Chapter 10 Allegories of Mastery

The Pragmatic and Semantic Basis of the Metaphysical Incoherence of Authority without Responsibility

I. Introduction: Asymmetrical, Defective Structures of Recognition

The analytic models presented in Chapter 9 are structured by relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses. Attitudes of attributing and acknowledging (or claiming) can have statuses of responsibility and authority as their objects, in the sense that what is attributed (to another) or acknowledged (oneself) is responsibility and authority. And those normative statuses of responsibility and authority can have the attitudes of attributing and acknowledging as their objects, in the sense that what one is responsible for doing or has the authority to do includes (among other practical doings) adopting normative attitudes of attributing or acknowledging. Many complex constellations of these relations between attitudes and statuses can be distinguished. The idea, central to modernity as Hegel conceives it, that normative attitudes are instituted by normative statuses, is the idea that statuses that are to begin with merely virtual, as the objects of attitudes of attributing and acknowledging them, become actual when those attitudes are suitably situated in such complex constellations. The Kantian individual autonomy model and the Hegelian social recognitive model differ in the structure of attitudes and statuses they take to be necessary and sufficient to institute actual statuses. This chapter considers variants—including modern ones—of a third sort of structure: the traditional subordination-obedience model of the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses. The principal concern of this chapter is to diagnose in detail the defective nature of the normative statuses instituted by practical constellations of this form, and so the defects of the self-conscious normative subjects of those statuses and attitudes.

Hegel’s principal topic in Self-Consciousness is the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity, which he sees as culminating in the modern Kantian autonomy conception. He offers a diagnosis of the defects of that conception, both in theory and in practice, under the heading of Mastery. The exploration of this kind of understanding of normative subjects—this sort of self-understanding—grounds a critique both of traditional practical and theoretical forms of subordination-and-obedience and of the Kantian autonomy model, which shows up as deformed by residual commitment to a distinctively modern form of Mastery. It is this critique that opens the path to the proper social-recognitive successor model of normativity.

Mastery is a kind of practical self-conception, a kind of practical self-consciousness: a conception of the normative subjects of statuses and attitudes—that is, selves, including oneself. In its most general form, it centers on the idea of pure independence. Pure independence is independence purified of any admixture of dependence. In terms of the reading of Hegel’s vocabulary of “independence” / “dependence” (when applied on the side of subjects) as his way of talking about authority and responsibility, pure independence is the idea of authority without any correlative responsibility.

Pure independence is a Bad Idea. There is no such thing as authority without responsibility, and there can be no such thing. The very idea turns out to be incoherent because incompatible with the intelligibility of such authority having determinate content. But that does not mean that commitment to such a possibility cannot be constitutive of actual social practices and forms of life. Far from it. In Hegel’s view all previous social institutions and self-understandings have been forms of Mastery. Because that central conception is ultimately incoherent, the normative statuses, normative attitudes, and normative subjects that are formed in the context of practices exhibiting the structure of Mastery are defective in characteristic ways. Although the defectiveness of those practices and the practical self-conceptions they articulate have psychological and sociological consequences, the defect in question is at root ontological and metaphysical, rather than psychological. For the normative subjects practically understanding themselves according to the categories of Mastery are essentially self-conscious creatures. What they are in themselves depends on what they are for themselves; the structure of their normative statuses depends on the structure of their normative attitudes. A defect in the latter is a defect in the former.

Hegel presents his diagnosis of the ills of Mastery in allegorical form. We first saw his use of this trope in the discussion of Force in the third Consciousness chapter. There one could well have thought that the trope employed is rather synecdoche, having the part stand for the whole, because Newtonian forces remain a paradigm case of theoretical entities—the topic I claim is really under discussion. Here the literary form becomes more overt, as abstract constellations of normative practices, statuses, and attitudes are embodied in the human figures of the Master and the Servant, the Stoic, the Skeptic, and the Unhappy Consciousness. I discuss the last three briefly in Section XI. In the first part, concerning the Master and the Servant, I focus on three allegorical interactions, under the headings of the “struggle unto death,” the “efficacy of fate,” and the “triumph of servitude through work.” Each makes a different point about what is wrong with the subordination-obedience model of normativity allegorized as Mastery.

What ties all these dimensions of defectiveness together is the practical conception of Mastery as pure independence, authority without correlative responsibility. We will see that this conception brings with it a more specific commitment to the immediate constitutiveness of some of the Master’s attitudes—both acknowledgments, paradigmatically, of authority, and attributions, paradigmatically, of responsibility. This is the capacity of those attitudes to institute statuses all by themselves, regardless of the existence of any complementary attitudes on the part of others. The responsibilities that the Master’s authority abjures are of various kinds, emphasized in different allegorical lessons. He denies responsibility to (dependence of his authority upon) other subjects. More particularly, he denies responsibility to (dependence of his authority upon) the attitudes of others. He denies the authority of others, hence his responsibility to (dependence upon) their normative statuses. One crucial dimension of constraint by (authority of, responsibility to) statuses is their content. For the content determines what one is responsible for or authoritative about. So responsibility to contents is also denied. This is particularly important for reading the allegories of Stoicism and Skepticism. To deny responsibility to the content of statuses, and so of attitudes toward those statuses, is also to deny responsibility to the process of determining those contents. This is the responsibility to identify with some commitments rather than other, incompatible ones. It is the process of experience that becomes visible allegorically here in terms of the sort of identification through risk, and if need be sacrifice, that is one of the conceptual lessons of the struggle unto death. It shows up again in the discussion of the Servant’s experience of working.

Hegel’s claim is that all these come as a package. All these forms of responsibility that the Master abjures are implicit in any exercise of authority. On this view there is no stable resting place between Mastery’s denial of all these kinds of responsibilities and the proper recognitive view, which embraces all of them. It is no use trying, cafeteria-wise, to pick some subset to admit while rejecting others. Part of the argument for that holistic claim takes the form of the recognitive model, including the process of experience—now expanded from the purely cognitive form in which it showed up in the Introduction and Consciousness chapters to a practical form that includes work and intentional agency. And part of the argument is a proper reading of the lessons of the various allegories of Mastery.

II. The Subordination-Obedience Model

It will help in understanding those allegories to consider the asymmetrical subordination-obedience model of normativity that lies at the heart of the conception of Mastery, when it is couched in the same terms as the Kantian autonomy model and the Hegelian recognition model. The most basic structure of the Kantian autonomy model, as presented in Chapter 9, is shown in Figure 10.1. (Recall from that chapter that in these diagrams, normative statuses are polygons of different kinds, normative attitudes are ovals of different orientations, and arrows indicate the “object of” relation between statuses and attitudes.) Autonomy is a kind of authority. Specifically, it is the authority to make oneself responsible by taking oneself to be responsible. That is, it is the authority to adopt attitudes (acknowledgments of responsibility) that are immediately constitutive of the statuses (responsibilities) that are their objects. The autonomous subject institutes normative statuses of responsibility by adopting attitudes.

Considered at the same level of resolution, the corresponding basic structure of the subordination-obedience model of normativity is shown in Figure 10.2. On this model, the superior is the normative subject of the status of authority, and the subordinate is the normative subject of the status of responsibility. Further, the authority distinctive of the superior is the authority to institute responsibilities of the subordinate by the adoption of attitudes of attribution. The superior has the authority to make the subordinate responsible by taking the subordinate to be responsible—that is, by attributing the status of responsibility. What the Kantian model sees as the structure of each individual normative subject is traditionally divided between two kinds of normative subjects.

Comparing these two constellations of normative statuses and normative attitudes, one is struck by their overall similarity. Both are complex kinds of authority. And they are the same kind of authority: the authority to institute, indeed, immediately to constitute, responsibilities. This is the genus of which both the traditional superior / subordinate model and the Kantian autonomy model are species. What distinguishes these two species of that genus is that one is an essentially social structure, while the other is an essentially individual structure. The reason is that one is mediated by an other-regarding attitude, attribution of the normative status of responsibility, while the other is mediated by self-regarding attitude, acknowledgment of the normative status of responsibility. They differ only in the mediating attitudes that are the objects of the two forms of authority—the attitudes taken to be immediately authoritative in instituting responsibilities. In this sense, the two complex normative structures are attitude-duals.

It is remarkable that the traditional metaphysics of normativity and the ne plus ultra of modern metaphysics of normativity are so simply and symmetrically related. That the models are related in this straightforward and natural way suggests that the conceptual analytic apparatus that first distinguishes normative statuses from normative attitudes (what consciousness is in itself and what consciousness is for consciousness), and then within those categories distinguishes normative statuses of authority and responsibility (independence and dependence) and normative attitudes of acknowledging and attributing (what consciousness is for itself and what it is for another), is both cutting at appropriate joints and rendered at an illuminating fineness of grain. The conceptual raw materials for these models, articulated in the substantive distinctions just mentioned parenthetically, are front and center in Hegel’s texts. The analyses epitomized in the diagrams illustrating the models just show how those raw materials can be assembled to produce the various constellations of statuses and attitudes discussed: the traditional subordination-obedience model, the Kantian autonomy model, and the Hegelian recognitive model.

Filling in the picture a bit, it is worth taking account of the social dimension of the Kantian autonomy model (see Figure 10.3). The contribution of the second subject really is supplementary, a bit of additional structure rather than an essential element of the notion of autonomy. For Kantian respect, the attribution by another of the authority that is autonomy is not taken to be essential to that authority. The authority that is autonomy is not instituted by attitudes of attributing it—neither in an immediately constitutive way, where it is individually sufficient to institute the attitude, nor even when playing a suitable role as part of a larger structure of attitudes. That idea—in Kantian terminology, the idea that the dignity of selves understood as normative subjects is the product, at least in part, of its respect by others—is Hegel’s. Of course, for Hegel it is not the respect of others alone that institutes the dignity and authority that is autonomy (the normative capacity to commit oneself, to undertake responsibilities both doxastic and practical). It is an essential element of his recognitive model that the authority to institute normative statuses by adopting the attitude of respect or recognition must also be attributed by the one respected. This is the requirement that respect or recognition be reciprocal in order for those attitudes genuinely to institute the normative statuses that are their objects (to promote those virtual statuses to actuality). If we query the Kantian model about the nature of the authority (rather than the responsibility, the duty) to adopt the attitude of respect (attributing the authority of autonomy—that is, dignity), we can ask whether we should either take it to be a brute metaphysical fact, at least in the sense of not being instituted by any constellation of attitudes, or take it that the duty to respect is itself one of those that autonomous normative subjects as such have the authority to institute by their acknowledgment.

