I’ve been reading this book, Authority by Richard Sennett. It has some pretty meaty ideas in it, even if a lot of them come from citing other sources. I liked this one:
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The young Hegel thought that the burden of establishing conditions of liberty in society lay with the oppressed; no benevolent Platonic guardian, no necessary angel, would come to the rescue. The Hegel of the Phenomenology has clarified this idea. Hegel does so by defining the birth of liberty — in the bondsman’s consciousness of his work. He then describes the stages of liberty through which the bondsman passes. There are four of these stages, and the movement from each to the next occurs when the oppressed negates what he or she had formerly believed.
These four stages are stoicism, scepticism, the unhappy consciousness, and rational consciousness. They begin with the stoic’s withdrawal from the world into his or her own thought, a primitive, inward freedom. The scepticism of the next stage turns toward the world: the bondsman, still an obedient servant, nonetheless disbelieves in the role he acts and in the lord’s moral superiority. The unhappy consciousness takes this sceptical knowledge about a social relationship inside; there is a lord and bondsman in every human being. Hegel calls unhappy consciousness “consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being.” In a rational consciousness this knowledge again becomes social; the unhappy schism each person feels in himself he also sees in others. Hegel calls this final stage of freedom “rational” because now the person can perceive and act with others according to common purposes; there is no longer the need to fight others for recognition, since one’s own consciousness is so developed that one knows the divisions within oneself are divisions that exist in all humanity. Hegel also calls this rational, purposive consciousness an “absolute” state of freedom, and the use of the word “absolute” is key to his overall intentions: “Of the absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.”