Life and the two-fold structure of domination: subjugation and recognition in Hegel’s master-servant dialectics

ABSTRACT

In this article, the master-servant figure in the Phenomenology of Spirit is analyzed against the background of Hegel’s ontology of life as an embodied process. It is therefore argued that the theme of this figure is the question of domination in general, understood as a social relationship of subjection that can take on different historical configurations. Domination is understood as a relationship of disparity of status between dominant and dominated subjects. Therefore, domination would have an intersubjective aspect, as constituted by asymmetric relations of recognition, and a material one, as this disparity in recognitive status enacts the extraction of physical and symbolic resources from subordinated subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Life
• recognition
• domination
• master-servant
• subjectivation

Notes

1 See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 135, 149.

2 See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 261, 267.

3 See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 723. See on this Gregoratto, The Ambiguity of Love, and more in general, as for Hegel’s impact on twentieth-century French philosophy, Stone, Hegel and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, who focuses on the impact of Kojève’s influential interpretation of Hegel on Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, and Irigaray. For the reception and the transformation of the master-slave figure in Marxism and in twentieth-century French philosophy, see in particular Kuch, Herr und Knecht, 171–221.

4 See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 191–3. On this, see in particular Bird-Pollan, Hegel, Freud and Fanon.

5 See Lacan, The Mirror Stage, 1–7.

6 See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 170–7.

7 See Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 251–77.

8 See Irigaray, I Love to You, 105.

9 For the debate between Taylor and Habermas, see Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”, 25–73; 107–48.

10 See Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

11 See Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 53, for an analysis of manliness as a relational notion, and the dependency of both dominated and dominant on a sort of Hegelian dialectics of recognition.

12 See Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition.

13 See Butler, Subjects of Desire.

14 See, for instance, Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 53–63; Pippin, “What is the Question for which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition is the Answer?”

15 See, for instance, McDowell, “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self”; Stekeler-Weithofer, Philosophie des Selbstbewußtseins, 412–18; Gabriel, “A Very Heterodox Reading of the Lord-Servant-Allegory in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.”

16 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 104–5. Most readings assume that the willingness to risk its natural, material life, is decisive for self-consciousness, and constitutes a break with living naturalness: see for instance Pippin, “‘Naturalness and Mindedness”; Brandom, “The Structure of Desire and Recognition.” For a different line of interpretation, which insists on the constitutive relation between bodiliness and self-consciousness in the Phenomenology, see in particular Russon, The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Testa, Selbstbewußtsein und zweite Natur; Second Nature and Recognition, on the role played in this context by habit as second nature; on the role of living form in the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, see also Ng, “Life and Mind in Hegel’s Logic and Subjective Spirit.”

17 On the “finitude” of bodily individuals in the account of life, see in particular Judith Butler’s interpretation in Malabou and Butler, “You Be My Body For Me,” 629.

18 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 110.

19 Ibid., 108.

20 This point has been made in particular in the interpretation of this chapter offered by Terry Pinkard, who writes that “the kind of dependence and independence that are in question here have to do with the dependence and independence of points of view” (see Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 53). Pinkard on this basis reads the dialectics of recognition between master and servant as developing Hegel’s conception of the social nature of knowledge as something historical and institutional, but somehow neglects that this can be affirmed by Hegel only on the basis of the embodied character of self-consciousness. Pinkard hence reads this dialectics as a matter of epistemic and normative conflict between subjective points of view (56–7), which leaves out of the picture the fact that Hegel is here also dealing with power and material relations of domination.

21 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 405 and annotation.

22 See Hegel, System of Ethical Life (1802-3) and First Philosophy of Spirit, 231–5; Hegel, Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6), 106–10.

23 See on this Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 92–130.

24 See, for instance, Gallese, “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis,” 33–50.

25 See Mead, Mind, Self, and Society.

26 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 108.

27 Ibid., 109.

28 Particular emphasis on this moment of “letting go” (Freigabe) has been put forward by Ludwig Siep, Praktische Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus, 159–71.

29 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 109.

30 Ibid., 111.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 107.

33 See Todorov, Life in Common, 21–6; Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 219–46.

34 See Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §§ 433, 435 and annotations.

35 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 112.

36 As we have seen, only another subject that is truly independent, and recognized as such, will be able to recognize me as an independent individual: hence, treating the servant as living thing is an immanently contradictory recognitive act on behalf of the master.

37 For a discussion, in the contemporary debate, of the relation between the intersubjective and the material aspect of domination, see the debate between Axel Honneth, who assumes the priority of the first aspect, and Nancy Fraser, who argues that these are mutually irreducible elements (see Fraser and Honneth, Recognition or Redistribution). I would prefer to say that, in the model that I am reconstructing here, material relations enact recognitive patterns. I refer here to the distinction between schemas (intersubjective patterns) and resources (the materiality of social structures), which has been traced by the social historian William Sewell, and more recently re-elaborated by Sally Haslangher: see Sewell, A Theory of Structure, 8; Haslangher, Critical Theory and Practice, 21–3.

38 See Boltanski, On Critique; Lordon, Capitalisme, désir et servitude.

39 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 35.

40 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 114.

41 Ibid.

42 Interpretations of the master-servant figure such as those offered by McDowell’s “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self,” and Stekeler-Weithofer’s Philosophie des Selbstbewußtseins, get it right when they claim that the master-servant figure has an intra-subjective layer. Still, once they detach the process of subjectivation from its inter-subjective social context of formation, they lose sight of the specificity of the kind of intrapersonal relation that is being accounted for: a form of subjection, that is, an intra-subjective relation shaped by domination.

43 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 115.

44 See Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” 261–5, 273–6.

45 See, for instance, Gorz, Capitalisme, socialisme, écologie, 52.

46 See Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 31–2.

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Notes on contributors

Italo Testa

Italo Testa is Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Critical Theory at the University of Parma. His research interests include German Classical Philosophy, Critical Theory, Pragmatism, Embodied Cognition, and Social Ontology. Among his books: La natura del riconoscimento (Mimesis, 2010), Hegel critico e scettico (Padova 2002). He has edited I that is We, and We that is I (Brill, 2016), Habits. Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2020).