No More Learning

Bildung here has two contradictory motions. It reinforces the status quo, reproducing spirit's self-alienation in existing social relations, and yet it is changed or re-formed in doing so by the experience of this repetition. Together these constitute political experience, and the relationship of the- ory and practice. Reform is the goal of a political action, but it is re-formed in attempting such reform, and re-formed in such a way as to reveal the domination of existing social relations over all such political action. As we will see shortly, it is philosophy that can comprehend the meaning and sig- nificance of this experience in which the goal of political action is inverted or turned against itself.
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The education of Bildung in the Phenomenology is to be found in the totality of this pre-determined formation and equally pre-determined re- formation. Its moments are those of speculative logic. It is, first, an immediate (re)production of the alienation of spirit, one that contains therein the drive for reform. Second, Bildung is the negative experience of attempting such reforms, that is, that they do not work and merely reinforce the status quo. Thus 'good' action for reform becomes 'bad' action in practising fur- ther earthly barbarism. The noble deed becomes the ignoble deed. The ruler is not an obedient servant but a wealthy and powerful master. But, and third, there is the recognition of the implications of these contradictions, that nothing is quite as it seems, and that meanings and values are them- selves inverted, or pass into their opposite. Thus, says Hegel, 'the language of this disrupted consciousness is the perfect language and the authentic existent Spirit of this entire world of culture' (1977: 316; 1949: 370).
The self-contempt that results from this experience of hypocrisy is the experience of 'pure' culture, stripped now of the finery behind which power masquerades as servant to God. This is the pure culture, the pure education, of the faithful self of pure consciousness as really the reasoning schemer and deceiver who must face his own truth in the dissolving of his charades. Pure education here is the I that says I am never what I take myself to be; rather, I am the negation of all that I take myself to be. My hypocrisy is my education regarding myself. I have been reformed every time I have sought to deny this hypocrisy. Now I must accept the universality of this re-formation, that is, the universality of the negative. 'Here, then, we have the Spirit of this real world of culture. Spirit that is conscious of itself in its truth and in its Notion. It is this absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and of thought; it is pure culture' (1977: 316; 1949: 371). This alienation reforms spirit and reforms the reforming spirit. The double negation is the truth of a new shape of spirit, an honourable spirit that owns up to the hypocrisy of not acknowledging inevitable inver- sion. With this education the edifices built out of hypocrisy collapse. This I is now prepared for further and higher education regarding its objectivity and formation and re-formation but this, as we will see in a moment, requires a different form of philosophical education.
Bildung, then, contains within itself the totality of a dialectic that forms and is re-formed in turn. All universals are found culpable of self-interest, and self-interest becomes the new universality. This also characterizes modern social relations. Culture does not describe a one-off stage of spirit's alienation and education. Culture is the movement of all experiences of inversions and of contradictions in theory and practice. Modern culture
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expresses the separation of thought and the absolute. Here, though, it con- cerns the inversion of reason which is experienced as acting against itself, and takes place not in the feudal barbarism of lawlessness, but in the univer- sal property law of bourgeois social relations. This is not the alienation of spirit where personality is to be sacrificed in bringing God's will to earth; it is rather the misrecognition of spirit as universal in individual property rights. The person of Roman law returns now with the status of Emperor shared among free men, and a free man is the man who is independent of others in owning his own property. Nevertheless, contradiction and culture are both present here. The good act that seeks universal significance becomes the act of perpetuating self-interest. Philosophical education per- sists in the same self-contempt for not being what the master appears to be.
Thus, to comprehend modern social relations requires acknowledging that actions for universality are determined in and by a world wherein the terms defining such actions and purposes have already ensured their incom- patibility. Here is the double bind of all political action: the terms that define what must be done are the same terms that make it impossible. At this point one can imagine resignation in the face of failure and impotence. But this is not the significance of Bildung. Bildung is a totality of opposition. In modern terms this totality has been defined by Horkheimer and Adorno as the dialectic of enlightenment. This states the totality of inversion and contradiction as myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment returns to myth. In a sense this dialectic of enlightenment is pure culture, or the culture of reason wherein formation and re-formation is reason in and for itself. The dialectic of enlightenment takes culture as far as it can go, that is, to the pure recognition of itself as misrecognition. But the culture of culture con- tained in Bildung here - and in its modern form as the dialectic of enlightenment - is a philosophical education regarding the truth that this total inversion contains. This philosophical form of Hegelian education is the Aufhebung.
