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Kant & Co.

Masters, Slaves & Meanings

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) had a grand, overarching theory of how history unfolds. Roger Duncan looks at the nature of master-slave relationships in Hegel’s thought.

Paul Tillich’s popular sixties classic The Courage To Be describes the spiritual quest of the West unfolding historically in three stages of ‘existential anxiety’. The first anxiety, he says, was about death – represented by the detached Stoic and in the more dramatic Christian ways of coming to terms with the Grim Reaper. Christianity then deepened the human sense of self and individual responsibility, and by the Middle Ages the focus had shifted to an emphasis on sin and guilt and the avoidance of eternal punishment. Later disputes during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation really got into this theme, under the category of an individual’s ‘justification’. Finally, Tillich says, the modern period shifts to an emphasis on the question of meaning: ‘What’s it all about?’ Endless life is of little interest if we don’t know what to do with it.

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