At the center of my consideration is the famous dialectic of Slave and Master along with Hegel’s formulation that “life is a way of enduring death.” According to Hegel, there exist two types of consciousness: the consciousness of the Slave and the consciousness of the Master. The Master differs from the Slave in that he takes the risk of facing death, while the Slave surrenders his freedom to the Master, so that only the Master has the experience of a brush with death. In Hegel, eschatological optimism is directly connected to the concept of death: one’s attitude and relation to it. The Slave is not an eschatological optimist; he is its opposite. You might recall Martin Heidegger’s interesting formulation which goes something like: “the absence of eschatological thinking is a pure form of nihilism.” The Slave whom Hegel describes has no such eschatological thinking. He does not believe in finitude, he refuses to face his finitude, he refuses to cross paths with death. He gives his freedom to the Master so that he will come to terms with death in his stead. This is reminiscent of modern man, who is more or less ready to fully trust the mediasphere, to open up to it and allow it to constitute his perspective. “If people are dying from the coronavirus, then I could die too.” Everything is as it says. “If people are not dying from it, then I won’t die either.” The Figure of the Master in Hegel @PRAVPublishing Excerpt: from Eschatological Optimism by Daria Platonova Dugina https://pravpublishing.com/eschatological-optimism/