No More Learning

At first the I experiences the social bond as something missing and knows this lack because his own certainties are not universal in an immediate ethi- cal unity with others. This lack is again an unhappiness for him because the bond that he seeks seems torn between the irreconcilability of uncertain social relations and true relations posited beyond his earthly existence. It seems to him that there can be no paradise on earth, and that in fact his social life is paradise lost. But his social bond is retrieved in knowing that all rational men are equal with one another and deserve equal recognition
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and respect. However, he finds that this principle is easier in theory than in practice. His own actions in the world seem always to repeat a conflict between self-interest and universal brotherhood. In the final part of his social education he realizes that because he is rational and accountable for his own actions, he must look inwardly for the justification of his actions and not seek external justification. This is the social man for whom social responsibility rests in his own conscience. But even here there is trouble, because from the point of view of everyone else one man's conscience can justify anything. His attempts to ground a true social relation end only in an arbitrariness of action and a hypocrisy of justification.
Only here is spirit able to understand itself as having been the substance in these subjective experiences. There are two losses here: the loss of the I to the social and loss of the social to the I. These losses have their truth in the recollection or the learning that results from them. The negations are not overcome, but they are productive of themselves as subject and sub- stance in the education of the I that recollects them as its own self-(re-) formation. This is not mutual recognition, but it is the education in Hegel in which I am already other and the other is not me. This is the spiritual education in Hegel of the I that is We and the We that is I.
How is spirit now to represent this education as it looks back at the jour- ney of self and society, this time in the awareness that it was present all the time? It can find itself present in the sensuous representations of religion and art, but I do not intend to pursue here this education in representa- tion. Instead I turn now to spirit's relation to itself as education. This is the view realized in old age.
Old age
I am my own heir. (Lope de Vega4)
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
(T. S. Eliot, 1944: 43)
Old age here is not to be measured in years but in the wisdom of the actual- ity of recollection. The old man does not overcome the adult, nor does the adult overcome the child. The child is in the adult as the adult is in the old man. 5 This is the integrity of the Aufhebung. It preserves what it changes
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such that 'change' means the re-forming that pertains to education, to learning. Education is the only form that thinking takes in which it can retain what is changed in its being changed, for both are contained in the learning that knows change in this way. The old man is the philosophical adult; the adult is the philosophical child; the child is the philosophical old man; and all of them are spiritual shapes of the reflective subject whose spiritual education we have been following. The co-existence of these shapes in recollection is absolute spirit, and is I-philosophy. This, in a nutshell, is to know the comprehensive nature of spiritual education in Hegel.
Old age recollects how the relation of self and other is self-determinative as the spiritual education to I-philosophy. The Phenomenology has chronicled the individual and sociological enquiries into the relation of the reflective subject and his social world. In old age absolute spirit recollects that the dif- ferent shapes of this relation always presupposed natural standpoints that hid behind various veils their own genesis in the experience of life and death and its actuality as the relation of self and other. On the one hand, the spiritual education of the reflective subject led to the recollection of his otherness to himself. On the other hand, he learned that his otherness could not easily be reconciled with the otherness of other such subjects. What absolute spirit has learned from both of these journeys is that the shapes of self and other were not only its own misrecognitions of itself, but were, at root, shapes of life and death. Now, in recollection, it finds its misrecognitions of life and death to be a totality in the Aufhebung of its development and negations. Absolute spirit, in recollection, knows that it is already other and that the other is not it. As such the old man is returned to life and death as the whole of I-philosophy for he knows now that his spiritual education has been formative in the myriad misrecognitions of life and death and in the loss of those misrecognitions to negation. Thus we end this chapter by looking briefly at how this absolute knowing of self and other as life and death is formative of philosophical wisdom in and of old age. The old man, facing his own death, recollects the truth of I-philosophy in this return to and of life and death.
Death only becomes actual in the life in which it is known. Its absence is its actuality and is how death exists in life. But it has also been a point of controversy throughout the history of Western philosophy as to what happens after death. Socrates did not fear death because he was open about his ignorance of it, and asked himself why would he be scared unless he presupposed that he knew something about what comes after death? The mediaevalists generally held the view that man, created by God who is eternal, must also have an eternal soul that will, after death, return to its
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creator. But education in Hegel turns this on its head. The wisdom of old age, here, is to know that eternity, too, is actual and can only be recollected from within the present. The prejudice that the subjective thinking of eter- nity is an error is grounded in the illusions of an unhappy spiritual education. The 'beyond' of the eternal is a finite prejudice grounded in the illusion of the reflective subject. The old man has seen such othering return many times in his spiritual journey and now recollects the truth in education of the eternal in the present. In his wisdom he sees recollection as the actual- ity of eternity and knows that the fear of error in knowing the absolute is really the error itself. Life is death. Life is the actuality of the eternity known as death. The life we lead has been an education towards knowing eternity in the finite.
