Natural and social structures of human autonomy and their technical mediation

[Michael Allan]

> Taking the logic another step:
> http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/aut/aut.xht#eq2.8
> 
>         Moreover, in Hegel's phenomenology:
> 
>   2.8.  Thesis and antithesis are symmetrical and logically
>         reversible.
> 
>         Therefore, if we are to be free and self-determined:
> 
>   2.9.  We shall be a part of the stars, particularly in their
>         distance and isolation.  In thinking so, our thoughts shall
>         belong to the self-consciousness of those stars.

Not true, my mistake.  First, they couldn't be symettrical if they
dealt with whole/part relations.  Second, the relation isn't even
whole/part but actually shared-part, the reverse of which (parts of
stars are parts of stars) is uninteresting.  (Learning as I go.)

Another correction, this one at the *micro*scale.  It's not our
difference bridging and erasure that meshes so neatly with Hegel, but
rather our *standing* differences:
http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/aut/aut.xht#mic

  Hegel sees autonomy as an ongoing collective and historical process,
  and truth as likewise a dynamic whole, the essential moments of
  which include negatives, falsehoods or disparities that are not
  “thrown away, like dross from pure metal, not even like the tool
  which remains separate from the finished vessel”, but these
  disparities are ever “directly present” in the “living” whole.  This
  fits remarkably well with the contemporary technology of consensus
  making at the microscale, dependent as it is on evolving populations
  of text, continuous vote shifting, and the ever-present opposition
  of critical, standing differences in the formalized structure of
  consensus.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/