Mistakes in Class, or Herrschaft und Knechtschaft

A very wise professor today asked the class to define what Hegel means by the master and slave dialectic. I started to respond (with little attention to my words) that it is about two "subjectivities" that confront each other in a relationship where what is at stake is their self-sufficiency. She stopped me there and said, "the master-slave dialectic is not about two subjectivities. It is about the dialectic." And she's right, and not just because--as I too quickly concluded--that she is of the school that reads the section on mastery and slavery in a  Derridian way and not in a Kojevian way. I was stupid for saying "subjectivity," right off the bat. That is where she was correcting me, and this is where the Derridian way of reading it (along with Heidegger and Hyppolite, though Heidegger may take this too far in this direction) is really useful.

"Subjectivity" is a really misused word in general. I meant something like "self," but even that is not what is at stake in the master-slave dialectic. Nothing like it even appears or presents itself there throughout the whole passage. What presents itself is, as she said, the dialectic, but also and more specifically, self-consciousness. And what gets staked--that is, either lost by the master-slave relationship or relieved/superseded by it-- is life. Hegel says:

Die Darstellung seiner aber als der reinen Abstraktion des Selbstbewusstseins besteht darin, sich als reine Negation seiner gegenständlichen Weise zu zeigen, oder es zu zeigen, an kein bestimmtes Dasein geknüpft, an die allgemeine Einzelnheit des Daseins überhaupt nicht, nicht an das Leben geknüpft zu sein. Diese Darstellung ist das gedoppelte Tun; Tun des Andern, und Tun durch sich selbst. Insofern es Tun des Andern ist, geht also jeder auf den Tod des Andern. Darin aber ist auch das zweite, das Tun durch sich selbst, vorhanden; denn jenes schliesst das Daransetzen des eignen Lebens in sich.

[The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not the the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. This presentation is a twofold action: action on the part of the other, and action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on its own part, is also involved; for the fomrer involves the staking of its own life.]

The master-slave relationship is about dialectic because it it the form of this relationship that gets constituted and is proper to the appearance of self-consciousness (its phenomenality): this is why Hegel focuses on what is shown or presented in the confrontation: or rather this is why he says the (twofold) confrontation is itself a Darstellung (diese Darstellung ist das gedoppelte Tun). The only thing that perhaps functions like (though still does not appear similar to) a self or a subjectivity that makes its appearance here is life, and this is the reason why I wanted to say "self" and said "subjectivity"--and, I'm thinking, why this mistake is made more generally in talking about this famous passage in Hegel.

Life in Hegel is an interesting thing: it is thought about constantly in his earlier writings in a similar way to how he thinks, later on, about Geist. Life in the Phenomenology, however, seems a little more bare: it becomes something like bare life, the functioning of Spirit at a natural level. It is what must be superseded, essentially, because it is the most basic thing that challenges self-consciousness in the other: that is, his bare existence as foreign to self-consciousness, to consciousness' being-for-itself. But notice that this bare existence is not itself something foreign to self-consciousness in general. It itself is an appearance or a mode of manifestation of a self-consciousness: in other words, life is not something with some significance outside of remaining just another way that self-consciousness appears here to a self-consciousness (whether it be one's own or the other's). What I'm getting at is that life just another form of the dialectic operating as a form of or within (for lask of better words) self-consciousness, and we mistake it for something else, something more vague, if we think of it apart from its dialectical structure--that is, by what we normally might mean by it.

Thus, though her ultimate reason might be more Derridian, my professor was absolutely right: that is, she was right not even because the dialectic, as Derrida shows in "From Restricted to General Economy," is what gets arbitrarily (and yet also, for other reasons, necessarily) preserved by Hegel throughout his rendering of the master-slave relationship--in other words, not because the dialectic is what is at stake for Hegel--but also because what is being talked about in it is only the dialectic, not something external to it or itself other than it that we designate by life or self-sufficiency. This is the hard part about thinking about Hegel: getting outside of his own verbiage to explain him--as I tried to do--inevitably makes one betray the phenomenon (in Hegel's sense, the self-showing of Spirit) that one seeks to convey: it takes one also outside the form of spirit (in this case, self-consciousness) that one is discussing or bringing to language.

