One way to illustrate the
importance
of recollection in Hegel beyond the imagination is in the way that the absolute or God can be known.
Education in Hegel
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48 Education in Hegel
education regarding the cycle of Entwicklung. Bildung disrupts the smooth flow of potentiality to actuality. What is actual here is the experience of the negation of development, or its being re-formed in its being known. This opposition is the history of philosophy, that is, the history of philosophy is the history of a development whose unfolding appears to exceed itself at every turn. The history of philosophy is therefore set a different and unique challenge: to comprehend a development whose comprehension obstructs development. Or, to comprehend how the I can be of unfolding yet also as unfolding. This requires a notion of education or development that, in appearing to exceed development, in fact practises development.
Between them, Bildung and Entwicklung play out an educational drama that has philosophical implications which still remain to be acknowledged and comprehended. Therefore, we move now to the third and most impor- tant notion of education in Hegel, that of Aufhebung, in order to show how Bildung and Entwicklung are its constitutive but not its exhaustive moments. What they constitute is the disruption of the consciousness that does not think philosophically, and the historical, theological and political telos of doing so. Disruption as teleology, and teleology as disruption are the motor force of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and his History of Philosophy. Together they ensure that dogma is constantly negated and that the negation is understood as human development. Together here they have their relation comprehended as a self-(re-)formation in the Aufhebung.
Aufhebung (self-[re-]formation)
This is perhaps the most disputed term in all Hegelian thought. On it hangs the system itself because the Aufhebung is the mechanism by which negation and negation of negation realize a determinate self-(re-)formation. It is un- Hegelian to see Hegel's philosophy as based around the triadic relationship of thesis-antithesis-synthesis because such a formula suppresses the fact that in Hegel any such movement changes the consciousness that experi- ences it. This change is the culture, the formation and re-formation, of the consciousness. Merely to observe this development and to comment upon its apparent logic from a vantage point, or as a voyeur, is both to presuppose and to misunderstand this culture of experience, and of subjectivity. Indeed, it is to eschew precisely the education that the sequence of the terms describes. In the mind, let us say, of a critic of Hegel, this formula is inter- preted as one in which the synthesis overcomes the opposition of thesis and antithesis. Equally, in the same mind, a critique of this overcoming might
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be made on the grounds of the apparent imperialism of Eurocentric ratio- nalism. Overcoming and resolving oppositions, the critic might say, is the terror imposed by reason over all oppositions or dualisms. Such a critic may champion the view, on the one hand, that differences should not be over- come or, on the other, that difference exceeds the illusory sovereignty of the synthesis that reason seeks to impose. The former might be called the pluralism of the postmodern, the latter the excess of the poststructural.
Hegel does not, however, have a philosophy based on such a simplistic view of the overcoming or resolving of opposing dualisms. Hegel's philoso- phy and the notion of the Aufhebung within it are centred on the relations that serve as the conditions of the possibility for the thinking of objects. The sense of contingency found here is more radical, more penetrating and more significant than versions of contingency that seek only to assert relations of dependence. Such assertions are forced to presuppose the rela- tion they wish to acknowledge. Or, put another way, the relation to the object is always made possible by, and is contingent upon, a prior relation to that object. This means not only that even assertions of contingency are contingent, but also that this realization must in turn collapse under the weight of itself, even, or especially, when it is posited as difference, as possi- bility, or as the impossibility of absolute thinking. We saw above this re-formation as characteristic of Bildung.
This insight into philosophy as the relation of the relation does not, of course, belong exclusively to Hegel. On the contrary, it is the insight into the dialectic that gives form and content to Western philosophy from Plato to Derrida. What is significant about Hegel's contribution to this debate7 is that his whole philosophy works not with the one relation or the other, but within the relation of both relations; that is, within the relation to the object and the relation to that relation. This is the educative significance of the Aufhebung. It is, we might say here, to work within the broken middle8 of the natural standpoint of thought's relation to an object and the philosophical standpoint of thought's relation to that relation. There is no overcoming here although there is a double negation; the negation of the object in rela- tion to consciousness and the negation of that relation in relation to consciousness (now as its own object). Hegel's system is a detailed explora- tion into the implications of each relation upon the other. It is not a system where mediation or negation are overcome, but rather one where philoso- phy, and, therefore, education in Hegel, are precisely the subject and substance of those implications. As an essentially educative experience, this broken middle cannot be resolved, for it precedes thinking as the latter's
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condition of possibility. But what it can learn from this impossibility of resolution is its own truth, a truth known in and as the form and content of the contradictory and inevitable conjunction of abstraction and media- tion. Aufhebung is this truth that lies within the relation of contingency to itself, and in the following section we will explore the structure of this edu- cational relation as recollection.
Seen in this way, Aufhebung is the philosophical education that underpins the education of Bildung and Entwicklung, and, most importantly, their phil- osophical and educational relation to each other. My case, here, is this. Bildung in the Phenomenology prioritizes the reform of the thinker that comes with thought's negation of its object. Entwicklung in the History of Philosophy prioritizes the telos of such changes. As such, as we saw above, their relation to each other is anything but harmonious. Telos is already disrupted in Bil- dung, and Bildung always returns to (this disrupted) telos. It is this difficult relation - an aporetic relation - that is expressed as self-(re-)formation in and by Aufhebung.
