Philosophers in Bondage
Curiously, the staggering epigraph to his Counternarratives, “Slavery is the social situation of philosophy,” which John Keene attributes to Fred Moten, wasn’t something Moten actually wrote or said. It was, rather, Keene’s creative paraphrase, and given its obscure origin, communality, and refinement in transmission, it is tempting to read it as a sort of folk insight that has crystallized more or less in plain view.
At first confrontation, as examples of the ways in which the master-slave template has colored the history of western thought swirl about one’s mind, the simple observation seems damning, as if the whole philosophical enterprise had been contaminated from the outset by the circumstances of its birth. Has it perhaps benefitted from the institution of slavery in the same way that the prosperity of the United States was built upon the labor, thwarted lives, and early deaths of generations of kidnapped and brutalized Africans and their descendants, or even engaged in a pact of silence with the practice that secretly rendered the leisure, or freedom, dubiety, or wonder that are said to be its pre-conditions possible, hijacking its ostensibly noble, and universal, mission from the start? Is there not, at the very least, something systemic if not inherent in a rhetorical tradition that arose amidst slavery that indelibly marks it as the product of such a society? Can there not be?
Of course slavery had already existed for millennia prior to the dawn of philosophy, and there is virtually no known civilization in which it has not played a role, though many of them never developed formal philosophical pursuits, however limited in scope. But still, for all that it might be more safely true to say that slavery is the social situation of civilization more generally, the simple fact that philosophy came into being and persisted through age upon age within a social order that accepted slavery as a given, all the while purporting to teach right living or to ponder the mystery of Being, is devastating.
Slavery was indeed practiced in ancient Athens during the era in which philosophy as we understand it in the West arose. Aristocrats, Plato and Aristotle certainly owned slaves, probably quite a few, while their lowlier mentor, Socrates (who, we may recall, declined recourse to the expedients of privilege to evade the bonds of the state when it found him capitally guilty of impiety and corrupting the young, thereby forever insinuating the ambiguity that is the philosopher’s ultimate duty toward reality into western culture), is said to have prevailed upon wealthy acolytes to purchase Phaedo of Elis, who, as the son of a fallen enemy, had been enslaved, and presumably dragooned into prostitution, in his youth, in order to set him free. Rare among philosophers, Aristotle explicitly pondered the question of a rationale for slavery, though he concluded that, like the subservience of women, it reflects a fact of nature, that some of us are simply inferior to or weaker than others, “natural slaves,” as he called them¹ (hence, that the unequal treatment of some human beings is justified and the existing order vindicated, in that respect at least).² Although expositors tend to focus on the vision-enabling figure of the sun in the foundational paradigm of western metaphysics, Plato’s allegory of the cave features human beings who are shackled and prevented thereby from discovering, much less exercising, the full potential of their faculties. If the sort of bondage he intends to depict is more epistemological than existential, it nevertheless inaugurates the philosophical project under the aspect of a form of subjugation, portraying the philosopher as the would-be liberator who has not only escaped his bonds and discovered (the) truth – note that it was not the truth that set him free – but returned to reveal to his fellow prisoners, who of course cannot easily credit his ravings, the path to freedom. Bondage is thus established as the normal state of humankind, a consistent theme which, under various guises, permeates the history of philosophical thinking.³ We might therefore be forgiven for concluding that the very fact of philosophy implies that something is wrong, a breach in our relationship with the world, society, ourselves; it signifies and, at its best, it potentiates discomfort. Novalis said that philosophy is homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere, but this is only the positive, hopeful, best-of-a-bad-situation aspect of the essential alienation that it bespeaks.
Philosophy proper (a disturbing but persistent notion) has seldom discussed slavery per se, though it has, one imagines in accordance with a Freudian dynamic, often been drawn to imagery and language that prevail upon it. In its pages, we have been slaves to the flesh, to habit, to fear, to pleasure, to hope, to fortune, to belief, to sin, to our ignorance, and collaterally, to our knowledge, to our weakness, to our pettiness, to the self, to the state, to patriarchy, to capital, to labor, to wages, to time, to language, to prejudice, to reason, even to philosophy itself, and in Hegel, to our “lord and master, death.” But, much like the American revolutionaries who, resisting external tyranny, declared that all men are naturally endowed with liberty even as they themselves kept slaves, few thinkers – perhaps not surprisingly, as the primary audience of philosophy (if not necessarily philosophers themselves) has always been elites – have recognized the disjunction between their ethical, and in less transparent ways their epistemological theories, and the moment by moment reality of the lives of the enslaved, which necessarily affects their reception of and response to the world, and ipso facto undermines all philosophical generalities or values; from such dogmatic slumbers, even the likes of a Hume or a Kant were unable to awaken.
