Hegel's Phenomenology Research Articles

Justification of School Subjects Education from the Viewpoint of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Justification of School Subjects Education from the Viewpoint of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Recognition Reconsidered

Perhaps one of the most celebrated motifs in modern philosophy is the struggle for as presented in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Most noteworthy are his accounts of domination and liberation (beherrschen, befreien) and dependence and independence (Unselbststandigkeit, Selbststandigkeit) and the dialectical ways that they interrelate to form an account of recognition. Hegel's account has inspired a vast literature on the topic of recognition spanning from Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Jurgen Habermas, and Anthony Appiah,1 to Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy,2 to Paul Ricoeur.3 This topic continues to be one of great significance today in and in social and poUtical thought. One place, however, where the notion of recognition is rarely (if ever) mentioned is in connection with Martin Heidegger.4 In what follows, I argue that, notwithstanding his explicit intentions to the contrary, Heidegger's existential analysis provides not only conditions for the possibility of thinking about recognition, but an account of recognition. To be clear, even though Heidegger does not provide a full-fledged theory of recognition, he gives us more than the mere conditions for the possibility of considering it. That is, Heidegger provides a phenomenological elaboration of the notion of recognition with normative impUcations, thereby going beyond the merely transcendental aspect of his project. In order to demonstrate that Heidegger provides such an account, I examine Being and Time §26, where he distinguishes between leaping in and dominating the other and leaping ahead and freeing the other.5 Departing slightly from the spirit of Heidegger's self-understanding, I contend that the ethical dimensions impUcit in his account far exceed the Uteral existential analysis and indeed, anything Heidegger himself imagined for fundamental ontology based upon that analysis. My argument unfolds in three main steps: First - in a section that comprises the bulk of this article - I cite and analyze Heidegger's discussion of soucitude (Fursorge), where I claim that his account of recognition can be found. Heidegger identifies three extreme possibilities of solicitude: indifference (or deficient modes) and two positive modes: leaping in (einspringen) and dominating the other, on the one hand, and leaping ahead (vorspringen, vorausspringen, entspringen) and freeing the other, on the other hand. Second, I sketch the positions of two central players in the contemporary literature on recognition - Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth - and examine some key tenets that define their respective positions. Third, I reexamine what Heidegger says about solicitude in terms of these contemporary accounts of recognition and I argue that Heidegger's fundamental ontology can provide an account of recognition. My aim is to demonstrate that Heidegger does not make good on his claim for the ethical neutrality of his analysis. Heidegger claims that fundamental ontology is ethically neutral insofar as it provides the conditions for the possibility of without any ethical content, i.e., without being an ethical theory that prescribes either specific or general imperatives, norm, rules, or guidance in particular situations. There is thus a sense in which Heidegger is right in claiming that Being and Time is not an ethics in any traditional sense of the term. Traditionally, has been rooted in a subject: a single, stable, essential being to whom moral responsibiUty, obligation, praise, and blame can be attributed. Given that Heidegger overturns this traditional notion of subjectivity with his account of Dasein, it is the case that in any traditional sense indeed is absent from Being and Time. But matters are not that simple, for although Heidegger overturns the notion of subjectivity (thereby overturning the traditional discipUne of ethics), in Being and Time he retains many ethically charged concepts (i. …

Modern Eleusis: Religion and Factory

Marx's reflections on Christianity depend on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, and this was the context in which he conceived the idea of treating the critique of religion as a starting-point for the critique of bourgeois society in general. There are three different political–economic connections in which Marx employs the concept of religion to shed light on capitalist society in general: the relation between bourgeois and citizen in capitalist society; the phenomena of commodity circulation; and, finally, the production process. The close relation between Christianity and the alienating nature of capitalist production may well explain why Marx did not follow up his critique of religion in the form of a specific work—a question recently brought forward by Alexander Saxton. Analysis of some general features of the relation between capital and religion leads to the conclusion that Protestantism prevails as the true religious form in capitalist society. The capitalism–religion connection sheds light on the Marxian concept of workers' subsumption under capital at the global level.