Recollection
A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me
(Pascal, 1966: 218)
Aufhebung is significant in Hegel because it achieves something that appears to the abstract rational consciousness to be impossible. It is able to know something as both an appearance and as the negation of this appearance. This means that it somehow preserves what it knows as both what it was (its appearance) and what it is now known as. When Aufhebung is translated as 'sublation' it fails to pay due attention to the most important feature of the Aufhebung, that it is essentially a learning experience. But if this was all there was to it, the Aufhebung would amount to no more than a sceptical knowing, that is, a knowing of things to be not as they appear. What seems to be lack- ing in Aufhebung seen in this way is any kind of positive knowledge about what the thing actually is. The nature of the positive element of the Aufhe- bung is what is most at stake in Hegel. If it is purely positive then it is easily fashioned into the kind of claims for absolute knowing that appear arro- gant and self-satisfied. If it is not positive at all, then it teaches us nothing. What kind of notion remains, then, if any, that might somehow know the
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truth of something in what it is not, and maintain that negativity even in its being known as such? How might it be possible to know something that is known as unknown? The answer to this question, and the structure of the Aufhebung in Hegel, is of education as recollection. When the negative knows itself it is as recollection.
We saw in Chapter 1 how life can know its own nothingness in death, how the master can know his own nothingness in the slave, and how the self can know his nothingness in his other. But if we now replace 'know' here with 'recollect,' the educational character and structure of this knowing can be brought to the fore. To recollect oneself is to be what one is not. There is a double significance here, and one that was also found in Chapter 1 regard- ing life, the master and the self. First, one recollects that one is something other than what one is. This is the same as saying that one is never what one was, because the knowledge of what one was can only be recollected. It can only be known differently to how it was. This opens up a fear of only ever being nothing, a fear of nihilism, because a positive standpoint is forever impossible. But, and second, to recollect is to be what one is not. This is a result, albeit one that looks strange and out of sorts with rationalism. There is only one way that this opposition or autoimmunity can make sense of itself without the aid of further external presuppositions or assertions. One can be what one is not when one is learning about oneself. The structure of this learning is recollection, for in recollection what is recalled is what was by that which is what one was. What is lost and kept is that which is recol- lected as recollecting. In this learning, in this education, the positive and the negative carry their own truths at the same time in and as learning. This is how the Aufhebung works, through recollection, as our philosophical edu- cation that what was and what is are both present and absent in and as learning. Learning holds thought and being together without suppressing their difference. This, indeed, is what is educational about philosophy and philosophical about education.
Later in this chapter we will see how the history of philosophy appears when viewed philosophically as recollection. This is undertaken by looking at the aporetic mastery of the West and its export of vulnerability across the world. Before that, however, we will illustrate this concept of recollection, and therefore Aufhebung, in three ways. First, by looking at the role it plays in Hegel's presentation of the psychology of thought; second, and with the non-specialist in Hegel in mind, by way of William Wordsworth's ode 'Inti- mation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'; and third, albeit briefly, by looking at recollection in Philip Verene's book Hegel's Recollection.
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For those who seek an obvious justification from Hegel that the Aufhebung is recollection there is not much to go on. But what there is, goes a long way. Recollection is primarily described as a moment in the development of thought to rational cognition. In both the Philosophical Propaedeutic (1809-1811) and the Philosophy of Mind (1830) Erinnerung is the first stage wherein immediate intuitions come to be held as images in the memory such that they become representations. The translation of Erinnerung as inwardizing9 refers to what happens when the ego or the I recollects itself from its feelings and intuitions as a presence or a being in time and space. Recollection works here by creating the intuition as an image within the ego. To know the image as mine is to know the I to whom it belongs.
But the term inwardizing does not capture the unique features of what takes place here. In the Philosophical Propaedeutic Hegel notes that the I does not restrict itself to the intuition that has been internalized, but also liber- ates this intuition from an external time and space to a subjective time and space. In this way, it is universalized as form and 'through the sublation (das Aufheben) of the particular time of intuition it becomes enduring (dau- erned)' (1986: 152; 1970: 45). The nature of this universality is 'just as much a non-existent as a preserved existence' (1986: 152; 1970: 45), and it is the Aufhebung that preserves what is not, or what is negated. It is as recollection, then, that the I here learns to know itself in this activity as the I. The point that must not be missed is that the imagination and the I can only know of themselves as recollection through another recollection. This same struc- ture is therefore repeated when thought, having itself or this I as its own object, knows itself in self-opposition. Here, the Aufhebung is a recollection of what the I is not as what nevertheless is.
As we saw above in the quotation from the final paragraph of the Phenom- enology, recollection is not restricted to its part in the psychology of the knowing mind. In the philosophical mind recollection recalls itself and plays out the negation of the negation as formative self-determination. This is true of all mediations, not just those in the imagination, for it is how the I will know itself as recollected even within the imagination. In the latter the I recollects itself in the negation that is representation. This is true also of the recollection that is absolute spirit. In both cases there is the relation of the external in the internal, and the relation to that relation. The latter is the recollection of the former as itself prior to this education. This is as true for immediate intuition as it is for all representations of objects, and of the relation to these representations. Recollection is what makes the relation a triadic self-(re-)formation. This is why, also, it is the substance of
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spirit. This relation of the mind to the object is the fundamental relation in the whole of Hegel's philosophy. How it is interpreted depends on the way that recollection is posited within different social and political relations. It is when the I becomes aware of itself as that which existed without this awareness that we find the significance of recollection as philosophical education.
