No More Learning

3 Levinas uses the notion of recollection here (se recueillir and le recueillement) to describe the revelation of the transcendent in the welcome of the feminine face. See Levinas, 1969: 150-5; 1961: 124-8.
4 For a philosophy of the teacher working with education in negation, and with the truth of the teacher therein, see Tubbs (2005b).
5 In a private letter, Howard describes Levinas and the Political as 'a bleak read'.
6 There is not space to compare Levinas with Derrida here. We can note, however, that the totality of war is a similar effect to the totality of difference-opposition,
and that its incompletion is its autoimmunity.
7 The full paragraph from Caygill here reads as follows: 'As part of the Diaspora he
has, according to his own theory, not only the right but the obligation to question those actions of the State of Israel that are idolatrous or that diverge from its pro- phetic inspiration. Indeed we shall see that, on some occasions, Levinas did act according to his political principles, but also that on others he remained silent or, it might be argued, privileged the work of the state over the prophetic principles of the work of justice. The possibility of the latter - in the face of Levinas's own thought - is not unconnected with the persistent discourse of sacrifice that attends his reflections on Israel. This cannot but bring him into an uncomfort- able proximity with idolatry and the risk of the consequent deflation of his own political and ethical thought' (2002: 176).
8 While Caygill concerns himself with the effect of this opposition on the political in Levinas, in fact it is an opposition that disrupts the whole of Levinas's project in Otherwise than Being. Significant here, as Caygill points out, is that Levinas aban- dons 'the language of metaphysics' (2002: 124) employed in Totality and Infinity in order to frame a 'project of religious and social theory' (2002: 124). The third party of metaphysics and politics, and of ego and alterity in Totality and Infinity, becomes divided from itself in Otherwise than Being and portrayed as two middles, as illeity and justice.
9 The arguments presented now until the end of the chapter lean heavily on what has been presented above in Chapters 1 and 2.
10 We have been carrying this ambiguity as Other.
11 Kierkegaard calls this 'repetition' forwards, but I have kept recollection here
to illustrate better its autoimmunity to itself; see Kierkegaard (1983). See also
footnote 11 of Introduction.
12 This is the same insight that Nietzsche noted in the historical man and
is Zarathustra's most abysmal thought, that all 'I will' is really only 'what was'.
Ressentiment here is the will's refusal to accept the universal nature of this 'error'.
13 Matt. 19. 22; Lk. 18. 23.
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[N]o wise man ever wished to be younger.
[I]t can be said that man is prior to the boy in substance and completion,
but the boy is before the man in generation and in time.
Introduction
(Aquinas, 1998: 25)1
This chapter reconstructs the Phenomenology of Spirit as a spiritual education of the modern reflective subject. It does so in order to illustrate the spiritual education that is carried in and by the Western experience of self and other. It retrieves, or recollects, the stages of spirit's phenomenological education as stages in the spiritual life of a modern reflective subject from childhood, youth and adulthood to old age.
The Phenomenology is the story of the spiritual education of the West from Ancient Greece to early nineteenth century Europe. 2 Its dynamic is the way that life, in its perspective as victor over death, continually misrecognizes itself as independent from its struggle with death. The forms that this mis- recognition takes are self and other, both within the one individual - the I - and external to him - the We. Death continually returns in the form of negation to teach life, or the self, of the truth it is suppressing. These nega- tions are the shapes taken by spiritual education, and the Aufhebung they carry is actual in the recollection of itself as spirit.
As we will see, this spiritual education comes to know itself in and as the recollection that is life in death and death in life, or as absolute spirit. But, equally important, this philosophical education is still the truth of the indi- vidual reflective subject who is already other to himself and to the (external) other. The Aufhebung of these two negations has its subject and substance in preserving the negations in philosophical education, and not in any final overcoming of the reflective subject who is being educated in this way.
(Swift, 1886: 113)
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This education is actual, then, in and as I-philosophy, that is, as the individual who learns himself. I-philosophy is recollection as absolute spirit and is the learning that knows itself as the science of experience. It is as I-philosophy that Hegel's philosophies of Right, Religion, etc. are written. However, in this chapter we will restrict ourselves to the spiritual education formative of I-philosophy in the Phenomenology.
