A self-consciousness wants to be recognized as a self by another. Each risks its life to prove it is more than a living thing. One fears death and submits — the bondsman; the other becomes lord.
But the victory is hollow: the lord is recognized only by someone he does not recognize, and he depends on the slave’s labour. The slave, having felt “absolute fear”, and having shaped the world through work, comes to find his own mind in what he makes. The slave becomes the bearer of history.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsMuhammad Iqbal
The Urdu and Persian poet-philosopher of Lahore who preached “khudī” — the self’s dynamic development — as the heart of a reconstructed Islam, wrote “Sāre jahāṅ se acchā” for India, and later envisioned a Muslim homeland that became Pakistan.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Genevan philosopher of nature, freedom and feeling — “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” — whose Social Contract inspired revolutionaries and whose Confessions invented modern autobiography.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The philosopher raised by the Theosophists to be a “World Teacher”, who renounced the role in 1929 — “truth is a pathless land” — and spent sixty years teaching that freedom comes only from seeing the movement of one’s own mind, without authority, method or guru.
The Analects
The collected sayings and conversations of Confucius and his disciples — the most influential book in East Asian history.
Bad Faith
Self-deception about one’s own freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined by role or nature, to escape the anguish of choice.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.