HEGEL: MINDS, MASTERS, AND SLAVES
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Hegel’s writings offer both a general conception of reality and of history, to wit, Absolute Idealism, and specific, and sometimes brilliant, analyses of particular parts of reality and episodes and tracts of history. Now although the phrasing of his insightful examinations of particular problems about people, their communities, and their lives is usually informed by his general philosophy, we can often delete the heavy-duty philosophical terms that consequently appear within his discussion of particular problems, and concentrate on those claims which Hegel made about those problems that do not, or at least do not appear to, presuppose his general philosophy. We can, that is, examine those claims in disconnection from their place within Hegel’s comprehensive philosophy, even though he might have regarded such a procedure as sheer butchery.1
One valuable analysis that we can, to some degree, isolate from the total structure of Hegel’s thought is the discussion, in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, of Lordship and Bondage or, as it is more often called, the dialectic of the master and the slave. I shall summarize that dialectic below, after reviewing some tenets of Absolute Idealism that help us to see some of the more general philosophical questions with which Hegel was concerned in the course of his master/slave discussion. But I preconfess that the least satisfactory aspect of my presentation will be my treatment of the linkage between Hegel’s general philosophy and this famous master/slave dialectic.
Hegel thought that everything the mind, any mind, experiences is in some sense a product of mind itself. One way of explaining how he arrived at this strange idea is by describing how he responded to the thought of Kant. Kantian philosophy features a set of dualities or oppositions, such as those between freedom and necessity, between the sensibility and the understanding, between the analytic and the synthetic, and between the infinite and the finite. Kant loved dichotomies. But Hegel, by contrast with Kant, abhorred ultimate dichotomies in the scheme of things. He objected to what he called, in his Lesser Logic, “the strict ‘either-or’: for instance, the world is either finite or infinite; but one of these two it must be.” He preferred to say such things as this:
The soul is neither finite only, nor infinite only; it is really the one just as much as the other, and in that way neither one nor the other.2
So Hegel was a great reconciler, a mediator between ideas apparently hostile to one another, and one way of entering Hegel’s thought is by recollecting a fundamental dichotomy in Kant’s philosophy, and then exhibiting how Hegel rejected it.
Kant distinguished between the world as it is in itself and the world as it presents itself to us, or, as he put it, the world as it is for us, the world as far as our experience of it is concerned. We cannot know the character of the world as it is in itself: its inherent character is inaccessible to us. Our knowledge is rooted in and inseparable from our experience, and the content of our experience does not replicate the content of the world, because the features of our mental constitution, which we do not choose, cannot change, and cannot transcend, ensure that the world is presented to us only through the prism of our conception and perception of it. Because our minds contribute to the character of our experience, that experience fails to provide us with an unimpeded view of the experienced world. We are, in particular, capable of experiencing reality only by imposing on it the forms of space and time. Kant thought he proved that spatiotemporality is the mind’s, not the world’s, contribution to our experience of the world, and the fact that all our experience has a spatiotemporal character means, for Kant, that none of it provides us with a portrayal of reality as it really is.
Most contemporary philosophers would argue that Kant’s proposition that things as they are in themselves are beyond our grasp is incoherent. They would say that one cannot posit the existence of something one also says one knows absolutely nothing about.3 They would agree with Kant that the mind shapes its experience, but they would say that it is through that very shaping that we acquire knowledge of what we experience. Our intellectual operations are our way of gaining purchase on the real world, and it is preposterous to represent the instruments we use to gain knowledge as barriers to our knowledge, as though the fact that in order to grasp an object I must grasp it in some particular way prevents me from truly grasping it. For most contemporary philosophers, there is a world independent of the mind, and the mind’s activity is its way of coming to know that world.
Hegel too thought that Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself was an untenable notion, and for similar reasons. Hegel said that we cannot claim to know the existence of something we say we know nothing about. He also insisted that, far from being beyond the reach of our thought, the Kantian thing-in-itself is transparently a product of our thought, the product our thought produces by thinking away all the particular determinations of things. That resulting product is nothing but the empty idea of being.
I. 1.
When the Critical Philosophy understands the relation of these three Terms so as to make Thoughts intermediary between Us and Things in such a sense that this intermediary rather excludes us from things than connects us with them, this view may be met by the simple observation that these very things which are supposed to stand beyond ourselves, and beyond the thoughts referring to them, at the opposite extreme, are themselves things of thought, and, as being quite undetermined, are just one such thing (the so-called Thing-in-itself), the product of empty abstraction.4
Again:
The Thing-in-itself (and under “thing” is embraced even Mind and God) expresses the object when we leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it, all its emotional aspects, and all specific thoughts of it. It is easy to see what is left—utter abstraction, total emptiness, only described still as an “other-world”—the negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought. Nor does it require much penetration to see that this caput mortuum is still only a product of thought, such as accrues when thought is carried on to abstraction unalloyed … Hence one can only read with surprise the perpetual remark that we do not know the Thing-in-itself. On the contrary there is nothing we can know so easily.5
There is, so to speak, nothing to it.
