Chrissie Taylor Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan's Four Discourses

A
DRAFT POLEMIC?
An enquiry into the Hegelian and Nietzschean subjective psychological motifs
in relation to Lacan’s four Master discourses.
Contents
Page

Introduction 2

I. Historical landscape to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) 4

Hegel’s ‘Master and Servant Dialectic’ 12

II. Landscape to Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887) 24

Nietzsche’s ‘Master-Slave morality’ 31

III. The Tensions between Hegel and Nietzsche’s Subjective Motifs 37

IV. A Lacanian Theoretical Framework 40

Lacan’s Four Discourses 48

The Master Discourse 48

The University Discourse 54

The Hysteric’s Discourse 56

The Analyst’s Discourse 62

V. Critique of the Clinical Application of Lacan’s Four Master Discourses 66

VI. Conclusion 72

Edits without a home 81

Bibliography 82

Page 1 of 87 © Chrissie Taylor 2016

Introduction

This paper enquires into the ‘master-and-servant dialectic’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807)1 by Georg Hegel (1770-1831) and the ‘master-slave morality’ in On The Genealogy of
Morals: A Polemic (1887)2 by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). The aim is to draw out their
subjective psychological motifs, and the tensions between them, with which to examine their
role in the ‘master-slave’ trope3 in the work of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). The purpose is to
theoretically challenge why Hegel is cited as inspirational to Lacan’s 19804 XVII Seminar entitled
L’envers de Psychanalyse (generally translated as The Other Side of Psychoanalysis). With which
to then illustrate flaws in Bruce Fink (1999) and Paul Verhaeghe (1995) descriptions of Lacan’s
four discourses as a neo-Marxist schema not Hegelian dialectic (Aufhebung5).
I agree with Terry Pinkard (2007) that Alexandre Kojève’s (1902-1968) “completely
idiosyncratic” interpretation of Hegel was conflated with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Karl
Marx (1818-1883) and probably Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). And that this produced a
mêlée of Kojève-an ideas informing a contemporary ‘master-slave’ trope’; in distortion of both
Hegel’s ‘master-and-servant dialectic’ and Nietzsche’s ‘master-slave morality’6.
Of course, while Kojève was at liberty to read, or misread, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche and/or
Marx, in whatever way he wished, I will argue that it was a serious mistake to assume Kojève
was reflecting Hegel as Hegel intended, or Nietzsche as Nietzsche intended. And as a result, that
contemporary educational primers in the academia of today, such as Bruce Fink (1999) and Paul
1
Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), generally translated as The Phenomenology of Spirit but possibly more often recognized in
German as The Phenomenology of Mind. Kai Froeb: “One central term of Hegel, the German word "aufheben", is usually translated as
"sublation" into English. It has more than one meaning:
a) … to raise something, from a lower place to a higher place…
b) … raising something to a higher level, taking it a step further…
c) …"storing", "saving", "preserving"… in the sense that the original thesis and antithesis are still present in some sense…
2
Hereafter referred to as the Genealogy.
3
Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2006): “Many elements of the 'left Hegelianism' and Marxist humanism of the post-war decades
can be traced back to... Kojève's... violent world-view and focus upon... rupture and struggle rather than synthesis. For Kojève it is
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit which is the key text and, within that text, it is the master-slave dialectic which is foregrounded to the
exclusion of almost everything else.”
4
For ease of reference, I have taken the date of 1980 from Lacan’s online Bibliography http://www.lacan.com/bibliography.htm as
referencing dates are very confused by subsequent translation and publication dates.
5
Merriam-Webster dictionary: “Sublate: to negate or eliminate (as an element in a dialectic process) but preserve as a partial element in a
synthesis.”
6
Pinkard (2007) endorses this opinion by suggesting that Kojève may have used Neitzsche to further his own “dialectic of the master and
the slave”.
Verhaeghe (1995), aimed at clinical therapeutic application of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
are imbued with neo-Marxist doctrines that do not reflect Hegelian nor Nietzschean intent with
regard to human subjective autonomy.
I have relied upon Pinkard (2007) for his expert interpretation of Hegel, Chris Arthur (1983) for
distinguishing Hegel from Marx, and Keith Ansell-Pearson (2006) for a masterly contemporary
interpretation of Nietzsche. These philosophers provided a useful starting point for an initial
interpretation freed from Kojève-an distortions of Hegel and Nietzsche’s subjective
psychological motifs with which to then enquire into whether these motifs are reflected, or not,
in the highly idiomatic schemas of Lacan’s four master discourses.
I describe the historic landscape to Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic and Nietzsche’s master-
slave morality in relation to their likely political ethos to aid the aim of comparing their
subjective psychological motifs to Fink’s7 (1999) neo-Marxist educational primer regarding
Lacan’s four master discourses. I will highlight inadequacies in the received model of Lacanian
schema8 employing Slavoj Žižek’s (1997/2006) idea of the roles of authenticity and consistency,
now widely ascribed to Lacan’s discourses, while challenging the therapeutic integrity of
Verhaeghe’s9 (1995) clinical psychoanalytic application of Lacan’s four discourses.
I address Žižek’s defensive apologia regarding Lacan as “fundamentally Hegelian, but without
knowing it”10 as unacceptable. Žižek’s ‘Hegelian-Marxist’ allusions have become dubious
psychosocial memes affecting the “study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in
general”11, and may not be ‘passed off’ as if genuinely Hegelian in origin, meaning or intent12.
I critique philosophical and academic forms of incorrect attribution occurring in post-modern
7
Bruce Fink (Date of birth not known – Present)
8
Employing Donald Kunze’s “Boundary Language", an interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory in a graphic way to
inform the study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in general." http://art3idea.psu.edu
9
Paul Verhaeghe (1955-Present)
10
Žižek, (1997/2006) on Lacan.
11
Referencing Donald Kunze’s “Boundary Language", an interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory in a graphic way to
12
Reminiscent of Freud’s entirely disingenuous claims to be endorsed by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche et al and whose ‘provoking presence he
felt dwarfed’ (Anderson, 1980).
neo-Marxist terms, under the guise of higher education in psychotherapeutics, as highly
problematic and potentially psychosocially destructive. And the clinical application of such as
entirely lacking in apolitical integrity and an ethic of ‘first do no harm’ as far as it is humanly
possible.
In conclusion, I invite the return to a pursuit of excellence, accurate attribution of historical
influence and conscientious depictions of truthful educational landscapes (both good and bad).
And especially in academic medical humanities and psychosocial higher education focused upon
the mental health of others. Because if post-modern neo-Marxism is in any way informing
dubious method, or methodology, in therapeutic training, in both biased and unauthorised
political moulding of young minds, it merits further enquiry if not serious public censure. And I
conclude with Professor Henrietta Moore’s13 radical critique in 2015 in which her call to dissent
included addressing what she considered to be now entirely “unhinged” contemporary politics.
I. Historical landscape to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)14

Prior to his death Hegel’s “fame and authority” was recognized in German philosophy although
“almost entirely dissipated” after his death in “a mixture of contempt, horror, and indifference”.15
Pinkard (2007) describes Hegel as having been viewed as an “excessive metaphysician” and
somehow perceived as if guilty of societal corruption and philosophical method16.
Interest in Hegel regrew via the humanities and late 19th century British Idealists17 yet respect
for his work suffered again under the weight of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and George
13
Postgraduate lecture given in 2015 at Birkbeck College by Professor of Culture, Philosophy and Design / Director of the Institute of
Sustainable Global Prosperity at UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, Faculty of the Built Environment, London.
14
Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes is generally translated as Phenomenology of Spirit but I would stress the alternative translation of
Phenomenology of Mind, while hereafter referring to it as the Phenomenology.
15
Pinkard (2007), P. 119, pp. 1.
16
Pinkard (2007), P. 119, pp. 1. It appears Pinkard is likening Hegel to Socrates by way of The Apology of Socrates where Plato describes
Socrates as having been ‘poisoned for corrupting the young and for impiety to the Gods’. In this context, I contextualize Hegel as having
sought – in metaphysical terms - an educated electorate at a time of rhetoric-ridden constitutional monarchy lacking awareness-raising
democratic debate.
17
Also referred to as “British Hegelians” (Pinkard, 2007, P. 118)

Edward Moore (1873-1958) in their assault on idealism through a growing trend of logical
positivism18 in British analytic philosophy in the early 20th century19.
Pinkard argues that Hegel’s first biographer, Johann Rosenkranz (1805-1879)20, an advocate of
German nationalism, contributed to Hegel’s controversial status. Nietzsche’s controversial
reputation during and after WWII, in an era of rising Stalinist communism, may have played its
part also in Hegel’s ‘master and servant dialectic’ becoming muddied in to an Hegelian (rather
than Nietzschean) ‘master-slave’ trope.
Pinkard (2007 & 2011) reintroduces us to Hegel as “once again still very much alive and as
controversial as he has ever been”21. Pinkard tells us, for example, that Benedetto Croce (1866-
1952) admitted ‘what was vital was Hegel’s discovery of a way of thinking dialectically
approaching the richness of the experienced world instead of reducing it to bloodless
abstractions’22. Pinkard highlights that when Croce wrote ‘What is Living and What is Dead of
the Philosophy of Hegel’ (1906) that Croce appeared forgiving of Hegel‘s ‘so-called mistakes and
supposedly flawed theory of opposites’23. Pinkard demonstrates that Hegel’s dialectic24 process
of Aufhebung25 in his Phenomenology is clearly misunderstood by Croce when Croce ridicules
Hegel’s “conflated idea of distinct realms of spirit within a theory of opposites” making “one the
truth of the other”26 because nothing could have been further from Hegel’s thinking.
Even a Marxist led extract from Hegel for Beginners (1996) explains that Hegel’s Aufhebung
(sublation) is “difficult to explain as it can only be seen in practice” and that “every stage of the
18
Schilpp, P.A. (1951): Russell (1944) said that "with a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green, that
the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them ...’. pp 3–20.
19
It is possibly worth exploring how logical positivism may have sublimated into what Jordan Peterson describes as post-modernism
conflated with neo-Marxist biases atomising meaning into solipsistic, narcissistic or hysterical forms of “reflexivity” masquerading as
academic creativity.
20
Helpful chronology: Hegel (1770-1831), Schelling (1775-1854), Rosenkranz (1805-1879), Croce (1866-1952).
21
Pinkard (2007), P. 147, pp. 1.
22
Pinkard (2007), P. 119, pp. 2.
23
Pinkard (2007), P. 119, pp. 2.
24
Oxford Dictionaries: Dialectical: “Relating to the logical discussion of ideas and opinions: dialectical ingenuity; and/or concerned with or
acting through opposing forces: a dialectical opposition between social convention and individual libertarianism”. Accessed online
12.7.16: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dialectical
25
Hypothesis and antithesis aiming toward synthesis Merriam-Webster dictionary:“Sublate: to negate or eliminate (as an element in a
dialectic process) but preserve as a partial element in a synthesis.”
26
Hereafter intended by me to be focused upon the ‘sleeping mind of a person’ or ‘world of peoples’.
dialectic is partial and partially untrue”; the “dialectic is organic rather than mechanical logic
within contradictions”27, aimed at “purposefully overcoming as well as preserving what it
overcomes”. And is about actively “dissolving [the Aristotelian] static view of separated deductive
patterns” in a “dynamic movement towards the whole” that is “not reduced to logical categories”28.
‘Opposing’ and ‘dissenting’ forces are not necessarily ‘opposites’ or ‘contradictions’ and these
are common category mistakes made by pseudo-intellectuals. By way of an over-simplified
example: when a white Anglo-Saxon disagrees with another white Anglo-Saxon person, about
what it is to be Anglo-Saxon, this does not make either of them non-Anglo-Saxon, right, wrong or
black (rather than white). To highlight Croce’s error, what conceivable opposite of an Anglo-
Saxon might one be required to imagine or believe in order to substantiate Croce’s
misapprehension that opposing opinions dictate opposites defining some kind of binary
definitional truth of the other?
“Hegel deals with logical categories” such as “being, becoming, one, many”, but he does so only to
reveal their “inadequacies and internal tensions” so that “each category is made to generate
another more promising one”. So, when Croce criticizes Hegel for claiming that “religion [is] the
not-being of art” and that these “two abstractions possess truth only in philosophy, [as] the
synthesis of both”29, Croce attempts to force simplified logical categorization onto far too complex
an infinity of differences. Pinkard helpfully reminds us to appreciate Hegel’s view of art and
philosophy as not ‘two distinct members of the same species’ but different “degrees of activity”
because ‘art does not include philosophy’ but ‘philosophy directly includes art’ 30 & 31.
Hegel’s sense of reality in his Phenomenology was aimed at revealing a multitude of evolving
subtle degrees, in subjective and objective awareness. This was not the clumsy category mistake
27
www.marxists.org
28
www.marxists.org
29
Pinkard (2007), P. 120, pp. 1. (Croce: 1915:60)
30
Pinkard (2007), P.119, pp.2 while quoting Croce (1915:56) to clarify Croce’s misunderstanding.
31
“Sublation: to negate or eliminate (as an element in a dialectic process) but preserve as a partial element in a synthesis.” (Merriam-
Webster dictionary).
made by Croce32, whose misunderstandings about Hegel’s triadic ‘panlogism’33 irritates Pinkard
sufficiently to admonish Croce, and others, for mistakenly doing the following:

“Everything from nature to mentality to social life to history itself seemed to be swallowed into
the Hegelian “logic” in a way that did violence to the very concrete nature of Hegel’s own
thought.”34

Kenneth Westphal (2003), in The Significance of Rejecting Reductionism equally argues
inadequate comprehension of Hegel as a ‘bitter irony of recent history’ because:

“Hegel who was the first to defend realism against the challenges of historicist relativism is
tarred as the very kind of historicist Hegel most decidedly opposed”’.35
Not surprisingly, therefore, Pinkard’s (2007) interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology concludes
with a stinging critique of the wealth of misconstrued misunderstandings of Hegel’s thinking:

“This dialectical metaphysics of Hegelianism cannot therefore be taken out of Hegel or
omitted in some form of “reconstructing” Hegel’s thoughts (any number of people since
Croce have proposed to do) since the quasi-paradoxical form of this thought makes sense
only in terms of such a distinctive fusion of logic and metaphysics.”36
Pinkard (2007) demonstrates how “reconstructing” Hegel inaccurately swelled politically
activated ideas of ‘alienation’ preoccupied with revolt, not mediation. And that this experiential
basis of misconstruing Hegel’s thoughts was led in 1930’s France by Jean Wahl (1888-1974) in
his path-breaking Le Malheur de la Conscience37 (1929) in which Wahl incorrectly understood
32
New World Encyclopedia: “Historicism also often challenged the concept of truth and the notion of rationality of modernity. Modern
thinkers held that reason is a universal faculty of the mind that is free of interpretation, that can grasp universal and unchanging truth.
Historicism questioned this notion of rationality and truth and argued for the historical context of knowledge and reason. Although
individual theories vary as to how and to what extent knowledge is historically conditioned, historicism is an explicit formulation of the
historicity of knowledge. The major question to historicism is its relativist implications.”
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Historicism
33
Pinkard (2007) P. 120, pp 1 as: “the identification of the real with the rational”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary: panlogism: “the doctrine
that the absolute or the absolute reality is of the nature of logos or reason; especially Hegelian philosophy.” Online access 12.7.16:
34
Pinkard, 2007, P. 120.
35
Westphal, 2013, P.88.
36
Pinkard, 2007, P. 134.
37
‘The Unhappy Consciousness’.
the entirety of Hegel’s Phenomenology as a ‘universal human theme of alienation’.38 And how
this gross misinterpretation failed to recognize that political ideas of conflict are not the
Hegelian objective of resolution. Political conflict preoccupied with oppression did not in any
way reflect Hegel’s subjective psychological focus upon consistent acts of subjective and
objective reconciliation (Bildung39).

Hegel’s enquiry into the subjective psychological anatomy of self-consciousness is not aimed at
the fairness or unfairness of economic or social status in adversarial political terms. Subjective
comprehension of one’s feelings of alienation was, for Hegel, in existential relationship to
oneself, others and the world in general and was the objective of resolution within one’s self.
‘Wahl was coming out with his existential reading of Hegel and Lukacs’ while promulgating the
notion of ‘Hegelian Marxism’40 in a post-war left wing France filled with the intellectual
atmosphere of Marxist ‘1844 Manuscripts’.41 In this cultural context, Pinkard argues that rather
than treat Wahl’s ‘unhappy consciousness’42 from a phenomenological perspective Kojève, as a
Russian émigré, treated Hegel’s dialectic as “just another tale of mastery and slavery”43. This
political attitude of over simplistic binary categorizations of the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed’
in only ‘alienated’ revolutionary ‘conflict’ with one another could not have been further from
Hegel’s “distinctive fusion of logic and metaphysics”.44 Hegel sought self-conscious, self-aware
‘self-responsibility’ in the will to consciously generate better outcomes than violent conflict.
Hegel as metaphysical and (psycho)logical peacemaker was, therefore, profoundly
misrepresented by Marxist revolutionaries.
38
Paraphrased quotation of Pinkard (2007), P.122, pp 1.
39
Wood (1998) on Hegel because “... social institutions surely had much to contribute to the education, cultivation and progress of the
human species. And their barbarous suppression in the name of those very values has surely been a serious step backward.”
40
Pinkard (2007) P. 127, pp 1.
41
Pinkard (2007) P. 127, pp 1.
42
Wahl (1929), ‘Le Malheur de la Conscience’.
43
Pinkard (2007) P. 129, pp 2.
44
Pinkard, 2007, P. 134.
When Kojève was lecturing at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939, it is
important to note that Kojève influenced “a great many of the later post war luminaries of French
philosophy and letters in attendance”45, including Lacan46.
It is reasonable, therefore, to argue that while Kojève’s form of ‘Hegelian Marxism’ was
cultivating ideas of ‘political modernization’ during Lacan’s formative intellectual years, this
movement had also misappropriated Nietzschean themes of a master-slave morality. Pinkard
(2007/2011) provides valuable philosophical and historical insight into how Marxist intellectual
preoccupations in post WWI/pre WWII France took Hegel’s ‘master and servant dialectic’ and
reframed it as a “master-slave dialectic” that became an ubiquitously published misquotation and
one that is still conflated in psychosocial university lectures today with an equally fundamental
misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s “master-slave morality”.
The human tendency for politically motivated rhetoric, as opposed to (a more Hegelian) self-
conscious intellectual self-awareness, lacking accurate philosophical history in more disciplined
intellectual rigour, has distorted comprehension of Hegel’s ‘Master and Servant Dialectic’ (and
Nietzsche’s ‘Master-Slave Morality’) to such an extent that the psychosocial academia of today is
in serious need of educational admonishment and correction.
Hegel’s intent was focused upon consistent acts of subjective and objective reconciliation
(Bildung47). Undoubtedly, this has been historically mistranslated, misunderstood and
misquoted by those promoting communist ideologies48 in serious miscomprehension of the
subjective psychological context in which Hegel’s metaphysics aimed toward all human
consciousness. And, it would be fair to say, wholly ignorant of Hegel’s objective in resolving, not
promoting, the desire for violent conflict in destructive revolution.
45
Pinkard (2007) P. 128, pp 1.
46
Publication of his doctoral thesis in 1932: De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivi de Premiers écrits sur
la paranoïa; Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
47
Wood (1998) on Hegel because “...education, cultivation and progress of the human species….” was needed.
48 Primarily, in this context, referring to a French clique of primarily pseudo-intellectuals of the café societies of the avant-garde
employing a cultural idiomatic style of the French language. (Not to mention Hegel’s original German mistranslated into French
and then further mistranslated from poor French into English.)


