logicp_writings/collectivist_theology/Master-Slave-Dialectic.md

Understanding the Master-Slave Dialectic of Hegel

Context

• From Phenomenology
• Explains how self-consciousness dialectically sublates into: {Absolute Knowledge, Spirit and Science}
• a priori to understanding the Science of Logic

Sublate/Sublation

From the German "Aufheben".

• To take up, lift up and carry.
• To higher level where its abstraction can be utilized. It is sometimes translated to mean negate or take away, but there are two ways in which to examine this. See following section.

Sublate Negation

As you take up an idea or concept, you'll be able to understand some aspect of it, which could be considered an abstraction of it, and this can be synthesized into some other action or observation. You may have negated some aspect of the original concept, and reduced it into a partial component, or even transformed the aspect of it into some new conception from which an abstraction can be more easily deduced, internalized, harnessed, and so forth.

In the other sense, to lift or take incurs the negation of having moved some object from its original place, but in doing so you are also engaging with that object, or carrying it across spacetime for a later point, preserving its potential for incorporation with that future event.

Recognition

Absolute knowledge can only be attained after self-conscious recognition of another instance of self-consciousness. Believes that the entirety of reality is present to self-consciousness, and that this state is reached in 3 steps:

1. Desire (directing outwards from self)
2. Master-slave (directed to an unequal other)
3. Universal self-consciousness (self consciousness recognizing self in another)

Myth

• Story of people meeting
• Self consciousness developed from consciousness
• Sublation into absolute knowledge, not through natural science, but through phenomenology as per a progression through history wherein a struggle for freedom leads to realization of self
• Hegel's language makes for multiple interpretations:
• a) self consciousness through human development
• b) self consciousness of a society in history becoming a nation realizing freedom

Master-Slave

Dual interpretation: The dialectic interpreted as an internal process occurring in one person OR as an external process between two people.

This occurs because Hegel asserts "end to the antithesis of subject and object" - What occurs in the mind also occurs outside Objective and Subjective unified through sublation.

Two natural beings meet and find self consciousness in one another's independent existence. They are aware of one another's pre-reflective, exclusionary disposition which prioritizes itself.

Each being perceives itself as truly self-conscious through certainty of oneself as a thinking being. This constitutes an incomplete self-consciousness, failing to see the other as equivalent.

Interplay of manipulating the other, whereby they see themselves reflected in the other. This yields a form of narcissism.

The self loses itself when finding itself as the other, which is also sublation in the sense of having reduced the representation of the other to its own self.

Reaction

When confronted with the other, the self cannot be immediately recognized. The other is like an ordinary object.

Death struggle

The fight, nearly to the death. If one dies, self consciousness is not achieved. This is an "abstract negation". Death is avoided by agreement and subordination to slavery.

One transformed into master as they do not perceive their identity as dependent on life, thus eliminating fear. The other is transformed into slave out of fear.

Enslavement

Recognition of the other gives each self-certainty required for self-consciousness. Relation of master/slave preserves the recognition of each other. In recognizing the other, one's own consciousness is made into an unessential object, but realization of this object constitutes certainty of self

Contradiction/Resolution

This state is not sufficient to achieve full self-consciousness. Slave only recognizes pain of death. Master's self-consciousness is dependent on the slave for recognition.

Slave creates increasingly sophisticated products for master from nature due to creativity, and sees himself reflected in the products, thus causing him to realize that the world is created by his hands. The slave is no longer alienated from his own labour and achieves self-consciousness, while the master becomes dependent on the products created by the slave, resulting in his becoming a slave.