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Lookup NU author(s): Professor David RoseORCiD
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Technological advancements have a direct effect on the self-understanding of the human and the current paper offers a diagnosis of changing social practices from a Hegelian philosophical-historical framework. Hegel has an interesting story to tell about the formation of modern identity and its connection to the institutions of justice and property. The modern, Enlightenment self is formed through a need for the rationalization of institutions of punishment and the economic material institutions of private property and capitalism. Such institutions form what he calls the objective freedom of a social fabric, or those institutions which ground and make intelligible the subjective self-understandings of the individuals. The modern subject understands itself as an intentional agent with individual and distinct wants, preferences and goals atomistically existing within society not because such an understanding is the best representation of an individual, but because the objective freedom of the society makes it necessarily so that the individual is constructed as an intentional agent and thus becomes one. The aim of this paper is to explore and present Hegel's dual concepts of objective and subjective freedom, to argue that the self is an artificial object and to show that the Enlightenment self-understanding of an intentional agent is, due to specific technologies, undergoing a fundamental transformation. The main claim is that a new understanding of the "subject" is required to avoid unfreedom in the territorialisation of the digital world and its information.
Author(s): Rose DE
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Posthuman Studies: Philosophy, Technology, Media
Year: 2019
Volume: 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 189-212
Acceptance date: 15/05/2018
Date deposited: 20/11/2018
ISSN (print): 2472-4513
ISSN (electronic): 2471-4461
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.2.2.0006
