Rereading Hegel on Mutual Recognition: the Internalization of Trapped Spirit
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In Hegel’s philosophy, labor plays a vital role. However, it is overlooked as a political element in his dialectical system. By applying the insights of Michel Foucault, specifically
Foucault’s disciplinary system, to Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic, I show the way in which labor is inherently political, something Hegel misses, and reinterpret Hegel’s conception of the political to coincide with this new interpretation. My re-reading of Hegel focuses attention on the
Absolute Moment as Spirit trapped in history. In the end, I show the way in which the political standing of labor changes the way Spirit moves through the material realm and ultimately the ability of Spirit to recognize and realize itself. Rereading Hegel on Mutual Recognition: The Internalization of Trapped Spirit
GWF Hegel’s dense and complex works have all been analyzed to the nth degree, and for good reason. He is among the most influential philosophers in the history of the discipline.
However, using the work of Michel Foucault, I will show a side of Hegel’s work that I think has been overlooked. Labor is at the center of the material world for Hegel, but he gives no account of it politically. By applying Foucault’s disciplinary system and his conception of the
Panopticon, I will reinterpret the way in which Hegel’s dialectical history unfolds. I will begin by using Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to show that the typical interpretation of Hegel’s
Master-Slave Dialectic is incorrect, and present an interpretation that redirects our understanding of Spirit and indeed of history, which is centered around the politicization of labor. Finally, I will demonstrate the path of freedom through labor using this reinterpretation of Hegel’s dialectical system.
Beginning with the Master-Slave Dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, one can trace out a particular logic when applying some of the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, specifically from Discipline and Punish. Essentially, the Master-Slave Dialectic describes a
Master and Slave and the relation of labor that joins them. The Slave performs labor while the
Master does not, allowing the Master to achieve recognition.1 Where Hegel seems to suggest that the Slave will eventually overcome the Master, Foucault’s work tells a different story. From
Discipline and Punish: “Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities” (218)2. Essentially, the disciplines are a means of control that makes humans docile and productive. Humans do not question what they are told, and they are very good at performing those actions.
1 GWF Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 111-119 2 Michel Foucault (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, p. 218 The main driving force behind the disciplines in the last two centuries for Foucault is prisons, especially the particular project of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was originally the creation of Jeremy Bentham, who imagined a central tower surrounded on all sides by cells holding criminals. Through the manipulation of light and shadow, those in the cells would always be visible, but those in the tower in charge of observing the criminal could never be seen.
Criminals never know exactly when they are being watched, but they know that they could be watched at any and every moment (195-209).3 The disciplines need structural institutions to properly grow this type of mass compliance to an unseen and unwritten rule (218).4 Foucault never articulates interpretations beyond the physical structure, though some have been put forth and can be found, for example, in the work of Simone Browne (38-42).5 I will use the term
“Postopticism,” a term stemming from Foucault’s conception of the Panopticon and the disciplines working in tandem to ingrain a system of personal and interpersonal surveillance that essentially becomes second nature not only in the criminal, but in every individual human being.
