No More Learning

As we saw above, life, in asserting its identity in a certainty immune to its own aporetic grounding, excludes death as other than identity. Death is the negation in which life begins its self-conscious existence, but its contribu- tion to this formative experience is eschewed. It is not hard to see how the certainty of the Western self repeats this eschewal in order to shield it from its own vulnerabilities. Rather than learn of itself from the other, it prefers to protect the illusions of its certainties. It does this by many means, all of which have in common the export of negation, that is, of fear, vulnerability and death, to those who are other than itself. At one extreme, when fear of death in life is total, when it is fear lacking fear and is without mediation or learning, then it seeks to secure itself in the idolatry of uniforms and scape- goats. Lacking mediation it is free to export total negation, free, that is, to
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export death without the negation of the self of the exporter. At its furthest limit, this is genocide. Evil lives in such privation of education.
But even without the totality of uniforms and scapegoats what chance has the other, the stranger, if we - and here 'we' should not be avoided, because it reveals the hidden veil of Western self-interest - if we do not know at whom we gaze because we suppress self-gaze? Modernity is not just out- sourcing its call centres. It is exporting fear and vulnerability in the form of conflict and instability to ensure that they are not ours.
After all, who is the easier to bomb? Is it the other who is undecideable or otherwise-than-being, yet-to-come, and beyond comprehension, or is it the other that I find in myself as the truth of my own vulnerability? Is not the answer here in fact that it is the unknowable and incommensurable other who is expendable, since he is not recognized as my own humanity? To know thyself in the sense carried within Hegel's philosophy of the other is not a Western logocentric ontotheological imperialism. On the contrary, the refusal to know thyself is the domination of abstract reason over its own grounding in death, loss and vulnerability. Knowing thyself is the disrup- tion of that abstract domination. It is an education wherein what I learn of myself is also what I learn of the otherness that constitutes my vulnerable identity. Neither is this solipsism. Solipsism is where the I refuses its own relation and refuses its negation, and refuses the implications for it of this negation. To refuse to know thyself is to refuse to know the other. This is the refusal that finds it easier to drop bombs.
Thus, there is no stranger who is not already known to me, and there is no self that is not already lost to me. This is the concept of the other in modernity. In the concept of the other he and I are the same in our differ- ence, and justice must always be done to the difference for the same to be sustained, and to the same for difference to be sustained. The other is not me; the other, therefore, is also me in my vulnerable non-sovereignty. The 'also' here is spirit because spirit is the return and reform of the relation of sovereignty and non-sovereignty in and as human education. Spirit is the learning of vulnerability and is the vulnerability of this learning. When the 'also' refers to the otherness of the idea of humanity this is world spirit in education in Hegel.
Indeed, this 'also' currently takes shape in the bombs that carry the export of otherness beyond the West, and in the cheap commodities that return it seemingly without implication for our vulnerability. 9 But world spirit knows this exporting of vulnerability and importing of security philosophically, that is, as its own formative experience and education. It knows the vulnera- bility that motivates the export and it knows the fear and trembling that
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comes with the import. The education carried in world spirit is not just a vulnerability of nation states to each other. It is also the vulnerability of the consequences and implications of a life-style that discards such conse- quences and implications as far away as is politically and technologically possible. To learn to see the relation of freedom (of life-style) to death is to learn to risk the education of the self regarding its relation to itself and its other. The actuality of this education will be sadness. Sadness registers my experience of the other who must suffer for my security, and it registers also my resignation at the intractability of this suffering. If sadness is all that can be learned here, then there is no truth to it, for it would mean that there is no educative import to the sadness, that we learn nothing from it. But because the relation between my not-self and the other who is not me, is (not-me), this sadness has formative significance. If we restrict world spirit to life and death, to feelings of sadness, we are avoiding the actuality of sad- ness, and we are avoiding its political education. We are avoiding being changed by the truth that presents itself in sadness.
