← Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit (via the translation of A.V. Miller), seeking sense, but also a way of extracting and explaining that sense into writing. In this entry I am planning an adjusted approach to this problem: I plan to extract the major concepts as I find them, and allow an explanation to develop organically around them, hopefully, as they are collected. What I want to avoid is getting bogged down by either details or overall paradigms, which I can consider afterwards as I choose.
Two self-conscious entities pit themselves in a struggle to the death, but one of them submits before the mortal threat. The result is a new status quo: a lord (the victor) and the bondsman (the defeated). They each have their own perspective and comprehension.
The lord
The [lord’s] essential nature is to exist only for himself; he is the sheer negative power for whom the thing is nothing. [191]
In some respects, the struggle has left the lord unchanged: it has maintained his independence from the world (including from life, which he staked without submission). But now his reality includes the bondman, who is forced to recognize the lord. Thus the lord has an objectified recognition (i.e. the bondsman instantiates the priority of the self-consciousness of the lord, or in yet other words, the bondsman is a proof of the lord’s power and freedom).
The lord has also gained a mediator between itself and things – the bondsman works on things for the lord. In this way, things come to the lord via the workings of the bondsman, and therefore within the lord’s reality (i.e. as he conceives reality) all things are for him (i.e. for the “I” that is the lord).
There is a certain reversal in this state of affairs, since as the results stand, the lord’s situation (including his mastery over himself) currently depends on an entity that is an “unessential consciousness” [192] (i.e. the slave). The implication being, the lord has trapped himself into a dead end for consciousness, for although it is being fulfilled, it is limited in a way that it cannot seem to overcome without a step backwards.
The bondsman
[The bondsman’s] whole being has been seized with dread ; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. [194]
As a consequence of submitting, the bondsman as acquired its lord The lord instantiates for the bondsman the fact of his servitude. This means that the truth for the bondsman, i.e. the criteria of reality, is another (the lord), thus making himself (the bondsman) something unessential to reality.
However, the bondsman has also acquired a fear of death. There is a strange consequence to this, as read in the sentence that immediately follows the previous quote:
But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness. [194]
The experience of mortal dread enlightens consciousness by showing everything to be dependent on its existence. Note (says Hegel) this is only an element of the bondsman becoming “aware that it is a being-for-self” [195], an achievement that depends on work.
Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off [195]
The bondsman acts as a mediator for the lord, between things and the lord, working on them so that they fit the lord. The lord experiences only the satisfaction of fleeting desire. But for the bondsman the thing is independent (since the bondsman exists in a world that is dependent on the lord), and therefore is working to change it, the bondsman is changing an independent and enduring thing.
The combination of the experience of fear and of forming independent objects combine to show the bondsman that he exists for himself. In working on a thing, the bondsman is working on a world that was the source of fear. But by controlling that thing he becomes “aware that being-for-self belongs to him” [196] and acquires (what Hegel calls) a “self will”, and is “a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude” [196].
Miscellaneous
Various ideas worth thinking/meditating on:
- The epiphany of mortal fear. Note how the awareness of death consumes everything and even itself.
- The experience or perception of the bondsman that has not won the freedom of mind. What can it mean to have one’s existence subservient to another’s?
- Imagine contemporary life as a mode of bondsman (enlightened or not), e.g. insofar as one lives to serve others (viz. participate in the presumed reality of society from which one is separate yet subservient).
- Also, consider the possibility of mastery of work becoming its own chain and lock.
- Or, imagine the contemporary life as a mode of lordship, e.g. insofar as one lives in a world made to serve him (i.e. filled with consumable materials), and/or the possibility that this restricts consciousness’s expansion (per Hegel’s text).
- Consider the possibility of mastery of work becoming its own chain and lock.
P.S. I’ve since written a write-up summarizing author/philosopher Charles Taylor’s notes on the lord/bondsman in his book “Hegel”.
