§8 What If Hegel’s Master and Slave Were Women?

In the Introduction I referred to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which is embedded within his dialectic of recognition, as an urtext for divining the social nature of the self. Hegel’s dialectic can be viewed as setting the stage for Mead’s understanding of how the self develops through actions and symbolic gestures that are affirmed by others. His text is also valuable because it provides a way of thinking about transcendence that influenced twentieth-century theoreticians such as Sartre and Marcuse. Yet Hegel fails to offer a sufficiently ontogenetic account of the self’s development, and he remains an obstinately pre-Darwinian thinker. In this chapter I turn to Hegel to demonstrate (once again) his lasting value in addressing contemporary social issues, such as how we are to think about gendered relationships, but also to suggest some of his limitations, principally, his lack of appreciation for how the instinctual or impulsive may serve as modes of transcendence in particular contexts. The goals for this chapter, then, are fourfold: first, to provide a reading of Hegel’s dialectic that shows how the notion of transcendence as negation is operative in perhaps the most famous of his texts; second, to show how Mead would reinterpret and criticize Hegel’s dialectic, especially his concepts of self-consciousness and recognition; third, to present an approach to gendered relationships that parallels Hegel’s master-slave dialectic; and finally, to suggest an alternative to notions of “cultural transcendence” that we find in Hegel by highlighting the biological or physiological dimension of emotions.1 But before we turn to an exposition of Hegel’s text, a more detailed introduction to this chapter is in order.

There are at least two questions lodged in the one question of the title of this chapter: could both master and slave in The Phenomenology of Spirit be women, and, hypothetically speaking, if one or both were women, how would the dialectic be different? From within the narrow confines of the introduction to the section that includes the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it should make no difference whatsoever if the master and slave were both women. At the start of the dialectic, we are operating at a level of universality that should transcend differences of gender. When two individuals, two self-consciousnesses, initially encounter each other, each experiences this encounter as a loss, because each self sees its essence, pure self-consciousness, as “out there,” in the other.² Each then proceeds to supersede this apparent loss by “defining” this essence as its own. The self and other appear at this juncture to be neutral with regard to gender, that is, if we assume that both genders are capable of at least a modest degree of self-consciousness. However, given Hegel’s views regarding the development of the subject, the roles of women and the family in history, and the fact that there is a battle to the death in the dialectic (one that Hegel would not have associated with women), it is implausible that the lords and servants in this section of the Phenomenology are female (in Hegel’s mind). And to reinforce this point, we know that the chapter that follows the master-slave dialectic deals with Stoicism, a philosophical position that Hegel links to male figures such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

It certainly appears that Hegel has men in mind when he speaks of master and slave. As we shall see, it can even be argued that the dialectic would end (for Hegel) if the participants were women. However, by abstracting the dialectic from the development of spirit in the Phenomenology , the dynamics of the relationship are such that a plausible case can be made for viewing dominants as male and subordinates as female. Simone de Beauvoir makes such a case in The Second Sex, as does the psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller in Toward a New Psychology of Women, which was first published in 1976. Although Hegel is an important presence in Beauvoir’s work, Hegel does not make an appearance in Miller’s book, nor does Beauvoir for that matter, with whom Miller shares a good deal. Miller does not seem to be aware of Hegel’s dialectic. Nevertheless, she presents a picture of relationships between men and women that is similar in important ways to Hegel’s account of master and slave. Many have commented on how Hegel’s dialectic can be used to illuminate gendered interactions, while acknowledging that a reading of this sort is outside the scope of Hegel’s intentions in this section of the Phenomenology. Yet this type of reading is legitimate, so long as it doesn’t conflate Hegel’s views with those that can be developed from his insights. Many have also stated that using Hegel in this manner is a bit old hat and have turned to what have been denominated postmodern readings. I am going to be old-fashioned here.³ I am going to present Miller’s views and interweave them with insights from Hegel’s text. I take it to be of interest that a psychiatrist, working within the psychoanalytic tradition and writing in the 1970s, has developed insights similar to Hegel’s. It is also of interest that Miller would challenge both Hegel and the Beauvoir of The Second Sex on the priority of culture over nature as a path to transcendence. For Miller, transcendence of fixed roles and patterns of behavior involves accommodating impulses or instincts that help to generate emotions. For women to transcend the limitations placed on them in particular societies, their members (male and female) are going to have to learn to accept a different sort of balance between the cultural and the biological. Miller does not advocate some sort of primitivism but an appreciation for the extent to which biologically grounded needs can inform the emotions and the behavior of social actors. Transcendence is suspect if it merely reinforces accepted prejudices about the relationship between first and second nature.

