PREVIEW-Episode 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness

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0:42 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 35 is what is the self for which you read Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit from 1807, specifically part B or chapter 4, self consciousness. My name is Mark Linsenmayer in myself from Madison, Wisconsin.

1:07 Seth: This is Seth Paskin being for another in Austin, Texas.

1:11 Wes: This is Wes Alwan achieving Satisfaction from other self consciousnesses in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:18 Unknown speaker: And this is Tom McDonald. I'm sublating all the moments of experience up to this point in New York.

1:25 Mark: That might be the first time that every single person used something relevant to the reading as their intro.

1:34 Unknown speaker: Well, I've been listening to you guys, so I'm studied up.

1:37 Mark: Yes, welcome, Tom.

1:39 Wes: Yeah, welcome.

1:40 Mark: What is your deal, Tom? Why are you here?

1:42 Unknown speaker: Well, I think I posted to your site and then you found my blog and I had a lot of stuff on Hegel in my blog, but I think my situation is a little bit like your guys. Like I'm. I work in something completely unrelated to this, but I do it outside as a passion. And I think that's what I find really attractive about your podcast is that it has a kind of energy that I think is not the same in an academic type of context. So, you know, I relate to what you guys are doing.

2:11 Wes: Yeah.

2:11 Mark: And you do a lot of volunteer discussion groups in New York City?

2:15 Unknown speaker: I run some meetup groups. So on meetup.com, i don't know if you guys heard of meetups.

2:20 Wes: Yeah, I have.

2:20 Seth: Yep.

2:21 Unknown speaker: So I have NYC Philosophical Reading and another group called NYC Film and Philosophy. Both of them are semi regular and we get quite a significant group of people. You get some people who've got a lot of background in this, some people who are complete newcomers. So I have some experience too with trying to find that place where you can have a discussion about these things that is not completely, you know, off

2:44 Mark: the farm and you guys actually tried to read Hegel's Phenomenology, like, from the beginning with the group of beginners you were mentioning.

2:51 Unknown speaker: This was a couple summers ago. It was not my group. It was another meetup group. It was kind of the one that inspired me to start my own. And we tried to read the Phenomenology from beginning to end, and it was really hellacious. It actually came to fist fights because you have. As a matter of fact, I was kicked out of the group. And actually, Sean, if you're listening. Yes, you know, I'm here. I'm still talking about the Phenomenology. It was an interpretive difference that we have. I mean, there's so many different ways to interpret this book. We got into a debate as to whether you read it logically or historically. And I'm sure this will come up in our discussion right now.

3:27 Mark: I think this is the only time it will come up.

3:32 Seth: This is an object lesson to you children out there. Philosophy does matter. These are not simply abstract conversations with nothing at stake. People can literally come to blows over ideas.

3:44 Mark: Are they coming to blows because the ideas matter in themselves or coming to blows in the same way people come to blows over which football team is better?

3:51 Wes: Right.

3:51 Mark: Elevating the triviality of the material to emotional tone.

3:56 Seth: Now, I suspect given the material, they probably came to blows over the life and death struggle between lord and bondsman.

4:03 Unknown speaker: It was perhaps suppressed consciously, but that might have been the dynamic that was going on under the surface. He was.

4:10 Wes: You were enacting the reading, as psychoanalysts like to say.

4:15 Mark: Has this book ever been done as a musical?

4:18 Unknown speaker: It should be interpretive dance.

4:20 Seth: I think if it is done as a musical, it should be done as some kind of kabuki theater.

4:24 Mark: Because it seems very artistic to me. The motion of the forms and the swishing about and the language. Like, it seems like it's almost like a verbal painting.

4:32 Unknown speaker: Well, that would be fitting. Hegel is part of the romantic movement. And I don't want to violate any rules here. It's very probably be hard for me not to make references to, like, specific texts.

4:43 Mark: Hey, we should do the rules so we can have it very clearly in mind and point it out every time you violate it. Our ground rules are, number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Two, don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you'd understand me if only you'd read Bob and Doug McKenzie's account of the history of democracy in Egypt and take off, you hoser, eh

5:08 Wes: 3.

