This integrity is the
subjective
substance of the education of youth into adulthood.
Education in Hegel
?
?
?
?
?
?
I-Philosophy 147
Hegel's comments here will not please those progressive educators who see play as the most important method of a child discovering the world and the rules that govern interaction with others. Hegel favours discipline over play. Play has its place in the child's life but it is not to be seen as the way in which the child will best learn of social life. Hegel's fear is that learn- ing of mediation through play will deny the child the seriousness of mediation, an experience which is absolutely necessary for a formative edu- cation in the demands of freedom. Perhaps Hegel's concerns here are particularly sharp when seen against the present form and content of the culture industry in the West that sells entertainment and fun in life as more desirable, more worthwhile, even more meaningful than the seriousness of thought that freedom and its effects on others demands. Freedom to have mass produced fun is freedom separated from its own dialectic of com- mand and obedience, or mastery and service. Relevant here, then, is Hegel's comment that the child 'must obey in order that he may learn to command. Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom' (1990: 60, zusatz), adding that 'the most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to break them' (1990: 59, zusatz). This obedience, however, need not be seen as cruel or dictatorial and Hegel is clear in his own pedagogy that the learning of obedience is necessary for the truth of a man's independence in the world. The truth of independence is in obedience, not to others, but to the self that must live with others. It is also the case that examples of education in obedience given by Hegel are learning the alphabet and learning of order in the natural world. Here obedience to structure is also an experi- ence in abstracting from sense-certainty and is therefore also a development of the understanding, for, again, it is part of the forces that constitute perception of objects in thought.
However, the understanding here that is based on perception will have to face its own limited scope and, ultimately, its failure to hold to its immediacy. A child may understand what a leaf is and what a bird is, but this under- standing only raises another set of issues. These concern the relation of one's thought to the world that it knows. In its most insistent form this is the question repeated by the child as to 'why' things in the world are as they are. Here is the experience that thought can be more powerful than the world it knows, for it can demand answers to questions raised but not answered by the world. The understanding is insufficient to satisfy itself on the appear- ance of the world in thought. The understanding, as it were, reports on objects in the world but such reporting only raises further and deeper ques- tions. It is in this instability of the understanding that the understanding
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 148 Education in Hegel
comes to understand itself. This is where the consciousness of the child
becomes the self-consciousness of youth. Youth
No preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that older people have tried in vain to put into our heads before.
(Swift, 1886: 109)
Youth takes its beginning in the certainty of its own self-consciousness. It does not need to remember that it has arisen from the frailty of the understanding for it takes itself to be the beginning of all knowledge. Youth knows best. This certainty, however, is grounded in the separation of thought from the real world. Spiritual education here sees self-consciousness look- ing only to itself for truth. Its freedom consists in the fact that, as self- consciousness, it is not mastered by any other or any thing. Here youth enjoys an indifference to the world, but it is an indifference that can take different forms. Youth appears self-centred, self-obsessed and thinks the world revolves around it. 3 However, one form of this self-centredness is an idealism about how the world is and how it should be, although it shows lit- tle or no benefit of actually having had any contact or experience with the 'real world'. Thought here is in search of its own purity and integrity within self-consciousness, a purity that is tied to its separation from the real world and one that is true only to the thought of the world.
Accompanying this idealism self-consciousness can take the shape of a disbelief in all claims to truth in and by the real world. Certainty becomes something certain only of the untruths of the world. All truths that are asserted over and against this scepticism collapse in the wake of their com- peting with each other; opposed to every account there is another equal account. This scepticism can be nihilistic and destructive in its indifference. Youth can be the rebel who serves self-certainty in the negation of the world, and does so, at first, by holding this negativity to be the ground of his certainty. But the cost of the standpoint of this rebel is that his certainty in the lack of truth cannot survive its own negation, its own undermining. The (negative) spiritual lesson here is that the indifference of self-consciousness to the world cannot ground itself in order to preserve this indifference. Self-consciousness becomes indifferent to itself and suffers the same nega- tive fate as it held for the real world. This is the beginning of a very unhappy spiritual education for youth, one in which the certainty of self-consciousness
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 149
opposes itself. Its own certainty turns against itself and leaves self-conscious- ness and its truth rent asunder. This self-consciousness is now dualistic and inwardly torn apart. It is essentially self-contradictory, and is other to itself in the way that previously the external was other to it. This stage of spiritual education is not just the loss of truth but also the impossibility of ever knowing truth. Thought contradicts every truth it comes across. It is a very destructive experience for youth in that it can find no rest from its doubts about the world and about itself. It despairs in a sense of hopelessness that knows no possible reconciliation between thought and truth.
The youth here is open to many different influences that claim a mean- ing that can restore self-consciousness from its negativity to a positivity. One response to this unhappiness is a faith in the eternal and the beyond, whilst another is attachment to an ideal of a society yet to be achieved. Both in a sense are idealistic. But experiments with such solutions inevitably repeat the same contradictions, and youth is plunged further into despair with each repetition. Youth's search for meaning in life expresses the pain born of deep and fundamental unhappiness at the relation between truth and the I for whom it appears.
