Assignment #9

For this blog post, please write the script of a conversation between Marx and Mill regarding the public and the private. You can use some of their words, but please make sure that their ideas about these subjects are very clear in your text. Do your best to take on the "voice" and "character" of each philosopher.

Reminder for everyone:
On Thursday, November 13, by the end of the day your last paper for the term will be due (by the end of the school day). For this paper you must revisit the questions of the summer reading assignment:

How do we determine where our privacy ends and our obligations to society begin? To what extent does the public sphere inform our life in the private sphere? What is the connection between the political, the social, and the personal? To what extent do our beliefs inform our actions?

This paper should be about 5 pages long.
You must cite Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. You may cite any other philosophers you choose.
You must turn in your entire folder with your paper. No folder = no credit for fall term.

Kierkegaard

In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Soren Kierkegaard is all about subjectivity. Kierkegaard argues that it is attaining subjectivity, not objectivity, which is the "highest task confronting a human being." He says that subjectivity is indeed quite difficult pursue and it takes art and skill to be subjective. Social networking websites such as Facebook or Twitter provide an outlet for just the type of subjectivity that Kierkegaard is talking about.

By creating Facebook profiles, a user may find himself figuring out exactly what he wants his friends to know about him. He is creating an objective portal through which others see the user. He boils all of his superfluous information down into one profile that gives views a sense of the person behind it. The user is creating a snapshot of himself, an objective lens in which others see him, and publishes it for the public. In the process of creating this objective snapshot, though, the user may find that he looks more subjectively at himself. Facebook enables users to not only learn more about the others around them, but also to learn about themselves.

While Facebook or Twitter profiles may help the user understand himself, it does very little to help the user know the people around him. Facebook and Twitter profiles portray an objective snapshot that is really not even real. After all, a snapshot is just that, a snapshot—a portal into someone's life at a specific time. It may seem obvious, but there is no way that a Facebook profile can provide a realistic, dynamic view of a person's life. The only subjectivity to be had is for the creator, not the viewer. The Facebook News Feed only adds to the observer's illusion that they know another user. To some degree, the News Feed keeps people informed about the objective truths in someone's life, which some may confuse with the dynamic, subjective truths of his life. Although an observer may know that Jim joined "Bears Against Colbert" or that Sally broke up with Johnny, what does he really understand? Without understanding the dynamic, essential details of a person's life, do you really know them or are they just ghosts?

Kierkegaard would seem to argue that by trying to live behind a virtual identity, a person is restricting himself to a life of continuing objectivity; it is the real relations with real people that count, not the online relations with virtual snapshots. It is intuitive: the more time that a person spends on weak and shallow ties, the more time he loses with real, deep, dynamic people—the very people that seem to promote subjectivity. It seems as though Kierkegaard would argue that the less time a person spends observing through objective portals, the better. It would seem that while Facebook and other social networking sites are sometimes useful, perhaps it would be better if we spent our time interacting with real, engaging, and genuine people, rather than just their profile or online persona.

If Kierkegaard had a facebook....

Kierkegaard believed that a man should view the world through his own lens. That is the only place a man will ever be, so that is the only place that is worth learning to be.
Every person who has a facebook puts himself in his own space. He can only view other’s spaces in this space, and other people can only see him in that space. It simulates the real world in that he can only see other people through his eyes, and they can only see what he presented to them. On the digital screen, it is slightly easier to recognize this phenomenon.
A person can only log into his own facebook account. From that account he can only make his own decisions. He can choose to write on someone else’s wall, that is the only control he has. He cannot command his friend to write on his wall. He can friend somebody, but they do not have to friend him back. He only has power over is account.
Although facebook can never be as genuine as real-life interactions, it is a sketch of what human life is like. It sounds foolish, but we can only control what we can control. Most people have heard this many times, it is Kierkegaard’s idea of striving to be subjective. It seems to trivial to “strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a task…but for this very reason alone it is a very difficult task…because every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different” (Kierkegaard 116). People have a problem accepting that they cannot control everything. They waste their energy being frustrated or upset about things that cannot be changed.
So although Kierkegaard would probably have been perplexed to see a facebook page, he would have understood that through a facebook account a person only has one choice; subjectivity. It is a digital simulation of the real life boundaries that every human has. He is a subject, he cannot be an object. He cannot create a categorical imperative that controls all other beings. He can only control himself.
On facebook, less people will be frustrated with what they cannot control because it is not real life. On the other hand, it is a good reminder of the boundaries that one human has; the boundary of his subjectivity. That he can only control things on one end of the bargain, always. That will never change as long as he lives. The sooner he can accept that, the sooner he can move on to the more important question; how to live his life.

