Confidence's Role in the Battle

Although Hegel fails to mention it in his section, “Lordship and Bondage,” I think confidence is a term that is essential to the system he lays out. However, in order for me to explain its relevance, I need to first sketch an outline of this system:

In a section we skipped over, Hegel explains the manner in which consciousness shifts its focus inward from objects in the world to itself. As I understand it, consciousness becomes anxious about its individuality. It worries that it isn’t any different than all the objects it sees (that it is just another object rather than a subject.)

This desire to be recognized as a subject, or something apart from the objects around it, becomes consciousness’ motivation. At first, this motivation leads it to negate the world around it, and, strangely, Hegel seems to think negation is akin to destruction. Unfortunately, after this destruction, there is nothing left for consciousness to impose its will on. Thus the process of destroying other objects in order to prove its individuality ultimately fails.

As a result of this failure, consciousness realizes that the only substantial way to be recognized as a subject—as something different from the world of objects—is by being acknowledged by some other consciousness. Thus it begins to seek other consciousnesses. When it finally does meet another, the only way recognition can be achieved is if each consciousness puts its life on the line. Hegel explains that by risking its life, each consciousness proves “that it is not attached to any specific existence…that it is not attached to life” (113). In other words, in being unafraid of having its life taken away, a consciousness is demonstrating that it is something more than the object that is its body; namely, it is a subject. (It is important to note that in a fight to the death, it is this object—the one serving as a body—that would be destroyed.)

In my opinion, this life and death struggle for recognition—which seems to be an essential step in Hegel’s system—presupposes confidence. Each participant in the struggle must be confidant that it actually does have some existence that is separate and independent from its body. If a consciousness lacks this confidence, then it seems it would be unwilling to put the life of its body on the line. If this where to happen, it is unclear how the two consciousnesses would interact. Likely, the unconfident one would simply forfeit to the confidant one and willingly become a slave. However, in this case, it is unlikely that the enslaved consciousness would ever have a chance of being free, because one of the essential ingredients of freedom, for Hegel, seems to be this risking of one’s life. (Recall that in Hegel’s system, the enslaved consciousness ultimately becomes freer than the master.)

The Ethics of the Master-Slave Dialectic

As a refresher, the master-slave dialectic begins from the idea that consciousness can only gain knowledge of itself as an individual by meeting resistance from the objects over which it exerts its will. The problem is that objects can’t really offer resistance, as they either bend to our wills or break. So the only way that consciousness can come to know itself is through encountering the one thing that can offer resistance—another consciousness. To Hegel, this resistance amounts to nothing less than a life-and-death struggle, in which both consciousnesses offer up their lives in the effort to be recognized. When one consciousness decides that the struggle for recognition is not worth dying, it consents to slavery, giving the new “master” the recognition it desires; however, this recognition is ultimately hollow, as the slave is not giving it in earnest, but as a defense. In class, we compared this to one person in a relationship bending to the will of the other and saying “I love you,” even when the sentiment is not true. In the master-slave dialectic, neither consciousness achieves the desired recognition. There are two major ethical implications here that I want to examine. First, that the slave effectively chooses slavery; second, that consciousness’ individual knowledge of itself is dependent on other consciousnesses—that is, we need other people so that we can be “selves.”

These implications work together, so I want to look at the first one in light of the second. The obvious ramification of the second (to me, at least) is that, because the individuated self is contingent upon the resistance and recognition of and by another consciousness, we should care about others. To view the self as a sui generis creation is ultimately a fruitless (and pretentious) stance, willfully ignorant of others’ influence on one’s individual being. So shouldn’t we actively seek to mitigate the enslavement—metaphorical or literal—of other consciousnesses? To accept the first implication, that enslavement is at the whim of the enslaved—is to condone it. Though I can agree that slaves to have the freedom to change their predicaments (through suicide, if nothing else), how can we submit them to such a challenge if they are not phenomenologists? People born and raised in oppressive environments cannot have true conceptions of their individuated consciousnesses and as such may not be aware of their own freedom. The role of the un-oppressed—those outside a particular master-slave relation—then, might be to undermine the master-slave relationship, validating the oppressed and encouraging a return to the life-and-death struggle for recognition. This is revolution.

The dialectic and me

As we have most likely all discovered by now, Hegel uses the dialectic as his method for discovering truth. Throughout the phenomenology consciousness continually encounters a problem and uses one extreme to attempt to solve his problem, or answer a question. Then when that attempt fails he quickly jumps to the other spectrum and uses that extreme to answer the same question. What consciousness eventually finds is that the answer to his problem/question can only be solve by synthesizing the two concepts into one new concept.

During sense certainty the struggle for consciousness is in trying to identify a common object. At first, he attempts to do this by using only the singularity but not allowing himself to relate to any universal concepts. When this method fails to truly capture what consciousness means to convey, he switches to only using universal concepts without making reference to any type of individually of an object. Eventually consciousness learns that only through meshing these two concepts can he truly explain what he means and convey what he intends. This is the dialectic as it is played out in sense certainty.