The model of self-determination that I have been developing can sustain a turn to the biological; think here of the influence of Darwin on Mead and Dewey, and Mead’s claims about biological impulses. However, it might still be argued that biology, properly contextualized, has yet to be given its due as a potential counter to, and source of, transcendence. Miller appears to offer a counterweight and an alternative to viewing transcendence from the vantage point of a Sartre or a Hegel, although I certainly don’t believe that her position undermines the basic claims of this book, for example, because, as I will argue, she is in fact closer to Mead than one might expect. And this proximity will allow a recapitulation of some of Mead’s basic claims about human nature.

Before I proceed, two caveats are in order. First, I am not suggesting that one can find in Hegel the psychological insights or the commitment to egalitarianism that are at the heart of Miller’s analysis. Nor am I claiming that Miller should be read as a dialectical philosopher. I am claiming that Miller’s book has the potential to illuminate Hegel’s text, and vice versa. Second, Miller’s work is of limited value philosophically because of the extent to which she uncritically relies on the psychoanalytic tradition; for example, she does not work through the tensions between Freud’s determinism and the claims for human freedom and creativity that she espouses. But hers is not a philosophical work, and I am not turning to it for resolution of these issues. I am choosing to close Transcendence with an examination of her ideas in order to emphasize the fact that transcendence is possible in a multitude of ways, including heeding the biological, a point that Marcuse would certainly find congenial. I now turn to the promised exposition of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which sets the stage for Mead’s and Miller’s insights.

In the section in the Phenomenology on self-consciousness, in which we find the dialectic of master and slave, we enter the narrative as consciousness comes to view itself as the object of knowledge. Prior to this there were modes of consciousness that attempted to engage the sensuous world by perceiving and interpreting “external” objects. Now consciousness has itself for its object. It is the I = I, or the consciousness that is immediately aware of itself through an act of reflection. It is the cogito. How can there be an immediate reflection of this sort? For Hegel, there cannot be.⁴ Reflective knowledge entails mediation (an insight that Mead endorses but develops in a different manner). It turns out that self-consciousness is not only aware of itself; it is still aware of the sensuous world, the so-called world of externality. Self-consciousness is not merely an I = I, a pure selfconsciousness, because it also “contains” the “awareness of” the sensuous world that it seemingly left behind. Although self-consciousness would like to dismiss this world of appearance, it “haunts” self-consciousness, as Sartre might say. Self-consciousness, the “I” that takes itself to be unitary, cannot rid itself of otherness that undermines its unity.⁵ It is, we are told, “Desire in general” (105).

What self-consciousness desires is to be in unity with itself, that is, without otherness.⁶ It seeks to assert that it has no ties to the independent objects of the sensuous world. After all, it is supposed to be a pure self-consciousness. In order to maintain its purity, its identity, in the face of that which is different from itself, it negates the objects that it encounters in the external world. “Self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life” (109). But the drive to overcome the otherness of these independent objects is complicated by the fact that the so-called independent objects are not simply “out there,” simply external. Selfconsciousness is aware of them in the activity of superseding (some of) them; hence, they are an element of its consciousness.⁷ Notice that thus far I have not referred to self-consciousness as male or female. There is nothing about the argument up to this point that requires that selfconsciousness be male. As a matter of fact, self-consciousness should be thought of as a genus (110). However, as we will see shortly, there is good reason for believing that Hegel has men in mind even at this juncture.

Self-consciousness is in a state of continuous unrest. It desires to be an immediate unity—that is, it does not “wish” to be “outside” itself caught up in externality—so it must confront the otherness of the independent objects of the world. The fact of the matter is that this otherness is actually “within,” because the individual is conscious of the sensuous world; however, self-consciousness acts as if the otherness is only “out there,” in the world. Its response, as we have seen, is to seek to rid its world of this otherness. “It destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty, a certainty which has become explicit for self-consciousness itself in an objective manner” (109). How does it accomplish this? It might be as simple as eating and digesting that which is other. Of course, this relationship to the external world will not achieve what self-consciousness wishes. “In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it aware that the object has its own independence” (109).⁸ At this stage of the dialectic, then, self-consciousness depends on the independent other that it wishes to supersede, to transcend if you will, for it only realizes itself in the process of negating this other. Not only is it aware of the external world but its “essence” now lies in the activity of negating the independent objects of this world. In other words, the “I” requires the activity of transcending independent objects in order to be a self-conscious “I.” But the “I” does not want to accept the fact that it requires the mediation of objects in an external world. It cannot admit that it depends on the other (nor that the other is part and parcel of its own consciousness).

