I’ve had a hard time getting people to finger me lately, although I’ve made some good progress on my thinking about epistemology. For a while now, I’ve understood the inaugural puzzle of modernity to be
what if what you think about things and the reality of the things themselves are necessarily different because of something inherent to the act of thinking?
Of course, if you’re thinking in terms of “things,” purely from the perspective of accessing reality, you’ve already lost — we’ll start simple: all the matter that exists, considered as a single entity, is what I’m going to call the universe, and that’s the only “thing” that is straightforwardly “real” because every other thing besides the universe has the problem of being one thing among many, which is not a problem for everything, as it’s the only everything, not really the sum of all the other smaller things so much as the one real thing, something we fragment into every other smaller thing with our thinking. We could call this entity the realthing, but then maybe other confusions would arise, with people who talk too fast for spaces to scan, e.g., so universe is fine. There isn’t any other thing as fundamentally simple as the universe, so it’s good to appreciate it while you can: things are about to get significantly more complicated.
To wit, coffee mugs — impossible! For pedagogical purposes, you are now a character in this essay, and I am an entity in your universe with near total omnipotence, so I give you a mug, and also a table to put it on, but don’t thank me quite yet, as I’m here to interrogate your metaphysical assumptions: what makes the mug in front of you the mug in front of you? Why do you not consider it part of the table it’s sitting on, the table a part of the floor it’s sitting on, and all those things not just part of the oneness of all things? Well, you reason, smugly, they look different. Surely, I concede, but think of the snowy peak of a large mountain: what makes the snowy peak, which looks different from the rest of the large mountain, also part of the large mountain? You are now frustrated: a large mountain and a snowy peak obviously have a different relationship than a table and a mug, you say, because you can separate those things. To prove a philosophical point, I cut off one of your fingers — my finger! you exclaim. Your finger?
Separating things is doubtless not a uniquely human faculty but certainly a characteristic one: we move through a distinguished world: mugs are not tables; tables are not rooms; snowy peaks are parts of large mountains, but large mountains are not the rest of the earth, and of course, if you don’t need to drink out of it, then the mug does become part of the table, and if you don’t need to put anything on it or grab anything off it, the table becomes part of the room, just like how if you need to climb the snowy peak, it becomes its own thing, and if you are just thinking generally about The Earth, then obviously the mountain becomes part of it. The distinctions between things are fluid. They generally depend on what we need from them, and also when we need it.
So, that’s why you think your mug is a thing, maybe, but why do you think it’s a mug? Is my mug the same as yours? Learning from experience, you go straight for something related to human activity — a mug is anything that does what a mug does — but to complicate this philosophical point, I cut off another one of your fingers and put it in your mug — you couldn’t use the other finger, you say, annoyingly, as if you’ve established any philosophical basis whatsoever for your claim that the two severed fingers are the same kind of thing. We’re not doing moral philosophy yet, but I cut off a third finger to teach you a lesson about humility and then put it in your finger-holder.
Things are changing before your very eyes, and the blood loss, claro, so you’re starting to feel insane. To relax, you think about the oneness of all things, meaning, once again, you and your fingers are the same thing, which is everything — ahhhh, you think, this bliss, so godlike! I cut off a fourth finger for blasphemy: you can’t have two things that are both everything. Do they include each other? How does that work? Dumbass.
But, as a gesture of good faith, I decide to move you to a room that contains a copy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit; it’s in German, which I didn’t know you didn’t know how to read, not that I can, but I at least wanted to be open to the possibility you could — at any rate, it doesn’t matter that in this case, you can’t read, because you don’t want to read: you don’t like thinking; you like experiencing: simply existing in the here and now, you declare, is the richest, most complete way to be alive. It doesn’t even matter that I’ve locked you in this nearly empty room — empty? Look at these walls! Hear these sounds! Smell these smells! That’s right: you’re practicing mindfulness. What matters, you’re confident, is what’s in front of you, that is, what’s here, and also now.
But what is here? New room! No Hegel. You’re still here, but the word here no longer refers to the same room. Really, you could be in any room, and it would still be here — I cycle you through a dozen new rooms to prove this philosophical point. Dizzy, you accept the word here is indifferent to the room you’re actually in.
