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DawitAkliluFirstEssay 9 - 20 May 2021 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | In short, Hegel’s theory espouses a relationship between the master and slave that is asymmetrical in power and understanding. The master, through their self-understanding and ability to project consciousness in objects, is able to control the slave by mediating the slave’s existence through projections of consciousness which traps the slave into a state of dependence. In other words, the master controls the slave by projecting itself onto the slave’s desires. This theory translates well, as it was intended, into our conversations about the role that social dogma over race, gender, ability, and religion act as disruptive force that complicates our process of forming our own identity. Most of us have felt this feeling of not truly feeling that we are understood or understand ourselves and the theory nails that feeling on the head by explaining it in the age old terms of dominant versus subservient. Yet, in this section of the book Hegel offers little regarding a way out from this vicious cycle maybe because the way out is simply not engaging, to simply accept that you are what you are and that the world will continue to project things onto groups regardless of whether one does find that self-acceptance (and maybe that’s something we already do in a sense as we get older and more comfortable in ourselves). Nevertheless, Hegel provides us with an interesting perspective into one of the most fundamental aspects of the human experience that we all should keep in mind as we remind ourselves that we are not all of what | |
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As you have restricted the readership, so that you and I are the only readers of the essay, I infer that it is only written for you and me. You know this story, which doesn't mean that it isn't written for you, and I don't, which doesn't mean that it is written for me. You tell what is to you a familiar story well, and it wouldn't be for me to interrogate or "correct" it even if I had any basis to do so. So there isn't much I can do to help improve it as it stands. There are places where words are missing, which I have highlighted, suggesting that as carefully as you wrote it you didn't proofread it with equal care. One paragraph needs rewriting for continuity. | | | | |
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< | If I am the intended reader of the essay. the best route to improvement is to replace the simple ideas that lie outside the boundary of the autobiography with less simple ideas. You and I both know what stereotypes are, how the US population is roughly demographically composed, how ethnically-based implicit assumptions work to support existing structures of social power. So if we want to have a conversation about the ideas that flow for you out of your autobiographical narrative, we can start further along. | >
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Now that this draft has been reset for public readership, we need to think about it differently than we did last time, when its only readers were you and me. My suggestion to improve the last draft was to look for the larger ideas personal experience signifies; this revision meets that suggestion by importing a slab of Hegel. Whether this is what a broader readership for your idea most needs is unclear to me. But for the increase in complexity and the large investment of space involved it seems to me that the return is not very substantial. Do we need all the machinery of Hegelian dialectic to know that the "relationship between the master and slave is asymmetrical in power and understanding"? Is Hegel actually what we require in order to understand that "Most of us have felt this feeling of not truly feeling that we are understood or understand ourselves and the theory nails that feeling on the head by explaining it in the age old terms of dominant versus subservient"? | | | | |
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< | If I am, on the other hand, merely a bystander and the essay is written mostly for you, then even those criteria of judgment are barely applicable. We would not be trying to figure out how to make your legal writing better, because this isn't legal writing. Minimal editing to remove confusion, which I have done, is all I am qualified to do. To the extent that there is any opportunity involved in working with me, this is all we can make of it. In which direction you might want to take the rewrite is entirely up to you. | >
> | From the point of view of execution, the draft is also in the technical sense unimproved. "FINISH THIS" applies both to the place it literally appears, and to the fragmentary last paragraph with its unfinished last sentence. It's as though you gave up or lost interest in the middle of the revising. | | | | |
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> | If you want to do another draft by the morning of May 24, I will read again. | | |
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