No More Learning

The structure of the life and death struggle is that of education carried in recollection. 2 Death appears to be unknowable in itself for, as many have pointed out, if death is, then I am not, and if death is not, then I am. Seem- ingly their paths cannot cross in such a way for both to be present in each other. Yet this view is based upon the presupposition - at its peak in mediae- val philosophy - that God is unchangeable and absolutely other in relation to a thought which can only know the true mediated in thought, that is, as changeable. The same case is made for death. Death in itself is unknowable to thinking because thinking can only think death from the point of view of life, that is, as error. But phenomenology in Hegel thinks this error as its own truth, or knows the totality of the relation to error to be thinking's own truth. Put like this, life is the actuality of death for life is the being-known of
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death. It is how death is known at all. Life in this sense is the actuality of death, it is the 'what is' of death. To imagine death as not-life cannot be achieved without life itself. Death, then, is dependent upon life for its very being, for its existence at all. In life, we carry the truth of death with us at all times. We will examine life's dependence upon death in a moment.
Hegel makes this same case in the way he presents the life and death struggle. He describes it in the only way open to us to know death, that is, from the perspective of life. It is important to recognize this in reading the life and death struggle, for this is to concede that there is no other place to begin to know death than in life. The struggle, precisely, is our recollection of what is not, in what is. The struggle is the recollection of itself from where 'itself' is already the victor. When life knows death it is from the per- spective that death is other than life. It excludes the perspective of the vanquished, that is, of death. It is, therefore, also a recollection of the origin of the veil in which the role of the veil in this recollection of itself is hidden. Life presents its victory over death in the form of two beings who, in facing each other, experience the possibility of their own death. When read as a chronological sequence of events, that is, when read only forwards, this meeting is viewed as a struggle for recognition. But this is the perspective of the veiled veil, that is, of life hiding what it owes to its forma- tive relation to death, and hiding this hiding. As such, this is a version of natural law theory that posits origin from its own point of view. But, when also read backwards, the logic of recollection can expose both the complic- ity of the perspective of the victor in its account of its origin and its complicity in hiding this complicity in the account. Recollection, as the loss of that which it recollects, is perfectly suited to recovering the loss of death to life. In addition, it is the method of knowing origin because what is known as origin is recollection of what is lost. This is the philosophy of origin in Hegel.
We must note here how the logic of recollection is formative and educa- tional. It is what looks back at itself to a time when it did not know itself but must have had the potential to know itself since now it knows this potential- ity as actual. This means that recollection learns of itself in the loss of itself. This is the speculative import of its negative structure, and is why and how it can know death, for it is the actuality of death, and has death as a forma- tive part of its own truth. In recollecting the part that death plays in the victory of life recollection views the veil that hides it, and that hides itself. Recollection does not overcome the veil for it is of the veil. It does, however, open up a different account of the relation of life and death to that offered by life, and one that will know how to retrieve life's now missing combatant.
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Thus, in this new account, life faces life, and experiences the negation of its immediate totality. It experiences this as the possibility that because of the 'other' (it is at this moment learning the otherness of what will become 'other') the life of this one life is neither exclusive, nor impregnable, nor certain. The desire for life, therefore, includes at this moment the death of that which has fragmented its certainty. But they are the same moment. The experience of death is also the desire for its death, for the death of death, and that means the death of life's other. Therefore, loss, death and other are all part of this one experience for life. But, of course, the other that faces life here is also life. Life is related to itself in this experience, but life does not survive this encounter as a self-relation, but as self without rela- tion. Loss, death and other become other to this life that is now an I. It is the eschewal of death here that determines the certainty of this life as a self- conscious person. The vulnerability to and the otherness of death is here removed completely from the certainty of the I and transferred to that which has death as its own truth. The other is defined here as that which is other than life and which has death as its own truth. Life's eschewal of death is the source of all otherness, and is the illusory source also of its own political identity and certainty.
Master and slave
One common reading of Hegel at this point sees the result of the experi- ence of death by life as a mutual recognition where each life recognizes his mutuality in the other life that faces him, and comprehends that this mutu- ality be expressed in some form of social contract, where each is recognized as the same as the other. But this is not the significance of the life and death struggle. Such a view of mutual recognition imposes a middle between the combatants that is wholly abstracted from the way each experiences the significance of their struggle for survival. Mutuality is a fetish of the middle of the life and death struggle, and has nothing to do with the actual shapes that this fear-of-death-become-life-and-its-other now takes. Rather, the two living beings learn about themselves from within the components of the life and death struggle. Their vulnerability now takes political form, and the life and death struggle is continued now by different means.
