However, even here,
education
against the veil is itself veiled, for Rousseau as tutor must hide from his
?
?
Education in Hegel
Indeed, when Hooper leans over the girl his face would have been visible to her, and one of those assembled there swears that at this moment 'the corpse had slightly shuddered' (1987: 100) as if death had recognized itself in Hooper.
Moreover, it is said that it is as if the spirit of the Minister and of the deceased 'were walking hand in hand' (1987: 100).
At a wedding the veil inspires in the bride a 'death-like paleness' (1987: 101).
Accompanying this partnership of the veil and death are feelings of horror, dread and sorrow which induce, in turn, fear and trembling.
Those who are on their own death-beds are indeed drawn to Hooper and they refuse to die until he has come to them.
The gloom of the veil 'enabled him to sympathize with all dark affections' (1987: 104).
What disturbs Hooper the most is his wife, who leaves him, refusing to have the veil come between them, and the children of the parish who show an 'instinctive dread' (1987: 104) of the veil and flee from Hooper whenever he approaches them.
The veil, then, covers Hooper's face. But, of course, it reveals far more than ever it conceals. It is taken as a sign that Hooper is hiding a secret sin, yet it reveals to those who see it in this way that they are doing the same; such secrets, as they say, that 'we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would feign conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them' (1987: 99). The veil hides Hooper's face from being seen but is interpreted as a turn inwards to reveal his own darkest corners to himself. I wonder, says one lady, that he is not afraid to be so alone with himself. This underestimates just how painful the revelations of the veil are to Hooper. He says to his wife, 'you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil' (1987: 103), and he avoids mirrors to avoid the revelations that are realized in seeing his face veiled. 'With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that saddened the whole world' (1987: 104). The veil reveals inwardness and the fear and trembling accompanying such inwardness not just to Hooper behind the veil, but also to all who come face-to-face with it, as it were. As he is entombed in that 'saddest of all prisons, his own heart' (1987: 105) so, he reveals that same prison in others who would prefer to avoid it.
I want in particular here to illustrate the educational and formative rela- tionship between death and the veil in Hawthorne's story for it illustrates vividly the life and death struggle and the master and slave relation in the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 18 Education in Hegel
Phenomenology of Spirit. This will be examined in more detail in a moment, but for now, note how the veil comes to symbolize death by reminding the parishioners of their existential form, and of its fragility to investigation, and how, accompanying this fragility, is the darkness of what is not revealed about themselves. As the bourgeois flees from the life and death struggle to the illusory stability of identity and independence, so, the veil uncovers the instability of this illusion and reveals the presence of death in life to the masters.
There is a further important Hegelian aspect that can be uncovered here. The parishioners were content with the face-to-face, but not because it ensured openness or that, to introduce a Levinasian theme here, it spoke of the inscrutability of God in the face of the stranger. In fact, the situation is the reverse. The face-to-face offered the mutuality only of a deception shared by the participants. The face-to-face hides more than it reveals. Only when the face-to-face was interrupted, when the veil itself refused the mutu- ality of its face with the face of the other, did the parishioners' philosophical education truly begin. Refused the mirror of mastery the parishioners were thrown back upon the oldest and most terrifying maxim of the Western philosophical tradition: Know Thyself.
Rousseau and civil society
This education, then, has its origins long before its modern form and content. Nevertheless, it is this modern form and content that we are con- cerned with here. The intrigue of the bourgeois is wonderfully exposed by Rousseau both in the Discourses and in Emile, and this is all the more impor- tant in the way Rousseau ties this intrigue to social relations and to private property in particular. We will spend a moment exploring Rousseau's cri- tique of the mask of the bourgeois, before turning our attention to Hegel.
In the 'Discourse on the Origin of Inequality', Rousseau links the origin of the person in society to the establishing of property relations. 'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society' (1973: 84).
Private property for Rousseau was merely a false or inauthentic expres- sion of the instinct for self-preservation which characterized 'natural man'. In the 'Second Discourse', he argues that it was this desire for self- preservation that led natural man to the understanding that co-operation with others aided self-preservation. The selfishness of natural man was mutual, and therefore brought about self-motivated co-operative forms of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 19
living. Such a union was a natural union, for it was based solely upon the desire for the self-preservation of each individual. For Rousseau, such a union was not yet a social union, and natural man who co-operated with other such men was not yet a person.
The natural union becomes a social union through the influence of the common life which natural man begins to lead. What was formed in order to best preserve the independence of natural man now turns against its original purpose and creates all of the social customs to which the individ- ual loses his independence. These include speech, feelings of love, the family, leisure time and most importantly, public esteem. 'Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem' (1973: 90). In the leisure time brought about through the efficiency of co-operation, natural man came to judge himself in comparison with others around him. As a result, natural self-preservation was turned into social self-interest. Independence ceased to be natural. Now man was preserved not only through self-preservation of the body, but also his identity was preserved through and by the good opin- ion held of him by others. In these social relations of dependency, for Rousseau, lay the origin of property and inequality.
