Hegel’s grounding of intersubjectivity in the master–slave dialectic

1

The debate between Kant and Hegel has been given new life by the recent interest in Kantian moral theory conceived of as constructive rather than as foundational. In this article, I would like to suggest some ways in which Hegel’s theory of the development of intersubjectivity in his famous account of the master–slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit both intersects with and pushes further arguments about the basis of morality in contemporary Kantian meta-ethics.

With Rawls’ appropriation of Kantian moral theory, attempts, in the English- speaking world at least, to provide a metaphysical grounding for morality have largely been put on hold. The Rawlsian claim that what is central in Kant is the doctrine of respect for persons has indeed given rise to a rich Kantian or at least Kant-inspired literature in both moral and political philosophy. ¹ The idea of Kantian constructivism, as elaborated by Rawls, holds that the justness of moral or political judgment is given by its conformity to a universalizable process of judgment. This move appears to obviate the need for a grounding of moral theory if only it can be assumed that people share a commitment to impartiality and respect for persons. ² The commitment to such a process, however, means that any moral reflection already occurs in the midst of social relation. The point is put succinctly by Andrews Reath who argues that ‘to require that we base a procedure of moral deliberation on some set of moral notions, without having a clear idea of what its “output” should be … is not a plausible aim for moral theory’. ³ The point is rather to systematize the moral agreement we already have.

However, with the appearance of Onora O’Neill’s Toward Justice and Virtue (1996) and Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity (1996a), the notion of a metaphysical grounding of morality has re-emerged as a viable possibility. To be sure, neither O’Neill nor Korsgaard believes that Kant’s failed deduction of morality in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, section 3 can be rehabilitated. But both address the apparent regress opened up by the need for a final justification; O’Neill has done this by emphasizing minimal moral requirements of non-deception and non-coercion while Korsgaard has done so by developing a theory of the essential intersubjectivity of reasons.

Building on arguments developed in The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard’s more recent work has sought to ground morality by arguing for two theses. Stated briefly, the first argues that agency is essentially self-authorizing, since in order to act in the world, the agent, and only the agent, must choose between different paths. The agent’s decision is made according to a principle and this principle in turn constitutes the identity of the agent. We are what we decide to do. In this sense, we reflect on which incentive is given to us by the world (to use Korsgaard’s language) to act on, and our decision makes us who we are. I will call this the reflective endorsement thesis.

The second thesis concerns the source of the incentives that we must choose between in acting. Because we have a principle according to which all decisions are made, it makes no difference whence the incentives come. Korsgaard thus argues that internal incentives or motivations have no greater power over us than external sources and hence that we can respond to others’ needs (as long as they are recognized by us as incentives) just as readily as we can respond to our own. This means that there is no essential division between subjects: all can, in principle, be bound by the same concepts. ⁴ I will call this the publicity of reason thesis. The conclusion of the publicity of reason thesis thus states that it is possible to take others’ reasons as reasons for our actions, which means that morality, taking other people’s reasons as intrinsically valuable (hence restrictive of our own desires), is possible.

If this argument is correct, and I think it is, it still leaves a central question unanswered, namely how do we actually become just. This is a criticism that has been articulated for the English-speaking world most compellingly by Bernard Williams’ attack on the impartial system of morality. ⁵ Williams’ central charge is that deliberative rationality in the form of Kantian morality is only one motivational factor among many. This is shown by the fact that we experience regret when a project we embark on fails. Deliberative action, Williams’ argument goes, is always secondary to the life-project we are engaged in. This is why correct deliberation cannot shield us from the feeling of failure if our project fails. Our sense of success or failure as persons depends on a certain amount of luck and only secondarily on having acted morally in formulating our ground project. Williams writes: ‘[The agent’s] moral luck … does not lie in acquiring a moral justification. It lies rather in the relation of [the agent’s] life, and of [her] justification or lack of it, to morality.’ ⁶

Williams’ attack can be read as the complaint that, even if one grants the possibility of rational moral deliberation, it depends on social conditions (as well as simple luck) to what extent agents will be able to justify their actions to an objective system of morality. So, in Williams’ famous example, Gauguin’s desire both to stay with his family and also to realize himself as a painter are incompatible goals, which place Gauguin in the tragic position of having to choose between art and family.

Williams’ account has several consequences for a Kantian theory of morality. While it grants the internalist moral psychology I have labeled the reflective endorsement thesis, it denies that reflective endorsement alone can constitute us as agents. ⁷ Williams is not, then, in disagreement with Korsgaard about our actions constituting us. For both, we are constituted by our principle, the principle that we use to adjudicate between different incentives in the world. The disagreement arises at the level of what the principle we act on looks like. For Korsgaard, the principle turns out to be the categorical imperative itself, while for Williams the principle takes the form of a ground project which is different for each person. To put the matter differently, Korsgaard and Williams examine the problem from different perspectives. Korsgaard’s argument takes place on the systemic or metaphysical level, the level at which the conditions for the possibility of morality are to be examined. Williams, by contrast, argues from the perspective of current moral dilemmas, from the perspective of the suffering individual in history.