One way to illustrate the importance of recollection in Hegel beyond the imagination is in the way that the absolute or God can be known. In the Philosophy of Mind Hegel distinguishes between mere knowing (Wissen) and cognition (Erkennen). Consciousness is always an awareness of being, and as we saw, this is implicitly a recollection, but the mind also wants to know its truth. In this activity Geist will recollect the implicit recollection that is the I as not-I. A double recollection such as this is a double negation. The first recollection (the simple I) is recalled as negative and known as not known by a second recollection. This second recollection pulls the ground out from under its own feet in doing so. That which recollects itself as recollec- tion loses itself to itself. Recollection here is essentially groundless. This is the same groundlessness that is feared by Aristotle and his mediaeval com- mentators as the reductio ad absurdum. 10 Hegel sees that in philosophy this groundlessness is treated only negatively, that is, as making impossible the comprehension of God. Theology, he says, will accept that we can know that God is but not what God is. 11 This says no more than that theology refuses God as recollection because the negation of the negation is seen to hold no educational and philosophical substance. Yet it is in and as education that groundlessness has its own substance. This means that we can know that God is, but also we can learn what God is. This serves as an example of how recollection underpins the movement and development that form the Hegelian system. Recollection is how immediacy is known as lost, and how mediation knows this loss as itself. This is the characteristic of all intellec- tual movement in Hegel that knows itself negatively, from the simple I in imagination to the absolute in cognition.
Recollection in Wordsworth
In Wordsworth's poem 'Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' he describes the truth of a child and his development to the adult in terms of recollection. The child in the poem, at first, is at one with nature and the eternal universe, 'a time when meadow, grove, and stream/ The earth and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light. ' But this blissful state is known to the poet only as recollection, for 'it is not now as it has been of yore;-/ Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night
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or day,/ The things which I have seen I now can see no more. ' This loss of the 'child of joy' sees 'Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing boy. ' The child is emerging into the adult world and education is doing all it can to ensure that the child is lost to the amour-propre of social convention, so that 'the little actor cons another part. '
Yet Wordsworth is not just drawing attention to childhood as paradise lost. Nor, indeed, is he describing the unfolding or the development of the child to the adult merely as a seed becoming a plant or as a matter merely of the passage of time. He is adding to the teleological development of the child a range of negative and contradictory experiences that by their very nature disrupt any teleology. Adult recollection has to instigate a change in the adult, to re-form his understanding of himself. If this is an inevitable part of his development then the change brought about in recollection was always its potentiality. Here one might argue that Entwicklung and Bildung are rec- onciled, in that the re-form of recollection was always part of the teleology, and the telos of Entwicklung realizes itself in Bildung, in the reformative experiences of recollection. But there is no such reconciliation to be had in recollection. This is because what Entwicklung and Bildung produce is the paradox of recollection, a dialectic of enlightenment where telos includes within it its own loss of itself to itself, and where Bildung is the experience of this re-formation of telos and therefore of the child. It is in the philosophical import of this aporetic relationship between development and reformation that we find the all-important notion of Aufhebung. It is found too in Word- sworth's poem. Recollection has so re-formed the adult that he cannot be the child, nor can he be as the child. The negative paradox here in recollec- tion is that the comprehension of the child can never belong to the child. By definition the child must be re-formed as adult in order to understand the truth of the child. This paradox is summed up by Wordsworth at the very beginning of the poem saying 'the child is the father of the man', mean- ing the child gives birth (in recollection) to the man who is the father. 12
How, then, does Wordsworth view this philosophical education? Recollec- tion knows the loss of childhood in order to comprehend childhood, and it is from within the prison-house that the writer looks back at his lost child- hood. But this is not nostalgia. The adult, gazing back at childhood, states that it is not for the simple delights and liberties of childhood that he gives thanks. 'Not for these I raise/ The song of thanks and praise;/ But for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things. ' And he concludes
What though the radiance that was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight,
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Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Famously, it is this philosophic mind, the mind of recollection, in which 'the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. '13
What is it, then, that brings Wordsworth to claim that recollection brings even more joy than childhood itself? It is the comprehension that, in the negativity and loss contained in recollection, there is realized something of even greater significance. In Wordsworth's ode, the doubts that come with the loss of childhood are themselves formative and, because they are not overcome, continually re-formative of the adult. Doubts hold more joy, more difficulty, more depth, than can ever rest in innocence. Transposing Hegelian terms into the ode, we see that the seed of reason (the child) develops as it must from its potentiality to its actuality. But to realize this actuality reason must become self-conscious, and in doing so, reason is re- formed in a relation to itself. In knowing itself it must also lose itself. Here, the Entwicklung of reason is re-formed in its Bildung. The philosophic mind that knows of development and its negativity is reason become spirit. But neither Bildung nor Entwicklung are adequate to express the educational nature of spirit even though they are constitutive moments in it. It is Aufhe- bung that describes this educational nature of spirit.
Metaphor
Philip Verene's study of recollection in Hegel is rare in that it seeks the essence of Hegel's philosophy in education in general and in recollection in particular. In short, he argues that the key to understanding the dialecti- cal movements of the Phenomenology lies in the difference between the in-itself and the in-itself that is also for-itself. 14 This, states Verene, must not be seen as a relation for to do so is to posit a third (Dritte) that unifies them. For Verene, these two moments - we might call them thought and the
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thought of this thought - are not a relation but are the condition of the possibility of relation. This 'doubled Ansich' (1985: 16) is experience, and is 'process-like in that it is just the movement between the two moments of in itself and for itself' (1985: 108). Verene is absolutely clear here that the twoness of the Ansich 'can never be compressed into a oneness' (1985: 107). Instead, recollection is the way to understand and to see through the appearance of such unity. Recollection can hold the doubled Ansich in metaphor and image without unifying them. As such, metaphor is both a remembering of the twoness and, in its re-presentation in a new form, is 'self-altering' (1985: 20). The duality that cannot be a unity is suspended by a metaphor or an image that re-presents what cannot be expressed in a proposition. Indeed, it is what makes consciousness possible at all. The con- cept (Begriff) is always 'in friendly opposition to the image (Bild)' (1985: 13) because the image is what makes consciousness of itself possible.