Death and Experience of Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit- Work versus Erotism

Death and Experience of Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit- Work versus Erotism

Hegel, Dostoyevsky and Carl Rogers: between humanism and spirit

There has been a heated debate within psychotherapeutic counseling of the role that can be afforded to spirituality within the counseling setting. If one single factor can be accorded primacy, then it might be reckoned the late Carl Rogers turned to spirituality in the last decade of his life. The following examines this debate in relation to the supposed, and, it might be argued, demonstrated, ineffable nature of alterity in relation to intersubjectivity in general. Many of the protagonists in this debate have highlighted the inadequacy of discursive language in conveying the essential moment of connectedness in Rogerian therapy between two individuals. This gap, perceived or real, has been filled by rendering the relationship between therapist and client as spiritual. It is argued that this move has already been rehearsed in at least two classical texts, G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Both authors at quite crucial junctures in these texts turn to spirituality within the context of a very specific self—other relation. There is very little discernible difference between these described relationships, in either substance or form, and those described by Rogers and others as being their most successful therapeutic encounters. All of them can be regarded as a therapeutic relationship between two specific individuals that derives benefits for both irreducible to, and irreplaceable by, the psycho-social benefits of wider group membership.

On A Philosophical Model of Hegel's Phenomenological Method: A Reply to Kenneth Westphal

Hegel's Phenomenology is among the most difficult, if it is not in fact the most difficult, philosophical treatise ever published. Owing to its opacity of form and content, the Phenomenology, which Hegel quite accurately describes as the highway of despair upon which natural consciousness travels to its absolute knowing, has had its share of hitchhikers (§78). In their efforts to comprehend the scenery along this highway, many readers of this text rely on any number of analytical commentaries and expositions. Westphal (2003) offers a welcomed contribution to this kind of secondary literature.As its title suggests, Westphal's text seeks to introduce Hegel's Phenomenology in a novel way, namely with explicit reference to the epistemological issue at its core. This is the Dilemma of the Criterion from Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism. (Benson 1996). In addition to introducing the central features and characteristics of the epistemological aim of the Phenomenology, Westphal devotes considerable effort to showing how, that is by what method, Hegel responds to at least Pyrrhonian skepticism.Westphal's examination of Hegel's method is framed by two questions. The first question is: what is Hegel's method? The answer that Westphal offers, namely that Hegel employs a phenomenological method, agrees with a host of classic and contemporary commentators, including Ivan Iljin (1946:126), Alexandre Kojève (1980: Ch. 7), Kenley R. Dove (1969-70), William Maker (1982), Wendy Lynn Clark and J.M. Fritzman (2002). Nevertheless, Westphal does offer a detailed, sophisticated, and novel account of the characteristics of Hegel's phenomenological method that is unrivaled in the extant literature.

The Apotheosis of Apotheosis

The recent translation of Emmanuel Levinas's essay On Escape complicates our view of his relationship to Hegel, and reopens the ontological question of escape. The impetus for Levinas's essay was National Socialism's effort to reduce subjectivity to being qua biologistic. To resist this, Levinas enlists idealism as an ally. He affirms the idealist subject's effort to escape being, but denies that it makes good its escape. I challenge this denial by comparing Levinas's phenomenology of escape with Hegel's phenomenology of unhappy consciousness, paying special attention to the themes of shame and the will to escape. The similarity between treatments leads me to suggest that the urge to escape emerges at least as early as medieval Christianity, thus predating the historical predicament of mid- 1930s European Jewry. I conclude by interpreting space travel and the posthuman figure of the cyborg as signs that escape continues as an object of human aspiration.

