No More Learning

To this end Harris rigorously separates the Science of Logic and the Phenom- enology from any religious excesses. He describes the process of the phenomenology of spirit in the following way:
The Gospel had to be proclaimed and Platonically interpreted in an imaginative mode; the subjective consciousness had to advance gradually from imagination to conceptual thinking. Through this historical devel- opment, human self-consciousness finally arrives at comprehension of the 'whole' within which it begins as consciousness. (1995: 94)
He concludes that it is the Phenomenology that is Hegel's real philosophy of world history and it is the Phenomenology that has eternal significance beyond the way Hegel's own time is included in ways that distort it. He mentions that at the end of the Phenomenology Hegel makes what Harris calls 'a puzzling comment' (1995: 95) about a commensurability between the phenom- enological shapes of experience and the structure of the Science of Logic. Harris says that Hegel mentioned this again only once, in his Berlin lectures, and 'probably he abandoned the idea' (1995: 95). If the Science of Logic is his- torical then, says Harris, it is not 'strictly conceptual' (1995: 95). Far from being the comprehension of its own time, Harris argues that the Logic is the comprehension of eternity, 'the thought of God before the Creation' (1995: 100). The Phenomenology however 'is neither the comprehension of its own
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time nor the comprehension of eternity, but the universal comprehension of time as such' (1995: 100). Thus, its lessons are not bound to their time in the way that Hegel's 'real' philosophy is, and by 'real' here Harris means the real experiences of the system within their own historical context. The distinction here is that 'phenomenology moves away from actual experience towards pure logic; the System moves from pure Logic back to real experience' (1995: 98) as and in nature and spirit. Harris mentions here the views prevalent in Hegel's time on the state, war, punishment, science and technology. These are specific to real philosophy, but not to understanding the ladder of the Phenomenology to pure logic. What was pres- ent to Hegel as objective and real has become for us something known phenomenologically, that is, as part of the appearances that educate us to science. We are still charged with having 'to achieve the comprehension of our own time for ourselves' (1995: 97). This means, says Harris, that the more Hegel's real philosophy becomes for us a historical curiosity, the more we will comprehend the relevance of his logic to our own situation.
However, and in response to this view in Harris, it can be said that his sep- aration of logic from culture can be seen also as cultural and as a stage of religious representation. To refuse this present complicity of pure logic with cultural spirit risks being as superstitious and reactionary as he accuses Hegel of being about his own time. What is at stake in Harris's interpreta- tion is the question of complicity in the mastery of the West's view of itself in relation to its non-Western others. We will explore this in a moment. But regarding Harris we must raise again the question, is it not just another cultural reproduction to be separating logic from culture? Hegel's com- ment seen above regarding the commensurability of the phenomenological stages of experience and the structure of the Science of Logic - a comment that Harris is happy to dismiss - in fact goes to the heart of the matter regarding Western logocentric domination. There has to be a commensu- rability here because the Logic is also a phenomenological shape of experience. The beginning that is not a beginning in Being is its positing of itself. This positing parades as essence or the reflective mind, but it is merely illusory being (Schein). This illusion then continues to learn how philosoph- ically it is substantial and a real philosophical experience. Absolute knowing, therefore, repeats the structure of the master/servant relationship, that is, of itself constituted in and by its determination in independence and depen- dence, and in life and death. Real modern social relations triumph in the Logic because absolute knowing is returned to the question of method, which is precisely where the Logic began, that is, with the question of its own beginning. 15 The Logic may be called pure culture in the sense that the
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oppositions of Bildung have become their own content, and thus become absolute knowing because recollection is known philosophically as Aufhe- bung, as thought's own self-determination. But to separate logic from culture altogether where 'there is no interaction with historical experience' (1995: 95) is to repeat a standpoint of natural (Western) law, in Harris's case, the standpoint of the appearance of pure thinking. He may be right to say that in the climax to the Logic 'the last vestige of the traditional concept of God has vanished' (1995: 103), but this is not the same as saying that experience 'is left behind' (1995: 93).
The illusion, here, is that the standpoint that criticizes Hegel for his nascent cultural imperialisms is not itself also just such a nascent cultural imperialism. The critique in Harris of Hegel's Western mastery is another mastery. Failure to recognize this mastery is one of spirit's most important modern shapes. A more philosophical Hegelian critique is to recognize that cultural imperialism is already present, and inescapable, in the critique of imperialism. What this looks like I want to explore briefly in the follow- ing section. But let me be clear here. I am not trying to argue that Harris is somehow arguing for a completion of experience. He is clear, as we saw, that we must comprehend our own time for ourselves, and that this will be helped the more that Hegel's own time appears as a historical curiosity. I am not arguing that Harris is arguing for an ahistorical science. Rather, I am making the point that his argument for present science risks becoming ahistorical when he criticizes Hegel for cultural baggage without, also, recognizing the logic of this critique in its own political actuality.