However, this unhappiness in fact already contains the seeds of the Aufhe- bung that will retrieve and recollect meaning from within the despair. The independent self-consciousness that negates the world and negates itself now shares its negativity with the world. This can be a cruel education for at its heart is the recognition of the complicity of idealism and rebellion with the world they oppose. Youth comes to see that it did no more than repeat the very uncertainties in itself that it accused the world of. The solution, as it were, always becomes part of the problem. This return of the negative to the self-consciousness that exported it to the external world is the educa- tion that now brings youth and the world together. Out of the experience that thought and the world cannot be separated comes a new reality for self- consciousness. This new reality sublates the unhappiness of youth and his negation of self and world. This realizes a standpoint wherein thought sees that in and through its negative self and work it has exercised a totality, in that what it has done it has done to itself. This is no longer freedom from the world. Now this is the freedom of thought as comprehensively self- determining of itself and the world. The self-consciousness that recollects itself in this new freedom is the thought that thinks the truth of all reality, and this is reason. Now the youth enters adulthood because reason becomes him. More colloquially, this is where idealism realizes the truth and neces- sity of 'selling out' to the adult world as it is. However, as we will see now, the recollection of the development and negativity of self-consciousness that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 150 Education in Hegel
formed the rational and comprehensive idea of itself is forgotten when rea- son takes itself abstractly as being the consciousness of truth and being the truth as consciousness, that is, as adult.
Emile and Sophie
If we look for a moment to Rousseau's Emile, we find that this ambivalence is not found in the education that Rousseau provides for his pupil. As his tutor in fact he ensures that Emile does not experience the unhappiness of the I either in relation to its own negation or the negation of the social world. Indeed, Emile is kept free from any tension between the develop- ment of his own needs and the demands of his civil society, the demand, that is, for amour-propre, for conformity to social - and for Rousseau, hypo- critical and unjust - norms and values. Emile is educated beyond the city and as such moves from childhood to adult via a period of youth that is not self-contradictory, not as it were, torn between the freedom of the I and social conformity. Emile's youth is spent learning about freedom in physical but not in actual political relations. He moves from play to work without an intervening education into the freedom of his own self-consciousness and its negations and returns. In other words, Emile is denied the formative political education of life in the aporia of the free-thinking I in the unfree world.
One might see this as a successful education in that the excesses of bour- geois individualism have been avoided, with the result that Emile knows only true needs and thus only forms social relationships grounded in integ- rity. However, the real cost of this smooth transition from boy to man is borne by Sophie. On her befall the contradictions that Emile is protected from. She has to know intricately the workings of bourgeois civil society if she is to survive in the social world. Hers is a full political education into the self-interest and power of male bourgeois individualism and into the need, therefore, for her to formulate a political response. This response is to learn how to play the game in ways that ensure she has some political control over her life and its events. Yet her lack of freedom is for all that a more signifi- cant political education than Emile receives. Her education is where fashion and freedom oppose one another to the extent that freedom is re-formed and re-conceptualized according to the political actualities that face Sophie. However, this education is refused a rationality beyond that of necessary artifice. Sophie has no opportunity for the Aufhebung in which her dilemma can become transformative recollection because she must remain wedded
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 151
to the life that alienates freedom from political reason. She must remain free only in the sense that she must find new ways to display her power of attraction over her man, a power which, as Rousseau makes clear, is abso- lutely grounded in her powerlessness.
Thus, while Emile has reason without the experience of political actuality, Sophie has the experience of political unfreedom without reason. Yet per- haps remarkably, there is an Aufhebung in Emile. Rousseau points out that it is in the unity of these differences between Emile and Sophie that power and powerlessness are both developed and re-formed. The power of Emile discovers its dependence upon Sophie, and in turn the powerlessness of Sophie recognizes the power that it holds over Emile. There is also recollec- tion in Emile, for Rousseau has his student come to thank him for the formative experiences he has engineered for him, seeing in hindsight how necessary they were. However, Emile has not been educated for the world as it is and will not comprehend freedom except in his relation to Sophie, but even here the freedom of the master is the freedom that has exported its own truth in vulnerability to the other, to Sophie. The return of this vulnerability, and the formal equality of Emile and Sophie remained beyond Rousseau's time.
Adulthood
The adult enjoys the certainty of himself as at one with the realities of the social world. He is reason that is in and for itself, for there is no contradic- tion between his own idea of himself and the idea that the world has of him. His thought of reality and his own lived reality are no longer at odds with each other. This is where the doubts and uncertainties of youth are sublated into the positive unity of the I and his world. This world is his world and, having negated the illusory freedom he had as a youth, where the real world was merely a beyond, it now reinforces the freedom of the sovereign ratio- nal person who is one among other such sovereign rational persons. Thus, the education of youth to adulthood becomes fixed as the rite of passage into the reality of the social world, a reality in which the I knows its respon- sibilities for work, family and community.
However, the adult seldom remembers the path that has led to this new certainty, and therefore this I appears as a natural standpoint. It forgets that the truth of reason lies in the experiences that have formed it. This is never more obvious than in the relation between adult and youth. The adult forgets his own youth when educating his children, and is particularly
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 152 Education in Hegel
agitated with the 'attitude' of youth. It is also the case that youth cannot understand the adult for the former has not travelled the path that deter- mines the adult. Thus the adult forgets that the child moves from sense-certainty to ego-certainty, and that with the latter there is a freedom from the world that allows comment and criticism upon it without the binds of commitment to it.