What to do? Well, a good trick would be to have that which is other negate itself—that is, do away with itself—so that self-consciousness would not have to deal with it. This cannot ultimately work, as we shall see, but for now self-consciousness favors this move. “On account of the independence of the object, therefore, it can achieve satisfaction only when the object itself effects the negation within itself” (109). This seemingly would free self-consciousness from the need to grapple with independent objects. However, this kind of self-negation is not to be had in nature. Things and animals do not negate themselves, or at least do not do so in a way that could be satisfying to self-consciousness.

We learn that “[s]elf-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (110). Why should this be so? We will not fully understand why until we are much further along in the Phenomenology.⁹ Nevertheless, it is clear at this juncture that a self-consciousness cannot hope to overcome otherness through the negation of merely natural objects. It can never “conquer” all of the objects of the external world, and it actually needs these objects for its activity of negation. In order to overcome “otherness,” self-consciousness must find another route. Its task is not an easy one. It must locate a form of otherness that is sufficiently different from itself that its activity of negation can continue, but which is also sufficiently similar to itself so that overcoming this otherness is not insuperable. Only another human being can potentially fulfill these conditions. Hegel famously remarks, “A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it” (110).¹⁰ If a self could recognize itself in another, and see the other as itself, the individual would no longer need to negate independent external objects in order to realize and assert its self-consciousness. Its activity of negation would be confined to overcoming the otherness of another self-consciousness. In other words, by mutually recognizing each other as selves, each self-consciousness would have its relationship to itself mediated by the other. They would “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (112).¹¹

We are, however, far from achieving this explicit unity of self and other. Recall that the activity of negating defines self-consciousness at this point. The initial reaction to the discovery of another self-consciousness is to seek to negate this other. This is similar to the reaction to “external objects” that we saw earlier. But the intensity of the reaction is compounded by the unique threat that another self-consciousness poses. The individual finds its essence out there in the other, because the other is another self. Its own essence is now tainted with otherness (because it sees itself in the other). The individual wishes to negate this otherness in order to be at home with itself. This preoccupation, instead of leading to mutuality, at this stage of the dialectic leads to another reality, inequality, that is, master and slave. Why does the dialectic take this turn?

In addition to the desire of self-consciousness to destroy that which threatens its identity, and to rid its world of otherness in general, selfconsciousness also seeks to define itself as above the merely natural, as not merely a part of the external world. It wants to be recognized as a pure self-consciousness. To do so, it must rise above its own biological life, which from the perspective of pure self-consciousness is part of the external world. It must transcend the limits of the merely biological. “The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life” (113). As a pure self-consciousness it is more than willing to risk its own biological life in seeking to kill the other, who threatens its identity.¹² By risking its life in this manner, self-consciousness hopes to demonstrate that it is above the merely biological and to rid its world of the pretender to its throne. And of course, the other self-consciousness has identical hopes. Hence, a battle to the death ensues.

However, Hegel declares that without biological life there can be no self-consciousness. If both self-consciousnesses die in the struggle, the dialectic would end, and the merely natural would win out, namely, death. So at least one consciousness must choose life, and another must choose self-consciousness over life. This will assure that that spirit’s development can continue. “[T]here is posited a pure self-consciousness [the master], and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood [the slave]. Both moments are essential” (115).

Before we turn to the master-slave dialectic, it is worth highlighting that in “the battle to the death” Hegel is without a doubt speaking about male agents. In support of this claim I offer the following passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he is discussing the family, a much more developed social relationship than the one we are currently addressing but that still reflects his basic assumptions about males and females.

Thus one sex [male] is mind in its self-diremption into explicit personal selfsubsistence and the knowledge and volition of free universality.... It follows that man has his actual substantive life in the state, in learning, and so forth, as well as in labour and struggle with the external world and with himself so that it is only out of his diremption that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself. ... Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the family, and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame of mind.¹³

This is perhaps the place to answer one question raised by the title of this chapter: What if Hegel’s master and slave were women? The answer is rather straightforward for Hegel. We would never have arrived at the distinction between masters and slaves had the burgeoning self-consciousnesses been women, because women would have clung to life and avoided the “the trial by death” (114). On the other hand, men might have killed each other off in their quest to rise above the merely biological. Fortunately, some men were willing to become slaves in order not to die. But such men are not really men. They are womanly in that they prefer the biological to transcendence. As a matter of fact, if this presentation of Hegel’s position is reasonably on target, one can see why Beauvoir’s analysis of woman as Other is such a plausible extension of Hegel’s text. Women, like slaves, have been mired in the biological, the natural, and the nontranscendent. In Beauvoir’s words, “Spirit has prevailed over Life, transcendence over immanence. ... In woman are incarnated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her hold when he frees himself from nature.”¹⁴

