The Stage

When Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit (2004) in 1807, he had one thing in mind. He wanted to provide an accurate philosophical and scientific process through which the mind comes to acquire knowledge of oneself and the world. Hegel, like Kant and Descartes before him, sets out to defend philosophy’s claim to universal truth. This claim of being able to grasp the meaning of being, of being something, and of being in the world, rivals the theological and scientific monopoly to such a claim. In doing so, Descartes, Kant and Hegel resort to demonstrating that philosophy’s claim to universal truth has a scientific basis.  In Phenomenology of Spirit (2004) Hegel underscores that any claim to truth is predicated upon the subject–object antagonism, a dialectical relation, through which self-recognition can be achieved. It is important to note that there are various ways in which Hegel’s dialectical subject has been interpreted. It can be referring to either the subject of philosophy or the human subject.  The process itself is multifaceted consciousness (sense-certainty, perception and understanding, which are analysed below, are stages that move towards consciousness), self-consciousness, reason and spirit. Each facet or step of this process accordingly reveals to the Other that its grasp of ‘being’ is ‘deceptive’ or ‘fictitious’ Butler explains in Subjects of Desire (1999: 21–24). This un-concealment, though, is not bounded, it does not take place within the parameters of each facet, but rather when one progresses from one facet to another, for example, from consciousness to self-consciousness and so forth. To put it otherwise, the process of becoming a subject identifies the fiction of each stage once it looks back from the stage it has arrived at to the one that it has left behind. It is evident, as Butler (1999) and Nancy (2002) point out, that Hegel is tracing a history of these fictions, whereby their unity can result in the Absolute (self-knowledge of philosophy itself, as itself and ultimately knowledge of the subject as itself and itself). Effectively, Hegel produces a moving subject or, to use Nancy’s term, a ‘restless’ (2002) subject. Butler uses the phrase ‘Substance is subject’ that is found in the ‘Preface’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit to suggest that ‘the “is” carries the burden of ‘becomes’ (p.18) exemplifying as such that Hegel’s subject is a moving subject.

One of the effects of this process is that it grasps each facet in negative terms, as what it is not. So, when the subject moves from consciousness to self-consciousness, to take one example, this subject realises that the way it understood the world in the first place was as it was not as it encountered it in the first instance.

The Trap

 One of the most impactful in philosophy, law, and the wider humanities, section from the Phenomenology of Spirit is that of the master and slave dialectic, located in paragraphs 176-196 of the book.  The section is often used to explain how we recognise ourselves (a necessary journey) of self-consciousness and others and moreover how a basic material interdependence between oneself and others is being established. Judith Butler’s interpretation of the master and slave dialectic in Subjects of Desire sheds the spotlight upon the role of desire in the road to self-consciousness. When two self-consciousness meet, in the figures of master and slave, they become conscious of who they are by recognising that they are not the Other self-consciousness that they encounter.  In the master and slave scene, the master recognises themselves as occupying the role of the master because they are not a slave, and the slave equally recognises themselves as not the master. This is a significant moment in Hegel’s philosophy Butler suggests. These two figures, master and slave, realise that their identification, is ecstatic, depending on the other and simultaneously they recognise that the Other is not an object, a mirror that it will merely reflect one’s identity.  The Other, also desires freedom or autonomy (p. 48-49). In realising that their desired autonomy may be jeopardised by the Other, they initially want to kill or destroy the Other. In the end the master or slave fail to enact this homicide, as they realise that in doing so, they will be simultaneously killing themselves, as they rely on each other for recognition. Their desire for life supersedes the desire for freedom or, autonomy or, as Butler aptly puts it the desire for life keeps at check any murderous act (p.52).  But ‘[domination], the relation that replaces the urge to kill, [and] must be understood as the effort to annihilate within the context of life’ (p.52). This last sentence is startling. It reminds us that by forfeiting murder, neither of the characters in our scene are free. The master realises that they are not free from their body -as if they were to annihilate the slave, they will be annihilating themselves-so instead of merely accepting that they are a body they instead outsource the body to the slave ‘to be the body that he endeavours not to be.’ (p.53). The slave in turn takes pride in their ability to give shape to objects, needed through their creative labour, and through labour they ‘become schooled in freedom’. (p.56) Note that the slave can only gain a partial taste of freedom, as only their desire to create objects is fulfilled, and not an overall all desire to be agents of their future. Still, nobody, nor master nor slave, Hegel writes can acquire freedom unless they risk their life. Though the slave seems to be in a worse position, as they are trapped in the spatial and existential situation that surrounds them. Still, the real lesson of this scene with these actors with unequal power, is that the desire for freedom or autonomy ‘can be integrated only in the desire that explicitly takes account of need’ (p.56). So, the interdependence that we are told that exists in the scene by both Hegel (p.112) and subsequently by Butler (p.50) can only arise if the actors recognise that desire and need are interconnected, and absolute freedom -freedom from material needs is illusory. This story of interdependence may be helpful in recognizing that nobody can be an autonomous individual, but is entrapping, as it retains the slave in the position of subjection (Hegel, 2004: 114). Even if this is an accurate description of the conditions of slavery, the notion of interdependence that emerges out of this scene does not provide us with many alternatives to this situation. It seems to suggest, that life, whether those of the slave or, the salary worker-Hegel at point a call the slave a worker (p.118)- is defined by work and mere survival. It suggests that the Phenomenology’s scientific inquiry into the acquisition of knowledge and recognition is underpinned by capitalist reasoning, whereby humans are seen only in terms of production. This type of interdependence is mired in capitalist colours.

