HOT New Self-Help Trend: 19th Century German Philosophy
Or: Hegelian Freedom as Owning our Deeds
If you’ve ever made a conscious effort to live a better life then you’ve probably come across these two things to do: take responsibility and rewrite your story. These moves are simple in theory and difficult in execution, things which we have to do ourselves but which we cannot do alone.
What I want to show you here is how the deepest philosophical toolkit for those moves was forged two centuries ago by a notoriously dense German thinker - G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s project certainly wasn’t life‑coaching; it was an incredibly ambitious attempt to understand how freedom, history, and rationality all hang together. Yet his account of owning one’s deed inside a community of reciprocal recognition turns out to illuminate some of the most effective modern practices of change, practices which have transformed my life and which could transform your life too.
The point of this post is to connect the power of community self-transformation to some arcane and challenging writing from a long time ago. Thinking about growth is not itself growth, and if you’re in a crisis I urge you to get into action and start talking to someone immediately. That said, I like exploring the reflective parts of human life, and I much prefer to do so with other people, so I invite you to think about these things with me. If I can get you excited about personal growth or about philosophy then this post will have succeeded.
Now for some Hegel.
Hegel in two (painfully dense) sentences
Freedom is not mere choice; it’s being at home in what you actually do. A decision is free when, looking back, you can still say “Yes, that deed expresses who I really am.”
That retrospective ownership becomes real only within a public network of recognition. Freedom is a private fantasy unless you have witnesses who recognize said freedom and hold you accountable to the story you tell about yourself.
Put another way, freedom is social - a sailor who falls overboard and flails in the open ocean doesn’t have anyone around to tell them no, but that isn’t a very attractive vision of freedom. Freedom is living in a society where people honor your right to self-determination, where you can say “this is what I want my life to be” and others say “yes it is”.
Hegel, like I said, is as ambitious as it gets about this stuff: he says that all of history is reality’s process of learning to make its deeds intelligible to itself, doing so through ever wider forms of social recognition - through family, civil society, state, and global community. Whether or not he succeeds in his assertions is outside of our scope here. The key move that I want to pluck out of his work is recollection (Er‑innerung): taking what has happened, retelling it until its necessity makes sense, and thereby integrating the past into a renewed present that can then move forward.
Hegelian micro‑dialectic at Landmark
I’m a big fan of Landmark - I’ve gotten a lot out of their programs, especially the Landmark Forum. The following isn’t an official exposition of their work, just me taking two things that I like and fitting them together in a way that hopefully commends them both.
Landmark is a personal growth and development organization that does its work through group conversations. During these conversations people speak publicly about what they want to work on and get coaching from the Landmark leader. These conversations center around many things, including the two imperatives highlighted at the top of this piece - taking responsibility and owning your story.
During one of these conversations a participant shared that she had endured a physically abusive relationship and was having trouble with these ideas. It seems outrageous and insane to say that an abuse victim is somehow completely responsible for their abuse, and similarly wrong to rewrite the victim’s story in a way that trivializes the terrible experiences that abuse victims endure. The Forum leader invited the participant to see that, within those brutal constraints, she had made the best possible choices to stay alive. She was encouraged to describe those actions as courageous and even powerful, to deny her abuser the ability to take power out of her story.
That’s powerful stuff, and if you quit reading here and go jump into Landmark then I’ll consider my work done. However, because this is a philosophical piece, I want to go back to the Hegelian beats we’re looking at here:
Negation of the old narrative - leaving behind “I was completely powerless.”
Recollection - identifying the concrete deeds she did perform (securing safety, discovering inner endurance, eventually leaving).
Recognition - the group publicly ratifies the new story: those acts were mine and they were brave, and everyone supports me in asserting this.
The participant left relieved-not because any facts changed, but because the meaning of the facts was sublated (aufgehoben): cancelled as a story of impotence, preserved as data, and elevated into a story of agency.
Twelve Steps, innumerable new stories
Alcoholics Anonymous, another pillar of my life, choreographs the same pattern:
Step 1 negates old illusion of control.
Steps 4‑5 creates a fearless moral inventory and public confession (a recollection and recognition).
Steps 8‑9 make amends, re‑inscribing the new self into the broader social fabric.
Step 12 carrying the message to newcomers generates and maintains the communal network that transformed your life at the start of the process, solidifying your new self image of socially-valuable sobriety.
What looks like “powerlessness” at the start is actually the entrance fee for a richer, Hegelian freedom: the sober person can review the wreckage of their past and still say “that was me, and it is now integrated into a new me”. My trauma didn’t drink alcoholically, I did. The misery and chaos of the past no longer means that I’m a broken person, it means that I’m a person who can help people dealing with misery and chaos in a way that nobody else can.
Freedom as a spiral - downward alone, upward together
Many would worry that revisiting trauma or moral failures just picks at old scabs and causes pointless psychic damage, re-inscribing a message that there’s something wrong with you. This is a fair concern, and what ultimately matters is the presence of an affirmative community.
Revisiting the past is like traveling on a spiral - looked at from a 2-dimensional perspective it looks like going around in circles, but from a 3D perspective every turn of the circle brings you higher or lower. If we retell our stories alone, we risk re-enforcing the same story - if we tell our stories with others then the stories of others and the recognition of others provides us with perspective and affirmation that we could never conjure by ourselves. Telling our stories together, we can revisit the same facts differently each time, every retelling bringing new perspective and less alienation into our lives.
Final thought: we don’t just have pasts, we have histories
Human beings are special kinds of beings - we are beings who wonder what it means to be what we are. There is an open-ended self-interpretation that is baked into the fabric of our existence. Other things that exist have a past, a sequence of events behind it that completely determines its present - if you throw a ball through the air, you can (in theory) completely predict where it will be in the future if you know every point it has hit before now. For human beings, however our past determines us, we also have a history - we tell a story about the past, and we are influenced by that story as much as we are by the sheer facts of what happened to us.
We can’t change our pasts, but we can always(!) change our histories. The past influences me much differently if I see it as proving my helplessness and corruption or if I see it as proving my endurance and commitment to growth.
The recognition of others is critical to the successful re-interpretation of our histories. If I declared myself to be the reincarnation of Napoleon and demanded that everyone worship my immortal might, people would declare me insane and my re-interpretation would never be concretely realized. If I declare myself to be a sober alcoholic then I find an entire community of people eager to say “yes you are”, people who will help support me in that re-interpretation no matter what.
I am very grateful for the communities that I have discovered, recognitive conversations that have made freedom possible for me in a way I could never have conjured in isolation. My hope is that everyone can find, or make, such communities for themselves, and that we can transform our institutions to make that kind of freedom available for everyone.