Chapter 5
Education in Hegel in Levinas
Introduction
Howard Caygill has recently said of Levinas that his 'anti-Hegelian opera- tion is less the overcoming of Hegelian dialectic than its deflation' (Caygill, 2002: 53).
Education in Hegel in Levinas
Introduction
Howard Caygill has recently said of Levinas that his 'anti-Hegelian opera- tion is less the overcoming of Hegelian dialectic than its deflation' (Caygill, 2002: 53).
Education in Hegel
This, again, is education in Hegel.
This is not, then, a political experience imbued with a pledge from beyond. This is an experience of freedom, within freedom, by freedom. It is an experience of the truth of complicity in freedom and of freedom in complicity. This is a doubling that does not have the luxury of excess, and where even what remains is consumed by mastery. This appears hopeless and resigned until and unless they are experienced as having their truth within education. Education is never resigned or hopeless because re-form- ing is the truth of what education is, and in this case it re-forms how we understand both hopelessness and resignation. This re-forming of totality within totality is the hard philosophical lesson of modern social and politi- cal contingency, and it is where and how the absolute appears in these modern social relations. Hegelian Aufhebung does not avoid the experience of vulnerability having its own truth in the master as his spiritual education. But there is no alteration in an iteration that merely affirms itself as unde- cideable. The master is decided already. This is the political implication of modern philosophy. It is from here that philosophy must have already begun. Derrida does not seek to avoid this political totality. Indeed, it is his aim to avoid avoiding it. He says that to do philosophy is 'to project the greatest mastery over all the possible discourses of mastery and to renounce it. The two things go together . . . [it is] a modesty haunted by the devil' (1995: 140). He is right here. But modest mastery in diffe? rance is protected against because the master can immodestly control the definition of mas- tery by which he is to be judged. The weakness and vulnerability of the master, as the master/slave relation makes clear, is in his mastery, and the greater this recognition, the greater, too, the modesty.
I have tried to show in this chapter how Derrida's protection of philoso- phy from the absolute has distorted his understanding of the Aufhebung and of education in Hegel. Derrida's notion of transformative aporetic educa- tion precludes from itself the truth in education that Derrida seeks for dif- fe? rance, for deconstruction, for iteration and for autoimmunity. Diffe? rance, the effect of iteration, has always disavowed itself of any triadic structure by refusing its construction within and by negation. To refuse negation is to avoid 'the self who is other and the other who is not me'. It results, as we have seen, in Derrida exporting otherness beyond spirit in order to protect spirit from its dogmatic assimilation of otherness. It is this avoidance of the
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negative and self-otherness that has the result of transformation in Derrida being form without content, a dialectic of nihilism. 20 The result has been that commentators search for ways in which diffe? rance makes a difference. In the Derrida I have presented above, diffe? rance makes all the difference; it changes everything, until it is asked to state what this difference consists in, and then it has nothing to say. It has no voice which can speak of how we should understand the truth of this change, or, therefore, of this philosophi- cal education. Derrida, ironically like many Hegelians, wants the transforma- tive power of aporetic critique without the burden of the absolute. But transformative philosophical education without absolute spirit is only the illusion of education. Nothing changes unless we are being re-educated about what change in and by education actually means. It is to remain uned- ucated about all transformation because it is to remain uneducated about education by education. This re-education is the truth of education in Hegel, transformative of the thinker in being thought.
Absolute ambition
Finally, now, I return to Beardsworth's challenge that aporetic philosophy, Derridean or Hegelian, is too unambitious in terms of its scope for transfor- mation. Perhaps there are two notions of ambition at work here. Derrida's ambition in the way I have presented him is concerned with keeping alive and open the truth to-come that lies suppressed in and by the dominance of difference-opposition. The educational strengths and weaknesses of this we have explored in this chapter. What, then, of the Hegelian Aufhebung? What is the scope of its ambition? It shares Derrida's concern to expose aporia in identity, and to find meaning in difference and otherness. But its view of its complicity within prevailing social relations is very different from Derrida and at the most fundamental level. Hegelian Aufhebung is the expe- rience of the risk that is run in trying to think truthfully. It speaks of the preparedness to live and work with the groundlessness of its own reason. This is philosophy as the vocation to be true to itself. If this means that it appears unambitious as a force for social transformation, then so much the worse for versions of transformation that are less than true to themselves. 21 Part of education in Hegel means learning to mediate ambition as also actual.
The Aufhebung does work for the middle, and does so by not presuppos- ing the truth of the work beyond the unavoidable social and political pre- suppositions that already ground it. Beardsworth is right to be concerned
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about the ways in which the diremption of the universal and the particular are being played out on a global scale between master and servant. I hope that the other chapters in this book have begun to illustrate the contribu- tion that education in Hegel can make to these debates. The centre is pre- cisely what needs to be thought. But we should be ever mindful of imposed middles that are less than comprehending of the conditions that pre- determine middles as broken middles. This is not a lack of ambition. If any- thing, it is painfully too ambitious, recognizing its own groundlessness yet still risking truth within such an actuality. It is wrong to mistake Hegel's 'grey in grey' for an end of formative philosophy. As I hope previous chapters have shown, recollection is not passive, nor is it nostalgic. It is our knowing of phi- losophy as formative and it is itself re-formative of this knowing. This is where the centre can be thought, and this too is not an unambitious project.
Notes
1 I use spirit and Geist interchangeably in this chapter.
2 I should add here that in this chapter I am not concerned with Derrida's critique
of the Hegelian Aufhebung, except as it pertains to the form and content of Glas. Indeed, I am trying to draw out from Derrida the presuppositions that ground his idea of transformative aporetic philosophy as he practises it in Glas, Of Spirit and Rogues. It could be said, however, that Derrida retrieves from the Aufhebung all that he takes to be transformative from all that is dogmatic, and that diffe? rance is there- fore his own version of the Aufhebung. While I think this is true, it would need a different chapter to make this case, one that did attend to Derrida's comments, beyond Glas, on Hegel.