As a politically engaged writer in a cultural era of a constitutional monarchy, “Hegel argued [for]
popular election but not for an uneducated multitude”49. And as a metaphysician, Hegel argued
for a higher order of thinking about the human spirit (human mind) in a world of human spirits
(all human minds) for “a new world and a new shape of Spirit”50 as an advocate for an educated
electorate, in stable and productive societal relations, not political upheaval or revolt.
However, because of the oligarchic cultural context in which Hegel lived, the “first stable
relationship that emerges in Hegel’s dialectical development of this topic [spirit/mind] is that of
Lordship and Bondage”51. However, in dubious Marxist intent, one may not latch on to the term
‘lordship’ or ‘bondage’ without sufficient care for Hegel’s introduction, meaning and purpose.
Political concepts of bondage (e.g., service to Marxist supposed unproductive labour) are not
invited by Hegel. In fact, here at least, one could say the opposite. The subjective psychological
motif of lordship over the self in order to no longer be in bondage to wilful desire may not be
overlooked in this context.
The Hegelian directive is to develop a phenomenological (not ideological or political) self-
conscious subjective sense of personal sovereignty over oneself, i.e., that personal psychological
self-mastery in relation to others was to inform productive - not unproductive – outcomes. And,
as such, was aimed toward liberating the sovereign self from subjective bondage to
unproductive wilfulness. Psychologically-speaking, Hegel’s subjective psychological motif is
about the nature of self-educated and self-consciously motivated modes of reconciliation
(Bildung) without which bondage to every day realities, irrespective of the societal or political
context, could not hope to be resolved. For Hegel, an educable mind requires both a subjective
and objective sense of relationship in well-reasoned52 self-conscious mediation with one’s self,
others, and the world at large. Especially if an educated electorate, for Hegel, implied a genuine
49
Duquette, D.A. (undated), Section 2. (Hegel) Political Writing, pp. 2.
50
Hegel (1807), Chapter 7, Religion, § 808.
51
Arthur (1983) pp. 6.
52
Hegel (1899), The Philosophy of History lectures: “To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational
aspect. The relation is mutual.”
desire for a change for the better. In this sense, for Hegel, a poverty of mind that lacked self-
conscious self-awareness could only ensure enduring poverties of circumstance. To echo
Pinkard on Marx, I would argue that Hegel’s particular psychological approach to universal
human emancipation was not replacing (temporarily or otherwise) a “barbarous suppression”53
with another.
I conclude this historical backdrop with Pinkard (2011) quoting Marx as having said: “I found
Hegel standing on his head, and I put him on his feet”. Pinkard robustly argues that ‘what counts
as upside down, and what counts as right side up, depends upon your [phenomenological]
attitude’. Pinkard rephrases this Marxist homily, unequivocally, by saying, “Marx was upside
down and Hegel right side up, and Marx tried to turn them both upside down!”54.
Pinkard claims that “Hegel was right and Marx was wrong” while pointedly reminding us
historically that every single “reiterative collapse of antiquity or form of civilization is because the
reasons you give and ask for become unreasonable and cease to make any sense”55. Thus,
enforcing the new, under the banner of anti-oppression (destroying the old), becomes a mode of
unreasonable senselessness.56
I would argue that Hegel believed that oppression, in one form or another, was an inevitable
part of every-day life, and any attempt to eradicate it via conflict against oppression was a fool’s
errand and not a wise man’s mission. Hegel sought self-conscious mediation aimed at mutually
resolved outcomes - not violent conflict. This Hegelian philosophical perspective in
phenomenological metaphysics could not, therefore, have been more profoundly opposed to
popular Marxist ideology aimed at politically materialistic violent social revolution.
53
Wood (1998)
54
Pinkard (2011) See 5.40 minutes into the video of this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7M1LsHgkE
55
Pinkard (2011) See 5.40 minutes into the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7M1LsHgkE
56
Wood (1998): “Hegel’s conception of Bildung takes for granted modern society’s conception of a whole series of oppositions which are
now often questioned. Among these are: undevelopment/cultivation, backwardness/progress. Such questioning may arise from
recognition of the way in which the practical application of these distinctions has led to the brutal destruction of non-European cultures in
many parts of the world, whose wisdom, art and social institutions surely had much to contribute to the education, cultivation and
progress of the human species. And their barbarous suppression in the name of those very values has surely been a serious step
backward.” Hereafter, I take this Hegelian insight forward as expressing the unproductive (destructive) nature of ideological
revolt is in violent oppression (itself) of ‘otherness’.

Arthur (1983), an authority on Marx, confirms in his Myth of Marxology that Hegel’s ‘servant’
was never intended by Hegel as a ‘slave’ when clarifying differences between Hegel and Marx.
The 1930’s Marxist political desire for a form of collapse of the ‘old’, in this Hegelian context,
now appears to be a Lacanian ‘purloined letter’57. Whether Lacan knowingly misrepresented
Hegel, or not, is not my concern. My worry is how Lacan’s pretentious referencing of Hegel’s
influence over his work pervades a myriad of psychosocial narratives and schema, being applied
to the “study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in general”58 today; to name
but a few of the psychosocial domains now involved.
A reductive dis-associative Lacanian lens, in a quadra-partite model now seemingly fashionable
psychosocial tool (representative of the slavery of the analysand and the master role of the
analyst) currently endorsed by Žižek’s neo-Marxism as if Hegelian in origin, meaning or intent is
disturbingly disingenuous, if not intellectually dishonest. The promotion of creative and/or
critical thinking (derivative of such inchoate Lacanian psychoanalytic theory) is thus founded
upon a distorted concept not merely inaccurate or politically dishonest misattribution.
I will now draw out an Hegelian psychological motif; reassured to some degree of its separation
from ‘Kojèvean Marxism’ (masquerading as an ‘Hegelian Marxism’ trope).
Hegel’s Master and Servant Dialectic

Arthur (1983)59 makes particular mention of the fact that Hegel’s use of Herrschaft und
Knechtschaft60 in his Phenomenology should be correctly translated as “Master and Servant” and
not ‘Master-Slave’. Arthur points out that Hegel made this important distinction very clearly
57
Referencing Edgar Allan Poe’s original literary motif in The Gift for 1845 (1844), and Lacan’s subsequent pseudo-analytic appropriation
of this preceding motif regarding dishonesty in purloining evidence.
58
Referencing Donald Kunze’s “Boundary Language", an interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory in a graphic way to
59
60
In Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807)
himself.61 I would argue that the word “and” is also very significant in subsequent contemporary
over-use of a hyphen in misattribution. The word ‘and’ denotes the presence of two separate
objects, concepts, things or beings. The ‘hyphen’ replacement for Hegel’s ‘and’ is either an
unconscious sleight-of-hand or misguided conflation with a Nietzschean ‘master-slave’
derivative, or both. More importantly, the ‘hyphen’ denotes a locked-in condition devoid of the
autonomous identities in an Hegelian dynamic of choice.
In every dictionary the word ‘servant’62 does not mean ‘slave’63. A slave is defined as the legal
property of another while a servant is not. Etymologically and semantically, a servant is neither
locked-in to another nor a legal (or political) object possessed by another. While there is no
shortage of theoretical conflations surrounding the pragmatic, political or economic nature of
‘servitude’, the critical point is that a servant, in the Hegelian sense, is neither a slave nor a
powerless object, and is a legally independent sovereign subject in their own right. The political
or psychosocial subsequent use of the word ‘slave’ in Hegel’s name, therefore, insinuates
something into Hegel’s thinking that is not true nor representative of Hegel’s purpose.
The idea of service to oneself and others implied by Hegel and psychologically expounded upon
is a dynamic internal personal choice. It is not an enforced or passively endured political, legal
or economic preoccupation with oppression proposing conflict or destructive outcomes.
Hegel’s idea of alienation was descriptive of a subjective struggle within the process of
individuated self-consciousness that does not invite misinterpretation of a servant as a slave in
Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel’s use of the word ‘servant’ (not ‘slave’) is, therefore, of central
psychological importance to any psychoanalytic theory claiming to be Hegelian.
61
Arthur’s footnote 13: “That this choice of terminology was deliberate is seen when we find that in his Berlin lecture on Herrschaft und
Knechtschaft, Hegel draws a distinction between der Sklave and der Knecht. See: Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Vol. 3, ed. M.
Petry, Holland/Boston 1979, appendix pp. 342–43 (Phil Slater in a brief unpublished paper, ‘Objectification, alienation and labour: Notes
on Hegel, Marx and Marcuse’ (1980), in the context of polemics against Marcuse’s early work for confusing ‘objectification’ in Hegel and
Marx.
62
Oxford online dictionary: Servant: “A person who performs duties for others, especially a person employed in a house on domestic duties
or as a personal attendant.”
63
Oxford online dictionary: Slave: “A person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them / Origin: Middle English
shortening of old French.”
As a classicist, Hegel’s possible stoicism, in relation to any or all master and servant dynamics is
not lacking in awareness of the history of Epictetus (AD 50 – 135) as a Greek speaking
philosopher born into slavery. Keith Seddon (1956 – Present) tells us that Epictetus saw
philosophy as a way of life and not just as a theoretical discipline. And while harsh realities may
be beyond our control, whether we are Stoics, or not, these should be accepted calmly and
dispassionately as a Stoic. All individuals are responsible for their own actions in Stoicism and
these actions are to be examined and controlled through a lens of rigorous self-discipline.

“Although Epictetus based his teaching on the works of the early Stoics [none of which survives]
which dealt with the three branches of Stoic thought, logic, physics and ethics, the Discourses
and the Handbook concentrate almost exclusively on ethics. The role of the Stoic teacher was to
encourage his students to live the philosophic life, whose end was eudaimonia ['happiness' or
'flourishing'], to be secured by living the life of reason, which – for Stoics – meant living
virtuously and living 'according to nature'. The eudaimonia ['happiness'] of those who attain
this ideal consists of ataraxia [imperturbability], apatheia [freedom from passion], eupatheiai
[good feelings], and an awareness of, and capacity to attain, what counts as living as a rational
being. The key to transforming oneself into the Stoic sophos [wise person] is to learn what is 'in
one's power', and this is 'the correct use of impressions' (phantasiai), which in outline involves
not judging as good or bad anything that appears to one. For the only thing that is good is
acting virtuously (that is, motivated by virtue), and the only thing that is bad is the opposite,
acting viciously (that is, motivated by vice).”

Hegel’s philosophical approach appears to be that of unavoidable service to oneself and others,
whether in the employ of a household, organisation, institution, landowner, aristocrat, royal
court or church. In this sense, a social or political ideology that suggests removing oppression
(as if possible) does not appear to be Hegel’s perspective on life.
The mind (geist) of Hegel’s subjective servant in his Phenomenology has both objective and
subjective human dependencies served by productive, not unproductive, inter-dependence with

others. Hegel’s definitional journey of this entails a sense of identity informed by
comprehension of two modes of consciousness in mediated relationship with oneself and others,
without which personal identity ceases to have any real meaning or relevance. Hegel’s own
words take much reading to comprehend but there is a dynamic psychological motif on offer
that unifies independence with essential social inter-dependence.

“In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us
or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid
independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience;
through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not
purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form
and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are
unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two
opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent whose essential nature is
to be for itself, the other is dependent whose essence is life or existence for another.” (Hegel,
1807)64

Hegel’s consciousness has two arenas of awareness seemingly in opposition (theoretically) to
one another in subjective and objective terms. An actualised self being activated through the
essential experience of another for self-consciousness of selfhood to occur through mediation
between the two in self-realization. Without the ‘other’ there is no need for self-realization.
The idea of alienation is within this subjective psychological space and has nothing to do with
being the ‘alienated property’ of another. Relationship with others informs identity, i.e.,
“thinghood” in co-existence in both subjective and objective terms.
Without the ‘other’, the nature of one’s own existence has little meaning or requirement for self-
consciousness. Hegel is suggesting that to become self-conscious is in a practiced (not abstract)
64
Hegel (1807), Chapter 4, Lordship and Bondage, Part A, § 189.

process of mediation with another as an enduring (not temporary) inter-relationship with
oneself - in the context of others - for evolving self-aware realizations to occur – without which
the nomenclature of master or servant would be entirely meaningless. This is not a conflict-
based master-slave trope preoccupied with alienation. Identity, and self-worth, are afforded
only in relationship with others because Hegel is suggesting a relationship with oneself only
exists in relationship to another within a ‘conscious self-mediating process’65. Self-
consciousness becomes entirely redundant if there is no relationship to or with others. This is
not “desire of a human being is the desire for the Other”66 (as Lacan would have us believe) but
thinghood (as identity) necessarily informed by one’s relation to others. The successful or
unsuccessful outcome of which is the contextual subjective and objective space of selfhood in
which Aufhebung is placed by Hegel; and is of particular and universal metaphysical concern to
him in sovereign remedy of how to live well not badly.
Hegel’s ‘Master and Servant’ dialectic in 1801 thus becomes an objective relationship between
the subjective realm of our service to identity (from within) defined by the satisfactory (not
unsatisfactory) nature of outcomes in mastery (from without) of all of our subjective desires,
intentions or thoughts. Arthur (1983) says, the “dialectic moves forward precisely through the
servant”67. I understand from this that the success (not failure) of life outcomes is fundamental
to Hegel’s dialectic, in providing a worthwhile sense of existence in a real world of problem-
solving difficulties. There is no assumed slave-hood (other than to un-checked subjective
desires) in an individual spirit (geist) in the Hegelian self-conscious journey of self-educating
working benefit to both ‘self and other’ in the world (Weltgeist).
I take from this, in metaphysical terms, that we are all Hegelian ‘servants’, in one form or
another. Our sense of identity (as defined by Hegel) is in relation to service to both ourselves
and others, one way or another, whether we want this or not, whether we like it or not. Arthur
65
Hegel (1807), Chapter 7, Religion, § 808: “... is a conscious, self-meditating process”. Merriam-Webster dictionary: “mediation: the act
or process of mediating; especially : intervention between conflicting parties to promote reconciliation, settlement, or compromise.”
66
Librecht (1999)
67
argues, apparently for Hegel, that only through the satisfactory (not unsatisfactory) provision of
‘goods and services’ does the servant “become conscious of what he truly is” and through ‘this
rediscovery of himself by himself’ he ‘realizes that it is precisely in his work’ that ‘he acquires a
sense of himself.’68 Arthur’s Marxist self-worth through one’s work role in only generating
material ‘product’ perhaps overlooks infinitely more variable forms of potential human good
outcomes, and resonates with Marxist misinterpretations of Hegel’s writing. However, the ‘self-
conscious’ overcoming of obstacles to generate (not just ‘produce’) better (not worse) outcomes
(for an uneducated but potential future electorate) is at the heart of the subjective psychological
enterprise within Hegel’s metaphysical idealism. I would argue Hegel is wholly focused upon
subjective human emancipation in objective reality. Not just the material ‘product’ of only
physical ‘goods and services’.
The Hegelian internal strength needed to overcome (unproductive) base desires is perhaps re-
introduced by Marxists as oppressed human beings in external ‘dire necessity’69. And if Kojève’s
Hegel is thus entwined within Marxist advocacy regarding ‘alienation’, how is Hegel’s concept of
productive outcomes to be addressed or separated from Marxism? Arthur (1983) argues:

“These terms [‘goods and services’] are superficially comparable to Marx’s in that both Hegel
and Marx see work not merely in its utilitarian aspect but as a vehicle of self-realization; thus
they see the servant rather than the master as the locus of a more developed human existence.”70

Arthur (1983) argued that fundamental differences between Marx and Hegel were because Marx
wanted a “change in the mode of production [that] recovers for the worker his sense of self”71 while
for Hegel “the condition of ‘fear and service’ is necessary [for] the educative effect of work, even
within an exploitative relation of production, sufficient for the worker to manifest to himself his
own ‘meaning’ in his product [personal productivity].”72
68
Abstract from Arthur (1983) pp. 6, citing Hegel at footnoted 14. Gesammelte Werke, Band 9, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg
1980, pp. 114-15
69
Euripides (412 BC): “Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.” from Helen, (Translation: Lattimore, R).
70
71
72
Arthur (1983) pp. 7. Arthur’s footnote 15: Phänomenologie p. 115.

Arthur underscores, on behalf of Hegel, that without ‘fear’ or ‘service’ there is no inducement to
‘check desire’ so “that consciousness rises above self-centred goals” in the essential “breaking of
self-will through subjection to an alien power”.73 Thus an objective external agent, of any kind, is
needed in order to become “capable of rational freedom”.74 Hegel is thus defined by Arthur as
“work as ‘desire held in check’ ”75 that necessitates “putting a distance between the immediate
impulses of self-will and formative activity”76 connoting that the subjective self is both servant
‘and’ master to desire held in check.77 Arthur is claiming Hegel’s servant is overcoming “slavish
appetite”78 (using a Nietzschean term) as momentum for a self-conscious subjective
psychological servant aimed now toward self-conscious subjective mastery. (If we forgive the
Marxist inflection in Arthur’s use of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ and Nietzschean inflected use of
‘slavish’ rather than Hegel’s attention to impulsive ‘desire’.)
Does Arthur’s version of Hegel become synonymous with the beginning of a thinking man of
objective reason capable of becoming a member of an ‘educated electorate’? Is this a mediated
process of consciously ‘electing’ self-aware relations with others, whatever the political status
quo or oppressive regime? Would this be how to ‘become’ better qualified to elect for
productive (not unproductive) change in any political context? Is this how Hegel sought to
liberate the individual from subjective laziness (i.e., the oppressions of their own unchecked
desires) by re-focusing them upon the more ethical external measurement of productive
outcomes (in universal terms)? And would this self-consciousness rescue one from feeling
‘alienated’ from oneself and others in order to focus upon non-destructive outcomes?
This is not, of course, an argument against man’s capacity for inhumanity to man, or the right to
bear arms against cruelty. But Hegel’s metaphysical higher order educative insight into the
73
I overlook the use of the phrase ‘alien power’ to draw out the more important point of rational freedom under hardship of any kind.
74
Arthur (1983) pp. 8. Arthur’s footnote 18: “This is clearer in The Berlin Phenomenology, paras 434, 435.”
75
76
77
Arthur (1983) pp. 8. Arthur’s footnote 16: Phänomenologie p. 115
78
I detect a Nietzschean conflation in Arthur’s use of ‘slavish appetite’ in Hegel’s name.

psychological nature of what ‘being in service’ to oneself and others entails is in the subjective
‘particular’ (geist). More precisely, the personal will and social skills needed to be able to
actually solve any ‘universal’ human, societal and political problems (Weltgeist). For Hegel, it
appears that an ‘educated electorate’ to come into being cannot be born of ignorance,
selfishness, stupidity or moral laziness - irrespective of one’s perceived ‘status’ in this world. I
would suggest this aspect of Hegelian metaphysics is about the lack of individual ‘self-
consciousness’ that informs man’s appalling capacity for inhumanity to man.
Rational freedom for Hegel means liberating one’s own capacity to reason with, and fully check,
wilful desire. And in breaking free from unchecked desire one may become capable of rational
choice. Alienation, in this context, references only one’s own lacunae when perpetuating
irrational conflict; whether subjective or objective.
The agency of ‘power’ is not independent of the ‘producer’ of ‘outcomes’ for Hegel, as it might be
for Marx. And it is not about ‘labour’ in ‘production’ in the context of capitalist exploitation.
According to Arthur (1983), Marx understood the subjective mental process that Hegel was
describing. Arthur quotes Marx’s early writing as complaining that “‘the only labour Hegel knows
and recognizes is abstract mental labour’”79. Marx, therefore, recognized Hegel’s subjective
psychological purpose here in ‘estrangement’ (alienation) within the mind’s own efforts towards
objective self-awareness. This does not reflect Wahl’s misappropriated ‘universal human theme
of alienation’80 incorrectly imbued into political Marxist propaganda. It is not correct to make
Hegel’s servant a political ‘object’ of ‘labour’ or ‘production’ without grossly insulting Hegel.
Hegel’s internal and external agency introduces self-realization to ‘check desire’, irrespective of
social, moral, economic or legal condition. And is internally and externally mediated through
relationship, because self-worth is vested in the capability for mediating good not bad outcomes
with others. Hegel’s more sovereign individual ‘subject’ is capable of achieving autonomy
79
Arthur (1983) pp. 10. Arthur’s footnote 20: Marx, Early Writings p. 386
80
Pinkard (2007), P.122, pp 1.
through self-management of beneficial results in their own life to the benefit of all.
Without an external, and internal, condition for discomfort, in obligation toward good outcome,
what need is there to check desire? Or, find the will to mediate well instead of badly? For Hegel
some degree of threat, pressure or duress in physical and emotional terms must exist (as it
always does in any reality) for Hegel’s metaphysical journey towards self-accountable self-
consciousness to take root.
Rather than interpreting this as material, economic or political injustice, as Kojève did, Hegel is
expressing a far greater metaphysical reality regarding life in general. Namely, that all forms of
subjective existence are subject to some kind of problem-solving discomfort, whether it is the
fear of freezing weather or the pressing need for a bed or an income. For Hegel this includes a
well-built built subjective home as well as a soundly constructed objective house. The absence
of which would make it difficult to flourish rather than perish, as everyone needs the co-
operation of others to brick-lay the subjective and objective structural walls of human efficiency,
rather than inefficiency; in rationally elected actualization of subjective and objective wellbeing.
We are all subject to the need for gainful employment to live well, rather than badly. This
highlights a key question, in life. We can either choose to live wisely for ourselves (no matter the
conditions) or mistakenly and resentfully81 expect others to do it for us or be forced to make
impoverished ends meet against our will. For Hegel, the qualitative difference in actualised
human outcomes is profound. Political ideology, such as Marxism, makes quantitative rather
than qualitative arguments, that lead to material acts of irrational bad faith and all too often bad
or disastrous outcomes. For Hegel, utility does not lack ‘spirit’ (geist/mindfulness).
Hence the motif here is to do one’s level best at whatever one does, at all times, irrespective of
circumstance, to maximize (not minimize) an improved sense of personal freedom with which to
81
‘Resentment’ referencing Nietzsche’s slavish ‘ressentiment’.

increase personal capacity (not foster more incapacities) in life, and for one and all.
By way of contemporary example, the Hegelian making of a cup of tea for my employer would
invite me to make the best possible cup of tea rather than indulge in an ‘unchecked desire’ to
complain when asked to make a cup of tea. The aim being that of a more productive outcome. I
and my employer may register, together, how good my tea can taste in a will to make the tea to
the best of my ability? And how good I may be at other things (alluding to Epictetus’ life) that is
derived from a mutual sense of worth, and satisfaction, from a reliably well made (not badly
made) cup of tea. This does not remove a tyrant in life but it may, just may, ‘educate’ a tyrant
that an excellent cup of tea made in unresentful self-restraint has very observable and
noteworthy value. This Hegelian mediating attitude of good will in self-restraint is a
phenomenological perspective on life, not a socio-political argument about who has more
political or economic power. It is about who ultimately derives the most benefit from any or all
circumstance.
If one assumes that an ‘educative’ subjective and objective ontology for Hegel is mirrored in his
metaphysical and logical method here, with a teleological perspective aimed at an ‘educated
electorate’, we might prise Hegel’s ‘master-and-servant dialectic’ out of this distorted Kojèvean-
Marxist ‘master-slave’ trope. Because unchecked human desire (that we could easily associate
with internal subjective Nietzschean slavery) seeking politically enforced change/ideology
invites the risk of one bad master merely replacing another; which is certainly not Hegel’s
weltanschauung82. Hegel seeks self-conscious self-mastery of checked desires with which to
better master life, universally, through increasing, not decreasing, self-responsibility. 83 The only
‘slave’ in this context would be the less self-conscious person propelled by unchecked desires
into repeatedly bad outcomes.
Arthur (1987) confirms that Marx himself saw Hegel’s Phenomenology as:
82
A particular philosophy or view of life.
83
Hegel was well aware of Epictetus’ (50-135 AD) life history and philosophical ideas of self-aware self-responsibility.

