He or she re-minds us of the way death, negatively, is
constitutive
already of our life as human beings.
Education in Hegel
First, the self as the I is not other to itself because otherness is grounded in what is not the I.
Second, the self, because it is I, is also not the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 30 Education in Hegel
other that exists heteronomously, that is, it is not the other who is slave, or animal or object, nor is it the other person because, as sovereign, these per- sons are indifferent to each other. Thus, the I is not other both internally and externally. However, education in Hegel knows the educative signifi- cance for the I in this certainty that it is not other. The certainty of the I and the loss of certainty as otherness cannot (yet) find themselves in each other. But the certainty of the self is so only relative to the other. This is already foreclosed in saying that the certainty of the I is that it is not other. The I is defined positively by being defined negatively, that is, against what it is not. That the I is not the other means that the I is only in relation to what it is not. This is the first element of the experience that constitutes the philoso- phy of the other. He does not yet understand that this is the same otherness that he exported from himself. But this experience of the vulnerability of self-certainty, of the loss of certainty to uncertainty and of independence to dependence, is the beginning of wisdom. The self is now known, in fear and trembling, as the opposite of what it took itself to be.
The second experience sees the self come to learn that this vulnerability has a name and a truth of its own. The name of this vulnerability of the self is the other, because it is this other to which the self is indebted for his own identity. The self here is no longer immune to his own aporetic identity. Rather, he is made to suffer by that which he thought he had eschewed, namely, otherness to the identity of the life called I. The truth of this vulner- ability is even more powerful because its truth is the opposite of the truth that the self assumed for itself. The truth of the self who is not other is now the truth of the self who is not self.
If the philosophy of the other consisted only in the radical instability of the self, then life might well be called diffe? rance. Alternatively, if the differ- ence of self and other is reconciled in being understood, then life might be called mutual recognition. But the loss of the truth of the self is not the overcoming of the self, nor is it the not overcoming of the self. It is rather the Aufhebung of the self, and that means that what is lost is also retained, and that this loss and retention between them form a further relation that re-forms - is the re-formation of - that first relation. Neither loss nor self are overcome and somehow left behind. Their re-formed relation is proof of their persistence for they are the component parts of this re-formation. This we must now explore as the third partner in the philosophy of the other.
The self that is not self is having returned to it that which it thought con- stituted no part of itself, that is, its vulnerability to otherness. Now it finds vulnerability at its core. But in addition it finds that this internal vulnerability
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 31
also has an external existence. Since vulnerability was other to the self, vul- nerability exists in everything that was deemed as other to the self by the self. Death was other than life, slave other than master, and now otherness per se is other than the self. The truth of loss that now pervades the self has an objective existence outside of himself. This truth is none other than that which was the part of the formation of the self that the self discarded. His arrogance is coming back to haunt him. His new truth as not-self is found to have a real existence as what is not self. Thus, self and other are related to each other once again. We should not say that they are re-united for they were never united. As recollection death was always other. But we can say that a relation is formed between them in the experience that the self has had of his loss of certainty and of this loss being in the world as what is other to himself. They are the same truth, but they are this same truth only in and as the education of the self. Their relation is existent only in this education because in education, and indeed, as education, the ambiguity of this rela- tion is its own truth.
Education in Hegel can hold negations together because education in Hegel is the self-formative circle of the same returning to itself and making a difference in doing so. It is in such self-determining opposition that learn- ing appears as both subject and substance. Only this philosophical learning can have loss as self-development, self-education, and self-re-formation, for it has its own end in its own loss and its own loss as its own end; and both of these it has as its own revolution and re-formation. Thus, in the case of self and other that we are exploring here, self and other are not united in a mutual recognition nor differentiated as diffe? rance or rhizome (Deleuze). They are, however, related in an experience of their shared negativity such that the truth of the self as not self, and the truth of other as not self, become formative of the self whose experience this is. The self here learns the truth of himself, and learns that the truth of himself is in the learning. He cannot become the other, for it is still the self that is having this learning experience. He cannot not be the other either, for that loss is now integral to his own identity. If he cannot be the other and cannot not be the other, what is he? He is the education carried in the triadic phenomenology of aporetic identity.
The educative significance of this aporetic experience of self and other is the philosophy of the other. It is the concept, the knowing, of the other by the self. The difficulty of this education is captured by the following phrase: I am already other and the other is not me. I am already other because the certainty of my self-identity is already defined against that which is other than this living I. The second half of the phrase - the other is not me - contains
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 32 Education in Hegel
the substance of the education that grounds the philosophy of the other. On the one hand, the other is not me, but on the other hand, the other is not me. If we add a hyphen to the last two words the meaning becomes clearer; the other is (the I that is already) not-me. Since the self is already not itself, not-me, and the other is also not me, the self and the other are the same in their difference. That which was exported by the self cannot be returned to it in any pure form; it is too late for that. But the self can see the meaning and the significance for it of having done so. It has returned to itself the part of itself that it eschewed, that is, what is experienced as loss is returned to it also as loss; what is experienced as vulnerability is returned to it also as vulnerability. The lack of unity in the relation of loss to itself is the actuality of the other to the modern bourgeois self. 'I am already other and the other is not me' is a statement of the actuality of the modern relation of self and other, an actuality that has to be thought if the misrecognition of self and other, and of life and death, are to have any formative social, politi- cal and philosophical import. 5 It is to this import that we turn now in the final two sections of this chapter.
