Language and Time in Hegel's Ontology of Subjectivity

Abstract

This thesis argues that Hegel’s views on subjectivity are deeply rooted in, and defined by, both language and time. Specifically, we claim that Hegel’s account of subjectivity is decisively characterized by fundamentally ontological conceptualizations of both language and time. What we conclude is that Hegel’s philosophy and its conceptualization of subjectivity is a robust attempt to reconcile the changing, finite, temporal modes of being with the classical philosophical expectation that philosophy arrive at truth, which is non-finite and ahistorical. By defining time as becoming and language as the medium for the rational expression and comprehension of being that is meaningful for us, we claim that Hegel’s approach to the being of subjectivity is developed through a thematic relation of language and time. Overall this thesis aims to make an original contribution to Hegel studies and his views on subjectivity, time, and language by arguing that comprehending subjectivity means grasping how it becomes. This thesis begins, then, with the idea that both being and time are becoming, and that this is at once a finite and non-finite notion. From there, we emphasize that what Nature becomes is us, human subjectivity, and that we apprehend this being that is meaningful for us as time and through language. In history, subjectivity becomes as the written embodiment of a particular people, and, in philosophy, subjectivity becomes linguistically according to an ahistorical, non-finite notion of becoming as the subject’s own self-determination; neither excludes the other because there is only the continual becoming of our making sense of the rational whole.