The Ethics of the Negative: Overcoming the Frustrations of Thinking Dialectically in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

The scholarship on Hegel in educational philosophy is concentrated heavily in three broad areas. First, writers have emphasized a basic understanding of dialectical thinking and its application to various educational problematics. Second, there has been a great deal of interest in reading Hegel’s phenomenology as a representation of developmental psychology. And third, Hegel has been referenced in relation to individual educational philosophers such as John Dewey and Paulo Freire. In this essay, I wish to take a closer look at a very important dimension of Hegel’s philosophy that has remained largely unexplored within the context of education: the ethic of “the strenuous effort of the Notion.” One of the most surprising and perhaps emotionally stimulating aspects of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is his honest, if not brutally honest, depiction of intellectual labor as a strenuous task that demands an ethical commitment to thinking as such. Here I will argue that this ethical practice involves overcoming self-righteousness, stubbornness, and vanity. As long as educational philosophy does not address the ethics of the negative then any discussion of dialectical thinking (detached from the affective component of thinking) and developmental psychology (interested in necessary stages without reference to the contingent toil of intellectual labor) are simply abstractions not equipped to address the hurtles and pitfalls on the path towards self-determining learning. Such an analysis will therefore further support and refine Nigel Tubes’s emphasis on the centrality of the experience of dialectical thinking in Hegel’s phenomenology. After a brief review of Hegelian scholarship in educational philosophy, I will outline Hegel’s ethics of learning with specific reference to the Preface and Introduction of Phenomenology of Spirit.