Deconstruction as Darstellung

Derrida is typically taken to be the thinker most antithetical to Hegel, and deconstruction to be the philosophical antithesis to Hegel's systematic rationality. While I do not dispute the accuracy of this perception, I argue in this paper that it does not offer an adequate or a complete picture. Specifically, much about Derrida and about deconstruction is more similar to Hegel than is typically realized. I argue that Derrida's deconstruction shares a great affinity to the method of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, so much so that we could identify and articulate a latent Hegelianism in Derrida's approach. I begin with a description of Derrida's own project, then offer something of an apologia for his work. Finally, I describe Hegel's method of exposition [Darstellung] and compare it to deconstruction, pointing out the fundamental similarities between the two thinkers.

To understand time from the time?: The role of ′Marburg′ notion of time in Heidegger's confrontation with Hegel

This article discusses Heidegger's thesis that one cannot talk about Hegel's essential advancement from the inherited notion of time. Due to the ambivalent interpretation - according to which Hegel's notion of time was both not respected enough, but also vulgar; that from him one should not learn about temporality, but that his standpoint can still serve as a proper example of everyday time - Heidegger opted for the reciprocal historical-philosophical reflection with the goal to show the direct interdependence between Aristotle's and Hegel's understanding of time. The problematic assumption in that interpretation consists of Heidegger's emphasis on the constructive, and thus pronouncedly controversial link between history and spirit, which tries to deny the unique, historical movement of the spirit. Heidegger's diagnosis might not be problematic if his interpretation of Hegel's philosophy were not directed to a concrete perspective of thought, focused on the mechanism which in a way completes the spirit of the new-age ontology. Moreover, historical fulfillment of the epoch-making model of ontology is closely related to the dominance of the natural understanding of time which also reached its peak in Hegel. In other words, regardless of the issue about its foundedness, Heidegger's conviction that Hegel indicates a peak in the vulgar interpretation of time implies nothing else but the idea of the historical development of spirit. With misunderstandings which inevitably follow when the interpretation of natural time of finite beings is proclaimed to be a ?natural?, i.e. everyday and philosophically irrelevant attitude to time - one should recognize why Hegel's phenomenology of time is being fundamentally-ontologically deformed with Heidegger.

Ibsen and Hegel on Egypt and the Beginning of Great Art

In the young Henrik Ibsen's intellectual quarters, abroad as well as in his native Norway, Hegelianism was very much the philosophical system de rigueur. Hegel's student Marcus Jacob Monrad taught phenomenology and aesthetics at the University of Christiania (now Oslo) throughout the 1850s, and promoted a wider Hegelian way of thinking through frequent book reviews and newspaper articles. In Italy, soon to be his home away from home, Ibsen socialised with the art-historian Lorentz Dietrichson, whose views on the history of art were outspokenly Hegelian. Ibsen was also in touch with the Hegelian circle gathering around the painter I. C. Dahl at the Academy of Art in Dresden. While Ibsen rarely engages in explicit philosophical discussion, he makes a significant exception when responding to the Danish translation of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. He admits that he has no professional expertise in this area but continues to observe that, insofar as ‘there are writers [like Mill] who lay down the law about philosophy without any knowledge of Hegel or German thought in general,’ it seems to him that ‘anything is allowed.’ To think philosophically without Hegel appears to Ibsen as tantamount to thinking without a reference point or standard.

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as an Argument for a Monistic Ontology1

This paper tries to show that one of the main objectives of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is to give an epistemological argument for his monistic metaphysics. In its first part, it outlines a traditional, Kant‐oriented approach to the question of how we can make sense of our ability to cognize objects. It focuses on the distinction between subjective and objective conditions of cognition and argues that this distinction, understood in the traditional (Kantian) way, is much too poor to do justice to our very elaborated conception of kinds of objects. The second part deals with the Phenomenology. Here it is claimed that Hegel reacts in a sophisticated way to the shortcomings of the traditional epistemological view in presenting a theory which allows us to understand why we have to distinguish between different kinds of objects and how these kinds are related to conditions of cognition. This epistemological doctrine, however, is not developed by Hegel for its own sake. Rather, it has the function of a “transcendentalistic” (not “transcendental”) argument for a monistic ontology. Thus, one can make sense of Hegel's claim that the Phenomenology is to be understood as an introduction into his (monistic) System.