It should be noted that I have not yet found another author who uses this exact term, though there are authors who use similar terms like those Simone Browne compiles in Dark Matters. Not only is the tower empty, the tower has completely vanished: everyone is a watcher. This shows something in the way Spirit purportedly moves in the Master-Slave dialectic, for there is no way the Slave could fully recognize its power in a relationship that is one-sided. Applying Foucault’s disciplinary system to Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic changes the typical interpretation and brings to light something unseen about Hegel: that politics is a matter of power relations and labor is central to politics for him. (195-209)6
3 Foucault, Discipline, p. 195-209 4 Ibid. p. 218 5 Simone Browne (2015), Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 38- 42 6 Foucault, Discipline, p. 195-209 The Master-Slave that Hegel describes is similar to the Panoptic moment in history, wherein the Slave is aware of the Master as surveyor, but slowly begins to learn surveillance for itself. Spirit becomes trapped and fractured by this deepening gap in recognition, such that the
Master is abstracted by Spirit at the point that the Slave now surveys itself and others because the disciplines have become so ingrained that it no longer requires surveillance. This abstraction creates a “Postoptic Eye,” that which watches without being seen from within each individual self-consciousness that makes up the whole of human life, from here on referred to as “Species-
Being.” It should be noted that Species-Being here, although an important term for others, especially Marx, is not meant as a reference to another idea, work, or author, merely as shorthand that fully captures the original concept. Spirit has become trapped, circling through an enslaved mass whose labor is used only for control. History and labor, two manifestations of Spirit, have ultimately rendered Spirit unable to realize itself. This is the Absolute Moment, in that the self- consciousness of the Eye has come to realize itself by trapping Spirit in history. The Absolute
Moment is different from the moment in that the Absolute is Spirit trapped within time. This occurs when labor is organized in such a way that time becomes regimented and stuck by the conception of the working day under capitalism, forcing Spirit to remain within its restrictive rule. In the moment, time is free and Spirit is free with it; time is free because the organization of labor has changed. It becomes absolute because Spirit is not free to move in a way that allows for progress, stopping the forward progress of history as time is regimented and organized. The Eye traps Spirit by using the institutions created gradually that have regimented and organized time.
(111-119)7
This occurs because the self-consciousness of the Master, as the disciplines become ever more ingrained, begins to become abstracted because it does not have an equal in the Slave. One
7 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 111-119 is recognized and the other is recognizing, but the Slave (recognizing) has no autonomous conception of itself as a self-consciousness. In Hegel’s words, “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (111)8. It easily supersedes the other and its own self, moving beyond the simple material realm and into the Ideal realm of recognition and realization. Once the Master essentially disappears, the Slave is left on its own but with the Spirit that has moved through and abstracted the Master still moving through it. Since there is no explicit master to be seen, the realm of the political must shift away from the constitutional monarchy that Hegel describes and towards relations of power like those Foucault describes. This is because Hegel’s constitutional monarchy requires a visible figurehead, a known and recognized king, while Foucault’s power does not necessarily work for the benefit of a single individual and is certainly not recognizable in the material world the way a monarch would be.
In fact, politics has always been about power in Hegel because labor has always been the material engine of history. The Slave performs the labor while the Master claims recognition for that labor because labor is a fundamentally political act that denotes the relations of power (i.e. who performs what labor and who benefits). That fact has become hidden by the legacy of history developed through the continuing process of instilling and ingraining the disciplines:
Labor has become depoliticized, viewed as a matter of simple human nature that is beyond questioning. This moment of depoliticization is due to the trapping of time in a regimented and ordered system as found under capitalism, the institutions of which are responsible for ingraining and instilling the disciplines that allow for the control of labor. The Slave is unable to deflect recognition from the Master and bring about absolute realization and mutual recognition as the
8 Ibid. p. 111 standard interpretation of this element of Hegel’s philosophy, because the Slave has no understanding of the true worth of his labor as an expression of power.
Labor is an essential power relation, as it determines who performs what actions and who is to benefit from those actions, so Hegel’s conception of the ultimate form of Spirit in the realm of the political as the state and, more specifically, a constitutional monarchy, must be rethought and updated. It should be replaced with the capitalist enterprise (Hegel would not use this term in the same way, but the modern corporation is a good way to imagine this), a system of power relations in which the central component is labor and power is expressed through the ability of the Masters to guide the labor of the Slaves by any means necessary. It could be said that, to use contemporary terms, Hegel’s world-historical individuals are actually corporate CEOs, but I digress.
This point about the ultimate form of Spirit further grounds the temporality of my argument in the era of capitalism. Furthermore, with regards to temporal grounding, a note must be made about a note in Hegel. He consistently places nature beneath mankind and beneath the realm of Spirit, but answers the question of inequality by saying that it is actually entirely natural and unavoidable across several fronts, including “talents, wealth, and intellectual and moral education” (105)9. Within the larger context of his work, it is absolutely ridiculous for him to posit that Spirit would be unable to overcome nature in any way. Hegel devalues nature in every way, even subjugating the agricultural class for relying on nature. Those who benefit from these inequalities, those who lead the institutions subject to the Eye, benefit in terms of the overarching power relations, but they are completely unable to justify these inequalities on the basis of actual labor unless inequality is depoliticized as something inherent and unavoidable, a mere part of nature.
