No More Learning

It is the third partner, however, that is to prove more powerful than either of these responses. Spirit is present here as the appearance of an alienation of itself, that is, as a diremption between God and man. This appearance is known precisely in the contradictions that plague the person. His failed attempts to reform the world re-form him in and as the culture of spirit.
It is here that the reflective adult who is sceptical regarding the possibility of any common bond between his self-interest and the community will learn that this is precisely what he does have in common with everyone else. His education here is that the good act is always compromised in being enacted. Self-interest is inescapable. This self-interest and the hypocrisy of the self- less act are the new spiritual universality. It is how this person now realizes that he is in fact part of objective social life. His complicity is his new educa- tion and it is an education, again, in the hypocrisy of the stance that holds itself separate from social life. The good act cannot hide from the hypocrisy of its self-interest, but equally, self-interest cannot hide from its need for social life. This is a new shape of spirit. On the one hand, it commits to reason the superstitions that have been employed by faith in bringing God's law to earth. On the other hand, it also commits to reason the hypocrisies of earthly authorities in masking self-interest behind spiritual benevolence. Youthful spirit now finds equality and universality out of its own self-oppositions. This shape of spirit is the enlightenment of spirit that it is the work of true universality when it opposes pseudo-universality. The person now knows the third partner in ethical life has all along been spirit in which the I and the We are always related, even at those times when that relation is obscured behind the intrigue of seemingly benevolent self-interest. He knows now that wars of self-interest are barbarism but he knows also that there exists a powerful force by which to oppose this self-interest, and this is the idea of the equality of all men. This, then, is the culture of spirit, the philosophical education that finds spirit in the truth of liberty, fraternity and equality.
Adulthood
If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc. , beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
(Swift, 1886: 112)
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Spirit now embarks on the stage of its education where its abstract unity - enlightenment - becomes an object to itself as morality. Here again our reflective subject will experience spiritual education as one where an inter- nal certainty becomes other to itself. This is the education of spirit into adulthood.
To begin with, the fervour and excitement of spirit finding itself to be the equality of all men makes it forget the negations that constituted its self- (re-)formation. Any new beginning means, again, that the third partner has become another form of natural consciousness. Enlightenment here is the immediacy of the equality of all men and is therefore only abstract. Its cer- tainty justifies collective terror over and against individuals who set themselves above this equality. But, in the demand for a justification of this terror, the immediacy of spirit's certainty must become object to itself and, again, other to itself. Its certainty therefore opposes itself in being known, for in being known the strength of reason as equal in all men is also the weakness of reason that it is in no man in particular and therefore in no man at all save those who assert it as their own. Whether he chooses as his cause equality within existing social relations or equality in revolutionized social relations, the third partner will be suppressed if formal equality is dominant over inwardness. This shape of ethical life is characterized as ter- ror not just by the state but also in those modern political revolutions where the term revolution best describes not the change that takes place but the reproduction of the suppression of spirit, of the third partner, in such upheaval.
It is in this struggle of the inner and the outer of the person that spirit becomes morality. The heterogeneity of the totality of abstract equality in formal law is now opposed to the knower whose equality it is supposed to embrace. This means that it is experienced internally as a further separa- tion of the rational person and his collective truth. This internal experience of formal universality is the education of spirit to morality, that is, to the question of whether a man should find his spiritual certainty in the duties that are commanded of him externally, or whether he should obey the duty that comes to him against this externality, that is, the duty of his own con- science. His spiritual education here is this dilemma of subjectivity opposed by substance. It has substance, however, as this dilemma, and this is what the moral individual's spiritual education now consists in.
The adult moral person might respond to this struggle by giving priority in the moral experience to his conscience, and to his well-intentioned actions in the world. Moral actions here are grounded in the certainty of truth in the I. Here moral spirit becomes only internal and undifferentiated
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from the I. The moral adult believes that he has grasped here the truth of his spiritual education, that truth in the world rests with the good inten- tions and the piety of the conscientious I. The only community he belongs to is the religious community that expresses the internal ground of con- science externally. His duty to conscience overrides his duty to the state and its laws.
But conscience already contains within it the seeds of its own higher edu- cation. It is grounded in a contradiction that it cannot survive. When conscience acts universally in the world, the world accepts it as only a par- ticular or an individual conviction. Its claims to universality are only a matter of words, contradicted by its deeds. It does what it believes to be right. It is precisely because individual conscience lacks substance that any substance will do. This is both the ground of moral judgements and therefore also their lack of ground. Spiritual education here has its revel and repose in this aporia. The moral individual pays lip service to the universal but acts only as he wishes. This education has its subject and substance in the hypoc- risy of his moral judgements. This is because the judge must judge himself and expose the opposition of universal and particular within him. Judge- ment here acts as the valet to the moral hero, knowing the details of the life behind the grand appearance. When our moral adult judges himself he has his moral actions as other to himself. In this he might expect a form of mutual recognition for in confessing his hypocrisy he is other to himself and therefore other qua other. But as we have seen, this is not the structure of spiritual education regarding self and other. The other to the confessor is a hard-hearted judge who does not believe the veracity of the confessor. Even in this negation of the I by itself, the other is not this I. This lack of mutual recognition can see the moral adult return from his outer confes- sion into an inner certainty of the beautiful soul which refuses further risk of non-mutual recognition. Lacking recognition it pursues an ascetic pin- ing for that which the world cannot provide.
However, a lack of mutual recognition is already a spiritual education regarding self and other, as we have seen elsewhere in this book. The spiri- tual education of the moral subject consists in his double loss or negation. He loses to the We the truth he found in conscience, and he loses the truth of this loss when seeking its mutual recognition in others. Here the I is already other and the other is not the I. This is the self-determinate shape of spirit in its moral development. The Aufhebung of its development and self- opposition now teaches spirit something new about itself. It cannot achieve the unification of the moral adult with all other such adults but these two losses can recollect themselves as how the I and the We are negatively related.
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It has passed through various stages of this non-achievement, from its imme- diate childhood, to its youthful culture and its sense of adult responsibility. Now in its Aufhebung it has the recollection of this development and nega- tion as the story of its own becoming. It is this education.
What is spirit to make of this? It comes to see that it is the dualism of sub- ject and substance known in and as the relation that separates them. The relation can only be known in retrospect, as its own recollection of itself. Spirit here is educated to know itself as this education, for here it has learned that what is lost is also retained in and as that learning.
Summary
Before looking at this learning in and for itself, it might be helpful to offer a summary of the spiritual education of the reflective subject that we have just described. The spiritual I begins as an ego and a will in the world which then, in its self-consciousness, has itself as its own object. This I, however, suffers from this separation in itself. It has doubt attached to everything it thinks, believing thought to be unable to hold truth in itself. Certainty therefore becomes something of a lost cause, something that can only lie in an idealism beyond the real world. This I is characterized by its unhappi- ness in this separation, an unhappiness that can take a variety of forms ranging from utter scepticism to a faith in the idea of the beyond, be it God or an alternative form of society. The way out of this unhappiness is for the I to join the real world and to receive the certainties that it can offer. The I is now an adult but he can be as far away from knowing his spiritual educa- tion here as it is possible to be, for the rewards of joining society can seduce the I away from his spiritual dilemmas.
The spiritual education of this I continues, however, when he experiences the vulnerability of such certainties. These vulnerabilities arise in his work in the social world with others like himself, when he realizes that his cer- tainties are not justified against the certainties of others. This is the beginning of his sociological education regarding his contingency upon social relations.
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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