Love, the desire to be desired and the Master-Slave dialectic

 

    What follows is an excerpt from my upcoming book, "Intersubjectivity and its paradigms". It contains my own interpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic as viewed through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Note that when I say "psychotic", in this post, I am not necessarily referring to schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, but to the psychotic clinical structure.

“THE ONE WHO FIRST GIVES IN”

 

    In “The Phenomenology Of Spirit”, Hegel introduces his idea of the master-slave dialectic (also often translated as the “master-servant” or “lord-bondsman” dialectic) in order to explain the sublation of consciousness into self-consciousness. It is described by a myth: two people that meet and start fighting each other to the death in order to be the only person alive, since the existence of another consciousness threatens one’s monopoly over self-consciousness itself. Eventually, one of the two people cares for their life more than the other and begs to stop the fight. That person who “gives in first” becomes the slave for the other one, who becomes the master – the master is the one who was willing to risk their life more, and by caring less about death, they were able to fight for more. The one who cares about their life more becomes the slave because the one who is willing to risk their life more will put certain conditions over the other in order to stop the fight.

    More concretely, you can imagine this: A and B have a physical fight, and after many cuts and bruises, after both of them start realizing that if they continue fighting for more, they’ll eventually die, there will be one who cares about living a bit more than the other, let’s say that B cares about their life more than A. Then B will propose to stop the fight: “Hey, A, let’s stop fighting because if we continue, one of us will die and I don’t want it to be me”. A was willing to continue fighting for more time than B (for how much, we cannot know exactly), so A now has two choices: a). ignore B and continue fighting, or b). agree to end the fight under certain conditions. A would be an idiot to not put certain conditions on ending the fight, since A is willing to risk their life more than B, A now has more “leverage” to negotiate the terms of their future relationship (“I will stop punching you if you agree to do this favor for me”). The more someone is willing to risk their life, the more leverage they have to negotiate a contract of subservience over the other.

    The general formula is this: the one who “gives in” first becomes the slave for the other one, who becomes the master.

    It is the same thing in capitalism, where the employer almost always has more leverage to negotiate the contract with their new employee, after a successful job interview, and thus, have a certain kind of power over them – it is just like Hegel said, because the employee needs the employer more than the employer needs the employee, and thus, the employer fears the death of their relationship less!

    As you can see, this myth can be interpreted literally or metaphorically (in the case of the employer-employee relationship, the death was a metaphorical death of the relationship itself). Metaphorically speaking, it is a good allegory for what goes on in every relationship of ours. The master-slave dialectic is the resolution for the dialectical tension between how we want others to be and how they themselves want to be. It is the dialectical reversal over the problem of the persona: the persona is a negotiation between how others want us to be and how we ourselves want to behave (the “being yourself vs. being loved” dilemma) – and it corresponds to the fantasy of the neurotic (algebraically represented by Lacan as “$ ◊ a”). The master-slave dialectic, on the other hand, is the fantasy of the pervert (algebraically represented by Lacan as „a ◊ $”), it is the compromise between „letting the other be themselves” vs. „loving them”. In other words, if you do not tell other people what to do or how you want them to be like, they will behave in a particular way that offends or upsets you. If you do try to control or change other people, you risk changing them so much that you are only „talking to yourself in the mirror through others”, like the psychotic does. Or, like I explain in my previous book:

 

“We all wish for better social skills. Even those with very good social skills wouldn’t mind even more charisma, even more persuasion power, even more social awareness, and so on. But how do unlimited social skills look like?

Imagine your social skills become so good that you can charm or persuade anyone into doing anything you want. You become so good at applied psychology that you even have the superpower-like ability to control the tone of the people’s voices and their exact choice of words and speed of talking. You can make anyone, with enough effort, do anything to anyone else.

In this hypothetical reality, once you become so powerful, how much of the other is “human” anymore? If any one person can be controlled into doing anything, regardless of initial resistance, can we call them ‘human’ anymore? This is how a robot behaves, be it programmed by classical programming or by artificial intelligence. You will soon realize how extremely lonely you are. Each person is a puppet of your decisions, and is thus controlled by you, it is as if no other person would exist, since you would only interact with yourself. To be unlimitedly persuasive is like playing a game of chess with yourself: you make both moves.

Thus, the desire for social interaction is the secret desire for failure. The analogy with the chess game is so good because it is also an example: we play two-player games usually when there is at least a small chance for failure, either with other real-life people (in person or over the internet) or with bots. This is the masochistic nature of humans: we do not want it to get easy.”