The master has power over the thinglike consciousness because by risking his life, he has proven that he is above the merely biological. The slave was not willing to risk life, so it is fitting that the master or lord should hold him in bondage (115). For the master, the objects of the world are seemingly no longer a threat to his independence, for he has the servant to act as a buffer between himself and the world of things. The slave works on the world for the master. “The lord relates himself mediately to the thing through the bondsman” (115–116). To put it quite simply, the master enjoys the fruits of the bondsman’s labor, while the bondsman appears to be mired in animality and thinghood. The master is seemingly desire satisfied. And he appears to have achieved recognition of his status, because he has the slave to acknowledge his (pure) self-consciousness and mastery.

Of course, there is something not quite right in all of this. For the master to achieve independence, the other who recognizes him should be independent, a peer of the master. A dependent creature cannot recognize an independent one. The master cannot gain the satisfaction that he needs, the certainty of himself, for the inessential cannot acknowledge the essential. Further, we have here a contradiction—the master’s alleged independence is in fact a dependence on the slave. A role reversal has seemingly taken place. How does the slave come to recognize this reversal? The bondsman has two experiences to draw on to help raise his consciousness, work and fear. Work is desire held in check. And fear allows the worker to experience the power of the negative.

At this juncture we can break off the overview of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. We can reasonably conclude that Hegel assumes that he is discussing men in the life-and-death struggle and in the master-slave dialectic. Yet the manner in which Hegel describes the relationship between the master and the slave has allowed commentators to view slaves or servants as women. This is the move that Simone de Beauvoir makes and the one that Jean Baker Miller would make, had she engaged Hegel. We will turn to Miller shortly. First, I want to address how Mead might respond to Hegel’s notions of self-consciousness and recognition.

Mead would certainly agree that self-consciousness is a fundamental feature of human experience, but it is not essential, at least not in the neo-Aristotelian way that Hegel thinks of it as essential. Mead is, after all, a post-Darwinian, and “essentiality” is either transitory (e.g., a species or a role) or defined in terms of interest; for example, a chair can be defined as having an “essence” relative to the interest of human beings who sit in such objects. Mead would want to ask Hegel an obvious question: How do we arrive at the point of having a consciousness that is capable of reflection, an I = I, either in terms of the individual or the species? We need a (nonspiritual) mechanism that can account for reflection, the turning back of experience on itself that is entailed in self-consciousness. Hegel doesn’t explain this phenomenon. He assumes that there is an “I” that is aware of itself at the very beginning of the section on selfconsciousness, which is tantamount to assuming that self-consciousness has always been present in human beings, however “primitive” it might be. In other words, spirit’s essence has always entailed some form of the genus self-consciousness. Hegel, after all, was an antievolutionist.

The Phenomenology begins with a section on consciousness, which is followed by the one on self-consciousness that we have been discussing. This might lead readers to conclude that Hegel has a developmental model that can explain how individuals or the species moves from consciousness to self-consciousness. This would be the wrong inference. The chapters in the Phenomenology on consciousness present modes of consciousness that do not fully appreciate the limitations of their own claims, for example, the claim that the senses can provide certain knowledge. They are ultimately of no assistance in understanding how self-consciousness emerges, unless one is talking about the self-conscious subject as it is found in German idealism. The early chapters intertwine philosophical positions with developmental claims in an idiosyncratic fashion that simply doesn’t address this issue. They do, however, assume that self-consciousness is implicit in the various modes of consciousness, without acknowledging the degree to which consciousness is already a form of self-consciousness.

Hegel would claim that self-consciousness is implicit in the chapters on consciousness and will become explicit in the chapters to follow. From Mead’s vantage point, self-consciousness is more evident (explicit) than Hegel acknowledges in these early chapters. The proof of this claim is to be found in Hegel’s appeal to language in the very first chapter of the Phenomenology on sense-certainty,¹⁵ for the presence of language suggests that there is a more sophisticated form of self-consciousness present than Hegel allows.¹⁶ As we have seen, language for Mead implies that self-consciousness, or at least a proto-self-consciousness, is present. Yes, it is true that for Mead there can be a limited use of language without the presence of a self or self-consciousness, for example, in very young children. ¹⁷ But in practice, if we are talking about Homo sapiens who possess language and live in social groups, and therefore have generalized other(s), then we can be fairly certain that the adults in such communities would be self-conscious. Hegel is so fixated on undermining sense-certainty and perception as forms of “knowing” in the early chapters of the Phenomenology that he doesn’t examine the degree to which self-consciousness is explicit in these forms, except insofar he uses the presence of the “I” to undermine the pretenses of these particular forms of consciousness. ¹⁸ From Mead’s perspective the book really should have begun with an exploration of social interaction, because consciousness, as Hegel presents it, is already a form of (social) self-consciousness, and an explanation is called for regarding its appearance and genesis.

