1. In Place of an Introduction (pp. 3-30)

Man is Self-Consciousness. (3)

The man who contemplates is "absorbed" by what he contemplates; the "knowing subject" "loses" himself in the object that is known. (3)

The (conscious) Desire of a being is what constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say "I. ..." (3)

It is in and by -- or better still, as -- "his" Desire that man is formed and is revealed -- to himself and to others -- as an I, as the I that is essentially different from, and radically opposed to, the non-I. The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire. (4)

Negating action is not purely destructive, for if action destroys an objective reality, for the sake of satisfying the Desire from which it is born, it creates in its place, and by that very destruction, a subjective reality. (4)

For there to be Self-Consciousness, Desire must therefore be directed toward a non-natural object, toward something that goes beyond the given reality. (5)

Desire, being the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality, is something essentially different from the desired thing, something other than a thing, than a static and given real being that stays eternally identical to itself. (5)

And since Desire is realized as action negating the given, the very being of this I will be action. (5)

In its very being this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is. This I is a (human) individual, free (with respect to the given real) and historical (in relation to itself). (5)

Man can appear on earth only within a herd. That is why the human reality can only be social. But for the herd to become a society, multiplicity of Desires is not sufficient by itself; in addition, the Desires of each member of the herd must be directed -- or potentially directed -- toward the Desires of the other members. If the human reality is a social reality, society is human only as a set of Desires mutually desiring one another as Desires. (6)

Thus, in the relationship between man and woman, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants "to possess" or "to assimilate" the Desire taken as Desire -- that is to say, if he wants to be "desired" or "loved," or, rather, "recognized" in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. (6)

Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires. (6)

Therefore, to desire the Desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I "represent" be the value desired by the other: I want him to "recognize" my value as his value. I want him to "recognize" me as an autonomous value. In other words, all human, anthropogenetic reality -- is, finally, a function of the desire for "recognition." (7)

Therefore, to speak of the "origin" of Self-Consciousness is to speak of a fight to the death for "recognition." (7)

In order that the human being is realized and revealed as Self-Consciousness, therefore, it is not sufficient that the nascent human reality be manifold. This multiplicity, this "society," must in addition imply two essentially different human or anthropogenetic behaviors. (8)

Now, "to recognize" him thus is "to recognize" him as his Master and to recognize himself and to be recognized as the Master's Slave. (8)

If man is nothing but his becoming, if his human existence in space is his existence in time or as time, if the revealed human reality is nothing but universal history, that history must be the history of the interaction between Mastery and Slavery: the historical "dialectic" is the "dialectic" of Master and Slav. But if the opposition of "thesis" and "antithesis" is meaningful only in the context of their reconciliation by "synthesis," if history (in the full sense of the word) necessarily has a final term, if man who becomes must culminate in man who has become, if Desire must end in satisfaction, if the science of man must possess the quality of a definitively and universally valid truth -- the interaction of Master and Slave must finally end in the "dialectical overcoming" of both of them. (9)

They are Consciousnesses that have not yet accomplished for one another the [dialectical] movement of absolute abstraction, which consists in the uprooting of all immediate given-being and in being nothing but the purely negative-or-negating given-being of the consciousness that is identical to itself. (10)

And this is why his own subjectivity-certainty of himself does not yet possess truth [i.e., it does not yet reveal a reality -- or, in other words, an entity that is objectively, intersubjectively, i.e., universally, recognized, and hence existing and valid]. (11)

He believes himself to be a man, [...] he has the "subjective certainty" of being a man. But his certainty is not yet knowledge. (11)

For that idea to be a truth, it must reveal an objective reality -- i.e., an entity that is valid and exists not only for itself, but also for realities other than itself. (11)

Truth is the revelation of a reality. (12)

But for that recognition to satisfy him, he has to know that the other is a human being. (13)

For man is real only to the extent that he lives in a natural world. This world is, to be sure, "foreign" to him; he must "deny" it, transform it, fight it, in order to realize himself in it. But without this world, outside of this world, man is nothing. (14)

Their murderous action is abstract negation. It is not negation [carried out] by consciousness, which overcomes in such a way that it keeps and preserves the overcome-entity and, for that very reason, survives the fact of being ocvercome. (14-15)