This means for the old man that the thought of life after death takes on a different and recollective significance. We have seen that education in Hegel is death in life, but is there also life in death? What happens when death wins the life and death struggle? What is the view of the victor in that case? Religion and philosophy in the Western tradition have often argued for some form of resurrection of body and soul, or of the soul without the body. This is to say that when death is the victor over life, nevertheless life is still carried in and by death (as death has previously been carried in and by life). Some also see life after death as a metaphor for how the memory of the deceased lives on in friends, family, books and anything else that counts as a legacy. From Ecclesiastes comes the thought that 'I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man shall rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion' (Ecc. 3. 22) before he returns to the dust from whence he came. Here the deceased becomes part of the recollection of those he leaves behind and he is part of their continuing education regarding truth. For example, this is the wisdom of recollection when the parent sees his own death in the life of his children and grandchildren. This is not merely restricted to legacy and continuity. It is also a recognition that he will become death in the lives of these others. This is perhaps the final gift he can give to his loved ones, to teach them one last time of the wisdom gained as death approaches. 6 In these senses, life is in death just as death is in life. But of course the question that remains is whether the deceased will be able to recollect his own death for himself, or perhaps, instead of recollection, there will be bliss and tranquillity that will have no division between mind and God.
As we saw above at the beginning of Chapter 2, the Phenomenology ends with the same issue. Absolute spirit has recollection as its new shape. All that it has been lost is also preserved in what is. 'Their preservation
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[combining] history . . . and the Science of Knowing . . . form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of Absolute Spirit (Hegel, 1977: 492-93, 1949: 563-64), that is, both life and death. Death has been pivotal to the spiritual education of the reflective subject in this chapter for it has been the forma- tion of every recollection of loss. This was also true, as we saw above, of the relation of self and other. Every educational movement is a death, a loss, a negation. It is how this death is understood that gives what is learned its own shape and content. Spiritual education is what happens when nothing happens. Absolute spirit is absolute because it comes to know death as self- determination, that is, death is the true movement of absolute spirit, and absolute spirit is the truth of death as life. Truth is the experience of death known as formative, as spirit.
Put like this, the question regarding life after death becomes an educa- tion that re-forms itself, that is, that re-forms the question. The truth of death is already present. It is what life is. Life is that which knows itself because it has death as other. But the other here is already determinate of life. Therefore the question, 'is there life after death? ' is re-formed accord- ing to its own actuality. Life is already of death. Life recollects death. Life is already after death. Life must admit its complicity in the positing that underpins the question.
But - and here we raise an issue not taken up in our study of education in Hegel7 - recollection of death is as much recollection forwards as it is back- wards. When death is present as life it is so in the sense that life is both before and after death. Life is after death in that life is victorious in the life and death struggle as the Hegelian spiritual child. Life is also before death as it approaches it in Hegelian old age. Thus life recollects itself in death both backwards and forwards. This groundless standpoint is learning, or is I-philosophy. It is the actuality of time past and time future; the actuality of all time, of eternity known in recollection. This changes how we understand the question as to whether there is life after death. It educates us not to think of their separation on earth and the need for their unification beyond earth. Rather, it educates us to think of life as after death and before death. It commends us, in short, to know the question of life after death as a philo- sophical education that knows not just their separation but also their actuality, their relationship.
The actuality of this relationship is the recollection of absolute spirit, a relation of truth to itself sustained, lost, and sustained again in learning of the finite in the infinite and the infinite in the finite. As a self-relation abso- lute spirit is I-philosophy, other than itself and itself as not the other. It is the truth of groundlessness and of death in the life of the individual. It is
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substance as subject. It is the development, culture and Aufhebung of the eternal that is I. It is consciousness, self-consciousness and recollection.
This is no longer picture-thinking, this is philosophical education where truth can be known in and by itself. Equally, this is not the reconciliation in any abstract sense of God and the old man. It is only reconciliation in an educational sense, where the reconciliation of subject and substance is in our experience of their difference and not in the overcoming of their difference.
Education in Hegel is not first to comprehend the truth of life as the self- othering of God. But it is perhaps first in comprehending this as a totality of actuality in recollection. The old man faces death, then, from the point of view of its truth, from life. He has recollected his life in the truth of death. His wisdom tells him that he has participated in the life of eternity and has been part of the whole that eternity is. Now he may recollect his death in the truth of life. He knows, also, that wisdom is never closer to its truth than when life and death too are close to each other.
Notes
1 From De Principiis Naturae.
2 I will not in this chapter explore spiritual education beyond the Phenomenology,
although previous chapters have attempted this in different ways.
3 As my Gran said to me, many times.
4 From Nietzsche, (1982: 522).
5 The otherness of woman to man and man to woman, as of woman to woman and
man to man, will also have its truth in life and death, that is, where I am already
other and the other is not me.
6 Barren educational midwives - teachers - who have no children of their own can
find this education in the eternal loss of their pupils. This 'death' of the teacher for the pupil is in the educational truth expressed by Nietzsche that 'one repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil' (1982: 190).
7 See footnote 11, Introduction.
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