So, in the master-slave dialectic, what is at stake is the ability of the dialectic to appear or show itself as a Darstellung, and in doing so, risk something about that Darstellung that structures and is structured by this ability: life. In other words, the self-sufficiency of self-consciousness is what is challenged by the life of the other, which must leads one to stake one's own life (or rather, present one's life) to him in mortal combat. This is the better way to put it. Because the other exists, because their phenomenality appears (a redundant way to put this, but I'm just trying to be clear), I am threatened as anything that must be more than just living, more than bare life--namely, self-consciousness. Thus, I must present myself against them in a fight.

Even more basic introduction to Hegel

Here is an even more basic introduction to Hegel (and particularly Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and "dialectic") than the one before. It should provide a good sort of primer for anyone reading Derrida's "The Pit and the Pyramid" in Margins of Philosophy, in that it gets you thinking in the general mode of Heidegger and Hyppolite about Hegel and language--this is the mode of thought that Derrida in that essay elaborates, investigates, and to which he reacts:

Here are some simple passages in the chapter on sense-certainty that have to do with language, and particularly the conflicts, the frustrations, the impossibilities—in short, the problems—of language:

In J.N. Findlay’s analysis of the Phenomenology: “In the use of demonstrative words, there is a conflict between what we really say and what we mean to say (our Meinung, was wir meinen [i.e. what we ‘intend.’])” (p. 508).

Also in Findlay’s analysis: “Language, being divine and rational, frustrates the attempt of sense-certainty to grasp… particulars” (p. 509-10).

And in the Phenomenology itself: “If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language” (§110).