Both the content and the structure of the Phenomenology are part of this education. As such, it is a spiritual education unlike that, for example, of Augustine in The Confessions or al-Ghazali in Deliverance from Error. While it involves spirit's confession to itself regarding its own mistakes in its experi- ences of thinking the true, this confession takes a modern form in the diremption of the I and the We. Included among these mistakes is the idea that this spiritual education is simply chronological, as for example the edu- cation outlined by Rousseau in Emile. In fact, spiritual education in Hegel works backwards as recollection as much as it works forwards as develop- ment. It is part of the method of the Phenomenology to disrupt chronology in line with the ambiguities of the education it is following, while at the same time still being a discernible development.
Hegel described the Phenomenology as a science of the experience of con- sciousness. This means that the structure of the book is determined by how thought works rather than how history appears. In the Phenomenology thought is concerned to find its history in chronological history. This devel- opment works behind the back of chronological history as spiritual education. When this latter can recollect its own development, spiritual education has determined itself as absolute spirit. But this is not just another dogmatic historical standpoint. It is also that which knows itself in its own groundlessness, its absolute negation, in and as its learning of this ground- lessness. As we have seen in previous chapters, only learning can be the something of the nothing. This is the truth of old age, as we will come to see, and it is the eternal circle and finite education that constitutes absolute spirit and that is known in and as education in Hegel. Therefore, the stages in spiritual education of childhood, youth, adulthood and old age that we will follow are not simply the chronological development of the reflective subject. They are, rather, the component parts of the recollection that knows them as itself. Spiritual personal development and chronological personal development may coincide to varying extents, but the former refer to a spiritual education that a subject may or may not have during his life. Indeed, such a spiritual education may be precisely what is missing in the contradictions and aporias lived out within the chronology of a reflective subject's life.
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Nor are the stages of childhood, youth, etc. arbitrarily applied to spiritual development. They arise within the recollection of spirit when it looks back at the different characteristics of its own development. Also, because educa- tion in the Phenomenology and in this chapter is one of recollection, this education begins not with the child but with the modern reflective subject in the social world who recalls his becoming this recollection. Childhood is its immediacy; youth is its time of uncertainty in mediation; adulthood is the certainty of the self; and old age is the whole that recollects these stages as itself, as I-philosophy. There is no certainty however, that spirit's develop- ment will match the facts of any individual life. As Hegel is reported to have said when asked about the difference between philosophy and facts, so much the worse for the facts.
There is one final point to be made here before turning to the Phenome- nology directly. The modern political subject is defined as free in his separa- tion from, and not in his union with, the other. As such, modern political experience is dualistic, divided between the individual and the social. The social is other to the free individual, and his experience of law and of its categorical imperatives is, at worst, one of heteronomy and, at best, one of aporia. This determines how the modern person sees his own development, that is, as a relation to himself and, separately, as a relation to others. In what follows I have found it helpful to call the latter a sociological educa- tion. Sociology articulates these tensions between self and society in many forms. But a sociology of sociology is needed if this experience of contin- gency, where the I is torn between personal and social freedoms that contradict each other, is to be able to comprehend itself as a shape of philo- sophical and spiritual education. That the Phenomenology is structured in this way is in itself a recognition of its own moments within and contingent upon essentially modern social and political relations.
It will be helpful at this point to say a little about the way the chapter is now organized. It has two main divisions. Part A recollects the education of the I, and Part B recollects this education as the I that is We. It is common in work on Hegel to call these the stages of reason and spirit, respectively, but I want these terms to emerge in the education and I have therefore given priority to the terms I and We. In each of the Parts A and B there is the development from childhood to youth to adulthood. The repetition of the headings is also the return of the I and the We to each other. The chap- ter ends with a section on absolute knowing as old age which recollects the whole of itself in life and death, or more accurately as death in life.
We begin then in the recollection of the immediate beginning of the reflective subject, that is, in childhood.
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Childhood
Childhood for Hegel is the time of immediacy, that is, of a consciousness that consists of will without responsibility to itself. Consciousness begins with the awareness of objects through the senses, objects that, as such, are immediately present. The child learns most in these early years because he is open to the outer world and all that it introduces to his senses. But this sense-certainty will be unable to sustain itself in such immediacy, for objects come and go. How is the child to know these objects when they are not present to his senses? This is the same as asking how the child can deal with the change from 'this is' to 'it was'. The absence forces a change in con- sciousness, where the object is now the thought of the object. This thought is, as it were, the result of the loss of immediacy, even though at this early stage it may only be an immediate thought. The child will also attempt to give himself a presence in the world. Immediate at first, this too will suffer the failure of immediacy, where this presence is opposed by other such presences. Put together, these two experiences of the loss of immediacy force the child into a different stance in the world, one which is gradually developing into the impermanence of all objects, that is, into their being thought. Thought, then, gradually becomes aware of itself as the 'I' or the ego of the child. The I, here, is the instability of immediacy becoming known to it and is experienced as will.
