Summary: There is no guest this week, but once again I return to the subject of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in preparation for the Diet Soap Philosophy Writer's Workshop this weekend. This time we cover Part IV: The Truth which Conscious Certainty of Self Realises by taking a look at Charlie Kaufman's first film Being John Malovich. The Philosophy Writer's workshop has so far been a monthly online conversation done about Hegel's great book, and if you'd like to subscribe to the workshop you can find a link at dietsoap.podomatic.com. Subscribers to the workshop and donors to the podcast will receive a copy of my latest book while supplies last. Right now the book is the novella Wave of Mutilation (although copies of my radical memoir Pick Your Battle is also available.) Later this year my next novella, the Doom That Came to the LOLcats will be available, and who knows what will come after that. In any case I want to thank Reagan S and Tracy V for donating to the podcast in the last week and let you both know that your books are in envelopes and will be in the mail in tomorrow's mail. For those of you who are going to join in next week for the philosophy writer's workshop, I look forward to discussing Hegel with you. And if you'd like to join in there is plenty of room in the workshop, so go ahead and subscribe before Sunday the 29th and I'll be sure to get in touch with you on how to participate. -- Excerpt from the Phenomenology: With self-consciousness, then, we have now passed into the native land of truth, into that kingdom where it is at home. We have to see how the form or attitude of self-consciousness in the first instance appears. When we consider this new form and type of knowledge, the knowledge of self, in its relation to that which preceded, namely, the knowledge of an other, we find, indeed, that this latter has vanished, but that its moments have, at the same time, been preserved; and the loss consists in this, that those moments are here present as they are implicitly, as they are in themselves. The being which “meaning” dealt with, particularity and the universality of perception opposed to it, as also the empty, inner region of understanding – these are no longer present as substantial elements (Wesen), but as moments of self-consciousness, i.e. as abstractions or differences, which are, at the same time, of no account for consciousness itself, or are not differences at all, and are purely vanishing entities (Wesen).