Jewish Philosophy Today

What is philosophy?1 Why is it philosophy? And if there is such a thing as philosophy, who counts as a philosopher? These questions guide any number of essays devoted to the topic of philosophy; some specifically address the meta-question of what constitutes philosophy and what thinkers are included in this category. As we see in the history of philosophy and in current trends in contemporary philosophy, defining those who are allowed in a particular category and those who are not is not an easy task; nor does it usually have a logic other than a political movement of the time. I would be remiss if I did not recognize that the question of philosophy still remains, for some, a question: what is it and why is it philosophy? A brief tour of some of the most prominent and recognizable names in the philosophical canon whose has caused a bit of a stir will help us to orient ourselves in this field called philosophy. Beginning with Spinoza, who is generally accepted as part of the Western philosophical canon, we can ask, as Emil Fackenheim does, if his acceptance is the result of his opting out of Judaism and/or because the community of Amsterdam excluded him, making him and his thought seem less and therefore less parochial. The Moses Mendelssohn (a philosophical contemporary and friend of Kant's) who appears in histories of early modern philosophy-the one who debates with Jacobi over Lessing's Spinozism-is not the Moses Mendelssohn who appears in accounts of modern philosophy. The central text for this latter Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, addresses concerns regarding state and religious power: what is the relationship, if any, between the two and what limits on each should be imposed?2 His interest lies in persuading his readership that there is no inconsistency in being a German citizen and remaining Jewish. His exploration into the relationship between national citizenship and religious identity is still relevant today. In the late modern period, Hermann Cohen, a brilliant neo-Kantian and the teacher of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, is also largely ignored, though Cohen's work is infused with Kantian philosophy. As Fackenheim points out, insofar as Cohen is a neo-Kantian, he cannot be completely ignored, but little heed, if any, is paid to the way in which Cohen takes up Kantian philosophy into a framework. Rosenzweig, who wrote his dissertation on Hegel, is rarely, if ever taught, in existentialism courses and we can lament the lack of attention given by philosophers to his The Star of Redemption. Certainly, The Star is a daunting book, and it is no easy task to read it; however, other difficult books (e.g., Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit) are not only central to the canon of modern philosophy, but they are celebrated in part because of their level of difficulty. In any event, Rosenzweig often inspires his own set of debates precisely over the issue of whether he was a thinker or a German philosopher. Was The Star a work of philosophy or, as he feared, simply a Jewish book? Buber's / and Thou (like Tillich's The Courage to Be and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling) frequently appears in introductory philosophy courses or in courses on existentialism, usually when dealing with questions of religious experience or the role of the human in religious experience. This frequency, however, might be more of an indication that Buber's sophisticated philosophical ideas appear simplistic and/or that the mystical religious tradition that informs his thought is either unknown or viewed as irrelevant.3 When we move to the more contemporary thinkers and explore the debate surrounding Levinas's Judaism and the role that Judaism plays in informing his philosophical thought, it is difficult not to speculate about why such debates become so heated. What is at stake in proclaiming Levinas to be a philosopher? …

