A quote from Terry Pinkard’s ‘Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the historical shapes of justice?’ pp.22-29 (references removed)
Self-Consciousness and Its Other Link to heading
Hegel gives an account of the way in which a kind of immediate self-consciousness living in a world of background involvements is pushed into a more reflective form by virtue of breakdowns in its own practices. To motivate this view, Hegel argued in the opening chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit that a straightforward stance of experiencing things which takes itself to dispense with any such self-conscious involvement is ultimately self-undermining. What he calls “sense-certainty” is the act of pointing something out, for example in such statements as “That one, over there.” In such “sense-certainty,” what looks like transparent reference to objects—a way of “taking” objects that need not rely on any “meaning” but only some kind of meaning-free reference to them—undermines itself in the way that it has to take into account the speaker’s or experiencer’s position. Hegel entertains the suggestion that this idea of a pure reference to objects can be made good in terms a purely perceptual encounter with objects (as distinct from a meaning-free, purely sensuous act of referring), but this ultimately fares no better. That kind of encounter also takes itself to grasp such objects in terms of a pure referring activity that is not mediated by meanings (but which nonetheless occurs against the background of a set of descriptions). In turn, making that move raises the ante about whether what we refer to as, for example, a “green” thing might be in reality a “red” thing, or that even perhaps when we call an act of gratitude a virtue, we are actually referring to a vice. Those doubts raise the even more unnerving possibility that even the whole world might be actually inverted on us, such that everything that appears up is really down, left is really right, green is really red, sweet is really sour, just is really unjust, and so forth. Behind even ordinary acts of referring, it turns out, there is a mode of our “taking” things one way or another and having to posit matters that are not immediately present in the sense-experience itself. Our apperceptive lives are already at work in what at first glance seem to be decidedly nonapperceptive activities.
Just as we are tempted to take our conscious lives as resting on the basis of some kind of meaning-free reference to objects, we are also tempted to take our self-conscious lives as our showing up for each other in what also looks like a completely transparent fashion and of our actions as guided by ultimate desires that cannot themselves be justified (that is, are not mediated by any further meanings). Each thinks of the other subject as a self-conscious other, as an immediate second-person to its first-personal reference. However, it is in each having the second-person as the object of their thought that each shows up as the second-person. That is, it is in my first-person grasping of “you” as your thinking second-personally of “me” that “you” grasp “me” second-personally, and it is thinking within that complex thought that we comprehend ourselves thereby as plural, as what Hegel calls “The I that is a We, and a We that is an I.” In such thoughts, in the actualized state of such self-knowledge, we do not swallow, as it were, the other person simply into our own viewpoint, but rather, as Hegel puts it, see the “other as other” while remaining at one with ourselves. We comprehend each other, that is, as each occupying a place in a concrete space of reasons that is occupied by human creatures in the natural order. That space is also a space of authority, of taking on the burden of justifying ourselves to each other and even to ourselves, all carried out within the idea of a rational human life and not just a rational life abstracted away from its animality.
Absent any other considerations, the possibility for a fundamental conflict is thereby established. If for whatever contingent reason, one of the self-conscious creatures takes himself to be unconditionally authoritative over some set of claims and the other disputes this authority, and when for whatever contingent reason, that first subject takes this to matter so much to him that he is willing to stake his life on it (and thus willing to kill for it), there is and eventually must be a struggle for recognition. Obviously, if both subjects die in the struggle, this problem is not solved. However, if one kills the other, the problem is once again not solved (since there is nobody to give the desire recognition). If out of exhaustion both call off the struggle, the problem is also not resolved, and the struggle for its resolution is merely postponed. In this context, when there is a ground-level, fundamental dispute over what reason requires and a decision must be reached, there is nowhere else to go but for one of them simply to establish by fiat some relation of authority. That, in turn, takes them both out of the abstract space of reasons and into the real world of conflict. In such a struggle, the only solution, absent any other considerations, seems to be for one of them, out of the fear of death, succumbing to the claim to authority on the part of the other. One becomes the master, and the other becomes the slave subservient to the master.
The irrational appeal to force on the master’s part arises out of the impossibility, at this stage of abstraction, of settling the argument about authority, when one of them stakes a claim to such authority that cannot at first be shared (and is willing to stake his life on it). However, there are two deeper strata of difficulty with the result of the dialectic of master and slave.
