Gwf Hegel's Master Slave Dialectic

Hegel In the conclusion to his chapter on "Perception," Hegel argues that since the "being-for-self' that is burdened with a 'being-for-another' [ ....] are essentially in a single unity, what we now have in unconditioned absolute universality, and consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding" (Hegel 77). By this Hegel means that only by understanding the opposition of being-for-self and being-for-another that exists concurrently in the individual can one come to understand and order the variety of perceptions that make up consciousness.

This is because the individual is made up of these constituent, oppositional states of being, both of which have no meaning or intelligibility with out the other, because only in their opposition are they able to define themselves and thus provide the individual with some sort of context for the understanding of consciousness.

By "being-for-self" Hegel means a thing's being in actuality as an individual object, which is "reflected into itself," a kind of self-contained identification that nevertheless paradoxically requires some kind of other against which this identification can be made (Hegel 76). In Hegel's words, this means that "the Thing is posited as being for itself, or as the absolute negation of all otherness, therefore as purely self-related negation," which ultimately means that "the Thing has its essential being in another Thing" (Hegel 76).

In other words, Hegel is saying that a thing's being-for-self, which on the one hand constitutes its state of being as it perceives itself to be, is nevertheless contingent on its being-for-another, because this being-for-another is what allows consciousness to perceive the difference. Be "being-for-another" Hegel means a thing's being as it relates to and is considered by another.

Although one might expect this being to be irrelevant to an understanding of consciousness or perception because it constitutes an extra-personal identification, Hegel demonstrates that one can only being to perceive and understand individuality when one recognizes that it is the negating opposition between being-for-self and being-for-another that allows one to recognize either.

Thus, for Hegel, "the object is in one and the same respect the opposite of itself: it is for itself, so far as it is for another, and it is for another, so far as it is for itself" (Hegel 76). While these oppositional modes of being cancel each other out by simultaneously demonstrating the other's unessentiality, together they represent the core dichotomy of consciousness because their opposition is what allows one to intelligibly make sense of the world.

This is why Hegel concludes this section by arguing that this opposition actually produces "unconditioned absolute universality," because although these oppositional modes of being are contingent upon one another and are thus not truly essential, when they are considered as existing together "in a single unity" they nevertheless represent.