God does Facebook

This is awesome:

A Facebook Haggadah

Self-hood and it’s relation to money, sex and politics

Adapted and mostly quoted from Matthew Allen Fox’s The Accessible Hegel

Hegel introduces desire (or appetite) as the ingredient responsible for switching on our specifically human engagement with the world of objects. In humans, desire is not mere wanting; it is the will both to actively fashion what is external and to assimilate or otherwise appropriate this “other”. Desire also affirms that we are embodied consciousnesses, who are in and of the world; we are anchored there. Moreover, desire, as Hegel speaks of it, contains the energetic impulse to self-hood in its latent, as yet undeveloped form. In Hegel’s scenario, two desiring pre-selves encounter each other. Each strives to dominate its rival, doing violence if necessary to achieve this aim. But a mortal finish will not advance the cause of self-hood because recognition by the other is a crucial ingredient of one’s identity. A lifeless other will not be able to provide the feedback needed to spur self-development onward. There, Hegel posits an outcome of his hypothetical struggle in which one party either becomes subdued by, or submits to, the opposing counterpart. We come here to the famous master/slave relationship that has been appropriated and transformed by so many other writers since his time.

Inasmuch as each side seeks unrestricted self-expression, the resolution of the master-slave relationship embodies instability and tension. This restless element provides the momentum that drives the dialectic of self-hood onward, as we shall see. In this first resolution, the master achieves a style of self-hood that is based on denial (negation) of the slave’s self-hood The slave is the vehicle or instrument of the master’s will and experiences his or her life as being merely the means to another’s ends. But not only is the master/slave relation unstable, but also premised on modes of false consciousness. The master’s self-hood amounts to little more than the negation of another’s desire for self-hood The slave’s existence, on the other hand, assumes the inertness of instrumentality and embodies self-denial. Furthermore, the slave undertakes the task of working on behalf of the master, “mediating,” through physical labor, between nature and the master. The master delegates to the slave the activity of satisfying his or her basic human needs while “living the life of luxury”: and is thereby once removed from contact with the world. But in this configuration, the master becomes alienated from the very source of doing from which all selves derive (the self is a doer and is what it does; the master becomes a non-doer). The slave, then, is oddly enough a step closer to realizing full self-hood – as a being who is also a doer – than is the master. The master, by treating the slave as a mere thing or means, also denies to himself or herself the sort of mutual recognition needed for fuller forms of self-hood.

When it slowly begins to dawn on the slave that it is because of slave labor that the master’s identity is sustained, this is an empowering realization. The slave comes to learn that rebellion (“negation of the negation”) can help to overthrow an oppressive condition of existence.

In this light, consider religion, consider war, consider poverty and debt, consider marriage, consider government, consider employment and consider morality (the battle within). Once the trickle begins, the deluge of self-awareness follows.