Out of Buber and Bondage: Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic
Gerard Breitenbeck
5/5/14
Hegel’s famous Master-Slave Dialectic, or “Lordship and Bondage,” moves through three major concerns, the first dealing with how a self-consciousness encounters another self-consciousness; the second with the struggle of finding oneself defined within an Other’s negation; and the third an elaborate metaphor of “Lord and Bondsman,” which attempts to explore two “modes of consciousness” resulting from this struggle (PS, 190). I will here put the ideas of Hegel into conversation with those of Martin Buber, the Jewish mystic and existentialist philosopher whose I and Thou explored exclusively the questions and paradoxes of the meeting of two self-consciousnesses. Although I do believe Hegel stumbles in a couple of spots in his treatment of this subject–in particular his approach to the path of liberation for the “Bondsman,” my interest is not so much to have Buber and Hegel enter into contest with one another, but rather to use Buber’s ideas to wedge out and illuminate the core issues at work in each stage of Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic.
According to Hegel, when I encounter another self-consciousness, the process of recognition is the same as it would be with recognizing a bottle, in that I bring with me all the concepts that make a bottle a bottle, so too I bring to my encounter of another self-consciousness all the concepts that make a self-consciousness a self-consciousness. When Hegel says that self-consciousness “…is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized,’” this is what he means (PS, 178). Here, things get tricky, as our experience of what self-consciousness (SC) consists of comes from our own experience of SC, which, unlike our concept of the bottle, is both distinguished, and the very process of distinguishing–it includes our apprehension of the bottle, as well as everything else–including the second, Other self-consciousness. Paradoxically, according to Hegel it is only through this encountering of another SC that the first SC can distinguish her SC as something that can be distinguished. In other words, our understanding of self-consciousness is defined / revealed by our conception of another self-consciousness. “First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other” (PS, 179). Now, when Hegel says that it does not regard the other as essentially real, I want to say that what he means by this is that, like all other concepts, the apparition of another self-consciousness is, (like the bottle), mediated by Language, thus it is not Real in the Lacanian sense, it does not exist for the first self-consciousness as an independent, unmediated Truth, but as a something whose encounter is constructed.
The trouble resultant from the above paradox should be apparent–if our conception of our own self-consciousness (which is an infinite, ongoing process of distinguishment) is itself distinguished through our encountering of another SC, and recognizing (distinguishing) our own SC in that other person, than our conception of SC for both oneself and the Other has by its very distinguishment been amputated from its infinite nature–reduced to Objecthood. Another way to think of it can be found when Hegel defines, “Self-consciousness as primarily simple existence for self, self-identity by exclusion of every other from itself” (Hegel, 186). That is, self-identity is determined by distinguishing with your self-consciousness that which is not you. But upon recognizing another self-consciousness located outside of you is a momentary loss of the self (PS, 179). “Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and hence its own certainty of itself is still without truth” (PS, 186). That is to say, for the first SC to apprehend the second SC as such, this involves the disorienting and frightening paradox of finding one’s own self-consciousness existing among that which has been excluded from one’s own self-identity. A struggle results, one that demands either a reassertion of a concrete self-identity for the first SC, or a submission to and embracing of the “absolute fear” of the “negative reality” wherein the first SC finds itself within the negation being apprehended by the second SC (PS, 196). The “fear” here comes at the placing oneself at the mercy of another SC, to be apprehended either as an Object or a Subject, to encounter the state of one’s identity as being defined externally by another.
While Hegel uses his concept of “absolute fear” to talk about the Bondsman’s relationship to her object of labor, I find the entire “labor” detour an unfortunate and dehumanizing distraction. Why is it that Hegel permits the Master to engage in his primary relations to the Bondsman (if in a way that undermines his own self-identity), while the Bondsman only relates to her Master through fear, and her source of consciousness is her relation to the objects of her labor (195)? That is, either as Master we become Bondsman by reducing another SC to an Object, or as a reduced Object as Bondsman we, through our communion with other Objects (that is, through our labor), encounter the “absolute fear” of existing within the negation of another SC. To put it another way, it seems to me without cause that Hegel denies the Bondsman the ability to encounter the Master’s SC, even without the Master’s reciprocal recognition of the Bondsman’s.
Indeed, this appears to be one of the fundamental points on which Hegel and Buber differ. The recognition that Hegel speaks of–recognizing the totality of another self-consciousness, Buber calls “encounter,” or the relating of a “I” to a “You” (vs. an “I” to an “It”). Rather than Hegel’s claim that “Self-consciousness exists… only in being acknowledged,” Buber contends that SC exists only in acknowledging (PS, 111) (Buber, 59). Actually, I’m not all that certain it was Hegel’s intention to invert things this way; depending on how I read it, I’m inclined to think that Hegel accidently obscures this first step on his mad dash into his hall of mirrors that is 180-182. Indeed, as he says, “First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being…” (PS, 179–Italics added). That is, first comes the loss of one’s own self, what comes first is the recognizing of another SC, not another SC recognizing you. The conflation that follows, in which Hegel claims the self “finds itself as an other being…” is problematic, not for the reasons that leads Hegel into his hall of mirrors, but because Hegel suckers himself into attempting to describe a totality recognizing another totality, (which he very well knows can’t be done, and says as much in 178) and his first step in attempting to do so is to willfully confuse recognizing another totality with recognizing oneself. What Hegel is conflating here is the mode of relation with which the first SC is encountering the second SC, which, as Buber would readily agree, is completely tied up with the first SC’s conception of its own self-identity, but, is not and necessarily cannot be the same as a seeing of its own self. After all, it is precisely the simultaneous recognition of one’s infinite self-consciousness and the recognition of this being found not in oneself that creates the “problem” in the first place.