Although the dimension of respect introduces a social element into the autonomy model, it is quite different from the social element of the superior / subordinate model. Crucially, respect (or recognition) is the attribution of a distinctive kind of authority, while the superior (constitutively) attributes responsibility. Further, respect and recognition are not taken to be immediately constitutive of the statuses they attribute, while the superior’s attributions of responsibility are taken to be immediately constitutive of the statuses they attribute. If we further articulate the superior-subordinate model of the traditional subordination-obedience structural understanding of normativity, as Hegel allegorizes it in discussing the Master and the Servant, it emerges that there is an analogous dimension of duty to respect in that constellation of attitudes and statuses too. It just runs, as it were, in the other direction. For we can distinguish two different kinds of responsibilities that the superior institutes that figure principally in Hegel’s allegory. These are the responsibility to respect the authority of the superior and the responsibility to obey the commands of the superior. Though obviously intimately related, the former concerns the superior’s attitudes, expressed in his commands, and the latter concerns the superior’s status as having the authority immediately to constitute responsibilities on the part of the subordinate by the superior’s attribution of them.

We could diagram the duty to respect as shown in Figure 10.4. This structure concerns the relations between normative subjects, superior and subordinate, that is the subject of one of the dimensions of critique Hegel offers in the Master-Servant allegory. It is discussed later under the heading of the metaphysical self-defeatingness of Mastery, the normative “efficacy of fate.” A principal duty of the subordinate is to respect or recognize the superior, in the sense of attributing the authority that is definitive of the superior as superior. This is like Kantian respect, in that it is not taken to be constitutive of the authority-status it attributes, either by itself or together with other attitudes. The subordinate’s duty or responsibility to respect is unlike Kantian respect in that this status is instituted, indeed, immediately constituted, by attitudes—specifically, by its attribution by the superior. The respect of the subordinate for the superior is not an instituting attitude, but the duty or responsibility to adopt it is instituted (in fact immediately constituted) by its attribution by the superior.

Although there is a certain symmetry to this structure, this distinction between instituting and noninstituting attitudes, and between authority and responsibility, is an asymmetrical feature of it. Eliminating these asymmetries in favor of a picture in which normative statuses are instituted by reciprocal recognition yields the Hegelian social recognitive model (see Figure 10.5). According to the account in Chapter 9, the authority instituted in this way is also the authority to attribute responsibilities, which, if suitably complemented by acknowledgments, are constitutive of those responsibilities.

The complementary duty to obey is diagrammed in Figure 10.6. This is the dimension of relations between normative subjects and the objective world on which the subordinate works to satisfy the desires (a kind of attitude) of the superior. It, too, is the subject of one of the dimensions of critique Hegel offers in the Master-Servant allegory, and is also discussed later under the heading of the metaphysical self-defeatingness of Mastery, the normative “efficacy of fate.” Commands, issued by the superior and addressed to the subordinate subject, are attributions of specific responsibilities. Commands correspond to specific recognition in the Hegelian model, as opposed to the general recognition that has its analogue in the respect of the subordinate for the superior. For commands attribute specific responsibilities, rather than the capacity to be the subject of normative statuses at all. A crucial difference is that on the Hegelian model, specific recognition institutes statuses only when suitably complemented by acknowledgments on the part of the one specifically recognized (the one to whom the statuses are attributed by one generally recognized and recognizing).

The responsibilities specified by commands are practical responsibilities: the responsibility to do something. When all goes well, acknowledging practical responsibilities is acting accordingly. The acknowledgment is not something that causes the intentional performance. It just consists in such performances. In the subordination model, acknowledging specific practical responsibilities takes the form of obeying the commands that articulate and institute them. Hegel discusses intentional agency as the practical acknowledgment of responsibilities in his Reason chapter.1 The discussion of the significance of the Servant’s work provides the rationale for the expository transition from the discussion of normativity in Self-Consciousness to the discussion of intentional agency in Reason.

Like the autonomy model and the subordination model, the duty to respect and the duty to obey that articulate the latter are attitude-duals. The duty to respect is a responsibility to attribute, and the duty to obey is a responsibility to acknowledge. Besides differing in the flavor of the attitudes that are the objects of the two kinds of responsibilities, the duty to respect and the duty to obey also differ in the statuses that are the objects of those attitudes. For the duty to respect is the responsibility to attribute authority, while the duty to obey is the responsibility practically to acknowledge responsibility. These two aspects, the duty of respect and the duty of obedience, define the responsibility characteristic of the subordinate and (so) the authority characteristic of the superior. They also structure Hegel’s allegorical discussion of the Master and the Servant. If we put them together, we get a more articulated diagram of the subordination-obedience model of normativity (see Figure 10.7).

This is the constellation of statuses and attitudes that should be compared with the fully articulated diagram of the attitude-duals that are the “suitably complemented” specific recognitive attitudes in Hegel’s social-recognitive model of normativity, as presented in Chapter 9. And it is the ills of this subordination-obedience conception (both theoretical and practical) of normativity that Hegel dissects in the allegories of proud consciousness and the struggle unto death, the efficacy of fate, and the prospects of liberation of the Servant through labor, to which we now turn.

III. Identification

In Chapter 8, I appealed to the first index episode in the allegory Hegel presents in the Self-Consciousness chapter, the “Kampf auf Leben und Tod,” the life-and-death struggle, to illuminate this transition from the organic space of living beings to the normative space of responsible selves. This transition relates the structure where the distinction between independence and dependence shows up first in the form of the at most protonormative distinction between desiring animal and what is desired to the structure where the distinction between independence and dependence shows up in the form of the genuinely normative, because recognitively articulated, distinction between authority and responsibility. This is the contrast Hegel invokes in describing the confrontation of two desiring animals:

Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth … according to the Notion of recognition this is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of being-for-self. [PG 186]

These orectic and recognitive structures correspond to two forms that the distinction between what things are for consciousness and what things are in themselves—on the normative side, that is the distinction between attitudes and statuses—can take.

Let us look more closely at the role the life-and-death struggle plays allegorically in Hegel’s speculative retrospective recollective rational reconstruction (Erinnerung) of the advent of the subordination-obedience structure of recognition. In the allegory, what emerges from the life-and-death struggle is a distinctive constellation of recognitive relations between superior and subordinate, personified as Master and Servant [Herr und Knecht]. Each party practically understands himself and the other according to the categories of Mastery. This is a practical normative conception that understands the Master as a locus of pure independence, authority without responsibility, and the Servant as a locus of pure dependence, responsibility without authority. Hegel thinks a practical recognitive conception embodying this social division of normative role is implicit in any practices exhibiting the asymmetrical superior-subordinate structure—even in cases—for instance, medieval feudalism—where, by contrast to the univocal personification in the allegory, every individual except those at the very extremes plays both roles, superior to some and subordinate to others.

Further, he argues that this practical recognitive conception is radically defective—and so, accordingly, are the self-conscious normative selves or subjects it shapes. At base, what is wrong with the subordination-obedience model is that it systematically mistakes power for authority. This is, to be sure, a fundamental mistake about the metaphysics of normativity. But the mistake is not merely theoretical. It is practical, as well. It leads to deformed social institutions and deformed self-conscious individual selves. Those institutions are deformed in fact, not just in their self-understandings. This mistaking of power for authority has a relatively intricate fine-structure, according to Hegel. That is what he is teaching us about with the allegory of Mastery. So it is of the first importance that we understand how the allegory of the victor and the vanquished in a life-and-death struggle that results in a superior-subordinate relation introduces, incorporates, and motivates the practical normative conception of Mastery.

One key feature of the life-and-death struggle is precisely that it is a matter of life and death. We already saw that an essential element of the transition from being a living organism, belonging to the realm of Nature, to being a denizen of the realm of Spirit is willingness to risk one’s biological life.

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 vanishing moments, 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. [PG 187]

I argued in Chapter 8 that the new element that is introduced here is the idea that in risking one’s life one identifies with what one risks one’s life for, rather than identifying oneself with the biological existence that one risks. By being willing to risk one’s life for something, one makes it the case that the life one risks is not an essential element of the self one is thereby constituting, while that for which one risks it is. What mattered for the transition from Natur to Geist were the cases where what one was willing to risk one’s natural life for was a commitment, something normative: a normative status or attitude.² This is risking something concrete and actual for something abstract and ideal.

Being willing to risk one’s life for something is adopting a distinctive kind of practical attitude toward it. I have suggested thinking of that attitude as identifying with what one is willing to risk and if need be sacrifice one’s life for. The claim is that adopting that attitude has a particular effect. It changes one’s status, making what one risks or sacrifices for an essential element of what one really is. That is to say that identification is a kind of taking oneself to be something that is also a making of oneself to be something. In the case of identification, what one is for oneself immediately affects what one is in oneself. It is an attitude that is self-constitutive. The self that is constituted by what I call “existential identification” (we will see that there are other varieties) is an essentially self-conscious self, in the sense that its attitudes—at least its existentially identificatory attitudes—are an essential component of what it is in itself. Those attitudes institute a special kind of normative status.

Self-consciousness can be thought of to begin with as consciousness of one’s self—a matter of being for oneself what one is in oneself. In the idiom I have been employing, this is to have one’s normative statuses appropriately reflected in one’s normative attitudes. It is to acknowledge the responsibility and authority one actually has. We might think of this as theoretical self-consciousness. The self-constitutive achievement of existential identification makes visible a complementary dimension of practical self-consciousness. For in this case, statuses reflect attitudes, rather than the other way around. It is by practically taking oneself to be a certain kind of self, identifying with one rather than another element of one’s statuses and attitudes, that one makes oneself into a different kind of self, alters one’s status. What one is in oneself (a status) is responsible to (in Hegel’s terms, dependent on) what one is for oneself, one’s practical attitude of identification.