This difference in perspective, however, does not mean that I consider these accounts as fundamentally incompatible. These two approaches can be brought together, I contend, by furnishing a history of the development of principles, thereby both justifying Korsgaard’s systemic argument about the conditions for the possibility of morality and addressing Williams’ objection by showing it to be diagnosing a historical mismatch between morality and self-expression.

Hegel furnishes us with just such a theory of the historical development of the principles which are at issue in the debate between Korsgaard and Williams. Hegel shares Korsgaard’s two theses about reflective endorsement and the publicity of reason, but adds a historical dimension to his account. ⁸ The historical axis reveals the dialectical interplay between the agent’s ground project and the demands of reason to be understood as compatible rather than mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the developmental approach to morality allows Hegel to go beyond his own charge that Kantian morality is empty by showing that the demands of reason reveal themselves only gradually during the process of human history. ⁹

The account I will be presenting here is a constructivist one. It is thus non-foundational in the sense that the interplay between agents will itself constitute their normative commitments to each other. The end goals of the normative commitments will be something like the kingdom of ends or Hegel’s free state in which individuals recognize each other as the bearers of absolute value.

The next section will lay out some of the general ideas in Hegel’s philosophy relevant for the developmental account of morality. In the third section I will give an interpretation of Hegel’s so-called master–slave dialectic from the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here I will trace the development of normativity as it arises in the interplay between self-consciousness and reflective endorsement. In the final section I will return to Williams’ critique of the Kantian position in order to determine whether the Hegelian account has been able to resolve some of the disagreement.

2

In this section I would like to set out briefly some of the background to Hegel’s development of the two theses about reflective endorsement and the publicity of reason I discuss above. These tenets, to be sure, are set forward elsewhere too, but I take it that they play a central role in his account of intersubjectivity as developed in the Phenomenology. In the next section I will provide textual evidence for some of the claims I make here on Hegel’s behalf. Because of the complexity of Hegel’s project, not all the arguments can be developed equally, however. I will confine myself to an overview of what I take Hegel’s contribution to contemporary Kantian meta-ethics to be.

A general (and first) thesis Hegel returns to again and again is that there can be no meaningful distinction between different branches of philosophy. In the case we are investigating here this means that there is no distinction between epistemology and ethics, since they both rely on what we might call moral phenomenology. The failure to see this connection, Hegel argues, means that moral philosophy – as it occurs in pre-Kantian and Kantian philosophy – takes the central point for granted: that perceiving a person epistemologically is already to be in some sort of meaningful contact with the other as a moral subject. ¹⁰ To be sure, Kant addresses the issue in the third chapter of Groundwork in the form of a deduction and again in the Critique of Practical Reason as a thought experiment. For Hegel, however, intersubjectivity, as the basis of morality and ethical life, is a problem that requires both an epistemological and an ethical solution. Thus the relevant distinction in ethical debates is not between the atomistic self-interested individual and the social individual but between being a subject recognized as the bearer of value and not being so recognized. For Hegel, then, the conception of the individual as the bearer of intrinsic value is something which develops historically. It cannot be somehow deduced from first principles.

The above claim is a direct consequence of Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s distinction between the understanding and reason, where the understanding is limited by the categories and thereby denied knowledge of human freedom. Since this is such an important claim, I would like to rehearse it in a little bit of detail here. Here I follow Robert Pippin’s account in Hegel’s Idealism.

Recall that for Kant, in making a judgment I must be able to recognize myself as the one making the judgment, for otherwise it would not be me making the judgment. As Pippin puts it, being in a subjective state, even a merely momentary subjective state, does not count as having an experience of and so being aware of that state unless I apply a certain determinate concept and judge that I am in such a state, something I must do and be able to know that I am doing. ¹¹ Awareness of my judgment is not something I happen to have but the condition of the judgment being mine. This means that the judgment is reflective. ¹²

This reflective judgment means for Kant that the ‘I’ of apperception must supply a form for the judgment, and since only certain forms are available to us, only certain types of judgments can be made. These are the categories of the understanding. But this Kantian claim raised the following problem: how should one understand the claim that ‘intuitions must conform to the categories for experience to be possible’? Does this claim amount to a demonstration of the objective reality of pure concepts (as Kant thought) or does such a claim amount to the assertion that we can know a priori that intuitions conform to categories because there is no real independent ‘givenness’ in experience, and thus that an ‘identity’ between concepts and intuitions has been established, that ‘thought’ has successfully determined its ‘other’?