So long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest, and happy lives. . . . But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provision for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable. . . . (1973: 92)
In this social situation, it was no longer the case that man worked for himself and in the interests of pure self-preservation. Now, through prop- erty, it became possible for some not to have to work at all, while others had absolutely no choice but to work for those who had 'provision for two' (1973: 92). Rousseau notes that 'in this state of affairs, equality might have been sustained, had the talents of individuals been equal' (1973: 94). How- ever, with the disappearance of the independence of natural man, and his dependence upon others, there was now nothing to prevent the natural inequality between men unfolding, and becoming a social inequality. Strength, skill and ingenuity made equal work into unequal reward, one man gaining 'a great deal by his work, while the other could hardly support himself' (1973: 94-95).
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This social inequality, made possible by the division of labour and private property, gave rise to a whole new way of life which Rousseau knows as 'civil society'. It became in the interests of men to secure co-operation with others in order to gain advantage over them, to make someone work not for the benefit of himself, but for another. To this end civil man invented new strategies to ensure his own success at the expense of others.
Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jeal- ousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on a mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of oth- ers. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality. (1973: 96)
Property therefore gave rise to a society where each was at war with the other, a war masked by the pretence of 'civility'. So often seen as the natural state of man, for Rousseau this war of all against all was a corruption of nat- ural man, a corruption inevitably brought about when one man co-operated with another for reasons other than his own self-preservation. To be able to have more than was necessary for self-preservation, and to see the advan- tages over others of doing so, were the beginnings of the evils of civil society. The coup de gra^ce was achieved when the right to inequality was enshrined in the universal right of private property. Rousseau argues that the rich real- ized quickly that the force by which they had appropriated their riches was a force that others could use against them. To secure themselves from such usurpation, the rich 'conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man' (1973: 98). Masking the benefit which such a plan gave the rich, they argued to all those who had less and were a threat,
let us join . . . to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambi- tious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to conform; rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations. (1973: 98)
The ruse was successful, for the weak were also busy trying to gain rewards for themselves, and saw in political institutions at least some advantage to
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their attempts. What they did not see was how the law served to ensure that social inequality was preserved, and mitigated against their own attempts for riches. 'All ran headlong to their chains' (1973: 99), unable to see through the now transparent and thus hidden mask of political equality how law enshrined social inequality. Rousseau concludes on the origin of civil society that it
bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery, and wretchedness. (1973: 99)
In the social relation of private property the natural need that each has of the other is distorted into the need of one to exploit the other. The strength of the independent natural man is overcome in civil society by the weakness of dependent man who seeks to exploit that need. The honesty of self-preservation is replaced by the deceit of self-interest. Natural man is replaced by social man, or by the property-owning person, and all the inequalities which are maintained in his name.
This person is related to other persons by way of exploitation. Because each person is potentially a way of another gaining self-advantage, personal relations are characterized by falsity and by deceit. It is here that the theme introduced by the veil in Hawthorne's story finds expression in Rousseau. However, while in Hawthorne the veil is visible and therefore reveals a secret behind it, in Rousseau the veil of social equality is transparent and thus reveals neither itself nor what it achieves. Now, in civil society it became in the interests of men 'to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things' (Rousseau, 1973: 95). In social rela- tions the person becomes a mere illusion of 'sociability', for public life is a pretence, and is wholly artificial. Behind the civility lies the selfishness and greed of the person who works solely for his own self-interest. But unless the mask is revealed, then, like the law, it hides the real inequality behind the merely formal assurances of equality. Rousseau writes that before civil soci- ety, 'men found their security in the ease with which they could see through one another' (1973: 6). In civil society, enjoying social relations based upon private property, that artless and candid life has vanished, and every person is now merely a false show and an appearance.
We no longer dare seem what we really are, but lie under a perpetual restraint . . . we never know with whom we have to deal. . . . What a train
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of vices must attend this uncertainty! Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness. (1973: 6-7)
The falsity of the person is what Rousseau calls amour-propre, a self-interest which is fed through the degree to which another can be exploited, be it in terms of material riches or personal aggrandizement. The ingenuous- ness of natural man Rousseau calls amour-de-soi, 'a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, creates humanity and virtue' (1973: 73). The formal equality of civil society masks the fact that it, in turn, masks how natural inequalities have been institutionalized. The formal relationship of one person to another invisibly masks the fact that each is out to get from the other as much advantage as it can. In the market-place advantage is sought by exploiting the needs of others, yet giving the appear- ance of fairness. In social relations advantage is secured by constructing an appearance of civility and compassion which will gain social favour. In both relations, the person is forced to behave in a deceitful and hypocritical way. Rousseau sees amour-propre as the embodiment of the fall of natural man from self-preservation to social self-interest. The cause of the fall is not man's nature, but the nature of society. It is the social relation which has turned man from an honest and open human being to a cunning and arti- ficial person.
