Can we learn anything about management from a German Philosophy text published over 200 years ago? I think we can, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
One of the most read (in part because it is one of the most easily understood) parts of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit is the Lord and Bondsman scene, also known as the Master/Slave Dialectic.1 This section is under 10 pages long, but it takes on the notion of self-consciousness and the famous idea that “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness”(§175)2
The Scenario
In this section, Hegel shows two self-consciouses meeting each other and engaging in a life-or-death struggle to be recognized by the other. There are numerous interpretations of why this occurs and why one is willing to give up more. But in the end, one side is unwilling to continue risking their life for the struggle and thus become the slave. The other side becomes the master.
For our purposes, it is helpful to consider this a mere prologue. What is most interesting is what unfolds once each side assumes its new position as slave or master.
Once one self-consciousness realizes that ‘life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness’ (§189), and so gives up the life and death struggle, it appears at first that the two self-consciousnesses can now attain a kind of equilibrium, where the one that has given up the struggle is the slave and the other is the master. The master can now show himself to be a subject in the eyes of the slave, not by risking his life, but by exercising power over the slave’s body, the very thing the slave was not prepared to lose in the struggle. At the same time, the master can overcome his estrangement from the world not simply by trying to destroy it (which was the only possibility at the level of desire) but by setting the slave to work on it. 3
However, no equilibrium is reached because as soon as the two roles of master and slave are set, they begin to show that there are problems:
Now Hegel is not of course suggesting that the resultant social statuses of Lord (Herr) and Bondsman (Knecht) represent a stable social achievement or resolution of the problem posed; just the opposite. He sets out immediately revealing its instability and unsatisfactory and so temporary status. Famously, the Lord must remain unsatisfied because he is recognized by one whom he does not recognize as capable of acknowledging authority. He sees the bondsman as little more than an animal, attached to animal life. The Lord does not appreciate, as the slave ultimately will, that the bondsman has in effect chosen life as a value, a choice that constitutes (ultimately), we might say, the modern or bourgeois form of life. And the Bondsman recognizes someone who does not recognize him, so has not yet achieved the initial status of authoritative recognizer. But, Hegel explains, the Bondsman is now in a position to understand that the stark opposition between attachment to or independence from life is a false opposition and can begin the slow work or “labor of the Concept” in freeing himself from his natural dependence and thereby eventually from the Master, who grows increasingly dependent on the Bondsman. In this context, one can understand how and why Hegel thinks of human freedom as a historical and social achievement, not a metaphysical or any other sort of property of the human as such. And all of us are well aware of the extraordinarily powerful impact such a notion would have outside of philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 4
However, the situation is not as simple as each now recognizing the other. For the master, the slave is now an object, an instrument for them to use, which makes it difficult to conceive that there could be recognition from this object of them as a person.
And for the slave, their recognition of another that can’t recognize them, but from their new position, they can identify and change the world through their labor. The slave also learns that being free isn’t just giving up the attachment to life, but that it is in living itself, and Hegel points out that this happens through work.
The slave therefore comes to a different conception of individuality from that adopted by the master (who has not gone much beyond desire). In particular, the slave no longer sees the world as alien to it, which must therefore be negated if it is to achieve ‘its unalloyed feeling of self’ (§195). Rather, in his work the slave labours for someone else’s satisfaction, and so learns respect for the independent existence of the objects around him, with which he finds he can work. Consciousness thus comes to a new conception of itself as an individual in the world, by now treating that world as a place to which it is attuned, not merely because it has various ‘skills’ that make it ‘master over some things’, but because it possesses ‘universal formative activity’, which gives it ‘universal power’ over ‘the whole of objective being’ (§196). 5
Essentially, the master has lost the ability to truly connect with the world and doesn’t have the three attributes of the slave: “fear, service, and work on the world” 6
On Freedom
In Todd McGowan’s reading of Hegel, the slave can gain freedom through negation.
