Continuing on Hegel's Phenomenology, "Spirit" chapter, now up to sections 484-510, which is the first part of "Self-Alienated Spirit. Culture."
In Hegel's ongoing semi-mythical story about the development of the modern self and society, we're now at a point where people are "bare persons," legally recognized but not distinguished from each other. We thicken these thin selves using cultural contents: your profession, your group memberships, your style, etc. But this way of individuating is fundamentally self-alienating: these ways that we identify ourselves are foreign to our souls!
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