5:08 Mark: Be rigorous and exact in all that you say instead of talking like that evil bastard Hegel. And before we get too far into this, I wanted to thank we had a few people donate through the donate button this week. Russ Baker, Nick Beer and just a few minutes ago light Luxor. I don't know what that if that's a name or what, but you will help our hosting and other people are welcome to do that as well. Let me ask you one more question, Tom. Did you start sort of self taught or did you take a big load of this in college or whatever to get you the taste?

5:38 Unknown speaker: First of it, I really got into philosophy as a freshman. I think it was like Western Civilization 101 and we did the Greeks and we read the Republic and that's what I really got nipped with, philosophy. But I didn't do it as a major. I did media studies which was kind of theory oriented but it was kind of postmodernism and we read like Foucault cultural studies type of approach. So there was definitely philosophy there, especially kind of post structuralism and that sort of thing. But I was always interested in philosophy proper too. So I've just maintained it, you know, and I've it's been so many years now that even though I don't have the formal training, I'm reading a lot of stuff.

6:18 Mark: Well, and you said you a couple years ago just read a whole bunch of secondary sources on Hegel's phenomenology in particular as part of that seminar or.

6:26 Unknown speaker: Yeah, that was a couple years ago. We read this book and ever since I've been reading tons of secondary literature in continental philosophy in general. I think ultimately continental, it's all rooted

6:39 Mark: in Hegel and I don't want to just jump in here and talk for five minutes. Does anybody else want to sort of give the short version of what the book as a whole is trying to do as opposed to what the chapter that we're actually going to care about is?

6:53 Seth: No, but I do want to make a request that we be very deliberate about walking through this and at least try to get through the steps of what he is trying to accomplish in the section we're in before we dive off into the deep end of all the significance and all that, because this is a tough one.

7:10 Wes: A brief statement of what the overall goal of the book is though would be good.

7:14 Unknown speaker: I think that the book it is epistemology. It's a theory of knowledge. I think he's a realist about knowledge. He wants to say that we know the world against Kant and the idea that the there's a thing in itself we'll never know. He wants to show that epistemology is connected to the ethical and the social,

7:32 Mark: which I can't help but point out is totally stolen from Fichte. Man folks who have been listening to our other episodes. The Schopenhauer is sort of the closest in time and place to this and starting at the same point in terms of post Kantianism. And Fichte was already out there, this Kantian student who had made the practical turn right, who took Kant's ethics in particular and said, we are not primarily thinking beings, we are primarily acting beings. And from what I learned, I also read a few chapters from in the Spirit of Hegel by Robert C.

Solomon, who we have talked about on this podcast a few times before because he taught at ut, taught Seth and Wes and myself all directly. And in fact, I did a whole independent study for a semester where I was supposedly just reading Hegel's Phenomenology. And this in the spirit of Hegel. And Solomon was big on this chapter, in particular self consciousness as encapsulating the Fichtean turn, at least in its initial steps. Although the most famous part, this master slave conflict, is really Hegel's own, which he writes about not only in this book, but in virtually everything else that he wrote at the time.

The rest of this book, apparently it was written pretty fast. He expressed a lot of dissatisfaction about it later. This was really early in Hegel's career. It really gives a different side of him, this more historicist, more relativist side than the kind of Hegel, this absolutist that Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that we've read were so critical of.

8:54 Unknown speaker: It really strikes me that he's writing this book for himself, that he was trying to work out the whole history of philosophy to his own understanding. And in part that's why the book is so hard to read, whereas his later work, he realizes that, my God, nobody else is going to understand, and he tries to make it more comprehensible. There's an anecdote that he gave a copy of the Phenomenology of Spirit to Goethe, and Goethe basically told him, I can't make any sense of this.

9:19 Wes: Do you know that Hegel actually edited a newspaper for a while and he

9:23 Mark: changed all the language to make it read just like this?

9:26 Wes: No, no, he's actually very capable writer. His earlier essays are actually very clear. And he didn't start writing like this until he was trying to get a permanent academic post. And he was just basically meeting the expectations of academia of the time. Right.

9:41 Mark: Fichte and Schelling also are accused of being obscurantists in the same era. Yep.

9:45 Wes: But with Hegel, there's proof that he can write in a different way about philosophy and about the news, apparently, or at least edit.

9:51 Unknown speaker: This may be rooted in Kant as well, because Kant started writing in this kind of transcendental style where there's no personal voice, where it's this trying to describe things in this ultra abstract way.

