Real modern social relations triumph in the Logic because absolute knowing is
returned
to the question of method, which is precisely where the Logic began, that is, with the question of its own beginning.
Education in Hegel
?
?
?
?
Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 57 different terms; it attempts to think the 'and' of its two moments as a
unity (1985: 117),
an attempt that circles back to nature and immediacy.
Such a summary does not do justice to this clear and incisive reading of
Hegel's philosophy as essentially educational. However, among several dif- ferences between our two accounts of recollection, one must be mentioned here. In Verene's recollection I believe that the actuality of the absolute is sacrificed for the perceived openness of metaphor. When the in-itself becomes known for-itself this is a negation, and this can be represented metaphorically and in imagination. The continual renewal of metaphor is what ensures recollection is open and non-dogmatic. As he says, 'in the rec- ollective act we are the image' (1985: 113). The problem here in comparison to the notion of recollection that I am employing as education in Hegel is that Verene's notion of recollection remains fixed in the imagination. Put differently, political externality remains suppressed within and by the prior- ity given here to the inner. This amounts to a serious misrecognition of the nature of recollection. The representation of the gap in the double Ansich is only a single negation. But the philosophical and political import of rec- ollection is in its double negation. It is here that the political import of recollection as actuality is to be found.
It is in the nature of recollection to know that everything that is not recol- lected is posited, as it is to know also that recollection is the only way positing can be known. Verene's notion of recollection does not recognize this about itself. Indeed, his notion of recollection is itself a positing that the double Ansich cannot be a relation. This, in turn, is to fail to recollect how the rela- tion of the 'and' that Verene says is unknowable is already an actual political fact. This is what recollection does. It reminds us that reality is always a pre- supposition, but one that can only be known negatively, or as actual. In Verene's example, the relation between thought and its object that he says cannot be a relation is only the illusion of the real, the illusion that truth cannot be thought because relation would, in his view, overcome the truth of the gap. But recollected, this illusion is known as posited, and this is a critique of the posited identity of the mind that so posits. It is a critique of what consciousness failed to recollect in itself, that it is already what is (now) recollected as the political fact of presupposition.
In short, then, Verene's notion of recollection concerns only the single negation that is inwardized as image and known as the I. These are the images, as he says, of the master and the slave, the unhappy consciousness, the spiritual animal kingdom and the beautiful soul. But this is only half of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 58 Education in Hegel
their story. Verene's notion of recollection is spared its additional political implications in knowing the image as actual social relations, actual relations of political power. It does not go on to work with the double negation, the recollection of recollection, in which the image is itself recollected as a political fact. In contrast, in education in Hegel recalled reality is what is actual, and what is actual is learned as the unavoidable positing of the real as a pre-determining political fact. Actuality is essentially a political educa- tion in the recollection of the real as not known, but, and in the very nature of recognition, it is always too late to avoid this presupposition. Education in Hegel knows this complicity as its own actuality, its own education, and its own Aufhebung.
As a final note, Verene might respond by pointing out that he attends this double negation in absolute knowing, and in particular in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic. He argues here that whereas all previous shapes in the Phenomenology had lived in the illusion that the key had to be found to uniting the double Ansich, now, in absolute knowing, there is the wisdom that 'the "and" is real' (1985: 116). He describes the 'real' as the space between the in-itself and the for-itself that is 'the root of the absolute liberation of consciousness, its ground of its freedom' (1985: 116) and 'represents' (1985: 116) their 'mutual attachment' (1985: 116) to each other, this time as a categoreal representation rather than a metaphorical one. It is not clear to me what Verene means by the 'real' here. If it means that the space is absolutely open then this reads the political out of absolute knowing completely, for it only makes illusion abso- lute. If on the other hand it means to say that the gap is now actual mutual attachment, this is only an imaginary political world. Both of these are themselves grounded in the prior positing of the absence of actuality as the third partner in the double Ansich. But education in Hegel teaches that the third partner is not optional. It is what recollection recollects. In addition to the single negation of Verene's notion of recollection we have to work with the double negation in which recollection knows reality actually, and knows the gap that Verene works so hard to keep open as also always already closed. This is not a metaphorical education, it is actual political life.
Cultural imperialism
Exploring the different notions of education in Hegel, and in particular how the Aufhebung is to be seen as recollection, now offers a way into some of the political questions that surround Hegel's history of philosophy.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 59
I want, in particular, to think about how education in Hegel challenges the stereotype of Hegel referred to at the beginning of this chapter - the one associated with a history of philosophy that in effect seems to end history - and how it re-forms this interpretation of his concept of freedom. I will argue, now, that in thinking about the issue of Western domination in the world, Aufhebung and education in the history of philosophy offer a reform- ing of and an education about present Western mastery and freedom. Aufhebung as it were opens up Hegelian critique as a present history of phi- losophy. It is in this sense that Hegel says in the shorter Logic, 'the history of philosophy, in its true meaning, deals not with a past, but with an eternal and veritable present' (1975: 126).
Hegel's notion of the beginning of the history of philosophy immediately raises concerns for the perspectives in the world that are passed over as hav- ing not yet begun the pathway of despair of reason's education. Yet Hegel's beginning the history of philosophy in Ancient Athens comes about by means of philosophy as recollection. What it recollects is its own develop- ment. It looks for the potential of which it is the actuality. Its beginning, then, is not optional, it is pre-determined by its development to the point of this recollection. Equally, however, this undermines the standpoint of the history of philosophy per se, because recollection is always the groundless- ness of such a standpoint. Recollection is what exposes the history of philosophy to be other than itself.
