No More Learning

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Famously, in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel sets out in Paragraph 86 how the absolute is to be learned in experience. He notes two experiences: one of an object for a consciousness, and one of the experi- ence of that experience. Since in both cases what is known is mediated in being known, both objects are negated, for each of them is not known in-itself. This is, therefore, a double negation. Thought provides a special case here because what is experienced negatively is the same thing that is doing the negating. As such, this has absolute significance because, even though consciousness only knows itself negatively as what is negated and negating, it knows itself. In a moment I will return to this process as one of recollection.
This paragraph in the Phenomenology is not intended to be merely an asser- tion about what truth is. Rather, it is intended that the Phenomenology itself will go on to demonstrate it. But it comes across as an assertion, as so much in Hegel does. Why it comes across as an assertion is, however, itself instruc- tive. In any double negation there is the additional significance of its being educative and formative for the mind involved. Education is the third part- ner here, for education is the name of what is happening. It is when this education is suppressed or masked, or avoided, that Hegelian propositions about truth, as about so many other things, are reduced merely to the status of assertion.
Clearly, a notion of truth grounded in such a negative education is unlike that which one might reasonably expect truth to look like, and certainly different from that which is presupposed in what is referred to as 'formal' philosophy. This is because the absolute in Hegel refers not just to truth that results from learning, but also to the truth of itself as learning, that is, that the absolute understands the significance for it of negative experiences and comprehends this education to be what truth is. It is the purpose of Education in Hegel to illustrate below in different ways what this negative knowing, this education, looks like to the modern rational mind as it learns of its own truth from within its own negations. We will see that this truth is an education that comprehends its practice, practises its comprehension, and knows itself to be the whole that, in being true to itself, can only sustain itself as learning.
However, if truth in Hegel is somehow grounded in subjective experience surely this should immediately worry us, for it seems to bring together two things that are incompatible - truth and subjectivity. Should this combina- tion not mean rather the opposite, that truth can never be known in-itself and therefore never fully or properly comprehended? But for Hegel this is the whole point. It is not our business to predict what truth should or shouldn't be. We are invited to remain open to learning about truth as we
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learn about everything else, that is, from experience. That truth is not in substance in-itself, because of our subjective experience of it, is the ground or, better, the groundlessness, on which Hegel's absolute is to be found. Truth forms and re-forms itself in what is learned in such difficulties.
Unrest
Second, and still in response to the caricature mentioned above, this in turn gives rise to a tempering of the nature of the absolute in Hegel. At a time, rightly, when there is great caution surrounding notions of truth that appear in the Western philosophical tradition, Education in Hegel shows that the absolute in Hegel is not arrogant, although neither is it timid. Rather, as with the project of Education in Hegel overall, the absolute is modest in the weakness that characterizes it and immodest in presenting this weakness. This is a spiritual and philosophical notion of truth. It is not, again, truth as a standpoint or a dogma, yet crucially it does retain standpoint and dogma within its own conception of truth. There is no more rigorous critique of the whole basis of a standpoint in modern Western thinking than Hegel. 2 What makes Hegel's critique of standpoint so compelling is that it never avoids the ways in which a critique of standpoint opposes itself and, in addi- tion, it never presupposes the meaning of this self-opposition outside of the education that it performs. As such, Hegel is able to offer both a critique of bourgeois rational mastery and at the same time a philosophical and politi- cal critique of the complicity of that critique in what it opposes. This means that education in Hegel is not a formal intellectual exercise, it is the work of the actual intellect, and it is within the nature of actuality that an imma- nent critique of standpoint leaves itself groundless. This, I will argue, is exactly the nature of education in Hegel. It is the truth of the groundless- ness of all standpoints. Indeed, the integrity of Hegelian thinking is that it does not avoid its own abstraction in standpoint. Education in Hegel retains all its own misrecognitions but comes to know them differently.
In addition, here, we should note that it is in the nature of education not to rest with itself. The difficulty but also the power of Hegelian philosophy is that truth in Hegel is compelled to re-learn about itself, from itself, in what- ever situation it faces. It cannot rest, because education is the truth of unrest. To borrow an expression from Derrida, further explored in Chapter 4, edu- cation and learning have the unrest of autoimmunity as their own truth.