Beyond simple issues of convolution, passages 180-182 problematically attempt to deploy a narrative of the way in which these two self-consciousnesses will navigate their encounter. But what precisely reveals this narrative to be incoherent is that Hegel has immediately placed the first SC as an agent with an agenda to navigate through this encounter, but the instant that this is done so the encounter is no longer between two totalities but that of a Subject distinguishing an Object. Rather, Buber would say that the “losing of its own self” might be better termed as a finding of its true self, that, as I argued above, it is in the initial recognizing of another SC that activates the true embodiment of one’s own SC–that in that “losing” one gains an infinite, indistinguished SC that is fundamentally different from one’s SC while it is apprehending objects (or people as objects). In this way, the first SC of the first SC is no longer defining itself by what it is not, pushing away all that is the rest of the world from it, including the other SC, but in recognizing the other SC as being a totality that is in an irreducible state of encounter with all that it stands in relation to, (including the first SC), the first SC has, through this recognition, lost the boundaries of itself and implicitly recognized its own totality as well. But the moment Hegel would start describing all the sublating and canceling of selves and double consciousness, Buber would just sadly shake his head, because by definition Hegel would be describing the very distinguishment that true encounter momentarily frees itself from.
For Buber, the site of encounter is always in the space between two self-consciousnesses, and therefore neither “owns” the encounter at any particular instant. Hegel, it seems, wants to have it both ways in 178–he argues for the need for recognition in order for self-consciousness to exist–but truly someone must be doing the recognizing at some point, and this recognizing or failure to recognize must be a choice that is not hostage to the recognition of the other, or else we have an endless loop with no point of origin. While for Buber it true that entering into the kind of totalizing relation he and Hegel describe can certainly be a position of vulnerability, the other SC’s failure to capitulate hardly means that death or even fear should follow. For Buber, the defining act of self-consciousness is found in the first SC’s recognizing the other SC as a SC–and while mutual recognition is the site of real dialogue and communion, the “humanity” or saliency of the “I” is tendered not by that recognition, but by the act of recognizing the Other.
If then, we take a moment to entertain the notion that it is the recognizer whose “life” is at stake, not the recognizer, then we can quickly see why the slave is ultimately in a better position of encounter than the Master, because the slave is always able (it is even perhaps to her advantage) to see her master as a Subject and not an Object, as a self-conscious totality like her in her most undistinguished state of being. Indeed, one might hope for a master to learn to show decency, mercy, compassion if she is a Subject. Meanwhile, the master cannot, by the very principle that permits her to remain a master, conceive of the slave as another Subjectivity. The very concept of slavery demands that the entity is striped of their subjectivity, their will and freedom–that they become objects among other objects. In this way, the master not only is forced to obscure her self-consciousness as it relates to external reality–that is, deny the subjectivity before her–she must also restrict her own self-consciousness to accommodate her role as master. In other words, in order to relate to the slave as slave, such a relation demands that the master act as master, thus delimiting her own subjectivity to the rigid structures of masterhood. “The master brings himself into relation to… a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness whose essential character is thinghood” (PS, 190).
Buber calls the Master “mode of consciousness” the “I-It” relationship, and his conception of it is notably similar–the “I-It” (Master) relationship consisting of “…breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, lack of relation…” while the “I-You” (Bondsman) relationship consists of “presence” and “stand[ing] in relation” (Buber, 55, 64). Likewise, Buber acknowledges that both “moments are essential,” (PS, 189; Buber, 85). Hegel, it seems, does himself a disservice by the unbalance of the metaphor, in that a Bondsman lot is unmistakably pejorative (though so is a master’s, at least in our present understanding). Likewise, his dramatic “life-and-death struggles” over self-consciousness do nothing to help unmuddy the waters. Beyond the confusing language in 180-182, his casting of the Bondsman’s site of self-knowledge in his relationship to his labor alone strikes me as strangely dismissive of interpersonal relationality as a richer point for the same, and perhaps a case of Hegel grumpily needing to pencil-in solace in his own body of work. At the end, we have in his Master-Slave dialectic an apprehension of some astounding ideas about the nature of the encounter of Subjectivities, and the ways in which the particular mode of consciousness that permits the apprehension of totality cannot exist without the contrary side–that of distinguishment and thinghood. The relationship between these modes of consciousnesses is unfortunately obscured by Hegel’s initial attempt to wrestle an encounter with totality into his own distinguishment, as well as a governing metaphor that (at least at present) is so loaded and problematic it’s exceedingly difficult to see around it to the implications of the theory it is ostensibly employed to illuminate. Perhaps the main trouble underlying this particular project can be best seen in light of why Buber is able to avoid it. That is, Buber is at least half a mystic, while Hegel merely spikes his Kantian tea with the occassional shot of Romanticism. Buber is perfectly at home dealing with totalities and encountering them and the push and pull of the object world of distinguishment that occurs alongside of that, and is ready to admit that distinguishment and logos and understanding are simply not enough to define that which cannot be defined. Hegel, meanwhile, while he says he knows this can’t be done (PS, 178), can’t help try anyway, and a couple times here finds himself a bit lost for it, (or, at any rate, he certainly loses me).
Bibliography
Hegel, The Phemonology of Spirit, “Lordship and Bondage.”
Martin Buber, I and Thou. (Touchstone, NY. 1970).