I. Introduction
In the following essay I shall propose a reading of Lordship and Bondage that follows what Robert Pippin termed a ‘practical turn’ (Reference Pippin2011: 28). I shall further argue that this practical turn ought to be qualified as implying what I will define as Hegel's ‘first philosophy’.
I will begin with a reading that evinces the connection between the practical achievement of Self-Consciousness and the final constitution of Spirit as exhibiting a concentric relation—i.e. that Spirit will be revealed to have its centre in the practical achievement of self-conscious individuals and that this is relevantly anticipated in Lordship and Bondage. I will then offer a commentary on the notion of a complex desideratum as a way of attaining the concept of desire at work in the Phenomenology. This commentary will show that Hegel frames the satisfaction of this peculiar desire as a distinctive problem that will in turn necessitate a proper practical solution—hence, the genesis of practical reasoning. This argument shall lead us to the implicit critique of contractualism, which may (in the terms of Hegel's argument) function as an impediment to the proper philosophical understanding of reciprocity.
Finally, I shall offer a detailed reading of the Lord and Bondsman trope and interpret these two figures as two aspects of one self-conscious individual in the process of apprehending his or her practical nature, thus making explicit a tripartite structure of practical self-consciousness. I will read the figure of the Lord as the deliberative aspect of Self-Consciousness and the Bondsman as the instrumentality of the same Self-Consciousness. Following this initial characterization I will provide a close reading of the steps Hegel takes to show the unity of these two notions as constituting the possibility of individual practical identity and concomitantly the genuine possibility of reciprocity, providing argument enough against a mere formal notion of personhood. I will offer a reading of the three notions employed by Hegel: servitude, work and formative activity. This reading will lead us to the appreciation of the self-constitution of integral personality, which qualifies the initial orectic problem and functions as the beginning of an argument towards the practical attainment of Spirit.
II. Contextualization of the argument
To begin, I shall propose a reading of Lordship and Bondage within the ‘intrasubjective’ family of readingsFootnote 1—that is, I shall follow John McDowell's suggestion (Reference McDowell2013: 161–65) that a reading of Lordship and Bondage has to account for the intrasubjective character of the argument (Reference McDowell2013: 161). However, I believe that McDowell's reading does not properly account for the notion of desire at work in the text. Robert Pippin has persuasively tackled this oversight up to a point (Reference Pippin2011: 13–14). Nonetheless, I would like to extract a further consequence: by not being able to account for the complexity of the desideratum—i.e. that self-consciousness finds satisfaction only in another self-consciousness—McDowell's argument is not capable of understanding the genesis of practical reasoning which, as I shall argue, is the proper subject of Lordship and Bondage. As I will show, desire (überhaupt) is not simply indicative of a form of generality for negating otherness through consumption (McDowell Reference McDowell2013: 155); importantly, it is that the complexity of desire shows Self-Consciousness that his final desideratum cannot indiscriminately and monotonously be treated as a mere object of consumption and thus requires practical reasoning in order to address other persons as equally independent beings. Hence, my reading shall provide evidence for what Hyppolite termed the double task of the Phenomenology: to show individual self-conscious human beings the possibility of reconciliation in the form of Spirit, i.e. to apprehend reciprocity in the first person (Reference Hyppolite1979: 321).Footnote 2
Before commenting further on this notion of reconciliation, it is necessary to make an additional point concerning Pippin's reading. Although I do agree with his reading of the text as evincing a practical turn, I do not believe his argument provides all the relevant evidence for this very notion of practicality. I shall argue, furthermore, that this evidence is indispensable to understanding the project of the Phenomenology. Pippin is correct in claiming that Hegel's text does not support McDowell's paraphrase of the ‘struggle to the death’ as a mere allegory (Pippin Reference Pippin2011: 28). He is also correct in assuming that at this stage of the argument—contrary to McDowell's interpretationFootnote 3—what Spirit is, is already anticipated (vorhanden). Nevertheless, I shall put forward that the proper argument for the practical anticipation of Spirit is to be found in the intrasubjective tripartite structure of the Lord and Bondsman trope: i.e. servitude, work and formative activity. Thus, we arrive at this argument via the description of an intersubjective problem—that is, the initial failure of a self-conscious individual (because practical reasoning is in absentia) to comprehend another self-conscious individual. Hence, I shall argue that the proper appreciation of the practical turn implies the apprehension of the concentric structure of Lordship and Bondage. The initial moment of Lordship and Bondage builds up to an intersubjective problem: self-consciousness desires another self-consciousness, but without practical reason this desire results in failure. Failure, as the death of the other, will precipitate Self-Consciousness into its intrasubjective realm where it will finally apprehend the relation between reflection, self-constitution, and reciprocal recognition of others. This apprehension is the anticipation of Spirit as the possibility of reconciliation amongst self-conscious individual persons.Footnote 4
Hegel anticipates the theme of reconciliation at the end of ‘Force and the Understanding’. I will flesh out the inherently normative and practical idea contained in this material, since Hegel recalls this theme via an explicit comparison at the beginning of Lordship and Bondage. This notion of reconciliation—that is, the apprehension in the first person of human nature through reflection, and consequently the recognition of other persons as belonging to the same nature—shall be described in the argument that follows as Hegel's ‘first philosophy’. I shall use this term in the sense that the argument presented to us in the Phenomenology implies a definition of human nature (the in-itself)—the rationale behind Self-Consciousness is desire (überhaupt)—that has to be shown to the reader in the form of a phenomenological reflection (the for-itself).Footnote 5
Hegel's first philosophy is distinctively non-dualistic, in the qualified sense that it reinterprets the complex function of human desire as requiring practical reason as the source of a hierarchy amongst desires, as well as the principal of self-constitution of individual persons, and finally, as the condition of the possibility of reciprocal recognition of other self-constituting self-conscious persons.Footnote 6 For this reason, at the opening of ‘Lordship and Bondage’, Hegel attempts a critique of a Hobbesian form of contractualism, which amounts to (in Hegelian terms) a false picture of human nature.Footnote 7
I shall argue that this critique of the Hobbesian picture of human nature, with its concomitant contractualism, and the apprehension of the complex desideratum combine to offer us the rationale for interpreting the conspicuous absence of fear in Hegel's allegory of life-and-death struggle.Footnote 8 The absence of fear is thus representative of a Hobbesian reversal. In other words, while fear in the Hobbesian account remains the sole motor of human action, Hegel will attempt to recover practical reasoning as the proper motor for action, reinterpreting fear as respect for a deliberative, rational exercise. It is relevant that we appreciate Hegel's rhetorical choice for couching this important idea in a Hobbesian vocabulary; Hegel rescues the notion of fear from the circumstantial and particularistic use we find in Hobbes and applies it to fear as respect before the deliberative act, personalized in the allegorical figure of the Lord, as the beginning of wisdom.Footnote 9 It is only after a proper interpretation of this notion of wisdom that we can speak about a practical turn, since it is only at the end of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ that Hegel concludes his argument concerning the practical nature of Self-Consciousness.