Now, my qualm with the phenomenology is not with the dialectic itself, but in how it is presented. In my experience through life I have thought and I cant say that I can see the dialectic in many things in my life. I don’t see it in the way I approach the world, or the decisions I make. I have thought about this, and so I thought about how we see consciousness. Even thought I don’t remember or cant recall distinctly the dialectic in my life, I do see it in children, much like the place consciousness begins, and I recognize it there. But children when they for instance are playing with a toy, and then their parent takes it away, they are confused. They start to cry and are scared that their toy is gone forever. But, the child is not in any position to understand the complexity of what is at work, or recognize the changes it itself is undergoing really. This made me question myself, and wonder, “Am I just the same as the child? Moving through the dialectical process, but not recognizing or understanding it?” It seems to me that I might be just like the child. I might be coming up against new challenges, and attempting to solve them just by moving from one extreme to the next, until I synthesize the two and find an answer. This is a very difficult dilemma for me, because I don’t know if I will be able to recognize this change in myself. However, I will continue to attempt to try.

Hegel and Saussure

Today I was reading a bit of Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, and saw an interesting alignment with Hegel, especially his criticism of sense-certainty. I am referring to Hegel's statement that if we are unable to express a concept in determinate language, it is untrue.

The parallel with Saussure is in his ideas about how we perceive language. Essentially, he claims that when we think about something like a tree, we have two components of our object. First we have the signifier that is the sound-image, the sensory aspect of an object. This could be anything from a picture of a tree to the literal word "tree" or arbor or what have you. The second component of tree, the signified, is our concept of it. This one is more difficult to articulate, because this part is usually what happens in our head. The evidence that concepts exist is that we can think them without using our lips or tongues to make any sounds. (the sound of thinking?) So, the sound-image and the concept, signified and signifier respectively, are united to become what we consider a sign. Languages are made up of signs, forming the structure for any kind of communication.

It seems like Saussure is in agreement with Hegel because the inherent bondage of language and concepts is apparent in both works. Objects without concepts cannot be true just as sound-images without concepts cannot exist. When you think about it, language can be broken down to the simplest of symbols representing concepts or sounds of their own. Of course, our mind is the machine that creates the shortcuts so that we never really have to sound out each individual letter when reading a word (aloud or to ourselves) and our mind is also the mediator of our sound-image and our concept. We have to view language as an interdependent system continuously changing, growing, being controlled by those who use it. Just like the mind, our languages must remain flexible because our language can never really be tamed. In my days of learning Chinese, I realized that I could never truly be fluent simply because it isn’t my first language (or the easiest to learn, by any means.) So many things like humor, idioms and syntax are largely culturally perpetuated in our language acquisition, but I digress…

One thing that Saussure and Hegel both surprise me with is their perpetual optimism about the capacities of the human mind. I guess they were both tackling such incredibly intellectual fields, so they had to have faith in their own capacity to reflect on the complex ideas that inevitably pop up. An issue that arose in Saussure’s work was his claim that sign systems (languages) are based on binary oppositions. This is the Achilles heel that the proceeding literary movement post-structuralism chose to strike. Should have seen that one coming.

Mutual Recognition and God

As Hegel moves from the dialectic of the object to the dialectic of the subject, he explains that what consciousness is now in search of is self-certainty. Consciousness has now become self-conscious and is looking for a way to be certain of itself as an independent being. Hegel explains the only way for consciousness to do this is to become in and for itself for another. By this he basically means that consciousness becomes certain of its own independent will when it is acknowledged as an independent will by something like itself, another consciousness. The point he will ultimately come to (as it’s been revealed by Dr. J) is that the best way for consciousness to achieve this recognition as an independent will is through mutual recognition with another consciousness.

When I examined my impressions of what “mutual recognition” would mean, I was reminded of an idea of God found in Sufism. From what I understand of Sufism, the Sufi perspective on God says that God created man so that through man’s consciousness of God, God might come to know himself. Man’s essential purpose in life is to remember God and become more God-conscious. They achieve this goal through varied means: prayer, mantras, dance, music, and also whirling in some particular orders. When a man is God-conscious, Sufis believe God is able to know himself better through the mind of that man. (If you’d like more information on this Sufi perspective, I’d try here: http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/sufism.htm)

This idea I feel is very relatable to what Hegel was talking about. If we put Sufism in Hegelian terms, God-consciousness created man-consciousness so that he could be recognized by man-consciousness as the God-consciousness and therefore be certain of his own consciousness through man. In other words, God is able to be self-certain of his independent will through mankind’s recognition of him. At this point I will admit that I am not entirely sure this works because of the possibility that God-consciousness and man-consciousness are too different to be able to recognize themselves in each other. I do not know whether it is important for the two consciousnesses to be on the same level in order to recognize their own independences through each other. And I am sure many will object to this idea on the basis that they have no empirical evidence that even provides them with a God to recognize themselves in.