Each of the theoretical and the practical dimensions of self-consciousness yields something that the self is in and for itself. In the first instance, a normative status that is virtual as the object of a normative attitude (the acknowledging of a responsibility or the claiming of authority) is also an actual status. According to Hegel’s model, this happens when that status is also attributed by a normative subject who is recognized as having the authority to institute such statuses by its attitudes, when they are suitably complemented. The second case arises when one identifies with an attitude (or, equivalently, the virtual status that is its object), promoting it to a higher metastatus than some status one actually has, something one is in oneself. That virtual status does not thereby immediately become actualized. But it nonetheless counts not only as something one is for oneself. For that it is something one is for oneself becomes an essential part of what one is in oneself.

IV. The Practical Conception of Pure Independence

It is practical self-consciousness in this sense, beginning with existential identification, that makes one essentially self-conscious, makes what one is for oneself an essential element of what one is in oneself. This achievement of self-constitution through existential identification—being willing to risk one’s life, and so everything one already actually is in oneself for something one is to begin with only virtually, ideally, for oneself—is the beginning of human history. Through this practical attitude of identification, a living being makes itself more than merely a desiring animal simply by taking itself to be more, in its practical willingness to risk its animal existence.

Hegel claims that this identification with a normative attitude (and hence with the virtual status that is its object, the responsibility one acknowledges or the authority one claims) happens in a particular context, and for that reason has a particular effect. That context is the social context of a life-and-death struggle with another self-consciousness. Risking one’s life for something else (a normative status or attitude) is one crucial element in the life-and-death struggle. But it is not all there is to that phenomenon. The surplus beyond existential identification through risk of life that the social practical context of the life-and-death struggle supplies is the result of the particular practical attitude for which each party risks its life in the life-and-death struggle. It is when subjects of this attitude collide, that, as Hegel puts it, “they must engage in this struggle.” [PG 187; emphasis added]

The combatants are living, and so desiring, beings. Implicit in desire, by its nature, is a second-order desire: the desire that things should be in themselves just what they are for the desirer. That is the desire that one’s desires be satisfied, just because they are one’s desires. To see that such a second-order desire is implicit in what it is to be a (first-order) desire, it suffices to reflect that it is as correct to say that all particular desires are united in their common aim at satisfaction as it is to say that all particular beliefs are united in their common aim at truth. Hegel says in discussing the antecedents of the struggle that “life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity” [PG 188]. Independence is the sought-for natural authority of desire. The absence of negativity is the implicit ideal of lack of resistance to that authority by a recalcitrant world. That ideal of pure independence implicit in desire as such is the orectic origin of the practical normative self-conception of Mastery, and so of normativity exhibiting the structure of subordination.

This implicit ideal is a practical conception of oneself as an immediately, transparently constitutive taker. To be a constitutive taker is to be such that taking things to have a certain practical significance succeeds in making them have that significance. This is things being in themselves what they are for the sovereign desirer. Such constitution is taken to be immediate in that it does not depend on being suitably complemented by any other attitudes, in particular, by anyone else’s attitudes. The constitutive power or authority one takes one’s desires to have is taken to be transparent in that the virtual status that is the object of one’s desire and the actual status achieved are taken to have the same content: one succeeds in doing just what one was trying to do.

For phenomenal self-consciousness to understand itself according to the conception of pure independence is for it to take consciousness as constitutive of its objects. Everything is taken by this concept of consciousness to be in itself exactly what it is for consciousness. Thus, self-consciousness understanding itself as purely independent is consciousness that takes itself to be a constituting consciousness, a consciousness that makes things so by taking them so. In fact, no consciousness can be in itself purely independent in this sense. The independence consists rather in how consciousness takes itself to be—that is, how it is for itself. To be for oneself a constitutive taker, to be sovereign in one’s takings, is to construe oneself under the categories of pure independence.

Practical consciousness that understands itself as purely independent consciousness, then, insists on the sovereignty of its takings. Descartes formulated and contributed to a tradition that finds the boundaries of the self by tracing the extent of cognitive and practical sovereignty. For him, the mind consists of that which we cannot mis-take. Cognitive mental activity (cognition) is that which is whatever it is for the mind, i.e., whatever it seems or is taken to be. Practical mental activity (volition) is that over which we have total dominion, where no means are necessary to satisfy one’s desires. As there is no gap between seeming and being in our cognitive sovereignty over our mental states (seemings or takings), there is no gap between trying and succeeding in our practical sovereignty over our volitions (willings as minimal tryings). (Hegel explicitly argues against the practical part of this theory in his discussion of the conception of action he calls “the honest consciousness” in the Reason section, discussed here at the end of Chapter 12.) In this context the independent consciousness can be seen as extending sovereignty over self to sovereignty over everything, to be expanding in its self-conception the boundaries of itself until they are all inclusive.

Why does the practical self-conception of a being that will risk its life for that self-conception take the form of a commitment to being purely independent? Self-constitution requires only that one be willing to risk death in preference to relinquishing one’s concept of oneself as essentially a taker, someone for whom things are something. What is the origin of the additional and ultimately self-defeating condition of the unconstrained constitutive sovereignty of the subject in those takings? I have offered as an answer: Because of the nature of the second-order desire that is implicit in desire as such. The process by which humanity arises exhibits two important aspects. Independent consciousness fastens on one of them, and learns a mistaken lesson from its self-formative process. One can constitutively take oneself to be essentially a taker, by being willing to risk one’s life for that self-conception. In this self-constitution, the self appears both as subject and as object: the (constitutively) taking self and that which is taken to be that self. Independent consciousness fastens on the constitutiveness of itself as taking taker (in this special self-taking), and assumes that constitutiveness characterizes itself as taken taker. Because its taking of itself was constitutive, it takes itself to be a constitutive taker. The formal difficulties that this taking engenders stem from the fact that while one can constitutively take oneself to be essentially a taker, one cannot constitutively take oneself to be a constitutive taker. One cannot even in general be a constitutive self-taker. Some self-concepts one can constitutively attribute to oneself (e.g., being a taker and being essentially a taker), and others one cannot constitutively attribute to oneself (e.g., being a constitutive taker). Independent consciousness is the result of drawing an incorrectly generalized conclusion from the success of one kind of self-constitution, mistaking it for another kind of success.

V. The Struggle

The struggle that transforms the second-order desire implicit in desire as such into a commitment the Master existentially identifies with inevitably results when two such desirers confront one another. “In the way that they immediately make their appearance, they exist for each other in the way ordinary objects do,” because they are “self-sufficient shapes, sunk in the being of life.” [PG 186] Desiring that everything be in itself what it is for oneself includes desiring that everyone be in themselves what they are for one. Subjects cannot show up as other subjects from the point of view of this desire, because what things are for them cannot make any difference to what things are in themselves. A kind of orectic solipsism is enforced: each sovereign subject confronts a world consisting of what for it are only objects, not other subjects.

In the account in Chapter 8 of the triadic structure of desire, that structure was epitomized by the relations between hunger, eating, and food: a desire, an activity motivated by that desire, and a practical significance things could have with respect to the desire. The desire then provides a standard of assessment of the success of the activity it motivates, accordingly as the desire is or is not satisfied. For that induces a distinction with respect to the practical significance, between what has that significance for the desirer (is treated as food by being eaten) and what really has that significance, in itself (is in fact food in that it satisfies the hunger that motivated the eating). (Notice that this status, too, is defined by an attitude—namely, by hunger’s cessation.) This orectic structure accordingly makes possible the sort of experience of error that the Introduction identifies as the source of consciousness’s practical grasp of its representational character.

This analysis encourages us to inquire into the activity that corresponds to the second-order desire that everything be in itself just whatever it is for the desirer. What stands to that desire as eating stands to hunger? I think the answer Hegel offers is that that activity is engaging in a life-and-death struggle with any and every other subject of that same desire. That is struggling to make the other be in itself what it is for the sovereign desirer: an object for whom and in whom only the sovereign desirer’s desires are efficacious.

What makes the second-order desire for immediate constitutive power the motive for the struggle? It becomes so when it confronts, and so conflicts with, another such desire: the second-order desire of another desirer. Here two questions arise: why does confrontation with another such desirer lead inevitably to conflict, and why does such conflict matter more than any other conflict of desires of two different desirers?

The independence of consciousness construing itself as purely independent is not practically compatible with the existence of other beings that are independent in the same sense. The insistence on being a constitutive subject (a sovereign desiring taker) precludes the recognition of others as being subjects in the sense one is oneself. This is imperial rather than pluralistic independence. For according to this practical self-conception, everything else must depend upon the attitudes of the sovereign subject. This ultimately unworkable demand follows inexorably from the self-concept by which purely independent consciousness understands and defines itself (unto death). If a self-consciousness took itself to be just a taker rather than a constitutive taker, something things are for without the additional commitment that what things are in themselves must be just whatever they are for that taker, then that consciousness could be what it takes itself to be compatibly with others taking, and correctly taking, themselves to be subjects of the same kind (and with objects retaining some independence in the form of resistance to desire). But for a consciousness conceiving itself as constitutive, this is not possible.

What is new about the life-and-death struggle is not that two desirers come into conflict. Two predators might covet the same carcass, and so fight over it, without victory instituting a Master-Servant relationship. What is distinctive about the case in Hegel’s allegory is that the parties to the struggle each practically existentially identifies with the second-order desire that everything be in itself just whatever it is for the desirer. This desire cannot be satisfied by wresting a carcass from a rival and feasting on it. It requires the subjection of the rival. Second, it matters that what they are struggling and risking their lives over is a kind of self-conception: that provided by the second-order desire that one’s desires be immediately satisfied—that is, that everything be, in itself, what it is for oneself. Finally, the particular second-order desire to be an immediately, transparently constitutive desirer is unlike other, first-order desires, in that second-order desires of this particular kind are incompatible with and opposed to one another de jure, necessarily, in principle, and universally, as opposed to de facto, contingently, in practice, and in particular cases. That is why the parties must struggle.