I’m taking these quotes (especially the last one) about language and its specific relation to sense-certainty as representing how language relates to the larger task of the Phenomenology. If I can tease out the significance of language in general, then, this should orient you so that you can understand specifically what is going on in the quotes—i.e. language’s relation to the “this” to the “now,” to “particulars,” to the “bit of paper” and the like.
What does this mean if I can do this? It means I’m elaborating a thesis of Heidegger’s (as well as Kojeve’s and Hyppolite’s) about the meaning of language in the way this task unfolds or accomplishes itself (cf. “Hegel and the Greeks” in Pathmarks).
To put it plainly, the task of the Phenomenology is to try and show thought, or have thought show itself. This thought is thought in action, thought beyond the distinction between thinking and doing—Hegel calls it Spirit. A culture is in a sense this type of thought; battles between nations or plays in the theatre are types of this thought in some way, in some aspect of their existence. This thought, then, shows itself in acting in various forms, forms like “Consciousness” “Self-consciousness” “Reason,” etc.—the general divisions of the Phenomenology—and also in more specific forms, like “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and “understanding”—the individual chapters of the work. It should be obvious that when there is no more showing of thought, when thought just simply is what it is and does not show itself as what it is, the task of the Phenomenology is completed. Hegel then goes to describe how this thought is, beyond its appearance, beyond its being a phenomenon. This is the task of the Science of Logic. But it is clear that if the task in the Phenomenology is to have thought show itself, when Hegel is writing about sense-certainty, he is trying to make thought in this particular form show itself as thought that takes this particular form. He is trying to show how sense-certainty—a way our consciousness is sure of the objects to which we relate—is thought showing itself in some way, and furthermore is thought in its action as showing and not simply just being itself.
Now we can understand that in claiming that language has some relationship to the task of the Phenomenology I’m claiming that language has a relationship to the way that this showing of thought has to unfold. In short, it means how this showing must be described by Hegel, how it must be put into language.
Now, taking a step back, we usually say that Phenomenology is an unfolding of something called “the dialectic.” Could it be that this putting into language is “dialectic?”
But don’t we normally think of dialectic as a threefold structure (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) of some sort that organizes or is the organization of what comes to light in the Phenomenology? Or, better, as the twofold interplay between something and its own contradiction?
Heidegger claims that both of these interpretations are right in a sense, but only if they get their meaning from this first meaning of dialectic—in the sense of the relationship of language to the unfolding of thought. I’ll note now that for Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojeve, and thus for Derrida, this is the case too. The dialectic, for these philosophers, is a going-through-language. Heidegger specifically reads dialectic as “dialegesthai:” from dia, Greek for “going through,” and legein, “the gathering (and only gathering, not unifying) of disparity, of multiplicity, under a signifier or movement of signifiers, that is at the heart of logos, language.”
But we can think this more simply if we just think that dialectic will come on the scene when the showing of thought has a relationship to language. It is only in this sense that the dialectic is the threefold or twofold structure in the Phenomenology that we might normally think it is—before it is the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” or the interplay between “identity and contradiction,” it is this establishing of the relationship of thought to language.
So when thought indeed has a relationship to language, sense-certainty, as a way thinking shows itself, it will be dialectical in the way it unfolds, in the way it accomplishes this showing. But then why do all the quotes above talk about the failure of language to get at what sense-certainty wants it to get? Why, in general, is language a problem in the Phenomenology?
Because these represent moments in the Phenomenology when thought is trying to establish a relationship to language that is not dialectical, that is, when it is, in an effort not to show itself but to hide itself, trying to twist language into a mode that it does not want to inhabit. What is this mode of language? A mode where language disappears in front of what it communicates, where it undoes itself as language and does not, rather, make thought show itself in language, through the mediation of language. In short, a language that erases itself so that we get only the showing of thought, and no language with it.
This is impossible for Hegel: just this pure showing is precisely what “cannot be reached by language.” In the chapter on sense-certainty, we have portrayed a form of this showing of thinking that is nothing but this desire to have language erase itself, to have what is meant to be shown exceed the attempt to mean by putting it into language. It wants to have the showing of thought be just a “this,” a “here,” a “now.” But this is precisely what, in its frustration, Hegel says is “divine and rational.”
So we have a problem, don’t we? Thought when it does not show itself is precisely when it shows itself purely, without language, when language disappears in front of what it shows. Thought when it shows itself purely does not show itself, but hides itself.
I leave this for you to think about. Meanwhile, what has been proven, if we accept this, is that dialectic is the only way that thought can show itself—that is, as a way thought relates to language. If dialectic does not appear, there we have no showing, and in fact no thought as well. Dialectic, properly understood, is a relationship of thought to language without which thought is incomprehensible. The failure of language in these instances in the chapter in sense-certainty then only serves to prove how dialectic is necessary for the thought to appear, if we understand dialectic as the relationship between thought and language.

Hegel and the sway of truth

Why do we have so many objections to Hegel's philosophy as too "idealistic," that is (ignoring any historical determinations of this word but rather getting at the experience of Hegel's philosophy it tries to signify), as making the world conform to a movement of thought rather than to its own movements? This is the underlying phenomenon that the critiques of Hegel by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kojeve, Sartre, Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others react to and from which they claim their justification. In other words, in Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kojeve, Sartre, Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida... in all these philosophers reacting to Hegel, they all levy a critique on Hegel's being too idealistic, or, to use a word of Bataille's used to characterize this experience (that Derrida takes over), too restricted--in the sense of restricting the movements of the world to its own movements, to its own "economy." Now, I would include Heidegger too, except he in a sense understands why this is so, and so can't be said to be merely "reacting" to the idealism of Hegel--even though he himself is probably the most critical of this catalogue of critics, the person that Hegel disgusted most. For it is through his determination of the essence of truth that he shows us there have been other essences or swayings of truth (Wesen for Heidegger means more like a movement of ecstatical perdurance or swaying than "nature," which it is often horribly rendered as), and particularly the sway of truth of which Hegel's "idealism" or "restrictedness" is merely the effect.
Heidegger allows us to see that for metaphysics, and I quote,"truth is the agreement of thought with the object." The history of metaphysics determines the true in this way, and thus cannot be broken with or altered without altering how truth is supposed to be the truth of agreement.
Now, the problem with this characterization of metaphysical truth is that it is not only Heidegger's. The quote just cited is not Heidegger, but Hegel in his Science of Logic (44). Hegel writes that it is "inept" to think that

truth is the agreement of thought with the object, and [that] in order to bring about this agreement--for it does not exist on its own account--thinking is supposed to adapt and accomodate itself to the object.
-Science of Logic, "Introduction," 44.