But Hegel’s inference from the supposed incoherence of Kant’s position was not the inference which is favored today. As I have indicated in No. 2 in the chart below, both Hegel and our contemporaries agree that there is no unknowable thing-in-itself, where “thing-in-itself” means a thing that subsists utterly independently of consciousness (as opposed to where it means: how things really are, for Hegel certainly thought, as, of course, our contemporaries do, that there is a way that things really are). But our contemporaries conclude that there is a knowable thing-in-itself, and Hegel concludes instead that there is no thing-in-itself, where that means, once again, a thing that subsists utterly independently of consciousness. According to Hegel everything is, in Kant’s terms, for us. In other words, everything exists only in relation to mentality.
Hegel arrived at this conclusion because, unlike our contemporaries, he accepted from Kant the following brief list of candidates for sources of our experience: 1. A world we cannot know. 2. The mind’s own operations. He then, unlike Kant, dismissed the first item on the list, and was thereby forced to assert that the entirety of our experience is in some sense produced by mind, by, in fact, an infinite mind of which each of our finite minds is a part, or which manifests itself as, or at any rate, in, a series of finite minds, one of which each of us has.
I. 2. Philosophical positions of Kant, Hegel, and common sense philosophy (CSP):
1. The three positions set out above are the only (minimally) coherent sets of answers to the six questions. Proof: the answers to the first two questions determine the answers to the remaining four. Now, the second question may be answered yes or no. If its answer is no, then the first question may be answered yes or no. If its answer is yes, then the answer to the first must also be yes. Thus “NO, YES,” respectively, is an inconsistent pair of answers to the first two questions. Accordingly, there are only three coherent pairs of answers to the first two questions, to wit, those exhibited above. And since, as already remarked, the answers to the first two determine the answers to the remaining four, the only (minimally) coherent sets of answers to the six questions are the three given above.
2. Hegel and CSP agree in rejecting Kant’s answer to 3. It is Hegel’s agreement with Kant on 2 which, given his agreement with CSP on 3, determines his differences with CSP on questions 4 and 5.
I. 3. A result of Hegel’s response to Kant is that for Hegel all knowledge is self-knowledge. We all commonly distinguish between things we know about ourselves and things we know about external nature. But because he thinks mind constructs the world, Hegel must and does say that our knowledge of nature is really knowledge of ourselves, though it takes philosophizing to make us realize this. It is not immediately evident that all knowledge is self-knowledge, but the distinction between the subjective and the objective worlds disappears under rational scrutiny.
Perhaps we can understand the Hegelian thesis that everything a person experiences is in some sense a product of mentality by considering cases of experience where we might be prepared to say that this is so, that the object of a person’s thought is also a product of his thought. Hallucination might be one such case. A writer’s deliberations about a character he has invented might be another. A mathematician’s work on a problem he has devised might be a third. But we would not say that when I see or think about that chair, I have to do with a creation of mind, whereas Hegel would say that I do. Hegel would not, of course, say that this chair was produced by Jerry Cohen’s mind, but by a larger mind, an infinite mind, of which each of our finite minds is a part; or which manifests itself as a series of finite minds. Something transcending me creates the chair, but I am so intimately related to that creative me-transcending thing, to Geist, that, in knowing it, what I know is in some sense my own mind.
There is, then, finally no objective world which is not also subjective: all knowledge is knowledge by the subject of the subject, all knowledge is knowledge about the knower, and this is the deep metaphysical reason for the authority of mind over nature to which reference is made in the master/slave dialectic.