Living death
I want to explore a little the education that philosophy can carry regarding the origin of the I in the life and death struggle. As we saw above, the veil worn by the Minister walked hand in hand with death. Why should this be so? It is because the veil is the truth of death in life. When the face-to-face becomes face-to-veil, as it did for the Minister's parishioners, the face has reflected back to it the veil that it also wears, the veil that is, however, trans- parent and that is seen through but not also seen. It takes the veil to come face-to-face with itself for the veil to become visible. But what, then, is the relation to death here? Following on from the life and death struggle just presented, life has to learn of itself and of the truth of itself from its experi- ence of being finite and of being able to die, to vanish completely. Life that presents itself as master holds itself apart from its relation to death, for mas- tery is the export of death to the life of another. This is mastery; not over death itself (although this is part of its illusion) but over its relation to death in life. The veil of the master is transparent but present. It veils the death that stalks his certainty. When this transparent veil of self-delusion is exchanged for a real veil, the wearer reveals the uncertainty of the master. He reveals it to himself, for he knows he is acknowledging his absolute vul- nerability. He becomes absolutely vulnerable because he can no longer
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 33
present to others a transparent veil of his certainty; and he reveals it to others for they see their own veil, their own illusory certainties, now revealed by his veil. The veiled face-to-face reveals the truth in a way that the face- to-face never can. This stands as a political critique of the face-to-face in Levinas. There is no such face-to-face that is not mediated by the transpar- ent veil of mastery or by the prior face-to-face of life and death. The claim for the breaking through of God into earthly identity does not pay suffi- cient respect to the power of life to sustain us in our identity. I may care, even weep for the suffering of others, but always from behind my veil. Only in exposing and wearing my veil am I really face-to-face. 6
Where, then, might we look for the presence of death carried in life? We saw in the struggle how life learns of itself only in the experience of its being abolished in death. The truth of life here is of the recollection of itself as pure vulnerability, but as not (yet) dead. As Hegel says, absolute negation is not for those who survive the struggle, but it is, nevertheless, the truth of their survival. Where in life, then, is this recollection an education about the truth of life? It can be found in the sadness of facing death. It is in sadness that recollection as the actuality of death meets its always absent and always present teacher, but this experience of sadness reforms sadness into something substantial, for sadness is the recollection of death in life. The mourners are strangely comforted.
Philosophy knows this. It knows how the life and death struggle is carried in each life and has its unity and difference in each individual. The individ- ual so often only recognizes this in extreme situations where death is seen to be close. It can be a lover, a relation, a public figure, even a princess. The death of any loved one, ours or someone else's, raises the philosophical rec- ognition of the presence of death in our life and existence. The bereaved acts here as spiritual ambassador for the truth, able to educate all who see in him their own relation to the true, that is, to absolute vulnerability. 7
More generally, when someone dies, and we are in contact (in whatever way) with that death, we are educated about life. I do not mean here to restrict myself to Kierkegaard's observation that we will all die at some time and that the sooner we realize this, the better - although of course he is right. The more subtle point Kierkegaard makes is not live now, for tomor- row we die. It is rather that we should carry death with us as teacher. But I want to extend Kierkegaard's observation here. Being close to the death of another we are reminded of how death is constitutive of ourselves. Phi- losophy knows sadness as negation and as the uncertainty, anxiety and doubt that accompanies the deepest questions about who we are and why we are here. Philosophy, as the presence of doubt, is also the presence of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 34 Education in Hegel
death as teacher. Philosophy knows the I that is not I, but knows it forma- tively, as an education. The protection against this education is the appearance of the I as independent, free and without guile in its identity. This appearance is the transparency of the veil that hides the not I and hides this hiding. But the veil cannot always remain hidden, especially when it meets the death of those close to it. At the funeral of a loved one we are mostly death, we are not I at a deep level of prescience, at least for a time. The death of the loved one brings us closer to the loved one even than in life, for we are not I as he or she is not I. Negative meets negative in this life and death struggle. Here there is the mutuality of death with death. And this is positive. The truth of the bereaved, on such occasions, becomes death as our own truth.
He or she re-minds us of the way death, negatively, is constitutive already of our life as human beings. This is the way in which the sadness of funerals can be enjoyed as life-affirming, that is, education- ally at a profound spiritual level. Sadness is the name of the truth, and philosophy is its means of inspiring comprehension or recollection. It is, in Hegel's language, where the slave is his own work, a living death. This same truth, as we will see below, constitutes what Hegel calls world spirit.