10:05 Wes: Yeah. Although I think the style is very different from Kant because I think Hegel's really going for a level of abstraction to the point where it's. But I think you're right. He's trying to be very abstract, where he might be more specific or give examples. He's trying to be very general. And so, you know, your fight, for instance, over whether or not to interpret it historically or in some other way. Well, really, all those interpretations apply. Right. And that's one of the reasons why he's being so general. He wants to capture all those different senses. So I respect part of the motivation that leads to the obscurity. But I also think that, you know, at least according to Solomon's account, in the spirit of Hegel, there was actual pressure to write in a certain way to be accepted as an academic.

10:43 Seth: I'll defend Hegel the same way I defended Heidegger in saying that when you're trying to articulate something that hasn't been articulated before, and there's an accepted vocabulary that you're trying to overcome, it might require a little extra work. There's a. Definitely a fair amount of repetitiveness. Right. Where he's saying the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways to try to make a point. But then you have these turns of phrase that are difficult to grasp, I imagine I didn't have time to look it up in German to look at it beforehand. But you know, where you say the thing in itself for itself or the. For itself in itself. And this apparent duplication that maybe doesn't necessarily add anything for us, but was intended to add something, or it's grasped

11:24 Mark: the notion, but, you know, has not grasped the reality of the situation or something like that. Yeah, just these basic terms, like he's using it very repetitively. But if you don't understand the basic terms.

11:33 Wes: Yeah.

11:33 Mark: Then it's just a puzzle.

11:35 Wes: It is. It's Like a code. And it's actually tremendously rewarding to decode Hegel. But again, as the secondary literature shows, you know, there are a lot of brilliant commentators who have given very. At the same time they show the genius of the Hegel's account, but they also show there are clear ways to put all of this stuff.

11:52 Mark: Yeah, well, to actually evaluate it, you have to translate it into something else. So I feel like, you know, to the extent that I can actually say, oh yeah, I agree with Hegel on his account of the self or something, it's because somebody else has explained it to me in a simpler way and I can evaluate that. Whereas when I actually look back at the text, like I'm not entirely sure that that's what's being said, you know, so it's strange and rewarding and frustrating.

12:16 Unknown speaker: I think with Hegel you also get a lot of things that come in Heidegger, which is this hermeneutic turn like Hegel accepts that we have to make sense of the world in the language we use and it's obscured from us in the text. But other people have noted that Hegel actually is not extremely formal. He plays with words in order to inflect the ordinary, everyday understanding of them. I'll give you an example. He talks about content. When he's talking about consciousness or cognition in a certain stage, he'll talk about it having an idea, but the idea doesn't have content.

There's a formal sense of concepts having content in formal philosophy. And then there's the sense of not having content in the sense of having fulfilled desire, not feeling contentful, just bringing it down to everyday experience and feeling. And it's there in the text, even though it's hard to see. There's definitely a sense of informality underneath.

13:15 Seth: That's an interesting point. The famous peach colored translation by Miller with the foreword by Findlay that I picked up at Borders as they're going out of business and mentioned in a blog post recently. Findlay's forward is actually quite good and he says, Tom, the same thing that Hegel was very self consciously aware that he was kind of speaking from within the paradigm, but trying to talk through something and that he was very comfortable with the idea that he was going to basically be saying things that sort of in a Wittgensteinian concept would have to be thrown away later, but that you kind of had to work from within the paradigm and the language that he had. And Mark, one of the things that you mentioned in the notice on the blog about what we were going to read that this was Hegel's version of the state of nature.

13:59 Mark: Right.

13:59 Seth: That was an interesting point that I guess underscores the interpretive stance that you take with respect to the text. If you read this as trying to describe some sort of developmental. This is the way human beings develop consciousness or self awareness. Right. Or self consciousness or. These are the phases in history in which consciousness. I think that would be pretty restrictive and I think it would not do justice to what he's trying to accomplish.

14:24 Unknown speaker: This comes back to the whole point about his writing style, the abstraction in a literary sense. Hegel self consciously was trying to refer to many, many things with this. And certainly Hobbes is there without using anyone's.

