No More Learning

It is often not commented upon that education stands at the centre of Levinasian ethics. Education is explicit in Totality and Infinity but rather more implicit in Otherwise than Being. We will now explore three ways in which education is presented by Levinas: as teaching, as philosophy and as study.
Teaching
If the relation of totality and infinity is neither concept nor representation nor any act of assimilation by knowledge in the totality, how is this epiphany structured? Levinas's answer to this is teaching which he affirms in Totality and Infinity as the relation that binds the vulnerability of totality to the vul- nerability that is infinity.
The breaches of totality are found within time, property and desire. These breaches form a relation with the Infinite that is, as Levinas says, 'non-aller- gic' (1969: 51). The special quality of this relation is that it is expressed in the face and commands a response of welcome, generosity and metaphys- ics. This command, which is not experienced as object or subject, is what Levinas refers to as 'a teaching' (1969: 51). From the other is received more than the I. To receive is both a breach of totality and a teaching therein about infinity. The primacy of teaching is the 'primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest' (1969: 79). It is, in this sense, part of 'the marvel of creation' (1969: 89) which creates 'a being capable of receiving a revelation, learning that it is created, and putting itself in ques- tion' (1969: 89). As such, says Levinas, 'the miracle of creation lies in creating a moral being' (1969: 89) or a being who from his isolation is open to being taught about his creation through the absolutely Other. It is in this teachability, characteristic of the created moral being, that justice comes to be known.
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Levinas also argues that teaching is contained in the transitivity of the face and the feminine. They are capable of the transitivity from having to giving, a transitivity that knows itself as education. The face and the feminine signify the signifyingness of this educational movement. As such, they are not just teaching; they are also learning, and part of their teaching is that one learns to be teachable. Becoming teachable, in Levinas, is becoming responsible. Levinas is clear, however, that teaching must not be seen as a middle term. 'Western philosophy,' he says, 'has most often been an ontol- ogy: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being' (1969: 43). Teach- ing in Levinas avoids this reduction to the same by arguing that teaching is not a neutral conjoining of subject and object in (free) cognition. Rather, teach- ing is the break up of all such reconciliations and all such illusions of freedom and knowledge. Teaching is in the trauma of the loss of the latter and teaches that alterity cannot be reduced to such freedom and knowledge.
Teaching in Totality and Infinity is thus required to carry the weight of infinity exceeding totality. As we saw above, Levinas introduces the idea around the non-allergic relation to the Other, that is, the ethical relation. It is the calling of the I beyond itself and its view of itself as an essence, to the relation with the Other who 'approaches me not from the outside but from above' (1969: 171). Thought can thematize everything that is exterior to it and assimilate it into the same; but it cannot assimilate the teacher who makes thematization possible. This transcendence is in the unassimilable face of the Other. Teaching is what is received from this height; it is the face of the Master. Levinas continues here,
this voice coming from another shore teaches transcendence itself. Teach- ing signifies the whole infinity of exteriority. And the whole infinity of exteriority is not first produced, to then teach: teaching is its very produc- tion. The first teaching teaches this very height, tantamount to its exteriority, the ethical . . . The Other is not another freedom as arbitrary as my own, in which case it would traverse the infinity that separates me from him and enter under the same concept. His alterity is manifested in a mastery that does not conquer but teaches. Teaching is not a species of a genus called domination, a hegemony at work within a totality, but is the presence of infinity breaking the closed circle of totality. (1969: 171)
Teaching, then, is not just about God; it is the truth of God expressed in the face. It is not merely a conceptual knowledge; it is the breach of the totality of concepts. Its education is radical; its expression teaches that the
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infinite requires the separated and isolated being in order that the infinite can breach the totality in its teaching. Without the atheism of the ego, there would be no teaching of the absolutely Other. The miracle of creation is that it creates in such a way that it can be revealed, present but absent. Teaching is this revelation. 'The contradiction between the free interiority and the exteriority that should limit it is reconciled in the man open to teaching' (1969: 180).
