When the false oracle has informed Don Quixote that Dul- cinea can only be disenchanted if Sancho Panza will receive several thousand lashes, the latter agrees to receive them on condition that he inflict them himself and in his own good time. One night Don Quixote becomes so impatient for the release of his love that he attempts to become the whipper, at which point Sancho Panza knocks his master down.
don quixote : So you would rebel against your lord and master, would you, and dare to raise your hand against the one who feeds you.
sancho: I neither make nor unmake a king, but am simply standing up for myself, for I am my own lord.
Similarly, when Mr. Pickwick, on entering the Debtors' Prison, attempts to dismiss Sam Weller because it would be unjust to the latter to expect him to accompany his master, Sam Weller refuses to accept dismissal and arranges to get sent to jail himself.
Lastly, the master-servant relationship is between real persons. Thus we do not call the employees of a factory or a store servants because the factory and the store are corporate, i.e., fictitious, persons.
ii
Who is there? I.
Who is I?
Thou.
And that is the awakening—the Thou and the I.
paul valery
Man is a creature who is capable of entering into Thou- Thou relationships with God and with his neighbors because he has a Thou-Thou relationship to himself. There are other social animals who have signal codes, e.g., bees have signals for informing each other about the whereabouts and distance of flowers, but only man has a language by means of which he can disclose himself to his neighbor, which he could not do and could not want to do if he did not first possess the capacity and the need to disclose himself to himself. The communication of mere objective fact only requires monologue and for monologue a language is not necessary, only a code. But subjective communication demands dialogue and dialogue demands a real language.
A capacity for self-disclosure implies an equal capacity for self-concealment. Of an animal it is equally true to say that it is incapable of telling us what it really feels, and that it is incapable of hiding its feelings. A man can do both. For the animal motto is that of the trolls in Ibsen's Peer Gynt—"To thyself be enough"—while the human motto is, "To thyself by true." Peer is perfecdy willing, if it is convenient, to swear that the cow he sees is a beautiful young lady, but when the Troll-King suggests an operation which will take away from Peer the power of distinguishing between truth and falsehood so that if he wishes that a cow were a beautiful girl, the cow immediately appears to him as such, Peer revolts.
To present artistically a human personality in its full depth, its inner dialectic, its self-disclosure and self-concealment, through the medium of a single character is almost impossible. The convention of the soliloquy attempts to get around the difficulty but it suffers from the disadvantage of being a convention; it presents, that is, what is really a dialogue in the form of a monologue. When Hamlet soliloquizes, we hear a single voice which is supposed to be addressed to himself but, in fact, is heard as addressed to us, the audience, so that we suspect that he is not disclosing to himself what he conceals from others, but only disclosing to us what he thinks it is good we should know, and at the same time concealing from us what he does not choose to tell us.
A dialogue requires two voices, but, if it is the inner dialogue of human personality that is to be expressed artistically, the two characters employed to express it and the relationship between them must be of a special kind. The pair must in certain respects be similar, i.e., they must be of the same sex, and in others, physical and temperamental, polar opposites— identical twins will not do because they inevitably raise the question, "Which is the real one?"—and they must be inseparable, i.e., the relationship between them must be of a kind which is not affected by the passage of time or the fluctuations of mood and passion, and which makes it plausible that wherever one of them is, whatever he is doing, the other should be there too. There is only one relationship which satisfies all these conditions, that between master and personal servant. It might be objected at this point that the Ego-self relationship is given while the master-servant relationship, as defined above, is contractual. The objection would be valid if man, like all other finite things, had only the proto-history of coming into being and then merely sustaining that being. But man has a real history; having come into being, he has then through his choices to become what he is not yet, and this he cannot do unless he first chooses himself as he is now with all his finite limitations. To reach "the age of consent" means to arrive at the point where the "given" Ego-self relationship is changed into a contractual one. Suicide is a breach of contract.
in
crichton: There must always he a master and servants in all civilized communities, for it is natural, and whatever is natural is right.
lord loamshere : It's very unnatural for me to stand here and allow you to talk such nonsense.