Slavery and the Multiple Self

Malcolm Bull
Slavery and the Multiple Self

The concept of the self currently plays a significant role within moral philosophy and intellectual history. That this is so is due in some measure to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. [*] Both philosophers treat questions about the morality of actions or agents as secondary to those about the identity of the moral subject. And because it is considered vital to relate moral philosophy to the analysis of personal identity, the historical developments that have fashioned that identity become important as well. For MacIntyre and Taylor, the history of ideas offers a uniquely promising way of reanimating moral philosophy, and Taylor in particular has devoted much energy to tracing the formation of the modern self in the belief that the resulting narrative will reveal the framework within which our moral intuitions are articulated. [1]

It is difficult to dismiss the simple but powerful insight that underlies this project. Since no one is likely to argue that morality involves acting or treating others in ways that are inappropriate to who we and they are, it does seem to suggest that, if we can only gain a full understanding of our identities, we should also start to get a sense of how we ought to live. But even if this basic premiss is accepted, it may still be argued that the project has been formulated in such a way as to prejudge the findings of any historical investigation. In this article, I suggest that Taylor’s and Macintyre’s conception of the self excludes many, perhaps even most, human subjects, and with them a sequence of texts that describe and interpret their position. These texts, it will be argued, constitute a continuous narrative about the type of self ignored by Taylor and MacIntyre, and, as such, offer the schematic outline for a history of the self that is fundamentally different from theirs. Much of what follows is an attempt to articulate the essential features of this narrative in the works of Aristotle, Hegel, and Du Bois. But before turning to this alternative history it is necessary to examine Taylor’s and Macintyre’s arguments in more detail.

Moral Reactions and Gut Reactions
MacIntyre famously remarked that a moral philosophy always presupposes a sociology. [2] This involves two claims: first that all moralities make some assumptions about the identity of moral agents, and, second, that there is no way to define a moral agent without reference to their social and historical context. Taylor defends both at greater length than MacIntyre himself. What differentiates moral reactions from gut reactions like nausea is, he suggests, the fact that the former are open to question, explanation, and correction in a way that the latter are not. Moral intuitions are distinguished by the fact that they have a framework within which they can be articulated and evaluated, a framework that invariably seems ‘to involve claims, implicit or explicit, about the nature and status of human beings’. Moral intuition therefore presupposes what Taylor terms ‘a given ontology of the human’. [3]

The move from ontology to sociology is effected through the consideration of what is involved in personal identity and, in particular, the kind of personal identity presupposed by moral intuition. What Taylor terms the ‘punctual self’, defined solely in terms of the continuity of its self-perception, provides an inadequate framework for the consideration of moral agency because it excludes self-interpretation. As individuals, and especially as moral individuals ‘We are selves only in that certain things matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me’. [4] Self-interpretation in this sense is inescapably a linguistic activity, and as languages require linguistic communities, so self-interpretation requires a community, not just to provide a language, but to provide the social meanings of selfhood within which any self-interpretation is articulated. As Taylor puts it

One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it. . .I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in social space, in the geography of social statuses and functions. [5]

In MacIntyre, the same conclusion is stated still more forcefully:

The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide. [6]

Unless you want to maintain that it is possible to have a productive conversation about morality without knowing who the conversation is about, or else that all we need to know about moral agents is that they have continuous self-consciousness, these conclusions seem unobjectionable. But even if we accept that moral discourse is always about people in all their social and historical particularity, the next stage of the argument may appear rather more problematic.

Virtue and Unity
According to Taylor, moral selves are not neutral, punctual objects because ‘what counts as an object will be defined by the scope of the concern, by just what is in question’. He then goes on to suggest that since in moral intuition ‘what is in question is, generally and characteristically, the shape of my life as a whole’, the self must be conceived as a unity, and I have to consider ‘my whole past life as that of a single self’. [7] The argument that underlies this progression from wholeness to unity to singleness is largely derived from MacIntyre, who makes the same moves, arguing first that ‘the unity of a virtue in someone’s life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole’, and later that ‘the unity of an individual life’ consists in ‘the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life’. On this interpretation, personal identity is ‘just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires’. [8]

The problem with these arguments is that they can progress only by exploiting the ambiguity of the terminology and moving from a whole/part distinction via the unity/disunity opposition to a single/multiple dichotomy. Because considering something as a whole means considering it in its entirety, Taylor suggests first that it must be considered not just exhaustively but also simultaneously, as a unified totality; and, second, that it must be considered as a unity not just in the sense that it is a totality but that it is a single undivided object. However, this is not necessarily the case. If, at half-time in the World Cup Final, the tv commentator suggests to the panel that they should discuss the game ‘as a whole’, this implies that they should not focus exclusively on the goals, that no player or incident should be omitted from consideration, and it might additionally, although not necessarily, be taken as encouragement for musings about the entirety of the match as a unified entity. However, even thinking about the match in this sense would hardly lead anyone to suppose that subject of the unified narrative was a single unified character. On the contrary, far from being the solitary hero of the narrative, it is only possible to make sense of the match on the assumption that it has dual character, and that there are two competing protagonists. And if the panellists move on to consider the championship as a whole, they will find that this involves numerous simultaneous narratives, most with protagonists who disappear long before the end of the story. When Taylor and MacIntyre refer to human life as a ‘quest’, they have in mind something more like the quest for the Holy Grail than the World Cup, yet there seems no reason why one type of teleological narrative should be considered more representative than the other. The whole story may be the complete story, but it does not necessarily consist of a unified narrative with a single character.

Taylor is tempted to conclude that ‘there is something like an a priori unity of a human life through its whole extent’, but mindful that, on his own account, self-interpretation is constitutive of the self, he has to allow the hypothetical possibility that cultures could exist in which people might legitimately be considered to have two selves. (For example, a society in which it was universally acknowledged that everyone took on a new identity at the age of forty.) However, he concludes that ‘in the absence of such a cultural understanding, e.g., in our world, the supposition that I could be two temporally succeeding selves is either an overdramatized image, or quite false’. [9] Taylor may be right to suppose that there are no cultures in which the kind of thought experiments Parfit performs on the Lockean self actually take place. But although rejecting the punctual self may make it easier to dismiss the claim that there are temporally successive selves, invoking a conception of the self that involves both selfinterpretation and elements of intersubjective experience opens the door to understandings of the self in which the self is not synchronically unified. There is, in other words, a potential tension between treating the self holistically, in all its historical, social and interpretative complexity, and treating the self as a single, coherent unit. Not only does the former not necessarily imply the latter, it may make it more, not less difficult to keep the self intact. If, for any social or historical reason, personal identities are interpreted or constructed in terms that imply duality or multiplicity, then, even if there is continuity of self-consciousness, the self must be understood in correspondingly multiple terms.

Double Consciousness
It is not difficult to find examples of self-interpretation in which the self is understood as simultaneously double or multiple rather than single. The best-known formulation of this idea is probably W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of the double consciousness of the African-American who leads a ‘double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes’, and, in consequence, ‘ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body’. [10] Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness is significant for several reasons. As a self-interpretation that locates the subjective experience of twoness within a specific social and historical context, Du Bois’s account of double consciousness meets all the requirements of Taylor’s self. It is, furthermore, not merely a literary trope or piece of academic speculation, but, according to his biographer, an expression of ‘the irreducible fact that Du Bois’s existence. . .was a psychic purgatory’, [11] and an expression in which many members of Du Bois’s community were able to recognize themselves. As the repeated literary deployment of the concept testifies, the idea of double consciousness has seemed like a useful self-interpretation of more than one generation of African-American. [12] What we have, in other words, is just that possibility which Taylor believes never to have been instantiated ‘in our world’, a community in which it proves impossible to locate personal identity within a single social space, a community in which many individuals have found the moral imperative to consider their lives as a whole to be incompatible with defining themselves as single or united beings.

That it should be so easy to find a counter-example to Taylor and MacIntyre’s insistence upon the singleness and unity of the self implies that their histories of the self may be radically incomplete. One way to explore this possibility is to retrace the steps that lead to Du Bois’s anguished expression of psychic duality. In what follows, I will suggest that Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness is the conclusion of an argument that stretches back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. Ironically, the major figures in this debate are Aristotle and Hegel, philosophers who are of central importance to MacIntyre and Taylor respectively. So by recapitulating the argument in all its sometimes intricate detail, it becomes possible not only to reveal the sources of the multiple self and so illuminate a largely unexplored pathway in intellectual history, but also to indicate more precisely the nature of the exclusions implied by Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s arguments.

Aristotle
Du Bois’s work is grounded in the history of New World slavery. Insofar as that institution had a theory, it was provided by Aristotle’s remarks on slavery in the Politics. Although the precise meaning of the passages in question is not always clear, they underpinned the medieval concept of dominion, and in the Renaissance furnished arguments first for the enslavement of indigenous Americans, and then for the enslavement of Africans instead. When opponents of slavery sought to criticize either the practice or the institution it was to Aristotle that they too referred. [13]

Although no one appears to have advocated the abolition of slavery in the ancient world, the existence of the institution clearly posed something of an intellectual puzzle. Slavery was universally held to be a subhuman condition, and so, if it were justifiable, those held in that condition ought to be subhuman too. However, there was no distinct race of slaves: freemen were liable to become slaves through being taken prisoner in war or some other misfortune, and slaves could become free as a result of manumission. So if, as the comic poet Philemon put it, ‘no one is born to be a slave; only chance enslaved his body’, [14] how could slavery be justified?

Natural Slavery and Legal Slavery
Aristotle’s response was to make a distinction between legal slavery on the one hand and natural slavery on the other. Legal slaves are those who happen, by chance, legally to be slaves, whereas natural slaves are those who are, by nature, fitted for slavery. Against those who would claim that the former condition necessarily implied the latter, Aristotle pointed out that even they would ‘by no means admit that a man that does not deserve slavery can really be a slave—otherwise we shall have the result that persons reputed of the highest nobility are slaves. . .if they happen to be taken prisoners of war and sold’. [15] So if it is conceded ‘that there exist certain persons who are essentially slaves everywhere and certain others who are are so nowhere’, [16] it follows that there must be a less than perfect fit between legal and natural slavery. Thus, Aristotle suggests, the only true slaves are natural slaves legally enslaved; natural citizens who are legally enslaved ought to be freed, and natural slaves who are legally free ought to be enslaved.