Two hundred and fifty years later the manner of this amour-propre may have changed, and few now defend the view that society is overly polite and respectful. But if Rousseau is right, then the respect that has been lost and to which some may yearn for a return, was not respect at all, only a sham, a show without integrity or substance, in reality, a transparent and therefore invisible veil masking by its transparency deceit and intrigue. Rousseau wrote Emile to illustrate what an education in amour-de-soi would be, that is, an education that prevented social custom from influencing his pupil, so that Emile's needs would always be genuine and never based on the false needs created in the veiled society. This means an education for Emile that, while it takes place in society, remains separate and detached from it until such time as Emile can participate in social relations as his own man with self-determined needs. Emile, therefore, is an education against the devel- opment of an invisible veil, and for a genuine and naturally developed education whose goal is to know thyself.
However, even here, education against the veil is itself veiled, for Rousseau as tutor must hide from his
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pupil not only the way he engineers situations for Emile, but also that he is tutoring him at all. Natural education in Rousseau is also aporetic. It is a veiled education against the veil.
If politeness and ceremony are no longer the form of the bourgeois veil, nevertheless the fact of the veil persists in civil society. Here the sphere of the equality of the rights of all persons masks its more fundamental charac- ter as the sphere of selfish interests, greed, economic power and business interests that transcend even the boundaries of the nation-state. The idea of globalization speaks here of a global civil society where self-interest on the world stage has developed faster even than the veil of the equality of all persons. However, as we will see a little later, it is the pedagogy of the master still, not only to hide his mastery behind the transparent veil so that he can wilfully deceive others, but also to veil from his own view the effects of his veiled mastery.
Life and death
We noted above in Hawthorne's short story how the veil was seen by those who faced it as being akin to death itself, indeed, as if the Minister and death walked hand in hand. Why should this be so? Why is hiding the face able to evoke the darkest thoughts of death? An answer to this question comes from the way Hegel sets out the relation of life and death in the Phe- nomenology, and in particular in the way life eschews death as other. Education in Hegel returns death to life by retrieving and revealing the veil that is transparent and unseen in modern social relations. This education reveals and wears the mask that is worn but hidden by the reflective self. It does not seek to remove the mask altogether for truth in Hegel is in illusion, not its being overcome.
The structure of the life and death struggle is that of education carried in recollection. 2 Death appears to be unknowable in itself for, as many have pointed out, if death is, then I am not, and if death is not, then I am. Seem- ingly their paths cannot cross in such a way for both to be present in each other. Yet this view is based upon the presupposition - at its peak in mediae- val philosophy - that God is unchangeable and absolutely other in relation to a thought which can only know the true mediated in thought, that is, as changeable. The same case is made for death. Death in itself is unknowable to thinking because thinking can only think death from the point of view of life, that is, as error. But phenomenology in Hegel thinks this error as its own truth, or knows the totality of the relation to error to be thinking's own truth. Put like this, life is the actuality of death for life is the being-known of
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death. It is how death is known at all. Life in this sense is the actuality of death, it is the 'what is' of death. To imagine death as not-life cannot be achieved without life itself. Death, then, is dependent upon life for its very being, for its existence at all. In life, we carry the truth of death with us at all times. We will examine life's dependence upon death in a moment.
Hegel makes this same case in the way he presents the life and death struggle. He describes it in the only way open to us to know death, that is, from the perspective of life. It is important to recognize this in reading the life and death struggle, for this is to concede that there is no other place to begin to know death than in life. The struggle, precisely, is our recollection of what is not, in what is. The struggle is the recollection of itself from where 'itself' is already the victor. When life knows death it is from the per- spective that death is other than life. It excludes the perspective of the vanquished, that is, of death. It is, therefore, also a recollection of the origin of the veil in which the role of the veil in this recollection of itself is hidden. Life presents its victory over death in the form of two beings who, in facing each other, experience the possibility of their own death. When read as a chronological sequence of events, that is, when read only forwards, this meeting is viewed as a struggle for recognition. But this is the perspective of the veiled veil, that is, of life hiding what it owes to its forma- tive relation to death, and hiding this hiding. As such, this is a version of natural law theory that posits origin from its own point of view. But, when also read backwards, the logic of recollection can expose both the complic- ity of the perspective of the victor in its account of its origin and its complicity in hiding this complicity in the account. Recollection, as the loss of that which it recollects, is perfectly suited to recovering the loss of death to life. In addition, it is the method of knowing origin because what is known as origin is recollection of what is lost. This is the philosophy of origin in Hegel.
We must note here how the logic of recollection is formative and educa- tional. It is what looks back at itself to a time when it did not know itself but must have had the potential to know itself since now it knows this potential- ity as actual. This means that recollection learns of itself in the loss of itself. This is the speculative import of its negative structure, and is why and how it can know death, for it is the actuality of death, and has death as a forma- tive part of its own truth. In recollecting the part that death plays in the victory of life recollection views the veil that hides it, and that hides itself. Recollection does not overcome the veil for it is of the veil. It does, however, open up a different account of the relation of life and death to that offered by life, and one that will know how to retrieve life's now missing combatant.