There seems to be here an implicit conservatism in adulthood, particu- larly in the demand for the youth to become adult and to accept his responsibilities. This returns the I from its idealistic freedom to its complic- ity within the world it rejects. Yet Hegel does not see this conformism as suppressing entirely the possibility of new meaning in the world. In the adulthood of civil society there remains scope for 'honourable, far reaching and creative activity [for this is not] a dead, absolutely inert world but, like the life-process, a world which perpetually creates itself anew, which while merely preserving itself, at the same time progresses' (1990: 62-63, zusatz). This is the nature of the Aufhebung in Hegelian philosophical education. It is where change is arbitrary, even terroristic, unless it is able to preserve what it negates in a new, developed and negated form.
This, indeed, is the integrity of the Aufhebung; that it neither wholly dis- cards its previous shapes nor imports into itself anything from outside that will suppress the immanent power to educate and develop. Thus, the nature of 'change' that the spiritual education of the adult brings about is an edu- cation, also, about what 'change' means. We might say here that spiritual education requires one always to understand the nature of change within development, culture and Aufhebung so that one's natural consciousness does not act blindly in the world against the actuality of change and often therein against the very people one intends to benefit.
This integrity is the subjective substance of the education of youth into adulthood. Thus, Hegel says, 'on the one hand we can say that the man only creates what is already there; yet on the other hand, his activity must also bring about an advance' (1990: 63, zusatz). This ambivalence is the protection against terror and has that protection as part of the change it brings about. The integrity is the ambivalence, and it is what makes youth despair of the seeming indiffer- ence of the adult world to real social change.
As reason, then, the adult can only see youth as yet to understand the totality or the real world, and is impatient at the arrogance of the self- consciousness that knows so much only because it knows so little. But the certainty of the adult now fares little better, and will undergo its own experi- ences of failures, negations and transitions. Having forgotten the path to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 153
adulthood, the adult is reason only immediately as far as the child and the youth are concerned, and they experience this adult as thinking himself right without having to justify this. This is reason without reason, and is the immediate appearance of the authority of the adult, an empirical but not (yet) a spiritual authority. But immediate reason cannot withstand the rela- tion to itself that thought brings about here. It cannot remain unchanged by the demand that it justify itself universally, for this means that the univer- sality of the adult must become an object for him, and therefore separated from him. The adult is called upon to think its own universality, a contradic- tion that defeats itself. Just as in the life and death struggle life made its negation other to it, so the adult here makes his negation other to him. This is the same negation that realized itself as reason out of its own unhap- piness regarding its relation to the true. Thus it makes external the experi- ence that it depends upon. It externalizes its own truth. As such, this truth appears as an object over and against it as universal law. Law here is to rea- son and the adult what death is to life. Both the adult and life have to find themselves again in that which they have eschewed. Law, a universality, is other to the adult whose truth it is. As such, this other is all rational self- conscious adults. The truth of the adult therefore is other people. This is reason as social relation, or ethical life, or again, as society. Only when the adult learns that he is this same relation to himself as he is to other people will his spiritual education be recollected by spirit as its own development. It is this spiritual education of the adult in relation to society that we will now follow.
Of course, this is not the first time that self-consciousness has become aware of ethical or social life. Indeed, as we will see in a moment, ethical life has been present throughout its education. The point is, however, that they are separated in our account of this education because that is the structure of our modern experience of spirit, that is, that the I is claimed and opposed by the political totality in which it finds itself. It is this experience, now, that will begin a new education for the adult. His relation to others has always been formative for him, but now he must recollect the ways in which this has been so. What lies ahead for this reflective person is an education about how universality as other has also grown and developed spiritually. In a sense the education of the adult must begin again, in the childhood and youth of spirit. The adult, who judges the youth, must now judge himself in the same terms, that is, about how much he knows because of how little he knows. Thus this education begins negatively with the loss of the certainty of the rational person to the totality of ethical or social life.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 154 Education in Hegel PART B
I As We
Spiritual education, like that of personal education, takes its beginning from the reflective mind of the adult. This adult now seeks to understand how his dependency upon others - the We - compromises his individual sovereignty. In essence this is a sociological education. There are two truths in this sentence. His education is sociological because it is dualistic. He is trying to comprehend how society or social forms relate to the I as its truth. This means that the reflective I is still posited as that from which the enquiry into society can begin, as it was in beginning its enquiry into itself. Dualism is built in to the very structure of such a sociological enquiry, but whilst dualism carries out the enquiry, it leaves its own presupposition of itself out of the enquiry. In other words, the essence of sociological enquiry is illu- sory. This is the second truth in the sentence that in essence this is a sociological education. There is, therefore, a third partner in this sociology. There is the consciousness that knows sociology to be compromised by its own standpoint. This education teaches that the standpoint of the reflective I and of his object of study is not just a study of the contingency of the for- mer upon the latter. It is also a study carried out by contingency in the form of the dualism of self and society. The shapes that this latter contingency takes, the shapes of illusion, are the shapes of spirit now in the Phenomenol- ogy. They are present only in the ways in which they are posited. This third partner is veiled and hard to see, but it remains the meaning and the signifi- cance, the actuality, of dualism. It is this triadic relation that is intended by the dualism of I-philosophy. The third partner is present in appearing to be absent. It takes the wisdom of old age to come to know this third partner as the truth of its other 'truthful' appearances.