Entwicklung (development)
Entwicklung, in the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, refers to development as the unfolding and evolving of a story or a drama. In particular it is used to illustrate the relation between potentiality and actuality.
In the section entitled 'The Idea as Development' (Die Idee als Entwick- lung)4 Hegel teaches that in any form of development there must be two principles, namely potentiality and actuality. A development must have the
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potential for that development already within itself as part of itself. Spirit, then, for Hegel, is self-formative and reveals and learns only what was always potential in it.
In describing development as potential Hegel often uses the seed as illustrative. 'The seed,' he says, 'is endowed with the entire formation (For- mation) of the plant; the productive force (Kraft) and the product (Hervorge- brachte) are one and the same. Nothing emerges except what was already present' (1987: 72-73; 1940: 103). This activity of the seed, then, is self- production (Sich selbst Hervorbringen; [1940: 103]). However, it is formative not just of its potential, but also of the repetition of its production beyond itself. The seed does not just produce itself once. Rather, the process of self- formation is complete only when a new seed has been produced, and there- fore even the completion of the self-formation is not really a completion, only a renewal or a repetition.
This entire cycle of self-development from potential to potential has its actuality in the existence of the potential. If the content of the seed never waivers in its self-development, the form that this content takes in doing so nevertheless changes visibly. It has, as Hegel puts it, to become 'something different' (1987: 73) in acquiring a form in relation to other things. How- ever, what the seed does naturally, reason must do cognitively. The seed can be all plants as one plant can be all seeds. Development here is not rup- tured by relations of universal and particular, for its circular nature is without beginning or end. 5 But reason's development is not so unproblem- atic. Hegel notes the part reason plays in the development or unfolding of the human being.
Man is essentially reason (Vernunft); the man, the child, the educated and the uneducated man, all are reason, or rather the possibility of being reason is present in and given to everyone. . . . The only difference is that in the child reason is only potentially or implicitly present, while in the adult it is explicit, transformed (gesetzt) from possibility into existence. (1987: 74; 1940: 104)6
However, reason's cycle of self-development is interrupted by the fact that 'development' is concrete as the 'I' or as subjectivity. What the seed does naturally reason must do consciously. A development that knows of itself is an education that disrupts this development. It is a development that opposes development. In the sense referred to above, this opposition is what drives Bildung. It is the experience that re-forms what is experienced, and negates therefore the initial formation. We can say here that Bildung is
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education regarding the cycle of Entwicklung. Bildung disrupts the smooth flow of potentiality to actuality. What is actual here is the experience of the negation of development, or its being re-formed in its being known. This opposition is the history of philosophy, that is, the history of philosophy is the history of a development whose unfolding appears to exceed itself at every turn. The history of philosophy is therefore set a different and unique challenge: to comprehend a development whose comprehension obstructs development. Or, to comprehend how the I can be of unfolding yet also as unfolding. This requires a notion of education or development that, in appearing to exceed development, in fact practises development.
Between them, Bildung and Entwicklung play out an educational drama that has philosophical implications which still remain to be acknowledged and comprehended. Therefore, we move now to the third and most impor- tant notion of education in Hegel, that of Aufhebung, in order to show how Bildung and Entwicklung are its constitutive but not its exhaustive moments. What they constitute is the disruption of the consciousness that does not think philosophically, and the historical, theological and political telos of doing so. Disruption as teleology, and teleology as disruption are the motor force of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and his History of Philosophy. Together they ensure that dogma is constantly negated and that the negation is understood as human development. Together here they have their relation comprehended as a self-(re-)formation in the Aufhebung.