3 This is taken from an as yet unpublished essay by Richard entitled 'Responding to a Post-Script: Philosophy and its Futures' (2007). It replies to a reply I had made to his slightly earlier essay 'A Note to a Political Understanding of Love in our Global Age' (2006) which published by the E-Journal Contretemps. The whole exchange was to be published by Contretemps but sadly the Journal ceased publish- ing before this was possible.
4 Derrida's italics.
5 Derrida's italics.
6 'To relieve' is how Derrida's term relever in Glas - itself Derrida's translation of Auf-
heben - is translated in the English version of Glas. As I noted above in footnote 2 I have not extended this chapter to include Derrida's comments on the Aufhebung except as they constitute Glas.
7 This turn to the event in Glas is unjustified within or without the totality of differ- ence-opposition. This Heideggerian move is an example of the presuppositions of the absolute that ground Derrida's critique of absolute knowing. This will become clearer in what follows.
8 From Hegel, (1988: 327).
9 Note here I am juxtaposing the end of Glas and the beginning.
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10 But not, as noted above, with the turn to the event.
11 This is expressed by Lo? with to Jaspers who, after hearing Heidegger's lecture on
Ho? lderlin, 2 April 1936, sees this as the reason for Heidegger linking poetry to
the swastika (Ott, 1994: 133).
12 The context of this omission in Introduction to Metaphysics is important here.
Heidegger is arguing that spirit has degenerated into mere cleverness, which itself becomes a tool, a value, and a political propaganda. Against this Heidegger commends 'a spiritual power which originally unites and engages, assigns, obliges' (Of Spirit: 65, Introduction to Metaphysics: 48; the translation of Derrida's translation is used here) and it is here that he chooses to illustrate this spiritual power by quoting from his own Rectoral Address but dropping the inverted commas around the first spirit. Thus we get 'spirit ['spirit' in the original] is neither empty sagacity, nor the gratuitous game of joking, nor the unlimited work of analysis of the understanding, nor even the reason of the world, but spirit [without inverted commas in the original] is the being-resolved [Entschlossenheit] to the essence of Being, of a resolution which accords with the tone of the origin and which is knowledge' (Derrida, 1987: 67). In addition, the chapter in Introduction to Meta- physics then proceeds to assign the originarity of this spiritual Dasein as within 'the absolute privilege of the German language' (1987: 68).
13 Simon Critchley, for example, argues that it does. By granting the priority of the originary pledge or the promise that is affirmed, then, in the question and in opposition, this opens 'the ultimately ethical orientation of Of Spirit' (Wood, 1993: 95). If Hegel's anti-erection seeds virility against pressure, then Derrida's 'inver- sion or reversal' (1993: 96) of the question in effect puts the lead in Hegel's pencil (as it were). This new priority for Critchley is the Levinasian Other, a dimension of alterity and transcendence. Here, for holocaust we can read 'ethics of deconstruction'. Further, for Critchley, the footnote signals Derrida's 'depar- ture' (1993: 95) from what he calls 'the repetitive order of commentary' (1993: 95) in Of Spirit. This departure needs to be understood as affirming the 'uncondi- tioned duty' (1993: 94) that underpins deconstruction, that is, its 'ethical and political responsibility' (1993: 94). At root here, for Critchley, Derrida practises in deconstruction an 'undecideability' (1993: 94), a 'suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in, as and through a practice of double reading' (1993: 94). See also Wood, 1993: 1.
14 It is interesting here to note that this could well be a description of recollection, of the grey in grey. It is important then to bear in mind that there is no loss here for Derrida, no negation, and therefore nothing to be recalled from loss. The return is diffe? rance, not recollection; it is remarkable, but not self-(re-)formative.
15 Derrida has always been mindful to remind his readers that he has never eschewed reason in his philosophy.
16 It is interesting to note the mutuality of fear and risk achieved here in the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD), but this mutuality still represents only a mutual export of fear. It is not the way that fear and vulnerability in the double negation of self and of self as other speaks its educational truth. MAD, because it is mutual, is not open to learning of fear as the self who is other and the other who is not this self. Learning is in the lack of mutuality; this is the real double neg- ative of education in Hegel, a learning that MAD closes off from itself. MAD is
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fear is stasis; this is its madness. But from Derrida's point of view it was perhaps
safer for the world than less explicit autoimmunity.
17 I have said more on the speculative and educative significance of this 'and' in an
earlier work, Philosophy's Higher Education, (2004) chapter 6.
18 I note here that Gillian Rose has stated that diffe? rance, comprehended specula-
tively, could have been the unity and difference of identity and difference (Rose,
1984: 139).
19 see above, Chapter 1.
20 See Gillian Rose's Dialectic of Nihilism (1984).
21 At times in writing this chapter I have been struck by the thought that it might
appear somewhat decadent to be arguing over whose version of vulnerable non- sovereignty is the right one. But, this too must be risked.
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Chapter 5
Education in Hegel in Levinas
Introduction
Howard Caygill has recently said of Levinas that his 'anti-Hegelian opera- tion is less the overcoming of Hegelian dialectic than its deflation' (Caygill, 2002: 53). In this chapter I want to reflate the Hegelian in Levinas or, more accurately, to show how education in Hegel in Levinas in fact reflates itself through the eternal return of presuppositions as oppositions. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section looks at how Levinas deflates the Hegelian dialectic in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, with particular attention paid to three forms of education found there, namely teaching, philosophy and study. The second section watches the reflation of Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation in some of the poignant and telling criticisms offered by Caygill. This reflation comes about by way of the aporias that mediate Levinas's ethics, and for Caygill this is most apparent in the oppositions of war and peace, and state and religion. The final section reads this reflation as education in Hegel. It concentrates on how the relation of state and religion, the notion of alterity, and the posit- ing of error in philosophy are re-formed in such learning.