“… a spiritual odyssey, or, perhaps, a Bildungsroman[84] of spirit [mind85], in which spirit [mind]
discovers that the objective shapes given to it in consciousness and self-consciousness are
nothing but its own self-determination. Spirit [Mind] comes to know itself through producing
itself, in the first instance as something which stands over against itself.”86

I comprehend from the above that a fully reasoning mind, mindful of its own opposing desires,
has self-consciously elevated87 itself to become more subjectively self-responsible. The Hegelian
subjective servant has thus become his own subjective master:

“Bildung is simultaneously a process of self-transformation and an acquisition of the power to
grasp and articulate the reasons for what one believes or knows. Acquiring a genuinely rational
comprehension of things goes hand in hand with a process of liberating maturation through a
struggle involving selfhood and the overcoming of self-conflict.” (Wood, 1998)

Thus, as Pinkard says, this “cannot therefore be taken out of Hegel or omitted in some form of
”reconstructing” of Hegel’s thoughts”.88
Hegel’s Phenomenology sponsors a mental process that “only through setting up opposition and
then negating it”89 can well-reasoned thought become capable of mindfully attaining better
outcomes. The subjective mental process (of synthesis in working through hypothesis and
opposing antithesis) in Aufhebung is about opening up problems to find their re-solutions. It is
not problem-making desires foreclosing better consequential conscious choices.90
84
Merriam-Webster dictionary: “Bildungsroman: a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character”. Dictionary.com:
“Bildungsroman: a type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.”
85
Geist all too often translated as ‘spirit’ also means ‘mind’.
86
Arthur (1983) pp. 11. Arthur’s footnote 22: Marx, Early Writings pp. 386.
87
Kai Froeb: “One central term of Hegel, the German word "aufheben", is usually translated as "sublation" into English. It has more than
one meaning:
a) … to raise something, from a lower place to a higher place…
b) … raising something to a higher level, taking it a step further…
c) …"storing", "saving", "preserving"… in the sense that the original thesis and antithesis are still present in some sense…
d) … English language verb "to lift"… in the sense of "to end", "to negate" say in the expression "to lift a ban"…” Accessed online
23.7.16: http://web.archive.org/web/20110706031521/http://hegel.net/en/sublation.htm
88
Pinkard (2007) P. 134, pp 2.
89
Arthur (1983) pp. 11. Arthur’s footnote: 23. Phänomenologie p. 422.
90
Hegel (1822): “The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom ... Itself is its own object of
attainment. and the sole aim of Spirit. This result it is, at which the process of the World's History has been continually aiming ...- P.122,
pp1. N.B. This is not repression of desires in the psychoanalytic sense because it is consciously choosing an alternative desire.
Therefore, Hegel’s synthesis of the ‘unity of opposites’ is aimed at human emancipation for a
better world in an individual mind liberating itself from self-limiting desires in short-sighted
emotional interests91. This is not the Marxist concept of socio-economic enslavement to only
capitalism’s materialistic private interests. Westphal (2013) tells us that Hegel as a radical
idealist took Heraclitus’ ‘unity of opposites’ seriously and lectured enthusiastically on the
subject. As such, Hegel could never have been promoting Marxist enslavement to capitalist
private interests.
It can be argued, therefore, that Hegel may have been taking idealism (thesis) and realism
(antithesis) into metaphysical psychology (synthesis) in the best interests of the subjective
individual (geist) for the benefit of the objective world at large (Weltgeist). If every Hegelian
subject liberated themselves from only private interests or desires, what ‘desire’ for a Marxist
ideology would remain?

In conclusion, what Hegelian subjective psychological motif may one attempt to take forward?

1) An alienated subjective mind in an objective world is subject to unchecked desires
2) A subjective mind in relation to another makes selfhood realisable
3) Iff 92desires are checked self-conscious self-mastery is possible
4) Iff self-mastery can mediate with another to satisfactory outcome
C) An alienated subject becomes realised selfhood in self-mastery making self-worth of
benefit to the world.

A self-aware mind (geist) of productive (meaningful) benefit to self and others makes possible a
world (Weltgeist) better informed by Hegelian self-educating electorates. The subjective
choosing of ‘checked desires’ cannot be under-estimated in this context. And Hegel’s ‘checking
of desire’ does not equate to psychoanalytic ‘sublimation’ but a conscious awareness of these
91
Hegel (1822) The Philosophy of History: “When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the
assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.”
92
“Iff” means ‘If and only If’ in logical argument.
desires to enable the self-conscious developmental management of them; certainly not the
suppression of them. One cannot consciously manage something one suppresses or sublimates
out of conscious awareness.
Hegel tried to build a psychological bridge between our subjective and objective realms, as both
subject (master) and object (servant) in generative dialectic within ourselves and with others.
Hegel’s self-conscious servant is heralded as the master of the future wellbeing of the world.
Through a metaphysical triadic of expanded realizations in proactively responsible relationship
with the self, others and the world that is no longer irresponsibly (unconsciously) ruled by
unchecked rampant wishes, wants and desires. Hegel must have been familiar with St Augustine
(354-430 AD) saying, “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty other than organised robbery”.
But that did not render Hegel a Marxist ideologue, impractical idealist or ‘just war’ theorist.
II. Landscape to Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887)93

In the 2006 second revised edition of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Ansell-Pearson (2006) writes:

“Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and [the
Genealogy] his most important work on ethics and politics”.

Carol Diethe (2006), as translator, provides introductory ideas about understanding Nietzsche’s
difficult polemic. Firstly, that Schuld (translated often as Christian ‘guilt’) has an earlier meaning
of ‘debt’94. Secondly, that Übermensch is in relationship to Unmensch because “Nietzsche intends
his readers to reflect on the two types of human being, Mensch.”95 But, what two types of a ‘man of
integrity and honour’ (Mensch) is being addressed by Nietzsche, and why? Diethe references
Walter Kaufmann’s (1967) translation of Nietzsche as working towards a “’synthesis of the
inhuman and superhuman” 96 [Unmensch and Übermensch]. This is not the common colloquial
assumption/misunderstanding that Nietzsche advocated becoming an Übermensch (Superman).
93
Full title: On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic
94
Diethe (2006), P.x, pp.4.
95
Diethe (2006), P.x1, pp.1. Generally, all dictionaries take Mensch to mean: a person of integrity and honour.
96
Diethe (2006), P.x1, pp.1.
The German word ‘uber’ means ‘over’ (indicative of ‘overlord’) while ‘unmensch’ colloquially
means ‘monster’ (indicative of ‘inhuman’97)? So, what would synthesizing these two
descriptions or a man of ‘integrity and honour’ (mensch) suggest?
Ansell-Pearson (2006) argues that Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality ‘can justifiably be regarded as
one of the key texts of European intellectual modernity that retains its capacity to shock and
disconcert the modern reader’.98 And also “one of the darkest books ever written”, alarming even
Nietzsche in the process of studying “the perverse nature of the human animal” that Nietzsche
called ‘the sick animal’.
Yet, Nietzsche remained hopeful of “a new kind of humanity coming into existence”99 in spite of
“man’s monstrous moral past”.100 Nietzsche’s critique of modernity stresses that “all modern
judgments about men and things” are full of “moralistic mendaciousness”.101

Paul Kirkland (2009) expounds upon Nietzsche’s call to arms:

“If lies are the condition of humanity, it is unclear how elimination of lies will lead to increase of
human knowledge, without thereby destroying our humanity. Nietzsche’s education of the free
spirit involves bringing this problem to the fore, thereby exposing the situation which makes the
quest for knowledge and intellectual liberation difficult.”102

In Ecce Homo (1888)103, Nietzsche describes his Genealogy essays, written the year before, as
three decisive preliminary studies by a psychologist for the re-evaluation of values. Ansell-
Pearson’s (2006) description of which can be summarized as follows:

97
Referencing Proto-Germanic (etymologically Proto-Indo-European) form of “un- related to “ne. It may be important to remember that
philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century were also usually philologists (structure, development and relationship of language).
98
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiii, pp.1.
99
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiii, pp.1, citing Neitzsche at 9GM, III, 14.
100
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiii, pp.1.
101
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiv, pp.1, citing Neitzsche at GM, III, 19.
102
Kirkland (2009), Wise Innocence, P.6/7.
103
Often referred to as Neitzsche’s final years of insanity.
Essay 1: The ressentiment104 of the ‘psychology of Christianity’105
Essay 2: The instinct of cruelty in the ‘psychology of conscience’106
Essay 3: The psychological perversion of human will in ‘harmful ideal’107
While inviting us to read Nietzsche with care, Ansell-Pearson (2006) points out that extracting
isolated images108 from Nietzsche’s essays should be avoided109. The historic and political
misinterpretations of Nietzsche110 have sullied comprehension of his purpose. And I hope
drawing out an underlying subjective psychological motif may contribute to improved
comprehension. Because Ansell-Pearson suggests Nietzsche’s polemic “has lost none of its force
today”111 while describing his writing as “very different from standard academic writing”.
Whatever the differences, Nietzsche intentionally assaults his readers to wake them up. And, as
Ansell-Pearson points out, in “unpredictable forms of ridendo dicere severum” i.e., “saying what is
sombre through what is laughable”112. Nietzsche dared to say, in ways few would contemplate,
that human resentment informs human nature, and in particular to any claims of moral virtue.
Therefore, claims to moral virtue appear relevant to Nietzsche’s references to both Unmensch
and Übermensch (as both entail ‘mensch’ as an aspiration to that of a man of honour and
integrity). Ansell-Pearson condenses this possibility, in my opinion, on behalf of Nietzsche as
follows:

“For Nietzsche, morality represents a system of errors that we have incorporated into our basic
ways of thinking, feeling and living; it is the great symbol of our profound ignorance of ourselves
and the world... humankind has been educated by ‘the four errors’” 113.

104
A key word throughout Nietzsche’s work. Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “Ressentiment: deep-seated resentment, frustration, and
hostility accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these feelings directly”.
105
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiv, pp.2. For the purposes of this paper, taking Nietzsche’s reference to ‘Christianity’ as including the much
broader Judeo-Christian moralistic tradition in Western society at large.
106
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiv, pp.2.
107
108
109
That I argue that Kojève and Lacan, among others, have done.
110
Nietzsche’s sister’s anti-semitic betrayal of her brother, see Diski (2003): “Her life is a story of mediocrity triumphing over inspiration,
meanness over excess, ressentiment over the Übermensch. Her transformation of her brother’s work into a Nazi cookbook bears an
uncanny resemblance to the rise of National Socialism itself in a chaotic Germany.”
111
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xv, pp.1.
112
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xv, pp.1.
113
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvi, pp.1.
Pinkard succinctly draws out114 these four educational errors of humankind as follows:
- “we see ourselves only incompletely”;
- “we endow ourselves with fictitious attributes”;
- “we place ourselves in a ‘false rank’ in relation to animals and nature”;
- “we invent ever new tables of what is good and then accept them as eternal and
unconditional”.115

Nietzsche takes us beyond the human prejudices of convention that nominate for us what is
good that define for us what is evil, in asking us to think ‘beyond good and evil’116. And in so
doing, Nietzsche asks us to own our atavistic origins. And in this context, I would argue this is
neither Unmensch (a monster lacking sufficient integrity and honour) nor Übermensch (an
overlord presuming too much integrity and honour); in line with Kaufman’s 1967 translation
implying Neitzsche sought to synthesise the two terms. In having too little aspiration to
integrity would be as bad as a presumption of having a right to aspire to more than others; in
ignorance of our own underlying monstrous natures?
If one forgives Nietzsche his polemic style, the unrelenting genealogy of horror, brutality and
cruelty of the inhuman Unmensch and/or Übermensch that moralizes away our genealogical
history, we may note our capacity to “breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of
the ‘beast of prey man’”117. And that this succeeds only in re-cultivating a “’more comfortable,
more mediocre, more indifferent”118 human animal (Unmensch?) and one “that takes taming to be
an end in itself”119 (Übermensch?).
Nietzsche sees the future depending upon the free thinker in his/her passionate opposition to
the ‘creative revenge’ of the mediocre animal (slave) who thinks that civilized small mindedness
(slave-morality) can somehow ‘redeem us from all past guilt as if the conquered summit of
114
115
Ibid
116
Ibid
117
Neitzsche, GM, I, 11.
118
119
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvi, pp.2. citing Neitzsche at GM, I, 9.
humankind’ (master-slave morality) that ‘considers itself to be the definition of morality’ or ‘the
only morality possible or desirable’.120
In the course of Nietzsche’s genealogical polemic he spells out a one-size-fits all121 moral conceit
of a ‘herd animal morality’, to which Ansell-Pearson points out122 that Nietzsche views as a
‘symptom, mask, sickness, stimulant and poison’123 from which we must liberate ourselves.
Nietzsche believed that “moral genealogists are so caught up in merely “modern” experience they
are altogether lacking in knowledge; [and] they have ‘no will to know the past, still less an instinct
for history.“124
Nietzsche’s preface to his Genealogy reflects on On the Origin of Moral Sensations (Rée, 1887125 ),
and describes as “back-to-front” and “hypothesis-mongering into the blue”126 the reiterative
“popular superstition of Christian Europe that selflessness and compassion are what is
characteristic of morality”127. For Nietzsche, claiming to be “selfless and compassionate” only
suppresses, pretends away, our atavistic pedigree; although Nietzsche lauded the ‘English
psychologists’ for holding up “a microscope to the soul” in pursuit of “truths: ‘plain, bitter, ugly,
foul, unchristian, immoral’”.128 Ansell-Pearson credits John Locke and David Hume (not Freud129)
in this context, while stressing that Nietzsche was primarily critical of these philosophers for
their “complex, intellectual activity emerged out of processes that are, in truth, ‘stupid’, such as the
vis inertiae of habit and random coupling and mechanical association of ideas.”130
By way of example, who has not knowingly killed a fly, an ant or a spider, while expounding the
Christian commandment ‘thou shall not kill’? Or, condoned the slaughter of millions of new-
120
Neitzsche BGE (Beyond Good & Evil), 202.
121
Ref: “morality valid for all” Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvii, pp.1. but citing Neitzsche at BGE, 228.
122
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvii, pp.1.
123
124
Nietzsche, GM, II, 4.
125
Rée (1849–1901) and Nietzsche were friends.
126
See: Sluga, H. (2006): “Wittgenstein’s The Blue Book shares with Nietzsche the conviction that human thought proceeds through
analogies...”. P.11, pp.1,
127
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xviii, pp.1,
128
129
Useful chronology: Locke (1632-1704), Hume (1711-1776), Hegel (1770-1831), Nietzsche (1844-1900), Freud (1856-1939).
130
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xviii, pp.2.
born cows, to sauté a calve’s liver?131 Or legalised murder of one another in war? The ‘random
coupling and mechanical association’ of the words ‘selfless’ and ‘compassionate’ in the course of
the ‘habit’ of slaughtering infant animals, or the committing of atrocities in war, religious or
otherwise, are examples of what Nietzsche was bluntly pointing out.
Ansell-Pearson (2006) argues that Nietzsche viewed the ‘bungling of moral genealogies’ through
‘plebeian ambition’ as lacking in ‘spiritual vision of real depth’.132 So, what ‘real depth’ was
Nietzsche seeking?133 Was Nietzsche trying to stem a rise of nihilism in the culture, climate and
political landscape of 1887? Following which, if it were not for WWI, shell shock victims (and
the untimely demise of the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis) during WWII, Freud134 (clearly
better informed of Nietzsche135) may not have found any avant-garde audience for a derivative
psychoanalytic language of the unconscious imbued with Nietzsche’s words:

1) The ressentiment136 of the ‘psychology of Christianity’137 in the bourgeois parenting, family
structure and madhouses of Europe.
2) The instinct of cruelty in the ‘psychology of conscience’138 in the emotional sublimations
imposed on a psyche by the ‘morally mendacious’.
3) The perversions of human will in ‘harmful ideal’139 in opposing tensions between id, ego
and super-ego.