We will begin now to look at spirit's education regarding its own develop- ment. We will follow this education through the same phases of childhood and youth, although this time in the way they express themselves as social or collective forms rather than in individual consciousness, self-conscious- ness and reason. Nevertheless we are still following this education in the way it appears in and to the modern reflective subject. It is this subject that has the following spiritual experiences, and it is only as a result of this edu- cation that we will be able to refer this sociological education as really a spiritual education, for although they are all shapes of spirit, this only appears in the spirit's recollection of itself in its old age. Equally we will see the same structure of immediacy, mediation and Aufhebung moving this
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 155 education forwards at all levels such that particular developments take on a
greater significance only when they become what is recollected. Childhood
Spirit's immediacy is, like the consciousness of the child, only knowable to itself in a recollection that knows it to be lost. In the Phenomenology this immediacy is already the collapse of consciousness as the divine law and custom of Hellenic city-states, where spirit as the child is the tradition that binds together all its members in a common substance.
For our reflective subject these 'natural' social relationships begin in the immediate relations of the individual and ethical life, that is, as love in the family and as law in custom and tradition. When these immediacies hold the individual at one with the collective through feeling and emotion, and see such allegiance as virtue, then the nation becomes a family and shared blood becomes the tie of the social bond. But the consciousness of the people, if it is to ground its sovereignty objectively, must be thought of as something permanent and sustainable in the world beyond its immediate perception and understanding of itself. This process becomes even more urgent as the immediacy of the collective bond comes into contact with other such bonds in the world. This life and death struggle of immediacies is already the end of immediate 'natural' social life and is the beginning of political life. The mind that survives the struggle exports the death of itself as other than itself, which helps in turn to define this community against that community. But it is already too late for immediate ethical life here, for the child comes to see that it, the social collective, cannot sustain itself in feelings and emotions against this will becoming self-conscious. All ethical immediacies are in this sense the spirit of the child, a spirit which carries the fundamental ambivalence of immediate belonging and life in relation to otherness. Even though the other to the collective can be used to strengthen the intensity of the immediate bond, nevertheless in the other of ethical immediacy - and other here means both the other to immediacy and the otherness of immediacy to itself - the seeds of the collapse of imme- diate ethical life are already present. The natural ethical life cannot hold out against its division into otherness, a division that at first is concrete as the I of its citizens and as the law that recognizes them.
Youth
Youthful spirit takes its beginning in the certainty of the law that guarantees the rights of the person. This law is property law because the sovereignty of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 156 Education in Hegel
the person is based on the exclusion from him of the vulnerability that would compromise his legal identity. This is passed to non-persons, that is, to objects and to men deemed no better than objects. This certainty, how- ever, cannot be at peace with itself. The law is a form of universality that, in eschewing vulnerability as other, denies to itself the means by which its vul- nerability might come to know itself. Spirit, here, is an alienation of itself from itself. Divine law is the truth of the vulnerability alienated from itself and become absolutely other to the truth of the legal person. This person thus enters a period of most unhappy education in which political truth cannot be reconciled with divine truth, and where all attempts at trying to do God's work on earth merely emphasizes and repeats their separation. This is experienced as dualism but is accompanied by the third partner who is present not as the two sides of the separation, but as the relation they continually misrecognize. As dualism the truth of the antithesis of divine and temporal authority is cast beyond man, who is deemed to be the one at fault here, to the perfection of a being beyond man. Here, the alienation of freedom from itself finds truth in the only place it can, in a beyond that transcends all human imperfection. The result is a world in which truth is absent from real life and demands that it be established there. But all attempts to do so remain unaware of the third partner in the relationship. Hence they can only repeat, but not re-form, the pre-existing relation between God and man. The result is that all attempts to establish God's will and law on earth collapse in on themselves because they are only human attempts. Faith in the work goes hand-in-hand with lawlessness on earth and the result is barbarism. The harder faith struggles to bring God to earth, the greater the barbarity.
Youthful spirit mirrors here the unhappy youth of self-consciousness. The latter existed in the rupture between inner freedom and outer authority. Now, the legal person is caught between an idea of truth that is beyond him, and beyond everyone else, and a life where it becomes impossible to act for the good. It is not necessary that this person believes in God (though he may do) for that is not the philosophical significance of this form of ethical life. The significance here is Bildung, that is, the education of the reflective adult about the third partner than can express for him the contradictions in his life. His good actions turn out bad results, his noble actions turn out ignoble, his attempts to act beyond self-interest turn against themselves, each reinforcing the feeling that it is impossible to act in the world accord- ing to a good that seems to be possible only in the world beyond human weakness. He may retain faith in the idea of the good, or he may despair
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 157
completely of the good and see intrigue as a fair response to a hopeless situ- ation abandoned by God.