(Ștefan “Lastrevio” Boros, “Love, politics, social norms and sex”, Chapter XIII: ANXIETY, SHYNESS AND WHAT MAKES US HUMAN)

 

    If everyone would do as you wish, they would have no free will and no subjectivity, everyone else would just be a clone of yourself (like in the psychotic’s fantasy). The master-slave dialectic is, thus, this dialectic between “making people do what you want” and “letting people do whatever they want”. You choose the former, and you regress into psychosis, since everyone else is just a clone of yourself. You choose the latter, and you are in conflict with everyone, since no on behaves as you wish.

    This is what Hegel meant when he explained that the existence of another consciousness threatens our own monopoly over self-consciousness itself. The psychotic fantasy is an attempt at such a monopoly, an attempt to make everyone else “a clone of you”, or like I previously explained in this book when describing the paradigm of meaninglessness, “to talk to yourself through others”. Perversion, instead, is an attempt at a resolution to this master-slave dialectic, at “controlling others without controlling others”, or at “making other people do what you want out of their own free will”.

    This is how we can interpret Lacan’s name for the last lecture in his eleventh seminar: I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you. We all want attention (what Hegel would’ve called “recognition” of our existence), but we want a particular kind of attention, we want others to love us in the way we want to be loved or “recognized”, in a way that conforms to our fundamental fantasy. Yet, in this process of controlling the way in which others love us, we risk “mutilating” them, as Lacan says, in changing the other person so much that they are not “another subject” anymore, but a mere clone or reflection of ourselves. When we have “psychologically mutilated” the other so much that they do not have any freedom to choose the way in which they love us, they are no longer a different subject, but we are just talking to ourselves through the other, we have created a clone of ourselves (as Hegel would’ve said: we have achieved monopoly over self-consciousness).

    Moving on, what happens when one of the two people gives in first and becomes a slave? In real life, we are dealing way less often with physical fights to the death, but we are dealing with potential “metaphorical deaths” of certain relationships. Hence, the formula for my own interpretation of the master-slave dialectic in our day-to-day lives is this:

1.     Replace “physical violence” with the violence of absence or silence itself, the violence inherent in ignoring each other or in not saying/doing anything

2.     Replace “death” with the metaphorical death of a conversation or of a relationship

    This is the most common scenario: two people stop talking to each other and each person waits for the other person to text/message them first, or to make the first move. You see this a lot in dating and relationships, but you also see this after two friends or family members have an argument and each wait for the other person to apologize first, or to at least attempt to make-up first. It is often justified that “you do not want to look desperate”, but I think this is more often a cope, a retroactive justification of this behavior. In actuality, we desire to be desired. Desire is a hole, a gap, a lack in ourselves (“what we do not have, what we lack, what we miss”). However, to desire love means to desire the other’s desire, to want to be wanted, this creates a whole ton of problems since you attempt to fill in your lack with the other person’s lack (to fill your inner emptiness with the other person’s inner emptiness). The person who texts first, for example, signals to the other that they need this relationship more than the other. If we stop talking for a week and suddenly you message me “Hey, what’s up?”, you just communicated that you needed to talk more than I needed to talk – in other words, you feared the death of the relationship more than me.

    This desire to be desired cannot be communicated since it is precisely the point at which speech intersects impossibility. If people were to actually “say what they want” in a relationship, a lot of conversations would happen like this: “Hello, I want you to message first. Oh wait, I just did…”. Hence, the desire itself is self-defeating, a sort-of “self-censoring desire”. This desire to be desired can be compared with quantum particles which, once observed (or in this case, talked about), disappear.

    The psychotic structure forecloses this gap created by the master-slave dialectic, and the psychotic answer to the master-slave dialectic is “absurdity” or “nonsense”. I once invented a joke in order to explain how the master-slave dialectic works for psychotics:

 

A schizophrenic boy has a crush on his paranoid classmate. One day, the schizophrenic boy texts his paranoid classmate: “Hello, I want you to send the first message”, not realizing that by writing this, they just sent the first message.

The paranoid girl replies: “Hah, you thought you can deceive me? I know that you are lying, that you are not actually wanting to send the first message and actually wanted me to send the second message! I will not fall prey to your tricks!”, and then hits send, not knowing that she just sent the second message.

 

    Of course, this example is exaggerated, but you may see from time-to-time examples from real psychotics who may say stuff like “Hey, I always am the one inviting you out, how about this time you do the inviting? Invite me now.”. Such a mode of intersubjectivity is inherently solipsistic, as I often said in previous chapters, since it denies the other person any freedom to choose their own answer, you are just attempting to “turn two into one”, to make the other person a part of you or a clone of yourself.

