No More Learning

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One final point here. The non-dogmatic education regarding truth in social relations means that education in Hegel is open to the truth of other forms of the relation between state and religion. This pertains to the ques- tion of the third party, the other to the relation of state and religion. The state that is open to being other than itself, that knows itself in illusion, is also in relation to another state. Here, the state is already other to itself and the other state is not it. Here too is world spirit in education in Hegel, for it is the state that knows how to find itself in the other state because the other state is other to it. Nation can speak unto nation as it speaks unto itself. In the negation of the modern state by itself and in relation to its other it has a universal language, the language of the negation of the negation, that is, of their truth as relation in education. Vulnerability here is not weakness, but rather the strength gained in the truth of vulnerability. It is not so much that this truth can change the world, but rather that it changes it all the time, but only more or less recognized for what it is.
Alterity in education in Hegel
We have already seen in previous chapters that education in Hegel is a phi- losophy of self and other9. This can now be revisited in relation to the face-to-face in Levinas. The reflation of his anti-Hegelian operation means that the Hegelian notion of alterity is present in Levinas's thinking but it is eschewed from it within a natural appearance of the same opposed to the Other. As we noted above, this prejudgement in Levinas posits the relation of the same and Other even before the enquiry into them has begun. When God is cast beyond the same he is cast also beyond social relations. But this is an activity of social relations, themselves already a shape of the knowing or not knowing of God. The prior mediation of self and Other is not optional here. As such, one of the ways that education in Hegel differs from Levinas is in the recognition of a lack of mastery over mediation. Positing an absolute alterity is just such an act of mastery over mediation. The truth in proximity is therefore a truth un-re-formed in and by the mediation of this mastery over mediation. Positing a beyond of political totality is already the mediation by politics and religion of each other. This comes down, as so often in education in Hegel, to a question of complicity. The critique of totality is always a self-critique. This is why learning, and neither a notion of overcoming nor of a beyond, is the truth of this critique.
Complicity within the relation of state and religion educates us regarding Levinas's notion of the face-to-face. In education in Hegel there is no face- to-face as Levinas describes it. The face-to-face in education in Hegel is of
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life and death. It is as death in life that life is lived learning of itself as abso- lute vulnerability. But the face-to-face of life and death is relieved in Levinas's notion of the face-to-face, relieved that is, in that the face already has death as other, as the other face. Levinas's face-to-face does not recognize its pre- determined political actuality. It does not, and this says the same thing, comprehend how the face-to-face is already a formation of state and religion which is itself already a formation of life and death. Against Levinas, then, education in Hegel teaches here that the il y a and the transcendent are not the trembling and the epiphany of the absolute that Levinas claims. In fact they relieve the face from having to recognize in itself the reproduction of prevailing social and political relations. The relief means that the natural appearance of the I as life that has death as other remains unchallenged. It is education in Hegel that retrieves death for the I as a critique of the natu- ral political relations of the face-to-face. This educates the face that the one face is already other to itself and that the other face, the face that faces it, is not it. We have seen what happens when Levinas exports the face-to-face of life and death into a totality of the same; the third party returns as the mediation carried by death, and can be accommodated or refused accord- ing to the whim of God in proximity.
Education in Hegel, then, offers a very different account of self, other and the third party than is found in illeity and justice in Levinas. Illeity is the Otherness of self and other, and justice is the otherness of self and other. We must ask of Levinas, what prejudgement of truth is it that can be sure that Otherness and otherness are not the one truth, or that they are other to each other? 10 Such a presupposition is grounded in the positing of truth as other to its being known or, as we will see in a moment, as error. This positing is, as we saw above, merely an unchallenged reproduction of the natural appearance of state and religion. Levinas's ethics is grounded in such an appearance. It is what leads him to judge that Otherness and other- ness are not the same. But education in Hegel teaches that this positing already carries within it a historically specific shape of the relation of state and religion. Taken as a neutral and obvious judgement that God and soci- ety cannot be the same, it is in fact the modern shape of their relation parading as if the relation were yet to be established. Seen in this way, the difference between Otherness and otherness is really a philosophical edu- cation regarding the politics of their appearance as different. This does not mean that suddenly they are reconciled. But it does mean that we learn the truth of their separation as our own political actuality.