Living death seen in this way clearly raises the political question about how one should relate to the other, be it other in colour, gender, age, race, sexuality, religion, culture, nation, or whatever. The freedom of pluralism also wears the veil of political transparency. Power requires to be read into the relation of self and other, not out of it, if the truth that it carries is to be open to its being learned. 8 One recognizes here the caution that is needed. To criticize pluralism looks as if it might be advocating inequality, or even practising prejudice and discrimination. On the contrary, what it com- mends is that the actuality of inequality not be suppressed or hidden. Inequality between self and other is a structural feature of their political relationship. It does not cancel itself just because it works both ways because, as we have seen, their relationship is grounded in negativity and the nega- tivity of the two selves does not add up to a whole. This lack of completion is present whether the self affirms his difference to the other or their mutu- ality. The other is already the representative of the incompletion of the relation.
Thus the political question as to how one secures justice between self and other is translated philosophically into how one does justice to their actual relationship. Anything else is an injustice against their recollection of their origin and determination. Doing justice to the actuality of self and other means retrieving the struggle that forms them. Such retrieval, in recollec- tion, is educative in three ways. First, the self learns it is not-I. Second, this
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 35
self learns that the other is also not this I. Third, the self knows that it sus- tains this education. Here, then, education is a value in itself, and is the value that does justice to self and other. But even if this work and this justice are also undertaken by the other, and even though they will be the same in their difference, justice to their relation still demands that it cannot be abstracted into a middle ground. The just relation of self and other requires their truth in their struggle. Hiding the struggle by assertions of sameness or difference is only an illusory justice. To really do justice to the difference of the other one must also do justice to the other in oneself. The relation is both of these struggles.
World spirit
World spirit might well be the most difficult and contentious element of Hegelian philosophy. If it is understood without being grounded in educa- tion in Hegel then it is reduced to a statement of imperialism seemingly advocating that the West drag the rest of the world into modernity, justified because this will be rational progress. We will explore in more detail the way this unfolds in the history of philosophy in the following chapter. Against such views we can read world spirit as education in Hegel, and in particular as constituted by the philosophy of the other that we have just described. What is at stake here regarding world spirit is nothing less than the idea of humanity known and understood as the actuality of the relation of self and other on the world stage. It is where education in Hegel achieves global sig- nificance. Again here we will interweave the themes of the veil, life, death, loss and vulnerability around the relation of self and other in order to pres- ent world spirit as education in Hegel.
As we saw above, life, in asserting its identity in a certainty immune to its own aporetic grounding, excludes death as other than identity. Death is the negation in which life begins its self-conscious existence, but its contribu- tion to this formative experience is eschewed. It is not hard to see how the certainty of the Western self repeats this eschewal in order to shield it from its own vulnerabilities. Rather than learn of itself from the other, it prefers to protect the illusions of its certainties. It does this by many means, all of which have in common the export of negation, that is, of fear, vulnerability and death, to those who are other than itself. At one extreme, when fear of death in life is total, when it is fear lacking fear and is without mediation or learning, then it seeks to secure itself in the idolatry of uniforms and scape- goats. Lacking mediation it is free to export total negation, free, that is, to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 36 Education in Hegel
export death without the negation of the self of the exporter. At its furthest limit, this is genocide. Evil lives in such privation of education.
But even without the totality of uniforms and scapegoats what chance has the other, the stranger, if we - and here 'we' should not be avoided, because it reveals the hidden veil of Western self-interest - if we do not know at whom we gaze because we suppress self-gaze? Modernity is not just out- sourcing its call centres. It is exporting fear and vulnerability in the form of conflict and instability to ensure that they are not ours.
After all, who is the easier to bomb? Is it the other who is undecideable or otherwise-than-being, yet-to-come, and beyond comprehension, or is it the other that I find in myself as the truth of my own vulnerability? Is not the answer here in fact that it is the unknowable and incommensurable other who is expendable, since he is not recognized as my own humanity? To know thyself in the sense carried within Hegel's philosophy of the other is not a Western logocentric ontotheological imperialism. On the contrary, the refusal to know thyself is the domination of abstract reason over its own grounding in death, loss and vulnerability. Knowing thyself is the disrup- tion of that abstract domination. It is an education wherein what I learn of myself is also what I learn of the otherness that constitutes my vulnerable identity. Neither is this solipsism. Solipsism is where the I refuses its own relation and refuses its negation, and refuses the implications for it of this negation. To refuse to know thyself is to refuse to know the other. This is the refusal that finds it easier to drop bombs.
Thus, there is no stranger who is not already known to me, and there is no self that is not already lost to me. This is the concept of the other in modernity. In the concept of the other he and I are the same in our differ- ence, and justice must always be done to the difference for the same to be sustained, and to the same for difference to be sustained. The other is not me; the other, therefore, is also me in my vulnerable non-sovereignty. The 'also' here is spirit because spirit is the return and reform of the relation of sovereignty and non-sovereignty in and as human education. Spirit is the learning of vulnerability and is the vulnerability of this learning. When the 'also' refers to the otherness of the idea of humanity this is world spirit in education in Hegel.
