Awesome and thank you very much. Very excited to be here and essentially talk about what's a platform and this quote that I've got following this that it's essentially that thing that you're speeding slash developing on. So to get things started, just a little bit about myself. So you know my name is somebody you can find me on most places online is just that summary. You know, I've been working in this industry for over two decades. You know, I've had a lot of different positions, you know, in that time done everything from, you know, software engineering as an individual contributor to working in the platform infrastructure and reliability space. I've worked at previous companies like Airbnb Uber and Twilio and I'm today now in the VP of engineering at upbound.  But you know there's been one common thing throughout my entire career and it's this notion that I've spent, you know a lot of time basically building internal platforms and it's one of the big reasons why, you know I wanted to do this webinar is to really just kind of share, some of my thoughts, you know, and anyone that knows me knows I'm always constantly sharing my thoughts. And then an interesting fun fact about myself. I am an electronic music DJ and producer. I used to do it a lot more when I was younger. In fact, I often refer to my time, you know as an individual contributor as essentially living like a Superman slash Clark Clark Kent life.  Obviously I don't do that so much anymore as I've gotten a little bit older and you know started a family but you know it's definitely a very, very interesting time in my life so just a little bit of a you know interesting facts about summary. Now I'm going to quickly go over the agenda and what we're going to cover today. And you know I really have this belief that platforms, you know kind of have this storied history, you know there are things that everyone kind of knows things they know what it is, but you know but you ask 10 people, and you'll get 10 different answers as to what a platform actually is but I really do think that platforms kind of often evolve out of necessity and they're not necessarily created or designed. And so I do want to spend some time today, you know really trying to unravel this a bit more and understand why so you know we're going to start off I'm going to, you know, define some terms so well, we'll start off defining what a platform actually is from the summary perspective, you know and then I'm going to tell some of my own stories about replatforming that's a term I'll define as well too. Then we'll talk about the natural evolution of a platform and you know how that leads to replatforming. And that really you know one of the big lessons that I've learned over my my career is really about abstractions and making sure that as you built these platforms why creating the right level of abstractions is so important, and essentially doing this quote unquote, all the down, and then we'll summarize everything at the end, and we will have a q amp a at the end so I have allowed some time to take some questions I love answering questions, but we'll save all of those for the end. So if that sounds good, you know, we're going to go ahead and jump right in. If you, anyone that knows me knows that I always like to start like a talk or a presentation with really defining terms and really making sure that we're all on the same page and you know starting from the same page. So, let's start with defining what exactly a platform is and I'm going to start by actually telling a story here. So, anyone that's from California and specifically Southern California, you know, probably remembers from the 90s the series of commercials that were always on TV, and the commercials were by a company named freeway insurance, and the commercials always ended, you know, what's a freeway, you know there was a couple of hunks, and it was hey it's that thing that you're speeding on. And so when I think about platforms, you know, it's almost like the same thing sort of pops into my mind where you know freeways are always these things that we're always driving on you know we we use them especially in California to get from point A to point B, you know they're ubiquitous like they're essentially everywhere. Right. And you could not imagine, you know, living in Southern California, you know without using freeways to essentially get around but most people never really take the time to think about them. You know, again it's just part of life.  It's ubiquitous. It's always there it gets you from point A to point B. And a lot of times you don't even realize you're on one or that you're speeding and you know going 100 miles an hour. So let's start with the first term that I wanted to find and I've actually went online and I did a little bit of research here and I kind of pulled together some definitions from a few different places. But really, you know, somebody's definition of platform is really like this bullet point number one, you know, and it's an environment where software is executed. It's seen as a constraint or an aid to the software development lifecycle, and ideally it's going to abstract the underlying complexity in which applications are consumed and run. And so, at a very core level. That's what I think a platform is right. What about replatforming though, you know, replatforming is this notion that, you know, you often start out with a single version of a platform and then it kind of evolves and iterates over time. And it's usually the result of the increased complexity required for your engineers to be productive so generally over time, especially if you start out of startup and you build sort of version one of a platform. You'll notice that as you hire more engineers and as that company grows, you know the complexity of that platform that you probably didn't even set out to build but you actually built indirectly starts to increase and so you really start trying to look for ways to kind of reduce that complexity, and ultimately, you know, make your engineers more productive because at the end of the day, you know, productive engineers ship codes and features and functionality that really enable the business, you know, to make money, right. And so this notion of replatforming really is about, you know, starting to think about things like self service provisioning and deployments for engineers again reducing the context required to build deploy and operate services and not just deploy.  And then again this third point it's really about abstraction of the underlying complexity of all these different vendors that you're probably interacting with, you know, manage services and providers as well and so I think of replatforming almost as an opportunity, you know, because you generally set out not starting to build a platform, you kind of learn a lot along the way and then you decide hey there's a great opportunity to sort of evolve and replatform. So now here's kind of like a graphical representation and maybe even simplified form of a platform, you know, and again, this is an environment with which abstracts the underlying complexity at which applications and infrastructure are consumed. And so kind of going from the left to the right, you know, you've got your engineer on the left side. Generally, your engineer does not actually care about the underlying components of the platform. And, you know, some of you may actually disagree with that but I'm going to say this is most organizations is probably true for 80% of engineers.   And so the way that your engineers are actually working with things are primarily through these interfaces. You know, taking a step back from that though, I want to actually maybe define a couple of other terms here as well too because, you know, at a certain point in my career, you know, the cloud started becoming ubiquitous. You know, everyone originally thought the cloud was about virtualization. And if you remember some of the early cloud providers like that's all they were talking about. But I really did think the cloud back in those days where it really was about sort of these API's and automation, right where we really started to see the industry, you know, evolved from this, this notion of if you've heard the Cattles versus pet analogy, where we were really starting to think about everything that we did, you know, more as cattle and not as pets and automation was a huge part of that. But actually challenge anyone. If you go back in time and really look at what was going on, you know, was the early stage of the cloud really about virtualization. No, I don't think it was it was about automation. And it was about essentially, you know, these API's that the cloud provider started giving us that allowed us, you know, similar to a platform to have all these different interfaces that interacted with that API. You know that again abstracted away all this underlying complexity, but you know now allowed us to really start to do some amazing things really started. You know if you remember back in the day, you know we were configuring physical hardware and oftentimes it would take weeks or months to set up a new host. And now you could essentially do that with like a single API call, and it was like a game changer and so we've definitely seen the cloud, you know evolve over that over that time and you know I'm kind of picking on AWS and using them as an example here. But now again similar to our platform example, you've got these interfaces on the left, you've got a strong API in the middle, which is backed by you know an awesome control plane. But now that you've got this centralized API you now have the ability to build out all these centralized management services. And so these include things like centralized security, and policy and billing and monitoring logging, you know the whole nine. And now as we've seen over time with these cloud providers they really started launching more and more services, you know backing them anyone that's used AWS and ever, you know, logged into their console, kind of intrinsically understands this as well. So, that's a definition of a cloud or a public cloud. So, the last thing I'm going to define here is essentially a cloud platform. And this is more of like a thought exercise and anything because I really do think that we're moving to this world where you kind of want the benefits of both you know we've talked about a platform it's that thing that you're speeding slash developing on. We've talked about all the wonderful components of a cloud. And a lot of that is really like the strong API is an automation that you get with that as well. And so if you start thinking of maybe this future thing, you know, called a cloud platform it's really this, you know, it's this construct that kind of makes you the best of both worlds and kind of reading from my definition here, you know it's an environment providing organizations with self service applications and infrastructure, and a single point of control that aggregates across everything that they do. And so, I think this term cloud platform is something that you all are going to hear a lot more and more about, because it really is about combining the best of both worlds and I'm going to talk a little bit more about this later.  