14:38 Mark: Yeah, that's what you have to read the secondary sources that, you know, Solomon said. Oh, in some of these parts, if he's especially obscure, it probably means he's parroting word for word, somebody else's argument like that. The first couple chapters are Plato from the Theaetetus and Aristotle. And then the part we are focusing on is Fichte, and the. The part after that is Schelling and et cetera.

14:56 Unknown speaker: That would be very fair. You know, Kojève, one of the very important interpreters, he calls the book a Platonic dialogue between all the philosophical systems of history. And what Kojève wants to say is that Hegel does not have his own philosophy. And it's an interesting point because as the first phenomenologist, Hegel's not putting forth his own propositions. He's simply trying to show the dialectic of history.

15:20 Wes: Well, he's taking all those moments and synthesizing them. Right. Those all belong to the ultimate position or the absolute, which is his right.

15:30 Mark: Hegel is the end of philosophy.

15:33 Seth: Thank God that wasn't true.

15:34 Wes: Should we say what is the book doing over? We're going to be jumping in, not midway, but 10th of the way in.

15:41 Mark: Midway into the good part.

15:42 Wes: Yeah. What is the overall goal of the book? What is Hegel trying to do? I mean, on the one hand, he's doing something very similar to Kant by trying to ground the possibility of knowledge, let's say.

15:52 Mark: Yes, I would say he assumes right in the intro that the possibility of knowledge does not need arguing for that. Right. In the introduction of the book, he says that skeptics, by which he's including even folks like Kant who say that, oh, there's a thing in itself that we can never know, that they're unwarranted in doing that.

16:09 Wes: Well, let's not say it's a. It's an argument, but he shows how he gives this unfolding of different stages of knowledge.

16:18 Seth: I agree with you. He leads off talking a lot about science and the question of whether or not cognition or understanding can get us knowledge. I think that's part of the concern.

16:27 Unknown speaker: Yes.

16:28 Wes: Yeah. One of the important things to point out here, in a way, he's reacting to Kant's critique. A lot of the stuff. You can see it as a direct response to many things in Kant and other respondents to Kant, like Fichte. Kant spells out this close relationship between the unity of the self and the unity of experience, the way we construct the world and organize our experience as objects. And one of the things Kant ends up doing with his critique is he limits our knowledge. He cuts us off from things in themselves in order to preserve objectivity.

Kant thinks that if you try and maintain our access to things in themselves, you'll never achieve objectivity for reasons that Hume spells out with regard to causality that we've talked about on this podcast. So Kant cuts us off from things in themselves in order to give us one version of knowledge, this objectivity where objects are no longer things in themselves. And I think Hegel wants to show that, in fact, we don't need to cut ourselves off in that way.

17:24 Unknown speaker: I think Kant also wants to preserve the eternal in the thing in itself. The difference between the knowable and the unknowable in Kant is really grounded in the difference between the temporal and the atemporal. Kant wants there still to be this transcendent world of metaphysics. Hegel is like, that's the problem. We have to get rid of the idea that there's this eternal presence that's hidden from us. If we go radically temporal, we can get rid of the thing in itself.

17:52 Wes: Yeah, getting rid of the thing in itself is another way of saying that we have access after all, or that the fact that substance turns out to be subjectivity isn't going to be a problem. Anyway, Mark and Seth are going to get very angry at me if this turns into a conversation about Kant.

18:08 Seth: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, we got to step in.

18:10 Mark: This actually is relevant. Hegel does distinguish. And this is more chapter five, the one right after we stopped. But this is relevant to his. This is relevant to his style throughout.

18:19 Wes: Right.

18:19 Mark: Because if you read this, I mean, it sounds like what we said so far is, you know, Hegel puts forth a series of theories. First. He puts forward something like the naive theory of knowledge and shows why that's Wrong. Then puts forth something like Plato's theory of knowledge, shows why that's wrong. Then Aristotle's that's wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And he leaves out the names, but that doesn't actually capture the style here, because the style here is phenomenological. Which sounds strange because phenomenology is a description of experience, but it's not our experience.

If you're Husserl, you kind of start like Descartes. I'm sitting in my chair and now I'm going to introspect on my experience and I start talking about the things in front of me. And like, there's none of that set up for Hegel. Hegel jumps right in such that you're not even clear. Is he actually talking about a human being experience something, or is this some kind of abstraction? Is this like how an animal experiences? Or just this abstract point of view? Like, let's take a really simple theory of knowledge that's in fact too simple, nobody actually thinks this way.