Can I go now, you ask. Sure, I answer, just tell me what you mean by now. I graciously provide you a clock. I want to go home now, at 11:23, you say, just as the clock turns to 11:24. Of course, you think, kicking yourself: the word now must be indifferent, too. You sigh. Language sucks. Obviously you know what you mean by here and now. You just can’t express yourself. But if I was you, then I’d know exactly what you were talking about . . . so maybe what matters is not what’s in front of you, but you: the truth of the sentence I am here lies not in the here but in the I: the word here refers to this room, you decide, because I’m the one who’s in it!
I’ve added an intercom, and from it, you hear another voice: I am here, it says. You’re confused: who’s this dipshit? I am I, and I am here, you think. I am here, the telepath from the intercom counters. You’re ponderous a second but then decide maybe the word I is like the word here and also the word now, at least in that each of these words is only given meaning by the person speaking it. Everyone in the world could buzz in through the intercom and say, I am here, and what would matter isn’t just the I (which I?) or the here (which here?) but both the I and the here. Wow, you think, a relationship — holy moly.
Lit! You’ve just learned something important about how to perceive things, and I’ve decided to reward you with your old mug. You look at it. How do you even know it’s really real . . . ? Well, you know what nothing looks like, and that mug’s definitely not nothing, ergo, it’s something. But what kind of something is it? You examine it: it’s . . . cloudgray . . . heavy . . . roundish . . . and it is not . . . chartreuse . . . or any other color . . . light . . . actually that heavy . . . square . . . or any other shape . . . okay, interesting, you think, this mug has many different seemingly independent properties, and you’ve seen things that are round and chartreuse before — on your cell, on the web, for example — and also that cell phone was rectangular and not that heavy, and you’ve seen other things as well that have other combinations of properties as well, so . . . if none of these properties depend on each other, you think, whatever “the mug” is is maybe whatever is holding all these independent properties together, but then you remember some mistakes you made earlier, namely, you forgot to account for your own role in the process, and it is true that things are cloudgray to you, and heavy to you, and so on, and so perhaps this means that you are what takes all these independent properties and posits them into a single thing. But that sucks! You don’t want to be involved in the process. You want the coffee mug to exist, on its own, because that’s what it means to exist! So you look at the coffee mug. Well, you think, desperately, it is cloudgray compared to the table, and heavy compared to this feather my philosophical torturer just put on the table, and . . . okay, so insofar as it is not a table, it is a coffee mug, and insofar as it is not a feather, it is a coffee mug, and wow, I’m not involved at all, you think, this is lit!
So your thing is itself only insofar as it is not anything else? You want it to be what it is regardless of other things, but also it is what it is only in its relationships to other things? That’s an aporia, dumbass. You put your head in your hands. Aporias! you wail, I forgot about aporias! Well don’t do that, I say, with a near omnipotent headpat, you’re also about to be understanding: remember how you just broke something into many discrete qualities and then put it back together into one thing, using your mind? What if that process . . . was also a thing you could think about? Wait, and that means that process . . ., you think, getting caught up in an infinite regress, which I exacerbate by moving in a bunch of objects as the occasion for you to think about how everything is in your head, and how if you want, the table can be the mug can be the chair can be the other table can be, like, anything, like the mountain and the other, even stubbier table, and that means everything can be everything it’s not, you say, grabbing hold of the thread again, and any thing can be any other thing because of the infinite capabilities of my consciousness which is, itself, a thing I can think about, and now I am Other to myself and also myself, at the same time, and that means I can be whatever I’m not, anyplace, anytime, meaning, woah: self-consciousness!
It’s a little psychotic of you, I’d say, thinking your own thinking is more trustworthy than the real world surrounding you, but who among us — I move you into a new room, where there’s a one-way mirror looking into another of these philosophical torture rooms, in which you see a woman who is reading Hegel and seemingly enjoying herself. Remembering that you saw something online about how women who read Hegel in New York City have sex appeal, you ask me whether this room is in New York City, and I answer your question with a question to rabbinically illuminate that you already know what you want, regardless of the major metropolitan area you’re in. Yuuuuup, you think, self-consciously, that’s desire, alright, but easy there, tiger: you’re getting ahead of yourself — I decide to leave you the rest of your fingers, since we’re going to do more epistemology now, and one thing I’ve learned from experience is that you can never know when you might need to make a philosophical point.
