Lyceum

 Looking forward to this afternoon's return of our Lyceum speaker series, live on campus again for the first time since 2019 when Robert Talisse spoke of "Overdoing Democracy: The Problem of Political Polarization."

Today's speaker Richard Eldridge reviewed Talisse's eponymous book in the LA Review:

This suggestion that we might thus discover our likeness to others with different political identities resembles Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the breaking of the hard heart in recognition of likeness. We might, as Talisse puts it, discover that “it matters to ourselves and to others how our lives go.” Unfortunately, however, Hegel’s account of this breaking relies on practices of confession and forgiveness that are rooted in a religious conception of our ultimate likeness to one another as created beings. Absent this, reconciliation in recognition of mutual reasonableness seems likely to founder, and such practices and conceptions have been colonized by individual, competitive self-interest, even more in the United States today than in early 19th-century Prussia, as we have come to take “how our lives go” to be largely a matter of “getting what we want” in competition with others — never mind “reasonableness” and “fairness,” claims to which strike many as having essentially partisan content.

So... only a Hegelian can save us now? That's not encouraging. Our present reality is not quite rational enough to transcend its own contradictions. Maybe things would clarify under the influence of nitrous oxide. 

...That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!

Thought deeper than speech——!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my
God, oh God, oh God!

The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:—

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference...

Or not. 

Counting on Professor Eldridge to be a lot more coherent and articulate this afternoon.