9 GWF Hegel (1896), Philosophy of Right. London: George Bell & Sons, republished by Dover (2005), p. 105 Here it becomes important to impart some of the insights of Kathi Weeks into my argument, specifically The Problem with Work, in which she uses Nietzsche to work through problems of labor. One passage in particular outlines a hugely important idea: “The first step toward a new, more hopeful temporalist thus requires that we can first wrestle a viable present from the past, that we can alter our relationship to a past that threatens to render us not the authors of the present but merely its artifacts” (199)10. She continues on to describe Nietzsche as attempting to create an affective temporality that forces us to both recognize and overcome our past, using our present as political agents in such a way that we “could act collectively to change the world” (203)11. The importance of this passage as it relates to both history and labor is that history can be overcome. The events of history, as they actually and truly unfolded, cannot be changed. However, the legacy of these events can and must change so that mankind no longer falls into the trap of replicating the past forever. History is only progressive when its legacy allows for such movement by Spirit. Creating that affective temporality and creating large-scale world-historical collective action requires the repoliticization of labor both for Weeks and myself. Labor holds the key to unlocking the potential of the past as it relates to reinventing the futures we see.
It is important to ground this work in an understanding of the methodologies of the two theorists I am using, GWF Hegel and Michel Foucault. Hegel was a dialectician in the tradition of German Idealism, meaning that he conceived of history as being driven by an unseen force, which he called Spirit, through conflict, and that history unfolded in a structured way. The dialectical method requires constant movement through the ideal realm. If motion stops, then it was never dialectical in the first place, and some form of conflict is central to this movement.
10 Kathi Weeks (2011), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 199 11 Weeks, The Problem, p. 203 Foucault was a genealogist of history, differing from Hegel most noticeably on his favoring of materialism over idealism and his conception of history as being more circumstantial. Under
Foucault’s conception, the current historical circumstances could be different in infinite ways and the future could take equally as many paths. There are still rules that govern the movement of history, but it is more open-ended than Hegel’s conception. They agree, however, that mankind is historically constructed, created by his history, whatever that history may be. For my argument, I will maintain the dialectical approach, as this is a paper using Foucault to discover something about Hegel. (1-24)12
Certain terms must be defined in more depth. First, history itself must be described in some fashion. Moving from Weeks’ understanding through a reading of Nietzsche, Hegel offers a similar perspective in the introduction to his Philosophy of History, in which he wrote that, in opposition to nature, man has “an actual capacity for change, and change for the better, a drive toward perfectibility” (57)13. He goes on to say that Spirit begins from a state of nature more or less, and must distance itself from nature in order to move through humans, who are divorced from nature by a myriad of distinctive traits such as reason, passion and will. Because Spirit begins from the state of nature and must create beyond that, it is inherently bound to create its own conflict and struggle.
Spirit is the antithesis of matter and seeks something within itself-freedom. However, it is unaware of its ultimate goal’s existence within itself, and must struggle to discover this and realize itself. This struggle takes place in Spirit’s movement through the material world, especially through human labor. It must always remain moving for Hegel as his dialectical system dictates, and so it requires conflict of some sort to maintain this movement and ultimately
12 Todd May (2006), The Philosophy of Foucault. Montreal: McGill-McQueen’s University Press, p. 1-24 13 GWF Hegel (1988), Introduction to The Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, p. 57 realize itself. This is, in fact, a two-step process, beginning with the recognition of its own powers and ending with the process of realizing itself in such a manner.
I have shown labor to be inherently political in the work of Hegel. It is the engine of progress in the material realm, and represents the free endeavor of Species-Being to materially construct the world as he wills it. Spirit creates labor by flowing through Species-Being without the latter being aware of it, but, in the freest state of being, Spirit does not direct the labor of
Species-Being because the latter has recognized labor as a source of political power and a means of achieving freedom. It has used this realization to overcome the barriers standing between it and this freedom and now directs its own activities, which Spirit dutifully follows.
