Phenomenology Of Spirit Analysis

Prodhi Manisha

COCO 5

What are the forms of resistance available to slaves and what purposes do they serve?

The study of the complex system of slavery has remained critically insufficient due to the predominant treatment of the subject from a legislative and socioeconomic perspective localized in an external, corporeal world. In “The Phenomenology of Spirit”, the German philosopher G.W.F Hegel underscored the imperative to understand slavery as a cognitive and incorporeal system through the elucidation of the master-slave dialectic and the assertion that enslavement is essentially a psychological process. Thus, it follows that resistance as the subversion of enslavement must also be a psychological process. In this essay, I will discuss the

In my analysis, I will demonstrate that resistance is essentially the process by which slaves use mirror effect to manipulate the master-slave unilateralism and completely distort the master’s self-recognition.by reflecting back the absolute fear essential to the condition of enslavement. Given the dearth of firsthand meditative slave narrative, I will predominantly construct my analysis based on the Brazilian short story called “The Mirror: A Sketch for a New Theory of the Human Soul” by Machado de Assis and the Roman play “Pseudolus” by Plautus. Through characters constructed based on their lived experiences in slave societies, both authors use their characteristic expertise in exploring the inner worlds of masters and slaves to provide unadulterated and authentic insight into resistance psychology. Hegel’s exploration of the master-slave dialectic stagnates at the cusp of total enslavement, i.e. the singular formation of the “seasoned slave”. At this stage, the slave has achieved stoic consciousness, which entails “a purely thinking essence to which nothing can be of moment except to the extent

In other words, the slave now sees the object (“work”) as a truly independent thing, which in turn reflects the slave’s own independence and leads to the attainment of self-consciousness in its ultimate nature through the experience of absolute negativity and pure self-referrent existence. Expounding resistance within the Hegelian model necessitates extending the progression of such stoicism beyond pure acquiescence. In stoicism, the slave not only has an awareness of both the duality of recognition required for self-consciousness, but they also acquire the cognizance that the master is not privy to the experience of absolute negativity and pure self-referrent existence. Such awareness, in the phenomenology of spirit, leads to the formation of the skeptical consciousness that knows itself as dual but is not yet unified. It is at this stage that the precursory form of resistance is born--”passive” resistance. Skeptical consciousness and thus passive resistance is marked by a “negative response to otherness”