PREVIEW-Episode 36: More Hegel on Self-Consciousness

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0:42 Seth: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. This is episode 36, which is a continuation of episode 35 on Hegel's phenomenology of Spirit. So you should listen to that episode first. It's really Listen to that episode first. We're gonna skip the usual introductions and rules and all that kind of stuff because we are zipping right to chapter four or part B, the Self Consciousness chapter, the Lordship and Bondage subsection. Although we do have one change from last time. While we do still have our Wonderful guest, Tom McDonald, we are down a Wes Alwan who is sick at the moment. You already heard enough of him last time. We heard enough about Kant.

1:27 Wes: I'm starting to see Wes's Kantianism. Looking at some of his posts online, I'm starting to get the picture.

1:33 Dylan: We've been hearing it for two years.

1:36 Wes: Kant is good groundwork for Hegel. It's very hard to understand Hegel without Kant. So much of it is responding to Kant.

1:43 Seth: Well, since you brought it up, maybe we should start with the skepticism bit. Or do you want to talk about the skepticism bit when we actually get to it? Start with Lordship and Bondage.

1:51 Dylan: Yeah, why don't we talk about what exactly the Lordship and Bondage passage is supposed to be about, since we're in the self consciousness section of the book.

2:00 Seth: Right. It was established gradually last time that we cannot have a sense of self, whatever that means exactly, without the contribution of another person. And there was a lot of disagreement on what the interim steps in the section right before this were in getting to that when we are somehow conscious of life or projecting life onto whatever the object of consciousness is, or something like that.

2:25 Dylan: You said something about encountering another person or another. And I think that's one of the weird parts about this section is that it's not clear that that's. That's what's going on. Right. That this could be an Entirely internal dialogue as well. Yes, but I kind of want to just read from just a short section of the text. In section 179, he says self consciousness is faced by another self consciousness. It has come out of itself. It says, this has a twofold significance. First, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being. And secondly, in doing so, it has superseded the other.

For it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is at least a good enough place to get started. Yeah, it's an interesting notion that self consciousness sees it's identical. Self consciousness comes in contact with. With itself and says, oh, wait a second, this is me, but it's not me. Yeah, right, it's me, but it's other. And it has to kind of reconcile this fact that this is what he means, I think, when he says it comes out of itself. Like there's a way in which self consciousness could recognize itself kind of in itself and never recognize an otherness or an other.

But as part of this dialectical movement, whether this is logical or historical or developmental or whatever, there's a point at which self consciousness has to acknowledge that it identifies something that's identical to it outside of itself, and it has to figure out what to do about that. Is that a fair way of characterizing the problem?

3:55 Wes: Yeah, I think that's pretty good.

3:57 Seth: There's an ambiguity here to say that you see something that's identical. I mean, is it really identical? Token, token identical. Or is it type identical? Thinking of this phenomenologically, which. Thinking of the initial development of anything phenomenologically is pretty weird, right? You can't just sit back and do that. You have to. It's very imaginative, but that's, you know, that's what he's been doing.

4:15 Wes: All in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, they classify this as generative historical phenomenology.

4:22 Seth: I think that really what's going on, that this is kind of like intuition in a Kantian sense, where intuition is supposed to be examining the relationships maybe between concepts, but some of them, like spatial concepts, so Kant, Schopenhauer say. And even we said last time, Frege even says that the only way to understand the truth of a geometrical proposition is through some sort of spatial intuition. And that is there's something phenomenological about that. You're kind of putting yourself in the position where you're considering the concepts or the nonverbal equivalent of concepts, whatever that Is, and I think that's what's going on here, is that he's claiming a logical conceptual relationship between these different forms as we're going through here. So at the moment, between this incomplete self consciousness and the full blown self consciousness that requires an other here.

5:08 Dylan: Well, to bring that back to the point. So the question was, Mark, I think you had said, when we talk about the self consciousness identifying itself in an other, you were asking if it was type or kind.

