Master & Slave, from "Self-Consciousness" The Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY

A. Independence and dependence of self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (§§178-96)
I am unsure what I have to add to what is already known about this very famous dialectical moment. Hegel opens with “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (§178). This is a crux of the issue, and is also the problem for those two beings who will emerge from this as master and slave. Each sees in the other a free subjectivity and thus what is needed to recognize their self as also being a free subjectivity. But the freedom of this other must be tested. At §186 Hegel reminds us that self-consciousness is “simple being-for-self” which must therefore exclude what is not itself. When two such (proto?)self-consciousnesses encounter one another each is “certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth” (§186). But this meeting is due to be conflictual because self-consciousness’s own “presentation of itself” (self-concept?) requires that it show “itself as the pure negation of its objective mode” (§187) that is, that it is not attached to life (recall that self-consciousness sees all that is external as irrelevant to its constitution when this chapter opened). Each then must prove to the other that life is not more valuable than their own free subjectivity. But when it gets down to it, one relents and submits to the mastery of the other. But, this “trial by death, however, does away with the truth that was supposed to have issued from it” (§188). The slave’s recognition is not enough, because the slave is not a free subject independent of the world of mere appearances. The master does not recognize the slave and recognition must be mutual. They “exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another” (§189). That these two are nonetheless two that are one is something that is foreclosed by both of them (§189) The master never has his self-consciousness recognized as he wished to have it be (§192) but the slave, by virtue of his labors for the master and his belief in the master as master embodies in the slave the “truth of pure negativity and being-for-self” that comes from the fear of death (§194). In time the slave overcomes the otherness of things upon which he labors and is able to create and learn from this process such that his self-consciousness is no longer opposed to this otherness (as it was to the otherness of the master) and as such the slave’s self-consciousness is more fully self-consciousness as a consequence of his servitude (§195-6).