Additionally, Levinas holds that because teaching comes from beyond totality it is a 'non-violent transitivity' (1969: 51). The importance here of the notion of transitivity cannot be underestimated in Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation. Signification, expression, infinity, transcendence, the ethical, the face in Levinas all claim some kind of transitive quality in which what they do is also what they are. In transitivity, then, Levinas seeks to evade the dualism of theory and practice at the level of the transcendent. If the dual- ism did persist, then the 'epiphany of the face' (1969: 51), for example, would split into the totality of immediacy and its representation. Thus, teaching in Levinas is 'the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face' (1969: 67). It is not, as it were, under a category, and first of all it teaches this teaching itself, by virtue of which alone it can teach. It is the primacy of the ethical. It effectuates the welcome of the other and there- fore 'expresses a simultaneity of activity and passivity' (1969: 89) which places the relation with the other outside of the dichotomies of the a priori and the a posteriori. Teaching, then, is the non-conceptual relation of totality and infinity. But by its very nature it is in contact with the conceptualiza- tions of totality, for it is the truth of their vulnerability to becoming breached. Despite the emphasis that is sometimes placed only on the exteriority of infinity, teaching retains the ambivalence of being infinity in relation to totality. If there is no relation, there is no teaching. 4
In addition, teaching in Levinas has to be distinguished from the teacher/ student relation restricted within totality. Theirs is a totality defined by free- dom and lack of freedom, whereas the transitivity of teaching, of infinity in the face-to-face, 'leaves the plane of economy and labour' (1969: 181). The temporal teacher and student represent teaching as the war of totality in which knowledge is possession and autonomy. Teaching in the epiphany of the face, however, is described in Totality and Infinity as 'peace' (1969: 203). The face - teaching - does not offend my freedom, 'it calls it to responsibil- ity' (1969: 203), and is a peace that 'maintains the plurality of the same and the other' (1969: 203). This is another occasion where Levinas grants prior- ity to peace over war, finding here 'the first rational teaching, the condition for all teaching' (1969: 203).
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Teaching is not explicitly pursued in Otherwise than Being, yet its transitiv- ity is retained in the ways that signify the Other beyond the dichotomy of activity and passivity, that is, in the 'passivity of passivity' (1998: 143) which he also calls the glory of the Infinite. As such, education in Otherwise than Being is carried in the language of ethics by which the ego is com- manded beyond itself. Justice is the most important conduit of divine education here, and we will explore justice a little later. Aside from justice, sincerity is one of the ways in which the il y a 'is identified with nothing but the very voice that states and delivers itself, the voice that signifies' (1998: 143). The scandal of sincerity, then, is 'the impossibility of being silent' (1998: 143).
Philosophy
A further way in which education is carried in Otherwise than Being is in phi- losophy. Much of Levinas's criticism of philosophy is part of an engagement with Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl. However, with a view to the educa- tional in Levinas we will concentrate on the critical moment of scepticism within philosophy that he draws attention to and its import beyond essence in otherwise than being.
His most sustained commentary on philosophy in Otherwise than Being comes amid a host of questions he asks about whether philosophy is a reduc- tion of otherwise than being to the same. For example, in chapter 5 he notes that some might say that
the very discussion which we are at this moment elaborating about signi- fication, diachrony and the transcendence of the approach beyond being, a discussion that means to be philosophy, is a thematizing, a synchroniz- ing of terms, a recourse to systematic language, a constant use of the verb being. (1998: 155)
Levinas is dismissive of this kind of scepticism. Such objections, he says, are 'facile' (1998: 155). It has been the whole point of his treatise to show how 'everything is shown by indeed betraying its meaning' (1998: 156) and that when philosophy draws attention to this abuse, as Levinas has done, then this is precisely the abuse 'that justifies proximity itself [and] in which the Infinite comes to pass' (1998: 156). The contradiction of signification requires 'a second time' (1998: 156) to that of the immemorial, a time that Levinas calls 'reflection' (1998: 156), the time in which contradiction appears. Reflection is the time of the contestation of the meaning of significance but
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it is not the time of two simultaneous statements; it is the time 'between a statement and its conditions' (1998: 156). The contestation that this pro- duces is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness here is the result of time interrupting eternity. As such, philosophy can only achieve an ambivalent status: it is the knowing of proximity and it is the undermining of that knowing, for in its betrayal is the immediacy from which philosophy arises. Thus philosophy can do no better than 'to conceive ambivalence' (1998: 162).
