Hegel argues against 'abstract thinking.' Really, he makes the claim that his reader is already against abstract thinking and attempts to make the identity of the practitioners of it legible to the reader.
Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) — not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself above that of which it is not capable, but on account of the inward inferiority of the matter.
Abstract thinking is done by the uneducated—the nobles are too good for it.
What is abstract thinking?
This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.
(This is not all that abstract thinking is, but it is an example.)
And abstract thinking is not good:
To move from the maid to a servant, no servant is worse off than one who works for a man of low class and low income; and he is better off the nobler his master is. The common man again thinks more abstractly, he gives himself noble airs vis-à-vis the servant and relates himself to the other man merely as to a servant; he clings to this one predicate. The servant is best off among the French. The nobleman is familiar with his servant, the Frenchman is his friend. When they are alone, the servant does the talking: see Diderot's Jacques et son maître; the master does nothing but take snuff and see what time it is and lets the servant take care of everything else. The nobleman knows that the servant is not merely a servant, but also knows the latest city news, the girls, and harbors good suggestions; he asks him about these matters, and the servant may say what he knows about these questions. With a French master, the servant may not only do this; he may also broach a subject, have his own opinions and insist on them; and when the master wants something, it is not done with an order but he has to argue and convince the servant of his opinion and add a good word to make sure that this opinion retains the upper hand.
If there is any word to use to describe Hegel, it is aristocratic. (...What does that mean, exactly?)
Under my understanding of his writing, dominance is an unavoidable part of human relations, and the way to make it better is to remove the abstraction from it. That is, not to reduce the dominance's intensity, but to stop it from (roughly) 'deceiving each other about the other's humanity.' The servant and master are not to 'put on' roles defined by abstract features ('the one who commands'), but are to embody them fully.
In Hegel's view, the issue with dominance is its abstraction, its reduction of the texture & complexity of humanity. The seeing of a murderer as just-a-murderer, rather than someone-with-a-past-who-murdered-for-a-reason (and someone who, say, can be loved by God). There is certainly something to this which is compelling and correct—it's not entirely clear to me how one should understand, say, redemption in the eyes of Christ, but it may be entirely correct.
Still, in the context of a dominance relation, Hegel's perspective is anti-correct, to my experience. Entering a 'familiar' relationship with one's oppresor involves constructing a detailed simulation of a self which is presentable as a servant. This self cannot be one's 'actual' self, since it is still subject to the total dominance of the other, but it must appear to be an actual self of some sort. The distinction between an 'actual self' and the role one plays is blurry at best. This is the sort of attack that serves to dissolve the Cartesian boundary and constrain the servant's ability to accurately understand their situation (the dominance is still near-complete, after all). It may be that the French master is kinder on the object level, and maybe even in full. But they enact a much more deep and subtle kind of dominance on the servant.
See, from Zizek, How to Read Lacan:
Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!”
In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority.
Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her — go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.
This is a not-uncommon idea—that control over thoughts leads to dominance of the psyche. It's perhaps most clearly articulated in direct language on LessWrong with "The hostile telepaths problem". Freud observed the gap between conscious and unconscious—since everywhere we are asked to perform preferences, there will always be such a gap.
This is also often called a 'double bind' in the literature—cf. Gregory Bateson. See his original paper on double binds: "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia". Freyd's work on institutional betrayal, and 'fawn response' in psychology are all indirectly pointing to the same topic.
On Christ, see:
- Scott Alexander on the rise of early Christianity and COOPERATE-BOT (probably there's much more here)
- Christianity does really look like a compelling strategy. There is certainly some truth in it. One must believe in COOPERATE-BOT.
- JD Pressman on Christ & the Pharisees
This is closely related to my post on The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere—I think my critiques are analogous. Reading Hegel has helped me understand Vassar much more clearly—Hegel is saying all the same things but from the opposite perspective.
(Note: Deleuze&Guattari is also about double binds, against Hegel.)