bondage

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Since its use in Luther's translation of the Bible, the term bondage ( servant ahd. Boy, servant; -schaft: quality) as an antithesis to rule denotes a state of lawlessness and exploitation .

Servitude in European History

While slavery had not existed or should not exist in Europe since the Christian Middle Ages , servants were omnipresent in the country, in the city and at court . In the Federal Republic of Germany farmhands (and maidservants ) existed in agriculture until the 1960s , which essentially only ended with their mechanization .

In contrast to slavery, slavery presupposes a mild rule in the Christian sense that does not abuse dependencies, so that its sovereign decision-making power is preferred to a legal dispute. However, the medieval motto “ grace before justice ” lost its mildness as soon as one mistrusted grace and missed justice.

That an impaired servant no claim had to pay was for by the feudal obligation. B. of the nobility for emergency aid not outweighed. This situation only ended with the end of serfdom and the introduction of day laborers in the 19th century.

The difference between master and servant was characteristic of a social order in large parts of Europe that only came to an end in the 20th century. It can also be understood as the difference between free and unfree, exception and rule, or grace and mercilessness.

Middle Ages: bondage and feudal rights

Servant (the female counter-term is maid ) denotes in its original meaning a farm worker who takes on the position of a subordinate either through feudal bondage (e.g. serfdom) or through wage dependence. In contrast to ancient slavery (which was practiced well into the Middle Ages), the servant is equal in his human dignity to the master and can rise from this position through marriage and inheritance to the position of peasant. At least this fundamental equality of master and servant results in the Middle Ages through the equality of people before God. Servitude is therefore not necessarily dishonorable in the MA. However, it depends heavily on the regionally different traditions, and the actual reality of life certainly often deviated far from this idea of ​​equality; as a rule, one can say that the servant's position is closer to ancient slavery the further one moved to the northeast in the Old Kingdom . At the latest in dealing with the pagan Slavs in the eastern Marche , we find forms of serf bondage that hardly differ from the ancient practice of slavery until the high Middle Ages. In the MA, the term servant can denote a very broad spectrum of relationships of dependency or domination, about which general statements can only be made to a limited extent.

Servitude as a concept in European philosophy

At least in the figurative sense, servitude consists of the free domination of a slave as a characteristic Western wishful thinking that has been realized on an ever broader basis since the 18th century . Today servitude has shifted from former serfs to the functioning of mechanisms and machines . In human-machine communication , there is an increased division between domination and servitude . - Machines that free themselves from their bondage are a common topos in melodramas and horror films .

Bondage to La Boétie

Étienne de La Boétie , a friend of Michel de Montaigne , investigated the question of how it can be that one individual rules over many people as a young man around 1550. Since this cannot be due to the strength of the ruler, it must be based on other social mechanisms. He wrote down his thoughts on this in the Discours de la servitude volontaire . This writing was first translated into German by Gustav Landauer at the beginning of the 20th century and, in 1910, slightly abbreviated, was published in six episodes under the title Von der volunteigen Knechnung in Landauer's magazine Der Sozialist . Because of her, La Boétie is considered a forerunner of anarchism .

The dialectic of master and servant

The concept of servitude was introduced into political philosophy by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and since then has played a central role in the analysis of power relations, both in relation to the interaction between two or more people and from a social perspective. In Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit (1806/07) the initial political situation is a precivilizational of naked struggle in which the later master wins because, unlike the later servant, he has no fear of risking his life. The relationship of domination is the result of this open struggle in which the servant becomes a servant as soon as he decides to live. Now the historical process comes into play: In the course of exercising the rulership relationship, the servant acquires crucial skills that are important for the survival of the master, for example in agrarian feudalism farming . In this way the master becomes dependent on the servant. As long as the servant is not aware of this, the initial relationship of domination remains stable; only the “qualitative leap” (Hegel) in the servant's consciousness , who begins to understand his power, creates the historical basis for reversing the relationship, that is, for revolution . Hegel refers to Denis Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste (1773, published not until 1796), in which the servant Jacques takes the ideological position of determinism , but his master the (Christian) position of free will . The awareness of freedom, however, paralyzes the master, who feels pushed into a position of observation , while the servant appears active and motivated.

There is an old dispute in philosophy as to whether the situation of the revolution inevitably results from the dialectic of master and servant himself or whether an external impetus is needed to help the servant "on the jumps". This chapter in the phenomenology of mind has become central to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. In the Marxist interpretation, these roles are distributed among the nobility of the ancien régime , the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie , the possessing bourgeoisie. The historical reference point is always the French Revolution of 1789 as the first revolution in which the bourgeoisie rebelled as the servant of the nobility; accordingly , Marx and Engels forecast a second, final revolution in which the new relationship of rule between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was to be reversed.

With this, of course, the scope for interpretation for the chapter on the phenomenology of the mind is not exhausted. There are e.g. B. Attempts to interpret human-machine interaction in this sense, but fail because the artificial intelligence of a computer has so far not been able to prove awareness. Yet the Marxist line of interpretation is certainly the most important for the history of philosophy. In the middle of the 20th century, Hegel's phenomenology of the mind took on a new meaning at the level of the interaction of individuals, in existentialism . Here, above all, Sartre's ethic of recognition in being and nothing should be mentioned: The sado - masochistic constellation, which denies the "servant" recognition, fails with Sartre because of a master-servant dialectic in which the sadist functions as a master is dependent on the recognition and confirmation by the tormented person, which is denied to him precisely when he kills the "servant". The servant asserts his freedom by depriving the master of the decision about the continuation of his existence. Certainly a somewhat poor freedom, which historically can only be understood against the background of the Holocaust .

For the feminist philosophy , especially the feminist standpoint theory , which plays domination bondage -Dialektik an essential role. Based on Michel Foucault, these postmodern theories interpret knowledge as the foundation for relationships of power, which are revealed in the joke position of true and false . The postmodern strategies of interpreting texts and other media consciously choose the point of view of the “enslaved”, that is, from minorities (e.g. queer theory ), sexual oppression of women (feminism, gender theory ), in order to get through this “subversive” reading to expose the power relations, to bring them to the consciousness of the oppressed and to change the social reality. Radical forms of this strategy get entangled in a contradiction, which consists in wanting to establish a power relation of knowledge for one's own point of view; For example, there are feminist theories that claim better access to “objective” knowledge for the point of view of women (rights activists). However, from the perspective starting point of the theory, this claim to objectivity must again be viewed as a will to power.

Quote

And freely I explain all my servants - the programmatic final line of Rudenz in Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell from 1804.

See also

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Bondage  Quotes
Wiktionary: bondage  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

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  1. ↑ Étienne de La Boétie: Of voluntary servitude. Trans. U. ed. Horst Günther, Frankfurt / M .: European publishing house 1980 ISBN 3-434-00704-0 (with material-rich appendix “Sources, Circumference, Effect”).
  2. ^ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1988): Philosophical Library. Volume 414. Felix Meiner, Hamburg, ISBN 3-7873-0769-9 .
  3. ↑ Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothing. Rowohlt Tb., Hamburg 1993, 10th edition. ISBN 3-499-13316-4 .