Tracing the Subjectivities of the Changing Human: Hegel, Self-Understanding, and Posthuman Objective Freedom

Abstract

Technological advances have a direct effect on the self-understanding of the human. The current article 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 that 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 article 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 territorialization of the digital world and its information.