Indeed, this 'also' currently takes shape in the bombs that carry the export of otherness beyond the West, and in the cheap commodities that return it seemingly without implication for our vulnerability. 9 But world spirit knows this exporting of vulnerability and importing of security philosophically, that is, as its own formative experience and education. It knows the vulnera- bility that motivates the export and it knows the fear and trembling that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 37
comes with the import. The education carried in world spirit is not just a vulnerability of nation states to each other. It is also the vulnerability of the consequences and implications of a life-style that discards such conse- quences and implications as far away as is politically and technologically possible. To learn to see the relation of freedom (of life-style) to death is to learn to risk the education of the self regarding its relation to itself and its other. The actuality of this education will be sadness. Sadness registers my experience of the other who must suffer for my security, and it registers also my resignation at the intractability of this suffering. If sadness is all that can be learned here, then there is no truth to it, for it would mean that there is no educative import to the sadness, that we learn nothing from it. But because the relation between my not-self and the other who is not me, is (not-me), this sadness has formative significance. If we restrict world spirit to life and death, to feelings of sadness, we are avoiding the actuality of sad- ness, and we are avoiding its political education. We are avoiding being changed by the truth that presents itself in sadness.
However, we cannot ignore the importance that the distance of self and other has on this education. The further away death is from us, in time as in space, then the less powerful becomes its truth. There are more tears shed for the local death with universal significance than for the universal significance of the death local to somewhere else. How is the return of death to realize itself as world spirit when its truth exhausts itself the further it has to travel? Our answer here can be that the return is carried in our philosophical education, for it is in philosophy that the education of self and other has actuality. It is where modernity carries its negative truth know- ingly and with comprehension about its relation to the other. Modernity's un-philosophical masters have eschewed their own philosophical educa- tion. Even the hypocrisy of legitimate death - collateral damage - and illegitimate death - innocent victims - has not revealed to them the veil of mastery, worn invisibly, that kills the meaning of death, and kills the other carried in it.
How hard is it, then, to be in the truth of the relation of self and other, whether between and within persons, cultures, communities, or the nations that constitute the political totality of the earth? It is hard in proportion to the extent to which the relation to one's death in and by negation is charac- terized by its suppression, its eschewal and its denial. The greater the extent to which fears and insecurities are pushed on to others, at home, abroad, and soon no doubt, into space, the less is the self sufficiently educated to be able to meet them in the truth of the encounter. It is in education's own sub- jectivity and substance - its revolution and reform of itself - that the singular
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 38 Education in Hegel
can also be universal, can also know the other. This is to learn otherness as the truth of the self in the difficulty of remaining the self who is vulnerable to this truth. Known as having its truth in this education, and contra both the abstract post-foundational claims for undecideability and the excesses of the standpoint of mutual recognition, the concept of the other reclaims all the imperial terms again: 'our', 'we', 'West', 'logos', 'I', 'reason', 'us', 'society', 'spirit', 'absolute', 'property', 'person', etc, in order to be able to speak of otherness with the ambivalence of the complicity of mastery that it demands. The more unseen is the veil of the master, the more difficult is it to learn that I am already the other and the other is not me.
Notes
1 I first came across this story by way of Josh Cohen (2005).
2 The meaning carried by the term 'recollection' here is dealt with in more detail
in Chapter 2.
3 The otherness of animals is another recent export of death to recognize itself in
and as the vulnerability of the master.
4 The hyphen signals the relation here to the Aufhebung which, in the following
chapter, is defined as self (re-)formation. See also Chapter, note 3.
5 Note here that the concept of otherness is not described as 'I am already other; the other returns to me', which would be closer to a formulation that might be inferred from Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) according to the dialectic of enlightenment. This is because the dialectic of enlightenment describes the revolution of subjectivity but not its re-formation. Thus subjectivity is famously caught in a frozen dialectic, and is the key understanding Adorno's melancholic science of negative dialectic. There may yet be further modern reasons for such
melancholia.
6 This discussion of Levinas is returned to below in Chapter 5.
7 Sometimes a public figure can embody for others the truth of this living death. In
thinking about this, I was watching the Ryder Cup of 2006. A golfer named Darren Clark was representing Europe against the United States. His wife had died of cancer only a few months before but he had made himself available to play. The emotions that this produced, most notably in the crowds at the K Club in Dublin, but also amongst the television audience, were precisely of the truth of living death that was embodied in him. This emotion was visible every time he appeared. Tiger Woods, a US golfer, had recently lost his own father, and the hug between the two grieving opponents was the embrace of the I that is We in sadness. And the humility felt in and for suffering is witness to this deepest of human educations.
8 This is true also of debates in social science regarding qualitative research. The way that certain qualitative research perspectives have embraced the idea that the otherness of the research object can be respected and not objectified is grounded in the veil of the veil. The freedom it appears to offer the object is a veil that hides the presuppositions of self and other that already ground the identity of both
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 39
the self of the researcher and the object of the research project as other. The self- assurance of the researcher grows in strength from both the funds she 'wins' to carry out the research and the reputation she seeks for herself in publishing the results. Here, precisely, the self of the researcher exports the uncertainty of other- ness to the research object for her own ends. The more 'open' the approaches to the object become, the more invisible becomes the veil.