VI. The Significance of Victory

The first phase of Hegel’s allegorical story is the life-and-death struggle. Hegel says the result of the struggle is

two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is master, the other is servant. [PG 189]

The second phase is the normative relationship of subordination and obedience that obtains between the victor and the vanquished in that struggle. (Struggles that end in the death of one or both of the participants are irrelevant to the allegory.) This is the relationship between Master and Servant. In this structure, the Master shows up as purely independent (that is, authoritative) and the Servant as purely dependent (that is, responsible). And what the Master is for himself is his essential nature, part of what he is in himself. He has made himself in that sense essentially self-conscious.

The first point to realize in reading this phase of the story, in order to understand the self-conception of Mastery, is that the victor takes it that his victory indicates success in satisfying the desire that motivated the struggle in the first place. That second-order desire was the desire that one’s desires be immediately and transparently constitutive. It is the desire that one have the sovereign power to make things so by taking them to be so. This is the desire to have a certain kind of normative status, a kind of authority. Engaging in the activity motivated by the desire, in this case, engaging in the struggle, is taking or treating oneself as having that status: the practical significance induced by this distinctive sort of desire. Besides motivating its characteristic sort of activity and defining its characteristic sort of practical significance, according to its triadic structure desire also provides a practical standard for assessing the success of the activity. To succeed, by satisfying the desire, is to establish that what had the significance corresponding to the desire and the activity for the desiring subject also actually has that significance, in itself—that it really is as it was taken to be. In the paradigmatic case, what a hungry animal practically treats as food by eating it counts as really being food, being food in itself, and not just for the animal, in case it actually satisfies the hunger that motivated eating it.

In this more complicated case, the victor takes it that by taking himself to be an immediately and transparently constitutive taker in the way he has—that is, by existentially identifying with his claiming that status by risking his life, and by having come through the life-and-death struggle victorious—he has immediately and transparently made himself be such a constitutive taker, and so has successfully instituted that status. That is what the Master is for himself, and he takes his victory to have successfully transformed that status from being the merely virtual object of his attitude (the original second-order desire) to being actualized as the status that is what he is in himself. Here it is important to distinguish clearly three different descriptions of the status of the victor in the life-and-death struggle: the status the victor takes himself to have achieved, the genuine achievement that prompts him to conceive himself so, and the defective normative status that is actually instituted thereby. These are three essential dimensions of Mastery.

The first is what I have just been addressing. The life-and-death struggle was motivated by the desire, implicit in the nature of desire itself, to be an immediately, transparently, constitutive desirer—to have everything be in itself just what it is for the desirer—that is, just as it is desired to be. The victor in the life-and-death struggle takes it that the struggle, the activity motivated by that second-order desire, has been successful, has resulted in the satisfaction of that desire—that is, in his having the status he desired. Now, he is wrong about that. He has not in fact achieved that status. It is what he is for himself, but not what he is in himself. His practical self-consciousness is defective—indeed, massively, structurally defective. For that reason the kind of self, the normative subject, the self-defining status that he has in fact instituted, is deformed in a characteristic way. Selves conceiving themselves according to the categories of Mastery cannot be what they take themselves to be. Indeed, in important ways they have made themselves the opposite of what they take themselves to be: dependent where they see pure independence. That is the third dimension cataloged previously. Diagnosing the pathologies of this sort of practical self-conception is the principal achievement of the Self-Consciousness chapter.

Though he is wrong about what he has achieved, the victor in the life-and-death struggle is not simply deluded. He has substantially transformed himself by staking his life, by existentially identifying with his practical self-conception. In so doing he raised himself above being in himself simply a desiring living being. For he succeeded in making himself essentially self-conscious, someone such that what he is for himself is an essential component of what he is in himself. As such, he is subject to a distinctive new kind of self-development. For changing what he is for himself changes what he is in himself. As an essentially self-conscious being, he is now an essentially historical being. The act of practical self-identification he performed was constitutive. It was a self-taking that was a self-making. In this special case and in this sense, the Master is right to think of himself as a constitutive taker.

Furthermore, and crucially, his existential identification with his practical self-conception as an immediately, transparently constitutive taker was not only constitutive; it was in a sense immediately constitutive. For its effect of making him into an essentially self-conscious creature—a distinctive kind of self-creation as a self-creator—did not depend on his self-recognitive attitude being suitably complemented (hence mediated) by the attitudes of others. It is something he did, a status he achieved, all on his own, independently, as an exercise of his power (on its way to being his authority). By his practical identificatory attitude alone, by his being willing to risk and if need be sacrifice his life rather than relinquish his desire that his desires be constitutively sovereign, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from the swamp of merely biological being into a nobler status. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the victor makes his normative advance, achieves the kind of essentially self-conscious normative selfhood that he does by being willing to die for his commitment to pure independence, not by being willing to kill for it. He is willing to do that, too. That is an expression of his desire for recognition as what he takes himself to be. And therein lies another problem.

It is true that he is recognized by the vanquished as the victor in the struggle, and even recognized as Master by the one who thereby is constituted as Servant. And that fact is an essential element in the diagnosis of the deformation that afflicts Mastery as a normative self-conception and practical conception of normativity in general. But the victor has treated the vanquished solely as an object throughout the struggle. An essential part of the point of that struggle was to reject the other’s claims as subject, to reject the power of the other’s desires to impose practical significances on things, to make them be in themselves what they are for the other. Only the attitudes, the desires, of the victor are to matter. That is the self-conception the victor identifies with unto death. It is true that in taking himself to have succeeded in this aspect of the enterprise, in turning the vanquished into a mere object whose attitudes (what things are for it) have no objective import (make no difference to what things are in themselves), the Master is mistaken. And that mistake is an important one. The fact remains that the self-transformation the Master achieved, changing his status, what he is in himself, from being essentially a living desirer to being essentially self-conscious, is in a real sense immediately constitutive. For it is a change in status brought about by his practical identificatory attitude.

But his self-constitutive attitude was not transparently constitutive. For the status he actually achieved, being essentially self-conscious, is not the virtual status that was the object of his desire. What he desired to be was not essentially self-conscious, but immediately, transparently constitutive: for what things actually are, in themselves, to be just whatever they are for him, what he desires them to be. Things are to have the status he desires them to have, simply because he so desires, simply because of his attitudes. In making himself essentially conscious, he has not made himself into such a transparently constitutive taker—one who can make things so simply by taking them to be so. Though he succeeded in doing something, immediately and constitutively making himself essentially self-conscious by adopting the attitudes he does, the Master is wrong to think that his victory succeeded in satisfying the desire with which he identified, the desire that motivated the struggle in which he risked his life.

In effect, in understanding the significance of his victory in terms of Mastery, the victor in the life-and-death struggle has misunderstood what he has actually succeeded in doing. He has overgeneralized his genuine achievement, which was making himself essentially self-conscious in himself by his practical attitude of existentially identifying with what he is for himself. What he successfully made himself be in himself—the status his attitudes instituted—is not all of, but only a part of, what he was for himself. He has immediately instituted a status by adopting an attitude. But that status falls far short of the sort of sovereignty he desired his attitudes to have. In misunderstanding his achievement, the Master misunderstands himself.

VII. The Master-Servant Relationship

The Master’s self-misunderstanding, the sense and extent to which he is opaque to himself, emerges even more pointedly if we consider his actual achievement from a different point of view. For through his practical attitude of identification with the desire that his desires be sovereign over what things objectively are, through risking his life and emerging victorious from the life-and-death struggle, the Master has succeeded in transforming his original desire into a constellation of genuinely normative statuses and attitudes. He has not, to be sure, succeeded in attaining the status he takes himself to have and identifies with unto death: pure independence as sovereign authority without correlative responsibility. And crossing the crucial boundary between Nature and Spirit, between the protoconsciousness of merely desiring living things and the self-consciousness (and so consciousness in the proper sense) of selves as the subjects of genuinely normative attitudes and statuses is no part of what the Master-to-be began by desiring. It is nonetheless something he has actually succeeded in doing, a transformation of status his practical attitudes have succeeded in bringing about. For Mastery is a normative self-conception, a form of self-consciousness, however fundamentally mistaken it might be. The victor in the struggle has transmuted his second-order desire to be a sovereign desirer into subordination and obedience as a constellation of normative attitudes whose virtual objects are normative statuses construed according to the categories of Mastery. Indeed, the first large lesson we are to learn by properly reading Hegel’s allegory of Mastery is how normativity as traditionally structured by subordination and obedience is an immediate translation of the basic structure of desire (epitomized in the implicit second-order desire to have one’s desires immediately satisfied) into the recognitive medium of Geist. This is the fine structure of the misconstrual of power relations as intrinsically normative relations.

The Master’s self-conception, which he will not relinquish short of death, requires that he recognize no others but himself (that is, take no one else to be a taker or subject) and that he cancel in actuality the independence of objects that he has already canceled in his conception of himself and them. For no one else can be for the consciousness understanding itself as sovereign in the sense of being a constitutive taker, what that consciousness is for itself: namely, an immediately and transparently constitutive taker. Recognizing someone in this sense would be relinquishing the authority the Master insists on (unto death): that things, including oneself and others, are in themselves whatever he takes them to be, what they are for him, not what anyone else (any other candidate constitutive taker) takes them to be.

The servitude of the Servant is meant to be a single practical solution to the challenge of the Master’s immediate, transparent constitutiveness, on the side both of recalcitrant subjects and of recalcitrant objects. It is to allow the Master to realize his self-conception and be in himself what he is for himself—namely, a constitutive taker who by his attitudes makes everything (himself included) be in itself whatever it is for him. The problem of the other as subject is solved by turning him into an object. The problem of the recalcitrance of objects is solved by using obedient Servants as objects to subdue objects that are less immediately obedient than the Servant (whose will is his Master’s, though his work for the Master is in an important sense still his own). These may be other objects, or they may be human beings not yet subdued.³

The Servant becomes an object for himself and for the Master by recognizing the Master under the same concept under which the master recognizes himself—namely, as transparently constitutive taker. Because the Master takes the Servant to be an object (without the willingness to risk life required for humanity) and the Servant takes the Master’s takings as constitutive of what things are in themselves, the Servant can conceive of himself only as object, not as subject. To be even potentially a normative subject, one must at least conceive of oneself as a subject, so that one may acquire the courage to risk one’s life for that conception. What things are for the Servant is not determined by the Servant’s desires, but by the Master’s. So what they are for the Servant is whatever they are for the Master. The Servant is not a separate taker, either of self or of other things. For himself, he is what he is for the Master, an object. Both he and the Master take this to be what the Servant is in himself as well, though they are both wrong.