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)
? ? ? ? ? ?
Hegel's comments here will not please those progressive educators who see play as the most important method of a child discovering the world and the rules that govern interaction with others. Hegel favours discipline over play. Play has its place in the child's life but it is not to be seen as the way in which the child will best learn of social life. Hegel's fear is that learn- ing of mediation through play will deny the child the seriousness of mediation, an experience which is absolutely necessary for a formative edu- cation in the demands of freedom. Perhaps Hegel's concerns here are particularly sharp when seen against the present form and content of the culture industry in the West that sells entertainment and fun in life as more desirable, more worthwhile, even more meaningful than the seriousness of thought that freedom and its effects on others demands. Freedom to have mass produced fun is freedom separated from its own dialectic of com- mand and obedience, or mastery and service. Relevant here, then, is Hegel's comment that the child 'must obey in order that he may learn to command. Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom' (1990: 60, zusatz), adding that 'the most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to break them' (1990: 59, zusatz). This obedience, however, need not be seen as cruel or dictatorial and Hegel is clear in his own pedagogy that the learning of obedience is necessary for the truth of a man's independence in the world. The truth of independence is in obedience, not to others, but to the self that must live with others. It is also the case that examples of education in obedience given by Hegel are learning the alphabet and learning of order in the natural world. Here obedience to structure is also an experi- ence in abstracting from sense-certainty and is therefore also a development of the understanding, for, again, it is part of the forces that constitute perception of objects in thought.
However, the understanding here that is based on perception will have to face its own limited scope and, ultimately, its failure to hold to its immediacy. A child may understand what a leaf is and what a bird is, but this under- standing only raises another set of issues. These concern the relation of one's thought to the world that it knows. In its most insistent form this is the question repeated by the child as to 'why' things in the world are as they are. Here is the experience that thought can be more powerful than the world it knows, for it can demand answers to questions raised but not answered by the world. The understanding is insufficient to satisfy itself on the appear- ance of the world in thought. The understanding, as it were, reports on objects in the world but such reporting only raises further and deeper ques- tions. It is in this instability of the understanding that the understanding
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 148 Education in Hegel
comes to understand itself. This is where the consciousness of the child
becomes the self-consciousness of youth. Youth
No preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that older people have tried in vain to put into our heads before.
(Swift, 1886: 109)
Youth takes its beginning in the certainty of its own self-consciousness. It does not need to remember that it has arisen from the frailty of the understanding for it takes itself to be the beginning of all knowledge. Youth knows best. This certainty, however, is grounded in the separation of thought from the real world. Spiritual education here sees self-consciousness look- ing only to itself for truth. Its freedom consists in the fact that, as self- consciousness, it is not mastered by any other or any thing. Here youth enjoys an indifference to the world, but it is an indifference that can take different forms. Youth appears self-centred, self-obsessed and thinks the world revolves around it. 3 However, one form of this self-centredness is an idealism about how the world is and how it should be, although it shows lit- tle or no benefit of actually having had any contact or experience with the 'real world'. Thought here is in search of its own purity and integrity within self-consciousness, a purity that is tied to its separation from the real world and one that is true only to the thought of the world.
Accompanying this idealism self-consciousness can take the shape of a disbelief in all claims to truth in and by the real world. Certainty becomes something certain only of the untruths of the world. All truths that are asserted over and against this scepticism collapse in the wake of their com- peting with each other; opposed to every account there is another equal account. This scepticism can be nihilistic and destructive in its indifference. Youth can be the rebel who serves self-certainty in the negation of the world, and does so, at first, by holding this negativity to be the ground of his certainty. But the cost of the standpoint of this rebel is that his certainty in the lack of truth cannot survive its own negation, its own undermining. The (negative) spiritual lesson here is that the indifference of self-consciousness to the world cannot ground itself in order to preserve this indifference. Self-consciousness becomes indifferent to itself and suffers the same nega- tive fate as it held for the real world. This is the beginning of a very unhappy spiritual education for youth, one in which the certainty of self-consciousness
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 149
opposes itself. Its own certainty turns against itself and leaves self-conscious- ness and its truth rent asunder. This self-consciousness is now dualistic and inwardly torn apart. It is essentially self-contradictory, and is other to itself in the way that previously the external was other to it. This stage of spiritual education is not just the loss of truth but also the impossibility of ever knowing truth. Thought contradicts every truth it comes across. It is a very destructive experience for youth in that it can find no rest from its doubts about the world and about itself. It despairs in a sense of hopelessness that knows no possible reconciliation between thought and truth.
The youth here is open to many different influences that claim a mean- ing that can restore self-consciousness from its negativity to a positivity. One response to this unhappiness is a faith in the eternal and the beyond, whilst another is attachment to an ideal of a society yet to be achieved. Both in a sense are idealistic. But experiments with such solutions inevitably repeat the same contradictions, and youth is plunged further into despair with each repetition. Youth's search for meaning in life expresses the pain born of deep and fundamental unhappiness at the relation between truth and the I for whom it appears.