Without examining the details of this view, we can see that Hegel’s reinterpretation of the Kantian apperception thesis sets the stage for a more ambitious theory of ‘what there is’. By rejecting the notion that there is a distinction between receptivity and spontaneity, and therefore rejecting the idea that there is something beyond the reach of reason, Hegel is poised to construct a theory of reason which develops itself purely out of itself and must therefore justify itself purely on its own terms. According to Pippin, Hegel is thus committed to a theory about the priority of pure concepts in human experience. Hegel argues that the Notion (Begriff) determines the possibility and character of human experience and that, since there is no contrast between our conceptual framework and the world itself, the Notion does not limit us. Hegel believes that the spontaneity of self-conscious activity (the nature of reason itself) means that reason extends over both theoretical and practical reason, hence that there is no distinction between the two. I will call this the spontaneity thesis. ¹³

This thesis, as has been noted by H. S. Harris, has two sides. The first side is self-consciousness in the sense of Kant’s apperception thesis, a pure self-regarding ego. The other side is reflection, which is the endorsement of one desire over another. ¹⁴ This side is active. This distinction corresponds to the Kantian distinction between positive and negative freedom.

On the interpretation I am giving, the spontaneity thesis is a thesis about how we recognize ‘objects’ in the world either as means to our ends or as ends in themselves. For Hegel, we must learn to recognize people as people. This means that we must learn to treat them as ends in themselves rather than just as means to our ends, to use Kantian language. There is no pre-given knowledge about what is a person and what is an object. ¹⁵ This means, for Hegel, that there is no categorical distinction between epistemology and ethics: all objects are given to us passively through the transcendental unity of apperception but all must be responded to as well through the spontaneity of practical reason. What we must learn as a culture and as individuals is how to act on which object.

I will call this thesis the moral phenomenology thesis. It is surely the most far-reaching thesis, going to the core of Hegel’s theory of freedom. In the context of this article the point can be made as follows: for Hegel, the process of recognition, that is, the process of seeing others as humans and thus ends in themselves rather than as objects is what constitutes our history and our civilization. Ethical life or Sittlichkeit is the development of a type of relation between humans which is based on freedom rather than instrumentalization (much like the Kantian kingdom of ends). For Hegel, then, the process of civilization makes our potential for freedom (our self-consciousness of freedom) actual by creating the right sort of society in which people are given the opportunity to understand each other as ends in themselves rather than as adversaries. We know that we are free when we are able to take the needs and desires of others into account in our own decisions as if they were our own. In this sense, we recognize that the other is really just like us.

Hegel’s moral phenomenology goes beyond Kant in claiming that we can have real ‘knowledge’ of who is free. ¹⁶ This ‘knowledge’ is normative which means that it incorporates both epistemology and ‘morality’. But to put it this way also means that normativity must be ‘learned’, that is, who is autonomous and who is not is a ‘fact’ about the world which cultures as well as each subject must learn.

This theory of normative knowledge might be illustrated by the notion of a practice in which certain learned actions lead to the internalization of the normative values embedded in them. Saying ‘please’ and saying ‘thank you’ are initially understood as external norms by small children, but repeated use leads children to value these words as signs of recognition and value. Likewise, people’s perceived normative value can shift over time. Women and people of color have not always been recognized as the bearers of the same value as white European men. ¹⁷

Hegel’s moral phenomenology thesis claims that who is a person is the result not of some essential characteristic that each person has, rationality, for instance, but rather that who counts as a person is determined historically. However, Hegel does not conceive of this as a contingent process. Rather, historical development is driven forward by the capability of freedom which each individual has the capacity and desire to realize. The difference to the Kantian conception is that freedom is understood as being relative to historical practices and not as relative to a transcendental ideal of the person as autonomous. The gradualism inherent in this conception goes a long way toward showing that moral motivations depend on historically immanent factors rather than the agent being motivated by transcendental truths.

For Hegel, people are motivated by their empirical and social commitments. But the way these empirical and social commitments are themselves constructed is rational in the sense that it follows the path implicit in the idea of reason itself. The difference between Kant and Hegel on this count thus lies not in their respective teleological commitments but rather in their moral psychology. ¹⁸ For Hegel, we are motivated by the world around us, for Kant, we are (or can be) motivated by the idea of reason itself. ¹⁹

This account of motivation in Hegel fits, I will argue, into a historical account of the categories of morality in the sense that, taken together with the spontaneity thesis, we can see the general range of human motivations evolving gradually toward freedom. I will come back to this below, but let me just note that what I mean by this is simply that the development of social norms is the product both of the spontaneous (and self-revising) activity of reason and the concretely given set of existing norms.

3

The brief but difficult section of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel develops the notion of normativity and intersubjectivity can be divided into three parts: (1) the state of nature in which the subject enjoys radical freedom and encounters the other, leading to the struggle to the death, (2) the outcome of the struggle and the description of the master and the slave, (3) the slave’s realization that ‘his’ labor makes ‘him’ free.

