Hegel: Master-Slave Dialectic

Hegelian Subject and Recognition

• Hegel's subject is different: it is a CREATED subject, a "process" of INTERSUBJECTIVITY
• not simply "given" or "natural" but created by human activity....how?

• by becoming an object-for-others or "appearing" for others (in the same way that a chair is an object-for-us, an object that "appears" to us)

Subjectivization (Recognition) Through Violence

• recognition (or "acknowledgement": both translate the German "Erkennung") is the name for this process of creating the subject through its visibility to others

• why must this creation be violent?
• Kant/Descartes: we come to "know" things and to "name" things CORRECTLY by extracting ourselves from nature, from our "bodes" and our sense-experience

Kant to Hegel

• in other words, the body must be "silence" or "quieted"--one cannot think clearly unless one has satisfied all desires: hunger, thirst, sex-drive, fear, etc.

• subject - object
• how can an ACTIVE, THINKING subject make contact with or relate to a STATIC object?

• Kant: subject is given to itself, it simply appears without any prior process of "subjectivization," or without having to be CREATED
• it is "natural" (because not created by us)

• Hegel: yes, certainly, this is correct--but we cannot accomplish this "silencing" of the body alone; it requires the participation of others who RECOGNIZE me as a thinking, acting being...what does this mean?
• this takes us to the "risk of life" and the "struggle to the death"

• so we can know the "self" in the same way we know a "chair": we simply observe it, and record what we see

• a chair is not AUTONOMOUS; it does not "change itself" the way a "self" does; it is not "self-creating"...but in what sense? a "tree" is also self-creating, but not in the same way that a HUMAN "self" is

To The Text...

• what is the "truth" of self-certainty? or, what's wrong with Kant's "given" subject?
• Hegel begins by asking: if we APPEAR to ourselves as certain, if we are "certain" of ourselves, what happens when we test this "certainty" of ourselves against our EXPERIENCE of ourselves??

Hegel: Master-Slave Dialectic

"The Notion of the object is superseded in the actual object, or the first, immediate presentation of the object is superseded in experience: certainty gives way to truth." (p. 104)

Nature vs. Culture

• human "culture"--the organized system of value and meaning that organizes our lives--is something humans CAUSE by agreeing with each other on these meanings and values (and it must be SPOKEN)

• thus we come to SEE or EXPERIENCE that "seeing" or "experiencing" ourselves is very difficult to do...how can one "experience experience"?
• what we are trying to do is SEE the act of SEEING

"In this experience, self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple 'I' is absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment lasting independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a self-consciousness which is not purely for itself but FOR ANOTHER; i.e. it is a merely IMMEDIATE self-consciousness, or consciousness in the form of 'thinghood'. Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness..."

• pure self-consciousness: LORD/MASTER
• self-consciousness-for-another: BONDSMAN/SLAVE

• this means that we must interrupt the given life-process, the sequence of causes and effects characteristic of our organism (hunger: eating) in order to create something DISTINCTLY HUMAN

"The lord relates to himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent, for it is just this which holds the bondsman in bondage; it is the chain from which he could not break free in the struggle, thus proving himself to be dependent, to possess his independence in thinghood." (p. 115)

Recognition is thus NOT a process of simply "identifying" or "categorizing" a thing as what-it-is--for instance, "that is a chair." Rather, it is a process of bestowing VALUE on a thing via "testing" its capacity to exhibit the human quality of self-determination.

This process obviously begins with natural materials which we then "form" into human meanings--you might say that a spoken or written word is just the reorganization of natural materials (pen, paper, etc. -- or air and vibration, when we speak) in a human way.

"...content of the connection and the connecting"

• as Hegel puts it, the problem is that "the 'I' is the content of the connection [between 'seer' and 'seen'] and the connecting [the 'seeing'] itself" (p. 104)

So we get absolutely nowhere with this problem so long as the 'I' is the only agent in the process of "being seen."

"The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific EXISTENCE, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. This presentation is a two-fold action: action on the part of the other, and action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part, is also involved; for the former involves the staking of its own life."

• how do we first "see" each other, then? more or less as a threatening, desirous organism--not unlike a grizzly bear coming to eat you

Thus the relation of the two self-consciousnesses is such that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being FOR THEMSELVES to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case.

• but unlike the bear, we are capable of COMMUNICATING with one another--and if we can communicate, then it is possible to create VALUES and MEANINGS together

"What is 'other' for [self-consciousness] is an unessential, negatively characterized object. [In other words, an object TO BE NEGATED--to be eaten, consumed, etc.] But the 'other' is also a self-consciousness; one individual is confronted by another individual. Appearing thus immediately on the scene, they are for one another like ordinary objects, INDEPENDENT shapes, individuals submerged in the being [or immediacy] of LIFE." (p. 113)

And it is only through the staking of one's life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure BEING-FOR-SELF. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. (p. 113-4)

"...in other words, they have not as yet exposed themselves to each other in the form of pure being-for-self, or as self-consciousness."