So what’s the difference between this woman and a coffee cup, I ask you. You nonverbally signal that you think I’m stupid for asking that, so I nonverbally signal that you’re at five fingers now. Wounded, you tell me that she is a human being and then say something liberal about humanity that I can’t really follow, so I decide to move a remedial cat into your room. This is Māo, I say, but I fuck up the tone and then have to assure you there’s no relation; you introduce yourself to Māo, and then I ask you what the difference between a cat and a coffee cup is. Well, obviously cats start small and then get bigger and then die and like generally change and so forth? you say, as I give you atomic vision, and you realize things are basically always changing all the time, lowkey. I restore your nonatomic vision. The cat has agency, you say. But like what do you mean by that, I say. The cat can do stuff, and sort of all the stuff that is unified by the doing is the cat, you say, and like, you say, elaborating, if you were to cut off the cat’s fingers, then the cat couldn’t use them, so it would no longer be the cat, but the only thing the coffee cup can do is exist passively, which is to say as an object for us, whereas being alive is sort of precisely the unity of an existence for others — as an object — and an existence for yourself — as a subject — that emerges in action.
Crisp! I’ve been humbled. Okay let me take this remedial cat back, and here’s . . . two of your fingers — you can go back to looking at the Hegelian woman. So, a revamp of an old question for you: what’s the difference between the cat and the woman? Clearly, you say, feeling yourself, the woman knows she’s a “woman,” whereas the cat is just alive, which is to say, the woman has an understanding of concepts, like I do, which means she is a self-consciousness, like I am, and I mean, you say, she is reading Hegel, after all, and seems to actually be reading and enjoying it, unlike many people who claim to read Hegel, for clout. Why would anyone do that, I ask you, to figure out why you think anyone would do that, and you shrewdly point out that self-consciousnesses have an image of themselves as a thing, but also an awareness that in general, the image of the thing is not the thing itself, and so if they are looking at themselves, thingily, they will get caught up in an infinite regress, and the only way out of that is to be recognized by someone like-them-but-not-them as someone who is like-them-but-not-them.
You’re on a roll, so I give you another finger and a new scenario: I swap you into a room with a one-way mirror looking into another room, where there are two nonbinary guys, Master and Slave, who have decided to get recognition from one another by trying to kill each other, a premise you don’t feel the need to ask follow-up questions about, on account of they named themselves that. You also infer from the names and watching them a bit that Slave does stuff for Master, and that Master feels good that everything is done for them, but that also a life premised on the freedom to do whatever you want where someone else is actually doing everything for you is no freedom at all, and conversely, you gather, Slave is not actually serving Master — as Slave could surely kill themselves at any time — but serving life itself, and appears to be doing so out of fear (of death, mainly, i.e. negation of the self), although since Slave is the one doing all the labor, well that’s what lets us make the world in our own image, no? and there’s a lot of radical potential there, you say, so I feel like as opposed to trying to kill each other, maybe they could just collaborate on cool projects and then maybe kiss? Fuckin A, diva! I say, moving myself into the room to offer you a fist bump of well-calibrated sincerity, but here I do have to pick a similarly calibrated tone and remind you that it is really important at this juncture to remember that I’m only nearly omnipotent, and a loveful smooch is one thing these two self-consciousnesses will have to choose for themselves . . .
A pretty interesting thing happened as I was a few days away from finishing the first half of this essay, which is I got mildly cruised while playing Sunday night pool at a dive bar, and thus fingered, thereby undermining the superficial conceit I was using to structure this essay; it was fun, and though that wasn’t how I thought that might happen, what I thought might happen after it happened happened, and seeing the opportunity for another rote, combination-high-and-low type joke (“now, with even more time to think about dialectical philosophy, [attempts at dialectical philosophy],” e.g.), I instead chose to make use of something I’ve been learning from my four month experience of being a 30-year-old woman — viz., patience — and so, a few minutes later, I was rewarded by realizing that this was a concrete experience of contingency relevant to something I was already interested in saying in the second half of the essay regarding a contradiction inherent in the form of narrative as such, and also a pretty good way to use the section break I already had planned — we’ll get to the contradiction soon.