We have seen that for Mead the genesis of self-consciousness, both in terms of phylogenesis and ontogenesis, is intimately connected to the development of language. Self-consciousness requires not only the reflexive vocal gesture but the capacity for role-taking, which itself requires a degree of mastery of anticipatory experience. Without being able to take the role of the other, one would not be able to anticipate and retrospect in a fashion that makes taking the perspective of the generalized other possible. And without the generalized other, the genus “self-consciousness” that Hegel examines—that is, a self that is aware of itself as a unity—is absent for Mead.

Hegel claims that self-consciousness experiences its essence outside itself and must negate this externality. Mead would say that this overcoming of externality through negation is unnecessary. Why? Because self-awareness is built on forms of reciprocal or mutual recognition from the outset, not in the sophisticated sense of recognizing the dignity of the other but in a basic sense that selves would not develop without individuals mutually recognizing their attitudes and behaviors in each other.¹⁹ For Mead, recognition involves a re-cognition of one’s own attitudes (or preparations for action) and behaviors. I may be (prereflectively) aware of my behaviors, but I don’t re-cognize them as my own, as “part” of my (burgeoning) self, until I can see and affirm them as if I were the other. This requires an affirmation by the other, a “signal” from the other, a recognition by the other, that I am actually “getting it right,” that I understand the meaning of certain (shared) attitudes and behaviors. In other words, through mutual or reciprocal recognition I learn to trust that I am accurately taking the perspective of the other and the generalized other, which in turn helps generate a self as a cognitive object. Whether we are focusing on the phylogenetic or the ontogenetic, mutual recognition precedes the quest for affirmation through a struggle with the other. From Mead’s vantage point, there is confusion in Hegel’s account between the role of recognition in the process of the development of self-consciousness and the desire on the part of a specific consciousness to have his or her uniqueness affirmed in a particular way, that is, as a pure self-consciousness (and then as a master). Mead’s account provides the conditions for the possibility of the specific dynamic that Hegel addresses in the struggle between two self-consciousnesses.²⁰

Mead doesn’t dismiss the importance of what he calls self-assertion. However, self-assertion is the result of having a personality with a specific set of interests and goals, which may include seeking status in a community. A willingness to transcend the biological in order to achieve self-consciousness, which for Hegel entails being recognized as willing to transcend the biological, is simply not as pivotal in Mead. In this regard, Mead would be more amenable than Hegel to Miller’s position, as we shall see.

In Toward a New Psychology of Women Miller tells us, “Dominant groups usually define one or more acceptable roles for the subordinate. Acceptable roles typically involve providing services that no dominant group wants to perform for itself ” (6).²¹ We also learn from Miller that “subordinates themselves can come to find it difficult to believe in their own ability” (7). If subordinates take on the characteristics that they are expected to, often childlike qualities, then “they are considered well-adjusted” (7). In Hegel’s terms, the subordinate is expected to set aside her own needs in order to serve the master. She is the inessential. He is the essential.

Throughout most of Western history women’s efforts have kept the household functioning. For most of American history, women have made sure that the “trivial things” of the household—for example, children’s needs, cooking, cleaning—are not allowed to intrude on their husbands’ activities or even their states of mind. The husband, as the dominant, has a sense of himself as above such things, much as Hegel’s master is above the merely natural and biological. To engage in these domains, a man would have to relinquish his special humanity, his claim to manhood. Much like Hegel’s master, men have lived a lie by not acknowledging the dependent side of themselves, while women, like Hegel’s slave, cannot (at first) see their potential for independence. Ideally, men and women would acknowledge both sides of themselves. However, it is typically the case that women have functioned as servants, and as servants they feel that they must please their masters. In order to do so, women must learn about men. In this regard women possess what Du Bois refers to as a double-consciousness, which entails an internalization of the dominant as an internal critic. In Miller’s words, “Subordinates often know more about the dominants than they know about themselves. If a large part of your fate depends on accommodating to and pleasing the dominants, you concentrate on them. Indeed, there is little purpose in knowing yourself ” (10–11).

