Continental Philosophy Research Group Talk (Jacob McNulty, Yale)

The Continental Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Jacob McNulty, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.

Talk Title

“Hegel and Nietzsche on Masters and Slaves”

Talk Abstract

Hegel and Nietzsche agree that a primitive social relationship of domination — and its breakdown—was consequential for the history of the human race. Yet they differ in their understanding of that relationship, specifically over whether it is born of a desire for recognition or not. Hegelian masters desire recognition, whereas Nietzschean ones are largely indifferent. As Deleuze was the first to point out, Hegel’s account appears suspect from a Nietzschean point of view, specifically because it seems to involve a slavish perspective on mastery — over-generalizing what is in fact a slavish personality trait, namely, the desire for standing in the eyes of others. In this talk, I respond to Deleuze by presenting two arguments on behalf of Hegel’s recognition-based model of the master/slave relationship. These arguments leverage what I will the economic and the existential dimensions of social relationships of domination and oppression to show that they are inherently recognitive. The lesson to emerge is that Nietzsche biologizes and psychologizes what are, in fact, “spiritual” phenomena in Hegel’s sense. Nietzsche’s account then involves a bad appeal to “immediacy” or brute fact.

About the Continental Philosophy Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Continental Philosophy Group works in the traditions of textual interpretation of human consciousness, phenomenology, and post-structuralist critical theory, among other related traditions of thought.