The Escape to Equality

 While we may find Butler’s sharp interpretation of the master and slave scene helpful,  in as much as it provides us with an understanding that links desire to bodily needs- a body needs feeding, to sleep, to have water to be[i] – it is still peculiar that Hegel chooses the scene of the master and slave to reach to the conclusion that desire, and need are interlinked and that these characters are interdependent. The Phenomenology of Spirit was written well before the 13^th Amendment Abolished Slavery in the US in 1865 and before the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in the UK. Slavery was abolished in Prussia, Hegel’s birth country in the same year as the Phenomenology was published. We can speculate therefore that Hegel knew very well the conditions of slavery, and moreover of attempts by slaves to escape these conditions, to become free. We may wonder why Hegel does not focus on the lessons we can gain, regarding recognition and interdependence, from the scene of an escapee slave. We may also wonder, why the scene of the meeting of two self-consciousness is not fleshed out in a meeting between two trades people, or two factory workers. We may wonder therefore why this meeting takes place between two that are unequal. If the desire for life dominates over the desire to annihilate the Other, and reveals an interdependence between these two subjects, we must ask also how this secure life looks like? Does it offer the same opportunities, openings, material goods, and satisfies both protagonist’s desires? The slave will not have their desire to be free satisfied unless Butler writes, ‘[it relinquishes his shackles through disobedience and the attendant fear of death.’ (p.56). Fanon when engaging with Hegel’s master slave dialectic also stresses that freedom requires a risk of ones’ life , and also warns that the legal abolition of slavery, does enable the slave to form their lives in ways that get us away from this dialectic as they ‘assume the attitude of a master (Fanon, 1986:219). At this point we need to ask, if the annihilation of the Other is aborted, because as Hegel suggests that both master and slave realised that life is more valuable and that they are interdependent on each other for identification purposes, we may need to ask what kind of life is being secured, why call this relationship one of interdependence, and who benefits from it. Certainly not the slave, as their life remains in a bad romance, to borrow the title from Lady Gaga’s song. The slave attached to the master is unable to use their body in an agentic way, to build their own world. If we stick with the Hegelian story of the master slave dialectic, it is as if we are accepting that some must accept to have lesser lives, to merely survive. Moreover, it is as if we accept that interdependence means subordination to the landowner or more general to the one that owns the means of production. If we stick with the scene of the master and slave, it is as if we are saying that the only meaningful life is a survived life

