system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I'm having some trouble understanding Hegel's Lordship and Bondage

When Hegel talks about the Bondsman's "fear of death" and "absolute negativity," I'm confused as to what he is actually referring to. Is he referencing the Bondsman's simultaneously inessential and essential relationship with the Lord, in that the Lord depends on the Bondsman to affirm himself but also considers the Bondsman to be like an object? I somewhat understand how the fear of death is needed to give meaning to work, but I don't really get get how this relates to the Lord. Is the Lord not a *pure being-for-itself* like the Bondsman because it does not work or have the fear of death? 

Additionally, what does Hegel mean in this passage (Phenomenology of Spirit 191):

>For what the bondsman does is really the action of the lord. The latter's essential nature is to exist only for himself; he is the sheer negative power for whom the thing is nothing. Thus he is the pure, essential action in this relationship, while the action of the bondsman is impure and unessential. But for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal.

This passage, for reference, is before the parts about fear of death and work.

Thanks!
gpt
Remember, Lord and Bondsman are the product of a struggle *to the death* for recognition. The Bondsman became a Bondsman precisely because he *feared* death, i.e. he gave up the struggle, he surrendered to the Lord rather than continue to stake his life in the struggle, and thus entered bondage to the Lord. 

Hegel's point is this: whereas self-consciousness began the struggle thinking that *staking* one's life was what was required to prove one's self-conscious status qua absolute negativity, the Bondsman comes to learn that *fear of death* itself is that very negativity (in the fear of death, "everything solid and stable [is] shaken in its foundations", etc.). The Lord has not experienced the fear of death, and so it has not truly experienced negativity (thus the rest of the *Phenomenology* can be thought as following the consciousness of the *Bondsman*). 

In the passage you've cited, Hegel is explaining why the Lord-Bondsman relationship is an instance of *mis*recognition. The Bondsman's work is "really the action of the lord" because the Bondsman qua Bondsman only does the work the Lord commands him to do. Thus only the Lord exists for himself, he is the essential party: the Bondsman is unessential qua mere tool or instrument of the Lord's will. But if this is so, then any recognition that might exist between Lord and Bondsman is "one-sided and unequal": the Lord cannot recognize himself in the Bondsman, nor can the Bondsman recognize himself in the Lord, since their very positions as Lord and Bondsman are fundamentally unequal.