These problems aside, let’s just assume this idea could be realistic, that God’s self-certainty requires mankind’s recognition of him as an independent will. If this is true, then isn’t that almost saying God’s very existence as a self-certain independent being is dependent on mankind believing in God? For centuries man has believed that God’s existence (or non-existence) shapes humanity as independent, intellectual beings. If the recognition idea was true for all consciousnesses, wouldn’t that then suggest that mankind’s existence also shapes God as the being he is?

Hegel and Truth

The Preface and Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit deal extensively with knowledge, a central theme of the text. Hegel shies (or rather, elects to abstain) from proving the efficacy in reason, which to some might appear negligent. However, this omission is fairly excusable even should you disagree with his dismissal of basic epistemological concerns on the simple grounds of expediency. More important to reading the Phenomenology is Hegel’s theory of truth.

Hegel clearly looks to the whole for truth. It becomes clear the whole at which he is looking is historically expansive while anchored in Hegel’s monist unity. Still, grasping Hegel’s concept of truth has proved a significant task I have yet to comfortably resolve. The following quote from the Phenomenology gets at the nuanced conception of truth Hegel held:

“True and false belong among those determinate notions which are held to be inert and wholly separate essences, one here and one there, each standing fixed and isolated from the other, with which it has nothing in common. Against this view it must be maintained that truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made. Nor is there such a thing as the false, any more than there is something evil.”

Perhaps easier than directly gleaning Hegel’s conception of truth from the text would be examining a common conception of truth in relation to Hegel. A common theory of truth is adherence to an objective world (either directly or through such a mediator as a proposition). When a detective grills a suspect for the truth, they are working toward an understanding of presumably objective events through a singular account of someone who experienced it. While working towards an objective account, the detective must also determine whether their suspect’s statement itself is true. While the truth of the suspect’s statement might also be weighed in its accordance to an objective reality, it can as easily be measured by adherence to what that suspect actually believes. This standard of truth doesn’t require an objective reality experienced by all, though it could easily render the detective useless: their case could quickly become filled with seemingly contradictory “truths.” It would seem Hegel’s truth of a crime would be an understanding of the perceptions of all those involved in the crime and perhaps even their motives, as they are a distinct and strong force upon what happened. However, I am unsure if this painting of a search for truth in a crime scene would merit even a glance from Hegel. Is there an underlying truth to a series of events, or are they merely particulars imposed by man upon a shared experience? Ultimately, I do think Hegel would find such a truth, if only from my knowledge of the importance he placed upon history. Other conceptions of truth also lend themselves to Hegel. More pragmatic notions of truth, such as Charles Sanders Peirce conception of truth as that which is guaranteed not to conflict with experience, echo of Hegel’s dismissal of inquiries into the effectiveness and limits of knowledge. Other conceptions of truth hold it as more a convention or product of language than a natural occurrence.

I found this entry an interesting read on truth theory.

examining processes.

During the last class, one of the major topics of discussion was that of Hegel’s “processes”. Just for a slight recap, Hegel says the truth of a things existence is the “process” that that completes that thing, or makes that thing what it is. For example, the truth of a tree, would be the process that occurred from the time that an acorn hit the ground till the time that it grew into a tree, and then for whatever reason the tree ceased to exist.

Now the question I posed during this discussion was about how accidents and potentiality apply to this system. Accidents would be those things that intervene in the natural course of processes for the subject, in this example a tree. For example, if the acorn were to fall on hard ground and not be able to start the process of rooting itself, or if an animal ate it, these would be just two examples of the great many accidents that could befall the natural course for this tree, and hinder it. Potentiality is what the tree is all of the possible outcomes that the tree as in being itself, as well as what the tree could have become if accident had not befallen it, basically the fact that, had not the squirrel eaten the acorn, it would have become a mighty oak, or that if it had gotten more light it could have grown taller, so on and so forth.

The response to this question from Dr.J was that all of the accidents, and all of the potentialities that did, or could have befallen the natural process of the tree are the “truth” of what the tree was. Therefore, the tree was an acorn that was eaten by the squirrel but also could have been an oak. These things are both true about the tree, and yet it never became an Oak as proof that it could be, so it is in a sense false.

My new inquiry into this question is this: is the truth of the tree also not the past that existed before it? Is it not also true then that the acorn was attributed to a tree that then is attributed to many potentials, and accidents, leading back to another tree, and on infinitum into an infinite regress? It seemed at first to me to be easily dismissible, but after some thinking about it, is not the “truth” of the tree that part of the process of it coming into being the tree that it as an acorn fell from? It seems to me that the lines between processes are not very clear at all, at least when history is involved.