No More Learning

14 As is the fact that some concepts employed in one chapter might be more fully
discussed in another. The most important example of this I think is that recollec- tion, used throughout the work, has its most detailed exposition in Chapter 2.
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Self and Other: Life and Death
Man is born handed over to the necessity of death.
Introduction
(Aquinas, 1975b: 212)
In what ways might one be said to learn from the sadness of a funeral? Is it in the way a funeral is a teacher of death in life? Is it because it commends a deep recognition of the truth of death in life? Death is the great universal; we know this. Yet often it takes a funeral, or something of this nature, to bring us to the reminder of where death lies in life. We are of death yet we live as if death is other than life. In fact, life draws a veil over death. Some- times we see both the veil and its secret. Most times the veil itself is hidden, and in a very particular fashion that will be described below. Either way, education in Hegel teaches us that a philosophy of the other is carried in and by this veil.
In this chapter, then, I want to make the case for a philosophy of the other in Hegel which has its substance in the relation of life and death and in the ways this relation appears as social and political actuality, including that of world spirit. I will try to show how education in Hegel teaches of this relation of death in life as the template for the relations of self and other. In modernity, this relation has form and content in reflective subjectivity but the relation of life and death that determines it is hidden in the illusion of appearing not to be hidden. This is the veil of modern social relations, a transparent freedom that uses its transparency to hide itself. It is seen through but is not itself seen through at all. This is the ambivalent sense in which 'transparent' will be used in this chapter. Hegel's philosophy of the other is an education about the seeming ingenuousness of this (hidden) veil. But we must note even at this early stage, revealing the veil does not mean removing it, for illusion is the truth of self and other in Hegel.
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Derrida and Levinas have created the appearance respectively that Hegel cannot accommodate a notion of philosophy that is open to difference or to otherwise-than-being. These claims are explored in Chapters 4 and 5 below. Some who are more sympathetic to Hegel try to claim for him a theory of the other in the model of mutual recognition that is found in paragraphs 178-184 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This, however, is also mis- leading. It is all too easy to read these paragraphs independently of the part they are playing in the master and slave relation. In fact, mutual recogni- tion in Hegel is written from a standpoint of its being an impossible beginning and end for the self-consciousness that thinks it. Mutual recogni- tion is always already the misrecognition of its being thought. This is the significance of illusion in Hegel, that thought hides its presuppositions behind the freedoms they make possible.
It is from within this misrecognition that Hegel's philosophy of the other is to be found. This means comprehending that his philosophy of the other is a triadic philosophy that concerns not only self and other but also the comprehension of the third partner in their relationship, a third partner who is hidden within the relation of self to other that it determines. This third is pursued in different ways in each of the chapters of this book, but in this chapter it is explored in a very specific way as the hidden third partner in the relation of self and other in Hegel. This requires us to explore, in turn, the determination of the self in loss, the export of loss beyond the self, the hiding of both this loss and its export, and the forma- tive significance of its return. Because the loss and its export are both hidden there can be no simple political unification of self and other, for both are already determined in the deceit, and neither can free itself from its complicity within this appearance of separation. There is, then, a third partner to the self and its other, namely, the aporia that haunts the relation of their being separated. To coin a phrase from Adorno, self and other are torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up. But their dilemma is our education about the incompletion of this relation. Taken as evidence only of failure, and not also of formative political experi- ence, the self can grant itself the right to wallow in the aesthetic of resignation and mourning, and its concomitant, the demand for action. It presumes to know what is wrong with society and what it needs to put it right. But both resignation and the demand for action repeat the truth of the third part- ner, that is, the failure that accompanies them. There is here a dialectic of
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enlightenment where resignation calls for action and action returns to resignation. Taken as a whole, this dialectic of enlightenment is the loss of both resignation and the demand for action. What, then, is left? This ques- tion and its despair leave us open, now, to begin to explore and to learn the meaning of the self that is loss without ground. I will argue that loss without ground is carried in the ambiguities of the following statement of identity and non-identity: I am already other and the other is not me. In particular, this statement recognizes the complicity of the veiled self even in the state- ment about its complicity. Loss without ground is the illusion of the self and of its other. But in modern bourgeois social relations, as we will see, even the illusion itself is present as a transparent veil that, as such, cannot be seen. We will, however, begin our study of self and other with a veil that is not veiled, in order to bring out more clearly the nature of the self that it reveals.