Hegel’s subject discovers its freedom not just through a single negation but through a series of negations. In the “Self-Consciousness” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this dynamic unfolds in its most straightforward fashion, which is why so many discussions of Hegel and freedom focus on it. In the dialectic of the master and the servant, Hegel famously locates freedom on the side of the servant. Even though servants must act according to the masters’ whims and have limited control over the direction of their own lives, servants have negativity on their side: they experience their own nothingness through the confrontation with the fear of death, and they experience the nothingness of the external world as they negate this world through work. 7
Through work, the slave gains their freedom as they fear death. They realize that they can adapt who they are to survive.
The negativity of an absolute fear emancipates servants from their attachment to themselves as substantial beings. They grasp that everything about themselves that they assume to be fixed and stable can simply melt away, and this frees servants from a belief in their own identity as something determinative and authoritative. 8
This is different from the situation of the master who was willing to give up their life and, therefore, didn’t fear death.
The fearless masters who don’t labor have no contact with this negativity and thus enjoy the fruits of mastery in pure unfreedom. Masters remain enthralled both to their own identity and to the external world. Both act as substantial authorities over the master, which the master never has the opportunity to negate. Masters do not recognize their insubstantiality in the way that servants do. Through the phenomenology of servitude, Hegel illustrates that negativity is the occasion for freedom. But his account also reveals that negativity doesn’t have the last word on the subject’s freedom. 9
It is paradoxically the fear of death and the unwillingness to give up their life that gives the slave a degree of freedom while the master is willing to risk it all. Ultimately, the slaves become unfree because they can’t recognize that the identity they are willing to die to protect binds them. Freedom doesn’t end there in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The notion of freedom is a bit more complex than this implies. The master feels free (although he isn’t in many ways), and there are severe limitations on the slave’s freedom.
Due to his sense of untrammeled freedom the master enjoys a sense of superiority and power over both the slave and the things to which the slave feels himself bound. The master expresses this sense of power in two different ways: by holding the slave in subjection, and by consuming things around him… The fear that keeps a servant a servant and impedes servants from risking their lives in revolt is actually an emancipatory fear that reveals the insubstantiality of the servants’ own identity. Hegel notes that the servant “felt the fear of death, the absolute master. In that feeling, it had inwardly dissolved, has trembled thoroughly in itself, and all that was fixed in it was shaken. However, this pure universal movement, the way in which all stable existence becomes absolutely fluid of everything permanent, is the simple essence of self-consciousness, the absolute negativity, the pure for-itself.”10
Work as freedom?
Let us go back to the earlier proposition that freedom comes from “fear, service, and work on the world” 11
In the master-slave relation, enjoyment and work are thus divided between the two individuals concerned in a manner that inevitably makes one think of Marx’s account of capitalist society. Hegel’s account differs from that of Marx, however, in at least one important respect. Marx provides an analysis of the way in which objective, historical processes of production lead to the division between capitalists and proletarians. Hegel, by contrast, sets out the ways in which the master and slave conceive of themselves and their freedom (or lack of it). The master may be deluded about his capacity for unrestrained enjoyment, but that capacity belongs to his self-understanding, and that is what interests Hegel in the Phenomenology. Similarly, work – or the limited negation of independent, resistant things – belongs to the self-image of the slave. 12
Both the master and the slave have a relationship with and through work. This will get us closer to the value of this passage for our times. When we look at each of the roles, there is a contradiction or dialectic that both the master and slave are caught in.
