Toward a New Conception of Human Subjectivity for the Age of Globalization: Revisiting the Hegelian Vision of “Spiritual Subjectivity”
type: CreativeWork
description: My major argument in this dissertation is that Hegelian spiritual subjectivity can and should serve as a philosophical basis for envisioning a new conception of human subjectivity for the age of globalization. Why, then, does globalization demand a new conception of human subjectivity at all? What constitutes the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity such that it is not only relevant and but also necessary to the contemporary, postmodern context of globalization? My dissertation largely addresses these two questions. As for the first question, it requires my critical analysis of the context in which we are living. We are living in an era of globalization whose primary driving force is globalizing capitalism. Among many challenges posed by capitalist globalization today, I claim, it most importantly challenges us to reflect deeply upon the anthropological question of “what it means to be authentically human.” The human being that capitalist globalization is eager to promote and produce is none other than a faithful global consumer who, without critical thinking, simply succumbs to one’s sensuous inclinations or desires in their sheer particularity, contingency, and arbitrariness, who is easily attracted to the external appearances and sensible images of commodities endlessly released onto the market, and who thus is always ready to buy them both online and offline. And I suspect that this anthropology of capitalist globalization seems to be justified philosophically by the contemporary intellectual movement known as postmodernism, particularly by its thesis of the “death of the subject” which argues that human subjectivity is merely an after-effect of the pre-subjective, extrinsic processes of language, culture, power, ideology, the unconscious, etc. In other words, postmodernist anthropology (the death of the subject), regardless of its real intent, may function as a philosophical basis and ideological justification for capitalist globalization’s disgraceful reduction of …
abstract: My major argument in this dissertation is that Hegelian spiritual subjectivity can and should serve as a philosophical basis for envisioning a new conception of human subjectivity for the age of globalization. Why, then, does globalization demand a new conception of human subjectivity at all? What constitutes the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity such that it is not only relevant and but also necessary to the contemporary, postmodern context of globalization? My dissertation largely addresses these two questions. As for the first question, it requires my critical analysis of the context in which we are living. We are living in an era of globalization whose primary driving force is globalizing capitalism. Among many challenges posed by capitalist globalization today, I claim, it most importantly challenges us to reflect deeply upon the anthropological question of “what it means to be authentically human.” The human being that capitalist globalization is eager to promote and produce is none other than a faithful global consumer who, without critical thinking, simply succumbs to one’s sensuous inclinations or desires in their sheer particularity, contingency, and arbitrariness, who is easily attracted to the external appearances and sensible images of commodities endlessly released onto the market, and who thus is always ready to buy them both online and offline. And I suspect that this anthropology of capitalist globalization seems to be justified philosophically by the contemporary intellectual movement known as postmodernism, particularly by its thesis of the “death of the subject” which argues that human subjectivity is merely an after-effect of the pre-subjective, extrinsic processes of language, culture, power, ideology, the unconscious, etc. In other words, postmodernist anthropology (the death of the subject), regardless of its real intent, may function as a philosophical basis and ideological justification for capitalist globalization’s disgraceful reduction of …
author: Yoo, Yun Kwon
keywords: Globalization, Hegel, Postmodernism, Subjectivity, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Zizek, Philosophy, Religion, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
date published: 2020-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:40:28Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University