5:21 Seth: I think, or yes, or individual identity. So when you see yourself in something else, I mean, are you saying, oh, that's something that is like me, or are you actually saying that is me? And I think he's purposefully, like he's saying that this form of consciousness is maybe not sophisticated enough to make that distinction. I'm kind of making that up. I mean, it sounds like token. Token identity is what he's saying. That actually is me. Consciousness is not just seeing something like it. It has come out of itself and found itself in another being.

5:51 Wes: Well, when you just encounter an object that you eat, it belongs to us and we make it a part of ourselves. And that's what some of the language he uses is. The animal assimilates the object to itself. So that kind of consuming desire and consumption of objects, they're other, but then they are made into part of me. You know, Seth, you just talked about how this line where he says the otherness has to be negated. I have to make it part of me that kind of derives from the eating and consuming and assimilating things into my own body. So encountering the other agent, this other kind of self like agent, that's going to be much more problematic because they're going to resist me.

6:30 Dylan: That's what he describes in this section for sure, that that's the movement he starts off by saying, you have this thing where self consciousness recognizes or sees itself in another. And I think I agree with you, Mark, that at least for our purposes, it's like finding yourself as token, not type. And then in section 186, he says, I'm paraphrasing here, the encounter of the two self consciousnesses involve one seeking the death of the other. And I think that's the metaphor for negation in the same way that we've talked about in the last episode, all of the steps that you go through in negating the object. So Tom just mentioned that we have this dialectical movement where consciousness has an object and then negates it. And what Hegel's describing here is this special Kind of activity of negation that has to take place when that object is another self consciousness.

7:23 Seth: No, I like that connection. I gotta admit that I had not considered previously for some reason, when it gets to this life or death struggle part of this, I always took it more or less literally because that makes sense. If, if you're talking about, oh, this is his version of the social contract. People in the state of nature coming together and at that point they don't have anything else to give but their own lives. There's no property, there's no sense of self that's going to be given up, you know, so that's what you put on the line in this sort of thing.

But if you're thinking of it more as these two consciousnesses, they could even be in one head, like think multiple personality disorder. And that in these two things coming together, each one seeks to extinguish the other, to establish itself, to take the other into itself. So that, that just really feeds into this picture of the whole universe as very flexible in where the points of view can be coming from and how far they can stretch, how far these selves can consider that are they necessarily linked, one per body? Or at least do they try. Is it just inherent in the nature of conscious experience to try to expand beyond yourself or contract within yourself?

And of course, the way I'm putting it presumes again that there's already a self that's equivalent with the body that's set up. But, you know, maybe that's not even justified.

8:34 Wes: Well, the thing is, Hegel wants to try to explain why there does not have to be a self a priori. I mean, I think that's what's sort of very radical and interesting about what he's trying to do. He's completely trying to say that Descartes and Kant and all of modern philosophy has this thoroughly inadequate concept of selfhood. They just take selfhood as given. Maybe not Kant as much as Descartes, but essentially they don't really see the selfhood as generated. They don't consider the possibility that selfhood might be something that does not exist prior to this kind of historical becoming.

9:08 Seth: Right. But once the self comes into existence through this procedure that's being described here, it seems like it can't go away. I mean, yeah, the person could die. Yes, but even if you lose the struggle and you become a slave and you say, oh, your will is my will, master, I will do whatever you say. And you kind of try not to have self, that doesn't work. Human creatures are made up in such a way that we are not actually able to extinguish the Cartesian point of consciousness in that way, maybe with enough drugs.

9:39 Dylan: Let me just say this. There's kind of the key point is that self consciousness wants to be certain of itself. And insofar as it's been encountering objects and negating them and taking them into itself, it establishes a certain kind of certainty of itself because it of course keeps returning to itself. It's like casting a fishing line, right? I mean, you cast out and you always reel it back in, it always comes back to you. And what happens when self consciousness encounters another self consciousness or itself? It suddenly finds that it cannot so easily return back to itself.

It becomes uncertain with this kind of object compared to the way it is with other types of objects. So this seeking the death of the other and trying to negate the other is a way of trying to re establish the certitude of consc as it had previously existed or this other non reflective or non evolved state of self consciousness. And so to me, the metaphor of the Lord and the bondsman, him saying there's two different ways that you can approach the fact that you need to negate this other. One is to try to treat it like an object of sense and say, I own this, it is part of me, my will is its will and what I want is what it wants.