So now I want to dive a little bit more into this notion of replatforming and what that entails and so again anyone that knows me knows that I love to tell stories. And so, I'm going to tell three stories here of things that happened at companies that I have worked at in the past. I intentionally changed the names to protect the guilty. But I've already noticed some of you on this webinar. Some of your former coworkers as well. So I think it'll be pretty easy to kind of figure out some of the companies that I'm talking about, but I digress. So let's talk about story number one, and you know replatforming example number one. And the interesting thing about, you know, this replatforming example is many of us can probably relate, you know, to breaking up the monolith. You know, and generally if you work at a startup or a smaller company, you know you don't actually set out to build a microservices architecture you generally start out with one code base and one monolith you start building upon that you start hiring more engineers. You eventually get to a point where you realize that you've got so many engineers, you know, working on this sort of single code base or project that it's really starting to slow down their velocity. Now, the interesting thing about this example is at the time, I don't think we actually thought of breaking up our monolith as replatforming. We were just breaking up the monolith.  But, you know, at that point, our monolithic application was used by close to 1000 engineers. And, you know, it was an absolute train wreck, in terms of getting features fastly, you know, deployed or quickly deployed out to production. And if you can imagine, you know, this many engineers all working on essentially one code base, you know, and everything that that in Intel, you know, you can you can just start to imagine some of the problems that we were having and so we set out to break up the monolith. And we did a couple of things. One is, you know, we created a framework that made it very, very easy to create and launch new services because we wanted folks to migrate their code out of the monolith. And so this was a great thing to do in practice. But because we reduce so much friction here, we very quickly went from a world of one monolith to a world with thousands of microservices. And this was absolutely crazy.  You know, we just sort of made this process easy. We made it really easy for folks to launch these new services. You know, and so, you know, our engineers definitely took advantage of that. Now, one of the things the big takeaways I actually think from this story is, I actually think it was both a success and a failure that we made it easy for folks to create new services. Because once we reduced all that friction and I believe the SLA around creating a new service before them was probably like weeks. It's been a while, but once we reduced all that friction, folks really took advantage of it. And similar to when I was talking about the cloud earlier, and it really being about not about virtualization but about automation. This was like a prime example of us showing that we were actually like in folks way. You know, it was actually more important for us to make it really easy for engineers to deploy these services, you know, on their own and to self provision, but you know, we could have also provided a bit more guidance and structure, you know, as we did this as well. And so the interesting thing about this and my third bullet point here is, you know, part of this process meant we deployed all these services without any like SLAs or service level agreements between teams. And so it meant that if you were a team, and we made it very, very easy for you to deploy a new service, then if you had a dependency on another team, it was often easier to just like fork that teams code base into your own service, like, you know, build out any additional functionality that you needed yourself, and then, you know, launch that as a new service and run that yourself as well. And so, you know, this is definitely something that folks did and it actually took us years to unwind sort of this decision and actually kind of bundle things into slightly larger quote unquote domains or blogs or you're starting to hear these terms like pop out in the industry a lot as well. Example one number one of replatforming breaking up the monolith, we did not think of this as replatforming at the time though we did really just think we were breaking up the monolith. So my second example and this is probably something that a lot of folks are going to be feeling familiar with as well, especially as we're starting to see Kubernetes get adopted more and more in the world right now is essentially moving from Docker to Mesos and like the migration that that entailed, you know, and so this actually was another form of replatforming, even though we were only focused on the compute part of the platform. Right. And you know a lot of folks can remember we very quickly evolve from like Docker to to Mesos to Kubernetes and you know you're really starting to see, you know our compute technologies, you know, iterate very quickly right now. I mean we essentially did this at the company to all of our engineers as well, but we also changed a lot of other things while we were doing it and again, we did not look at this as actually replatforming. We just thought hey you know what we're just changing the compute layer of our organization and so there's a couple of things that we did, you know that essentially forced a lot of toil on our engineers. One, you know at that point in time all of our engineers actually were writing puppet configs themselves. So, we basically forced them to just switch from puppet to Docker. Now, you know, using Docker was obviously a little bit easier, but there was still a lot of constraints and we still require folks, you know to go through these migrations to essentially do these translations from puppet to Docker, you know, and then very quickly after that, you know we forced another Mesos migration on top of them as well, which required a little bit less work to do but we were, you know, pushing content or toil onto our engineers. One of the things we realized here is that our engineers actually didn't care about like our compute underlying compute technology again, but they were just focused on moving quickly and shipping code to production and shipping fee features for our product. And so by us kind of doing these rapid migrations and iterations, you know, again, we force a lot of toil onto these folks. We also missed the opportunity here because we were a little bit myopic and just, you know, iterating on the container and orchestration capabilities to kind of make our services a little bit more portable to make it so that these things could actually run from anywhere, and we're so close tightly coupled, you know with the core technologies and underlying technology that we were using. So that's example number two. Now my third example. This is the one config or one ring example. And this is probably the example that's closer to replatforming in the sense that we did sort of know that we were iterating on our platform, and we did approach this this problem essentially saying like hey, you know what, we don't want engineers to require context across you know and understand like 50 different tools or services to be able to deploy something in production and so in this example we actually did set out to build a unified configuration format for provisioning and operating microservices. And the idea here it was, it would abstract away all of the underlying complexity from all the tools that were actually required to make that a reality. So, we introduced our own configuration lamb language in YAML, and literally every single person on this call is probably doing something similar today we're all inventing our own configuration, like YAML and Jason based formats. And so we were no different at the time. Again, as we were going through the three platforming exercise, you know, we again introduced a lot of toil onto our engineers, we didn't actually make this migration. Easy for them to do and it was a migration. They actually had to do a lot of work to kind of validate that their services, you know, could migrate safely in the process we actually use. We actually changed the abstractions that we were using. And so this meant that we actually broke things after engineers had shipped things into production, because we realized we didn't have the right abstractions or interfaces. You know, and again this just introduced even more toil and more frustration, you know, onto the organization. And then, you know, we, you know, YAML is great. It's also very verbose.  And so this again resulted in a lot of toil from the organization. But this was actually one example of us replatforming where we did sort of understand, you know, what we were trying to do. And we were intentionally trying to evolve the platform. So those are my three stories. And in each of those examples, except for the last one, you know, I've repeated this several times already, but we actually didn't realize that we were replatforming and we were, we were iterating on our platform. And it was really important that we sort of that were not myopic when we do that, that we don't just focus on solving one tactical problem, but we actually use it as an opportunity to envision, you know, that thing that you're developing and speeding up like what's that actually going to look like over time and how can we further like reduce the context for our engineers like required to do their jobs. So, there's this concept I have called the emergent platform. You know, and it's really this notion that if you're going to change the underlying component of your platform, and it forces a migration and toil on your engineers that you're doing it wrong. You really want a platform that from day one has the right level abstractions so that as you iterate on those underlying components, you can, you know, change them you can change underlying technologies without sort of forcing work onto your onto your engineers and this is why, again, designing the right abstractions which we'll get into a little bit later up front is so important. And so there was a couple of things that you know points that I wanted to outline from the previous example. One is you know really this focus on tactical work, blinding us to the opportunity that we had to replatform in front of us. You know, the