Ideology as Artificial Respiration: Hegel on Stoicism, Skepticism and Unhappy Consciousness 1 by Arvi Särkelä An inclusive diagnosis of the pathologies of recognition needs to regard the critique of ideology as one of its necessary components. In contrast to many other living creatures and species, humans and their communities relate to their reproductive ends interpretively. 2 Thus, it might well be that a pathological condition, that is, a systematic deviation from reproductive ends making social life ‘dead’ or ‘ill,’ is being maintained precisely by these creatures’ interpreting the ‘false’ situation ‘falsely.’ Yet I will argue that a crucial point of both ideology and its critique, as “moments” of a recognition- theoretical diagnosis of social pathologies, must be that ideology is never fully false. In the broader context of a critical theory of society this demands a reinvestigation of Adorno’s claim that, in ideology, the true and the false are deeply interwoven (Adorno 2003, 465). In the following, I will draw upon Hegel’s phenomenological analysis of Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness as intellectual reactions to social pathology. I will argue that, in Hegel’s view, the true and the false are held together in ideology by its being recognitively educational: ideology presents both a moment of social pathology and a moment of its overcoming. It gives, so to speak, artificial respiration to a social life fallen ill. 1 Phenomenology and Ideology As it happens, the claim that the chapter ‘Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism and Unhappy Consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit already presents something like a critique of ideology is far from being accepted in contemporary Hegel scholarship. For example, Robert Stern distinguishes between two competing readings of these passages. The first I shall call the historical materialist reading, which Stern attributes to Alexandre Kojève. In this interpretation, Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness are treated as servile ‘ideologies’ and thus, Stern claims, are given a ‘purely socio-political rationale’ (Stern 2002, 86). By contrast, the other interpretation, which one could call the conceptual realist 3 reading, identifies a clear conceptual progress in these shapes as they bring self-consciousness forth from what initially appears to be a deadlock in the