Right. That's the position of the Lord. And the bondsman is in a different position. And this one I have a little harder time describing. But ultimately, because the bondsman is truly being for the other, even though it's in this position of certitude, the Lord is not being for the other, it's simply treating the other as an object of itself.

11:17 Seth: Right, Just like something it's eating.

11:19 Dylan: Yeah, exactly. Now the bondsman or the, you know, people say this, call this the master and slave also the bondsman sacrifices its will, so to speak, for the sake of the Lord. And that movement of acknowledging the other as a wholly other and as being. I think he says he's being for another. But basically this sacrifice of the self for the other is the first step that makes possible the self realization and then the mutual recognition. So Hegel's key point, and by the way, this is what I think the Marxists pick up on, right, is he's basically saying, if you read this as a metaphor, he's saying in the master slave dialectic, the master is wholly dependent on the slave.

The slave, even though it appears to be in the subservient position. The slave is the only one who's actually in a position to, in Hegel's term, become self actualized being itself. But it also, the way the Marxists read it, the slave actually is the one with the power because it controls the means of production. You know, the master can't live without the slave, but the slave can live without the master.

12:24 Wes: Right.

12:24 Dylan: That's the metaphor.

12:25 Wes: And I think that's absolutely right. This whole passage certainly is more about the slave. The slave is the one who really develops and eventually brings this stage to its fulfillment when the slave realizes that he's the real support of the whole situation. But in the beginning, there is a positive contribution that the master makes, and that is the master is the one who's willing to risk his biological life for superiority. And in that act, what Hegel locates is that when you have this struggle and one of the combatants is willing to risk his life, but the other is not willing to risk his life, the slave just recognizes the other as superior.

Like, I am fearful and humbled and awed by what's happened. And so in that moment, the master acquires a new sense of self. Wow, I'm gaining this power. And also he gains the desire of another desire. And that transformation of desire into a desire that is now social is key because I think in 174 he's talking about it has to give itself the certainty of itself. It's the idea that the desire can't be given. Like, so for instance, like, you know, we have to eat food. My desire to eat, it's just given naturally. It's not really mine. Now if I desire to eat Korean barbecue, that's actually mine.

But just having to eat is natural. So I think what Hegel's trying to locate is this point where the freedom to think about oneself and to actually desire the recognition of the other, somehow that becomes possible for the master.

13:59 Dylan: Yeah, obviously for Hegel, all the elements in any of this are going to contribute something to the whole. It's not simply the case. Like we don't want to overread this as this being some kind of emancipation text, or, you know, like we don't want to take the Marxist move with the text tonight anyway. But Tom, what he says that I think sort of points to what you were just saying is in section 190, he says the Lord is the consciousness that exists for itself, but no longer merely the notion of such a consciousness. Rather it is a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness.

So in other words, prior to this movement of desire for this object that is self consciousness, another self consciousness, there's a certain way in which consciousness has a notion of itself, but it's not actually existing for itself. It's like it's almost in a kind of eddy in the stream, circling around and around. And it's only when confronted with an other that self consciousness is given the push or the motivation it needs to try and expand and begin to exist for itself. And that makes a certain kind of weird sense, even though this is very odd, if you imagine metaphorically that the consciousness that only has a notion of itself, that has never encountered another self consciousness, is kind of like true solipsism.

And what Hegel's saying is, what a horror. You know, it's a state of existence where you have something that has some kind of identity and some kind of notion of self, but it's a very cheap and poor notion of self. Until you encounter something that challenges that notion of self, you're really only sort of acting out the part of true self consciousness.

15:41 Seth: I buy that description, except for the comparison to solipsism. I think solipsism is closer to the skepticism that we're going to get to right in the section after this, that you actually have to have a sense of self in order to say I am the only thing that exists. That there's some brute sense, some unexpressed sense, in which what you're saying is right. It's not a sense of self, but there's some way of acting where you don't acknowledge anybody else. I guess you could just say that, you know, so it's. In other words, it's a purely negative notion of self.