The attraction of Verene's thesis is that it finds education at the core of Hegelian philosophy. Consciousness recollects itself in images and meta- phors that allow it to express itself without filling the gap that has produced it. In this way Verene presents a Hegel that is open and non-dogmatic, one where each new recollection overturns the previous one, and where gradu- ally the illusions and appearances of these images become known for what they are. This is the education of consciousness in the Phenomenology through its own experience of its misrecognitions of itself.
Verene maintains this open and non-dogmatic character in his reading of absolute knowing. Referring to the final paragraph of the Phenomenology (which we paraphrased near the beginning of this chapter) and particularly to the reference there to the Calvary of spirit, he argues that
absolute spirit hangs on a cross because the annulment of time cannot be perfectly accomplished. Spirit does not create its own perfect likeness. Its friendship with its own forms is not complete. They foam out to it and it must recollect them. Experience cannot be perfectly recollected. (1985: 112)
This has implications for the relation (the metaphor? ) between the Phenom- enology and the Science of Logic. Here he says
absolute knowing freely releases itself into the world of metaphysical thought, not because it has attained a unity between the two moments within the being of the subject, but because it has overcome all illusion that there is such a phenomenon. It takes up the quest for unity in
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unity (1985: 117),
an attempt that circles back to nature and immediacy.
Such a summary does not do justice to this clear and incisive reading of
Hegel's philosophy as essentially educational. However, among several dif- ferences between our two accounts of recollection, one must be mentioned here. In Verene's recollection I believe that the actuality of the absolute is sacrificed for the perceived openness of metaphor. When the in-itself becomes known for-itself this is a negation, and this can be represented metaphorically and in imagination. The continual renewal of metaphor is what ensures recollection is open and non-dogmatic. As he says, 'in the rec- ollective act we are the image' (1985: 113). The problem here in comparison to the notion of recollection that I am employing as education in Hegel is that Verene's notion of recollection remains fixed in the imagination. Put differently, political externality remains suppressed within and by the prior- ity given here to the inner. This amounts to a serious misrecognition of the nature of recollection. The representation of the gap in the double Ansich is only a single negation. But the philosophical and political import of rec- ollection is in its double negation. It is here that the political import of recollection as actuality is to be found.
It is in the nature of recollection to know that everything that is not recol- lected is posited, as it is to know also that recollection is the only way positing can be known. Verene's notion of recollection does not recognize this about itself. Indeed, his notion of recollection is itself a positing that the double Ansich cannot be a relation. This, in turn, is to fail to recollect how the rela- tion of the 'and' that Verene says is unknowable is already an actual political fact. This is what recollection does. It reminds us that reality is always a pre- supposition, but one that can only be known negatively, or as actual. In Verene's example, the relation between thought and its object that he says cannot be a relation is only the illusion of the real, the illusion that truth cannot be thought because relation would, in his view, overcome the truth of the gap. But recollected, this illusion is known as posited, and this is a critique of the posited identity of the mind that so posits. It is a critique of what consciousness failed to recollect in itself, that it is already what is (now) recollected as the political fact of presupposition.
In short, then, Verene's notion of recollection concerns only the single negation that is inwardized as image and known as the I. These are the images, as he says, of the master and the slave, the unhappy consciousness, the spiritual animal kingdom and the beautiful soul. But this is only half of
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their story. Verene's notion of recollection is spared its additional political implications in knowing the image as actual social relations, actual relations of political power. It does not go on to work with the double negation, the recollection of recollection, in which the image is itself recollected as a political fact. In contrast, in education in Hegel recalled reality is what is actual, and what is actual is learned as the unavoidable positing of the real as a pre-determining political fact. Actuality is essentially a political educa- tion in the recollection of the real as not known, but, and in the very nature of recognition, it is always too late to avoid this presupposition. Education in Hegel knows this complicity as its own actuality, its own education, and its own Aufhebung.
As a final note, Verene might respond by pointing out that he attends this double negation in absolute knowing, and in particular in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic. He argues here that whereas all previous shapes in the Phenomenology had lived in the illusion that the key had to be found to uniting the double Ansich, now, in absolute knowing, there is the wisdom that 'the "and" is real' (1985: 116). He describes the 'real' as the space between the in-itself and the for-itself that is 'the root of the absolute liberation of consciousness, its ground of its freedom' (1985: 116) and 'represents' (1985: 116) their 'mutual attachment' (1985: 116) to each other, this time as a categoreal representation rather than a metaphorical one. It is not clear to me what Verene means by the 'real' here. If it means that the space is absolutely open then this reads the political out of absolute knowing completely, for it only makes illusion abso- lute. If on the other hand it means to say that the gap is now actual mutual attachment, this is only an imaginary political world. Both of these are themselves grounded in the prior positing of the absence of actuality as the third partner in the double Ansich. But education in Hegel teaches that the third partner is not optional. It is what recollection recollects. In addition to the single negation of Verene's notion of recollection we have to work with the double negation in which recollection knows reality actually, and knows the gap that Verene works so hard to keep open as also always already closed. This is not a metaphorical education, it is actual political life.
education regarding the cycle of Entwicklung. Bildung disrupts the smooth flow of potentiality to actuality. What is actual here is the experience of the negation of development, or its being re-formed in its being known. This opposition is the history of philosophy, that is, the history of philosophy is the history of a development whose unfolding appears to exceed itself at every turn. The history of philosophy is therefore set a different and unique challenge: to comprehend a development whose comprehension obstructs development. Or, to comprehend how the I can be of unfolding yet also as unfolding. This requires a notion of education or development that, in appearing to exceed development, in fact practises development.