    Romance novels, movies and shows are infamous for depicting a utopian, exaggerated or unhealthy vision of love and are widely criticized for that. However, there is one romance anime that is probably one of the only ones that depicts a more or less realistic picture of love: “Kaguya-sama: Love Is War”. It is a romantic comedy that caricatures the master-slave dialectic: two wealthy Japanese high school students, coming from high-class families, fall in love with each other and yet are too proud and narcissistic to confess their love first, as they believe whoever does so first would "lose" in their relationship. The story follows their many schemes to make the other one confess or at least show signs of affection. While, of course, parodying and exaggerating the dialectic, the main premise of the show is at least realistic – to love someone without being loved back (or, alternatively, to love/desire someone more than they love/desire you back) puts them in a position of power over you, which is one reason why most people have so many defense mechanisms to hold back from doing so too early (anxiety, shyness, paranoia/skepticism, pride/narcissism, etc.). If you admit that you are under their spell, but that they are not under your spell, often times you can, indeed, be more easily manipulated. Love, that is, the desire to be desired, is the lack in oneself that tries to be filled in by the lack in the other, and thus, to admit to someone that you love them is like showing them the place in your body where you have an open wound – now that they have that information, you may be at their feet, because they know the place to strike if they happen to want to hurt you.

 

THE MASTER BECOMES DEPENDENT ON THEIR SLAVE

 

    What happens in the resolution of the master-slave dialectic? In the case where “death” means “metaphorical death of a relationship”, both people remain silent instead of fighting, waiting for the other person to message/hit them up first. The person who gives in first demonstrates that they need this relationship more than the other. The person who is “colder”, the one who replies back harder, can now become the master: they can (more or less indirectly) put certain terms and conditions onto the other person regarding when and how they can get a reaction out of them. For example, they now have the power to reinforce certain behaviors over others – reply faster when the slave did something you like in that day, reply slower when the slave behaved improperly in that day.

    Hegel continues to explain how the slave “works” for the master, and the master profits off of the labor of the slave. As a general formula: the slave does all the work, the master tells the slave how to do that work. In the case of conversation, the slave is usually the one directing the conversation (regardless of how paradoxical this may sound, the slave is the one with control over the conversation), the one who is constantly thinking of what to say, coming up with subjects of conversation, of new topics to be discussed, asking questions, and so on. In this case, the “metaphorical death” in the myth of the dialectic is not “the death of the relationship” but “the death of the social interaction/the conversation”, represented by the infamous “awkward silence”. The slave is the one who fears the awkward silence more (the death of the conversation), so they will be the first one to try to “make the conversation work”. In this case, the slave is the one doing more of the work (or all of the work). In other words, the person who first breaks the awkward silence becomes the slave – they are doing more of the work while reaping less of the benefits, but at the same time, the master (the one who does not break the awkward silence) now depends on the slave! Of course, this master-slave relation may change every few minutes in an actual social interaction.

    It’s a similar case in the larger context of a relationship, where the person who fears the death of the relationship more will usually put more work into making that relationship work. That person is the slave – the master gains power over the slave by having indirect control over what exactly the slave is doing with the relationship, while putting in little-to-none of the work.

    The summary of the power-relation is this: the slave works for the master, and thus the master is dependent on the slave. In other words, the slave “gives” and the master “takes”. The master is positioned in the selfish or egoistical position where they do little to none of the work and receive most, if not all of the benefits. On the other hand, the slave is “being taken advantage of” – they do most to all of the work and receive little to none of the benefits of the work. However, this relationship has a “twist”, because while it may seem at first glance that the master has all of the power, that it is “better” to be a master in life, that you’d rather live as a master than a slave, you have to remember that the master is dependent on their slave(s).

    Let us go through two other simple examples. The first example: a rich person (the master) having literal servants/slaves for all of their life. They were born rich, and were always rich, and thus never needed to learn how to cook, how to clean, how to take care of themselves. For all of their life, other people did work for them: this rich person always had a multitude of servants who cleaned their house, who cooked for them, and the rich person never worked a day in their life. We are fooled to believe at first glance that the rich master has all of the power and the slaves are being taken advantage of. But there is a specific ‘perverted’ power the servants have: the master relies on the servants for their bare existence. If the servants all decided to leave one day, organize a strike or something, or if the rich person suddenly lost all their money, or if the relationship between the two would break for some reason, the servants would go on with their lives, the master wouldn’t. The master would be left all alone with no one to cook for them, clean for them, etc. They also wouldn’t find a job, since they never thought that they will work a day in their life, so they will soon die of hunger all alone. In other words, because the master relied on other people to do all the work, they depended on others, and when the other is gone, the master is dead. Hegel’s point was that the struggle was one of life and death, and that the master ‘affords’ being a master because they do not fear death. In other words, the position of the master is “I have nothing to lose, so I can afford to risk everything, and potentially win”. Many of us are faced in life with such situations in which we hit rock bottom (in our career, in a relationship, etc.), when things get so bad that they simply can only get better from now on, and in the most paradoxical way, the very fact that we have nothing gives us something: the very fact that we have nothing to lose anymore give us a certain form of ‘perverted’ power: the very loss of all power is a power in of itself.

