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.
Education in Hegel
?
?
?
?
Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 53
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 57 different terms; it attempts to think the 'and' of its two moments as a
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.
Cultural imperialism
Exploring the different notions of education in Hegel, and in particular how the Aufhebung is to be seen as recollection, now offers a way into some of the political questions that surround Hegel's history of philosophy.
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I want, in particular, to think about how education in Hegel challenges the stereotype of Hegel referred to at the beginning of this chapter - the one associated with a history of philosophy that in effect seems to end history - and how it re-forms this interpretation of his concept of freedom. I will argue, now, that in thinking about the issue of Western domination in the world, Aufhebung and education in the history of philosophy offer a reform- ing of and an education about present Western mastery and freedom. Aufhebung as it were opens up Hegelian critique as a present history of phi- losophy. It is in this sense that Hegel says in the shorter Logic, 'the history of philosophy, in its true meaning, deals not with a past, but with an eternal and veritable present' (1975: 126).
Hegel's notion of the beginning of the history of philosophy immediately raises concerns for the perspectives in the world that are passed over as hav- ing not yet begun the pathway of despair of reason's education. Yet Hegel's beginning the history of philosophy in Ancient Athens comes about by means of philosophy as recollection. What it recollects is its own develop- ment. It looks for the potential of which it is the actuality. Its beginning, then, is not optional, it is pre-determined by its development to the point of this recollection. Equally, however, this undermines the standpoint of the history of philosophy per se, because recollection is always the groundless- ness of such a standpoint. Recollection is what exposes the history of philosophy to be other than itself.
Nevertheless, there are implications here for the way Eastern traditions are categorized philosophically when freedom recollects its beginning in Ancient Athens. In the East, says Hegel, the person remains dominated by substance to the extent that consciousness is extinguished and the subject annihilated. Thus 'political freedom, law, free ethical life, pure conscious- ness, thinking - all these are absent. What is required for their emergence is that the subject shall set himself as consciousness over against substance and so gain recognition of himself there' (1987: 167). In sum, for the his- tory of philosophy to begin, substance must be made a concrete objectivity, a concrete universality, so that this relation to subjectivity, at first external and alien, can bring into being the formative Aufhebung or education wherein the relation of subject to substance determines itself in and as free- dom. Importantly here Hegel uses the figures of the master and the servant (Herr und Knechtes) to illustrate the fate of the will with regard to alien sub- stance. Where the will is not universal, and where substance therefore is dominant over subject, 'there is only the status of the lord and the status of servant. This is the sphere of despotism' (1987: 169) and in it the feeling of finitude is fear. This is the case for master and servant. The latter stands in
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fear and lacks in any legal recognition that might offer some form of inde- pendence. The former rules by fear, but he still lacks a recognition in anything other than fear. Thus says Hegel, 'both are on the same level. The difference between them is only the formal one of more or less force or energy of will' (1987: 169). Fear, therefore, whether in the finite caprice of the master or the finite domination of the servant was, for Hegel, 'the ruling category of the East' (1987: 169). It follows, then, that there could be 'no philosophical knowledge in the East' (1987: 171) by which a history of philosophy could have begun, for what was required was the recollection of the experience of fear as self-development. In the master/servant relation- ship in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the History of Philosophy what was required for the beginning of philosophy, of wisdom, was that fear be expe- rienced as absolute negativity, and known now as the self-determination of substance. Politically, when substance is known as having this negative char- acter then there is reason, spirit and the concept. Only when fear is formative of the universal in the finite, a formation that is a self-determination of sub- stance in the subject, does freedom begin to emerge. We will return to what this means for the relation of East and West in a moment.
Much criticism is made of Hegel's Western logocentric and imperialist 'standpoint'. As we saw above, Philip Kain has recently argued for a reading of Hegel as a cultural relativist. By this he means that the absolute should be seen as a cultural paradigm that will shift when those it marginalizes or excludes will come to subvert it. The other to the absolute is therefore the critical factor in the paradigm shift. This enables Kain to claim that one can keep the absolute in Hegel as the structure within which culture is ordered without holding to the absolute as a closed and fixed content. But his case rests on suppressing the educational import of the Aufhebung - which plays no part in his argument - a suppression that itself rests upon ignoring the illusory being of the reflective mind that has the absolute as its object. With- out the Aufhebung and illusory being the contingency that Kain argues for, a cultural contingency, never meets itself as object in a second contingency, that is, the philosophical contingency of the culture of contingency itself. As such, his standpoint is one that does not acknowledge the third partner in the relation of self and other, or does not acknowledge education in Hegel.
A different response to this has been made by the Hegel scholar Henry Harris. He has commented that Hegel's philosophy of history, and by impli- cation his history of philosophy, is unfortunately imbued with 'the nascent cultural and economic imperialism of Western Europe' (1995: 5) that was
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 61 prevalent in Hegel's time. They present world history in a way that is both
'superstitious and reactionary' (1995: 5). For example, Hegel
not only presents world history as the movement of 'Providence' (as if a superhuman agent were really involved), but also employs the myth of a 'March of the Spirit' from the Sunrise towards the Sunset to support
a 'substantial' interpretation of the great Asian cultures as logically prim- itive. (1995: 5)
Such a view, says Harris, we now know to be 'an unhistorical fiction' (1995: 5). Harris is certain that Hegel would no longer hold to a view of the history of philosophy as simply a progressive philosophy of history that dismissed non- Christian religions in the way that he did. What Harris argues for instead is that Hegelian science be kept separate from its religious extensions. The latter are, as it were, merely cultural representations of a particular time and place. The conceptuality of science must therefore be kept apart from some of its historically contingent baggage.
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 64 Education in Hegel
between development, culture and the Aufhebung that re-forms any such attempts at justification.