Aufhebung (self-[re-]formation)
This is perhaps the most disputed term in all Hegelian thought. On it hangs the system itself because the Aufhebung is the mechanism by which negation and negation of negation realize a determinate self-(re-)formation. It is un- Hegelian to see Hegel's philosophy as based around the triadic relationship of thesis-antithesis-synthesis because such a formula suppresses the fact that in Hegel any such movement changes the consciousness that experi- ences it. This change is the culture, the formation and re-formation, of the consciousness. Merely to observe this development and to comment upon its apparent logic from a vantage point, or as a voyeur, is both to presuppose and to misunderstand this culture of experience, and of subjectivity. Indeed, it is to eschew precisely the education that the sequence of the terms describes. In the mind, let us say, of a critic of Hegel, this formula is inter- preted as one in which the synthesis overcomes the opposition of thesis and antithesis. Equally, in the same mind, a critique of this overcoming might
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be made on the grounds of the apparent imperialism of Eurocentric ratio- nalism. Overcoming and resolving oppositions, the critic might say, is the terror imposed by reason over all oppositions or dualisms. Such a critic may champion the view, on the one hand, that differences should not be over- come or, on the other, that difference exceeds the illusory sovereignty of the synthesis that reason seeks to impose. The former might be called the pluralism of the postmodern, the latter the excess of the poststructural.
Hegel does not, however, have a philosophy based on such a simplistic view of the overcoming or resolving of opposing dualisms. Hegel's philoso- phy and the notion of the Aufhebung within it are centred on the relations that serve as the conditions of the possibility for the thinking of objects. The sense of contingency found here is more radical, more penetrating and more significant than versions of contingency that seek only to assert relations of dependence. Such assertions are forced to presuppose the rela- tion they wish to acknowledge. Or, put another way, the relation to the object is always made possible by, and is contingent upon, a prior relation to that object. This means not only that even assertions of contingency are contingent, but also that this realization must in turn collapse under the weight of itself, even, or especially, when it is posited as difference, as possi- bility, or as the impossibility of absolute thinking. We saw above this re-formation as characteristic of Bildung.
This insight into philosophy as the relation of the relation does not, of course, belong exclusively to Hegel. On the contrary, it is the insight into the dialectic that gives form and content to Western philosophy from Plato to Derrida. What is significant about Hegel's contribution to this debate7 is that his whole philosophy works not with the one relation or the other, but within the relation of both relations; that is, within the relation to the object and the relation to that relation. This is the educative significance of the Aufhebung. It is, we might say here, to work within the broken middle8 of the natural standpoint of thought's relation to an object and the philosophical standpoint of thought's relation to that relation. There is no overcoming here although there is a double negation; the negation of the object in rela- tion to consciousness and the negation of that relation in relation to consciousness (now as its own object). Hegel's system is a detailed explora- tion into the implications of each relation upon the other. It is not a system where mediation or negation are overcome, but rather one where philoso- phy, and, therefore, education in Hegel, are precisely the subject and substance of those implications.
As an essentially educative experience, this broken middle cannot be resolved, for it precedes thinking as the latter's
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condition of possibility. But what it can learn from this impossibility of resolution is its own truth, a truth known in and as the form and content of the contradictory and inevitable conjunction of abstraction and media- tion. Aufhebung is this truth that lies within the relation of contingency to itself, and in the following section we will explore the structure of this edu- cational relation as recollection.
Seen in this way, Aufhebung is the philosophical education that underpins the education of Bildung and Entwicklung, and, most importantly, their phil- osophical and educational relation to each other. My case, here, is this. Bildung in the Phenomenology prioritizes the reform of the thinker that comes with thought's negation of its object. Entwicklung in the History of Philosophy prioritizes the telos of such changes. As such, as we saw above, their relation to each other is anything but harmonious. Telos is already disrupted in Bil- dung, and Bildung always returns to (this disrupted) telos. It is this difficult relation - an aporetic relation - that is expressed as self-(re-)formation in and by Aufhebung.
Recollection
A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me
(Pascal, 1966: 218)
Aufhebung is significant in Hegel because it achieves something that appears to the abstract rational consciousness to be impossible. It is able to know something as both an appearance and as the negation of this appearance. This means that it somehow preserves what it knows as both what it was (its appearance) and what it is now known as. When Aufhebung is translated as 'sublation' it fails to pay due attention to the most important feature of the Aufhebung, that it is essentially a learning experience. But if this was all there was to it, the Aufhebung would amount to no more than a sceptical knowing, that is, a knowing of things to be not as they appear. What seems to be lack- ing in Aufhebung seen in this way is any kind of positive knowledge about what the thing actually is. The nature of the positive element of the Aufhe- bung is what is most at stake in Hegel. If it is purely positive then it is easily fashioned into the kind of claims for absolute knowing that appear arro- gant and self-satisfied. If it is not positive at all, then it teaches us nothing. What kind of notion remains, then, if any, that might somehow know the
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truth of something in what it is not, and maintain that negativity even in its being known as such? How might it be possible to know something that is known as unknown? The answer to this question, and the structure of the Aufhebung in Hegel, is of education as recollection. When the negative knows itself it is as recollection.