III. The concentric structure of the argument: the intersubjective problem and the intrasubjective requirement
It is helpful to imagine the material contained in ‘Lordship and Bondage’ as forming two concentric circles. The reason for this suggestion is not merely for ease, but rather to make a philosophical point explicit: Geist, though different from Self-Consciousness, shares the same centre—namely, the self-conscious individual person.
The relationship between both circles can be tentatively described as a representation of the relationship between reciprocal recognition (i.e. the ‘intersubjective’ problem) and self-recognition as self-constitution (i.e. the ‘intrasubjective’ requirement)—that is, only individuals who have grasped the notion of self-constitution are able to understand other individuals in turn as self-constituting themselves. This process of reciprocal recognition will issue in Geist as concrete freedom.Footnote 10
Hegel introduces the figures of Lord and the Bondsman with an important qualification regarding the concept of recognition. One self-conscious individual is in and for itself only when it is recognized by another as being in and for itself (PhG: ¶178).Footnote 11 At the outset, this qualification is meant to exclude the brutal unresolved desire represented in the life-and-death struggle, but also purely formal, non-philosophical, or contractual forms of recognition.
This full-blooded sense of recognition implies that a self-conscious individual must apprehend his own self-constituting nature—that is, how he becomes through his own acting in order to reciprocally apply this knowledge of what he is in and for itself to another self-conscious individual. Hegel will actually provide a phrase for the achievement of reciprocal recognition, later in the ‘Actualization of rational self-consciousness through its own activity’: ‘I perceive in all of them the fact that they know themselves to be only these independent beings, just as I am’ (PhG: ¶351). Following this, the first-personal requirement for full-blooded reciprocal recognition should be addressed—namely, that they have the same kind of knowledge of their independence, which is to say, the concrete freedom that I also have.
Hegel calls this capacity to know oneself as self-constituting oneself freely the concept of the ‘unity of self-consciousness in its duplication’. This notion of duplicationFootnote 12 represents the duplication of Self-Consciousness into two singular aspects that constitute its nature: the Lord (or one's deliberative capacity) and the Bondsman (one's instrumental capacity). The unity of these two aspects represents an autonomous agent—that is, one who is capable of acting in accordance with one's ends. The development of the concept of unity of the will issues in the possibility of accounting for shared ends that independent agents recognize as reasonable—namely, as a form of compatibilism between concrete personal freedom (not abstract self-sufficiency) and the dependence that consists in sharing ends that are naturally collective (but that do not override the individual). This latter aspect is extremely important. It implies a sort of reflexive-distance between individuals that Hegel describes as a form of opposition in one of his anticipatory and tentative definitions of Spirit: ‘this absolute substance which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I”’(PhG: ¶177).
There are two textual moments where Hegel describes the concentric structure of his argument as a way of attaining what he calls the pure concept of recognition (PhG: ¶185) and what has been suggested here as the full-blooded sense of reciprocal recognition for which his argument strives. First, Hegel is careful to point out that, given the shortcomings of a merely formal way of accounting for reciprocal recognition, one must note ‘how the duplication of self-consciousness in its oneness, appears to self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶185). This passage suggests a particular mode of presentation: the need to attain the cognitive gain in the first person that will allow—in the constructed gedankenexperiment of the life-and-death struggle—a concrete form of resolution. Hegel is clearly aware of the difficulty of the subject and the form of the presentation. He begins by suggesting that the varied moments of this philosophical gain must be kept apart without forgetting that the end of this first-personal cognitive gain is the proper revelation of the social nature of reason.
Second, Hegel describes the two opposed shapes of consciousness—independent and dependent—as existing before a unity has been achieved through reflection right at the introduction of the Lord and Bondsman section (PhG: ¶189). The requirement for this first-personal reflection is brought about by the patent failure of the life-and-death struggle to give a proper moral and existential satisfaction before the complex desire of one self-conscious individual for another self-conscious individual. The gain that Hegel motivates, which will give Self-Consciousness the necessary materials for satisfying its desire, demands the tripartite structure represented in the Lord-Bondsman trope. Both recognition-of-the-Lord and work are essential to the reality of an actual person. This reflection will make it possible for Self-Consciousness to face another Self-Consciousness without treating it as a mere object, as is the case in the life-and-death struggle.
IV. The apprehension of the complex desideratum
IV.i. Fluidity: repression and submission: orectic solipsism
The stage is now set for a different kind of problem. Self-Consciousness cannot disappear within the reality it comprehends. In order to stand the ground of its independent willing within the vast flux of life, Self-Consciousness will have to enter the totality of life in order to understand the threshold of dependence on the world and others around him. In essence, Self-Consciousness will have to comprehend what kinds of ends it can have, and how it can give these ends a practical reality. Self-Consciousness has to give itself reality and preserve itself within the totality of life, which Hegel calls fluidity—that is, the autotelic circular movement of biological life. Therefore, it will apprehend itself as an individual life, which will imply a distinct kind of movement, a prospective movement or a teleology.
This prospective aspect can be found first in the phrase: ‘life points to something other than itself, to consciousness, for which Life exists as this unity, or as genus’ (PhG: ¶172). Life as genus is being rescued here from the immediacy of simple biology. Avoiding this simplicity affords consciousness the understanding of the prospective character of Life as it points to something other than the mere preservation of biological life, as the genus common to its several species. An intuition concerning Spirit is already at work here, but this intuition still has to be understood in consonance with the proper derivation of the concept of end, since there is a distinction between the anticipation of Spirit and its constitution—that is, the delineation of compatibility between life and deliberation that points away from its immediacy. This latter thought is, of course, a paraphrase of the idea that Self-Consciousness will learn: ‘life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness’(PhG: ¶189).
Hegel is careful to present the concept of desire as possessing two different aspects, like two sides of the same coin. Therefore, the argument begins with the enumeration of these two moments, that are, at this particular stage of the argument, rendered as a kind of orectic solipsism. These two moments are a way of working the notion of self-preservation into the proper conception of desire that includes other individuals as essential to this peculiar form of preservation. In other words, it is Hegel once again pointing out the fact that to attain the notion of Spirit is to apprehend our reciprocal nature. Nevertheless, this first characterization of self-preservation is minimal.