However, we cannot ignore the importance that the distance of self and other has on this education. The further away death is from us, in time as in space, then the less powerful becomes its truth. There are more tears shed for the local death with universal significance than for the universal significance of the death local to somewhere else. How is the return of death to realize itself as world spirit when its truth exhausts itself the further it has to travel? Our answer here can be that the return is carried in our philosophical education, for it is in philosophy that the education of self and other has actuality. It is where modernity carries its negative truth know- ingly and with comprehension about its relation to the other. Modernity's un-philosophical masters have eschewed their own philosophical educa- tion. Even the hypocrisy of legitimate death - collateral damage - and illegitimate death - innocent victims - has not revealed to them the veil of mastery, worn invisibly, that kills the meaning of death, and kills the other carried in it.
How hard is it, then, to be in the truth of the relation of self and other, whether between and within persons, cultures, communities, or the nations that constitute the political totality of the earth? It is hard in proportion to the extent to which the relation to one's death in and by negation is charac- terized by its suppression, its eschewal and its denial. The greater the extent to which fears and insecurities are pushed on to others, at home, abroad, and soon no doubt, into space, the less is the self sufficiently educated to be able to meet them in the truth of the encounter. It is in education's own sub- jectivity and substance - its revolution and reform of itself - that the singular
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can also be universal, can also know the other. This is to learn otherness as the truth of the self in the difficulty of remaining the self who is vulnerable to this truth. Known as having its truth in this education, and contra both the abstract post-foundational claims for undecideability and the excesses of the standpoint of mutual recognition, the concept of the other reclaims all the imperial terms again: 'our', 'we', 'West', 'logos', 'I', 'reason', 'us', 'society', 'spirit', 'absolute', 'property', 'person', etc, in order to be able to speak of otherness with the ambivalence of the complicity of mastery that it demands. The more unseen is the veil of the master, the more difficult is it to learn that I am already the other and the other is not me.
Notes
1 I first came across this story by way of Josh Cohen (2005).
2 The meaning carried by the term 'recollection' here is dealt with in more detail
in Chapter 2.
3 The otherness of animals is another recent export of death to recognize itself in
and as the vulnerability of the master.
4 The hyphen signals the relation here to the Aufhebung which, in the following
chapter, is defined as self (re-)formation. See also Chapter, note 3.
5 Note here that the concept of otherness is not described as 'I am already other; the other returns to me', which would be closer to a formulation that might be inferred from Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) according to the dialectic of enlightenment. This is because the dialectic of enlightenment describes the revolution of subjectivity but not its re-formation. Thus subjectivity is famously caught in a frozen dialectic, and is the key understanding Adorno's melancholic science of negative dialectic. There may yet be further modern reasons for such
melancholia.
6 This discussion of Levinas is returned to below in Chapter 5.
7 Sometimes a public figure can embody for others the truth of this living death. In
thinking about this, I was watching the Ryder Cup of 2006. A golfer named Darren Clark was representing Europe against the United States. His wife had died of cancer only a few months before but he had made himself available to play. The emotions that this produced, most notably in the crowds at the K Club in Dublin, but also amongst the television audience, were precisely of the truth of living death that was embodied in him. This emotion was visible every time he appeared. Tiger Woods, a US golfer, had recently lost his own father, and the hug between the two grieving opponents was the embrace of the I that is We in sadness. And the humility felt in and for suffering is witness to this deepest of human educations.
8 This is true also of debates in social science regarding qualitative research. The way that certain qualitative research perspectives have embraced the idea that the otherness of the research object can be respected and not objectified is grounded in the veil of the veil. The freedom it appears to offer the object is a veil that hides the presuppositions of self and other that already ground the identity of both
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the self of the researcher and the object of the research project as other. The self- assurance of the researcher grows in strength from both the funds she 'wins' to carry out the research and the reputation she seeks for herself in publishing the results. Here, precisely, the self of the researcher exports the uncertainty of other- ness to the research object for her own ends. The more 'open' the approaches to the object become, the more invisible becomes the veil.
9 This vulnerability, since 9/11 is also being returned as bombs.
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Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy
What then is it in the soul which causes it to take more pleasure in things which it loves when they are found and recovered than if it has always had them?