You use the word notion a bunch of times there. And we should say for listeners who haven't looked at this text that the word notion is used throughout here with a capital N, depending on your translation as just meaning the empty, unformed idea of something. And that's all. The way the dialectic always works is first you sort of get a notion of something, and then you have to fill out the content in some way, usually by reflecting on some contrast. So the notion itself, this poverty, this initial self, that is just the bare tautologous I equals I that we were talking about in the last podcast.

That would be the notion of self. It's a pure negative.

16:45 Dylan: Yeah, I agree with that.

16:46 Seth: And I like the image that he uses of the other person is the middle term in the relation of ourselves to ourselves. So that self consciousness is relational, but for it to be any kind of real relationship at all, it has to go through something else.

17:01 Dylan: Does this echo anything with what we talked about when we talked about Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard says the self is the relation that relates to itself.

17:08 Mark: Right.

17:09 Wes: Which is very Hegelian.

17:10 Seth: He definitely had read this, but I think he's talking about the developed self already, that there's still going to be a fluidity to it because of just this nature of the way it's put together.

17:21 Dylan: I'm wondering about the middle term, if what Kierkegaard did was substitute God for the other as the middle term.

17:29 Wes: Yes, he tried.

17:30 Seth: Well, that's actually in here, in the part after this again, the stoicism, skepticism part. So let's bring that up again when we get there.

17:37 Dylan: Okay.

17:38 Wes: Seth, your point about how the Marxists pick up on the servant here, where servant is the real basis of the situation. The point I was making about the master, the contribution that master makes. What's interesting about this is how dialectically intertwined both of these things are. Because even the Marxist will recognize when the master acquires this unnatural desire for the desire to be recognized. That's where you get human desire. And when Marxist economists look at society, they say, look, our desires are human creations, and this is different than natural desires.

That's their criticism of liberal economy, that the liberal economy, we just assume that people just have their desires and preferences and whatever they are, that's what they are. So that doesn't matter when we look at the economy. The Marxists, on the other hand, are like, wait a minute. How desires are formed really matters because society makes them. So they would recognize this moment as key. It's not giving the master credit. It's not active. It was almost a passive thing. But it did come about because the master had this strange desire that transcended a merely natural desire.

18:43 Dylan: Yeah, that's a great point, Tom. And to follow up on it, on the notion of desire. So for the listeners in the text, Hegel, and we talked about this last time, you know, Hegel uses the word desire with a capital. The translator uses a capital D, which

18:56 Seth: is always gratuitous because German all.

18:59 Dylan: Now it is gratuitous in German. Yes. But the point being that desire is kind of the movement or the motivating force that ties together consciousness and the object. So consciousness has a desire, broadly speaking, to reach out and negate or own objects. And if this desire doesn't exist, then consciousness never really is motivated to move outside of itself. And so metaphorically One way to read this is to say the lord position is not metaphorically the power position in some kind of a feudal relationship. What it is just saying is that the self consciousness that reaches out to the other self consciousness and tries to own it, that makes that first move, if you will, or is motivated by the movement, is in the position of the Lord.

And he wants to talk about desire as being the key contribution or the key movement of the Lord in this lord and bondsman relationship. And he contrasts that with what the bondsman contributes, which he says is work, which again, is something that the Marxists, I'm sure, picked up on. But the reason that's important is that the Lord desires the other and tries to negate it and own it. But that desire is never going to be fulfilled, unlike with objects of sense perception, unlike with ideas, unlike with all other kinds of objects, the desire for the other.

You will never be able to negate the other in the same way. And that desire will never be fulfilled. And what happens is the bondsman, who basically says, I will make the Lord's will, my will, and begins to do work, actually creates something concrete. And that work becomes a thing which acquires permanence. And the bondsman can then eventually come to see in his work his own independence. And so what you have here is this dynamic of unfulfilled desire on the one hand, and then the realization of activity, or it's the turning from notion to existence on the other hand.

And those two things together is what he means when he says they're both part of the dialectic. But it's not until self consciousness has created something, made concrete, something out of this dialectic, that it can acknowledge and sort of respect its own independence, which is the first movement towards that self realization.