Men fear dependence, which is just what relationships of domination and subordination can breed. In terms of Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, we can say that the master depends on the slave but cannot acknowledge this dependence, while the slave is actually competent in managing the affairs of the household. Yet competence is of no assistance in enhancing one’s self-esteem if the slave’s contributions are seen as fundamentally less valuable than the master’s. And this has surely been true of so-called women’s work. As noted, so-called women’s work has had to do with many of the most basic concerns of life, concerns that men in Western cultures have typically sought to escape, such as child rearing. And here is an interesting connection to psychoanalysis, for the latter has dealt with just those areas that have been relegated to the domain of women: the bodily, the childish, and the sexual. Men have denied parts of themselves that psychoanalysis helps us explore.

Freud focused on bodily, sexual, and childish experience and said that these are of determining but hidden importance. More recent psychoanalytic theory tends to emphasize the deeper issues of feelings of vulnerability, weakness, helplessness, dependency, and the basic emotional connections between an individual and other people.... One might even say that we came to “need” psychoanalysis precisely because certain essential parts of men’s experience have been very problematic and therefore were unacknowledged, unexplored, and denied. Women, then, become the “carriers” for society of certain aspects of total human experience—those aspects that remain unsolved. (This is one reason why women must be so mistreated and degraded.) The result of such a process is to keep men from fully integrating these areas into their own lives. (22–23)

Hegel’s master can be viewed as rejecting behaviors and attitudes that are associated with mere animal life, because to be self-conscious is to rise above the merely biological. For Miller, this “rising above the merely biological” would be interpreted in terms of men’s rejection of states of vulnerability and emotional attachment. Men define them as feminine and in so doing reject aspects of themselves that are required for human flourishing. Women are left to do the work of keeping men connected to these parts of their lives. They mediate the natural for men. Miller asks, can we not view the current women’s movement in light of how women have been “the bearers of these human necessities for the social group as a whole?” (24).²²

From the perspective of the dominant male culture, weakness, vulnerability, and helplessness are negatives to be avoided or denied. But they are fundamental parts of life, and women have dealt with them in ways that men have not. This should be viewed as a strength. The master, after all, denies large portions of experience by having the slave take care of them for him. In Miller’s terms, he denies his feelings of vulnerability and weakness. On the other hand, “by having to defend less and deny less, women are in a position to understand weakness more readily and to work productively with it” (32).

By acknowledging vulnerabilities, Miller is not suggesting that women should remain attached to them. Women, as a matter of fact, must learn how “to let go of their belief in the rightness of weakness” (32), in order overcome their “fear of not being weak” (32).²³ In a parallel fashion, Hegel’s slave must let go of viewing himself as the inessential, as weaker than the master who was willing to sacrifice life. However, there is an important difference between Miller and Hegel here. Hegel argues that through living in fear and through work in service to the master, the slave overcomes the mentality of a slave. Through transforming the world and seeing himself in his transformations, he is liberated from the master’s definition of him. “Through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.”²⁴ The slave transcends the given by transforming it. Notice that Hegel is arguing, as Beauvoir does, that attachment to the merely natural hinders the development of the individual. Miller challenges this notion. The natural must be given its due, as we shall see. (Of course, with regard to women’s role in history, Beauvoir’s argument is more nuanced than this, but in the final analysis Miller would view The Second Sex as ceding too much ground to culture, to a form of “transcendence,” while underestimating the virtues of the “biological.”)

For Miller, women play a role in maintaining the present state of affairs by propping men up, for example, by rescuing men when they feel emotionally threatened. Subordinates often perform this role. It is reasonable to assume that Hegel’s slave (qua slave) sought to recognize his master in a way that satisfied the master’s self-image (or perhaps in light of Gross’s work we should say, the master’s “self-concept”).²⁵ Women, for Miller, allow men to be dependent without having to acknowledge their dependence, that is, they support their sham independence. To use current psychological jargon, both women and slaves enable the dominants. Yet it is important to note how difficult it is for women to do the right thing. For example, faced with a spouse suffering from certain kinds of anxieties, the woman is often left in a no-win situation, as in the case of two of Miller’s clients, Charles and Ruth.

He harbored the seemingly contradictory wish that his wife would somehow solve everything for him with such magic and dispatch that he would never be aware of his weakness at all. She should do this without being asked.... The fact that Ruth did not instantly accomplish this feat for him was a deep-seated cause of his anger at her. Instead, she confronted him with an attempt to deal with the problem, and by doing so, reminded him of his feelings of weakness and vulnerability. But even if she had done nothing, her very presence would have caused him to face the frustration of his wish for total caretaking and problem solving. (33)

These are precisely the kinds of binds, according to Miller, that we fall into by failing to acknowledge the damage to ourselves and to our relationships that is produced by a lack of reciprocity. The master’s insistence on dominance and his unwillingness to acknowledge his dependence are at the heart of Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave. And the inequities of the lordship-and-bondage relationship will only fully resolve themselves for Hegel when there is a society of mutual recognition, a reciprocity between self and other.