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 54 Education in Hegel
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
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 57 different terms; it attempts to think the 'and' of its two moments as a
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.
Cultural imperialism
Exploring the different notions of education in Hegel, and in particular how the Aufhebung is to be seen as recollection, now offers a way into some of the political questions that surround Hegel's history of philosophy.
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I want, in particular, to think about how education in Hegel challenges the stereotype of Hegel referred to at the beginning of this chapter - the one associated with a history of philosophy that in effect seems to end history - and how it re-forms this interpretation of his concept of freedom. I will argue, now, that in thinking about the issue of Western domination in the world, Aufhebung and education in the history of philosophy offer a reform- ing of and an education about present Western mastery and freedom. Aufhebung as it were opens up Hegelian critique as a present history of phi- losophy. It is in this sense that Hegel says in the shorter Logic, 'the history of philosophy, in its true meaning, deals not with a past, but with an eternal and veritable present' (1975: 126).
Hegel's notion of the beginning of the history of philosophy immediately raises concerns for the perspectives in the world that are passed over as hav- ing not yet begun the pathway of despair of reason's education. Yet Hegel's beginning the history of philosophy in Ancient Athens comes about by means of philosophy as recollection. What it recollects is its own develop- ment. It looks for the potential of which it is the actuality. Its beginning, then, is not optional, it is pre-determined by its development to the point of this recollection. Equally, however, this undermines the standpoint of the history of philosophy per se, because recollection is always the groundless- ness of such a standpoint. Recollection is what exposes the history of philosophy to be other than itself.
Nevertheless, there are implications here for the way Eastern traditions are categorized philosophically when freedom recollects its beginning in Ancient Athens. In the East, says Hegel, the person remains dominated by substance to the extent that consciousness is extinguished and the subject annihilated. Thus 'political freedom, law, free ethical life, pure conscious- ness, thinking - all these are absent. What is required for their emergence is that the subject shall set himself as consciousness over against substance and so gain recognition of himself there' (1987: 167). In sum, for the his- tory of philosophy to begin, substance must be made a concrete objectivity, a concrete universality, so that this relation to subjectivity, at first external and alien, can bring into being the formative Aufhebung or education wherein the relation of subject to substance determines itself in and as free- dom. Importantly here Hegel uses the figures of the master and the servant (Herr und Knechtes) to illustrate the fate of the will with regard to alien sub- stance. Where the will is not universal, and where substance therefore is dominant over subject, 'there is only the status of the lord and the status of servant. This is the sphere of despotism' (1987: 169) and in it the feeling of finitude is fear. This is the case for master and servant. The latter stands in
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fear and lacks in any legal recognition that might offer some form of inde- pendence. The former rules by fear, but he still lacks a recognition in anything other than fear. Thus says Hegel, 'both are on the same level. The difference between them is only the formal one of more or less force or energy of will' (1987: 169). Fear, therefore, whether in the finite caprice of the master or the finite domination of the servant was, for Hegel, 'the ruling category of the East' (1987: 169). It follows, then, that there could be 'no philosophical knowledge in the East' (1987: 171) by which a history of philosophy could have begun, for what was required was the recollection of the experience of fear as self-development. In the master/servant relation- ship in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the History of Philosophy what was required for the beginning of philosophy, of wisdom, was that fear be expe- rienced as absolute negativity, and known now as the self-determination of substance. Politically, when substance is known as having this negative char- acter then there is reason, spirit and the concept. Only when fear is formative of the universal in the finite, a formation that is a self-determination of sub- stance in the subject, does freedom begin to emerge. We will return to what this means for the relation of East and West in a moment.
Much criticism is made of Hegel's Western logocentric and imperialist 'standpoint'. As we saw above, Philip Kain has recently argued for a reading of Hegel as a cultural relativist. By this he means that the absolute should be seen as a cultural paradigm that will shift when those it marginalizes or excludes will come to subvert it. The other to the absolute is therefore the critical factor in the paradigm shift. This enables Kain to claim that one can keep the absolute in Hegel as the structure within which culture is ordered without holding to the absolute as a closed and fixed content. But his case rests on suppressing the educational import of the Aufhebung - which plays no part in his argument - a suppression that itself rests upon ignoring the illusory being of the reflective mind that has the absolute as its object. With- out the Aufhebung and illusory being the contingency that Kain argues for, a cultural contingency, never meets itself as object in a second contingency, that is, the philosophical contingency of the culture of contingency itself. As such, his standpoint is one that does not acknowledge the third partner in the relation of self and other, or does not acknowledge education in Hegel.
A different response to this has been made by the Hegel scholar Henry Harris. He has commented that Hegel's philosophy of history, and by impli- cation his history of philosophy, is unfortunately imbued with 'the nascent cultural and economic imperialism of Western Europe' (1995: 5) that was
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Education in Hegel in the History of Philosophy 61 prevalent in Hegel's time. They present world history in a way that is both
'superstitious and reactionary' (1995: 5). For example, Hegel
not only presents world history as the movement of 'Providence' (as if a superhuman agent were really involved), but also employs the myth of a 'March of the Spirit' from the Sunrise towards the Sunset to support
a 'substantial' interpretation of the great Asian cultures as logically prim- itive. (1995: 5)
Such a view, says Harris, we now know to be 'an unhistorical fiction' (1995: 5). Harris is certain that Hegel would no longer hold to a view of the history of philosophy as simply a progressive philosophy of history that dismissed non- Christian religions in the way that he did. What Harris argues for instead is that Hegelian science be kept separate from its religious extensions. The latter are, as it were, merely cultural representations of a particular time and place. The conceptuality of science must therefore be kept apart from some of its historically contingent baggage.
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.
