Breathing as Labour: On the Implicit Value Judgement in Hegel’s Concept of Work

This paper argues that Hegel’s concept of labour in the Phenomenology of Spirit rests on an implicit value judgement that is neither argued for nor acknowledged. By demonstrating that the act of respiration satisfies each of the conditions Hegel stipulates for labour—objectification, persistence, recognisability, and the structure of externalisation-alienation-sublation—I show that Hegel’s exclusion of such acts from the category of labour is not a principled exclusion but a prior value decision dressed in ontological language. The paper concludes that Hegel’s framework either admits respiration as a genuine instance of self-mediation or must supply an additional criterion, the absence of which exposes the framework’s internal incoherence.