Nevertheless, there are implications here for the way Eastern traditions are categorized philosophically when freedom recollects its beginning in Ancient Athens. In the East, says Hegel, the person remains dominated by substance to the extent that consciousness is extinguished and the subject annihilated. Thus 'political freedom, law, free ethical life, pure conscious- ness, thinking - all these are absent. What is required for their emergence is that the subject shall set himself as consciousness over against substance and so gain recognition of himself there' (1987: 167). In sum, for the his- tory of philosophy to begin, substance must be made a concrete objectivity, a concrete universality, so that this relation to subjectivity, at first external and alien, can bring into being the formative Aufhebung or education wherein the relation of subject to substance determines itself in and as free- dom. Importantly here Hegel uses the figures of the master and the servant (Herr und Knechtes) to illustrate the fate of the will with regard to alien sub- stance. Where the will is not universal, and where substance therefore is dominant over subject, 'there is only the status of the lord and the status of servant. This is the sphere of despotism' (1987: 169) and in it the feeling of finitude is fear. This is the case for master and servant. The latter stands in
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 60 Education in Hegel
fear and lacks in any legal recognition that might offer some form of inde- pendence. The former rules by fear, but he still lacks a recognition in anything other than fear. Thus says Hegel, 'both are on the same level. The difference between them is only the formal one of more or less force or energy of will' (1987: 169). Fear, therefore, whether in the finite caprice of the master or the finite domination of the servant was, for Hegel, 'the ruling category of the East' (1987: 169). It follows, then, that there could be 'no philosophical knowledge in the East' (1987: 171) by which a history of philosophy could have begun, for what was required was the recollection of the experience of fear as self-development. In the master/servant relation- ship in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the History of Philosophy what was required for the beginning of philosophy, of wisdom, was that fear be expe- rienced as absolute negativity, and known now as the self-determination of substance. Politically, when substance is known as having this negative char- acter then there is reason, spirit and the concept. Only when fear is formative of the universal in the finite, a formation that is a self-determination of sub- stance in the subject, does freedom begin to emerge. We will return to what this means for the relation of East and West in a moment.
Much criticism is made of Hegel's Western logocentric and imperialist 'standpoint'. As we saw above, Philip Kain has recently argued for a reading of Hegel as a cultural relativist. By this he means that the absolute should be seen as a cultural paradigm that will shift when those it marginalizes or excludes will come to subvert it. The other to the absolute is therefore the critical factor in the paradigm shift. This enables Kain to claim that one can keep the absolute in Hegel as the structure within which culture is ordered without holding to the absolute as a closed and fixed content. But his case rests on suppressing the educational import of the Aufhebung - which plays no part in his argument - a suppression that itself rests upon ignoring the illusory being of the reflective mind that has the absolute as its object. With- out the Aufhebung and illusory being the contingency that Kain argues for, a cultural contingency, never meets itself as object in a second contingency, that is, the philosophical contingency of the culture of contingency itself. As such, his standpoint is one that does not acknowledge the third partner in the relation of self and other, or does not acknowledge education in Hegel.
A different response to this has been made by the Hegel scholar Henry Harris. He has commented that Hegel's philosophy of history, and by impli- cation his history of philosophy, is unfortunately imbued with 'the nascent cultural and economic imperialism of Western Europe' (1995: 5) that was
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 61 prevalent in Hegel's time. They present world history in a way that is both
'superstitious and reactionary' (1995: 5). For example, Hegel
not only presents world history as the movement of 'Providence' (as if a superhuman agent were really involved), but also employs the myth of a 'March of the Spirit' from the Sunrise towards the Sunset to support
a 'substantial' interpretation of the great Asian cultures as logically prim- itive. (1995: 5)
Such a view, says Harris, we now know to be 'an unhistorical fiction' (1995: 5). Harris is certain that Hegel would no longer hold to a view of the history of philosophy as simply a progressive philosophy of history that dismissed non- Christian religions in the way that he did. What Harris argues for instead is that Hegelian science be kept separate from its religious extensions. The latter are, as it were, merely cultural representations of a particular time and place. The conceptuality of science must therefore be kept apart from some of its historically contingent baggage.
To this end Harris rigorously separates the Science of Logic and the Phenom- enology from any religious excesses. He describes the process of the phenomenology of spirit in the following way:
The Gospel had to be proclaimed and Platonically interpreted in an imaginative mode; the subjective consciousness had to advance gradually from imagination to conceptual thinking. Through this historical devel- opment, human self-consciousness finally arrives at comprehension of the 'whole' within which it begins as consciousness. (1995: 94)
He concludes that it is the Phenomenology that is Hegel's real philosophy of world history and it is the Phenomenology that has eternal significance beyond the way Hegel's own time is included in ways that distort it. He mentions that at the end of the Phenomenology Hegel makes what Harris calls 'a puzzling comment' (1995: 95) about a commensurability between the phenom- enological shapes of experience and the structure of the Science of Logic. Harris says that Hegel mentioned this again only once, in his Berlin lectures, and 'probably he abandoned the idea' (1995: 95). If the Science of Logic is his- torical then, says Harris, it is not 'strictly conceptual' (1995: 95). Far from being the comprehension of its own time, Harris argues that the Logic is the comprehension of eternity, 'the thought of God before the Creation' (1995: 100). The Phenomenology however 'is neither the comprehension of its own
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 62 Education in Hegel
time nor the comprehension of eternity, but the universal comprehension of time as such' (1995: 100). Thus, its lessons are not bound to their time in the way that Hegel's 'real' philosophy is, and by 'real' here Harris means the real experiences of the system within their own historical context. The distinction here is that 'phenomenology moves away from actual experience towards pure logic; the System moves from pure Logic back to real experience' (1995: 98) as and in nature and spirit. Harris mentions here the views prevalent in Hegel's time on the state, war, punishment, science and technology. These are specific to real philosophy, but not to understanding the ladder of the Phenomenology to pure logic. What was pres- ent to Hegel as objective and real has become for us something known phenomenologically, that is, as part of the appearances that educate us to science. We are still charged with having 'to achieve the comprehension of our own time for ourselves' (1995: 97). This means, says Harris, that the more Hegel's real philosophy becomes for us a historical curiosity, the more we will comprehend the relevance of his logic to our own situation.