However, in this ambivalence there is 'the periodic return of scepticism and of its refutation' (1998: 167). Levinas sees scepticism as a refusal of syn- chronization, one that returns again and again and is insensitive to attempts to refute or totalize its return. As such, scepticism for Levinas has an impor- tant educational significance. It contests the synchrony of the same in such a relentless way that Levinas credits scepticism with being 'sensitive to the difference' (1998: 168) between saying and the said, and between the same and the other. Crucially here Levinas states that because of this sensibility, and because scepticism refuses to be assimilated as the negation that reab- sorbs every difference into its own order of the same, 'scepticism in fact makes a difference' (1998: 168). The difference it makes is that because it returns it exceeds all absorption into the self-contradictory. This articulates how education in Levinas's philosophy is to be distinguished from educa- tion in Hegelian negation. The totalitarianism of the latter can refute scepticism in terms set by the negative, but it cannot totally refute it because scepticism 'returns' (1998: 168) in the face (as it were) of totality. Scepticism carries 'the trace of the saying' (1998: 168), a trace that because it does not appear within 'the logical scope of negation and affirmation' (1998: 168) is wholly underestimated by philosophy. This trace is an alternating movement which is 'without end and without continuity. [It] is a tradition' (1998: 169) and it renews itself as an 'excluded middle' (1998: 169).
Scepticism then is anti-Hegelian. But Caygill argues that this is not able to complete a rejection of Hegel, only its deflation. Levinas, he says, sustains the power of the negative while remaining vigilant 'not to endorse the nega- tion of the negation' (2002: 54). Indeed, says Caygill, Levinas 'diverts negation into an iterative circuit of the eternal return of botched nega- tions' (2002: 54). The substance of Caygill's claim, I believe, lies in the fact that education in Hegel is not characterized by allergy to otherness, nor is it able to totalize scepticism such that it makes no difference. Otherness and the return of scepticism, in education in Hegel, do not just trace a dif- ference, they oppose themselves in the tracing. To say that this opposition is 'other' than the truth of otherness in scepticism is to separate its return,
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its dialectic, from itself. This is the protection from the negation of the negation that Caygill refers to. The deflation is grounded in positing the difference between 'other' in opposition and 'other' in the trace - which is a positing of the very concept of otherness that is presenting itself in its eternal moments. We might risk saying here that Hegel's absolute and Levinas's otherwise than being witness the same movement, they just differ in how open they are to learning of eternity from this eternal return. Hegel is open to learning that all judgements of the same and the other are grounded in a positing of the identity and non-identity of what otherness is. It is this positing that is used by Levinas as the criterion for judging what is and what is not Other. As education in Hegel has shown us in previous chapters, it is not just that otherness is posited here before the enquiry into what it is is carried out, although this remains the case in Levinas. When he judges such mediation as allergic to otherness it is a judgement based in precisely this positing. It is also the case that what is being judged as Other comes from the point of view of the life that already has death as other. The very concept of otherness hides the relation that determines it. We will return to this presently. This same risk in bringing Hegel and Levinas together here is also recognized in calling their relation to each other not one of mere opposition, but one of deflation and reflation. There is still opposition between totality and infinity and in otherwise than being, but the deflation and reflation of education in Hegel are the import of these oppositions in Levinas, that is, where scepticism falls to itself in the signifi- cance of its own eternal return.
Study
Caygill notes that in some of his Talmudic Commentaries Levinas articu- lates the State of Israel as 'bearing witness to the promise of a new kind of state' (2002: 167), a new form 'of the political that marks the transforma- tion of the territorial nation-state' (2002: 175). The University - or a University of the Jewish State - offers Levinas an institution both universal and particular in and out of time. The University is to unite the Diaspora and the State of Israel in and as a prophetic politics. Caygill in his conclud- ing Afterword looks to study as the 'equivocal blessing and danger of fire' (2002: 199). Reading the 'forgotten, ancient, difficult books' (2002: 200) substitutes for burnt offerings, while the life spent in the study of the former breathes life into the embers and provides both fire and light.