Contrary to Levinas's misrecognition of self, other and third party, illeity and justice can be re-formed into education in Hegel as 'I am already other
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and the other is not me'. I am already other means my relation to myself is one of absolute vulnerability. Equally, the other as not me means that my vulnerability is not returned to me as my own by my finding otherness in an other. There is no mutual recognition here. The opposite is the case. Even my vulnerability is other than the other. But nor is there justification for refusing my having vulnerability as the actual truth of myself, proved, as it were, precisely because it is not reconciled by finding the same in the other. This is the truth of otherness in the negation of the negation, that is, where otherness is absolutely unable to know itself. Levinas, ruling out the possi- bility that I can be other to myself and find that same otherness in the other who is not me, is forced to posit new violences that will try to mediate between the triad of man, God and state. The result, as we have seen, is to fail to do justice to the determination of infinity within social totality. I am already other and the other is not me - this is self-otherness, and self-otherness known as the other who is not me. This is the Aufhebung, the recollection of truth learning about its own misrecognition. It is the openness of the nega- tion of the negation because it is the truth of learning that it remains open to its own misrecognition rather than overcoming it or closing it down. Alterity in Hegel is a double negative, but only a single education.
Error as actual vulnerability
The same point can now be made slightly differently in regard to education in Hegel as the actuality of error. Actuality is one of Hegel's most important educational concepts. It is well known, for example, that in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right he stated that 'what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational' (1967: 10). The conservative tone of this comment is seemingly backed up by others in the Preface, notably that philosophy always comes about too late to instruct the world on how it ought to be and that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, at the end of the day. Philosophy appears here to be the science only of hindsight. Yet it is the significance of the philosophical education that hindsight carries as recollection that requires to be comprehended.
There are two points here. First, recollection is not restricted to looking backwards. This is because a present recollection is also open to itself as a future recollection. In other words, we can know that this present will be recollected in the future. We will be known again, and truthfully, when our truth is negated, re-formed and re-learned. Our mastery over the past is nonesuch because we do not have mastery over the present. This is the groundlessness of recollection in and for itself. Recollection backwards is
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also recollection forwards. 11 As such, its actuality includes but does not pri- oritize its being known as yet to be known. This is not undecideability. It is the knowing of the truth of undecideability.
Second, if the recollection of what was and the future recollection of what is are seen as error in the sense that they are only knowledge for us, and not knowledge in itself, then all knowing is error. But the judgement of this as error presupposes that the object of thought stands on one side and the thought of it on the other. In fact, Hegel's political education is based on the insight that error is itself the universality of all thought, because all thought is recollection. 12 If error contains universality then the truth of this requires to be known. One way to proceed here would be Socratic, and to say that this is the universality of ignorance, that we know only that we do not and cannot know anything. But Socrates, too, holds the universality of error still only as error. It is in the negation of the negation, and therefore in education in Hegel, that the universality of ignorance is comprehended, that is, that error itself is true. This, as we have been arguing, is the nature of education in Hegel. In several of the chapters above we have seen how, when the actuality of death in life - negation of negation - is eschewed, it defines otherness per se. The idea that negation in thought is only error - that error is 'other' than truth - is just such an exporting of death. If the truth of error is comprehended, as it is in education in Hegel, then death has become its own groundless absolute knowing, and, again, it is only learning that can hold the truth of such negation as its own actuality. Levi- nas, in casting truth beyond the error of totality, is in fact avoiding the truth of the vulnerability that is so central and yet at times so far from his work.
Educational imperative
Finally in this chapter to the question of education as a moral imperative. Does education in Hegel feed the other with bread from its own mouth? Levinas's political philosophy is so appealing because it appears to offer a transcendental, perhaps categorical, perhaps unconditional imperative that I am commanded by the Other to feed the stranger over and above my own needs. Does anything in Hegel come close to this? It does. The question for the master here is not, as in Levinas, am I commanded to give, for it is in the nature of mastery that one master can refuse another. The question really is how do I learn that the command is just? The answer is that one can only experience the command within the social relations that already shape the command and its reception, and that means experiencing the command, the imperative, as an autoimmunity. To help the other is to oppose myself. Accepted at face value, I can react to the command as being impossible or
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unwelcome, and walk past the stranger who needs help; or I can help in bad conscience; or I can give food to the first stranger but not to the second. Each of these responses speaks from within the impossibility of the uncon- ditional command. But philosophically, I can learn of the significance of the truth of this impossibility, that it is in the impossibility that I am able to learn why and how giving bread is my own truth in relation to myself as well as to the other. It is when I learn that the command to love thy neighbour as thyself is within the experience where I am already other and the other is not me, that it offers an education different from that found in Levinas. I am commanded to give only because I know the other to be other to my otherness.