But let's put ourselves in that position and analyze it. And the reason he can do that is because he's got this distinction that comes up again between really. Chapter three, Force and the Understanding is where he talks about Kant's points about the understanding that we talked about in the Schopenhauer episode as well, about how you need concepts in order to understand anything. We use the understanding as a faculty to organize the contents of experience, something like that. But then the thing that was Schelling's contribution here, which he gets more explicit about in chapter five, but is also there right at the beginning of the self consciousness, is.

And we talked about something like this in the Schopenhauer episode too. Schopenhauer had this. Yeah, okay, with the understanding, you can do natural science. You could sort of do the kind of things you could track regularities, you could do causality. But. But to understand, remember for Schopenhauer, how everything is in fact will. Like there's some faculty beyond understanding that can give us. Schopenhauer doesn't want to call it knowledge, but he ends up treating it like knowledge really through the rest of his. The World as Will and Representation, certainly something he can talk about, and it's some kind of empathy.

And that's the Schelling's philosophy of nature. Here it was in the air, and Hegel is playing on this, that to think of all natural forces. Remember, for Schopenhauer, even gravity is something that you could conceive of as will. Well, Hegel doesn't Use that word. Exactly. But certainly as something that you could put yourself in the point of view of and describe how things would be like, which seems like a weird sort of abstraction. Like what justifies him in being able to do that? He's got this whole big thing at the beginning how you can't really specify a method in advance for philosophy.

If you do that, you're already lost. But yet he's doing this very weird specific thing of like throwing himself from the point of view of these various things and again doing it very abstractly so that like in this master and slave chapter that we're going to talk about, you know, most people interpret that as two self consciousnesses encountering each other, but there are other interpreters that think this is all going on in one person's mind.

21:03 Wes: Well, it is both part of the point. Yeah, exactly. One self consciousness is necessarily two self consciousnesses.

21:09 Unknown speaker: Yes, absolutely.

21:11 Wes: How do we want to do this? Do you want to start at 166 and start. Does any set this right? This might be one where we should really work through.

21:18 Seth: So I didn't, I mean, I read through the consciousness section and I think if we could just give like the 2 minute elevator pitch that gets you from sensation through perception to understanding, it would help. So this is the down home cooking version of Hegel. I love the maneuver that he does. He says, okay, well if we're going to look for knowledge, where could it be? And one place you could say that it is is sense certainty that our sensation, like visual, auditory, tactile of the world, at least the fact of the sensation can't be denied. And you could say there's a certain immediacy to the sensation.

But he says the immediacy isn't really the truth, it's not really the object, if you will, or the being. He uses the term being and truth interchangeably. And I'd like some help with that at some point. But the immediacy of the experience, which is purported to give you a sound basis for knowledge, isn't really what you think it is. Because he says, suppose you say now is night in 12 hours, that will not be true. And you're really saying it from your perspective. And so what he does is kind of flip it around and say anything you ascribe to sense certainty or sensation is really reflected back in you and it's really about you.

22:33 Wes: Yeah, the critical thing there is that insofar as it's related to you, it means it's really a universal. So you really haven't gotten at a particular by, say, ostension and saying here, you know, you might think there's some radical particularity there, but that here turns out to be a universal, which is illustrated by the fact that it doesn't really name anything except in the, you know, your relation using it. But then I could use it and my here would be different than your here. So the attempt at getting at a particular breaks down and you end up with something universal, which in this pattern is going to be repeated as we go forward.

23:07 Unknown speaker: And the breaking down is really key because there's. You get negativity. And the negative is a really key concept for understanding Hegel. It's a really strange concept. You know, when he's describing that now, how the now develops in sense certainty, he talks about how, you know, we apply now to this moment. And then the word has a meaning for us when the reference changes. When it's daytime and now is day, the meaning that it had for us is negated. And we have to expand the meaning to encompass this difference. The night limits the day. We understand them through contrast, but we learn that we can expand the meaning of the term now to encompass differences. So universality is a negative in Hegel, it is nothing but the differences. It's a weird way of putting it, but that's key.