Between them, Bildung and Entwicklung play out an educational drama that has philosophical implications which still remain to be acknowledged and comprehended. Therefore, we move now to the third and most impor- tant notion of education in Hegel, that of Aufhebung, in order to show how Bildung and Entwicklung are its constitutive but not its exhaustive moments. What they constitute is the disruption of the consciousness that does not think philosophically, and the historical, theological and political telos of doing so. Disruption as teleology, and teleology as disruption are the motor force of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and his History of Philosophy. Together they ensure that dogma is constantly negated and that the negation is understood as human development. Together here they have their relation comprehended as a self-(re-)formation in the Aufhebung.
Aufhebung (self-[re-]formation)
This is perhaps the most disputed term in all Hegelian thought. On it hangs the system itself because the Aufhebung is the mechanism by which negation and negation of negation realize a determinate self-(re-)formation. It is un- Hegelian to see Hegel's philosophy as based around the triadic relationship of thesis-antithesis-synthesis because such a formula suppresses the fact that in Hegel any such movement changes the consciousness that experi- ences it. This change is the culture, the formation and re-formation, of the consciousness. Merely to observe this development and to comment upon its apparent logic from a vantage point, or as a voyeur, is both to presuppose and to misunderstand this culture of experience, and of subjectivity. Indeed, it is to eschew precisely the education that the sequence of the terms describes. In the mind, let us say, of a critic of Hegel, this formula is inter- preted as one in which the synthesis overcomes the opposition of thesis and antithesis. Equally, in the same mind, a critique of this overcoming might
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be made on the grounds of the apparent imperialism of Eurocentric ratio- nalism. Overcoming and resolving oppositions, the critic might say, is the terror imposed by reason over all oppositions or dualisms. Such a critic may champion the view, on the one hand, that differences should not be over- come or, on the other, that difference exceeds the illusory sovereignty of the synthesis that reason seeks to impose. The former might be called the pluralism of the postmodern, the latter the excess of the poststructural.
Hegel does not, however, have a philosophy based on such a simplistic view of the overcoming or resolving of opposing dualisms. Hegel's philoso- phy and the notion of the Aufhebung within it are centred on the relations that serve as the conditions of the possibility for the thinking of objects. The sense of contingency found here is more radical, more penetrating and more significant than versions of contingency that seek only to assert relations of dependence. Such assertions are forced to presuppose the rela- tion they wish to acknowledge. Or, put another way, the relation to the object is always made possible by, and is contingent upon, a prior relation to that object. This means not only that even assertions of contingency are contingent, but also that this realization must in turn collapse under the weight of itself, even, or especially, when it is posited as difference, as possi- bility, or as the impossibility of absolute thinking. We saw above this re-formation as characteristic of Bildung.
This insight into philosophy as the relation of the relation does not, of course, belong exclusively to Hegel. On the contrary, it is the insight into the dialectic that gives form and content to Western philosophy from Plato to Derrida. What is significant about Hegel's contribution to this debate7 is that his whole philosophy works not with the one relation or the other, but within the relation of both relations; that is, within the relation to the object and the relation to that relation. This is the educative significance of the Aufhebung. It is, we might say here, to work within the broken middle8 of the natural standpoint of thought's relation to an object and the philosophical standpoint of thought's relation to that relation. There is no overcoming here although there is a double negation; the negation of the object in rela- tion to consciousness and the negation of that relation in relation to consciousness (now as its own object). Hegel's system is a detailed explora- tion into the implications of each relation upon the other. It is not a system where mediation or negation are overcome, but rather one where philoso- phy, and, therefore, education in Hegel, are precisely the subject and substance of those implications. As an essentially educative experience, this broken middle cannot be resolved, for it precedes thinking as the latter's
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condition of possibility. But what it can learn from this impossibility of resolution is its own truth, a truth known in and as the form and content of the contradictory and inevitable conjunction of abstraction and media- tion. Aufhebung is this truth that lies within the relation of contingency to itself, and in the following section we will explore the structure of this edu- cational relation as recollection.
Seen in this way, Aufhebung is the philosophical education that underpins the education of Bildung and Entwicklung, and, most importantly, their phil- osophical and educational relation to each other. My case, here, is this. Bildung in the Phenomenology prioritizes the reform of the thinker that comes with thought's negation of its object. Entwicklung in the History of Philosophy prioritizes the telos of such changes. As such, as we saw above, their relation to each other is anything but harmonious. Telos is already disrupted in Bil- dung, and Bildung always returns to (this disrupted) telos. It is this difficult relation - an aporetic relation - that is expressed as self-(re-)formation in and by Aufhebung.