Nietzsche wanted us to engage the world in a life-affirming program (not lifeless abstractions)
aimed at rethinking authentic human nature, not suppressing it. Wilkerson describes Nietzsche
as offering up a “constant struggle with one’s psychological and intellectual inheritances.”140 And
while Freud located these Nietzschean ideas within the unconscious, Freud failed to appreciate,
131
Nietzsche does not prioritize human beings over the animal kingdom.
132
Nietzsche, BGE, 252. [Ree dismissed metaphysical efforts regarding how to define good and evil, and relied more on Darwinian
adaptation theories.]
133
The German word for ‘spiritual’ is geistig, potentially meaning ‘mental vision of real depth’. Is this what Nietzsche might have meant?
134
Freud disingenuously denied Nietzsche as an influence, while becoming a primary psychoanalytic influence for Lacan.
135
Young, C. and Brook, A.(1994).
136
A term philosophically originated by Kierkegaard and developed by Nietzsche describing hostility toward an object-subject of
frustration, fuelling a self-justifying value system, rather than responsibility for one’s own hostility.
137
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xiv, pp.2.
138
139
140
Wilkerson, D. Frederich Nietzsche, pp.2, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
in my opinion, that Nietzsche had argued that any doctrine (including Freudian or Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory) was “just a sign that the will to power’”141 was more at work than not.
The lesson Nietzsche wanted us to learn was to own our ‘will to power’ and to stop moralizing it
out of conscious existence142.
While Nietzsche’s work has been called an “extravagant metaphysics”, Ansell-Pearson assures us
that Nietzsche did not intend it to be. But that his definition of the will to power is a “’primordial
fact of all history’”143 and is present in all societal aspirations, especially under the mantle of
“well-ordered egalitarianism” and “democratic idiosyncrasy”.144 And, as such, this is not unlike
the ‘unchecked desires’ to be met and mastered in Hegelian self-consciousness. Ansell-Pearson
questions us today, on Nietzsche’s behalf, by asking, “Might they [modern democratic
dispositions] be, as Nietzsche insinuates, masking ‘plebeian enmity towards everything privileged
and autocratic, as well as a new and more subtle atheism’?”145
Could an important list of Nietzschean questions be asked of Lacanian psychoanalysis if it is
applied too doctrinally, or authoritatively, or politically? Is a ‘plebeian’, ‘autocratic’ or ‘subtle
atheism‘ working its way through ‘democratic idiosyncrasy’ as a psychosocial malady today?
Unconsciously imbued with “ressentiment” that “suffers from being moralistic” 146 in the very
forewarned terms that Nietzsche cautioned us against over one hundred years ago? Is there a
need, as Nietzsche predicted, for a fundamental new set of self-conscious values not unlike
Hegelian panlogism147 in Aufhebung148?
I agree with Ansell-Pearson when he argues that Nietzsche asks us to rely upon “fundamental
transformations, on disruptions, and on psychological innovations and moral inventions that
141
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xix, pp.1.
142
As Freud perversely did in unattributed plagiarism of Nietzsche, while overlooking Nietzsche’s conscious, not unconscious, call to arms.
143
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xix, pp.2, citing Nietzsche at BGE, 259.
144
Ibid
145
146
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xix, pp.2
147
Merriam-Webster : “the doctrine that the absolute or the absolute reality is of the nature of logos or reason. Hegelian philosophy.”
148
Triangulated self-aware self-restraints focused upon reasoning out consequentially better outcomes (not wanton desire)?
emerge in specific material and cultural contexts.”149 I also agree with Ansell-Pearson when he
points out that Nietzsche equally cautions us against making a fetish of such principles150; even
transformations, disruptions, psychological innovations or moral inventions. I understand this
to mean that ‘principles’ alone do not propel the kind of ‘emergence’ in the ‘specific’ synthesis of
the weak (Unmensch) and moralising false strength (Übermensch) within us all - that Nietzsche
proposed we all stop pretending does not exist. Here I am reminded of Pinkard (2011)
describing what precedes cultural failure151. What if principles become so contextually and
culturally absurd, lazy or over-generalized, or zealous, as Nietzsche vehemently warned against,
that they cease to make sense? I surmise from the above, that for Nietzsche, we are all ‘slaves’ to
‘herd mentality’, if we are not indeed very, very careful. To remedy this, we need to seek
differences in origin, beyond good and evil, with which to find what surprises and disturbs us, to
avoid acquiring a Nietzschean mask of a very sick ‘one-size-fits-all’ moral conceit.
With this polemic framework and background in mind, what subjective psychological motif may
we find within Nietzsche’s master-slave morality?
Nietzsche’s master-slave morality

Nietzsche’s society is “split into two distinct groups: a militarily and politically dominant group of
‘masters’ [who] exercise absolute control over a completely subordinate group of ‘slaves’.”152
Masters are powerful, active, unreflective, self-affirming, and uninhibited. Good is defined by
their way of living, and bad is defined by not having that way of life. Therefore, Nietzschean
slaves are “not capable of living the life of self-affirming physical exuberance” and the “terms
‘good’ and ‘bad’ form the basis of a variety of different masters’ moralities.”153 However, what
might be these differing master moralities?154
149
Ibid
150
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xx, pp.3.
151
Pinkard (2011), Aprroximately 5.40 minutes into the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR7M1LsHgkE
152
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Good, bad and evil, P.xxi, pp.1.
153
Ansell-Pearson, P.xxi, pp.1.
154
In genealogical terms, aren’t all masters/noblemen ‘slaves’ to the ‘divine right of kings’? And kings slaves to God?
Nietzsche’s polemic is about the psychological subjective nature of a pernicious attitude to life
(reminiscent of Hegel’s unchecked desires), informing a morality of weakness in subversive
revenge towards what one wants but does not have; especially in those who appear to lord it
‘over’ us? In contemporary terms, does a ‘them-n-us’ mind-set partake of Nietzsche’s concept of
slave morality? And are there more of these subversive subjective slaves today, or less?
In psychological terms, is a Nietzschean ‘slave’ experiencing “ressentiment”155 through the belief
that someone else has power or superiority ‘over’ them as designated ‘master’? In turn, are all
masters then experiencing resentment toward their perceived masters up an inevitable socio-
political ladder of human hierarchies? Could this be Nietzsche’s ‘different master moralities’?
Was Nietzsche addressing the lack of individualised autonomy (synthesizing Unmensch and
Übermensch156) actualising a more existentially and individually formed idea of ‘integrity and
honour’?157 Was Nietzsche inviting us to stop partaking of a Jacob’s ladder of resentments in
flawed aspiration to a power we think we don’t have, stair-cased in subjective preoccupations
with our own powerlessness, drowned in the illusion of some heaven above or beyond
ourselves? Did Nietzsche want us to consciously seek a greater faith in ourselves from within
ourselves? As Spinoza had philosophically suggested and demonstrated in his life well over a
century before?158
Psychologically-speaking, Nietzsche is condemning slave morality because we all partake of it,
until we refuse to partake of it in greater self-awareness; no matter where we sit in our
atavistically inherited hierarchies. Namely, to overcome our slavish appetite for ‘creative
revenge in the imagination’ 159. This psychological motif appears to reflect the many and varied
forms of resentments in psychoanalytical theories of sublimation, displacement, projection and
155
Merriam-Webster: a deep-seated resentment, frustration, and hostility accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these
feelings directly.
156
Kaufmann (1967)
157
Diethe (2006), P.xi, pp.1.
158
Nietzsche is known to have been influenced by Spinoza whose philosophical proofs of God saw God within everything. Spinoza as a
much respected, if not beloved, continental philosopher had lived out a modest life of virtue, rather than merely expounding one, after
being ‘excommunicated’ by his own religious culture.
159
transference. It also appears to describe an increasing number of fragmenting ‘them-n-us’
mindsets appearing in the socio-political and psychosocial landscapes of today.
Ansell-Pearson (2006) describes Nietzsche’s powerless slaves unconsciously translating the
‘good life’ of the master into something to be desired while also devalued as ‘evil’ in a subversive
“pale semblance of self-affirmation” because they are also just “evil masters” in the making. So,
rather than actively choosing a “life of robust vitality” Nietzschean slaves opt for ‘a variety of
further conceptual inventions stylizing their own natural weakness(es)’ for which they can then
claim some form of dubious ‘moral credit’.160
I understand that a Nietzschean ‘slave revolt’ would be against ‘the masters’ form of valuation’161
and not a physical revolt against actual slavery. Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality appears to
me to be aimed at enslaved minds evading the actualized psychological responsibility of
autonomy, in preference for passive aggressive, stagnant, self-righteous indignations. And that
this cannot be right action in free will, but indicative of a genealogically impoverished notion of
‘free will’ exercised through vilification of the ‘good life’ that someone else has, as a
psychologically scapegoated subject/object – merely projected upon and vilified as if an ‘evil
master’ (oppressor). I would argue this is a working definition of psychological cowardice
masquerading as moral virtue that Nietzsche nominates as “bad conscience”162 and “the most
insidious illness”.
However, Nietzsche bravely suggests ‘bad conscience’ is also a potential “episode, a bridge, a
great promise” from which our atavistic natures might feel called to a potential “active bad
conscience”163. This has increasing resemblance, albeit more dramatically described, to that of
selfhood awakening to its own ‘unchecked desires’ in Hegel’s invitation to the self-responsibility
of selfhood in promotion of active (not passive) ‘self-consciousness’. And, in this context,
160
Ansell-Pearson, 2006, P.xxi, pp.1
161
162
Nietzsche, GM, II, 16.
163
Ibid.
Nietzsche’s subjective psychological ‘slave’ and ‘master’ are not unlike Hegelian subjective
internal opposing forces (in Aufhebung) consciousy struggling with a new wealth of possible
self-realizations aimed toward productive, not unproductive, new outcomes. Neitzsche’s self-
consciousness awakening in an ‘active bad conscience’ (not passive ‘bad conscience’) is no
longer, therefore, in denial of its own underlying ‘monstrous nature’.
Nietzsche appears to take the obverse route to Hegel in describing the mob subject acting out
slavish appetite (unchecked desire) in grave ignorance of recognising their own brute natures.
This echoes Hegel’s self-educating servant in search of self-mastery. And in some way connotes
the courage or strength of character to master one’s own resentments in life. As any real
common sense would dictate a life of passive resentment is a waste of time (if not a life)
compared to a will to actively problem-solve wisely; in conscious awareness of a real role in
consequentially good, not bad, outcomes. As only outcomes can realistically measure actively
responsible intent.
However, Nietzsche’s prehistoric creditor-debtor socio-economic birthplace of the
“ressentiment” story is not yet fully told. Ansell-Pearson (2006) takes us into Nietzsche’s
Third Essay, from guilt as no more than ‘a piece of animal psychology’ into a ‘material sense
of obligation subject to moralization before the Christian God’. 164 In Nietzsche’s First Essay,
priests as members of a master class focus on purity165. But, for Nietzsche, this
preoccupation with purity leads to guilt (debt) that assumes the face of sin166 in priestly
reinterpretation of the animal “bad conscience”. For Nietzsche this represents the most
dangerous and disastrous trick of religious interpretations in the history of the sick soul of
(European) mankind.167 As doctrine, not goodliness, is now political zealotry (in a will to
power not virtue).
164
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxiv/xxv, pp.1, citing Nietzsche at GM, III, 20.
165
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxiv/xxv, pp.1, citing Nietzsche at GM, I, 6–7.
166
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxiv/xxv, pp.1.
167
Nietzsche, GM, III, 20.
The metaphorical slave’s resentments (projected onto the master as having evil values) in
Nietzsche’s First Essay, is now put into the hands of a societal priestly master class. This now
begs the question as to who is now slave and who is now master? By way of example,
Nietzsche’s priests can only be slaves to God and church, their perceived master(s), in this ‘will
to power’ over others in presumed moral virtue preoccupied with sin (indebtedness).
This is not to say the exceptional human being, within priesthoods, does not exist. In fact,
Nietzsche seems to make a clarion call for us all to become exceptional human beings, rather
than remain a herd animal meandering from Unmensch to Übermensch in variable degrees;
constitutionally trapped in master-slave moralities of our own doctrinal making.
I agree with Ansell-Pearson (2006) that Nietzsche believes all slaves (all people) suffer because
they are inherently weak, either through nature or unfortunate circumstance, as simply a ‘brute
fact’ and nothing whatsoever to do with whether they are good or evil. Nietzsche’s description
of priesthood is one that promotes ‘senseless suffering’ aimed toward indebted obedience. This
is not the autonomy of self-responsibility that Nietzsche seeks. (Or, that Hegel sought in a
consciously self-educating ‘educated electorate’.)
The suffering of natural or circumstantial weakness, in this Nietzschean version of 2,000 years of
European history, under ecclesiastical management, worsens into ‘a progressive spiral of life-
abnegation and self-denial in the service of Western culture’168. And eradicating ‘religion’
(inherent to all Western language) does not solve the Nietzschean problem, any more than
Marxism could.169 Post-modern critical theory in an emperor’s new clothes of quasi-
ecclesiastical garb of political-correctness, in increasing infinite regress, appears to be repeating
this reiterative atavistic problem of human nature that Nietzsche fiercely pointed out. As Ansell-
Pearson (2006) describes it well, the atavism of the will to power is ‘turned utterly against itself’
168
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxvi, pp.1.
169
The history of communism under Stalin as proof.
in service of an ascetic ideal that represents ‘life operating against life’170 in a ‘degenerating life’
struggle against psychological ‘suicidal nihilism’.171 He furthers describes how this ‘gnaws’
intensely at life orchestrating a ‘metaphysical-moral guilt’ at the ‘expense of the future’ in abject
‘hatred of the human condition’ in overwhelming inevitable ‘fear of happiness and beauty’.172 Is
this a psychological description of self-abnegating guilt fuelled by a morality of indebtedness
crushing all ‘robust vitality’ (to think for oneself) in its ongoing preoccupations with ‘sin’?
Ansell-Pearson reminds us that in describing modern man, Nietzsche famously wrote that we
“live in an age in which the desire for man and his future – a future beyond mere self-preservation,
security and comfort – seems to be disappearing from the face of the earth.”173 While also citing
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and preface to his Human, All Too Human174, Ansell-Pearson heralds
Nietzsche’s Third chapter (Genealogy) on Sin and the Aesthetic Ideal, as affirming the importance
of a ‘Yes to life’ in a more profoundly metaphysical sense.
For Nietzsche, a deep-seated ‘Yes to life’ is “both the highest and deepest insight that is ‘confirmed
and maintained by truth and knowledge’”175, and not in a simple-minded way. From this more
liberating perspective (than indebtedness to sin), each Nietzschean ‘free spirit’ must attempt to
realize what is possible in life in the fullest sense of freedom from any kind of master-slave
morality. As such, this describes constructively questioning everything. In more contemporary
terms, nothing comes closer to describing a healthy child full of enquiry, awe and curiosity
raised by emotionally intelligent enabling (not moralizing) self-aware, self-disciplined parents
checking slavish appetites in both themselves and their children, free from preoccupation with
sin. Idealistic, yes, but no less an essential human ambition if seeking something better than
reiteration of a Hobbesian ‘brute’ world of atavistic pedigree professing false ‘moral virtue’.
170
171
Nietzsche, GM, III, 13.
172
173
Nietzsche, Gay Science, 382.
174
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxvii, pp.1, citing Nietzsche at HH, Preface.
175
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxvii, pp.1, citing Nietzsche at EH ‘BT, 2.
Kirkland (2009) reinforces Ansell-Pearson’s interpretation by arguing that, “embracing life and
critiquing modernity are, for Nietzsche, necessarily interrelated and represent aspects of a new
nobility”176 and that this “noble-good” sets us apart from good and evil and is defined by someone
capable of experiencing themselves as “value creating”.177
There is a wealth of possibility in questioning the phrase ‘value creating’, and I wonder whether
this might well harmonize in some way with Hegel’s concept of productive good outcomes.
However, my immediate purpose is to further a subjective psychological motif, in contrast to
Hegel, that I may take forward into Lacan’s psychoanalytic four master discourses.
Therefore, what Nietzschean subjective psychological motif may one take forward, in working
comparison to Hegel?

1) An alienated subjective mind in an objective world is subject to slavish appetites
2) A subjective mind in unrealised slavish appetite fuels resentments
3) Resentments fuel moralising false-virtue
4) Moralising false-virtue is a master-slave morality
5) Master-slave morality alienates self-mastery
C) Alienated self-mastery (lacking conscious self-worth) is detrimental to the world.

Based upon the above, the subjective psychological tensions between Hegel and Nietzsche
appear remarkably similar in their concerns for the future wellbeing of a real and hitherto
consistently troubled world.
III. The Tensions between Hegel and Nietzsche Subjective Motifs

I conclude, that for both Hegel and Nietzsche, we are all subjective human beings in a
challenging and difficult objective world. And our troubled subjective ‘unchecked desires’,
‘slavish appetites’ and ‘ressentiments’ make demands upon us to better learn through self-
176
Kirkland (2009), Introduction, P.xvi.
177
Kirkland (2009, p.69-70)
conscious mediation within ourselves and with others to become more ‘value creating’ in
producing meaningful beneficial outcomes for us all.
If a Nietzschean subject is not master of his/her own Hegelian unchecked desires and remains a
slave to appetite in promoting dubious self-worth through ressentiment in acts of ‘bad
conscience’, this is not of value to anyone, nor is it a real virtue or an educated electorate. If
providing no mutual recognition of another (irrespective of perceived status) one furthers
alienation and ultimately unsatisfactory outcomes that is not of benefit to the world. Hegel’s
self-conscious acts of mediation are aimed toward something better for the world. And if one
does not resolve a subjective sense of alienation from what is possible within oneself, both
subjective and objectively, the genealogical prehistoric mind-set described in Nietzsche’s
polemic - and the unchecked desires in the mind of Hegelian subjects – will simply continue to
be insufficiently self-conscious to be of any benefit178. The corollary of which, of course, would
be a world view that depicts an Hegelian un-self-conscious servant lacking the self-mastery to
qualify as an educated electorate and Nietzschean resentment-fuelled false virtues demonizing
others in an ongoing morbid will to power that only continues to contribute to human society’s
atavistically monstrous outcomes.
Nietzsche wished to point out, polemically, that if we did not wake up to our genealogical origins
as fundamentally ‘brute’, to begin to cultivate a self-responsible ‘Yes to life’, not slavish
moralizing, our (Western) human condition was doomed. To realize an ‘active bad conscience’
capable of Hegel’s invitation to awaken subjective self-conscious self-mastery is, therefore,
synonymous. Both Nietzsche and Hegel wanted us to over-come, to be-come more than, our
own private interests in false virtue. But to prosper the subjective psychology of self-
responsibility in any political or economic conditions; with which to far better address our
individualism in reasoned conscience in self-conscious relation to our unavoidable
interdependency with one another.
178
The essence of Hegel’s panlogic intent.
Both Hegel and Nietzsche sought subjective self-conscious self-awareness motivated to engaging
in an objective world in a self-responsible and more vital manner. Hegel is less gloom laden than
Nietzsche, and perhaps less passionate. However, Hegel points a subjective metaphysical way
forward, while Nietzsche vehemently warns us against not taking it. Hegel hopes to overcome
world problems by inviting an educated electorate to emerge in self-educating selfhood
cognisant of its interdependence with others. Nietzsche fears that if we do not recognise our
atavistic origins to awaken wiser self-consciousness, our slavish appetites will continue to
repeat monstrous behaviours in morbid forms of interdependence.
It is fair to posit that Nietzsche’s master-slave morality is complimentary to Hegel’s master-and-
servant dialectic. Nietzsche’s lens is that of dismay and horror at the cost of atavistic
resentments under the guise of moral virtue in his Master-Slave Morality. With human nature
remaining in destructive servitude (slave-hood) to moralizing folly in the lack of self-conscious
self-awareness of petty self-interests. Hegel aspires to an idealistically envisioned raising up of
self-consciousness in dialogue with one another in a fully cognisant Master and Servant Dialectic
with which to overcome poor outcomes via the unification of opposing subjective and objective
wills so that consistently better outcomes become possible, feasible and realizable.
The subjective lenses of Nietzsche’s pessimism and Hegel’s optimism are not the same, but they
proffer a fundamentally similar message. Which is for individuals to get the better of their
internal demons (from whatever origin) or hope for change for the better in their own life, and
the world at large, is highly unlikely. This humanistic change for the better is considered
possible in Hegel’s way of thinking but remains potentially doomed in Nietzsche’s.
How, therefore, may one enquire into Lacan’s four master discourses with this in mind?

IV. A Lacanian Theoretical Framework

This enquiry is motivated by serious concern about the psychosocial implications, if not
consequences, of the ‘master-slave’ trope central to Lacan’s four master discourses being a neo-
Marxist derivative of Kojève’s political angst, not Hegel’s metaphysical panlogic idealism. Lacan
referenced Hegel repeatedly while in fact vocally also deferring to ‘his master’ as Kojève in his
four master discourses in his XVII Seminar entitled L’envers de Psychanalyse179 (translated as
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan, 1980180).
I argue that English translations/educational introductions to Lacan’s four discourses are
derivative of Kojève, not Hegel. Dylan Evans (1999) suggests that whenever Lacan refers to
Hegel it is “Kojève’s Hegel that he has in mind”; an opinion reinforced by James Mellard (2006).
However, many received authors of contemporary academic primers about the history of
psychoanalysis, including Eli Zaretsky (2004) and Philip Hodgkiss (2001) make no mention of
Kojève in relation to Lacan, and Dany Nobus (1999 and Malcolm Quinn, 2005) only superficially
address Kojève’s influence. However, Katrien Libbrecht (1999) describes Lacan’s theory of the
“desire of a human being is the desire for the Other” (a central motif to Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory) is also derived from Kojève’s reading of Hegel.
The primary worry, therefore, is that Lacan’s body of work when Hegel is assumed, cited or
quoted as a primary influence is in very serious error181. And lacking in accountability for the
educational responsibility to be neither politically biased nor academically incorrect. Especially,
if Lacan, himself, on The impotence of Truth in Seminar XVII, addresses the problematic function
of the master in his four master discourses by dismissively suggesting that “Hegel had a go”182
while claiming his “master, Alexandre Kojève” was in his mind183 (implying Hegel had failed while
179
Grigg (2007), offers ambiguities in translation of l’envers as not just “the other side,” but also “back,” “verso,” “lining,” “underside,”
“flip-side,” “underneath,” “bad side” – [as] connotations of the unseen, even the obscene, which “the other side” in English barely
suggests.”
180
I have taken the date of 1980 from Lacanian online Bibliography http://www.lacan.com/bibliography.htm as referencing dates are very
confused in variable translation and publication dates.
181
E.g., “Lacan is fundamentally Hegelian, but without knowing it.” (Žižek, 1997/2006, Lacan)
182
Lacan (1969-1970), Seminar XVII, Ch. XII, p. 169, pp.4
183
Lacan (1969-1970), Seminar XVII, Ch. XII, p. 169, pp.5
he, Lacan, and Kojève, had not) in the process of speaking, lecturing and formulating his quadra-
partite schema184 of his own four discourses for clinical application.