Hegel describes the initial position of Self-Consciousness, upon entering life, as a form of repression (Unterdrückung) of the diremption caused by having desires directed towards something that is other—for example, consider the paradigmatic case of satisfying hunger.
This initial position, however, is unstable. It will not afford Self-Consciousness any permanence (Bestehen) (PhG: ¶171) as someone, or as forming the world and itself. Consider hunger and the apple, this would be equivalent to hunger being repressed by the destruction of the eaten apple; thus, like the eaten apple, the feeling of hunger no longer exists. Of course, the flux of life remains at arm's length, since the feeling of hunger is recurrent and with it is the basic structure of desire (i.e. the desire and the object it consumes). The repetition of this simple form of repression is, nevertheless, untenable, even at a basic level of desire, since it has no prospective direction. The constant attempt to suppress this diremption will conclude only with the cessation of this individual life. Movement here has a monotonous aspect: it is the incessant satisfaction of natural emerging desires that cause change in the individual who preserves itself, relating to the world only through consumption.Footnote 13 This monotony is far from the notion of satisfaction Hegel wants to define, since basic consumption implies a sort of negation and destruction irreconcilable with reciprocity, which is the proper genus of life for a person (satisfaction in another self-consciousness (PhG: ¶175)).
The argument thus introduces a further specification, the notion of forming (gestalten), which possesses both prospection and a practical direction of fit towards the world. This specification will, in turn, afford the proper connection between enduring permanence and satisfaction; and this nexus is the first, albeit dim, intuition of a teleologically structured activity.
Hence, the following moment is a form of submission (Unterwerfung). Self-Consciousness will have to position itself within the continuity of the process of life, which in turn, as otherness, includes all and everything, in order to become an individual—that is, to become someone or, as Hegel puts it at this reductive level, a member. This peculiar act of forming, which characterizes the act of submission is no longer the mere immediate being moved by, say, hunger in order to repress it. Now it assumes the guise of a form of production that submits, for example, the original form of the flesh of an animal to the form of a given cut of meat. Submission in this way allows individuality to consume the whole of nature in an act of self-preservation, as a possible permanent system of satisfaction of desires. Submission is therefore the act by which Self-Consciousness is described as comprehending the nexus of the process of life as a whole and individual life as a movement dependent upon and continuous with the entire process of life.
In other words, this argument amounts to a first intuition of Spirit as placed within nature. It is a qualification of the preservation of life as demanding prospection and not merely an arbitrium brututum. Hegel is, at this moment of the argument, anticipating something like a practical impingement for Self-Consciousness: the motionless tautology ‘I am I’ (PhG: ¶167) unfolds in the sphere of life, as Hegel puts it, and points to something other than itself (PhG: ¶177)—that is, to something future-directed and outside of the mere immediacy of repression.
At this stage, Self-Consciousness has made a substantial gain. The initial diremption between Self-Consciousness and fluidity, described as a passive separating out (PhG: ¶171), has now led to the intuition of independence through the future-directed act of submission. This is to say that Self-Consciousness knows that it shapes nature; thus it submits nature to a particular form in order to survive.
At the conclusion of the movement of submission, Hegel introduces an important qualification: the individual keeps itself alive, as Hegel says, at the expense of nature. This is how it affords the feeling Footnote 14 of a self-given unity (PhG: ¶171). This feeling of a self-given unity is a variant of a kind of orectic solipsism. This is because the complex desideratum that will include other Self-Conscious individuals—the satisfaction in another Self-Consciousness—cannot be sustained at the expense of others like Self-Consciousness. Of course, it is precisely in this solipsistic mode that Self-Consciousness will first meet another equally independent Self-Consciousness in a life-and-death struggle. The reason for this fight is that neither has the proper self-knowledge of their self-constitution, which will issue in the reciprocal mode of knowing each other as independent. Therefore, they are moved to each other by a desire for each other, which they try to resolve on the model of submission just described—that is, by trying to make satisfaction permanent (a permanence which will eventually only be attained through work).
IV.ii. Loss of uniqueness and projection: the derivation of reflexive-distance
The previous section uncovers the non-immediacy of the concept of desire. It begins with an account of its etiology, but does not reduce it to that particular etiology. Even as the mechanism of submission approaches a proper teleology, it is still blind with respect to relevant differences in its objects.
It is evident that this blindness is an impediment to the apprehension of Spirit. Self-Consciousness has to go beyond the simple difference of itself as desiring and an object of desire. It will be driven by an orectic pull, not only to a mere object of consumption, but to others like itself. Hegel describes this movement as a kind of loss of uniqueness. The significance of this loss is tremendous: Self-Consciousness must step outside its immediate relationship with life, consequently leaving behind the unsatisfactory orectic solipsism.Footnote 15
Hegel will now begin to conceptualize the identity behind the idea of another Self-Consciousness. In this sense, this loss is the acknowledgment of others like oneself, even though the proper conception of another self-conscious individual is inaccessible at this stage of the argument. Hence this sort of loss is initially a structural requirement for the presence of others of the same kind, even though the materials needed to impose a rational limit upon an unfettered vicarious apprehension have not been determined yet.
Hegel divides the apprehension of another self-conscious individual into particular phases. Let me begin by both identifying these textually and offering a gloss of the Hegelian terms: first it begins with the merely vicarious apprehension of another (‘for it finds itself as another being’ (PhG: ¶179)); it continues with the apprehension of another autonomous agent like me (‘the other independent being’); which finally leads to the full-blooded reciprocal apprehension of both of us as autonomous agents (‘it receives back its own self’ and ‘lets the other again go free’ (PhG: ¶181)).
The reflexive distance of the original loss structures the movement described above, and will afford the constitution of Spirit the proper notion of opposition. This is part of the overall argument of the Phenomenology—namely, the tendency towards actuality—and hence the constitution of Spirit cannot prescind from those individuals who apprehend it.