First, if all authority is recognized authority, then an infinite regress is set into motion, since one subject will have authority only if his authority is recognized by another subject, who in turn must be therefore recognized by yet another subject with authority, ad infinitum. If there are only two of them in the struggle, neither can claim authority, since it seems either that the regress cannot even get started (because there is no authority to start it), or that it just circles back and forth between two subjects neither of whom could ever acquire the authority to recognize the other one. If there were any mediating institutions such that an appeal to reason itself might be workable, the problem would be solved, but at this level of abstraction—in which one is discussing the concept of self-consciousness itself, not a particular institutionalized shape it must in fact assume—there are no such mediating institutions. If one of them simply has authority, then the regress does not get going. The struggle is over which one of them has it.
The second stratum of difficulty with the dialectic of master and slave goes to the heart of Hegel’s theory of subjectivity. Although the dialectic of master and slave is often taken to be aiming at the establishment of some kind of intersubjectivity, Hegel’s point in the discussion is slightly different. In the initial confrontation, there is no grand failure of intersubjectivity per se. At one level, the two combatants understand each other perfectly well. (They certainly share enough to be able to talk to each other, and each seems to understand the expression, “Submit or die!”) For that matter, each may even understand himself as having some version of what we might loosely call “ethical” requirements on him or herself. (For example, one or both may see themselves as ethically required to assert the superiority of their own “people” over those of the other.) Each is a form of self-consciousness, rooted in a world fraught with ought. Their struggle over who is to exercise the right to determine their own respective normative positions (such as who is to defer to the wishes of the other and who is to give orders) indicates that there already is a bit of a shared outlook on things—shared enough for both of them to engage in a struggle to the death. Their problem has to do with the way in which they relate to the order of thoughts under which they bring themselves as “subjects” in the first place.
Putting Hegel’s discussion into a different context may help here. Michael Thompson has distinguished monadic from what he calls bipolar judgments (or what we might better call “dyadic” judgments). This is not merely a surface distinction between judgments such as “He did something wrong” and “He did her wrong.” The latter type of judgments are dyadic—one wronged a specific other—and the former are monadic in that they apply to a subject conceived as a single individual standing in a relation to an order of thoughts. As Thompson phrases it, in a monadic judgment, “the other agent is something in respect of which either agent might ‘mess up’ instrumentally. All of the normativity in the case derives from the agent’s own ends, and is thus merely monadic.”
That the “normativity … derives from the agent’s own ends” does not imply that monadically conceived agents must be conceived as necessarily brutally self-interested or as indifferent to the suffering of others. Their own ends may in fact include norms such as “do not knowingly inflict suffering on other self-conscious agents,” but they are still just their own ends, monadically conceived, not specific duties to specific others. A system of law, for example, may specify all kinds of duties regarding others and declare that one has done wrong if one harms another in a specific way. What makes the action (legally) wrong in such a case is that it violates the legal norm under which the individual fell. A monadic order has more or less the structure of a game. In the monadic order, doing a wrongful or rightful action is just violating the rules—such as committing a foul or stepping outside the white lines—and only secondarily in having done something or another to an other. It is like having the moral referee blow the whistle on you for being offside or committing a foul.
As Thompson notes, like himself, both Aristotle and Aquinas seem to distinguish clearly between the kinds of monadic requirements imposed by such a legal system from those dyadic requirements imposed by a system of justice. To be sure, a legal system can also impose dyadic requirements, or it can achieve much the same end by a system of rights belonging to individuals but which are rights that can be monadically held. The point is that it need not do either, and yet it can still be a legal system. The distinction between the monadic and dyadic stances even appears typically in legal systems themselves in the matters of private law, such as contract (where one creates via legal rules a duty to a specific other and a corresponding right on the part of the other), and in matters of criminal law, where, as Thompson puts it, “the verdict of the jury, ‘Guilty!’, expresses a property of one agent, not a relation of agents. If another agent comes into the matter—if there is, as we say, a ‘victim’—it is, so to speak, as raw material in respect of which one might do wrong.”
In the imaginative encounter of the individuals who constitute the dialectic of mastery and servitude, the encounter is staged as that between two concept-using agents who jointly bring each other under the concept of concept-user, which means that they see each other as self-conscious agents. Each is a self-conscious life who at first takes his normative requirements to be monadic in structure. His commitments are his own and are mediated by the order of thoughts under which he places himself in order to be a knowing subject at all. He tells himself, as it were, that he is obligated to infer Q from P or that the evidence requires him to believe X. These are duties he owes but not to any particular person. It is by continuing to see himself as a monadic subject gripped by normative requirements but owing them to nobody in particular that he confronts the other.
