We’ve lingered a while on the concept of life. Now it’s time to get to the “life and death struggle” that G.W.F. Hegel describes in his Phenomenology of Spirit.
What is it about life that makes struggle something essential to it? Nothing in itself. Struggle is the truth of life but nothing is true merely in itself. It’s only when you are conscious of something that any truth emerges.
If living beings had no consciousness, then life would just be a clash of various matters, or things going on. Not even that really. But consciousness, through its understanding, gives meaning to what it perceives. And the clash of living things it perceives as a struggle.
This is an essential component of Hegelian thinking that we must not lose sight of: its idealism. Things can be said to be “true” or “false” only because they are perceived to exist and understood in a certain way. Outside the scope of consciousness the categories of “true” and “false” simply do not apply.
So we won’t go too far with the claim that “life is struggle.” Struggle is something only consciousness can experience. Talk of the “struggle” of a tree for nutrients and survival might be only metaphorical talk, depending on whether or not you believe that trees and plants have consciousness.
The “life and death struggle” that Hegel describes has everything to do with consciousness. The understanding realises it can know nothing about the world in itself, or the world as it is independently of us; realising this, the understanding turns inward and finds the truth only in itself and so becomes self-consciousness. And this leads to a necessary doubling of consciousness: there is the ‘I’ and the ‘I’ that perceives the ‘I.’ Think of a person looking into a mirror. You see your face there, but the entity that sees the face is not that face, but something less tangible; it is your mind. And yet the face, just as much as your mind, is you. There is a doubling therefore, a splitting off of the body from the mind in the very process of identifying body and mind.
The ‘I’ asserts its independence from the world; after all, the world has been proven to be unknowable in itself, and all truth is found within me. And yet here I am with this exterior, this external physical form upon which I depend. If my body dies, then so do I. The body demands certain things from me – food, shelter, and so on – and I must obey if I want to live.
Body and soul assert dominance over one another. We can imagine the body saying: you must obey me because without me you will die. We can imagine the soul saying: I am superior because all truth is found in me and you are nothing.
If the soul sticks to what it believes, and relinquishes care for the body, then it perishes. The life and death struggle ends in death.
If the soul relents and agrees to serve the body, then the result is life. We move to the next stage, called “Master and Servant,” where the body is now the master and the soul is the servant.
The notion that struggle arises from consciousness, rather than from life itself, has all kinds of interesting implications. For one thing, it fits with the ancient mystical idea that the more you let go of consciousness, the less you see the world in terms of struggle and more in terms of a pleasing creative flow. Our struggle with ourselves is only such because we perceive it as such. It might seem strange to some people to describe a soul in a struggle with its own body; to others it will seem very familiar. Hegel is describing here a tension that exists in all of us, from time to time at least, when we on some level start to question who we are and what our role and purpose might be; in society, in the cosmos. When thinking about our own identities and actions, this all has to do with the materiality of the world; with bodies and what we do with them. These questions of identity and purpose are important and necessary, yet perhaps some tension can be relieved by reminding ourselves that all stress and worry, along with all our very highest and lowest thoughts and ambitions, originate in our minds, in our own consciousness creating concepts and playing games with itself.