The master–slave section of the Phenomenology begins by announcing the intended result of this dialectic: ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged’ (§ 178). ²⁰ This is a large claim and we will spend the majority of this section trying to understand it. But in terms of the theses enumerated above, we might interpret this opening statement as the claim that the subject which is only conscious of its freedom abstractly or negatively (as a mere possibility – ‘in itself’) must become intersubjective if it is to be a subject at all, that is, if it is to know itself as having agency and positive freedom. It becomes intersubjective when it exists in relation to another self-consciousness and hence has its desires and needs reflected back to it by that other self-consciousness which acknowledges it. The subject must act and develop in the world in order to realize its freedom. Its actions must become public in the sense of both being responses to the world and intelligible to those around it rather than merely private fantasies.

Hegel begins his account of the development of intersubjectivity and freedom by imagining what a lone subject might look like, a subject which is constrained by its physical needs only and which lives only according to its desires and needs. We might conceive of this subject as conscious in the sense that it can choose the best way to get what it wants but not in the sense that it reflects on its ability to find the means to its end. The subject thus behaves like an animal, having desires and realizing the means to satisfy them, but without being aware that it is taking the means to its ends.

Hegel writes of this self-consciousness:

Self-consciousness is primarily simple existence for itself, self-identity by exclusion of every other from itself. It takes its essential nature and absolute object to be Ego; and in this immediacy, in this bare fact of its self-existence, it is individual. That for which it is other stands as unessential object, as object with the impress and character of negation. (§ 186)

What Hegel is after here is the movement from treating others as means to an end to treating them as ends in themselves. But how do we get from perceiving the world in terms of our own gratification to perceiving it in terms of a community of subjects, each with its own capacity for self-determination? As already mentioned, Hegel’s strategy is to understand the appearance of ethical reason historically or developmentally.

The condition for the possibility of intersubjectivity is laid when two such beings encounter each other. Each is accustomed to bending the world to its will, but each finds the other resisting its will. Neither subject recognizes the other as a subject. ²¹ And how could it, being accustomed to seeing the objects of the world merely as means to its own end? The subject thus approaches the other in its usual fashion: it seeks to destroy it, to convert it into something that is useful to it. ‘[The two subjects] are for each other in the manner of ordinary objects’ (§ 186). But unlike the vegetable which yields to the subject’s power, the other fights back, because it too is accustomed to having the world yield before it. Each subject wants to maintain absolute dominance over its surroundings, hence maintain its radical freedom. There ensues a struggle to the death in which each tries to maintain its previous status. Neither recognizes the other as a subject like itself and thus seeks to annihilate the other.

It is important to see that the other becomes a threat to the subject by being quite literally there, by appearing in (for the first time) intersubjective space. The desire to destroy the other in order to preserve the subject’s radical freedom shows both that the subject is as yet unaware of itself as participating in this social space and that the struggle to the death is the original condition of social space, hovering as it does between the radical denial of the other and the promise of mutual recognition.

Peaceful coexistence is not an option at this point. This is because for Hegel self-consciousness is an activity which seeks to realize itself at the expense of everything around it. This is the dialectic of all or nothing, of being or nothingness. The conceptual world of the subject tolerates no resistance because, as an expression of freedom, it seeks to expand indefinitely. But this expansion is resisted by the world around the subject. The outcome is the social world in which interaction is governed by norms.

As part of the struggle for recognition, the first step to be achieved is self-consciousness, the ability to abstract from one’s particular position in the world and hence to see oneself as part of a community of individuals. Abstraction is thus something to be accomplished, something to be developed. But how?

During the struggle, each combatant is determined to vanquish the other. To do this, each is prepared to die for its (as yet untheorized) principle of having the world yield before it unconditionally. This principle is each creature’s truth, as Hegel puts it. And through the struggle each becomes conscious of this truth. The struggle, in other words, raises each subject’s mode of life to a principle and makes each self-conscious of its decision process. It is only the struggle to the death which makes this possible because only the threat of annihilation can provoke the fundamental reorientation that produces such a change in consciousness.

Each conceives of itself as an essence, as having an identity according to which it makes decisions. Self-consciousness is thus the condition of identity or of having a principle. In this first step of the argument we have thus moved from unified apperception in instrumental action to self-conscious reasoning. We have further seen that for a subject to have a unified self means for it to have a principle that unifies it in the sense of abstracting from its particular activities. Self-consciousness pits the subject against the world.

The question now becomes, what is the nature of this ability to have a principle or to reason? In fact, Hegel says, it turns out that there is more than one principle. One principle is just to go on as before, that is, to treat nature as a means to my own end. This is the principle that the victor has won the right to keep. The precise content of the other principle has yet to emerge. But this principle, of course, is what is in question and what we shall pursue here.