Law, Right, and Forgiveness

In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the identification of the singular individual with the universal is initially expressed by means of the concepts of law and right. Developed by Hegel in ethical life and state of right,' law and right enable a particular kind of being, self-knowledge, and interaction for their respective consciousnesses. These legal categories, however, virtually disappear in the remainder of the text, and whereas Hegel's critique of law in these sections is important in its own right, attempts to bring it to bear on contemporary legal theory risk anachronism. What I will argue in this essay, however, is that the problem of law re-enters the text in Hegel's discussion of forgiveness, and that we can look there for a modern resolution to the problematic dependence on law exhibited by the very different legal frameworks of ethical life and state of right. The ascendancy of forgiveness as a fundamental organizational principle results in a radical circumscription of the role of law. It also represents the enduring force of Antigone's political legacy, or so I will argue-both for Hegel and for us modern readers still grappling with her role in the Phenomenology. In addition to developing the import of these legal insights for interpretation of the Phenomenology, I will also suggest that forgiveness's resolution of the failed legal frameworks is helpful in the context of the contemporary skepticism (exhibited by feminist, race-theorist, queer, communitarian, and democratic perspectives, among others) regarding the purported critical efficacy and neutrality of legalism and the connection of legal advocacy with the "natural" aspects of human identity. Hegel's theory of forgiveness provides a strategy for exposing the inequalities in access to power that the liberal protection of freedom and equality has been accused of concealing. His view of its priority over law can be used to transform law into an expression of a relationship between universal and individual that is neither composed prior to the production of that relationship, nor constituted by an assertion of power by defenders of the status quo, who deny the impact of difference on the law's operation. I will argue that Hegel's theory of forgiveness is productive in this context because it construes individual action as central to the universels that regulate our interaction and provides a critical way of thinking and representing the social "we" holistically. In order to construct the ground upon which to show the relevance of Hegel's theory of forgiveness to his theory of law, I will discuss: a) the forms of social life in the Phenomenology that are organized according to law and right; b) forgiveness' resolution of the difficulties they confront; and c) the critical transformation of law that Hegel's account of forgiveness suggests. For the present I will limit myself to the internal logic of the Phenomenology and to the importance of forgiveness as a social-structural principle therein, and thus not address the more immediately practical resonance of forgiveness's as an alternative to contemporary legal thinking. The Law-Based Societies of the Phenomenology. Ethical life and state of right are the only social forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology that are based specifically on law and right, and both are for Hegel inadequate expressions of spirit. The characters of ethical life identify immediately with their respective laws (Creon with human and Antigone with divine law); the positive aspect of this identification is their implication and agency in the laws and forms of social interaction that structure their political life, in whose production they are thus immediately engaged. The immediacy of this identification, however, precludes any recognition and expression of their particularity. Ethical characters are submerged in the universal ethical substance, such that the role of their particularity in it is concealed until the "unsuppressable" assertion of the singular self renders ethical substance unsustainable. …

Uma concepção dialética da arte a partir da gênese do conceito de trabalho na fenomenologia do espírito de Hegel

A Fenomenologia do Espírito de Hegel não é ainda o lugar específico da posição de sua filosofia da arte propriamente dita. Entretanto, é possível compreender a relação sistemática entre alguns conceitos fundamentais desta obra de 1807 e a concepção hegeliana de arte da maturidade. A partir desta relação, destacaremos em nossa interpretação três diferentes e complementares teses: 1. Da obra de arte como produto ideal do trabalho do espírito (Geist); 2. Do simbolismo da religião natural como produto do trabalho do artesão à beleza da religião da arte; 3. Da necessidade do oráculo à subjetividade concreta do ator de teatro.

Reading Hegel's Phenomenology (review)

Reading Hegel's Phenomenology (review)

Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake (review)