second one is not really having a holistic view of how our changes we're going to impact that overall developer experience or platform experience and this is something that even to this day. I think a lot of companies are, are, you know, really bad at, because when I say developer experience, it's not just building, it's not just deploying but it's also operating over the end to end lifecycle of your service or feature in production, and everything that entails and at many companies today that can be, you know, work that's the spread across hundreds of services and tools, etc. And so you really do want to take the time to take a step back and you know view, have a holistic view of that into an experience. And then the third one is really, you know, if you're going to replatform if you're introducing new technologies, you actually should be reducing complexity and context, not increasing it. And so this is always an opportunity when you're replatforming, you know to essentially do this as well. So I've kind of talked about replatforming a little bit and I've used these past three examples to talk about that but I actually want to take a step back and you know kind of holistically look at just one way that platforms, you know, evolve over time. And so I'm going to use like a typical startup as an example, where, you know, you can almost think about version 1.0 of a platform as a startup as the thing the founders built in a weekend or the thing that the early employees built in a weekend. You know, when you're when you're iterating on a startup, especially in the early stages, you know, it's more important to validate all these hypothesis that you have and really iterate on them quickly than it is to focus on, you know what things might look like three or four years out, because you don't know if your lunch is going to be there next week. And so it's more important to iterate and move very quickly. And so this is a big reason why for version 1.0 of platforms. They're designed, they just kind of get cobbled together, and they very quickly get iterated on over time, you know, the early employees at a company, you know, kind of jump in and have a big part of sort of driving the story. But again, you know, especially at an early stage startup you're moving so quickly, you don't really have time to be thinking, you know, years in the future. And you'd almost be irresponsible if you were doing that as well, you know, focus on the now, you know, validate the concept you can always iterate later. And that's generally what happens with version 2.0 of a platform. And generally, version 2.0 often happens when, you know, a company it's probably in series B or series C or even D land, where the company starting to grow very quickly, you sort of nailed your, your product and your product market fit and your go to market strategy.  And now you're starting to realize that hey all those decisions we made in a weekend, when we built version 1.0 of our platform. You know, now all of these decisions are coming back to on us now, you know, we've got a bit essentially scale the platform up as fast as possible, you know, to meet this increase demand we have with users and, you know, customers, etc.  But again, you often don't have the time to take back take a step back and take a holistic look at essentially what you're trying to build and, and what you're trying to do. And then that gets us into version 3.0 land and version 3.0 of this platform is this is generally the opportunity that all of us should be taking to replatform to really take a step back and really envision that end to end developer experience across the bill deploy and operate, you know, life cycles really imagine what that's going to look like for years really imagine, you know, how are we going to reduce our engineers complexity how are we not going to force migrations on them. How are we going to enable our underlying technology to keep evolving over time, you know, and, you know, introducing best of breed solutions, etc. And so generally when you're jumping from version two to three, take this opportunity to replatform take this opportunity to really design the thing that you're building. So, one of the things I actually wanted to call out here is often when we're setting about to actually sort of do this. You know replatforming and introducing new technology it's an opportunity to actually introduce new technology, and really to see, is there a better way, you know, of doing the thing that I'm trying to do. And I 100% believe that that's true today. And I think as we think about building platforms and replatforming in the future, you know the underlying component and the thing that needs to change and improve is you know, let's evolve from using infrastructure as you know to build out our all of our platforms, let's now move into the 2020s, and you know essentially what we're calling like the era of the control plane. And I really do think control planes are sort of the next revolution of technology and building platforms and managing applications and infrastructure, and I'm going to talk a little bit about why I think that that's actually the case. So, first of all why now why why does it make sense, you know to really deploy, you know, these to do this replatforming and to introduce this new technology and control planes. One is I really do think this is the era, the era of the rise of internal platforms, you know we're talking about it a lot I've said it several times in this presentation reducing context required to be productive for engineers and providing that consistent we're now also starting to see platform teams pop up at companies all over the place, and not only platform teams but tooling that actually, you know, targets these platform teams as users as well. These teams have emerged to build these internal platforms to essentially get us from version two to version three, and they have this you know increased charter to you know accelerate development and you know control operations over that life life cycle and life and the third again I repeat, you know I'm repeating myself here but I really want to drive home this point is it's all about reducing complexity, you know, and making sure that you know the thing that we're exposing to our users. You know we're not requiring them to have a lot of context to actually be able to do their jobs. This is a great opportunity to really take a step back and make sure that we're actually building and the providing the right level of abstractions, essentially, all the way down. And so what do I mean by this great platforms, I think are designed upfront with easily consumable abstractions for your engineers to use. I actually think it's very very hard to do this in practice, but you know if you get the abstraction right then you can essentially go through those platform evolution steps and those replatforming steps without throwing a lot of toil and migration and force work on to your engineers. Well, one thing I want to talk about and one way to essentially do this is, you know with cross plane and cross plane to an open source project, and it's a control plane for framework that gives you sort of these building blocks to compose your platform. Now, anyone that's familiar with cross plane, I am grossly over simplifying what cross plane does here, but I want to kind of introduce these as some high level concepts to really think about, you know how you can, you know start building, you know the right abstractions and use the right technology as you evolve and as you replatform.  One, you know we all built these abstraction layers to talk to, you know clouds right very few folks actually expose things like the AWS APIs directly, they generally build some abstraction layer on top of that, you know, and that's sort of where everybody starts. One of the things I really like about an open source project like cross plane, it is essentially gives you that abstraction layer upfront. So now this is just one component that you don't have to rebuild and that you don't have to do you can just kind of take this and use this as a foundation and it's open source for really building out what you're doing. And then the second is this this notion of composing resources together or defining resources. You know I talked about in one of my examples of replatforming the fact that we had, you know the one configure the one ring example the fact that we had sort of created, you know our own configuration language to define like the things that you know our engineers deployed and operated in production and you know again was another level of abstraction. And again, if I went to 10 different companies today. I bet you that I would essentially find 10 different version of these configs or these ways that you defined and compose resources together. And so again by taking advantage of an open source technology, it gives you the opportunity to just build on a standard that's essentially already out there. You know, kind of moving to this third building block this is the notion of essentially like a universal package right. And the simplest way I think about this is like how do you package up the thing that you're building, you know that your engineers are taking and using and consuming and making it really really easy for them to essentially do that. The last building block is a control plane. Now that you've got like this nice package or this bundle that's got all these resources in it, you know that knows how to talk to like different cloud providers and abstractions. You actually need the engine that's going to take that thing, and then it's going to run and it's going to execute it. And so generally if I think of these four building blocks. When most companies are actually going through a notion of replatforming, they're essentially building some version or iteration of all of this. And it's always bespoke. It's always something that's unique to your organization.  One of the things I would actually challenge folks with is, you know, we have a great opportunity to standardize on the way that we're starting to think about building platforms, so that we're not always reinventing the wheel over and over, you know, over time and so that we can actually get to the more meaty part of replatforming without you know essentially again reinventing the wheel and doing all these things over over time and so, you know, taking advantage of open source talk technology is a great way to do this. Another example I often like to use here is essentially the, the database abstraction layer or ORM example, right, you know, if I went into a company today, and I essentially, you know, Toby engineering department.  