The beauty of Aristotle’s solution was that it upheld the institution of slavery while legitimating enslavement and manumission as the processes through which legal slavery accommodated itself to the underlying realities of natural slavery. The implication that slaves and non-slaves belong to two distinct categories of humanity whose existence legal slavery could strive to reflect but never alter is confirmed by Aristotle’s earlier analysis of the meaning of natural slavery and the character of natural slaves. A slave is like a tool in that it is ‘an instrument of action’ separable from its owner, [17] and like a domestic animal in that it is the living property of another person. [18] Being the property of the master means that the slave is in a sense part of the master, [19] not, of course, part of the master’s soul but part of the master’s body. [20]

Given Aristotle’s understanding of the body-soul relation it would seem that those fitted for this arrangement should be distinguished by their bodies, but, as Aristotle acknowledges, this is not the case. [21] Natural slaves are characterized solely by the incompleteness of their souls. What the souls of slaves lack is variously described as deliberation, [22] spirit, [23] and rationality—in the sense of possessing rather than merely apprehending reason. [24] The precise relation between these attributes in Aristotelian psychology is unclear, but in every case it can be claimed that the deficiency of the soul precludes the possibility of proper self-government. Since it is the nature of the body to be governed by the soul, it is therefore appropriate for the bodies of those with souls incapable of governing the body to be governed by other, more complete souls. [25]

The Incomplete Soul
The natural slave in the state of natural slavery is thus an incomplete soul whose body becomes part of the master’s body so that the master’s soul may govern unhindered. [26] According to Aristotle, the type of authority the master exercises over the slave is the same as that of a tyrant over his subjects, [27] or the soul over the body, [28] in that, although there may be some community of interest between ruler and ruled, government is solely in the interest of the ruler. [29] The rule of a master over a slave conforms to this type because, it too is an example of the soul ruling the body. However, although the master rules the slave’s body with the absolute authority with which the master’s soul governs his own body—of which the slave’s body is now merely a separate part—there is no implication that the master’s soul rules the slave’s soul in the same way. On the contrary, the rule of the rational over the appetitive part of a soul is like that of a monarch who rules in the interests of his subjects, or a father who governs in the interests of his children with ‘admonition, reproof, and encouragement’. [30] The master’s soul should rule the slave’s soul in the same way, with admonition and not merely command. [31] It appears that the slave’s incomplete soul is not enslaved by the master’s soul, merely subject to it, and so, whereas friendship between master and slave is impossible insofar as the slave is a tool or body-part of the master, friendship between master and slave is possible insofar as the slave is another soul, albeit incomplete and subject to the master. [32]

Enslavement and Humanity
Aristotle’s analysis of the neat fit between the institution of slavery and the character of the natural slave provides a justification for the enslavement of those whose humanity is somehow incomplete while retaining the awareness that slavery does not obliterate such humanity as they possess. And if he fails to argue the corollary that those who are not natural slaves cannot be accommodated to natural slavery, it is easy to see how the argument might go. If slavery is the rule of the slave’s body by a soul of another, then the very possibility of slavery depends upon the slave’s body not being governed by the slave’s own soul. In the case of natural slaves, of course, the soul is not equipped to rule and so the proper relation of soul to body can only be established through slavery which brings the slave’s body under the rule of the master’s soul. But for a complete human whose soul already rules the body with the despotic rule of a master, the body does not await enslavement, and indeed cannot be enslaved for the simple reason that it is, in a sense, already enslaved.

For a complete human to be enslaved, their body would have to be taken over by the soul of another. But, as Aristotle makes clear in the De Anima, the Pythagorean idea that any soul can find its way into any body is an absurdity. Just as each craft must employ its own tools, so each soul must employ its own body: a soul cannot start using another body any more than a carpenter can suddenly start employing a flute. [33] The idea that someone who is not a natural slave can be enslaved must therefore be similarly absurd: for it suggests that a master can appropriate a body that is already employed by another soul. The possibility that a body could be ruled by two souls at once is also excluded. Not only does every body have ‘its own peculiar shape or form’ and thus the unique soul appropriate to it, but the soul, is, by definition, what provides unity. If the soul were divided according to its functions and yet somehow still the soul of a single person, whatever held the parts of the soul together would be the soul, not the parts themselves. As Aristotle states: ‘If. . .some other thing gives the soul unity, this would really be the soul’. [34] Just as a tyrant is, by definition, unique in the exercise of his tyranny, [35] and a state could not simultaneously be subject to several tyrants—without thereby either being an oligarchy or disintegrating into separate states—so the soul’s rule of the body is also unique and exclusive. Where the soul rules the body, slavery is not just improper but impossible.

Greeks and Barbarians
The difference between natural slavery and non-slaves in legal slavery is therefore analogous to that between natural slaves and freemen under tyrannical government. According to Aristotle, and the Greeks in general, Asiatic peoples were slaves by nature and so acquiesced in the tyrannical nature of their monarchies without resentment, [36] whereas Greeks found tyrannies unendurable, and so were liable to revolt because as freemen they could not tolerate being treated as slaves. [37] Although both barbarians and Greeks might be subjected to the same form of government, it did not make them the same type of people. Similarly, slavery cannot make slaves of those who are not slaves simply by giving them the legal position of slaves.

Aristotle’s theory emphasizes that slaves are born not made, and that freemen and natural slaves are categories as mutually exclusive as those of Greek and barbarian. In consequence, anyone who is really a slave is suited to being one, and anyone who is not a slave by nature can never really be a slave whatever their legal position. On this account, to claim that someone who is really a slave—as opposed to merely being under the legal disadvantages of slavery—should not be a slave is simply a misunderstanding, a contradiction which implies either that the slave’s soul is somehow simultaneously complete and incomplete, or that the slave somehow has two souls, one complete and one incomplete.

Although within Aristotle’s theory the idea that those who are truly slaves are wrongly enslaved becomes unthinkable, his account also created a framework from which that unthinkable conclusion could be reached. Aristotle never bothered to work out how his theory of slavery could be correlated with his theory of the soul, and as a result never resolved the question of how, if the slave’s soul is incomplete and his body ruled by the master’s soul, the two souls are related to the slave’s body. The obvious answer would be to suggest that there was a division of labour with the master’s soul performing only those functions of which the slave’s inadequate soul was incapable, with the result that through slavery the slave gained the complete soul he otherwise lacked. However, in the De Anima, Aristotle explicitly rules out such a division in favour of the unity of the soul. Within the theory of slavery, therefore, was an implicit duplication of the soul which threatened to undermine the very theory of the soul on which Aristotle’s account of slavery depended.

Hegel
Aristotle maintained that the same relationship could exist between people (tyrants and subject) as between the constituent parts of an individual person (soul and body), and implied that the relationship of master and slave was this same relationship expressed between a person (the master) and another being (the slave) who was both a person and part of the other person. For Hegel, who sought simultaneously to describe both the interand the intra-personal aspects of human development, the slave therefore provided a natural focus. Indeed, the originality, and also the confusing complexity, of Hegel’s remarks on mastery and slavery may in large measure be attributed to his attempt to exploit the ambiguous condition of the slave in Aristotle’s account in order to generate precisely that contradiction which Aristotle excluded.

In order to understand Hegel’s argument, it is necessary to appreciate the extent to which his approach to the problem is structured in Aristotelian terms. Although the relevance of Aristotle’s theory to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic has often been noted, [38] its full significance to Hegel has not been appreciated. Indeed, some recent commentators have distanced Hegel’s dialectic from classical and colonial slavery on the basis that Hegel’s terms for master and slave, Herr and Knecht, are more appropriate to the feudal relation of lord and serf, or master and servant. [39] But this is a false distinction. In Christian von Garve’s German translation of Aristotle’s Politics, published posthumously in 1799, Aristotle’s word for the slave, doulos, is translated as both Sklave and Knecht, and occasionally also as Diener; but where the slave is directly juxtaposed with the master—rather than discussed in general—the two are almost invariably described as Knecht and Herr. [40] In the notes to Garve’s text, the equivalence of Aristotle’s despotés and doulos to the German Herr and Knecht is spelt out in the definitions given to the two words: despotés is the Greeks’ ‘particular word for the master (>Herr) who rules over either bonded or bought slaves (Diener)’; doulos, although not the most abject form of enslavement and also a metaphor for other kinds of submissiveness, ‘expresses the special character of this servitude (Knechtschaft)’. [41]

Self-Recognition through Work
Garve’s now almost wholly forgotten translation of the Politics is significant not only because it shows that Herr and Knecht were taken to be the German equivalents of Aristotle’s master and slave, but also because the notes incorporate an unfinished essay by Garve which discusses Aristotle’s theory of slavery from a contemporary perspective. [42] The degree to which Hegel may have been influenced by Garve must await full discussion elsewhere, [43] but one place in which Hegel appears to develop an insight from Garve’s essay is in his account of the slave’s self-recognition through work.