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is centrally funded by the key concepts of the Imaginary,
Symbolic, Real, l’objet petit a185 and jouissance186 informing Lacan’s overall theoretical
framework; and terms now technically/academically disseminated in psychoanalytic
education/training. None of these defining theoretical terms may be overlooked, therefore, in
observing the schematics of his four master discourses described as a ‘boundary language’ by
Donald Kunze (2013) who lauds it as “an interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian
theory in a graphic way to inform the study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory
in general". This Lacanian schema is now a widely circulated ‘interdisciplinary’ academic and
psychosocial tool that requires serious correction in its presumed credibility; as a distorted if
not fumbled philosophical, political and theoretical muddle of misattributed incomprehensions
of projected/dislocated ‘speculative’ images (as if truth).
Lacan’s Imaginary order is an “investment in the speculative image”187 as a central theoretical
departure from Freud. Lacan argued that rather than the Freudian infant being viewed
psychoanalytically as having fulfilled or unfulfilled desires of its mother, sanctioned by the
father, the Lacanian infant endures a ‘flip-side’ (l’envers)188 of a Freudian equation.
The Lacanian biologically chaotic infant is thrust into a dis-associative external realm
overwhelmed by caretaker desires, language and cultural expectations. Lacan connotes this as a
‘gap’, sometimes a ‘split’, and at times a ‘void’ from which he suggests the infant’s subjective
existential need to satisfy some wordless sense of loss (from the womb) is described as “l’objet
184
Hegel’s triadic panlogic metaphysical idealism bears no relationship to Lacan’s post-modern dystopic political quadripartite schematics.
185
Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis: “The use of the lower case marks the distinction between this object and the “big Other”
"symbolized by the capital A[utre].”
186
Lacan, (2004, Seminar X): “What the neurotic shrinks back from is not castration, but from turning his castration into what the Other
lacks. He shrinks back from turning his castration into something positive, namely, the function of the Other... What might ensure a
relationship between the subject and this universe of significations, if not the fact that somewhere there is jouissance?”
187
Lacan, (2004, Seminar X): “... everything that concerns taking one’s bearings in the imaginary, the phallus will henceforth step in, in
the form of a lack.” P38-39.
188
Lacan Seminar XVII is entitled L’envers de Psychanalyse in which the four discourses are described. Grigg (2007), as translator, offers
ambiguities in translation of l’envers as not just “the other side” but also “back”, “verso”, “lining”, “underside”, “flip-side”.
“underneath”. “bad side” – [as] connotations of the unseen, even the obscene, which “the other side” in English barely suggests.”
Equally, in vernacular French: back-to-front, wrong way round, inside-out.
petit a”189. Lacan theorizes (imagines) this loss leads to a libidinal drive toward “jouissance” as
an extension of Freud’s pleasure principle. Lacan further describes this postnatal human
condition as “the body image functioning in the... specifically imaginary... as a minus, as a blank”190
while floundering in the external world of linguistically imposed cultural expectations.

“Lacan tries to articulate something about psychic life, in which the ego is precipitated from
outside, in a specular plane, and through processes that are imaginary.” (Baraitser, 2016)191
Firstly, it is important to note the linguistic and cultural dictionary differences between the word
‘speculative’ (“engaged in, expressing, or based on conjecture rather than knowledge”) as opposed
to ‘specular’ (“relating to mirrors or acting as a mirror”) In English versus a French use of the
words “speculaire” and “speculatif” (or “speculative”). The ubiquitous English translations of
Lacan’s lectures in French are potentially very troubling indeed. For example, in French the
world ‘specular’ has a definition of “mirror writing, transparent” and ‘speculatif’ would be “a
man of speculative mind”. While etymological similarities are clear, subtle differences in
semantic nuance are critical in psychoanalytic theoretical intent or meaning. Such as a possible
variant translation such as a ‘the transparency of a person mirror writing’ or a person with ‘a
speculative mind’. Neither denote knowledge. Both denote an expression of adjectival
conjecture. And central throughout Lacan’s florid lectures.
However, in following supposedly received/accepted English definitions of Lacanian theory, the
‘mirror phase’ (as the above conjectures have been reduced) theoretically comes to the infant’s
supposed psychoanalytic rescue, when the child first registers a seemingly non-chaotic objective
physicality of themselves when ‘pointed out’ in a mirror as a visible thing. It is never entirely
clear, in Lacanian theory, whether this is dependent upon someone else pointing this out to the
child, or not. This moment in child development underpins Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory
189
Lacan (2004, Seminar X): “If the Hegelian concept of desire and the one I’m promoting to you here have something in common, it’s
this. At a moment which is precisely the unacceptable point of impasse in the process of the Selbstbewusstsein [self-confidence or self-
consciousness] as Hegel would have it, the subject, being this object, is irremediably stamped with finitude.” P.24, pp.6.
190
Lacan, (2004), Seminar X), P.39, pp.1.
191
Baraitser (2016) during academic debate over the proposal for this paper.
toward a metaphorical, rather than a real, experience that implies a mediated sense of identity
(speculative mind), rather than a precisely predictable and definitive one. As such there appears
to be no real identity-event in Lacan’s psychoanalytic map, or actual state of ‘thinghood’
informed by self-actualizing relationships as there is for Hegel. Lacanian ‘desire for the other’ is,
therefore, a profoundly distorted ‘speculative image’ formulated by Lacan and is not Hegel’s
‘real’ relationship with oneself in productive mediation with another to become reliable
thinghood. On this basis, alone, Lacan cannot be Hegelian with, or without, knowing it.
Lacan describes his theoretical viewpoints in so many obscure ways, that speculative
interpretations can only abound, one upon the other. In more traditional philosophical rigour
something one might nominate as ‘assumption laid upon assumption’ that can only result in a
highly ‘speculative’ unreality lacking logical foundation or truth values. For example, Lacan
provides an experience of this theoretical existential lack of ‘real’ identity by saying:
“… the subject advances towards jouissance, that is to say, towards what is furthest from him,
he encounters this intimate fracture, right up close, by letting himself be caught, along the way,
by his own image, the specular image. That’s the snare.” (Lacan, 2004, Ch.VII).
As Frosh (2012) describes it, this is not a psychology of ‘progress through stability and/or
authenticity’192; and that Johnston (2013) further illuminates for us as the child becomes an
adult :

“Who and what one “imagines” other persons to be, what one thereby “imagines” they mean
when communicatively interacting, who and what one “imagines” oneself to be, including from
the imagined perspectives of others—all of the preceding is encompassed under the heading of
this [Imaginary] register.”193
192
Frosh, 2012, Ch.16, P.179, pp 1.
193
Johnston (2013), 2.1.1 The Imaginary, pp.1.
The Lacanian ego no longer qualifies as a Freudian tri-partite id, ego and superego development
set of possibilities but as Frosh (2012) argues more like “a defense, an armour or shell supporting
the psyche”194. As such, the cultural language into which every child is born, along with the
intrinsic moral law-making that inevitably comes with invested language, forces the infant into
what Lacan describes as the ‘Symbolic order’ as ‘a kind of apparition of winged signifiers that
make holes in the real all by themselves’.195 The sense of ‘alienation’ imposed by Lacan upon
subjective human development as the ‘real’ as unobtainable is very troubling. There appears to
be no ‘objectivity’ possible. And, thus, one must question how ‘psychotic’ Lacan’s view of human
existence must be if all human development is so totally out of Lacanian touch with any kind,
form or assumption of reality (whatever it might be) as having actually real features and
attributes of its own that we are capable of comprehending or relating to coherently.
The above poetic allusions, rather than credible theory, provides a glimpse of Lacan’s third
register of the ‘Real’, by default, however. While the question remains whether it possible for
anything real to be experienced from this Lacanian non-real-imaginary-only existential
standpoint. So, how can Lacan suggest or propose a ‘one size fits all’ theoretical model for
clinical application, such as his four master discourse schematic, from such an unreal/imaginary
standpoint if ‘other people’ (such as the Lancanian analyst’s analysand) is not, in fact, to be
addressed as real in any meaningful subjective sense?
Of course, I understand that Lacan is attempting to describe the phenomenological gap, split or
void between reality and our subjective understanding, comprehension or allocation of meaning
to it. But I do not understand how, for Lacan, anyone is capable of being real enough,
objectively, to formulate a schema for clinical application? If whatever is real is so subjectively
unobtainable for both analyst and analysand alike? Nor precisely how Lacan presumes to
identify the now fundamentally (non-obtainable) unreal subjective content within another
194
Frosh, 2012, Ch.16, P.179, pp 1.
195
Lacan, 2004, Seminar X, P.87, pp.4
human being from his own ‘psychotic’ standpoint (the speculatively punctured unreal from
within himself)? It also begs the next question of what we cannot obtain as ‘real’ as being
described as having ‘holes in it’ (whether of our own making or not).196 For anything to have
‘holes in it’ makes the assumption, somewhere, that ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ is) can exist without holes?
There is a fundamental contradiction to Hegel’s sense of self as something of a tangible,
obtainable, nature that is able to conceive of the possibility (theoretical or otherwise) of
‘thinghood’. And if Lacan’s subjects can only make holes in the Real, whatever the speculative
term ‘Real’ now actually means, what is the overall Lacanian psychoanalytic purpose of a ‘one
size fits all’ schema in applied clinical practice? To help ‘others’ recognize the
phenomenological gap in all human subjectivity, one way or another, or is Lacan aiming to help
‘others’ overcome it ‘productively’?
Lacan’s preoccupations with post-modern language deconstrucction import so many
linguistically framed (if not fuzzy) theoretical notions of non-reality, it can only hypocritically
produce a schematic of Lacan’s own Imaginary Symbolic with his own ‘holes’ in it (his own
phenomenological psychosis). So, how can Lacan identify what is real for anyone else from this
hole-punched imaginary perspective of his own? (Irrespective of very badly translated English
formulating multiple interpretations of Lacan’s opaque post-modern French style of lecturing).
Hegel’s self-educated self-consciousness in the real world is not here and Lacan, probably
unwittingly, has foreclosed it, for himself.
The Hegelian subjective self is informed by mediation with someone else in a real, not merely
imaginary, or specular, way because it is measured by objective outcomes. The imaginary
and/or Symbolic register is clearly of importance, psychoanalytically-speaking, but Lacan’s
Imaginary Symbolic subsumes the Real entirely and does “violence to the very concrete nature of
Hegel’s own thought”.197
196
I intend the allusion to a ‘fallacious/circular argument’.
197
Pinkard, 2007, P. 120.
Lacan’s self-admitting inadequacy in logically failing to provide a far more robust theory for
actual application (in a real world) - in favouring specular speculation upon specular speculation
of his own – leads us to Lacan’s world of the Imaginary/Symbolic – which is wholly interwoven.
Lacanian theory reaches an important theoretical summit here, and I agree with Frosh (2012)
when he argues that [Lacan’s imaginary] ‘symbolization will always fail’ and that the underlying
desire for complete or entirely satisfactory communion with another will ‘break through cracks
in the defensive structure of ego’ and effectively ‘demolish all our attempts at identity-
construction’.198 And while I am sympathetic to healthy debate about whether ‘identity’ actually
exists, as a stable or static ‘thinghood’, a sense of self certainly does exist (no matter how fluid
this may be). And this does not require speculative non-proofs (compounded assumptions)
(about the universal immaterial nature of subjectivity) attempting to argue that nothing real can
be felt, experienced, expressed or understood subjectively. Which must be absurd, in real terms,
if we can learn another cultural human language, board an aeroplane, transverse the planet and
sufficiently coherently speak another language to ‘get about’ adequately enough in another
people’s world or worlds of meaning.
The Lacanian ‘imagined’ gap, split or void between conscious and unconscious desire appears to
be a self-fulfilling prophecy of hopeless alienation. Is Lacanian theory an eternal meandering
through unchecked desires and slavish appetites in solipsistic search of jouissance? Where is the
stable subjective psychological basis for consciously and objectively overcoming these desires or
appetites without running the risk of collapsing into nihilism? This does not reflect a spirit
(mind) of mediating self-realizations consciously electing fruitful relationships (with what can
indeed be experienced as oppressively real) to prosper something more objectively worthwhile
and productive than base desires, resentments or perpetual searches for ‘joy’ only. Neither
Hegel nor Nietzsche propose a meaningless enterprise of such child-like self-preoccupations.
198
Frosh, 2012, Ch.16, P.181, pp 3.
I find little evidence of a self-conscious Hegelian sense of self-worth in this Lacanian specular
mirroring image of a sense of non-self. Without a sense of integrative self, it would appear that
Hegelian mediation with another cannot be possible or ‘really’ on offer or aimed toward an
educated electorate taking a self-responsible productive place in a real (not imaginary) world. I
find an eerie resonance to Nietzsche’s acts of bad faith using dubious notions of philological or
semiotic doctrines of unreality, as if of profound intellectual value. Is this an example of
Nietzschean false virtue? Phenomenological subjectivity is an already known, not unknown, to
be potentially distorting of our human perspectives. But, what does Lacan add to this already
preceding understanding of ourselves, if anything?
Both Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s subjective motifs make the primary assumptions, rightly or
wrongly, that there is a real world that human beings are capable of engaging with; in an actual
and beneficial way. Lacan’s primary assumption, however, is that there is no identity (sense of
real self) nor an objective purchase upon the world beyond the subjective ‘Symbolic Imaginary’.
In which case, by way of pragmatic example, how can a Lacanian trust a medical A&E
department to save lives after a motorway pile up? Or, even attempt to create one? Or identify
the psychological implications of a fuel oil tanker spill leading to massive explosions that
conflagrated the occupants of crashed cars? Or, establish the medical protocols for dealing with
such? It is also of interest how a Lacanian analyst would apply the four master discourses with a
burns-victim in recovery from such a traumatic life experience? How would Lacanian theory
engage with the medical profession at the point of trauma patient entry to A&E to produce
better patient care outcomes? If incapacitated by subjective Symbolic Imaginary in perverse
inability to take hold of anything Real?
However, whether one agrees with a Lacanian framework of psychoanalytic theory, or not, this
paper’s primary objective is to establish whether Lacan’s four master discourses are in any way
Hegelian in origin, or not. And, so far, Lacan’s theoretical framework is not in any way
foundationally Hegelian.
Lacan’s Four Discourses199

Descriptions of the four discourses usually follow the order I have taken from Fink (1995, 1999):
1) The Master Discourse
2) The University Discourse
3) The Hysteric’s Discourse
4) The Analyst’s Discourse
I shall be taking a ‘ridendo dicere severum’ critical approach to these discourses. Justified by the
above nomenclatures for these four discourses ignoring a wealth of human circumstances,
personal roles and far more complex mire of human dynamics while tritely offering only four
generic stereotypes. By way of example, where is the Widow, Child, Parent or Old Man (as only
a very few examples among many) to be supposedly ‘squeezed’ into this limited structure aimed,
presumably, at ‘therapeutically’ addressing any or all forms of human subjectivity?
The Master Discourse

Fink (1999) describes this discourse, on behalf of Lacan, as “the fundamental matrix of the
coming to be of the subject through alienation”. While this seems already a misinterpretation of
Hegel, in the style of Kojève (and Wahl200), Lacan’s fundamental thesis of subjective human life is
that there is no identity (‘coming to be’) nor purchase upon the real world. Therefore, it is
difficult to know how can this lead to a ‘coming to be through alienation’? Unless ‘coming to be’
is a sense of self that proves adequate to an analysand (like a widow, child, parent or old man)
with or without Lacanian belief in its existential substance?
While the choice of the word ‘Master’ seems required (or used to colloquially describe all four of
the ‘master discourses’) it is not clear why Fink states that this discourse’s position has “a
somewhat different function in the context of the four discourses” 201 because this schematic role
199
Lacan (1901-1981), The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII.
200
Wahl (1929) ‘The Unhappy Consciousness’.
201
Fink (1999), P.31, pp.1.
denotes the “The master [who] must be obeyed – not because we will all be better off that way or
for some other such rationale – but because he or she says so”202. Fink exemplifies that as “… the
slave, in slaving away for the master, learns something: he or she comes to embody knowledge
(knowledge as productive)” in a process of “… taking the capitalist as master here and worker as
slave...”. Firstly, what is this political rhetoric doing, or aiming to do, for a widow, child, parent
or old man in a psychoanalytic setting? Secondly, the use of the word ‘slave’ is not Hegelian, as
clarified above. Thirdly, Hegel was not engaged in describing the ‘product’ of physical ‘labour’ as
clarified by Marx. So, what is Lacan (in Fink’s words) aiming toward here in Hegelian terms?
Fink says this, “represents the surplus produced: surplus value”. 203 Whether this ‘surplus value’ is
on offer to the analyst or the analysand’s benefit is ambiguous but in the psychoanalytic sense
subjective transference and countertransference is ‘producing’ something of mutual value and is
presumably intended. Although, I would argue, Fink and any Lacanian analyst employing this
kind of terminology must be entertaining a capitalist profit-making mode of being themselves
(set by their own neo-Marxist standard here) if they are being paid by a publisher, university or
analysand. Irrespective of whether the analyst and/or analysand are meant to be merely
playing out a semantic notion of ‘capitalist’ or ‘master’ as a signifier rather than economic
terminological fact204, or not, this is already palpable nonsense imposing itself on any bereaved
widow (haunted by joyful memories in her irredeemable loss) or an old man (facing up to
physical decline and impending inevitable death).
I find it difficult to be charitable about this opening politicized rubric. The imposition of which
provides little open-minded therapeutic humility I can apolitically comprehend or even wish to
comprehend. Although if something of value is produced out of this peculiarly politically biased
psychoanalytic thought process, I would like to know what it might be.
202
Fink (1999) referencing Lacan “in Seminar XX that the first function of language is the ‘imperative’” (Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore,
o.c., p.33)
203
Fink (1999), P.31, pp.1.
204
Of course, ‘facts’ become increasingly difficult to find, suggest or nominate within this Imaginary Symbolic order of Lacanian theory.
Fink further describes, still under the mantle of the Master discourse, the “activity of the worker”
as “appropriated by the capitalist” which in turn “procures the latter[‘s] enjoyment of some kind:
[as] surplus jouissance”205. Freud’s pleasure principle appears (in distorted measure) as the
beginning of some interesting conceptual category mistakes. For example, is this referring to the
analyst’s or analysand’s surplus pleasure in an analytic clinical setting? And who is the worker
and who is the capitalist in such a setting? Is the personal pleasure sought by the analysand
exploited as surplus profit by the analyst, or an undisclosed other? What overall form of
psychological exchange is Lacan (or Fink) trying to symbolize or signify here?
Fink goes into some detail about this discourse as the ‘matheme’206 or ‘mathemes’ of S1, S2, $ and
a in a schema regarding their role in the other three discourses. However, these ‘mathemes’
must also apply to the Master discourse because they proceed through all four of the discourse
as follows:

S1 Master signifier
“A connection that depends on the essential
} medium of speech – the subject is separated
from the production of the discourse – and this
results in a discourse that is always
inadequate.”207
S2 Knowledge (Truth)

________________________________________________

a “Surplus Enjoyment”208
} “An unbridgeable gap separates subject $ and
the object a.”209
$ 210 The Subject