Thus, it is not that we are the same that commands my generosity. It is that I can recognize the difference of the other in myself, even though I can never have this as an abstract mutual recognition. This is perhaps the most fundamental difference between Levinas and Hegel regarding the relation of self and other. The imperative in education in Hegel is not just to feed the stranger but to know why to feed him, which means to know the truth of our relationship and thus also to know the stranger in my own otherness. That I should treat my neighbour as myself carries the imperative of double negation where I am already other and the other is not me. How else could I know to feed him unless his otherness to me and my otherness to myself learn of themselves within the impossibility of their being the same?
Generosity, here, is autoimmune, and difficult, because as master I have to accept generosity as an antagonistic self-education. Giving reveals me as the face-to-face of life and death. As life I am already death in life, I am already other to myself. But death is not me and therefore I am not the other. Giving plays out this crisis of identity, and is an education that carries its own imperative. Learning generosity is hard because generosity is never enough, it is never a blank cheque. This aporia of giving educates us regard- ing self and other. When I give I have to suffer this education, namely that I am already other and yet the other is not me.
I am not fulfilled in my giv- ing and this lack of fulfilment is exactly the truth of giving, the truth of death in life. The imperative of education in Hegel is not simply to give or to be generous; it is to risk the learning that it offers us. To do justice to the other here is the imperative of education in Hegel. Or, of course, one could sell all one has and give it to the poor - but the man (and, indeed, the nation) were sorrowful on hearing this, for he was very rich. 13
Notes
1 Levinas's view that such a criticism is facile will be returned to below.
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2 In a chapter which in essence is arguing that Levinas's notion of the absolutely unassimilable Other is an oxymoron, the question of the capitalization of 'other' is raised. In upper case it is the ineffability of God that is prioritized, whereas in lower case it is absolute knowing that is veiled. That said, I retain capitalization for Levinas's absolutely Other as it keeps in view its opposition to otherness in Hegel. The ambiguity that the other - say, the stranger - is the Other in Levinas is retained, where appropriate, by the use of Other. I have not, however, amended any direct quotations.
3 Levinas uses the notion of recollection here (se recueillir and le recueillement) to describe the revelation of the transcendent in the welcome of the feminine face. See Levinas, 1969: 150-5; 1961: 124-8.
4 For a philosophy of the teacher working with education in negation, and with the truth of the teacher therein, see Tubbs (2005b).
5 In a private letter, Howard describes Levinas and the Political as 'a bleak read'.
6 There is not space to compare Levinas with Derrida here. We can note, however, that the totality of war is a similar effect to the totality of difference-opposition,
and that its incompletion is its autoimmunity.
7 The full paragraph from Caygill here reads as follows: 'As part of the Diaspora he
has, according to his own theory, not only the right but the obligation to question those actions of the State of Israel that are idolatrous or that diverge from its pro- phetic inspiration. Indeed we shall see that, on some occasions, Levinas did act according to his political principles, but also that on others he remained silent or, it might be argued, privileged the work of the state over the prophetic principles of the work of justice. The possibility of the latter - in the face of Levinas's own thought - is not unconnected with the persistent discourse of sacrifice that attends his reflections on Israel. This cannot but bring him into an uncomfort- able proximity with idolatry and the risk of the consequent deflation of his own political and ethical thought' (2002: 176).
8 While Caygill concerns himself with the effect of this opposition on the political in Levinas, in fact it is an opposition that disrupts the whole of Levinas's project in Otherwise than Being. Significant here, as Caygill points out, is that Levinas aban- dons 'the language of metaphysics' (2002: 124) employed in Totality and Infinity in order to frame a 'project of religious and social theory' (2002: 124). The third party of metaphysics and politics, and of ego and alterity in Totality and Infinity, becomes divided from itself in Otherwise than Being and portrayed as two middles, as illeity and justice.