Hegel has an essay from 1808 that’s both much easier to read than the Phenomenology and like 450 pages shorter; it’s called “Who Thinks Abstractly?” In it, he gives the following example of abstract thinking: a maid is buying eggs at a market and notices that they’re rotten; she says to the egg-seller, these are rotten eggs; upset, the egg-seller proceeds to berate the maid, picking apart her clothes, her body, her family, and so on; in Hegel’s words, the egg-seller “subsumes the other woman — scarf, hat, shirt, etc., as well as her fingers and other parts of her, and her father and whole family, too — solely under the crime that she has found the eggs rotten. Everything about her is colored through and through by these rotten eggs.” This is abstract thinking: “to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.”
One of the appeals of abstract thinking is its explanatory power. Once you’ve subsumed every concrete detail under an abstraction, it’s easy enough to see that abstraction expressed in every concrete detail, particularly when you consider the word expression in its genetic sense, as the process by which the abstract information encoded in an organism’s DNA (its genotype) becomes the observable, concrete particulars of its body (its phenotype). When you think this way, you can explain everything — take God, for example: if you believe that God is in the DNA of everything, then whenever you look at anything, you will see God. The ability to explain literally everything is more or less unique to the idea of God, but there are other godlike things that work more locally. You might think that everything that happens in capitalist society is an expression of capitalism or that everything that happens in a city is the expression of its unique local character or that everything a person does is the expression of their biology, or their race, or their class position, or even their gender.
You can explain everything with abstract thinking, except for the experience of contingency, which is precisely that which you cannot, really, explain. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice, and the second time, I only knew the man to the extent that you know any stranger who’s sharing a train car with you. It did not need to be me he assaulted, although, as the years have passed, and I have struggled to make sense of this, I have seen the temptation of assembling the many seemingly unrelated things from my past into a compelling narrative that led to that point. Looking backwards, everything that has happened feels like something that had to happen, as it’s the only thing that has; looking forward, nothing has actually happened, so anything could. This, of course, distinguishes the experience of being alive from that of being a character in an already completed narrative — whether that is a novel, a novelistic work of philosophy, an essay, a movie, an already completed TV show, or what have you — in that those arrive to us already completed, meaning whoever was in charge approved the past events knowing the future ones, and vice versa, something that can be vaguely comforting, I gather, from people who believe that everything happens for a reason, usually a god’s.
Life’s a lot more like a livestream. There’s contingency. We don’t really know what the future will hold. Sometimes you get fingered on purpose, and other times it’s something else. Two is the number used, in many different contexts, to establish a pattern, and even though being sexually assaulted once would’ve been sufficient to impact my life enough to let being “a victim” be a part of my sense of self, I don’t like thinking of myself as “a victim” for the same reason I don’t like thinking about other people as “rapists”: I want less rape, in my life and in others’, and making either being raped or raping someone into part of an abstract identity, as opposed to recognizing raping someone as a choice that some people make, and continue to make, makes it seem as if they chose to do that because it is something intrinsic to who they are, and thus something they will never not be, thus making rape something they will never not do; I want less rape, though, so that’s not how I choose to think about it.
There is a fairly extreme vision of the human freedom of choice implicit in the ideas above, and it is one often challenged by the existence of mental illnesses, such as bipolar — a mental illness that can make you psychotic in a few, qualitatively different directions — or obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mental illness that often manifests as feeling trapped in seemingly unbreakable patterns of behavior. I use these examples because I have lived with, and been diagnosed as, both, so I can tell you from the inside that when you are, e.g., manically psychotic, the world makes a lot of sense, and in fact, the world makes much more sense than it normally seems to. But chances are your sensemaking has taken a sharp left turn from that of the herd, and so when you explain it to others, and you are not in a social context in which such out-of-the-box thinking might be rewarded, they probably will push back and try to convince you that you are being psychotic, leading you to withdraw into your psychotic sensemaking, become paranoid, feel persecuted, and, if you weren’t already doing bad stuff, then likely that. This is one reason an effective way of managing things like bipolar and OCD is to consider the “distortions” in your thinking egodystonic, meaning they are at odds with who you consider yourself to be, in other words, they become the thoughts of some Other inside you, hence why people who see the ways their “insane” behavior have hurt people, big or small, may apologize by saying something like “sorry, that was my OCD talking” or “I was manic, and I wasn’t myself.”