So we leave the victor behind, for he is stuck in his instrumental relation to the world in which he sees himself as the sole source of normativity which here means simply egotistical desire. He recognizes no one as his equal and so does not become intersubjective. ²²

But what of the loser? In giving up his previously held principle, in submitting to the will of the stronger, the weaker acknowledges that life is more important than any (particular) principle. In choosing to live, however, he gives up his principle and becomes a thing, an object in nature which has no principle of its own. The loser becomes a thing, an object which the master shapes and dominates. Thing-hood, for Hegel, means not having a will of one’s own. Not being able, in other words, to act on one’s own reason.

This situation might best be elucidated in terms of motivation. The slave’s ability to have motives, his self-consciousness, appears to have been replaced by ‘motives’ coming from the outside, from the master. The worry is, in other words, a worry about the possibility of some sort of externalism in which you act exclusively because someone tells you to, without regard for your own desires. In Kantian terms, we might say that your maxim is formulated by someone else. ²³

Korsgaard, drawing on Nagel and Williams, puts the point thus: ‘Suppose I say that the person P has a motive to do action A. If I intend this to imply that the person P has a motive to do action A, the claim is of an internal reason; if not, the claim is of an external reason.’ ²⁴ The point is that it is a requirement of practical reason that it be capable of motivating us. Practical reason can thus explain our actions from an internal or first-person perspective. ²⁵

The specter of complete domination of the slave by the master gives rise to the specter of someone acting without being motivated to act, that is, of someone acting through sheer force of the other but without any internal reason to do so. The master, in the picture, has complete mind control over the slave such that he can control the other’s action without physical coercion. Put another way, this time from the perspective of the slave, the threat is thus quite literally that the slave’s motivations for action, that is, the ‘reasons’ that can explain his action will not be found in him but rather in the master. What is objectionable in externalism is that it appears that the slave’s actions are the results not of his own authority but of someone else’s.

This point has the important result that, on the externalist view, the master makes it impossible for the slave to have an identity. One’s identity comes from the ability to bring one’s self-consciousness together with the material of the world over time. One’s identity is the history of this process of endorsing incentives. But without desires of one’s own, one’s identity lacks a fundamental part of what it is to have an identity, the self-determining part. ²⁶

The point of Hegel’s parable is to show that we always have a choice and that the choice is always ours. We can act on the other’s command or we can choose death. But this choice itself cannot be taken away from us. But a radical externalism would take this choice away from us, wishing to show with certainty that one option is better than the other.

Pursuing this separation between the slave’s self-consciousness and his thing-hood, Hegel writes that through the battle to the death, the unity of self-consciousness with itself, as exemplified by its two parts, is that: ‘Through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, of consciousness in the form of thing-hood’ (§ 189). The thing-hood to which the first (slave) self has been reduced is now merely a mechanism, no longer operating under its own freedom. The master, however, ‘is the consciousness that exists for itself, but no longer merely the Notion of such a consciousness, i.e. through a consciousness whose nature it is to be bound up with an existence that is independent, or thinghood in general’ (§ 190). So the master’s every desire is the slave’s command.

The key thing to see here is that the master’s desires are immediately authoritative for the slave, that is, they do not have to be turned into a maxim by the slave. The master’s desires are not incentives to be chosen among but already maxims which carry normative authority.

From the master’s perspective, then, the slave is an instrument, a means, to the master’s ends. It is central to Hegel’s analysis that the slave is torn just as the master is torn. On the one hand, his ability to endorse, that is, act on incentives makes him free. But on the other hand, the slave’s endorsements are not free precisely because his options of what to endorse are given by the master. This division, which is only ever overcome in the free state (if that), haunts the Hegelian subject.

The essential problem diagnosed here, as above, is that for the master to truly enslave the slave, the master would have to control not only the slave’s actions, but his motivations as well. But to do this would mean that the master would have to control and hence be the slave’s self-consciousness. But to be the slave’s self-consciousness would mean to be the slave, since, as we saw above, the condition for holding a principle and hence for acting on this principle is precisely being self-conscious. And this means that there is an internal contradiction to slavery, namely that the slave cannot at once be completely under the control of the master and also serve the master’s needs (as an independent being).

Hegel explores this question further through an analysis of self-consciousness and practical reason in the figure of the laboring slave.

Having thus leveled a powerful critique at externalism, we can now go over the idea of what it means to have a principle and then to the idea of reflective endorsement, already alluded to in our discussion of Korsgaard. That is, how the gradual movement from the abstract freedom of self-consciousness becomes the actual freedom of the endorsement of one’s own desires.