PART A
Deflating Hegel
Following Caygill's line of argument, Levinas's deflation of the Hegelian dialectic amounts to emptying the system of the movement associated with negation, mediation, contradiction and Aufhebung. Within such movement Levinas finds only a repetition of the same from which no new result emerges. As such, the Hegelian dialectic is emptied of the form and content that represent its presupposition that nothingness can be determinate, can be known. Against this, Levinas argues for a fundamental non-grounding of
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the I in the isolation of anonymous being, in the insomnia of the il y a that is the 'horror, trembling, and vertigo, perturbation of the I that does not coincide with itself' (1969: 143). Within this trembling a revelation regard- ing alterity is possible for Levinas in the isolation of the existence of the I in the form of the immediate caress. This consolation, lacking any finite agenda, transports the I 'elsewhere' (2001: 93). It is the nature of this else- where and its presence in the totality of the same that comes to define Levinas's philosophical and ethical project, described in Totality and Infinity as instituting 'a relation with the infinity of being that exceeds the totality' (1969: 23). Where the Hegelian dialectic can sublate such nothingness into meaning, Levinas insists that this only posits endless representation of the same: a totality in which nothing is ever allowed to remain as an un-sublated or an un-sublatable other. Hegel's infinite, says Levinas, operates by 'exclud- ing all multiplicity from it; he posits the infinite as the exclusion of every "other" that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby limit it' (1969: 196). This operation has meaning as time displayed in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history; as subjectivity in substance; and as objective freedom in the rational political state. Each 'meaning' only repeats the totality of the same, and each is the paganism that sees God or ethics reduced to ontology.
Levinas's anti-Hegelian project is grounded then in the impossibility of knowing the other within the totality of the same. It will be an important part of the reflation of Hegel in Levinas to show how he judges the incom- mensurability of the same and the absolutely other. For example, in Totality and Infinity he says,
the radical separation between the same and the other means precisely that it is impossible to place oneself outside of the correlation between the same and the other so as to record the correspondence or the non- correspondence of this going with this return. Otherwise the same and the other would be reunited under one gaze, and the absolute distance that separates them filled in. (1969: 36)
However, in judging that the same and the other are known as incom- mensurable Levinas posits for himself the very position that he deems impossible and illegitimate. 1 As we will see, mediation is already present in the assertions that Levinas makes for the difference between the same and the other, and as we will also see, the ground of this positing is of philoso- phy as error. Reflating positing retrieves the negative from within Levinas and returns him to education in Hegel. But this is not the Hegel found in
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Levinas who 'posits the infinite as the exclusion of every "other" that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby limit it' (1969: 196). That Hegel, the one Levinas opposes, does not take account of education in Hegel as we are presenting it. This will become clear later, but preceding this we need to spend a little time exploring some of the key terms that con- stitute Levinasian ethics in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being.
Totality and Infinity
In Totality and Infinity (1969) Levinas argues for three modes of non-Hegelian subjectivity that are interrupted by the absolutely Other. 2 Each is a form of desire, and each exposes the human subject to a fundamental vulnerability that exceeds the totality of the same. The interior life is both a happiness at having needs that can be satisfied - where, through taking in content it becomes content-ed - and a fragility at the uncertainty of attaining this content(ment) in the future. Time, however, expresses the vulnerability that needs cannot be certain to be satisfied in the future, and exposes the plenitude of enjoyment to 'the unknown that lurks in the very element it enjoys' (1969: 144). In doing so, time breaks up the totality of subjectivity and forces it beyond itself into relation with an alterity that cannot be assim- ilated. This vulnerability is consoled by the welcome that is 'in the gentleness of the feminine face' (1969: 150), a welcome that speaks to and of some- thing other than the I. 3 The hospitality offered to vulnerability is the possibility of 'the transcendent relationship with the Other' (1996: 155).
The second mode of this vulnerability is expressed in property. In the interiority hollowed out by enjoyment there is formed a heteronomy 'that incites to another destiny' (1969: 149). The paganism of enjoyment is pos- session which, compared and quantified, is property. But the approach of the stranger calls into question 'my joyous possession of the world' (1969: 76) and this disquietude again breaches the totality of the ego. Here the relation to the Other is in the need to give or refuse to give what I have to the stranger. Thus, as the feminine graces the welcome that is the home, so generosity graces private property with the Other, and is therein the aboli- tion of inalienable property rights.
The final example of the ambivalence of totality is expressed in Levinas's conception of metaphysical desire that 'tends towards something else entirely, toward the absolutely other' (1969: 33). '"The true life is absent. " But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi' (1969: 33). Metaphysics breaches the satisfaction of man with himself with a desire that cannot be satisfied. This vulnerability, this il y a, draws beyond the I to 'the
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alterity of the Other and of the Most-High' (1969: 34), and it is present in the metaphysical import of the face-to-face.
These three breaches of totality by the welcome, by generosity and by the face-to-face speak against Hegelian negation and mediation. These latter oppose and sublate what is Other, whereas the former remain vulnerable in 'a non-allergic relation with alterity' (1969: 47). Levinas believes that this non-allergic relation remains open to God while the Hegelian operation closes it down. It is part of Levinas's argument here that desire is totality and infinity in a way that mediation cannot sustain. As such, the epiphany of the face-to-face relation is wholly Other and unassimilable, and contests its ability to be murdered by the same. This contestation and this epiphany are the stranger, the destitute, the widow and the orphan. This epiphany cannot be represented, for the same cannot think it. Its impossibility exhausts all the resources that the same can call upon to represent the Other, and exceeds them. It is the language of God, and on earth this lan- guage speaks as ethics and justice. It precedes thought and consciousness and breaches their totality by this precedence. 'A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice. Ethics is the spiri- tual optics' (1969: 78).