VIII. The Metaphysical Irony at the Heart of Mastery

Here is the irony of Mastery: the Master has not only made himself essentially self-conscious; he has achieved a genuinely normative status—crossing the boundary between the merely living and the genuinely normative. The Master-Servant relation is a genuinely normative structure of subordination and obedience. And it is so because it is what the Master denies it is: a recognitive relation, in which recognitive attitudes are suitably complemented (albeit asymmetrically), so as to institute normative statuses (albeit defective ones). The Master and the Servant agree on what each one is. That is the suitable complementation. They are both wrong, about each other and about themselves. That is the defect.

In fact the Master is the Master only insofar as he is recognized as the Master by the Servant. The Servant exercises recognitive authority over the Master, who is normatively dependent upon, responsible to, the Servant for his status—which is a normative status just because and insofar as it is instituted by recognition. But the Master does not recognize the recognitive authority of the Servant. His self-conception is one of pure independence, in which all authority is vested in him. The Servant is practically conceived as purely dependent, merely responsible. A basic point of Hegel’s allegory is to contrast this asymmetrical constellation of normative attitudes and statuses, in which for both the Master and the Servant the social division of normative labor locates authority solely in one of the parties and responsibility solely in the other, on the one hand, with the symmetrical constellation of normative attitudes and statuses of subjects who reciprocally recognize each other, each both exercising recognitive authority over the other and being recognitively responsible for his normative status to the attitudes of the other, whose authority he acknowledges, on the other hand. We are here introduced to the lesson that will be explored throughout the rest of the Phenomenology: how the traditional subordination-obedience structure of normativity institutes defective normative statuses and normative subjects. That asymmetrical social normative structure, whose implicit practical ideology is Mastery—the glittering but spurious ideal of pure independence, authority without corresponding responsibility—persists into modernity even in its most developed reflection in the Kantian model of autonomy as the constellation of normative attitudes that institutes normative statuses. The allegory of the normative relation of Master and Servant emerging from the primal power relations between victor and vanquished in a life-and-death struggle presents this normative structure in its rudest, rawest form.

A vivid example of the pathology at work in the form of self-consciousness that consists in practically conceiving of oneself according to the categories of Mastery is a kind of psychological distress that is a common affliction of celebrities—for instance, in entertainment or politics. It is compounded of these elements. First, such subjects revel in the feeling of superiority over ordinary, noncelebrated people that they take their status to establish and consist in. Their celebrity status is understood both as epistemically witnessing or testifying to that superiority and as ontologically constituting or instituting it. Second, they identify with that status. They take that superior, distinguished status to be essential to what and who they really are, in themselves. It is the basis of their self-esteem, articulating what they are for themselves. Third, they despise the mass of inferior, undistinguished, talentless ordinary people, by contrast to whose lesser status their own is defined. An integral part of the status the celebrity identifies with is the right to look down on those of lesser status.

Even slightly self-reflective celebrities adopting these attitudes toward the status they identify with are liable to detect the tension those attitudes stand in with the fact that it is precisely the attitudes of those despised, inferior masses that make them celebrities in the first place. That status is conferred precisely by the masses’ admiration, their recognition, their celebration of the celebrated ones. It is instituted by their practical attitudes of buying tickets, devoting leisure hours to reading about and appreciating, voting for, admiring the celebrities in question. So one is made what one is by being so taken by people one has no respect for, whose judgment one dismisses, whose authority one in no sense acknowledges. In short, one is made what one is by being thought wonderful by people one does not believe can tell what is wonderful, people to whose opinions one attributes no weight, people one takes to have no right to assess such things. One’s status is instituted by attitudes one does not take to have any authority.

What happens to the Master is the metaphysical version of what happens psychologically to someone who aspires to celebrity, acquiring along the way a contempt for the mass of admirers whose attitudes of acknowledgment institute and constitute that celebrity. Self-respect is difficult to achieve by regarding oneself as reflected in a mirror of morons. The Master is who he is insofar as he is recognized as Master by those whom the Master is committed to regarding only with contempt. He is no more than they can make him. His low opinion of them is in fact a low opinion of himself.

We can contrast this situation with one in which Hegel would think nondefective normative statuses can be instituted by normative attitudes. Consider the status of being a good chess player. Achieving that status is not something I can do simply by coming subjectively to adopt a certain attitude toward myself. It is, in a certain sense, up to me whom I regard as good chess players: whether I count any wood pusher who can play a legal game, only formidable club players, Masters, or even Grand Masters. That is, it is up to me whom I recognize as good chess players, in the sense in which I aspire to be one. But it is not then in the same sense up to me whether I qualify as one of them. To earn their recognition in turn, I must be able to play up to their standards, to earn their recognition. To be, say, a formidable club player, I must be recognized as such by those I recognize as such. My recognitive attitudes can define a virtual community, but only the reciprocal recognition by those I recognize can make me actually a member of it, accord me the status for which I have implicitly petitioned by recognizing them. My attitudes exercise recognitive authority precisely in determining whose recognitive attitudes I am responsible to for my actual normative status.

I can make things hard on myself or easy on myself. I can make it very easy to earn the recognition (in this respect) of those I recognize as good chess players if I am prepared to set my standards low enough. If I count as a good chess player anyone who can play a legal game, I will not have to learn much in order to earn the recognition by those who can play a legal game of my capacity to play a legal game. The cost is, of course, that what I achieve is only to be entitled to classify myself as a member of this not at all exclusive community. On the other hand, if I want to be entitled to look up to myself (as it were), I can exercise my independence and set my standards high, recognizing only Grand Masters as good chess players. To be entitled to class oneself with them, be aware of oneself as possessing the status they give concrete determinate content to, would be an accomplishment indeed. But it is not easy to earn their recognition as a good chess player in that sense—that is, by those standards. The difference in the determinate contents of these self-conceptions, and of the chances of realizing them and becoming in oneself what one is for oneself, illustrates one dimension along which are arrayed different constellations of self-consciousness that is both determinately independent (authoritative) as recognizing and determinately dependent (responsible) as recognized.

Hegel’s Master is in the position of aiming to be entitled to regard himself as a good chess player at the level of Grand Master on the basis of his recognition as a good chess player by players who struggle to play legal games. His self-consciousness is defective, and so is the self he becomes in himself by having that self-consciousness as what he is for himself. The less worthy are those whom one recognizes, the less worth does their recognition in turn establish. It is combining this simple feature of mediated self-recognition with the peculiar structure of domination and submission that is metaphysically ironic, turning both the dominating and the submissive consciousness in themselves into the opposite of what they are for themselves. What is metaphysically required to constitute a nondefective self-consciousness is to be recognized (respected, admired) by those one recognizes (respects, admires).

IX. From Subjects to Objects

The central idea in play here is the metaphysical irony of Mastery. Conceiving of himself, unto death, as purely independent, as exercising immediate, transparently constitutive authority without any correlative responsibility, the one who has existentially constituted himself as superior makes himself wholly dependent, for who he really is, on the ones he has constituted as subordinates. He is recognitively responsible to the recognitive authority of those subordinates. In an earlier discussion (in the fragment on the “Spirit of Christianity”), Hegel discusses a precursor reversal like this under the heading “Wirkung des Schicksals”: the efficacy or causality of fate.⁴ It is the revenge of the normative ideal on defective actuality. It is what determines that the Master cannot get what he wants, cannot be who he aspires to be and takes himself in fact to be.

The institution of self-conscious normative subjects who are for themselves what they are in themselves requires that recognitive authority and recognitive responsibility be coordinate and commensurate. It requires two such normative subjects exercising reciprocal recognitive authority over each other and holding each other recognitively responsible. Asymmetrical claims of authority without corresponding responsibility institutes only virtual statuses, statuses actual only as the objects of those attitudes, not genuine normative statuses. And claims of authority unaccompanied by grants of authority to hold one responsible for the exercise of that authority are asymmetrical in that sense. A principal symptom of the defect inherent in exercises of Mastery, claims of pure independence, is the structural failure of self-consciousness that consists in what the Master is in himself, his actual normative statuses, being massively divergent from what he is for himself, the virtual statuses that are the objects of his attitudes. And it is not just that what the Master is for himself gets wrong what he is in himself. Being that for himself deforms what he is in himself, precisely because of what his act of essential identification has made him: an essentially self-conscious self—a self such that what it is for itself is an essential structure defining what it is in itself. This metaphysical irony is the efficacy of fate.

To understand it better, it helps to turn from the asymmetrical recognitive relations between superior and subordinate subjects allegorized as Master and Servant to the relations each sort of subject stands in to objects, as Hegel does in his text. It is true that the Servant, too, is wrong about who and what he is. To be self-conscious one must be an object for oneself, and what one takes that object as (classifying something as something being the form of consciousness or awareness) must be a subject. The Servant does this—though he does not believe he does. The sense in which the Servant is an object for himself is dual, and the imperfection of the Servant’s realization of the ideal of thinking is in part expressed in the fact that these two sides do not coincide for the Servant. First, the Servant takes himself to be whatever he is constituted as by the takings of the Master. Because the Servant is an object for the Master, he is an object also for himself. Second, the Servant has as an object of his consciousness the Master, whom he takes to be a subject. So the Servant both has himself as an object and has an object that he is conscious of as a subject. The latter he does not take to be an awareness of himself, because he takes the Master to be the constitutive taker. But insofar as there is a constitutive taker in the structure of domination, it is the Servant. For it is his recognition of the Master as Master that institutes the normative structure of subordination and obedience.