Hegel’s book The Phenomenology of Spirit is, among other things, a narrative of the mind’s progressive discovery of the essential unity between it and the objects of its experience. In the least sophisticated forms of our thinking the objects of our thought manifest themselves to us and have the value for us of things other than ourselves. This stage is not a misfortune. It is necessary at a certain point for the mind to misperceive as nonself what is actually self, because there are truths we can learn about ourselves only if throughout an initial period our investigations are governed by this error, this false distinction between what investigates and what is investigated. We learn about what appear to us to be independent objects and later discover that the information we acquire is really information about ourselves. Minds at first treat what they experience as something alien, yet it is, in fact, something from which they have confusedly alienated themselves. Eventually they recognize their confusion, reclaim the objects of their experience, and appropriate consciously what was always by right theirs. In the culmination of its journey, spirit “is at home with itself in its own otherness as such”:6 “the external reality which embodies us [that is, in which we are embodied] and on which we depend is fully expressive of us and contains nothing alien.”7
II. 1. Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit expounds one stage in the mind’s journey toward awareness of its oneness with the objective world, its journey toward complete self-knowledge and complete self-appropriation. The book opens with a consideration of the relation between subject and object in experience and knowledge of an object that is apparently independent of the subject, yet securely known by the subject. Hegel argues that the more we scrutinize that relation, the more plain it becomes that the object depends for its features on the subject related to it. The division between subject and object is therefore declared untenable, and we are required to examine modes of reality in which subject and object are fused.
The three modes of consciousness that precede those which fuse subject and object are entitled, successively, “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and “force and understanding: appearance and the supersensible world.” By virtue of the obscurity of the relevant texts, and my own limited telepathic powers, I cannot offer a limpid exposition of these sections of the book. But I can confidently say this much: in each case the pretension of consciousness that it knows a reality other than consciousness itself breaks down. We do not, it turns out, in the first stage, enjoy a secure and stable and incorrigible knowledge of given sense-data: Hegel rather modernly claims that we cannot so much as identify a sense-datum without presupposing truths about things that go beyond the content of our immediate consciousness. So we pass to perception, where what we think we know is not an object of sense but indeed an independent thing. But it then emerges that there is plenty of theoretical presupposition in our conception of thinghood: the thing is not, in truth, presented to us in all its independent glory, but manifests itself as a thing only under categories that we apply, categories that are refined by natural science, which is the third stage. The “supersensible world” in the name of that stage is the set of forces that scientific understanding posits beyond and in explanation of perceptual appearance.
Thus, if we consider the view of the supposedly external world which mature reflection on it develops, we find that natural science, which is such mature reflection, regards the world’s appearances as derivative and misleading, and as produced by forces and laws, which are explanatory constructs of physical theory. But these constructs are not just the objects but also the products of the understanding mind. “Consciousness, in having these constructs as its object, actually has itself for an object. With the realization of this fact, consciousness becomes self-consciousness.”8
Thus Hegel thinks that the physicist who speaks of discovering, e.g. forces, speaks misleadingly: he really invents them. And there is a certain plausibility in saying that he invents them. Newton did not stumble upon gravitational force as one might stumble upon a stone. But Hegel’s conclusion, that the physicist’s whole object of study is something invented by him, cannot be sustained. For either there is an element of discovery in the invention or there is not. If there is an element of discovery, then in some sense forces are in the world, even if it is also true that they are, in some sense, invented. But even if, to turn to the other possibility, the physicist’s forces are truly and wholly invented, the reason why the physicist invents them is because they serve to explain or at least order information about sensory phenomena which cannot themselves be regarded as invented.
In any case, and as I said, such reasonings induce Hegel to embrace the conclusion that subject is not ultimately separate from object, and the associated thesis that all knowledge, all consciousness, is self-knowledge, self-consciousness. So he wants to examine the fusion of subject and object.
II. 2. Hegel begins with the most primitive instance of that fusion: life, and the vital desires that accompany it, desires, that is, to incorporate seemingly external realities physically, in my being, thus achieving an elemental fusion of object and subject. Note that a living human being is both a natural being and a conscious being, and so, in the idea of life, and of life’s impulses and metabolism with the world, the union of nature and spirit might seem to be achieved. As a liver I have as part of me the nature I located outside of me as a perceiver. My vital impulses and desires are equally mental and physical. The question: does my hunger belong to my body or to my mind? is not easy to answer. And though Hegel does not himself mention it, we can cite sexuality as a remarkable phenomenon in which the physical and the spiritual are inseparably united. To go in for sex, you need both a body and a mind: you lack specifically sexual desire unless you are both physical and mental.
II. 3. But the unity of subject and object provided by the fact that we are alive, desirous, and physically world-incorporating is inadequate, because the impulses embodying that unity are not finally, not in an ultimate sense, attributable to the subject who has them. According to Hegel, and, later, and following him, Sartre, a person can disengage herself from her drives and desires, repress or disown her impulses: she can deny the part of herself which is merely natural. Insofar, moreover, as I do act on a desire, it is only because I endorse it. It is not fully my desire; it presents itself as external to me save insofar as I take it up and give it the value of a project.