Reviewed by: Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake William Desmond Donald Phillip Verene . Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 264. Cloth, $45.00. This is an outstanding book written with elegance and verve, packed with erudition and delivered with wit. It offers insight into both Joyce and Vico in their distinctiveness and in the mutual light they throw on each other. Verene outlines what is peculiar to his own approach in the following way. In the early part of the twentieth century the influence of Croce on the study of Vico as the "Italian Hegel" was immense. Verene, a distinguished Hegel scholar who has himself written with aplomb of the images in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, is well-placed to situate Vico in relation to Hegel. Croce's influence was followed [End Page 362] by the search for a "Vico without Hegel." The ensuing studies of Vico as an original thinker in his own right have tended to oscillate between two approaches: either stressing Vico as a figure in intellectual history, addressing his sources and influences; or in terms of the philosophical and critical assessment of Vico's ideas themselves. Verene offers a third approach, derived from his own relation to Joyce in relation to Vico. His reading of Joyce made him realize how in Joyce's work we find an entire Vico, a Vico who gave Joyce himself wings of imagination. In the present instance, one might say that Joyce and Vico together give Verene wings in a new flight of philosophical and scholarly imagination. Philosophy must go to school with the poets, since philosophy is an activity of language, and must discover its own beginnings in the myths from which all culture also begins. As Verene nicely puts it: "The connection between Joyce and Vico became for me a sleeping giant, only partially awake, like Howth Castle and Environs at the beginning of Finnegans Wake" (ix). That said, the more dominant concern of Verene's book is the work of Vico in its full compass, albeit approached in a Joycean spirit, and refracted through Joyce's own refraction of Vichian concerns. Much of the work on Vico in English focuses on the New Science. As Verene himself points out there are only two books in English which address themselves to the full compass of Vico thought, including The New Science: Robert Flint's Vico (1884) and H.P. Adam's Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico (1935). Verene joins their company as a third, and does so with distinction. His book is divided in three parts. Part I gives a portrait of Vico which itself is doubly delivered. Thinking doubly is central to both Joyce ("two thinks at a time") and Vico. Verene offers us a marvelous portrait of the Joycean Vico, in which his ear for the striking citation of phrase from Joyce resonates with the voluminosity of Vico's teachings. He shows not only that Vico had entered intimately into Joyce's art but that the plurivocal way of poetic wisdom was already celebrated in Vico. This portrait is delivered with the contagious spirit of comedy. Verene portrait of Vico is a biography in which history and myth are wedded to each other, and each under the wise rule of a vision equally philosophical as philological. In Part II Verene offers us a recounting of Vico's voyage from the beginnings of his studies to the edge of a new beginning, as equally old as new, with the New Science. This part will be especially illuminating for students of Vico, newcomers as well as adepts, who would benefit from an overview of Vico's career, delivered with attunement to the major intellectual concerns animating its individual episodes and its overall course. In three chapters it covers the following concerns: first, the new art of pedagogy—wisdom speaking; second, the most ancient wisdom—metaphysics; and third, the universal law—jurisprudence. Finally in Part III Verene deals with the culmination of Vico's voyage in the New Science. This part is particularly good on the...

Bataille's Contestation

The aim of this essay is to clarify one of the central themes in Georges Bataille's post-war writings, namely sovereignty. At the same time, it attempts to bring to light the intellectual tradition from which Bataille's thinking arises and to which it contributes. Three specific themes are addressed: the so-called community debate (Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot), Bataille's Hegelian influences (especially Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel's phenomenology), and the possible affinities between Bataille's understanding of sovereign enjoyment and Lacan's “other” jouissance. Through these admittedly brief and suggestive investigations, the essay can hopefully elucidate what Bataille understood as “contestation,” a rather specific form of critical thought and a confrontation with the Western traditions of knowledge and, further, examine the limitations and differences of this contestation in relation to what one could call “social criticism.”

Reading Hegel's Phenomenology

Introduction Part 1. Consciousness 1. Sense, Time and My Meaning 2. From Perception to Philosophy 3. Understanding: Things, Forces and the Body Part 2. 4. Death and Desire in Hegel's Epistemology: The Form of Hegel's Argument 5. Reading and the Body 6. Hermeneutical Pressure: Intersubjectivity and Objectivity 7. The Freedom of Self-Consciousness and Early Modern Epistemology Part 3. The Absolute Reason 8. Reason and Dualism Spirit 9. Spirit and Scepticism 10. The Contradictions of Moral Life: Hegel's Critique of Kant 11. Selfhood, Conscience and Dialectic Religion 12. The Ritual Basis of Self-Identity 13. Vision and Image in Hegel's System 14. Deciding to Read: On the Horizon (of Christianity) Absolute Knowing 15. Absolute Knowing: The Structure and Project of Hegel's System of Science

Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism

Cultural and individual fantasies of enter troubling terrain in gothic tales of British and German Romanticism. In the interiority of dreams and visionary spaces, a male protagonist makes a fateful encounter with a supernatural force and finds himself dispossessed of his real and symbolic masculine estate. Emphasising the interdisciplinary range of this recurring motif, Ellen Brinks traces distressed masculinity in canonical instances of gothic imagination -- Byron's 'Oriental Tales and Coleridge's Christabel -- but also in works such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Keats's Hyperion Fragments, and Freud's letters and scientific writings. tropes and tableaux of the effeminizing supernatural cross a range of genres and perplex social and natural distinctions concerning and male sexuality to produce multiple, often contradictory, identifications. They report, from various sites, increasing anxieties about male effeminacy or the emergence of a male homosexual identity within the fraught cultural desires during the Romantic period and its Freudian afterlife. An account of the construction of sex and gender in the Gothic, Gothic Masculinity should be of interest to scholars of sexuality, gender, queer theory, Romantic subjectivity, and the German and English Gothic.

Teaching the Other

Until the early part of the twentieth century, virtually every Western philosopher could claim a treatise or text on education as part of his philosophical corpus: Plato's Republic; Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics', Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education; Rousseau's Emile; Kant's On Education; and Dewey's Democracy and Education, to name a few. At the very least, philosophers recognized the role of education in the cultivation, and occasionally even in the oppression, of the subject (see, for example, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Mill's The Subjection of Women ). But with a few exceptions (namely, Dewey, Whitehead, and a few other American philosophers), twentieth century philosophy discarded education as a topic for serious philosophical inquiry, turning it over to the colleges of education where the primary focus is pedagogy.1 This essay returns to the discussion of education as a significant topic for philosophy by examining two recent works that bring together themes in education and continental philosophy.2 The first, Irene Harvey's Labyrinths ofExemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction, is a close reading of Rousseau's Emile through the lens of deconstruction. Harvey examines the multiple layers of exemplarity at work in this significant philosophical treatise on education in order to demonstrate the complex way in which the example works. How does exemplarity function and convey to us what it hopes to teach us? Ultimately, Harvey offers a new theory of examples. Harvey's treatment of Rousseau's work has significant philosophical consequences, since it asks us to consider examples, certainly not a concept limited to Rousseau's treatise, work within a philosophical framework (here she also invokes Hegel and Kant, and then finally, Aristotle). But her work also has significant consequences for education and moral development. Examples are often the primary way in which we teach children generally, and they are usually the means by which we cultivate them specifically within a moral framework. Thus, the questions Harvey raises with regard to the example, particularly as it relates to Rousseau's Emile, lead us to ask how do we cultivate children? One might say that the second book considered here, Sharon Todd's, Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education, continues where Harvey's book ends. Todd's book considers Levinas's ethical project, if combined with themes in psychoanalysis, might offer us an effective pedagogical tool to educate for social justice. We might, then, consider these two books together so that questions raised in one complement questions raised in the other. Setting an Example Irene Harvey's Labyrinths of Exemplarity is well organized and covers quite a bit of territory. It begins with Part I: Threads of Exemplarity, a careful examination of the role of examples in Rousseau's educational treatise, Emile. This first part is divided into three sections, each one offering a description of examples function, first for Emile, then for Sophie (or woman), and then for us. That is, we are taken on an in-depth journey, one which travels through Emile's relationship to examples, then Sophie's, and then ours as the readers of Rousseau's book. Harvey then moves to Part II: Theories of Exemplarity, where different methodologies relating to exemplarity are explained. Parts III and IV, respectively, engage us in a discussion of Derrida's reading of Rousseau and his own employment of the example, and, finally, Harvey ends with a discussion of Aristotle and a new view of exemplarity. Although Harvey's book is fascinating in its entirety, Part I is a tour deforce in its exploration of the layers of exemplarity at work in Rousseau's Emile. Let me begin by focusing on this part of the book. Harvey opens her introduction with a quote from Derrida, who is responding to a recent collection of essays devoted to his work. …