Tom McCarthy
speaker
238 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Tom McCarthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You've got the transformation of
social and class relations.
So this is the kind of general situation of the novel.
But for Hegel, I guess, you know, reducing and summarizing ridiculously from my late reading, the kind of main characteristics of spirits coming into consciousness of itself are firstly a kind of, as with Spinoza, a relationality.
So nothing is
in and of itself, but rather as what Hegel calls the mediation of its self-othering with itself.
And this is one of our Man Behind Curtain keywords, mediation.
This book, this word crops up
Many times in the phenomenology.
So for Hegel, being properly understood is not immediacy, but mediation, the reflection of otherness within itself.
And he uses, like Spinoza, this register of optics, of like rays and refractions, threads of light, eye of the spirit, lucidity.
And reflection is one of his core terms.
So for Hegel, the I of consciousness, the me of consciousness, is merely the reflection of self-consciousness into itself, or the certainty that has become truth.
But, he continues, the truth of this certainty is really a double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness.
So spirit, this kind of character on the march,
achieves its end as what he calls this process of reflecting itself to itself.
And again, this motif of this image of double reflection is all over Middlemarch.
So, for example, the epigraph to chapter 73 takes the form of a little poem that reads, "'For souls are double mirrors, making still an endless vista of far things before repeating things.'"
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