(Augustine, 1998: 137)
In this chapter I argue for a reassessment of the significance of education in Hegel's history of philosophy. This focuses partly on the relation that Aufhebung has to two other educational themes in Hegel, those of Bildung and Entwicklung, and on the way that the educational structure of Aufhebung can be understood to lie in the notion of recollection. The implications of this notion of recollection in the history of philosophy are then examined in regard to the view that the history of philosophy is explicitly a Western imperialism and that its view of freedom is imbued with a suppression of its 'others'.
Introduction
Consider the following quotation from Hegel in the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. On the development of philosophy over the last two thousand years Hegel says
The first thing is the purely abstract and universal thought . . . It is thought as it appears in the East and is connected with Oriental religion and the Oriental consciousness generally. Here thought is wholly abstract and substantial without any advance or development (Entwicklung), and indeed it is the same now as it was many millennia ago . . .
The second thing is self-determining thought, the Concept; this we see emerging in the [Ancient] Greek world . . .
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The third thing is the fixing of these differences [between thought and being, and between subject and object] and consciousness of them. This is the philosophy of the modern European world, Christian and Germanic philosophy; (1987: 174; 1940: 36-37).
And a little later on he says, 'man and God, the subjective Idea and the objective Idea are one here. This is the Germanic principle, this unification of subject and object' (1987: 179; 1940: 246).
One may well be unsettled by these assertions regarding the truth of the individual in universal modern Western philosophy. It reads like the confi- dence of a man who, having his essence and his truth in himself, has shut up shop to any and all other possibilities and gone home in the warm glow of self-satisfaction of a job perfectly completed. Does the following quotation do anything to mediate this apparent conceit and arrogance?
It is taken (in an abbreviated form) from the final paragraph of the Phenome- nology of Spirit. It states that spirit's becoming at home with its essence, its self-fulfilment
consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance. [T]his knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer exis- tence and gives its existential shape over to recollection (Erinnerung). . . . [This recollection is] a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from [its earlier experiences]. But recollection (Er-innerung), the inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it. . . . [Here, then] the goal, Absolute Know- ing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the [previous shapes of spirit] as they are in themselves. . . . Their preser- vation [combining] history . . . and the Science of Knowing . . . form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of Absolute Spirit (1977: 492-93; 1949: 563-64, [Hegel's italics removed]).
The tone of this quotation in its description of absolute knowing is rather different from the first one. Here, absolute spirit knows itself absolutely only in and as a process of self-education. It recollects all of the mistakes that it has previously made in how it understood itself, and has those mis- takes now as formative of itself. What it is now is the recollection of all that it has been. The question that poses itself here for us is what kind of an edu- cational event is this recollection? 1 I will address this question now around
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issues relating to the Hegelian history of philosophy, and in particular those of cultural imperialism and mastery. But, in advance, my answer to these questions lies in two further questions that are raised by the final paragraph of the Phenomenology. First, how could this combination of history and learn- ing in recollection close itself, as if it was a termination and completion, and still be itself, still be learning? Second, how could recollection know itself as the Calvary of absolute spirit without the renewal, the continuing education, of itself as life in death?
Nevertheless, it is widely the case that the absolute in Hegel is received one-sidedly as merely abstract, positive assertion. Couple such assertion on truth with comments on some other cultures and races that Hegel makes - including on African slaves, native Americans, Asians and Jews - and it is perhaps unavoidable that Hegel is labelled at best as a product of his age, and at worst as a defender of Western imperialism. This is only exemplified by his history of philosophy and philosophy of history which seem to claim that the West is the culmination of what reason can achieve in terms of the state and religion and the thinking of the absolute.