The standpoint of mastery
At stake here is the complicity of critique in the relations it critiques. It is a complicity that is accompanied by a mastery, even if an unwitting one, because the power lies in the conditions of the possibility of critique. The mastery is in the posited standpoint of the critique of imperialism. A genu- inely speculative critique has to contain its mastery and the collapse of its standpoint in the contingency of contingency that underpins its groundless and absolute determination.
As such, in this final section of this chapter we will bring this education in Hegel found in the history of philosophy to bear on the present standpoint of Western mastery. Thus far, this chapter has presented a view of the his- tory of philosophy as more than merely a justification of sovereignty by the Western master. It has argued, in particular, for an educative relationship
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between development, culture and the Aufhebung that re-forms any such attempts at justification. The perspective that recollects itself in the history of philosophy disrupts any merely linear pattern of development. This has been expressed above in the recognition that the history of philosophy is by definition held hostage by that which the history of philosophy itself makes possible. This has implications for the epistemological status of the history of philosophy. Any claim made for a commensurablility of past and present as the one development collapses in the recollection that divides them, and has its truth in the Aufhebung that knows (learns) this truth of recollection. As with education in Hegel in each of the chapters of this book, the Aufhe- bung here is not a simple reconciliation of spirit with its history, it is the essential openness to the lack of reconciliation, learned and re-learned, and formed and re-formed in this learning.
What, then, can this view of the recollection of the history of philosophy offer to an examination of Western mastery in relation to its others? Recol- lection in the history of philosophy is the same educational experience of death in life and of the other in the self that we saw in Chapter 1. What is recollected in the history of philosophy is the East in the West (and, although not our subject here, of the West in the East). This seems a remarkable claim, not least because, as we have recorded, the history of philosophy is primarily seen as the West without the East at all. But it is the truth of educa- tion in Hegel that what is learned is how the other is present in the self. In this case, then, how is the East16 present in the standpoint of the mastery of the West? I will argue now that it is present as the export of fear and vulner- ability by the West.
To make this case we must draw again on the way that Hegel uses the master and slave relation to characterize freedom in the East and in the West. In philosophical terms, where there is only fear of arbitrary power, there the relation is one of despotism. It is not until fear is itself the truth of the master that a modern notion of freedom is possible. But this modern notion of freedom does not stand apart from its pre-modern counterpart. It stands always in relation to it and this relation is determined by the rela- tion that the master has to fear. The idea that it stands apart and separate from the pre-modern is precisely the shape the modern mastery takes when it misrecognizes its own relation to fear and vulnerability. They are both - the pre-modern and the modern - shapes of the life and death struggle as the actual relation of master and slave and self and other. This means that the criticisms made of the way the history of philosophy eschews the East misunderstand the shapes of the relation of East and West that the history of philosophy learns in recollection. Any claims that the East is over-
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looked, or even more controversially, that it should not be represented philosophically as fear without freedom, hides two crucial things. First, they take the West to be the yardstick of what is and is not to be deemed as free- dom. Second, in doing so, they perpetuate the illusion that the West is independent from fear. They fail, in other words, to recollect the relation of West and East, of freedom and fear, and fail to recognize how the West relates to fear in its modern freedoms. Education in Hegel can retrieve this relation and with it the truth of the way the East is in the West.
Hegel is clear about the formative actuality of fear and vulnerability. Both in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy and most famously in the master/ slave section of the Phenomenology, he quotes Ps. 111. 10 - 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom'. 17 The ambiguity here is instructive. The 'of' in fear of the Lord can and does mean two things at once. It refers to the fear that the servant has of the master and to the fear that the master has of his own finitude, the very thing in which originates his need to rule over others. Freedom is wholly dependent upon fear because freedom is determined by the relation to fear. In the life and death struggle life has fear as other. In the master and slave relation the master has fear as other. And in modernity the property owning person has fear as other. In each case, life, the master, and the modern person have their sovereignty groun- ded in their freedom from fear. They have exported fear to that which is not them, that is, to that which is other. It is wrong therefore to pit East against West, fear against freedom, as if only the former in each pairing has social relations based in the master and slave relation. In the West this rela- tion is actual as the illusion that there is no slave, that the person who owns property need no longer fear for his sovereignty. In fact, what has hap- pened here is that fear has been pushed away, out of sight so that it is out of mind. Freedom from fear is the illusion of Western sovereignty.