Spirit is trapped by history in that Species-Being labors not to create, but exclusively to consume, never allowing for Spirit to actualize itself freely in the material creations of Species-
Being. Conflict arises everywhere and forces the continued movement of Spirit because each individual human being, while attempting to achieve recognition, instead allows for the recognition of the Eye. Species-Being can never realize itself while it attempts to view itself through the eye which is not his own, that being the Postoptic Eye. Conflict arises in the material world because each individual human being attempts to achieve recognition as a self- consciousness where the commonality does not actually exist; self-consciousness must be able to see itself in the other in order to recognize it and itself be recognized (111-119)14 When self- consciousness looks for itself in the other, it will find something, but what it has actually discovered is that all self-consciousnesses are trapped in this one-sided relation of recognition-all see themselves through the Eye. As self-consciousness begins a suicidal assault on itself to assuage this conflict and bring about realization, each “is indeed certain of its own self, but not
14 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 111-119 of the other and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth” (113)15. The form is true, but the content is not in this regard.
Species-Being, subject to the movement of Spirit trapped in history and subject to acts of labor to which it does not actively consent, is now itself trapped in the Absolute Moment. The freeing of Spirit requires the freeing of labor for Species-Being, which will come through labor’s radical redefinition. As Hegel himself says, eventually machines will fully take over the process of production and man will no longer be forced to labor to fulfill his need (104)16. This process comes about through the natural desire to become more efficient and thus abstraction of labor which gives way to greater specialization and the division of labor with the ultimate goal of maximizing production, a goal shared by the Eye, as labor has become tied to consumption and greater production means greater consumption, creating an incredible rate of movement for Spirit that only serves to create more violence in the material world.
Furthermore, once human labor has been completely replaced by machinery within this particular moment, Spirit is ripped from the realm of the human and forced to move through machinery. Hegel uses ‘machinery’ in reference to technological advances that will remove the need for certain types of human labor, believing that, eventually, all human labor will be done by machines. This is the lowest moment of Spirit at which it is most divorced from itself. This is a powerful moment for Species-Being, however. Freedom from the confines of labor for its own sake, it can begin to rediscover labor as the free endeavor to create. In this moment, in fact, the relationship between Species-Being and Spirit is fully broken, as Spirit remains trapped in the continuous cycle of creation and consumption, unable to follow the labor of Species-Being beyond this cycle.
15 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 113 16 Hegel, Right, p. 105 Only upon recognizing labor as a means of political power once more does Species-
Being cease to recognize consumption as being tied to labor, breaking the cycle and reuniting
Spirit with a freer Species-Being. This is the process by which history is overcome and obtains a new legacy, allowing for true progress to begin. Slowly, Species-Being will begin to wield greater and greater power as its labor becomes more and more free. The temporality that has created the history that traps Spirit becomes fractured, as it relies on a conception of time found under capitalism, which must be fundamentally destroyed for Spirit to realize itself.
Once capitalism falls, this conception of time will follow suit, and the moment will cease to be an absolute. Spirit will continue to move, but will no longer require conflict in the same way because labor has been freed from all constraints and Species-Being is now able to labor as it chooses. Spirit requires conflict only when recognition is achieved by one self-consciousness and not another. Because all conflict has been ended at this moment, the realm of the political is moved within individual self-consciousnesses, allowing labor to move from a relation of power between individuals to a tool of self-empowerment. Spirit need now only move through recognition between human beings as their free labor allows them to exist for one another.
Bibliography
Browne, Simone. (2015), Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit. Edited by J. Hoffmeister. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -. (1896), Philosophy of Right. Translated by S.W. Dyde. London: George Bell & Sons. Republished by Dover in 2005. -. (1988), Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. May, Todd. (2006), The Philosophy of Foucault. Montreal: McGill-McQueen’s University Press. Weeks, Kathi. (2011), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.