Lordship, Bondage, and Forms of Freedom

A. Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (§178-196) & B. Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness (§197-231)

The natural reaction to our fear of the Other as a valid I is played out in the master-slave dialectic for which Hegel is so famous.

Hegel recognizes that the desire to abolish the Other first takes us to the life-and-death struggle. Hegel rejects this as a common actualization, however, because "trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self-generally" (§188).

Instead, we try to abolish the Other by fully subsuming the Other into ourselves. We assert our will on the Other as the master. This too fails to fully validate the self. The I is identified with the will, and the will naturally with action, or work. The master projects his will onto the slave, who performs the work. Eventually the slave understands that he has the validity of self by virtue of being the actor, and the master understands that he has lost the validity of self by divorcing his will with the performance of actions (§195). The unfulfilling nature of this situation keeps the process in constant flux, which I take Hegel to believe we can see in history.

Hegel then gives three pictures of possible reactions to the master-slave problem. The first, stoicism, is to withdraw into thought or the world of theory. This person is indifferent to the problem because he refused to engage in it with the Spirit, though he does so with his action (§199). The second, scepticism, is to withdraw into the world of doubt. This person is lost in the paradoxes of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding, and is unable to make sense of the flux of life (§203).

The third possibility is the Unhappy Consciousness. The Unhappy Consciousness finds a middle ground of sorts - it admits and embraces both the unchangeableness and the changeableness (unity/many, theory/doubt), but it cannot understand how to embrace both simultaneously. The flux of this situation is the reason for the unhappiness we experience at this stage (§216-230). Perhaps teen-age angst provides us with an example of this kind of dissatisfaction with the world. In fact, what it reminds me of most is Camus' realization of the absurd. Of course, the two philosophers move in very different directions from this point.