I want to claim, with Hegel, that our own fullest life is lived in the self-awareness of the process by which we create and maintain social grammars, structure, and history.
But also there is no pure access to the form of the process from which we might try to obtain necessary norms or a finally comprehensive historical narrative, such as Hegel seems to desire.
There is a danger in this, though, since unless there is some dynamism that forces us towards complete self-awareness, what reason have we for moving beyond the closed horizon of a narrow place or culture? If the mere existence of empirical pluralism will not be enough, is there anything else to ensure openness?
We have a native spaciousness and a self-relation-in-process that can be invoked, but though these are implicit in any inhabitation of places or concepts or rules, they are not automatically taken explicitly account of in those place grammars or concepts or rules.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001