The enigma of awareness (of awareness)
31/10/12
Consciousness as simplification, of decision, of making the world manageable. (See my theory on Attention). And then, the mystery of our awareness of this process, the reflexivity of the whole. With Zizek:
"The subordinate mediator becomes the subject". That seems to be a quite general law governing human action and attention, or, to be more precise, what becomes the subject (and the object of attention) is a successful subordinate mediator.
In this respect, we might consider Malabou’s reading of Hegel’s linguistic anthropology: "Chapter 3 [of The Future of Hegel] then raises the question: if humans are not the only animals that develop habits, what is it that gives us a capacity for self-determination that other animals lack? Chapter 4 responds that the use of language differentiates human beings from other animals and makes our habitual behavior unique: "Man is exemplary because the human formative power can translate the logical process into a sensuous form" (74). This, Malabou concludes, makes each of us capable of plastic individuality, of transforming our own singular essence in unforeseeable ways by incorporating what was formerly accidental."
Note btw that Malabou’s reading is consistent with my own view of Hegel as a demythologizer in religion, and as a philosopher who acknowledges the productive dimension of reflexivity.
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Zizek: "History means there is no metalanguage" —you cannot stand on your own shoulders, cognitively speaking, and any panorama of philosophy, any reading of another philosophy, is done from a situated philosophical standpoint. For Hegel, the meaning of an act arises through the act itself; meaning is not pre-existing: it is created retroactively. History is one big process of exaptation.
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