In other words, Hegel both characterizes metaphysical truth with regard to its essence and seeks to break with it, just like Heidegger. Truth shall not be the truth of agreement for Hegel. It shall be more. But before we define what it is, we must ask: is it this "more" that will make his philosophy look "restricted," or "idealistic?" Or could it merely be the fact that he is rebelling against a tradition of truth as agreement, as adequation between the thought and the object?
While this last thought is obviously--if anyone who utters it knows their Hegel and particularly the definition of truth that Hegel gives us--unfounded, wild, and stupid: for Hegel, truth is in fact even more the truth of adequation or agreement than the metaphysical tradition he here criticizes as "inept." But I'd like to suggest that maybe this last thought isn't as unfounded or wild or stupid as we'd like to think it is.
In other words, Hegel really does attempt to break with the metaphysical tradition that we now, only with the help of Nietzsche, Wittegenstein and Heidegger, have come to recognize and to an extent overcome. And this attempt in its critical gestures comes dangerously close to carrying it out. The boldness of the criticism, and the attempt to overcome it by a systematic shift in the way philosophy is done, in fact seem to make it almost impenetrable to the charge of idealism--that is, if they didn't fail. But it is this dangerous closeness, I'd like to say, that makes Hegel in his failure, appear all the more restricted--in a way he comes so close to doing what we attempt to do today that it is inevitable that a failure would seem idealistic. But who genuinely can criticize someone as idealistic who rightly is able to diagnose and to an extent displace the condition of metaphysical truth since even before Plato? Wouldn't someone who is able to do this precisely be the most realistic, most generally (i.e. not restricted) in touch with the actual as opposed to someone who sacraficed reality to his own ideas? That is what I mean.
Truth is not agreement for Hegel. As Heidegger makes clear, anyone who diverges from the tradition that affirms the opposite of this statement is destined to remain either in deep obscurity or will be cast off by the tide of reaction in favor of truth as what agrees. And yet Hegel says, "One must discard the prejudice that truth must be something tangible" (50), that is, able to be ascertained as what in an object agrees with a thought about that object.
What is truth then for Hegel? It is speculative truth: in other words, it is not only the agreement of the thought and the thing, but the identity of the thought and the thing in each other. True truth also includes certainty, the reassertion of the thought or the object as itself in its opposite, or (put differently) in its difference from itself.
Now, isn't this just more agreement? Yes. But also no. Indeed, Hegel takes his insight into the problem with truth in metaphysics and buries it in more metaphysical thinking rather than breaking with that tradition. But if one thinks speculative truth respectfully, it has the opportunity of being thought as not relying on agreement perhaps as much as a philosophy where truth is solely agreement between thing and thought. I'll leave it for others to do this.
But the fact remains, even if Hegel does even more rigorously entrench himself in a metaphysics where truth is agreement, truth is not merely agreement for Hegel. And this is perhaps the least restricted potential of the science he lays out. How can we think the possibilities of this particular unrestricted moment in Hegel, precisely when it is also the most restricted?
Truth for Hegel isn't, when thought rightly, the mere agreement of a thought and a thing. In this sense, then, truth isn't idealistic. Truth is a movement of mutual identity in otherness, truth combined with certainty, that does not require an object in the sense of an object for adequation. So it does not restrict the world to its terms. Rather, what is true belongs to truth itself in its own unfolding: truth's terms explode and generalize into a world. Insofar as one attributes a goal for this truth to come out and face the world, i.e. to agree with it, it will necessarily be misinterpreting Hegel because it will only be able to see idealistic agreement as the truth. But while truth keeps to itself, this truth will not be idealistic.
It will, of course, also be doubly a truth of agreement. But it is possible to use this aspect of non-agreement, of non-idealism as a clue to interpretation of Hegel that does not constantly submit itself to a metaphysical definition of truth for ridicule. In that vein, Heidegger and, to an great extent, Hippolyte's interpretations of Hegel do this. Kojeve, however, seeks to make Hegel work with metaphysical truth: this is why he must erase much of Hegel in the Phenomenology through his anthropological/Marxist interpretation.
Emphasizing and teasing out the self-movement of truth allows for a different version of truth than metaphysical truth to start to cultivate itself, even though it is merely this version of truth reasserted. In a sense, it is what happens when one tries to think truth as the development of what Hegel calls Geist not, in its English translation, as "Mind," i.e. as the truth of a personal, anthropological, Transcendental-consciousness/subject (for whom objects appear and must agree), but as "Spirit," as a less easily definable movement of discourse within itself. For those who know these two translations of Geist, all I'm trying to do is suggest what constitutes the difference between them, and how thinking the latter is ultimately more productive, more true to Hegel (in his conception of truth at least), and ultimately less idealistic than the former way.