9 The arguments presented now until the end of the chapter lean heavily on what has been presented above in Chapters 1 and 2.
10 We have been carrying this ambiguity as Other.
11 Kierkegaard calls this 'repetition' forwards, but I have kept recollection here
to illustrate better its autoimmunity to itself; see Kierkegaard (1983). See also
footnote 11 of Introduction.
12 This is the same insight that Nietzsche noted in the historical man and
is Zarathustra's most abysmal thought, that all 'I will' is really only 'what was'.
Ressentiment here is the will's refusal to accept the universal nature of this 'error'.
13 Matt. 19. 22; Lk. 18. 23.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 6 I-Philosophy
[N]o wise man ever wished to be younger.
[I]t can be said that man is prior to the boy in substance and completion,
but the boy is before the man in generation and in time.
Introduction
(Aquinas, 1998: 25)1
This chapter reconstructs the Phenomenology of Spirit as a spiritual education of the modern reflective subject. It does so in order to illustrate the spiritual education that is carried in and by the Western experience of self and other. It retrieves, or recollects, the stages of spirit's phenomenological education as stages in the spiritual life of a modern reflective subject from childhood, youth and adulthood to old age.
The Phenomenology is the story of the spiritual education of the West from Ancient Greece to early nineteenth century Europe. 2 Its dynamic is the way that life, in its perspective as victor over death, continually misrecognizes itself as independent from its struggle with death. The forms that this mis- recognition takes are self and other, both within the one individual - the I - and external to him - the We. Death continually returns in the form of negation to teach life, or the self, of the truth it is suppressing. These nega- tions are the shapes taken by spiritual education, and the Aufhebung they carry is actual in the recollection of itself as spirit.
As we will see, this spiritual education comes to know itself in and as the recollection that is life in death and death in life, or as absolute spirit. But, equally important, this philosophical education is still the truth of the indi- vidual reflective subject who is already other to himself and to the (external) other. The Aufhebung of these two negations has its subject and substance in preserving the negations in philosophical education, and not in any final overcoming of the reflective subject who is being educated in this way.
(Swift, 1886: 113)
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This education is actual, then, in and as I-philosophy, that is, as the individual who learns himself. I-philosophy is recollection as absolute spirit and is the learning that knows itself as the science of experience. It is as I-philosophy that Hegel's philosophies of Right, Religion, etc. are written. However, in this chapter we will restrict ourselves to the spiritual education formative of I-philosophy in the Phenomenology.
Both the content and the structure of the Phenomenology are part of this education. As such, it is a spiritual education unlike that, for example, of Augustine in The Confessions or al-Ghazali in Deliverance from Error. While it involves spirit's confession to itself regarding its own mistakes in its experi- ences of thinking the true, this confession takes a modern form in the diremption of the I and the We. Included among these mistakes is the idea that this spiritual education is simply chronological, as for example the edu- cation outlined by Rousseau in Emile. In fact, spiritual education in Hegel works backwards as recollection as much as it works forwards as develop- ment. It is part of the method of the Phenomenology to disrupt chronology in line with the ambiguities of the education it is following, while at the same time still being a discernible development.
Hegel described the Phenomenology as a science of the experience of con- sciousness. This means that the structure of the book is determined by how thought works rather than how history appears. In the Phenomenology thought is concerned to find its history in chronological history. This devel- opment works behind the back of chronological history as spiritual education. When this latter can recollect its own development, spiritual education has determined itself as absolute spirit. But this is not just another dogmatic historical standpoint. It is also that which knows itself in its own groundlessness, its absolute negation, in and as its learning of this ground- lessness. As we have seen in previous chapters, only learning can be the something of the nothing. This is the truth of old age, as we will come to see, and it is the eternal circle and finite education that constitutes absolute spirit and that is known in and as education in Hegel. Therefore, the stages in spiritual education of childhood, youth, adulthood and old age that we will follow are not simply the chronological development of the reflective subject. They are, rather, the component parts of the recollection that knows them as itself. Spiritual personal development and chronological personal development may coincide to varying extents, but the former refer to a spiritual education that a subject may or may not have during his life. Indeed, such a spiritual education may be precisely what is missing in the contradictions and aporias lived out within the chronology of a reflective subject's life.