In addressing the question of whether it is possible for a slave to have virtue, Aristotle suggested that slaves participate in virtue only insofar as they need it to perform their masters’ orders, and that free artisans, such as cobblers, are in a similar position—which Aristotle calls ‘limited slavery’—in that their virtue is also derived from carrying out orders. However, Aristotle emphasizes that this does not imply that the master has any special knowledge of the tasks a slave or artisan performs: the master must know how to direct tasks and the slave must know how to execute them, but virtue attaches only to the former activity, which, as the cause of the latter, is also the cause of any virtue in the latter. [44] Garve realized that this argument opened up a significant space within which those in complete or limited slavery could exercise autonomy and so experience freedom, a freedom achieved not without but within their servitude. He articulated the argument first with reference to the contemporary artisan, but then outlined its implications for those in complete rather than limited servitude:

The work of craftsmen produces something which lasts and which serves for the use or pleasure of men. Their efforts are such that they are able to be independent of those for the benefit of whom they execute these tasks. The man who orders a pair of shoes for himself gives orders to the cobbler only to the extent to which he determines how he would like the shoes to be made, but it is not necessary for him to supervise the cobbler while he is preparing the shoes. Once the cobbler has received the order from his customer, in the carrying out of his task he simply observes the rules of his trade rather than the commands of his customer, and yet he produces exactly what is asked of him. The craftsman must to a certain extent submit to others when he accepts the order for his work, and also when he delivers the finished product. . .But he is, by the very nature of the matter, completely free while he works. [45]

From this essentially Aristotelian argument Garve extracts the paradoxical and profoundly un-Aristotelian conclusion that, in submitting to orders, the worker achieves a freedom which means that he ‘can eject from his workshop any customer who tries to lord it over him’ just as Apelles did to Alexander. Within the experience of work, specifically in the process of physically shaping a material object into something of permanent value, there is the potential not just for a liberating freedom, but for an overturning of the normal social hierarchy. It was for this reason, Garve suggests, that in antiquity ‘for those who made clothes or household implements for their masters, slavery became more bearable than for those who had to wait on their masters’, and for this reason too that ‘the work of the craftman was transferted so quickly from the hands of the slave into the hands of the freeman’. [46] Rather than risking the possibility that slaves might experience freedom through work, work of a liberating kind was given to the free.

In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic the insight that even unfree labour might be a route to freedom becomes an integral part of a far more subtle and complex argument, but its basic structure is still clearly discernable. The same anti-Aristotelian paradox lies at its heart for ‘the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own’. [47] Not only this, but there is the same emphasis upon both the formative nature of the work and the permanence of the object thus fashioned:

The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. This. . .formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence. [48]

What Aristotle had tried to maintain as a virtue-free vacuum becomes in Hegel the site of a transformation.

Africans and Asiatics
Enough has been said to indicate that the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology shares certain continuities of vocabulary and thought with Aristotle’s theory of slavery. But reading the dialectic of the Phenomenology in the context of its later reformulations in the Philosophical Propaedeutic and the Encyclopaedia, and in the light of Hegel’s remarks on African slavery in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, suggests that Hegel’s engagement with Aristotle goes deeper still. That Hegel had the institution of slavery in mind when writing on mastery and slavery is clear from the Zusätze to the third volume of the Encyclopaedia, where the master-slave dialectic is illustrated with reference to the tyrant-subject and master-slave relations of antiquity. According to Hegel, in the ancient world, slavery existed in what were otherwise free states, because the Greeks and Romans had not yet attained the notion of absolute freedom, and believed that a man was free ‘only if he was born free’. [49] To this Aristotelian conception of a world synchronically divided between slave and free, Hegel juxtaposed his belief that the division between slave and free was essentially diachronic. While accepting Aristotle’s idea that individuals and nations who lacked thymos, or, as Hegel put it, the energy and courage—Muth is also Garve’s translation of thymos in the equivalent passages in Aristotle—to will their freedom, deserved to be enslaved by masters or tyrants, he maintained that slavery and tyranny were merely a necessary stage in the history of nations—and individuals—and hence only relatively justified. Citing the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus—one of Aristotle’s stock examples of tyranny in the Politics—he argued that his tyranny had taught the Athenians obedience to the law and so made tyranny in Athens redundant. [50] But since Hegel did not suppose the whole of humanity to have progressed towards freedom at the same rate, the appropriateness of tyranny and slavery was subject to local variation. He was thus able to reinscribe Aristotle’s distinction between barbarian slaves and free Greeks not as an immutable fact of nature but rather as the result of the uneven development of the human race.

Just as for Aristotle Asiatics had all been natural slaves, so for Hegel Africans were all slaves by virtue of their undeveloped consciousness. Since, according to Hegel, ‘the basic principle of all slavery is that man is not yet conscious of his freedom, and consequently sinks to the level of a mere object or worthless article’, [51] and the African had ‘not yet reached an awareness of any substantial objectivity’ such as God, law, or freedom, [52] it followed, as it had mutatis mutandis for Aristotle, both that all Africans were slaves, with the consequence that amongst them ‘the distinction between masters and slaves is a purely arbitrary one’, [53] and that their political order was invariably tyranny, which, being slaves, they considered perfectly legitimate and did not feel to constitute an injustice. [54] However, Hegel, writing in the light of half a century of anti-slavery agitation, [55] accepts both that slavery ought not to exist and that in rational states it does not exist. Colonial slavery, he suggests, is no different from classical slavery or serfdom in medieval and early modern Europe: it is just another ‘phase in man’s education’, a consequence of the general rule that man must ‘first become mature before he can be free’. [56] Just as Pisistratus’s tyranny had allowed the Athenians to mature, so, by implication, the European enslavement of Africans will eventually allow them to become conscious of their freedom as well.

Soul and Body
Since, like Aristotle, Hegel identifies the master-slave relation with that of tyrant and subject it would be natural for him to equate it also with soul and body. It is clear from the discussion of soul and body in the Encyclopaedia that Hegel did conceive of the relation between the two in terms of mastery and slavery. The development of the feeling soul towards consciousness is summarized in a Zusatz as the process through which ‘the soul becomes master (Meister) of its natural individuality, of its bodily nature’. [57] According to Hegel, this is achieved through habit, for in habit, the body is subjected to the domination of the soul and moulded to its particular feelings, while the soul is emancipated from particular feelings, and freed to become the actual soul of consciousness. As the Zusatz to this section of the Encyclopaedia states, to bring about this end the soul must ‘transform its identity with its body into an identity brought about or mediated by mind, must take possession of its body, must form it into a pliant and skilful instrument of its activity, so transform it that in it soul relates itself to itself and its body becomes an accident brought into harmony with its substance, with freedom’. [58] The phrase ‘instrument of activity’ (Werkzeug der Thatigkeit) is the same as that used in Garve’s translation of Aristotle to define the slave, [59] so there can be little doubt that if, as Hegel states, ‘on the one hand, habit makes a man free, on the other hand, it makes him a slave (Sklave)’, it is the body that is enslaved and its master, the soul, that is freed. [60]

From this account of the relation between soul and body it is clear that Hegel conceives habit in terms of the Aristotelian relation of master to slave—and soul to body. But although formulated in these terms, Hegel does not equate the soul-body relation with that of tyrant and subject, nor with historical forms of mastery and slavery, or the possibility of progress beyond such relations. If he had been a materialist or an epiphenomenalist rather than an idealist, he might perhaps have done so; instead, he seems to have shifted the dialectic to another level, with the result that it became not the dialectic of soul and body, but the dialectic of self-consciousness in all its inevitable duality. So although Hegel’s account of soul and body retains its Aristotelian form, the role of the soul-body relation in Aristotle’s account of natural slavery, and its function in providing an intrapersonal analogue to the interpersonal relation of tyrant and subject appears to have been transferred to another level of self awareness, that of self-consciousness.

That this is the case is shown by the fact that Hegel not only uses tyranny and slavery to illustrate the development of self-consciousness, but uses the development of consciousness to explicate the condition of slavery. According to the Encyclopaedia, it is universal self-consciousness, attained as a result of the master-slave dialectic, that gives rise to the virtues and institutions of civil society. [61] It is these virtues and institutions that Hegel supposes Africans to lack. The precise level of self-consciousness Hegel attributes to them can be gauged from the comment that Africans lack familial affection because such ‘philanthropic sentiments of love etc. entail a consciousness of the self which is no longer confined to the individual person’. [62] The problem, in other words, is that ‘The African, in his undifferentiated and concentrated unity, has not yet succeeded in making this distinction between himself as an individual and his essential universality’. [63] He is therefore ‘as yet unconscious of himself’, not in the sense that has not attained selfconsciousness but in the sense that he has not progressed beyond immediate self-consciousness which ‘has not as yet for its object the I=I, but only the “I”. . .[and] is not as yet aware of its freedom’. [64]

The Promise of Freedom
It is, of course, through the master-slave dialectic, that self-consciousness is brought ‘to the consciousness of. . .real universality, of the freedom belonging to all’. [65] Similarly, it is through the development of consciousness that emancipation from the actual historical experience of slavery becomes possible. Just as slavery existed in the classical world because the Greeks and Romans ‘did not know that man as such, man as this universal “I”, as rational self-consciousness, is entitled to freedom’, [66] so it exists in Africa where consciousness as immediate self-consciousness is unaware of its freedom. However, just as the ancients developed through this experience of servitude to masters and tyrants, so Africans may be expected to attain a universal self-consciousness through the experience of enslavement by Europeans. As Hegel noted in the Encyclopaedia, some Africans having acquired freedom ‘through Christianity after a long spiritual servitude’ had in Haiti actually formed a state on Christian principles. [67] Since Hegel held universal self-consciousness to be the root of freedom, the state, and other civil virtues, the fact that colonial slavery had allowed some Africans to attain this universality meant that their consciousness had developed through the experience of slavery.

Whereas Aristotle had suggested that the explanation and justification for slavery lay in the existence of people with incomplete souls, Hegel argued that the explanation for slavery was undeveloped selfconsciousness. However, the shift from soul to consciousness does not appear to have disrupted the essential Aristotelian trinity of relationships in which master-slave and tyrant-subject relations are both analogous to one another, and simultaneously analogous to and sustained by a third type of relationship, internal to the person. In Aristotle, the interpersonal relation of master and slave worked through being an internal relation between soul and body—the master’s soul and the slave’s body. Is there anything comparable in Hegel?

The Master-Slave Dialectic
Since Hegel’s account of slavery is so clearly conceived within Aristotelian terms, and since he differs from Aristotle chiefly in considering the transcendence of slavery to be a function of human progress in history, it is appropriate to read the master-slave dialectic as an account of how that progress is achieved. [68] However, it is important to remember that in the Phenomenology the master-slave dialectic functions chiefly as a means of illustrating a particular phase in the development of self-consciousness. As such, it is not always clear when Hegel is referring to events that are intrapersonal, in the sense that they take place within a single individual, and when he is referring to events that are interpersonal and so require the involvement of more than one individual. Most commentators have concentrated on the interpersonal aspect to the exclusion of the intrapersonal; however, as Josiah Royce and G.A. Kelly both emphasized, the dialectic also seems to articulate an internal division, ‘the shifting pattern of psychological domination and servitude within the individual ego’. [69]

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal
In the Phenomenology, there are repeated references to the splitting of self-consciousness into opposing extremes, and to the inescapable mirroring of one by the other. Both metaphors suggest that we are dealing, not with the activities of separate human beings, but with component parts of the individual psyche. In order to understand how this might be the case it is necessary to consider why we might think of there being two self-consciousnesses within a single person. According to Hegel, self-consciousness becomes self-consciousness rather than consciousness by differentiating itself from the content of consciousness, between an ‘I’ that is conscious and what that ‘I’ is conscious of. However, insofar as that ‘I’ is self-conscious what it is conscious of should be another ‘I’ and not a self-less object. So self-consciousness moves towards positing its content as another selfconsciousness, a double of itself.