23:59 Wes: One way of looking at that is that when something requires reference to something else, it's limited by that. And so once you get the possibility of the limitation of, say, here by context, and you have that negation, that's sort of the same process as making it into universal. The particular, in a way, is negated in the universal insofar as you bring into the picture lots of different particulars. And it's. That assertion that you were making about the particular turns out to, in fact, involve a lot of other different particulars. And that's the limiting factor and that's the negating factor that's associated with the universal.

24:38 Seth: Yeah. If anybody wants to. I've got. I think it was section 90 or. I don't know how the pagination works, but just do sections. Well, in that section on sense certainty, it's page 58 of the version I have, and then it's like 90 from the original section 90.

24:52 Unknown speaker: I think those are the paragraphs in Miller.

24:54 Seth: He says, when you say now is night and then 12 hours later, now is preserved, but it's not preserved as night. That's the negation. He says, what you find out is that it's mediated both by what it is and what it is. Not. And that's what it means to be a universal. And that's how that negation is critical to universality, but also ultimately is going to be critical to. You're right, Tom. He really uses this as a central. I don't know if it's the right way to call it methodological or systemic, structural piece of what he's doing. But the idea that negation is part of what we do and that you negate and leave behind, you negate as part of your positive process.

25:33 Unknown speaker: He says over and over again throughout the text, that cognition pays no attention to its act of differentiating. So it takes everything as a positive entity and it doesn't recognize the differentiation and difference as the active component of the concept conceiving anything.

25:51 Mark: We need some examples here. This is going to be nothing to people. So like Bertrand Russell, let's just say a particular for him is like red patch here. Now, you know, so whatever that is, I'm not even going to say. I'm not going to conceptualize about it. I could be wrong about what this, you know, I think it's a book, but let's leave aside its book ness. I could be wrong about that. But I am certain right now that I am having a sensation of red. And the fact that later I'm going to have a sensation of something else, how is that even relevant to the fact that I am absolutely certain that right now I'm having a sensation of red and therefore I founded knowledge?

26:26 Unknown speaker: Seth, you know, you said before about the difference between being and truth in Hegel, he says that in the experience of sense, the truth vanishes. And I think what he means there is that the truth is the concept of what it is, so that the concept of the book, the concept of its redness, are completely necessary to having that experience of the book. So if Russell were to simply say, no, it's just this book and it's just this redness, he's just wrong. He's missing the fact that. That the concept is mediated by language. You can't make sense of a book or redness without language.

27:03 Wes: So think of Kant saying that concepts and particulars are mutually dependent. Or perception is theory laden. You don't get particulars without universals. You can't access them except through concepts. They're empty. What is it?

27:17 Unknown speaker: What's Kant's thing, intuitions without concepts are blind? Yeah, that's very fitting because that's almost what Hegel means when he talks about the truth disappearing.

27:26 Seth: So, yeah, Mark, my response to what you were saying about Russell saying that particular red patch here now that Hegel says in this section that what sensation gives you, or what sense certainty is, is immediacy. But it's an immediacy that he says does not have the truth of being, it has the truth of has been. And so in addition to the fact that the immediacy of sensation doesn't give you a particular, it just gives you the immediacy of this broad swath. You may talk about it and say, oh, now is night, I am here now. And you think you're talking about a particular that points something out, but in reality you're just making reference to universals. He also seems to think that sensation is always talking about something that's past, which is to say you're talking about something that is not. And that knowledge is not about what is not, it's about what is.

28:13 Unknown speaker: There's also the social dimension here. These are the valleys.

28:16 Mark: Not in this chapter.

28:18 Unknown speaker: No, I think it is present. It's just that it doesn't become apparent until later. And you look back because there's no way that the universal makes sense if it isn't part of language. And language already implies a social dimension.

28:33 Seth: I don't know. What do you guys think about this as a criticism, though, of a theory that says that our sense data are going to be the source of our enduring eternal knowledge? I think the points he made were pretty good.

28:44 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it seems again the idea that, say, perception is theory laden, or if you analyze the concept of radical particularity that fools itself into thinking it's escaped universality, you'll find that the universal is already there, the concept is already there, or however you want to put it. I think that's the point he's making and I think it's.

29:05 Mark: I think that's good enough for one third of our two minute seminars.

29:08 Seth: I agree. I agree, I agree.

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