History: Death Repression in Man

[David Morris]

Life Against Death, p. 102 (paperback)

Hegel [...] develops the paradox that history is what man does with death,
along lines almost identical with Freud's.  Freud suggests that the aggression
in human nature - the drive to master nature as well as the drive to master man
- is a result of the extroversion of the death instinct, the desire to die
being transformed into the desire to kill, destroy, or dominate.  Hegel
postulates a transformation of the consciousness of death into a struggle to
appropriate the life of another human being at the risk of one’s own life:
history as a class struggle (the dialectics of Master and Slave in Hegel’s
terminology) is based on an extroversion of death.  And similarly Hegel’s other
fundamental category of human history, human work or labor, is a transformation
of the negativity or nothingness of death into the extroverted act of negating
or changing nature.  More generally, according to Hegel, time is what man makes
out of death:  the dialectic of history is the dialectic of time, and “time is
the negative element in the sensuous world;”  time is negativity, and
negativity is extroverted death. 

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