As increasingly efficient modern capitalism eradicated such vestiges of humanity as historical slavery may ever have possessed, and slaves became more and more perfect commodities, hunted without stint, as minerals were mined or fish were fished – the intimate brutality at the heart of it occluded from the ordinary eye – and traded as if they were so many bales of cotton or bolts of cloth, former slaves, joined by economists, journalists, religionists, politicians, jurists, novelists, utopians, and even the occasional philosopher, began to describe and to denounce the practice – Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot come to mind – and a collateral literature in defense of slavery found its audience as well. In the turbulent era surrounding the American Civil War, the master-slave dynamic assumed (as if by magic) a central role in the thinking of its greatest philosophers, if again, a role that sublimated (or perhaps “philosophized”) the lived experience of the slave to the extent that I, and I dare say almost every other white college student, was still able to read them in the 1970s and 80s, including Marx, without ever thinking about actual, flesh-and-blood, historical slaves, or even finding such a notion potentially “philosophically interesting.”
For both Hegel and Nietzsche, philosophy is the inspiration, and for the latter, largely the province of the slave. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the master-slave relationship configures the dawning of self-consciousness (which, in accordance with the often perverse nature of the dialectic, only the subservient – the loser in “the struggle for recognition” – actually achieves, an unforeseen epiphenomenon of its intended purpose); and Nietzsche, who despised Hegel, located in that very fact precisely what he believed was wrong with philosophy, that it embodies the weakness, the fear, the cowardice, the resentment, the vengefulness, the self-doubt, and the subservience of the slave, while yet conniving to wield power. If unfreedom is the metaphysical (if not necessarily the material) status primus of philosophy, for Nietzsche it has never transcended its slavish lineage.
Marx, too, depicts Hegel as slave to the grand philosophical plantation he had envisioned, living, as he put it, in a shack next door, and though he himself would boldly acknowledge the existence of the actual, everyday working world, thereby compromising his philosophical credibility for (almost) all time, even he still resorted chiefly to rhetorical, analogical evocations of slavery; and if he encouraged the slave-like masses to cast off their bonds and change instead of merely interpreting the world, he nevertheless believed that it must be intellectuals who raised the common folk to an understanding and roused them to the embrace of their historical purpose.
The quixotic, perhaps myopic mission of philosophy, still in many respects its living motive force in spite of everything, is to uncover and to reveal universal truth. For it, unless we are all somehow slaves, the experience of the slave, the particular slave, is of little interest; but the thing about actual slaves is that they are, each one, irreducibly, or rather ungeneralizably, particular. Slaves and descendants of slaves reading or hearing the words of the philosophers, these sincere men of ideas, must wince, for surely they know not what they are saying. In this slavery of which they speak, where is the terror, the torture, the rape, the murder, the degradation, the vile treatment, the tearing of children from their parents and parents from each other, the utter destruction of societies and of vast numbers of particular lives, and, dare I say, the dignity asserted or joys stolen from under the costive eye of scorn, the indomitable life force of the oppressed? How is it that they so casually speak of the slave with contempt instead of with the compassion for which ordinary decency should suffice?
If Moten’s discreet remark screams: Distrust philosophy!, it is because what makes philosophy possible is exactly what has permitted slavery to exist, the imperative to look past, or beyond, what is in front of it. And if he’s saying something that sounds dramatically different to me than to the American descendants of African slaves, it’s because he understands that the same words do not and cannot mean the same thing to everyone, indeed that they must not, that privilege, interests, hypocrisy, and oblivion, precede and infiltrate thought, that the individual is neither an instance of the universal, nor actually an individual at all, that to be true for all is to be false for each, that we are distinctly not all in the same boat.
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1 As in the thinking of George Fitzhugh in the antebellum South, slavery could therefore be portrayed as serving the good of the slave rather than the mere enrichment of the master.
2 The one prominent slave who appears in the Platonic Dialogues is the young boy who belongs to Meno, and it seems clear that Socrates chose him to help demonstrate his view of the innate, and consequently egalitarian, character of knowledge precisely on account of his outward circumstances.
3 Even the Stoic philosopher-slave (well, ex-slave), Epictetus, like Plato and Aristotle, views slavery as essentially a spiritual condition, but unlike them, a matter that is under one’s own control, in fact the only matter that is under one’s own control in life, and not as a terrible injustice perpetrated by some human beings against others from without. For him, the condition of unfreedom is the fault of the unfree (whether a slave or a king) and (his own experience notwithstanding) he speaks of slavery in entirely figurative terms.
John Wronoski is a former antiquarian bookseller, art dealer, and curator. He is the author of the book-length exhibition catalogue, Boris Lurie: A Life in the Camps, and has essays in numerous art-related publications, most recently, Heide Hatry’s Icons in Ash (Station Hill Press).