The Slave Mentality: Morality of Spirit in Hegel's Lordship and Bondage

Abstract

The master-slave dialectic which occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit represents a crucial role in his ambitious project to cure European culture. At the turn of the 19th century, Hegel perceived Western culture as one inflicted with a pathology of implicitly contradictory dualisms which cause man to be unhappy and divided in himself. In his Phenomenology, Hegel lays bare the philosophical horizon for a system of broadly scoped monisms that will transform man’s cognition and perception of the other through the development of consciousness. The section entitled Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage is critical to Hegel’s dialectical derivation of the development of self-consciousness, the moment when consciousness becomes aware of itself, when recognized by another. This derivation permits an interpretation of Hegel in such a way that a moral structure of relations between two self-consciousnesses can exist. What would form a moral dimension of recognition? Delving further, what would be the nature of this inter-subjective context of morality?The master-slave dialectic which occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit represents a crucial role in his ambitious project to cure European culture. At the turn of the 19th century, Hegel perceived Western culture as one inflicted with a pathology of implicitly contradictory dualisms which cause man to be unhappy and divided in himself. In his Phenomenology, Hegel lays bare the philosophical horizon for a system of broadly scoped monisms that will transform man’s cognition and perception of the other through the development of consciousness. The section entitled Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage is critical to Hegel’s dialectical derivation of the development of self-consciousness, the moment when consciousness becomes aware of itself, when recognized by another. This derivation permits an interpretation of Hegel in such a way that a moral structure of relations between two self-consciousnesses can exist. What would form a moral dimension of recognition? Delving further, what would be the nature of this inter-subjective context of morality?In this discussion, I claim that the morality of Spirit in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is the recognition of another as a self-consciousness. This recognition, in turn, allows self-consciousness to become certain of itself as a being-for-itself. I argue that recognition is only possible with the psychological state I name the “slave mentality.” In order to derive recognition from the slave mentality, I will identify two psychological states in the dialectic. The first will be the primordial psychological state of self-consciousness, which precedes the initial and inevitable engagement of one self-consciousness with another. The second psychological state will be one that is fashioned in the enslavement of one self-consciousness by another, which will occur after the life and death struggle. Afterwards, I move beyond the dialectic and present a third psychological state, which I will determine to be the final psychological state that is necessary for Spirit and, consequently, for morality.