The Slave on the Throne

Aristotle on the Natural Slave

“Some men are by nature free, and others slaves.”

— Aristotle, Politics, Book I

In the Politics, one of the monumental works of Western political thought, Aristotle, the sage of Stagira, offers the world’s first systematic philosophical account of the relation between the δεσπότης (despotēs), the master, and the δοῦλος (doulos), the slave. This account unfolds within his wider inquiry into the natural foundations of political life. Aristotle passes beneath the outward distinctions of legal status and political power to ask what, in the nature of the men themselves, separates the one who commands from the one who obeys. At the root of this relation lies ἀρχή (archē), the principle of rule itself. Where does the capacity to command reside?

In the master, it resides within. He possesses within himself the rational principle, λόγος (logos), by which his conduct is ordered and from which command proceeds. The natural slave shares in reason insofar as he can recognize its authority and submit to its direction, but he does not possess it as a power of self-command. The principle of command therefore remains external to him, embodied in another man.

For this reason, Aristotle describes the slave as a living possession and an instrument of action. Such an instrument does not originate the end it serves. It receives direction from the man who employs it. So too, the natural slave acts toward a purpose conceived elsewhere. His labor gives effect to an intention whose governing principle resides in another man.

This opposition between mastery and servitude belongs to an older Greek vision of the world. Heraclitus gives it archaic expression in Fragment 53, his famous declaration on πόλεμος (polemos), usually translated as “war,” though carrying here the broader sense of conflict or strife:

“War is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.”

Heraclitus, master of the aphorism, offers no systematic doctrine of natural slavery. In this fragment, πόλεμος (polemos) appears as a power of revelation. Through it, the concealed order of the world is brought into view: gods are distinguished from men and the free from the enslaved. Strife does not create rank so much as disclose the order hidden beneath appearances. Aristotle records that Plato first became acquainted in his youth with the teachings of Heraclitus through the philosopher Cratylus. The Heraclitean vision of a world in perpetual flux, whose hidden order emerges through contrary forces, left a lasting impress upon him and helped shape the problems to which his mature philosophy would respond.

In Plato, however, this pre-Socratic vision of rank and order is carried inward and given a more explicit and systematic form in his tripartite account of the soul. In the Republic, conflict no longer merely discloses distinctions among men; it becomes the drama of man’s inner life. The order of the just city finds its counterpart within the soul, whose justice likewise depends upon the rule of reason. The λογιστικόν (logistikon), the rational faculty, discerns what is good for the whole man and gives measure to his competing desires. The ἐπιθυμητικόν (epithymētikon), the appetitive faculty, is drawn toward immediate satisfaction and knows no measure beyond the force of its own longing. Between them stands the θυμοειδές (thymoeides), the spirited faculty from which courage and the love of honor arise. When properly formed, spirit becomes the natural ally of reason, lending strength to its judgments and helping bring appetite beneath its discipline. Justice arises when each part performs its proper function without usurping the office of another, and the divided powers of the soul are brought into concord beneath rational rule.

The just man therefore possesses an ordered hierarchy within himself. Reason governs, while spirit lends force to its command and brings the lower elements of his nature beneath its discipline. Plato accordingly describes him as having become “one rather than many”: his conduct proceeds from an inward principle of rule. The unjust man, however great his outward power, remains inwardly divided, a house at war with itself and subject to forces he cannot master. He may possess Machiavellian cunning, even genuine intelligence, yet he lacks sovereignty over himself. His reason has become the servant of appetite, furnishing arguments for desires he lacks the strength to restrain.

Aristotle gives the Platonic account of inner order a harder anthropological form. What Plato describes as a hierarchy among the powers of the soul appears in Aristotle as a distinction between kinds of men. The capacity of reason to govern is no longer treated merely as an achievement of psychic order, but as a natural faculty distributed unequally among men. Some possess the principle of command as their own and are capable of directing themselves and others toward an end they have rationally conceived. Others participate in reason only through their recognition of it in another. They encounter command as an authority imposed from without because its governing principle does not reside fully within them.

Yet Aristotle is careful not to confuse the rule of the master with political rule. Masterly rule belongs to the οἶκος (oikos), the household, and arises from the relation between one whose nature is fitted to command and another whose nature requires direction. Political rule, by contrast, is exercised among free men who share in deliberation and possess the capacity to rule and be ruled in turn. The citizen obeys without thereby becoming servile, for the authority to which he submits belongs to an order in which he also participates. The slave receives command from another as the governing principle of his action; the free citizen recognizes in political authority a rule proper to men who possess reason in their own right. The confusion of these forms already contains the seed of tyranny, for the tyrant governs free men as though they were slaves.

The question of natural slavery also arises within the older Greek dispute between φύσις (physis), nature, and νόμος (nomos), convention or customary law. Some held that mastery was contrary to nature, since convention alone declared one man free and another a slave, while the relation itself rested upon force. Aristotle therefore cannot accept legal status as proof of natural rank. Victory in war may give one man possession of another, but conquest cannot establish that the victor is by nature fitted to rule or that the defeated man was born to obey. An unjust war may place a free soul in chains.

The decisive question is whether the outward relation corresponds to a real distinction in nature. Where the two coincide, law gives visible form to an order already present in the men themselves. Where no such natural basis can be found, slavery is merely domination imposed by force and sanctioned by convention.

The true division lies in the source of command: whether its principle belongs to the man himself or must be received from another.

