Routledge History of Philosophy Volume VI: The Age of German Idealism by Kathleen M. Higgins & Robert C. Solomon

Author:Kathleen M. Higgins & Robert C. Solomon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780415056045
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1993-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

Hegel suggests that it is solely by risking one’s life that such a truth is established, and, indeed, the two self-consciousnesses fight (almost) to the death. The other must be “cancelled” because their otherness contradicts one’s view as self-conscious, free, and independent. However, it becomes clear that the role of the other in this life-and-death struggle is not only that of a threat or purely destructive. The recognition by the other of one’s self is at the very crux of the conflict. Thus it is gaining the recognition of the other that is the point of the battle, not the extinction of the other. Hegel says that “trial by death does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally” (PG, 188). Thus Hegel argues that self-consciousness requires the presence of another for one’s own self-consciousness. In fighting for recognition, each tries to save their own life, but each tries also, if possible, to preserve the life of their opponent. If one consciousness is victor, and neither loses their life, then one becomes a consciousness “for itself,” independent, a master, while the other becomes a consciousness ‘for another,” a slave whose essence, Hegel comments, is “life,” suggesting that all that the slave has salvaged, at least for the moment, is their life.

The lord or master “is the consciousness that for itself, which is mediated with itself through another consciousness” (PG, 190). But the master, although self-sufficient in the sense of having the slave dependent on him, is also dependent on this dependence. Because the master maintains the power, they are the master, but because they are now self-sufficient only through the industry of the slave, they are also dependent on the slave. Hegel stresses the importance of a Lockean relationship to “the thing”—presumably land, food, or some craft—which the slave has immediately (“he labours upon it”) but “the master only mediately, except that he gets the enjoyment of it” (ibid.). In the course of the dialectic, the slave, because of their direct relation to the thing, becomes self-sufficient, while the master, because of their dependence on the slave, becomes wholly dependent. (From this reversal Marx is to take his central theses of class struggle and the ultimate degeneration and self-destruction of the economic master classes.) Furthermore, the problem of the continued need for the recognition of the other breeds a further instability into this relationship. The master, who depends on the slave for the recognition that they are indeed the master, now finds that the slave is a totally dependent creature without an independent will, incapable of giving them the recognition of an independent other. The slave, in other words, becomes a “yes-man,” whose recognition is irrelevant precisely because it is coerced.

In the master-slave relationship, we first see the striving for freedom of Spirit, the ultimate truth of self-consciousness. In the master-slave relationship, we see only the inadequacy of the attempt to derive this truth from human relationships which treat persons as independent and opposed.

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