And that's essentially what all of us are doing every time we replatform today. And again, I think there's really an opportunity here to start standardizing so again we can, we can focus on providing more differentiated value and not sort of reinventing the wheel over and over. I kind of already briefly talked about you know this notion of composable resources. And you know how you can kind of construct all of this together, but now I want to actually get into a little more of the notion of, you know, these abstractions right. Many of you are probably already familiar with Conway's law. It's this notion that every platform or infrastructure team, you know, inevitably exports an internal platform that mirrors how the engineering, how the engineering organization is structured internally. So, if you are at a company that is already thinking about replatforming today, and providing like this next level of abstractions and I use this in one of my earlier examples as well. You're going to find that you're going to actually need to change these abstractions. If you start out by building them based on like the company's organization structure. And this is a mistake that I've seen companies make repeatedly, you know, again, if you're going to, if you're going to provide like the right level of abstraction, you know, it's not going to look anything like the actual organization looks like. And this is just always something to keep in mind you don't want to sort of expose this leakiness, you know, to your, your developer and engineers with how your own internal infrastructure and platform team and CI CD team, etc. So if you are all operating, you really want to give them something that's easily consumable. That's more closely tied to the work that they're doing and the perspective that they have on their end, versus, again, just exposing the underlying complexity of the engineering organization. The lesson here, do not create abstractions based on your organizational structure. If there's anything that you remember from this talk, this is probably one of the biggest ones because going down this path, you know, similar to the examples that I called out previously, are going to just cause you a lot of pain, you know, long term as well. With that said, let me kind of quickly summarize like all the different things that we've talked about today and some of the points that I've made and, you know, you can really sort of walk away, you know, from this discussion with, you know, these three main points.  And then it should exist over that whole build deploy and operate like stage and life cycle. Number two, everyone, every single one of you on this call, whether you realize it or not, you're either building a platform or your replatforming. And, you know, it's always an opportunity to take a step back and take a holistic look at what you're doing and essentially use that for bullet point number three, which is, you know, hey, your platforms are always going to evolve. So you should use every opportunity to ensure that you're designing the right abstractions, you know, for your engineers to easily consume. So that was a mouthful. There was a lot there actually want to take some time to take any questions right now as well too. So I'm going to pass things back to the Linux foundation and we'll talk about next steps. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much summary and if anyone has any questions. We can give a few minutes to have you put them in the Q&A box and he'll be able to answer those. So I'll just give everyone about a minute. You have any Q&A feel free to throw them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. All right, it looks like we got one asking, will there be slides or the talk made available after this. The recording will be on the Linux foundations YouTube page, usually by the end of the day. And then summary, you're more than welcome if you would like us to share the slides as well that will be on the landing page. Okay, happy to do that as well of course. Okay, it looks like we got another question. So no abstractions around org structure. Can you give some examples of abstractions you do think work well. Yeah, so you know definitely take this with a grain of salt. But you know, I'm going to use a very simple example here think of maybe an engineer that works at a company that has like a typical lamp stack right where, you know, maybe a key and my sequel and a very simple cache and a web server like engine X, you know, and then some very simple routing, etc. Right. You know, you could imagine that, you know, if you're using my example of tying this too closely to the organizational structure, you know, part of that might be owned by the infrastructure team, you know, part of that might be owned by the database team. So that might actually be owned by like the caching team if you have one and then part of that might be owned by like the service discovery or routing team. So a bad abstraction there would essentially be exposing all of those individual components, you know, to that actual engineer, because that engineer really is just thinking about that whole application as the abstraction. Maybe instead of exposing all those individual components you just give them something like application, and the application has all of those things bundled into it and maybe you know those things aren't even tied that closely like to the language so maybe there's just a concert or sorry type that closely to the underlying infrastructure maybe there's just a concept of application, and that could be tied to some type of database that could be tied to some type of web service that could be tied to some type of caching layer, etc. But it's essentially the only thing that you're exposing to your engineers is that application so now they can just take that abstraction and they can use it, you can iterate on technologies and everything on the background but it's not necessarily tied to those individual organizations. One of the things that you will have to be careful with is that, you know, there is this intersection point of the abstraction, and then all the different organizations that lie underneath. So someone doesn't need to own that, you know, and someone does need to be responsible for that, and ensuring that you're having like the right coordination and whatnot across all the various components but I think generally that ends up being like your platform team. Any more questions. The next one. Can you give us some practical examples of platform implementation of the principles you outlined in the webinar. So, sorry, can you repeat that question. Yeah, can you give us some practical examples of platform implementation of the principles you outlined in the webinar. Yeah, so let me go back through history a little bit here. This is kind of similar to, you know, the last question that I just answered as well where essentially, you know, at one company we essentially did provide like application as a construct, you know, to our engineers where we essentially said, Hey, in order to configure and operate this all you're going to need is like four lines of yeah, right. And those four lines of YAML were all the information that we needed to actually deploy the entire underlying application stack. It started by just essentially declaring you know what language, you know that the engineer was going to be using because that language implied a lot of underlying like assumptions as well too and so we we then iterated on this over time we then sort of created, you know you can just think of like Java service like Python service, Go service, PHP service, and you essentially define that at the high level, and then everything else would just magically happen, you know underneath and so we essentially made a lot of assumptions for folks and we again reduce the complexity that was required for them to actually deploy these applications because at the end of the day. They're like great okay now I can just focus on actually writing code. I've got a place where all my code lives and then everything else is sort of transplant apparently handle for me under the background. That was actually one of our, the more successful examples I think in my career, we essentially just started out with that single abstraction. And it took sort of a while to implement the first version of that. But once we did that it was very, very easy to like build on top of that. So, we did that with our own sort of bespoke like solution. Now I would 100% like do something like that by just like leveraging crossplane, it would have made it like 1000 times easier. All right, we got two more questions. And the next one is, can you share an easy analogy of what a control plane is that would be helpful to use when talking to non platform engineers. Wow. An easy analogy of a control plane when I'm talking to non platform folks. All right, I'm totally making this up on the fly but like let's see, let's see if this works so I would almost imagine like a control plane is like imagine you're in a car. And there's a driver who's got like the steering wheel and they're driving, and then you've got a navigator who's sitting next to them, who knows exactly where you're wanting where you want to go.  Basically kind of take over the wheel and sort of fix it for you. So maybe the driver starts falling asleep, you know, that navigator essentially grabs the wheel and puts it back on track and like wakes the driver up. I don't know. That was probably a terrible analogy. But that's just a simple one that I can kind of think off, think of off the top of my head. One last question. How does something like cross plane connection. Sorry, let me start over again. How does something like cross plane connect to the various cloud services and their API CLIs or you guys. So, essentially cross plane is extended by what we call providers and so you know if you think about cross plane as it's core I mentioned that it's a control plane framework. But basically it enables you to abstract away and talk to anything that has like a public API so you can write a cross plane provider, or like use an upbound official provider that you know, for literally almost anything out there and it's not just other public cloud providers that have API's it's also private clouds as well that have their own API's. It's also things like managed services so in essence you could have a provider that talked to like Elastico or Twilio or Syngrid, like all of these things can essentially be abstracted away and so the primary way of doing that is via a cross plane provider. I think I answered that question fully but if I didn't let me know. Awesome. I think that sounded great. And so that was the last question. So, I will go ahead and say thank you again to summary for your time today and thank you everyone for joining us. As a reminder, this recording will be on the Linux foundations YouTube page later today. We hope you join us for future webinars and have a wonderful day. Awesome. Thanks Linux foundation and thanks for everyone that attended. Have a great day.