In passing, we should note also that this integrity of non-avoidance of unrest in what is being negated calls for a rigour that has less to do with
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the scholastic and more, much more, to do with the pursuit of the truth of the negations in one's life. The rigour of such education in Hegel lies in the risk of its unrest and in the struggle for the meaning of this unrest in human relations. This integrity, the integrity of learning that will not stop with itself, begins with Socrates in Ancient Athens. In Hegel the annoying gadfly of philosophical questioning learns more about its truth than Socrates could have done. But it lives on. Philosophy is not at an end in Hegel. It is in the throes of another period of development, of its own re-formation. Education in Hegel aims to contribute to our understanding of this modern education and development. This is why the book is written as it is. It does not pursue education in Hegel through a scholarly exegesis of the concept of education in all his work. Nor does it undertake an historical survey as to when and how Hegel's philosophy has been employed as educational method within institutional education. I have no doubt that this alone will not recommend the book to many who work closely with Hegel. Instead, I have taken from Hegel what I consider to be his most central and his most illuminating insight into philosophy - that it has its truth as education - and brought it out of his texts to speak where possible to twenty-first century issues and problems. Education in Hegel marks only the tip of this deep iceberg, and more remains to be done here than I am even close to being aware of. Nevertheless, I felt it justified to shake the dust off the old man (as Hegel was called as a young man) and to let his educational philosophy emerge in and through the aporetic experiences of some of the most impor- tant prejudices that characterize the modern and post-modern world. 3 As such, I have tried to show what we can learn from Hegel about the ways in which we think about inequalities of wealth and power, about freedom and tyranny, and about climate change, as well as about the relation of self and other and of life and death.
As will be seen from the chapters that follow, education in Hegel empha- sizes meaning rather than solution, and this again may frustrate those readers who want not merely to interpret the world but to know how to change it. I hope that, in what follows, education in Hegel might begin to persuade them of the need also to comprehend the actuality of their desire.
Mutuality
I feel it pertinent in this Introduction to mark out two standpoints in particu- lar that education in Hegel opposes. The first of these is mutual recognition. It is a central tenet of Education in Hegel that his contribution to the idea of
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the social, political and global 'other' lays elsewhere than in mutual recog- nition. The latter posits a middle between individuals that cannot be thought by a self-consciousness in modern social and political relations. Mutuality is present only aporetically in its autoimmunity to itself. It is, as such, a spiritual event. As we will see in Chapter 1, the life and death strug- gle in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is not the effect of a political struggle for recognition, it is the origin of the political per se and is masked as this origin precisely by that which it produces, namely, the political. The second standpoint is that of post-foundational philosophy, taken here with a broad brush - but not so in Chapters 4 and 5 - which posits a mutuality of differ- ence. The claim for a radical heterogeneity between self and other, between cultures, and between subjectivity and the absolutely other, is itself under- pinned by a middle of mutuality in which all are the same in being different. Mutual recognition of the same, and recognition of mutual difference, are two sides of the same coin, whose currency in both cases is an imperialism of the middle, one that is more-or-less - mostly less - acknowledged by its practitioners. Education in Hegel is a critique of such imperialisms, one that refuses for itself a posited grounding in such mutualities while at the same time recognizing its own positing within them.
Life and death
One of the premises in Education in Hegel, then, is that modern conscious- ness is not well educated regarding the relations that it expresses, or about the relations that are present in how consciousness understands itself in the world around it. The most important of these is that despite all of the ways in which it feels sovereign and independent in life, the modern individual is never free from its absolute master, never free from its relation to nega- tion, that is, to death. The free individual is negated by his fear of death, and this fear and negation is what he most fears. But for education in Hegel this negation is formative of modern life. It is an education about death in life, an education that re-forms the truth of the free person.
It might seem strange, even counter-intuitive, for education in Hegel to be arguing for the experience of fear within modern freedom. Is it not patently obvious, a critic might say, to associate fear with regimes that sup- press freedom, whether militarily or ideologically, or both? However, in the way that I read Hegel, fear is always a constituent of social and political life, although present in very different ways. What determines political life is how fear, vulnerability and negation are employed, that is, either for secu- rity against others or for education about others. The dictator wields fear as
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a weapon over those in his dominion because he fears for his own security. Here fear is openly opposed to free self-determination. The market econ- omy, on the other hand, wields freedom as a weapon over its poorer constituents because the consumer fears any negation of its own freedom. Here, the fear of the vulnerability of the free consumer is avoided and made invisible by being exported to others.