However, and in response to this view in Harris, it can be said that his sep- aration of logic from culture can be seen also as cultural and as a stage of religious representation. To refuse this present complicity of pure logic with cultural spirit risks being as superstitious and reactionary as he accuses Hegel of being about his own time. What is at stake in Harris's interpreta- tion is the question of complicity in the mastery of the West's view of itself in relation to its non-Western others. We will explore this in a moment. But regarding Harris we must raise again the question, is it not just another cultural reproduction to be separating logic from culture? Hegel's com- ment seen above regarding the commensurability of the phenomenological stages of experience and the structure of the Science of Logic - a comment that Harris is happy to dismiss - in fact goes to the heart of the matter regarding Western logocentric domination. There has to be a commensu- rability here because the Logic is also a phenomenological shape of experience. The beginning that is not a beginning in Being is its positing of itself. This positing parades as essence or the reflective mind, but it is merely illusory being (Schein). This illusion then continues to learn how philosoph- ically it is substantial and a real philosophical experience. Absolute knowing, therefore, repeats the structure of the master/servant relationship, that is, of itself constituted in and by its determination in independence and depen- dence, and in life and death.
Real modern social relations triumph in the Logic because absolute knowing is returned to the question of method, which is precisely where the Logic began, that is, with the question of its own beginning. 15 The Logic may be called pure culture in the sense that the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 63
oppositions of Bildung have become their own content, and thus become absolute knowing because recollection is known philosophically as Aufhe- bung, as thought's own self-determination. But to separate logic from culture altogether where 'there is no interaction with historical experience' (1995: 95) is to repeat a standpoint of natural (Western) law, in Harris's case, the standpoint of the appearance of pure thinking. He may be right to say that in the climax to the Logic 'the last vestige of the traditional concept of God has vanished' (1995: 103), but this is not the same as saying that experience 'is left behind' (1995: 93).
The illusion, here, is that the standpoint that criticizes Hegel for his nascent cultural imperialisms is not itself also just such a nascent cultural imperialism. The critique in Harris of Hegel's Western mastery is another mastery. Failure to recognize this mastery is one of spirit's most important modern shapes. A more philosophical Hegelian critique is to recognize that cultural imperialism is already present, and inescapable, in the critique of imperialism. What this looks like I want to explore briefly in the follow- ing section. But let me be clear here. I am not trying to argue that Harris is somehow arguing for a completion of experience. He is clear, as we saw, that we must comprehend our own time for ourselves, and that this will be helped the more that Hegel's own time appears as a historical curiosity. I am not arguing that Harris is arguing for an ahistorical science. Rather, I am making the point that his argument for present science risks becoming ahistorical when he criticizes Hegel for cultural baggage without, also, recognizing the logic of this critique in its own political actuality.
The standpoint of mastery
At stake here is the complicity of critique in the relations it critiques. It is a complicity that is accompanied by a mastery, even if an unwitting one, because the power lies in the conditions of the possibility of critique. The mastery is in the posited standpoint of the critique of imperialism. A genu- inely speculative critique has to contain its mastery and the collapse of its standpoint in the contingency of contingency that underpins its groundless and absolute determination.
As such, in this final section of this chapter we will bring this education in Hegel found in the history of philosophy to bear on the present standpoint of Western mastery. Thus far, this chapter has presented a view of the his- tory of philosophy as more than merely a justification of sovereignty by the Western master. It has argued, in particular, for an educative relationship
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 64 Education in Hegel
between development, culture and the Aufhebung that re-forms any such attempts at justification. The perspective that recollects itself in the history of philosophy disrupts any merely linear pattern of development. This has been expressed above in the recognition that the history of philosophy is by definition held hostage by that which the history of philosophy itself makes possible. This has implications for the epistemological status of the history of philosophy. Any claim made for a commensurablility of past and present as the one development collapses in the recollection that divides them, and has its truth in the Aufhebung that knows (learns) this truth of recollection. As with education in Hegel in each of the chapters of this book, the Aufhe- bung here is not a simple reconciliation of spirit with its history, it is the essential openness to the lack of reconciliation, learned and re-learned, and formed and re-formed in this learning.
What, then, can this view of the recollection of the history of philosophy offer to an examination of Western mastery in relation to its others? Recol- lection in the history of philosophy is the same educational experience of death in life and of the other in the self that we saw in Chapter 1. What is recollected in the history of philosophy is the East in the West (and, although not our subject here, of the West in the East). This seems a remarkable claim, not least because, as we have recorded, the history of philosophy is primarily seen as the West without the East at all. But it is the truth of educa- tion in Hegel that what is learned is how the other is present in the self. In this case, then, how is the East16 present in the standpoint of the mastery of the West? I will argue now that it is present as the export of fear and vulner- ability by the West.
To make this case we must draw again on the way that Hegel uses the master and slave relation to characterize freedom in the East and in the West. In philosophical terms, where there is only fear of arbitrary power, there the relation is one of despotism. It is not until fear is itself the truth of the master that a modern notion of freedom is possible. But this modern notion of freedom does not stand apart from its pre-modern counterpart. It stands always in relation to it and this relation is determined by the rela- tion that the master has to fear. The idea that it stands apart and separate from the pre-modern is precisely the shape the modern mastery takes when it misrecognizes its own relation to fear and vulnerability. They are both - the pre-modern and the modern - shapes of the life and death struggle as the actual relation of master and slave and self and other. This means that the criticisms made of the way the history of philosophy eschews the East misunderstand the shapes of the relation of East and West that the history of philosophy learns in recollection. Any claims that the East is over-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 65
looked, or even more controversially, that it should not be represented philosophically as fear without freedom, hides two crucial things. First, they take the West to be the yardstick of what is and is not to be deemed as free- dom. Second, in doing so, they perpetuate the illusion that the West is independent from fear. They fail, in other words, to recollect the relation of West and East, of freedom and fear, and fail to recognize how the West relates to fear in its modern freedoms. Education in Hegel can retrieve this relation and with it the truth of the way the East is in the West.