Here Aristotle’s distinction reveals itself as a judgment upon the nature of men. Outward station does not always disclose inward nature. Aristotle himself concedes that nature does not invariably give the free man and the slave outward forms corresponding to their souls. The beauty or deformity of the body is easily perceived; the rank of a soul is far more difficult to discern. The visible order of an age may therefore conceal the true hierarchy of men, raising those fitted to obey above those born with the power to rule.

Because this inward conception of mastery answers to a permanent reality in man’s nature, it finds renewed expression in modern thought. Goethe, most clearly in Faust, and Nietzsche after him carry the ancient problem into a new philosophical world. In Goethe, man appears as a field of contending powers, divided between higher aspiration and the downward pull of desire. The drama of Faust is therefore also a drama of self-command: whether the soul can impose order upon the forces struggling within it or become dispersed among them. Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles gives dramatic form to the inward servitude of a man unable to govern the powers he has awakened.

Nietzsche carries this inward struggle further through the will to power, one of the governing ideas of his mature philosophy. The self appears as a hierarchy of competing drives, each pressing toward mastery. Rank emerges where a dominant force subordinates the rest and directs the man toward a governing end. The will to power thus reveals itself inwardly as the capacity to give law to one’s own nature and bend its conflicting energies toward a single purpose. A man’s rank is disclosed by the power that rules within him. Where no such sovereignty exists, he becomes merely the ground upon which his impulses contend.

The free man is ordered from within. His governing power remains firm when appetite or fear presses against it. Reason does not bargain with passion or become its advocate; it gives measure to the whole man and subjects his competing impulses to a settled order. Such a man is not held upright by external restraint. His capacity to rule rests upon his mastery of himself, and his freedom becomes the expression of an inner sovereignty. He is a law unto himself because law already lives in his soul. Through this strength, he shapes the circumstances of his life rather than being shaped by them.

The “slave” is his inverse. Lacking the power of self-command, he cannot give himself measure or direction. Reason reaches him chiefly from without, through commands he did not originate and standards he cannot establish for himself. His intelligence may calculate and explain, yet it cannot govern; it serves whatever appetite presently holds mastery over him. Servility has already taken root in his nature. Even when raised to power, he remains inwardly dependent, taking his bearings from convention and the judgment of others. Slavery begins within, as a condition of the soul, before it assumes any legal form.

The natural slave may therefore ascend to the highest office without ceasing to be what he is.

The vulgar error of our age, hardened into the conventional wisdom of the plebeian mass, is to mistake position for rank. It assumes that the visible order of the present world reflects the natural hierarchy of men, and that those who occupy its commanding heights must therefore possess the qualities of rule.

They do not.

The modern West increasingly assumes the form of the tyranny Aristotle described: free men are ruled as slaves by men who are themselves servile in soul.

We pass through an Age of the Wolf in which appetite has cast off measure and cunning has usurped the place of wisdom. It raises inwardly servile men to power, men who imitate the gestures of command while lacking its principle within themselves. They occupy office and direct the machinery of the modern world, yet none of this makes them free in Aristotle’s sense or in any true sense of the word. Power cannot bestow mastery upon men who remain enslaved within. Whatever titles they bear, they remain what they are: slaves.

Their outward authority only enlarges the reach of their disorder. What remains confined within an ordinary man becomes, in the ruler, the fate of peoples and civilizations. The appetites he cannot govern acquire political force. His inward dependence is imposed upon the world as a demand for universal submission.

Here the Aristotelian slave approaches Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment, though he is not yet the Last Man. The man of ressentiment still possesses a reactive power. Unable to answer strength through action, he turns grievance into a principle of valuation and gives moral form to his impotence. He condemns what he cannot attain and names his incapacity virtue. His revenge is accomplished through judgment: the higher man is made guilty for possessing the strength denied to him.

Through this revenge, what Nietzsche calls slave morality conquers. It overturns the older order in which strength served the good and beauty gave nobility visible form, teaching weakness to regard itself as moral superiority. The Last Man inherits the world it leaves behind. He no longer burns with the hatred of the man of ressentiment, for the objects of that hatred have already been brought low. He seeks comfort and mistakes the extinction of higher longing for happiness. The flattened world appears to him as peace because nothing remains within it powerful enough to disturb him.

The rulers of a decadent age may embody both tendencies: ressentiment supplies their hatred of what is higher, while the spirit of the Last Man shapes the world they seek to create. They resent excellence because its existence stands as a judgment upon them. They seek a world in which every height has been levelled and every distinction stripped of authority. The fallen order around them becomes the visible expression of their inward condition. Rancor passes into law, while baser passions acquire institutional form.

Far from dissolving Aristotle’s distinction between the master, who can rule himself, and the slave, who cannot, the rule of inwardly servile men gives that distinction its most perverse political expression. The present age abounds in spiteful mutants, slaves in body and soul who have usurped the place of the master. In their hands, authority is severed from the qualities of rule, allowing position to supplant rank. Men governed by appetite rise above those they presume to command, until the public order assumes the form of their private disorder.

This is the mark of a fallen world: the slave sits upon the throne. Power passes into the hands of men who cannot govern themselves, and the disorder they carry within is imposed upon all beneath them. The chains they cannot break in their own souls are fastened upon the world. Under the enthroned slave, inward servitude becomes outward rule, until civilization itself takes the form of his bondage. His ruin becomes the fate of the age.