Lord–bondsman dialectic
passage of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
The lord–bondsman dialectic (German: Herrschaft und Knechtschaft; also translated master–servant dialectic) is a famous passage in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. It is widely considered a key element in Hegel's philosophical system, and it has heavily influenced many subsequent philosophers.
The passage describes, in narrative form, the development of self-consciousness as such in an encounter between what are thereby (i.e., emerging only from this encounter) two distinct, self-conscious beings. The essence of the dialectic is the movement or motion of recognizing, in which the two self-consciousnesses are constituted in each being recognized as self-conscious by the other. This movement, inexorably taken to its extreme, takes the form of a "struggle to the death" in which one masters [beherrscht] the other, only to find that such lordship makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the bondsman, in this state, is not free to offer it.
This passage has been influential in a variety of disciplines. In particular, Alexandre Kojève's anthropological interpretation of what he renders the master–slave dialectic (French: Dialectique du maître et de l'esclave) has inspired 20th-century work on topics Hegel never pursued such as feminism and critical race studies.
Context
"Independent and Dependent Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage" is the first of two titled subsections in the "Self-Consciousness" chapter of Phenomenology. It is preceded in the chapter by a discussion of "Life" and "Desire", among other things, and is followed by "Free Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness".
Hegel wrote this story or myth in order to explain his idea of how self-consciousness dialectically sublates into what he variously refers to as absolute knowledge, spirit, and science.
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