This will has to learn of itself as part of the failure of immediacy. Objects are perceived as stable only in the knowing of them, and they are known only in contact to other objects. Perception differentiates objects according to their properties and conceptualizes them, even if only in memory to begin with. But this is the beginning of understanding in the child, for it is where the world is known according to its being thought. This understand- ing of the world is itself immediate. Hegel argues here for the child's early education beyond the family to be one that does not prioritize the immedi- acy of the world in feeling and in the senses over the failure of such immediacy to sustain itself and the thoughts of the world that this induces. The child needs to think the world, for this is how and where the path to adulthood and to freedom begins. To fetishize the feeling at this stage in the child's education risks encouraging a merely arbitrary response to the world of objects and other people.
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Hegel's comments here will not please those progressive educators who see play as the most important method of a child discovering the world and the rules that govern interaction with others. Hegel favours discipline over play. Play has its place in the child's life but it is not to be seen as the way in which the child will best learn of social life. Hegel's fear is that learn- ing of mediation through play will deny the child the seriousness of mediation, an experience which is absolutely necessary for a formative edu- cation in the demands of freedom. Perhaps Hegel's concerns here are particularly sharp when seen against the present form and content of the culture industry in the West that sells entertainment and fun in life as more desirable, more worthwhile, even more meaningful than the seriousness of thought that freedom and its effects on others demands. Freedom to have mass produced fun is freedom separated from its own dialectic of com- mand and obedience, or mastery and service. Relevant here, then, is Hegel's comment that the child 'must obey in order that he may learn to command. Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom' (1990: 60, zusatz), adding that 'the most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to break them' (1990: 59, zusatz). This obedience, however, need not be seen as cruel or dictatorial and Hegel is clear in his own pedagogy that the learning of obedience is necessary for the truth of a man's independence in the world. The truth of independence is in obedience, not to others, but to the self that must live with others. It is also the case that examples of education in obedience given by Hegel are learning the alphabet and learning of order in the natural world. Here obedience to structure is also an experi- ence in abstracting from sense-certainty and is therefore also a development of the understanding, for, again, it is part of the forces that constitute perception of objects in thought.
However, the understanding here that is based on perception will have to face its own limited scope and, ultimately, its failure to hold to its immediacy. A child may understand what a leaf is and what a bird is, but this under- standing only raises another set of issues.
These concern the relation of one's thought to the world that it knows. In its most insistent form this is the question repeated by the child as to 'why' things in the world are as they are. Here is the experience that thought can be more powerful than the world it knows, for it can demand answers to questions raised but not answered by the world. The understanding is insufficient to satisfy itself on the appear- ance of the world in thought. The understanding, as it were, reports on objects in the world but such reporting only raises further and deeper ques- tions. It is in this instability of the understanding that the understanding
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comes to understand itself. This is where the consciousness of the child
becomes the self-consciousness of youth. Youth
No preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that older people have tried in vain to put into our heads before.
(Swift, 1886: 109)
Youth takes its beginning in the certainty of its own self-consciousness. It does not need to remember that it has arisen from the frailty of the understanding for it takes itself to be the beginning of all knowledge. Youth knows best. This certainty, however, is grounded in the separation of thought from the real world. Spiritual education here sees self-consciousness look- ing only to itself for truth. Its freedom consists in the fact that, as self- consciousness, it is not mastered by any other or any thing. Here youth enjoys an indifference to the world, but it is an indifference that can take different forms. Youth appears self-centred, self-obsessed and thinks the world revolves around it. 3 However, one form of this self-centredness is an idealism about how the world is and how it should be, although it shows lit- tle or no benefit of actually having had any contact or experience with the 'real world'. Thought here is in search of its own purity and integrity within self-consciousness, a purity that is tied to its separation from the real world and one that is true only to the thought of the world.