Leaving aside Hegel’s rather parochial views on women, his vision of the good society is one in which differences flourish. For Miller, women’s liberation is not a matter of simply taking over current men’s roles and values but occurs in part through the creation of new roles and relationships, that is, by allowing differences to flourish. This is quite in line with Mead’s argument that in the modern world a healthy social system is one in which there is a growing diversity of roles and functions. And he argued that women should not be confined to traditional roles.²⁶

This transformation is, of course, easier said than done. If women move beyond currently prescribed boundaries, they are viewed “as either attacking men or trying to be like them” (17). If women try to assert their own needs, they will have to be prepared to be “seen as creating conflict and must bear the psychological burden of rejecting men’s images of ‘true womanhood’” (17). (How often have we heard women mouth the line that they are not feminists, even as they are engaged in just the sorts of activities that feminists would approve of, for example, asserting their rights to a career?) Women “are encouraged to concentrate on forming and maintaining a relationship to one person. In fact, women are encouraged to believe that if they do go through the mental and emotional struggle of self-development, the end result will be disastrous—they will forfeit the possibility of having any close relationships” (18–19).

So through the fear of isolation and conflict women “are diverted from exploring and expressing their needs” (19). To do so would not only be to risk conflict with powerful institutions and men but to turn away from the ideas of womanhood that they have internalized. Women instead “are encouraged to ‘transform’ their own needs” (19); that is, to come to see someone else’s needs as their own, in a manner similar to that of Hegel’s slave. Miller tells us, “Conflict is denied and the means to engage openly in conflict are excluded” (13). She goes on to note, “In sum, both sides are diverted from open conflict around real differences, by which they could grow, and are channeled into hidden conflict around falsifications. For this hidden conflict, there are no acceptable social forms or guides because this conflict supposedly doesn’t exist” (13).

To overcome merely living for the other will entail what Miller calls good conflict.²⁷ “Conflict, seen in its fullest sense, is not necessarily threatening or destructive.... Growth requires engagement with difference and with people embodying that difference” (13). Miller’s remark on growth is apt not only in terms of describing ways of improving male and female relationships but is also well suited to describing a central feature of the form of cosmopolitanism that was addressed in earlier chapters of this book. Her reference to good conflict, translated into Hegel’s terms, entails making implicit contradictions or conflicts explicit. Both Hegel and Miller would agree that conflict and contradictions must be engaged, although the ways in which psychoanalysis and Hegel overlap and divide on the nature of conflict is a question that is beyond the scope of this chapter.

Miller and Hegel clearly disagree on the instinctual or impulsive. For Hegel, the instinctual trials of the body are ultimately superseded by culture and history, at least for men. Not so for Miller, since the needs produced (in part) by biological impulses, such as a need for emotional attachment, remain omnipresent, even if they are often denied by men as they seek to assert their masculinity. For Miller, there is certainly a sense in which “transcendence” would involve overcoming aspects of traditional roles through a willingness to give emotions, many of which have their origin (at least in part) in instinctual or bodily needs, their due.²⁸ In this regard she bears some kinship to Marcuse in the manner in which he turns to transhistorical (but historically informed) instincts, for example, Eros, as a ground for rejecting common cultural assumptions about wellbeing. The instinctual provides a route for transcending one-dimensional society. Where I believe Miller and Marcuse would differ is on the degree to which Marcuse emphasizes sublimation of the instinctual in order to create an aesthetic that could challenge one-dimensional society.²⁹ (This is not to say that Miller is somehow opposed to sublimation. But I suspect that she would be skeptical about the value of a “mediated” aesthetic that requires a loss of connection to more immediate feelings.)

Miller’s understanding of the dangers presented by approaches such as Hegel’s and Beauvoir’s, which too often dichotomize nature and culture, is in line with Mead’s understanding of the biological and physiological. He is, after all, a post-Darwinian, neo-Hegelian, for whom we are first and foremost biological and social organisms with an unusual set of capacities that permit the development of extensive social networks and self-reflection. He views biological impulses as ongoing, “sublimated” and “non-sublimated,” facts of human life.³⁰ No doubt society molds and shapes the impulses for Mead. But recall that in Chapter 4 we saw that there is an impulse to affiliate, which continues even in so-called civilized times, and can lead to war. Also recall Mead’s language in the following passage.