Subservient or submissive consciousness in fact has two sorts of object: ordinary objects, of which the Servant takes himself to be one, and the Master, as being-for-self or subject, the kind of being things are something for. The Servant sees himself in ordinary objects in that many of them are products of his formative activity and hence direct expressions of his conceptual development, and the rest are potential raw material for such expressive transformation. Further, the Servant treats objects as constituted by a subject, and so has the concept of an independently active consciousness. What the Servant takes the Master to be is what the Servant in fact is. The Servant’s concept of the Master is really a self-concept. The Servant has both the property of being a constituting consciousness (insofar as anything can be one) and the concept of such a consciousness. He is a practically constituting consciousness in the sense of being an intentional agent, not in the sense of being an immediately constitutive consciousness. And a constituting consciousness is something that things can be for him. These are the raw materials of thought, which the Servant has not yet realized because the two do not yet coincide for him. The Servant does not recognize himself in his concept of the Master, though what the Master is for the Servant is what the Servant in fact is in himself (insofar as anything can be one). Human history is the working out of the interdependence of the Servant’s two sorts of self-conception: of himself as merely dependent or constituted (compare: recognized) being, and as independent or constituting (compare: recognizing) being. The correct understanding of the latter is not (pace the Master) possible without seeing its presupposition of the former. This is the road to the appreciation of the essentially social nature of subjectivity, which requires mutual recognition synthesizing independence and dependence in freedom, and universality and particularity in individuality.

The defect in the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes that Hegel is diagnosing allegorically in the structure of subordination and obedience afflicts the subordinate no less than the superior. But the ironic reversal of fates works to the advantage of the coerced subordinate. It manifests principally in the asymmetry of their relations to objects of desire.

Mastery essentially practically understands itself as consisting of attitudes that are immediately and transparently constitutive of the statuses that are the virtual objects of those attitudes. To actualize the virtual objects of attitudes of desire is to satisfy those desires. To do so immediately is to have those desires immediately gratified. The Servant is construed as the instrument of such gratification. In the allegory, it is his job to overcome the stubborn resistance of objective reality to the Master’s desires: to fetch the inconveniently distant foodstuff, to coax it from inedibility to palatability, and to serve it as and when desired. The Servant is responsible for seeing to it that the objective sources of recalcitrance to the Master’s desires remain invisible to the Master. Of course it is part of the irony that the supposed immediacy of gratification of the Master’s desires is achieved precisely by the mediating labor of the Servant.

What the Master is spared is labor: the concrete practical overcoming of the stubbornness of objective reality that consists in its recalcitrance to desire, the object’s not being in itself just whatever it is for the desiring consciousness. The Servant expends the effort to transform the merely virtual status of being the object of an attitude of desire into the actual status of a satisfier of that desire. The Master’s relationship to his desire is if anything even more immediate than that of nonsapient desiring animals, who do at least confront the recalcitrance to desire that is objectivity. The Servant’s relationship to desire is abstract, mediated by his social relation to the desiring Master. For the Servant acts on desires he does not feel, is not immediately moved by, because they are not his desires but the Master’s. They show up to the Servant in the mediated, normative form of commands, obligations, exercises of authority, to which he is responsible. That is why it is the Servants who become the true normative subjects of subsequent human history, leaving the Masters behind as evolutionary dead ends. It is a further dimension of the metaphysical irony of Mastery that normative subjectivity, having been initiated by the Master’s existential identification with his practical conception of himself as Master, as purely independent, is continued and brought to fruition only by the Servants whose work the Master compels. By obliging him by force to work, the Master lifts up the Servant to a new form of normative subjectivity.

Two narrative paths are opened up by the ironic reversal of fortunes occasioned by the normatively emancipatory labor forced upon the Servant by the Master. One is consideration of the practical dimension of self-consciousness represented by work. This is “reason as purposive action,” [PG 22] addressed in the subsequent Reason chapter. The other is the subtler, more conceptually articulated forms of the ideology of Mastery that become available to the subordinates in traditional recognitively asymmetrical constellations of power and normativity. Hegel discusses these in the second half of the Self-Consciousness chapter, under the headings of Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.

X. Recognition and Cognition

The key to understanding the relationship between recognition and cognition is the realization that the work the Servant is obliged to do is the practical version of what showed up for us already in the Introduction as the experience of error. That process, in which the disparity between what things are for consciousness (appearance) and what they are in themselves (reality) is the motor of change of attitude, was identified there as the locus of the representational dimension of conceptual content, the objective purport (their directedness at what things are in themselves) of commitments expressing what things are for consciousness. The experience of error is the normative, conceptually articulated, hence geistig, development of orectic protoconsciousness. For we saw how the triadic structure of desire allows that merely natural state not only to institute practical significances (e.g., things treated as food by being responded to by eating) expressing what things are for the desiring animal, but to provide standards of correctness and error regarding what things are in themselves, accordingly as eating what is taken as food does or does not satisfy the motivating hunger. The distinction between appearance and reality that shows up naturally, concretely, and immediately in that setting is transformed into something normative, abstract, and mediated where the desire that motivates the Servant’s activities and assesses the correctness or error of their results is something only the Master immediately feels. In this sense, the Master mediates the Servant’s relation to the objects, issuing commands and assessing obedience—that is, exercising authority and holding responsible.

This process is the one that at once institutes and determines conceptual contents, in the sense of making them more determinate. Conceptual contents are articulated by relations of incompatibility and consequence (determinate negation and mediation) that they stand in to other such contents. Each experience of error, of the disparity of what things are for an acting subject and what they turn out to be in themselves, incorporates into the practical classifications the agent is making some of the objective relations of incompatibility (and hence consequence) that articulate the properties of the objects being acted on. In this way the concrete aspects of the stubbornness of the objective world are incorporated into the contents of subjectively deployed concepts. An agent might have a concept of oak tree that identifies a certain leaf shape as sufficient circumstances of application and includes among the consequences of application that boiling animal skins in water together with the bark of that tree will soften, tan, and preserve them. Experience might then teach that the consequences of application actually follow only if the tree with leaves of that shape whose bark is used is a certain minimum age or height. Experience is an exercise in vulnerability to how things actually are. In altering its conception of oaks in the course of such an experience of error, the agent acknowledges the authority of how things are in themselves, and the responsibility of how things are for the agent to that actuality.

We are now in a position to see that there is a recognitive version of this sort of experience on the side of self-consciousness that exhibits a generic structure of authority and responsibility corresponding to the specific cognitive experience of error characteristic of consciousness. It is a basic Kantian insight that the notion of representational purport is a normative one. To understand something as a representing is to take it to be responsible for its correctness to what counts as represented just insofar as it is understood as exercising that sort of authority. The same normative structure that governs the relation between representings and representeds on the cognitive side of relations to objects governs the relation between normative attitudes and normative statuses on the recognitive side of relations to other subjects. If whatever seems right to me is right, if there is no room for error, for a distinction between how I take them to be and how they really are, then there is no way I am taking things actually to be, in themselves. And if I and others have whatever statuses I take them to have, if my attitudes immediately institute those statuses, if the notion of claiming authority or responsibility I do not have or attributing authority or responsibility another does not have goes missing, then there are no statuses of authority and responsibility that are the objects of my attitudes—not even virtual ones. Absent the normative structure that makes intelligible the possibility of error, representings are not intelligible as representings, which must have distinct representeds as their objects, and normative attitudes are not intelligible as attitudes, which must have distinct statuses as their objects. Mastery’s ideology of pure independence corresponds, on the recognitive side of self-consciousness, to a form of cognitive consciousness that takes whatever seems right to it to be right, and so fails to adopt determinately contentful attitudes because determinately contentful statuses have gone missing as available to be even the virtual objects of those attitudes.

In recognizing other subjects, that is, in attributing recognitive authority to them, I make myself normatively vulnerable (responsible) to them, in the sense that my actual status depends not only on my attitudes, but also on the attitudes of those I recognize. Just so, in representing something, in attributing to it the representational authority constitutive of being represented, I make myself vulnerable to error, in the sense that the correctness of my representing depends not only on how I represent things, but on how it actually is with what only counts as represented just in virtue of having that authority. This normative vulnerability to the other, whether on the side of subjects or of objects, this acknowledging one’s responsibility to and the authority of the other, opens up the possibility of discordance between one’s commitments. On the recognitive side, the discordance is incompatibility between the virtual statuses one acknowledges or claims and those that are attributed by those one recognizes. On the cognitive side, the discordance is between the contents of one’s own attitudes. What a subject must do in order to count as registering such discordance is practically acknowledge the normative obligation to repair it, by changing some of the discordant attitudes. Such normative discordance and its practical repair are familiar as two stages of the experience of error, from our discussion of Hegel’s Introduction.

When a cognitive consciousness responds to repair discordant commitments by taking the semisubmerged stick to be straight (in itself), and only to look bent (for consciousness), what it is doing is a version of what a self-constituting self-consciousness does in identifying with some of its attitudes and sacrificing others. It was pointed out earlier that not all self-constitutive identification need be existential identification, where what is risked or sacrificed is the actual existence of the self in question. What is risked and if need be sacrificed in identifying with one attitude (and so with the virtual status that is its object) can be other substantial statuses, such as an office, a job, or some other respect in which one is recognized. (“I could not love thee so, my dear, loved I not honor more.”) In sacrificing one commitment for another, one is identifying with the one rather than the other. And that process, so crucial for the recognitive constitution of self-consciousness, is exactly what happens in the experience of cognitive error.

Consciousness is always self-consciousness because cognitive commitments are commitments—that is, normative statuses recognitively instituted by the attitudes not only of the knowing subject but of those other normative selves recognized by and recognizing that one: those playing suitable roles in the constellation of statuses of reciprocal authority and responsibility that constitute a recognitive community. The metaphysical irony afflicting Mastery shows that even self-constitutive identification, whether existential or not, turns out indirectly to depend on recognition by others, because the content of the commitment one identifies with is not entirely up to the one identifying with it. One is not in general committed to exactly whatever one takes oneself to be committed to. This distinction between status (what one normatively is in oneself) and attitude (what one normatively is for oneself) is recognitively constituted by the whole community, because it is that community that administers the determinate conceptual contents of those statuses and attitudes. It is up to each cognitive subject whether or not to be committed to the coin’s being copper. But it is not in the same way up to that individual subject what commitment to its being copper entails or is incompatible with. It is up to each individual normative subject whether or not to identify existentially (so, to the death) with commitment to the samurai code of Bushido. But the content of that code is not subject to being cut and trimmed by the attitudes of each individual samurai who commits to it. It is not the case that whatever seems to them to accord with the code really does. The content of the status their attitudes have given normative force to for them swings free of the individual attitudes that brought that content to bear (made it normatively binding) on those subjects.