Caygill notes that this 'blaze of the many readings that make up the Dias- pora contrasts with the uniform light of philosophy, politics and the state'
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(2002: 200). Study breaks up the totality of the same. Equally, at times for Levinas the fire is the inextinguishable flame of the transcendent which traverses history as suffering. This strange fire exceeds its temporal finitude by being the 'permanent horizon of marvel' (2002: 201). It is beyond 'the prudence of techniques; without calculation [and] without past' (2002: 202). This education is the strange fire that is kept apart from war or political struggle.
PART B
Reflation in aporia
In this section we begin the Hegelian reflation of Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation. In his book Levinas and the Political, Caygill has developed an aporetic critique of Levinas that reveals both an inescapable terror in Levinas's politics - a terror carried by war and peace - and, for Caygill, a sadness, perhaps even a pessimism, regarding the actuality of the modern political state. 5 As such, his analysis stands in stark contrast to those who see in Levinas an 'irreproachable ethical rigour' (2002: 1). He exposes aspects of Levinas's political judgement that are 'chilling' (2002: 1) in their 'unsen- timental understanding of violence and power' (2002: 1). In this section I want to look at two themes that Caygill uses to illustrate how aporia and mediation reflate Levinas in ways that re-educate us regarding his ethics. The first theme is that of war and peace, and the second is religion and the state.
War and peace
That Caygill finds the theme of war and peace central to Levinas's work is not surprising once one recalls Levinas's own life. He witnessed the wars that followed the Russian revolution from his home in Lithuania and the Ukraine. He was a prisoner in World War II but lost members of his family to the Holocaust. He witnessed the foundation of the state of Israel and he was in France for the events of 1968. As such, Caygill concludes, Levinas's political philosophy 'is haunted by an unassimilable past of political horror and an unforeseeable future of political promise' (2002: 3). As a result, says Caygill, for Levinas 'it is irresponsible to speak of peace without war, or to imagine a peace that is but the cessation of war: war is inextricable from peace, violence is inextricable from ethics' (2002: 3).
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War in Levinas is the war of ontology and totality which is waged against proximity and responsibility. Peace is the peace of ethics or of illeity which is waged against and of necessity within the totality of the same. The weap- ons of war are representation and essence; the weapons of peace are trauma and substitution. The work of justice, as Caygill says, is the between of ethics and ontology. It is the middle 'that opens the space for politics, but which also leaves the character of that space undecideable' (2002: 96).
In his discussion of Totality and Infinity Caygill notes how Levinas's concept of totality holds within itself the relation of war and peace. Totality as a concept in Levinas begins by encompassing Heideggerian ontology but by Totality and Infinity it refers to 'the entire history of Western philosophy' (2002: 94). Both share the imperative to extend their sovereignty over the whole of exteriority which Caygill calls 'the violent identification of totality and exteriority through war' (2002: 95), or war used to make the present a totality and the totality a present, or 'an objective order' (2002: 104; Levinas 1969: 21). On the other hand, they also share the disruption that, by defini- tion, what seeks totality cannot be total. This 'intrinsic incompletion' (2002: 95), says Caygill, 'anachronistically disrupts its identity' (2002: 95), but it also means that war in the cause of totality is, at root, not only 'the perma- nent possibility of war' (2002: 105) but also meaningless self-destruction, 'sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice' (2002: 105). Thus Caygill finds an 'hor- rific phenomenology of war' (2002: 119) in Levinas where any opposition to war, for example, by eschatological politics, becomes 'a declaration of war by peace upon war' (2002: 107). 6 Such aporias are Caygill's reflation of the mediation that persists in Levinas.