Recollection
A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me
(Pascal, 1966: 218)
Aufhebung is significant in Hegel because it achieves something that appears to the abstract rational consciousness to be impossible. It is able to know something as both an appearance and as the negation of this appearance. This means that it somehow preserves what it knows as both what it was (its appearance) and what it is now known as. When Aufhebung is translated as 'sublation' it fails to pay due attention to the most important feature of the Aufhebung, that it is essentially a learning experience. But if this was all there was to it, the Aufhebung would amount to no more than a sceptical knowing, that is, a knowing of things to be not as they appear. What seems to be lack- ing in Aufhebung seen in this way is any kind of positive knowledge about what the thing actually is. The nature of the positive element of the Aufhe- bung is what is most at stake in Hegel. If it is purely positive then it is easily fashioned into the kind of claims for absolute knowing that appear arro- gant and self-satisfied. If it is not positive at all, then it teaches us nothing. What kind of notion remains, then, if any, that might somehow know the
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truth of something in what it is not, and maintain that negativity even in its being known as such? How might it be possible to know something that is known as unknown? The answer to this question, and the structure of the Aufhebung in Hegel, is of education as recollection. When the negative knows itself it is as recollection.
We saw in Chapter 1 how life can know its own nothingness in death, how the master can know his own nothingness in the slave, and how the self can know his nothingness in his other. But if we now replace 'know' here with 'recollect,' the educational character and structure of this knowing can be brought to the fore. To recollect oneself is to be what one is not. There is a double significance here, and one that was also found in Chapter 1 regard- ing life, the master and the self. First, one recollects that one is something other than what one is. This is the same as saying that one is never what one was, because the knowledge of what one was can only be recollected. It can only be known differently to how it was. This opens up a fear of only ever being nothing, a fear of nihilism, because a positive standpoint is forever impossible. But, and second, to recollect is to be what one is not. This is a result, albeit one that looks strange and out of sorts with rationalism. There is only one way that this opposition or autoimmunity can make sense of itself without the aid of further external presuppositions or assertions. One can be what one is not when one is learning about oneself. The structure of this learning is recollection, for in recollection what is recalled is what was by that which is what one was. What is lost and kept is that which is recol- lected as recollecting. In this learning, in this education, the positive and the negative carry their own truths at the same time in and as learning. This is how the Aufhebung works, through recollection, as our philosophical edu- cation that what was and what is are both present and absent in and as learning. Learning holds thought and being together without suppressing their difference. This, indeed, is what is educational about philosophy and philosophical about education.
Later in this chapter we will see how the history of philosophy appears when viewed philosophically as recollection. This is undertaken by looking at the aporetic mastery of the West and its export of vulnerability across the world. Before that, however, we will illustrate this concept of recollection, and therefore Aufhebung, in three ways. First, by looking at the role it plays in Hegel's presentation of the psychology of thought; second, and with the non-specialist in Hegel in mind, by way of William Wordsworth's ode 'Inti- mation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'; and third, albeit briefly, by looking at recollection in Philip Verene's book Hegel's Recollection.
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For those who seek an obvious justification from Hegel that the Aufhebung is recollection there is not much to go on. But what there is, goes a long way. Recollection is primarily described as a moment in the development of thought to rational cognition. In both the Philosophical Propaedeutic (1809-1811) and the Philosophy of Mind (1830) Erinnerung is the first stage wherein immediate intuitions come to be held as images in the memory such that they become representations. The translation of Erinnerung as inwardizing9 refers to what happens when the ego or the I recollects itself from its feelings and intuitions as a presence or a being in time and space. Recollection works here by creating the intuition as an image within the ego. To know the image as mine is to know the I to whom it belongs.
But the term inwardizing does not capture the unique features of what takes place here. In the Philosophical Propaedeutic Hegel notes that the I does not restrict itself to the intuition that has been internalized, but also liber- ates this intuition from an external time and space to a subjective time and space. In this way, it is universalized as form and 'through the sublation (das Aufheben) of the particular time of intuition it becomes enduring (dau- erned)' (1986: 152; 1970: 45). The nature of this universality is 'just as much a non-existent as a preserved existence' (1986: 152; 1970: 45), and it is the Aufhebung that preserves what is not, or what is negated. It is as recollection, then, that the I here learns to know itself in this activity as the I. The point that must not be missed is that the imagination and the I can only know of themselves as recollection through another recollection. This same struc- ture is therefore repeated when thought, having itself or this I as its own object, knows itself in self-opposition. Here, the Aufhebung is a recollection of what the I is not as what nevertheless is.
As we saw above in the quotation from the final paragraph of the Phenom- enology, recollection is not restricted to its part in the psychology of the knowing mind. In the philosophical mind recollection recalls itself and plays out the negation of the negation as formative self-determination. This is true of all mediations, not just those in the imagination, for it is how the I will know itself as recollected even within the imagination. In the latter the I recollects itself in the negation that is representation. This is true also of the recollection that is absolute spirit. In both cases there is the relation of the external in the internal, and the relation to that relation. The latter is the recollection of the former as itself prior to this education. This is as true for immediate intuition as it is for all representations of objects, and of the relation to these representations. Recollection is what makes the relation a triadic self-(re-)formation. This is why, also, it is the substance of
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spirit. This relation of the mind to the object is the fundamental relation in the whole of Hegel's philosophy. How it is interpreted depends on the way that recollection is posited within different social and political relations. It is when the I becomes aware of itself as that which existed without this awareness that we find the significance of recollection as philosophical education.