Education in Hegel is not arguing here for fear over and against freedom or security or peace of mind; nor, because one fears fear, can it argue against it. Freedom and fear co-exist in ways that shape personal, social, national and global relations. Education in Hegel seeks better to comprehend how this is so. It commends freedom to learn from fear - a suppressed people demands freedom from fear which is externally imposed - but also for fear to learn from freedom - a free people can learn of the ambivalence of their freedom when fear, vulnerability and negation are recognized within it. 4 The former will find strength in vulnerability; the latter will find vulnerabil- ity in strength. It is the case that, while freedom includes the freedom to learn of fear from within itself, it eschews this education when it forces others to experience fear on its own behalf. This latter is a failure of educa- tional nerve, a failure of freedom to risk its own learning. Fear is what motivates the struggle for freedom, but a freedom that forgets its roots in fear and holds itself (wrongly) to be free from fear, will never be able to learn of others from within itself. This education, in particular, is explored in Chapter 1.
This forms the core of education in Hegel as I will be presenting it. Antici- pating the arguments made below for a moment, education in Hegel begins where life learns of its misrecognition of its relation to death. Most impor- tantly, it learns here that the relation of life and death is the template for the social relation of self and other. It learns too, that politics always carries the relation of life and death but in different ways at different times in different historical epochs. Modernity is characterized here by the illusion that life is not of death. This illusion has its cost, its impact, in social and political relations. It is the illusion, for example, that grounds the appear- ance of bourgeois property law as a natural law between persons, as it does between thought and its relation to its object. This forms the basis of the critique that education in Hegel is able to offer regarding relations between self and other, rich and poor, master and slave, and West and East. I say something on each of these relations in the course of the book. For educa- tion in Hegel, then, where life learns of itself as already presupposing a particular relation to death, this is our philosophical education about the spirit of the age. It is also an inclusive and participatory education precisely
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because it is within the experience of the universality of life and death.
Mediaeval philosophers and theologians went to great lengths to protect the masses from speculative truths. Education in Hegel seeks the opposite; not to protect any modern consciousness from its education regarding its own end. It is hard, is it not, to live constantly in relation to negation, to death? Nevertheless education in Hegel teaches that this is the most funda- mental relation in human existence. It teaches also, and this is one of its most challenging aspects, that how a human society or culture avoids its relation to death is also the shape of its social and political relations. Or, perhaps more accurately, social and political relations are the actuality of the ways in which life misrecognizes its relation to death.
I can anticipate here the revenge practised against Hegel by a certain kind of supporter of Nietzsche. These supporters might bemoan the way that such talk seems again to be grounded in the spirit of ressentiment against life, and to articulate, again, all the hatred of being alive as a human being. In addition, they might abhor the way that fear seems to return here as a value, as a life-denying principle that causes man to be petrified, and then to turn him against himself as if his being alive was the error itself. But I think Nietzsche would not be so vengeful here at the kind of negation at work. Death in education in Hegel is life-affirming; it is in their relation to each other that life seeks itself, and does so against those shapes of itself in thought that seduce it into its own seemingly rational mastery. Did Nietzsche not seek the redemption of man from the error of rationalization viewed as immune from the forces of life and death? And did Zarathustra not respect the tightrope-walker precisely because he lived his life with fear and death against this error? 5 In Twilight of the Idols, he says that 'the most spiritual human beings, if we assume they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just for that reason they honour life because it pits its greatest opposition against them' (1982: 524). When life seeks itself in relation to death, this is as much education in Hegel as it is in Nietzsche. 6
Recollection
The relation of life and death in social relations is educational in and as recollection. A few years ago at a seminar in Goldsmith's College, London, I heard the presenter say that the trouble for Hegel in Hegelian philoso- phy is that 'nothing happens'. This is a wonderful observation but not for the reasons that the presenter intended. He meant to imply that Hegel's philosophy is essentially a tragic and idle tautology. In fact, the phrase