What I cannot disown are my thoughts. I can disaffiliate myself from my desires, and treat them as things. I can renounce a desire, and the desire may persist even though it is renounced. I can think of a desire I have as something alien which I shall fight against. But I cannot relate myself in this fashion to, I cannot disaffiliate myself from, for example, one of my beliefs. Either I am committed to my beliefs, and a whole range of propositional attitudes, or I do not have them. When, therefore, I reflect about what I think, I am reflecting about what I am. I am coming to know myself, and what I am coming to know is the same as the knower who is coming to know. Both are me.
II. 4. So now (though it’s not so clear why) Hegel wants to focus on transactions not between the mind and external nature or between the mind and the physical nature to which it is attached but between the mind and itself. But Hegel announces that he will expound how consciousness seizes itself by telling a story about two consciousnesses, two people who are interested in self-knowledge, and what happens when they meet one another. Consciousness confronts itself, in the first instance, in another consciousness that confronts it. A person can be fully conscious of himself, can be in full and secure possession of himself, only by virtue of being recognized by another person: I become an object for myself through being an object for the other person. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”9 If I am to know myself, another must know me, so that I can recognize myself in and through his recognition of me.
II. 5. But the transaction between me and him must be absolutely reciprocal. He cannot recognize me unless he is himself recognized. Therefore only if I give the other man my recognition can he recognize me and thus enable me to recognize myself. My recognition of him presupposes his recognition of me, and vice versa. What is required is an exchange of recognitions between us, in which our awarenesses of ourselves and of one another, all four awarenesses, grow together.
Why does Hegel demand this reciprocity, for true recognition (Anerkennung)? I think it becomes plain when we grasp that to recognize something, here, is not the merely epistemological matter of realizing that you have encountered it before: you don’t, in the relevant sense, recognize a rock. It is, rather, a matter of acknowledging it as possessing a certain standing, or value, as when a state recognizes another state, or as when a person demands recognition from a contemning person who knows all too well that she exists, that she is there. To recognize here, is to acknowledge the value of, and four such acknowledgments are in question:
a I acknowledge value in him
b I perceive value in myself
c He acknowledges value in me
d He perceives value in himself.
We shall see that any one of a, b, c, or d entails the other three if we introduce two plausible principles: (1) I cannot attribute worth to another person unless I think I have some worth. For if I don’t think I do, I can’t think that I have the right to valorize him, or, indeed, though it’s not immediately to the point here, to devalorize him, to depreciate him.10 (2) I cannot feel worthy, perceive value in myself, unless I think another thinks me valuable, unless, that is to say, another confers value on me.
Now if we take two people as forming a whole society for the purposes of recognition, then from these principles it readily follows that the four “awarenesses” all presuppose one another, along the following endless and beginningless entailment-chain: a entails b (by (1)) which entails c (by (2)) which entails d (by (1)) which entails a (by (2)). … 11
This mutual dependence might be thought to necessitate that the perceptions and conferrings grow gradually. For it might be thought that there is otherwise a threat of circularity here. Maybe incomplete versions of a, b, c, and d are not as mutually dependent as the full-blown versions are.12
II. 6. Now, instead of examining the relations between these four awarenesses Hegel imposes a second modification on the proceedings. (The first modification was to present self-consciousness’s possession of itself as a matter of two self-consciousnesses recognizing each other.) He is interested in an interchange which is completely mutual, but he decides without any ado to present an interchange which is not mutual, in which one person only recognizes and the other is only recognized.13 I believe he thinks it appropriate to begin with an unsatisfactory one-sided recognition because, at this stage of the development of consciousness, it is unaware that true recognition must be fully mutual.
The one-sided exchange takes place between people who will come to be called the Master and the Slave. We can divide what Hegel says about them into three parts: (1) The struggle between the two people; (2) The apparent outcome of the struggle; (3) The real outcome, which is not at first apparent.
III. 1. (1) The Struggle. The persons confront one another as obstacles in each other’s paths, each with his own point of view, pursuing projects which include no recognition of the other’s projects. Each implicitly demands the recognition of the absolute validity of his own project by the other, and therefore resists acknowledgment of the validity of the other’s projects. A struggle between them is therefore inevitable.
III. 2. In striving for the other’s recognition, each agent in the encounter wishes to prove himself to be, and to be recognized by the other to be, more than a part of nature, more than just a brute obstacle in the other’s path. To do so, he must transcend his biologicality; he must show “that [he] is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such … not attached to life.”14 And to show that, he must show that he is prepared to let his life be destroyed.15 In other words, he must risk his life, for the sake of the recognition as nature-transcending to which he aspires, and he does so by entering battle with the other, by challenging the life of the other:
It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself.16
So each risks his own life and thereby gives the other the opportunity of doing the same. (A convenient move, since the risk for either will obtain only if each challenges the other.) One must display a willingness to risk one’s life in order to demonstrate that one is a free being, not a merely natural being: if one is unwilling to risk one’s life, then one is tied down by it, one is not completely free, and that attachment to life, so we shall see, will lead one to be pure unacknowledged acknowledger, if the other is, by contrast, willing to persist with risking his life.
