Heikki Ikäheimo

This volume contains the workshop papers of the philosophical conference Dimensions of Personhood held in August 13-15, 2004 at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The conference was organized by the Finnish Academy research project The Concept of Person. In the call for papers, the theme of the conference was formulated as follows. Recent developments in neuroscience and information technology, in medicine and biotechnology, and in society and culture more broadly have made various questions concerning our identity as human beings urgent. As our power over ourselves increases, the questions of who we are, how we are to conceive of ourselves and how we should use our powers over ourselves, become more and more pressing. The concept of person is in many ways a necessary starting point in answering such questions. However, the concept is often used in an indeterminate sense, and when efforts have been made to clarify the concept, different philosophers have ended up with rival usages and rival theories. For example, the theories differ on whether ‘person’ is identical with ‘human being’, ‘subject’ or ‘self ’. Yet it seems to us that the rival theories of personhood are trying to capture a common idea, namely that persons differ from (other) animals, machines, detached ‘minds’, brains and sub-personal mechanisms in the kind of relations to self, to others and to the world that they have, or are capable of having. The general idea of the conference is thus to approach personhood along three dimensions, where the being of persons differs from the being of non-persons: 1 self-relations, 2. interpersonal relations, and 3. world-relations. The guiding question of the conference is: how does the concept of person illuminate these relations (to self, to others, to the world), and how do these relations illuminate the concept of person? Our wish is to bring together recent work done in each of these dimensions and further our understanding concerning the ways in which personhood and these relations are intertwined.

Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of recognition deprives individuals and communities of something essential for their flourishing. Yet critics including Judith Butler have questioned whether recognition is implicated in structures of domination, arguing that the desire to be recognized can motivative individuals to accept their assigned place in the social order by conforming to oppressive norms or obeying repressive institutions. Is there a way to break this impasse? Recognition and Ambivalence brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Honneth and Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject. Contributions from both proponents and critics of theories of recognition further reflect upon and clarify the problems and challenges involved in theorizing the concept and its normative desirability. Together, they explore different routes toward a critical theory of recognition, departing from wholly positive or negative views to ask whether it is an essentially ambivalent phenomenon. Featuring original, systematic work in the philosophy of recognition, this book also provides a useful orientation to the key debates on this important topic.

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel’s account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the normative or evaluative super-principle of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity. Published online first 27 January 2021.

This article begins by tracing two issues to be kept in mind in discussing the theme of love as far back as Aristotle: on the one hand the polysemy of the term philia in Aristotle, and on the other hand the fact that there is a focal or core meaning of philia that provides order to that polysemy. Secondly, it is briefly suggested that the same issues are, mutatis mutandis, central for understanding the discussion of love or Liebe by Hegel, the central classic reference in debates on recognition. Thirdly, by pointing out a certain ambiguity in Harry Frankfurt’s recent work on love, the article focuses more closely on the thought that love in the simple sense which Aristotle had pinpointed as the focal meaning of philia, which is arguably at the core of Hegel’s discussion of Liebe, and which still forms at least one of the core senses of the term, is a ‘personifying’ attitude of recognition. Finally, drawing on the above points the article addresses the question whether love as a form of recognition is restricted to intimate relations such as those between family-members, ‘lovers’, close friends and so on, or whether it has applications in interhuman relations more broadly. The answer to this question, it is suggested, is essential for the viability of ethically substantial notions of solidarity beyond circles of close acquaintances, whether within the civil society, across nations, or towards future generations.

This collection of original articles considers the perennial question ‘What are persons?’ It aims first of all to clarify the nature of the question and its relation to associated questions such as the nature of the human animal; how the concepts of human being, person, subject, and self are related; the persistence and unity of persons; and questions as to the conditions for personhood and personality.The ‘dimensions’ of the book’s title reflects the volume’s focus on the relations that persons have with themselves and each other.

According to a widely shared view, a radical change took place in the role of intersubjectivity in Hegel's philosophy somewhere between Jena and Berlin. For instance, Jürgen Habermas's judgement is that whereas in the Jena writings – in the JenaRealphilosophien, and perhaps still in the 1807Phenomenology of Spirit– Hegel conceived of intersubjectivity as an essential element in the constitution of subjectivity and of objectivity, in Berlin Hegel's intersubjectivist conception was replaced by a metaphysics of the absolute I or absolute self-consciousness, in which intersubjectivity no longer plays any important constitutive role.Perhaps it is due to something like this view having been mostly taken for granted even among Hegel-specialists that scholarly literature on intersubjectivity in Hegel's late Encyclopaedic system is indeed very scarce. Robert R. Williams'Hegel's Ethics of Recognitionargues convincingly that the theme of intersubjective recognition can be seen as a central thread running through the whole of Hegel's Encyclopaedic philosophy ofobjectivespirit. But very little has so far been written on the theme of intersubjectivity or intersubjective recognition in Hegel's Encyclopaedic philosophy of subjective spirit. My thesis in what follows is that intersubjectivity or intersubjective mediation in recognition can and should in fact be seen as an essential constituent also of subjective spirit as Hegel conceptualises it in the 1830 Encyclopaedia.

“From Hegel to Marx and Back - Two Sketches of a Normative Ontology of the Human Life-Form.” This article clarifies and compares two theoretical approaches to a normative or evaluative ontology of the human lifeform by the mature Hegel and the young Marx. More exactly, it looks into the ways in which the ideas of recognition and concrete freedom figure in the thinking of the two authors, explicitly in Hegel and more implicitly in Marx. It turns out that Marx’s conception is closer to Hegel than may seem or he himself may have been aware of, but also that Marx’s ontology is in crucial ways poorer than Hegel’s.