A Sort of Universal Self-Affirmation

 In A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer, S.J., I noticed in the chapter "Dominance and Subjection" the remark that

The self-certainty with which this whole thing [the dialectical progress of self-consciousness] began inevitably involves a sort of universal self-affirmation (we see this in children).

 We do.

 Quite a while ago, a friend who had no children asked me what the "terrible twos" were about. I thought about this, and said that they were about discovering the subject-object distinction. Some years later, at the Paulist Center in Boston, I heard the homilist say exactly that. My recollection is that he implied that many of mature years still hadn't mastered the distinction.