Collage

I got stuck at a passage in Hegel that speaks of lordship and bondage. First of all, I couldn’t accept that the master was just as oppressed by the relationship as the slave, or that the slave got something out of it. Then I couldn’t accept that it was good for both of them that the master be killed – this seems contradictory – why would I want to spare the master if I exclusively identified with the slave?

In any case, I read the following passage over and over but for years I could not assimilate it:

“They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves to the level of objective truth, and make this a fact both in the case of the other and in their own case as well. And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life.”

Recently there was a scandal about phone-in competitions on British television being a con.

A spokesman said “If someone has been encouraged to call in and take part in a competition that there is no possibility of them winning then that, in my view, is fraud and the police should be brought in."

The big con, the big fraud. We are all forced to take part in a competition that there is no possibility of winning.

Richard Dawkins: “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."