One can understand why Levinasian ethics has proved so attractive to a form of Western thinking that is trying to mediate its power in and over the world. For the view that the philosophical tradition of self-conscious reason has failed to protect the world from the horrors of war and from the Holo- caust in particular, Levinas offers something absolutely beyond rational self-consciousness. In the loneliness and isolation of bare existence he finds God as the absolutely Other who is present in our vulnerability. Not in thought but in the physicality of the face, this truth is communicated to us as gentleness, as generosity and as the welcome. Levinas offers here an ethics that transcends the sovereignty of the rational I that is allergic to oth- erness, and an ethics that protects all that is best in human existence, that is, the truth that exists in our caring for others. He reconciles the transcen- dent with the deconstruction of absolutist philosophy and offers truth that is other than dogma, than imperialism, and than totality. In sum, he offers goodness without mediation, a face-to-face ethical relation 'maintained without violence [and] in peace' (1969: 197), maintained, that is, not in negation and return but in revelation. Negation 'remains within the total- ity' (1969: 209) whereas God exceeds this totality. As such, 'war presupposes peace' (1969: 199) because peace is the presence of God in the nakedness of the face before its being clothed in social relations. We will return to the theme of war and peace in Levinas below.
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Already here there are themes that characterize education in Hegel, most importantly perhaps, that of vulnerability. In Totality and Infinity the I is vulnerable to himself as desire; he is vulnerable to the gaze of the other who breaches the I; he is vulnerable to the sovereignty in his property; and he is vulnerable to the truth of this vulnerability as metaphysics. In educa- tion in Hegel, however, the I is vulnerable to himself as his own other; he is vulnerable to the other who, even as other, is not the same other as he is to himself; and he is vulnerable to the truth of the relation of the two vulnera- bilities, a truth he knows in education. But from our account of Totality and Infinity it is clear that Levinas sees himself addressing these themes in ways very different from Hegel.
Otherwise than Being
We turn now to some of the ways in which Levinas develops these themes in Otherwise than Being. This text continues Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation but there is an enforced change of emphasis due to the introduction of the third party to the relation of self and other. This complicates significantly the metaphysics of the social relation described in Totality and Infinity. Levi- nas employs terms in Otherwise than Being that move his thought on from that in the earlier text. Prior to the war of allergic egoisms there is now a relation of proximity, an originary ethical disinterestedness where responsi- bility of one for the other inverts the ego by substituting itself for the other who approaches. For Levinas, this is a different kind of subjectivity alto- gether from essence for it is where the 'Here I am' is hostage to and for the care of the other. It is found in the relation between 'saying' and the 'said'. Proximity, as originary ethics, is a saying that is beyond essence, beyond the dialogue that occurs between two people. The saying is therefore above the said in which the former is thematized, conceptualized and cognized. How- ever, the latter is absolutely necessary as the 'lived time' (1998: 37) in which phenomena appear. While saying lies beyond essence as proximity and responsibility, the said exposes entities as phenomena and exhibits them around the subject-object relation. Synchronization is this assembling of entities in the totality of the present by the same, synchronized, that is, 'into a time that is recallable, and becomes a theme' (1998: 37). As such, says Levinas, 'the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontology, is the price that manifestation demands' (1998: 6). Saying, in being said, is 'a betrayal' (1998: 6), and further, it makes the otherwise than being, in this case saying, appear to be 'an event of being' (1998: 6).
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Equally, proximity for Levinas is the primary form of sensibility, and cog- nition is only secondary to this. Proximity disturbs cognition and therefore essence in a way similar to the unrest seen above in Totality and Infinity. This disturbance is a 'coring out' (1998: 64), a murmur that is 'the non- coinciding of the ego with itself, restlessness, insomnia, beyond what is found again in the present' (1998: 64). This break up of the totality of essence is variously described by Levinas as the signifyingness of significa- tion, illeity, and diachrony, in addition to proximity and substitution. They are, in sum, 'a tearing away of bread from the mouth that tastes it, to give it to the other' (1998: 64) and they are registered as physical sensations prior to their synchronization. Also similar to the relation of enjoyment and trauma in Totality and Infinity is the idea in Otherwise than Being that sensibil- ity and suffering have no sense unless they are relative to the enjoyment which they tear apart. Sensibility is the pain of giving, for giving has a mean- ing 'only as a being torn from the complacency in oneself characteristic of enjoyment' (1998: 74). Proximity has meaning, says Levinas, 'only among beings of flesh and blood' (1998: 74). Substitution is material and real; it is not ideal.
How, then, within this totality, does Levinas conceive of the possibility of 'a break out of essence? '(1998: 8). This question focuses on the conditions of possibility for temporalization. Beyond temporalization with its return of the same, 'there must be signalled a lapse of time that does not return, a diachrony refractory to all synchronization, a transcending diachrony' (1998: 9). The lapse of time that transcends synchronization is the significa- tion that is carried in saying, that is, the signification not of what is said but by the responsibility embodied in the approach of the neighbour. Here subjectivity becomes the signifyingness of signification; not a negation of subjectivity but more an overpowering of essence by the prior obligation of proximity to the other. This disinterestedness Levinas calls 'passivity' (1998: 49). Illeity is the term used for the ambiguity of the infinite that transcends synchronization yet requires that synchronization in order to exceed it. Ille- ity here is substitution of one for another: it is giving. It is, again, the 'tearing away of bread from the mouth that tastes it, to give it to the other' (1998: 64). This substitution of essence for illeity is the ambiguity beyond I or Thou. It is where 'I am inspired' (1998: 114).
