Lord–bondsman dialectic
This movement, inexorably taken to its extreme, takes the form of a "struggle to the death" in which one masters [beherrscht] the other, only to find that such lordship makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the bondsman, in this state, is not free to offer it.
It is preceded in the chapter by a discussion of "Life" and "Desire", among other things, and is followed by "Free Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness".
Hegel wrote this story or myth in order to explain his idea of how self-consciousness dialectically sublates into what he variously refers to as absolute knowledge, spirit, and science.
In order to explain how this works, Hegel narrates an abstracted, idealized history about how two people meet.
However, Hegel's idea of the development of self-consciousness from consciousness, and its sublation into a higher unity in absolute knowledge, is not the contoured brain of natural science and evolutionary biology, but a phenomenological construct with a history; one that must have passed through a struggle for freedom before realising itself.
Hence, the self-consciousness that results from this initial meeting is necessarily incomplete, as each views the other as an "unessential, negatively characterized object"[5] rather than an equivalent subject.
According to Hegel, On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for this primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other.
[12] As philosopher Robert Brandom explains: Hegel's discussion of the dialectic of the Master and Slave is an attempt to show that asymmetric recognitive relations are metaphysically defective, that the norms they institute aren't the right kind to help us think and act with—to make it possible for us to think and act.
And Hegel's argument is that unless authority and responsibility are commensurate and reciprocal, no actual normative statuses are instituted.
His reading of the lord-bondsman dialectic substituted Hegel's epistemological figures with anthropological subjects to explain how history is defined by the struggle between masters and slaves.
A synthesis takes place between master and slave: the integral citizen of the universal and homogenous state created by Napoleon.
[17] The lord—bondsman relationship influenced numerous discussions and ideas in the 20th century, especially because of its connection to Karl Marx's conception of class struggle as the motive force of social development.