This illusory freedom is achieved in the ways that the West has found to export its fear to those who are its others - and remember here that the definition of the 'other' is part of the freedom of the master. Fear and vulnerability are exported to the poor of the world as part of the freedom to enjoy affordable possession of goods and resources. They are exported as capital, as trade, as war, and even as charity and aid. Cruelly, perhaps, in these last examples, even when the West tries to embrace vulnerability it finds it to be autoimmune.
Seen in this way the East is present in the West. What differs is that the West enjoys the illusion that the East is not present. East and West are the one truth of self and other. It is precisely because they are self and other that they are not exclusive of each other, which means, in turn, that their
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differences can be comprehended in ways that educate about their rela- tion. In the East fear has freedom as other. In the West freedom has fear as other. In education in Hegel this is the relation wherein 'I am already other and the other is not me. ' There exist many tensions in the East as freedom makes itself known as the truth of fear. There are similar tensions in the West as fear returns to haunt its vulnerable freedoms. Together they edu- cate themselves and each other.
If the West was to risk this education regarding its relation to its fears and vulnerabilities then it would risk also the re-formation of its own freedom according to its truth. The master can learn again the truth of the slave, and learn how to embrace the powerless as its own truth. We may not know what such an education would look like but we know it would not leave the West, the master, as he is now. He already re-learns universality because he knows he fears losing it. But this fear of loss is not yet his truth in the sense that it can determine his relation to universality. But it is a real fear because it fears its truth so much. This fear of truth is fear of freedom's own development.
It is, then, the education of the master that the West must attend to. This, however, is still an education that awaits the West. It would constitute a surrender not of the universal but for the universal. It is how the West can learn of freedom again from within the fear that guards it, and wherein this fear can itself be the path to a re-formed notion of universality - world spirit. This is the risk that freedom demands.
The end of the history of philosophy
A history of philosophy, then, that eschews recollection eschews therein its own philosophical character. Such eschewal avoids acknowledging that looking back over the history of philosophy recollects the telos as present and as disrupted. A history of philosophy that avoids the implications of this re-formation is the adult who never sees the child as his own parent. Such an adult is in a state of denial regarding his upbringing.
But a history of philosophy that understands the paradoxes of development and re-forma- tion understands that the history of philosophy has its condition of possibility in recollection. Recollection unavoidably is the method of the history of philosophy but it falls to Aufhebung to know the history of philosophy within recollection, and to comprehend the philosophical structure of recollec- tion as self-(re-)formation. Recollection comprehends the history of philosophy as development, but it is the Aufhebung that comprehends this recollection as development, as formative and re-formative of Vernunft, of
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reason that is speculative. History is the development of philosophy but philosophy is the re-formation of history as development.
There is a further implication here, however, and one that re-forms the reputation of Hegel as the dogmatic philosopher par excellence. It is that in education as recollection Western philosophy arrives at the point of its most radical openness to itself. The truth of recollection, and of education in Hegel, lies in knowing that what is known is not known, or that it is without ground. Judged merely abstractly, such education and learning is seen as overcoming what is not known, or where knowing replaces not knowing. This is how the absolute in Hegel is taken to mean the end of the history of philosophy and indeed the end of history per se. But what recollection learns does not overcome its groundlessness or ignorance. It learns of itself as the truth of this groundlessness. It is the truth of knowing what is known as not known - and this sentence is deliberately ambiguous, lending itself to mean- ing that nothing is known and that therein nothing is known. This is the educational truth of subjective substance in Hegel.
This is an end of the history of Western philosophy in one sense. It is the end of the standpoint of reason that is ignorant of its own ignorance. But as such it is also the beginning of a deep educational openness wherein the Western master consciousness is for the first time able to learn of its truth in otherness, both its own and that of its others. The West has had to learn how to be open to the truth of learning. Having done so it is ready to begin learning again. What has been learned in the history of Western philosophy becomes now the struggle for openness to a future history of world spirit. This struggle of world spirit from the West's point of view will be the strug- gle to be open to learning how its truth is in knowing that it does not know. Or, its struggle will be to learn and re-learn that its own truth is already other and that the other is not its truth.