If substitution is the signifyingness of the signification that bears respon- sibility for the other, and exceeds the limits of essence, diachrony is the anachronism of that excess. It is where saying is anachronism. As the-one- for-the-other is the signifyingness of the signification of the break-up of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
This is not, then, a political experience imbued with a pledge from beyond. This is an experience of freedom, within freedom, by freedom. It is an experience of the truth of complicity in freedom and of freedom in complicity. This is a doubling that does not have the luxury of excess, and where even what remains is consumed by mastery. This appears hopeless and resigned until and unless they are experienced as having their truth within education. Education is never resigned or hopeless because re-form- ing is the truth of what education is, and in this case it re-forms how we understand both hopelessness and resignation. This re-forming of totality within totality is the hard philosophical lesson of modern social and politi- cal contingency, and it is where and how the absolute appears in these modern social relations. Hegelian Aufhebung does not avoid the experience of vulnerability having its own truth in the master as his spiritual education. But there is no alteration in an iteration that merely affirms itself as unde- cideable. The master is decided already. This is the political implication of modern philosophy. It is from here that philosophy must have already begun. Derrida does not seek to avoid this political totality. Indeed, it is his aim to avoid avoiding it. He says that to do philosophy is 'to project the greatest mastery over all the possible discourses of mastery and to renounce it. The two things go together . . . [it is] a modesty haunted by the devil' (1995: 140). He is right here. But modest mastery in diffe? rance is protected against because the master can immodestly control the definition of mas- tery by which he is to be judged. The weakness and vulnerability of the master, as the master/slave relation makes clear, is in his mastery, and the greater this recognition, the greater, too, the modesty.
I have tried to show in this chapter how Derrida's protection of philoso- phy from the absolute has distorted his understanding of the Aufhebung and of education in Hegel. Derrida's notion of transformative aporetic educa- tion precludes from itself the truth in education that Derrida seeks for dif- fe? rance, for deconstruction, for iteration and for autoimmunity. Diffe? rance, the effect of iteration, has always disavowed itself of any triadic structure by refusing its construction within and by negation. To refuse negation is to avoid 'the self who is other and the other who is not me'. It results, as we have seen, in Derrida exporting otherness beyond spirit in order to protect spirit from its dogmatic assimilation of otherness. It is this avoidance of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 114 Education in Hegel
negative and self-otherness that has the result of transformation in Derrida being form without content, a dialectic of nihilism. 20 The result has been that commentators search for ways in which diffe? rance makes a difference. In the Derrida I have presented above, diffe? rance makes all the difference; it changes everything, until it is asked to state what this difference consists in, and then it has nothing to say. It has no voice which can speak of how we should understand the truth of this change, or, therefore, of this philosophi- cal education. Derrida, ironically like many Hegelians, wants the transforma- tive power of aporetic critique without the burden of the absolute. But transformative philosophical education without absolute spirit is only the illusion of education. Nothing changes unless we are being re-educated about what change in and by education actually means. It is to remain uned- ucated about all transformation because it is to remain uneducated about education by education. This re-education is the truth of education in Hegel, transformative of the thinker in being thought.
Absolute ambition
Finally, now, I return to Beardsworth's challenge that aporetic philosophy, Derridean or Hegelian, is too unambitious in terms of its scope for transfor- mation. Perhaps there are two notions of ambition at work here. Derrida's ambition in the way I have presented him is concerned with keeping alive and open the truth to-come that lies suppressed in and by the dominance of difference-opposition. The educational strengths and weaknesses of this we have explored in this chapter. What, then, of the Hegelian Aufhebung? What is the scope of its ambition? It shares Derrida's concern to expose aporia in identity, and to find meaning in difference and otherness. But its view of its complicity within prevailing social relations is very different from Derrida and at the most fundamental level. Hegelian Aufhebung is the expe- rience of the risk that is run in trying to think truthfully. It speaks of the preparedness to live and work with the groundlessness of its own reason. This is philosophy as the vocation to be true to itself. If this means that it appears unambitious as a force for social transformation, then so much the worse for versions of transformation that are less than true to themselves. 21 Part of education in Hegel means learning to mediate ambition as also actual.
The Aufhebung does work for the middle, and does so by not presuppos- ing the truth of the work beyond the unavoidable social and political pre- suppositions that already ground it. Beardsworth is right to be concerned
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about the ways in which the diremption of the universal and the particular are being played out on a global scale between master and servant. I hope that the other chapters in this book have begun to illustrate the contribu- tion that education in Hegel can make to these debates. The centre is pre- cisely what needs to be thought. But we should be ever mindful of imposed middles that are less than comprehending of the conditions that pre- determine middles as broken middles. This is not a lack of ambition. If any- thing, it is painfully too ambitious, recognizing its own groundlessness yet still risking truth within such an actuality. It is wrong to mistake Hegel's 'grey in grey' for an end of formative philosophy. As I hope previous chapters have shown, recollection is not passive, nor is it nostalgic. It is our knowing of phi- losophy as formative and it is itself re-formative of this knowing. This is where the centre can be thought, and this too is not an unambitious project.
Notes
1 I use spirit and Geist interchangeably in this chapter.
2 I should add here that in this chapter I am not concerned with Derrida's critique
of the Hegelian Aufhebung, except as it pertains to the form and content of Glas. Indeed, I am trying to draw out from Derrida the presuppositions that ground his idea of transformative aporetic philosophy as he practises it in Glas, Of Spirit and Rogues. It could be said, however, that Derrida retrieves from the Aufhebung all that he takes to be transformative from all that is dogmatic, and that diffe? rance is there- fore his own version of the Aufhebung. While I think this is true, it would need a different chapter to make this case, one that did attend to Derrida's comments, beyond Glas, on Hegel.