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Thus, in this new account, life faces life, and experiences the negation of its immediate totality. It experiences this as the possibility that because of the 'other' (it is at this moment learning the otherness of what will become 'other') the life of this one life is neither exclusive, nor impregnable, nor certain. The desire for life, therefore, includes at this moment the death of that which has fragmented its certainty. But they are the same moment. The experience of death is also the desire for its death, for the death of death, and that means the death of life's other. Therefore, loss, death and other are all part of this one experience for life. But, of course, the other that faces life here is also life. Life is related to itself in this experience, but life does not survive this encounter as a self-relation, but as self without rela- tion. Loss, death and other become other to this life that is now an I. It is the eschewal of death here that determines the certainty of this life as a self- conscious person. The vulnerability to and the otherness of death is here removed completely from the certainty of the I and transferred to that which has death as its own truth. The other is defined here as that which is other than life and which has death as its own truth. Life's eschewal of death is the source of all otherness, and is the illusory source also of its own political identity and certainty.
Master and slave
One common reading of Hegel at this point sees the result of the experi- ence of death by life as a mutual recognition where each life recognizes his mutuality in the other life that faces him, and comprehends that this mutu- ality be expressed in some form of social contract, where each is recognized as the same as the other. But this is not the significance of the life and death struggle. Such a view of mutual recognition imposes a middle between the combatants that is wholly abstracted from the way each experiences the significance of their struggle for survival. Mutuality is a fetish of the middle of the life and death struggle, and has nothing to do with the actual shapes that this fear-of-death-become-life-and-its-other now takes. Rather, the two living beings learn about themselves from within the components of the life and death struggle. Their vulnerability now takes political form, and the life and death struggle is continued now by different means.
The life that is certain of itself is the political master. The life that must carry the death that the master has eschewed for himself is the slave. These are the shapes that life, death and other take in the first face-to-face. The only proof of this face-to-face ever happening comes in its recollection. Indeed, recollection is the actuality of this face-to-face. It knows the encounter as loss,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 26 Education in Hegel
as impossibility, as the 'nature' of the political, and as its potential freedom become actual. Even the risking of the lives of the combatants in the life and death struggle is known only retrospectively by that which survives the encounter. There is no mutual recognition in the recollection of the life and death struggle. There is only life and death, master and slave. What lies ahead for recollection here is to wear the veil that will reveal life and death as death in life and life in death. In turn, this will mean learning how mod- ern political freedom is grounded in the self that has death as other, and that therein masks its true grounding in loss, in the trauma and fragility of the bourgeois self. It is to the modern form that politics takes here that we will turn in a moment.
We saw above how death was carried in and by life which nevertheless masks what it bears. This creates the illusion that life is its own ground, sovereign in its ubiquity and always something other than nothing. Now we will see how the same illusion works in the master/slave relation that consti- tutes modern free subjectivity. The master/slave relation is the structure of life becoming its own object in thought. Having learned from the loss of its immediate certainty that it can absolutely vanish, life becomes known to itself in the recollection of the struggle that it has emerged from. This knowing is grounded in the illusion that this life is not dependent upon the life and death struggle, but is independent and sovereign in its own right. This illusion is the master. However, death is present in the determination of the master, but it is present only as that which is eschewed by the master as other than his truth. This is a crucial moment in the formation of life in and as the reflective subject who knows himself. There is a part of his deter- mination that is hidden from him behind the presupposition that he, the master, has about his own sovereignty as a self. Where, then, does death have its actuality in its relationship to life. Death is that which is prejudged as antithetical to the existing I. Death, eschewed as a player in the identity of the master, is posited as 'other' to this identity. For the master, death, or the other, is the slave. The slave has no sovereignty: indeed he has no life that can be said to be his own. He is a living death, the other to the auton- omy of the master, or of life. There are themes here, then, in the master/slave relation, that relate to the veil, to life, to death, to loss and to the other that can now be constructed in such a way as to produce a philosophy of the other. Furthermore, this philosophy of the other will show how the know- ing of self and other is essentially education.
The politics of eschewing death as other, and as actual in the nothingness of the slave, can be brought out more clearly if its opposition is presented less abstractly and more personally. The reflective living subject that has its
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 27
actuality in and for itself is the bourgeois subject. He is his own object, and thus an end in himself. This autonomy provides for his legal identity granted to himself in his own image. Thus, the law of private property is the form of universality that enshrines this particular misrecognition of the life and death struggle. It defines sovereignty as the independence of a life and grants sovereignty to each independent form that life takes, and it defines non-sovereignty as that which lacks this self-defining independence, grant- ing the rights of non-sovereignty to that which carries the nothingness of death with it, that is, both to inanimate objects and to those men judged as objects, that is, slaves. Presented in this way the eschewing of death as other than the living subject appears as anything but a neutral judgement. It is a judgement of the most intense political self-interest and is the actuality of the political power of the master.
The master practises a deceit here. He knows he is his own object for this self-consciousness grounds his autonomy and freedom. As such, he keeps for himself what is positive here, and gets rid of the negative implications of his objectivity. Positively, as object in itself, he is his own master. But nega- tively, as object for himself, he is the loss of mastery to mediation, to its being known. This one experience has ambivalence at its core. Rather than live with ambivalence the master is able to export the negativity of self- consciousness to something judged as other than his self-consciousness. He keeps his power by exporting the loss of power. It is the case, here, that such a master, in holding on to only the aspects of self-consciousness that are favourable to him, has in fact only built his house on sand. What he exports will remind him, in anxiety and fear, that he is always vulnerable to nega- tion, for even though he thinks he is rid of it, it is still part of the totality of his identity. He exports death to others, but the exporting is always, also, his own repeated experience of vulnerability, that is, of death.