I earlier characterized the slave’s will as not his own and thus as purely a means to the master’s ends. It is now time to see why Hegel thinks that it is impossible for the slave to be merely (purely) an instrument of the master. Let us turn again to the question of self-consciousness. Here Hegel will seek to show that self-consciousness requires a principle in order to act. The principle which self--consciousness has, however, changes. I will refer to the changeable principle as the identity in order to keep it separate from meta-principles like the categorical imperative or the hypothetical imperative. ²⁷

As we saw, the struggle to the death between the two subjects first creates self-consciousness in the sense that both subjects become aware of themselves only as they confront each other over whose principle will dominate. In this confrontation, each becomes aware that he has a principle, hence becomes self-conscious. However, in the struggle, only one principle prevails and this is the victor’s. The loser’s self-consciousness is now filled with the principle the victor imposes on it. And this principle becomes the slave’s identity: do whatever the master tells you to do. This is how the master can get the slave to do his every command. So the slave quite literally identifies with the master and hence with his desires.

Hegel argues that this subservience is possible because in the struggle to the death, the slave’s principle, his identity, melted away and he became quite literally an extension of the master. After the struggle, he conceives of himself only in relation to the master. Hegel writes of the slave that he is ‘not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action’ (§ 192). Here I take it that being-for-self is having a principle around which an identity is constructed. The slave’s allegiance to the master means that that master is the slave’s principle, his identity. This is how externalism works.

However, we have already seen that the slave’s self-consciousness has been linked to two different principles or identities. The first one was that of pure instrumental reason while the second one is the master’s command. This suggests that self-consciousness is capable of having different identities over time. What needs to be understood now is how identities develop or are acquired.

For Hegel, the answer to this question lies in understanding what an agent does, that is, in understanding how self-consciousness (as capacity or form) relates to having an identity which directs activity. Hegel argues that the complete destruction of the slave’s first principle has rid him of his immersion in the world, has given him true self-consciousness in the sense of abstract thinking. The slave, in other words, must realize that his self-consciousness is intrinsically his own and that whatever identity is imposed on him is secondary to his self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness, Hegel is here saying, is negativity. For to know oneself separate from the world is to know oneself as imposing one’s will on the world. And to know oneself as imposing one’s will on the world is to know oneself as having a principle according to which this is done. So, in terms of the master–slave dialectic outlined here, the objective is for the slave to understand the work he does for the master as his own work as forming his proper identity. In this sense, the slave must reject the externalist model of agency and recognize that his self-consciousness is in fact at the root of all of his action. It is thus not the principle imposed by the master that constitutes the slave in the most fundamental way, but the slave’s ability to have a principle – his self-consciousness as reflective endorsement. ²⁸

His forced labor for the master affords the slave the opportunity to see himself as an agent. In an important passage, Hegel contrasts the master and the slave’s relation to the product the slave produces: ‘[For the master] desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self. But that is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence’ (½195). To paraphrase: because the master has not participated in the production of what he consumes, the fulfillment of his desires has only fleeting reality for him. His ‘negativity’ is expressed merely as consumption rather than as objective creation. While it is true that the product is generally experienced as independent of the consumer in later stages, Hegel’s point here is simply that by not having to exert any effort to create the object of his satisfaction, the master also does not reap the benefits of such exertion. The function of the slave is to make the master’s wishes come true, but as realized wishes, they have no reality (for the master) since he had nothing to do with their realization.

For the slave, ‘work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence’ (§ 195). By going up against the permanence of nature, the slave experiences himself as likewise permanent, that is, he experiences the world as resisting him. But what he creates despite this resistance is the authentic expression of his agency. Whatever he creates bears the mark of his self-consciousness and his principle. The act of creating dinner for the master, for instance, is not completely prescribed and so leaves room for what we might call the spontaneity of the slave’s self-consciousness. This spontaneity of mind, this creativity, is thus the core of the slave’s true self. The slave’s position in history, by contrast, is seen by the slave as merely one possible instantiation among many. His identity as slave, his principle of action which is to do as the master demands, is a temporary identity.

To sum up then, Hegel argues that agency is only possible through the combination of self-consciousness with a principle of action. On the structural view, this means that to be an agent one requires a principle, but this principle is variable in the sense that it can come from anywhere, the agent himself or some external force. On the developmental view, to be discussed below, however, the point is that the first principle actually must come from an external source since it is only through suffering that the slave can become conscious of himself as a subject who is ‘free’ to choose his principles.

The variability of the principle for action which the master–slave dialectic explores has the important consequence that reasons for action are to be understood intersubjectively. That is, though Hegel rejected the externalism of the master imposing his will completely on the slave, there is nonetheless something to this thought experiment; namely that the will of the other does have an important place within the decision-making capacity of the subject. This means that having a principle is having a principle which is subject to the influence of others. And this, I take it, is the same point that Korsgaard makes when she says that other people’s desires or reasons can motivate us in the same way as our own reasons and desires can. When we act, the incentives for acting can come equally from inside us and from outside us, so intersubjectivity is possible. This is the publicity of reason thesis.

