Hegel goes on to rapidly expose it as a self-indulging, stultifying fantasy. For first, while the concept of recognition demands reciprocal equality, master is recognized by the servant only, that is by someone she does not recognize herself. “As a result the recognition that has arisen is one-sided and unequal” – which is to say, it is no recognition. And second, since the other consciousness is the place where the first one obtains its objective existence, or its truth, it follows that by denigrating the servant it is itself that it has inflicted the damage to. 

The master seems to believe that in her person the problem of selfconsciousness has been resolved, that she is not only “the concept” of being-for-itself, but exists for herself as “mediated through another consciousness” (§190). She has seemingly established a stable relation to both the thing and the other self-consciousness. Having proved to be “self-standing”, she rules over the servant; for according to her it is the latter’s attachment to being that holds her in bondage: “it is the chain which the servant could not break free from in the struggle” (§190). 

In this experience self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. (§189)
This is crucial. According to Hegel, the struggle for death does not leaddirectly to the shape of master and servant. At first, the immediate self-consciousness rather sticks exclusively to its “pure being-for-itself”, and since to that effect it has nothing to lose, it can experience no fear and can only persist in fighting. Only the dull counting of futile deaths makesthe survivors understand that there is more in self-consciousness. 

So, the two self-conscious living beings engage in a life and death struggle. We can figure them as two fearless, proud subjects clashing against each other in the attempt to elicit the other’s recognition, and showing an equal determined will, they continue fighting to the end until one or, characteristically, both of them die. In this they have effectively established the certainty they were struggling for – yet, as Hegel goes on to remark, “this is not the case for those who passed the test in this struggle” (§188).