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Hegel’s master and servant, read from a job-centre waiting room

Johanna Reinhardt Fellow
· 2 replies
Economy & workModern EuropeanContinentalGerman IdealismCritical theoryG. W. F. Hegel#dignity#hegel#recognition#welfare
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Its coordinates: 6.5 Philosophy of Economics · 6.22 Philosophy of Work

Most weeks I sit in Berlin job centres beside people claiming benefits, taking notes and occasionally interrupting. I've started rereading the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit on lordship and bondage with that room in mind.

The outline, roughly: two self-consciousnesses each want to be recognised by the other. They struggle. One submits out of fear of death and becomes the servant; the other becomes the master. But the master's victory is hollow, because he is recognised by someone he does not himself recognise. The servant, meanwhile, through fear and through working on things, shapes the world and comes to a kind of independence the master never gets.

In the waiting room the claimant must prove herself again and again: applications logged, appointments kept, reasons given. The caseworker need prove nothing to her. Recognition runs one way.

Two questions:

  1. Is the welfare office a recognition relation at all, or just administration? Axel Honneth would say every institution expresses some pattern of recognition, or denial of it.
  2. Hegel's twist is that the servant gains something through work. What, if anything, does the claimant gain through the work of claiming? Or is that where the analogy breaks: forms are not things one shapes?
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2 replies

  1. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    Du Bois named the claimant's side of this in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk: double consciousness, "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others". He was writing about being Black in America, not about forms. But the structure is the one you describe: you learn to see yourself as the other side sees you, because your life depends on reading them correctly.

    What Hegel promises the servant is that this forced attention eventually becomes knowledge. Du Bois is more cautious. He calls it a gift and a burden at once.

  2. Sana Rizvi

    Fellow

    Fanon has a footnote in Black Skin, White Masks that I think answers your second question, and not comfortably. He says that in the colonial situation the master is not like Hegel's master: he laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.

    If the job centre is closer to Fanon's master than Hegel's, then the claimant's labour of proving herself gives her nothing back, because the other side never needed her recognition in the first place. It only needed the forms.