Abstract
In this chapter I will elaborate on three broadly Hegelian ideas. Firstly, that the subjective and objective aspects of “spirit” (Geist), that is to say the psychological and social structures distinctive of persons and their life, are co-constitutive elements of a whole. This whole is the human life-form, or “the life-form of persons”. Secondly, that recognition or Anerkennung as self-transcendence and inclusion of otherness is ontologically constitutive of both, and key to their internal interrelations. Thirdly, that though freedom as collective autonomy is distinctive of this life-form, thought on the model of abstraction from necessarily determining otherness it is theoretically mistaken, and, put in practice, pathological in a literal sense of a pathology of life with this form.
