Life with Hegel

Our last two seminars have been on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Philosophy of History." The only book I've read that is more incomprehensible than this one is the other book by Hegel that we've been reading, namely, "The Phenomenology of Spirit." I am really hoping that our next few seminars will make me understand this stuff better, because right now my brain is short-circuiting around a sentence which contained the words 'bifurcation', 'self-otherness of the simple', 'abstract immediacy', and 'substantiality as the in-itself'. Whew. Someone take me back to Aristotle - he's hard, but at least he writes in English. ;)

We have finally arrived at the part of senior theology where we study the Trinity. It's extremely interesting stuff. So far we've said that there are two immanent processions in God, namely, that of intellection and that of will. The first is a generation and is the Son; the second is love and is the Holy Spirit. I really DO hope, along with many previous years' worth of seniors, that I don't accidentally write anything heretical on my final theology exam. :)

This weekend was rather interesting. On Friday evening there was a concert, the first one of the year. It was given by a group called L.A. Cantilena, and consisted of music by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Telemann. That was quite enjoyable. After the concert was the annual game of Students vs. Tutors Trivial Pursuit, held in the coffee shop. The activities director asked for volunteers to be captain of the student team, and Anthony was the only volunteer, so the Official Student Microphone was handed over to him, he and I got to sit up front, and I rolled the die for the student team. Dr. McLean's pre-concert statement that the tutors would win turned out, unsurprisingly, to be true. I've attended the Trivial Pursuit all four years here, and the students have only won once. Oh well, it was fun anyway.

I had rather a bad morning on Saturday, but I won't go into that here. I worked on seminar and on my thesis all afternoon, and now have 6 pages of my rough draft finished. The draft is due on November 30, and only needs to be at least 20 pages long, so I'm feeling pretty good about it so far. I just got through a few pages which explain, both from common conception and from Aristotle, what it means to say that something is natural. After dinner, Anthony and I decided to go see the new Pixar movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." That was one of my favorite books when I was little, and the movie was alright, too. I don't think Anthony was as much of a fan, though (except for all the horribly corny puns). Oh well.

Not a whole lot has been going on today as of yet. The choir sang at Mass, we ate brunch, I finished seminar and read a bit of theology, and now I've been wandering around for the last couple of hours trying to find something to do until dinner.

For those who don't know yet, Anthony is going to be visiting me for a few days during Christmas break, and I am VERY excited. :) He arrives on Tuesday, January 5, and we are leaving together to return to TAC on Saturday the 9th. I've made all kinds of wonderful plans for what to do during his visit, including but not necessarily limited to seeing all the sights of downtown Seattle, going sledding in the mountains, and hopefully meeting various friends and relatives. So anyway, it should be a lot of fun.

Well, according to my watch, it's now (finally) nearly 5 o'clock, which translated means, dinner time. SO, I will end this post and wish everyone a happy Sunday!