"To overcome dialectically" means to overcome while preserving what is overcome; it is sublimated in and by that overcoming which preservs or that preservation which overcomes. (15)

Thus mediated by negation, it is sublimated or raised up to a more "comprehensive" and comprehensible mode of being than that of its immediate reality of pure and simple, positive and static given, which is not the result of creative action (i.e., of action that negates the given). (15)

This object, i.e., the I, is absolute mediation, and its essential constituent-element is abiding autonomy. [That is to say, real and true man is the result of his inter-action with others; his I and the idea he has of himself are "mediated" by recogition obtained as a result of his action. And his true autonomy is the autonomy that he maintains in the social reality by the effort of that action.] (15)

The Master is Consciousness existing for itself. And he is no longer merely the [abstract] concept of Consciousness, but a [real] Consciousness existing for itself, which is mediated with itself by another Consciousness, namely, by a Consciousness to whose essential-reality it belongs to by synthesized with given-being, i.e., with thingness as such. [This "Consciousness" is the Slave who, in binding himself completely to his animal-life, is merely one with the natural world of things. By refusing to risk his life in a fight for pure prestige, he does not rise above the level of animals. Hence he considers himself as such, and as such is he considered by the Master. But the Slave, for his part, recognizes the Master in his human dignity and reality, and the Slave behaves accordingly. The Master's "certainty" is therefore not purely subjective and "immediate," but objectivized and "mediated" by another's, the Slave's, recognition. While the Slave still remains an "immediate," natural, "bestial" thing, the Master -- as a result of his fight -- is already human, "mediated." And consequently, his behavior is also "mediated" or human, both with regard to things and with regard to other men; moreover, these other men, for him, are only slaves.] (16)

Taken as Self-Consciousness as such, the Slave, too, is related to the thing in a negative or negating way, and he overcomes it [dialectically]. But -- for him -- the thing is autonomous at the same time. For that reason, he cannot, by his act-of-negating, finish it off to the point of the [complete] annihilation [of the thing, as does the Master who "consumes" it]. That is, he merely transforms it by his work [i.e., he prepares it for consumption, but does not consume it himself]. For the Master, on the other hand, the immediate relation [to the thing] comes into being, through that mediation [i.e., through the work of the Slave who transforms the natural thing, the "raw material," with a view to its consumption (by the Master)], as pure negation of the object, that is, as Enjoyment. [Since all the effort is made by the Slave, the Master has only to enjoy the thing that the Slave has prepared for him, and to enjoy "negating" it, destroying it, by "consuming" it. (For example, he eats food that is completely prepared)]. (17-18)

Desire cannot achieve this because of the autonomy of the thing. The Master, on the other hand, who introduced the Slave between the thing and himself, is consequently joined only to the aspect o the thing's dependence, and has pure enjoyment from it. As for the aspect of the thing's autonomy, he leaves it to the Slave, who transforms the thing by work. (18)

The Master's attitude, therefore, is an existential impasse. (19)

After the fight that made him a Master, he is not what he wanted to be in starting that fight: a man recognized by another man. Therefore: if man can be satisfied only be recognition, the man who behaves as Master will never be satisfied. And since -- in the beginning -- man is either Master or Slave, the satisfied man will necessarily be a Slave; or more exactly, the man who has been a Slave, who has passed through Slavery, who has "dialectically overcome" his slavery. (20)

If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working Slave. (20)

Slavery is also self-consciousness. (21)

The Slave, on the other hand, did not want to be a Slave. He became a Slave because he did not want to risk his life to become a Master. In his mortal terror he understood (without noticing it) that a given, fixed, and stable condition, even though it be the Master's, cannot exhaust the possibilities of human existence. (22)

There is nothing fixed in him. He is ready for change; in his very being, he is change, transcendence, transformation, "education"; he is historical becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence. (22)

The Master forces the Slave to go to work. And by working, the Slave becomes master of Nature. (23)

Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as a man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. Therefore, it is by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is "incarnated" Spirit, he is historical "World," he is "objectivized" History. (25)

It is by serving another, by externalizing oneself, by binding oneself to others, that one is liberated from the enslaving dread that the idea of death inspires. (28)