Last week I read Hegel's "Who Thinks Abstractly?" several times. It made me pleased to see that, in a way, what I used to chalk up to my own naivete and/or needless optimism, Hegel finds to be cultured thinking. It is the uneducated, he says, that categorize and abstract everything, failing to deal with specifics. The best example involves a young woman telling and elderly merchant woman that her eggs are rotten. "You may be rotten!" replies the old babushka, proceeding to determine that the girl must be a gold-digging tramp of a woman, merely because of her suggestion that the eggs were bad. The point is not that abstract thinking ought not be done, only that thinking in the abstract is only good when dealing with abstractions. As Stephens says, "Make it real." So, I'm going to continue to deal with people and actions on a case-by-case basis, because heaven forbid I allow a single conversation to turn someone into a Liar, or a single rumor another into a Slut, or a single altercation another into a Jerk.

Until next time, I remain.