As can be seen, it takes some effort to make applied clinical sense of this monographic schema-
obscura; claiming ‘surplus enjoyment, on the one hand, while providing something that “is
always inadequate”, on the other.
205
Fink (1999) referencing Lacan at Seminar XVII at P.19 and P.31.
206 Abstract: ‘Lacan saw his "matheme" as something that would ensure the integral transmission of his teachings...proof against the
"noise" or interference inherent in any process of communication' (David Macey, "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) p. xxxii)
207
Encyclopedia of Lacan, pp.5://nosubject.com/Four_Discourses
208
I assume Kunze refers here to jouissance in relation to the pursuit of l’object petit a (the lost maternal womb).
209
Encyclopedia of Lacan, pp.5://nosubject.com/Four_Discourses
210
I apologise that my laptop keyboard provides only a dollar sign with which to denote a capital S with a forward slash across it.
If the above schema is representative of a ‘medium of speech’ in discourse that is always
inadequate’ what merit may there be for one to attempt the discourse? Particularly if one party,
or both, face an ‘unbridgeable gap’ between the imagined desire for whatever ‘surplus
enjoyment’ is meant to mean?
If we take Lacan’s imagined ‘l’objet petit a’ as seriously as he would like us to, in its original
existential irredeemable sense of loss, what is the objective of the discourse if loss is always
faced with an unbridgeable gap with joy in any or all possible futures? What therapeutic
purpose can be on offer here? Because the plethora of subjectively obfuscated symbols
(evocative of logical positivism’s reduction of human language to calculus211) is indeed very
problematic. Therefore, these arbitrary semiotic algebraic signifiers, and dubious aspirations to
epistemological respectability, must admit to some post-structural logical truth-seeking method.
But how is this communicable as a shared form of reality if Lacan’s Imaginary Symbolic is ‘full of
holes’?
I see no calculus here capable of producing reliable epistemological meaning, or truth values,
only random assumptions with neither necessary nor sufficient logical argument; and certainly
no reliably mathematical process or procedure for all of Lacan’s or Fink’s flamboyant ‘calculated’
efforts. This post-modern psychoanalytic derivative reminiscent of a mathematically driven
reductionist Viennese circle has absolutely no truth value logical rigour. Did Lacan miss what
meaningful algebraic mathematical truth objectives must always entail? Or did Lacan strike
some post-modern mathematical pose in the very same way Žižek claims he was Hegelian
“without knowing it”?212
211
Logical positivism is based upon the mathematical assumption that for language to have meaning it must be capable of being reduced to
some form of truth value logic.
212
Žižek, 1997/2006, Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian? pp.4. Both Freud and Lacan seem guilty of borrowing philosophical legacies
that they have both failed to intellectually articulate in properly attributed manner to add well argued ‘value’ rather than muddily
plagiarise.
Nonetheless, the above descriptions (of the ‘Master Discourse’) inform a working diagram in
ubiquitous circulation on the internet promoting a "Boundary Language" as follows:
agent&&& other
S1 S2
__________ __________
$ a
truth production 213
My primary focus is not now the schematics that Fink (1999) describes as the “quadrapartite
structures... that Lacan considers of value and interest to psychoanalysis”. Nor is it the endless
category mistakes appearing throughout Lacan’s amazing tour de force in fractured
deconstructive thinking - while lecturing about his post-modern ideas of this supposed
psychoanalytic truth value formula. I remain focused upon the neo-Marxist (one-size-fits-all)
presumptions reflected within this obtuse formulaic now populating broader educational
curricula (as if in Hegel’s name).
So far, I detect only Kojève in Pinkardian ‘meshed’ terms (if not terminologies) in an Arthur-ian
(1983) ‘Myth of Marxology’ purloining a Nietzschean theme of the will to power (symbols
claiming arbitrary subjective meaning) in a doctrine (Nietzschean ‘slave morality’) of Lacan’s
Imaginary Symbolic (false virtue) in faltering desires in relation to reality. I do not see how this
can help one “become conscious” of what one “truly is”214 even if Lacan would permit one any
dependable purchase on reality in a Symbolic Imaginary subjective state ‘full of holes.’
With a more apolitical therapeutic objective in mind, this schematic is remarkable in its lack of
Hegelian or psychoanalytic self-consciousness regarding its own chaotic self-defeating
arguments. There appears a ‘will to power’ in formulating a ‘superior-minded’ (Master attitude)
213
Abstracted from Kunze, D. (undated), " "Boundary Language", an interdisplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory in a
graphic way to inform the study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in general."
214
Abstract from Arthur (1983) pp. 6, citing Hegel at footnoted 14. Gesammelte Werke, Band 9, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg
1980, pp. 114-15
and politicised imposition of alienation upon an analysand (as a Slave). An already suffering,
scared or emotionally wounded human being merits more respect than this, in my opinion, to
avoid this Lacanian schema becoming a manifesto for a phenomenological experiment (at best)
rather than psychological torture (at worst) evocative of Kafka’s (1914/15) The Trial.
If psychoanalysing the mind, thoughts and words of someone is to be directed toward
therapeutic outcomes in humane ‘service’ to human suffering, a belief in a patient’s human
worth is necessary. It is not optional. Therefore, it is not ethical, in my opinion, to attempt to
reprogram an analysand in a nihilistic assumption of an unbridgeable gap between joy and loss.
While these Lacanian notational symbols may have some validity, in the philosophical sense of
an existential or phenomenological thought experiment, how they are to be disclosed, shared or
explained to the analysand when applied in clinical practice is not addressed; as it should be
because any such (politicized) mind-games should never be played out in any clinical context
without an analysand’s express knowledge and consent.
Additionally, it is troubling to know how a Lacanian analyst can function if the overall
psychoanalytic speech method is ‘always inadequate’ in relation to the analysand’s
‘unbridgeable gap’ with loss, or alienated pleasure. Because this Lacanian ‘alienated’ human
position must also apply to the analyst. No matter how illusory the potential wellbeing of a
subjective sense of self may be (for both analyst and analysand), this existential human
phenomenological problem is not served in neo-Marxist infected ‘discourse’ of ‘non-selfhood’
foreclosing ‘selfhood’ in a ‘master-slave’ neophyte prophecy predicated only on defeat. Hegel
did not suggest ‘non-selfhood’ or ‘defeat’ in mediated self-conscious consciousness about oneself
in relation to others. Hegel argued for productive not unproductive outcomes; and as
Wittgenstein (1914) said215: “Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to
where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear
one.”
215
Wittgenstein, Journal entry, 1 November 1914.
The University Discourse

Fink (1999) opens his description of the University discourse with “knowledge replaces the
nonsensical master signifier” because “systematic knowledge is the ultimate authority, reigning in
the stead of blind will”. But how is “systematic knowledge” possible or the “ultimate authority” if
there is no Lacanian purchase upon the real and the ‘master signifier’ is “nonsensical” anyway? It
is possible to surmise Nietzsche’s will to power in “blind will” is seeking authority through some
notion of knowledge acquisition. But if there is no reliable ‘selfhood’ nor purchase upon ‘reality’,
how can “systematic knowledge” as an “ultimate authority” exist or even proceed? Even if we
admit it is a subjective variable on the will to power? We can only continue to ponder that if the
real is subjectively unobtainable that knowledge and/or truth cannot be dependably acquired
and, therefore, it is not possible to acquire ‘systematic knowledge’ or any ‘ultimate authority’.
And what ‘ultimate authority’ over whom is Fink referencing and to what purpose? There is a
meandering Lacanian ‘lack’ of meaningful purchase on reality (i.e., actual knowledge) in
seemingly misappropriated Nietzschean ‘slave morality’ suffering under the axiomatic illusion
(neurotic belief) that ‘knowledge is power’. And if this is supposed to be subjectively true of the
analysand in Lacanian applied clinical practice, how can this be any less true for the analyst?
The Lacanian psychoanalyst must be in an equivalent illusion.
Fink goes on to say that the University discourse is “providing a sort of legitimation or
rationalization of the master’s will” that Lacan agrees is “an arm of capitalist production (or of the
military-industrial complex...) ” because “knowledge here interrogates surplus value (the product
of capitalist economies, which takes the form of a loss or subtraction of value from the worker)”.216
Again, finding the will to be charitable to the above quotes is very difficult. Firstly, what is Fink’s
neo-Marxist educational primer doing in a ‘university’? Unless Fink seeks “rationalization of his
master’s will”? Because whatever applies, theoretically, to a Lacanian analysand, under the
burden of Lacan’s overall psychoanalytic framework, must also apply to the analyst.
216
Fink, 1999, P.33.
Therefore, what degree of “moralistic mendaciousness”217 informs this psychoanalytical set of
discourses? Did Lacan also unwittingly make himself the subject of Nietzschean dismay ‘without
knowing it’?
If the master signifier as previously outlined by Fink is “The master [who] must be obeyed – not
because we will all be better off that way or for some other such rationale – but because he or she
says so”218, how does this didact become knowledge, systematic or otherwise, in the university
discourse if it is only “providing a sort of legitimation or rationalization of the master’s will”? Or
able to bridge the Symbolic Imaginary unbridgeable gap with this desire, whether feasible or
not? There is now a sense of Waiting for Godot219 in observing either the master discourse in ‘do
as I say’ (in blind will to power) or the university discourse in ‘believe in what I say’ (as
systematically acquired knowledge).
Kojève ‘meshed’ thinking (as Pinkard would say) is now promoting a ‘Myth of Marxology’ (as
Arthur would say) in a soufflé baked in a broken Nietzschean oven.
The recipe of an elusive but desired ‘will to power’ sustaining a notion of capitalistic exploitation
of knowledge within an illusion of ‘ultimate authority’ is hard to work into something of
universal therapeutic value. To promote politicized psychoanalytic (unproven) assumptions
and project them onto an analysand (without their knowledge and consent) through an assumed
or presumed (not declared) subjectively assumed location on a quadripartite schema, is
eccentric and very controlling as well as potentially very harmful. And leaves little ‘space’ for
anything outside of a neo-Marxist mind set.
217
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiv, pp.1, citing Neitzsche at GM, III, 19.
218
Fink (1999) referencing Lacan “in Seminar XX that the first function of language is the ‘imperative’” (Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore,
o.c., p.33)
219
A play by Samuel Becket, originally written in French between 1948 and1949 and first performed in Paris in 1953 when Lacan was in
his forties. I wonder if an acidic Irish wit wrote a play mocking the French tendency for pseudo-intellectual café philosophizing forever
in waiting…
I do not see any Hegelian servant in service to mutually beneficial outcomes (in a multitude of
unknown possible variables) in this university discourse. Unless ‘surplus enjoyment’ as
jouissance is an illusory shared communion with one another (analyst and analysand) and is
mutually considered productive because it is known to be ultimately unobtainable (‘l’objet petit
a’) in a pre-agreed theatrical of the absurd.220
Certainly, Lacan (if not Fink) presents contrary perspectives on knowledge in the four
discourses, so far. One the one hand, a purchase on reality is not possible without ‘holes in it’.
On the other hand, lauding “systematic knowledge” has some obscure role in the discourse
process. And a universal category such as ‘knowledge’221 (a word not a person) is supposed to
be able to “interrogate surplus value” (when only a person can). Is this Lacanian scheme of four
discourses making a claim for “systematic knowledge” and “surplus value”? Or ridiculing it?
The Lacanian analyst is certainly ‘capitalising’ when ‘observing’ and/or ‘interrogating’ an
analysand if charging money for introjecting these contrary notions upon the analysand in
‘discourse’. But it is exceedingly hard to identify how this can be productive in Hegelian terms
with regard to beneficial outcomes.
In this context, it is important to now note that there are no less than fifteen pages of references
made to Hegel in Lacan’s XVII Seminar222 without referencing Marx or Nietzsche. I do not see
Hegel, as I understand Hegel, as Lacan purports, only what Nietzsche railed vehemently against
regarding (neo-Marxist) false virtue in morally mendacious priestly doctrines.

The Hysteric’s Discourse

Fink (1999) describes the Hysteric’s discourse as “the exact opposite of the university discourse”
in the “self-contradictory nature of desire”.223
220
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket (was first performed in Paris in 1953 when Lacan was in his forties and) is in the genre of the
‘theatre of the absurd’.
221
I refer the reader to Edmund Gettier (1966) on Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?. http://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf
222
In English translations.
223
Fink, 1995, P.35
Is Croce’s clumsy use of ‘opposites’ now appearing in this Lacanian schematic without Lacan
‘knowing it’? Why else would Fink be making category mistake after category mistake (in Croce-
like misapprehension of Hegel)? The ‘self-contradictory nature of desire’ is not elucidated
adequately. And the unbridgeable gap separates $, the Subject, and ‘l’objet petit a’ (as subjective
loss in search of jouissance)224 still prevails (in overall theoretical terms). So how can the
University discourse credibly claim that the Master discourse is ‘nonsensical’? And, therefore,
what is “the exact opposite” of the University discourse in the Hysteric’s discourse? The previous
two discourses already depict ‘self-contradictory desire’ in one form or another. Therefore,
what is the ‘self-contradictory nature of desire’ when it contradicts itself yet again? Is Lacan
atomising meaning or attempting to define meaning through the opposites of opposites?
Rather than psychoanalytically “dissolving [the Aristotelian] static view of separated deductive
patterns” that should never be “reduced to logical categories”, how does Lacan (or Fink) ensure
that psychoanalytic theory does not lose all “dynamic movement towards [a] whole” 225 person?
And without making neo-Marxist assumptions about that person? Is it Lacan or Fink’s
misapprehension of Hegel’s Aufhebung that falls into the Croce-an trap of playing with
‘opposites’? This is not Hegelian. ‘Synthesising’ opposing emotional forces’ is Hegelian. The
panlogism of Hegel’s dialetic method is already previously argued (on Hegel’s behalf) and entails
that ‘opposing’ or ‘dissenting’ forces are not necessarily ‘opposites’ or ‘contradictions’. And as
also already argued above, the Marxist led extract from Hegel for Beginners (1996) explains that
Hegel’s Aufhebung (sublation) is “difficult to explain as it can only be seen in practice” and that
“every stage of the dialectic is partial and partially untrue”; the “dialectic is organic rather than
mechanical logic within contradictions”226, aimed at “purposefully overcoming as well as
preserving what it overcomes”.
224
Encyclopedia of Lacan, pp.5://nosubject.com/FourDiscourses
225
www.marxists.org
226
www.marxists.org
I will now repeat (from above) what Pinkard demonstrated regarding Hegel’s dialectic227
process of Aufhebung228 in his Phenomenology is not “conflated idea[s] of distinct realms of spirit
within a theory of opposites” making “one the truth of the other”229 because nothing could have
been further from Hegel’s thinking.
The good news, however, is that Fink describes that the “hysteric pushes the master – incarnated
in a partner, teacher, or whomever – to the point where he or she can find the master’s knowledge
lacking”; and who demands and contradicts the analyst (or whomever represents the Imaginary
Symbolic other) because “either the master does not have an explanation for everything, or his or
her reasoning does not hold water”230.
The Lacanian Hysteric appears now to be surprisingly promising, in my opinion.
Fink elucidates much of scientific theory of concern to Lacan, in the discourse of the Hysteric,
where he describes “science as having the same structure as the master discourse”. But Fink
concludes with the claim that “the truth of the hysteric’s discourse, its hidden motor force, is the
real”. 231 Which Fink elucidates upon as, “Physics too, when carried out in a truly scientific spirit,
is ordained and commanded by what is real, that is to say by that which does not work, by that
which does not fit.232” So, the Master discourse is ‘nonsensical’ and the University discourse is
somehow more ‘truly scientific’ while the Hysteric’s discourse is focused upon what is ‘real’?
But Lacan’s overall theoretical framework forecloses anything real. So has Lacanian theory
endured because it befuddles (in post-modern deconstructive arrogance) so magnificently that
no-one can find the temerity, or an intelligible purchase point, with which to critique it
efficiently?
227
Oxford Dictionaries: Dialectical: “Relating to the logical discussion of ideas and opinions: dialectical ingenuity; and/or concerned with or
acting through opposing forces: a dialectical opposition between social convention and individual libertarianism”. Accessed online
12.7.16: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dialectical
228
Hypothesis and antithesis aiming toward synthesis Merriam-Webster dictionary:“Sublate: to negate or eliminate (as an element in a
dialectic process) but preserve as a partial element in a synthesis.”
229
Hereafter intended by me to be focused upon the ‘sleeping mind of a person’ or ‘world of peoples’.
230
Fink, 1995, P.36-37
231
Fink, 1995, P.36-37
232
Ibid.

Yet again, the framework for the Lacanian definitions of the ‘Imaginary Symbolic’, in relation to
the ‘Real’, does not work with these (contrary) descriptions of ‘science’. Science, in truth, is an
enlightened process of identifiable fallibilism233. And because Lacan basically advises us that
there is no reliable subjective purchase upon reality, Fink’s reference to “a truly scientific spirit”
in the University discourse appears remarkably naïve (epistemologically234) unless it is taking a
ridiculing deconstructive attitude toward an analysand attempting to be ‘scientific’. Because
‘scientists’, in this Lacanian context, must all be lost souls struggling with their own subjective
specular identity in symbolic imaginary relation to reality. And no less so than the analyst.
In reading “the truth of the hysteric’s discourse” as a “motor force” that “is the real” is, however,
encouraging. Even if viewed through a fuzzy subjective lens of self-contradicting theorising
regarding the specular (mirrorings) reality (with so many holes in it) that one has to resist the
temptation to ridicule (even when fully cognisant of the phenomenological underlying truisms
Lacan is ‘playing’ with that were far more coherently philosophically argued in Plato’s
Theaetetus dialogue well over two thousand years ago).
The fragmented circuitry in Lacanian language, within a framework that argues authoritatively
that signifying (language) is ‘in the way’ (symbolic not real) now tests the limits of Lacan’s own
epistemological (or philosophical) pretentions. It is not surprising, therefore, that someone,
somewhere, at some point, has to be an authentic refusenik; because the real world undoubtedly
exists (whether we have complete comprehension of it or not). It is psychosocially ironic,
however, that this authentic role should fall to the ‘Hysteric’ for Lacan. So by association, are
Lacan’s frequent Hegelian references suggestive of Hegel as some kind of ‘authentic’ hysteric ?
233
See Karl Popper (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery: “Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it
a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. Our science is not knowledge (epistēmē): It can never claim to have
attained truth, or even a substitute for it, such as probability.
234
Thomas Nagel (1986), Ch. I & V, that Stephen Hetherington describes as discussing “the interplay of different perspectives (“inner”
and “outer” ones) that a person might seek upon herself, especially as greater objectivity is sought. (This bears upon section 9’s
distinction between two possible kinds of question that can be asked about whether a particular belief is fallible knowledge.”

I’m not sure whether Lacanian applied psychoanalytic method, at its best, is simply aiming to
bring out the confused, frustrated and annoyed hysteric in us all (in poorly mimicking Socratic
irony in over-complicated symbolic ‘mathemes’). But is it the best or wisest way of
psychoanalytically supporting a widow who has just lost her aristocratic land owning titled and
much beloved husband of fifty years along with her hitherto longstanding family home when
finding herself alone in a tiny dower house? Is psychically overwhelming her with some highly
prejudicial neo-Marxist psychological ‘chip on the shoulder’ of a virtual reality of incurable
phenomenological alienation going to be ‘therapeutic’ for her in the emotional abys of past
memories of a possibly joyful fulfilling life swallowed up and lost to lonely grief?
The Hysteric’s discourse led me to Frosh for clarification. For Frosh (2012), the analyst is
considered to be ‘le sujet supposé savoir’ by the patient, i.e., the person who is supposed to know,
and to know how the ‘patient is supposed to get better’. Frosh’s description is that this
‘discourse will always be restless because complete understanding of the unconscious is
unattainable’235. However, Žižek’s236 view is that this analysand (the Hysteric) is “authentic” (not
inauthentic) while “inconsistent” (not consistent) in their demands. Here, the tension between
the subjective nature of this discourse and the objective subject’s demand for real knowledge or
truth raises an impression of Lacanian purpose. Because Lacan (1991) clarifies that “what leads
to knowledge is... in the more or less long term... the hysteric’s discourse.”237 However, what is
Lacanian ‘knowledge’? So far, it is a neo-Marxist world view of presuppositions that forecloses
essential comprehension of its own epistemological fallibility.
If the hysteric is willing to puncture, in authentic emotional terms, an undisclosed neo-Marxist
Lacanian model that presupposes that all language/reality is merely symbolic fantasy, while the
analyst is presuming that somehow knowledge and truth can subjectively not exist in one
235
Frosh, 2012, Ch.16, P.182, pp 3.
236
Reference: Kunze, D. (2013 and undated) importing graphic published by Kunze, D. (unknown), as a ""Boundary Language", an
interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory in a graphic way to inform the study of film, architecture, landscape,
literature, and theory in general."
237
Lacan (1991), P. 23, pp.5.
quadrant of this schematic and yet can objectively exist in another quadrant, the hysteric has my
political vote. Especially if the Lacanian analyst, who has presupposed the hysteric is in a
subjective virtual reality (specular Symbolic Imaginary), is at liberty to change the rules of the
game (position on the quadripartite theoretical schema) whenever they like without informing
the hysteric.
In presupposing the hysteric is seeking knowledge when, in fact, s/he may not be, is foreclosed
theoretically in the Lacanian overall framework because this already presupposes that
knowledge (something real) is unobtainable. So something is fundamentally amiss here. Being
unknowingly pushed around a quadripartite schema (without your knowledge and consent) to
somehow self-realize that knowledge (something real) may appear to exist one minute, and not
the next, beggars belief as a therapeutic model in service to human suffering.238 A postgraduate
student in phenomenological philosophy may enjoy this experiment but a mother who has just
lost a young child to a fatal illness would not benefit from being theoretically ‘messed about’.
The Lacanian analyst’s ‘slavish appetite’ to this schema of circular arguments within circular
arguments is an almost perfect scenario for bringing out the hysteric in anyone. And perhaps is
the only basic purpose of Lacanian psychoanalysis? To wake us up to our forever thwarted
desires in life. But what if the analysand already knows this? And is seeking a more educated
electorate position?

