/lit/ - Literature

question to any Hegel fags that may be lurking, or to OP,

I see it often interpreted that Hegel's master/slave dialectic is about either proving other consciousnesses outside of your own or that the recognition of other consciousnesses is required to make your own. Consciousnesses here usually taken to be a colloquial sense of other, independent people.

Is there any textual evidence for this interpretation? It's so common that I assume there are some lectures or maybe something in the Encyclopedia that puts it this way, but just from reading PoS that is not at all the sense that I got. From reading it I got the sense that he meant consciousness as in independent stages of the same consciousness, e.g the way the rest of the book is set up, and that the master/slave was the relationship between something like consciousness as the unchangable in-itself (e.g Reason, subject) and consciousness as the self interacting with the world (Understanding constructing objects, realized practical will, sense, so on). So to me the dialectic came to the conclusion that the Master can't really exist without the Understanding, and the roles are reversed or interchangable as which one is the master and which the slave.

Can someone point me in the right direction for the evidence behind all these other interpretations?

What are the easiest chapters and what are the hardest chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit?

>Sense-certainty
>Perception
>Force & Understanding
>Self-Consciousness
>Reason
>Spirit
>Religion
>Absolute Knowing

I know Force & Understanding is supposed to be difficult but it isn't the most difficult chapter, is it?