Lessons from Hegel about Identity

-- By DawitAklilu - 22 Feb 2021

Section I: Introduction

Identity. A word that carries a complicated connotation and a concept that we all encountered, for better or worse over the course of our lives. One of the most complex analysis, at least that I have read, about identity comes from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which can be applied in a variety of contexts to help explain why forming our identity can be such a turbulent experience.

Section II: An experience

I remember like it was yesterday, my first day in a new school. I walked into my science class. We were learning about the periodic table and our teacher was asking questions to gauge our knowledge. Being the diligent student, I had already gotten a leg up on the rest and answered in rapid succession, much to the surprise of my classmates; However, their astonishment wasn’t caused by my knowing the answers but rather because the "black kid" was smart.

Section III: Hegelian Dialectic and Phenomenology of Spirit: An Overview

Section IV: The Takeaway

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"?

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.

If you want to do another draft by the morning of May 24, I will read again.

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