The veil
We begin, then, by looking at a short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) called 'The Minister's Black Veil'. 1 In this parable the Rever- end Mr. Hooper one day appears before his congregation wearing a black crepe veil that drops down over his face. This causes consternation, of a sort that we will explore in a moment, amongst all who know him, including his wife, and to all who subsequently meet him. He never explains the veil, nor does he ever remove it, not even on his own death-bed. He is buried still wearing the veil, but not before he has forced himself, just prior to death, and with a mighty effort, to look around the room at those who are gath- ered and to announce 'I look around me, and lo! on every visage a Black Veil' (1987: 107). This is a major theme in the short story. When his congre- gation see the veil, it is as if their Minister has climbed inside them and revealed their darkest thoughts and sins. They hear Hooper preach, through the veil, that they should be prepared for the dreadful hour which will snatch the veil from their own faces.
If this was the sole meaning of the parable - that we all hide behind a veil of some kind; indeed, that it is the truth of the bourgeois to do so - then it would be a wonderfully dramatized critique of amour-propre and its intrigues. It would be no less an essay if Hawthorne had confined himself to making this point. We will return to this notion of bourgeois semblance in a moment. However, it is to a different but related aspect of the story that we now turn.
When Hawthorne describes the effect that the veil has on both its audi- ence and its beholder, it is always in the darkest forces of terror and,
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significantly, of death. I will cite a few examples here. When Hooper attends the funeral of a young girl it is felt that the veil is suddenly not out of place, but rather that it is quite appropriate. Indeed, when Hooper leans over the girl his face would have been visible to her, and one of those assembled there swears that at this moment 'the corpse had slightly shuddered' (1987: 100) as if death had recognized itself in Hooper. Moreover, it is said that it is as if the spirit of the Minister and of the deceased 'were walking hand in hand' (1987: 100). At a wedding the veil inspires in the bride a 'death-like paleness' (1987: 101). Accompanying this partnership of the veil and death are feelings of horror, dread and sorrow which induce, in turn, fear and trembling. Those who are on their own death-beds are indeed drawn to Hooper and they refuse to die until he has come to them. The gloom of the veil 'enabled him to sympathize with all dark affections' (1987: 104). What disturbs Hooper the most is his wife, who leaves him, refusing to have the veil come between them, and the children of the parish who show an 'instinctive dread' (1987: 104) of the veil and flee from Hooper whenever he approaches them.
The veil, then, covers Hooper's face. But, of course, it reveals far more than ever it conceals. It is taken as a sign that Hooper is hiding a secret sin, yet it reveals to those who see it in this way that they are doing the same; such secrets, as they say, that 'we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would feign conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them' (1987: 99). The veil hides Hooper's face from being seen but is interpreted as a turn inwards to reveal his own darkest corners to himself. I wonder, says one lady, that he is not afraid to be so alone with himself. This underestimates just how painful the revelations of the veil are to Hooper. He says to his wife, 'you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil' (1987: 103), and he avoids mirrors to avoid the revelations that are realized in seeing his face veiled. 'With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium that saddened the whole world' (1987: 104). The veil reveals inwardness and the fear and trembling accompanying such inwardness not just to Hooper behind the veil, but also to all who come face-to-face with it, as it were. As he is entombed in that 'saddest of all prisons, his own heart' (1987: 105) so, he reveals that same prison in others who would prefer to avoid it.
I want in particular here to illustrate the educational and formative rela- tionship between death and the veil in Hawthorne's story for it illustrates vividly the life and death struggle and the master and slave relation in the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 18 Education in Hegel
Phenomenology of Spirit. This will be examined in more detail in a moment, but for now, note how the veil comes to symbolize death by reminding the parishioners of their existential form, and of its fragility to investigation, and how, accompanying this fragility, is the darkness of what is not revealed about themselves. As the bourgeois flees from the life and death struggle to the illusory stability of identity and independence, so, the veil uncovers the instability of this illusion and reveals the presence of death in life to the masters.
There is a further important Hegelian aspect that can be uncovered here. The parishioners were content with the face-to-face, but not because it ensured openness or that, to introduce a Levinasian theme here, it spoke of the inscrutability of God in the face of the stranger. In fact, the situation is the reverse. The face-to-face offered the mutuality only of a deception shared by the participants. The face-to-face hides more than it reveals. Only when the face-to-face was interrupted, when the veil itself refused the mutu- ality of its face with the face of the other, did the parishioners' philosophical education truly begin. Refused the mirror of mastery the parishioners were thrown back upon the oldest and most terrifying maxim of the Western philosophical tradition: Know Thyself.