Perhaps the last history of Western philosophy has been or is being writ- ten. But for this to be true the last shall also be first, for the new history of (self-[re-]reforming) Western philosophy has already begun. It recollects now that its own truth without ground is a retrospective viewpoint with a future significance that re-forms the standpoint of the present. It has to be, for although the owl of Minerva flies at sunset, nevertheless the truth of its groundless flight is already its openness to the new day that it heralds. 18
Notes
1 I will not in this chapter look at Hegel's discussion of recollection in the Ancient world or in Plato in particular. In brief, however, he argues that two types
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of recollection can be found in Plato: one which is empirical, the other which is absolute. He notes that Plato turned to myth and religion in depicting the second but points out that Plato does not present this as philosophical doctrine. See Hegel 1974: 32-36; 1970: 42-46.
2 I will return to Kain's work a little later in this chapter.
3 I use re-form in this chapter to emphasize speculative movement, as opposed to
reform which is abstracted from such movement.
4 Whereas the Berlin Introduction of 1820 is Hegel's own manuscript, the Intro-
ductions that I draw on now are from 1823/25/27 and are taken from the notes
of students attending Hegel's lectures.
5 Clearly current environmental events teach us that this circle can be dramatically
affected by reason. It remains to be seen whether nature has any defence to this.
6 The translation of gesetzt here as 'transformed' obscures the nature of positing and
the way that it recollects itself, and therein the role of recollection in actuality.
7 And, I would argue, to Kant, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; see Tubbs, 2004.
8 This phrase was employed recently by Gillian Rose; see Rose, 1992. It refers in
turn to the idea - from a letter by Adorno to Walter Benjamin - that the thought of the whole by modern reason is the experience of 'torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up' (Adorno, 1999: 130). See also Chapter 3 and Tubbs, 2000.
9 This is so, for example, in Wallace's translation of the Philosophy of Mind. It stands in contrast to Verene's argument, mentioned below, that the translation of Erin- nerung as recollection loses its sense of inwardizing.
10 Aquinas, for example, says that 'everything that is multiform, mutable and capa- ble of defect must be reducible to a source in something that is uniform, immutable and capable of no defect' (1975a: 40).
11 See Hegel, 1990: 190-92, para. 445, zusatz, and Hegel 1988: 88.
12 Compare this speculative insight to the medieval view of Avicenna who refuses relation its own substance; 'fatherhood is not in the son . . . fatherhood is in the father. . . . There is nothing here at all which is of both of them. . . . As for a state posited for both fatherhood and sonship, this is something unknown to us and has no name' (Avicenna , 2005: 118). This, of course, has implications for the
relation of God and Christ.
13 A similar conclusion is to be found in St Augustine's City of God; see, Book IX,
chapter 12.
14 This is based to some extent on paragraphs 85-86 of the Phenomenology, the same
paragraphs I refer to in the Introduction.
15 I have offered a reading of the master/servant relationship in the Science of Logic
in Tubbs, 2004, chapter 2.
16 I have to stress here that the concept of 'the East' does not refer empirically to
any particular country. 'The East' is being used here as a concept of freedom's
relation to itself, as Hegel does in the history of philosophy.
17 See also Aquinas's discussion of this Psalm in the Summa Theologiae (Aquinas,
1920: 229; Part II. 2nd Part. 19. 7) who, with Ecclesiasticus (1916: Book I, and Book XXV. 12) argues that although fear is appropriate in knowing God, faith is the beginning of wisdom regarding first principles and essence.
18 See Introduction, footnote 11.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 3 Fossil Fuel Culture
Politics aimed at the formation of a reasonable and mature mankind remain under an evil spell, as long as they lack a theory that takes account of the totality that is false
(Adorno, 1991: 28)
Introduction
In this chapter I explore the significance of education in Hegel in relation to some of the issues about freedom, representation and philosophy that are raised by the nature of our modern fossil fuel culture. In particular I will examine education in Hegel in regard to the illusions that endure within fossil fuel culture and to their philosophical significance. I am not con- cerned here with the disputed causes or effects of global warming, or with predictions about when the supplies of oil will run dry. 1 My interest is rather to show how the freedoms made possible by burning fossil fuels have con- tributed to a culture which liberates personal freedom from the relation to the other, to death and to the universal. One implication of this, I will argue, is resignation at the unavoidability of complicity within the representation of this political totality, a resignation that is deemed wrongly to hold no further educational significance.