21:14 Wes: When you say independence, you know, when you think about the way that Hegel moves from calling, you know, an idea appears and it's merely abstract or it's merely a notion. And then through the mediating movement of the chapter, it becomes actualized. Consciousness has to learn what it really means. What does independence really mean? So the master is like the idea of independence?

21:36 Seth: Yep. The notion? Yep.

21:37 Wes: When the master's recognized, it's like, oh, wow, I'm like this independent thing. So the notion appears. But is that actually what independence is? Is independence sitting on your butt while somebody brings you food? I think this is still so relevant to a lot of, like, management labor relations. It's inevitable that when people are in managerial positions, you kind of become lazy and dependent on your workers.

22:02 Seth: I Don't, though, buy his point. So he says the act of creation itself that the slave is doing. So the slave is out there making things and just making things, creating things itself, builds up your sense of self. You know, it's not just the other person treating you in a certain way. It's also having this objective effect in the world that you can then look at and say, I did that. And he says that the master is alienated from that. The master is not going to feel that. The slave is going to feel that. I can see that in some circumstances, the way you're saying it.

Oh, the master is sitting at home all day, and the slave goes out and gets the food. And the slave has the experience of hunting and all this stuff. Yeah, okay, that. But that's not how I picture an actual master slave relationship in the caveman days working out. It would be, here's the tribe leader running around with his minions, and the tribe leader will feel just as much responsible, in fact, will feel like, you know, wow, I'm directing these five other guys who are hunting this woolly mammoth, and go there, go there, go there. They take the mammoth down.

I, as the master, am gonna feel like I did that, because I don't give a shit about my minions. I don't even consider them people. I consider them tools. If I really consider them extensions of my body, then I consider their work to be my fulfillment. Whereas I would think that the slaves, maybe they'll feel part of the team and, you know, we did this, but maybe they'll just be, oh, nothing for me, master. It's all, you know. Then maybe they won't get a sense of self out of it.

23:25 Dylan: No, honestly, I think that's a legitimate criticism. Like I said, I'm trying to read it metaphorically as a dynamic. But if you take it the way you take it, Mark, I think you're right. That's why I have a hard time reading it. That literally is that it would fall apart if you looked at actual historical.

23:42 Wes: But wait, the thing is, what Mark is saying is absolutely right, and I don't think that Hegel's argument is that simplistic. I think that it still stands even in light of that kind of picture that Mark is putting in. And I don't even think the Hegel doesn't disrespect the masterly position. Like I was saying, the master is a person who really has this sense of dignity and pride and selfhood, and that's an important thing. But the masters of history, they do have to become conservative in the sense that they need to maintain the status quo part of the job.

Once you've reached the top of the heap, no matter what you're doing, even if you're active, even if you're commanding people, you want to keep the order. That is. So you're not developing in the same way that somebody on the bottom probably is. And obviously not all the people in the bottom are going to be exceptional, but some of them are going to really, there's going to be something new. And then you also have to think about the fact that the way the technology has transformed human history, you know, technology really comes out of the labor and craft.

It's the thing that really changes the human condition from natural into something that is hard to describe as natural. So the slave in the labor is really the mediator that takes humanity from nature to civilization.

24:53 Dylan: Yeah. These, to me are. It's a metaphor for describing this movement or this thing that happens inside of consciousness and just to sort of tie something a little bit together. So Tom's point is, if all you do is desire and command, but you don't actually produce and are active, then ultimately you're not going to develop. You're going to be missing out on something that makes you essentially fulfilled and complete, a human being. And Hegel is not saying that the bondsman is fulfilled and complete as a human being. All he's saying is the bondsman is put into this position of having to work and create things and be active.

And it's this activity of creation or work that ultimately is necessary in order for you to truly get a sense of self. And he's saying, if all you do is desire and have this unfulfilled desire, but you don't actually go out and get active and produce something in this relationship with the other or via this relationship with the other, you're not going to have what it takes to be fully realized. And let me read a couple sentences here. Right, this is section 194. To begin with, servitude has the Lord for its essential reality. Hence the truth.