III. 3. Now if the antagonists struggle until one or both of them die, then they do stake and therefore do transcend their lives and they do prove their freedom. But, if they both die, then they do not prove their freedom to themselves, so neither has got what she wanted from the encounter. No one knows that she is free if they are both simply dead.17 And even if one survives, he survives without the recognizer he needs to help him to perceive his own freedom. So a trial to the death will not deliver the goods. Life is a condition of the development of consciousness. What is needed is a negation of life which, unlike killing, does not destroy it. The person must develop beyond his absorption in his life without actually losing it.
III. 4. Hegel thinks this will be accomplished if in the course of the struggle one of the combatants gives up, putting life before his recognition by the other. So we suppose that one of them is willing to risk his life all the way, but that the other isn’t. That other shows a greater attachment to life by surrendering, and he acknowledges the superiority of the first man, the man who persisted, the man who now becomes his master. The man who desisted becomes the slave.18
III. 5. Henceforth he exists for the sake of another person whose authority he recognizes. The loser’s projects have validity only in the context of the victor’s projects, which the loser’s laboring activity serves.
IV. 1 (2) The Apparent Outcome. Hegel now describes the relation each man sustains to external nature, in the aftermath of their struggle. He associates external nature with the natural life which each had risked in different degrees, and the relation of each to external nature in the outcome reflects how he related himself to his natural life in the struggle.
By being willing to risk it completely, the master asserted himself completely against his natural life. He overcame it. Accordingly, he now relates himself to external nature without compromise or self-denial. For him nature consists of objects which the slave has so shaped that all the master does to nature is consume and enjoy it.
By contrast, because in the course of the struggle the slave allowed his desire for life to overcome him, because he remained tied to what was natural in him, he faces in the sequel to the struggle an external nature to which he is bound, one on which he must labor arduously. His labor on nature, like the master’s consumption of it, is a kind of negation of it, but he cannot annihilate nature the way the master does by consuming it. Nature resists him, because his labor, like all labor, is directed at a material which he must fight, to make it assume the shape he has in mind.
(3) The Real Outcome. But, so Hegel now proceeds to assure us, if we reconsider the outcome of the struggle, it shows itself to be different from what it first seemed to be. A more searching inquiry reveals that the real victor is the slave and the real loser is the master.
Let us reconsider the master’s position, first vis-à-vis the slave, and then vis-à-vis external nature.
V. 1. The master is recognized by the slave, but the recognition he receives is defective. For in order to be a valuable recognizer of the master, the slave would have to be recognized by the master. But the master attributes no value to the slave: he does not recognize him. In dominating the slave the master has therefore failed to achieve what he wanted to achieve. He cannot perceive a dignity in himself because he perceives himself through a slave from whom he withholds recognition, to whom he assigns no dignity. So the master lacks the freedom that he seemed to have.19
V. 2. We now learn that, correspondingly, the slave has the freedom, or anyway something of the freedom, he was supposed to lack. He is the more independent of the two people, though he seemed utterly dependent, in thrall to the master and to external nature.
Why did he appear that way? Because we biased our examination of him by considering him only in relation to the master. In particular, we were interested in his labor only insofar as it was a service to the master, and we invidiously contrasted its rigors and pains with the master’s unfettered enjoyment of nature. Now we retrace the slave’s experience of the struggle and its aftermath, from his own point of view.
We know that in the struggle he experienced an extreme fear of death. That is what led him to surrender and what enabled the master to subject him. But now Hegel finds a supreme value in that supreme fear. The slave’s fear brought him to the threshold of death, which is the disappearance of life. One could say that he experienced death as much as anyone who does not die can experience it. Hegel says that the consciousness of the slave
does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity [that is, of negation of all particular nature] and being-for-self, for it has experienced this its own essential nature. For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away20 of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness.21
I believe Hegel is saying that the slave’s terror made him independent of his biological nature. He realized that he was nothing but a pure consciousness, independent of nature. In the moment of supreme terror, nothing was fixed, all that seemed solid and given melted away, and all that was left was pure freedom of thought, unharnessed to anything.22
Now if he became independent of his internal nature in the struggle, this fact must somehow be revealed in the struggle’s outcome. And that means that the significance of the slave’s labor on nature was not fully appreciated in the account of its deficiencies that we supplied above. We must reconsider the significance of the slave’s labor. We must look for a new contrast between it and the master’s consumption of nature.
