Response to Ross Abbinnett’s Review of Education in Hegel

Abstract

I thank Ross Abbinnett for his careful reading of Education in Hegel. His observations in his Review are both perceptive and challenging, and take us directly to what, for Studies in Philosophy and Education, must be a central concern: namely, the relationship between philosophy and education. Abbinnett’s Review notes correctly that Education in Hegel is not a book about ‘the institutional practice of schools or ... Higher Education.’ Such examinations remain naive unless they recognise that neither philosophy nor education are immune from determination within modern social and political relations. In the shadow of this recognition, the vocation of philosophy and education together is to comprehend the experience of this determination and to speak of the difficulty of freedom within it; that is, to learn of freedom within the philosophical experience of its negation and incompleteness. Education in Hegel and Abbinnett’s Review both have deeper aspirations for philosophy and education than the well-intentioned but often credulous analysis of institutional policy and practice. Abbinnett has skilfully and concisely summarized the main arguments in Education in Hegel. He notes the centrality in it of the master/slave relation as the form and content of the life and death struggle. What the master chooses to do with death once he has eschewed it as his own truth articulates actual social relations, including their dissimulation and illusion. He notes that this is a ‘reformation of the concept of modernity’, one that reads phenomenology and Aufhebung against more conventional models of Hegelian interpretation. He picks up the importance, too, of the notion of complicity in phenomenology, particularly in regard to fossil fuel culture, showing how it opposes the reflexive models of Habermas and others. Overall, Abbinnett recognises that Education in Hegel offers a ‘phenomenology of modernity’ where ‘the experience of freedom, mortality and recognition that is characteristic of modern life, is represented through the illusions of self-sufficiency that have taken possession of the mass of self-conscious individuals.’ This sentence resounds with concepts that might enthral philosophers in and of education. Experience is the conduit of learning; freedom is both enlightenment and its self-critique; mortality remains the great