Rousseau and civil society
This education, then, has its origins long before its modern form and content. Nevertheless, it is this modern form and content that we are con- cerned with here. The intrigue of the bourgeois is wonderfully exposed by Rousseau both in the Discourses and in Emile, and this is all the more impor- tant in the way Rousseau ties this intrigue to social relations and to private property in particular. We will spend a moment exploring Rousseau's cri- tique of the mask of the bourgeois, before turning our attention to Hegel.
In the 'Discourse on the Origin of Inequality', Rousseau links the origin of the person in society to the establishing of property relations. 'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society' (1973: 84).
Private property for Rousseau was merely a false or inauthentic expres- sion of the instinct for self-preservation which characterized 'natural man'. In the 'Second Discourse', he argues that it was this desire for self- preservation that led natural man to the understanding that co-operation with others aided self-preservation. The selfishness of natural man was mutual, and therefore brought about self-motivated co-operative forms of
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living. Such a union was a natural union, for it was based solely upon the desire for the self-preservation of each individual. For Rousseau, such a union was not yet a social union, and natural man who co-operated with other such men was not yet a person.
The natural union becomes a social union through the influence of the common life which natural man begins to lead. What was formed in order to best preserve the independence of natural man now turns against its original purpose and creates all of the social customs to which the individ- ual loses his independence. These include speech, feelings of love, the family, leisure time and most importantly, public esteem. 'Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem' (1973: 90). In the leisure time brought about through the efficiency of co-operation, natural man came to judge himself in comparison with others around him. As a result, natural self-preservation was turned into social self-interest. Independence ceased to be natural. Now man was preserved not only through self-preservation of the body, but also his identity was preserved through and by the good opin- ion held of him by others. In these social relations of dependency, for Rousseau, lay the origin of property and inequality.
So long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest, and happy lives. . . . But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provision for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable. . . . (1973: 92)
In this social situation, it was no longer the case that man worked for himself and in the interests of pure self-preservation. Now, through prop- erty, it became possible for some not to have to work at all, while others had absolutely no choice but to work for those who had 'provision for two' (1973: 92). Rousseau notes that 'in this state of affairs, equality might have been sustained, had the talents of individuals been equal' (1973: 94). How- ever, with the disappearance of the independence of natural man, and his dependence upon others, there was now nothing to prevent the natural inequality between men unfolding, and becoming a social inequality. Strength, skill and ingenuity made equal work into unequal reward, one man gaining 'a great deal by his work, while the other could hardly support himself' (1973: 94-95).
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This social inequality, made possible by the division of labour and private property, gave rise to a whole new way of life which Rousseau knows as 'civil society'. It became in the interests of men to secure co-operation with others in order to gain advantage over them, to make someone work not for the benefit of himself, but for another. To this end civil man invented new strategies to ensure his own success at the expense of others.
Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jeal- ousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on a mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of oth- ers. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality. (1973: 96)
Property therefore gave rise to a society where each was at war with the other, a war masked by the pretence of 'civility'. So often seen as the natural state of man, for Rousseau this war of all against all was a corruption of nat- ural man, a corruption inevitably brought about when one man co-operated with another for reasons other than his own self-preservation. To be able to have more than was necessary for self-preservation, and to see the advan- tages over others of doing so, were the beginnings of the evils of civil society. The coup de gra^ce was achieved when the right to inequality was enshrined in the universal right of private property. Rousseau argues that the rich real- ized quickly that the force by which they had appropriated their riches was a force that others could use against them. To secure themselves from such usurpation, the rich 'conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man' (1973: 98). Masking the benefit which such a plan gave the rich, they argued to all those who had less and were a threat,
let us join . . . to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambi- tious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to conform; rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations. (1973: 98)
The ruse was successful, for the weak were also busy trying to gain rewards for themselves, and saw in political institutions at least some advantage to
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their attempts. What they did not see was how the law served to ensure that social inequality was preserved, and mitigated against their own attempts for riches. 'All ran headlong to their chains' (1973: 99), unable to see through the now transparent and thus hidden mask of political equality how law enshrined social inequality. Rousseau concludes on the origin of civil society that it
bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery, and wretchedness. (1973: 99)
In the social relation of private property the natural need that each has of the other is distorted into the need of one to exploit the other. The strength of the independent natural man is overcome in civil society by the weakness of dependent man who seeks to exploit that need. The honesty of self-preservation is replaced by the deceit of self-interest. Natural man is replaced by social man, or by the property-owning person, and all the inequalities which are maintained in his name.