In self-consciousness, therefore, we have a division and duplication which can be thought of as two selves. However, as Hegel makes clear, these two self-consciousnesses are inevitably also one and the same, and so they mirror each other: ‘Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same’. [70] This is where the problem starts, because both self-consciousnesses seek to establish their own selfhood, and selfhood has to be recognized by the other. (To think of yourself as a self, you have to think of yourself thinking of yourself as a self, but that makes the self you think of thinking of yourself as a self rather less of a self than you.) As a result, the two self-consciousnesses embark on the struggle for priority that initiates the dialectic.

It is possible to conceive of the dialectic taking place internally between two self-consciousnesses, one of which masters the other and uses it as the medium through which it is conscious of material reality. But Hegel’s account also employs several concepts such as recognition, fighting, and work—not to mention mastery and slavery themselves—that are extremely difficult to understand in anything other than interpersonal terms. And in the dialectic’s first formulation, in the System of Ethical Life, Hegel states that it is where there is ‘a plurality of individuals’ and their power of life is unequal, that the relation between them, as ‘person to person’, is that of lordship and bondage. [71] Thereafter, although the Phenomenology cast the dialectic primarily as the relation of self-consciousness with itself, there remained a tendency, evident in the Propaedeutic and especially in the Encyclopaedia, for Hegel to describe the master self-consciousness and servile self-consciousness as separate people.

If the master-slave dialectic is read as an inter-personal relationship, then the fact there is already more than one distinct self-consciousness can be assumed. In this context, recognition becomes more than just the acknowledgement of the integrity and independence of one’s own consciousness as an object; it now involves acknowledging another individual as free and giving him the respect due to someone in that state. Similarly, the fight is now a literal struggle in which one of the combatants, faced with the prospect of biological death, gives up his freedom and yields recognition to the other in return for his life.

Soul and History
What is unclear, however, is how Hegel thinks the intrapersonal development of self-consciousness, through what is only metaphorically a master-slave dialectic, is related to the interpersonal relations of actual masters and slaves in history. Since each implies the other—undeveloped consciousness is the cause of slavery and slavery causes the consciousness to develop—there must be some relationship, but what is it? Hegel does not give a direct answer, but it is nevertheless possible to argue that a particular type of relationship is implied both by the internal structure of the argument, and by the Aristotelian framework within which it is conceived. For Aristotle, the concept of slavery applied equally to the relation of the soul to the body and the master and to the slave—or tyrant to subject. For Hegel, the concept of slavery applied equally to the relation of the master self-consciousness to the servile self-consciousness and to the relations of actual masters and slaves—or tyrants and subjects. For Aristotle, the external relationship of master and slave is dependent upon and effected through the internal relationship between soul and body. Specifically, slaves are distinguished by a deficiency in their internal constitution which makes their souls incapable of mastering their bodies, and so makes their bodies properly subject to the souls of those who are capable of such mastery.

For Hegel, too, the external relation of master and slave depends on an internal one, namely that of self-consciousness to itself. If Hegel’s argument follows Aristotle—as it does up to this point, save that the role of soul and body has been transferred to master self-consciousness and servile self-consciousness—then slaves would be distinguished by some deficiency in self-consciousness such that of the duplicated self-consciousnesses, one could not master and enslave the other and so required another self-consciousness to do so. In which case, the external relation of master to slave would be effected through the master self-consciousness of one individual enslaving the self-consciousness of another, with the result that the master-slave dialectic would be simultaneously interand intrapersonal, being between different persons related as a single individual.

The plausibility of the above interpretation is suggested not only by its congruity with the Aristotelian framework within which Hegel’s argument is constructed, but by the fact that it is difficult to make sense of Hegel’s oscillation between the interand the intrapersonal without assuming that the master-slave dialectic is not just a case of self-consciousness relating to itself as though it were two persons, but also of two persons relating as though they were one self-consciousness. Evidence that this is so is provided by Hegel’s first tentative account of the relation of master and slave in the System of Ethical Life. Although Hegel is thinking of mastery and slavery in terms of interpersonal relations, he nevertheless maintains that within the relation of master and slave ‘the former is related to the latter as cause; indifferent itself, it is the latter’s life and soul or spirit’. [72] This definition, which recalls Aristotle’s account of slavery where the master is to the slave as soul to body, and so causes the action of which the slave is the instrument just as ‘the soul is the cause. . .of the living body’, [73] is restated still more explicitly in the Propaedeutic, where it is said that the slave ‘lacks a self and has another self [the master’s] in place of his own’. [74]

Sleepwalking and Slavery
However, it was not only Aristotle who offered a model of how two persons might function as one. Hegel’s description of one person being the soul of another also looks forward to his account of the relation of magnetizer and somnambulist in the Philosophy of Mind. The practice of animal magnetism, or mesmerism, in which the magnetist would place the patient into a magnetic sleep or trance so that they were subject to the magnetizer’s will was described by Kluge, one of Hegel’s sources, in terms of the mastery (Herrschaft) which the magnetizer exercised over the patient, [75] and Hegel’s remarks on the topic are significant both because they echo his first definition of the master-slave relation, and because in describing two persons as related so that one becomes the consciousness of the other they constitute a direct parallel to his other accounts of master and slave. According to Hegel,

The patient in this condition is accordingly made, and continues to be, subject to the power of another person, the magnetizer; so that when the two are thus in psychical rapport, the selfless individual, not really a ‘person’, has for his subjective consciousness the consciousness of the other. This latter self-possessed individual is thus the effective subjective soul of the former, and the genius which may even supply him with a train of ideas. [76]


In animal magnetism, therefore, we have an example of the way in which two separate individuals may come to function as one when one forfeits the freedom rooted in consciousness and the other becomes his consciousness, soul, and genius. [77] The relationship between them is then what Hegel calls a magical relationship, [78] i.e. a relationship in which one mind exercises unmediated influence over another, as does man over the animals, and the soul over the body when, in habit, it makes the body ‘a subservient, unresisting instrument of its will’. [79] Since the relations of soul to body and man to animal were standard Aristotelian analogues of the master-slave relation, this strongly suggests that Hegel thought of the relation of magnetizer to somnambulist in terms equivalent not only to his own account of master and slave but to Aristotle’s as well.

But unlike Aristotle’s theory of slavery, the theory of animal magnetism offered an account of how the selfless individual might gain from this loss of individual identity. According to Walther’s Physiologie des Menschen, a German medical textbook contemporary with Hegel’s Phenomenology, when two individuals are in magnetic rapport they experience an ‘intimate community of action such that one soul is in both of them’ except that ‘on one side there is an active and on the other a passive rapport’. However, Walther continues, ‘this relation can also be reversed in an instant and the somnambulist magnetize the magnetizer’. [80] So although the structure of the magnetic relation might be identical to that of Aristotle’s master and slave in that one person became part of another and one soul governed two bodies, it held within it the potential for that relationship to be overturned, and the positions reversed. [81] This possibility was implicit in the ambiguous position of the somnambulist: although, the somnambulist might be a selfless individual possessed by the soul, or consciousness, of the magnetizer, his individual soul was not so much annihilated as dissolved in the universal soul of the world. As Walther observed, ‘in magnetic sleep the soul is in intimate communion with the universal world soul’. [82] So although the somnambulist’s individual soul is functionally replaced by that of the magnetizer, it also participates in the universal soul which is shared with that of the magnetizer, with the result that, as Walther put it, ‘that which separates and divides them no longer exists’, and, by implication, the question of which of the two is dominant and which subordinate becomes secondary.

Pure Universality
Hegel rehearses the commonplace distinction between the individual and universal conceptions of the soul in his account of magnetism. [83] But for him, there is no straightforward exchange of individuality for universality in magnetic sleep, because the somnambulist loses full consciousness only to achieve a limited form of universality at a lower psychic level. [84] Despite this shift, it is not difficult to see the parallel with the master-slave dialectic where the slave exchanges individuality for universality at the same psychic level, namely that of self-consciousness. Just as the consciousness of the somnambulist becomes ‘an inward consciousness’ so, after the fight, the slave is ‘a consciousness forced back into itself’. [85] However, for the slave, unlike the somnambulist whose consciousness is reduced to the level of genius, there is no real loss: it is still a self-consciousness because, according to Hegel, the condition of self-consciousness without a self-object, ‘this pure universal movement, the absolute melting away of everything stable, is the essential nature of self-consciousness’. [86] So just as in the magnetic state the selfless somnambulist was thought to participate in what Hegel termed ‘the wholly universal being in which all differences are only ideal and which does not one-sidedly stand over against its Other’, [87] so in the master-slave dialectic the slave gains ‘the intuition of itself not as a particular existence distinct from others but as the implicit universal self’. [88]

Animal magnetism provided a model for an interpersonal relation that took the form an intrapersonal one, and in which the resulting loss of individuality for one party led to their participation in universality. Given that Hegel himself conceived the magnetic relation in terms parallel to that of the Aristotelian master and slave, and describes it in terms strongly reminiscent of the master-slave dialectic, it is difficult to believe that the dynamics of animal magnetism are not reflected in the dialectic itself. If so—and here, for the first time, it is necessary to go a little beyond what is explicitly stated by Hegel—it would suggest that master and slave are related as follows: the self-consciousness of the slave is the immediate self-consciousness of one whose self-consciousness, although perhaps duplicated has not progressed to one-sided, let alone mutual recognition. This self-consciousness is shattered in the fight with the result that the object of the slave’s self-consciousness becomes the consciousness of another individual—the master—without the object of the master’s self-consciousness thereby becoming the slave’s consciousness. From this position of one-sided recognition, in which the slave’s self-consciousness has as its object not itself but the consciousness of his master, the slave is emancipated first by the fact that not having an individual self-consciousness is the experience of universal self-consciousness, and secondly, by the fact that, through work, he once again becomes the object of his own self-consciousness—that is, universal self-consciousness. His self-consciousness then has as a double object itself and the master. Being thus doubly and universally self-conscious, the slave can no longer be a slave, because slavery is having for the object of self-consciousness the consciousness of another, and although the slave does have as its object of self-consciousness the consciousness of another he also has his own consciousness. The result of the dialectic is therefore that the servile self-consciousness is no longer merely servile: it has become ‘a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness’, and the individual whose self-consciousness became merely servile is no longer a slave.

