Seeing Our Planet Whole: A Cultural and Ethical View of Earth Observation by Harry Eyres

Author:Harry Eyres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Hegel

At the beginning of his great treatise The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel writes that “The significance of that ‘absolute’ commandment, ‘know thyself’…is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self.”2 According to Frances Berenson, “Hegel writes that the Other Self is the only adequate mirror of my own self-conscious self; the subject can only see itself when what it sees is another self-consciousness.”3 But if Hegel acknowledges that the self can only be known in relation to the other, the example he gives of this process, the Master-Slave dialectic, does not seem particularly encouraging. In the first stage of this, according to Berenson, “each person only fully recognizes his own conscious being and belittles any claim to other self-consciousness. Here each self seeks to assert his own self-consciousness even at the price of destroying the life and self-consciousness of others, even though this risks his own existence.”4

In Hegel’s defence, we should acknowledge that this is only an early stage of the dialectic. Hegel does not propose the Master-Slave relationship as a satisfactory one. In a passage which has given rise to multiple interpretations, Hegel suggests that through the crucible of the unsatisfactory Master-Slave relationship a more rewarding one of mutual recognition and self-knowledge may be achieved.

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