Reaching Subjectivity

Kierkegaard argues in Concluding Unscientific Postscript that our task as individuals is to learn how to be subjective and to understand our own subjectivity. We need to refrain from objectively, for we are not objects. Each person has a subjective self, an identity, which is deeper than our notion of truth in the metaphysical world. We need to nurture and encourage that self to live complete and enlightened lives.

To develop that self, we must find or create a realm of privacy. It is there, and not in the public sphere, that the subjective self can reach its full potential. Only individuals, all individuals, have subjectivity and it is only in the private realm that this subjectivity exists.

In an attempt to gain subjectivity we create a mask, our Facebook profiles or Twitter updates, to understand ourselves. To an individual this is an innocent attempt to define himself, but to the observer this is an objective illustration of that individual. “The objective tendency, which proposes to make everyone an observer, and in its maximum to transform him into so objective an observer that he becomes almost a ghost” (Kierkegaard 118). When one is only an objective observer and refrains from being subjective, he becomes vacant, lacking a true self. This also can be said for the silhouettes of our true selves that we create on the internet. A Facebook profile is an image the person is presenting to the public. The public then forms opinions on the person based on his favorite music, the picture he chose for his profile and the various groups he joined. This is not an accurate perception of a person and his true, inner, subjective self.

There exists an innate quality within each individual which leads them to define their own subjectivity and inner truths. “Every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different” (Kierkegaard 116). In the broad scheme of the world, we look to the people around us for guidance. This can perhaps explain our fascination with online networking sites. Originally Facebook users contested the addition of the Facebook News Feed, “[y]et when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive” (Thompson 2). We are easily drawn to objective truths to help us define ourselves, yet as Kierkegaard would claim, it is not through objectivity that we discover our inner selves. It requires a much more intimate process.

Our subjectivity and morality are incredibly private components of ourselves. Facebook and other online programs put us into the public realm, thus objectifying ourselves. While Facebook is a tool to present ourselves, compare ourselves and keep tabs on others, it does little more than create a façade that can sometimes be an obstacle on the way to achieving subjectivity.

Facebook and Subjectivity

"The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to 'know thyself'," Clive Thompson comments near the end of his article. The concept he is hitting on is interesting: that somehow we can understand ourselves better when we are looking at ourselves objectivity, rather than when we are alone with the whirlwind of our thoughts.

We are all subjects, and we all have an innate desire to understand who exactly we are--to look at our subjective selves through an objective lens. In creating a Facebook profile, we put down to writing a ghost of our identity. Our list of favorite movies, our periodic status updates, the photos that we upload, even what our friends write on our wall--all serve to create a picture of who we are. It's a picture that we have almost complete control over, true, but even what we choose to display as our identity shows something about our identity. Maybe this is what is so appealing about Facebook and similar websites: that in some small way we are able to condense who we are and project it out to others in a way that we can all understand. Thompson suggests that by filling out and updating these kinds of sites, we are able to transition into looking at ourselves objectively.

One woman that Thompson interviewed claimed that posting daily to Twitter had made her happier and calmer because "the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively." This, however, only works as far as you are able to accurately describe how you are feeling at a given moment. It's as though we are viewing our feelings and opinions second-hand; while it is easier to comprehend than the first-hand version straight from our heads, consideration must be given to how accurate the condensed information can possibly be.

If he lived in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard would argue that the idea of trying to look at yourself through the lens of the outsider is ridiculous. Even in his own time, Kierkegaard disagreed with the Western tradition of trying to think objectively. He believed that the less we employ our own subjectivity, the more we become objects, merely observing the world around us. His thoughts on Christianity--that it has to be accepted subjectively, and cannot be thought about rationally--run parallel to the question of identity on Facebook. We cannot know every detail of our identity; it is too complicated and always in a state of change. The attempt to rationalize it by condensing it to words and media on a website, while tempting, requires oversimplifying ourselves and thus can never portray an accurate picture of who we are. Ultimately, as Kierkegaard would say, we just have to be.