Double Consciousness
In the Phenomenology, the result of the dialectic is that the servile consciousness recognizes its own being-for-self and the being-for-self of the master consciousness without grasping the identity of the two. For the servile consciousness, therefore, the outcome is that instead of having a single object—as was the case when self-consciousnesses were merely duplicated—it now has a double object: the self-consciousness of the master and the self-consciousness of itself. In reality, these are the same because both are universal self-consciousness, but their identity remains unperceived by the servile self-consciousness. [89] The situation is therefore the same as that of the unhappy consciousness where ‘the duplication which formerly was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now lodged in one. . .[but] it is not as yet explicitly aware that this is its essential nature, or that it is the unity of both’. [90]

The Violent Diremption of Spirit
In the Propaedeutic, this transition is implicitly interpreted at an interpersonal level and invested with greater significance: it is ‘the transition to Positive Freedom’, in which the former servile self-consciousness attains universal self-consciousness and so ‘recognizes itself and the other Self-Consciousnesses within it, and is, in turn, recognized by them’. [91] This conclusion is restated in the Encyclopaedia where Hegel avers that ‘universal self-consciousness is the affirmative awareness of self in an other self’. The appended Zusatz gives a fuller explanation of what this means: [92]

In this state of universal freedom, in being reflected into myself, I am immediately reflected into the other person, and, conversely, in relating myself to the other I am immediately self related. Here, therefore, we have the violent diremption of mind or spirit into different selves which are both in and for themselves and for one another, are independent, absolutely impenetrable, resistant, and yet at the same time identical with one another, hence not independent, not impenetrable, but, as it were, fused with one another. [93]

The contradictory nature of the dialectic at an interpersonal level is here stated as unambiguously as it can be. Just as the slave, in recognizing himself to be free, comes to recognize himself in the master, so, when the slave is free, the master comes to see himself in the slave. This development is then the model for the mutual recognition of all by all which characterizes universal self-consciousness. Each recognizes himself in the other, so everyone is simultaneously different and yet the same.

Read in the context of the Aristotelian framework within which it is constructed, the outcome of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic proves to be pointedly anti-Aristotelian. Aristotle had argued that there was a clear and unalterable division between slave and free, and that the institution of slavery, in its natural rather than its legal form, depended upon that division. But by Hegel’s time, this theory was clearly incompatible with the development of slavery in world history. That there had been slavery in many societies was indisputable, but so was the fact that slavery had disappeared from many of those societies and was moving towards abolition in the Americas. Aristotle had made no allowance for wholesale emancipation; in terms of his theory, it would mean either that none of those emancipated had ever really been slaves or else that all were still slaves and so incapable of self-government or of forming a state. [94] However, it was a matter of history that in Haiti slaves had formed a state. If, as Hegel appears to have done, one still thought of slavery in essentially Aristotelian terms, then the simplest way to interpret the evolution of slavery into freedom was to allow that contradiction which Aristotle had excluded: the idea that freemen might really be slaves, and that true slaves might not just be slaves but become free as well.

In both Hegel and Aristotle, the master-slave dyad is an interpersonal relation constructed as an intrapersonal one. In both cases this is made possible through the homology between mastery and slavery at an interpersonal level and some internal relationship constitutive of the individual person. In Aristotle, this is the relation of soul to body; in Hegel it is the relationship of self-consciousness to itself. For both philosophers, the condition of slavery is one in which the dominant internal pole of the master is related to the subordinated internal pole of the slave in the same way as it would be related to its own internal subordinate. One consequence of conceiving slavery in this way is that the potentially dominant pole of the subordinated individual remains, not of course fulfilling a dominant role, but as an unfulfilled potential or ineffectual residuum. According to Hegel, the irony of the master-slave relation lies in the fact that this potentially dominant pole is developed through the condition of slavery itself; that is, as a direct result of the subordinate pole’s subordination to another. It is because the servile selfconsciousness of the slave is dissolved and then used as a mere instrument that it gains recognition from itself, and so develops its own dominant pole—a recognized self-consciousness—alongside that of the master. If Hegel’s dialectic were translated back into Aristotelian terms, it would mean that because his body functioned as an instrument of action the slave’s soul became complete and so gained the same control of the body as that exercised by the master. The result would therefore be two complete souls in one body rather than two recognized self-consciousnesses in one person, and not just any two souls but the souls of master and slave—in Aristotelian terms a double impossibility, for the soul of a master could govern a slave’s body if, and only if, the slave’s soul were incapable of doing so.

One Body, Two Souls
Two souls in one body might have seemed like an impossibility to Aristotle, but in animal magnetism there was new, seemingly scientific, evidence to suggest not only that one soul might govern two bodies but that one body might contain two souls. From Puységur’s first experiments with magnetic sleep it was apparent that the difference between the waking and magnetic states of one individual were such that they had to be regarded as ‘two different existences’. [95] As one German contemporary of Hegel put it, the somnambulist ‘has a double being, one in the waking state, one in the magnetic crisis’, with the result that his ‘self-consciousness in the waking and the magnetic states appears to be truly double’. [96] In most accounts, this double consciousness is understood to take the form of an alternation between magnetic and waking states. However, insofar as the somnambulist retained some form of selfhood, the doubling in the magnetic state could be simultaneous. In Hegel’s account, the somnambulist loses its ‘adult, formed, and developed consciousness’ but ‘retains along with its content a certain nominal self-hood’. [97] In this condition, therefore, the individual is not self-consciousness but rather ‘a genius which beholds itself, with the consequence that in relation to the magnetizer,

When the substance of both is thus made one, there is only one subjectivity of consciousness: the patient has a sort of individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual. . .the somnambulist is thus brought into rapport with two genii and a twofold set of ideas, his own and that of the magnetizer. [98]
So although the somnambulist has only one consciousness, that of the magnetizer, he nevertheless retains his own genius alongside that of the magnetizer with whom he is in rapport. The doubling that takes place in the master-slave dialectic would seem to conform to this pattern except that the double self-consciousness that results is not the product of the conjunction of the master/magnetizer’s consciousness and the slave/somnambulist’s normal consciousness, but the conjunction of the master’s consciousness with the slave’s universal consciousness gained through slavery.

Mesmerism and the Dialectic
Hegel discussed animal magnetism at length only after he had formulated master-slave dialectic, but the close parallels between the two suggest not only that Hegel’s account of somnambulism may reflect the structure of the dialectic, but that the dialectic may itself draw on magnetic theory. It is impossible to prove this hypothesis beyond doubt, but given that Hegel’s account of animal magnetism is by no means unusual and that all the relevant ideas were in circulation long before Hegel formulated the dialectic, the parallels are unlikely to be fortuitous. As Robert Darnton has demonstrated, mesmerism provided a stimulus to radical political ideas before the French Revolution, and its emphasis upon the magnetic interconnectedness of all individuals lent support to theories of human equality and fraternity. [99] For Hegel, trying to square an essentially static Aristotelian conception of slavery with the historical dynamic of emancipation, the theory of animal magnetism may therefore have offered two vital insights into how slavery was transformed into freedom. It undermined the belief in the unity of the soul upon which Aristotle had insisted, and provided a way of describing how being enslaved, like being magnetized, might paradoxically be a step towards universality and freedom. [100]

Du Bois
The close analogy between Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the practice of animal magnetism may not have attracted much attention from Hegel scholars, but it was nevertheless intuited by Du Bois, who fused the two in his famous description of the double consciousness of the African American:

After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. . . One ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body. [101]

Although it has been noted that the idea of double consciousness reflects contemporary psychological theories derived from early nineteenth-century experiments in magnetism, and that it echoes Hegel’s account of the unhappy consciousness in the Phenomenology, the intimate connection between the two remains unexplored and the depth of Du Bois’s Hegelian insight unfathomed. [102] What has not been fully recognized is not only that for Du Bois double consciousness and the veil are two ways of describing the same condition, but that the imagery of veiling and second sight is just as much part of the vocabulary, of animal magnetism as double consciousness, and as such is used by Hegel himself. The attribution of double consciousness to emancipated slaves is therefore not just a literary appropriation of an Hegelian trope, [103] but a redeployment of the vocabulary of magnetism to elaborate the outcome of emancipation within the same terms as those used in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.

The Functions of the Veil
For Du Bois, the veil has three related functions. Sometimes it is the veil of the readers’ ignorance which the author promises to throw aside in order to reveal a truth that is hidden from view. More often it is the veil that divides black from white within American society, preventing members of each group from understanding the other. In drawing aside the veil, Du Bois is therefore not just uncovering any truth but specifically the truth about the black world that is hidden from his white readers. On other occasions, however, it appears that the veil lies not between black and white but rather within black American consciousness, dividing one consciousness from the other within a single individual. Insofar as this is the case, unveiling the truth about black people means not just revealing that something is veiled but revealing something veiled, something that continues to be partially hidden even as it is uncovered.

It is the veil within consciousness that is movingly evoked by Du Bois in his description of his own son in ‘Of the Passing of the FirstBorn’:

How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown. . .Why was his hair tinted with gold?. . .Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?. . .And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. [104]

And just as the mixed ancestry of Du Bois’s child contributed to the double coding of his features, so the double lives of American Negroes create a comparable doubling within:

From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American. . .must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals [105]

According to Du Bois, the interpersonal veil that divides black from white in America is internalized with the result that the black American develops not merely the two consciousnesses appropriate to being a (white) American on the one hand and a black (nonAmerican) but also the veil between them. And because white and black are veiled from one another, the American Negro is veiled from himself, able to see himself either as an American or as a Negro but not as both at the same time.