Welcome to this lecture series on the aspects of western philosophy module 38. In continuation with the previous lecture, we will examine Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism with a focus on three important concepts. The three concepts are being in itself, being for itself and being for others except the last one, the other two we have already introduced, the two concepts and we have already mentioned about them in the previous one or two lectures, because they are so central to Sartre's conception of human existence. Before we actually begin our examination of these concepts, we will try to see what makes their analysis important in Sartre's philosophy. So, it is the problem of being which Heidegger starts with actually and for almost all phenomenologists this is a very central concern, the one which is given directly to consciousness or the question of being as it is framed by Heidegger. So, Sartre also starts with a problem which is very similar to this and he says that he also accepts that the problem of being is the most important phenomenological problem. But Sartre's appropriation of Husserl, particularly Husserl is very careful, is very interesting because he criticizes the Husserlian project that aims at uncovering the meaning or essence of the phenomenon through phenomenological direction. So, this has been the project of phenomenology according to Husserl which we have already discussed when we discussed Husserl's phenomenology in one of our previous lectures. So, uncovering the meaning or essence of phenomenon, this is what Husserl was concerned about and Sartre criticizes this objective he says that phenomenon has no meaning or essence. So, that it needs to be you know its essence can be studied, being is only the ground upon which objects can reveal themselves to consciousness. So, once sense we can say that Sartre is demystifying the concept of being, he is demystifying phenomenology because Husserlian phenomenology as we have already seen concludes in a kind of transcendentalism. It takes us to you know the reduction the kind of transcendental reduction which ultimately concludes in the isolation of the pure ego which is a transcendental ego pure consciousness we can say and in that sense we can say that there is a very strong mystical element in Husserlian phenomenology, it concludes in a kind of mysticism and he conceives this transcendental subjectivity as eternal something which is very similar to the kind of Atman in Indian philosophy. But Sartre demystifies this and he says that being is only the ground upon which objects can reveal themselves to consciousness and what is important is consciousness and ends man's being. This is a very remarkable aspect of Sartre in philosophy, what he says is its consciousness which needs to be studied and consciousness is so peculiar to human beings consciousness comes to the world through human beings. And Sartre in consumption of man we have already discussed in the previous lecture. He also subscribes to something which is very similar to the I mean broadly we can also say that you know Sartre in notion of man human existence is also a being in the world. Of course he elaborates this conception of being with several other you know adding several other aspects see for example this is one way to understand the concept of being and also the concept of human being the being of man according to Sartre. So there are three constituents of being being in itself being for others and being for itself. So these three according to Sartre are extremely important in understanding they are the three constituents of being according to him. So we will see one by one out of these three the first two are very important being in itself and being for itself and among these two being for itself is more important because that is the being of man according to Sartre. So basically there are two modes of existence according to him the being in itself and being for itself these are the two modes of existence possible. Being in itself is objects that are just there I mean this is the kind of being which objects in this world have they are objects like any object chairs tables computers telephones etcetera and to some extent they are fixed they do not they do not change have no awareness of value of themselves like they since they do not have consciousness under the hand being for itself is the being of human beings which are conscious the principle of subjectivity or consciousness. So in that sense being for itself occupies the central role in Sartre philosophy human beings are aware of themselves this their consciousness of their own existence is central to their being. So this is something which distinguishes man the being of man from the being of other entities again being in itself is the principle of objectivity or facticity it is a facticity means it never changes it is what it is there is it is so rigid and it refers to the being of things that is to the essence which they are fixed neither active nor passive under the hand being for itself refers to the being of individuals and their existence. So here there is a reference to individuals and their existences were which are concrete. So concrete human beings and again man defines his own essence and gives meaning to his own existence through the choices he makes. So I mean this is where you know man is different from an object a mere thing in this world because though there is some element of facticity about human existence for instance I belong to a particular place my childhood my past my parents my language the linguistic community all these things I cannot change they are my they are what constitutes my facticity I can see but at the same time I am not stuck with all these pasts I am something who moves on and how do I move on by making choices by taking decisions and acting on the basis of decisions and choices. So by though irrespective of my past irrespective of my facticity I have a future I have plans for my future what I am going to do in another 5 years or 10 years I have decided all those things I can or rather I can in principle decide all those things even you know what I am going to do after one hour after going out of this room finishing winding up this lecture I will straight away go to my office room then I will spend some time there in my office room I have some work to be done then after that I will go home all these things I have a very detailed project in front of me. So if you ask me the question who am I I cannot say that I am such and such a person so and so belonging to such a community such a society such a linguistic community and there are several things about my past about my facticity but who am I the kind of question who am I which the answer to that question also includes what I am planning to do my future is also part of that my existence. So in one sense my essence is cannot be locked into my past my essence is not get I mean it does not get stuck to my past alone it is something which is a moving essence or rather a becoming process and in that process what happens is that I make choices and I make myself I can say. So since my past is yet to be made my past is yet to be uncovered I cannot say that it is a complete facticity it is incomplete. So in one sense I am not a being in the sense a pen or a pencil or a computer is a being where everything is so complete and perfect a pen is a pen there is nothing more than that. So that kind of a completion of being you do not find in me as a human being. Now being in itself and being for itself though mutually exclude are combined in human being. This is another very interesting aspect of Sartre's existentialism what he says is that he makes a fundamental distinction between being in itself and being for itself.  But again Sartre says that in a very peculiar way though they mutually exclude they are in a very peculiar way combined in human existence. Man is both being in itself and being for itself. So there is a kind of ambivalence about human existence or human entity there is a kind of ambiguity about it there is a kind of confusion about it there is a kind of even a contradiction about human existence because on the one hand there is a being in itself which is fixed and rigid on the other hand there is a being for itself which is flexible and moving and dynamic represent facticity and transcendence respectively. So as long as I am a being in itself it is decided and determined by my facticity there are several things about me which I cannot change which determine and decide what I am. I am in Indian for instance that cannot be changed by birth I am in Indian I can change my nationality but still by birth I am in Indian cannot be changed. And there are several other factors about me my complexion my height many other factors which are accidental and it is very difficult for me to change but there are several things I can change I can change my job for instance I can change the kind of things which I do on an everyday basis there are several things I can make choices and change accordingly. So facticity is the givenness of our context which we cannot change and transcendence we transcend our facticity through our choices we are always more than our situation. So this is the element of something which is more than what is given is so peculiar to human being because what I am now need not necessarily be what I am tomorrow or what I am tomorrow need not necessarily reflect or need not necessarily dependent upon what I am today or yesterday. So this kind of a freedom only human beings enjoy. Facticity does not prevent me from being an exercising freedom this is what Sath was trying to highlight they refer to temporality past, present and future and facticity is our past which is unchanging future becomes relevant only for man its man who brings time. The being in itself is beyond time we can say time is not applicable in the case of being in itself but in the case of man time is extremely crucial man is a temporal entity. So it is man who brings time man who brings future to this world man projects himself to the future man is yet to be an incomplete being because tomorrow what I am going to do the decision I am going to take tomorrow something which even I cannot predict today because it depends on the situation and the context I am going to face tomorrow. So based on that I might take a decision and accordingly a choice will be made accordingly you know my essence also will be changed. So what I am the question can never be answered it is an incomplete I mean I am there is a basic fundamental incompleteness about my being. So for that matter there is no essence I can say. So now let us focus one by one being in itself rejection of the Aristotelian doctrine of potentiality. So this is Aristotle has sometime back we have examined it in this lecture series when we discussed Aristotle's philosophy one very important concept in Aristotle is the relationship between potentiality and actuality. He basically subscribed to a teleological conception of reality where he believed that every object is in a process of change in a process of evolution where potentialities are actualized. So there is nothing like you know everything is fixed the potentialities are actualized in that process. So here when it comes to the conception of being in itself Aristotelian theory of evolution or change based on potentiality actuality principles are being denied. Whatever is manifest itself in actuality and there cannot be any potentiality for other than itself. An object is not more than that it is in itself the idea of being in itself refers to the being of objects and entities other than human. So a pen is a pen it is what it is you cannot say that you know there is it is potential to become something else. Of course I can use it even as a weapon but then the pen is not responsible for that it is I am using it. So the focus is on consciousness not on being in itself there again it is being for itself which is a matter of concern. Again neither passive nor active neither an affirmation nor a negation because all these things can be applied only to entities which are conscious and dynamic. But entities which are passive and which are non-conscious we cannot attribute these things it is in itself it is massive rigid and still it is that which it is excludes other being.    