No.5348
If anyone's interested, here are the notes I took from reading the section on the Master-Servant dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology. I'll paste the simplified summary I developed at the end:
<The project is to develop a concept of a process of self-cognition, and this is done by allegory. Suppose two beings come into contact each other, and enter into a struggle to prove each others' self-existence, since self-recognition is only possible through the other. One is subordinated to the other, one being becomes the master and the other, the servant. The master desires to achieve independent consciousness, and takes from the servant what is necessary to achieve freedom and to live without fear of death. To the master it appears that he is self-sufficient, independent, and essential, and it appears that his servant is not-self-sufficient, dependent, and inessential.
<The trouble is that the master's appearance of independence and self-sufficiency is an illusion, created by the freedom that is generated by the servant's relation of dependence to the master, and the fact that the master does not interact with nature directly, but processed through the servant. The relation of dependence of the master to the servant is present, but obscured, and when it's uncovered the master loses his sense of independent self-existence.
<The servant's notion of self-existence is bound up with his relation to the master, but he comes to realize his own self existence in two ways. First, the servant fears death, which is the ultimate negativity, that is to say death has the power to negate all things; previously the servant associated negativity with the master, and negativity appeared alien. With death, negativity is immediately and completely personal. Second, the servant works on objects in nature for the master, which seems at first to be deeply impersonal: his work is at the whim of the master. But the truth is that work is an expression of the servant's creative or formative activity and capacity, the objects on which he works are left with the imprint of his own conscious activity, and so he realizes his own existence through that work. These two methods: fear and work, are related and inseparable if the servant is to attain a real self-consciousness, or a real mind of his own.