Accompanying this idealism self-consciousness can take the shape of a disbelief in all claims to truth in and by the real world. Certainty becomes something certain only of the untruths of the world. All truths that are asserted over and against this scepticism collapse in the wake of their com- peting with each other; opposed to every account there is another equal account. This scepticism can be nihilistic and destructive in its indifference. Youth can be the rebel who serves self-certainty in the negation of the world, and does so, at first, by holding this negativity to be the ground of his certainty. But the cost of the standpoint of this rebel is that his certainty in the lack of truth cannot survive its own negation, its own undermining. The (negative) spiritual lesson here is that the indifference of self-consciousness to the world cannot ground itself in order to preserve this indifference. Self-consciousness becomes indifferent to itself and suffers the same nega- tive fate as it held for the real world. This is the beginning of a very unhappy spiritual education for youth, one in which the certainty of self-consciousness
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opposes itself. Its own certainty turns against itself and leaves self-conscious- ness and its truth rent asunder. This self-consciousness is now dualistic and inwardly torn apart. It is essentially self-contradictory, and is other to itself in the way that previously the external was other to it. This stage of spiritual education is not just the loss of truth but also the impossibility of ever knowing truth. Thought contradicts every truth it comes across. It is a very destructive experience for youth in that it can find no rest from its doubts about the world and about itself. It despairs in a sense of hopelessness that knows no possible reconciliation between thought and truth.
The youth here is open to many different influences that claim a mean- ing that can restore self-consciousness from its negativity to a positivity. One response to this unhappiness is a faith in the eternal and the beyond, whilst another is attachment to an ideal of a society yet to be achieved. Both in a sense are idealistic. But experiments with such solutions inevitably repeat the same contradictions, and youth is plunged further into despair with each repetition. Youth's search for meaning in life expresses the pain born of deep and fundamental unhappiness at the relation between truth and the I for whom it appears.
However, this unhappiness in fact already contains the seeds of the Aufhe- bung that will retrieve and recollect meaning from within the despair. The independent self-consciousness that negates the world and negates itself now shares its negativity with the world. This can be a cruel education for at its heart is the recognition of the complicity of idealism and rebellion with the world they oppose. Youth comes to see that it did no more than repeat the very uncertainties in itself that it accused the world of. The solution, as it were, always becomes part of the problem. This return of the negative to the self-consciousness that exported it to the external world is the educa- tion that now brings youth and the world together. Out of the experience that thought and the world cannot be separated comes a new reality for self- consciousness. This new reality sublates the unhappiness of youth and his negation of self and world. This realizes a standpoint wherein thought sees that in and through its negative self and work it has exercised a totality, in that what it has done it has done to itself. This is no longer freedom from the world. Now this is the freedom of thought as comprehensively self- determining of itself and the world. The self-consciousness that recollects itself in this new freedom is the thought that thinks the truth of all reality, and this is reason. Now the youth enters adulthood because reason becomes him. More colloquially, this is where idealism realizes the truth and neces- sity of 'selling out' to the adult world as it is. However, as we will see now, the recollection of the development and negativity of self-consciousness that
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formed the rational and comprehensive idea of itself is forgotten when rea- son takes itself abstractly as being the consciousness of truth and being the truth as consciousness, that is, as adult.
Emile and Sophie
If we look for a moment to Rousseau's Emile, we find that this ambivalence is not found in the education that Rousseau provides for his pupil. As his tutor in fact he ensures that Emile does not experience the unhappiness of the I either in relation to its own negation or the negation of the social world. Indeed, Emile is kept free from any tension between the develop- ment of his own needs and the demands of his civil society, the demand, that is, for amour-propre, for conformity to social - and for Rousseau, hypo- critical and unjust - norms and values. Emile is educated beyond the city and as such moves from childhood to adult via a period of youth that is not self-contradictory, not as it were, torn between the freedom of the I and social conformity. Emile's youth is spent learning about freedom in physical but not in actual political relations. He moves from play to work without an intervening education into the freedom of his own self-consciousness and its negations and returns. In other words, Emile is denied the formative political education of life in the aporia of the free-thinking I in the unfree world.
One might see this as a successful education in that the excesses of bour- geois individualism have been avoided, with the result that Emile knows only true needs and thus only forms social relationships grounded in integ- rity. However, the real cost of this smooth transition from boy to man is borne by Sophie. On her befall the contradictions that Emile is protected from. She has to know intricately the workings of bourgeois civil society if she is to survive in the social world. Hers is a full political education into the self-interest and power of male bourgeois individualism and into the need, therefore, for her to formulate a political response. This response is to learn how to play the game in ways that ensure she has some political control over her life and its events. Yet her lack of freedom is for all that a more signifi- cant political education than Emile receives. Her education is where fashion and freedom oppose one another to the extent that freedom is re-formed and re-conceptualized according to the political actualities that face Sophie. However, this education is refused a rationality beyond that of necessary artifice. Sophie has no opportunity for the Aufhebung in which her dilemma can become transformative recollection because she must remain wedded
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to the life that alienates freedom from political reason. She must remain free only in the sense that she must find new ways to display her power of attraction over her man, a power which, as Rousseau makes clear, is abso- lutely grounded in her powerlessness.