V. 3. At this point Hegel reveals that the master’s enjoyment of the objects with which he is supplied by the slave is an unsatisfactory mode of self-assertion over nature. It is too evanescent. The master from time to time consumes bits of nature, but he does not leave his mark on them; he does not impress himself on nature in a permanent way. The point is not to destroy nature but to develop it, to improve it, just as the point was not to destroy life but to enhance it. The one who was willing to kill or be killed can now only kill,23 that is, destroy the bits of nature that the slave serves up to him.
V. 4. The slave, by contrast, imposes himself on nature in a permanent and stable way. His domination of nature is cumulative and perceptible in the forms he gives to objects. He externalizes the energies which constitute his being in what he makes, and he apprehends his powers, he recognizes himself, in the things he makes. He penetrates and subdues the alien natural reality before which he trembled in the struggle. As Terry Pinkard writes:
[T]the natural objects of the world count as things of value only to the extent that he, the slave, integrates them into a scheme of satisfying desire (even if that scheme of desires is not his own).24
V. 5. The master does not appreciate the dignity the slave achieves by his labor, and he therefore does not benefit from the acknowledgment of superiority he forces from the slave. He depends for his sense of self on the slave, and the sense he achieves is inadequate. But the slave creates self-hood for himself without mediation through the master, by translating his powers into the world through work, and by developing his powers against nature’s resistance to his operations on it. To quote Schiller, who influenced Hegel greatly, “he turns outward everything internal, and gives form to everything external.”25 Note, however, that, as Taylor explains, the slave “owes his transformation to his subjection; only under the discipline of service would he have undertaken the work which has raised him above his original limits.”26 Compare Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (Encyclopaedia, para. 435), as quoted by Wood: “This subjection of the servant’s selfishness forms the beginning of true human freedom, … a necessary moment in the formative education (Bildung) of every human being.”27
VI. 1. There are many puzzles in Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave, and I want to highlight just one of them. At the beginning of the story Hegel says that a willingness to sacrifice one’s life is a prerequisite of achieving freedom, and his description of the apparent outcome of the struggle obeys that principle. But the description he gives of the real outcome of the struggle seems not to be motivated by that principle. It seems to be governed by another principle, to the effect that virtual loss of biological life is the prerequisite of freedom. The slave experiences that virtual loss of life. The master meets the condition announced at the beginning, that is, he is willing to risk his life, but in the end we learn that to fulfill that condition is to be merely destructive, abstractly negative. The ruling principle in the end is not “You must be willing to die in order to achieve your freedom” but “You must in a certain figurative sense die in order to be reborn free.” If you’re willing to die you either do and hence can’t be reborn; or, if you don’t die, it’s because your opponent gives up and that means you never came close enough to death. You were willing to die but you never learned what death involves, and that lesson is the crucial lesson. The puzzle is: what justifies replacement of the first principle by the second? What are the respective authorities of these principles?
I am aware that I may not have convinced you of the power and interest of Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave. You will have noticed arbitrary steps in the deployment of the story, and I do not know whether the impression of arbitrariness is Hegel’s fault or a defect in my understanding of him. What I do know is this: that it would be wrong to stigmatize as a priori illegitimate the kind of project Hegel is attempting, namely, the project of tracing what happens in a specially constructed situation where we suppose that two people meet and are interested in becoming self-conscious persons. For narratives based on such special constructions can be found even in British empirical philosophy, and if you think those narratives in principle valid you must think Hegel’s project in principle legitimate. The difference between Hegel and the empiricist is that the empiricists Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith usually tell stories about what happens when people meet and seek to satisfy their material needs. Will they fight, or cooperatively labor, or exchange goods produced by separate labor, or establish over themselves an omnipotent state to assure that they do not slaughter each other? Hegel’s story is intended to illuminate not our material needs but our needs for recognition and for a sense of our own personality. Such needs are ignored by empiricists. But we have them, and if we think Hegel’s story curious, we can suggest other narratives in which the need for recognition is exhibited. Hegel’s story might help us make up a better one.
VII. 1. It is a permissible conjecture, for which, however, there is, so far as I know, no direct evidence, that Karl Marx drew revolutionary inferences from this section of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The master, or the capitalist, needs the slaving proletarian, but the latter does not need the former. This is true not only in the economic sense. It is not only that the bourgeois lives off the laboring man’s labor, while the laboring man lives off his own labor. It is also that the capitalist’s sense of personality depends on his exploitation of the worker, while the worker achieves that sense independent of the capitalist by laboring. The capitalist is irrelevant for his self-image, and this is one reason why he is going to get rid of him.28
VII. 2. There is another element in Hegel’s story which was important for Marx, and which I have not yet mentioned. Remember that the slave’s labor was preceded by absolute fear. The value of his labor, its significance as an assertion of freedom against nature, derived from the fact that in the state of absolute fear the slave was freed of his own nature. Hegel adds that labor not preceded by absolute fear, labor not coerced on pain of death, cannot have the same value. It would, he says, be merely “a skill which is master over some things, but not over the universal power and the whole of objective being.”29 Marx similarly conceived the total subjection and degradation of the proletariat as a necessary prelude to its task of constructing a new world in which people would be completely free.