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Nor are the stages of childhood, youth, etc. arbitrarily applied to spiritual development. They arise within the recollection of spirit when it looks back at the different characteristics of its own development. Also, because educa- tion in the Phenomenology and in this chapter is one of recollection, this education begins not with the child but with the modern reflective subject in the social world who recalls his becoming this recollection. Childhood is its immediacy; youth is its time of uncertainty in mediation; adulthood is the certainty of the self; and old age is the whole that recollects these stages as itself, as I-philosophy. There is no certainty however, that spirit's develop- ment will match the facts of any individual life. As Hegel is reported to have said when asked about the difference between philosophy and facts, so much the worse for the facts.
There is one final point to be made here before turning to the Phenome- nology directly. The modern political subject is defined as free in his separa- tion from, and not in his union with, the other. As such, modern political experience is dualistic, divided between the individual and the social. The social is other to the free individual, and his experience of law and of its categorical imperatives is, at worst, one of heteronomy and, at best, one of aporia. This determines how the modern person sees his own development, that is, as a relation to himself and, separately, as a relation to others. In what follows I have found it helpful to call the latter a sociological educa- tion. Sociology articulates these tensions between self and society in many forms. But a sociology of sociology is needed if this experience of contin- gency, where the I is torn between personal and social freedoms that contradict each other, is to be able to comprehend itself as a shape of philo- sophical and spiritual education. That the Phenomenology is structured in this way is in itself a recognition of its own moments within and contingent upon essentially modern social and political relations.
It will be helpful at this point to say a little about the way the chapter is now organized. It has two main divisions. Part A recollects the education of the I, and Part B recollects this education as the I that is We. It is common in work on Hegel to call these the stages of reason and spirit, respectively, but I want these terms to emerge in the education and I have therefore given priority to the terms I and We. In each of the Parts A and B there is the development from childhood to youth to adulthood. The repetition of the headings is also the return of the I and the We to each other. The chap- ter ends with a section on absolute knowing as old age which recollects the whole of itself in life and death, or more accurately as death in life.
We begin then in the recollection of the immediate beginning of the reflective subject, that is, in childhood.
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Childhood
Childhood for Hegel is the time of immediacy, that is, of a consciousness that consists of will without responsibility to itself. Consciousness begins with the awareness of objects through the senses, objects that, as such, are immediately present. The child learns most in these early years because he is open to the outer world and all that it introduces to his senses. But this sense-certainty will be unable to sustain itself in such immediacy, for objects come and go. How is the child to know these objects when they are not present to his senses? This is the same as asking how the child can deal with the change from 'this is' to 'it was'. The absence forces a change in con- sciousness, where the object is now the thought of the object. This thought is, as it were, the result of the loss of immediacy, even though at this early stage it may only be an immediate thought. The child will also attempt to give himself a presence in the world. Immediate at first, this too will suffer the failure of immediacy, where this presence is opposed by other such presences. Put together, these two experiences of the loss of immediacy force the child into a different stance in the world, one which is gradually developing into the impermanence of all objects, that is, into their being thought. Thought, then, gradually becomes aware of itself as the 'I' or the ego of the child. The I, here, is the instability of immediacy becoming known to it and is experienced as will.
This will has to learn of itself as part of the failure of immediacy. Objects are perceived as stable only in the knowing of them, and they are known only in contact to other objects. Perception differentiates objects according to their properties and conceptualizes them, even if only in memory to begin with. But this is the beginning of understanding in the child, for it is where the world is known according to its being thought. This understand- ing of the world is itself immediate. Hegel argues here for the child's early education beyond the family to be one that does not prioritize the immedi- acy of the world in feeling and in the senses over the failure of such immediacy to sustain itself and the thoughts of the world that this induces. The child needs to think the world, for this is how and where the path to adulthood and to freedom begins. To fetishize the feeling at this stage in the child's education risks encouraging a merely arbitrary response to the world of objects and other people.
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