Nevertheless, the culmination of the argument in the acknowledgment of the freedom of another lacks the proper self-recognition—brought about by the role of action in the movement of self-constitution. In other words, this is Hegel's presentation of the difficulty for which the Lord-Bondsman relationship is the solution. This receiving back of its own self is the distinctively first-personal gain that will limit the conception of another self-conscious individual as mere projection. The act of a principled self-constitution will thus afford an individual self-conscious person an internal perspective of another self-conscious individual. This is something that can be tentatively described as follows: he has constituted himself through his own action in the same form I have through mine.Footnote 16
Before this stage, however, Hegel describes a second moment that makes evident to the reader the cognitive lack felt by a potential self-conscious individual in having any substantive conception of another that is not merely a kind of reductive projection. The loss of uniqueness is the necessary first step that leads Self-Consciousness to a bare projective conception of the other. As such, Self-Consciousness does not ‘see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self’ (PhG: ¶179). This lack of essentiality is the obvious impediment to a genuine reciprocal recognition. Nevertheless, to overcome this mere projective vicariousness, Self-Consciousness will have to undergo the intrasubjective process that will make it possible to achieve genuine identity, allowing it to understand the genuine identity of another self-conscious individual (as in Hegel's phrase ‘individuality that takes itself to be real in and for itself’).
In what follows, Hegel properly develops this idea by giving it its proper practical content. The philosophical explanation of the notion of practical reality will show the mode by which a determinate agent can retain genuine, contentful reflexive distance from another. This will impinge, however, on Hegel's next step—namely, the qualification of a contract as inessential, which in his argument amounts simply to the formal possibility of individuality and a non-philosophical conception of cooperation.
This has the following consequence: Hegel's argument establishes recognition as structured by the essential character of a reflexive distance the individual members have to keep towards each other, and this distance can, essentially, only be obtained by Self-Consciousness deriving the concept of personal identity from its own action. We may also put this course of argument under the guise of its intended result: the reflexive distance Hegel is working out is the possibility condition of the ‘I, that is We and We, that is I’ (PhG: ¶177). Accordingly, the reflexive distance at work will issue in the constitution of Spirit, provided that several persons are capable of understanding the compatibility between their autonomy and their dependence as members of a species (provided they are able to perform ‘universal work produced by the action of all and each’ (PhG: ¶439)). Hegel then avoids the idea of conflation between the I and another (as in another person) to retain a modicum of an individual practical deliberative capacity (PhG: ¶186). Doing so thereby affords Hegel the possibility of further conceptualizing the moral idea of freedom in the second part of Chapter IV.
All of this has set the reader on the path for the life-and-death struggle since the reflexive distance worked out so far is still a matter of immediacy. Further, in an immediate stage, and before undergoing the intrasubjective requirement of the Lord-Bondsman relationship, Self-Consciousness has only one way to resolve the desire that points beyond immediate life and to another person: the violent collision with this other self-conscious individual. The proof of freedom can only be won by this initial violent collision (PhG: ¶187).
Eventually, the suppression of this form of immediacy relies on the cognitive gain effected in the Lord-Bondsman section. The Lord and Bondsman relationship is the allegorical representation (the attainment of the for itself) of the inevitability for any given actual person, while moving in accordance with its nature (the in itself), to give herself identity as an agent—what shall be conceptualized under the rubric of Bildung—according to ends autonomously given—that shall in turn be conceptualized under the rubric of ‘fear of the Lord’. Before embarking on an interpretation of the life-and-death struggle, it is helpful to consider a few other passages that constitute a critique of a merely formal or contractual solution to the problem of Spirit.
Hegel attempts to clearly render that this contractual solution represents a false startFootnote 17 for the attainment of Spirit. And his aim is to maintain the attainment of such a problematic throughout the Phenomenology. The form of this argument runs as follows: the contractual solution overrides the specific and personal differences between agents. It overrides the actual content, which the reflexive distance made tangible. This is a fundamental step in the apprehension of the concept of recognition since recognizing another person as such will imply that this other person has given herself, through her own action, an identity to be recognized.
This form of compatibilism between becoming an autonomous person, and the unavoidable character of dependence as Spirit, is the basis of Hegel's notion of recognition. Therefore, his notion of recognition cannot, in the argument of the Phenomenology, remain merely at a formal stage. Unlike the notion of a person, the notion of an independent Self-Consciousness (PhG: ¶187), as Hegel maintains, is indeed obtained only by risking one's life. This qualification matters greatly, and it is no small task to understand the contrastive forces at work at this moment in Hegel's argument.
V. Contract as a first non-philosophical intuition
This description of a contract accommodates the reflexive distance, which has already been worked out. Hegel's presentation of this contractual theme is, to say the least, gnomic. There are, however, a few crucial elements that should be described here: firstly, (a) the externally mediated subjectivity. Secondly, (b) the explicit comparison to the play of forces.
It is relevant that the formal solution Hegel criticizes represents a wider movement in his thought. The most obvious description of this progression—from a merely reified formal conception of collective action, toward an explicit philosophical conception—appears in the argument of the Philosophy of Right. As will be outlined here, this moment of the argument in the Phenomenology is exceptionally compressed. It is necessary to unpack it, however, since otherwise it would be difficult to interpret the explicit contrastive character in the passage: ‘the individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶187). Furthermore, the contrastive character of the statement can only be comprehended as a hierarchical progression toward a proper philosophical apprehension. In turn it will reveal the real source of normativity, the independent self-conscious individuals, constituting Spirit.
This represents the motivation behind Hegel's project and the very reason for the intrasubjective argument. The source of a normative form of life has to be described phenomenologically as a primitive and constitutive element of all self-conscious individuals. Hegel represents this problem of identification and repositioning of normativity using the comparison to the previously introduced notion: the play of forces, in itself a reified form of explanation. Furthermore, the first description of a contractual modus vivendi is characterized as merely formal and devoid of any actual content (in the sense of Wirklichkeit).
V.i. The externally mediated intersubjecitvity
The contrastive force in the statement concerning the individual-who-has-not-risked-his-life must be carefully considered. To anticipate the argument briefly: Hegel's concern, and the rationale behind the contrastive statement, is that a contractual notion of recognition will lead to nothing more than a dislocation of the source of normativity that structures human life to an external reified form. As a matter of fact, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel considers this form of hypostatizing to be a bad trait of character:
Since, in personality, particularity is not present as freedom, everything which depends on particularity is here a matter of indifference. To have no interest except in one's formal right may be pure obstinacy, often a fitting accompaniment of a cold heart and restricted sympathies.Footnote 18
However, this formulation from the Philosophy of Right depends on the cognitive gain effected in the Phenomenology (and actually refers to it in the argumentFootnote 19). In order to reach the point concerning the dislocation of the source of normativity from the self-conscious individual to the notion of reified formality, Hegel's presentation of the problem will be discussed in detail.
Hegel's formulation of a contractual outlook reads as follows:
Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both. (PhG: ¶182)
This statement is then followed by a comparison: ‘In this movement we see repeated the process which presented itself as the play of Forces, but repeated now in consciousness’ (PhG: ¶184).
At this point, the argument positions this reflexive distance as a condition for the possibility of entertaining collective ends. The conditional character of Hegel's statement—that what is to happen can only be brought about by both—is one more anticipation of Spirit. Nevertheless, Hegel does not recognize an arbitrary and schematic possibility of deliberation on collective ends to be the solution for the peculiar orectic problem—that is, the formal solution does not bring about the satisfaction of Self-Consciousness in another.
Hegel rehearses a similar argument in the Philosophy of Right concerning the formation of the state.Footnote 20 In that text, his point concerns the reification of the rational end of human life into what seems like an arbitrary contractual act of the will. As in the passage quoted above, the problem of normative dislocation assumes a pathological aspect that can only be cognitively rectified by a proper philosophical apprehension (namely, the rationality of belonging to a state is contained in the normative nature of every person).
Hegel's vocabulary accounts for the necessity of establishing, in the first person, a correct outlook on what a person is—i.e. agents, acting according to their own ends in the world, alongside others like them with whom they share some ends—is the reflection into a unity (PhG: ¶189). The significance of this reflection, which Hegel describes as an achievement, will facilitate understanding the next step in the concept of Spirit, which implies a genuine reciprocal apprehension. Nonetheless, in order to achieve full-blooded reciprocity, Self-Consciousness cannot merely recognize and be recognized, or recognize each other mutually as recognizing (PhG: ¶184). This is to say that schematic identical acts of the will will not suffice: Spirit demands a robust conception of recognition, i.e. recognizing someone, say, as good, or bad.
Hegel is careful to qualify his initial presentation of the problem as being analogous to the play of forces. In this way, the argument stays on track to re-establish concrete agency as the source of normativity. The scope of this problem is certainly very wide. Despite the difficulty, Hegel advances this form of critical reflection on the anteriority of a reified notion, not only to re-establish the source of normativity as issuing from Self-Consciousness, but also to put forward an admittedly non-Hobbesian conception of social life.Footnote 21 It is at this moment in the argument of the Phenomenology that there is a firm rejection of fear as constituting an external source of authority in the person of a Leviathan. There is, at this stage of the argument, an explicit first-philosophy at work: the life-and-death struggle is a concrete expression not only of a desire of one self-conscious individual for another self-conscious individual; indeed it is the absence of fear of one self-conscious individual before another.
In the argument Hegel will soon present, fear will emerge within Self-Consciousness as rational and as capable of being the source of normative authority or, as Hegel maintains, the beginning of wisdom. This will be the conclusion of the ‘dislocation’ argument advanced earlier: the dislocation of the source of normativity from the external reified notion back into the self-conscious individual person. Nonetheless, and before addressing this particular notion of fear, which contains Hegel's first philosophy, it is relevant to consider the comparison to the play of forces.
V.ii. The comparison to the play of forces made explicit
Hegel establishes a direct comparison: ‘in this movement we see repeated the process which presented itself as the play of forces, but repeated now in consciousness’ (PhG: ¶184). He points out the need to resolve the reified character of the play of forces—or, even better, its character as a permanent beyond (PhG: ¶144). Nevertheless, the repetition is qualified: it is now in consciousness. And this qualification represents the need for consciousness to apprehend itself as the source of normativity. It is important, at this point of the argument, to remember the particular transition effected in ‘Force and Understanding’, since Hegel presents this argument as an extension of that transition—that is, the transition from the play of forces to the realm of laws (PhG: ¶149). This transition is only effective after the understanding has apprehended itself as the real object of the investigation (PhG: ¶148), after the dissolution of the syllogism (PhG: ¶145). The introduction of a manifestly normative notion—the notion of law—is strictly concomitant with the characterization of the active aspect of the understanding as something that explains the super-sensible world in the form of laws. The inhospitable character of the absolute flux, Hegel's image for utter contingency, is converted by the understanding into the tranquil image of laws (PhG: ¶149). This image is yet to be disrupted, once again, by the introduction of the inverted world.Footnote 22
Hegel refines this notion of the understanding as the source of normativity over the course of his argument. He does this firstly through the notion of indifference, that force as such is indifferent to its law (PhG: ¶152) (the sort of indifference Self-Consciousness cannot have), and secondly, in the peculiar extension of the notion of law to cover the moral case of crime and punishment (PhG: ¶159).
The notion of indifference plays a crucial role in the refinement of the normative. Hegel, after characterizing electricity as indifferent to its being—or, as indifferent qua force to its law—goes on to say that a further expression of this indifference is the normative force of a definition. The term ‘normative’ appears here because Hegel's argument concerns the attempt, by means of preparing a definition, not to regress back to the pure unrest of the play of forces (PhG: ¶152). Of course, the argument—and this will be the very point of the extension of the notion of law to morals—concerns the topic of thinking the nexus between meaning and the perceived world; in other words how the normative notion of law affords a description of the world.
Hegel will describe crime and punishment as a form of reconciliation. He explicitly considers punishment qua nomos as present in the actual crime qua physis, much like the play of forces qua physis is present in the law qua nomos. But the theme of reconciliation is not merely the final resolution for the understanding's apprehension of its being the normative source of a coherent explanation of the world (although it is also that). Moreover, it is the introduction of an active stance towards the world that will characterize Self-Consciousness—that is, the need to abandon a contemplative stance which leads to the final realization that dependence on a world is necessary to a peculiar kind of action.
The terms at this stage of the argument are unequivocally action-related and are arguably an anticipation of the central problem of the ‘Lordship and Bondage’ section. Hegel clearly states, while still discussing reconciliation, that ‘the truth of intention is only the act itself’ (PhG: ¶159). Once again, Hegel resolves the issue at hand on the side of actuality. The explicit practical aspect of the example is important, because Hegel maintains that the reconciliation between the law and the crime is in the actual punishment, the action of punishing. It is in this example that the retributive nature of Hegel's thought is truly exemplified. The law does not rest qua nomos in its tranquil expression, but has to be, for its validity as such, reconciled in the punishing qua physis. This conception of law is, for this very reason, not merely formal. It is the expression of actual life, or of the actual presence of evil in persons. Hegel calls it an immanent necessity (PhG: ¶161), because the stability of the law is more than the diremption of the world of appearance (or the world of punishing) and the inner world (the world of law). The diremption is superseded by a punishment that is not defined by vengeance (as this would merely destroy the criminal); it is superseded by a punishment that is actually a pardon (with the end to restore the criminal's own humanity (PhG: ¶158)). Hegel then adduces this example to extensively qualify the normative notion, from the previous chapter, as being on the side of actuality.
VI. The absence of fear in risking one's life and the fear of the lord as the beginning of wisdom: locating Hegel's first philosophy
The previous two sections are meant to interpret the contrastive force in the statement: ‘the individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶187).
The association of risking one's life with freedom can only be understood after the consideration that the Hegelian notion of freedom implies a concrete form of life—this is, of course, the main reason why the Lord-Bondsman relationship will resolve on the side of service—even if the relation between those who belong to this form of life is characteristically problematic. The argument, so far, has also adduced the fact that the external mediation of the contractual solution represents a false start since it does not entail the cognitive gain the Phenomenology is meant to show.
It is relevant to note that this argument turns on the initial notion of desire. As already mentioned, as the argument advances, the notion of desire being developed begins to necessitate a kind of practical rationality that properly apprehends the complex desideratum. However, at this point, the proper manner of apprehension is still in absentia.
The way the argument illustrates this necessitation is through Hegel's description of the outcome of this struggle as a peculiar kind of failure. (It is a kind of failure that would be entirely impossible for a Hobbesian mind,Footnote 23 because the operative concept in Hobbes is a specific fear of one another, which is the source of external power that will subdue the harmful tendencies of all against all.) However, Hegel's problem is quite the opposite: the reasoning constantly runs up against a particular deficiency that impedes the desire one self-conscious individual has for another self-conscious individual to be satisfied.Footnote 24
There is, in fact, textual evidence for this Hobbesian kind of reversal. Later, in the argument concerning the frenzy of self-conceit, there is a description of a struggle of all against one another (PhG: ¶379), but not as occurring naturally in a state of nature, as it were before rationality, but rather as a consequence of a perfectionist apprehension of the source of the law as being constitutive of an individual's heart. Further, Hegel says that the resistance each offers against the other is the path to the apprehension of the reality of power and public (PhG: ¶378) order. This resistance will issue in the new shapes of virtue and the way of the world that are as such negotiated, concrete and normatively structured forms of life. Nevertheless, the reversal of the Hobbesian first philosophy is clear: the state of war is endemic to the public order (PhG: ¶379); it is a normatively structured problem, deriving from self-conscious individuality, to be solved by a rational process in the constitution of Spirit.
To return to the contrastive force in the phrase under consideration, and keeping this Hobbesian reversal in mind, it becomes clear that the recognition of different independent persons as the constitution of Spirit will only be properly effected, if these have come to understand their natures—intrasubjectively—as the source of the normativity that structures their forms of life. Therefore, that argument must run as follows: my intrasubjective apprehension of my independence is my act of self-constitution; or rather, it is my principled, deliberative, act of self-constitution. Hegel is certain that once this argument is put into effect over the several stages of the Lord-Bondsman relationship—i.e. service, work, formative activity—this intrasubjective cognitive gain will allow a person to understand other self-constituting agents without mere projection. This cognitive gain in turn, will largely qualify a person's constitutive dependence on other persons in the constitution of Spirit. Spirit will imply a continual process of keeping the full-blooded reciprocity intact, which Hegel describes as a first-personal attitude. This is inherently an element of a moral psychology directed towards collective spiritual life, a form of life maintained by the humble posture of always ‘self-sacrificing and benevolent, in which each accomplishes his own work’ (PhG: ¶439).
The individuals under phenomenological scrutiny in the argument thus know that life is not merely the motion of limbs (Hobbes Reference Hobbes2017: 81), but points to something prospective and constitutive that they have to actualize alongside each other. They do not fear each other, but they all fear the non-arbitrary Lord within them (PhG: ¶436); they fear in general, or respect that which informs life—that is, the end life points to and for which life is meant. From this position, it is relevant to further explore what has been termed here Hegel's ‘Hobbesian reversal’, which is the orectic push of a self-conscious individual to another like him, even though Self-Consciousness does not yet have the proper form of grasping this. Notice, however, that this argument implies a requalification of the concept of self-preservation. This is exactly what Hegel denotes with the contrastive statement concerning the inessentiality of recognition as a person in a merely formal way: the notion of self-preservation found in a Hobbesian person issues from the concrete fear of violent death, which in turn is constitutive of a reified notion, i.e. an external notion of control: the political or the theological.Footnote 25 Hegel's first philosophy implies a reversal of this assessment of natural consciousness. Again, the Hegelian individuals do not fear each other; they kill each other because they desire each other. Consequently, they will recognize that killing the other is a form of self-destruction since satisfaction is to be found in others and in Spirit.
At this intersection between natural existence and a deliberative beyond, both the dislocation and the qualification of fear as internal to Self-Consciousness should be addressed. A form of compatibilism between a deliberative capacity and natural existence is at play in this context; this is the meaning of the introduction of the relationship of the Lord to the Bondsman: ‘in this experience, self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness’ (PhG: ¶189).
Notice that Hegel does qualify fear—now, within one self-consciousness—as general: ‘for this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments’ (PhG: ¶194). The fear under consideration is not circumstantial; it is distinctively ethical. This fear is the fear of the absolute disappearance of the conditions that make the actualization of Spirit possible. This becomes clear not only to the one who dies in the struggle, but also to the one who survives
death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that is not for those who survived this struggle. They put an end to their consciousness in its alien setting of natural existence, that is to say they put an end to themselves. (PhG: ¶188)
Therefore the death of the other is not a victory, but self-annihilation. In this context, fear of death as the absolute Lord should be interpreted in the strict prudential sense; that is, as meaning that the seat of practical deliberation is life (not merely staying alive within solitude, but staying alive in order to achieve Spirit). This is the rationale that interprets the dependence of the Lord upon the Bondsman, and vice versa, and concomitantly interprets any person's dependence on both their deliberation and their ability to act. Further, as Hegel maintains, without service ‘fear remains at the formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence’ (PhG: ¶196).
This statement illustrates the importance of the dislocation of fear to the inner of Self-Consciousness as the genuine source of normativity. The self-constitutive act represented by the formative activity brings about the revelation of Self-Consciousness for itself as a proper philosophical apprehension. Only through a self-constitutive act, through fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, will fear (as respect for authority) ceases to be inward and mute (PhG: ¶196).