Already in the discussion of Hegel’s Introduction, where the experience of error is introduced, we saw that the notion of conceptual content, thought of as functionally determined by relations of material incompatibility and (so) consequence, is Janus-faced. On the side of the objects of cognitive processes and practices, incompatibility and consequence are alethic modal notions: a matter of objective noncompossibility and necessitation of the sort driving the unfolding of the implicit aristotelian object / property structure of facts in the Perception chapter. On the side of the normative statuses that are the objects of normative attitudes in recognitive processes and practices, incompatibility and consequence are deontic normative notions: a matter of the subject’s entitlements and obligations (authority and responsibility) to adopt various attitudes. The Self-Consciousness chapter provides the metaconceptual raw materials needed to see these as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one notion of conceptual content. It does that by introducing the recognitive framework on the side of self-consciousness within which normative attitudes and the statuses that are their objects are intelligible as having deontically articulated conceptual contents that on the cognitive side of consciousness are representationally responsible to the alethic modally articulated objective world they are intelligible as representing just in virtue of the subject’s normative acknowledgment of that authority. The assembling of those raw materials into a finished story limning the fine structure of the relations between representings and representeds, on the side of consciousness, and normative attitudes and statuses, on the side of self-consciousness, will not be completed until the discussion of the final, fully adequate, recollective form of reciprocal recognition, confession and forgiveness, late in the Spirit chapter. That will fulfill the promise, proffered already in the Introduction, of explaining how prospective and retrospective perspectives on the process of experience of cognitive error and recognitive disparity make intelligible the successful institution by those processes of both determinate conceptual contents and determinate discursive self-consciousnesses.

XI. The Semantic Failures of Stoicism and Skepticism

Hegel continues to pursue the critique of Mastery in the second half of Self-Consciousness, entitled “The Freedom of Self-Consciousness.” The general strategy pursued there confirms the diagnosis of the ills of the ideology of Mastery offered here. His allegorical Stoic and Skeptic understand themselves as purely independent in the sense of Mastery, but their mastery is taken to be exercised over the objects of thought rather than over its subjects. They both mistake the freedom of thought for a sort of constitutive authority over things, in virtue of which the thinker is wholly independent and the things are wholly dependent upon it. Like the Master, they do not understand the authority that is their freedom of thought as involving any correlative responsibility, either to objective things or to other subjects, to whose acknowledgments of their authority they are responsible.

The large problem that begins to emerge in this part of the chapter, and which is then pursued in further detail in the Reason chapter, is how to reconcile two different roles that individual self-consciousness plays. On the one hand, each individual self-consciousness is responsible to, and in that normative sense dependent on, something other than itself, in both its work on things and its recognition by other subjects. On the other hand, each individual self-consciousness is authoritative, and in that normative sense independent, in its practical attitudes of applying determinate concepts to objects and determinately acknowledging other subjects by attributing to them determinate commitments. This latter dimension of independence expresses the certainty of self-consciousness, what things, including itself, are for it. The former dimension of dependence expresses the truth of self-consciousness, what things, including itself, are in themselves. The conceptual challenge is to find a coherent way of conceiving this dual structure, according to which self-consciousness as individual is both constrained and constraining, both constituted and constituting, both assessed and assessing. It is the problem of reconciling the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The specific form of this problem that exercises the phenomenal self-consciousnesses canvassed under the headings of Stoicism and Skepticism concerns the irreconcilability of a conception of authority and responsibility that has a determinate content with a conception of such authority as purely independent.

Stoicism and Skepticism ignore both of the paired dimensions along which sensuously immediate contingent actuality further determines conceptual content by being incorporated in it. They try to conceive of determinately contentful thought in abstraction from the cognitive process of experiencing error that engenders and informs it. And they ignore the social perspectival recognitive distinction between the point of view of a performer who is being assessed and that from which the performance is assessed, which the Reason chapter will show to be essential to the concept of determinate commitment, of being bound by a determinately contentful norm. There is no content without constraint along these two dimensions. The Stoic idea is that because consciousness has sovereign authority over what things are for it, the distinction between that and what things are in themselves can be enforced by experience only insofar as consciousness permits it to do so. Its strategy is to refuse that permission, adopting an attitude it takes to be immediately and transparently constitutive. But not allowing itself to be normatively compelled by incompatibilities in acknowledging error is fatal to the institution of determinate conceptual content. The Skeptical self-consciousness practically expresses its conception of itself as purely independent by refusing to endorse or commit itself to anything, refusing to authorize or take responsibility for any claim. Its independence consists in its refusal to allow its consent to be compelled. Error is impossible in the absence of commitment—but by the same token, experience infusing concepts with determinate content becomes unintelligible.

The specific form of this problem that exercises the phenomenal self-consciousnesses canvassed under the headings of Stoicism and Skepticism concerns the irreconcilability of a conception of authority and responsibility that has a determinate content with a conception of such authority as independent. The basic arguments are recognizable as versions of those we saw already in the discussion of Perception, where the issue arose with respect to the determinateness of properties, and so of the objects that instantiate them, in the context of a conception of properties that requires them to be what they are independently of how other properties are. Variations of this argument will be with us throughout the Phenomenology. It will emerge in the discussion of Reason that the concept of determinate authority, or of someone being bound or obliged by a contentful norm, essentially depends on the social distinction between the point of view of a performer who is being assessed and that from which the performance is assessed. Thinking includes the application of determinate repeatables, which can be applied correctly or incorrectly. Insofar as a repeatable has a determinate content, the correctness of its application in particular circumstances depends on the correctness of applying other repeatables as well, to which the first is linked inferentially or by incompatibility. In the case of Stoicism and Skepticism in particular, Hegel thinks their misunderstanding of the freedom of thought in terms of independence shows itself (to us) in its failure to make explicit what is implicit in the possession by its states of determinate content.

Consider Stoicism:

Its principle is that consciousness is a being that thinks, and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true and good only in so far as it thinks it to be such. [PG 198]

The freedom of thought is conceived in terms of the moment of independence—that is, authority—consciousness has as recognizing. The distinction between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, which we saw in the Introduction, becomes something practically significant to consciousness in experience. The Stoic idea is that because consciousness is sovereign with regard to what things are for it, that distinction can be enforced by experience only insofar as consciousness permits it. Experience in this sense arises already in a primitive form for merely desiring organisms. A basic but still paradigmatic case is that in which an animal takes or treats something as food by “falling to without further ado and eating it up.” On occasion, however, this taking will show itself to be a mistaking. The object reveals itself as ultimately inedible—disgusting and unnourishing. What the animal in practice initially takes the object to be in itself—namely, food—is displayed as only what the object was for consciousness. The Stoic’s strategy for denying the moment of independence of the object (and hence the moment of dependence of consciousness, its responsibility to how it actually is with its objects) that becomes manifest in this sort of experience, is reinterpretation. Experience can enforce the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness only in virtue of the incompatibility of one taking with another—treating something as food by eating it with treating it as noxious by vomiting. But these incompatibilities are determinate differences for consciousness only insofar as they are posited by it, which is to say they constrain it only insofar as it is committed to them.

There are three ways one can appeal to the sovereign authority of consciousness as taker or recognizer to try to evade what is implicit in such an experience. One can deny that in vomiting one has in practice classified what was eaten as disgusting and not nourishing. That is, one can alter the practical significance of this response to one’s activity. Or one can deny that in eating one has in practice classified what was eaten as food. That is, one can alter the significance of one’s activity. Or one can deny that the two concepts one has applied to one thing by eating it and vomiting it back up are incompatible. This budget of options is what the Stoic is expressing in saying, for instance, that although my performance had the consequence of causing me pain, this forces me to acknowledge that things are not just as I was taking them to be in producing that performance only if I acknowledge that pain is a bad thing, or that my performance expressed an expectation or commitment incompatible with its painfulness. Because it is within my power, as free in thought, to withhold such acknowledgments, it is within my power to deny the independence of things (their authority over my takings) or their constraint on me (my responsibility to them), in spite of my experience.

The trouble with this strategy, as Hegel goes on to point out, is that although I do have the power to apply or not to apply a concept to any particular situation, my willingness to reinterpret the concept ad hoc has consequences for the content such applications express: “The content, it is true, only counts as thought, but also as thought that is determinate.” [PG 201] What content is retained by my classification of something as a pain if I am entirely unconstrained in what things I am permitted to classify as pain, and what follows from so classifying something? If I can alter the circumstances of appropriate application of that concept by denying that what I have in my stomach is a pain, and can alter the appropriate consequences of its application by denying that having a pain is a bad thing, how am I to be understood as having undertaken a determinate conceptually contentful commitment in calling something a pain? Unless the use of an expression or the application of a concept is normatively governed by incompatibilities and inferential relations to other concepts, it does not have determinate content. Inconstancy of concepts robs them of their content if the freedom of thought is understood as independence by emphasizing reinterpretation.

The manifold self-differentiating expanse of life, with all its detail and complexity, is the object on which desire and work operate. This manifold activity has now contracted into the simple positing of differences in the pure movement of thinking. [PG 199]

Because I have the power to redraw the lines around concepts that determine correct and incorrect application in particular cases, I can always redraw them so as to avoid constraint by the myriad details that manifest themselves in experience. But if this moment of independence is inflated so as to exclude dependence entirely, it becomes impossible to see what I am doing as drawing lines at all.

Hence freedom in thought, too, is only the Notion of freedom, not the living reality of freedom itself. For the essence of that freedom is at first only thinking in general, the form as such, which has turned away from the independence of things, and returned to itself. But since individuality in its activity should show itself to be alive, or in its thinking should grasp the living world as a system of thought, there would have to be present in thought itself a content for that individuality, in the one case a content of what is good, and in the other of what is true.…

But here the Notion as an abstraction cuts itself off from the multiplicity of things, and thus has no content in its own self but one that is given to it. Consciousness does indeed destroy the content as an alien immediacy [Sein] when it thinks it; but the Notion [Begriff] is a determinate Notion, and this determinateness of the Notion is the alien element which it has within it.…

The True and the Good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content, they soon become tedious. [PG 200]

The content of genuinely constraining concepts is elaborated and developed in experience precisely because of the “alien element” experience has within it. Banishing this element of dependence from one’s conception of experience is also banishing determinate content from one’s thoughts.