3 This is taken from an as yet unpublished essay by Richard entitled 'Responding to a Post-Script: Philosophy and its Futures' (2007). It replies to a reply I had made to his slightly earlier essay 'A Note to a Political Understanding of Love in our Global Age' (2006) which published by the E-Journal Contretemps. The whole exchange was to be published by Contretemps but sadly the Journal ceased publish- ing before this was possible.
4 Derrida's italics.
5 Derrida's italics.
6 'To relieve' is how Derrida's term relever in Glas - itself Derrida's translation of Auf-
heben - is translated in the English version of Glas. As I noted above in footnote 2 I have not extended this chapter to include Derrida's comments on the Aufhebung except as they constitute Glas.
7 This turn to the event in Glas is unjustified within or without the totality of differ- ence-opposition. This Heideggerian move is an example of the presuppositions of the absolute that ground Derrida's critique of absolute knowing. This will become clearer in what follows.
8 From Hegel, (1988: 327).
9 Note here I am juxtaposing the end of Glas and the beginning.
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10 But not, as noted above, with the turn to the event.
11 This is expressed by Lo? with to Jaspers who, after hearing Heidegger's lecture on
Ho? lderlin, 2 April 1936, sees this as the reason for Heidegger linking poetry to
the swastika (Ott, 1994: 133).
12 The context of this omission in Introduction to Metaphysics is important here.
Heidegger is arguing that spirit has degenerated into mere cleverness, which itself becomes a tool, a value, and a political propaganda. Against this Heidegger commends 'a spiritual power which originally unites and engages, assigns, obliges' (Of Spirit: 65, Introduction to Metaphysics: 48; the translation of Derrida's translation is used here) and it is here that he chooses to illustrate this spiritual power by quoting from his own Rectoral Address but dropping the inverted commas around the first spirit. Thus we get 'spirit ['spirit' in the original] is neither empty sagacity, nor the gratuitous game of joking, nor the unlimited work of analysis of the understanding, nor even the reason of the world, but spirit [without inverted commas in the original] is the being-resolved [Entschlossenheit] to the essence of Being, of a resolution which accords with the tone of the origin and which is knowledge' (Derrida, 1987: 67). In addition, the chapter in Introduction to Meta- physics then proceeds to assign the originarity of this spiritual Dasein as within 'the absolute privilege of the German language' (1987: 68).
13 Simon Critchley, for example, argues that it does. By granting the priority of the originary pledge or the promise that is affirmed, then, in the question and in opposition, this opens 'the ultimately ethical orientation of Of Spirit' (Wood, 1993: 95). If Hegel's anti-erection seeds virility against pressure, then Derrida's 'inver- sion or reversal' (1993: 96) of the question in effect puts the lead in Hegel's pencil (as it were). This new priority for Critchley is the Levinasian Other, a dimension of alterity and transcendence. Here, for holocaust we can read 'ethics of deconstruction'. Further, for Critchley, the footnote signals Derrida's 'depar- ture' (1993: 95) from what he calls 'the repetitive order of commentary' (1993: 95) in Of Spirit. This departure needs to be understood as affirming the 'uncondi- tioned duty' (1993: 94) that underpins deconstruction, that is, its 'ethical and political responsibility' (1993: 94). At root here, for Critchley, Derrida practises in deconstruction an 'undecideability' (1993: 94), a 'suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in, as and through a practice of double reading' (1993: 94). See also Wood, 1993: 1.
14 It is interesting here to note that this could well be a description of recollection, of the grey in grey. It is important then to bear in mind that there is no loss here for Derrida, no negation, and therefore nothing to be recalled from loss. The return is diffe? rance, not recollection; it is remarkable, but not self-(re-)formative.
15 Derrida has always been mindful to remind his readers that he has never eschewed reason in his philosophy.
16 It is interesting to note the mutuality of fear and risk achieved here in the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD), but this mutuality still represents only a mutual export of fear. It is not the way that fear and vulnerability in the double negation of self and of self as other speaks its educational truth. MAD, because it is mutual, is not open to learning of fear as the self who is other and the other who is not this self. Learning is in the lack of mutuality; this is the real double neg- ative of education in Hegel, a learning that MAD closes off from itself. MAD is
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fear is stasis; this is its madness. But from Derrida's point of view it was perhaps
safer for the world than less explicit autoimmunity.
17 I have said more on the speculative and educative significance of this 'and' in an
earlier work, Philosophy's Higher Education, (2004) chapter 6.
18 I note here that Gillian Rose has stated that diffe? rance, comprehended specula-
tively, could have been the unity and difference of identity and difference (Rose,
1984: 139).
19 see above, Chapter 1.
20 See Gillian Rose's Dialectic of Nihilism (1984).
21 At times in writing this chapter I have been struck by the thought that it might
appear somewhat decadent to be arguing over whose version of vulnerable non- sovereignty is the right one. But, this too must be risked.
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Chapter 5
Education in Hegel in Levinas
Introduction
Howard Caygill has recently said of Levinas that his 'anti-Hegelian opera- tion is less the overcoming of Hegelian dialectic than its deflation' (Caygill, 2002: 53). In this chapter I want to reflate the Hegelian in Levinas or, more accurately, to show how education in Hegel in Levinas in fact reflates itself through the eternal return of presuppositions as oppositions. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section looks at how Levinas deflates the Hegelian dialectic in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, with particular attention paid to three forms of education found there, namely teaching, philosophy and study. The second section watches the reflation of Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation in some of the poignant and telling criticisms offered by Caygill. This reflation comes about by way of the aporias that mediate Levinas's ethics, and for Caygill this is most apparent in the oppositions of war and peace, and state and religion. The final section reads this reflation as education in Hegel. It concentrates on how the relation of state and religion, the notion of alterity, and the posit- ing of error in philosophy are re-formed in such learning.