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'nothing happens' turns out to be a most pithy yet comprehensive descrip- tion of Hegelian philosophy and of education in Hegel in particular. Knowing nothing is where nothing happens, and this knowing of nothing as something is the template of education in Hegel, as indeed it is of the his- tory of Western philosophy in general. The Aufhebung is the actuality of this knowing; its substance is its double negation; its subjectivity is the dou- ble negation as recollection; and recollection is the education that knows truth in and as the Aufhebung. The whole is the way that death, or nothing, or the negative in life, is known by itself. 7 Spirit, actuality and the concept or the notion in Hegel have this Aufhebung or this education as their own self-determination. 8
This notion of recollection that I am arguing for as education in Hegel is differentiated from that in which memory overcomes forgetfulness, as, for example, in the Platonic recollection of separate forms by a corporeal intel- lect that has forgotten them,9 or where recollection in Hegel is confined to remembrance. 10 Education in Hegel will argue that recollection in Hegel has speculative significance deep within the remembrance of things forgotten. It is because recollection can only recollect itself, that is, can only be in-itself when it is lost as in-itself to the for-itself, that it cannot only be remem- brance. Recollection is the remembering of forgetting and the forgetting of remembering known together as educational and philosophical experi- ence. This is how it plays out the speculative and educational significance of Paragraph 86 of the Phenomenology referred to above. Recollection recalls its aporetic structure aporetically, and is known to itself in the educational self- (re-)formative structure of the Aufhebung, in which what is known is not 'overcome' in its being known. The paradox of this circle that completes itself in its non-completion is the negation of the negation known to itself in the instability and groundlessness that is learning. In fact, it is able to combine the subjectivity of recollection as inwardizing (Erinnerung) with the substance of the Aufhebung in the actuality of formative experience. The point here is not only that, famously from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk in recollection of the day's events, that is, as the actual thought of the day which negates events in retrieving them. It is also the case that the owl, or wisdom, knows to risk losing itself in flying again, in that it will be changed by what it learns. Recollection as its own truth is not restricted to the hind-sight of a critical or reflective mind. Rather, the owl of Minerva learns too that only in the groundlessness of the present is the future truly open. 11 This is the educable wisdom of I-philosophy12 that knows to recollect recollection, and knows this as the negative learning of what is negative.
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We should not pass over another intriguing aspect of this learning. It is not just death that is able to be known in life in recollection. It is also true for other ideas that are impossible for us, for example, those of infinity, eternity, absolute truth, the nature of God and the origin and purpose of the universe. It is commonplace that the finite human mind cannot grasp the infinite and the eternal. But the nature of their separation is already illusory. As we mentioned above, having them as an object of thought masks the ways in which this relation is already a political shape, a political pre- determination of the relation of thought to the eternal. As life is really death in life, so the finite is really the eternal in life. 13 Recollecting this rela- tion is also part of education in Hegel, just as is recollecting the other in the self, and truth in error. The recollection of these relations is what Hegel means by the education carried in the negation of the negation. It is what happens when negation learns of itself as learning.
Let me make this point somewhat differently. When I stare at the stars - and the stars have a noble status in the beginning as in the development of Western philosophy. For example, in the Metaphysics Aristotle says that man first philosophized owing to his wonder about the greater matters such as 'the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe' (1984: I. 2. 1982b 12-17) - when I stare at the stars everything changes for me. I lose myself to the vastness of the universe. But I also lose the stars and the universe for they are not what I can see of them. There are two negations here. I am negated by the universe which is itself negated by me, that is, by that which it negates. This is not mutual recognition, nor absolute alterity. It is an education wherein lies the truth of the negation of the negation, a truth that we will come to know in Education in Hegel as the social relation wherein 'I am already other and the other is not me'. This can only have substance and subjectivity as education, because it is only as education that something can learn about itself, lose itself in doing so, and remain other than itself even in knowing about itself. This is not esoteric; it is rational, for the truth of reason as education in Hegel is both true and groundless. Openness to this impossibility as learning is the fundamental openness and non-dogmatic character of education in Hegel.