Century of Human Sympathy
Although Du Bois regards the double consciousness and the veil as a partially negative state of affairs, there can be little doubt that it only exists as a result of the growing rapport between white and black. It is never explicitly stated by Du Bois, but of the social changes that formed double consciousness the most important was the slow, painful dawning of mutual recognition between slave and master which Hegel called ‘the affirmative awareness of self in an other self’. [106] Du Bois gives a lyrical description of this process in his essay on Alexander Crummell:

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhopper and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, ‘Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?’ And then all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, ‘O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?’ [107]

This diffusion of human sympathy meant that white Americans were able to see that blacks were Americans too. On the other side, it meant not only that blacks saw the dependency of the whites but that they also began to recognize self in other. For the young Alexander Crummell, the effect of this spreading recognition was a new ability to picture himself within the world of the master, to see as Du Bois puts it, ‘the blue and gold of life’. For black Americans whose consciousness was formed in this period, it might therefore be said that they were born with the psychic equivalent of the division that Du Bois saw physically inscribed on his own son: with only the shadow of the veil separating the blue and gold from the brown and the olive.

Being born with a veil is therefore not quite the same as being born within the veil. It is not just a matter of being born black in a white man’s world; it is rather the condition of being born black in a world that is divided but, thanks to the diffusion of human sympathy and the ending of slavery, also imaginatively interconnected and practically interdependent. [108] It is the conjunction of the two which ensures that the external veil becomes an internal one, and that the post-bellum generation of African-Americans are not so much unknown as partially known, both visible and invisible at the same time.

Gift of Second Sight
The corollary of this is, as Du Bois puts it, that the American black is both ‘born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight’. The imagery is again drawn from the vocabulary of magnetism. According to the nineteenth-century British magnetist William Gregory, when the magnetist, or operator, puts the patient into a trance ‘there is in many cases a veil, as it were, drawn before the [patient’s] eyes, concealing the operator’s face and other objects’. [109] The result, as Hegel had put it, was that when the soul is sunk in magnetic sleep ‘all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside it and its relationship to that world, is under a veil’. [110]

In the Philosophy of Mind, the relationship between veiling and second sight is spelt out in a Zusatz dealing with the possibility of the somnambulist’s clairvoyant foreknowledge of future events, which Hegel, using the English phrase, terms ‘second sight’. According to Hegel, when magnetized,

The clairvoyant is in a state of concentration and contemplates this veiled life of his with all its content in a concentrated manner. In the determinateness of this concentrated state, the determinations of space and time are also veiled. . .But since the clairvoyant is, at the same time, an ideational being he must make outwardly apparent these determinations veiled in his concentrated life. [111]

In other words, although the feeling soul of the somnambulist may apprehend something without the mediation of time, it is nevertheless expressed through the mediation of time, with the result that it effectively—although not metaphysically—constitutes foreknowledge of a future event. Hegel is unwilling to allow that this ability extends very far, but nevertheless asserts that ‘Especially among Highlanders, the faculty of so-called ‘second sight’ is even now not uncommon. Persons with this gift see themselves double, see themselves in situations and circumstances in which they will find themselves only subsequently’. [112]

Although Hegel applies ‘second sight’ only to premonitions of the future, in most accounts of magnetism the term was used to describe all forms of clairvoyant ability in the magnetic state. So although a somnambulist might be veiled in the sense that she was unable to see what was immediately in front of her, she could nevertheless simultaneously acquire a second sight, a clairvoyant ability to see things that she would not normally be able to see, such as events that had not yet taken place, the contents of rooms she has not visited etc. Being veiled and clairvoyant are therefore two aspects of the same condition, and the result is potentially a form of double vision in that if—as Hegel forgetfully suggests—the ordinary waking consciousness were not under a veil, the somnambulist would see both what she would ordinarily see and what they see with her second sight.

Clairvoyance and Somnambulism
How then does this pattern of veiling and second sight relate to the condition of double consciousness—or as Hegel, put it, twofold genius? Since a somnambulist is veiled, in that she is unable to see what would be seen by her usual consciousness, and clairvoyant insofar as she sees what is visible to her second consciousness, if that consciousness is that of the magnetizer, she sees what he sees, but if she is open to other influences, she may see what they see. Veiling and clairvoyance are, in other words, ways of describing the condition of double consciousness from the perspective of the single consciousness: what is veiled is simply the content of the first consciousness, what is seen with second sight is what is seen with the second consciousness. (However, if one conceives of two consciousnesses with equal claims to priority, there is no reason why one should not reverse the terms and think of the second consciousness as veiled whenever the first consciousness is operating, and of ‘first sight’ as a kind of clairvoyance.)

There is, in other words, a deep coherence in Du Bois’s imagery of veiling, double consciousness, and second sight, not only in that they can all be traced to Hegel, but in that they are all recognisably descriptions of the same magnetic condition. But in applying these terms to the emancipated slave, Du Bois is clearly not just appropriating the vocabulary of magnetic theory for his own purposes, for Hegel had himself suggested that the outcome of the master-slave dialectic, and, by implication, the struggle for emancipation in the Americas, was a form of double consciousness. Du Bois is, in other words drawing on the magnetic parallel to the master-slave dialectic to explicate the outcome of the dialectic itself. And although Du Bois does not deploy the full version of argument from the Phenomenology—with its emphasis on fear and work—the Aristotelian assumption that slavery is an interpersonal relationship that has the form of an intrapersonal one is retained. The basic reason for double consciousness is that those who possess it have been possessed by others. They see themselves through the eyes of another because their minds have been taken over by others. But the fundamental Hegelian move which Du Bois preserves is that emancipation does not take the form of throwing off this parasitic consciousness but of gaining one’s own sense of self in addition to it, and as a result not only seeing the other in oneself, but seeing one’s self not only in one’s self but in the other as well.

Slavery and the Self
Aristotle, Hegel, and Du Bois each offers a description of slavery at a particular historical moment. Aristotle describes the position of the slave in a world where slave labour is an essential and unquestioned part of the economy; Hegel tries to articulate the dynamic of emancipation at a time when colonial slavery is slowly beginning to dissolve; Du Bois describes the condition of the emancipated slave in the aftermath of the American Civil War. But although each account broadly endorses the situation it describes, at a deeper level all are mutually compatible, for Du Bois is using Hegel’s account of the master-slave relation, which in turn is based on the Aristotelian theory of slavery.

The suggestion that Du Bois thinks of slavery in the same terms as Atistotle may appear surprising, but if Du Bois’s account of double consciousness is taken seriously, we have to accept that Aristotle offers a description of the condition of the slave that may, at one level, be largely accurate. On this view, what Aristotle uncovered was not a metaphysical truth that justified the institution of slavery, but something of the duality inherent in the condition of the slave. As many commentators have noted, slavery is liable to generate conceptual difficulties for anyone trying to give a systematic account of the institution in terms of standard binary oppositions. [113] The slave is alive, but socially dead; a being who can be called upon to perform any human function without thereby acquiring the status associated with it; a personality without personhood. Aristotle recognized these contradictions and tried to accommodate them within his theory. In so doing he highlighted two features of slavery crucial to subsequent interpretations. The first was that the easiest way to express the contradictions of slavery was by assuming that slaves had a dual identity: one qua slave and one qua human being; one in which they functioned like a soulless body or tool, and one in which they had a soul like, but not quite the same as, the free. The second was that insofar as the slave was a slave, the master’s humanity took the place of the slave’s. As a result the slave became part of the master: a body governed by the master’s soul.

In Aristotle, these two features of slavery were not, and indeed could not be, brought together. However, his account of how the master used a slave as a soul used a body suggested that slavery might be seen as something akin to spirit possession in which the body of one individual was possessed by the spirit or soul of another. Animal magnetism provided a seemingly scientific example of this relation, and offered an example of how the psychic duality implied by Aristotle might be realized. In Hegel, this model is used to argue that emancipation works not, as might be supposed, by the consciousness of the slave ejecting the psychic parasite but by developing a full consciousness alongside it. Hegel’s argument reflects the Aristotelian assumption that natural slaves, being incomplete, do not cease to be slaves if they no longer have masters, and suggests that slaves can only become truly free by developing what they lack. But the argument can nevertheless be used by those who do not suppose slavery to have any such metaphysical foundation. Insofar as Aristotle merely inscribed the social contradictions of slavery within the soul(s) of slaves, the Hegelian account of emancipation can be understood in terms of social identity as well, and it was on this level that Du Bois found Hegel’s argument applicable to his own situation. What we find in Du Bois is a tacit acceptance both of the idea that slavery involves some kind of fracture or division of the self, and of the Hegelian point that freedom does not reunite the self so much as allow the fractured self to realize its implicit duality.

Slavery and Tyranny
This progression from Aristotle to Hegel to Du Bois is not just a curious piece of intellectual history, a genealogy of ideas about slavery and selfhood that has no bearing on the history of actual selves or on the social realities of life during and after slavery. On the contrary, each account is a description of the relationship between slavery and the self at a particular point of time. Of course, it can be argued that each writer misconstrued the situation he described, but even if this could be shown, there is no gainsaying the fact that each account seems to have been accepted by many of those subsequently involved on both sides of the relationship. Aristotle’s theory of slavery was found to be serviceable account of the master-slave relation by generations of European slaveholders; Hegel’s master-slave dialectic seems to have struck a chord not only with Du Bois, but also with many of those engaged in struggles for liberation of other kinds; Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness has served as a paradigm for the interpretation of the African-American experience for almost a century. Given that all of these accounts rely on the same basic model of how that relation operates, the fact that so many of those involved on both sides seem to have found one or another version of that model applicable to their own situation indicates that the model reflects the lived experience not just of slavery but—as Aristotle and Hegel implied—of forms of tyranny as well.