I detect neither Kojève nor Hegel within the parameters of this discourse, but maybe Nietzsche’s
‘bad conscience’ taking the hysteric forward in frustrated steps toward a Nietzschean ‘active bad
conscience’239. Perhaps the clinaman of a disruptive and emotionally truthful hysteric buckles a
semiotically circular Lacanian form of intentional passive aggression? But why is the hysterical
238
The search for ‘understanding’ in distressed or traumatised analysands is not a paradoxical Lacanian thought experiment. Making sense
of and resolving emotional pain, subjectively, is not a cold-blooded Lacanian epistemological non-truth/truth game in a bizarre virtual
reality. It is mediating between a myriad of opposing feelings, in the Hegelian sense, until a self-conscious sense of self-worth is
restored, which is not ‘surplus product’, it is unique individual subjective realization in better subjective and objective outcomes than
before.
239
Nietzsche at GM, II, 6.
analysand the only authentic party, so far, in this Lacanian Rubik cube of neo-Marxist
suppositions?
I would argue that whatever is clandestinely presumed by the analyst, as a host of undisclosed
Lacanian assumptions (about all analysands before they walk through the consulting room
door) can only be resented by a potentially sane (rather than insane) analysand; as and when
the Lacanian analyst’s fundamentally flawed theoretical assumptions in obtuse gamesmanship
start to emerge.
However, emotional authenticity is not knowledge. Nor is increased understanding of oneself
necessarily knowledge. And while an analysand’s desire for knowledge from the analyst may be
a legitimate desire, in some cases, it is ‘self-understanding’ (not knowledge) that is primarily
sought on an analyst’s couch. So a Lacanian analyst frustrating this desire may be a clever
psychological game but it is not a conscientious therapeutic.. I personally would prefer to pay
for a ticket to the theatre of the absurd. In my opinion, Nietzsche’s darker side of a master-slave
morality (not Hegelian master and servant dialectic) rears a potential monstrous head in the
priestly Lacanian lack of absolution (indebtedness) in an uncandid theoretical confessional box
employing a clinical quadrille of linguistic motifs that doctrinally aim to ‘resolve’ nothing.
The Analyst’s Discourse

“The analyst plays the part of pure desirousness (pure desiring subject), and interrogates the
subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between conscious and
unconscious shows through: slips of the tongue, bungled and unintended acts, slurred speech,
dreams, etc., In this way the analyst sets the patient to work, to associate, and the product of
that laborious association is a new master signifier. The patient in a sense ‘coughs up’ a master
signifier that has not yet been brought into relation with any other signifier.” (Fink, 1999, P.37)

The fact that a Lacanian analyst is hereby being trained to consciously play a “part of pure
desirousness” is somewhat chilling.

However, the rest of the above quote appears primarily Freudian - apart from the Lacanian
references to the “master signifier” already pre-defined in neo-Marxist terms. Why is what the
patient first “coughs up” from the unconscious perceived as a master signifier? Rather than a
university signifier or hysteric signifier? Unconscious ‘coughing up’ does not represent a
dialogue as Hegel intended in self-realising self-conscious engagement in real internal and
external dialogue, not one-sided discourse. The Lacanian analyst’s assumption of an analysand’s
slave-hood to “his or her division” within an undisclosed theoretical quadrant of the analyst’s
projected beliefs is troubling. This lack of unconditional open-mindedness makes authenticity
difficult for both parties.
Without doubt, the human (Symbolic Imaginary) produces ‘master signifiers’ within all
language240. But is the term ‘master signifier’ employed differently in the divisional definitions
of this Master discourse? Is there ‘word creep’ in predicated ‘divisional’ semantic
presuppositions that clearly dominate less than realistic objective outcomes. The uniqueness of
a patient’s own legitimate (albeit mysterious) sense of self is a wealth of human possibilities
(regardless of the alienating pitfalls of human language). Where is a patient’s mysterious sense
of meaning in the peculiarities of their own uninhibited language?
As I understand Hegel, he did not advocate theoretical semiotically prescribed clinical
observation of ‘the other’. He advocated authentic (conscientious) dialogue with ‘each other’. A
meaningful effort to synthesise mutual unconditional comprehensions of one another seems
precluded, or embargoed, in this Lacanian model. The Lacanian analyst’s potential
preoccupation with political ideology muddled up with gymnastic linguistic presumptions seems
short sighted. Hegel did not propose a theoretical ‘non-identity’ observed by ‘the other’ through
an ‘alienating’ revolving semantic lense for the short-sighted. Hegel was decidedly long sighted.
240
I do not go into the theoretical relevance with the id, ego and super-ego complexities that may well exist here as the claim of Hegel as
influencing the schema is the primary focus.
There is little teleology of self-worth, in a mutually authentic ‘work relationship’ in mediation
and mutual recognition of each other as real, not just semiotically lost employers of language.
The reliance upon such heavily politicized observations is very disturbing. Even if all people are
fundamentally politicized in some way, the objective of sound psychoanalytical practice must be
to unearth a multiple of variable forms of meaning and language, not presume to know them
before they are spoken.
In a predicated, if not pre-doomed, projection upon the analysand, I looked to the analyst for
their own highly neurotic process because the Analyst’s discourse cannot be authentic (as I
understand authenticity). Because it is simply not conducted in authentic relationship or
authentic dialogue. And, in my opinion, Lacan promotes a Nietzschean master-slave morality, in
neo-Marxist perversion. It does not matter, to me, how innovatively and semiotically disguised
it may be in quasi-matheme-atic methodology. It clearly presumes to have theoretical virtue (of
supposed honour and integrity) presenting itself as a strangely self-aggrandising overlord
(Übermensch) in ‘alienating’ presupposed doctrinal attitudes toward others.
The discourse of the Analyst, as a Lacanian ‘ideal’, Frosh (2012) argues, “should provoke
scepticism given Lacan’s opposition to ideals which are seen as Imaginary constructs” 241. And
because the analyst must not fall into being trapped by any of these schematic parameters, Frosh
argues that the Lacanian analyst is ‘merely performing a function for the patient’ as ‘the one who
knows at the patient’s behest’. With the solitary ‘analytic task to reveal there are no complete
answers’ only ‘more or less productive questions’. 242 Because as Lacan (1991) says this
“analytic discourse completes the 90 degree displacement by which the three others are structured
does not mean that it resolves them and enables one to pass to the others side. It doesn’t resolve
anything.”243
241
Frosh, 2012, Ch.16, P.183, pp 2.
242
Frosh, 2012, Ch.16, P.183, pp 2.
243
Lacan (1991), P.54, pp.2.
The analyst is expected somehow to step away from the appearance of mastery (as the
analysand’s ‘le sujet supposé savoir’) that Žižek describes as an ‘authentic’ and ‘consistent’
posture. But in stepping away from the appearance of ‘someone who knows’, without authentic
admission of so doing, the undisclosed theoretical adherence to the neo-Marxist nature of the
schematics of these four discourses is already inauthentic tomfoolery. Furthermore, for the
analyst to be “playing the part of pure desirousness” (as Fink teaches the trainee analyst) is not
‘stepping away from the appearance of mastery’. So, something shockingly aloof and inauthentic
is actually advocated here.
Therefore, I do not agree with Žižek that the discourse of the Analyst is authentic, even if it may
be consistent. It is the very predetermined consistency of neo-Marxist underlying purpose that
makes it suspect while making “four successive ninety-degree turns in a clockwise direction”244
under only the analyst’s understanding and control of the following schematic:
authentication
inauthentic/inconsistent authentic/inconsistent
S1 S2 $ S1
$ a a S2
master.servant Hysteric
Agency Other
restoration2
obversion
(anagnoris)
a $ S2 a
S2 S1 S1 $
analysis university
Truth Production
authentic/consistent inauthentic/consistent
confession
245
The above diagram is now widely used and includes Žižek’s specific notations regarding
authenticity and consistency. And as I would argue that the discourse of the Analyst is far from
‘authentic’ (in unconditional open-mindedness toward the analysand), it can only mimic the
University Discourse as ‘inauthentic’ in its presumption of its hidden “ultimate authority”.
244
Encyclopedia of Lacan, pp.6://nosubject.com/Four Discourses
245
Graphic published by Kunze, D. (unknown), as a ""Boundary Language", an interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory
in a graphic way to inform the study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in general."

Because the analyst is the only one who knows about the above schematic, in a clinical setting,
while orchestrating politicized presumptions without the analysand’s knowledge and consent.
The suggestion that the schematic diagram above is a dialectic equally leaves much to be
desired. Even if assuming the “anagnoris” notation on the diagram is intended to mean
‘anagnorisis’ (restoration). The absence of detailed explanation as to what exactly is supposed
to be restored (and for whom exactly) is curious. Because Lacan has been very explicit that the
Symbolic Imaginary prism in which we all must dwell in his overall l’envers (inside-out) theory
(which includes the analyst) resolves nothing. Therefore, what if anything can be restored, if all
is loss (or lost) in the first place (at birth) for Lacan.
As for “Truth” under the Analyst’s discourse quadrant, this is a paradoxical reference by any
standard as Lacan himself stressed the “impotence of Truth”. As truth, for Lacan, is itself first
heralded by the use of language as well as swallowed up by it. And that the ‘truth of desire’ is all
that seemingly prevails on the subject of truth, in Lacan’s mind. Which must, of course, prevail
over the Lacanian analyst as s/he is both locked-in to Lacan’s overall theoretical framework as
well as their own respective subjective Symbolic Imaginary realm of hole-punched grasping at
reality. It must be very difficult indeed, therefore, for the Lacanian psychoanalyst to avoid the
perpetual semantic traps of their own making.
V. Critique of the Clinical Application of Lacan’s Four Master Discourses

Lacan’s overall theoretical framework denies the possibility of a reliably objective purchase
upon the world, once language and psychosocial expectations have swallowed up subjective
identity. And this theoretical standpoint must, therefore, apply to both analyst and analysand if
this theory takes itself seriously. Therefore, objectivity is foreclosed by the subjective Symbolic
Imaginary (not Real) positions of both analyst and analysand. Without a coherent or meaningful
sense of self in relation to an objective world, and other people, authenticity can find no
residence. Unless, perhaps, in the hysteric who ultimately demands a real, not representative,

relationship with the analyst. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lacan defaults to theoretical
truth values that mimic logical positivism’s reduction of language to calculus. However, Lacan’s
obfuscating mathemes are neither epistemology, logic or truth because Lacan decries truth as
anything other than the truth of desire.
The only way this schematic, in applied clinical terms, can make sense is predicated on its
circular motion through its own suggested quadrants. And for it not to get stuck in its own
Lacanian conceptual traps - in any one of the quadrants referencing the unobtainable or the
Symbolic Imaginary for both analyst and analysand. And the only authentic attempt at dialogue
(the Hysteric) finally willing to drive this laborious process is someone in an already
presupposed process beyond their own comprehension (as is the Lacanian analyst).
I am concerned that Lacanian psychoanalysis purposely mimics some of the most alienating
existential truths of life. Because, as Lacan so distinctively states, symbolic imaginary desire (the
search for jouissance) can only remain a poor cousin to (l’object petit) as a sense of existential
loss that is out of reach (as the once safe pre-verbal womb).
Lacan’s neo-Marxism has a ‘bad faith’ odour to it in denoting only virtual reality, not tangible
reality, and prospers a lack of purpose in responsible commitment to good or productive
outcomes. Unless the idea of drowning in more questions, rather than less, is the Lacanian
purpose. In which case, a preoccupation with impotence rather than vitality would seem to be
the logos of Lacan’s own personal Symbolic Imaginary.

Anyone can be an existential nihilist, if they wish. But I would argue they may not impose this
dystopic presupposition on others in a clinical context. And they may not seek converts in the
realm of human suffering unless willing to be admonished as a Nietzschean priestly master class
zealously preaching ‘the four errors’; in which “we see ourselves only incompletely... endow

ourselves with fictitious attributes... place ourselves in a ‘false rank’... invent ever new tables of
what is good and then accept them... unconditionally”246.
To put anyone through a revolving door of a pre-predicated self-fulfilling failure, until they
become hysterical, because it is motorised by a master-slave trope capriciously hinged into a
neo-Marxist doorway, seems cruel. This resonates, in my opinion, with a virtual reality software
game application in which one is not told how to invent (imagine) one’s own way out of the
game. But real human suffering, in real life, is not a virtual reality ‘app’. Even if a subjective
psychological sense of self may be a multiply variable phenomenological fact that persistently
eludes cognitive objective epistemology.
Clinically applied psychotherapeutic practice, and the education of impressionable young minds
training to become psychoanalysts or psychotherapists, requires something fundamentally more
coherent than this Lacanian schematic of the four master discourses; with which to safeguard
the analysand from being emotionally or psychologically abused; by a depressingly pessimistic
perspective lurking within the foundational values of this Lacanian methodology. A Nietzschean
clarion call against it would seem appropriate, if therapeutic care for an exuberant ‘Yes to life’ is
in fact needed and wanted in the face of legitimate suffering in all its myriad human forms.
Cold blooded theoretical analysis in post-modern deconstruction of the meaning of words and
their phenomenological impact upon human subjectivity is an acceptable intellectual exercise or
academic curiosity, in and of itself. But if purporting to be an applied therapeutic in the medical
humanities, in what is a very real not theoretical world, requires far more open-minded
dedication to reliably beneficial outcomes. Coming to terms with the undoubtedly brutal
realities of life is no small thing. But assuming there is no point to it other than our own
symbolic notions of reality, lost in narcissistic yearning to go back to the womb, seriously risks
infantilising human beings altogether. Becoming responsible self-aware adults (whatever that
246

might mean) is open to a myriad of ideas, interpretations and prospective outcomes. And Hegel
and Nietzsche proposed their own dynamic views about what that might entail. And Lacan, I
would argue, more readily reflects Neitzsche’s gloom laden predictions while trampling Hegel’s
greater optimisms.
Hegel’s anti-categorical metaphysical idealism is nowhere to be seen, in my opinion, in a host of
Lacan’s blundering category mistakes; hypocritical of its own semiotic deconstructive post-
modern philosophy. And even if the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst could
denote every type of human being on the planet, these Lacanian stereotypes assume the
philosopher, the artist, the wise man and the mystic do not also legitimately exist. The four
master discourses, as I understand them, bear no relationship whatsoever to Hegel’s purpose or
intent in his master and servant dialectic. They perversely reflect instead almost all the
ressentiments depicted in Nietzsche’s master-slave morality and represent, to me, a Nietzschean
monster (Unmensch) of priestly proportions (Übermensch).
If, however, we like the political assumption that we are all workers enslaved by capitalism, it
suffices that if only one person in the world is not enslaved to capitalism or a neo-Marxist world
view, that Lacan’s four master discourses, as taught by Fink, have no place in the academic or
epistemological field of apolitical medical humanities.
If, however, we assume that Lacan aimed solely at the limitations of language and cultural
expectations prevailing over the human condition, the schema has some philological, cultural
and psychosocial peculiarities that may entertain itself as a deconstructive ‘interdisciplinary
notation system’.247 Lacan’s linguistically analytic viewpoint may be of some psychosocial
purpose or value but, as Ansell-Pearson might suggest, this neo-Marxist schematic is at grave
risk of being a “menacing and dangerous system that makes the present live at the expense of the
future.”248
247
Kunze (unknown): See "Boundary Language" descriptive text.
248
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvi, pp.2. citing Neitzsche at GM, Preface, 6.

Thus, in somewhat worried dismay, I sought out Verhaeghe’s From Impossibility to Inability
(1995)249 to ascertain more on clinical application of these four discourses. Because the average
analysand knows nothing of the Lacanian schematics under which they are being observed or
cajoled. And while I strongly disagree with the Lacanian framework informing the over-
intellectualized lenses of the four discourses (never fully explained to the analysand) and Žižek’s
notion of authenticity in the discourse of the Analyst, I sought, if possible, to find something of
therapeutic discipline. As I could not rid myself of the image of a Lacanian ‘scientist’ poking a
human bug under a microscope without a care for the wellbeing of the bug. It did not matter to
me that a Lacanian analyst might believe in their own authentic observational activity. I was
deeply worried about the human experimental bug being prodded through four successive
semantic boxes, for a Lacanian faux-scientist to authentically declare, “Look, I was right. If
prodded the bug moves.”
However, sadly, Verhaeghe (1995) argued in favour of these “Lacanian algebraic structures”, in
applied clinical practice, as a theoretical ‘one size fits all’ clinical method, while describing the
method as “boring” and “tedious” but the “price one has to pay” for providing “predictable
outcomes”.250 This description proved more than disappointing.
What are the ‘predictable outcomes’ for which Verhaeghe is willing to pay a high price? Because
Lacan claims his own schematic process “doesn’t resolve anything”? So, is ‘resolving nothing’ the
‘predictable outcome’ here? Is this the optimum outcome? If so, it is no wonder Verhaeghe
expresses this as a boring and tedious process. Therefore, by way of example, how may a
vulnerable human being suffering from legitimate emotional pain, e.g., the death of a beloved,
fare under the management of a Verhaeghe trained psychoanalyst “paying the price” (for some
notion of professional virtue) in this “tedious” doctrinal practice? Needless to say, nothing can
resolve the actual death of a beloved. But some form of emotional resolution of the devastating
249
Referencing Verhaeghe (1995) in particular.
250
Verhaeghe, 1995, Page 3, pp 2.
loss experienced may not be observed by an analyst, of any merit, as “boring”. In my experience,
the resilience of the human spirit (mind) under the weight of serious loss is a profoundly
humbling experience for the serious minded and compassionate analyst.
Authenticity has meaning only in relationship. The Lacanian method of the four discourses,
through its own reductionist antics, appears to assume the authority to define someone else
through an imaginary lens of presumptions (slavish appetites) in a neo-Marxist belief system
(will to power) that belies relationship in retaining authority over someone else (in false virtue).
This entirely unproveable Lacanian hypothesis is professed as if proven theory, without any
working antithesis regarding its own potential fallibility. This is not in “truly scientific spirit”.
Nor is it in the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic of Aufhebung.
It would be fair to criticise me for taking an intentionally hypercritical view of the ‘letter not the
the spirit’ of Lacanian lore. But this paper is an enquiry into Lacan’s (and Žižek’s) claims that
Lacan’s four master discourses are reflective of Hegel. But even if the Lacanian master-slave
political motif is approaching subjective internal opposing forces, in a wealth of possible self-
realizations, it is applied in dubious neo-Marxist manner. For it to be Hegelian, a meaningful
dialogue focused upon synthesising productive outcomes for both analyst and analysand is
required. All may be well and good if Lacanian observation of an analysand’s rampant wishes,
wants and desires (monologue 1) heralds the analysand’s reconciliation with these desires
within themselves (monologue 2). And it may be of no real matter how presupposed or
predefined these desires may seem to the analyst. But this activity in querulous observation of
subjective monologue is not a dialogue; nor is it a discourse or a dialectic. And if this clinical
practice “doesn’t resolve anything” for the analysand, it is not reflecting Hegel’s purpose or
intention in his Master and Servant Dialectic. And if purporting to be therapeutic, Lacan’s four
master discourses need to be held to account in Nietzschean “ridendo dicere severum”251
regarding the actual letter of the text in its educational primers.
251
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xv, pp.1. Vis “saying what is sombre through what is laughable”.

VI. Conclusion

I have not seen Hegel’s ‘Master and Servant Dialectic’, as I understand it, reflected in Fink’s
(1999) description of Lacan’s four discourses, or in Lacan’s XVII seminar. I have, however, seen
more than a few glimpses of the darker side of Neitzsche’s ‘Master-Slave Morality’. And not the
fully embodied, intelligent and self-responsible ‘Yes, to life’ that Nietzsche intended. I can only
find, so far, a master-slave trope of highly dubious muddled origins.
My enquiry, thus far, leads me to agree, but only satirically, with Žižek when he says:

“But, ironically, it is on the basis of Lacan's debt to Hegel that most critiques proceed... To such a
critique, Lacanians could respond, rightly, by stressing the rupture of Lacanianism with
Hegelianism - trying hard to save Lacan by emphasizing that he is not and never has been a
Hegelian. But it is time to approach this debate in a different light, by expressing the
relationship between Hegel and Lacan in an original way. From our perspective, Lacan is
fundamentally Hegelian, but without knowing it.” (Žižek, 1997/2006, Lacan: at What Point is He
Hegelian? pp.4)
I have serious reservations about Žižek’s invitation to “expressing the relationship between Hegel
and Lacan in an original way”, for all of the reasons outlined above, if not more, because it would
further muddy already murky waters. Original academic work, as I understand it, attributes
correctly, not incorrectly, and proceeds to something more robust than unattributed derivatives
or colloquialized misapprehensions (intentionally cultivated or otherwise).
I argue that Žižek is currently doing a disservice to Hegel, Nietzsche and Kojève, as well as Marx.
Kojève is entitled to his version of these thinkers, as much as Lacan is entitled to his version of
Kojève. But Žižek is not entitled to say that Lacan was, “Hegelian… without knowing it”.