It is unrelated to other beings a synthesis of itself with itself fully positivity dense massive and full it is beyond time I have already explained this you know how an object becomes beyond because temporality is something which human beings consciousness has brought to this world. It is the way in which consciousness approaches the world. So now again when you talk about the existence of being in itself there is no ultimate ground for the existence of being you cannot say that I mean here again you can see that is going against Husserlian conception where Husserl conceives that everything manifests for the transcendental ego. Being in itself is radically contingent inexplicable and absurd all meaning and value are something which we human beings conscious creatures are attributing to this world. But otherwise it is absurd it is inexplicable and it is contingent only essences can be explained. Now with this in mind let us move on to the next concept being for itself which is visibly the being of human beings. So here Sartre explains the presence of a free and knowing being such as man in a rigid immobile and deterministic universe. So there is a kind of fundamental dichotomy he maintains being in itself and being for itself man in a world. The world stands for being in itself which we have already seen is immobile this is dense lifeless and non-conscious absurd rigid. In the middle of that you have a being for itself which is conscious and free of course. The ambiguity of man's being involves both in itself and for itself facticity and freedom which I have already explained. So when we try to understand the nature of human being or the existential status of human beings we have to keep this in mind. It involves a kind of contradiction a kind of negation within itself between in itself and for itself between facticity and freedom are both physical objects and hence being in itself and self-consciousness and hence being for itself. So the human beings are both physical objects because we have a body we occupy space. In that sense we are physical objects and we have physical wants and hence we are to some extent being in itself. But at the same time we are self we are conscious we are conscious entities we are self-conscious and hence we are being for itself it is always a subject never an object. Now in this context it will be relevant and interesting to have a very brief comparison with Husserl because as I mentioned in the beginning it all started with Husserl the phenomenological project in a major way began with Husserl and Sartre too acknowledges the importance of Husserl in his in shaping his ideas. Particularly when it comes to the kind of you know phenomenological project which Husserl has undertaken which ultimately led to a kind of overcoming of the epistemological dichotomies which were created by modern philosophy. A Husserlian phenomenological project is in one sense it tries to go beyond the kind of what you call the kind of epistemological dichotomies created by western thought. So in that sense Sartre acknowledges the contributions of Husserl but at the same time he says that Husserl fails to some extent. Consciousness reduces the being in itself to what it is for consciousness. So this is again a very interesting dialectics between consciousness and being or objects in the world. So what he says is that consciousness or being for itself reduces the being in itself the words of objects to what it is for consciousness. So this is a chair for me for my consciousness it presents itself as a chair. So it appears as a chair. So I can rather I mean to put it in other words I can say that I am conscious of a chair. There is consciousness of a chair, there is consciousness of a table, there is consciousness of a computer. It is ontologically united to the things in the world to which it is present to and since consciousness is a being which is present to it cannot be an in itself and passive. So this is the interesting deviation he makes the basis of the distinction because unlike other objects consciousness is a being the being of consciousness is to which is present to a being which is present to beings are present to the consciousness. So in that sense the consciousness is at the other end the subjective form. So it cannot be an in itself and passive in that way because it is receptive it is to which objects are presented to or being is presented to being in itself is presented to that. So in that sense it is receptive hence cannot be passive. Consciousness could not be what it is unless it related itself to a being which is distinct and independent of it. So this is again a very interesting thing it could not be what it is. So even the very identity of consciousness the very nature of consciousness according to Sartre needs to be understood in relationship with the objects about which it is conscious something which we have already examined in the previous lecture where you know in the context of Sartre demystifying Uzurlian conception of subjectivity where for Uzurl scheme of things there is the ego the ego has consciousness about the object and there is the object. So there are three things in Uzurlian project but in Sartre the ego thing distinction is being overcome Sartre would say that instead of saying I am an ego and my ego has a consciousness about an object and there is an object Sartre would say that he would actually bracket the ego the transcendental ego itself is bracketed according to him. So consciousness could not be what it is unless it related itself to a being which is distinct and independent of it. This being is in no need of consciousness it is independent of consciousness actually consciousness is entirely dependent on it because what is consciousness according to Sartre is not an abstract entity something like a pure consciousness or transcendental ego of Sartre but it is always something which is conscious of objects in the world. So I cannot understand my consciousness as an abstract entity but it is always conscious of something of a chair of a pen of a computer of a camera etc. So in one sense it is a reversal of Uzurlian absolutism Uzurl confers a trans phenomenality to consciousness there is a notion of transcendental subjectivity pure ego in Uzurl it is for consciousness or ego the world exists it is the consciousness it is a transcendental ego which actually brings the world into being according to Uzurl which we have already seen but Sartre says that he confers trans phenomenality to being for him it is the being which is which remains unchanging being does not exhaust itself in its appearing the being of that which appears does not exist only in so far as it appears. So in that sense you know we can even say gives a kind of different importance to the concept of being the being in itself it is independent it is a being of man or consciousness which is dependent on this being because again Sartre is going to tell us that being for itself or consciousness or man's being is has always the nature of a negation and negation consciousness is consciousness of something of being as it appears of pen computer etcetera consciousness must be other than being and it is activity is a process of negation. So when I am conscious of an object say for example the computer or the camera in front of me I am also aware of the fact that I am not the camera I am not the computer. So that sort of negation or nihilation is involved in the process of consciousness which is of course happens a little pre-reflectively I am not always aware of it I do just mechanically sometimes but it is underlying that understanding that awareness underlines all our experiences of objects in the world it arises through a negation or nihilation of being in itself. So when I realize that or when I experience a camera or a computer or a pen or a knife I also realize that I am different from that as a nihilation as a negation while I perceive a pen I am also conscious that I am not the pen the not or nihilation. Since everything which is must be a being man cannot be a complete not being since everything which is must be a being everything which is must be a being. Since that is a case man cannot be a complete not being that is the irony because on the one hand there is a negation of being it is man is in that sense not in being not being in the being in itself man is not in itself man is for itself but at the same time and for itself is what for itself is a negation of in itself which means the negation of being but man cannot be a complete not being. So there is an ambiguity an ambivalence in conceiving human existence in man there is being in itself certain things my facticity cannot be changed I have already discussed this but man's being is not just that fixed some total I mean I cannot say that I am a some total of all these facticity I mean all these facts which are already there about me I am born to this place I speak this language I work in this place there are several things about me which are fixed and I would not want to confine myself to that I would not want to identify myself with the some total of all these things I am definitely more than that because I have I project myself into the future I have certain plans to do certain things even if I am not you know planning in advance I will have to make choices because life is going to unravel in front of me and giving me