Death, then, as other to life, is always present in the affirmations that life makes about itself. How death is recognized in life determines the form of property law and of social relations.
The veil, then, covers Hooper's face. But, of course, it reveals far more than ever it conceals. It is taken as a sign that Hooper is hiding a secret sin, yet it reveals to those who see it in this way that they are doing the same; such secrets, as they say, that 'we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would feign conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them' (1987: 99). The veil hides Hooper's face from being seen but is interpreted as a turn inwards to reveal his own darkest corners to himself. I wonder, says one lady, that he is not afraid to be so alone with himself. This underestimates just how painful the revelations of the veil are to Hooper. He says to his wife, 'you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil' (1987: 103), and he avoids mirrors to avoid the revelations that are realized in seeing his face veiled. 'With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that saddened the whole world' (1987: 104). The veil reveals inwardness and the fear and trembling accompanying such inwardness not just to Hooper behind the veil, but also to all who come face-to-face with it, as it were. As he is entombed in that 'saddest of all prisons, his own heart' (1987: 105) so, he reveals that same prison in others who would prefer to avoid it.
I want in particular here to illustrate the educational and formative rela- tionship between death and the veil in Hawthorne's story for it illustrates vividly the life and death struggle and the master and slave relation in the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 18 Education in Hegel
Phenomenology of Spirit. This will be examined in more detail in a moment, but for now, note how the veil comes to symbolize death by reminding the parishioners of their existential form, and of its fragility to investigation, and how, accompanying this fragility, is the darkness of what is not revealed about themselves. As the bourgeois flees from the life and death struggle to the illusory stability of identity and independence, so, the veil uncovers the instability of this illusion and reveals the presence of death in life to the masters.
There is a further important Hegelian aspect that can be uncovered here. The parishioners were content with the face-to-face, but not because it ensured openness or that, to introduce a Levinasian theme here, it spoke of the inscrutability of God in the face of the stranger. In fact, the situation is the reverse. The face-to-face offered the mutuality only of a deception shared by the participants. The face-to-face hides more than it reveals. Only when the face-to-face was interrupted, when the veil itself refused the mutu- ality of its face with the face of the other, did the parishioners' philosophical education truly begin. Refused the mirror of mastery the parishioners were thrown back upon the oldest and most terrifying maxim of the Western philosophical tradition: Know Thyself.
Rousseau and civil society
This education, then, has its origins long before its modern form and content. Nevertheless, it is this modern form and content that we are con- cerned with here. The intrigue of the bourgeois is wonderfully exposed by Rousseau both in the Discourses and in Emile, and this is all the more impor- tant in the way Rousseau ties this intrigue to social relations and to private property in particular. We will spend a moment exploring Rousseau's cri- tique of the mask of the bourgeois, before turning our attention to Hegel.
In the 'Discourse on the Origin of Inequality', Rousseau links the origin of the person in society to the establishing of property relations. 'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society' (1973: 84).
Private property for Rousseau was merely a false or inauthentic expres- sion of the instinct for self-preservation which characterized 'natural man'. In the 'Second Discourse', he argues that it was this desire for self- preservation that led natural man to the understanding that co-operation with others aided self-preservation. The selfishness of natural man was mutual, and therefore brought about self-motivated co-operative forms of
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living. Such a union was a natural union, for it was based solely upon the desire for the self-preservation of each individual. For Rousseau, such a union was not yet a social union, and natural man who co-operated with other such men was not yet a person.
The natural union becomes a social union through the influence of the common life which natural man begins to lead. What was formed in order to best preserve the independence of natural man now turns against its original purpose and creates all of the social customs to which the individ- ual loses his independence. These include speech, feelings of love, the family, leisure time and most importantly, public esteem. 'Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem' (1973: 90). In the leisure time brought about through the efficiency of co-operation, natural man came to judge himself in comparison with others around him. As a result, natural self-preservation was turned into social self-interest. Independence ceased to be natural. Now man was preserved not only through self-preservation of the body, but also his identity was preserved through and by the good opin- ion held of him by others. In these social relations of dependency, for Rousseau, lay the origin of property and inequality.
So long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest, and happy lives. . . . But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provision for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable. . . . (1973: 92)
In this social situation, it was no longer the case that man worked for himself and in the interests of pure self-preservation. Now, through prop- erty, it became possible for some not to have to work at all, while others had absolutely no choice but to work for those who had 'provision for two' (1973: 92). Rousseau notes that 'in this state of affairs, equality might have been sustained, had the talents of individuals been equal' (1973: 94). How- ever, with the disappearance of the independence of natural man, and his dependence upon others, there was now nothing to prevent the natural inequality between men unfolding, and becoming a social inequality. Strength, skill and ingenuity made equal work into unequal reward, one man gaining 'a great deal by his work, while the other could hardly support himself' (1973: 94-95).