PART A
Deflating Hegel
Following Caygill's line of argument, Levinas's deflation of the Hegelian dialectic amounts to emptying the system of the movement associated with negation, mediation, contradiction and Aufhebung. Within such movement Levinas finds only a repetition of the same from which no new result emerges. As such, the Hegelian dialectic is emptied of the form and content that represent its presupposition that nothingness can be determinate, can be known. Against this, Levinas argues for a fundamental non-grounding of
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the I in the isolation of anonymous being, in the insomnia of the il y a that is the 'horror, trembling, and vertigo, perturbation of the I that does not coincide with itself' (1969: 143). Within this trembling a revelation regard- ing alterity is possible for Levinas in the isolation of the existence of the I in the form of the immediate caress. This consolation, lacking any finite agenda, transports the I 'elsewhere' (2001: 93). It is the nature of this else- where and its presence in the totality of the same that comes to define Levinas's philosophical and ethical project, described in Totality and Infinity as instituting 'a relation with the infinity of being that exceeds the totality' (1969: 23). Where the Hegelian dialectic can sublate such nothingness into meaning, Levinas insists that this only posits endless representation of the same: a totality in which nothing is ever allowed to remain as an un-sublated or an un-sublatable other. Hegel's infinite, says Levinas, operates by 'exclud- ing all multiplicity from it; he posits the infinite as the exclusion of every "other" that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby limit it' (1969: 196). This operation has meaning as time displayed in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history; as subjectivity in substance; and as objective freedom in the rational political state. Each 'meaning' only repeats the totality of the same, and each is the paganism that sees God or ethics reduced to ontology.
Levinas's anti-Hegelian project is grounded then in the impossibility of knowing the other within the totality of the same. It will be an important part of the reflation of Hegel in Levinas to show how he judges the incom- mensurability of the same and the absolutely other. For example, in Totality and Infinity he says,
the radical separation between the same and the other means precisely that it is impossible to place oneself outside of the correlation between the same and the other so as to record the correspondence or the non- correspondence of this going with this return. Otherwise the same and the other would be reunited under one gaze, and the absolute distance that separates them filled in. (1969: 36)
However, in judging that the same and the other are known as incom- mensurable Levinas posits for himself the very position that he deems impossible and illegitimate. 1 As we will see, mediation is already present in the assertions that Levinas makes for the difference between the same and the other, and as we will also see, the ground of this positing is of philoso- phy as error. Reflating positing retrieves the negative from within Levinas and returns him to education in Hegel. But this is not the Hegel found in
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Levinas who 'posits the infinite as the exclusion of every "other" that might maintain a relation with the infinite and thereby limit it' (1969: 196). That Hegel, the one Levinas opposes, does not take account of education in Hegel as we are presenting it. This will become clear later, but preceding this we need to spend a little time exploring some of the key terms that con- stitute Levinasian ethics in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being.
Totality and Infinity
In Totality and Infinity (1969) Levinas argues for three modes of non-Hegelian subjectivity that are interrupted by the absolutely Other. 2 Each is a form of desire, and each exposes the human subject to a fundamental vulnerability that exceeds the totality of the same. The interior life is both a happiness at having needs that can be satisfied - where, through taking in content it becomes content-ed - and a fragility at the uncertainty of attaining this content(ment) in the future. Time, however, expresses the vulnerability that needs cannot be certain to be satisfied in the future, and exposes the plenitude of enjoyment to 'the unknown that lurks in the very element it enjoys' (1969: 144). In doing so, time breaks up the totality of subjectivity and forces it beyond itself into relation with an alterity that cannot be assim- ilated. This vulnerability is consoled by the welcome that is 'in the gentleness of the feminine face' (1969: 150), a welcome that speaks to and of some- thing other than the I. 3 The hospitality offered to vulnerability is the possibility of 'the transcendent relationship with the Other' (1996: 155).
The second mode of this vulnerability is expressed in property. In the interiority hollowed out by enjoyment there is formed a heteronomy 'that incites to another destiny' (1969: 149). The paganism of enjoyment is pos- session which, compared and quantified, is property. But the approach of the stranger calls into question 'my joyous possession of the world' (1969: 76) and this disquietude again breaches the totality of the ego. Here the relation to the Other is in the need to give or refuse to give what I have to the stranger. Thus, as the feminine graces the welcome that is the home, so generosity graces private property with the Other, and is therein the aboli- tion of inalienable property rights.
The final example of the ambivalence of totality is expressed in Levinas's conception of metaphysical desire that 'tends towards something else entirely, toward the absolutely other' (1969: 33). '"The true life is absent. " But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi' (1969: 33). Metaphysics breaches the satisfaction of man with himself with a desire that cannot be satisfied. This vulnerability, this il y a, draws beyond the I to 'the
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alterity of the Other and of the Most-High' (1969: 34), and it is present in the metaphysical import of the face-to-face.
These three breaches of totality by the welcome, by generosity and by the face-to-face speak against Hegelian negation and mediation. These latter oppose and sublate what is Other, whereas the former remain vulnerable in 'a non-allergic relation with alterity' (1969: 47). Levinas believes that this non-allergic relation remains open to God while the Hegelian operation closes it down. It is part of Levinas's argument here that desire is totality and infinity in a way that mediation cannot sustain. As such, the epiphany of the face-to-face relation is wholly Other and unassimilable, and contests its ability to be murdered by the same. This contestation and this epiphany are the stranger, the destitute, the widow and the orphan. This epiphany cannot be represented, for the same cannot think it. Its impossibility exhausts all the resources that the same can call upon to represent the Other, and exceeds them. It is the language of God, and on earth this lan- guage speaks as ethics and justice. It precedes thought and consciousness and breaches their totality by this precedence. 'A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice. Ethics is the spiri- tual optics' (1969: 78).
