The main aim of the essay is to examine three philosophical narrations. One of them, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, clearly inspired the other two, that is: Marx’s reflections in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the interpretation of the Odyssey in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Whereas Hegel’s dialectic opens a perspective of mutual recognition of individuals, permanently codified in their fundamental rights, the two remaining narrations lead to totally different conclusions. According to young Marx, the subjects not only do not recognize themselves mutually but even, under the influence of economic relationships, treat each other with disregard. Also in Adorno and Horkehimer’s view the labor processes, which according to Hegel led towards the freedom of individuals, distort interpersonal relations and strengthen the growing coercion. At the end, the proposal of Jürgen Habermas is taken into consideration. He argues that communication acts instead of labor processes are the real emancipating factor.

Rising technical standards of customers, legal requirements and the trend to minimize maintenance effort raise the thermal, mechanical and tribological loads on components of combustion engines. In this regard, emphasis is laid on improving the piston ring - cylinder liner tribosystem, one with the highest energy losses. An efficient performance has to be guaranteed during its lifetime. Tribological investigations could be carried out on engine test benches, but they are highly cost-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, a damage-equivalent test methodology was developed with the analogous tribological model, "ring-on-liner". The research was carried out under two characteristic operating conditions. One with a "standard" operating system, modelled in line with ideal lubrication conditions, and the other "extreme abrasive" operating system, typical to a system running on a lubricant contaminated by abrasive particles. To optimize the tribological loading capacity of the cylinder liner, with focus on these two operating conditions, numerous nitride coatings have been investigated. The key aspects being seizure resistance, running-in characteristics and long term wear behaviour.