The Hegel Thing

OK. we're going to try the Hegel Thing. Earlier this summer, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a dear friend. We'll call him David, and he is a good friend of L's from school, an all around brilliant dude who refuses to accept that he's one of the brightest people in any given situation. We were aimlessly drifting through the Greek & Roman wing, and we came upon a very early example of a sacrificial offering to the gods--a little copper statue of a person. The conversation it sparked went along much the same lines as what follows.

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OK. so. Hegel. hmm. not really a blogable topic. This will be woefully inadequate, but lets focus on the Master / Bondsperson dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

For Hegel, the Kantian separation of the self from the external world is lacking. The objects in the world around us are, as in Kant, things other than ourselves, but it is not until we can recognize this that we can, in opposition, comprehend such an entity as our self. The objective world and the subjective world necessarily inform one another, and so the Kantian separation becomes less useful.

Here's the important part. To confront an object in the world is to understand it as something other than your self. One moves beyond one’s self to approach the object. Thus a basic, purely negative notion of “self” arises. In turn, this self is able to then understand the object as an externality. The object is thus understood instrumentally, and the consciousness alienated from its object and dimly aware of the boundary that is it’s subject-hood—there are things in the world beyond its subjectivity.

Lets put that in less pretentious terms. You're walking along. You see a rock. You know this rock is not you. How? well, you pick the rock up and you throw it as far away as you can.

What happened?
Well, you're still standing where you were, unchanged. The rock is somewhere else, out of sight, or broken, or what-have-you. Point is, you've established yourself as other-than-the-rock. You don't know what you are, per se, but you know what you're not. Not rock. With me so far? Also important, you have power over this rock-thing. You have abilities, namely the ability to control the fate of a thing that is Other.

Hegel goes on to describe how in a social context we encounter another human, don't recognize that that's what we are too, but we see them throw a rock of their own, and realize that they, too, have power over others. They are other from us, so we must be other from them, oh shit - they can do to us what they did to the rock, we better do it to them first -BAM!- power dynamic, enter the whole history of western civilization stage left.

But lets focus for a second on an upshot from this that Marx in particular latches on to. Our ability to affect the material of the world around us is the crucial first step to realizing our self-ness. To actualizing, as we pretentious people like to say. Its only a few steps from there that creating things (and here's where we get into early Marx's materialism) is a crucial part to being human. Think about it for a second. If you've ever made a work of art or built anything, you have taken raw (or at least more raw) materials from around you and organized them in a way that created a product in line with your intentions. And I bet you felt pretty bad-ass. You can scoop some ore out of the ground, and forge and mix and bend and bang it into gears and pipes and chains and make yourself a bicycle. You can turn trees into houses. You can grind up flowers for pigment and paint something that expresses an emotion you had no word for. (of course we no longer get to do every step of that process, and thats Marx's alienation, but that's a whole 'nother blog post, chill out)

Ok, so are you with me so far? Important point is that making things out of the world around us is how we inform ourselves of what we are.

Now think back to this artifact David and I were looking at in the Met. It's a raw copper statue of a little person, that was made by a person in order to be offered to the Gods. Think about that.
It's saying, "I know what I am. This is what I am and I accept it." It's signing the Hegelian contract, so to speak. It's telling God / The Gods that you get it.


How cool is that?