Thus, while Emile has reason without the experience of political actuality, Sophie has the experience of political unfreedom without reason. Yet per- haps remarkably, there is an Aufhebung in Emile. Rousseau points out that it is in the unity of these differences between Emile and Sophie that power and powerlessness are both developed and re-formed. The power of Emile discovers its dependence upon Sophie, and in turn the powerlessness of Sophie recognizes the power that it holds over Emile. There is also recollec- tion in Emile, for Rousseau has his student come to thank him for the formative experiences he has engineered for him, seeing in hindsight how necessary they were. However, Emile has not been educated for the world as it is and will not comprehend freedom except in his relation to Sophie, but even here the freedom of the master is the freedom that has exported its own truth in vulnerability to the other, to Sophie. The return of this vulnerability, and the formal equality of Emile and Sophie remained beyond Rousseau's time.
Adulthood
The adult enjoys the certainty of himself as at one with the realities of the social world. He is reason that is in and for itself, for there is no contradic- tion between his own idea of himself and the idea that the world has of him. His thought of reality and his own lived reality are no longer at odds with each other. This is where the doubts and uncertainties of youth are sublated into the positive unity of the I and his world. This world is his world and, having negated the illusory freedom he had as a youth, where the real world was merely a beyond, it now reinforces the freedom of the sovereign ratio- nal person who is one among other such sovereign rational persons. Thus, the education of youth to adulthood becomes fixed as the rite of passage into the reality of the social world, a reality in which the I knows its respon- sibilities for work, family and community.
However, the adult seldom remembers the path that has led to this new certainty, and therefore this I appears as a natural standpoint. It forgets that the truth of reason lies in the experiences that have formed it. This is never more obvious than in the relation between adult and youth. The adult forgets his own youth when educating his children, and is particularly
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agitated with the 'attitude' of youth. It is also the case that youth cannot understand the adult for the former has not travelled the path that deter- mines the adult. Thus the adult forgets that the child moves from sense-certainty to ego-certainty, and that with the latter there is a freedom from the world that allows comment and criticism upon it without the binds of commitment to it.
There seems to be here an implicit conservatism in adulthood, particu- larly in the demand for the youth to become adult and to accept his responsibilities. This returns the I from its idealistic freedom to its complic- ity within the world it rejects. Yet Hegel does not see this conformism as suppressing entirely the possibility of new meaning in the world. In the adulthood of civil society there remains scope for 'honourable, far reaching and creative activity [for this is not] a dead, absolutely inert world but, like the life-process, a world which perpetually creates itself anew, which while merely preserving itself, at the same time progresses' (1990: 62-63, zusatz). This is the nature of the Aufhebung in Hegelian philosophical education. It is where change is arbitrary, even terroristic, unless it is able to preserve what it negates in a new, developed and negated form.
This, indeed, is the integrity of the Aufhebung; that it neither wholly dis- cards its previous shapes nor imports into itself anything from outside that will suppress the immanent power to educate and develop. Thus, the nature of 'change' that the spiritual education of the adult brings about is an edu- cation, also, about what 'change' means. We might say here that spiritual education requires one always to understand the nature of change within development, culture and Aufhebung so that one's natural consciousness does not act blindly in the world against the actuality of change and often therein against the very people one intends to benefit. This integrity is the subjective substance of the education of youth into adulthood. Thus, Hegel says, 'on the one hand we can say that the man only creates what is already there; yet on the other hand, his activity must also bring about an advance' (1990: 63, zusatz). This ambivalence is the protection against terror and has that protection as part of the change it brings about. The integrity is the ambivalence, and it is what makes youth despair of the seeming indiffer- ence of the adult world to real social change.
As reason, then, the adult can only see youth as yet to understand the totality or the real world, and is impatient at the arrogance of the self- consciousness that knows so much only because it knows so little. But the certainty of the adult now fares little better, and will undergo its own experi- ences of failures, negations and transitions. Having forgotten the path to
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