VII. 3. I want to instance a final conclusion that Marx might have drawn. Suppose we ask the question, what will happen if the master meets another master and if the slave meets another slave? Suppose a struggle like the one we described is duplicated elsewhere, and then the corresponding parties meet in new dyads: how will they relate to each other?
When one slave encounters another, two formed personalities, capable of creative relationship, meet. But when one master meets another, they can only act destructively toward one another. The real outcome of the struggle shows the masters to be restricted to a destructive attitude to persons and things.
1 These lectures are based on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. Miller, pp. 111–19. They were originally written October 1968, revised January 1998, tidied January 2004.
2 Hegel, The Logic of Hegel (“The Lesser Logic”), para. 32, p. 67. Terry Pinkard explains (Hegel’s Phenomenology, p. 361, fn. 87):
In his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel notes that the modern set of philosophical problems is dominated by a set of oppositions that philosophical theories seek to overcome or to reconcile. He mentions four such oppositions that play a central role in philosophical debate, which, he notes, do not play such a central role in ancient philosophy. They are (1) the existence of God and the concept of God; (2) the origin of evil, given God’s supposed omniscience and omnipotence; (3) freedom and necessity (which itself is divided into problems of freedom versus God’s omniscience, freedom versus natural necessity, and efficient versus formal causation); (4) the relation between mind and body. Hegel explains the domination of this kind of oppositional thought in modern philosophy as due to the influence of the Christian religion on the worldview of the moderns. It is with Christianity that these oppositions are either engendered or sharpened so that they become the philosophical problems of the culture. Likewise, the Christian promise of reconciliation (Versöhnung) is the basis for the philosophical community’s belief that some kind of resolution of these problems is the major task of philosophical thought in the modern period. See Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke, Vol. 20, pp. 66–69.
3 Cf. Jerry Fodor, “Cat’s Whiskers,” p. 17: “If you really can’t say anything about the world except as it is represented, then one of the things that you can’t say is that you can’t say anything about the world except as it is represented.”
4 Hegel, Science of Logic, 1, p. 44.
5 Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, para. 44, p. 67.
6 [This is a quotation from the beginning of chapter 8 (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Cohen slightly altered J. L. Baillie’s translation of the passage, by adding “own” before “otherness as such.” The original is “in seinem Anderssein als solchem bei sich ist.” Baillie’s translation is published as Hegel The Phemonenology of Mind, and the passage occurs on p. 790.—Ed.]
7 Taylor, Hegel, p. 148.
8 Soll, Introduction to Hegel’s Metaphysics, p. 9.
9 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 178, p. 520
10 Cf. Nietzsche: “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” Beyond Good and Evil, p. 81. Cf. the rabbi: “Look who’s talking.”
11 At the West Ham meeting in 1968 M. Rustin was exercised by the entailment relations about interpersonal valuation deployed here.
He said that if they are valid they provide a basis for a socialist commonwealth lacking in other philosophies, such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, and existentialism. For none of those three appreciates that men have an essential need for one another.
I answered that although the entailments indeed prove that men need a society they do not prove that they need a socialist society. I said that as long as a man has achieved a sense of personal value with some others he can then go on to exploit other others.
Rustin rightly complained that I had turned Hegel’s interpersonal valuation into a once-for-all socialization process, whereas it can in fact enter any dyad, so that in any exploiter-exploitee, master-slave dyad, the absence of mutual recognition diminishes both.
12 On this whole matter see Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: “Ignorant of his own human dignity, he is far removed from honouring it in others” (p. 114).
13 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 185, p. 112–13.
14 Ibid., para. 187, p. 113.
15 Cf. Jenenser Realphilosophie, as quoted by Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 86: “To him as consciousness it appears that it is a question of the death of the other; but it is really a question of his own.”
16 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 187, pp. 113–14.
17 Ibid., para. 188, pp. 114–15.
18 Cf. The Encyclopedia, para. 433: “One of those involved in the struggle prefers life, preserves himself as a single self-consciousness, but gives up being recognized, while the other holds [fast] to its reference to itself and is recognized by the first, who is his subject” (quoted by Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, pp. 86–87).