Assignment #8

For everyone:
Read the following article --

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html

For the post:
How does facebook help you to define your own subjectivity? (Please use the Kierkegaard piece from your packet to support your answer).

Lordship and Bondage ... Public and Private

Hegel’s famous Master/Slave dialectic presents an interesting scenario when paralleled to the relationships of the public and private spheres. This relationship between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ centers around the fact that each person involved ultimately wants to obtain self-consciousness, Hegel’s form of personal enlightenment. Hegel makes the clear argument that self-consciousness can only be obtained through relationships with others, with respect to each individual as an individual, each individual as a necessary part of the relationship, and also each individual as a part of the other. In a relationship between two individuals, these private realizations occurring in both persons as developing self-consciousnesses represent the private, and their mutual exchange of recognition represents the public. Contrast the public and private of Hegel’s subjectivity model with the relationship between duty and freedom, and the Master/Slave dialectic from Lordship and Bondage becomes even more intriguing. Hannah Arendt’s theory that the freedoms of the private sphere exist for the purpose of the enlightenment of the public correspond well with the independent and dependent relationship of the Hegelian proposition at hand. It then becomes the responsibility of each individual to identify him/herself with the other in all ways necessary to become a self-conscious because it is his/her public obligation to do so. Although this recognition takes place within each separate private realm, the outcomes of these realizations are meant to be demonstrated in the public for the greater good of the people. In the following stage of the Master/Slave dialectic, the relationship must conclude with the sublation of one individual, for the purpose of obtaining a real identity as an individual. Hegel states that “they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle” (68), and that through staking their lives, they obtain true freedom until the struggle ends. This struggle in the Master/Slave dialectic accurately represents the conflicts and confusion that take place in almost every proposed relationship of the public and private spheres. In Hegel, each individual has a private responsibility to engage in the necessary processes of recognition within the relationship. Next, the individuals each contribute their private realizations to a shared (public) mutual understanding. Finally, each individual takes what they can from the public, and tries to privatize everything that belonged to the other in the final act of negation, which ultimately ends up as objectification of the other.

Hegel- Public and Private

In the manner that Hegel presents his philosophical reasoning in these sections, he opens few possibilities for places to distinguish or draw the line between public and private. The clearest way of attaching those words to Hegel’s ideas seems to be to see his contrast of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as synonymous to private and public.  Examining the relationship between public and private through the lens of these definitions restricts many common associations that go with the private realm down to one person and expands the public associations into a space that includes everything but the unbroken sphere of one individual.  While our private realm does play a role in our identity, even in the universal conception of self as the antithesis to God, it is irrelevant to the process of self-actualization and is only significant when brought into the public realm to be shared and enhanced. The ability to be private in this sense is therefore unattainable to us upon our entrance into the determinate world,

Freedom conventionally resides in the private realm, and so when Hegel’s conception of the self is brought into the public, or into the realm of ‘others’, we lose a certain ultimate, albeit irrelevant or insignificant, private freedom of the self. As soon as we burst our self-contained bubble in our natural desire to know ourselves and become conscious of our own consciousness, we sacrifice that brand of limitless freedom for something restrained and determinate, yet ultimately greater. Our private self, despite being infinitely free, is meaningless until it is recognized - at which point it becomes nonexistent.

There is the classic old saying that considers whether or not a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it actually makes a sound; with a Hegelian perspective here, one could argue that the empty forest contains an infinite amount of possibility, yet, devoid of witness, it is essentially nothing. Granted, it is indeterminate, ‘free’ even; but in a sense, it isn’t real. Unlike the forest, our ability to be self-conscious of our own self-consciousness means that we can be our own witness. This ability, however, can only be derived through interaction, or sublation, with other people, and so to be our own witness we must enter into the public realm and sacrifice our realm of absolute freedom and privacy.

 In the master/slave dialectic, the master is able to regain more of his freedom by defying that very process: he sees his selfish freedom to do what he wants as more desirable than attempting to find a sense of self and to realize his consciousness. By objectifying other autonomous beings, he is rejecting his own opportunity for self-actualization by his inability to see them as the same as him. The imbalanced condition is the result of the master’s attempt to retreat into disillusion (of seeing others as a means for his ends, their objectification), therefore retreating into the insignificance of the private realm as well.

