Conditions of Communication

I post this blog as the beginning of a mediation on the requirements of communication within a community, such as we find here at Gaia. The main questions I will be thinking through throughout are 1) what is communication and 2) what are the requirements of communication?

I begin with an analysis of Hegelian themes in communication because Hegel threw down a gauntlet for all those thinkers of communication who came after him.  By first analyzing and understanding communication in its Hegelian parameters we open up a valid possibility of moving beyond Hegel.  The reasons for moving beyond Hegel should only be discovered in the course of examining his philosophy.

Hegel: Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself.  In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity.  For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an instituted community of consciousness.  The anti-human consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, being able to communicate only at that level. PoS, 69

1. The roots of humanity are located in a community of communicating consciousness striving toward agreement, for Hegel, it is here and in this activity only where human nature exists.

Why?  Feeling is inadequate inasmuch as it cannot be expressed or shared in a community of consciousnesses.  The emphasis here is on expression.  Feeling cannot be expressed as such, as singular existence because expression demands entry into language, a universal medium.  One cannot say the singular as such since language is a realm of universality and not singularity.  As soon as one attempts to communicate or express their feelings (singularity), they do so through language, but they necessarily betray feeling.  The worry is that one loses one's unique individuality.

2. This is why, for Hegel, private consciousnesses are deposited in language, in a universal medium, in Spirit, a universal "I".  For Hegel, dialectic is the activity of communicating consciousnesses that expresses and develops a universal self-consciousness.  Those consciousnesses that deny the realm of universality, preferring the certainty of feeling, are for Hegel beautiful souls. 
3. The beautiful soul in wanting to be preserved from the universality of language, the empty abstracting force of the community, is for Hegel dissolved in its own immediacy. 
Jean Hyppolite analyzes this dialectic, the intertwined nature of the singularity of immediate being or feeling and universality or mediated being at another, related level of consciousness: "The issue is a sort of conscious, and if we can call it deliberate, decision to turn back.  He takes the episode of Faust and Gretchen as his example of such an experience.  It is the issue of a consciousness, weary of the universality of knowledge and of the burden of mediation, that claims to turn back completely toward ineffable pleasure.  This consciousness knows that "all theory is gray and green the golden tree of life," it despises "the understanding and science, the supreme gifts of man."
4. This is the portrait of a consciousness who prefers to live life rather than undertake the path of knowledge or of despair it necessitates.   It is a decision, in an alternate register to the one we have examined in the dialectic between feeling and expression, to turn toward singularity of self, to reject the community of consciousnesses striving toward agreement.

More to come...