Re: [xmca] Mediation and Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Thank you Larry.

For Hegel, Freedom is in the very nature of a human being. A person may 
at a given moment be denied freedom, but such a person remains, in their 
essential nature, free, even whilst lanaguishing in the deepest and 
darkest dungeon. On the other hand, theorists of our time, as you say, 
following Foucault, take the opposite stance: that power is the master 
signifier which constitutes all other categories and experiences, 
including the human subject itself, and freedom recedes beyond the 
horizon of possibility. I prefer Hegel.

The material world is, if you want to see it that way, a constraint upon 
our freedom, but freedom is after all expressed in the world our 
predecessors have fashioned for us and which we constantly refashion. 
That's why what Hegel calls spirit does not spring anew from each 
individual ego who wants to bounce intersubjectively of someone else, 
but is constituted and reconstituted by human activity.

Andy
http://ucsd.academia.edu/AndyBlunden
Larry Purss wrote:
> Andy
>
> I just received a copy of your 2007 article *Mediation and  Intersubjective
> Interpretations of Hegel* which you posted. This article has offered a new
> clarity to my understanding of Hegel's use of intersubjectivity and your
> cautions that in our modern incorporation of Hegel as the ancestor of
> intersubjectivity we have lost the centrality of *spirit* which IN-forms
> Hegel's intersubjectivity
>
> Andy, your *genre* of writing which puts in *play* concepts such as spirit,
> mediation, intersubjectivity, and material culture was engaging and also
> informative
>
> In the spirit of play within this genre I would like to bring in Wayne
> Booth who is exploring similar themes in his article "Freedom of
> Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism".
>
>  He opens the article with this paragraph:
>
> Most critics today would see the "politics of interpretation"as beginning
> and ending not with freedom but with power.... In this view, the search for
> freedom of interpretation becomes the problem of how to resist power - how
> to wrest it from those who have it or how to produce a text that will not
> be co-opted by it.  WHO has the power - which class, which ruler, which
> faction. which sex - to impose what can be said and not said? Whose
> language, because of the power of its users, imposes a given view of
> reality upon whoever fails to resist the language?"
>
> Booth's response [in the article] is to explore the contrast between
> freedom *from* & freedom *to*.
> Freedom from external restraints and the power of others to inhibit our
> actions AND freedom to act effectively when restraints are less
> constraining.
>
> Booth writes such freedom to is gained,
> "only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by others,
> giving up certain freedoms from.
>
> This way of exploring mediation is using a different genre but seems to me
> to be playing on the same field.
>
> Andy, thanks for the article clarifying Hegel's notion of spirit.
>
> Larry
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts

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