Hegel is clear about the formative actuality of fear and vulnerability. Both in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy and most famously in the master/ slave section of the Phenomenology, he quotes Ps. 111. 10 - 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom'. 17 The ambiguity here is instructive. The 'of' in fear of the Lord can and does mean two things at once. It refers to the fear that the servant has of the master and to the fear that the master has of his own finitude, the very thing in which originates his need to rule over others. Freedom is wholly dependent upon fear because freedom is determined by the relation to fear. In the life and death struggle life has fear as other. In the master and slave relation the master has fear as other. And in modernity the property owning person has fear as other. In each case, life, the master, and the modern person have their sovereignty groun- ded in their freedom from fear. They have exported fear to that which is not them, that is, to that which is other. It is wrong therefore to pit East against West, fear against freedom, as if only the former in each pairing has social relations based in the master and slave relation. In the West this rela- tion is actual as the illusion that there is no slave, that the person who owns property need no longer fear for his sovereignty. In fact, what has hap- pened here is that fear has been pushed away, out of sight so that it is out of mind. Freedom from fear is the illusion of Western sovereignty.
This illusory freedom is achieved in the ways that the West has found to export its fear to those who are its others - and remember here that the definition of the 'other' is part of the freedom of the master. Fear and vulnerability are exported to the poor of the world as part of the freedom to enjoy affordable possession of goods and resources. They are exported as capital, as trade, as war, and even as charity and aid. Cruelly, perhaps, in these last examples, even when the West tries to embrace vulnerability it finds it to be autoimmune.
Seen in this way the East is present in the West. What differs is that the West enjoys the illusion that the East is not present. East and West are the one truth of self and other. It is precisely because they are self and other that they are not exclusive of each other, which means, in turn, that their
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 66 Education in Hegel
differences can be comprehended in ways that educate about their rela- tion. In the East fear has freedom as other. In the West freedom has fear as other. In education in Hegel this is the relation wherein 'I am already other and the other is not me. ' There exist many tensions in the East as freedom makes itself known as the truth of fear. There are similar tensions in the West as fear returns to haunt its vulnerable freedoms. Together they edu- cate themselves and each other.
If the West was to risk this education regarding its relation to its fears and vulnerabilities then it would risk also the re-formation of its own freedom according to its truth. The master can learn again the truth of the slave, and learn how to embrace the powerless as its own truth. We may not know what such an education would look like but we know it would not leave the West, the master, as he is now. He already re-learns universality because he knows he fears losing it. But this fear of loss is not yet his truth in the sense that it can determine his relation to universality. But it is a real fear because it fears its truth so much. This fear of truth is fear of freedom's own development.
It is, then, the education of the master that the West must attend to. This, however, is still an education that awaits the West. It would constitute a surrender not of the universal but for the universal. It is how the West can learn of freedom again from within the fear that guards it, and wherein this fear can itself be the path to a re-formed notion of universality - world spirit. This is the risk that freedom demands.
The end of the history of philosophy
A history of philosophy, then, that eschews recollection eschews therein its own philosophical character. Such eschewal avoids acknowledging that looking back over the history of philosophy recollects the telos as present and as disrupted. A history of philosophy that avoids the implications of this re-formation is the adult who never sees the child as his own parent. Such an adult is in a state of denial regarding his upbringing. But a history of philosophy that understands the paradoxes of development and re-forma- tion understands that the history of philosophy has its condition of possibility in recollection. Recollection unavoidably is the method of the history of philosophy but it falls to Aufhebung to know the history of philosophy within recollection, and to comprehend the philosophical structure of recollec- tion as self-(re-)formation. Recollection comprehends the history of philosophy as development, but it is the Aufhebung that comprehends this recollection as development, as formative and re-formative of Vernunft, of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 67
reason that is speculative. History is the development of philosophy but philosophy is the re-formation of history as development.
There is a further implication here, however, and one that re-forms the reputation of Hegel as the dogmatic philosopher par excellence. It is that in education as recollection Western philosophy arrives at the point of its most radical openness to itself. The truth of recollection, and of education in Hegel, lies in knowing that what is known is not known, or that it is without ground. Judged merely abstractly, such education and learning is seen as overcoming what is not known, or where knowing replaces not knowing. This is how the absolute in Hegel is taken to mean the end of the history of philosophy and indeed the end of history per se. But what recollection learns does not overcome its groundlessness or ignorance. It learns of itself as the truth of this groundlessness. It is the truth of knowing what is known as not known - and this sentence is deliberately ambiguous, lending itself to mean- ing that nothing is known and that therein nothing is known. This is the educational truth of subjective substance in Hegel.
This is an end of the history of Western philosophy in one sense. It is the end of the standpoint of reason that is ignorant of its own ignorance. But as such it is also the beginning of a deep educational openness wherein the Western master consciousness is for the first time able to learn of its truth in otherness, both its own and that of its others. The West has had to learn how to be open to the truth of learning. Having done so it is ready to begin learning again. What has been learned in the history of Western philosophy becomes now the struggle for openness to a future history of world spirit. This struggle of world spirit from the West's point of view will be the strug- gle to be open to learning how its truth is in knowing that it does not know. Or, its struggle will be to learn and re-learn that its own truth is already other and that the other is not its truth.
Perhaps the last history of Western philosophy has been or is being writ- ten. But for this to be true the last shall also be first, for the new history of (self-[re-]reforming) Western philosophy has already begun. It recollects now that its own truth without ground is a retrospective viewpoint with a future significance that re-forms the standpoint of the present. It has to be, for although the owl of Minerva flies at sunset, nevertheless the truth of its groundless flight is already its openness to the new day that it heralds. 18
Notes
1 I will not in this chapter look at Hegel's discussion of recollection in the Ancient world or in Plato in particular. In brief, however, he argues that two types
? ?
unity (1985: 117),
an attempt that circles back to nature and immediacy.