One can understand why Levinasian ethics has proved so attractive to a form of Western thinking that is trying to mediate its power in and over the world. For the view that the philosophical tradition of self-conscious reason has failed to protect the world from the horrors of war and from the Holo- caust in particular, Levinas offers something absolutely beyond rational self-consciousness. In the loneliness and isolation of bare existence he finds God as the absolutely Other who is present in our vulnerability. Not in thought but in the physicality of the face, this truth is communicated to us as gentleness, as generosity and as the welcome. Levinas offers here an ethics that transcends the sovereignty of the rational I that is allergic to oth- erness, and an ethics that protects all that is best in human existence, that is, the truth that exists in our caring for others. He reconciles the transcen- dent with the deconstruction of absolutist philosophy and offers truth that is other than dogma, than imperialism, and than totality. In sum, he offers goodness without mediation, a face-to-face ethical relation 'maintained without violence [and] in peace' (1969: 197), maintained, that is, not in negation and return but in revelation. Negation 'remains within the total- ity' (1969: 209) whereas God exceeds this totality. As such, 'war presupposes peace' (1969: 199) because peace is the presence of God in the nakedness of the face before its being clothed in social relations. We will return to the theme of war and peace in Levinas below.
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Already here there are themes that characterize education in Hegel, most importantly perhaps, that of vulnerability. In Totality and Infinity the I is vulnerable to himself as desire; he is vulnerable to the gaze of the other who breaches the I; he is vulnerable to the sovereignty in his property; and he is vulnerable to the truth of this vulnerability as metaphysics. In educa- tion in Hegel, however, the I is vulnerable to himself as his own other; he is vulnerable to the other who, even as other, is not the same other as he is to himself; and he is vulnerable to the truth of the relation of the two vulnera- bilities, a truth he knows in education. But from our account of Totality and Infinity it is clear that Levinas sees himself addressing these themes in ways very different from Hegel.
Otherwise than Being
We turn now to some of the ways in which Levinas develops these themes in Otherwise than Being. This text continues Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation but there is an enforced change of emphasis due to the introduction of the third party to the relation of self and other. This complicates significantly the metaphysics of the social relation described in Totality and Infinity. Levi- nas employs terms in Otherwise than Being that move his thought on from that in the earlier text. Prior to the war of allergic egoisms there is now a relation of proximity, an originary ethical disinterestedness where responsi- bility of one for the other inverts the ego by substituting itself for the other who approaches. For Levinas, this is a different kind of subjectivity alto- gether from essence for it is where the 'Here I am' is hostage to and for the care of the other. It is found in the relation between 'saying' and the 'said'. Proximity, as originary ethics, is a saying that is beyond essence, beyond the dialogue that occurs between two people. The saying is therefore above the said in which the former is thematized, conceptualized and cognized. How- ever, the latter is absolutely necessary as the 'lived time' (1998: 37) in which phenomena appear. While saying lies beyond essence as proximity and responsibility, the said exposes entities as phenomena and exhibits them around the subject-object relation. Synchronization is this assembling of entities in the totality of the present by the same, synchronized, that is, 'into a time that is recallable, and becomes a theme' (1998: 37). As such, says Levinas, 'the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontology, is the price that manifestation demands' (1998: 6). Saying, in being said, is 'a betrayal' (1998: 6), and further, it makes the otherwise than being, in this case saying, appear to be 'an event of being' (1998: 6).
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Equally, proximity for Levinas is the primary form of sensibility, and cog- nition is only secondary to this. Proximity disturbs cognition and therefore essence in a way similar to the unrest seen above in Totality and Infinity. This disturbance is a 'coring out' (1998: 64), a murmur that is 'the non- coinciding of the ego with itself, restlessness, insomnia, beyond what is found again in the present' (1998: 64). This break up of the totality of essence is variously described by Levinas as the signifyingness of significa- tion, illeity, and diachrony, in addition to proximity and substitution. They are, in sum, 'a tearing away of bread from the mouth that tastes it, to give it to the other' (1998: 64) and they are registered as physical sensations prior to their synchronization. Also similar to the relation of enjoyment and trauma in Totality and Infinity is the idea in Otherwise than Being that sensibil- ity and suffering have no sense unless they are relative to the enjoyment which they tear apart. Sensibility is the pain of giving, for giving has a mean- ing 'only as a being torn from the complacency in oneself characteristic of enjoyment' (1998: 74). Proximity has meaning, says Levinas, 'only among beings of flesh and blood' (1998: 74). Substitution is material and real; it is not ideal.
How, then, within this totality, does Levinas conceive of the possibility of 'a break out of essence? '(1998: 8). This question focuses on the conditions of possibility for temporalization. Beyond temporalization with its return of the same, 'there must be signalled a lapse of time that does not return, a diachrony refractory to all synchronization, a transcending diachrony' (1998: 9). The lapse of time that transcends synchronization is the significa- tion that is carried in saying, that is, the signification not of what is said but by the responsibility embodied in the approach of the neighbour. Here subjectivity becomes the signifyingness of signification; not a negation of subjectivity but more an overpowering of essence by the prior obligation of proximity to the other. This disinterestedness Levinas calls 'passivity' (1998: 49). Illeity is the term used for the ambiguity of the infinite that transcends synchronization yet requires that synchronization in order to exceed it. Ille- ity here is substitution of one for another: it is giving. It is, again, the 'tearing away of bread from the mouth that tastes it, to give it to the other' (1998: 64). This substitution of essence for illeity is the ambiguity beyond I or Thou. It is where 'I am inspired' (1998: 114).
If substitution is the signifyingness of the signification that bears respon- sibility for the other, and exceeds the limits of essence, diachrony is the anachronism of that excess. It is where saying is anachronism. As the-one- for-the-other is the signifyingness of the signification of the break-up of
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