Finally, I have to admit that a book such as this will appear strange to many within the context of present Hegelian commentary. Its argument for the absolute in Hegel will appear anachronistic, and its choice of education as its focus in Hegel is very rare. I am reminded here of Theodor Adorno who said in this regard, 'anyone who is defending something that the spirit of an age rejects as out of date and obsolete is in an awkward position. The arguments put forward sound lame and overdone. He addresses his
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audience as though he is trying to talk them into buying something they don't want. This drawback has to be reckoned with by those who are not to be dissuaded from philosophy' (1991: 20). Far from being dissuaded, I am resolved to describe here philosophy in Hegel as I have come to know it. I believe the truth of Hegel to lie in education and in learning. I have also found that this truth is never more powerful or more poignant than when it speaks directly to dilemmas and difficulties in life. It speaks to them of the meaning they carry as difficulties and dilemmas, but it does not resolve them, nor do I seek their resolution above all else, as I once did. I don't either seek the tranquillity of mind so aspired to by ancient and mediaeval philosophy. Education in Hegel has its own character, something that speaks of vulnerability and mastery, or of the vulnerable master who remains master and has this remaining master as part of his vulnerability. This approaches the character of the divine in modern life. Perhaps for this rea- son I have always found education in Hegel more open to teaching than to writing. In previous books I have referred to this education as the contradic- tion of enlightenment, as philosophy's higher education, and most recently as the philosophy of the teacher. I have also written about how this notion of education has been the substance of an undergraduate programme of studies. I have in this present book not repeated any previously published material on Hegel as a teacher or on some of his more pedagogically inspired texts and letters. But I am also painfully aware that the books fall short of the teaching. Perhaps it is right that this be so. If this book, and the earlier ones, is to be read in the spirit of education that this and they try to capture, then this is less likely to be the case for those who study Hegel among the cobwebs that, he himself warned, stand at the gates of entry to philosophy. It is more likely if it finds readers who experience the unavoid- ability of the eternal return of perplexity and who, nevertheless, refuse consolation in half-hearted assertions made with a bad conscience. To such readers I have tried to offer a Hegel who speaks to some of the most per- sonal aspects of our experiences of the world and those within it.
The chapters can be read independently of each other, and therefore some repetition of certain key points and ideas has proved unavoidable. 14 Chapter 1 lays out the structure of Hegel's philosophy of the other, and of life and death as they are carried in and by education in Hegel; Chapter 2 finds education in Hegel in the history of philosophy and carries a discus- sion of different types of education in Hegel, including Aufhebung as recollection; Chapter 3 re-thinks fossil fuel culture as a form of modern misrecognition of freedom and brings to bear the substance that pertains to the concept of illusion (Schein); Chapters 4 and 5 accept the challenge of
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relating education in Hegel to Derrida and Levinas respectively; and Chap- ter 6 experiments with a reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a modern, reflective, personal and social education.
Notes
1 From Twilight of the Idols.
2 I will try to substantiate this claim against Derrida and Levinas in Chapters 4
and 5.
3 Rightly in my view, Donald Verene states that 'so much interpretation of Hegel
will not dare anything; it engages [only] in a kind of deft furniture moving'
(Verene, 1985: 21).
4 I am reminded here of Nietzsche who, in Twilight of the Idols, notes that freedom
decays when the struggle for it is deemed complete or institutionalized.
5 This refers to the Prologue of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche,
1982).
6 There are many other ways in which education in Nietzsche and Hegel could be
compared favourably with each other. I have attempted such a comparison in Tubbs, 2005, chapter 7. In a future work tracing the history of Western philoso- phy I will read Nietzsche and Hegel together as the truth of modernity.
7 This is not a Romantic view of death. It does not mean to infer a recollection that seeks death rather than life. The truth of recollection, rather, is the struggle to know death while alive, and not instead of life.
8 I do not explore the notion or the concept in the book specifically (although educa- tion in Hegel is das Begriff), but actuality and spirit are both discussed in some detail. Also, I have not used capital letters for these and other specialist Hegelian terms, although I have retained them in quotations from translations that do.
9 See, for example, Socrates working with the slave boy in the Meno (1956).
10 As, for example, in a recent piece by George Lucas Jr. ; see Gallagher, 1997,
97-115.
11 There is another theme in recollection here, that of time. I have not included
discussion of this in the present volume, even in regard to the history of philoso- phy in Chapter 2 (although it does appear towards the end of Chapters 2, 5 and 6). It is something I will return to in a forthcoming history of philosophy as the concept of future history of philosophy and its relation as world-spirit. However, in brief, we could say here that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk not just in seeing what this day has taught it, but knowing also that past flying and future flying are both the groundlessness - the learning - of this flight. This is the same wisdom, put more prosaically, that comprehends that just as 'the good old days' are the perspective of present recollection, so, too, present recollection is already 'the good old days' of future recollection. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both observed that recollection works forwards as well as backwards. As we will see in Chapter 6, this is the actuality of the old man, not old in terms of chronology but in terms of the wisdom of education that knows the past and the future in the present, and knows therein the eternal.
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12 This is the title of Chapter 6.
13 These are themes I intend to take up again in a forthcoming History of
Philosophy.
14 As is the fact that some concepts employed in one chapter might be more fully
discussed in another. The most important example of this I think is that recollec- tion, used throughout the work, has its most detailed exposition in Chapter 2.
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