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MULTICULTURALISM AS A DISCOURSE OF DISGUISE: A POSSIBLE CANADIAN SOLUTION
PART 2: DEFINING THE KEY TERMS:
SELVES AND OTHERS, CULTURE AND MULTICULTURALISM
The fundamental concept that reveals differences between cultures is that
of ‘self’ (or ultimately, the individual). All conscious human beings develop a
sense of self. So how do different conceptions of ‘self’ develop?
The Self and Conscious Cultural Constructions
Many idealist philosophers consider the concept of the self as an “empty and
unreal abstraction.” It is “society which fashions us” [...] “The true self is a
social self.”® Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind tracks the self as a logical
concept from its emergence in the synthesis of the dialectical relation between
consciousness and others.® Consciousness becomes ‘self-aware’ through the
recognition of its capacities to contemplate self (one’s self) as an object of
thought. “Consciousness, however, qua essential reality is the whole of this
process of passing out of itself qua simple category into individuality and
the object, and of viewing this process in the object, cancelling it as distinct,
appropriating it as its own, and declaring itself as this certainty of being all
reality, of being both itself and its object.””
Hegel’s logical self gradually transitions into an individual within a
community. By individual, he means a being freely able to individuate itself
from others. Others are necessary for each self to know itself as a functioning
self and who it is becoming. The self is realized (actualized) in communal life.
“Since the state is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members that the
individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality and an ethical life.”*
Others
The Hegelian dialectic of self (a logical tool) and other suggests that selves
are beings who can individuate themselves from other beings. Selves can
know who they are not. A self becomes an individual as its particular set of
properties becomes a package recognizable by others. “The other” as human
being is a formal concept to which all developing individuals are dialectically
connected through self-reflection and the possibility of self-change.
William J. Mander, Idealism and the True Self, in William Mander — Stamatoula Panagakou
(eds.), British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 289.
° J.B. Baillie, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. G.W.F. Hegel, London, George Allen and
Unwin, 1966.
7 Baillie, Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 278-279.
8 T.M. Knox, (trans. with notes), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford, Clarendon, 1962, 156.
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