9 This vulnerability, since 9/11 is also being returned as bombs.
? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 30 Education in Hegel
other that exists heteronomously, that is, it is not the other who is slave, or animal or object, nor is it the other person because, as sovereign, these per- sons are indifferent to each other. Thus, the I is not other both internally and externally. However, education in Hegel knows the educative signifi- cance for the I in this certainty that it is not other. The certainty of the I and the loss of certainty as otherness cannot (yet) find themselves in each other. But the certainty of the self is so only relative to the other. This is already foreclosed in saying that the certainty of the I is that it is not other. The I is defined positively by being defined negatively, that is, against what it is not. That the I is not the other means that the I is only in relation to what it is not. This is the first element of the experience that constitutes the philoso- phy of the other. He does not yet understand that this is the same otherness that he exported from himself. But this experience of the vulnerability of self-certainty, of the loss of certainty to uncertainty and of independence to dependence, is the beginning of wisdom. The self is now known, in fear and trembling, as the opposite of what it took itself to be.
The second experience sees the self come to learn that this vulnerability has a name and a truth of its own. The name of this vulnerability of the self is the other, because it is this other to which the self is indebted for his own identity. The self here is no longer immune to his own aporetic identity. Rather, he is made to suffer by that which he thought he had eschewed, namely, otherness to the identity of the life called I. The truth of this vulner- ability is even more powerful because its truth is the opposite of the truth that the self assumed for itself. The truth of the self who is not other is now the truth of the self who is not self.
If the philosophy of the other consisted only in the radical instability of the self, then life might well be called diffe? rance. Alternatively, if the differ- ence of self and other is reconciled in being understood, then life might be called mutual recognition. But the loss of the truth of the self is not the overcoming of the self, nor is it the not overcoming of the self. It is rather the Aufhebung of the self, and that means that what is lost is also retained, and that this loss and retention between them form a further relation that re-forms - is the re-formation of - that first relation. Neither loss nor self are overcome and somehow left behind. Their re-formed relation is proof of their persistence for they are the component parts of this re-formation. This we must now explore as the third partner in the philosophy of the other.
The self that is not self is having returned to it that which it thought con- stituted no part of itself, that is, its vulnerability to otherness. Now it finds vulnerability at its core. But in addition it finds that this internal vulnerability
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 31
also has an external existence. Since vulnerability was other to the self, vul- nerability exists in everything that was deemed as other to the self by the self. Death was other than life, slave other than master, and now otherness per se is other than the self. The truth of loss that now pervades the self has an objective existence outside of himself. This truth is none other than that which was the part of the formation of the self that the self discarded. His arrogance is coming back to haunt him. His new truth as not-self is found to have a real existence as what is not self. Thus, self and other are related to each other once again. We should not say that they are re-united for they were never united. As recollection death was always other. But we can say that a relation is formed between them in the experience that the self has had of his loss of certainty and of this loss being in the world as what is other to himself. They are the same truth, but they are this same truth only in and as the education of the self. Their relation is existent only in this education because in education, and indeed, as education, the ambiguity of this rela- tion is its own truth.
Education in Hegel can hold negations together because education in Hegel is the self-formative circle of the same returning to itself and making a difference in doing so. It is in such self-determining opposition that learn- ing appears as both subject and substance. Only this philosophical learning can have loss as self-development, self-education, and self-re-formation, for it has its own end in its own loss and its own loss as its own end; and both of these it has as its own revolution and re-formation. Thus, in the case of self and other that we are exploring here, self and other are not united in a mutual recognition nor differentiated as diffe? rance or rhizome (Deleuze). They are, however, related in an experience of their shared negativity such that the truth of the self as not self, and the truth of other as not self, become formative of the self whose experience this is. The self here learns the truth of himself, and learns that the truth of himself is in the learning. He cannot become the other, for it is still the self that is having this learning experience. He cannot not be the other either, for that loss is now integral to his own identity. If he cannot be the other and cannot not be the other, what is he? He is the education carried in the triadic phenomenology of aporetic identity.
The educative significance of this aporetic experience of self and other is the philosophy of the other. It is the concept, the knowing, of the other by the self. The difficulty of this education is captured by the following phrase: I am already other and the other is not me. I am already other because the certainty of my self-identity is already defined against that which is other than this living I. The second half of the phrase - the other is not me - contains
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 32 Education in Hegel
the substance of the education that grounds the philosophy of the other. On the one hand, the other is not me, but on the other hand, the other is not me. If we add a hyphen to the last two words the meaning becomes clearer; the other is (the I that is already) not-me. Since the self is already not itself, not-me, and the other is also not me, the self and the other are the same in their difference. That which was exported by the self cannot be returned to it in any pure form; it is too late for that. But the self can see the meaning and the significance for it of having done so. It has returned to itself the part of itself that it eschewed, that is, what is experienced as loss is returned to it also as loss; what is experienced as vulnerability is returned to it also as vulnerability. The lack of unity in the relation of loss to itself is the actuality of the other to the modern bourgeois self. 'I am already other and the other is not me' is a statement of the actuality of the modern relation of self and other, an actuality that has to be thought if the misrecognition of self and other, and of life and death, are to have any formative social, politi- cal and philosophical import. 5 It is to this import that we turn now in the final two sections of this chapter.