Such a summary does not do justice to this clear and incisive reading of
Hegel's philosophy as essentially educational. However, among several dif- ferences between our two accounts of recollection, one must be mentioned here. In Verene's recollection I believe that the actuality of the absolute is sacrificed for the perceived openness of metaphor. When the in-itself becomes known for-itself this is a negation, and this can be represented metaphorically and in imagination. The continual renewal of metaphor is what ensures recollection is open and non-dogmatic. As he says, 'in the rec- ollective act we are the image' (1985: 113). The problem here in comparison to the notion of recollection that I am employing as education in Hegel is that Verene's notion of recollection remains fixed in the imagination. Put differently, political externality remains suppressed within and by the prior- ity given here to the inner. This amounts to a serious misrecognition of the nature of recollection. The representation of the gap in the double Ansich is only a single negation. But the philosophical and political import of rec- ollection is in its double negation. It is here that the political import of recollection as actuality is to be found.
It is in the nature of recollection to know that everything that is not recol- lected is posited, as it is to know also that recollection is the only way positing can be known. Verene's notion of recollection does not recognize this about itself. Indeed, his notion of recollection is itself a positing that the double Ansich cannot be a relation. This, in turn, is to fail to recollect how the rela- tion of the 'and' that Verene says is unknowable is already an actual political fact. This is what recollection does. It reminds us that reality is always a pre- supposition, but one that can only be known negatively, or as actual. In Verene's example, the relation between thought and its object that he says cannot be a relation is only the illusion of the real, the illusion that truth cannot be thought because relation would, in his view, overcome the truth of the gap. But recollected, this illusion is known as posited, and this is a critique of the posited identity of the mind that so posits. It is a critique of what consciousness failed to recollect in itself, that it is already what is (now) recollected as the political fact of presupposition.
In short, then, Verene's notion of recollection concerns only the single negation that is inwardized as image and known as the I. These are the images, as he says, of the master and the slave, the unhappy consciousness, the spiritual animal kingdom and the beautiful soul. But this is only half of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 58 Education in Hegel
their story. Verene's notion of recollection is spared its additional political implications in knowing the image as actual social relations, actual relations of political power. It does not go on to work with the double negation, the recollection of recollection, in which the image is itself recollected as a political fact. In contrast, in education in Hegel recalled reality is what is actual, and what is actual is learned as the unavoidable positing of the real as a pre-determining political fact. Actuality is essentially a political educa- tion in the recollection of the real as not known, but, and in the very nature of recognition, it is always too late to avoid this presupposition. Education in Hegel knows this complicity as its own actuality, its own education, and its own Aufhebung.
As a final note, Verene might respond by pointing out that he attends this double negation in absolute knowing, and in particular in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic. He argues here that whereas all previous shapes in the Phenomenology had lived in the illusion that the key had to be found to uniting the double Ansich, now, in absolute knowing, there is the wisdom that 'the "and" is real' (1985: 116). He describes the 'real' as the space between the in-itself and the for-itself that is 'the root of the absolute liberation of consciousness, its ground of its freedom' (1985: 116) and 'represents' (1985: 116) their 'mutual attachment' (1985: 116) to each other, this time as a categoreal representation rather than a metaphorical one. It is not clear to me what Verene means by the 'real' here. If it means that the space is absolutely open then this reads the political out of absolute knowing completely, for it only makes illusion abso- lute. If on the other hand it means to say that the gap is now actual mutual attachment, this is only an imaginary political world. Both of these are themselves grounded in the prior positing of the absence of actuality as the third partner in the double Ansich. But education in Hegel teaches that the third partner is not optional. It is what recollection recollects. In addition to the single negation of Verene's notion of recollection we have to work with the double negation in which recollection knows reality actually, and knows the gap that Verene works so hard to keep open as also always already closed. This is not a metaphorical education, it is actual political life.
Cultural imperialism
Exploring the different notions of education in Hegel, and in particular how the Aufhebung is to be seen as recollection, now offers a way into some of the political questions that surround Hegel's history of philosophy.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 59
I want, in particular, to think about how education in Hegel challenges the stereotype of Hegel referred to at the beginning of this chapter - the one associated with a history of philosophy that in effect seems to end history - and how it re-forms this interpretation of his concept of freedom. I will argue, now, that in thinking about the issue of Western domination in the world, Aufhebung and education in the history of philosophy offer a reform- ing of and an education about present Western mastery and freedom. Aufhebung as it were opens up Hegelian critique as a present history of phi- losophy. It is in this sense that Hegel says in the shorter Logic, 'the history of philosophy, in its true meaning, deals not with a past, but with an eternal and veritable present' (1975: 126).
Hegel's notion of the beginning of the history of philosophy immediately raises concerns for the perspectives in the world that are passed over as hav- ing not yet begun the pathway of despair of reason's education. Yet Hegel's beginning the history of philosophy in Ancient Athens comes about by means of philosophy as recollection. What it recollects is its own develop- ment. It looks for the potential of which it is the actuality. Its beginning, then, is not optional, it is pre-determined by its development to the point of this recollection. Equally, however, this undermines the standpoint of the history of philosophy per se, because recollection is always the groundless- ness of such a standpoint. Recollection is what exposes the history of philosophy to be other than itself.
