Another good place to think

Further thinking about the obsession with “difference” and “sameness,” and the effort to establish intersubjective relations of difference or across lines of difference, and finally had some sense of understanding of why “the dialectic” reduces everything to “the same,” by recollecting that Hegel uses the metaphor of the relation of the acorn to the oak — i.e., everything necessary for the oak is already present in the acorn — and presents the phenomenology of spirit as an account of the stages of the coming to full consciousness/development of the Absolute Spirit, which makes the moments of the dialectical process moments of self-consciousness in the end, as opposed to any actual consciousness or encounter with another; just encounter with the self in another form or under another rubric. [This is, after all, a form of idealism.] So I was tremendously excited and happy for a few minutes. Then I realized that I was really just catching up to the rest of the class. Even so, this very concept has been so extremely difficult for me [sort of a Mulderian? "the truth is out there," whether we ever really get to know it or not] to grasp, I remained pretty gratified.