Living death
I want to explore a little the education that philosophy can carry regarding the origin of the I in the life and death struggle. As we saw above, the veil worn by the Minister walked hand in hand with death. Why should this be so? It is because the veil is the truth of death in life. When the face-to-face becomes face-to-veil, as it did for the Minister's parishioners, the face has reflected back to it the veil that it also wears, the veil that is, however, trans- parent and that is seen through but not also seen. It takes the veil to come face-to-face with itself for the veil to become visible. But what, then, is the relation to death here? Following on from the life and death struggle just presented, life has to learn of itself and of the truth of itself from its experi- ence of being finite and of being able to die, to vanish completely. Life that presents itself as master holds itself apart from its relation to death, for mas- tery is the export of death to the life of another. This is mastery; not over death itself (although this is part of its illusion) but over its relation to death in life. The veil of the master is transparent but present. It veils the death that stalks his certainty. When this transparent veil of self-delusion is exchanged for a real veil, the wearer reveals the uncertainty of the master. He reveals it to himself, for he knows he is acknowledging his absolute vul- nerability. He becomes absolutely vulnerable because he can no longer
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 33
present to others a transparent veil of his certainty; and he reveals it to others for they see their own veil, their own illusory certainties, now revealed by his veil. The veiled face-to-face reveals the truth in a way that the face- to-face never can. This stands as a political critique of the face-to-face in Levinas. There is no such face-to-face that is not mediated by the transpar- ent veil of mastery or by the prior face-to-face of life and death. The claim for the breaking through of God into earthly identity does not pay suffi- cient respect to the power of life to sustain us in our identity. I may care, even weep for the suffering of others, but always from behind my veil. Only in exposing and wearing my veil am I really face-to-face. 6
Where, then, might we look for the presence of death carried in life? We saw in the struggle how life learns of itself only in the experience of its being abolished in death. The truth of life here is of the recollection of itself as pure vulnerability, but as not (yet) dead. As Hegel says, absolute negation is not for those who survive the struggle, but it is, nevertheless, the truth of their survival. Where in life, then, is this recollection an education about the truth of life? It can be found in the sadness of facing death. It is in sadness that recollection as the actuality of death meets its always absent and always present teacher, but this experience of sadness reforms sadness into something substantial, for sadness is the recollection of death in life. The mourners are strangely comforted.
Philosophy knows this. It knows how the life and death struggle is carried in each life and has its unity and difference in each individual. The individ- ual so often only recognizes this in extreme situations where death is seen to be close. It can be a lover, a relation, a public figure, even a princess. The death of any loved one, ours or someone else's, raises the philosophical rec- ognition of the presence of death in our life and existence. The bereaved acts here as spiritual ambassador for the truth, able to educate all who see in him their own relation to the true, that is, to absolute vulnerability. 7
More generally, when someone dies, and we are in contact (in whatever way) with that death, we are educated about life. I do not mean here to restrict myself to Kierkegaard's observation that we will all die at some time and that the sooner we realize this, the better - although of course he is right. The more subtle point Kierkegaard makes is not live now, for tomor- row we die. It is rather that we should carry death with us as teacher. But I want to extend Kierkegaard's observation here. Being close to the death of another we are reminded of how death is constitutive of ourselves. Phi- losophy knows sadness as negation and as the uncertainty, anxiety and doubt that accompanies the deepest questions about who we are and why we are here. Philosophy, as the presence of doubt, is also the presence of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 34 Education in Hegel
death as teacher. Philosophy knows the I that is not I, but knows it forma- tively, as an education. The protection against this education is the appearance of the I as independent, free and without guile in its identity. This appearance is the transparency of the veil that hides the not I and hides this hiding. But the veil cannot always remain hidden, especially when it meets the death of those close to it. At the funeral of a loved one we are mostly death, we are not I at a deep level of prescience, at least for a time. The death of the loved one brings us closer to the loved one even than in life, for we are not I as he or she is not I. Negative meets negative in this life and death struggle. Here there is the mutuality of death with death. And this is positive. The truth of the bereaved, on such occasions, becomes death as our own truth.
He or she re-minds us of the way death, negatively, is constitutive already of our life as human beings. This is the way in which the sadness of funerals can be enjoyed as life-affirming, that is, education- ally at a profound spiritual level. Sadness is the name of the truth, and philosophy is its means of inspiring comprehension or recollection. It is, in Hegel's language, where the slave is his own work, a living death. This same truth, as we will see below, constitutes what Hegel calls world spirit.