However, this unhappiness in fact already contains the seeds of the Aufhe- bung that will retrieve and recollect meaning from within the despair. The independent self-consciousness that negates the world and negates itself now shares its negativity with the world. This can be a cruel education for at its heart is the recognition of the complicity of idealism and rebellion with the world they oppose. Youth comes to see that it did no more than repeat the very uncertainties in itself that it accused the world of. The solution, as it were, always becomes part of the problem. This return of the negative to the self-consciousness that exported it to the external world is the educa- tion that now brings youth and the world together. Out of the experience that thought and the world cannot be separated comes a new reality for self- consciousness. This new reality sublates the unhappiness of youth and his negation of self and world. This realizes a standpoint wherein thought sees that in and through its negative self and work it has exercised a totality, in that what it has done it has done to itself. This is no longer freedom from the world. Now this is the freedom of thought as comprehensively self- determining of itself and the world. The self-consciousness that recollects itself in this new freedom is the thought that thinks the truth of all reality, and this is reason. Now the youth enters adulthood because reason becomes him. More colloquially, this is where idealism realizes the truth and neces- sity of 'selling out' to the adult world as it is. However, as we will see now, the recollection of the development and negativity of self-consciousness that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 150 Education in Hegel
formed the rational and comprehensive idea of itself is forgotten when rea- son takes itself abstractly as being the consciousness of truth and being the truth as consciousness, that is, as adult.
Emile and Sophie
If we look for a moment to Rousseau's Emile, we find that this ambivalence is not found in the education that Rousseau provides for his pupil. As his tutor in fact he ensures that Emile does not experience the unhappiness of the I either in relation to its own negation or the negation of the social world. Indeed, Emile is kept free from any tension between the develop- ment of his own needs and the demands of his civil society, the demand, that is, for amour-propre, for conformity to social - and for Rousseau, hypo- critical and unjust - norms and values. Emile is educated beyond the city and as such moves from childhood to adult via a period of youth that is not self-contradictory, not as it were, torn between the freedom of the I and social conformity. Emile's youth is spent learning about freedom in physical but not in actual political relations. He moves from play to work without an intervening education into the freedom of his own self-consciousness and its negations and returns. In other words, Emile is denied the formative political education of life in the aporia of the free-thinking I in the unfree world.
One might see this as a successful education in that the excesses of bour- geois individualism have been avoided, with the result that Emile knows only true needs and thus only forms social relationships grounded in integ- rity. However, the real cost of this smooth transition from boy to man is borne by Sophie. On her befall the contradictions that Emile is protected from. She has to know intricately the workings of bourgeois civil society if she is to survive in the social world. Hers is a full political education into the self-interest and power of male bourgeois individualism and into the need, therefore, for her to formulate a political response. This response is to learn how to play the game in ways that ensure she has some political control over her life and its events. Yet her lack of freedom is for all that a more signifi- cant political education than Emile receives. Her education is where fashion and freedom oppose one another to the extent that freedom is re-formed and re-conceptualized according to the political actualities that face Sophie. However, this education is refused a rationality beyond that of necessary artifice. Sophie has no opportunity for the Aufhebung in which her dilemma can become transformative recollection because she must remain wedded
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 151
to the life that alienates freedom from political reason. She must remain free only in the sense that she must find new ways to display her power of attraction over her man, a power which, as Rousseau makes clear, is abso- lutely grounded in her powerlessness.
Thus, while Emile has reason without the experience of political actuality, Sophie has the experience of political unfreedom without reason. Yet per- haps remarkably, there is an Aufhebung in Emile. Rousseau points out that it is in the unity of these differences between Emile and Sophie that power and powerlessness are both developed and re-formed. The power of Emile discovers its dependence upon Sophie, and in turn the powerlessness of Sophie recognizes the power that it holds over Emile. There is also recollec- tion in Emile, for Rousseau has his student come to thank him for the formative experiences he has engineered for him, seeing in hindsight how necessary they were. However, Emile has not been educated for the world as it is and will not comprehend freedom except in his relation to Sophie, but even here the freedom of the master is the freedom that has exported its own truth in vulnerability to the other, to Sophie. The return of this vulnerability, and the formal equality of Emile and Sophie remained beyond Rousseau's time.
Adulthood
The adult enjoys the certainty of himself as at one with the realities of the social world. He is reason that is in and for itself, for there is no contradic- tion between his own idea of himself and the idea that the world has of him. His thought of reality and his own lived reality are no longer at odds with each other. This is where the doubts and uncertainties of youth are sublated into the positive unity of the I and his world. This world is his world and, having negated the illusory freedom he had as a youth, where the real world was merely a beyond, it now reinforces the freedom of the sovereign ratio- nal person who is one among other such sovereign rational persons. Thus, the education of youth to adulthood becomes fixed as the rite of passage into the reality of the social world, a reality in which the I knows its respon- sibilities for work, family and community.
However, the adult seldom remembers the path that has led to this new certainty, and therefore this I appears as a natural standpoint. It forgets that the truth of reason lies in the experiences that have formed it. This is never more obvious than in the relation between adult and youth. The adult forgets his own youth when educating his children, and is particularly
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 152 Education in Hegel
agitated with the 'attitude' of youth. It is also the case that youth cannot understand the adult for the former has not travelled the path that deter- mines the adult. Thus the adult forgets that the child moves from sense-certainty to ego-certainty, and that with the latter there is a freedom from the world that allows comment and criticism upon it without the binds of commitment to it.