These diagnoses, and the identities people form around them, often can provide a solution to an old problem, which is why do we do stuff that’s bad for us? An oldish solution, Sigmund Freud’s, involves the “unconscious,” something Juliet Mitchell says he found “because nothing else would explain what he had observed,” although I have often, as a “mentally ill person” prone to behaviors no one else can understand, wondered why they didn’t begin by just asking me; Freud did, but as Mitchell points out a few pages later, he “read the history of the person backwards – as it is always essential to do; but in retelling it, he describes it as a march forwards, a process of development where it is in fact a multi-level effort of reconstruction.” This happens at a few different scales: very schematic Marxists, for example, are prone to reading the development of human society in this way, where each previous “stage” and the many events that lead from one to the other are seen as necessary, surely part of the structure of narrative, but then, confusingly, the future is read the same way. One virtue of considering humanity as a single patient is that it is a lot simpler to read its development backwards than it is to simultaneously make sense of billions of independent actors who act as if they themselves were independent, just as it is easier to treat millions of independent patients as if they themselves were all simply manifestations of the single bipolar, OCD, or whatever person.
The act of thinking introduces errors always, so it is not wrong to make mistakes when you think, as long as you account for that fact in your thinking. I have found that many people now think using a particular form of liberal identity politics popular among people who go to college and never leave it, physically or otherwise; it’s a way of thinking I have come to hate, and I hate it as much as, if not more than, e.g., the conservative thinkers who have made quite a bit of money by defining themselves against it. They make a lot of money doing that because it’s an easy target, and it’s an easy target because it’s a bad way to think, even if it occasionally results in good things. I also feel the same way about much of what passes for “structural analysis” these days, in which a concrete individual’s decision making — say, the things an artist decides to be put in their art — are explained using vague gestures at “structural forces.” For reasons that have never made sense to me, people that like to call themselves Marxists have decided that individual autonomy — which is to say, human freedom, a thing Marxism is ostensibly interested in furthering — doesn’t have any place in their writing. Surely, whether Marxists ignoring this in their writing is good or not depends, mainly on what they are writing about and what they are writing about it, but also on how those individual Marxists act as individuals in their real lives. For my part, I can say that I care more about furthering human freedom than I do about being able to call myself a Marxist, so if writing about individual autonomy and Marxism at the same time disqualifies me, totally chill with me, happy to just say I’m Isabel instead — also, I’ve read things like Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1957 book Search for a Method, so have quotes like “Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry” locked and loaded, in case we need to get pithy.
More importantly, I’ve learned through experience that even if you do not get to choose the choices presented to you, you always get to choose the ones you make. Living this truth is, I think, what makes you an “adult,” one of the few social identities that I do think it makes sense to organize around: living and acting this way is the precondition for working effectively with others, and I suspect this is one major reason nearly everyone besides those who rape children, and some of the people who do rape children, do not blame children for being raped, as they are definitionally the class of people who cannot be held accountable this way, unlike adults who get raped, who sometimes many of these people find it within their worldview to blame. It would be cruel to punish a child for being the victim of a social world they cannot meaningfully operate inside of, which, of course, leaves one to wonder why the experience of being an American child seems to be largely undergirded by pedagogies rooted in punishment, though from there, it’s not so hard to see that this is also true of the experience of being an American adult, who will surely leave school at some point but still have access to many other -to-prison-pipelines, nevertheless.
I’ve noticed that trans women are generally safer when we do not discuss children in any context, but especially the ones in which sex and sexual violence are present. This is interesting to me, because the trans women that might do so tend to be the ones who have survived a childhood generally understood to be the kind of childhood you have to survive, something that might give us insight into some concrete ways in which being a child can be hard. But, you know, a lot of people think we’re all rapists, so what are you going to do? There were a lot of other reasons I got castrated, although I hoped avoiding the assumption that my sexual desires were inextricably rape-y might be a nice consolation prize. Alas. Women rape people too, I suppose.