Levinas begins Totality and Infinity by asking whether we are 'duped' by morality when it fails to see itself in war with peace. He ends by asking in what ways peace, the triumph of the Messianic which is ever deferred, can be present as politics, or as peace in war? Caygill argues here that the begin- ning and the end of Totality and Infinity in fact replay the difficulty of the middle between war and peace. At the beginning Levinas asks whether 'lucidity, the mind's openness upon the true, consist[s] in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? ' (1969: 21). At the end of the book the Messianic has acknowledged its own collaboration in this permanent possibility.
War and peace are also thematized in Levinas's later work, Otherwise than Being. Caygill argues here that Totality and Infinity solicits the ethical within ontology while Otherwise than Being seeks the 'ontological within the ethical' (2002: 96). The first chapter of the latter draws attention to the fact that essence, as interest, is the state of war in which egoisms struggle with one
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another 'each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another' (1998: 4). Essence, says Levinas, is thus 'the extreme synchronism of war' (1998: 4). The remedy for such an allergy is not a 'rational peace' (1998: 4) for in reason interest becomes objectified as 'calculation, mediation [ ] politics [and] exchange and commerce' (1998: 4). As such, 'the mass remains permanent and interest remains. Transcendence is factitious and peace unstable. It does not resist interest' (1998: 5). It is in the disinterestedness of passivity that Levinas looks to find the peace that undoes all interest through substitution. Caygill observes that 'in the final sections of Otherwise than Being, Levinas searches for arguments that will link the ethical categories of proximity, substitution and responsibility with the order of ontology' (2002: 141). Thus Otherwise than Being ends as it and Totality and Infinity began: 'with war. But this is war - with all the ontological entailments that Levinas has taught us to see - now waged with a bad con- science. The otherwise than being is not otherwise than the war that Levinas has shown accompanies ontology' (2002: 143). These aporias reflate the contradictions of a totality that cannot avoid mediation by that which fails to exceed it.
Religion and the state
The relation of religion and the state in Otherwise than Being in a sense exceeds the relation of totality and infinity. In the earlier book, justice was the language of God, and was 'social' in the sense that the face-to-face is always a relation between egos and always an event of communication. But in Otherwise than Being this triadic relation can no longer be sustained against the problem posed by the third party.
The third party is other to the face-to-face or to proximity. In this case Levinas is clear that illeity has to recognize that its other in substitution is also other to another, that is, also in a relation of substitution to someone else. This recognition of the relation of substitution to a third party raises the question of how religion stands against the demands for calculated, rational and objectified universal justice? How, in other words, is prophetic justice to relate to state justice?
In addressing this Levinas distinguishes two violences. The first is the divine violence that defeats the ego in illeity. The ego is commanded here but not as a slave, for 'no one is a slave of the Good' (1998: 138). Divine violence accuses and redeems prior to any intentionality or will, just as the face in its destitution is both an accusation and an epiphany. The second violence is the interruption of substitution by the third man, the other to
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my neighbour. Yet this violence is latent in the first violence. If proximity only concerned the-one-for-the-other then, says Levinas, it would not have been troubled into consciousness, self-consciousness or a question. Proxim- ity takes on a new meaning here. 'The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction' (1998: 157). This contradiction arouses the question 'what has justice to do with me? ' a contradiction sustained in the relation of illeity and justice. It is here, however, that the possibility arises of judgements as to who is for or against those in proximity.
Caygill draws attention to the problems that are latent, and sometimes explicit in Levinas's construction of these two middles of illeity and justice. His concern, primarily, is that Levinas can be seen to defend a relation of responsibility between I and other while pitting this relation against the third party. This in effect means that the third party is not otherwise than being but otherwise than other. If justice is controlled by proximity there need be no rational order of justice. Additionally, proximity could wage 'just' war against a third party. This is what Caygill refers to when he talks of 'war waged with a bad conscience' (2002: 143).
There are times identified by Caygill when the antinomical relation of the two middles of illeity and justice is resolved against the third party, For example, he notes that in a 1968 interview Levinas chose silence - and, recall here, as we saw earlier, silence is not possible for sincerity - in response to a question about the State of Israel. Caygill remarks on the echoes of Heidegger's silence over the Holocaust in World War II. The point here is that when the state is seen as serving proximity against the third party Levinas is in danger of 'supporting injustice and forgetting the third for the sake of the Other - and thus indeed sacrificing Israel to the idol of the State of Israel' (2002: 166).