The dialectic besetting the master is easily grasped. The master sees in the slave ‘the truth of his certainty of himself’ (§192). That is to say, he sees his own freedom and power – his ‘truth’ – embodied in the slave’s subservience. At the same time, however, the slave’s subservience and dependence also make the master aware of his own dependence on the slave: ‘his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action’ (§192). Mastery takes itself to be unlimited, unfettered, wholly independent freedom. Yet it is mediated by the work of the slave, who prepares things for the master’s consumption, and by the recognition that the slave accords to the master. Furthermore, mastery depends for its very existence as mastery on the subservience of the slave: for one cannot exercise power and dominance, if there is no one there to dominate. The very presence of the slave is thus a constant reminder to the master of the dependent character of mastery itself. As the master becomes more conscious of this dependence, his sense of unambiguous mastery is undermined and his understanding of himself thereby transformed. 13
While the master feels they are powerful in relation to the slave, they also realize that they need the slave. Without the slave, without someone to dominate, the master would be nothing, and thus the master is dependent on the slave.
The slave is caught in its own contradiction.
[T]he experience of the slave, labour turns out to have a double-edged character. On the one hand, as we know, work is something the slave is forced to do, both by the master and by the fact that the slave understands things to resist and limit his efforts to negate them. On the other hand, however, slavish consciousness also ‘comes to itself’ through work (§195). That is to say, the slave comes to realize that work is his own activity, and the manifestation of his own freedom, even if it is required of him by another. Moreover, the slave sees that, in transforming a thing through work, he puts something of his own into that thing and gives it a new form. He sees that he embodies his freedom in the thing itself. 14
The slave is forced to work. However, through that work, the slave sees their ability to create and the freedom within that creation.
And so, two primary aspects are at play: recognition and labor. In those two aspects, we see the roles reversed.
It will prove that the master, who is recognised without recognising in turn, ultimately is a slave, entirely dependent on others; while the slave, who recognises without being recognised, is ultimately a master, creating her world. 15
But there is more to it than that, as Jason Read adds.
These two dimensions, that of recognition and work, can be understood as constituting two different philosophies of history: one dominated by the struggle for rights, for the legal structures of recognition, the other for the struggle over work, over its value and role in constituting society… The first, recognition proper, is through what is traditionally understood as inter-subjectivity, whereby I am recognised when another sees me as I see myself, understands my desires as valid. The second suggests that there is also a recognition of sorts in work, a process by which ‘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’. 16
Through this lens, we can see how being recognized for who we are and the value we create through work are two different aspects of how we see ourselves. Often, both of these surface at work.
What This Means as a Middle Manager
There are elements here that we still see in the modern dialogue about work. People often feel a degree of freedom at work. While they are forced into it to survive (as the slave in Hegel), they also find freedom in their choices regarding their work. The contradiction of the slave is alive and well in the modern worker.
Organizational leaders often feel the contradictions inherent in the master. While there is a sense of power and control in telling others what to do, leaders are ultimately not free; they depend on others to do the work.
Perhaps the most important takeaway is that while the workers are the ones who become the most aware of their situation and gain a degree of freedom from that awareness, that freedom is incomplete.
As a middle manager, the most important thing to take away is that so long as you see your role as controlling others, you are not actually free; it is only when you can see what you create that you can get a glimpse of freedom. But like the slave in Hegel, even that freedom is complete. Middle managers are in a unique position where they are both master and slave. They generally have to work out of the same fear that slaves face, but also are in a position where they tell others what to do. This gives middle managers the flexibility to identify as the slave instead of the master.
I will conclude with a final thought from McGowan on how Hegel sees freedom:
If one wants freedom, one must discover what happens when there are no external authorities left to fight, when the external authorities appear as the mark of our freedom rather than as an obstacle to it. One must denounce, but one must not remain content with just denouncing. The freedom to denounce fails to see that it remains caught up in what it denounces, whereas the freedom that identifies its own limit in the external authority reaches the point of self-determination. 17
- There are a few terms used: master/slave and lord/bondsman in the sources quoted, but I will use master and slave in this newsletter. ↩
- All paragraph numbers are from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. ↩
- Robert Stern, The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ↩
- Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness ↩
- Robert Stern, The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Robert Stern, The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ↩
- Stephen Houlgate, Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’: A Reader’s Guide ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel ↩