A life spent deferring to circumstances abolishes the future’s real novelty

Evidence

‘Abandon hope, all who enter here’: Is this not the covert inscription which decorates the pediment of the Hegelian Anthropology? What is the end of youth if not a dismissal of the ideal? To live out one’s life to the end, by deferring to the force of circumstances, would amount to renouncing any introduction of the new and unexpected into the realm of the actual. Man, to the degree that he only ‘creates what is already there’, will be condemned to verify the absence of the future. As the ages of man pass by in their course, the future disappears in the false light of distant horizons. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 300

Categorization

• XREF: This presses the reader’s core question: what social conditions tip the youth’s plastic receptivity into the mature man’s stasis — here conformity-to-the-universal (work, objective relationships) is the tipping institution. Connects to the question of institutional arrangements converting plastic agency into passivity.