The life that is certain of itself is the political master. The life that must carry the death that the master has eschewed for himself is the slave. These are the shapes that life, death and other take in the first face-to-face. The only proof of this face-to-face ever happening comes in its recollection. Indeed, recollection is the actuality of this face-to-face. It knows the encounter as loss,
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as impossibility, as the 'nature' of the political, and as its potential freedom become actual. Even the risking of the lives of the combatants in the life and death struggle is known only retrospectively by that which survives the encounter. There is no mutual recognition in the recollection of the life and death struggle. There is only life and death, master and slave. What lies ahead for recollection here is to wear the veil that will reveal life and death as death in life and life in death. In turn, this will mean learning how mod- ern political freedom is grounded in the self that has death as other, and that therein masks its true grounding in loss, in the trauma and fragility of the bourgeois self. It is to the modern form that politics takes here that we will turn in a moment.
We saw above how death was carried in and by life which nevertheless masks what it bears. This creates the illusion that life is its own ground, sovereign in its ubiquity and always something other than nothing. Now we will see how the same illusion works in the master/slave relation that consti- tutes modern free subjectivity. The master/slave relation is the structure of life becoming its own object in thought. Having learned from the loss of its immediate certainty that it can absolutely vanish, life becomes known to itself in the recollection of the struggle that it has emerged from. This knowing is grounded in the illusion that this life is not dependent upon the life and death struggle, but is independent and sovereign in its own right. This illusion is the master. However, death is present in the determination of the master, but it is present only as that which is eschewed by the master as other than his truth. This is a crucial moment in the formation of life in and as the reflective subject who knows himself. There is a part of his deter- mination that is hidden from him behind the presupposition that he, the master, has about his own sovereignty as a self. Where, then, does death have its actuality in its relationship to life. Death is that which is prejudged as antithetical to the existing I. Death, eschewed as a player in the identity of the master, is posited as 'other' to this identity. For the master, death, or the other, is the slave. The slave has no sovereignty: indeed he has no life that can be said to be his own. He is a living death, the other to the auton- omy of the master, or of life. There are themes here, then, in the master/slave relation, that relate to the veil, to life, to death, to loss and to the other that can now be constructed in such a way as to produce a philosophy of the other. Furthermore, this philosophy of the other will show how the know- ing of self and other is essentially education.
The politics of eschewing death as other, and as actual in the nothingness of the slave, can be brought out more clearly if its opposition is presented less abstractly and more personally. The reflective living subject that has its
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actuality in and for itself is the bourgeois subject. He is his own object, and thus an end in himself. This autonomy provides for his legal identity granted to himself in his own image. Thus, the law of private property is the form of universality that enshrines this particular misrecognition of the life and death struggle. It defines sovereignty as the independence of a life and grants sovereignty to each independent form that life takes, and it defines non-sovereignty as that which lacks this self-defining independence, grant- ing the rights of non-sovereignty to that which carries the nothingness of death with it, that is, both to inanimate objects and to those men judged as objects, that is, slaves. Presented in this way the eschewing of death as other than the living subject appears as anything but a neutral judgement. It is a judgement of the most intense political self-interest and is the actuality of the political power of the master.
The master practises a deceit here. He knows he is his own object for this self-consciousness grounds his autonomy and freedom. As such, he keeps for himself what is positive here, and gets rid of the negative implications of his objectivity. Positively, as object in itself, he is his own master. But nega- tively, as object for himself, he is the loss of mastery to mediation, to its being known. This one experience has ambivalence at its core. Rather than live with ambivalence the master is able to export the negativity of self- consciousness to something judged as other than his self-consciousness. He keeps his power by exporting the loss of power. It is the case, here, that such a master, in holding on to only the aspects of self-consciousness that are favourable to him, has in fact only built his house on sand. What he exports will remind him, in anxiety and fear, that he is always vulnerable to nega- tion, for even though he thinks he is rid of it, it is still part of the totality of his identity. He exports death to others, but the exporting is always, also, his own repeated experience of vulnerability, that is, of death.
