Sunday, October 30, 2011

Mastery and Servitude

Mastery and Servitude

Now that Hegel has given his evidence of self-consciousness he goes to further justify self consciousness by attempting to prove Self-Sufficiency and as well as Mastery and Servitude. The sheer act of being a being, live, conscious and in and for itself alone does not totally prove his theory of the self-conscious. He states, in 179. “For self consciousness, there is another self consciousness: self consciousness is outside itself. “ Now here is where someone who is reading Hegel can find it a little baffling. Hegel just stated that self-consciousness exists in and for itself, as in the first line of 178.

Looking at it a different way, I might say IE an eye (mine or yours) can see outward and into the world but not back into itself without aid of lets say a mirror. And lets say by not being able to do so, I cannot actually prove there existence even though they might work in every sense. In this way as in Hegel’s argument, to know for sure I have an eye that can see but no clue as to the color mechanism by which they work isn’t enough evidence to there existence. I can’t pluck out the eye and look at it. If that makes any sense, a self-conscious being can and know he or she is real or ‘recognized’ as he puts it. Hegel separates the “I” conscious into the master and servant. In coming to realize the self and its existence and have a more emphatic look back into this other self and see its inner working.

Now being cognizant of being conscious and self-sufficient the two states of awareness must now carry on being both for itself as well being to itself, now quantifying the self- consciousness. Being both master and servant to ones own reality.

To what degree of accuracy can Hegel prove his method? How much does outward appearance play into defining self-certainty?

11 comments:

  1. I find Hegel’s description of master-slave relations interesting. I personally interpret Hegel as claiming that the slave is the truly powerful one in such a relationship. Many individuals would automatically assume that a master is more powerful then a slave, because the slave obeys the master. Outward appearance doesn’t necessitate the inner workings of a relationship. The slave is the more powerful in such a relationship because the master receives his master-hood only through the existence of the slave. If the slave negates his own existence, he negates the master’s existence as a master. Would it be safe it say that our essence is reliant mostly on the opinion and experience of others?

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  2. As we talked about it in class, it's amazing how dependent people are on this master and servant relationship. If we were always alone, we would constantly doubt our own self and forget who we really are. Without any recognition, the self becomes useless by what Hegel is implying. As mentioned before, even if we are in the worst kind of relationship, as long we understand what we are and what our place is, that takes priority over being alone. A good example is back during slavery. When slaves were freed, a large amount did not know what to do with themselves because they did not understand their own self outside of being a slave. Hegel is really on point with this section.

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  3. It’s interesting to consider how Hegel’s philosophy involves, or crosses over into, psychology. His discussion of self-consciousness in particular seems to involve a form of psychoanalysis. You must examine your unconscious consciousness and learn how you view yourself, others, and yourself through others, as well as how you believe others may view themselves through you. This leads to a psychological understanding of how you fit into the world that surrounds you and how you “desire” to be seen – what your role is and what you want it to be. The master-servant aspect of self-consciousness’ battle for definition of itself and (sometimes) domination of others, directly relates to the psychological aspect of how you instinctively interact with anyone you may meet to judge how they relate to you and what role you must play for them. When you examine the dynamics of this “dueling self-consciousness,” yours versus others, you gain a good psychological understanding of how you see yourself, others in relation to yourself, and how successful or unsuccessful you are at navigating the world of relationships. According to Hegel, this duel is always a battle to the death. Unfortunately the death of the other would mean the death of you, since they, for a large part, are responsible for recognition of and definition of yourself. As a wise man once said, “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.”

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  4. My take of Hegel's idea of mastery and servitude is this: The master likes to view himself as a subject in counter to the servant who he objectified as the "other" because this view is required for the meaning of his masterhood, yet at the same time in order for the master to be recognized as a master, he needs an equal consciousness, as in another subject, to view him as the master that he is. He can only understand himself as a master in the eyes of the not-master, the objectified servant, because it is through the eyes of the not-master that he becomes a master, but this leads the master to an awkward position where he must view himself through the consciousness of the not-master, which forces him to recognize the not-master as a conscious subject equal to him. This results in the master's realization that his identity is dependent on the subjugation/objectification of another consciousness, so in this sense he is worse off than the servant, because unlike the master's identity, the servant's identity as a worker is more than just the negation of the master's identity since the servant's identity is also dependent on the objects which he labors on.

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  5. As Bryan mentioned, there does seem to be an incorporation of psychoanalysis. What I wonder is if the servant is truly the one that benefits, then to see if psychology would affirm that. I have a hard time imagining it would considering Hegel's conception of the master and slave relationship to be such an extreme one where the master is always the master and slave is always the slave. What Hegel is getting at may be something too abstract to be empirically tested, but if it can be, it would be beneficial to avoid the pitfall psychoanalysis can sometimes fall into of disregarding empirical information for the purpose of maintaining a theory.