We saw in Chapter 1 how life can know its own nothingness in death, how the master can know his own nothingness in the slave, and how the self can know his nothingness in his other. But if we now replace 'know' here with 'recollect,' the educational character and structure of this knowing can be brought to the fore. To recollect oneself is to be what one is not. There is a double significance here, and one that was also found in Chapter 1 regard- ing life, the master and the self. First, one recollects that one is something other than what one is. This is the same as saying that one is never what one was, because the knowledge of what one was can only be recollected. It can only be known differently to how it was. This opens up a fear of only ever being nothing, a fear of nihilism, because a positive standpoint is forever impossible. But, and second, to recollect is to be what one is not. This is a result, albeit one that looks strange and out of sorts with rationalism. There is only one way that this opposition or autoimmunity can make sense of itself without the aid of further external presuppositions or assertions. One can be what one is not when one is learning about oneself. The structure of this learning is recollection, for in recollection what is recalled is what was by that which is what one was. What is lost and kept is that which is recol- lected as recollecting. In this learning, in this education, the positive and the negative carry their own truths at the same time in and as learning. This is how the Aufhebung works, through recollection, as our philosophical edu- cation that what was and what is are both present and absent in and as learning. Learning holds thought and being together without suppressing their difference. This, indeed, is what is educational about philosophy and philosophical about education.
Later in this chapter we will see how the history of philosophy appears when viewed philosophically as recollection. This is undertaken by looking at the aporetic mastery of the West and its export of vulnerability across the world. Before that, however, we will illustrate this concept of recollection, and therefore Aufhebung, in three ways. First, by looking at the role it plays in Hegel's presentation of the psychology of thought; second, and with the non-specialist in Hegel in mind, by way of William Wordsworth's ode 'Inti- mation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'; and third, albeit briefly, by looking at recollection in Philip Verene's book Hegel's Recollection.
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For those who seek an obvious justification from Hegel that the Aufhebung is recollection there is not much to go on. But what there is, goes a long way. Recollection is primarily described as a moment in the development of thought to rational cognition. In both the Philosophical Propaedeutic (1809-1811) and the Philosophy of Mind (1830) Erinnerung is the first stage wherein immediate intuitions come to be held as images in the memory such that they become representations. The translation of Erinnerung as inwardizing9 refers to what happens when the ego or the I recollects itself from its feelings and intuitions as a presence or a being in time and space. Recollection works here by creating the intuition as an image within the ego. To know the image as mine is to know the I to whom it belongs.
But the term inwardizing does not capture the unique features of what takes place here. In the Philosophical Propaedeutic Hegel notes that the I does not restrict itself to the intuition that has been internalized, but also liber- ates this intuition from an external time and space to a subjective time and space. In this way, it is universalized as form and 'through the sublation (das Aufheben) of the particular time of intuition it becomes enduring (dau- erned)' (1986: 152; 1970: 45). The nature of this universality is 'just as much a non-existent as a preserved existence' (1986: 152; 1970: 45), and it is the Aufhebung that preserves what is not, or what is negated. It is as recollection, then, that the I here learns to know itself in this activity as the I. The point that must not be missed is that the imagination and the I can only know of themselves as recollection through another recollection. This same struc- ture is therefore repeated when thought, having itself or this I as its own object, knows itself in self-opposition. Here, the Aufhebung is a recollection of what the I is not as what nevertheless is.
As we saw above in the quotation from the final paragraph of the Phenom- enology, recollection is not restricted to its part in the psychology of the knowing mind. In the philosophical mind recollection recalls itself and plays out the negation of the negation as formative self-determination. This is true of all mediations, not just those in the imagination, for it is how the I will know itself as recollected even within the imagination. In the latter the I recollects itself in the negation that is representation. This is true also of the recollection that is absolute spirit. In both cases there is the relation of the external in the internal, and the relation to that relation. The latter is the recollection of the former as itself prior to this education. This is as true for immediate intuition as it is for all representations of objects, and of the relation to these representations. Recollection is what makes the relation a triadic self-(re-)formation. This is why, also, it is the substance of
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spirit. This relation of the mind to the object is the fundamental relation in the whole of Hegel's philosophy. How it is interpreted depends on the way that recollection is posited within different social and political relations. It is when the I becomes aware of itself as that which existed without this awareness that we find the significance of recollection as philosophical education.