lot of choices lot and I have to make decisions in life and by making choices decisions and implementing them acting I will keep on redefining myself I will keep on changing my my identity or my essence we can see he is not just his facticity he projects himself to the future he is not a being in itself not a thing among other things but his consciousness so this is what he talks about he says about man man is a project he projects himself to the future because there is a future for man and only man has future again hence man's being can only be non-being and therefore must consist in nothing so this nothingness is an aspect which you cannot avoid which is an inevitable aspect of human human being or human existence man is nothing we can say because if man is something then that something is fixed it is rigid it cannot change like a knife like a computer but man is nothing because man changes there is flexibility there is dynamism nothing comes into the world through man nothing nothing the very concept of nothing the very idea of nothing comes to the world through man the human self is both itself and not itself it is paradoxically present to itself in a mode of negation so man finds himself always in a mode of negation and that is being for itself consciousness is distanciation or separation from being so man always finds himself as consciousness which separates itself from the being around it the being which it encounters around it and is conscious of it is the being of which it is conscious of and always a distanciation or separation from this being man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world and without being the nihilation of the in itself there cannot be for itself so for itself is possible because there is a annihilation of the in itself the annihilation happens when there is a confrontation there is an encounter between consciousness and the world the world means the in itself so when this confrontation happens there is a realization that this consciousness is different from the in itself so that negation inevitable it is nothingness places it in a perpetual struggle towards the in itself and again nothingness becomes apparent in man's freedom so it is this nothingness which makes man free if man is something then man gets fixed to that something I get hooked to that something I cannot change it I am stuck there is something which determines me but since I am nothing I am nothing there is no thing or no essence to define and determine me I am free so that is what makes me free if you are determined by our past we could not choose so but the fact is he does choose man chooses all of us make choices whether consciously or unconsciously we make choices and even on occasion when we say that we are not making any choice that itself paradoxically is a choice I am not making a choice that it is that is my choice at that moment and thus he negates his past so by making choices new and new choices every day every moment I am redefining myself I am changing myself I am negating my past following Heidegger's Sartre considers itself as a project so the being for itself is a project for the future a projection to the future by virtue of negation of facticity and freedom now what is freedom we have already discussed the concept of freedom in the previous lecture and we have seen this famous statement which Sartre makes man is condemned to be free because there is no way man can run away from freedom and freedom the reason is that you know freedom naturally brings responsibility since we are free we are completely free there is boundless freedom so whatever happens to us whatever we do whatever choices we make and decisions we make and actions we perform we alone are responsible for that you cannot blame anyone so this is the very peculiarity of the conception of freedom advocated by Sartre so what he says is that since it is separated from being it cannot be determined by being and is essentially free so there is no thing which determines it there is no essence which will condition it there are no guidelines which would say that it has to or the consciousness human consciousness has to follow the dictims of so it is completely free human freedom precedes the essence of man and makes it possible and man makes himself through his choices so something which we have already seen that make I make a lot of choices in my life sometimes conscious choices and sometimes unconscious choices sometimes some choices are good some are bad but the unfortunate thing is that or rather I mean I do not want to call it unfortunate the fact is that that is human facticity the fact is that I cannot help there are no guidelines available I have to make a choice concrete choices depending on the situations man is nothing else but what he makes of himself and there is something called an inescapability of freedom I cannot escape my freedom because I am not a thing I am nothing I am not in itself if I am in itself then there is no freedom then I am fixed but since I am not in itself since I am not a thing I am completely free so but the when you talks about the inescapability of freedom Sartre is not actually advocating or advancing a metaphysical theory of human subjectivity that is not his intention freedom is an actual feature of lived human experience according to him something which we encounter every moment we encounter our freedom every moment that is the reason why you know we encounter lot of problems anxieties anguish uncertainties all these things are there because there is freedom so freedom in that sense is our ontological condition you which you cannot escape inescapability of freedom does not mean that each individual can choose whatever he wants so again is another possibility of a misconception freedom means freedom to do whatever you want that is not exactly what Sartre wants to advocate he never says that man is free to do anything he wants to do the what matters is not what you do but how you do the way in which you choose whether your choices are authentic or not and the inauthentic choices however you know references you make to freedom inauthentic choices are going to be bad choices so choices should be authentic freedom is inescapable as it determines the nature of our being and not to make choices and choose to be a slave of someone else blindly imitating others are all instances of freedom I can say that this is a paradox I can say that I am I do not want to make any choice or I do not want to exercise my freedom I will just obey whatever you say so I am ready to I surrender in front of you and say that I am your slave but even that involves a choice it is I am consciously choosing I am exercising my freedom to choose to be your slave so there is it is inescapable freedom is linked with the possibility of authentic or truly human life what is important is not what is chosen but in what manner it is chosen how you choose how you make a choice whether you make a choice on the basis of what others say or you know you what someone else's commands you or suggest you then it is not an authentic choice to have an authentic life one has to recognize the inescapability of freedom and accept the responsibility associated with it one has to conceive anguish also as inescapable as a condition for freedom and action see quite often this happens when we encounter crisis in our life there is a tendency to run away from taking decisions because there is a crisis you are not really sure about what would be the consequences of your actions you have a couple of choices left but you are quite uncertain about what would be the kind of consequences these choices would ultimately lead to so what you normally do is that you take advices from others that is the easiest thing like I can go I can approach my my professor or my colleague or my friend or my parents and ask them what should I do and whatever they say you just follow it this is a kind of surrendering your freedom which is inauthentic so there is an interesting instance which sarth himself sides he sides a personal experience whereas student of him approaches him for an advice this student it was during the second world war when there was resistance then the french resistance against the nazis nazi germany german occupation so this student of sarth wanted to fight the nazis he wanted to be part of the resistance movement because he felt that it is his responsibility and you know being a citizen being a human being it is his responsibility on the other hand he has certain commitments certain family commitments he has an old aged aged mother to look after so if he leaves his mother there would not be anyone else to look after his mother so he feels compelled to stay back and look after his mother so there is a kind of conflict which he encounters the one hand he thinks that it is his responsibility to go and join the resistance forces the other hand look after the mother so he approaches sarth for an advice and sarth says you have to take the decision do not expect me to take a decision for you that is running away from responsibility of course this is a very difficult situation very uncertain whatever I mean apparently you know any alternative you take will have its deep what you call consequences like sometimes any particular choice which you make might lead to disastrous consequences the mother might die if he goes to the resistance or he himself might die whatever I mean so this is a very difficult situation and sarth says that what is authentic is to realize the difficulties in it and understand that this is what is constitute of our human situation we are situated in one sense and free in another sense and our freedom always sort of you know bring anguish and anxieties which you cannot escape so when we talk about inescapability of freedom all these constitute the this inescapability this in one sense we can say that it determines human the ontological situation of man in one sense so since it is separated from being it cannot be determined by being and is essentially free so I have already pointed out this you know being for itself is separated from being in itself and because of this separation it is not determined by being and human freedom precedes the essence of man and makes it possible man makes himself through his choice so this is the point which we have already made it we have already discussed this in the previous lecture the concept of existence precedes essence so in the case of man man creates his essence unlike other entities whose essences are already created a priori there they are coming into existence their essence is created and determined but in the case of man owing to the separation from being the essence of man is not created it is something which man himself creates through his choices through his actions man is nothing else but what he makes of himself and here it is in this context