Oppressive political doctrine and State regulation of human relations denudes individuals of
self-propelled self-mastery. Marxism provided oppressive conditions that it promised to
eradicate - and failed. Lacanianism provides oppressively alienating clinical circumstances - and
admits it does not resolve anything. If oppressive or alienating emotional/subjective conditions
are impossible to eradicate, if one is realistic, a coming to terms with this unenviable reality is
necessary. However, a neo-Marxist master-slave trope only exacerbates the human challenge of
coming to terms with the injustices of the realities of life.
Nietzsche wanted us to recognise our emotional atavism, and will to power over others, not give
in to it. Hegel wanted us to mediate with one another, not give in to less than the best or most
productive consequential outcomes.
Importantly, to project any idea (e.g., master-slave morality) onto someone else ignores a
fundamental psychoanalytic truism. In that whatever you choose to ‘project’ is inevitably
profoundly autobiographical of yourself. This is Nietzsche’s explicit warning in perpetuating our
atavistic pedigree. Hence the importance of a psychoanalyst being fully analysed themselves
before qualifying for practice. While Lacan may have understood this at some level, his four
master discourses do not. The neo-Marxist ideology of the four master discourses is thereby
more autobiographical of Lacan, and the analyst employing this schema, not the analysand.
Lacanian theories do not reflect Hegel’s philosophical aims and purpose in elevating human self-
worth nor Nietzsche’s clarion call to stop repeating morally mendacious behaviours. Kojève’s
‘Hegelian Marxism’ is a misinformed invention that has become an entirely mistaken
contemporary misnomer. The world, at large, contains many and varied political ideologies.
Hegel’s philosophical search for metaphysical betterment (as a universal) through any one
human being (as a particular) is not a politically biased ideology and may not be re-sculpted in
political bias that, as Ansell-Pearson says, does “violence to the very concrete nature of Hegel’s

own thought”252. Žižek may not argue that Hegel’s metaphysics underpins or informs any such
neo-Marxist post-modern semiotic schema of Lacanian muddled thinking; in an infinite regress
of its own making. Nietzsche’s political polemic appears ubiquitously in Lacan’s four master
discourses in a distorted and unattributed manner that makes Lacan guilty of the very thing that
Nietzsche forewarned us against.
To arrive at a more definitive argument or critique, at this point, is difficult because of the
complexity of the philosophical, political, psychoanalytic and historic landscapes involved and
the enormity of the diverse literature in three very substantial academic arenas of scholarship.
Maybe this is why this post-modern neo-Marxist master-slave trope running around the
corridors of academia today in newly formed (supposedly interdisciplinary) psychosocial
departments appears to be unwisely unchecked in its remarkably pretentious popularity.
The weakness of this paper is its reliance on only three key sources of secondary interpretive
text, from which to draw a tertiary opinion. This, of course, risks doing what others have done in
mis-assigning meaning to the works of Hegel and Nietzsche, if not Lacan. It also only scratches
the surface of some highly complex and sophisticated subjective psychological issues of
enormous psychosocial importance. However, in the course of this enquiry more, not less,
disturbing questions have arisen than reliable answers. I pose below only a very few of these
questions on behalf of Hegel:

- Does Lacan reduce Hegel to “bloodless abstractions” 253?
- Or a flawed ‘theory of opposites’ making “one… the truth of the other”254?
- Does Lacan’s “quasi-paradoxical form of thought make sense?”
- Has Lacan mirrored Croce’s errors in binary reductionism of logical categories?
- Is Lacan’s analysand participating in a political process?
252
Pinkard, 2007, P. 120.
253
Pinkard (2007), P. 119, pp. 2.
254
Pinkard (2007), P. 119, pp. 2.
- Is a Lacanian analysand viewed as “capable of rational freedom”255?
- Are Lacanian analysands viewed as thinking people capable of objective reason?
- Is Lacan engaging in the “breaking of self-will through subjection to an alien power”?
- Does Lacan ensure productive, not unproductive, outcomes?
- Is Lacan’s analysand a political object or a legally independent sovereign subject?
- Do Lacan’s four master discourses view the analysand as object or subject?
- Does Lacan view an analysand as a slave oppressed by a master signifier?
- Can Lacanian theory accept or support individual identity in self-worth?
- Does Lacan assume that an analysand can “become conscious of what he truly is”256?
- Do Lacan’s discourses make an analysand a political ‘object’ of ‘production’?

The following are a very few of the questions I would pose on behalf of Nietzsche:

- Did Lacan invoke a new ‘psychology’ or a ‘doctrine’257?
- Is there an instinct of cruelty in Lacan’s psychology?
- Is there a psychological perversion of human will in ‘harmful ideal’258?
- Does Lacanian theory lay claim to false virtue?
- Did Lacan “take taming to be an end in itself”259?
- Did Lacan make the mistake of a one-size-fits all conceit?260
- Did Lacan design “complex, intellectual activity... out of processes…”
- Is there a “vis inertiae of habit and random coupling and mechanical association of ideas”?261
- Did Lacan construct a theoretical “symptom’ and/or ‘mask’?262
- Does Lacanian theory recognise its own atavistic pedigree?
- Did Lacan universalize subjective human behaviour?
255
Arthur (1983) pp. 8. Arthur’s footnote 18: “This is clearer in The Berlin Phenomenology, paras 434, 435.”
256
Ibid.
257
Ansell-Pearson (2006), P.xiv, pp.2. For the purposes of this paper, taking Nietzsche’s reference to ‘Christianity’ as including the much
broader Judeo-Christian moralistic tradition in Western society at large.
258
259
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvi, pp.2. citing Neitzsche at GM, I, 9.
260
Ref:“morality valid for all” Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xvii, pp.1. citing Neitzsche at BGE, 228.
261
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Genealogy and morality, P.xviii, pp.2.
262
- Did Lacan apply “fundamental transformations... disruptions... psychological innovations”?263
- Did Lacan make a fetish of these as principles?264
- Do Lacanian principles propel emergence in the uniquely specific?
- Or as “moral inventions... in [only] specific material and cultural contexts”265?
- Was Lacan too ‘caught up’ in political “modern experience’ to register apolitical ‘history’?122
- Do Lacanian principles become contextually or culturally absurd?
- Do Lacanian principles make sense?
- Does Lacanian theory orchestrate a ‘them-n-us’ mind-set?
- Does Lacanianism “stylize natural weakness”?266
- Was Lacan preoccupied with an aesthetic ideal267?
- Does Lacanian theory say ‘‘Yes to life”? As “both the highest and deepest insight”268?
- Does Lacanian practice invite the patient to ‘experience themselves as “value creating” 269?
- Do Lacan’s master discourses partake of “well-ordered egalitarianism”?270
- Or “democratic idiosyncrasy”?271
- Do Lacan’s four master discourses ‘insinuate or mask’ anything?272
- Is there “‘plebeian enmity towards everything privileged and autocratic”? 273
- Or “a new and more subtle atheism’?”274
- Does Lacanian theory inflict an oppressive sense of powerlessness upon the analysand?
- Is Lacanian theory a neo-Marxist doctrine or apolitical medical humanity?
- Or post-modern deconstructive semiotic critical theory?
- Do patients flounder under linguistically imposed Lacanian cultural expectations?
- Did Lacan construct yet another Nietzschean master-slave morality of false virtue?

263
264
265
266
Ansell-Pearson, 2006, P.xxi, pp.1.
267
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxiv/xxv, pp.1.
268
Ansell-Pearson (2006), Sin and the ascetic ideal, P. xxvii, pp.1, citing Nietzsche at EH ‘BT, 2.
269
Kirkland (2009, p.69-70)
270
271
Ibid
272
Ibid
273
Ibid
274
Ibid
Without further in-depth research, more fully identifying what degree of Hegel, or Nietzsche, is
insinuated into Lacan’s four discourses, and how, is an onerous task. It suffices, for this paper,
that Lacan’s four master discourses are quite evidently more derivative of Nietzsche in a Kojève
fashioned myth of Marxism than Hegelian. And that Lacan’s surreal jig-saw puzzle has so many
missing and broken pieces that for Žižek275 to re-glue an ‘Hegelian-Marxism’ designer-label on
the lid of this jig-saw puzzle box is risible.
Hegel lauded ‘the richness of the experienced world’ in any educational, cultural or political
context. And through marshalling one’s opposing internal and external ‘unchecked desires’ to
achieve successful outcomes in working relationships of any kind. Nietzsche howled with the
potential doom that lay ahead of us if we did not stop fostering false virtues and any ideological
or political neo-Marxist rhetoric employing a ‘master-slave’ trope is its own autobiographical
false virtue. (And this should be properly unpacked for students in psychosocial academia as a
meaningful and illuminating academic syllabus.)
As a metaphysician, Hegel explored the best possible nature of the subjective human mind or
spirit within a real, not a psychosocially unreal, virtual, naïve or politically biased world. As a
socio-political critic, Nietzsche sought to wake us up to our atavistic natures in righteous
indignations. (And this is very powerful psychosocial educational material that the youth of
today should be invited to far more fully explore.)
There is a fundamental duty of care in academia not to disingenuously misinform or misdirect
students about the history of ideas. And, as such, any educational curriculum must be clearly
non-denominational.276 Education is supposed to be an ‘enlightening experience’277 within any
academic field of purported excellence, especially if it is interdisciplinary. Academic mistakes in
misattribution are reprehensible - especially if known about and never admitted.
275
At the time of re-editing this paper (2019), Žižek is the International Director of The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London.
276
Cambridge Dictionary: “not connected with a particular religious [or political] denomination”.
277
Merriam-Webster dictionary: Education: “An enlightening experience”.

With this in mind, it is unforgiveable to cultivate philosophically incorrect attributions within
primary reading lists in university courses aimed at the teaching, training and application of
therapeutic psychoanalytic techniques. Unless such academic courses are prepared to be
seriously criticized for inadequate educational standards, at best, or illicit psychosocial doctrinal
biases, at worst. The potential damage in a lack of rigour in the pursuit of excellence in the
therapeutic aspects of the medical humanities cannot be understated.
To unknowingly misquote Hegel as informative of Lacan’s master-discourses, or to claim that
“Hegelian-Marxism” or “Hegel’s master-slave dialectic” even exists is not by any stretch of the
‘imagination’ an example of educational excellence. To entirely ignore the wealth of half-baked
Nietzschean motifs littered throughout Lacanian theory is careless as well as academically
neglectful. The pursuit of excellence is a tertiary educational privilege as well as an academic
obligation; that may not promote dubious political ‘private interest’. Nothing could be less
Hegelian. The meme of so-called creative ‘reflexivity’ also now commonly mandated in
psychosocial essay writing today now also invites subjective solipsism in ‘slavish appetite’ and
does not prosper reflexive rigour. Nothing could be less Nietzschean.
Far greater historical accuracy is essential in the representation of philosophical ideas. Those
presented by Kojève and Lacan, if not Žižek, are worthy of exploring, but only if fully unpacked
and properly attributed. If not, newly formed and supposedly interdisciplinary psychosocial
academic departments risk being a (Mickey Mouse) sorcerer’s apprentice drowning in
multiplying broomsticks (in a Walt Disney Fantasia).
The “study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in general”278 now also runs the
risk of more, not less, pseudo-intellectual muddles driving academic syllabi. The inability to
278
E.g., Donald Kunze’s “Boundary Language", an interdisciplinary notation system that uses Lacanian theory in a graphic way to inform
the study of film, architecture, landscape, literature, and theory in general." http://art3idea.psu.edu

differentiate trope from political bias from political propaganda represents not only a poor
educational standard but a dangerous one. Tertiary education must point out all of the historic,
philosophical, political and epistemological language/semiotic problems that continue to
prevail, whether we like them or not. Isn’t this the objective of deconstructive critical theory?
Or, has post-modern critical theory become a doctrinal host of new Nietzschean slaves
dismantling everything in linguistic infinite regress under the guise of intellectual virtue? If so,
the academic trend for free-form thinking, purporting to be inter-disciplinary, is not as
intelligent, deconstructive, creative or meaningful as it ‘Symbolically Imagines’ itself to be.
As already said above, Nietzsche said that we are all ‘slaves’ to ‘herd mentality’, if we are not
indeed very careful. To remedy this, Nietzsche asked us to seek differences in origin, beyond
good and evil, with which to find what surprises and disturbs us, to avoid acquiring a
Nietzschean sick mask of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ moral conceit. Therefore, unless academia can get
the better of their own moral conceits in a plethora of ‘unchecked desires’, ‘slavish appetites’ and
politicised demons (from whatever origin) in a truer Hegelian sense of Aufhebung, the growing
importance of interdisciplinary psychosocial education is illegitimately posturing in Nietzschean
false virtue. And change for the better in the lives of today’s youth, as an educated electorate of
tomorrow, is doomed from both Hegelian and Nietzschean perspectives.
In conclusion, since the global financial crisis of 2008, Professor Henrietta Moore in 2015
described a ‘world living well beyond its means’ now faced with the ethics of how to ‘limit
satisfactions’. And as a ‘nodal point’ in the historical determinations of subjectivity, this was
having a serious impact upon social change, ‘subject’ formation and politics as well as
cohabitation. Professor Moore pointed out that contemporary politics was not only ‘stuck but
inverted’ in a ‘contortion of desire and ethics’ and was now entirely “unhinged”. Moore (2015)
stressed that much needed societal change was being undermined by an overall passive ‘desire

to conform’ informing a complete ‘blindness to cruelty’ in impending social collapse and a
‘massive eco movement going nowhere’.279
Moore (2015) described social collapse as a ‘malaise of a contemporary society’ with no ‘Big
Other’ in a post-modern neo-liberal drive for freedom and personal pleasure starved of ‘ethical
desire’ or ‘ethical imagination’ absurdly focused on continuity and economic growth and not
‘lifestyle reorganization’. The moral imperative, therefore, for Moore was to discover, or
rediscover, a ‘shared notion of the good’ and a new form of ‘radical politics’ that ‘shared critical
narratives’ in active ‘dissent’.280
To this end I would strongly recommend the reintroduction of Hegel’s ‘Master and Servant
Dialectic’ and Nietzsche’s ‘Master-Slave Morality’; as they were intended to be read and
understood. And for these provocative historic thinkers to be fully debated, compared and
taken forward by any aspiring new interdisciplinary academic department as a foundational
syllabus of considerable psychosocial importance for the future.
279
Abstracted from Lecture Notes (Taylor, 2015)

280
Abstracted from Lecture Notes (Taylor, 2015)

Edits without a home:

Lacan has been poorly translated, both incorrectly and inappropriately, with respect to
understanding the French language and culture. There is a very well-known tendency toward
pretentious café style philosophizing in France. Often reminiscent of the floridly surreal poetry
readings in the rural French chateaux garden parties of today. The everyday preoccupation in
French conversation about who is being pretentious (prétentieux/prétentieuse) is common social
parlance. And particularly in the sidewalk cafés of Paris, where locals have a tendency toward
showmanship. And Lacan was definitely a showman.

I believe English-speaking academics have been naively seduced in their post-modern hunt for
the overlooked or the more avant-garde. Unaware it would seem of the capricious nature of
French intellectual salon poseurs. Many of whom have been dismissed in France for their
familiar form of “Vive la Republique!” neo-Marxist attention-seeking (pseudo-intellectual)
ravings. Academics who do not speak or read French, and have little or no background in
continental philosophy, are particularly at a loss, if not vulnerable to assigning deconstructive
meaning, to the original idiomatic or semantic French language when poorly translated into
English. Especially if translated from spoken French like most of Lacan’s published lectures.
The difference between spoken and written French is very significant in France.

Newly formed interdisciplinary psychosocial departments need to ensure they have sufficient
representation from philosophy departments to ensure academic naivety regarding continental
philosophizing (not philosophy) can be correctly, not incorrectly, taught or critiqued. For
example, no serious-minded academic philosopher would fail to learn 18th century German if
specializing or wishing to command an in depth understanding of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
Anyone wishing to become an expert on René Descartes (1596-1650) would also expect to learn
17th century French; a common contemporary English-speaking example of which is, “I think
therefore I am” that philosophically references what should be “I doubt thus I exist”.


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A

An enquiry into the Hegelian and Nietzschean subjective psychological motifs

in relation to Lacan’s four Master discourses.

Page 1 of 87 © Chrissie Taylor 2016

four discourses as a neo-Marxist schema not Hegelian dialectic (Aufhebung5).

mêlée of Kojève-an ideas informing a contemporary ‘master-slave’ trope’; in distortion of both

Hegel’s ‘master-and-servant dialectic’ and Nietzsche’s ‘master-slave morality’6.

regard to human subjective autonomy.

interpretation freed from Kojève-an distortions of Hegel and Nietzsche’s subjective

in the highly idiomatic schemas of Lacan’s four master discourses.

subjective psychological motifs to Fink’s7 (1999) neo-Marxist educational primer regarding

Verhaeghe’s9 (1995) clinical psychoanalytic application of Lacan’s four discourses.

knowing it”10 as unacceptable. Žižek’s ‘Hegelian-Marxist’ allusions have become dubious

I critique philosophical and academic forms of incorrect attribution occurring in post-modern

In conclusion, I invite the return to a pursuit of excellence, accurate attribution of historical

dubious method, or methodology, in therapeutic training, in both biased and unauthorised

I. Historical landscape to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)14

somehow perceived as if guilty of societal corruption and philosophical method16.

Page 4 of 87 © Chrissie Taylor 2016

positivism18 in British analytic philosophy in the early 20th century19.

German nationalism, contributed to Hegel’s controversial status. Nietzsche’s controversial

than Nietzschean) ‘master-slave’ trope.

approaching the richness of the experienced world instead of reducing it to bloodless

of Aufhebung25 in his Phenomenology is clearly misunderstood by Croce when Croce ridicules

within contradictions”27, aimed at “purposefully overcoming as well as preserving what it

are common category mistakes made by pseudo-intellectuals. By way of an over-simplified

Saxon might one be required to imagine or believe in order to substantiate Croce’s

definitional truth of the other?

Kenneth Westphal (2003), in The Significance of Rejecting Reductionism equally argues

inadequate comprehension of Hegel as a ‘bitter irony of recent history’ because:

tarred as the very kind of historicist Hegel most decidedly opposed”’.35

Not surprisingly, therefore, Pinkard’s (2007) interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology concludes

with a stinging critique of the wealth of misconstrued misunderstandings of Hegel’s thinking:

“This dialectical metaphysics of Hegelianism cannot therefore be taken out of Hegel or

only in terms of such a distinctive fusion of logic and metaphysics.”36

Pinkard (2007) demonstrates how “reconstructing” Hegel inaccurately swelled politically

his path-breaking Le Malheur de la Conscience37 (1929) in which Wahl incorrectly understood

objective reconciliation (Bildung39).

comprehension of one’s feelings of alienation was, for Hegel, in existential relationship to

than treat Wahl’s ‘unhappy consciousness’42 from a phenomenological perspective Kojève, as a

Hegel as metaphysical and (psycho)logical peacemaker was, therefore, profoundly

misrepresented by Marxist revolutionaries.

philosophy and letters in attendance”45, including Lacan46.

movement had also misappropriated Nietzschean themes of a master-slave morality. Pinkard

reframed it as a “master-slave dialectic” that became an ubiquitously published misquotation and

misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s “master-slave morality”.

conscious intellectual self-awareness, lacking accurate philosophical history in more disciplined

in serious need of educational admonishment and correction.

(Bildung47). Undoubtedly, this has been historically mistranslated, misunderstood and

misquoted by those promoting communist ideologies48 in serious miscomprehension of the

promoting, the desire for violent conflict in destructive revolution.

overlooked in this context.

The Hegelian directive is to develop a phenomenological (not ideological or political) self-

unproductive wilfulness. Psychologically-speaking, Hegel’s subjective psychological motif is

about the nature of self-educated and self-consciously motivated modes of reconciliation

conscious self-awareness could only ensure enduring poverties of circumstance. To echo

human emancipation was not replacing (temporarily or otherwise) a “barbarous suppression”53

resolved outcomes - not violent conflict. This Hegelian philosophical perspective in

popular Marxist ideology aimed at politically materialistic violent social revolution.

now appears to be a Lacanian ‘purloined letter’57. Whether Lacan knowingly misrepresented

but a few of the psychosocial domains now involved.

A reductive dis-associative Lacanian lens, in a quadra-partite model now seemingly fashionable

analyst) currently endorsed by Žižek’s neo-Marxism as if Hegelian in origin, meaning or intent is