Even if freedom is not absolute, even if we agree that we are not bounded entities and that we need the other for our recognition, there is something particularly problematic about out accepting that we can be recognised by someone that see one as a means to production, and as master negates their body by outsourcing it to the slave. Of course, as Butler warned us that the master cannot get rid of their body, they cannot live as desire without needs (p.53) but it is a struggle to see how the master does not already recognise their bodily needs, such as the need to urinate and defecate. It is difficult to imagine that one compartmentalises life, unless one was already ideologically conditioned to see things in isolation from each other. It is difficult to see how survival on its own can fulfil the needs for love and affections. If we accept this story, it is if we are accepting, that to escape from slavery, is an act of escapism, and not an act that reaffirms the possibility for a life outside this dialectic. An act of reclaiming the body and spirit, need and desire, for a new non-fragmentary life. It is this other life the fugitive slave reminds us that exists. It is also not the life lived by the master, who always sees through a kaleidoscope and fragmentary life. The escapee was not suffering from drapetomenia, as the racist Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright wrote in his report regarding diseases that ‘afflicted’ the slaves in the US[ii]. The escapee slave wanted out of the dialectic to form a different life.

Indeed, as Patricia J. Williams reminds us drawing on Frederick Douglass’s account of slavery’s violence and his attempt to escape his master that, the act of escape was in Douglass’s words akin to ‘stealing the property of his own body, a wrenching theft of “this arm,” of “this leg” (Williams, 2024: 3), reminding us that a person cannot be compartmentalised, fragmented and not be a whole[iii]. Frederick Douglass’s account articulates that the need to regain ownership of the body is constitutive of freedom, is also a vector of desire, desiring not be ‘amputated from generative categories like family, citizen, human being’ (Williams, 2024: 3). The need that the escapee slave was not just merely to survive, to live, or as the hand of their master, but to be the agent of their own body and destiny. In Williams account of the escapee slave Frederick Douglass, desire for freedom is explicitly interlinked with need-to be economically independent (p. 3), to regain his body so he can build and create the world he wants. The escapee slave shutters the illusion that the scene of recognition and interdependence in the master slave scene set by Hegel. There was never a scene of recognition, as the master would have already known that freedom cannot be freedom from need (body) as I already noted earlier, he is verymuch aware of his human body and needs. Hegel’s scene is like an optical illusion, trapping us into believing that the whole is impossible, that for the sake of survival we may need to forfeit the desire for freedom, that exchange freedom for life. The escapee slave, Frederick Douglass on the other hand reveals to us that the life that we submit to in the master slave dialectic is impoverished, bereft of spirit, agency, mutuality, and recognition. Nobody in that scene recognises anybody. No life is being saved. Or maybe what it is saved is a capitalist life, one that condemns us eternally remaining a means to an end.

If life is to survive, and grow into the potentiality that it can be, it requires a different mutuality. One where need and desire meet to recognise that both subjects are, body, affective, mind, water, mineral, blood, dreamer, believer, builder, creator and that they are both, like all of us also affected by surrounding scenes, like the environment. Only then perhaps we may be able to reverse the catastrophic bind that we find ourselves in. I am of course not suggesting that we should burn, abandon Hegel, but I am proposing that we stand away from him, escape from its dialectical shackles and see this move as a move to build with others a world different from that which constantly demands our subordination in exchange for survival.

Bio: Elena Loizidou is a Professor of Law and Political Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. @ElenaLoizidou3

Bibliography

Butler, J. (1999) Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New York: Columbia University Press.

Butler, J. (2020) The Force of Non-Violence, London, New York: Veson.

Cartwright, A. S. (1851) “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race’ Debow’s review, Agricultural, commercial, industrial progress and resources, v.11(3) pp.331-3.

Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skin, White Mask, London: Pluto Press.

Harney, S and Moten, F (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Study & Black Study, Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions.

Hegel, W.F. G (2004) Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, P (2024) The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law. London, New York: The New Press.

 Zappino, F and Casallini, B, (2023) “Fungorum more: The fact and value of interdependence”, Pandemos 1

[i] See Butler’s critique of interdependence as mere survival in The Force of Non Violence (2020: 67-102) as well as Federico Zappino’s and Burnella Casallini’s, (2023) “Fungorum more: The fact and value of interdependence”, Pandemos 1.

[ii] Samuel A. Cartwright (1851) “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race’

Debow’s review, Agricultural, commercial, industrial progress and resources, v. 11( 3) pp.331-3

[iii] An example of theoretical literature engaging with the figure of the fugitive is Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Study & Black Study, Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions.