Lordship, Bondage, and Colonialism

In the notes at the back of the Phenomenology, J. N. Findlay suggests that in “Lordship and Bondage” “’imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ at certain stages of development are given a justification” (523). His comment is perhaps motivated by Hegel’s statement, at the end of “Lordship and Bondage,” that “the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.  For this reflection, the two moments of fear and service as such, as also that of formative activity, are necessary, both being at the same time in a universal mode” (196, my emphasis). I agree with Findlay that this seems problematic at best. Hegel may be asserting the independence of the bondsman, but this independence only seems to come by way of his fear, oppression, and exploitation. In fact, it sounds strikingly similar to the rhetoric of the benevolent colonizer, who helps the colonized people to develop towards greater sophistication. This is, perhaps, not surprising; we’ve already noted in class discussion Hegel’s Euro-centric conception of history and progress. But I think we can also find hints at these troubling conclusions in other parts of this text, where Hegel seems to present a more innocuous, even idealistic, model of social interaction as mutual recognition.

As Findlay notes, the end of “Lordship and Bondage” seems to point towards troubling conclusions. Even earlier, the encounter between two self-consciousnesses seems (unnecessarily) hostile, and has less to do with “recognizing” the other as an individual that denying the other’s difference or “otherness”; in the encounter with the other, Hegel says, self-consciousness “has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (179). This strikes me as quite similar to the dynamic that Emmanuel Levinas refers to as a kind of “denial of alterity,” in which the Self refuses to acknowledge the Other as Other but rather subsumes the Other in the Self. Levinas considers this an ethically problematic dynamic, and Hegel also implies that it is not the end goal of social interaction. At this stage, the two self-consciousnesses have not attained self-certainty because they do not “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (184). They still appear to each other as objects, rather than “pure being-for-self, or as self-consciousness” (186).

Levinas envisions social interaction as the mutual recognition of alterity, or otherness—such an ungraspable otherness that the Self cannot, and should not, attempt to “comprehend” the Other in its entirety. Hegel, though he does not stop at the Self’s supersession of the Other, nevertheless seems to supersede the alterity of the Other in the universal. In fact, to attain self-certainty, each self-consciousness must root out “all immediate being,” as “the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life” (187). This denial of specific existence, I think, is where this dialectic first becomes especially threatening in a colonial context, where blanket universals tend to obscure rather than recognize difference, and ignore individual suffering rather than ameliorate it. Hegel seems to realize the difficulties in this model as well; presumably that’s why there are over 300 pages left. Without and reference to “specific existence” or relevance to “individuality,” the Self-Other encounter strikes me as empty and unfulfilling at best, and exploitative and oppressive at worst.

On an unrelated note, did anyone else immediately think "Tyler Durden is the Unhappy Consciousness"?