There seems to be here an implicit conservatism in adulthood, particu- larly in the demand for the youth to become adult and to accept his responsibilities. This returns the I from its idealistic freedom to its complic- ity within the world it rejects. Yet Hegel does not see this conformism as suppressing entirely the possibility of new meaning in the world. In the adulthood of civil society there remains scope for 'honourable, far reaching and creative activity [for this is not] a dead, absolutely inert world but, like the life-process, a world which perpetually creates itself anew, which while merely preserving itself, at the same time progresses' (1990: 62-63, zusatz). This is the nature of the Aufhebung in Hegelian philosophical education. It is where change is arbitrary, even terroristic, unless it is able to preserve what it negates in a new, developed and negated form.
This, indeed, is the integrity of the Aufhebung; that it neither wholly dis- cards its previous shapes nor imports into itself anything from outside that will suppress the immanent power to educate and develop. Thus, the nature of 'change' that the spiritual education of the adult brings about is an edu- cation, also, about what 'change' means. We might say here that spiritual education requires one always to understand the nature of change within development, culture and Aufhebung so that one's natural consciousness does not act blindly in the world against the actuality of change and often therein against the very people one intends to benefit.
This integrity is the subjective substance of the education of youth into adulthood. Thus, Hegel says, 'on the one hand we can say that the man only creates what is already there; yet on the other hand, his activity must also bring about an advance' (1990: 63, zusatz). This ambivalence is the protection against terror and has that protection as part of the change it brings about. The integrity is the ambivalence, and it is what makes youth despair of the seeming indiffer- ence of the adult world to real social change.
As reason, then, the adult can only see youth as yet to understand the totality or the real world, and is impatient at the arrogance of the self- consciousness that knows so much only because it knows so little. But the certainty of the adult now fares little better, and will undergo its own experi- ences of failures, negations and transitions. Having forgotten the path to
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 153
adulthood, the adult is reason only immediately as far as the child and the youth are concerned, and they experience this adult as thinking himself right without having to justify this. This is reason without reason, and is the immediate appearance of the authority of the adult, an empirical but not (yet) a spiritual authority. But immediate reason cannot withstand the rela- tion to itself that thought brings about here. It cannot remain unchanged by the demand that it justify itself universally, for this means that the univer- sality of the adult must become an object for him, and therefore separated from him. The adult is called upon to think its own universality, a contradic- tion that defeats itself. Just as in the life and death struggle life made its negation other to it, so the adult here makes his negation other to him. This is the same negation that realized itself as reason out of its own unhap- piness regarding its relation to the true. Thus it makes external the experi- ence that it depends upon. It externalizes its own truth. As such, this truth appears as an object over and against it as universal law. Law here is to rea- son and the adult what death is to life. Both the adult and life have to find themselves again in that which they have eschewed. Law, a universality, is other to the adult whose truth it is. As such, this other is all rational self- conscious adults. The truth of the adult therefore is other people. This is reason as social relation, or ethical life, or again, as society. Only when the adult learns that he is this same relation to himself as he is to other people will his spiritual education be recollected by spirit as its own development. It is this spiritual education of the adult in relation to society that we will now follow.
Of course, this is not the first time that self-consciousness has become aware of ethical or social life. Indeed, as we will see in a moment, ethical life has been present throughout its education. The point is, however, that they are separated in our account of this education because that is the structure of our modern experience of spirit, that is, that the I is claimed and opposed by the political totality in which it finds itself. It is this experience, now, that will begin a new education for the adult. His relation to others has always been formative for him, but now he must recollect the ways in which this has been so. What lies ahead for this reflective person is an education about how universality as other has also grown and developed spiritually. In a sense the education of the adult must begin again, in the childhood and youth of spirit. The adult, who judges the youth, must now judge himself in the same terms, that is, about how much he knows because of how little he knows. Thus this education begins negatively with the loss of the certainty of the rational person to the totality of ethical or social life.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 154 Education in Hegel PART B
I As We
Spiritual education, like that of personal education, takes its beginning from the reflective mind of the adult. This adult now seeks to understand how his dependency upon others - the We - compromises his individual sovereignty. In essence this is a sociological education. There are two truths in this sentence. His education is sociological because it is dualistic. He is trying to comprehend how society or social forms relate to the I as its truth. This means that the reflective I is still posited as that from which the enquiry into society can begin, as it was in beginning its enquiry into itself. Dualism is built in to the very structure of such a sociological enquiry, but whilst dualism carries out the enquiry, it leaves its own presupposition of itself out of the enquiry. In other words, the essence of sociological enquiry is illu- sory. This is the second truth in the sentence that in essence this is a sociological education. There is, therefore, a third partner in this sociology. There is the consciousness that knows sociology to be compromised by its own standpoint. This education teaches that the standpoint of the reflective I and of his object of study is not just a study of the contingency of the for- mer upon the latter. It is also a study carried out by contingency in the form of the dualism of self and society. The shapes that this latter contingency takes, the shapes of illusion, are the shapes of spirit now in the Phenomenol- ogy. They are present only in the ways in which they are posited. This third partner is veiled and hard to see, but it remains the meaning and the signifi- cance, the actuality, of dualism. It is this triadic relation that is intended by the dualism of I-philosophy. The third partner is present in appearing to be absent. It takes the wisdom of old age to come to know this third partner as the truth of its other 'truthful' appearances.