When I first published a version of this chapter2 I was able to discern its origin in three elements. First, the fuel protests in the UK in September 2000 which illustrated the absolute dependency of the social upon fossil fuels. It was a strange moment as the country moved inexorably towards complete breakdown within only a few days, and equally strange how, just before meltdown, the protesters went home. The second event was the inva- sion of Iraq by American and coalition forces, a campaign fuelled by the relationship between freedom and oil. And third, I remember reading the following introduction to a book written by Peter McLaren, a notable criti- cal theorist and critical pedagogue in the USA, and being struck by just how
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embedded fossil fuel culture is in determining the modern idea of freedom. Having revealed his despair at the possibilities for critical transfor- mation, McLaren ends his introduction with the following:
Living in Los Angeles is like being encysted in a surrealist hallucination. Yet as I look at the city from this cafe? window, things don't seem that bad: Kid Frost pulsates through the airwaves; a 1964 Chevy Impala cruises the street in all its bravado lowrider beauty; the sun is shining bountifully on brown, black and white skin (albeit prematurely aging the latter); my gas tank is full and the ocean is reachable before the heat gets too heavy and the streets get too packed. I'll take Olympic Boulevard toward Venice, searching for that glimmer of light in the eyes of strangers, seeking out that fertile space to connect, picking through that rag-and-bone shop of lost memories, and seizing that splinter of hope at the fault line of the impossible where the foundation of a new public sphere can be fashioned out of the rubble of concrete dreams. (McLaren, 1997: 14)
In this revised and extended version of the article I can now call upon a fourth element. I recently attended a workshop for critical educators from across the world. Its purpose was to re-think how the language of critical education might be revised in order for it to reflect more closely the cir- cumstances of (late) modernity. At one point, a member of the group admitting feeling guilty that, in order to attend such a forum, he had had to enlarge his own carbon footprint by flying half way across the world. It is not this confession that I take to be as significant here as the reaction of the group to the comment. His remark was met with wry smiles and chuckles from all of us who had travelled to the meeting. These were the smiles and chuckles of a collective resignation, that in order to attend such a meeting to consider the plight of the under-privileged and the oppressed, we had to contribute to environmental changes. The smiles and chuckles in effect said: You are right, but what choice do we have?
A justification for this or any such meeting might be made on the grounds that the importance of the subject under discussion merited this small increase in carbon emissions. Nobody expressed the opposite view, that the needs of the environment outweighed the need of the participants to dis- cuss together the needs of the poor. This in itself warns of one of the most important of all barriers to reducing the carbon footprint. Everyone can justify why, for them, every trip they make is important and necessary. The bigger picture is just too far removed from these expressions of personal freedom. I will return to this theme in a moment. Even the foreign holiday
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can be justified in terms of the benefits it will bring the economy in terms of increased effectiveness at work. With this in mind it is doubtful, is it not, that the stage will ever be reached where we are all politically or ethically accountable for our carbon footprints, or that we have to make a case in writing to the guardians as to why our journey is absolutely necessary. For one thing - and I will argue this case in a moment - this is unlikely because it offends directly and unambiguously our modern sense of per- sonal freedom.
However, what I want to pick up here in the smiles and chuckles of the participants is what it reveals about attitudes towards both paradox and complicity. The paradox was recognized by all at some level that saving the world on the one hand meant contributing to its pollution on the other. The struggle requires such complicity. There is no way to avoid it. I want to draw out two things here. First, such a reaction signals, I think, to a greater or lesser extent how complicity in paradox invokes resignation. Such a total paradox held for the participants no further education. The paradox is therefore seen as a dead end. It is essentially nothing. It highlights another aspect of this world against which, even though we struggle for change, we must admit our powerlessness. Second, however, this paradox has the potential to educate the master further regarding the nature of this totality and any resignation to it. This is where education in Hegel would begin, in the despair of the totality of our contingency within pre-determined ways of living and thinking, by asking about the political import of the despair, its determination within political conditions, and what it has to teach us about attitudes towards mastery and freedom. But, as is usual, the smiles and the chuckles at the paradox of complicity lasted only a few seconds. In resigna- tion - not admitted to but present in each small shrug of the shoulders - the discussion moved on, moved back to saving the world. The group was able, once again, to put the paradox behind it.
I want to make an unpalatable and perhaps dangerously over-stated comparison here. Let us suppose a guard gets up one morning, breakfasts, says goodbye to his wife and children, and sets off for his day's work in Auschwitz. Let us suppose, also, that at some time during his day it occurs to him, as it well might have done before, that the work he is engaged in is harmful. Might he smile quickly to himself, chuckle, and with a small, per- haps invisible shrug of the shoulders, move on and continue his work? Might he not think, rightly, that present conditions do not allow for any- thing different? If he protests, or deserts, he will likely be shot. Against this cold totality what choice does he have but to continue his work?