19 (1) For a brilliant elaboration of this theme, with relevant reference to the facts of American slavery, see Jon Elster, “Exploring Exploitation,” p. 14. Elster aptly quotes John Donne’s, “The Prohibition”:
Take heed of hating me,
Or too much triumph in the victory.
Not that I shall be mine own officer,
And hate with hate again retaliate;
But thou wilt lose the style of conqueror,
If I, thy conquest, perish by thy hate.
Then, lest my being nothing lessen thee,
If thou hate me, take heed of hating me.
Cf. Elster, Logic and Society, pp. 70–76.
(2) Compare the excellent remarks by Shklar at p. 78 of her “Hegel’s Phenomenology: An Elegy for Hellas”:
By cutting himself off from creativity, action and experience, moreover, he distorts his vision. For as his own most basic experience is the contrast between his own passive superiority and the working creativity of his inferiors, he comes to see everything, from man to the cosmos, in terms of this radical dualism. … The possibility of a greater social awareness is cut off by the immediate consequences of battle. The victorious hero enslaves the vanquished and he becomes a user of human tools. That ensures the continued isolation of the hero, and it also arrests his development. His defined role is now that of a man who depends on others to do all work and creating for him. He is thus not as free as he believes, for his life is really in the hands of his servants. Despising creativity, he has also denied himself the possibility of new learning and development. … The lord in his contemplative independence cannot survive without his body-slave.
20 Flüssigwerden. Marx’s “all that is solid melts” is verdampft.
21 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 194, p. 117.
22 (1) Cf. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, p. 64: he thereby becomes “free in the sense that nothing can count as authoritative for [him]self unless [he] has freely elected it for [him]self.” Hence the transition from the master/slave dialectic to Stoicism.
(2) Compare the significance of war in The Philosophy of Right. War liberates men from engulfment in everyday life and returns them to the universal idea embodied in the state.
23 There would appear to be a connection between the stigma Hegel here attaches to the master and the words of Schiller at p. 116 of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “An infinite perpetuation of being and well-being, merely for the sake of being and well-being, is merely an ideal of appetite and consequently a demand which can be put forward only by an animality that is striving after the absolute.”
24 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, p. 62. See also Hegel, Philosophy of Right, para. 194, p. 79:
The idea has been advanced that in respect of needs man lived in freedom in the so called ‘state of nature’ when his needs were supposed to be confined to what are known as the simple necessities of nature … This view takes no account of the moment of liberation intrinsic to work … Apart from this, it is false, because to be confined to mere physical needs as such and their direct satisfaction would simply be the condition in which the mental is plunged in the natural and so would be one of savagery and unfreedom, while freedom itself is to be found only in the reflection of mind into itself, in mind’s distinction from nature, and in the reflex of mind in nature.
Compare Shklar, “Hegel’s Phenomenology: An Elegy for Hellas,” p. 79:
The slave as a body-tool is not as immobilized by this situation as is the master. The slave learns. In his mortal fear he knows how to discipline himself. As he labours and produces for the benefit of the master, he imprints himself on the dead matter with which he works. In the process he not only creates things, but also himself. In his creative relation to objects he discovers his powers, and the really essential character of man. It is man as creator who is really self-aware and free, not the passive and dependent master. The slave achieves self-consciousness through his work.
25 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 64.
26 Taylor, Hegel, p. 157.
27 Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 88.
28 If you sit next to a man on a plane in the United States and ask him what he does and he says, “I make plastics,” you can confidently infer from his response, if he is being truthful, that he does not make plastics. He is identifying himself by reference to the activity of those whom he employs. He finds it most natural to offer a description of himself that is parasitic on the activity of others.
So we can give a Hegelio-Marxian explanation, in terms of parasitic identity, of that curious perversion in the meaning of the term “manufacturer” which has brought it about that a man is a manufacturer insofar as he does not work with his hands. To be sure, some (small) manufacturers make things with their hands, because they work side by side with their employees. But note. Suppose you ask a man, what do you do from 9 to 5, and he says, “I sew dresses.” You might then say, “Ah, so you’re not a manufacturer.” He may then reply, “No. In fact I am a manufacturer, despite the fact that I work with my hands.”
(However, in corporate capitalism, there is to a certain extent an inversion of this inversion, insofar as the worker sometimes identifies himself as a limb of the fragment of capital that employs him. The status-seeking auto worker who says, “I am with GM.” This is part of the syndrome of the soulful corporation, which ideology is a concerted effort to reverse the facts of capitalist reality. [For this last point, I am indebted to Pamela Zoline.])
29 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 196, p. 119.