Nevertheless, there are implications here for the way Eastern traditions are categorized philosophically when freedom recollects its beginning in Ancient Athens. In the East, says Hegel, the person remains dominated by substance to the extent that consciousness is extinguished and the subject annihilated. Thus 'political freedom, law, free ethical life, pure conscious- ness, thinking - all these are absent. What is required for their emergence is that the subject shall set himself as consciousness over against substance and so gain recognition of himself there' (1987: 167). In sum, for the his- tory of philosophy to begin, substance must be made a concrete objectivity, a concrete universality, so that this relation to subjectivity, at first external and alien, can bring into being the formative Aufhebung or education wherein the relation of subject to substance determines itself in and as free- dom. Importantly here Hegel uses the figures of the master and the servant (Herr und Knechtes) to illustrate the fate of the will with regard to alien sub- stance. Where the will is not universal, and where substance therefore is dominant over subject, 'there is only the status of the lord and the status of servant. This is the sphere of despotism' (1987: 169) and in it the feeling of finitude is fear. This is the case for master and servant. The latter stands in
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fear and lacks in any legal recognition that might offer some form of inde- pendence. The former rules by fear, but he still lacks a recognition in anything other than fear. Thus says Hegel, 'both are on the same level. The difference between them is only the formal one of more or less force or energy of will' (1987: 169). Fear, therefore, whether in the finite caprice of the master or the finite domination of the servant was, for Hegel, 'the ruling category of the East' (1987: 169). It follows, then, that there could be 'no philosophical knowledge in the East' (1987: 171) by which a history of philosophy could have begun, for what was required was the recollection of the experience of fear as self-development. In the master/servant relation- ship in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the History of Philosophy what was required for the beginning of philosophy, of wisdom, was that fear be expe- rienced as absolute negativity, and known now as the self-determination of substance. Politically, when substance is known as having this negative char- acter then there is reason, spirit and the concept. Only when fear is formative of the universal in the finite, a formation that is a self-determination of sub- stance in the subject, does freedom begin to emerge. We will return to what this means for the relation of East and West in a moment.
Much criticism is made of Hegel's Western logocentric and imperialist 'standpoint'. As we saw above, Philip Kain has recently argued for a reading of Hegel as a cultural relativist. By this he means that the absolute should be seen as a cultural paradigm that will shift when those it marginalizes or excludes will come to subvert it. The other to the absolute is therefore the critical factor in the paradigm shift. This enables Kain to claim that one can keep the absolute in Hegel as the structure within which culture is ordered without holding to the absolute as a closed and fixed content. But his case rests on suppressing the educational import of the Aufhebung - which plays no part in his argument - a suppression that itself rests upon ignoring the illusory being of the reflective mind that has the absolute as its object. With- out the Aufhebung and illusory being the contingency that Kain argues for, a cultural contingency, never meets itself as object in a second contingency, that is, the philosophical contingency of the culture of contingency itself. As such, his standpoint is one that does not acknowledge the third partner in the relation of self and other, or does not acknowledge education in Hegel.
A different response to this has been made by the Hegel scholar Henry Harris. He has commented that Hegel's philosophy of history, and by impli- cation his history of philosophy, is unfortunately imbued with 'the nascent cultural and economic imperialism of Western Europe' (1995: 5) that was
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 61 prevalent in Hegel's time. They present world history in a way that is both
'superstitious and reactionary' (1995: 5). For example, Hegel
not only presents world history as the movement of 'Providence' (as if a superhuman agent were really involved), but also employs the myth of a 'March of the Spirit' from the Sunrise towards the Sunset to support
a 'substantial' interpretation of the great Asian cultures as logically prim- itive. (1995: 5)
Such a view, says Harris, we now know to be 'an unhistorical fiction' (1995: 5). Harris is certain that Hegel would no longer hold to a view of the history of philosophy as simply a progressive philosophy of history that dismissed non- Christian religions in the way that he did. What Harris argues for instead is that Hegelian science be kept separate from its religious extensions. The latter are, as it were, merely cultural representations of a particular time and place. The conceptuality of science must therefore be kept apart from some of its historically contingent baggage.
To this end Harris rigorously separates the Science of Logic and the Phenom- enology from any religious excesses. He describes the process of the phenomenology of spirit in the following way:
The Gospel had to be proclaimed and Platonically interpreted in an imaginative mode; the subjective consciousness had to advance gradually from imagination to conceptual thinking. Through this historical devel- opment, human self-consciousness finally arrives at comprehension of the 'whole' within which it begins as consciousness. (1995: 94)
He concludes that it is the Phenomenology that is Hegel's real philosophy of world history and it is the Phenomenology that has eternal significance beyond the way Hegel's own time is included in ways that distort it. He mentions that at the end of the Phenomenology Hegel makes what Harris calls 'a puzzling comment' (1995: 95) about a commensurability between the phenom- enological shapes of experience and the structure of the Science of Logic. Harris says that Hegel mentioned this again only once, in his Berlin lectures, and 'probably he abandoned the idea' (1995: 95). If the Science of Logic is his- torical then, says Harris, it is not 'strictly conceptual' (1995: 95). Far from being the comprehension of its own time, Harris argues that the Logic is the comprehension of eternity, 'the thought of God before the Creation' (1995: 100). The Phenomenology however 'is neither the comprehension of its own
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time nor the comprehension of eternity, but the universal comprehension of time as such' (1995: 100). Thus, its lessons are not bound to their time in the way that Hegel's 'real' philosophy is, and by 'real' here Harris means the real experiences of the system within their own historical context. The distinction here is that 'phenomenology moves away from actual experience towards pure logic; the System moves from pure Logic back to real experience' (1995: 98) as and in nature and spirit. Harris mentions here the views prevalent in Hegel's time on the state, war, punishment, science and technology. These are specific to real philosophy, but not to understanding the ladder of the Phenomenology to pure logic. What was pres- ent to Hegel as objective and real has become for us something known phenomenologically, that is, as part of the appearances that educate us to science. We are still charged with having 'to achieve the comprehension of our own time for ourselves' (1995: 97). This means, says Harris, that the more Hegel's real philosophy becomes for us a historical curiosity, the more we will comprehend the relevance of his logic to our own situation.