This person is related to other persons by way of exploitation. Because each person is potentially a way of another gaining self-advantage, personal relations are characterized by falsity and by deceit. It is here that the theme introduced by the veil in Hawthorne's story finds expression in Rousseau. However, while in Hawthorne the veil is visible and therefore reveals a secret behind it, in Rousseau the veil of social equality is transparent and thus reveals neither itself nor what it achieves. Now, in civil society it became in the interests of men 'to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things' (Rousseau, 1973: 95). In social rela- tions the person becomes a mere illusion of 'sociability', for public life is a pretence, and is wholly artificial. Behind the civility lies the selfishness and greed of the person who works solely for his own self-interest. But unless the mask is revealed, then, like the law, it hides the real inequality behind the merely formal assurances of equality. Rousseau writes that before civil soci- ety, 'men found their security in the ease with which they could see through one another' (1973: 6). In civil society, enjoying social relations based upon private property, that artless and candid life has vanished, and every person is now merely a false show and an appearance.
We no longer dare seem what we really are, but lie under a perpetual restraint . . . we never know with whom we have to deal. . . . What a train
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of vices must attend this uncertainty! Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness. (1973: 6-7)
The falsity of the person is what Rousseau calls amour-propre, a self-interest which is fed through the degree to which another can be exploited, be it in terms of material riches or personal aggrandizement. The ingenuous- ness of natural man Rousseau calls amour-de-soi, 'a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, creates humanity and virtue' (1973: 73). The formal equality of civil society masks the fact that it, in turn, masks how natural inequalities have been institutionalized. The formal relationship of one person to another invisibly masks the fact that each is out to get from the other as much advantage as it can. In the market-place advantage is sought by exploiting the needs of others, yet giving the appear- ance of fairness. In social relations advantage is secured by constructing an appearance of civility and compassion which will gain social favour. In both relations, the person is forced to behave in a deceitful and hypocritical way. Rousseau sees amour-propre as the embodiment of the fall of natural man from self-preservation to social self-interest. The cause of the fall is not man's nature, but the nature of society. It is the social relation which has turned man from an honest and open human being to a cunning and arti- ficial person.
Two hundred and fifty years later the manner of this amour-propre may have changed, and few now defend the view that society is overly polite and respectful. But if Rousseau is right, then the respect that has been lost and to which some may yearn for a return, was not respect at all, only a sham, a show without integrity or substance, in reality, a transparent and therefore invisible veil masking by its transparency deceit and intrigue. Rousseau wrote Emile to illustrate what an education in amour-de-soi would be, that is, an education that prevented social custom from influencing his pupil, so that Emile's needs would always be genuine and never based on the false needs created in the veiled society. This means an education for Emile that, while it takes place in society, remains separate and detached from it until such time as Emile can participate in social relations as his own man with self-determined needs. Emile, therefore, is an education against the devel- opment of an invisible veil, and for a genuine and naturally developed education whose goal is to know thyself. However, even here, education against the veil is itself veiled, for Rousseau as tutor must hide from his
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Self and Other: Life and Death 23
pupil not only the way he engineers situations for Emile, but also that he is tutoring him at all. Natural education in Rousseau is also aporetic. It is a veiled education against the veil.
If politeness and ceremony are no longer the form of the bourgeois veil, nevertheless the fact of the veil persists in civil society. Here the sphere of the equality of the rights of all persons masks its more fundamental charac- ter as the sphere of selfish interests, greed, economic power and business interests that transcend even the boundaries of the nation-state. The idea of globalization speaks here of a global civil society where self-interest on the world stage has developed faster even than the veil of the equality of all persons. However, as we will see a little later, it is the pedagogy of the master still, not only to hide his mastery behind the transparent veil so that he can wilfully deceive others, but also to veil from his own view the effects of his veiled mastery.
Life and death
We noted above in Hawthorne's short story how the veil was seen by those who faced it as being akin to death itself, indeed, as if the Minister and death walked hand in hand. Why should this be so? Why is hiding the face able to evoke the darkest thoughts of death? An answer to this question comes from the way Hegel sets out the relation of life and death in the Phe- nomenology, and in particular in the way life eschews death as other. Education in Hegel returns death to life by retrieving and revealing the veil that is transparent and unseen in modern social relations. This education reveals and wears the mask that is worn but hidden by the reflective self. It does not seek to remove the mask altogether for truth in Hegel is in illusion, not its being overcome.
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.