    Let’s take another example of, probably, the most common master-slave dialectic: the newborn and the parent. A newborn is always the master of their parents, and the parents are the slaves/servants of the newborn. A newborn cannot take care of themselves, and thus inherently depends on their slave (parent) for their bare survival. The parent is the slave: they do all of the work and reap little to none of the benefits in this relationship. However, if the relationship between the two would suddenly break for some reason, the parent can survive on their own, the child will die. The newborn is the master: they do none of the work, others work for them. The newborn is the “boss” in the relationship as well because they order the slave around through their cries (“feed me”, “take care of me”, etc.).

 

THE MASTER IS UNSATISFIED WITH THE SLAVE’S RECOGNITION

 

    According to Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, the master enslaves the servant, gets the recognition they sought but are, in the end, unsatisfied. By the way, Kojève is the one who first came up with the idea that Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is inherently related to the idea of “the desire to be desired”, and Kojève was Lacan’s professor, hence why Lacan focused so much on this idea. The master is not satisfied with the slave’s recognition because recognition (“attention”, “love”, etc.) is only valuable if it comes from an equal or from someone above.

    The paradox is this: we want attention from others, when they do not give us that kind of attention that we wanted, we gain power over them, they start giving us the attention but now we are dissatisfied because we do not know if the attention they give us is authentic or if they give us that attention just because we have power over them.

    For example: if you are an authoritarian boss at work who micromanages everyone, your employees might constantly compliment you, be nice to you, etc. but you are not satisfied with this attention, because it is very likely that they are doing it just because you are their boss, and thus do not really mean it. Your employees are so nice to you because they gain something by being nice to you and/or they lose something if they are not nice to you.

    A second example: many people who feel themselves at the bottom of “the social hierarchy” envy the people on top who get all the attention, all the likes, all the women, all the social media followers, all the fame, etc. They want that power, but if they manage to obtain it, they are now at the top of the social hierarchy and remain unsatisfied – now they will complain about the opposite thing: everyone is nice to me just because they expect something in return, people who rejected me in the past now want to be my friend just because I’m famous, etc.

    The moral lesson of this is the same as of all Lacanian psychoanalysis: we do not know what we want, when we obtain what we think we want we often end up unsatisfied, we want more of it, or now we want to get rid of it because it is not like we imagined, etc. The grass is always greener on the other side, so be careful what you wish for. Or, like Beiser put it:

 

“If the self and other are to one another as master and slave, then the master still does not get the required recognition of himself as autonomous and independent. The master degrades the slave to the status of an animal and reduces him to an instrument for his own ends. The recognition of the slave is therefore of little value, if not worthless, to him. It is not the free recognition of another rational being, but it is only the humbled submission of an animal. Recognition loses all value if it comes from domination or coercion; it is only of value when it derives from the free choice and judgment of another. Since the master despises the slave, he does not get the assurance that he is after.

(…)

If the master is to gain recognition as a free being, then he has to recognize the slave as a free being. For the master gains reassurance not from the submissive acknowledgment of an inferior but only from the recognition of an equal. If the master recognizes the slave as a free being, then he also ceases to degrade himself to the level of his animal desires. He proves that he is rational because he recognizes that another person is an end in itself.

(…)

 The master proves his rationality when he finally recognizes the equal and independent reality of the slave. If he does this, that shows that he acts according to universal laws that grant someone else the same rights as himself. The master proves his freedom not by dominating this slave, then, but by treating him as his equal. Thus, Hegel proves the wisdom behind Rousseau’s famous lines: ‘He who believes himself a master of others is more a slave than they.’

(…)

This experience brings the dialectic to its conclusion. The self knows that it is rational because another rational being recognizes its autonomy. But it also knows that it is rational because it recognizes the autonomy of another rational being. In other words, the self knows that it is rational only through mutual recognition.

(…)

He finally admits that he is not the only self-conscious being, but that there is another such being. The self acknowledges that the other is not simply its own representations because it sees that the other is outside its conscious control. It cannot consume the other, as if it were an inanimate object; and it cannot treat it as a means to satisfy its desires, as if it were a slave. Rather, it admits that the other is outside its conscious control because it is an end in itself, a being that has a right to live according to its own self-appointed ends, even if they do not agree with the self’s own ends. So, for Hegel, to recognize another rational being as an end in itself is the refutation of nihilism. By such recognition, the solipsist has to concede that not all reality is within its conscious control, and that there is another rational being having equal status to itself.”