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This social inequality, made possible by the division of labour and private property, gave rise to a whole new way of life which Rousseau knows as 'civil society'. It became in the interests of men to secure co-operation with others in order to gain advantage over them, to make someone work not for the benefit of himself, but for another. To this end civil man invented new strategies to ensure his own success at the expense of others.
Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jeal- ousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on a mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of oth- ers. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality. (1973: 96)
Property therefore gave rise to a society where each was at war with the other, a war masked by the pretence of 'civility'. So often seen as the natural state of man, for Rousseau this war of all against all was a corruption of nat- ural man, a corruption inevitably brought about when one man co-operated with another for reasons other than his own self-preservation. To be able to have more than was necessary for self-preservation, and to see the advan- tages over others of doing so, were the beginnings of the evils of civil society. The coup de gra^ce was achieved when the right to inequality was enshrined in the universal right of private property. Rousseau argues that the rich real- ized quickly that the force by which they had appropriated their riches was a force that others could use against them. To secure themselves from such usurpation, the rich 'conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man' (1973: 98). Masking the benefit which such a plan gave the rich, they argued to all those who had less and were a threat,
let us join . . . to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambi- tious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to conform; rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations. (1973: 98)
The ruse was successful, for the weak were also busy trying to gain rewards for themselves, and saw in political institutions at least some advantage to
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their attempts. What they did not see was how the law served to ensure that social inequality was preserved, and mitigated against their own attempts for riches. 'All ran headlong to their chains' (1973: 99), unable to see through the now transparent and thus hidden mask of political equality how law enshrined social inequality. Rousseau concludes on the origin of civil society that it
bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery, and wretchedness. (1973: 99)
In the social relation of private property the natural need that each has of the other is distorted into the need of one to exploit the other. The strength of the independent natural man is overcome in civil society by the weakness of dependent man who seeks to exploit that need. The honesty of self-preservation is replaced by the deceit of self-interest. Natural man is replaced by social man, or by the property-owning person, and all the inequalities which are maintained in his name.
This person is related to other persons by way of exploitation. Because each person is potentially a way of another gaining self-advantage, personal relations are characterized by falsity and by deceit. It is here that the theme introduced by the veil in Hawthorne's story finds expression in Rousseau. However, while in Hawthorne the veil is visible and therefore reveals a secret behind it, in Rousseau the veil of social equality is transparent and thus reveals neither itself nor what it achieves. Now, in civil society it became in the interests of men 'to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things' (Rousseau, 1973: 95). In social rela- tions the person becomes a mere illusion of 'sociability', for public life is a pretence, and is wholly artificial. Behind the civility lies the selfishness and greed of the person who works solely for his own self-interest. But unless the mask is revealed, then, like the law, it hides the real inequality behind the merely formal assurances of equality. Rousseau writes that before civil soci- ety, 'men found their security in the ease with which they could see through one another' (1973: 6). In civil society, enjoying social relations based upon private property, that artless and candid life has vanished, and every person is now merely a false show and an appearance.
We no longer dare seem what we really are, but lie under a perpetual restraint . . . we never know with whom we have to deal. . . . What a train
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of vices must attend this uncertainty! Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness. (1973: 6-7)
The falsity of the person is what Rousseau calls amour-propre, a self-interest which is fed through the degree to which another can be exploited, be it in terms of material riches or personal aggrandizement. The ingenuous- ness of natural man Rousseau calls amour-de-soi, 'a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, creates humanity and virtue' (1973: 73). The formal equality of civil society masks the fact that it, in turn, masks how natural inequalities have been institutionalized. The formal relationship of one person to another invisibly masks the fact that each is out to get from the other as much advantage as it can. In the market-place advantage is sought by exploiting the needs of others, yet giving the appear- ance of fairness. In social relations advantage is secured by constructing an appearance of civility and compassion which will gain social favour. In both relations, the person is forced to behave in a deceitful and hypocritical way. Rousseau sees amour-propre as the embodiment of the fall of natural man from self-preservation to social self-interest. The cause of the fall is not man's nature, but the nature of society. It is the social relation which has turned man from an honest and open human being to a cunning and arti- ficial person.
Two hundred and fifty years later the manner of this amour-propre may have changed, and few now defend the view that society is overly polite and respectful. But if Rousseau is right, then the respect that has been lost and to which some may yearn for a return, was not respect at all, only a sham, a show without integrity or substance, in reality, a transparent and therefore invisible veil masking by its transparency deceit and intrigue. Rousseau wrote Emile to illustrate what an education in amour-de-soi would be, that is, an education that prevented social custom from influencing his pupil, so that Emile's needs would always be genuine and never based on the false needs created in the veiled society. This means an education for Emile that, while it takes place in society, remains separate and detached from it until such time as Emile can participate in social relations as his own man with self-determined needs. Emile, therefore, is an education against the devel- opment of an invisible veil, and for a genuine and naturally developed education whose goal is to know thyself.