One consequence of this argument is that it suggests that the double and multiple selves of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and psychology may reflect the multiple social emancipations that have occurred in the same period. [114] However, the point I want to make here is not so much that Aristotle, Hegel and Du Bois have collectively articulated the essential truth of domination and emancipation, as that the adoption of the same underlying model will have made that model constitutive of the relationship between slavery and selfhood, and that insofar as the model has provided the partern for other discourses of emancipation—whether of gender, race, or class—the selves formed through these liberations are liable to have the same characteristics. This would be irrelevant if what we understand as the self is what Taylor calls the punctual self of continuous self-perception. But if we share Taylor and MacInryre’s understanding of what selves are within the framework of moral enquiry, then the model of master-slave relations outlined above must be taken as offering a valid insight into the self and its history. As Taylor argued in his influential paper ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, ‘As men we are self-defining beings, and we are partly what we are in virtue of the self-definitions which we have accepted, however we have come by them’. [115] So if people find it helpful to think of themselves or of others as double or multipIe selves, then this interpretation cannot easily be dismissed as ‘an overdramatized image’. On the contrary, we may have to accept—as Taylor argues we do of virtue terms—that ‘if we cannot deliberate effectively, or understand and explain people’s action illuminatingly, without such terms. . .then these are real fearures of our world’. [116]

Multiplication through History
If so, the implications for Taylor and MacIntyre’s projects are considerable. Both philosophers offer a sharply drawn contrast between the self as a single character embedded within historical and social narratives, and what MacIntyre terms the emotivist or unencumbered self, and Taylor the neutral or punctual self, which has no history, belongs to no community, and imagines itself free to assume or reject any identity or moral orientation. But if we take seriously the picture of the double or multiple self formed through the process of enslavement and emancipation, then this suggests there is another alternative: a self that has no single identity or orientation not because it lacks a place in history but rather because it cannot escape it. Such selves pose a problem for both MacIntyre and Taylor. For although slavery offers just the sort of historical narrative which both consider morally relevant—MacIntyre actually cites being a descendant or beneficiary of slaveholders as something constitutive of the identity of a modern American [117]—insofar as it involves a duplication of the self it can hardly be accommodated within theories that rely upon the idea of having a single location in moral space as the foundation of objective moral judgement. If, as MacIntyre claims, ‘What is better or worse for X depends upon the character of that intelligible narrative which provides X’s life with its unity’, [118] then what can be said about those whose communal narratives have given their lives disunity, and whose personal quests seem to lead in opposite directions?

That MacIntyre and Taylor’s understanding of the moral self seems inapplicable to the duplicated selves formed through slavery is probably no accident, for the emphasis upon the unity of virtues and the corresponding unity of the life that embodies those virtues is taken directly from Aristotle. Aristotle, of course, denied that slaves exercised virtue except performing actions commanded by the master, and claimed that any virtue associated with those actions was the master’s rather than the slave’s. MacIntyre is naturally affronted by this, but nevertheless maintains that rejecting Aristotle’s view on this point ‘need not carry any large implications for our attitudes to his overall theory’. [119] However, things may not be so easy. Indeed, the possibility that Aristotle may have had a more accurate view of the limitations of his own theory is suggested by Taylor in ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’. Not only are we partly constituted through self-definition, but

What definitions we understand and what ones we don’t understand, is closely linked to the self-definitions which help to constitute what we are. . .[and] we have great difficulty grasping definitions whose terms structure the world in ways which are utterly different from, incompatible with our own. [120]

If this is true, anyone who defines themselves as a united, single self will find it extraordinarily difficult to understand the world from the perspective of those who define themselves otherwise. And the inevitable result of building a moral theory around an understanding of the self that is less than universal will be that any selves that do not fit will be excluded from consideration as moral subjects. The possible consequences may be illustrated by Nietzsche, a philosopher with whose project MacIntyre and Taylor have rather more in common than they care to acknowledge.

Nietzsche or Du Bois?
Du Bois was not the only late nineteenth-century writer to describe the doubling that resulted from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, or to see a parallel between this psychological multiplication and racial mixture. Nietzsche made the same point in Beyond Good and Evil:

The German soul is above all manifold. . .A German who would make bold to say ‘two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast’ would violate the truth rather grossly, or, more precisely, would fall short of the truth by a good many souls. As a people of the most monstrous mixture and medley of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element. . .the Germans are more incomprehensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even frightening than other people are to themselves. [121]
That this multiplication of souls is in part the consequence of a master-slave dialectic becomes evident later in the same section where Nietzsche not only claims that ‘the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul’ was ‘brought into a system by Hegel’, but cites the fusion of noble and slavish moralities in a single individual:

There are master morality and slave morality—I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other—even in the same human being, within a single soul. [122]

The ‘intermarriage of master and slave’ that has created democracy is just another form of the racial mixture that has created the German race, because, according to Nietzsche, those who exhibit the oppressive and vindictive instincts of slave morality are ‘the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all pre-Aryan population in particular’. [123]

The German Soul
At a descriptive level, Nietzsche’s claim about the manifold nature of the German soul echoes the model of slavery found in Aristotle, Hegel, and Du Bois. The noble, he claims in Beyond Good and Evil, is a ‘whole human being’; [124] the slave is an ‘incomplete human being’, [125] and the emancipatory mingling of the two, which he termed ‘the slave revolt in morals’, results in both types being found in one person who then becomes ‘a battleground for these oppositions’. [126] However, despite his reputation as a celebrant of psychic multiplicity, Nietzsche’s response to this situation is not that of Du Bois who envisages a merger or truce in which neither self is lost or even adulterated, but in which the moral climate changes to accommodate this doubling and so ‘make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows’. [127] On the contrary, Nietzsche, who was, as Graham Parkes observes ‘as against democracy intrapsychically as he is in politics’ [128]—wants to redefine morality in order to avoid the possibility that Du Bois’s hope might be realized. [129]

The moves through which he seeks to accomplish this will be familiar to any reader of MacIntyre or Taylor. He first shifts the focus of moral enquiry from actions to human subjects because ‘It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions’. [130] He then moves from ontology to sociology by arguing that we should think of human subjects not as isolated individuals but in their historical and social particularity because ‘One cannot erase from the soul of a human being what his ancestors most liked to do and did most constantly’. [131] He finally argues that moral reasoning itself, the ‘orientation to the good’ as Taylor calls it, presupposes a particular type of human selfhood, namely that of nobles, the ‘whole human beings’ whose descriptions of the good are ‘a triumphant affirmation of itself’, [132] as opposed to slaves, who being weak and incomplete, inevitably orient their morality outwards, and say ‘no to an ‘outside’, to an ‘other’, to a ‘non-self’. [133]

The implication of this is, as Nietzsche puts it, that ‘Today. . .when only the herd animal receives and dispenses honour in Europe. . .today the concept of greatness entails being noble’ [134]—not, in other words, being incomplete like a slave, or even divided against oneself like those in whom master and slave coexist and in whom the slave treats the master as not-self, but having an inclusive wholeness. Nietzsche is not naive enough to suppose that any return to simple unity is possible, but his response to the manifold nature of the soul is nevertheless to call for its realization from within wholeness, for what he terms ‘wholeness in manifoldness’. This move is precisely the opposite of that envisaged by Du Bois. Nietzsche is not contemplating the acceptance of divided selves nor even the synthesis of many in one. For him, multiplicity is essentially negative. As he put it in a note of 1888:

The antagonism of the passions—the double, treble, and multiple soul in one breast: this is very unhealthy, it is a sign of inner ruin and disintegration, betraying and promoting internal duality and anarchy—unless of course one passion becomes master. [135]

What Nietzsche recommends is an internal tyranny in which one dominating passion enslaves the others, [136] and so allows the soul to attain universality, the expansion of one into many achieved by Goethe who ‘aspired to. . .totality. . .[and] disciplined himself to a whole’. Such a person would then have ‘universality in understanding and affirmation’, and become ‘a man to whom nothing is forbidden, except it be a weakness’. [137]

Nietzschean Man
The fact that MacIntyre and Taylor are treading in Nietzsche’s footprints is hardly surprising given that both paths lead to the same destination. Aristotle is the source of Nietzsche’s ‘great-souled man’, who although ‘capable of being as manifold as whole’ is a being in whom all virtues are one, [138] and Aristotle too provides the model for the unitary moral subject of MacIntyre and, at one remove, of Taylor. In this respect, MacIntyre’s famous question ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’ could not be more misleading. Nietzschean man may not appear within Taylor and MacIntyre’s work in all his sociopathic glory, but it is nevertheless the unified moral self of the master, and not the doubled, divided, or multiplied self of the (former) slave, that is the focus and bearer of moral discourse.

The suspicion that the ethics of the unified moral subject is simply another name for the morality of the masters is hardly dispelled when, at the very end of After Virtue, MacIntyre tries to avoid this implication and distance himself from Nietzsche by pointing out that

. . .if the conception of a good has to be expounded in terms of. . .the narrative unity of a human life and of a moral tradition, then goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can be discovered only by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central vision is a shared vision of and understanding of goods. [139]

The problem is, Nietzsche got there before him. He too noted that ‘as a good man, one belongs to the ‘good’, a community that has a communal feeling’. [140] But he had no hesitation in specifying the type of community in which such a shared vision of the good would be found:

The profound reverence for age and tradition—all law rests on this double reverence—the faith and prejudice in favour of ancestors and disfavour of those yet to come are typical of the morality of the powerful. [141]

Small wonder that some empirical researchers have found it difficult to locate individuals who exhibit a strong sense of a unified self save amongst the most powerful groups within contemporary society. [142] From Aristotle onwards, having a unified moral self has been seen as a privilege confined to a social elite. When challenged by the multiple emancipations of modernity, the reactionary response, exemplified by Nietzsche, has been to reassert the unified self of the master morality in order to exclude the multiple selves engendered by the success of slave morality. It is this response that is echoed by the leading moral philosophers of our time.