Here I would like to come back to the two planes of analysis I mentioned earlier: the systemic or metaphysical, and the historical. It is important to see that Hegel and Korsgaard agree on the systematic level that reasons for actions can come from both the inside and the outside. The difference lies in Hegel’s further argument that there is a historical dimension to be considered as well, that of the actual balance of influences which are available for endorsement. Hegel’s point is that reflective endorsement always occurs within the context of constraint. We are, Hegel insists, actually not always free to choose between inner and outer incentives for action. The slave, though he can, at the metaphysical level (as the possessor of reason), choose between inner and outer incentives, actually cannot exercise his autonomy because his identity does not permit it. His principle is not yet freedom, but rather subservience to the master. So there is a gap between the capacity for freedom furnished by self-consciousness and the actual capacity to exercise this freedom as concrete autonomy. This gap is to be overcome through the historical development of the broader scopes for action.

The discussion of identity formation via the combined effects of self-consciousness and desires or incentives has shown that the free formation of identity depends not only on self-consciousness itself but on what self-consciousness ‘works on’, so to speak. That is, identity depends on the sorts of things that we actually do endorse. If our choice of what to endorse is not free then we are not free.

The second waking of the slave’s self-consciousness is thus both the realization of the slave’s freedom but also the realization of his enslavement. As soon as the slave realizes that his actions are his, and that they constitute his identity, he must also recognize that it is within the power of the other to impose an identity on him as well. The decisive move of the recognition of self-consciousness and spontaneity through work only modifies this insight in the sense that now the slave realizes that identities are changeable and that identities come from the world itself. This changeable identity is what gives him hope for change and (depending on the historical state) for justice and recognition.

Seen historically or developmentally, intersubjectivity, as the slave experiences it, means that his immediate incentives for action are gradually replaced by a historically determined set of (ever expanding) incentives for action. This is the work of cultural formation. Instead of endorsing only his own desires (as the egoist would have it), the slave endorses desires which come from outside his immediate purview (as well as some from inside). This means that his reasons are intersubjective instead of subjective. Indeed, we can now see that the slave’s incentives were never purely subjective at all because the subject only becomes a subject through taking the other’s ‘reasons’ as his reasons for acting.

The dialectic of the master and slave replaces radical freedom of self-consciousness with a succession of reflectively endorsed incentives which together constitute the identity of the slave. The slave’s principle, we can now see, just is his identity and his identity is his principle: the way he sees and acts in the world.

To put this a little differently, the point I take Hegel to be making is that, as a minimal condition, having a principle is just having a relation to the world, and this principle is the condition for the possibility of an identity which directs your actions in a more individuated way. This identity is composed of the series of material motivations together with the history of which motivations the subject has endorsed. But just as your actions are shaped by the possibilities open to you, so your identity or history opens you up to certain options in the world. And by ‘world’ I mean other people as well as material objects. Indeed, as I have said repeatedly, for Hegel, what is to be learned is how to distinguish people from other organisms. This too depends on the development of our principle or identity.

The above point about the development of human identity taken together with points made previously about how (on the developmental view) intersubjectivity arises only through domination, leads into a further point about the development of intersubjectivity, namely that intersubjectivity is fundamentally also a power relation. ²⁹ Above I said that, for Hegel, subjectivity and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. But to this we must add that the fundamental attitude toward the world arose in struggle for the supremacy of each actor’s principle. Intersubjectivity was thus something that was forced on the loser by the victor. In order to stay alive, the loser had to accept the victor’s principle as his own, had to accept that he is not the only agent. Intersubjectivity is thus forever informed by this struggle for supremacy.

In serving the master, the slave recognizes himself as acting both for himself, and for the master: the slave provides the master with plenty and himself with enough to survive. The slave must weigh his own objectives against those of the master. He asserts his agency at the margins of his master’s power. He might exercise some creativity in preparing dinner, but is still bound to create that dinner. Fear of the master animates the slave’s labor. It gives him reason to transform the world.

We are now in a position to say something further about what having a principle means. In Kantian terminology, having a principle is a way of determining which actions one should and should not engage in. Kantian constructivists like Rawls and Korsgaard have argued that there is, in fact, only one principle of action and that this principle is just the categorical imperative. ³⁰ While for Hegel, the free state in which mutual recognition exists might not look much different from the Kantian kingdom of ends, Hegel’s point is rather that the right understanding of the idea of regulative reason, the categorical imperative, is something which must be developed through the struggle for recognition. Unequal power relations among subjects must be overcome in order to make space for a better conception of intersubjectivity than existed before.

This is where history enters into the picture. History, for Hegel, is the process in which agents act on the possibility of recognition, on the possibility of taking other people’s reasons as reasons rather than experiencing them as coercive power. But history is also the continued failure of this ideal and so keeps reminding us of the fact that we have not yet reached the point of full intersubjectivity. So, to bring things back to the master–slave dialectic, we can say that the master–slave dialectic is the origin of history in the sense that it is the origin of normativity itself. Hegel conceives of history as reflective in the sense that it is made up of the history of human (and therefore normative) relations. As the record of normative human relations, history also tracks the injustice of these relations, from the slave’s submission to the master all the way up to mutual recognition in the free state. History is thus the history of the emancipation from slavery, and records the way humans move from physically dominating each other, through intellectual domination to freedom.