However, even here, education against the veil is itself veiled, for Rousseau as tutor must hide from his
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pupil not only the way he engineers situations for Emile, but also that he is tutoring him at all. Natural education in Rousseau is also aporetic. It is a veiled education against the veil.
If politeness and ceremony are no longer the form of the bourgeois veil, nevertheless the fact of the veil persists in civil society. Here the sphere of the equality of the rights of all persons masks its more fundamental charac- ter as the sphere of selfish interests, greed, economic power and business interests that transcend even the boundaries of the nation-state. The idea of globalization speaks here of a global civil society where self-interest on the world stage has developed faster even than the veil of the equality of all persons. However, as we will see a little later, it is the pedagogy of the master still, not only to hide his mastery behind the transparent veil so that he can wilfully deceive others, but also to veil from his own view the effects of his veiled mastery.
Life and death
We noted above in Hawthorne's short story how the veil was seen by those who faced it as being akin to death itself, indeed, as if the Minister and death walked hand in hand. Why should this be so? Why is hiding the face able to evoke the darkest thoughts of death? An answer to this question comes from the way Hegel sets out the relation of life and death in the Phe- nomenology, and in particular in the way life eschews death as other. Education in Hegel returns death to life by retrieving and revealing the veil that is transparent and unseen in modern social relations. This education reveals and wears the mask that is worn but hidden by the reflective self. It does not seek to remove the mask altogether for truth in Hegel is in illusion, not its being overcome.
The structure of the life and death struggle is that of education carried in recollection. 2 Death appears to be unknowable in itself for, as many have pointed out, if death is, then I am not, and if death is not, then I am. Seem- ingly their paths cannot cross in such a way for both to be present in each other. Yet this view is based upon the presupposition - at its peak in mediae- val philosophy - that God is unchangeable and absolutely other in relation to a thought which can only know the true mediated in thought, that is, as changeable. The same case is made for death. Death in itself is unknowable to thinking because thinking can only think death from the point of view of life, that is, as error. But phenomenology in Hegel thinks this error as its own truth, or knows the totality of the relation to error to be thinking's own truth. Put like this, life is the actuality of death for life is the being-known of
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death. It is how death is known at all. Life in this sense is the actuality of death, it is the 'what is' of death. To imagine death as not-life cannot be achieved without life itself. Death, then, is dependent upon life for its very being, for its existence at all. In life, we carry the truth of death with us at all times. We will examine life's dependence upon death in a moment.
Hegel makes this same case in the way he presents the life and death struggle. He describes it in the only way open to us to know death, that is, from the perspective of life. It is important to recognize this in reading the life and death struggle, for this is to concede that there is no other place to begin to know death than in life. The struggle, precisely, is our recollection of what is not, in what is. The struggle is the recollection of itself from where 'itself' is already the victor. When life knows death it is from the per- spective that death is other than life. It excludes the perspective of the vanquished, that is, of death. It is, therefore, also a recollection of the origin of the veil in which the role of the veil in this recollection of itself is hidden. Life presents its victory over death in the form of two beings who, in facing each other, experience the possibility of their own death. When read as a chronological sequence of events, that is, when read only forwards, this meeting is viewed as a struggle for recognition. But this is the perspective of the veiled veil, that is, of life hiding what it owes to its forma- tive relation to death, and hiding this hiding. As such, this is a version of natural law theory that posits origin from its own point of view. But, when also read backwards, the logic of recollection can expose both the complic- ity of the perspective of the victor in its account of its origin and its complicity in hiding this complicity in the account. Recollection, as the loss of that which it recollects, is perfectly suited to recovering the loss of death to life. In addition, it is the method of knowing origin because what is known as origin is recollection of what is lost. This is the philosophy of origin in Hegel.
We must note here how the logic of recollection is formative and educa- tional. It is what looks back at itself to a time when it did not know itself but must have had the potential to know itself since now it knows this potential- ity as actual. This means that recollection learns of itself in the loss of itself. This is the speculative import of its negative structure, and is why and how it can know death, for it is the actuality of death, and has death as a forma- tive part of its own truth. In recollecting the part that death plays in the victory of life recollection views the veil that hides it, and that hides itself. Recollection does not overcome the veil for it is of the veil. It does, however, open up a different account of the relation of life and death to that offered by life, and one that will know how to retrieve life's now missing combatant.
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Thus, in this new account, life faces life, and experiences the negation of its immediate totality. It experiences this as the possibility that because of the 'other' (it is at this moment learning the otherness of what will become 'other') the life of this one life is neither exclusive, nor impregnable, nor certain. The desire for life, therefore, includes at this moment the death of that which has fragmented its certainty. But they are the same moment. The experience of death is also the desire for its death, for the death of death, and that means the death of life's other. Therefore, loss, death and other are all part of this one experience for life. But, of course, the other that faces life here is also life. Life is related to itself in this experience, but life does not survive this encounter as a self-relation, but as self without rela- tion. Loss, death and other become other to this life that is now an I. It is the eschewal of death here that determines the certainty of this life as a self- conscious person. The vulnerability to and the otherness of death is here removed completely from the certainty of the I and transferred to that which has death as its own truth. The other is defined here as that which is other than life and which has death as its own truth. Life's eschewal of death is the source of all otherness, and is the illusory source also of its own political identity and certainty.