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[*] I am grateful to Marcus Wood and Michael Inwood who read an earlier version of this text and made many helpful comments.
[1] C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, ma 1989.
[2] A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London 1981, p. 22.
[3] Taylor, Sources, p. 5.
[4] Ibid., p. 34.
[5] Ibid., p. 35.
[6] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 205.
[7] Taylor, Sources, p. 50.
[8] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 191 and p. 203.
[9] Taylor, Sources, p. 51.
[10] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, New York 1989, p. 165 and p. 5.
[11] David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1863–1919, New York 1993, p. 96.
[12] Ibid., p. 199. See also E.J. Sundquist, To Wake The Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Cambridge, ma 1993, and P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London 1993.
[13] See L. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, London 1959.
[14] Quoted in P.A. Brunt, ‘Aristotle and Slavery’ in Studies in Greek History and Thought, Oxford 1993, p. 351.
[15] Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, ma 1932, p. 27 (1255a, 25–8).
[16] Aristotle, Politics, p. 27 (1255a, 31–2).
[17] Ibid., p. 17 (1253b, 23–1254a, 8).
[18] Ibid., p. 23 (1254b, 25–6).
[19] Ibid., p. 17 (1254a, 8–13).
[20] Ibid., p. 29 (1255b, 11–2).
[21] Ibid., p. 23 (1254b, 27ff.).
[22] Ibid., p. 63 (1260a, 12).
[23] Ibid., p. 567 (1327b, 27–9).
[24] Ibid., p. 23 (1254b, 22–3).
[25] Ibid., pp. 21–3 (1254b, 15–20).
[26] My analysis here follows that in R. Schlaifer, ‘Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle’, in M.I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge 1960, p. 195f.
[27] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thompson, Harmondsworth 1976, p. 276 (1160b, 29–30).
[28] Aristotle, Politics, p. 21 (1254b, 4–5).
[29] Ibid., p. 203 (1278b, 33ff).
[30] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, p. 90 (1102b, 34–5).
[31] Aristotle, Politics, p. 67 (1260b, 5–7).
[32] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, p. 278 (1161a, 32-1161b, 6).
[33] Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. W.S. Hett, Cambridge, ma 1936, p. 43 (407b, 20ff.).
[34] Ibid., p. 63 (411b, 10).
[35] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, p. 275 (1160a, 36–1160b, 1).
[36] Aristotle, Politics, p. 249 (1285a, 20f.).
[37] Ibid., p. 327 (1295a, 23).
[38] Most recently by Steven B. Smith in ‘Hegel on Slavery and Domination’, Review of Metaphysics 46, 1992, pp. 97–124.
[39] For example, C. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology’, nlr 142, November–December 1983, pp. 67–75; P. Osborne, The Politics of Time, Verso, London 1995, p. 72.
[40] Die Politik des Aristotles, 2 vols, trans. C. von Garve, edited with notes by G.G. Fülleborn, Bteslau 1799–1802, 1, pp. 14, 18, 58.
[41] Ibid., II, p. 69.
[42] ‘Eigene Gedanken über Sclaverei und Despotie’, Ibid., II, pp. 135–165.
[43] On Hegel’s earlier use of Garve’s works see H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801, Oxford 1972, pp. 35–8, and L. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807, Cambridge 1987, pp. 188–94.
[44] Aristotle, Politics, p. 65 (1260a, 34–1260b, 5).
[45] Die Politik, 11, pp. 142–3. (The translation is by John Baildam).
[46] Ibid., p. 143.
[47] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford 1977. p. 119 (196). In references to Hegel the page number in the translation quoted is given first, followed by the section number.
[48] Ibid., p. 118 (195).
[49] G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, (Part iii of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences) trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Millar, Oxford 1971, p. 174 (434Z). Hereafter abbreviated as Enc. iii. The Zusätze are based on lecture notes used by Hegel or taken by his students in courses for which the Encyclopaedia was the textbook. Although not prepared for publication by Hegel himself, they provide a good indication of the overall structure of his thinking and the analogies he perceived between it and other historical developments.
[50] Ibid., p. 175 (435Z).
[51] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge 1975, p. 183.
[52] Ibid., p. 177.
[53] Ibid., p. 183; cf. Aristotle, Politics, p. 7 (1252b, 5f.).
[54] Ibid., p. 182; cf. Aristotle, Politics, p. 249 (1285a, 20f.).
[55] For the historical background see R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848, Verso, London 1988.
[56] Hegel, LPWH., p. 184.
[57] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 92 (402Z).
[58] Ibid., p. 146 (410Z).
[59] Die Politik, 1, p. 19.
[60] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 144 (410Z).
[61] Ibid., p. 176 (436).
[62] Hegel, LPWH, p. 184.
[63] Ibid., p. 177.
[64] Ibid., p. 178; Enc. iii, p. 165 (424Z).
[65] Ibid., p. 176 (436Z).
[66] Ibid., p. 174 (433Z).
[67] Ibid., p. 43 (393Z). D.B. Davis relates this event to the master-slave dialectic in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, Ithaca 1975, pp. 557–64.
[68] There is an extensive secondary literature on the dialectic, some of the best known readings are gathered in J. O’Neill, ed., Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, Albany 1996.
[69] G.A. Kelly, ‘Notes on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”’, Review of Metaphysics, 19, 1966, p. 784. See also J. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Boston 1892, pp. 209ff.
[70] Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 112 (182).
[71] G.W.F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox, Albany 1979, p. 125.
[72] Hegel, System, p. 125.
[73] Aristotle, On the Soul, p. 87 (415b, 9).
[74] Hegel, Propaedeutic, p. 62 (35).
[75] C.A.F. Kluge, Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus, als Heilmittel, Berlin 1815. A list of references is given in the index, p. 475.
[76] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 104 (406).
[77] Ibid., p. 116 (406Z).
[78] Ibid., p. 95 (405).
[79] Ibid., p. 97 (405Z).
[80] P. F. von Walther, Physiologie des Menschen, 2 vols., Landshut 1807–8, ii, p. 363.
[81] Hegel discusses this possibility in the Encyclopaedia, p. 121 (406Z).
[82] Walther, Physiologie, ii, p. 363.
[83] Ibid., pp. 109–110 (406z).
[84] Ibid., p. 110 (406z).
[85] Hegel, ibid., p. 103 (406); Phenomenology, p. 117 (193).
[86] Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 117 (194).
[87] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 109 (406Z); cf. p. 105 (406).
[88] Hegel, Propaedeutic, p. 63 (38).
[89] Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 120 (197).
[90] Ibid., p. 126 (206 and 207).
[91] Hegel, Propaedeutic, p. 63 (38).
[92] Jegel, Enc. iii,p. 176 (436).
[93] Ibid., p. 177 (436Z).
[94] Aristotle, Politics, p. 213 (1280a, 32).
[95] Quoted in A. Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, New Haven 1993, p. 42. Although it pays little attention to the early nineteenth century German sources, Crabtree’s is the best available history of animal magnetism and its relationship to double consciousness and multiple personality.
[96] C.A. von Eschenmayer, Versuch die scheinbare Magie des thierischen Magnetismus, Vienna 1816, p. 57 and p. 56.
[97] Hegel, Enc.iii, p. 103 (406);
[98] Ibid., p. 104 (406).
[99] R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Cambridge, ma 1968.
[100] For an account of George Eliot’s independent but parallel use of animal magnetism to create a master-slave dialectic see M. Bull, ‘Mastery and Slavery in The Lifted Veil’, Essays in Criticism, 48, 1998, pp. 244–61.
[101] Du Bois, Souls, p. 5.
[102] The best and most recent study, which contains references to all the earlier literature, is S. Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903, Chicago 1995.
[103] This is Zamir’s approach in Dark Voices, pp. 113 ff. Zamir provides much valuable information on Du Bois’s interest in Hegel (he studied with Royce and Santayana at Harvard) and on nineteenth-century American Hegelianism, but ignores the Encyclopaedia and so does not note the parallels between Hegel and Du Bois discussed below.
[104] Du Bois. Souls, p. 170.
[105] Ibid., pp. 164–5.
[106] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 176 (436).
[107] Du Bois, Souls, p. 178. On Du Bois’s identification of Crummell’s personal odyssey with emancipation from slavery see Sundquist, To Wake, p. 518.
[108] Although it may therefore be true that the condition of double consciousness is experienced more acutely in proportion to the extent of integration into white society, there seems little basis for Zamir’s claim that double consciousness is confined to a black middle-class elite (Dark Voices, p. 116).
[109] W. Gregory, Letters to a Candid Enquirer on Animal Magnetism, London 1851, p. 78.
[110] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 103 (406). Wallace’s translation was first published in 1894 and would therefore have been available to Du Bois.
[111] Ibid., p. 112. (406Z). The Zusätze were not translated by Wallace, but were included in the collected German edition of 1845 which Du Bois, who spent two years in Berlin, would have been quite capable of reading.
[112] Ibid., p. 113 (406Z).
[113] O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, ma 1982, pp. 35–76. See also D.B. David, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca 1966.
[114] See K. Miller, Doubles, Oxford 1985, and I. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple, Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton 1995.
[115] C. Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, Review of Metaphysics, 25, 1971, p. 47.
[116] Taylor, Sources, p. 69.
[117] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 205.
[118] Ibid., p. 209.
[119] Ibid., p. 152.
[120] Taylor, ‘Interpretation’, p. 47.
[121] F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York 1956, 244 (references to Nietzsche’s works are to sections not page numbers). The quoration ‘two souls. . .’ is from Goethe’s Faust.
[122] Ibid., 260.
[123] F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith, Oxford 1996, i. 11.
[124] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 257.
[125] Ibid., 258.
[126] Nietzsche, Genealogy, I.16.
[127] Du Bois, Souls, p. 5.
[128] G. Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology, Chicago 1995, p. 348.
[129] Despite the fact that both are independently recognised to have been responding to Hegel, the comparison between Nietzsche and Du Bois awaits serious exploration. However, the contrast should not be overstated: Nietzsche acknowledges the creativity of slave morality; Du Bois idealizes aristocracy within his own racial community.
[130] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
[131] Ibid., 264.
[132] Nietzsche, Genealogy, I.10; Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
[133] Nietzsche, Genealogy, I.10.
[134] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 212.
[135] F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York 1967, 778.
[136] Ibid., 384.
[137] F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth 1968, 49
[138] See W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 4th ed., Princeton 1974, pp. 382–4.
[139] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 240.
[140] F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann, Harmondsworth 1995, 45.
[141] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
[142] See C. Lemert, ‘Dark Thoughts about the Self, in C. Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford 1994, pp. 100–29.