(Frederick Beiser, “Hegel”, Chapter VIII: Solipsism and Intersubjectivity)

 

    Take the paragraphs from Beiser’s book that I just quoted and replace “solipsist” with “psychotic”, since I already explained previously in the book why all psychotics are unconsciously solipsistic (they behave like how you would expect a solipsist to behave). Hence, what Kojève and Beiser both missed is that there is a category of people for which this is less of a problem – the psychotically structured subject. For the psychotic, the dissatisfaction of being a master recognized by a slave is minimal, it is still there sometimes, but it is more of a practical manner. A psychotic person might ask themselves things like “Are they nice to me just because I am rich and they expect something in return?” as well, but from a purely practical, pragmatic, cold and “logical” point of view: they worry that once they lose their money, they might lose the attention/love they get as well, but as long as they have the money, they do not care that the attention is “inauthentic”, that they are loved/appreciated just because of a part-object that they possess (ex: money, social media followers, influence, etc.). For the psychotic, temporarily taking the position of the slave can be a means to an end but never an end in of itself. Psychotics desire to be the master. It is only for the neurotic and perverted subject that always being a master is an unpleasant experience in of itself.

    In every other case however, the best resolution of the master-slave dialectic is mutual slavery. If both people are masters (both people want to be the one who “takes” in a relationship, both people want to be loved unconditionally), then there is no one from who to take, and it results in a fruitless competition. If both people are slaves (both people seek to be the one who “gives” in a relationship, both people seek to love unconditionally), then it is not only a win-win, but an authentic one.

    This is the homeostasis towards which every romance should strive towards: mutual unconditional love. It is, however, an unrealistic ideal that the lovers can only infinitely approach but never quite reach, usually, since this balance is often disturbed by various external interventions in the relationship (logistic manners regarding work and planning, incompatible schedules, possible competitors, etc.) – the disturbance of this balance starting the master-slave dialectic again. The path towards mutual unconditional love (the “slave-slave” dialectic, so to speak) is a long path and you cannot achieve it by the snap of a finger, since trust and vulnerability are its preconditions. This homeostasis of mutual slavery is analogous to giving someone a gun that they can kill you with and trusting them to never using it. But it is only in such cases where love reaches its highest, most “pure” form: if the other person has nothing to gain by loving you and nothing to lose by not loving you, only in those cases we can speak of an ultimately “pure” love – an ideal one should tend towards but that is impossible to reach exactly.

    This chapter also counts as a refutation of Jung’s claim that “love and power are opposites”:

 

“But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind. It is interesting to see how this compensation by opposites also plays its part in the historical theories of neurosis: Freud’s theory espoused Eros, Adler’s the will to power. Logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power. Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other: the man who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds his compensatory opposite in the will to power, and that of the man who puts the accent on power is Eros. Seen from the one-sided point of view of the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance. But the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible.”

(Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 78)

 

    Jung’s mistake is in viewing power as a psychic energy in of itself, a form of “libido”, drawing inspiration from Nietzsche’s and Adler’s concept of the “will to power”, just like he views Eros and Thanatos as the other two kinds of libido. However, power is not a psychic energy isolated in a person’s psyche, but, as we know from Hegel, a social process drawn from our desire to be desired (our desire for mutual recognition). The relationship between love and power, thus, is much more complicated, since power is more akin a vector that has a certain direction. Having power over someone is not the same as submitting to someone’s power. The will to power and love annihilate each other only insofar as both partners in an equation take the selfish attitude of the master – but love and power go hand-in-hand quite well when they approach the ideal of “mutual slavery”. Power is inherently related to the concept of dependence. If someone depends on you, you have power over them. The end-goal of love is codependence. In a relationship of codependence, both partners have power over each other. So, we cannot speak of love and power as two sides of the same coin.

    In our highly individualistic modern capitalist society, dependence is becoming more and more pathologized, not only in psychology, but in society in general. Both men and women are bombarded everyday with worshipped ideals of independence – men are given “Red Pill” masculine relationship advice about how to not submit to a woman and how to hold power in a relationship, women are given the feminist ideal of the “independent” woman who does not need men. The result of independence is the death of love, there is no love without codependence. Codependence does not kill power however, it just “inverts” it, so to speak. In a romantic relationship of codependence, power is still there, it’s just that it functions in a more proper way than in the non-relationship of “mutual independence” or in the competition of the “master-master” deadlock.