Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit”
Insofar as one’s identity arises and is defined only with other people, killing the others is self-defeating, for one loses precisely that source of recognition that one has come to require.
If either self-consciousness is to attain recognition, therefore, one of them must back down. This is not to say that in every such struggle one party will in fact back down, but that the logic of the situation requires that one capitulate. The one that does so shows thereby that it is not absolutely free after all. It is actually attached to life and afraid of death, and accepts that its identity is (at least in part) determined and limited by what is given to and other than it. This consciousness thus acknowledges that its identity depends on its own body and the realm of natural things around it, and in consciousness of this dependence it becomes the servant, bondsman, or slave of the other. The other self-consciousness, having succeeded in proving itself to be absolutely free and fearless, is recognized by the slave as his (or her) lord and master. The life and death struggle thus leads logically — if not always in fact — to the relation of master and slave (21).
This relation — Hegel’s famous account of which profoundly influenced Marx — is not intrinsic to social life. It is not to be encountered, for example, where there is genuine mutual recognition. It is the result of a struggle for recognition by two (or more) primitive self-consciousnesses, one of which — the slave– finally accepts what Tom Rockmore rightly calls the “deep truth” that “life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” and thereby lets the other enjoy the feeling of unencumbered freedom.
Desire in the Master and Slave
Desire, we recall, negates and consumes things; but it also runs up against the independence of things, and so fails to “have done with the thing altogether” and thereby to achieve complete satisfaction. By interposing the slave between himself and things, the master succeeds in separating these two sides of desire from one another. He leaves the slave to deal with the independence and resistant “thereness” of the thing, and reserves for himself “the pure enjoyment of it.” With the help of the slave, the master thus frees himself from the frustrations of desire and revels in the pure joy of consuming.
The problem faced by the master is twofold. On the one hand, though he receives recognition from the slave, the master does not recognize the slave in turn, and so cannot find true value in the slave’s recognition of him. The outcome, Hegel writes, “is a recognition this is one-sided and unequal.” On the other hand, the very relation that embodies for the master his absolute freedom — his dominance over the slave — also reminds him that in his freedom he is actually dependent on another.[…]
There is a further sense, however, in which “the truth of the independent consciousness” — the master — is to be found by looking to the slave: for in the slave we begin to see what the freedom and indepence to which the master lays exclusive claim are in truth. …
How, then does the slave prove to be free? First of all, through his labour: for even though he is forced to work by the master, his labor is nonetheless his own activity. Furthermore, unlike the master’s unchecked desire, which consumes the object and leaves nothing behind to mark its activity, labor enables the slave to give enduring objective expression to his freedom. The slave may not find himself recognized by the other self-consciousness, but he does find his freedom embodied in the object of his labour.
Equally important to the slave’s freedom is his fear of death. In the original life and death struggle, both self-consciousnesses seek recognition for themselves as “purely negative being” — being that is “self-identical” yet not tied to being anything in particular. …
Fear is sometimes understood by commentators merely to be that which forces the slave to labor in the service of the master in the first place. Hegel’s point, however, is more subtle. It is that fear alters the slave’s understanding of the meaning of labor itself.
The slave has to labor because he is subservient to the master. Through his labor, however, the slave discovers that he has the freedom to transform things himself and, indeed, to transform them according to his own will and intention. In working on things, he thus acquires what Hegel calls “a mind of his own”. The slave’s freedom, however, is the freedom to transform the particular things that he encounters: to turn this piece of wood into a chair or these ingredients into bread. Accordingly, the slave develops particular skills, depending on what he is required to work on. The freedom that he exhibits in his labor is thus still a limited freedom: it consists in the particular ability to give new shape to these particular objects, and bears witness to the fact that the slave’s consciousness is still mired in the world of given particularities (or, as Hegel puts it, that “determinate being still in principle attaches to it”).