Spirit is the concrete existence of the fear that Self-Consciousness will (in the next part of the argument) come to know as the possibility condition for the achievement of integrity. As outlined previously, this fear is not particular, but general; it is contained within every self-conscious individual. And it is this fear, as wisdom, that will bring about the satisfaction of the complex desire for another self-conscious individual as a form of reciprocity.
This last idea interprets the meaning of Hegel's reversal of the Hobbesian first philosophy. Contrary to Hobbes, who maintains that neither justice, nor injustice, are faculties of either body or mind,Footnote 26 Hegel's first philosophy purports to show that these are internal to the nature of Self-Consciousness as body (desire) and mind (fear). Now Self-Consciousness needs to apprehend the proper way to encounter satisfaction in others such as himself—namely because the desire to preserve life is the desire to preserve a certain kind of life, the life that befits a person amongst other persons and is beyond the merely immediate. Hegel's way of showing this is with the Lord-Bondsman relationship. The conclusion drawn here thus leads to the narrower circle of the concentric structure of the argument, the intrasubjective domain of the human mind.
VII. The main trope interpreted
VII.i. Lord and Bondsman: deliberation and instrumental reasoning
The struggle described above has pushed Hegel's argument fully into its intrasubjective phase, the reflection of self-consciousness into itself (PhG: ¶176). After understanding that life is as important as pure self-consciousness (PhG: ¶189)—that is, life is for the constitution of Spirit—Hegel will use the allegory of Lord and Bondsman to find the proper adequacy between the self-constitution of integrity and the constitution of Spirit. This can be paraphrased as follows: Self-Consciousness will apprehend its deliberative capacity (so far it is only intimated rudimentarily in the submission model) as situated, and eventually as conforming to the existence of other self-conscious individuals, that unlike the bits and pieces of matter, as well as other animals, cannot merely be submitted to any other form.
Hegel then describes the result of the struggle as a sort of diremption: the Lord and the Bondsman are two opposed shapes of consciousness, before reflection into a unity has been achieved (PhG: ¶189).Footnote 27 This passage is especially relevant, not only as an indication of the concentric structure of the argument (alluded to throughout this article) but also to explain what Hegel will present as a solution to the peculiar failure of desire (in its previous submission model).
To pause for a moment, the reflection into a unity will be a distinct kind of cognitive gain for Hegel's argument. Specifically, the unity under discussion here is equivalent to the achievement of personal integrity. In turn, this integrity will function within the argument as the possibility condition of understanding other self-constituting integral persons (the corrective to the peculiar failure of desire). To explore this further: the double aspect of the relation of the Lord to the Bondsman condenses a complex process by which Self-Consciousness understands itself first as becoming the kind of subject it will then, in turn, recognize in others as the complex desideratum—that is, another self-conscious person, not a mere object. The implication at this moment of the argument is that Self-Consciousness does not understand yet this other like himself whom he desires, because he has not yet self-constituted himself as an integral person.Footnote 28
The peculiarity of the failure of desire within Hegel's argument consists precisely in its precipitating Self-Consciousness to the apprehension of the Lord. The Lord is a deliberative capacity, which endemically possesses a certain distance with respect to the world. The lord is the beginning of a teleological reflection upon desires, needs and prospection in general; it is the correction of the immediacy of the autotelic conception determined earlier in the chapter.
The roles of the Lord and Bondsman can be understood more perspicuously through a comparison: Christine Korsgaard, in the conclusion to her Sources of Normativity (Reference Korsgaard1996), tries to define the necessity of a reflective structure that backs up moral action. She describes this structure as a sort of double nature, or I am arguing, as a Hegelian nature:
The fact that we must in the light of reflection gives us a double nature. The thinking self has the power to command the acting self, and it is only its command that can make action obligatory. A good thinking self commands the acting self only to do what is good, but the acting self must in any case do what it says. (Reference Korsgaard1996: 165).
The similarity in this presentation to Hegel is striking. This is so because, like Hegel, Korsgaard is trying to make explicit the necessary connection between action and normativity. This demonstration, if it is to avoid the Hobbesian type of reification discussed above, will tend toward a problematic duplication within one self-conscious person. In what follows, Hegel will offer the anatomy of this diremption between the Lord and Bondsman to show that it has no stability as such and will conflate into one integral person. The suppression of this diremption (that when kept open will issue in the Unhappy Consciousness) demands that action ought to be principled (as Hegel says, any action serves a principle). So Hegel will develop this thought through the concept of servitude. To this extent, he will present the action of the Bondsman as ‘really the action of the Lord’ (PhG: ¶191). And this servitude will exhibit the importance of self-constitution to Self-Consciousness.
Regarding Korsgaard's thought that the thinking self only commands what is good, Hegel will argue for such a necessity in the figure of the sceptic (an argument that culminates in the notion of a non-arbitrary Lord (PhG: ¶436)). Like Korsgaard, Hegel intends to show the place of a moral psychology in the context of individual human life, and further qualify this moral psychology as strictly constitutive of Spiritual life.
This last point is indispensable for the understanding of the economy of Hegel's argument and therefore should be described further. It is true that the entire ‘Self-Consciousness’ chapter anticipates the argument concerning Spirit. Nonetheless—and this is the animus behind the present argument for the concentric structure of Hegel's argument—it is crucial that the constitution of Spirit will depend on the proper intrasubjective conception being put forward because the acts of recognition of other integral persons depend firstly on the proper apprehension of oneself as capable of becoming an integral person. This is precisely the reason behind the Hobbesian reversal: it is a false start, a false conception of human nature. The apprehension of what Self-Consciousness is in-and-for-itself will lead to what Spirit is in-and-for-itself. This is the formula for Hegel's first philosophy, a form of compatibilism, which is expressed as the maintenance of a life for a purpose, as Spirit or in the formula of desire for another Self-Consciousness. Hyppolite describes this form of compatibilism as the double task of the Phenomenology ‘to lead naïve consciousness to philosophical knowledge and to lead individual consciousness to emerge from his would-be isolation […] so as to raise it to Spirit’ (Reference Hyppolite1979: 322).
Given that this elucidation of the Lord-Bondsman trope evinces the structure of practical rationality, it is now necessary to understand Hegel's detailed argument for the proper articulation between deliberative and instrumental reasoning as issuing in the self-constitution of integrity. This, in turn, constitutes the reciprocal recognition amongst persons that will lead to the constitution of Spirit.Footnote 29
VII.ii. The tripartite structure of the self-constitution of integrity: servitude, work and formative activity
The tripartite structure Hegel presents in the last paragraph of the section under consideration shows the culmination of the argument concerning both the source of normativity as located inside Self-Consciousness (where fear of the Lord as the beginning of Wisdom (PhG: ¶195)) and the achievement of an integral identity (i.e. ‘becomes for himself, someone existing on his own account’ (PhG: ¶196)).