It has become part of the spirit of our own age to discipline thinkers from ages less enlightened than our own. Thus, Philip Kain has recently written that 'we cannot pretend that Hegel confines himself to merely describing Western ethnocentrism, imperialism, and racism . . . We must [also] admit that Hegel actually endorses them and we must be clear that this endorse- ment is deeply objectionable' (2005: 252). 2 Yet isn't this exactly what Hegel is being accused of, that is, looking backwards at times less enlightened than his own and judging their inadequacies? What will the future make of Kain's judgement here other than perhaps that he did not recognize the imperialisms of his own present in his comment on past imperialisms? In fact, in education in Hegel there is a much more rigorous acknowledge- ment of complicity in the imperialisms of the age than there is in Kain's reading of Hegel here. Hegelian philosophy allows no 'natural' or common sense standpoints immunity from negation. This changes fundamentally the status of philosophical critique in Hegel, for its own standpoint is within this unavoidable groundlessness of autoimmunity or self-opposition. How, for example, could one read the quotation above from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy and not experience such oppositions? Of course in the quotation we bristle at the certainties regarding European philosophy. It is precisely in such bristling - and Hegel would have expected this - that the standpoint commends its own autoimmunity. The notions of the begin- ning, the development and the consummation of Western thought in the concept and its attendant notions of freedom that are carried in the
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quotation, also carry their own negation in and by their unavoidable complicity in the social and political relations of their time. That they are open to this complicity absolutely and unconditionally is what sets education in Hegel apart from philosophical critique that forgets or avoids its own imperialisms, even in stating that they are not avoiding them. This is the changed meaning of knowledge and of truth in education in Hegel. It means that it is possible to critique, for example, the presuppositions and the standpoints of critiques of imperialism and racism, not with a view to supporting either imperialism or racism, far from it, but with a view to revealing how they repeat in their critiques the imperialisms that they oppose. This is how the Aufhebung works, not just by rejecting tyrannies, but by recognizing the tyrannies even in such rejections. The contradictions of reason cannot disown their origins in 'free' thought. This is the extra mile that education in Hegel travels, not just to expose contingency, but the con- tingency of the exposure. I attempt this now with regard to the history of philosophy, past and present.
Hegel's notions of education
There are three notions of education in Hegel which, together, constitute the process of the history of philosophy. These are Bildung, Entwicklung and Aufhebung.
Bildung (cultural formation)
Bildung in Hegel is formation or development through the repetition of misrecognition. This is the meaning of culture in Hegel. It prioritizes the process involved in the experience of contradictions, most especially when the particular and the universal are opposed to each other. But if Bildung is seen as the entire import of education in Hegel this is a mistake, not just in regard to Bildung, but also to the nature of Hegelian science as a whole.
At times Bildung is translated as 'culturation' to refer to developments that move away from nature and towards reason. In the Philosophy of Right, for example, Bildung appears in relation to the maturation of the single individual from the necessity of external needs to the freedom of internal, rational needs. Hegel rejects the idea that Bildung is some kind of corrup- tion of a state of nature. Rather, Bildung develops the idea of the individual who has needs, but equally is able to recognize himself in these needs. Civil society is thus the enculturing of the person in his comprehension that his freedom lays in his freedom from others. This is the culture, the education, of
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independence. But Bildung will also develop the individual's understanding of the contradictions of this independence, and will therein enable the per- son to recognize his objectivity in the universality of the state. Hegel is clear here that this education is a hard struggle for it involves the negation of desire in and by the labour of the concept. Bildung, therefore, describes the process by which ethical life replaces natural need, and it is the maturation of the person from particular to universal, and of family to civil society and state.
In the Phenomenology and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy the educa- tion carried in and by Bildung is given a much fuller treatment. Specifically, it describes how the self-alienation of spirit is played out in the Middle Ages between the lawless barbarian invaders and the divine authority of the Christian God. The only law that is present here is the inward devotion to God. But because the political world and the spiritual world are alienated from each other there exists both appalling barbarism and austere peni- tence in equal measure.