The Best Relationship

The relationship between the public and private spheres of life is quite similar to the relationship between the self and the other that Hegel presents in Lordship and Bondage. Hegel believes that the goal of life is to gain a higher self awareness. To gain a higher self awareness you have to sublate other consciousnesses. This is like the public and private because, the private is your self awareness, and when you let others, the public, influence your private than your private becomes more meaningful. Thus, it is possible to say that the best way to live one’s life is to let the public sphere have more influence than the private sphere.

The relationship between public and private also can be looked on in a bigger picture that Hegel brings up. Hegel believes that the ultimate goal of everybody’s life is to help god become more self aware. He believes that people can do this by becoming more self aware themselves and therefore becoming more independent and becoming a self autonomous being that god can then sublate and become more self aware. Here the public sphere can be looked on as god and the private sphere is everyone’s individual self consciousnesses. The overarching meaning of life is to allow the public sphere to grow and people do this by acting as autonomous individuals. If everyone just acted on what they thought the society needed than the society would get better to a point and then stop. It would stop because the society is meant to serve the individual and when the individual serves the society the society has no use. This is why people have to have a balance of freedom and responsibility to society so that the society and the self can both grow.

It is better for every part of life if people have a both freedom and responsibilities. It is best when people have more responsibilities because then the greater good gains quickly but still serves the individual’s freedom. Having more responsibilities also is better for the individual because it allows the individual to value his or her freedom more and makes his or her freedom more meaningful. There are people with all different levels of freedoms and duties but the ones that are the greatest overall people have more responsibilities than freedoms. The greatest people allow the public sphere to influence more of their life than the private sphere.

Hegel's Theory against Public and Private

Hegel’s idea of subjectivity and the other can be viewed in relation to public and private in two ways. One way is to view it on a small individual scale, and the other addresses the bigger picture. Each involves seeing the pre-self-conscious individual as an individual in private, and “the other” is found in public. On the smaller scale, there is a single individual who finds self-actualization through the public sphere; he uses the public to determine himself in private. On a larger scale, what determines the boundaries and extent of privacy and private life for any society must come from a relation or exchange with it’s “other,” which is the ultimate public: the government. His theory involves two “selves” that use each other to achieve self-consciousness, “the process is absolutely the double process of both self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same” (67). Also in both cases and following Hegel’s theory, the individual and its other become conscious of themselves.

If a person were to live their life utterly secluded and engulfed by privacy, according to Hegel, he would never find true self-consciousness. A person must enter into the public sphere, and therefore step outside their private realm in order to become self-conscious. Self-consciousness or self-actualization is contingent on there being another person or “other” for the first person to sublate. This “other” being can exist as other individuals or as public society as a whole. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, he extensively discusses how an individual can use a relationship with another individual for self-consciousness, but his theory also is true to the relationship between an individual and society. In most cases, public society is almost a being in itself, and a person can shape society while society shapes that person. The word shape and the term “self-actualization” can be used interchangeably when addressing public and private. By viewing society as a public entity and an individual as a private being, one can see how a person is self-actualized by that society while at the same time, society sublates the individual and comes out of this process with a part of him in its composition.

In the large scale sense, the public is government. The people may create the government to start, but their privacy is found through a self-actualization process in which the government is also further defined. This is Hegel’s life and death struggle, and it benefits both the people and the government to engage in it, “they must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth, and make this a fact both in the case of the other and in their own case as well” (68). Self-consciousness in terms of a government and the privacy of its people means discovering the boundaries of each. How much privacy the people are allowed depends on how the government views its people and how much control the government has. At the same time, the boundaries and control of the government depends on how its people view or wish to view it.

Assignment #7

For everyone:
Make sure you really understand what is going on in Hegel's "Lordship and Bondage".

For the post:
Create an argument that relates Hegel's ideas of subjectivity and the other in the Master/Slave dialectic to the issues of public and private.

Assignment #6

There is not a blog post assignment this week.
Work on your papers. They are due Wednesday (10/8) in class. Please remember to turn in your paper in your folder (with your first paper).