For it is the independent consciousness that it is for itself. However, servitude is not yet aware that this truth is implicit in it. Okay? For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread, for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In this experience, it has been quite unmanned and trembled in every fiber of its being. Etc. Etc. Right? And then in the next section, the feeling of absolute power, both in general and in the particular form of service, is only implicitly this dissolution.

And although the fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not there and aware that it isn't a being for itself. Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is in the moment which corresponds to desire in the Lord's consciousness. That's just talking about desire, right? And he says, desire has reserved for itself pure negation of the object. But satisfaction is only fleeting because it lacks objectivity and permanence. Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check. In other words, work forms and shapes the thing.

The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent. And because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. So, referring back to the previous conversation about the other forms of dialectic with the objects of consciousness, consciousness is reaching out, it's grasping its desiring object, and then it's negating them by making them part of itself, it's owning them, right? And in order to make this jump from whatever this impoverished state of being is to this next state, or at least even have the possibility, you have got to create an object, or grasp an object, or go after an object which has independence from you.

And you have to recognize that it's independent of you. And you have to reckon with that

27:54 Seth: fact, which just means you can't negate it. It doesn't necessarily have to have independence of its own. Just even go attack a windmill with a lance, it will resist that.

28:04 Dylan: No, you're absolutely right. It just has to resist negation. And what I think he's saying is that the objects, from the Lord's perspective, don't resist negation, but he never succeeds in making them part of itself. Whereas the bondsman is able to encounter something that is truly independent and resist negation, and then suddenly say to himself or herself, oh my gosh, what's going on? This is something I cannot take into myself, that I cannot own.

28:31 Wes: So the master gains this sense that what's really important is that I'm recognized. But the master can't even really be fulfilled in that, because, like you said, if the slave completely makes themselves subservient, then the master isn't really being recognized by an autonomous other, by an equal right.

28:48 Seth: It says it has to happen both ways for it to work.

28:51 Wes: It's a paradox. The master has acquired and desires this recognition of being superior. But to the degree that the slave becomes an instrument of his own will, he can't be recognized by an instrument of his own will.

29:05 Seth: We need another word in here also to differentiate desire, taken as this brute, unowned thing, like an urge versus something that is owned, something. That is what you were talking about, Tom, as the Marxist saying that all our desires are created by society. If you as a mature individual can say, oh, this is what I want, then that is something completely different. And that requires a level of selfhood that is not present certainly in this early part of the phenomenology. And I guess the Marxists would argue that if our society treats us like sheep and we don't think enough and that we have this consumerism is the default desire, that that's not even really a desire proper either. We need to distinguish between proto desire and personal desire or something like that.

29:50 Dylan: Yeah, I think that's fair. That makes sense. And in all of the times I was referring to it, I was talking about the proto form, not the personal form.

29:57 Wes: You know, it's interesting here how you get a lot of the existential themes in philosophy are kind of born here in terms of a sense of authenticity. You know, authentic selfhood seems to be connected to authentic desire. A desire that is not merely given to me, but something I have made. You also have a lot of the theme of death and negativity. How important it is that the slave learns limitation. Seth, like you were saying, the quote about the beginning of wisdom. It begins in the slave. Because the slave has learned self limitation and negativity in terms of working and transforming nature and the objects, but also negativity in the sense that their own selfhood is limited by the master.

The reason why the master doesn't develop further is because there's this lack of negativity. In 194. Hegel talks a lot about what you were mentioning, Seth, about how the slave becomes. Experiences this radical fear. His whole being is shaken. The quote here is this consciousness was not driven with anxiety about just this or that matter. Nor did it have anxiety about just this or that moment. Rather, it had anxiety about its entire essence. It felt the fear of death, the absolute master. In that feeling it had inwardly fallen into dissolution, trembled in its depths.

And all that was fixed within it had been shaken loose. And where he's saying that all that is fixed is shaken loose. You see how the slave gains wisdom about the world being fluid and remakeable. The master is a conservative. He just wants to maintain things in a fixed way. The slave learns this transformative character of himself and the world, that things can change.

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