One way to illustrate the importance of recollection in Hegel beyond the imagination is in the way that the absolute or God can be known. In the Philosophy of Mind Hegel distinguishes between mere knowing (Wissen) and cognition (Erkennen). Consciousness is always an awareness of being, and as we saw, this is implicitly a recollection, but the mind also wants to know its truth. In this activity Geist will recollect the implicit recollection that is the I as not-I. A double recollection such as this is a double negation. The first recollection (the simple I) is recalled as negative and known as not known by a second recollection. This second recollection pulls the ground out from under its own feet in doing so. That which recollects itself as recollec- tion loses itself to itself. Recollection here is essentially groundless. This is the same groundlessness that is feared by Aristotle and his mediaeval com- mentators as the reductio ad absurdum. 10 Hegel sees that in philosophy this groundlessness is treated only negatively, that is, as making impossible the comprehension of God. Theology, he says, will accept that we can know that God is but not what God is. 11 This says no more than that theology refuses God as recollection because the negation of the negation is seen to hold no educational and philosophical substance. Yet it is in and as education that groundlessness has its own substance. This means that we can know that God is, but also we can learn what God is. This serves as an example of how recollection underpins the movement and development that form the Hegelian system. Recollection is how immediacy is known as lost, and how mediation knows this loss as itself. This is the characteristic of all intellec- tual movement in Hegel that knows itself negatively, from the simple I in imagination to the absolute in cognition.
Recollection in Wordsworth
In Wordsworth's poem 'Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' he describes the truth of a child and his development to the adult in terms of recollection. The child in the poem, at first, is at one with nature and the eternal universe, 'a time when meadow, grove, and stream/ The earth and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light. ' But this blissful state is known to the poet only as recollection, for 'it is not now as it has been of yore;-/ Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night
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or day,/ The things which I have seen I now can see no more. ' This loss of the 'child of joy' sees 'Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing boy. ' The child is emerging into the adult world and education is doing all it can to ensure that the child is lost to the amour-propre of social convention, so that 'the little actor cons another part. '
Yet Wordsworth is not just drawing attention to childhood as paradise lost. Nor, indeed, is he describing the unfolding or the development of the child to the adult merely as a seed becoming a plant or as a matter merely of the passage of time. He is adding to the teleological development of the child a range of negative and contradictory experiences that by their very nature disrupt any teleology. Adult recollection has to instigate a change in the adult, to re-form his understanding of himself. If this is an inevitable part of his development then the change brought about in recollection was always its potentiality. Here one might argue that Entwicklung and Bildung are rec- onciled, in that the re-form of recollection was always part of the teleology, and the telos of Entwicklung realizes itself in Bildung, in the reformative experiences of recollection. But there is no such reconciliation to be had in recollection. This is because what Entwicklung and Bildung produce is the paradox of recollection, a dialectic of enlightenment where telos includes within it its own loss of itself to itself, and where Bildung is the experience of this re-formation of telos and therefore of the child. It is in the philosophical import of this aporetic relationship between development and reformation that we find the all-important notion of Aufhebung. It is found too in Word- sworth's poem. Recollection has so re-formed the adult that he cannot be the child, nor can he be as the child. The negative paradox here in recollec- tion is that the comprehension of the child can never belong to the child. By definition the child must be re-formed as adult in order to understand the truth of the child. This paradox is summed up by Wordsworth at the very beginning of the poem saying 'the child is the father of the man', mean- ing the child gives birth (in recollection) to the man who is the father. 12
How, then, does Wordsworth view this philosophical education? Recollec- tion knows the loss of childhood in order to comprehend childhood, and it is from within the prison-house that the writer looks back at his lost child- hood. But this is not nostalgia. The adult, gazing back at childhood, states that it is not for the simple delights and liberties of childhood that he gives thanks. 'Not for these I raise/ The song of thanks and praise;/ But for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things. ' And he concludes
What though the radiance that was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight,
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