Now, it does not follow from the assumption of such agents grasping each other as self-conscious concept-users that they also thereby have a sense of justice vis-à-vis each other—that they see the other as having the kind of status that would be given expression in some kind of dyadic relation, as in, “I owe it to her not to do that.” They may well have a concept such as, “It would be wrong for me to do that,” but that is a different matter. One can think of them as analogous to agents belonging to two different legal systems confronting each other and each demanding of the other that the other recognize—bestow or acknowledge the binding status of—the former’s own legal system as binding on himself. With each coming from two different metaphorical legal systems in a context in which each demands complete jurisdiction over the other, each is, as Hegel likes to say, an other to the other. Even though both legal systems might by chance share some of the same content—or, for that matter, they might by chance even have the same norm of not coercing other rational agents into compliance with one’s own legal orders—any such sharing would be accidental. It is not necessary for it to be a “legal system” that it have such a norm prohibiting that kind of coercion at all, and in the absence of such a norm, there will be conflicts that will be, from the standpoint of each, legally irresolvable. In particular, if both agents assert the full normative status of their own “legal system”—remembering that this is an analogy—against the other, there will be no way to adjudicate the conflict except by either abandoning the conflict or by appeal to force.
To the extent that one of the agents decides in favor of demanding full recognition for himself and his order of thoughts on the part of the other, there is a struggle which can also escalate into a struggle over life and death. This will happen when one of the agents for some reason demands the jurisdiction of his own order of thoughts—his own, so to speak, legal system—and is willing to stake his own life on such a demand. He demands recognition from the other as authoritative. The other, moreover, understands the demand. Both share a human shape of life, and they both understand what each is demanding and equally the seriousness of the demand. Each understands the other to be saying “submit or die.”
That at first creates the misleading appearance that they share an order of thoughts, that they seem to inhabit the same “legal system” or that they are really playing the same game. However, from within the demands made for recognition, what starts out as two “games” becomes deadly. Once one of them, for whatever reason—madness, rage, Alexandrian dreams of conquest—decides that the system within which he lives simply must be recognized by others not in that system, there is no way out of the conflict other than a struggle for recognition which quickly turns lethal. When out of fear of losing his life one submits to the domination of the other, a new relation, that of mastery and servitude, is instituted.
Although the struggle begins as each attempts to subjugate the other by bringing him into his own system of concepts, by virtue of engaging in the struggle, they have changed the context in which they operate. They were at first two individuals at odds with each other. Now they are two individuals whose subjectivity is part of a shared normative enterprise, except that this enterprise now involves servitude on the part of one, mastery and command on the part of the other. As part of a shared normative enterprise, they have also changed the shape of their respective self-relations and therefore their self-consciousness. Whereas before, they were part of two different enterprises, now they share an enterprise with a conceptual and existential conflict at its very core.
The master demands recognition from the other as master, but the master refuses to give in turn any such recognition to the other. The master demands recognition but refuses to give it. Logically viewed, the master demands a dyadic judgment from the servant, whereas he refuses to take up any such judgment for himself, relating himself only monadically to his own conception of what his order of thoughts requires. He also demands recognition from somebody who on the master’s own terms does not have the authority to bestow such recognition.
What Hegel calls “eternal justice” thus can, within the terms set by the master, not become manifest here. However, the servant, by being taken up into the master’s “legal system,” eventually comes to grasp, however inchoately, that his own status as agent depends on his taking up the dyadic form for himself. He is an agent with status only in the eyes of the master, and he comes to understand that likewise the master is only the master in terms of such a dyadic relation. The servant thus comes to a correct comprehension of the relationship, whereas the master acquires powerful motives for understanding it falsely. The servant comes to understand what he is doing and, as he does, to distance himself from his status as servant. The master, on the other hand, has powerful motivations for not understanding his deeds in a deep way at all.
Transparency of reference breaks down in both the observational cases and the cases of second-person reference. What seemed like a fully transparent reference to another subject (in the second-person) as standing in the same order of thoughts as oneself itself breaks down under the pressure of disputes about who or what really has authority to specify what that order really requires or what exactly is the order in which both are standing. What seemed like merely a brute desire for submission by the other is in fact a mediated desire for authority. That is the dialectic of mastery and servitude, and it provokes, as Hegel puts it in his later entries in his Encyclopedia, the formation of a common will which in turn systematically yields its place to a conception of “universal self-consciousness” (a term borrowed from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason), that is, of reason itself as constituting the order of thoughts with all human subjects as its members. It provokes, that is, recognition of a “space of reasons” as authoritative. However, that is a result, not a presupposition—an achievement, not something always already in place. It is also in its concrete form not fixed once and for all.
“Eternal justice” is not coeval with “subjectivity,” but it emerges as essential to the shape subjectivity takes in history. Out of mastery and servitude emerges a conception of a justice to which appeal can always be made, even if it often goes unheeded and often is repressed before it can ever find expression. How that actually works in historical development is yet to be shown.