"The Concept is the killing of the Thing"

Thinking the thing, the object, means thinking the death of the thing as well as its living relation to you: this is what Kojeve means when he says that the Concept is the killing of the Thing. Thinking, for Hegel, is always therefore a thinking of death. It is a thinking that thinks and indeed enacts the death of the thing thought. This is because, at bottom, the being that is thought is at the same time nothing--at least this is what Hegel says in the Science of Logic. The crucial thing to grasp is that even if we consider the thinking of the thing's nothingness, its death or relationship to you [the thinker, the thinking] as dead--even if we consider this thinking of nothingness a reduction of the abstract, pure nothingness of the thing to a determinate nothingness, one still has to think the death of the thing in this act. In other words, sometimes too much stress is put upon Hegel reducing nothingness to something determinate and something able to be exchanged in an economy of being--Bataille and Derrida are guilty of this--and not enough on the fact that what is indeed interesting about the determinate nothingness is that it is nothingness, that it is the death of the thing, the thinking of its negativity as related to whatever that negativity brings about. The recuperation of negativity into a determinate economy of negativity, the extraction of negativity from its abstractness, its purity, is secondary to this engagement with negativity as the other side of every single thing. Only if one stresses that thinking is a thinking of the death of the thing, a simultaneous lifting it into death and out of abstraction, does one really get what Hegel is talking about when he calls this thinking in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit submitting to the "labor, the patience of the negative."
Quickly, I'll just finish by being clear: thinking is the thinking of the death of each thing because at bottom each thing has its being purely, in pure abstraction--in pure being. Now, this is at bottom the same thing as nothingness. Insofar as a being is a being it is equal to nothing--thus, with any thinking of the being of something, one also has to think its negativity. Even when determinate and not pure, the abstract equality of nothing with being reigns... it is what brings about this determination of being and nothing. Thus, one is thinking at the same time of a being and of its death, its abstract nothingness. It is only by thinking this nothingness as part of the thing that one can say something is at all. Also, it is only by thinking this nothingness that one can lift what is equivalent to nothingness out of its abstraction and into the Concept: the Concept is therefore the thinking that comprehends the nothingness, the death of the thing, giving it its determinacy and its nothing equally as it gives it its being. Thus Hippolyte can also say that Language is the death of the thing, along with Hegel, and be right: associating the Concept with language as he does, Hippolyte equally shows us that language is what accesses the nothingness, the death of the thing.

Unrewarding/stupid ways to read Hegel

1. As a dialectician that merely shows the determinations of spirit in the forms of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. That is, as a thinker that just partitioned up phenomena into three parts, the third of which resolved the discordance between the first and the second (which is the mere opposite of the first). In other words, a thinker of the formula: given A, (A + -A) = B. Still a prevelant view of Hegel, even among Hegelians. It is this view that leads such a prominent thinkher as Robert Charles Solomon to declare the dialectic arbitrary in the Phenomenology of Spirit in his book In the Spirit of Hegel: Solomon would rather junk a whole mode of thought (speculative thinking via the dialectic) than actually combat the misunderstanding prevalent in America that takes Hegel as this thesis, antithesis, synthesis thinker.
Why this is stupid: It completely erases negativity from the dialectic. The antithesis of the thesis is not merely the opposite of the antithesis. It is its negation. That is, given the basic phenomenon of of being, if we posit being as a thesis, nothing is not the antithesis because nothing is the opposite of being. rather, it is what happens when being grounds itself in itself as itself to the point that it can no longer be called "being." This is nothing. Furthermore, the synthesis of being and nothing is becoming not because becoming is something that interposes itself between being and nothing as a sort of "compromise" that will resolve both terms into one. Rather, it is again the grounding of nothing in itself (which was the grounding of being in itself) such that it can no longer be called "nothing," or, more accurately, "nothing-that-once-was-being." The truth of this is seen perhaps most clearly in Hegel's reflections on space and time, which I'll elaborate later (with the help of Heidegger and Derrida). In the meantime, this quote of Hegel's is enough to refute this view.