One way to illustrate the importance of recollection in Hegel beyond the imagination is in the way that the absolute or God can be known. In the Philosophy of Mind Hegel distinguishes between mere knowing (Wissen) and cognition (Erkennen). Consciousness is always an awareness of being, and as we saw, this is implicitly a recollection, but the mind also wants to know its truth. In this activity Geist will recollect the implicit recollection that is the I as not-I. A double recollection such as this is a double negation. The first recollection (the simple I) is recalled as negative and known as not known by a second recollection. This second recollection pulls the ground out from under its own feet in doing so. That which recollects itself as recollec- tion loses itself to itself. Recollection here is essentially groundless. This is the same groundlessness that is feared by Aristotle and his mediaeval com- mentators as the reductio ad absurdum. 10 Hegel sees that in philosophy this groundlessness is treated only negatively, that is, as making impossible the comprehension of God. Theology, he says, will accept that we can know that God is but not what God is. 11 This says no more than that theology refuses God as recollection because the negation of the negation is seen to hold no educational and philosophical substance. Yet it is in and as education that groundlessness has its own substance. This means that we can know that God is, but also we can learn what God is. This serves as an example of how recollection underpins the movement and development that form the Hegelian system. Recollection is how immediacy is known as lost, and how mediation knows this loss as itself. This is the characteristic of all intellec- tual movement in Hegel that knows itself negatively, from the simple I in imagination to the absolute in cognition.
Recollection in Wordsworth
In Wordsworth's poem 'Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' he describes the truth of a child and his development to the adult in terms of recollection. The child in the poem, at first, is at one with nature and the eternal universe, 'a time when meadow, grove, and stream/ The earth and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparelled in celestial light. ' But this blissful state is known to the poet only as recollection, for 'it is not now as it has been of yore;-/ Turn wheresoe'er I may,/ By night
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or day,/ The things which I have seen I now can see no more. ' This loss of the 'child of joy' sees 'Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing boy. ' The child is emerging into the adult world and education is doing all it can to ensure that the child is lost to the amour-propre of social convention, so that 'the little actor cons another part. '
Yet Wordsworth is not just drawing attention to childhood as paradise lost. Nor, indeed, is he describing the unfolding or the development of the child to the adult merely as a seed becoming a plant or as a matter merely of the passage of time. He is adding to the teleological development of the child a range of negative and contradictory experiences that by their very nature disrupt any teleology. Adult recollection has to instigate a change in the adult, to re-form his understanding of himself. If this is an inevitable part of his development then the change brought about in recollection was always its potentiality. Here one might argue that Entwicklung and Bildung are rec- onciled, in that the re-form of recollection was always part of the teleology, and the telos of Entwicklung realizes itself in Bildung, in the reformative experiences of recollection. But there is no such reconciliation to be had in recollection. This is because what Entwicklung and Bildung produce is the paradox of recollection, a dialectic of enlightenment where telos includes within it its own loss of itself to itself, and where Bildung is the experience of this re-formation of telos and therefore of the child. It is in the philosophical import of this aporetic relationship between development and reformation that we find the all-important notion of Aufhebung. It is found too in Word- sworth's poem. Recollection has so re-formed the adult that he cannot be the child, nor can he be as the child. The negative paradox here in recollec- tion is that the comprehension of the child can never belong to the child. By definition the child must be re-formed as adult in order to understand the truth of the child. This paradox is summed up by Wordsworth at the very beginning of the poem saying 'the child is the father of the man', mean- ing the child gives birth (in recollection) to the man who is the father. 12
How, then, does Wordsworth view this philosophical education? Recollec- tion knows the loss of childhood in order to comprehend childhood, and it is from within the prison-house that the writer looks back at his lost child- hood. But this is not nostalgia. The adult, gazing back at childhood, states that it is not for the simple delights and liberties of childhood that he gives thanks. 'Not for these I raise/ The song of thanks and praise;/ But for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things. ' And he concludes
What though the radiance that was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight,
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Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Famously, it is this philosophic mind, the mind of recollection, in which 'the meanest flower that blows can give/Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. '13
What is it, then, that brings Wordsworth to claim that recollection brings even more joy than childhood itself? It is the comprehension that, in the negativity and loss contained in recollection, there is realized something of even greater significance. In Wordsworth's ode, the doubts that come with the loss of childhood are themselves formative and, because they are not overcome, continually re-formative of the adult. Doubts hold more joy, more difficulty, more depth, than can ever rest in innocence. Transposing Hegelian terms into the ode, we see that the seed of reason (the child) develops as it must from its potentiality to its actuality. But to realize this actuality reason must become self-conscious, and in doing so, reason is re- formed in a relation to itself. In knowing itself it must also lose itself. Here, the Entwicklung of reason is re-formed in its Bildung. The philosophic mind that knows of development and its negativity is reason become spirit. But neither Bildung nor Entwicklung are adequate to express the educational nature of spirit even though they are constitutive moments in it. It is Aufhe- bung that describes this educational nature of spirit.
Metaphor
Philip Verene's study of recollection in Hegel is rare in that it seeks the essence of Hegel's philosophy in education in general and in recollection in particular. In short, he argues that the key to understanding the dialecti- cal movements of the Phenomenology lies in the difference between the in-itself and the in-itself that is also for-itself. 14 This, states Verene, must not be seen as a relation for to do so is to posit a third (Dritte) that unifies them. For Verene, these two moments - we might call them thought and the
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thought of this thought - are not a relation but are the condition of the possibility of relation. This 'doubled Ansich' (1985: 16) is experience, and is 'process-like in that it is just the movement between the two moments of in itself and for itself' (1985: 108). Verene is absolutely clear here that the twoness of the Ansich 'can never be compressed into a oneness' (1985: 107). Instead, recollection is the way to understand and to see through the appearance of such unity. Recollection can hold the doubled Ansich in metaphor and image without unifying them. As such, metaphor is both a remembering of the twoness and, in its re-presentation in a new form, is 'self-altering' (1985: 20). The duality that cannot be a unity is suspended by a metaphor or an image that re-presents what cannot be expressed in a proposition. Indeed, it is what makes consciousness possible at all. The con- cept (Begriff) is always 'in friendly opposition to the image (Bild)' (1985: 13) because the image is what makes consciousness of itself possible.