Master and slave
One common reading of Hegel at this point sees the result of the experi- ence of death by life as a mutual recognition where each life recognizes his mutuality in the other life that faces him, and comprehends that this mutu- ality be expressed in some form of social contract, where each is recognized as the same as the other. But this is not the significance of the life and death struggle. Such a view of mutual recognition imposes a middle between the combatants that is wholly abstracted from the way each experiences the significance of their struggle for survival. Mutuality is a fetish of the middle of the life and death struggle, and has nothing to do with the actual shapes that this fear-of-death-become-life-and-its-other now takes. Rather, the two living beings learn about themselves from within the components of the life and death struggle. Their vulnerability now takes political form, and the life and death struggle is continued now by different means.
The life that is certain of itself is the political master. The life that must carry the death that the master has eschewed for himself is the slave. These are the shapes that life, death and other take in the first face-to-face. The only proof of this face-to-face ever happening comes in its recollection. Indeed, recollection is the actuality of this face-to-face. It knows the encounter as loss,
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as impossibility, as the 'nature' of the political, and as its potential freedom become actual. Even the risking of the lives of the combatants in the life and death struggle is known only retrospectively by that which survives the encounter. There is no mutual recognition in the recollection of the life and death struggle. There is only life and death, master and slave. What lies ahead for recollection here is to wear the veil that will reveal life and death as death in life and life in death. In turn, this will mean learning how mod- ern political freedom is grounded in the self that has death as other, and that therein masks its true grounding in loss, in the trauma and fragility of the bourgeois self. It is to the modern form that politics takes here that we will turn in a moment.
We saw above how death was carried in and by life which nevertheless masks what it bears. This creates the illusion that life is its own ground, sovereign in its ubiquity and always something other than nothing. Now we will see how the same illusion works in the master/slave relation that consti- tutes modern free subjectivity. The master/slave relation is the structure of life becoming its own object in thought. Having learned from the loss of its immediate certainty that it can absolutely vanish, life becomes known to itself in the recollection of the struggle that it has emerged from. This knowing is grounded in the illusion that this life is not dependent upon the life and death struggle, but is independent and sovereign in its own right. This illusion is the master. However, death is present in the determination of the master, but it is present only as that which is eschewed by the master as other than his truth. This is a crucial moment in the formation of life in and as the reflective subject who knows himself. There is a part of his deter- mination that is hidden from him behind the presupposition that he, the master, has about his own sovereignty as a self. Where, then, does death have its actuality in its relationship to life. Death is that which is prejudged as antithetical to the existing I. Death, eschewed as a player in the identity of the master, is posited as 'other' to this identity. For the master, death, or the other, is the slave. The slave has no sovereignty: indeed he has no life that can be said to be his own. He is a living death, the other to the auton- omy of the master, or of life. There are themes here, then, in the master/slave relation, that relate to the veil, to life, to death, to loss and to the other that can now be constructed in such a way as to produce a philosophy of the other. Furthermore, this philosophy of the other will show how the know- ing of self and other is essentially education.
The politics of eschewing death as other, and as actual in the nothingness of the slave, can be brought out more clearly if its opposition is presented less abstractly and more personally. The reflective living subject that has its
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actuality in and for itself is the bourgeois subject. He is his own object, and thus an end in himself. This autonomy provides for his legal identity granted to himself in his own image. Thus, the law of private property is the form of universality that enshrines this particular misrecognition of the life and death struggle. It defines sovereignty as the independence of a life and grants sovereignty to each independent form that life takes, and it defines non-sovereignty as that which lacks this self-defining independence, grant- ing the rights of non-sovereignty to that which carries the nothingness of death with it, that is, both to inanimate objects and to those men judged as objects, that is, slaves. Presented in this way the eschewing of death as other than the living subject appears as anything but a neutral judgement. It is a judgement of the most intense political self-interest and is the actuality of the political power of the master.
The master practises a deceit here. He knows he is his own object for this self-consciousness grounds his autonomy and freedom. As such, he keeps for himself what is positive here, and gets rid of the negative implications of his objectivity. Positively, as object in itself, he is his own master. But nega- tively, as object for himself, he is the loss of mastery to mediation, to its being known. This one experience has ambivalence at its core. Rather than live with ambivalence the master is able to export the negativity of self- consciousness to something judged as other than his self-consciousness. He keeps his power by exporting the loss of power. It is the case, here, that such a master, in holding on to only the aspects of self-consciousness that are favourable to him, has in fact only built his house on sand. What he exports will remind him, in anxiety and fear, that he is always vulnerable to nega- tion, for even though he thinks he is rid of it, it is still part of the totality of his identity. He exports death to others, but the exporting is always, also, his own repeated experience of vulnerability, that is, of death.
Death, then, as other to life, is always present in the affirmations that life makes about itself. How death is recognized in life determines the form of property law and of social relations.