Living death seen in this way clearly raises the political question about how one should relate to the other, be it other in colour, gender, age, race, sexuality, religion, culture, nation, or whatever. The freedom of pluralism also wears the veil of political transparency. Power requires to be read into the relation of self and other, not out of it, if the truth that it carries is to be open to its being learned. 8 One recognizes here the caution that is needed. To criticize pluralism looks as if it might be advocating inequality, or even practising prejudice and discrimination. On the contrary, what it com- mends is that the actuality of inequality not be suppressed or hidden. Inequality between self and other is a structural feature of their political relationship. It does not cancel itself just because it works both ways because, as we have seen, their relationship is grounded in negativity and the nega- tivity of the two selves does not add up to a whole. This lack of completion is present whether the self affirms his difference to the other or their mutu- ality. The other is already the representative of the incompletion of the relation.
Thus the political question as to how one secures justice between self and other is translated philosophically into how one does justice to their actual relationship. Anything else is an injustice against their recollection of their origin and determination. Doing justice to the actuality of self and other means retrieving the struggle that forms them. Such retrieval, in recollec- tion, is educative in three ways. First, the self learns it is not-I. Second, this
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 35
self learns that the other is also not this I. Third, the self knows that it sus- tains this education. Here, then, education is a value in itself, and is the value that does justice to self and other. But even if this work and this justice are also undertaken by the other, and even though they will be the same in their difference, justice to their relation still demands that it cannot be abstracted into a middle ground. The just relation of self and other requires their truth in their struggle. Hiding the struggle by assertions of sameness or difference is only an illusory justice. To really do justice to the difference of the other one must also do justice to the other in oneself. The relation is both of these struggles.
World spirit
World spirit might well be the most difficult and contentious element of Hegelian philosophy. If it is understood without being grounded in educa- tion in Hegel then it is reduced to a statement of imperialism seemingly advocating that the West drag the rest of the world into modernity, justified because this will be rational progress. We will explore in more detail the way this unfolds in the history of philosophy in the following chapter. Against such views we can read world spirit as education in Hegel, and in particular as constituted by the philosophy of the other that we have just described. What is at stake here regarding world spirit is nothing less than the idea of humanity known and understood as the actuality of the relation of self and other on the world stage. It is where education in Hegel achieves global sig- nificance. Again here we will interweave the themes of the veil, life, death, loss and vulnerability around the relation of self and other in order to pres- ent world spirit as education in Hegel.
As we saw above, life, in asserting its identity in a certainty immune to its own aporetic grounding, excludes death as other than identity. Death is the negation in which life begins its self-conscious existence, but its contribu- tion to this formative experience is eschewed. It is not hard to see how the certainty of the Western self repeats this eschewal in order to shield it from its own vulnerabilities. Rather than learn of itself from the other, it prefers to protect the illusions of its certainties. It does this by many means, all of which have in common the export of negation, that is, of fear, vulnerability and death, to those who are other than itself. At one extreme, when fear of death in life is total, when it is fear lacking fear and is without mediation or learning, then it seeks to secure itself in the idolatry of uniforms and scape- goats. Lacking mediation it is free to export total negation, free, that is, to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 36 Education in Hegel
export death without the negation of the self of the exporter. At its furthest limit, this is genocide. Evil lives in such privation of education.
But even without the totality of uniforms and scapegoats what chance has the other, the stranger, if we - and here 'we' should not be avoided, because it reveals the hidden veil of Western self-interest - if we do not know at whom we gaze because we suppress self-gaze? Modernity is not just out- sourcing its call centres. It is exporting fear and vulnerability in the form of conflict and instability to ensure that they are not ours.
After all, who is the easier to bomb? Is it the other who is undecideable or otherwise-than-being, yet-to-come, and beyond comprehension, or is it the other that I find in myself as the truth of my own vulnerability? Is not the answer here in fact that it is the unknowable and incommensurable other who is expendable, since he is not recognized as my own humanity? To know thyself in the sense carried within Hegel's philosophy of the other is not a Western logocentric ontotheological imperialism. On the contrary, the refusal to know thyself is the domination of abstract reason over its own grounding in death, loss and vulnerability. Knowing thyself is the disrup- tion of that abstract domination. It is an education wherein what I learn of myself is also what I learn of the otherness that constitutes my vulnerable identity. Neither is this solipsism. Solipsism is where the I refuses its own relation and refuses its negation, and refuses the implications for it of this negation. To refuse to know thyself is to refuse to know the other. This is the refusal that finds it easier to drop bombs.
Thus, there is no stranger who is not already known to me, and there is no self that is not already lost to me. This is the concept of the other in modernity. In the concept of the other he and I are the same in our differ- ence, and justice must always be done to the difference for the same to be sustained, and to the same for difference to be sustained. The other is not me; the other, therefore, is also me in my vulnerable non-sovereignty. The 'also' here is spirit because spirit is the return and reform of the relation of sovereignty and non-sovereignty in and as human education. Spirit is the learning of vulnerability and is the vulnerability of this learning. When the 'also' refers to the otherness of the idea of humanity this is world spirit in education in Hegel.
