Recognition exists only as mutual recognition.
Hegel describes this not as friendly agreement but as a process, and a hard one. In the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) he says of this process: “It is a struggle; for I cannot know myself as myself in the other so long as the other is an immediate, other existence for me” (§ 431, own translation). As long as I have the other before me merely as a body, a thing among things, I cannot find myself in them. Both must go beyond this mere immediacy.
In the same paragraph Hegel calls this immediacy the bodiliness of self-consciousness. The body is sign and instrument; through it one exists for others. This matters for cooperation online.
Better known than the paragraph itself is a sentence from the addition to it: one is “truly free only when the other is also free and is recognised by me as free” (own translation). This sentence is not from Hegel’s printed text. The additions (Zusätze) were compiled after Hegel’s death by Ludwig Boumann from students’ lecture notes. The thought is Hegelian; the wording may not be his.
Honneth, and two objections
Axel Honneth took up the idea for the present in The Struggle for Recognition (German 1992). He distinguishes three forms: love, rights and social esteem. All three appear in a successful cooperation: care for one another, equal rights among the participants, and esteem for what each contributes.
Hegel should not be idealised here. § 432 says that the struggle for recognition is a matter “of life and death”, and the addition to § 431 describes how, at this stage, a person proves their capacity for freedom only by putting “themselves, like others, in danger of death” (own translation). Hegel means a transitional stage, to be overcome in the state. Still, the objection remains that violence is declared the gateway to freedom. A second objection goes deeper. Patchen Markell (Bound by Recognition, 2003) argues that recognition also binds: whoever is recognised is fixed to an image, and whoever recognises holds power. Recognition is therefore not a pure good. It must stay open to what the other has not yet become.
Recognition without the body
If Hegel is right that bodiliness is the medium in which recognition first takes place, a question arises online. In a video call the body is reduced to image and voice; in a chat it is missing altogether. What takes the place of bodily risk?
Experience suggests that the risk does not disappear; it moves. Online, people put themselves at stake in other ways.
- The commitment of the recurring appointment. Whoever turns up every week at the same time, with nobody forcing them, binds themselves. Absence is noticed.
- Being wrong about a text in front of others. Whoever proposes a reading in a reading group risks being wrong in front of everyone. Correction is then itself recognition: a reading is only worth contradicting if one has taken it seriously.
- Coping with a foreign language. Whoever speaks a language they have not mastered gives up their command of the situation. Whoever listens and waits recognises them in precisely this weakness.
How can you tell that an online community practises recognition? Contributions are taken up by name. Mistakes are voiced and corrected without shaming. The absence of a member is noticed and mentioned. Disagreement is possible without anyone leaving. And people come back without needing a reminder.
An example
An international reading group meets live online to read a text sentence by sentence. The participants have different first languages; some read in translation. In the first weeks few speak, and cautiously.
Over time this changes. Someone who once proposed a reading that turned out to be wrong, and saw the group work with it rather than pass over it, speaks more freely the next time. The commitment of the appointment, being wrong together about the text and patience with the foreign language achieve what on site often goes unnoticed, because mere presence seems to guarantee it.
What this means for the law
For Hegel, even the contract presupposes recognition: whoever concludes a contract recognises the other as a person and an owner (Groundlines § 71, remark; on contract generally §§ 72–81). He understands right as a whole as the existence of freedom (Groundlines § 29).
In practice this means that the law gives recognition a form that holds even when goodwill fades. Equal voting rights, defined rights to information, fair procedures and the duty to have regard to the interests of others are recognition in solid form. They do not replace lived recognition, but they give it ground to stand on.