Death, then, as other to life, is always present in the affirmations that life makes about itself. How death is recognized in life determines the form of property law and of social relations. In the modern bourgeois law of private property death is the other-than-autonomous-form-of-life-known-as-I. This master, as we saw, has objects as other to it. The abolition of the slave as a legal concept is the recognition by the master that differentiating animate life into men and objects, based for example on skin colour, is not only an arbitrary judgement of power, but also an hypocritical one. As such, the rights of mastery are extended to all persons in the modern state, and the otherness of death is now only exported from them to inanimate objects and to animals. 3 But this modern, legally recognized, Western master must pay a heavy price for the freedom that life grants itself from death.
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Because the Western self is not other, no one is other. If none are other to themselves or to each other then each has a more fulfilling life with objects, which are still other and can still therefore reinforce the certainty of the master, than they have with other masters. Since, here, no one is other, no one has any true relation to himself or to other such selves. This is the civil society of the individual rights granted to atomistic individuals who, unre- lated to themselves, are also unrelated to everyone else. The only otherness they share is an otherness carried in the objects they own. As such, this man of civil society does not just relate to himself and to others as objects, he relates to objects as if they were the proof of his humanity.
This is, of course, the commodification and objectification of social rela- tionships. The master, in exporting negation, exports the part of himself that he judges as other than mastery, precisely that part of him that is needed in order to learn of humanity from within the sovereignty of the I.
Marx has shown how the capitalist market place offers only the illusion of freedom in that the free wage-labourer can still be paid to carry the nega- tive aspects of bourgeois self-identity. But the global capitalist market means that even this wage-labourer can export elements of this negativity to others in poorer parts of the world when participating in the freedoms of, for example, shopping and travel. As Chapter 3 will argue in more detail, these freedoms, stripped of negativity, become actions without implication. Edu- cation in Hegel aims for the retrieval of this implication as complicity, from which negativity may be retrieved for the conception of humanity.
Self and other
I want now to place the experience of the actuality of death in life within the relation of self and other in order to draw out Hegel's philosophy of the other. In short, I will present the case for the other in Hegel as the loss that is carried by the self, but carried behind an invisible veil that holds the real- ity of the self and other grounded in (their) illusion. Recognizing how illusion determines the identity of the self and the other is an education into the way loss - in this case of sovereignty - is formative.
Thus far, we have explored the relation of self and other as the misrecog- nition of the life and death struggle, and of death in life in particular, and as a misrecognition hidden by the definition of freedom that it makes possible. What remains is to translate this now into a philosophy of the other, which requires, in turn, the formulation of the concept of the other. In short, the other is that which is present in the self as loss. Models of the other that are grounded in an equality of pluralism only suppress the
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experience of the other in the self and thus have to assert it over and above that experience. Pluralism is the equality of masters, often, of course, asserted over those who are not masters. This is the equality, for example, of the global market. Models of the other that are grounded in a radical heteroge- neity, be it difference or otherwise-than-being, assert the experience of the other over that of the self. This, too, hides a mastery, but in this case it is not the mastery of the self, but mastery over the self. Education in Hegel holds both aspects of this experience of the opposition of equality and difference in tension, and finds a philosophy of the other therein.
There are two aspects that constitute the triadic education of self and other. The self is other to himself internally and externally, but in such a way that both the internal and the external relation of self and other edu- cate each other. We have seen this same relation in action between life and death, and between master and slave. Now we will explore it as the educa- tion of self and other. The self in question here is still the bourgeois master. This self is determined in and by the relation of life to death which has actuality as the master and the slave. The self, therefore, in the same way has his identity formed by exporting death, or that which is other than his self-certainty, to anything that is not himself. The self is grounded in a loss that he is not yet aware of internally as being part of his own determination. Loss becomes other therefore only in an external sense, and inwardly the self is without the threat of loss, without the danger to it of what is other.
Having exported otherness, however, the self has already sown the seeds of his own negation, for that which he has eschewed nevertheless remains, albeit suppressed, as constitutive of the identity of the self. This self has laid the ground externally for an education about himself internally. This edu- cation, as we will see now, is both revolution and re-formation4. It is revolution because negation will return from externality to the source of its eschewal; and it is re-formation because this return is an experience in which what returns to itself is changed in doing so. It is this experience that generates the concept of the other.
As death was judged other to life by life, so loss is judged other to self by self. The self has exported its vulnerability and as such appears immune to dependence upon anything other than itself. This is the ground of its sov- ereignty. It is the educative significance of loss in this sovereignty that elicits the philosophy of the other, and it is to the structure of this education that we now turn.
The tautology of the self is that the self is defined as not other. This has two aspects. 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
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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
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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
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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
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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.