However, and in response to this view in Harris, it can be said that his sep- aration of logic from culture can be seen also as cultural and as a stage of religious representation. To refuse this present complicity of pure logic with cultural spirit risks being as superstitious and reactionary as he accuses Hegel of being about his own time. What is at stake in Harris's interpreta- tion is the question of complicity in the mastery of the West's view of itself in relation to its non-Western others. We will explore this in a moment. But regarding Harris we must raise again the question, is it not just another cultural reproduction to be separating logic from culture? Hegel's com- ment seen above regarding the commensurability of the phenomenological stages of experience and the structure of the Science of Logic - a comment that Harris is happy to dismiss - in fact goes to the heart of the matter regarding Western logocentric domination. There has to be a commensu- rability here because the Logic is also a phenomenological shape of experience. The beginning that is not a beginning in Being is its positing of itself. This positing parades as essence or the reflective mind, but it is merely illusory being (Schein). This illusion then continues to learn how philosoph- ically it is substantial and a real philosophical experience. Absolute knowing, therefore, repeats the structure of the master/servant relationship, that is, of itself constituted in and by its determination in independence and depen- dence, and in life and death.
Real modern social relations triumph in the Logic because absolute knowing is returned to the question of method, which is precisely where the Logic began, that is, with the question of its own beginning. 15 The Logic may be called pure culture in the sense that the
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oppositions of Bildung have become their own content, and thus become absolute knowing because recollection is known philosophically as Aufhe- bung, as thought's own self-determination. But to separate logic from culture altogether where 'there is no interaction with historical experience' (1995: 95) is to repeat a standpoint of natural (Western) law, in Harris's case, the standpoint of the appearance of pure thinking. He may be right to say that in the climax to the Logic 'the last vestige of the traditional concept of God has vanished' (1995: 103), but this is not the same as saying that experience 'is left behind' (1995: 93).
The illusion, here, is that the standpoint that criticizes Hegel for his nascent cultural imperialisms is not itself also just such a nascent cultural imperialism. The critique in Harris of Hegel's Western mastery is another mastery. Failure to recognize this mastery is one of spirit's most important modern shapes. A more philosophical Hegelian critique is to recognize that cultural imperialism is already present, and inescapable, in the critique of imperialism. What this looks like I want to explore briefly in the follow- ing section. But let me be clear here. I am not trying to argue that Harris is somehow arguing for a completion of experience. He is clear, as we saw, that we must comprehend our own time for ourselves, and that this will be helped the more that Hegel's own time appears as a historical curiosity. I am not arguing that Harris is arguing for an ahistorical science. Rather, I am making the point that his argument for present science risks becoming ahistorical when he criticizes Hegel for cultural baggage without, also, recognizing the logic of this critique in its own political actuality.
The standpoint of mastery
At stake here is the complicity of critique in the relations it critiques. It is a complicity that is accompanied by a mastery, even if an unwitting one, because the power lies in the conditions of the possibility of critique. The mastery is in the posited standpoint of the critique of imperialism. A genu- inely speculative critique has to contain its mastery and the collapse of its standpoint in the contingency of contingency that underpins its groundless and absolute determination.
As such, in this final section of this chapter we will bring this education in Hegel found in the history of philosophy to bear on the present standpoint of Western mastery. Thus far, this chapter has presented a view of the his- tory of philosophy as more than merely a justification of sovereignty by the Western master. It has argued, in particular, for an educative relationship
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between development, culture and the Aufhebung that re-forms any such attempts at justification. The perspective that recollects itself in the history of philosophy disrupts any merely linear pattern of development. This has been expressed above in the recognition that the history of philosophy is by definition held hostage by that which the history of philosophy itself makes possible. This has implications for the epistemological status of the history of philosophy. Any claim made for a commensurablility of past and present as the one development collapses in the recollection that divides them, and has its truth in the Aufhebung that knows (learns) this truth of recollection. As with education in Hegel in each of the chapters of this book, the Aufhe- bung here is not a simple reconciliation of spirit with its history, it is the essential openness to the lack of reconciliation, learned and re-learned, and formed and re-formed in this learning.
What, then, can this view of the recollection of the history of philosophy offer to an examination of Western mastery in relation to its others? Recol- lection in the history of philosophy is the same educational experience of death in life and of the other in the self that we saw in Chapter 1. What is recollected in the history of philosophy is the East in the West (and, although not our subject here, of the West in the East). This seems a remarkable claim, not least because, as we have recorded, the history of philosophy is primarily seen as the West without the East at all. But it is the truth of educa- tion in Hegel that what is learned is how the other is present in the self. In this case, then, how is the East16 present in the standpoint of the mastery of the West? I will argue now that it is present as the export of fear and vulner- ability by the West.
To make this case we must draw again on the way that Hegel uses the master and slave relation to characterize freedom in the East and in the West. In philosophical terms, where there is only fear of arbitrary power, there the relation is one of despotism. It is not until fear is itself the truth of the master that a modern notion of freedom is possible. But this modern notion of freedom does not stand apart from its pre-modern counterpart. It stands always in relation to it and this relation is determined by the rela- tion that the master has to fear. The idea that it stands apart and separate from the pre-modern is precisely the shape the modern mastery takes when it misrecognizes its own relation to fear and vulnerability. They are both - the pre-modern and the modern - shapes of the life and death struggle as the actual relation of master and slave and self and other. This means that the criticisms made of the way the history of philosophy eschews the East misunderstand the shapes of the relation of East and West that the history of philosophy learns in recollection. Any claims that the East is over-
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looked, or even more controversially, that it should not be represented philosophically as fear without freedom, hides two crucial things. First, they take the West to be the yardstick of what is and is not to be deemed as free- dom. Second, in doing so, they perpetuate the illusion that the West is independent from fear. They fail, in other words, to recollect the relation of West and East, of freedom and fear, and fail to recognize how the West relates to fear in its modern freedoms. Education in Hegel can retrieve this relation and with it the truth of the way the East is in the West.