The progress [of the philosophical development of spirit or of the thinking of its various determinations] does not consist merely in the derivation of an other, or in the effected transition into a genuine other... the beginning of philosophy is the foundation which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.
-Science of Logic, 71.

In short, if negativity were a mere "making-opposite" there would be only the genuine transition into a complete other with respect to the thesis: the antithesis would strictly speaking only be the thesis that was othered. Hegel shows that it is in the retaining of the beginning element that othered itself through its own self grounding of itself as itself that constitutes progress. Only through the grounding of something as itself is there progress, is their othering.

2. As--and this is how Zizek puts it in his Looking Awry (that is how prevalent this view is)--as the thinker or even "stager" of various existential modes of being and their possible development into each other through the negation of their presuppositions. It should be noted that this is the view of perhaps the most influential interpreter of Hegel of modern times, Alexandre Kojeve, but only when Kojeve is reading Hegel at his worst, when he is trying to make Hegel fashionable or at least relevant by considering him through a Heideggerian lens. Kojeve has a great understanding of Hegel, but he makes Hegel mean most when he sticks most to the issue of time in Hegel--and it is significant that time is the reflection of negativity for Hegel, thus making sticking close to a proper conception of negativity in general a good rule for reading Hegel. Jean Hippolyte probably puts it best when he says that the transition in a book like the Phenomenology from sense-consciousness to absolute knowledge is not a tracing of the history of the development of a person: the Phenomenology, nor Hegel's other works, have nothing to do with history in the sense of a history of man or of an individual consciousness or an individual element of spirit. What is at issue for Hegel always is how knowledge determines itself and forms itself. What are the possible forms of knowledge and, on the other side, the known that is necessary for that knowledge to maintain that form? this is always the question for Hegel. Thus when Hegel is talking about "sense-consciousness," or the "beautiful soul," he is not talking about a particular point of view and then exposing the presuppositions of this view that will be necessary for any progress of this point of view to appear, as Zizek says. Hegel is looking at constellations of the way a subject and an object relate to each other in a spiritual form of knowing, that is, in a mode of knowledge. On a larger scale, he is also investigating the developments of that knowledge itself, even beyond the distinction between subject and object or knower and known.

3. As the most "Romantic" of philosophers. Contra to this, I'd say it is better to think of him as only part-Romantic. As Heidegger shows, Hegel is first and foremost a return to Greek and especially early Greek thinking. Continually pointing to his contemporary, Napoleon, says very little when one starts to see the influence of the ideas of Aristotle on Hegel. Take the typical example of a "Romantic" notion of Hegel's: his remark that Napoleon was history on horseback. This idea originates in a conception of history as an expression of spirit, and the conflicts that states engage in as an expression of that spirit in right. Underlying this view is, more than any "Romantic" conception of the state, an Aristotelian and Platonic conception of the polis as the actor in history and the primary actor in bringing about happiness for a people. I don't mean to deny the Romantic in Hegel entirely of course: this remark on Napoleon and especially the book on the Philosophy of Right is an exceptional Romantic document, and really can only be understood in the context of Romantic German historicism and the fascination with the classical. What I am suggesting, however, it is is profitable (as Heidegger found out) to think of Hegel first and foremost as a reader of the Greeks rather than a philosopher reacting to his turbulent time. It makes the discipline of his thought come out more.