this inescapability of freedom also becomes relevant so freedom is linked with the possibility of authentic truly human life which you have already seen and uncertainty about future as there are no eternal norms and principles to make choices yet we have to choose and in choosing we make ourselves there is no way that man can escape from making choices we have to choose and each choice will have consequences some are better some are some others are not so but which choice is going to be a better choice no one can tell you in advance so as the example cited where saath tells his student you have to make the choice no one can give you a ready made choice a priori our objective situation is we are free and no objective guidelines are available to us so that we can depend on them and refer to them and make choices nothing every situation is contingent every context you will have to make choices in concrete context of human life sometimes crisis written sometimes not so these situations are all unique and each individual will be encountering different situations the same individual might encounter different situations different occasions so you cannot have a ready made formula for addressing crisis in human life choices are not dependent on circumstances external to us so the circumstances in which we find ourselves are extremely important and here again the concept of authenticity becomes relevant to realize that freedom is boundless and make choices so this is what authentic existence in this context needs to be understood in this way one has to realize that freedom is boundless and freedom is inescapable and make choices accordingly there is uncertainty and that something which is again unavoidable except that there is anguish still make choices in act and do not blame circumstances and other factors there is nothing that can prevent one from making choices I cannot say that oh I did it because of circumstances or the heat of the moment I mean all these things we normally site us excuses for doing certain things for certain committing certain blunders but I cannot do that there is nothing like circumstances let me whatever circumstances are there you know that is your condition I mean I can probably say that had I been in a different country had I been born in a different country or had I been in a different institute I would have done several other things had these facilities were available for me I would have performed in a better way all these are excuses which I make the fact is that I am provided with I mean this is my facticity these are my facilities available and what I do with these facilities here that is what is going to matter so there is nothing that can prevent one from making choices and this is how you know authentic human existence needs to be conceived now there is another one more aspect of being which we have discussed which is being for others which is again very peculiar in the case of human beings alone and this is where we encounter other people awareness of another as subject this is again a very important problem philosophical problem in the history of western thought because the problem of other we had seen that you know how Hegel encounters this problem and tries to resolve it with this conception of universal absolute mind and there are some other philosophers who would encounter this problem but just leave it as such how to understand the other is a question now needs to explain the bridge from consciousness to consciousness from one consciousness to another consciousness and the traditional answer is knowledge about other minds knowledge about other people and hence in traditional philosophy this is being presented as an epistemological problem but according to Sartre being is the ground of our relationship to others and hence ontology which deals with the disclosure of being is important not epistemology so for Sartre it is an ontological issue being for others actually becomes part of my being it constitutes my the nature of man's being in one sense relationship to others is of the very essence of man I cannot even when I decide that I will have no relationship with others in this world no relationship with other human beings in this world even then you know it is the context of relationship is presupposed the experience of the other is inevitable we have to confront others the subjectivity of the other is encountered see that is a very interesting aspect even something which has been discussed by other thinkers notably by Hegel because when Hegel talks about is phenomenology of spirit I have discussed it in this lecture series when we have discussed Hegelian philosophy the three stages consciousness self-consciousness and reason the second stage unlike the first stage consciousness where the consciousness just encounters objects in the world and understand them as objects as chairs and tables and pens the second stage is where I encounter the consciousness encounter or subject encounters not just objects but other subjects who are also conscious beings and this according to Hegel leads to a conflict because the other can actually cancel my subjectivity the other is also a subject is not just an object so I cannot conceive I cannot relate myself with another subject in the same sense I relate myself with a computer or a chair. So, this brings an element of conflict in our relationship or rather exposes the possibility of a conflict in our relationship which leads to a kind of master save relationship according to Hegel and here again Sartre also says something very similar the subjectivity of other is encountered the other is encountered as a subject who can objectify me who can also see me can see me as an object being an object to the subjectivity of the other. So, one experiences oneself as being subjected to the objectification of another subject which is exemplified with the same conscience shame consciousness. So, this is a very interesting aspect of Sartre and philosophy what he says is that with through with the explanation of shame consciousness what he says is he takes up the example of a voyeur who peeps through a keyhole and suddenly realizes that another person is looking at him and judging him. So, looking through a keyhole which is you are not supposed to do that you are actually intruding the privacy of someone else and looking through the keyhole and then suddenly you realize that there is someone behind you who is watching you who is by watching you he is judging you. So, this realization that you are you have become an object of observation and object of judgment by another person that is a very uncomfortable feeling. So, he says that the experience of shame consciousness analogous to the pre reflective consciousness of the consciousness of object if the object is being seen by the subject. Now, another person is seeing me as an object the voyeur have here experiences the subjectivity of the other. So, it is not that you know the voyeur is this person who peeps through the hall is experiencing the other person as an object, but the other person is being encountered as a subject. So, the recognition of others subjectivity forces certain modifications in our existential structure. The possibility of this awareness in my relationship with other people or rather which is an inevitable aspect of human existential situation the others come into picture. So, we can say that the being for others dimension of my existential structure which is inevitable. This its recognition of other subjectivity forces certain modifications in our existential structure itself. My self conception does not depends only on me other subjects are there they would decide they would also be contributing to my creation of what I am others can objectify me. See the problem is that there is a fear the fear is that when other person objectifies me conceive me as an object he is essentializing me he is asserting an essence to me and he is saying that I am this he is judging me. So, this possibility of getting reduced to an object in front of another subject creates a kind of tension between me and others others and me. So, the other is always a problem in that sense the other as subject turns the voyeur in a being as object we want to objectify the other we want to make the other support our own self conscious conceptions I do not want others to oppose my self conceptions I want them to allow accept or agree with me, but that is not going to happen.   So, they can make you an object they can reduce your status to at the status of an object. So, the relations of domination and subordination this can never be overcome. So, what Sartre says is that this is something which you have to keep in mind that this in our existential situation the relations of domination and subordination in our relationship with others this cannot be avoided this cannot be overcome this can never be overcome and never key be stabilized not no dialectic of relations with the other, but only a circle responsible for the instability of my empirical self being in itself being for itself and being for others. So, let us conclude our discussion on Sartrean philosophy at this point very important and very interesting what Sartre says is that we have to accept that the existential situation of man is crisis written it is anguish it is characterized by anguish there is because freedom is inescapable and when you try to escape freedom by saying that these are expressions typical expressions by means of which I try to escape my freedom say for example, I can say that circumstances let me to do this someone force me to do that I had no choice no I have choices there is no situation where Sartre says that you have no choice you always have choices and you have chosen say that circumstances to blame circumstances and other external factors is according to Sartre bad faith. So, that is to exhibit bad faith and to exhibit bad faith is to exist in authentically to exist authentically one has to exercise choices consciously aware of the limitation consciously aware of the existential situation and it is as in the beaning itself we have mentioned since man is both being in itself and being for itself there is a perpetual conflict between being in itself and being for itself in man and this might also result in a kind of ambivalence ambiguity about human existential situation. These are things which you cannot escape these are things which are your situation your condition of action. So, an authentic existence implies that one has to realize it recognize these limitations and act accordingly and take decisions within that. So, we will wind up our discussion on Sartre in existentialism with this lecture the next two lectures remaining lectures in this series are going to be dealing with new trends post 1950 trends like post modernism and feminism. So, we will wind up this lecture here. Thank you.