We are born with our fundamental impulses.... This primal stuff of which we are made up is not under our direct control. The primitive sexual, parental, hostile, and cooperative impulses out of which our social selves are built up are few—but they get an almost infinite field of varied application in society, and with every development of means of intercourse, with every invention they find new opportunities of expression.³¹

Notice that Mead is arguing that these impulses (primal stuff) do not atrophy, although they find new and different routes of expression. Fundamental impulses are rarely ever “extinguished.” As we saw in Chapter 4, Mead speaks of the visceral, prereflective response that we have to the suffering of others. For example, it seems that only the pathological are completely without sympathy for others.³² “The kindliness that expresses itself in charity is as fundamental an element in human nature as are any in our original endowment. The man without a generous impulse is abnormal and abhorrent.”³³ While it is true that our obligations to others involve more than feelings, we shouldn’t dismiss their importance, for example, in helping to move us to assist others.

Mead would find Miller’s insistence on the biological foundations of certain needs compelling and applicable to both men and women. For Hegel, women retain a closer connection to the “biological world” than men do (or at least than “spiritually” evolved men do). This is not to suggest that Hegel dismisses the “natural.” But Mead and Hegel clearly have a different understanding of how men and women relate to the “natural world” and associated forms of life. It’s worth repeating in this context Hegel’s words from the Philosophy of Right that I cited earlier in this chapter.

After the phrase “he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself,” Hegel goes on to say, “In the family he has a tranquil intuition of this unity, and there he lives a subjective ethical life on the plane of feeling.” In other words, although the family is not crudely natural for Hegel, it is a form of ethical life dominated by feeling. It is where men experience an intuition of a deeper unity that will be realized in the State and in Absolute Spirit. Hegel’s hierarchy is clear and clearly demarcated.

Mead, on the other hand, like Miller, is a political egalitarian, and an egalitarian in regard to feelings and their place in human life. Miller derives her insights from clinical work and psychoanalytic literature. Mead’s work is informed by Scottish theorists of sentiment, as well as early twentieth-century research into physiology. These are different worlds. Yet Mead and Miller would agree that we would be ill-advised to become insensitive to the “feeling” dimension of our lives. There are times when this dimension can assist us in transcending rigid cultural or legal assumptions about what is morally praiseworthy or acceptable. (For instance, we feel for the suffering of the slave, even though slavery is legally permissible. Or as Marcuse might suggest, there are times when instinctual gratification reminds us of utopian possibilities, the promise of a world that transcends the parochialisms of one-dimensional society.) Both Miller and Mead would argue that all human beings are in principle equally tied to this sphere of feeling.³⁵ Mead, for example, is definitely not just speaking about women in the following passage.

We choose our business associates ... but we fall in love, and whatever action we take upon this primal premiss [sic], it is not a matter of our own choice. We say that we instinctively help a child who has fallen down.... [T]he impulse to helpfulness is just as much an endowment as the impulse of hostility. This primal stuff of which we are made up is not under our direct control.³⁶

So to some degree we have come full circle. In the first chapters of this book we saw how an existential understanding of transcendence is present in Dewey, as well as in Sartre and Rorty. But we also observed how for Dewey and Mead, the existential moment is balanced by the social and the organic.³⁷ In Chapter 4 we learned that a theory of cosmopolitanism built on Mead’s work depends on sentiments, which can be prereflective “initiators” of behavior even in highly socialized individuals. This theory requires acknowledging the impulsive, while appreciating the importance of obligation, which develops through the emergence of the social self and the “impartial spectator.”

Although Hegel didn’t dismiss the body, he thought that spirit transcended it, for spirit is free and self-determining, but the body is weighed down by matter. No doubt Mead’s understanding of the interaction between self and other owed much to Hegel. There is a dialectic of self and other in Mead. However, Mead sought to transform Hegel’s dialectic from a story about spirit’s development to one about the genesis of the self through language and social interaction. Mead set out on this path early in his career when he became intrigued by physiology and the social sciences, during a time that he was still captivated by Hegel. His dual interests are reflected in a letter that he wrote to his friend Henry Castle as a young assistant professor at the University of Michigan. It’s a good note on which to end this chapter, for it shows in a delightful fashion Mead bringing together Hegel, who helped teach Dewey and Mead how to think about the social and transcendence, and Mead’s commitment to the body and the biological sciences, which helped shape his branch of pragmatism.

I have at last reached a position I used to dream of in Harvard—where it is possible to apply good straight [physiological psychology] to Hegel, and I don’t know what more a mortal can want on earth.³⁸