The attraction of Verene's thesis is that it finds education at the core of Hegelian philosophy. Consciousness recollects itself in images and meta- phors that allow it to express itself without filling the gap that has produced it. In this way Verene presents a Hegel that is open and non-dogmatic, one where each new recollection overturns the previous one, and where gradu- ally the illusions and appearances of these images become known for what they are. This is the education of consciousness in the Phenomenology through its own experience of its misrecognitions of itself.
Verene maintains this open and non-dogmatic character in his reading of absolute knowing. Referring to the final paragraph of the Phenomenology (which we paraphrased near the beginning of this chapter) and particularly to the reference there to the Calvary of spirit, he argues that
absolute spirit hangs on a cross because the annulment of time cannot be perfectly accomplished. Spirit does not create its own perfect likeness. Its friendship with its own forms is not complete. They foam out to it and it must recollect them. Experience cannot be perfectly recollected. (1985: 112)
This has implications for the relation (the metaphor? ) between the Phenom- enology and the Science of Logic. Here he says
absolute knowing freely releases itself into the world of metaphysical thought, not because it has attained a unity between the two moments within the being of the subject, but because it has overcome all illusion that there is such a phenomenon. It takes up the quest for unity in
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unity (1985: 117),
an attempt that circles back to nature and immediacy.
Such a summary does not do justice to this clear and incisive reading of
Hegel's philosophy as essentially educational. However, among several dif- ferences between our two accounts of recollection, one must be mentioned here. In Verene's recollection I believe that the actuality of the absolute is sacrificed for the perceived openness of metaphor. When the in-itself becomes known for-itself this is a negation, and this can be represented metaphorically and in imagination. The continual renewal of metaphor is what ensures recollection is open and non-dogmatic. As he says, 'in the rec- ollective act we are the image' (1985: 113). The problem here in comparison to the notion of recollection that I am employing as education in Hegel is that Verene's notion of recollection remains fixed in the imagination. Put differently, political externality remains suppressed within and by the prior- ity given here to the inner. This amounts to a serious misrecognition of the nature of recollection. The representation of the gap in the double Ansich is only a single negation. But the philosophical and political import of rec- ollection is in its double negation. It is here that the political import of recollection as actuality is to be found.
It is in the nature of recollection to know that everything that is not recol- lected is posited, as it is to know also that recollection is the only way positing can be known. Verene's notion of recollection does not recognize this about itself. Indeed, his notion of recollection is itself a positing that the double Ansich cannot be a relation. This, in turn, is to fail to recollect how the rela- tion of the 'and' that Verene says is unknowable is already an actual political fact. This is what recollection does. It reminds us that reality is always a pre- supposition, but one that can only be known negatively, or as actual. In Verene's example, the relation between thought and its object that he says cannot be a relation is only the illusion of the real, the illusion that truth cannot be thought because relation would, in his view, overcome the truth of the gap. But recollected, this illusion is known as posited, and this is a critique of the posited identity of the mind that so posits. It is a critique of what consciousness failed to recollect in itself, that it is already what is (now) recollected as the political fact of presupposition.
In short, then, Verene's notion of recollection concerns only the single negation that is inwardized as image and known as the I. These are the images, as he says, of the master and the slave, the unhappy consciousness, the spiritual animal kingdom and the beautiful soul. But this is only half of
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their story. Verene's notion of recollection is spared its additional political implications in knowing the image as actual social relations, actual relations of political power. It does not go on to work with the double negation, the recollection of recollection, in which the image is itself recollected as a political fact. In contrast, in education in Hegel recalled reality is what is actual, and what is actual is learned as the unavoidable positing of the real as a pre-determining political fact. Actuality is essentially a political educa- tion in the recollection of the real as not known, but, and in the very nature of recognition, it is always too late to avoid this presupposition. Education in Hegel knows this complicity as its own actuality, its own education, and its own Aufhebung.
As a final note, Verene might respond by pointing out that he attends this double negation in absolute knowing, and in particular in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic. He argues here that whereas all previous shapes in the Phenomenology had lived in the illusion that the key had to be found to uniting the double Ansich, now, in absolute knowing, there is the wisdom that 'the "and" is real' (1985: 116). He describes the 'real' as the space between the in-itself and the for-itself that is 'the root of the absolute liberation of consciousness, its ground of its freedom' (1985: 116) and 'represents' (1985: 116) their 'mutual attachment' (1985: 116) to each other, this time as a categoreal representation rather than a metaphorical one. It is not clear to me what Verene means by the 'real' here. If it means that the space is absolutely open then this reads the political out of absolute knowing completely, for it only makes illusion abso- lute. If on the other hand it means to say that the gap is now actual mutual attachment, this is only an imaginary political world. Both of these are themselves grounded in the prior positing of the absence of actuality as the third partner in the double Ansich. But education in Hegel teaches that the third partner is not optional. It is what recollection recollects. In addition to the single negation of Verene's notion of recollection we have to work with the double negation in which recollection knows reality actually, and knows the gap that Verene works so hard to keep open as also always already closed. This is not a metaphorical education, it is actual political life.