We will begin now to look at spirit's education regarding its own develop- ment. We will follow this education through the same phases of childhood and youth, although this time in the way they express themselves as social or collective forms rather than in individual consciousness, self-conscious- ness and reason. Nevertheless we are still following this education in the way it appears in and to the modern reflective subject. It is this subject that has the following spiritual experiences, and it is only as a result of this edu- cation that we will be able to refer this sociological education as really a spiritual education, for although they are all shapes of spirit, this only appears in the spirit's recollection of itself in its old age. Equally we will see the same structure of immediacy, mediation and Aufhebung moving this
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 155 education forwards at all levels such that particular developments take on a
greater significance only when they become what is recollected. Childhood
Spirit's immediacy is, like the consciousness of the child, only knowable to itself in a recollection that knows it to be lost. In the Phenomenology this immediacy is already the collapse of consciousness as the divine law and custom of Hellenic city-states, where spirit as the child is the tradition that binds together all its members in a common substance.
For our reflective subject these 'natural' social relationships begin in the immediate relations of the individual and ethical life, that is, as love in the family and as law in custom and tradition. When these immediacies hold the individual at one with the collective through feeling and emotion, and see such allegiance as virtue, then the nation becomes a family and shared blood becomes the tie of the social bond. But the consciousness of the people, if it is to ground its sovereignty objectively, must be thought of as something permanent and sustainable in the world beyond its immediate perception and understanding of itself. This process becomes even more urgent as the immediacy of the collective bond comes into contact with other such bonds in the world. This life and death struggle of immediacies is already the end of immediate 'natural' social life and is the beginning of political life. The mind that survives the struggle exports the death of itself as other than itself, which helps in turn to define this community against that community. But it is already too late for immediate ethical life here, for the child comes to see that it, the social collective, cannot sustain itself in feelings and emotions against this will becoming self-conscious. All ethical immediacies are in this sense the spirit of the child, a spirit which carries the fundamental ambivalence of immediate belonging and life in relation to otherness. Even though the other to the collective can be used to strengthen the intensity of the immediate bond, nevertheless in the other of ethical immediacy - and other here means both the other to immediacy and the otherness of immediacy to itself - the seeds of the collapse of imme- diate ethical life are already present. The natural ethical life cannot hold out against its division into otherness, a division that at first is concrete as the I of its citizens and as the law that recognizes them.
Youth
Youthful spirit takes its beginning in the certainty of the law that guarantees the rights of the person. This law is property law because the sovereignty of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 156 Education in Hegel
the person is based on the exclusion from him of the vulnerability that would compromise his legal identity. This is passed to non-persons, that is, to objects and to men deemed no better than objects. This certainty, how- ever, cannot be at peace with itself. The law is a form of universality that, in eschewing vulnerability as other, denies to itself the means by which its vul- nerability might come to know itself. Spirit, here, is an alienation of itself from itself. Divine law is the truth of the vulnerability alienated from itself and become absolutely other to the truth of the legal person. This person thus enters a period of most unhappy education in which political truth cannot be reconciled with divine truth, and where all attempts at trying to do God's work on earth merely emphasizes and repeats their separation. This is experienced as dualism but is accompanied by the third partner who is present not as the two sides of the separation, but as the relation they continually misrecognize. As dualism the truth of the antithesis of divine and temporal authority is cast beyond man, who is deemed to be the one at fault here, to the perfection of a being beyond man. Here, the alienation of freedom from itself finds truth in the only place it can, in a beyond that transcends all human imperfection. The result is a world in which truth is absent from real life and demands that it be established there. But all attempts to do so remain unaware of the third partner in the relationship. Hence they can only repeat, but not re-form, the pre-existing relation between God and man. The result is that all attempts to establish God's will and law on earth collapse in on themselves because they are only human attempts. Faith in the work goes hand-in-hand with lawlessness on earth and the result is barbarism. The harder faith struggles to bring God to earth, the greater the barbarity.
Youthful spirit mirrors here the unhappy youth of self-consciousness. The latter existed in the rupture between inner freedom and outer authority. Now, the legal person is caught between an idea of truth that is beyond him, and beyond everyone else, and a life where it becomes impossible to act for the good. It is not necessary that this person believes in God (though he may do) for that is not the philosophical significance of this form of ethical life. The significance here is Bildung, that is, the education of the reflective adult about the third partner than can express for him the contradictions in his life. His good actions turn out bad results, his noble actions turn out ignoble, his attempts to act beyond self-interest turn against themselves, each reinforcing the feeling that it is impossible to act in the world accord- ing to a good that seems to be possible only in the world beyond human weakness. He may retain faith in the idea of the good, or he may despair
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? I-Philosophy 157
completely of the good and see intrigue as a fair response to a hopeless situ- ation abandoned by God.
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)
? ? ? ? ? ?