Indeed, this 'also' currently takes shape in the bombs that carry the export of otherness beyond the West, and in the cheap commodities that return it seemingly without implication for our vulnerability. 9 But world spirit knows this exporting of vulnerability and importing of security philosophically, that is, as its own formative experience and education. It knows the vulnera- bility that motivates the export and it knows the fear and trembling that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 37
comes with the import. The education carried in world spirit is not just a vulnerability of nation states to each other. It is also the vulnerability of the consequences and implications of a life-style that discards such conse- quences and implications as far away as is politically and technologically possible. To learn to see the relation of freedom (of life-style) to death is to learn to risk the education of the self regarding its relation to itself and its other. The actuality of this education will be sadness. Sadness registers my experience of the other who must suffer for my security, and it registers also my resignation at the intractability of this suffering. If sadness is all that can be learned here, then there is no truth to it, for it would mean that there is no educative import to the sadness, that we learn nothing from it. But because the relation between my not-self and the other who is not me, is (not-me), this sadness has formative significance. If we restrict world spirit to life and death, to feelings of sadness, we are avoiding the actuality of sad- ness, and we are avoiding its political education. We are avoiding being changed by the truth that presents itself in sadness.
However, we cannot ignore the importance that the distance of self and other has on this education. The further away death is from us, in time as in space, then the less powerful becomes its truth. There are more tears shed for the local death with universal significance than for the universal significance of the death local to somewhere else. How is the return of death to realize itself as world spirit when its truth exhausts itself the further it has to travel? Our answer here can be that the return is carried in our philosophical education, for it is in philosophy that the education of self and other has actuality. It is where modernity carries its negative truth know- ingly and with comprehension about its relation to the other. Modernity's un-philosophical masters have eschewed their own philosophical educa- tion. Even the hypocrisy of legitimate death - collateral damage - and illegitimate death - innocent victims - has not revealed to them the veil of mastery, worn invisibly, that kills the meaning of death, and kills the other carried in it.
How hard is it, then, to be in the truth of the relation of self and other, whether between and within persons, cultures, communities, or the nations that constitute the political totality of the earth? It is hard in proportion to the extent to which the relation to one's death in and by negation is charac- terized by its suppression, its eschewal and its denial. The greater the extent to which fears and insecurities are pushed on to others, at home, abroad, and soon no doubt, into space, the less is the self sufficiently educated to be able to meet them in the truth of the encounter. It is in education's own sub- jectivity and substance - its revolution and reform of itself - that the singular
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 38 Education in Hegel
can also be universal, can also know the other. This is to learn otherness as the truth of the self in the difficulty of remaining the self who is vulnerable to this truth. Known as having its truth in this education, and contra both the abstract post-foundational claims for undecideability and the excesses of the standpoint of mutual recognition, the concept of the other reclaims all the imperial terms again: 'our', 'we', 'West', 'logos', 'I', 'reason', 'us', 'society', 'spirit', 'absolute', 'property', 'person', etc, in order to be able to speak of otherness with the ambivalence of the complicity of mastery that it demands. The more unseen is the veil of the master, the more difficult is it to learn that I am already the other and the other is not me.
Notes
1 I first came across this story by way of Josh Cohen (2005).
2 The meaning carried by the term 'recollection' here is dealt with in more detail
in Chapter 2.
3 The otherness of animals is another recent export of death to recognize itself in
and as the vulnerability of the master.
4 The hyphen signals the relation here to the Aufhebung which, in the following
chapter, is defined as self (re-)formation. See also Chapter, note 3.
5 Note here that the concept of otherness is not described as 'I am already other; the other returns to me', which would be closer to a formulation that might be inferred from Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) according to the dialectic of enlightenment. This is because the dialectic of enlightenment describes the revolution of subjectivity but not its re-formation. Thus subjectivity is famously caught in a frozen dialectic, and is the key understanding Adorno's melancholic science of negative dialectic. There may yet be further modern reasons for such
melancholia.
6 This discussion of Levinas is returned to below in Chapter 5.
7 Sometimes a public figure can embody for others the truth of this living death. In
thinking about this, I was watching the Ryder Cup of 2006. A golfer named Darren Clark was representing Europe against the United States. His wife had died of cancer only a few months before but he had made himself available to play. The emotions that this produced, most notably in the crowds at the K Club in Dublin, but also amongst the television audience, were precisely of the truth of living death that was embodied in him. This emotion was visible every time he appeared. Tiger Woods, a US golfer, had recently lost his own father, and the hug between the two grieving opponents was the embrace of the I that is We in sadness. And the humility felt in and for suffering is witness to this deepest of human educations.
8 This is true also of debates in social science regarding qualitative research. The way that certain qualitative research perspectives have embraced the idea that the otherness of the research object can be respected and not objectified is grounded in the veil of the veil. The freedom it appears to offer the object is a veil that hides the presuppositions of self and other that already ground the identity of both
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 39
the self of the researcher and the object of the research project as other. The self- assurance of the researcher grows in strength from both the funds she 'wins' to carry out the research and the reputation she seeks for herself in publishing the results. Here, precisely, the self of the researcher exports the uncertainty of other- ness to the research object for her own ends. The more 'open' the approaches to the object become, the more invisible becomes the veil.
9 This vulnerability, since 9/11 is also being returned as bombs.
? ? ? ?