The Stoic strategy for conceiving the freedom of thought according to the model of independence can accordingly be seen (by us) to be inadequate, because of the incompatibility of its conception with the determinateness of the contents of thought, to which it is implicitly committed. The related Skeptical strategy for conceiving the freedom of thought according to the model of independence reveals itself as inadequate in just the same way. Skepticism is a “polemical bearing towards the manifest independence of things”—specifically, that “the independent things in their differences from one another are for it only vanishing magnitudes.” [PG 202] The Skeptical self-consciousness expresses its conception of itself as independent in practice by asserting its sovereignty as an assessor or determinate recognizer. It refuses to endorse or commit itself to anything, refuses to authorize or take responsibility for any claim. Its independence consists in its refusal to allow its consent to be compelled. It is acting in this way that counts as adopting a “negative attitude towards otherness.”

The strategy by which this negative attitude is enacted is retail and piecemeal. There is no master skeptical hypothesis such as an appeal to dreaming. (The skepticism of the allegory is the ancient sort, not the modern.) It proceeds, rather, by finding each specific claim or goal proposed as a candidate for endorsement determinately wanting in its justification.

Point out likeness or identity to it, and it will point out unlikeness or non-identity; and when it is confronted with what it has just now asserted, it turns round and points out likeness or identity. [PG 205]

It will appeal to some claims to point out flaws in the warrant of another, but when pressed to defend these retreats, denies commitment, and points out reasons for disbelieving them as well. The Skeptical self-consciousness shows itself independent of the power of the supposedly independent objects it talks about precisely by being able to take both sides of any question,

like the … self-willed children … who by contradicting themselves buy for themselves the pleasure of continually contradicting each other. [PG 205]

In the end, every commitment is found wanting, defeasible by the ingenuity of the assessor. Where the Stoic strategy is to reject in practice the incompatibility of commitments, the Skeptical strategy is to embrace it and universalize it: for every commitment it finds reasons to endorse incompatible ones.

Recall that in the Introduction skepticism is characterized as misunderstanding the negative lesson that ought to be learned from experience having the structure of unmasking the way we took things to be in themselves as merely the way they are for consciousness. Where we ought to see determinate negation, the revelation of specific inadequacies of conception, skepticism sees only abstract negation, the revelation of the general inadequacy of all conceptions. Experience, showing us that what we took to be real is merely a misleading way in which something else appears, is accordingly for it not the career by which consciousness educates and cultivates itself (its Bildung), but only a path of despair. When the unmasking that is the implicit structure of experience is made explicit, Hegel calls the result “dialectic.” Thus his account of the experience of perceiving consciousness he denominates the dialectic of Perception.

Dialectic, as a negative movement, just as it immediately is, at first appears to consciousness as something which has it at its mercy, and which does not have its source in consciousness itself. As Skepticism, on the other hand, it is a moment of self-consciousness, to which it does not happen that its truth and reality vanish without its knowing how, but which, in the certainty of its freedom, makes this “other” which claims to be real, vanish. [PG 204]

Rather than being a passive and uncomprehending subject of experience, self-consciousness understanding itself as skeptical is a restless agent, producing explicit dialectical recipes for thwarting each determinate inclination to endorse (to classify something particular as falling under a universal—that is, repeatable—concept). In adopting this attitude, Skepticism is not entirely wrongheaded. To think of it that way would be precisely to put abstract negation where determinate negation belongs, the mistake characteristic of the skeptic. There is here an important grain of Hegel’s eventual truth, though grasped one-sidedly in the way we will later come to be able to diagnose as expressing an alienated structure of Spirit, in the idea that experience is something we do, as well as being something that happens to us. But this independence ought to be grasped as one aspect, balanced by a corresponding dependence. Skepticism characteristically refuses to acknowledge this dependence.

The problem with this way of working out in practice a conception of self-consciousness as independent and unconstrained is this: On the one hand, in the small, the skeptical consciousness addresses itself (albeit negatively) to determinately contentful claims and projects, and appeals to determinately contentful claims incompatible with these, in order to preclude endorsement of them. On the other hand, in the large, it denies that endorsement of those claims and projects is ever in order. One of the lessons we learned from the dialectical rehearsal of the experience of perceiving consciousness is that determinateness of content requires standing in relations of material incompatibility and material consequence to other contents, the central senses of Hegel’s “determinate negation” and “mediation.” Clearly offering a dialectical refutation of some candidate claim presupposes the idea that commitment to or endorsement of the content of that claim is precluded by commitment to or endorsement of others, offered in refutation. But what sense does this sort of incompatibility of content make if all endorsement is precluded? Similarly, inference is a matter of commitment or entitlement preservation. But if the notion of entitlement is empty, if commitment is never in order, these relations too are empty. The applicability of the concept of determinate contents presupposes a certain framework of relations they can stand in to each other. Those relations in turn presuppose that judgments and other commitments understood as having those contents can be in order, and that when one is in order it can preclude and entail others. Talk of semantic content already involves commitments regarding the pragmatic role played by what has that content.

So Skepticism is in no better a position than Stoicism to reconcile its understanding of itself as independent in its takings with the determinate content of those takings.

What Skepticism causes to vanish is not only objective reality as such, but its own relationship to it, in which the “other” is held to be objective and is established as such.…

What vanishes is the determinate element, or the moment of difference, which, whatever its mode of being and whatever its source, sets itself up as something fixed and immutable. [PG 204]

The determinate element is what constrains, in refutation or justification of an endorsement. The constraint or dependence that becomes explicit in those dialectical performances is implicit in experience. The determinate incompatibilities and consequential involvements that articulate the contents of claims are acknowledged in the practical process of commitment and refutation that is experience, as Hegel conceives it. The trouble with Skepticism is that while it expresses its self-certainty as Mastery in dialectical refutation that essentially depends on the determinateness of what refutes and is refuted,

[t]his self-certainty does not issue from something alien, whose complex development was deposited within it, a result which would have behind it the process of its coming to be. [PG 205]

It is the dependence on or answerability to the objects we think about expressed practically in the movement of experience that gives our thought its determinate content. We will come to see that the representational dimension of semantic content, its being about an objective world, depends on each current commitment being recollectively vindicated as a “result which has behind it the [experiential] process of its coming to be.” Skepticism, like Stoicism, one-sidedly insists on its independence from constraint by this process, denying that there is any way things are in themselves that what they are for us is answerable to. And the two are alike in not being entitled to the concept of determinate content to which they must help themselves in order to compel surrender of commitment to selected contents.

Each of these is a strategy for understanding self-conscious individuality, without acknowledging the interdependence of its various moments. As a result, each seizes “one-sidedly” on a different formal aspect of that individuality as the one essential to it. Thus Stoicism focuses exclusively (and so abstractly) on the universal aspect of individuality, its function as recognizing or constituting consciousness, the sense in which taking it so is making it so, for consciousness. Accordingly, it can be identified with the attempt to make what things are in themselves coincide immediately with what they are for consciousness. Skepticism focuses exclusively (and so abstractly) on the negative aspect of individuality, the difference between recognizing and recognized consciousness, the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness, which expresses itself, indeed forces itself on us, in the movement of experience. The third form of self-consciousness considered allegorically in the last part of Self-Consciousness, the Unhappy Consciousness, focuses exclusively (and so abstractly) on the particular aspect of individuality, its dependent existence as recognized or constituted consciousness, being for another. Accordingly, all these shapes of self-consciousness (what we will come to recognize later, in the exposition of Spirit, as alienated) are categories of independence and dependence. Stoicism and Skepticism treat individuality as independent and seek to identify themselves with that independent element. They are strategies for mastering the changeable, contingent world that constrains us. The Unhappy Consciousness treats individuality as dependent, and identifying itself with the merely particular, seeks to overcome it.

In the discussion in this part of the book, Hegel introduces a consideration that was not in play in the exposition of Consciousness (except proleptically, at the very end), though it arises already in the Introduction. This is the idea that the only way determinate content can be conferred on a concept is by the movement of actual experience. A concept acquires determinate boundaries between correct and incorrect application (and so a determinate content) only through an actual history of application, in concrete circumstances and in concert with a particular collection of fellow concepts whose applicability is taken to be required or precluded by that of the concept in question—according to a particular retrospective recollective rational reconstruction or Erinnerung of that process. Experience is the crucible in which are forged the determinately contentful concepts consciousness has available to form and express desires as well as beliefs. The various ways in which the concepts must answer concretely to each other in experience, in which the movement of consciousness corresponds to finding itself with incompatible commitments, is required for them to have determinate contents. Incompatibility is significant only for and in this process. The moment of independence of the object of knowledge is what is manifested in such experience, as what the object was taken to be in itself reveals itself, via incompatibilities, as in fact (Hegel makes a more-than-merely-idiomatic use of the phrase “in der Tat”) only what it was for consciousness. That moment of independence of the object, Hegel argues, is essential for the possession by our concepts of determinate content.

Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness all attempt to conceive of determinately contentful thought in abstraction from the process of experience that engenders and informs it. Their self-conceptions are doomed to inadequacy (from our point of view) because of this commitment to determinate conceptual contents that are independent of the experience undergone by individuals. We are to learn the lesson that there is no content without constraint, which is a mode of dependence. The process of experience incorporates the stubborn immediacy of things into the evolving content of the concepts being applied, giving, as Hegel says, contingency the form of necessity—that is, normative form.

What is needed for the determinate contentfulness of normative attitudes (both cognitive and practical) is precisely what was forced on the Servant: “purposive activity,” whose paradigm is work. The content-determining process is now broadened beyond the merely cognitive experience of error to include active practical engagement with immediacy in purposive labor. What emerges for us, and will be pursued in the next part of Hegel’s exposition, is a lesson concerning

[t]his unity of objectivity and being-for-self, which lies in the Notion of action, and which therefore becomes for consciousness essence and object … that in principle action is only really action when it is the action of a particular individual. [PG 230]

Accordingly, we turn our attention from the conception consciousness has of its self to the conception it has of its action. This is discussed under the heading of Reason because “Reason is purposive agency.” [PG 22]