I have found that people, myself very much included, tend to like thinking about rape even less than they like talking about it, which is generally not at all. Consider the following thought experiment: you might consider someone you’re seeing your lover if you could walk into their house and eat their food without having to ask. Seems problematic, in the sense of obvious edge cases, but the intuition for it is clear. Now consider this: you can walk into anyone’s house and eat their food without asking, as long you’re ready to face the potential consequences, just as you could easily look at the next person you see and decide to rape them — knowing one of the men who sexually assaulted me and not the other, outside of what I might superficially infer from his appearance, I suspect that most people who would choose to make these superficial inferences would think that these two men could not have been anymore different, outside of the fact that they both chose to sexually assault me, but to look for signs that someone may or may not be a rapist in anything besides whether or not they have raped someone is to fundamentally misunderstand the problem of sexual violence, and, consequently, to always make it harder for victims to come forward: the only thing that reliably determines whether a person is a rapist or not is whether or not they choose to rape people. When I observed it in college and online, I mostly found abstract liberalism to be goofy, but elsewhere, like when I saw what happened when people I knew tried to use that framework to solve real instances of sexual violence, it also became something else.
Sexual violence is a problem that emerges alongside human freedom, which is to say, if the solution to the problem of sexual violence is understood in terms of prevention, it is a problem that will never be solved. The threat of rape, and the reality of it, is not something we will ever be able to eliminate; it is just something we can respond to. How we choose to do so is, of course, up to us: others might, but I find no joy in imagining the men who have assaulted me being punished, as that would not change the fact that they already assaulted me; I just want them to never do that to anyone else again, although I would prefer that they learn to choose that path for themselves rather than be incarcerated into it. This is to say, I think that no system we ever set up to prevent rape will ever be sufficient to prevent rape because humans act freely, and figuring out a way to misuse something to your ends is, definitionally, abuse; this is not a good reason to abandon the project of preventing rape, as rape is bad, and one goal it would be good for us to have, societally, is less rape. It is also equally true that while a societal structure will never be sufficient to prevent rape, at an individual level, every single individual waking up every single day and choosing, every single day, not to rape people would be. I see no reason not to aim for that.
The real people I know in my real life that I am closest to are people who think seriously about the world around them, which is why they are the people I have chosen to be closest to. I saw one of them after my first experience of being part of an organization full of people with professed radical values fail a victim of sexual violence, when I was feeling that I — for different reasons — had also failed this woman. My friend has also been a part of many organizations full of people with professed radical values who have failed a victim of sexual violence, and recounting to me their difficulty in doing something as simple as vetting a guest list at a social event, said:
You’re going to overthrow capitalism, but you can’t even keep the rapists out the function?
Again, this is not a reason not to try and overthrow capitalism — it just means that my baseline expectation if we’re going to be having a party together is that we’re all agreed on doing our best to keep the rape down.
Before humanity got the inaugural puzzle of modernity, it got the inaugural puzzle of consciousness:
I am all the stuff I can control, and the rest of everything ever is all the stuff that I cannot control, so now what?
Other people are, famously, very hard to control. For my part, I think all of them have an equally complex and individual (that is, “special”) life, but it is true that some people embrace that more than others: to make my specific life liveable, I have had to choose to live a way far more socially heterodox than is required by simply being trans, or any of my other social identities; I am a “strange” person, and I’ve learned through experience that this is a problem you have to solve in your long term social relationships, particularly romantic ones, which are the social relationships contemporary American society seems to generally understand as the most meaningful way to share a life with someone. In the sense that the abstract idea of romance often expresses itself in many historically determined actions that involve collaboration — like sharing a house, a bank account, children you provide for, and so on — I see the intuition, and as many contemporary Americans need a house, a bank account, and so on, I see why these relationships often are at the center of everyone’s lives. Many of the above thoughts have emerged as I have tried to make sense of why I recently had to end a nearly eleven year romantic relationship, which I was in for a third of my life, as well as the many conversations I’ve had with others about that, where I have often been reassured I will find love again, even though I have never said that that is my concern — I don’t think I’d be a writer if I felt my understanding of the world was already understood, but being a writer has made me much harder to understand, which is fine: it’s obviously worth it to me, as I keep choosing to do it.
I have noticed, thinking about many relationships I know of, present and past, that the main predictor for the long term success of a romantic relationship between two people is that neither person, strictly speaking, needs to be in it — they just choose to be. This is the kind of love founded in what Hegel might call “recognition,” and much as his Master undermines their desired freedom by attaining it through another, I suspect that those who use another’s love for themselves as a substitute for their own undermine the very thing they seek. Perhaps this framing will be useful for some and less useful for others, as we almost all need a house, and so forth, and we all want different things, meaning, pithily, we do not all get the same set of choices, just the same ability to choose them.