However, culture (Bildung) holds this relationship of contradiction and opposition within itself in a way that will educate it to a recognition of its rational universality. Culture in this sense not only repeats the lack of a rela- tion between God and man but it also experiences the failure of all attempts to unite them. All attempts to change the world according to the Will of the beyond collapse in on themselves precisely because they are human attempts. Such attempts are re-formed3, then, not in succeeding with reconciliation, but rather as emphasizing, again, the impossibility of such reconciliation - yet, as we will come to see, this also reaffirms their relation to each other. The result of the experience of the repetition of opposition as failure results in even greater alienation. Doing God's Will on earth becomes ever more impossible, yet demands ever greater efforts, all of which will be repeatedly re-formed against their original intentions. The more devoted are the attempts to bring this world into line with the other world, the greater is the repetition of the experience of barbarism.
Bildung here has two contradictory motions. It reinforces the status quo, reproducing spirit's self-alienation in existing social relations, and yet it is changed or re-formed in doing so by the experience of this repetition. Together these constitute political experience, and the relationship of the- ory and practice. Reform is the goal of a political action, but it is re-formed in attempting such reform, and re-formed in such a way as to reveal the domination of existing social relations over all such political action. As we will see shortly, it is philosophy that can comprehend the meaning and sig- nificance of this experience in which the goal of political action is inverted or turned against itself.
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The education of Bildung in the Phenomenology is to be found in the totality of this pre-determined formation and equally pre-determined re- formation. Its moments are those of speculative logic. It is, first, an immediate (re)production of the alienation of spirit, one that contains therein the drive for reform. Second, Bildung is the negative experience of attempting such reforms, that is, that they do not work and merely reinforce the status quo. Thus 'good' action for reform becomes 'bad' action in practising fur- ther earthly barbarism. The noble deed becomes the ignoble deed. The ruler is not an obedient servant but a wealthy and powerful master. But, and third, there is the recognition of the implications of these contradictions, that nothing is quite as it seems, and that meanings and values are them- selves inverted, or pass into their opposite. Thus, says Hegel, 'the language of this disrupted consciousness is the perfect language and the authentic existent Spirit of this entire world of culture' (1977: 316; 1949: 370).
The self-contempt that results from this experience of hypocrisy is the experience of 'pure' culture, stripped now of the finery behind which power masquerades as servant to God. This is the pure culture, the pure education, of the faithful self of pure consciousness as really the reasoning schemer and deceiver who must face his own truth in the dissolving of his charades. Pure education here is the I that says I am never what I take myself to be; rather, I am the negation of all that I take myself to be. My hypocrisy is my education regarding myself. I have been reformed every time I have sought to deny this hypocrisy. Now I must accept the universality of this re-formation, that is, the universality of the negative. 'Here, then, we have the Spirit of this real world of culture. Spirit that is conscious of itself in its truth and in its Notion. It is this absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and of thought; it is pure culture' (1977: 316; 1949: 371). This alienation reforms spirit and reforms the reforming spirit. The double negation is the truth of a new shape of spirit, an honourable spirit that owns up to the hypocrisy of not acknowledging inevitable inver- sion. With this education the edifices built out of hypocrisy collapse. This I is now prepared for further and higher education regarding its objectivity and formation and re-formation but this, as we will see in a moment, requires a different form of philosophical education.
Bildung, then, contains within itself the totality of a dialectic that forms and is re-formed in turn. All universals are found culpable of self-interest, and self-interest becomes the new universality. This also characterizes modern social relations. Culture does not describe a one-off stage of spirit's alienation and education. Culture is the movement of all experiences of inversions and of contradictions in theory and practice. Modern culture
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expresses the separation of thought and the absolute. Here, though, it con- cerns the inversion of reason which is experienced as acting against itself, and takes place not in the feudal barbarism of lawlessness, but in the univer- sal property law of bourgeois social relations. This is not the alienation of spirit where personality is to be sacrificed in bringing God's will to earth; it is rather the misrecognition of spirit as universal in individual property rights. The person of Roman law returns now with the status of Emperor shared among free men, and a free man is the man who is independent of others in owning his own property. Nevertheless, contradiction and culture are both present here. The good act that seeks universal significance becomes the act of perpetuating self-interest. Philosophical education per- sists in the same self-contempt for not being what the master appears to be.