The Master-Slave ialectic (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft in German) is a key element in Hegel's philosophy. It is a story or myth created by Hegel in order to explain his idea of how self-consciousness dialectically sublates into what he variously refers to as Absolute Knowledge, Spirit, and Science. It is presented in his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Spirit. It is also known as the dialectic of "Lordship and Bondage", with the name Master-Slave having evolved from a different translation. The Phenomenology exists, for reasons that are part of its nature and place in Hegel's work, in two places - as an independent work, apparently considered by Hegel to be an a priori for understanding the Science of Logic, and as a part of the Science of Logic, where absolute knowledge is explained.