Hegel is clear about the formative actuality of fear and vulnerability. Both in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy and most famously in the master/ slave section of the Phenomenology, he quotes Ps. 111. 10 - 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom'. 17 The ambiguity here is instructive. The 'of' in fear of the Lord can and does mean two things at once. It refers to the fear that the servant has of the master and to the fear that the master has of his own finitude, the very thing in which originates his need to rule over others. Freedom is wholly dependent upon fear because freedom is determined by the relation to fear. In the life and death struggle life has fear as other. In the master and slave relation the master has fear as other. And in modernity the property owning person has fear as other. In each case, life, the master, and the modern person have their sovereignty groun- ded in their freedom from fear. They have exported fear to that which is not them, that is, to that which is other. It is wrong therefore to pit East against West, fear against freedom, as if only the former in each pairing has social relations based in the master and slave relation. In the West this rela- tion is actual as the illusion that there is no slave, that the person who owns property need no longer fear for his sovereignty. In fact, what has hap- pened here is that fear has been pushed away, out of sight so that it is out of mind. Freedom from fear is the illusion of Western sovereignty.
This illusory freedom is achieved in the ways that the West has found to export its fear to those who are its others - and remember here that the definition of the 'other' is part of the freedom of the master. Fear and vulnerability are exported to the poor of the world as part of the freedom to enjoy affordable possession of goods and resources. They are exported as capital, as trade, as war, and even as charity and aid. Cruelly, perhaps, in these last examples, even when the West tries to embrace vulnerability it finds it to be autoimmune.
Seen in this way the East is present in the West. What differs is that the West enjoys the illusion that the East is not present. East and West are the one truth of self and other. It is precisely because they are self and other that they are not exclusive of each other, which means, in turn, that their
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differences can be comprehended in ways that educate about their rela- tion. In the East fear has freedom as other. In the West freedom has fear as other. In education in Hegel this is the relation wherein 'I am already other and the other is not me. ' There exist many tensions in the East as freedom makes itself known as the truth of fear. There are similar tensions in the West as fear returns to haunt its vulnerable freedoms. Together they edu- cate themselves and each other.
If the West was to risk this education regarding its relation to its fears and vulnerabilities then it would risk also the re-formation of its own freedom according to its truth. The master can learn again the truth of the slave, and learn how to embrace the powerless as its own truth. We may not know what such an education would look like but we know it would not leave the West, the master, as he is now. He already re-learns universality because he knows he fears losing it. But this fear of loss is not yet his truth in the sense that it can determine his relation to universality. But it is a real fear because it fears its truth so much. This fear of truth is fear of freedom's own development.
It is, then, the education of the master that the West must attend to. This, however, is still an education that awaits the West. It would constitute a surrender not of the universal but for the universal. It is how the West can learn of freedom again from within the fear that guards it, and wherein this fear can itself be the path to a re-formed notion of universality - world spirit. This is the risk that freedom demands.
The end of the history of philosophy
A history of philosophy, then, that eschews recollection eschews therein its own philosophical character. Such eschewal avoids acknowledging that looking back over the history of philosophy recollects the telos as present and as disrupted. A history of philosophy that avoids the implications of this re-formation is the adult who never sees the child as his own parent. Such an adult is in a state of denial regarding his upbringing. But a history of philosophy that understands the paradoxes of development and re-forma- tion understands that the history of philosophy has its condition of possibility in recollection. Recollection unavoidably is the method of the history of philosophy but it falls to Aufhebung to know the history of philosophy within recollection, and to comprehend the philosophical structure of recollec- tion as self-(re-)formation. Recollection comprehends the history of philosophy as development, but it is the Aufhebung that comprehends this recollection as development, as formative and re-formative of Vernunft, of
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reason that is speculative. History is the development of philosophy but philosophy is the re-formation of history as development.
There is a further implication here, however, and one that re-forms the reputation of Hegel as the dogmatic philosopher par excellence. It is that in education as recollection Western philosophy arrives at the point of its most radical openness to itself. The truth of recollection, and of education in Hegel, lies in knowing that what is known is not known, or that it is without ground. Judged merely abstractly, such education and learning is seen as overcoming what is not known, or where knowing replaces not knowing. This is how the absolute in Hegel is taken to mean the end of the history of philosophy and indeed the end of history per se. But what recollection learns does not overcome its groundlessness or ignorance. It learns of itself as the truth of this groundlessness. It is the truth of knowing what is known as not known - and this sentence is deliberately ambiguous, lending itself to mean- ing that nothing is known and that therein nothing is known. This is the educational truth of subjective substance in Hegel.
This is an end of the history of Western philosophy in one sense. It is the end of the standpoint of reason that is ignorant of its own ignorance. But as such it is also the beginning of a deep educational openness wherein the Western master consciousness is for the first time able to learn of its truth in otherness, both its own and that of its others. The West has had to learn how to be open to the truth of learning. Having done so it is ready to begin learning again. What has been learned in the history of Western philosophy becomes now the struggle for openness to a future history of world spirit. This struggle of world spirit from the West's point of view will be the strug- gle to be open to learning how its truth is in knowing that it does not know. Or, its struggle will be to learn and re-learn that its own truth is already other and that the other is not its truth.
Perhaps the last history of Western philosophy has been or is being writ- ten. But for this to be true the last shall also be first, for the new history of (self-[re-]reforming) Western philosophy has already begun. It recollects now that its own truth without ground is a retrospective viewpoint with a future significance that re-forms the standpoint of the present. It has to be, for although the owl of Minerva flies at sunset, nevertheless the truth of its groundless flight is already its openness to the new day that it heralds. 18
Notes
1 I will not in this chapter look at Hegel's discussion of recollection in the Ancient world or in Plato in particular. In brief, however, he argues that two types
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