As we noted above, Levinas seeks to articulate the State of Israel as 'bear- ing witness to the promise of a new kind of state' (2002: 167). Now Caygill draws attention to the deeper antinomies of trying to do so, that is, of trying to discern a '"superposition" of messianic eschatology and political onto- logy' (2002: 170). This superposition forces terms such as 'particular universal' (2002: 170) which serve only to reflate mediation in Levinas. Caygill is critical of the way that Levinas, faced with the real antinomy of justice and the state of Israel, remains silent at the point of its greatest diffi- culty. Indeed, again from Levinas's Talmudic readings, Caygill argues that Levinas elides this difficulty of the (Hegelian) problem of universal and particular by giving priority to the prophetic - namely the Diaspora and the Talmud - over the concern for justice within the state and to its neighbours
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who are excluded from proximity. Caygill concludes that 'Levinas's claim to a right of silence regarding the actions of the State of Israel reneges on his own political philosophy' (2002: 176). 7
Caygill's deeply worrying conclusion on the ambivalences of the political in Levinas is that at times Levinas does not hold the holy and the universal apart but, in fact, joins them in a collusion of ethics (religion) and 'human- ity' (the state) precisely against those third parties that interrupt the relation of I and other. The third, in this case, says Caygill, is Asia in general and 'the third Abrahamic religion - Islam' (2002: 183) in particular. As such there remains an ambivalence in Levinas as to whether 'Islam is indeed part of the holy history' (2002: 183), and rather less ambivalence in one essay in 1960, where Levinas refers to Asia as 'the yellow peril' (2002: 184). Caygill concludes that this essay at least reveals an 'aspect of Levinas's thought that arguably compromises many of his universalist ethical claims' (2002: 185).
Caygill goes on to show how Levinas argues for and against Islam in holy history: how he both blamed and removed from blame the Arab world for Auschwitz; but how, at crucial times, for example in discussing the issue of the Palestinians - and in particular the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila - the ethical is left 'trailing behind the political' (2002: 189). The prophetic, by having justice as other, can only ever be the continuation of the political war by messianic means, a war clearly endorsed by Levinas who, when interviewed about the massacres, responded by argu- ing that the violent third party, the Palestinians, forces the hand in defence of the genuine face-to-face. Is this the same as saying that the Palestinian is not other in substitution but rather other to substitution? Is it to say that the third party is the enemy of alterity? Is it, in sum, to say that the prophetic and the political must work with God on their side? Caygill says here that Levinas's claim for the war against the third party to proximity is 'rigorously consistent with his philosophy, which we have argued recognizes the inevi- tability of war. To describe the other as enemy as this point is thus entirely consistent with such a reading of Levinas's ethics' (2002: 192-93).
Caygill's concerns here begin to reflate the Hegelian dialectic that Levi- nas has sought all along to avoid. This reflation is the return of mediation. It is not a return that is posited from outside of Levinas's thought but is a return that is immanent within Levinas's anti-Hegelian operation. Caygill hints at such a return when, in his discussion of the state as the middle in Totality and Infinity, he notes that 'the repetition of the opposition of theory and the concrete [up to and in Totality and Infinity] will prove increasingly disruptive in Levinas's later thought, producing a split between Israel as a "utopia of the human" and the violent internal and external politics of the State of Israel' (2002: 115). 8
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Reflation as education
In this final section we will briefly discuss four aspects of education in Hegel as they pertain to the anti-Hegelianism of Levinas. The first three are in regard to the relation of religion and the state, alterity, and philosophical error. The final aspect concerns the educational imperative in Hegel.
State and religion
One of the most difficult propositions in Hegel is that 'religion and the foundation of the state are one and the same' (1984: 452). As such, the state and its laws 'are nothing else than religion manifesting itself in the relations of the actual world' (1956: 417). This statement requires to be compre- hended not as an abstract assertion of identity, but as subsisting in education in Hegel.