Coming to understand others in a more just way means understanding other people’s desires as something to be respected. The master, it is important to note, does not do this and so is left behind in the Hegelian account. He does not experience or enter into the normativity of the world around him; he does not bind himself to any goals because all of his desires are satisfied by the slave. Being part of history means learning to be normatively constrained. Only in this way, Hegel seems to be saying, can we become subjects in a more robust sense. The master does not do this and so is left behind by history’s progress.

I would thus like to interpret the ostensible inequality which marks the origin of normativity as necessary for this development itself. It is only in inequality, in suffering or limitation, that the ideal of the free state appears as normatively motivating. Normativity appears in the gap between our conception of ourselves as who we are and who we would like to be. But Hegel, unlike Kant, thinks that this difference is far slimmer than the one between current conditions and the kingdom of ends. For Hegel, progress toward justice is motivated more by the desire for incremental improvements in our freedom than by an overarching ideal.

By way of concluding this section, I would like to say that Hegel’s presentation of the master–slave dialectic, as I have interpreted it, shows that normativity is most powerfully experienced from the perspective of the loser of the conflict. The winner, like the master, never enters normativity because he is never at odds with existing conditions. Because he does not experience suffering, and thus has nothing to hope for, history leaves him behind. The loser, by contrast, exists in conflict and continues to insist that his desires be recognized by others. The difference between these two perspectives is quite nicely captured in Hegel’s elucidation of the Doppelsatz, according to which Hegel’s dictum that the real is the rational really means the real must become the rational. ³¹ For we can now see that to think that the real is the rational is the perspective of the master who exists outside of history. The slave’s perspective, by contrast, is the imperative that the real must become rational. The normative is here characterized negatively, as the failure of the present order of things. The failure of the present order means that some injustice exists and that we must strive for justice.

4

I hope to have shown that while there is significant overlap between Kantian and Hegelian constructivism, Hegel adds to the account of moral psychology a historical dimension which can help to overcome the problem of the indeterminacy of moral judgment, as it has been formulated by Williams. Recall that Williams’ critique of Kantian and generally deontological theories of ethics was that the ground project of any individual takes up a greater space within human identity than morality can. This is because the individual’s measure of human worth depends on her success in the real world as well as on her ability to justify herself to others. For Williams, then, identity is a more expansive notion than morality will permit.

I would like to address this point by showing how Hegel is both sympathetic to this point but refigures Williams’ insight in a way that permits a fuller conception of ‘morality’ or ethical life than either Kant or Williams have in mind. For Hegel, as for Williams, identity encompasses the totality of our relations with the world (including other people). But as our interactions with the world change, so does our identity. Hegel thus historicizes our identity, situating it more fully within its context and hence appreciates, more fully than Kant appears to, the inadequacy of the world we do inhabit.

For Hegel, our ground project is our identity in the sense that it is the measure of ourselves as free beings. As we seek to succeed in our ground project we also (unintentionally, for the most part) make the world itself more free. Our search for autonomy, Hegel argues, is also the general quest for the autonomy of others. (On this point, Kant fully concurs.) But what makes Hegel different from Kant is that Hegel conceives of the standard of justice and freedom applicable to the agent from within the ground project or the agent’s identity rather than in some sense transcendent to it. The contrast between Hegel and Kant is that for Kant, the categorical imperative functions as a standard to be referred to as the agent determines what she is about to do. But for Hegel, the standards of action come not from reason itself but from social norms, habits and other behaviors.

This latter perspective permits us to understand the conflicting motivations that humans face as they live their lives. From the philosopher’s perspective looking back over history, which may be our modern perspective as well, we must realize that our lives must both fit in with and alter the normative structures of our world. That is, we see normative schemata come and go, and this insight might mean that we become more eager to challenge oppressive structures, in Williams’ sense.

So in terms of Williams’ critique, we might reformulate the objection as stating that deontology fails to judge the ground project in its own terms. Hegel’s contribution is thus to see that we can judge the ground project on its own terms (from the perspectives of the desires of the subject) while also believing that reflective endorsement will move us closer to a more just world.

In more general terms, I would like to conclude that Hegel’s historical account of the development of the categories of morality shows that while a deduction of morality fails because it is too abstract, we cannot do without a metaphysical foundation of morality either. Hegel, like Kant, believes that it is absolutely essential to ground intersubjectivity philosophically in order to understand what makes a subject of intrinsic value a subject at all. Kant’s failure, Hegel seems to believe, is to put the emphasis on the intrinsic nature of value rather than on what it means to be a bearer of such ‘intrinsic’ value.