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About mediation

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Mediation and kinds of unity

There are no isolated immediacies

The first large-scale philosophical tactic in this study is an insistence on mediation. There are no simple identities. Everything attains its identity through mediations, which are not the same as relations. Relations are static connections with other established things; mediations are processes of establishment and mutual definition.

-- You do go on about mediation. But if you don't accept Hegel's necessary sequence of logical mediations, what unity does the notion of mediation retain? Isn't it then just a grab bag of different causal processes and logical dependencies?

-- The ontological point is general, that there are no isolated immediacies, that determination is always within contexts and histories. You're right that particular items may have their identity explained in different registers, leading to a grab bag effect. But the general point remains, and I do think there's something to the Hegelian necessary sequence, but only in an attenuated sense: that the characteristics of the process of meaning-creation and meaning-sustaining do tend to be themselves posited within the meanings sustained. This is modern self-awareness.