Master and Servant
A Philosophy of the Belly
Last time we looked at the “life and death struggle” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and I suggested that the “struggle” in question is a contest between the mind and the body. The struggle resolves itself into the “master/servant” relationship when the soul admits its dependence on the body — without a living body the soul perishes — and the body becomes the master.
Now that the body is the master, the soul knows its place: to work in order to feed, clothe, and shelter the body so that both body and soul can survive.
Here’s a reason not to be selfish: your existence does not depend on yourself alone. As Lao Tzu tells us: even Heaven and Earth depend on something other than themselves for their existence. So you do not survive merely by nourishing yourself; you must nourish others to make your life the best it can be.
The soul must no longer be selfish; it must work to nourish the body.
Lao Tzu points out that all your troubles exist because you have a body. No body, no trouble. So being free from trouble doesn’t sound like such a good option now, does it? This is the essence of the soul’s submission to the body. It’s also the reason that life is necessarily difficult.
One of the central lessons of the Tao Te Ching is: life is difficult. If you try to deny that life is difficult, then you will run into difficulty time and time again, running headlong at problems that are too big for you to handle all at once. If you acknowledge that life if difficult, that is the first step to finding a way to surmount the difficulty. Lao Tzu suggests starting small; a small action is hardly an action at all. “Deal with a thing while it is still nothing” because it’s easier to deal with things before they become problems. Break your big tasks down into manageable chunks. This is what Lao Tzu means by “taking no action”: you take actions so small that they are almost no action at all. And before you know it the difficult task is completed.
Life was a struggle for the soul when it denied that it required a body. The soul, when it tries to deny the real difficulties and necessities of life, becomes stuck. The struggle ends when the soul is given, by the body, manageable tasks to complete. Day by day the soul performs its tasks and life goes on.
The soul is now content. But what of its master? The body’s needs are endless. There has been a reversal, and now it is the body that is restless. It always wants more.
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it is the master’s dissatisfaction, contrasted with the contentment of the servant, that will lead to the dissolution of the master/servant mode of self-consciousness and its dialectical transformation into “stoicism.” The body requires the stillness that the stoic philosophy offers. In Lao Tzu, the body is not something that can be quieted; the needs of the “belly” are a constant, and wisdom consists in paying attention to this natural constant. What Hegel calls “stoicism,” in contrast, seems to promise a stillness and quietness of the body, and a dedicated focus on thinking, that a philosophy of the belly cannot offer.
(I’ve been reading D.C. Lau’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.)