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  6. I'm not sure if I was the only one who saw a connection between this idea of master and servant and what we previously discussed with the dialectic relationship. In class we discussed that in order for one to be self-conscious; they need to see themselves from the outside and are heavily dependent upon the other person. When we discussed this concept the first thing I thought of was the dialectic; in the dialectic we said that in order to know what something is we need to know what it is not. I saw this as a form of recognition.
    Although I make some sort of sense out of it, I tend to agree with Tom, I can’t really see how Hegel could completely prove his method. The idea that only the servant serves to win in this scenario I still grapple with a bit.

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  7. The relationship between master and servant is ironic in the sense that the one who benefits the most [servant] is the one who we would assume benefits the least. As stated by Hegel, the master gets the benefit of enjoying the servants labor but the servant gets the greater benefit in the end. The servant gets the benefit of knowing how to fend for himself [self-sufficiency], meanwhile if the master were to lose his servant he would no longer benefit in anything not only because he doesn’t have the servant doing the dirty work for him but also because he cannot survive on his own.
    As Hegel describes, the servant cannot be a servant without his master and a master cannot be a master without a servant. In the end, the servant dominates over his master even though ironically a master should be the one to dominate over his servant. A servant dominates because even though he might lose his master, he will still have the basis of what he was as a servant [skills like physical labor etc.], meanwhile if the master loses his servant he doesn’t have anything that would categorize him as a master anymore. He must have the servant in order to be considered a master, and the servant can still be a servant even though his has lost his master.
    Both self-consciousnesses need recognition from each other in order to know one another’s position in relation to each other. But the servant can still be a servant without the title of a servant, while the master can no longer be a master without his servant.

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  8. I think that there is an abundance of proof for this master-servant relationship. And like Bryan mentioned, a good deal is found in psychology. I'm immediately reminded of a variety of psychological phenomena that illustrate the inter-dependence of self-consciousness. What is interesting to me is the speed with which this dynamic takes comes into effect: in a matter of days or even hours you can get psychological reactions like Stockholm syndrome. Or better yet if you are familiar with the Stanford prison experiment, you see how quickly a person’s sense of self-consciousness can be altered when it is given a different role in this dynamic.
    Also interesting to me is the way in which this concept is related to Hegel’s broader idea of all things being in relation. How far does this relation (master-servant) extend? Does it apply only to human beings? Is it the only kind of relation among human beings?

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  9. I see the relatrionship of the master and servant in that they both benefit in different ways but in the end the servant benefits more in reality while the master appears to have the most benefits. The master is not a master without the slave. Without a slave he loses his title of master and all the power that comes with it. His existence as a master depends on if the servant exists. If the servant vanishes so does his title and a part of him/her self. The master is too dependent on the servant. The master cant fend for himself without a servant while a servant knows how to take care of him/her self. The servant doesnt depend on the master, without the existence of the master there title may be loss but they can survive and the loss of the title is positive while its negative if the master loses his titile.

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  10. To go off of what Bryan and more specifically Brett have said: I do not think the master-slave relationship is as black and white or set in stone as it first sounds when you read Hegel. It is entirely possible, in my experience, to have human relationships in which both parties alternate between the role of master and slave. One may tend toward a particular role, but, it is rare that one is always and forever in that role. Even if one is, there is much to be learned in the form of other relationships. As Bryan said, we instinctively judge ourselves by way of what we can offer others and what they can offer us. Jon also brought up Stockholm syndrome and the Stanford experiment and, at least in these cases, I think we can certainly find evidence to support Hegel’s claims.

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  11. As Chris mentioned above, people without a doubt, continuously and desperately strive to obtain recognition and they would go so far as to subject themselves to “dominate or be dominated” dynamics of the master – slave relationship (a.k.a Love). The perplexing thing in regards to this relationship is the fact that Hegel glories to position of being the slave! Hegel makes sense of this by arguing that the slave is the one who puts forth the most work and is the less dependent one. By being in the slave, one learns the virtues of hard work and self-sufficiency. In that sense, the servant is the one who wins the struggle and thus gains the recognition. Take for example a family consisting of a workaholic father, a housewife and a child. The father corresponds to being the master because he is the breadwinner and the head of the household, but more importantly, he is the more dependent one in comparison to his wife. For being a workaholic, the father most likely finds the concepts of cooking, cleaning and other miscellaneous chores to be a foreign and incomprehensible concept. In that sense he is reliant on the wife to save his hide from destroying everything. For being a workaholic, he is hardly there for the child and in most cases, it would be the mother whom the child approves of. In that sense, the father has no recognition. In such master – servant relationships, which is the actual beneficial role? Who is the actual master? Who is the actual servant?

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