Master–Slave Dialectic and Morality in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
Master–Slave Dialectic and Morality in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
The Man in the High Castle (1962) is one of Philip K. Dick’s
most acclaimed and striking novels. The narrative is set in an alternate
reality where the Axis powers have won the Second World War and
occupied the United States, dividing the country into three regions: the
Nazi ruled greater Reich, the Pacific Japanese States and the neutral
zone. As a result of this partition, Americans have become foreign in
their own country. This article examines the master-slave dialectic
and master-slave morality in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High
Castle. The master-slave dialectic is a theory proposed by Hegel in
the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel outlines a mutual relationship
where he assigns specific roles to two parties that engage in a struggle
for desire to achieve self-consciousness. In direct connection with the
master-slave dialectic is Nietzsche’s master-slave morality which was
developed upon Hegel’s original conception. The thinker describes a
binary opposition where particular values have been ascribed to master
and slave/servant morality to establish a sustainable and reciprocal
relationship. This study aims to analyze Dick’s The Man in the High
Castle from a philosophical perspective, attempting to expose the
master-slave dialectic and morality in the work of fiction and thus
revealing the author’s covert messages implied in the subtext of the
novel, while at the same time comparing and contrasting these with the
television adaptation.
___
- Brandom, Robert B. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s
Phenomenology. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2019.
- Burton, James E. The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and
the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Cole, Andrew. “What Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic Really
Means.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 34,
no. 3, 2004, pp. 577-610.
- Deleuze, Gilles, et al. “The Master–Slave Dialectic in Literary
Theory.” Hegel and the Foundations of Literary Theory,
Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 182 - 202.
- Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. Penguin Books, 2014.
DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “Redemption in Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Man in
the High Castle’.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1999,
p. 91–119, www.jstor.org/stable/4240754.
- Evans, Timothy H. “Authenticity, Ethnography, and Colonialism in
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.” Journal of the
Fantastic in the Art, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 366-383, www.
jstor.org/stable/24352269.
- Everett, Justin, and Paul Halpern. “Spacetime as a Multicursal Labyrinth
in Literature with Application to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the
High Castle.” Kronoscope, vol. 13, no. 1, 2013, pp. 47-66.
- “Fallout.” The Man in the High Castle, Produced by Ridley Scott,
and Frank Spotnitz, season 2, episode 10, Amazon Studios,
16 Dec. 2016.
- Master–Slave Dialectic and Morality in Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
132
Farivar, Marziyeh, et al. “Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectics: Lord
Byron’s Sardanapalus.” English Language and Literature
Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013.
- Greene, Murray. “Hegel’s ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ and Nietzsche’s
‘Slave Morality’.” Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion, edited
by Darrel E. Christensen, Springer, 1970, pp. 125-155, link.
springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-011-9152-4_5.
- Habib, M.A.R. Hegel and Empire: From Postcolonialism to Globalism.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
- Hegel, Georg W. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology
of Spirit. Cambridge UP, 2018.
- ---. Hegel’s System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit.
SUNY P, 1979.
- ---. The Philosophy of Right. Focus Publishing/R. Pullins
Company, 2002.
- Houlgate, Stephen. Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’: A Reader’s
Guide. Bloomsbury, 2013.
- Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on
the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cornell University Press, 1980.
- Krajewski, Bruce, and Joshua Heter. The Man in the High Castle and
Philosophy: Subversive Reports from Another Reality. Open
Court Chicago, 2017.
- Kucukalic, Lejla. Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age.
Routledge, 2009.
- Lindstedt, David. “The Progression and regression of slave morality in
Nietzsche’s Genealogy: The moralization of bad conscience and
indebtedness.” Man and World, no. 30, 1997, pp. 83-105.
- Meredith, Thomas. “The Radical Goals of Slave Morality in Nietzsche’s
On the Genealogy of Morality.” The Review of Politics, vol. 82,
no. 2, 2020, pp. 247-268.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge UP, 2001.
- ---. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Maudemarie Clark
and Alan J. Swensen, Hackett Publishing Company, 1998.
- Rossi, Umberto. “All Around the High Castle: Narrative Voices and
Fictional Visions in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High
Castle.” Telling the Stories of America - History, Literature and
the Arts - Proceedings of the 14th AISNA Biennial conference,
Roma, Nuova Arnica, 2000, pp. 474-483.
- Snelson, Avery. “The history, origin, and meaning of Nietzsche’s slave
revolt in morality.” Inquiry, vol. 60, no. 1-2, 2017, pp. 1-30.
- Şekerci, Mehmet F. “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and
The Relationship between God and Believer.” Bilgi,
no. 34, 2017, pp. 148-160, dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/bilgisosyal/
issue/29145/313918.
- Warrick, Patricia. “The Encounter of Taoism and Fascism in Philip K.
Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.” Science Fiction Studies,
vol. 7, no. 2, 1980, pp. 174-190, www.jstor.org/stable/4239329.
Williams, Robert R. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God:
Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. Oxford UP, 2012.
- Wittkower, Dylan E. Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Do Androids
Have Kindred Spirits? Open Court Publishing, 2011.