As mentioned previously, the presentation of servitude establishes a necessary connection between the action of the Lord and the action of the Bondsman. Nevertheless, this connection is problematic at first; Hegel calls this an unequal form of recognition. This inequality is the result of the Lord, the deliberative element of Self-Consciousness, trying to preserve the purity of its action, given the failure of desire. As such, Self-Consciousness tries to preserve a pure deliberative mode of action that remains pure at the expense of being ineffective.
Nonetheless, this purity necessarily collapses. The Lord is confronted by its dependence on the servile consciousness (PhG: ¶192). Once again, the Lord-Bondsman relationship shows the absolute necessity of servitude as constitutive of practical rationality (that is, actions according to ends, and in turn, practical rationality as constitutive of human nature). Recognition of the impossible severance between Lord and Bondsman amounts to the proper recognition of one's nature.Footnote 30
Thus it is not surprising that Hegel first addresses the issue of recognition in this intrasubjective context, especially considering he has previously addressed this topic of recognition intersubjectively as the pre-philosophic notion of a contract. Now Hegel begins to present his solution. At this stage, past the point of risking one's life, the argument is now within the duplication of Self-Consciousness. It is here, in the recognition of the nature of Self-Consciousness as demanding integrity, that the normative force of any self-constitution (or better, the necessity of the constitution of Spirit) is to be found.
Servitude shows that life, or attachment to life, and the desire for the complex desideratum is a principled self-constituting act. Therefore, it is in this first-personal venue that full-blooded reciprocity is to be found. Since all persons are a combination of self-legislating Lords and toiling Bondsmen, Hegel is simultaneously showing that the recognition of the source of normative force in self-constituting integrity is the same source of reciprocal recognition and the same source imposing limits on cooperation. Notice that persons can indeed execute each other's ends, they can give permanence to each other's ends and cooperate. But it does not follow that they can be mere Bondsmen, or be treated as mere means; in accordance with the nature of Self-Consciousness, they contain the Lord within themselves and their nature is equally the source of normativity.
The Lord discovers its essence in service, and the Bondsman in the consummation of its service will turn into an independent consciousness (namely, an integral person). The nature of Self-Consciousness will appear both as necessitating a principle, being not merely the automatic emergence of desires, and an effective action that constitutes the reality of all ends. At this stage, Hegel glosses, once again, a thought that has been running through the entire argument: the truth that Lord and Bondsman are one and the same action appears first outside of Self-Consciousness (PhG: ¶193). The reversal of this apprehension—from outside to inside Self-Consciousness—is effected by the apprehension of general fear as it has been described before. Servitude shows, in effect, that normativity is obedience—that is, normativity is for the self-constitution of a life and life is for the constitution of Spirit.
This then leads to the notion of work via the success of servitude. Servitude is the way Self-Consciousness rids itself of mere immediate natural attachment by giving effectual existence to principled action. Hegel addresses this effectual existence under the rubric of work. It is important to notice that Hegel will address work in a nexus with the concept of desire. Work will make desire operative, it will give it permanence, it will rescue it from the brutish submission-repression nexus.
In work, Hegel establishes the proper nexus between principled action and an actual world. The connection with the notion of permanence-of-an-actual-world is a crucial qualification for the complex notion of desire, which is qualified throughout the entire B section of the Phenomenology. The notion of desire-held-in-check or fleetingness-staved-off (PhG: ¶195) condenses the possibility of a sharable system of desires; essentially, it condenses the value of a permanent order of goods, needs and practices (food, houses and schooling). Hence, the notion of work makes a necessary contribution to the constitution of Spirit. Hegel establishes this connection by qualifying the notion of work as giving identity to the Bondsman: he who works according to a deliberative principle ‘becomes conscious of what he truly is’ (PhG: ¶195).
Initially the emergence of a desire in the Lord seemed unessential; it seemed a mere matter for the Bondsman to resolve. In work, nonetheless, Lord and Bondsman discover the possibility of permanence; they discover that desire is essential to the nature of Self-Consciousness and therefore not incompatible with the independence of Self-Consciousness (which was initially thematized in the independence of the Lord). This is the conclusion to the anticipated experience that both life and pure Self-Consciousness where equally essential to it, glossed here under the dictum ‘life is for living in accordance to principle’.
This leads to the final notion introduced by Hegel: formative activity. It is concomitant with the notion of work, but there is a change in direction. The permanence achieved by work is a permanence in the world, in the initial otherness, while formative activity is a permanence achieved in the person through the work done (PhG: ¶196). Therefore, work and formative activity are two sides of the same coin.
Hegel makes an important connection here between this inherent practical notion of work, formative activity, fear and, finally, power. He describes the conclusion of the Lord-Bondsman argument as the Bondsman's rediscovery of himself by himself (PhG: ¶196). This is the concrete image of integrity; it is, as are all-important notions argued for in the argument of the Phenomenology, presented as a cognitive gain with a distinctive self-reflective character. The Bondsman's rediscovery represents yet another important feature: as with the argument presented at the end of ‘Force and Understanding’ concerning the concept of law, the final argument of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ resolves on the side of actuality—namely, it resolves on the side of an activity that is effective in the world, that makes it possible for someone to acquire personal identity. As such, Hegel forms an argument that concerns the normative nature of Self-Consciousness, couching it in the significance of the cognitive content of the actions performed by any person: this is the nature of Self-Consciousness, to become an integral person, that will constitute Spirit.Footnote 31
Hegel refers to this self-constituting action, which is necessary for what he calls the apprehension of the universal mode (PhG: ¶196). This is the result of fear and service (referred to as a nexus) and formative activity as contributing to the acquisition by the Bondsman of a mind of its own (PhG: ¶196). It is the cognitive significance of this self-constituting action that makes obedience to principle effectual on the side of actuality; it makes the recognition of normativity necessary by recognizing its cognitive import in the permanent shaping of the nature of Self-Consciousness. Hegel refers to this necessity in the following way: ‘without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence’ (PhG: ¶196).
It is important to notice that fear is referred to here as formal and as necessitating action in order to cease to be merely formal. After this scrutiny of the tripartite structure of the intrasubjective activity of Self-Consciousness, fear can be understood as the universal mode of the attainment by all individuals of their Self-Consciousness. Now they are in a position to understand obedience to deliberation as their nature and their nature as the source of normativity.
